Hello and welcome mystery searchers and gizmo solvers, art piece finders and little boys
that hang out with guys that aren't actually detectives but do detective jobs.
Alright, that's welcome.
You're listening to Pocket Cast.
Yes.
My name is Fletcher, his name is Ed.
He can be found at EunucH0rn, that's horn with a zero instead of an O.
There we go.
This is, you can reach me, I can get that.
GappedtoothMF.
That's right.
On Twitter.
We also have a Facebook page, I believe it's Pocket Cast with an exclamation mark at the
end.
There's a space between Pocket and Cast.
I think so.
There's a little confusion if you look at our artwork versus our name, those two are
different.
There is another Pocket Cast that's out there, but they don't have a space and we have a
space and that's what makes the difference.
Honestly, those guys kind of suck.
I haven't actually listened to it.
I haven't even looked at it.
I bet it's okay.
I hate to just draw some shade on what could be a really good seven episode podcast.
Maybe they got their mission done.
That's it, they got it.
Maybe once we hit nine episodes they're like, oh, your Pocket Cast.
Our bad.
Then we'll start getting publicity.
It's going to take off.
Jay Leno could be in our future.
It's so funny that you say that.
I grew up watching Jay Leno, sneaking down at night to watch Jay Leno.
It's so funny to look back on it because I had no idea what they were talking about at
all.
Not a clue, but for some reason I just loved the talk show atmosphere and it was a late
night TV show.
I don't know what shows my parents used to watch after I went to bed.
So memory is funny, right?
You alter it without realizing that you alter it.
Either I have a memory of watching it on the stairs.
From our house in Iowa we could watch the TV on the staircase.
Were you watching it through the reflection of a picture?
No, no.
There was a line of sight.
There was a door way that you could go through.
There's no doors or anything, but it was just that big opening.
So part of the TV you could see from the stairs.
I thought that's where you were going with it for a second and I was like, oh God, I'm
about to question my entire childhood because I have a distinct memory of sitting on the
top step of the stairs and being able to watch TV through the reflection of a picture hanging
on the wall or something.
I could have, I guess, because we had pictures hanging there, but there was no need to.
Yeah, no need to obfuscate on my account.
I think if you can see the reflection you can probably see the original image, right?
I don't remember what I watched.
I do remember, was it the Twilight Zone or something maybe my parents were watching?
I don't remember.
I don't think your parents were watching the Twilight Zone.
I remember.
That's a good point.
You didn't, you weren't a baby in the seventies.
I don't even know when the Twilight Zone came out.
Maybe it's later than that.
It's black and white though.
So I don't feel like it's like, I feel like it's fair to say it's sixties.
Yeah.
I could have been watching reruns.
Yeah, it could have been reruns.
I watched so many reruns.
I remember murder mysteries.
Right?
Isn't that just the name of it?
Murder mysteries?
It could be.
I don't know.
I just had like a partially animated intro for like an adult late night TV show.
I don't know anything about it.
I feel like my family was always trying to get a deal on TV.
And so for a while we had like, I want to say it was like Canadian direct TV or something.
I don't know why, but we had all these Canadian channels and TV shows.
Interesting.
Ghost Rider was one of them.
Like the TV show or like?
Yeah, it was a TV show called Ghost Rider.
And it was like where this ghost could take, say for this, there's an ACD poster hanging
behind Ed.
And at the top it says AC, lightning bolt DC.
And the bottom it says for those about to rock.
So Ghost Rider would be able to take only those letters and create a message for these
kids that were trying to solve a mystery because this ghost was like helping them all the time
solve mysteries.
But the only way he could communicate was through like what letters he'd already been
given in certain scenarios.
Interesting.
Yeah.
You have never heard of that?
No, no one has cause it's Canadian TV.
I'm sure Canadians have heard of it.
I'm sure there's some people up North that are like, fuck.
Yeah.
Ghost Rider was my shit.
There's a show called Reboot that I really liked.
That's really cool.
It's about programs inside of a computer.
And it's some of the earliest like CGI television show like going on and it's nineties.
So it doesn't look great, but it doesn't look great.
All right.
That's fair.
But it's once again, one of those like it was mainly broadcast in Canada and eventually
it was brought down to America.
I think Cartoon Network might've picked it up eventually.
Oh no shit.
But for the longest time I'd seen it years before because of this weird ass Canadian
television.
Oh yeah.
That's awesome.
Man, we lost track there.
No, we found the track.
We are Pocket Cats.
Yeah.
What did we do?
We do a podcast.
About the DS and the DS library, all of the North American games.
Yeah.
We're playing them all.
I'm open to other games too.
What are you telling me right now?
I'm not saying I'm going to add in Japanese games because obviously we wouldn't have fun.
I mean maybe we...
There's some I'm sure that you can play without translation, but I'm sure there's a lot of
good games.
Yeah.
That's what I'm saying.
Yeah.
But if there's like a European game.
Oh, well it's funny you mentioned that because I don't know if you picked up on this, but
we've just played the UK version of Professor Layton and the Curious Village.
I did not pick up on that.
Everything was in pounds.
Now, I didn't think anything of it other than like, oh, maybe they just picked a monetary,
or not monetary.
I mean, yes, a monetary system, but an arbitrary monetary system from another country.
Obviously the professor is like, they're not American.
No, everyone's very clearly like...
Eastern European or European.
I don't know, but it's not...
So that would...
It made sense to me.
The little kid at one point says, core blimey.
So...
I don't even know what that means.
I know what blimey means.
I recognize it as an expression, but I don't know that I could give you a direct translation
of it.
This past two weeks, this fortnight, we played Professor Layton and the Curious Village.
Woo!
Bro, I was so pumped for this game.
I was too, especially after our last two games.
This was definitely nice going in.
Booting up and seeing, is it level five, is that what the studio is called?
That's the developer.
The developer.
Level five is just...
They have so many great games.
So seeing level five instantly, I'm just like, fuck.
Let's go.
Yes, let's do this.
They made a game that we talked about on the first episode, the Attack of the Friday Monsters.
So that's one of my...
They didn't, sorry, they published that game.
They didn't develop that game.
But there is a heir to level five games.
The first game on their list of developed games is Dark Cloud.
Did you ever see Dark Cloud?
It was a very cool action RPG on the PlayStation 2 that I remember watching my cousin Casey
play.
A ton.
I remember it was very specific summer vacation.
He would play a game that nobody's heard of on the PlayStation.
I don't think...
I'm going to back you up there and say that that's not...
No one's ever heard of it.
I think a lot of people have a very special place for Dark Cloud.
Maybe Dark Cloud 2 is specifically what I'm thinking of.
But those two games, people really appreciate and enjoy.
And then there's...
Do they have a DS title?
For the Dark Cloud series?
Yeah.
I don't know.
I didn't do too much digging.
I just kind of went through the list of level five, just curious of what they'd put out.
And besides these three games, I can't think of much else now.
To my knowledge, they did do all the other Professor Layton games.
Oh yeah.
And they just have quite the presence on Nintendo.
Dude, it was a clean polish through and through.
You were really surprised, I remember saying to me about the sound.
Oh dude.
So especially after rating our first couple of games fairly well from an audio perspective,
either from their music and the composition or the quality, what...
Bro.
The first...
You start a new save file and immediately you're met with pretty damn good full dub.
Fully animated cut scene.
It was insane.
Oh my God.
I was jumping up and down.
I was like, holy shit.
I didn't know it could do this.
It looks so good too.
It's so nice.
It's beautiful.
Dude, it's putting everything to shame.
And I'm like, oh no, we should have not played this game so early on.
But it was a breath of fresh air.
I will.
I'm curious of what you think about the cut scenes actually, because we got our first
two games were from 2009.
This game is probably, I'm going to say 2005, maybe even earlier than that.
And I think because of that in the cut scenes, the opening cut scenes, I almost feel like
Soul of Two Robos is better.
I feel like both of the last two games is almost better only in the lack of pixelization,
because there's a little bit of pixelization that you get with the Professor Layton cut
scenes.
But the art style...
The art style.
It's so good that it doesn't matter.
I have to give it to...
Hold on, let me look and see who it was.
There was a studio that did...
It was PA Works, Progressive Animation Works, did all the animations for the various cut
scenes in the game.
And I feel like I don't want to disagree with you about Soul of Two Robo and the quality
and how high they were ascending heights with those animations.
Well, they were a bunch of later on.
True, true.
Yeah, the technology is thoroughly established at this point, sure.
But I feel like the difference between is at that point it was known, this is what we
can do on this platform with these animations.
And I feel like Professor Layton was like, we don't give a shit.
This is our art style.
This is where everything is going.
Everything is thoroughly fleshed out.
And I felt like, was it as visually impressive at times as some of the stuff from Soul of
Two Robo?
Maybe not.
But dude, it was just clean and crisp the whole time.
And the consistency too.
It has such atmosphere to it.
And we love some atmosphere.
I know you and I both are all about the atmosphere in a game.
And that did such a great job of the characters staying individual, all strange in their own
way.
But within this universe, it made sense that each one would be in this town, this tiny
little town of, do you remember what it was called?
Saint Mystere?
Saint Mystere.
Yeah.
That was...
It's a cute little game, man.
I've had this, this title has been on my radar.
Maybe not this title specifically, but at least the Professor Leighton series.
It's always one that I was aware of growing up and I knew of.
Never once dipped my toe in.
Never really had an opportunity to as a kid.
And then by the time I'm an adult, it's not on my radar at all.
I'm like, oh, that sounded cool.
Don't know that I'd ever invest the time intentionally to go back and check it out.
So I didn't really know what to expect.
I knew it carried an air of a game for smart people, but I didn't even know necessarily
what that meant.
That was an impression I had of it.
For me, it kind of lived in the same stream as...
What are those games?
Ace Attorney?
Yeah.
It was a Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Never played any of them.
But yeah, I didn't really know what to expect.
Well, they do have a crossover, the Phoenix Wright.
I don't know if they're made by...
I have to assume they're developed by the same studio in order to have that kind of
crossover.
Yeah, I don't know the realities behind it.
I'm not sure.
It's definitely a title that sticks out in the DS.
When people talk about the DS, that feels like Professor Leighton is always brought
up.
Yeah, 100%.
That's one of the things that kept coming to mind for me is just when I think of DS,
especially with the exposure to various marketing that I had as a kid, Professor Leighton is
one of those titles that I remember being there and I remember seeing and hearing about,
but just never personally had the chance to play.
But God, it is a cool game.
Do you still feel like it's a game for smart people going into it, having played it, now
having to beat the game actually?
Oh yeah, I did beat it.
You did beat it.
I did.
Yes and no.
I don't want to gatekeep puzzles because at the core of the game, that's all this is,
it's just a brain teaser game.
But the puzzles are woven into a fairly involved storyline and you've got, like you said, interesting
characters to meet and stuff.
No, I wouldn't.
I would say I definitely struggled with some of the puzzles.
I recognized a large handful of them, whether or not I knew the solutions already or what
have you, but you can definitely cheese some of the stuff in here.
Yeah and you can, because they give you, so I guess to break down the basics of Professor
Leighton before we get into discussing this, you've got a point and click adventure.
Basically.
Where every cut, every scene that you come across that you can interact with, there's
probably two to three puzzles in and they can vary from riddles to math equations to
geometry.
A lot of logic stuff.
Logic is, there's a lot of, so there's a really, if you don't like one style, you're not going
to be deterred because there's a third of the other style that you will probably enjoy.
And you can skip puzzles straight up.
There's a lot.
If you're not having it.
I'd be curious to see how many puzzles you actually have to solve to complete the game.
I came across, and I know you came across a couple, but there are a couple of sections
of the game where you basically get hit with a wall, if you will, progress wall woods.
You have to have so many completed puzzles to continue.
I didn't think about that.
But there's definitely more you would encounter more than you needed to get there.
I don't know what the gap is between how many you're presented with versus how many you
need to progress, but it's reasonable.
And so you're a professor Layton accompanied by Luke is boy assistant.
Yeah.
Self-proclaimed attache or.
I love him.
I love Luke.
He's got such a spunk to him.
The professor is very laid back, very cool.
Sherlock Holmes type character.
Sherlock Holmes, Debonair.
Dude, he's a, oh, he's a gentleman.
And it's almost comical, like the stereotypes that apply to these guys.
And I think it's intentional.
Oh yeah.
But they're woefully loving characters and you just cannot help but really like these
guys.
And they just, they're out there for the most purest of intentions because they love the
heart of the mystery.
They love solving shit.
And they like to help people.
Yeah.
It's great.
There's no room for questions or wondering why is this well-grown man hanging out with
this kid?
I mean, dude, that kid's gotta be what eight?
Yeah.
But he's a boy genius.
He's obviously a boy genius.
He's a little savant.
Saving these weird riddles and shit with this older professor.
Yeah.
And you.
I'll say that man's credentials.
He's a professor.
Someone thinks he's a detective, but he's not, not a detective.
He's just a lover of puzzles.
So the professor and Luke get an invitation to.
St. Mystere.
St. Mystere to help with a mystery.
I'm curious.
Do you think the story is all that important?
So at the heart of the gameplay, irrelevant.
But the story is what had me pushing through.
For me, it was a mixture of I want to know what's going on because I would say it about
the halfway mark.
I thought I had a pretty good idea of what I thought was actually going on.
And you know, I'm fairly autistic and I like to think that I know where a movie's going
halfway through, right?
Or whatever the case may be.
So I really wanted to see if I was right.
I thought the story was endearing.
I thought it was charming and I thought it had more than enough to propel you through
having to just ram your head against some of these puzzles that were either really difficult
or maybe possibly slightly poorly worded.
And you're not sure.
Like, I know what the answer is, but I'm not presenting it how it wants it.
You know, the pacing was very nice there.
Yeah.
I quite liked it because I would really stump on one and then I'd breeze through two and
I'm like, oh, I'm a fucking genius.
Well, I mean, even the pacing with the story where it brings in where all of a sudden you're
just tired of the puzzles, not even tired of them, just tired of getting your ass kicked
by the puzzles.
And then you get a little bit of humor and intrigue.
Yeah, I do.
I enjoyed the story.
I just felt that it was very mundane compared to the characters that it presented.
The characters were excellent.
And I, I would like to take a second to talk about my favorite one.
Absolutely.
Let's hear it.
Did you ever meet Prashuto?
Prashuto is the little weirdo that eats all the trash and food in his house.
His house is just like trash.
So you should at some point, you should check out my Twitter profile because I finally put
a pro like a picture and it is of him.
Awesome.
Dude, I love this dude.
He's just this little short, slightly pot bellied man with a little cap on and he doesn't
give a shit about anything other than filling his face.
You say short, but I feel like he's smaller than the nine year old.
He's smaller than Luke.
He's a pretty, he's a pretty slender guy.
He's got a little tugboat on him.
You know, yep.
Little donut.
I liked, I liked Prashuto.
I resonated with him.
He's like, I don't, I don't leave my house, but to go to the market and buy copious amounts
of cured meats.
And I do not have time for whatever it is you want to talk to me about.
He is so annoyed with anybody that's like, I'm eating.
Leave me the fuck alone.
I think my favorite was probably the butler.
Arthur knows Matthew, Matthew.
I did like him too.
And his, something about his like just design, his 2d character design felt so aside from
the stylization of literally everyone else.
I thought, I don't know what it was.
Everyone else typically had a lot of over pronounced, lengthy, like every, I felt like
everybody was drawn out and had very slender and long gated pronunciations.
Whereas Matthew is short stout, short stout, dude.
It looks like Winnie the Pooh if you scrunched him down with your fingers.
Very like just like scared looking guy.
He's a great character.
He's just concerned about everyone's wellbeing.
Yeah, I could, I could feel Matthew's anxiety while playing the game.
Absolutely.
Anytime you see him, he's just like, Oh fuck.
He was murdered on the grounds.
Oh, this is my fault.
I'm on duty.
How would I let this happen to this family of amazing people who are terrible, God awful.
Yeah.
I said to you earlier, it reminds me of a Wes Anderson film.
Yeah.
I, I couldn't agree more.
It had a very Tim Burton-esque.
Yeah with those slender weird characters.
Two it's accentuations.
Oh, I, I loved it.
I really enjoyed it too.
The presentation, the atmosphere, the puzzles.
Dude you have a favorite puzzle that you can think of?
So they had several variations of different degrees of difficulty of those.
Man, I don't know.
They're called like the slide, the block slide puzzles.
Oh yeah.
You have something in one corner and the goal is to get it to the other.
And you've got blocks of various shapes on like a Tetris board and you only have so many
free blocks with which to play and you have to rearrange everything and work the one thing
from one side to the other.
Some of them were stupid easy.
And I did one of them.
I did, I was into like 600 moves on just working the motherfucker out.
But I do like those because you don't really know, you can come in with a strategy, but
at the end of the day, it's just kind of, you've got to move stuff around and forget
what you think you know.
And I don't know.
I like, I like those.
Yeah.
You definitely, you get like a line halfway cling together and it totally goes against
your strategy that you had before.
But at least now you have these three together that even if you had to move from way over
there, I've got them grouped now and I somewhat have it figured out.
And then you get a twist thrown at you or you're like, I've undone half of my progress.
I was so sure of my progress 10 seconds ago.
And then now I'm realizing I'm where I started.
If not worse off.
Yeah.
If not way worse off, I don't have time to restart.
Yeah.
What about you?
Do you have a favorite?
I think one of my favorites was one that I really disliked, but now that I think back
on it, I really enjoy it was the, uh, the guard, the lazy guard that wants to take as
few steps as possible through the, uh.
That's right.
It was the museum.
He wants to take a few turns as possible.
Right.
He had nine rooms set up in a three by three block each, each with a door.
It was almost, it was basically like one open room that had like.
Yeah.
Pillar.
Yeah.
Each of the points.
Yeah.
So they weren't that one.
That one threw me for a second because I thought it should just be a circle at one point.
He doesn't need to take any turns.
It's not a turn if you're just always turning.
It ends up being that like.
Just go through them diagonally.
Diagonally.
And it's just so duh.
It was duh.
I felt like as far as the puzzles go, I felt like that's where the shortcoming of the representation
of these puzzles and the DS itself came to play heavily.
And it's for me, it was really the only time that I struggled with anything.
And it wasn't on a lot of the puzzles, but there were a few where it was more of a free
flow where you're not interacting with designated points on the puzzle as it's presented to
you like you have these blocks.
You can move them or you connect the dots or whatever it might be.
You have to kind of draw something and it's a little bit more interpretive.
And I feel like it was almost intentional to trip you up with you can do anything.
Can you do anything the right way though?
Did you run into the star puzzle that we had talked about?
Holy shit.
With all of the black and white diagonal.
I did.
That's one where first of all, it's hard to see where the star is.
And then from that point, drawing the star, the stylus is not very accurate.
And I'm wondering because is this the touchscreen or is this because it's an earlier game that
was figuring it out?
Because I feel like in the last game we played where you could do some stylus controls, it
was a bit more accurate.
I still had some looseness to it, which you definitely when you run into a game where
you have to draw a star, you have to outline something.
You have to be fairly precise.
I had to draw that one twice because I did finally find it.
I did too.
And then I had to do it twice.
I drew it on there and it didn't take it.
So I was like, fucking I'll look somewhere else and I'm looking all over for it and eventually
realized that no, I just drew it roughly.
Yeah.
I was in the same boat and I didn't even really change my approach when I outlined it the
second time.
I just was like, well, hopefully this one gets the algorithm right.
And it did.
Yeah.
That's exactly how mine went too.
Damn.
That was a cool one.
That was a really interesting one.
I did like that one.
There were, we talked about this earlier.
There are some puzzles and these were probably amongst my least favorite, but also my favorite
is depending.
But some of the puzzles are logic and you have to, you know, you're just ruling stuff
out trying to keep up and it's throwing you for a curve.
Some of them are almost like word problems.
Like you'd get in a third grade math class, but with a loophole somewhere and you just
have to reread it a second time.
And some of them are, this isn't really a puzzle as much as fuck you and just do it
by hand.
You have to slog through the atrocity of whatever tedious activity we've presented before you
and you just have to not go cross-eyed.
There is no trick to it.
You just have to slog through and do the work.
I think one of the best examples of that is that you run into multiple of these where
it's, I was asking my dad how old he is and he's double the age plus 10.
Yeah.
And it's just like, and like you said, where you just have to write out and luckily you
have the stylist and the bottom screen to just start writing out your equations.
I am really, really bad at math.
I'm pretty good with pretty good with words.
Pretty good with the logic ones.
Geometry I'm all right with.
Yeah.
I get into these figure out based on these three different algorithms, what the answer
is going to be.
And I just get so frustrated and instantly walk away from that puzzle.
I feel that I am.
I am fairly proud of my completion statistics.
There were, I looked it up.
I think there's 120 total puzzles.
And I found it was I think 78 or 88, whatever the number was.
I completed all but one that I found.
I only skipped one.
Do you know which one you skipped?
Yeah.
I don't remember exactly which one, but did you ever make it past the clock tower?
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah.
You would have had to because that's where prosciutto is.
Yeah.
Okay.
So did you, do you ever talk to the, oh wait, no.
This was in the tower, tower area.
I think it's on the other side of the marketplace, which is past the clock tower.
Yeah.
Okay.
There's, so there's the lady and she's looks like she's holding up like a hand of cards
or something maybe.
And she's just got weird pancake titties that are like up on her chin for some reason.
Well she's holding some cards and the only puzzle she ever gave me were, were cards.
And she only, like she only appeared like kind of pretty late in the game.
And then she only reappeared for me even later in the game.
But she only gave you like these weird card puzzles and it had, it was, one of them was
I have, oh no, I do remember the exact one that I skipped.
It was something to the effect of you put all 52 cards face down, randomly scrambled
on the table plus one joker.
What are the odds that you will pull all four aces before the joker?
And I was like, no, I'm no, I don't know that math.
So I pulled a hint and it's worth noting that every time you get a hint on one of these
puzzles and the most I think you can ever get is three.
I don't think all of them have three, but most do.
And it's only three, but every time you do, you have to use a hint coin and those can
only be found by spamming random areas on a given location within the world and maybe
there'll be a coin there.
But there's a finite number of those anyway.
So I burned through the hints and like the first hint was something to the effect of
you don't need math to solve this one.
Just think about it a different way.
And I'm like, so I think I burned all three hints and they, I had no idea.
I threw a couple of guesses in there and I was like, fuck that.
Did you ever look up what the answer was?
No, there were a couple that I think, I think two or three that I did look the answer up
to and there were only ones that I was like very confident that I knew what was going
on and thought that I was probably getting caught up on some weird gimmick that didn't
translate well.
One of those ended up being like that.
I couldn't tell you which one and the other two, I was just dumb.
Yeah.
There's only one that I looked up and it was just me being dumb.
Yeah.
That, that always hurts your pride a little bit.
Let's see if I can word this right.
1000 of these equal two of these.
Right.
Isn't that what it is?
Yeah.
And I just started thinking immediately, oh, Roman numerals X.
Oh, that's actually, that's actually pretty, I mean, it's wrong.
I mean, obviously it's wrong, but like, I mean, there's so many without with zero context
and not having any other puzzles like that.
Like it's you come into that.
Like I have no idea even where this is starting.
I'm thinking X.
I'm thinking L. I'm thinking, you know, I'm thinking different, different Roman numerals
and it ends up being spoiler alert.
1000 millimeters.
Yeah.
One is one meter is a thousand.
Yeah.
And it makes it so, it's so, it's so obvious.
I even at one point thought about centimeters, but see the CM.
No, that doesn't work.
I was right there.
I had, I had the apple in my mouth, man.
And I just missed it.
Dude, this definitely, and I thought, I thought about, I think you said something about it
last with the end of last, not last week, but our last episode about, you know, seeing
this game or one of these titles as a kid and thinking that's a game for smart people
or not being smart enough to play it.
And I kept thinking about that this whole time.
I was like, dude, I would have gotten nowhere in this game as a kid.
Like I would have, I would have probably gotten a handful of these, but I would not have made
a lot of forward progress.
Yeah.
I know as a high schooler, I did not, I don't think I made it very far at all.
Just also realizing I was like, there's no way I'm going to make this through without
looking up answers or using tons of hints.
I did use a lot more hints than I wanted to in Michael Lime.
Yeah.
And at that point you're almost like, why am I bothering playing this game if I'm just
going to look up the answers this time through?
I did not do that.
I felt fine using hints.
You know, I was, yeah, I did, I did pretty well with, with hints.
The only time where you run into a problem with hints is that there is a puzzle I want
to solve, but I don't want to use my hint points because there's a, there's a puzzle
I will have to solve in the future to progress the story.
Yeah.
It's gear fear, but with hint points.
What is gear fear?
Gear fear.
Uh, I don't, I don't know that I could say with a hundred percent certainty that it was
invented or coined for this genre of games, but I learned about it through playing games
like Tarkov, like escape from Tarkov.
Um, but the idea that you go into a raid, you pew pew and you collect loot and find
some gear, you kill another player.
Maybe he's got really good shit.
So you pick it up and you only get to keep what you successfully exfil with.
You die, you lose everything on you.
Right?
So the idea that you might amass some really dope shit, but if you take it in, you risk
dying and losing it.
And so you have gear fear.
So you hold all this really good shit and you're too afraid to use it because you might
die.
Yeah, that's true.
Yeah.
But with, with hint coins.
Yeah, absolutely.
You absolutely have that feeling.
I'll say at one point in the game at the beginning about hint coins, they tell you that they're
hidden in these.
Be curious places.
The first one it gives you is, isn't it like a barrel that's kind of moving?
Yeah, it's shaking.
And so you click on it.
Very misleading.
Because the rest of them are.
There are none that are like being or animated.
It's just.
And you also have where I go into the town itself.
So you walk in the game is presented as hand drawn images.
And there are then on top of it, some of the characters kind of in their idle animations.
Yeah.
And then you have a choice to interact with objects or you can click on the bottom right
where you've got a shoe and that then will bring up arrows on your screen where you can
decide where you're going to traverse.
And it gives you, you know, there's only so many arrows.
So you can't have a predetermined destination.
Dude, late game, bro, late game arrows everywhere.
Oh, yeah.
The main the main place in the village, which I think starts out with two, two or three.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I think you're three because you're a big junction within the town.
So you can go back or down and you go left and right at the end.
There's also two buildings you can go into.
You can go through the clock tower.
And then I think there's actually another door at the very end.
So there's like six arrows on screen and they're all right next to each other.
It's pretty funny.
So when you're when you're not moving around, you can click on different spots and sometimes
they will.
Your characters will make a comment about them.
Sometimes they'll have a hidden puzzle in them.
True.
And sometimes they'll have the the coins.
Now anytime you have a cut scene, is it a cut scene or a chapter end?
So it depends.
I noticed that the earlier parts of the game, like you have a lot of front loaded animated
cut scenes setting up the story, blah, blah, blah.
And then because the story does make a lot of moves where you find you, you know, you
arrive at this place because you were invent or invented.
Holy shit.
You're invited.
There's this challenge that's been distributed.
The guy dies.
He's like, oh, my God, whoever can solve these puzzles and find my golden apple will win
my inheritance.
And so people are all, oh, my God, we're gonna solve these fucking puzzles and get a lot
of money.
And so at the beginning, you have all these cut scenes setting it up.
And then basically, you're given an objective and you try to hunt down that objective.
And then usually after you finish the main objective, that's that concludes a chapter.
And then you get a fairly drawn out cut scene introducing the next leg.
And then it's that point and click moving around, solving these puzzles, talking to
people.
And then towards the end, there's a lot more cut scenes again.
And there are some long cut scenes in there, bro.
And I was stoked on every single one of them.
I was never upset that there was a cut scene, dude.
It was so awesome.
It's good sign.
Yeah.
Very, very fucking pleased playing this game.
I had so much fun.
It was OK.
It was all right.
Yeah.
It was wasn't Valorant, but you know, it was all right.
I think I'll take this over Valorant.
So anytime you have a cut scene or a chapter and your hint coins will reset, but like not
in the same location where they were before.
But spots that you've clicked, but spots that you've clicked before may now have a hint
coin there.
It's a little, a little tedious.
It does get a little tedious.
You end up just, you know, you come up on a place and you're just, you know, just missing
a machine gunning the screen.
And I don't think we've mentioned this, but it's worth noting a hundred percent stylus.
This game does not have button controls.
Doesn't have any?
No.
Not even for dialogue?
You might be able to hit any or something.
You might.
But you may also be right that it is all 100 percent touch screen.
Even from the main menu, you have to touch the screen to select new game, continue or
whatever.
The third bonus.
Yeah, you're right.
Yeah.
There is no, there is no D pad controller button control.
And I loved it.
I fucking loved it.
I didn't even know this.
So I would say I enjoyed it too.
Yeah.
Good stuff.
Polished.
Good game.
I loved it.
And if you're going to have stylus controls, uh, adventure based puzzle game.
Oh dude.
Yeah.
Perfect.
This was perfect, dude.
I would play RuneScape all day on this thing.
There was a time when I had the 3DS and I was just trying so badly to find a hack or
a way to play RuneScape on the 3DS.
Dude, that'd be cool.
I believe you can find some footage of people using back in the day.
So there was a DS Brow web browser and you would get the game, the cartridge.
And then the cartridge also came with a memory pack that would plug into the GBA slot to
give it the extra memory that it needed to web browse.
And so from there they would get on to RuneScape.
It looked terrible.
Super laggy.
They're playing it on the web browser version, which you can't even do anymore.
Oh no.
Yeah, that's terrible.
It looked pretty rough.
And then I can't remember if I ever found anything on 3DS.
I mean, I guess you could have done the same thing given the timeframe allowed for you
to play it in a web browser.
And I remember, I remember being in the computer lab in like probably ninth grade, just discovering
RuneScape for the first time, dude.
Cooking some shrimps.
I wanted so badly to play that game and just know more about it.
It looks so cool.
I only played it like two or three times.
Some dude gave me, he was like, hey man, I've been playing this game for a long time.
Have a bunch of this shit that I have.
It's really cool.
And I'm pretty sure he gave me like an obby cape, like the obsidian cape and some other
gear.
I couldn't, I had no idea what it was.
I was just like, oh sick, thanks dude.
And then I got willy lured and PKed for everything, of course.
And that was about it.
Yeah then you walk away from the game.
Yeah.
I think I had a really similar experience of that.
Dude, I don't think there's anybody who's played RuneScape that hasn't, honestly.
No, no.
I don't think I even actually got PKed.
What'd you call it?
Will-dy-lured.
Oh, will-dy-lured.
I got lured to the wilderness and got player killed by a baddie.
By a baddie.
I think I just got baited into like a monster I couldn't beat.
And then they probably took all the shit from me.
Yeah.
Because I didn't come back in time.
Yeah, dude.
I wasn't playing games.
Like I had probably watched my grandma play Ocarina of Time a couple of times and probably
played it.
In ninth grade?
Yeah.
So there's something that we haven't covered in the show at all here.
There's some GameCube and stuff by that point, but I was like a vanilla Nintendo dog shit
twin stick controls.
What?
I didn't know anything.
I'm just saying that when I think of a gamer, I think of somebody that can play an FPS game,
somebody that can play an RPG.
A gamer to me is not somebody who likes to play Candy Crush on their phone.
Right.
That's a bored person.
A gamer is somebody who likes games and is familiar with the various types of games out
there.
As a kid, I was not a gamer.
I did have access to a few games.
But you put me in front of something like RuneScape and I was like, this doesn't make
sense to me.
I don't understand the game.
I don't understand where the game is coming from.
I think that everyone feels that way with RuneScape.
RuneScape is its own thing in that sense.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
If you didn't grow up with like...
If you don't have a wiki, if you're like, I didn't understand the pleasure in the game
until I was showed the wiki.
You have to play...
Dude, I don't like to play RuneScape if I can't do it at my computer desk with two screens
with a wiki on one side and a YouTube video in the corner.
Yeah, absolutely.
Gotta have it.
But I wouldn't consider myself a gamer as a child.
I think I would consider myself a gamer as a child.
Yeah.
I... even if I wasn't good at FPS or things like that.
Yeah, you definitely don't have to be good.
You don't have to be like, oh, I sweat, I twitch.
And RPGs, I never really understood or appreciated until honestly kind of recently.
I mean, until I was at least 18 and up, I feel like is when I really...
I might have enjoyed one or two RPG games before that, but not commonplace.
Yeah, I'd probably agree with you there.
I was definitely a lot more into...
I wanted to play Halo.
I want to play Call of Duty.
I wanted to play really anything at FPS that was cool and hip and it still is honestly.
But I remember...
Oh, I remember, I think it was one of my cousins or something.
Got a copy of Perfect Dark for N64.
Oh yeah.
And I wanted to play it so bad.
So bad.
And I think I got in trouble or something or I did some shit and I was barred from playing
for whatever reason.
And we were going back home that day.
I don't remember.
All I remember is that I'm pretty sure it was Michael.
Shout out, motherfucker.
I'm pretty sure it was him.
I think he got to play it and I didn't.
I'm still butthurt about that, dude.
I'm not going to lie.
I have gone back and I watched some YouTube gaming clips of people playing through Perfect
Dark.
We actually had Perfect Dark when you and I lived together.
You got the Rare package or something like that where it had Banjo-Kazooie.
It had Perfect Dark on there.
And I don't think any of us made it past the tutorial because it was so bad.
It was dog shit, dude.
It was dog shit.
It's a really bad game.
I do remember that.
I must have blocked that out.
I refuse to know that this game is not good.
That's such a bummer.
It is.
That hurts.
Man, I'm still wrecked about it.
Dude, Michael, this is somehow your fault.
There is something satisfying though about going back to a game on the opposite spectrum
that was hard as a kid or didn't make sense at all.
Are you smoking it now?
No, going back and it still doesn't make sense and it's still hard.
You're like, oh, I wasn't just a little kid.
I also just fucking...
This game sucks.
Well, I feel like that would apply to any Zelda water dungeon.
I've never had that much problem with the water.
I just have to memorize at this point.
They don't bother me that bad.
Oh really?
No.
Did the Ocarina of Time one with the water levels and shit?
It's almost the last level that you get into, right?
No, I think that one's pretty early on because it's right after you get the three stones.
I think it's one of your first...
You might be thinking...
I don't think the water temple is because you have to have your metal boots and all
that shit.
Metal boots, get the bottle.
Your blue tunic.
Or do you get that in the dungeon?
I don't know.
You might get it...
It's either that or the scale.
Either way though.
Oh my God.
Yeah, I don't remember.
I know.
I feel like by the time you get to the water temple, you're pretty set for it.
Yeah, that one might be farther on, but it also might be mixing up its position in the
timeline with the...
What is it?
Jabu Jabu's belly?
Jabu Jabu's belly fucking sucks.
That one is cancer.
Absolutely.
That's the reason to not play back through Ocarina of Time.
You're playing Ocarina of Time, you get to the...
What's that place called up on the canyon that's got the people that live in the volcano?
Goron Village?
Is that what it is?
It's just called Goron Village.
Goron Village, probably.
Sure.
It is now.
Like up there on nearly Death Mountain.
You get back into that part and you're like...
But you get through it and you get through that little dungeon right there and the game
is great and then you have to go into Jabu Jabu's belly and it's the fucking worst.
That's whenever I stop playing.
Yeah, that one does suck.
That one is a pain in the ass.
It's your favorite game.
It is my favorite game and it still is.
I need to play through it again.
It's been a long time since I played through it.
In my free time, my copious free time.
I bet it's been 12 years at least.
Oh, it's not been that long for me.
I think I played through it probably four or five years ago.
Oh really?
Yeah.
Huh.
Well done.
That's what I'm trying to remember.
I still have those old GameCube copies.
Or you do.
Or my brother does.
Do you have my GameCube copy?
Somebody...
No, no, no.
I definitely have my own.
I need you to see if...
Well, I need you to see if you have some of my GameCube games.
Please.
I'm fairly certain I have your copy of Piano 3.
I'd love to have it.
And if I don't have it, it's because it's in my collection now and probably Michael has it.
Or Brennan might even have it.
It's somewhere though.
These Moran boys.
Every couple of years, one of us will just send the whole kit to somebody else and then
we'll play it for a couple years.
Like a few years back.
Well, that mystery solved.
Maybe we should get back to the case at hand.
The case.
The case indeed.
Do we even need to go through and rate this game?
I think we could just be like 9.9.
Honestly, I'm there.
9.9 all day.
Maybe 9.5 just because the Silas lacks a little bit here and there.
I really...
It's not bad.
I struggle to find a flaw.
Yeah.
I mean, honestly, the only time I could see somebody going, yeah, it wasn't really for
me.
It's because they don't like puzzles.
Yeah.
It's just not their flavor of game.
Yeah.
You just don't like the atmosphere.
The Wes Anderson weird kind of Tim Burton-esque feel.
Yeah.
I mean, if this shit's in your alley, big time recommend.
Yeah.
You'll love this.
Even if you don't like the DS or video games, you don't have to like video games.
There is a mobile version of this game.
Oh, really?
This specific game?
This specific title.
Professor Leighton and the Curious Village.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's cool.
Crazy, huh?
I did not know that.
Now, I will be honest.
I don't know for a fact that it is currently available.
It was at the time, though.
But yes.
I could look it up and tell you definitively, but I'm not your mom.
Do it yourself.
Yeah.
And if it's not, there's a lot of easy ways to get it onto your phone.
Well, that and there's like five or six other titles.
For various platforms, perhaps?
Yeah.
And the Switch has one, too.
You're no longer Professor Leighton, but you're a female Professor Leighton, basically.
Oh, sick.
Cool.
Yeah.
And this is a very loved series, obviously, for a good reason.
And it is.
God, I really want to check out others in the series.
We definitely will be.
Oh, yeah.
I look forward to it.
This is one of those games where I absolutely had my DS in my pocket.
I was hooked on these puzzles.
I'm not saying the story was bad or anything like that.
I'm just saying I could have given a shit about it because I was so into these puzzles
and so I wanted the next puzzle.
I need my fix, man.
I need a riddle.
Give me a riddle.
Send us your best riddle.
Did you ever figure out where the story was going?
No, I honestly had no real idea.
I figured maybe that the old man was kidnapping people and like helped hypnotizing them and
helped put them be better.
Can I spoil it for you?
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
Spoiler alert right now.
If you don't want to know what's going down.
Well, I'll come in and post and tell you what time to tune in after we're done spoiling
it.
Yeah.
Maybe that's better than what I was going to suggest.
Maybe.
Yeah.
Maybe.
Maybe we're not like the next game is this.
I know that's the only reason you're listening.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
So spoiler for sure.
So the entire premise, the Baron dies.
His wife tragically had passed years prior.
They have this beautiful door or daughter Flora and he's just so worried that he's not
going to be able to keep her occupied and surrounded by positive people and she'll be
lonely after he's gone because he knows the time is coming.
And so Bruno, who was the unknown character that you were talking about earlier, the old
man with the sack that was seen kidnapping this guy Ramon and suspected of perhaps killing
Ramon.
Bruno and the Baron got together and the Baron commissioned Bruno to fabricate the entire
island of St. Mistier and all of the people, all the townsmen are all like animatronic
figures.
Oh no way.
And so he occasionally has to quote kidnap them in the, you know, in the middle of the
night to repair them when they break down.
And so the towers where he does all of his secret work and occasionally when the machines
are running and the towers making all these spooky noises, people mysteriously disappear
in the night, but then they also mysteriously reappear as though nothing had happened later.
Feeling better than ever.
Yeah.
So that's the story.
So the Flora character, what was her deal?
So she's the daughter.
She is.
She doesn't know that she is Flora.
Well, so she actually lives on the very top of the tower in this little house that's literally
just on the top of the tower and she's been waiting for somebody to come and find her.
So come to find out she is the golden apple.
So the girl that you meet, the lady, the Claude, not Claudia, Claudia is a cat.
So yes.
So you meet this woman who is the, well now, um, well she's the current wife of the former
Baron.
Right.
What is her name?
It's Nadia maybe.
Either way, who gives a shit, but she, she bears a uncanny resemblance to the former
wife who had passed away like a hundred percent.
Right.
And they even confuse them at the beginning.
She is also a robot.
She's like the beginning of.
Yeah.
And so you, you find these pages from a journal, um, as you play the game.
And so originally the Baron had her created to pretend to be mother, um, but it was too
much.
And so he had her personality overwritten to be this new wife.
And she just kind of was an at, you know, arm's length person in the dynamic of their
family.
Okay.
Got you.
Um, bigger plot twist.
The inspector that is kind of dogging you the whole time.
It's trying to figure out like who murdered whom is not an inspector.
He's actually your unknown arch nemesis, Don Paul.
He pulls off a mask and everything, dude.
He's like, it was me the whole time.
The professor knows who he is.
No, he's, he's like, I've heard of this guy, but I actually don't.
And this character, Don Paul makes these, he makes these mentions to suggest that there
was some slight in the past that was very obvious and should be well known to you.
And that's why you're my arch nemesis.
And Luke's like, you know, this guy and Layton's like,
No, I do not know this guy.
I have no idea why he's after me or what he's on about.
Oh man.
I'm down.
I want to keep playing this game.
I don't want to see this.
The story really pans out.
It's really cute.
There's still like, I mean, I revealed a lot, but there's, there's more to it.
There's so much character and flavor.
Um, and there's a lot of little nooks and crannies that the game doesn't make it apparent
to you that you can visit or that you'll be able to go to.
And some of them might be fairly obvious, but there's just, there's a lot of hidden
depth in there.
It's, it's, I liked it.
I enjoyed the shit out of it.
Nine out of five.
Wait, nine out of five.
Yeah.
Nine out of five.
I'm good with nine out of five.
Nine out of five.
It is.
That's a good rating.
Uh, I know we had talked about it before we started recording because we usually, this
is about the time where we usually do our little wheel of death to randomly select from
preselected titles.
Right.
Um, but you and I were talking about saying, fuck that.
Yeah.
I would like to play dementia.
I think I'm saying that right.
Dementia, the ward.
It's a first person shooter horror game.
I've played it before.
I really enjoyed it.
The last time I played it, I would really enjoy playing through it again.
I'm so down for it.
I think an FPS would be a nice change of pace.
I think I might have said that last episode.
A change.
It'd be a huge change.
Um, I would also like to say, first of all, Hey, thanks for listening.
I don't think we've ever said that, but thank you for listening.
We love doing this.
We're going to continue to do this.
Uh, enjoy listening some more.
And if you have a game that you want us to play, send it in.
I guarantee that we will play it.
Uh, the list is just basically kind of what we have an idea of what we want to play.
Sometimes we throw it on the randomizer.
This time we're just straight up picking which one we want to do.
Yeah.
There are no rules.
No, not at all.
Throw it to us.
We're pocket cats.
This is, this is not a democracy.
We do whatever the fuck we want.
Yeah.
It's free range.
Yeah.
We eat butts.
We eat butts and we like it.
Yeah.
Um, also it would be cool to get like other people on here.
Absolutely.
I told you before, Lexi will literally slit our throats in her sleep if we don't have
her on at any time we do a kingdom hearts title.
So yeah, I'd love to do that.
We can definitely throw that into the mix.
Yeah.
Send in your game.
And if you want to be on the show with us, I'm sure we can figure out a way to make that
work.
It's easy.
This is the easiest thing we've ever done.
Yeah, actually that's a pretty, yeah, it's shockingly easy.
Oh, another thing is that we are humans and we have random life time constraints.
It's going to be out of town.
So we're going to go ahead and do a three week play through for this game.
Yes.
I don't know if it's going to come across affecting at all the way that our editing
and distribution goes out.
We try to make it so that every two weeks the podcast comes out.
I don't know exactly how well we land on that.
Whatever.
Don't put it on the calendar.
Subscribe to us.
We'll just pop up whenever we have a new episode.
We've kind of got an idea of where we're going to be.
It'll be a fun little like surprise of, oh, look at this refreshing little.
I didn't know I could do this today.
I fucking hate Wednesday.
Let's do this.
It's like Wednesday way better.
Yeah.
And we're not making money off of this.
So it's not like we give a shit if it's consistent.
No, not at all.
Like us, don't like us.
We don't care.
Fucking no.
No.
But tell us.
Don't like us, send us some hate because we love the publicity.
Yeah, send us some hate.
Yeah, make me want to cry.
Oh yeah.
When I see a fat boy cry.
Yeah.
I'll do it for 20 bucks.
I'll do it for less than that if you make him really sad.
But it's got to be really good.
Really good.
There's some deep cuts.
I'm also realizing that we, I mentioned that there's something we haven't covered.
Oh, what's that?
Your sheltered ass life.
Dude, we don't have to talk about that.
I feel like listeners don't even deserve that after four episodes.
I think that you've just got a little taste.
This is another next time on Pocket Cast.
Yeah, Ed couldn't afford his therapist and so here you go.
Here we are.
I can't believe that the comment that you had of that you had never played a game really
until ninth grade.
You weren't a gamer until after ninth grade.
It's not that I never played a game.
I don't, I mean, I don't know what, what age I first played a game.
I didn't have regular access to video games for most of my life.
I remember we had a GameCube and then I bought a Wii even though my mom didn't want me to
have one.
So I paid my friend's mom to pick me one up and she brought it to the house.
I love it.
I don't even have to say anything.
This is so good.
It's a Wii.
Oh man.
All right, next time on Pocket Cast, we're going to be talking about Dementia of the
Ward, shooting up a bunch of dead things and being scared.
Don't really spoil it for me though.
I don't, I don't know what's coming.
Silent Hill FPS.
Oh, fuck yeah.
This will be fun.
Hell yeah.
Catch you next time, gamer boys and girls.
See ya nerds.