Max Max Utmost.

So do you know who killed the Noid?

Do I know who killed the Noid?

No I don't, but I know you should avoid him even though Yo Noid was one of my favorite NES games.

It is a good game.

It gets a lot of, it's got a bad reputation for some reason, but it was a very good game.

Yeah, I don't remember a lot about it.

I just remember being like when I found it, I was like, this is this is the game for me.

This is my game I know as a platformer, but that's about all I remember.

It sort of was a Super Mario Brothers 2 situation where in Japan it was something else.

It was a common no ninja Hanamaru, OK.

And when they brought it over, I guess they decided to switch it over to the Noid, who is the Domino's mascot for the late 80s, early 90s, for anybody who doesn't know, Domino's Pizza.

So yeah, they brought him over here and they changed it so it was the Noid.

I guess that makes sense from a business standpoint because then like Domino's is paying for the localization, right?

Yeah.

Did they have Domino's up there in in the the Great White North?

Yes, yes, there's actually our town is crappy for pizza.

Like usually I'd go for a local place, but all the local places here kind of suck.

And Domino's, at least where I'm from, has the reputation of being like ubiquitous and OK, but not anybody's favorite and they'll deliver it.

So, you know, it's the the lazy person's pizza.

Yeah, I don't mind Domino's.

So anyways, in 1989, a man with A357 revolver, a Magnum, held five people hostage in a Domino's in Georgia.

Whoa.

Now, nobody got hurt, thankfully, because the man eventually got hungry, wanted a pizza, and while he was distracted by the pizza, the hostages made their escape.

That man was Kenneth Lamar Noid.

What?

And he believed that Domino's were slandering him, that they decided to name a character after him because they were out to get him.

So it's a case of like paranoia.

Luckily nobody got hurt.

He got arrested.

He died, I think in Institute.

I, I can't remember.

Anyways, he he didn't kill the Noid.

Domino's killed the Noid.

He, I don't believe his demand was actually for them to stop using the Noid, but they continued using the Noid anyways for a couple more years and then just kind of axed him.

So yeah.

Yeah, were you going to say something?

I I was, but it was going to be a very terrible joke, so let's just skip ahead.

Welcome to Maximum UTT Crime, the true crime podcast that loves crime.

Now I got to hear the the terrible joke.

OK, so originally it was for Jonathan Holmes.

Have you ever considered holding up Arthur Conan Doyle's estate to accuse them of fraudulently stealing your name?

He's not a a famous cocaine addicted detective as far as I know.

I lied.

Welcome to Maximum Utcast, the official podcast of Maximum Utmost, the publication where there are no rules, because I couldn't think of any.

I'm your host, Zoe Handley, and this other guy is your other host, Daniel Pickleball Sanford.

Pickleball.

Where did that come from?

I'm definitely not Jonathan.

I'm filling in for him today and it's it's AI don't know how with what the metaphor I'm looking for is, but I'm it's a definitely a thing of my own design that I am here instead of Jonathan today.

Yeah, you.

You are the problem and the solution.

Yeah, I'm the problem.

It's me.

And so I've decided that so that I can go on vacation later this week, I will do 100 times the normal amount of work I do and then come back and it'll be as if nothing ever happened.

Well, we appreciate you for that.

Yeah, yeah.

So here we are.

Yeah, I didn't have anything for this first segment aside from that introduction.

I didn't have any news.

So I guess we'll just kick it on over to your guest.

Well, I had actually a little tiny bit of news.

I saw something just a minute ago about a company is using AI on TikTok to pretend that influencers are promoting games that they are definitely not.

Have you seen this or heard of it?

God I I have a restraining order again TikTok.

I know there's a chance that we are going to suddenly appear on TikTok, who knows, maybe even for this clip, I don't even know.

But I'm personally like weirded out by TikTok.

I don't get it.

But this thing I just saw said that basically they used AI to generate the speech and and the video, they're basically doing a deepfake of people that are like they look like Twitch streamers and they're saying all this cool shit about this game called the first descendant, which I've also never heard of.

And these ads would just run as if they are like real tik toks done by influencers.

And they're like telling you all the cool XP boosts or whatever bullshit you can you can get if you join the game now and the company's been apparently caught with their pants down.

Yeah, I would imagine that would be illegal in some way.

I would hope it would be illegal at some way.

Yeah, they apparently just flat out ripped off one guy's likeness, Daniel the Demon.

So a lot of Daniels on today's episode, Daniel the demon was just they straight up ripped off his image.

The others are created out a whole cloth.

But if you are not savvy enough on the Internet, you're going to see those these videos and think, wow, my favorite streamer is telling me the great things about this game.

I guess I'll check it out.

And it's just AI bullshit.

I think I saw a clip of it and it was just so bizarre, like a lot of AI videos are.

There's just this very distinct off quality to it that just feels so inhuman.

Yeah, whenever I see something like this, it looks like if you're not really looking at your phone, you know, you could be mistaken for, for thinking, no, this is, this is real.

But like if you look right at it, it always looks to me like a GIF that like didn't load correctly or something like that.

Yeah, there's so much wrong with the Internet right now, and AI is just like another layer of this was a mistake, we need to turn the Internet off.

I, I, I agree in a lot of ways and I, I did actually bring to mind a little bit of a topic.

Would you?

Would you ever listen to an AI podcast?

No.

What would be the point?

There wouldn't be one, but you know, if you listen to music on Spotify, I know that there is a lot of it's like a AIDJ that will like give you.

I don't know, I've never listened to it, but I'm just like, do they tell you like that was whatever song by the Killers and here's another song from another band that you're into.

Like I, I just don't, I don't understand the point of that.

I don't either.

Like there are people who will like marry AI or date AI.

That's very common apparently.

I will.

I don't know if it's very common or if it's just sensationalized, but that just seems so lonely to me.

Like don't you have in the back of your mind at all times that this is not a real feeling person that you're talking to?

And doesn't that just make things worse?

Yeah, and I mean, I, I watched that movie a long time ago.

Spike Jones directed her with Joaquin Phoenix as the the lead guy.

And of course, you know, it's a fiction, but he he falls in love with his his Siri clone.

And you know, I guess the idea is that like, eventually technology could become so advanced that you truly can't tell.

But yeah, like you said, in the back of your mind, you should always know this isn't real.

Yeah, I, I mean, some people will fall in love with the Eiffel Tower and marry that.

There is a condition.

I believe it's often linked to trauma that causes it.

So people will fall in love with basically anything.

It's just so creepy to me.

Like, yeah, I don't like talking to AI phone assistants like.

Oh yeah.

Why would I want to share my intimate moments with one?

What if there was a way that, like, I don't know, like a podcast could be transcribed and then using the power of AI, it could be converted into like a written post of some kind and collected into like a log of entries on the web, some sort of like web log.

Do you think that could ever happen?

Oh, just like some sort of written article.

Just like posted wholesale on the Internet.

Sort of.

A Yeah.

And what if we like?

Journaling.

We shorten it and call it like A blog.

That disgusts me.

I I don't know what kind of degenerate would run something like that.

Check out maximummost.com.

But the hottest blog on the web?

Yeah.

Did you have a a khusogi you wanted to talk about today?

Oh yes, yes, let's do that.

I will say that I picked this specifically for you, even though this wasn't finalized until just a few hours ago, but it suits you pretty well.

So, you know, buckle up for this one.

Speaking of like the vapidness of the Internet and how it was just a bad idea from the beginning, in the in the mid aughts around 2005, one of the popular things that emerged from the Internet was a frog thing with his Dick out.

Are you talking about the crazy frog that sings the theme song to Beverly Hills Cop?

That is exactly what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about Crazy Frog.

And yeah, if if you don't know, you are so lucky.

It was this sudden explosion of popularity around basically remixes of songs of just pop songs and theme songs, I guess.

But there was this weird.

It wasn't supposed to be a frog, but it ended up being called Crazy Frog anyways and it would just add noises which I'm not going to try to impersonate.

I'll try.

It Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding Ding Ding.

Yes, that's pretty much exactly it.

And you might be wondering, like, how does that work?

And it's probably exactly how you're imagining it.

The song just plays and then every once in a while this thing interjects with its ringing and dinging.

It's was created by an animator who wanted to create a short video to get himself a job.

Like he wanted to create a video reel of 3D animation.

So he found this sound that was actually the Swedish guy impersonating the startup of his moped.

The animator put the video ad on the Internet and it went viral so folks wanted it advertising for their company.

I don't know why you would want this weird thing with its Dick out advertising for your company but this was the mid aughts in Europe and next thing that happened was a cell phone ringtone subscription company picked up on it.

From there they decided to make a music video and and that just heightened its popularity.

And I I'm describing this very poorly, but I cannot overstate how popular this thing was.

This was like.

Gangnam.

Style of the middle of the mid aughts.

I remember at this era you'd just turn on the TV late night.

I had a strange obsession with watching a cable channel here called Nickelodeon Gas, which differ games and sports.

And they would play Legends of the Hidden Temple and Double Dare at weird hours of the night.

And I would watch that all the time.

And then they would just cut away from Mark Summers hosting Double Dare to just, hey, do you want a cell phone with this crazy frog?

And that was that was the late night experience for me and my post college time.

Yeah.

So this guy was everywhere.

The crazy frog.

Somehow I dodged him mostly growing up.

Like, yeah, I was.

I was just going into college when he exploded.

And I remember people making like reference to him.

But I never had to like, listen to the music.

I never heard it played.

I don't think I saw the video until just a few days ago when I played Crazy Frog Arcade Racer.

Yeah, I was.

So I I did jump ahead on a little bit when when you were talking about this, which, which one was?

Was it the the one for the DS or the one for the PC or the PS2?

PS2.

Or there's also a Gameboy.

They made so many games of this guy.

More than they should have.

Arcade Racer is actually the sequel.

Like in Europe, they had Crazy Frog Racer that never got released in North America, but Crazy Frog Racer 2 got released over here as Crazy Frog Arcade Racer.

So I mostly enjoy playing bad games.

I usually find something to enjoy about it, but every once in a while I find one that just makes me physically uncomfortable to play.

And this was one such case where I just it, it, it rattled me, to be honest, it rattled me.

It it, it took me the rest of the day to finally snap out of this haze that it put me in.

It's not terrible as a racing game.

Like it is something that you would probably like maybe you'd rent and then you wouldn't think about it again.

It controls OK.

It mostly is tolerable because the guardrails don't really slow you down.

So you only have to vaguely steer to actually be competitive.

You can just sort of ride the guardrails, but you have to listen to the crazy frog music.

Is is the uncomfortable part?

And it's and it's his versions of of the songs, I imagine.

Of course, yes it is.

It is.

It is the remixes with him ringing and digging.

I'm looking at a screenshot here of I guess just the the queue up to begin the race and crazy frog himself is front and center.

He's wearing a vest and a helmet but he is I guess riding an invisible motorcycle and his his ass is out.

And I'm guessing if I saw the front his his penis would also be out.

No, his his Dick got removed at some point apparently.

Like you know the censorship groups got involved and had his penis removed.

I guess when it starts becoming popular for children, that's when people kind of have a problem with this thing having its Dick out again.

If you don't know Crazy Frog, I'm being literal here.

In his initial incarnation, he just had this little Dick and scrotum just hanging there between his legs.

Yep.

So that was removed sometime before the game came out.

And usually when you like, if you look up the original Crazy Frog music video, which is like Axel or something, they have edited out his Dick.

And sometimes I pretty sure if you look closely at certain points when he is turning like the Dick just kind of reappears for a frame or two.

Because they they didn't do a great job.

Well, yeah, yeah, I guess somebody just didn't really want to be the guy sitting there going frame by frame editing out this frog thing's Dick.

Well, you know, if, if he's if he's got his Dick out and he's proud of it, you know what?

Who are we to stop him?

I guess I guess like it is kind of off putting but I mean people are pretty sensitive about body parts just hanging out.

I wouldn't have raised an objection, but it did make me feel kind of uncomfortable if I'm being honest.

Sure, I have something that I'm going to make you even slightly more uncomfortable with.

Check the chat of this Zoom call and maybe you've seen this before, but feel free to describe it after you've read what I've sent you and then you.

May be able to fuck you get to describe.

This one.

So I I saw this on on on Reddit probably 15 years ago.

It's a picture of back to waking Phoenix.

The waking Phoenix Joker is embracing the crazy frog, who is a little bit taller than usual.

The crazy frog is also pregnant which is I believe they refer to this as impregn.

And then the text to the side says she asked for a nude.

I sent her pic of Joker gently embracing an impregnated crazy frog and then she blocked me.

Then I realized she wanted a nude of my body.

IA fool sent one of my soul.

The human condition.

And when you, when you first described the crazy frog, I, I had remembered that I was telling people about the crazy frog.

And I think I even sent this, this image to other people in the past and they're like, what the fuck am I looking at?

And what is the crazy frog?

So I I'm glad that I'm glad that we were at least on the same page of knowing who the crazy frog is.

I figured you would just just with your connections to music as an artist, you would you would have seen this art.

I.

Like I said, I didn't have much connection with Crazy Frog originally.

I knew what it was but hadn't really interacted with it at all.

So in order to prepare for this podcast, I looked up a documentary on it.

And I'm not joking that everybody in the documentary is ashamed of having created Crazy Frog.

There's like, this music producer who's like, you know, I've produced bands that are way more deserving of fame than this thing.

And most of them, you know, they're ashamed of it, But they're like, you know, I have made other contributions to the art form.

Like, this is not the only thing I'm going to be known for.

And then there's just the animator who's like please don't put this on my tombstone.

Yeah, and it's, it's just goes to the idea that you, you always hear that.

I mean, Jonathan's talked about this a number of times where it's like you don't know what the thing you're going to pop off for is.

And it's usually the thing you put in the lowest amount of effort into.

Like I said, I, I heard crazy Frog late night TV right after college.

I went to Disney World immediately after college.

I, I had a little bit of money saved up and I was like, I'm going to go to Disney World.

And they were playing it over the, the loudspeaker.

As you know, the night ended at, at Epcot.

And I was like, what is happening here?

I, I already knew the song at that point, the Crazy Frog version.

But you never know what's going to be the thing that, like, really resonates with people.

Well, as Andy Warhol said, everybody gets there 15 minutes.

Yeah.

I would hate to be connected to it and and the animators like I made a lot of money off of it, but the whole time like I was just deeply uncomfortable with being involved in this.

I believe it.

Well, how does the game play?

We haven't even really talked too much about the game itself.

The game isn't like offensive to play.

It is like a substandard Mario Kart where you pick up weapons and you throw them at each other.

It is just so bland and so boring.

So all you can do is, you know, tune into the music playing.

And it is torturous.

These are songs that you'd hear at the supermarket maybe, like, just radio friendly as fuck.

Yeah.

And I can't stand that kind of stuff to begin with.

Like ear worms.

I hate that's all that's being played.

And I, it is part of me, died playing this game.

I'm looking at a review for Crazy Frog Racer 2.

Sam Bishop of IGN rated it 2.5 out of 10 and said despite not looking like the ocular abortion that one would expect, I wouldn't even wish it upon my worst enemy.

Yeah, man.

This always happens like Crazy Frog wasn't an isolated incident like there was hamster dance back in the 90s.

Oh yeah.

Yeah, it was a series of gifts of dancing hamsters, and it was put to music.

It was like the opening of the Disney Robin Hood movie.

Oh, that's right.

That's what it was.

Yeah.

That I forgot that I Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so that actually got ACD about it.

And I was, I was young and dumb enough that I really enjoyed it.

And the Internet was new enough and like nowadays that stuff lasts a week.

Yeah.

Like, stuff on the Internet goes by so fast because there's so much of it that I'm not sure will ever really get another Gangnam Style or or Crazy Frog just because memes these days, they like last a week and they're gone, replaced by something else.

I get lost with the fact that back in 2008 or whatever, I could keep up with like every indie game that was coming out, and that was just by reading Destructoid.

You'd start at the top of the auto load page and you just go to the last article you saw and you were abreast of all the news.

And now like there's just so much coming out every day that it's impossible to even play the stuff that seems good, that seems actually new.

But even between that you have like 50,000 grocery store simulators and like 10s of thousands of cozy games about decorating your room.

But for the people that want those, though, that's got to be like they're in heaven, you know?

How many of those can you play though?

I don't know honestly.

I mean now on my other show from the same feed to currently playing, I have talked to a couple people who are like, I love cozy games, give me more cozy games.

Cozy games can be great.

I do have my I've run into a lot of cozy games that I don't like and it's because sometimes they just remove all the challenge and like rough character edges so that you just have like very agreeable quirky characters and some sort of repetitive task.

And I guess that's cozy for some people.

But like you look at Stardew value, which arguably kicked off the whole cozy game craze, and it has challenge to it.

Like you, I don't think you can really fail at it, but you can definitely fail at your virtual life in it.

Like you, all your crops die, you can't take care of your animals or something.

You don't have any money.

I don't know if that leads to a game over, but you're not really playing well at that point.

But the coziness comes from doing this cozy task to overcome an obstacle.

And I think a lot of cozy games forget that part, that you do need some sort of challenge to keep things engaging.

Yeah, they're like not necessarily a fail or lose state, but it's more about just like just kind of take care of it at your own pace.

You can grow the crops or not.

You can go fish if you want.

Yeah, it might just be, it's a not for me kind of thing because, you know, I could play one game about decorating your room and I technically have like Animal Crossing was doing it back on the Game Cube days.

Have you played Unpacking?

No.

That one's really good.

It's a bit melancholy though, isn't it?

A little bit, yeah.

Because you know, you're you're opening boxes and you're like, The thing is, you're supposed to be like a an adult who has a bunch of childhood shit and you're like, oh, where am I supposed to put this teddy bear?

I don't need the teddy bear.

And you know, you think about that kind of stuff as, as you're playing it.

And so it was pretty, pretty good, I thought.

Yeah, I have limited capacity for introspection these days just because of just because of difficulties with my mental health.

I have to kind of pick and choose where I'm going to poke in my brain.

Fair enough.

Yeah, No, it isn't.

I'll give a better end note just so we don't leave people there.

So I do.

I, I did play that the, the sort of the grocery store game that kind of exploded the popularity of the grocery game genre, which is supermarket simulator, I think.

Do you want to know what I named my grocery store?

Yeah.

What's what you call it?

Maximum Utmart.

Yeah, there we go.

So all right, now we can kick it over to your guests.

Yeah, I don't know that we need too much set up.

I feel like, and this will be all in the show.

The guest is Shy Fox, AKA Daniel Fox, who I've talked to a number of times.

He's never been on, well, obviously never been on this show before.

We did have a fun chat.

He and I have been sort of collaborators on the Fix Your Harder Die David Lynch podcast and we get into all that in the clip, so we can check it out now.

Welcome welcome your our guest on Maximum Guest.

Hello, it's Daniel filling in for Jonathan as the interviewer of this episode.

And today I'm joined by Shy Fox, the main brain behind the Fix Your Heart or Die podcast, of which I'm also the producer.

Thank you for joining me, Mr.

Fox.

Or what name do you want to go by on this show?

Hey, you know, I'm Daniel Shy Fox.

You can call me any combination of those.

My fellow Daniel.

It's it's no big deal.

I'm, I'm anonymous, but only because I am too uninteresting to see.

Got any details regarding my identity?

Yeah, we're here.

I am.

I run the show.

Fix your heart or die, which you are an integral part of, and Jonathan is out today.

I am the substitute Jonathan of sorts, although you're the main substitute Jonathan because you will be interviewing me about my scintillating thoughts regarding the current state of the video game industry and upcoming releases.

Yeah, yeah, I guess there's all a little bit of Jonathan and all of us.

So we're going to be kind of, I guess, focusing kind of on Nintendo, but a little bit.

I don't know if some of these are third party, but we'll get into it.

But it is nice to finally have a space where just two dudes can just talk on the Internet.

I know it's very, very hard to come by these days.

So we finally got some hot dude on dude action here on the Internet.

I've been scouring every podcast feed I can find for some evidence that mediocre middle-aged white men have talked about video games in a recorded medium, and I've come up short, so I think we'll be filling an essential gap in the market here.

That's yeah, it's a It's good to finally have some space for us.

Of course I am definitely kidding.

But I have an ambush for you.

You weren't prepared for this, and that was part of my glorious design.

Oh no.

I am going to Co opt a regular segment of the show and I have a kusage to submit to you for review as well.

Oh no.

So what do we what do we?

So we could be in a world where I'm also the Co host of this episode.

I won't know yet until we do it.

And so we could be talking about a kusage already on the show and it'll this will be maybe 2 show gays in a row.

We'll find out.

But what?

What do you got?

I was just listening to the most recent episode of this show in preparation for being on here, and that really got me thinking.

I love bad games, I love Kusage, and I really love Zoe's spotlighting of those on this podcast and on the website.

So far I've been going back and reading her old articles on Destructoid about her various pics.

I had noticed that she's been sort of using these podcasts as an opportunity to iterate upon those old articles, and I I really admire that.

This is a great use of this space to elevate the art of Kusage to the next level.

So I was thinking about games I've played recently that are less than stellar or less than remembered, and I was thinking about a game for the GameCube from 2003, Jonathan's famous GameCube, which he invented, and it was called Dream Mix.

TV World Fighters, are you familiar?

No, I'm going to have to look this up.

That's kind of cool that if you go to Google and type in Dream Mix, you get this because there's nothing else called Dream Mix.

It's got great SEO, but it there's almost no trace of it in any meaningful way, especially on the Western Internet, because as you'll find, this is a game that was not released outside of Japan and should not have been, so it was a good choice on their part.

It has Transformers and Solid Snake.

Yes.

What is happening?

And Bomberman is there.

It's a weird mashup.

So it's a Smash Brothers knockoff, and it is a crossover between Hudson, Konami, back when those were two separate entities instead of being absorbed into one another, and Takara toys, also known as Tomi.

Nowadays, Takara Tomi, in addition to video game characters, you have a bunch of strange Japanese toys in the mix.

I was playing this game because one of the main things my very powerful gaming PC gets used for is to emulate old games that it doesn't need to be that powerful in order to emulate.

So when I have company or when I have friends or significant others over, we wind up playing a lot of Game Cube emulation because those games are still great for multiplayer.

They still hold up in a lot of ways.

And I had always heard the Legends of Dream Mix TV World Fighter.

It kind of was the the sort of game that was whispered about in hardcore gamer circles back in the early 2000s because it had this air of mystique.

It was an exclusive import.

It had a weird cast of characters.

It has a strange premise.

And those are all the makings of a game that that really make a certain set of gamers yarn for this to come to America.

So for a long, long time I thought this was a sort of lost gem.

Like I would pick this up eventually and my mind would just be blown to smithereens by its splendor.

But I wound up checking it out with some friends a few months ago and that was very much not the case.

So I really want to spotlight it here.

I mean, does it play like crap or?

So this is the best way I can think to describe how the gameplay feels.

It's like if the first Super Smash Brothers game on the Nintendo 64 was a mini game in one of the Mario Party games for the Nintendo 64.

It has that sort of flattened out, kind of not really all that well fleshed out feel to it.

The characters have one or two special noobs and the game is entirely in Japanese.

So at first I thought, well, I'm just not playing this right, I'm not pressing the right buttons.

There must be some way to execute more attacks in this.

I looked up a guide and a translation guide and it confirmed each character has 1-2 or at the very most 3 special moves to their name and they don't feel good.

And Smash brothers.

Part of the accomplishment is that all the moves are a little outlandish and they they fit with the characters theme from their respective games, but they still feel like they could be fighting game special moves at the end of the day.

Like they belong in a legitimate fighting game.

These all feel like the equivalent of either doing absolutely nothing, so a normal attack, or they feel like a Final Smash sort of attack.

For instance, 1 of Optimus Prime you mentioned Transformers are in here.

Optimus Prime and Megatron are both around Optimus Prime, or Convoy as he's known in Japan, which I think is a cooler name if I'm being honest.

Not really a Transformers guy though.

One of his special moves is just transforming into a truck and like spinning around in rapid succession so that it.

And he's huge.

He's the size of most of the stages in this game on some levels, so you're just going to be hit by this.

All the moves and all the characters have that cobbled together feeling where everything feels kind of floaty and janky and like it doesn't have proper startup time or end time or hit boxes considered.

It feels like a weird party game that was just made as an afterthought in the mini game of something else.

I just want people to be aware of Dream Mix TV World fighters and aware that it's legendary status in certain circles is undeserved.

Even as I I did find it charming.

So I assume you you've looked it up.

You've looked over this list of characters.

By the way, Are there any that you do not recognize from the list available to you?

We got bin bogami.

Off to a great start.

Bomberman of course, do not know Manji Maru Sengoku, don't know Master Higgins from Adventure Island, don't know Momotaro, don't know Yugo Ogami from Bloody Roar, don't even know Bloody Roar.

In the Konami side, there's Moe, it's the Easter Island statue is there?

Of course, the classic Konami character.

I don't know Power Pro Koon from Power Pros Simon Belmont.

OK, there you go.

Solid Snake Twin BI don't know twin B at all.

And from Takara you've got Aska from Sai girls who I do not know.

Lika Kayama from Lika Chan don't know that.

In 121, Mason from Microman, don't know that.

Megatron Optimus Prime of course, and then Tyson Grainger from Beyblade.

I've heard of Beyblade but I don't know anything about that stuff.

That's the cartoon where the the little kids spin tops at one another in an arena, and they somehow dramatize that.

I can't even imagine watching that, and I hope I never have to.

But there's a very strange mix of characters.

And even more notable is the fact that if this is supposed to be the All Stars of these companies, I mean I could think of 5 to 10 characters from Konami and Hudson that I'd rather have in here than any of the representatives here.

But maybe at that time, some of them were bigger deals in Japan.

And I mean, I, I didn't watch a ton of that Netflix show The Toys that made Us, but I did watch the Transformers episode.

And it was illuminating to me to find out that they just took a bunch of Japanese toys and put them together and sold them as a uniform thing called Transformers.

So it's interesting that they included those two as like a precursor to this game.

Absolutely.

Yeah, Apparently the Microman, one of the characters was from Microman.

The Microman line was specifically purchased by Hasbro for Western licensing and then became Transformers.

So that is a secretly very impactful property.

A lot of people probably don't know that Transformers has those origins.

The presentation of this game is more charming than anything else about it.

I enjoy the weird cast of characters.

If they were more fun to play it would be cooler that this strange cast of characters is hanging out together.

Every character kind of just feels mostly the same except for the Outlander special moves which just don't feel good to use, and then the Smash brothers style gameplay.

You hit each other until coins with hearts on them come out and any attack will do this.

It'll just cause coins to spill everywhere like their Sonic the Hedgehog dropping rings as they get hurt.

And then when they lose all their coins they shrink their soul leaves their body and then the enemy has to collect their soul in order to finish them off.

And they sort of just hang around in their tiny state and they can sort of interfere with the proceedings.

Interesting.

Well, and it also does bring to mind that I guess the original concept of Smash Brothers was like toys come to life and fight.

So here you have toys doing just that, but alongside Solid Snake and Simon Belmont.

And then the the equivalent of the justification for all why all these characters are here rather than being presented as toys?

Because that would make a lot of sense now that you mention it.

But actually it's presented as though they are the stars of a television variety show.

So throughout throughout the single player campaign, which is the exact same story beats for every character, 5 little cutscenes between 6:00-ish, different battles, and then a final boss.

New Joe, one of the villains from Bomberman and an original character who is just a generic Japanese woman Co anchor character who's very excitable about everything.

They host a variety show where they present the battles, and you have to perform well enough in the battle so that the ratings for the theoretical television show come in as high as possible in order to get a good rank.

It's a cute little idea, and the cutscenes were broad enough that, not understanding much Japanese, I knew what was going on here.

If you've ever seen a wacky Japanese news show or variety show, you know what to expect.

But I found myself thinking, is this a kusage?

Because of course, the definition of that is very flexible, and part of it relies on a consensus that the game is somewhat bad.

I could only find 2 reviews that were anywhere near contemporary for this thing.

One was from Fimitsu magazine, which gave it a 27 out of 40.

That's not an awful score.

That's not great.

That's pretty good because I I'm not super versed on Fimitsu but I believe they are very notorious for being very frugal is the wrong word but stingy with with those perfect 40s yes they may have given like under 10 ever and.

So yeah, like a 27 out of 40 is it sounds pretty good.

It's not awful.

It sounds like a solid score, but when you consider the star power this must have held in its home country around this time, that seems less than glowing.

It doesn't feel like anyone was very excited about this.

And then there was a Nintendo World Report score, the site formerly known as Planet GameCube, which I used to visit fervently every day back in the early Internet.

Just refreshing that page over and over again.

They gave it an 8 out of 10.

That's bullshit.

That does not deserve an 8 out of 10.

It's kind of one of the definitive examples of this kind of thing where it's just it's a cute idea.

You love to know it exists in the world, you don't want to actually play it.

And I don't even think it's a thing where it doesn't hold up well because Smash Brothers and games like it have come a long way.

It wouldn't be fair to compare it to the last 20 years of Smash Brothers and games like that.

But like I say, it's more basic than Smash Brothers on the 64 in every way.

And it came out five ish years later, so it's just kind of a big let down.

So go check out Dreamix TV World fighters, look up some YouTube videos about it, have fun looking at the wacky characters and then stop after 5 minutes.

That's my recommendation, folks.

Well, in terms of games that you would like to play, it sounds like you were playing some Donkey Kong bonanza.

I was.

How is that treating you?

Well, I thought I would finish it last night, but it pulled that trick and this game has felt like it was heading toward an end for a little while already.

Just surprised when I got to what I thought was going to be the final boss battle only to have the rug pulled out from under me.

So I've got an entire other layer or world in this game to go at least an actual final boss fight.

Is it the scale of like the the Symphony of the night, the the castle flipping and now you have to do it again or or?

Not quite, no, just just the addition.

So there's there's 15 main layers to the to the world and this is just an extra 16th layer and it's not as big as a lot of the earlier ones.

It's about on par with a lot of the later levels, it feels like.

So boy, I would love it if suddenly all the world's flipped upside down and I had to scour the reverse planet for bananas this time.

Find 660 ish more of them.

I don't think that's going to happen, but I was prepared to come here and ask you if I should spoil Donkey Kong Bonanza for everyone already.

It's only been out about a month and especially because I'm not done, I won't do that.

But I will say I got to the point where there is a big reveal in so far as a Donkey Kong game can have a big reveal, and I'm pretty fucking pumped about it.

I'm I'm excited to see where that development is going.

I don't know how I personally wound up staying unspoiled on the details of this this long.

It just goes to show how offline I am.

I'm trying to guess what a potential Donkey Kong spoiler could be.

I mean, the only thing I could think of is there's a sudden Mario, but like I feel like that that's not the kind of thing they would do.

You don't have to confirm or deny if you want to keep your your lips sealed on this.

I mean, is King K rule in this game?

I don't even know.

And and and here I am just vamping to myself because Mr.

Fox is keeping silent on this.

So.

Mom's the word.

I'll leave it to the listeners to speculate.

So no story spoilers, but just just to update on general Donkey Kong feelings.

This has been the hottest game for the past month in a lot of ways.

Pretty much everything that can be said about it has been said about it, I'm sure.

But I just want to say what a goddamn delight, man.

I, I love playing this thing.

I knew it would never surpass Super Mario Odyssey.

I don't think it will even by the time I finished playing it, because Super Mario Odyssey is an incredibly special game to me, but this feels like a meaningful fork off in another direction from that formula.

It started off feeling like it was built on those bones, and then with every layer it just expands the original things that it's doing and iterates upon its own original ideas to the point where I no longer consider it just a Mario Odyssey successor.

It is very comfortably its own thing at this point.

Yeah, I mean, and we've kind of talked privately off podcast about, you know, just, I guess my, my bad opinion thoughts about this particular.

Game.

Oh they're the worst opinions in my opinion.

Is there any any world in which you could see me a playing this game and B liking it?

So what I'll say is this, we we've talked about how your misgivings with the current state of the Zelda series.

What I really feel about Mario Odyssey and this is that they are more like the old Zelda games than the modern Zelda games are in some ways.

When I'm playing Donkey Kong Bonanza, it feels like a platforming Zelda game in a lot of ways.

It's very puzzly.

It's got the same sort of intricate challenges and approachability, but of course it's its own thing.

I really think that if you're missing that classic Zelda feeling and you don't really like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom very much, Mario Odyssey and Donkey Kong Bonanza are right there.

They just don't have Lincoln them.

That's true, yeah.

I guess my one of my biggest hang ups was I had not seen too much of Donkey Kong Bonanza other than the initial like here's the game.

And I was like, it doesn't really look all that interesting to me.

And the big marketing angle of like, you could destroy all of the things.

I was like, I don't want to do any of that, that that doesn't sound fun in the slightest.

But then I did actually put together that video of.

The giant burger video from earlier today, Yeah.

Yeah, today when we record this, but I think it's like 2 weeks told at the time this is going to air.

Yeah, we put together just like a song from I think it was Hamburger the movie, which I didn't even know was a thing.

And Jonathan was like, put this and here's some clips that I shot in the game and I just threw them all together and he was like, it's perfect.

But that that's actually the most I've seen of the game in action I think.

And it looked a little bit more interesting at that point, I guess.

I'm sure at some point I'll play it.

But I, I just, I feel like I've done everything with Donkey Kong.

I, I never had a big nostalgia for, for Donkey Kong.

And so I'm just like, what, what, what?

I don't get the appeal.

I feel you there.

You know, I've always been pretty cold on those Donkey Kong Country games.

The original trilogy.

I like the the Retro Studios sequel duology a lot more than the originals, and I'm in the vast minority on that.

Most Donkey Kong fans regard those as pale imitations, which is completely out of whack.

I don't know what the hell they're thinking about.

Even when I was a kid and playing Donkey Kong Country and it was a rare thing, pun not intended, for me to think critically this way, but I would play those Donkey Kong Country games and I would say to myself, something about this doesn't feel right.

These games feel strange and airless and the platforming is odd and stilted and I just really never got that into them, especially because they delight in being cruel to the player a lot of the time.

There you go.

Speaking of the big guy, yeah, I was never that big into them and I hate Donkey Kong 64.

See, that's the one that I like.

And.

Now, now, OK, I guess it's just a little bit of back story for me.

I skipped the SNES era just as a as a kid, we just were a Sega family.

And so then when N64 came out, I played Mario 64, I played Banjo Kazooie and then the next one that was the logical like collect everything type of game was Donkey Kong 64.

And I was like, this is awesome.

It's like Banjo, but like you could do more things.

A lot of people hated that one, and four, it's just you.

There's too many things.

I think there's like every single one of the Kongs has their own unique item that only they can collect or something like that.

Yes, and their own unique color of bananas on top of that.

And yeah, yeah, every stage is just an exercise in retreading the same ground and running between barrels so that you can pick up a different colored thing.

Not to get too much into it, but it does dovetail nicely with the overall point about Bonanza.

I liked Banjo Kazooie, the original, a lot.

Banjo Tooie is good for about half the game, and then the bloat really sets in and it just becomes a miserable slog for me.

And then with Donkey Kong 64, it felt like Rare said, well, we can outdo Banjo Kazooie, we'll just bloat it even more.

And they just took that pump and just started jamming away at it till we've got this ugly, greasy, bloated anti masterpiece of a Nintendo 64 finisher.

When King K Rule was added to Smash Brothers by popular fan demand, I feel like there was a bit of a turning point within Nintendo in regards to how they view the Donkey Kong Country games and their legacy.

I feel like before the Smash Brothers edition, they were all too hasty to write off the legacy of those games when they were forced to see how popular King K Rule is.

I think it forced them to reckon with how much people love Donkey Kong Country and how unwilling they are to let that go.

Yeah, So this feels like a response to that mindset where Nintendo says, well, Rare doesn't really make games anymore.

What if we made essentially a new Banjo Kazooie game in our new format and formula and we just put Donkey Kong in it because we own that character?

And then the Rare Legacy.

It feels like Rare Ghost wrote this game in a lot of ways, so to speak.

Their spirit is around every corner in this thing.

I feel like Nintendo, they have a better idea of what works about the Rare formula and what doesn't work about the Rare formula than Rare did back when they started losing sight of that.

So it's like they get to use all of those lessons learned from all those misfire games or imperfect games, and they get to give them a brand new beginning within their home franchise where they where they started in the 1st place with Nintendo.

It's a nostalgic homecoming, and it it makes me feel good, even as it makes me feel bad that Rare themselves have no participation, no ability to revel in enjoying it.

I did hear that on the music front they did sort of.

They didn't bring back Grant, Kirk, Hope or any of the the like composers and they just like grabbed their songs and just dumped them in.

And pretty much it seems like the new music is it doesn't kind of stack up.

The music is maybe the worst thing about the entire game.

That's a good point to bring up.

The stage music, the ambient music is mostly inoffensive.

I haven't found myself wanting to turn it off necessarily.

What gets old are the actual vocal tracks sung by teenage Pauline to morph Donkey Kong into his bonanza modes.

His transformations.

Those songs, I mean, they live in my head and I think part of my brain loves them.

At this point, just due to pure Stockholm syndrome, I do find myself imitating the weird nonsense lyrics because they're all in a nonsense language.

They sound like Splatoon music, but bad.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have a certain affection for Splatoon music that just does not apply here.

It's a shame because the whole game is themed around music and the power of singing.

And I just say to myself, well, then you couldn't spring to write some good songs and get some classic composers.

And no offense to the girl who voices Pauline, Couldn't afford to get a good singer for them either.

Shots fired.

Yeah, just a weird choice in my opinion.

Hopefully if if that voice actress or singer is listening, she'll take it with a grain of salt.

And I invite her to come on the show and debate me, frankly.

Sometimes it could be the kind of thing where like, they write the songs and the songs just are what they are and and no matter how good of a singer you are, you can't save anything.

Part of me wonders, though, about the songs, because you say you may secretly love them, and I can't tell if your your appreciation of Sonic the Hedgehog is ironic or unironic, but I I wonder.

Great mystery surrounding me in general, yeah.

I wonder if in a couple of years you'll be like, you know what, I got to put those Bonanza tracks on and just, and just vibe out to.

Well, OK, so if that happens and crazier things have happened, I implore you to hunt me down and put me out of my misery.

Sanford, please.

They're they're that bad right now.

Well, so then let's turn to the future of nostalgia, I guess with a couple of demos that you played and I played one of them.

So we'll get to Mina last, but Elliot next.

Adventures of Elliot is the full title or?

Yeah, The Adventures of Elliott, The Millennium Tale, I believe is the full title.

Again, we tried to prepare by looking up the release date, which is just a vague 2026.

My mind will not accept that full title like happens with a lot of JRP GS before they really simmer in my mind, because it's a lot of words to say very little and it's not not a particularly a sterling example of of a good game title.

What is it 365 days over 2 or or?

I think it's 358 / 2 days is how you say that.

Yeah, and don't ask me why.

At some point I knew what that title meant and I'm glad I've moved on from that place in my life where I kept Kingdom Hearts knowledge locked within me now.

I'm a much happier person in some ways now.

Well, so Elliott is what I'm just going to call it for the rest of my life.

Elliott is kind of getting, you know, I guess it's it's a little bit like an adventures of not adventures of Link, that's Zelda 2, but Link to the Past style game with Octopath treatment.

Is that what you'd say?

Maybe.

That's a good comparison.

It feels like a Game Boy Zelda game.

It feels like an HD2D remake of a 2D Zelda game that doesn't exist.

So you know, it's just a short demo.

It takes you about an hour ish to complete.

So comparing it to Zelda sets a lofty expectation.

What I would say is more of a neat comparison that will just apply to a lot fewer people is that it feels like a revival of Final Fantasy adventure slash, Adventures of Mana, the original Mana game before Secret of Mana and Trials of Mana, etcetera on the Gameboy.

And so it's an action RPG with an overhead perspective, and it just has that nice and simple 2 button system, but with a lot more cool tricks added on top of it.

A lot of new modern niceties and the HD 2D treatments of Octopath Traveler applied to its graphics, although to much greater effect in my opinion.

I've tried Octopath a couple of times.

They never really quite clicked with me and part of that was the visual style they employed a lot of, I believe it's called ambient occlusion.

The graphics in Octopath games that may details any further from you than, say, 10 squares look very blurry, as if they have a depth of field.

And that's a cool effect in theory, but it just makes everything kind of look like a blurry mess to me.

And it misses the target of replicating the look of an old pixel art game by doing so.

And in Adventures of Elliot, they've dialed that back a lot.

And these sliders are not accessible in the demo, but you can apparently in the full game adjust things like that level of blur to your liking, which I think should have been present to begin with.

Yeah, that should be the standard to just let you.

I mean, it's like the 3DS with the slider, the physical slider.

If you hate this, which I did, I just turned that off and I never thought about it again.

That's the least surprising thing I've heard so far, yeah.

Out of me.

Yeah, I man, I love the 3D on the three.

DSI couldn't get enough.

Just as a quick aside, I never touched a 3DS before.

I was a glasses wearer.

And so I think I didn't.

I had undiagnosed stigmatism and I was like, I hate everything about this.

Let's go flat.

And yeah.

Understandable.

It probably didn't work very well for you then, yeah.

Exactly.

I was like, this is just blurry as hell.

Like how does anybody enjoy this?

But for me, when I look at the HD 2D art style, the more I see it, the less I like it.

It's just those sprites just just stick out like a sore thumb to me against these beautiful backdrops.

I mean, they're a little bit pixelated looking, but they are like nice HD graphics I guess for just.

High detail, very cluttered, and yeah, exactly, they look like a modern environment.

And I, I don't know if it's just because it's easier to model those things.

I do not know what I'm talking about in the slightest about graphics and art styles and etcetera, or like modeling software.

I don't know anything about that stuff.

But I, I don't know if it's just easier to build a castle that you know, is made in, I think it's called Blender, and then just stack a 2D Sprite just there and just be like, let's turn on all the effects and done game.

You know, I don't know if that's just easy for them to do or or what, but it doesn't look that appealing to me personally.

Yeah, it's had very mixed results for me, but I think Adventures of Elliot is shaping up to be a gorgeous game and I really like, I sat down and I play this demo with rapt attention for an hour.

You know, that's not any huge accomplishment.

I came away feeling like, wow, they've they found a new way to use this HD 2D art style and not only does it look better, but I like this style of game.

This doesn't feel like it's just aping something from the past like the Octopath Traveler games tend to.

For me.

It feels like it's trying to create something new that's like something from the past.

It feels meaningfully iterative to me in an exciting way.

I like the way the fairy sounds by the way, and I don't care what anyone says.

I'm assuming you've maybe listened to our friend of show other show Podquisition.

Have you heard Steph Sterling talk about this topic?

Absolutely.

So I guess it could be like a cilantro of a of a game voice.

Yeah, that's a very good comparison.

And I've always I've been a cilantro lover in that way, and in general for actual cilantro.

But I love Navi from The Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time.

I think she's a great character.

I think she's underrated.

I've been living through almost 30 years of Let's kill Navi because she's so annoying jokes and I just want everyone to stop because she's beautiful and I love her so take that.

I thought Navy was fine.

Where I thought they did a bridge too far was in Skyward Sword.

I believe the sword is named Fee.

And that was just like please shut up.

I I understand how a treasure chest works.

Just let me, let me play the game.

Do you understand that your battery is low though?

Because it is.

Wait, would she interrupt with your when your Wii Remote battery was low?

Yeah, I believe so.

In the original version.

And when your hearts would be low, not only do you have the persistent beeping noise, but she would also tell you, hey, by the way, when you press this button, hey, your health is low, you might want to heal yourself.

Yeah, it's that's we won't get into Skyward Sword because that's one of my most hated Zeldas.

But let's get into instead Mina.

Mina the Hollower.

Yes, Speaking of good Zelda games, yeah.

And I like Skyward sorted by the way, but yeah, not to get into that, but yeah, MENA, the hollow word.

It's out on Halloween.

Yes, it's out on Halloween this year and it's been, boy, a long lead up to this game.

It's one of those where I feel like they announced it pretty hot off the heels of finishing Shovel Night once and for all, doing all the little side campaigns and updates they were obligated to do from their monolith of a Kickstarter campaign that reached all the stretch goals and then some.

I feel like they announced it five to six years ago at least, and it's just been kind of a a ghost ever since.

There's been very little in terms of meaningful updates between then and now.

And I've been, I've been watching, I've been waiting this entire time.

Jonathan has talked about Mina the holler work quite a bit.

I should probably have a broader media diet for video games.

But of the people that I've heard talk about video games, Jonathan has never let up.

He's been a relentless cheerleader for this game and it's infectious hearing him talk about it because it's like, I want to play this game now and I have played it and.

I'm not a big fan.

God damn it, you're the worst man.

Why do I even hang out with you?

You're so mean.

But you know, I don't want to, I don't want to yuck your Yum or anybody else's.

And in fact, it's not a bad game, it's just not for me is I guess what I'll say a lot of people comparing it to Link's Awakening, but to me it looks more like a Capcom game, maybe like a mid era Mega Man from the NES with like a little bit of nods towards the ninja guidance on NES with like the the cutscenes and the parallax scrolling that they have, which is like a beautiful effect.

I love when they do that and it's it's fantastic.

Where would you say it falls in the like NES throwback style of game?

Well, I mean, you say a combination of links Awakening in an older Capcom game.

There's two games that already fused those together.

They're called Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons for the Game Boy Color.

That's true and then also Minish Cap was a Capcom.

Yes, it was by, well, technically by former Capcom developers at Flagship, but yes, also basically the secret third Oracle game and the only one that's actually good by the.

Way I did like Minish Cap a lot.

I forget that one exists.

Minish Cap is severely underrated.

Oh man, I replay that every time it becomes available to me to me in a new way.

So I replayed that maybe last year when they put it on the Switch Online service.

Finally deserves a lot more Acolytes.

But yeah, MENA the Hollower.

So Shovel Knight, which is a game that I love absolutely over the moon for that game.

I played every campaign and I would have a hard time telling you which of the four I like the most.

They nailed it on all fronts.

And Shovel Knight was basically their attempt to make like a Mega Man style game or a Duck Tales or, you know, like an old school Capcom game.

And I've never liked those games.

I've never actually enjoyed playing Mega Man or really any any of the old stuff by Capcom in that vintage.

And Shovel Knight just felt like it took all of the best things about them and turned them into a game that actually felt good to me to play.

So much in the same way that MENA, the Hollow Word does that to the Zelda Oracle games, where it's like, oh, you knew what worked about this.

And then you mixed it in with a few other things.

Like you say, a little bit of Ninja Gaid and a little bit of Castlevania in the mix.

Yeah, yeah, I could see that.

And it just feels like it surpasses it's vastly more than the sum of its parts in that way.

Wow, this game is going to be something special.

So you've played the demo?

I have as well.

What weapon did you select in the early part?

I used the ball and chain although that's a good point, I should circle back and play it again with the other weapons.

Thank you for reminding.

Me, I went with the double blades.

They didn't have a ton of info about exactly.

I mean, they kind of described how each weapon functioned, but I, you know, they just like make your choice and you're, you're playing that further for the next 45 minutes.

And the double blades worked for me.

But when I finished the demo, I was, it was so fast of just like, OK, that's the demo that I was not sure if I actually did it right or if an unseen timer had expired.

So I looked it up online to somebody else doing a playthrough and they went with the ball and chain as well.

And I was like, that one looks cooler.

So, you know, maybe I chose the bad weapon, I don't know.

Maybe maybe you just chose the one that suited your play style the least or you know, could objectively be a worse weapon.

It is of course a demo, so they could still be tweaking that.

Or you know, when when you play a game that has those different weapon styles, sometimes there's only one that really clicks with you, or sometimes only two.

I'll be interested to try the dual blades and the hammer, but the the ball and chain, which is essentially A Castlevania whip that just felt perfect.

It was an amazing choice for playing through and keeping my distance so that I didn't get slaughtered by everything because it's a it's a briskly challenging game as.

Well, yeah, yeah, it is.

You know, I wouldn't say it's like impossible.

It's it does.

I don't think there's lives.

So you do have as many chances as you want, but it is challenging.

Does it borrow the Shovel Knight mechanic where when you die you you got to go recover your stuff?

It does and and at first.

So instead of losing your all of your collectibles, which are bones in this case, they're the currency that you use to level up in the equivalent of souls like that when you have a spark initially, and I assume that you can probably get more sparks in the main game as long as you have a spark.

When you die, you only drop that spark, but it seems to be absorbed by the enemy that killed you.

So in order to regain them you not only have to get back there, but you have to retrieve it directly from that enemy, which in my case during my one death was the big mid boss.

So I felt lucky to get that back.

You only died one time in this game.

I only died the one time I.

Was surprised with myself I was.

If there was lives, I would have definitely run through all of them and done at least one continue.

Like the mid boss was quite a challenge.

The last boss was not as hard as to me as the the mid boss, but I was dying on stupid things too.

You know, I don't know.

One of the biggest things for me is I wish there was a diagonal attack because there were so many times I got right up next to you.

Can't we do have cameras going, but the audience can't see that.

But I'd be here, the enemy would be here and I would be attacking.

And because you're attacking, you can't move to like actually hit.

So I would be like hammering, I mean, as the, as the two blades, I'm just hammering that, that attack button and then I'm missing constantly until I register that I'm missing and stop and move over and then point upward.

So like, yeah, I'm sure maybe the the dual blades was like a harder, at least for me, a harder weapon to go with.

I wouldn't have wanted to be any closer to those bosses than I was, so I think I really would have struggled if I had chosen the weapon you did as well.

Yeah, the dual blades are, I guess they're more of a damage per second attack versus the range of the the ball and chain or neither of us played the hammer, but I don't know if the hammer like I guess the hammer is got to be the power weapon, but.

It probably has a big swinging arc would be, I guess.

So diagonal attacks might be more of a possibility there.

I see.

Yeah, and the burrowing mechanic, the equivalent of the Shovel Knight Pogo bounce in this game is the burrowing mechanic where after you jump, if you hold down the jump button, you Burrow into the ground upon landing on it.

And then you have a good few solid seconds, not too much time, but not too little, to just snake through the ground underneath things.

And you can use that to pop up around enemies.

So you can just constantly be skirting their attacks, going right underground right as they swing at you and then pop up behind them and get a few hits, and feels ridiculously good when you get a hang for that mechanic.

I could never time that correctly.

I was always jumping up right as they were taking a swing at me and and then I'd take the damage, then I'd go down and then I'd, yeah, just pop up in the wrong place and take more damage and it was just a nightmare.

And then also there's like a bit where you can jump further if you dig 1st and pop up and then you'll jump 2 spaces.

And I got that eventually obviously because I got through the demo, but like it was just like pulling teeth for me to get get that under under control.

Some tricky timing.

I like I said, I was impressed with myself.

I'm not one of those guys who's like amazing at old school games.

I barely have much affection for NES or arcade games because I'm not up to stuff.

I can't handle the challenge of a lot of those games, if I'm being honest.

And that's that's what really made Shovel Knight and so far this feel different to me.

As it feels like not only does it surpass the quality of those old games in a lot of ways.

And not only does it iterate upon them, but it also makes them so much more accessible and makes them able to be completed by someone like me.

And not only by the skin of my teeth, but in a way that makes me feel like I can actually learn and grow and feel better and feel good about my accomplishments at the end of the at the end of the day.

Yeah, Mina.

Does a good job also early on, just like environmentally explaining how the digging works to where like you dig under certain obstacles and you need to jump across pits and stuff with it.

It, it does do a good job of, of explaining that which you know, I, I, I and I really I now that it's just dawned on me that potentially some of the developers of of this game series might listen to this show.

And I really did not mean any any.

I'm not trying to, I'm not a reviewer.

I'm, I'm just a person that played it.

This is my my experience.

You guys, you developers should hear what he was saying about you off my let me tell you just I thought it was not only rude but possibly even deplorable the kind of language Daniel was using about Yacht Club games.

I'm disgusted on their behalf.

Just going to say.

Oh wow, I mean, so so for for you, it sounds like the demo has caused you to be more excited, right?

Yes, it was the kind of situation where it would be so easy for it to be a let down after so much waiting and so much anticipation and being essentially the sophomore effort.

I know Yacht Club has made a couple of other things in the interim, but this is their new big flagship game and you know, sometimes those have a tendency to pale in comparison.

I don't think this is going to pale in comparison.

I think this is going to go down as another just rock solid modern classic entry in the Canon here.

For me, as soon as I finished the demo, I deleted it because I wasn't.

You really needed that 600 megabytes or whatever, didn't you?

Yeah, but.

And it's I, I hate to say it, but it will probably mean I wait for a sale down the line before picking it up instead of getting it right at lunch.

Where is.

Had I not played the demo, I was probably just going to pick it up right on Halloween, sight unseen because Jonathan's infectious.

Talking about the game, I was like, Oh yeah, this, this sounds for me, and it's not so much now that I've played it.

Speaking of the lack of visual elements on this show, something I get to see that no one else does right now is your Zoom background, which is shirtless Jonathan Holmes holding his phone with a picture of Shirtless Jonathan Holmes, et cetera.

In a straight line like that, I want nothing more than for Jonathan to become animated in the background.

Reach around your scrawny little neck and just ring it until you go blue, you know?

He's so satisfying.

Oh well, maybe he'll secretly walk into frame and and do that and reach through himself to to choke me out for all we know.

Well, I know what I'm going to be dreaming about tonight.

Well, did you have anything else you wanted to say on Mina Elliott or DK Bonanza or Dream Mix TV before we wrap things up?

I guess just the whole Mina thing and Elliot, the two of those are particularly exciting in a unique way because they both feel like successors to old Game Boy games and Game Boy games do not get a lot of play when it comes to retro cash in cachet.

People tend to make NES or Super Nintendo style games or nowadays Nintendo 64 and PS1 style platformers are really big in the indie scene.

I feel like Gameboy gets passed over and now we have the Switch to in the year of Our Lord Jonathan Holmes 2025, and it is a souped up, just exquisite cutting edge tech Gameboy.

And now we're getting 2 brand new Game Boy games to play on it.

And I just think that's really cool because it makes the Switch to feel like a handheld.

It it makes it feel like it's honoring its handheld roots as much as it is the next mainline console from Nintendo.

This is the Game Boy's spirit being alive within the modern era.

Yeah, that's an interesting way to put things.

Well, do you have anything you want to plug?

I mean, I know we talked about it at the start, you fix your Hard or Die show, give a just for anybody who's, we've talked about it a number of times on this podcast feed.

But for anybody who's just now, for the first time hearing about Shy Fox and his Fix Your Hard or Die show, what is it?

Yeah, so the basic pitch is that last year, after seeing almost no David Lynch things and none of Twin Peaks directly, I watched episode 8 of season 3 of Twin Peaks, the season that aired 25 years after the original run.

And I was so captivated by it that I I started recognizing all these connections throughout the history of pop culture and things that I already loved my entire life and enjoyed.

So I went back and I watched all of Twin Peaks.

I've been working my way through David Lynch stuff, and I'm a newcomer.

I've always heard how intimidating it is to get into this stuff, how impenetrable some of it is.

And Fix Your Heart or Die is about showing listeners that, like me, they love a lot of things about Twin Peaks and Lynch's work, even if they've never directly experienced it.

On our main show, Fix Your Heart or Die, the flagship show, we go through things that Twin Peaks has touched or inspired.

The first big episode we had with Conrad Zimmerman and Laura Kate Dale was about The Legend of Zelda Lynx Awakening, which has come up on this show on this very episode a couple of times already.

It's a very Twin Peaks coded game.

And if you love Legend of Zelda Lynx Awakening, you might love Twin Peaks in ways you don't even know.

Our other major series so far in that main line entry is Severance.

We've covered Season 1 of Severance.

We're going to finish covering Season 2 of Severance.

I was just about to ask when when's that last episode coming out?

That's going to be up this upcoming Friday, yeah.

OK, so maybe before this episode we're talking on.

Yes.

So by the time by the time you're listening to this, dear listeners, you can go over and you can hear our our entire coverage on Severance Season 2 over the course of three big parts with Laura, Kate, Dale and Alan Ortega, who will also be on this show soon, I believe.

Yeah, I'm going to try to get Alan for the next episode.

If if Jonathan and Zoe will let me be the interviewer for for two in a row.

Wow.

Yeah, I think you've heard it.

This has gone swimmingly A+ here for you thorough.

Even though even though I have bad opinions on games I'm I'm doing OK at talking to people.

It is impressive.

You may have the worst opinions of any any games podcaster that I that I've encountered.

But yeah, so and Severance to me is sort of the modern Twin Peaks in a lot of ways.

So we've covered one of the oldest examples of something being touched by Twin Peaks and one of the most cutting edge examples.

And Speaking of which, we've done special episodes where we covered Death Stranding 2 by Hedeo Kojima with Laura Kate Dale, who gave me the inside scoop before release on how lynchy in that game is in secret ways and how it carries on that kind of legacy.

And just the other day, Kojima came out and said, boy, I would have loved to have David Lynch in one of my games.

I'm so sad he died.

And it's just like, yeah, dude, we all know.

Thank you for confirming.

So that felt really kismet.

But we're we're gearing up for a lot of exciting things that the show has been in a little bit of a lull lately because my life is in tatters in some ways, but it's getting better.

It's getting better.

Don't worry about me, I'll be fine.

We've got some very exciting developments coming up.

Laura Kate Dale has just committed to joining as my full time Co host.

So she will be on pretty much every episode going forward, along with my new friend, also your friend Marcio Daniels, as we call him.

I'll also be joining in the fun on a regular basis.

Now we'll be starting a proper Twin Peaks recap podcast that examines it from a newcomers point of view and shows you you don't have to be an expert.

That's news to me and I work on the show.

Exactly.

Breaking scoop here, We'll be going through the whole journey because I've been talking about Twin Peaks inspired things so long, and honestly, I need a revisit of Twin Peaks, so might as well go ahead and make that content out of it, right?

And I think we're going to have a lot of interesting things to say about Twin Peaks in 2025 that you haven't heard anywhere else, because we keep unearthing new types of opinions on this show.

The point is, whether you're a David Lynch fan or not, and even if you're not not open to becoming one, stop by, fix your heart or die and just revel in how far reaching and storied its legacy is.

Because I am still aghast every other day when I discover a new connection to this thing.

It is still an ongoing journey of incredible discovery.

When Speaking of bad opinions I have.

You did convince you didn't make me, but you did.

You did, through Osmosis convinced me to watch all of Twin Peaks, and I will say I didn't overall like it, but there was a lot of stuff that I did like in it peppered throughout that I would never have experienced had I not.

Made the commitment to just sit down and watch all of them.

So, you know, if anybody's listening and they're they're like, well, maybe I want to listen to this show, but I've never seen Twin Peaks.

I mean, check it out.

It is not for everybody.

I'll say that flat out.

I don't know if maybe maybe you have the opposite of it and maybe think it is for everybody.

I don't think it's for everybody, but I think that in some ways, not to be hyperbolic, it is everything in a lot of ways.

So like you say, there's, there's so much within it.

Everyone's going to find something to cling on to, even you.

It has had a profound influence on your music.

The original soundtrack created by Daniel for Fix Your Heart or Die is available for purchase on Band Camp, and you can stream a lot of it on Spotify.

And it's an incredible original soundtrack to a podcast which usually doesn't have an entire suite of original music.

And so if you enjoy his work over here, at least listen to the music.

Because boy, Speaking of things that just live in my head musically and not in an annoying way like Paulines music, fix your hard or die music is now just inside of me and I love it.

And it came from you and it came from this and there's something in the show for everyone.

That's the message here.

Even if it's not for everybody, you will find something within it.

Trust me.

It's a stop on by patreon.com.

Fix your heart pod, blue sky, fix your heart pod.

That's also where I hang out online most of the time.

So you want to see more from my weird ass just just stop on by.

I'm doing and stuff.

And that was Shy Fox, so be sure to check out his show.

And I guess we're gonna talk a little bit more about Dream Mix TV World fighters.

So am I reading this right?

They don't have goemon probably.

Not I should have pulled up the.

It was Hudson before they were owned by Konami.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But they got Simon Belmont in it.

Yeah, I didn't know.

I didn't even know that Konami and Hudson had merged, but they did.

They had a lot of history together, so it it made sense.

Although Konami then went through its heel phase where they were just doing like pachinko machine.

So they were for a long time like the worst publisher in the industry just because they were sitting on a treasure trove of old licenses.

But recently they've started like licensing them out.

So we've been getting like the Castlevania collection.

We even got the Rocket Knight collection.

We got a new Getsu Fuma den, which was kind of unexpected.

It wasn't great, They didn't really finish it, but it wasn't bad.

And it was a new Getsu Fuma den, which I wouldn't have expected five years ago.

I'm not that worldly.

What is Getsu fuma den?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, you have to be kind of up on Konami's history or Japanese games in general.

It was kind of like, I'd say the closest game to it is maybe Castlevania, Castlevania or the first Ninja Turtles game.

But you kind of like walked around in this overhead maze kind of thing.

And you'd go into levels and the levels controlled really loosely.

And sometimes they'd scroll from right to left, sometimes they scroll from left to right.

And then there were sections where you went through a dungeon and it was sort of behind the back, like old dungeon crawler, you know, it took place in Yomi, the Japanese underworld.

So it was sort of hellish and horrorish.

It was decent.

It leaves an impact, even if it's not the best gameplay.

Fuma, who was the main character, he showed up in like the YY World games, which I don't know if you know the YY World games.

No, you're you're, you're talking about stuff I've I've never heard.

Of we can get deep into this, the YY world games were Konami games where they took like all of their popular characters because they had a good stable back in the Famicom days.

They were amazing in the Famicom days.

So they take their popular characters like going on Simon Belmont.

King Kong was in the first one.

Bill Reiser, the guy from Contra, the blonde from Contra.

They were just like, you know, they mashed all these characters together.

The first one was a bit Metroid ish and the second one was just sort of a very schizophrenic kind of all over the place game where it shifted game styles just so like from level to level.

Like a warrior Ware.

No, more like Earthworm Gym 2.

OK.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which is not going to like if you're not into retro games, anybody who's listening.

Earthworm Gym Two starts off a lot like Earthworm Gym One where you're just platforming and shooting stuff and then like 3 levels in you're floating through like somebody's intestine has a blind salamander clutching their gun and there's like pinball bumpers.

It has that like Mozart music.

Yeah, it's playing Moonlight Sonata, which I think is Beethoven.

Oh, Beethoven.

OK, I don't remember.

Oh man, we sound dumb now.

One of those classical guys.

Yeah.

Anyways, so it changes style like level to level.

Sometimes you're playing like basically Gratius, and other times you're playing sort of like Contra.

Is that the one that you need?

The giant marshmallow to bounce the Peter puppies across the stage.

Well, that was Earthworm Jim too.

I went back to YY World for a moment.

Oh my.

Bad.

Oh, now we're just switching back and forth what a weird concept that marshmallow stage was.

That was one of my favorites.

The concept of that, for anybody who's not familiar, is that Peter Puppy is on one side of the screen and CYCRO is in a building on the other.

And CYCRO flings Peter Puppy's puppies out into the street, and you have to catch them on a marshmallow and bounce them across the street to Peter Puppy.

And if the puppies hit the ground, they just splatter.

It is so morbid.

And if you drop too many puppies, Peter Puppy, who is like a Hulk, like Marvel the Hulk, not Hulk Hogan.

We spent enough time talking about him last time.

Yeah, we're talking about somebody else's Dick this episode.

Peter Puppy would eventually like Hulk out and just take out his rage on Jim, which really misplaced anger because if he went after CYCRO then we probably wouldn't be in this level.

I know.

But what a morbid who thought that up?

What was the pitch meeting like for that?

Like hey guys, I got an idea.

It might have been, what's his name?

Doug Ted Apple, who is not a great guy.

I don't know if he did much on the design or just the art.

Like Shiny's games are always weird and always a bit kind of off kilter.

So it really could have been like David Perry or I can't name anybody else at that studio.

Yeah, weird concept, but we are way off track now.

Yeah.

So rewinding Why?

Why world gets you from a den, Konami, Hudson, Dream Mix TV.

There you go.

I'm sad to hear it's not very good because it's got you go from Bloody Roar.

I love some bloody roar.

Solid Snake was in it and and the Moai Head who was from the Gratia series, well, he's actually from Easter Island, right.

But prolifically in the Gratia series, had a game of his own Moai kun on Famicom.

Yeah, that's a.

That's a good cast.

Yeah, it's a it's pretty wild just seeing these these come together and I I would imagine I haven't looked up the timeline.

Well, GameCube as opposed to Smash Brothers Brawl where Solid Snake popped over to that game, you know, so so this game would have had Solid Snake in a smash like before he made his way to the real 1.

He was got some practice and I guess.

I guess.

Oh, and Simon Belmont too.

Yeah.

So then, yeah, they were, they were trying some stuff.

And I I think Bomberman shows up as like a me fighter in some of the Smash Brothers.

I haven't played Smash in so long.

I played a bit of Smash Ultimate.

I can't get into it like I did back in the Game Cube days, but.

Yeah, my, my biggest time with it was definitely on the Wii U.

And then I played a little bit of Smash Ultimate on Switch and I was like, I'm done.

I don't need any more.

Yeah, I, I loved it back on the N64 when it first came out.

I had a friend over.

We were both coming down with a cold, like we're in like the early stages of a cold.

So we bought just like Vick's cough drops in Halls and then stayed up late playing Smash Brothers.

You shouldn't do that with a cold, no, no.

And also Halls and Vicks have like on the package that you should only consume so many of those.

We were going through packages of those so.

Yeah, yeah, when you have a cold, you want to just go to sleep, but I've done that myself.

Where where you just, they're like, I'm going to stay up and have fun even despite being sick.

Yeah, so that was a good time.

But yeah, Smash Brothers Melee was a big event on the GameCube, and then after that I actually didn't like Brawl.

Part of it is the single player because that plot, the subspace emissary plot, is so dumb I couldn't get over it.

That was my favorite part in the WE era was was that.

I'm sorry, but the worst part about it was they spoil Mother 3A game that they weren't planning on bringing to North America, So they're like, well, might as well spoil the big twist for you, yeah.

Yeah, if they're not going to bring it over one way or another, but I mean, that's got to be maybe something to do with like localization, right?

Because they would have put the same big cutscene in in the Japanese release of Smash Brothers, right?

Sure, but why?

Oh, it's the ending of Mother Three that they spoil.

Why would they do that?

Your guess is as good as mine.

This has been a very emotional podcast.

Feel like I'm working out some emotions here.

Well, yeah, hopefully, hopefully we don't, we don't unzip you fully, but you know, just just a little bit, a little bit at a time.

Yeah, got to, got to vent it, got to let it all out.

This is going to be a long one I hope.

And no Jonathan.

I'm surprised Jonathan may be like I don't want to put any thoughts in his head but he may be like y'all are good without me, you don't need me.

We'd we'd put a kibosh on that.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, this is definitely fun for me, don't get me wrong.

But you know, there's definitely the the Jonathan factor that like there's only a Jonathan shaped puzzle piece to a lot of this stuff.

Yeah, he's the most popular of the three of us at least, so a lot of people probably just heard that he wasn't here and turned it off.

So it's maybe just us talking to each other right now.

Maybe I'm going to re record a bit at the front and say like Jonathan, wait, wait, wait, don't, don't chime in.

Just just give us a minute.

Oh yeah, Sort of like that one season of The Witched where they just kind of like had Darren off screen.

We just kind of pretend that he's here, but we're like, we're hushing him every so often.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I have enough audio clips.

I might actually insert a couple of him being like oh OK or something.

Smoke and mirrors.

Yeah.

Anyway, I guess we should probably wrap this thing up.

Do you have anything that you want to plug on on this show?

OK, maximum, utmost.

I don't know if anybody listening uses Steam Curators, but if you do, use Steam Curators to help curate your steam shopping experience, Maximum Utmost has a curation done by me.

I actually just found you on there this week honestly.

I see this this plug is.

Important.

Yeah, it is because I I didn't know that you did that.

I was just on the front page and I saw.

Where is it?

Let's just do a little walkthrough here.

It's right in front of my face.

It's just above the blue toed feed.

Let us influence your buying habits with the Steam Curator page.

I saw that.

I was like, let me check that out.

And it is not as easy as you would think to follow somebody on there because when you click a link, it goes to the Steam page in your browser.

And unless you're also logged in there, which I wasn't, you can't just click the follow button.

I had to actually just go out of my way and login a second time versus being logged in on the Steam app.

Well, don't scare them off.

Well, I'm just, I'm telling him how to do it.

If you're, if you want to, if you want to see Zoe's recommends, definitely just, you know, log in on your browser.

You probably could do it on your phone too.

I don't know, but I should probably check out some of this myself because I don't know a lot of this.

Let's do Jonathan's plugs next.

Do you know what he might be working on or?

He works on Nintendo Force.

Yeah.

I sometimes work on Nintendo Force as well.

I haven't in the past few months, but every once in a while I pop up.

He makes comics for him.

And I think he's maybe gonna make a comic for this show if you're on the Patreon.

Not that we need to go deep into it, but on the internal e-mail thread I did see that you both were exchanging emails about that.

We should probably plug this podcast Patreon.

I got a little tag at the end that says check out the Patreon.

And Jonathan, Jonathan has been doing a great job across the years of at least me being involved where he sends out a comic couple times a year, I think it's like 3 or 4.

And he spends a lot of personal money that he will not let me reimburse him for on mailing them overseas.

And I'm just like, what are you doing, man?

And he's like, he's like, I got to get him out to the patrons.

He is that kind of guy.

Yeah, this comic might be written by me.

I did send him a script, but you know, it's up to him.

Oh yeah, yeah.

I think he said, like, looks great.

And then like, maybe he's hard at work on that comic for all we know.

Because that's Jonathan for you.

He does what he can with the time he has.

Yeah, but you can follow him at Tron Knots dot beast guy dot Social.

And As for me, I am Daniel, AKA Dweeb Yorst.

You can follow me at Dweeb Yorst, dot beast guy dot Social.

And that's nobody should ever have to try to spell that.

Don't worry about that.

I'm sure we'll find a way to put a link here in the show notes.

And you can, you can follow me there if you want.

And I'm a musician as well as a podcast producer.

So I do all the music on this show.

I don't know if a lot of people know that.

I'm sure everybody does.

Yeah, Daniel does all the hard work for this podcast.

It's not that hard.

It's harder than just talking into a microphone.

That's true.

Jonathan Holmes and I have the easy part.

But you also both have a a natural curiosity about just what's going on in the game space that I get off and discouraged by.

I'm I'm just like, well, I just don't want to.

I don't want to read about how depressing things are or.

You know you should read maximum utmost.

I hear it's great.

That's true, yeah.

I mean, I, I do read it, You know, there's less like doom and gloom because I think you just don't want to cover that.

It's covered elsewhere.

That's true.

I don't know.

I, I'm not all that interested in reading about it.

So I kind of feel like I'll be somebody who, you know, other people out there aren't that interested in reading about all the doom and gloom.

So let's just acknowledge it, but not dwell.

Yeah, I mean, and and just kind of scrolling through it's it's a lot of reviews and opinions.

So go get your news somewhere else and then come come over to Max Utmost to to find out what we think.

I do some offbeat news, sometimes retro releases I like to do, sometimes like game announcements that I'm excited for, but really it's a block.

It's what I am interested in and I hope to reach people who are also interested.

In it.

Well, there you go.

Well, cool.

Well, I guess that's probably it for us today.

Thanks for listening, I suppose.

I suppose that was the worst sign off in the history of podcasts.

And you're using it though.

I am all right.

I'll, I'll probably stop recording there.

You've been listening to Maximum Utcast, which is hosted by Zoe and Jonathan, with editing, production and music by Daniel.

You can support the show and get exclusive bonuses on patreon@patreon.com/T TWAD.

Visit maximummemos.com to read written articles about some of the topics we covered on the show, plus news, reviews, opinions and more.

Thanks for listening, and if you're not already sick of hearing my voice, here I am again to thank all our Patreon supporters for helping us make all these shows every week.

Our supporters are beautiful beings of pure light that can do no wrong, and if you'd like to fuse of them in the eternal glow of the universe, you can kick in a few bucks a month and get your name read here.

Along with all of our $5 and up supporters such as Carson, A Vanilla AU and B Counterfeit, Amber D, Evan Shy Fox, Alana G, Kyat Simon L Conduit of Chungus, Bearer of Dinkus, Minion of Jon Con, Bo M Midlife Stasis Conduit of finally changing his Patreon name for the first time since season 5, Jeff P, Samuel P Forest R, Benjamin S, Benjamin V, Ricardo V and Soda Baby.

And in lieu of a Jonathan remix, here's a little bonus chat for me and Zoe talking about the Rugrats game from her Steam recommendation list, which you can peruse over at maximummumos.com.

Oh, I've seen some.

There's a Rugrats game.

I didn't even know there was a Rugrats game.

Yeah.

It was.

It was made for the NES, and then they did like an overlay for it to make it look new.

So it's really an NES game.

But I guess they wanted to also get people who weren't interested in retro games.

Yeah, I think it gave people like this false impression that they were just getting a normal side scrolling and they wouldn't have been thinking like, oh, this is going to have the limitations of the NES, so it's not going to be able to do a lot of flashy stuff.

So, you know, my review for it was like this glowing like, oh, this is like, you know, easily as good as Yo Noid on the NES.

Whereas other reviews are like, yeah, it's not a very good platformer.

And it's like, OK, if you take it out of context, it's not that great, but.

Yeah, that's a.

That's an important piece of info.

Yeah, if you look at it like an NES game, it's pretty impressive.

I think design wise they really put some thought into.

It yeah, some of my original NES licensed games that I liked were I remember liking the Tiny Toons game and then also the Flintstones game.

I'm sure they're terrible but I I remember being a kid and being like those ones are pretty good.

The Flintstones are a little it's a little bit of a basic 1 and it's not too impressive, but Looney Tunes has its fans.

I haven't played through it all the way itself.

It was.

It was the tiny tunes.

One tiny tunes, sorry I missed.

There might have been a tiny Looney Tunes as well.

I don't.

There's there's Bugs Bunny's crazy castle.

Oh yeah, yeah.

But I remember there was, there was a part or, or maybe this was like core to the game, but you could like switch between three different characters who all had different like special moves.

And I was like, oh, this is awesome.

One of the Castlevanias did that too.

And I, I, I always like that in games.

Yeah, I, I mean Rugrats is like that as well.

So there you go.

You you got that link there?

Well, I might have to check it out then.

There's a lot of Garbage Pail kids and yes, oh really?

That that came out recently?

That is also not bad.

I think rug WRAS is a little bit better, a bit tighter, but you know, drivers pale kids for what it is, it's retty good.