VGA’s five-year anniversary was last week, so Henry Gilbert joins us for a belated Top 5 about some of the greatest fifth entries in game franchises ever. We also chat about Dynasty Warriors 9 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Kingdom Hearts 3, and your same-sex waifus and husbandos.
Question of the Week
Is there a game experience that’s intertwined in your memory with another piece of media (song, movie, TV show, etc.)? A song that reminds you of a game you were playing at the time, for example?
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Theme song by Matthew Joseph Payne. Break song is Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit Of…) (Synthpop Cover) by Hot Dad. Haunting and beautiful New Releases Theme by David B. Cooper.
If ya haven’t checked out the Laser Time YouTube channel, here’s something swell you might’ve missed!
And while we’re showing videos, check out these video answers to our previous Question of the Week!
Redrock963:
CajunCrippler:
jpalz:
@VGApocalypse @LaserTimeShow QOTW: what videogame character would be your husbando? pic.twitter.com/CQMLBfdG3x
— Jose Abalos (@jpalz) February 13, 2018
Aragorn546:
UPCOMING VIDEO GAME PRE-ORDER BONUSES
Kingdom Hearts III
Red Dead Redemption 2
Death Stranding
Final Fantasy VII Remake
Spider-Man
Crackdown 3
God of War
Metro: Exodus
Follow us on Twitter @VGApocalypse!
QOTW:
Back in 2015, while grinding for Sleeper Simulant (an Exotic railgun) in Destiny, I binged the entire first season of Talking Simpsons after pledging to the Patreon. The episodes being covered weren’t exactly great, but Bob, Hank, and recurring guests like Chris and Dave made sure the dreadfully dull grind was more tolerable.
In the end, it wasn’t a particularly great gun for dealing with anything outside of Raid and Nightfall bosses, but I still have that Patreon pledge going to this day.
I remember getting Dragon Warrior, a.k.a. Dragon Quest, free with my subscription to Nintendo Power. I was 8 or 9 at the time and listened non-stop to He’s The DJ, I’m the Rapper by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince while I’d grind through random battles. To me, those three things are forever entwined in my young brain: Dragon Quest, Will Smith, and Nintendo Power.
“I Remember You” by Skid Row”In My Darkest Hour” by Megadeth & “2 Outta 3 Ain’t Bad” by Meat Loaf remind me of playing Portal 2’d multiplayer mode by myself with two controllers sober as shite because my girlfriend at the time who wanted that game(not a Valve gal) left me not 2 days prior to it arriving and I listened to a lot of power ballads contemplating death whilst playing a game Idve hated regardless.
Guys it’s MGS “V” as in the alphabet letter not “V” as in 5 it’s in line with the post 3 semi side sequels not the semi future modern military sequels with literal #s
Japan got physical versions of Baya 1/2 for their overkill or whatever it’s called collection.
QOTW: several Laser Times from summer 2013 are associated in my mind with vidjagames I was playing at the time, such as Human Body Odor with Just Cause 2, and Super-Toons, *Psy-Crow Nauts*, and *Dubya Bee* with Grand Theft Auto IV (*WOW, BOB MACKIE*).
QOTW: I don’t really associate any licensed music with an actual game, but I do associate certain songs that I used as create a wrestler entrance music in various WWE games. When that started to become a feature, inserting a disc into your system and ripping a song to use, I was listening to The Lost Tracks of Danzig all of the time so basically every new WWE PS3 wrestling game I’d create the same guy and use “Pain is like an Animal” as his entrance music, so I still think of WWE games every time I hear that song (and I still listen to a lot of Danzig so it happens pretty frequently).
I think Henry is cherry-picking the worst of Bethesda and applying that to everything they release. The PS3 Skyrim was bad at launch, really bad. If anyone forgot, it had an issue with the RAM and basically after an hour of play the frame-rate would plunge and continue to get worse and worse until it froze. They patched it probably a month later and it was fixed, but it couldn’t be applied retroactively to your saves so you had to reinstall the game and start over. I had too many hours sunk into it so I “suffered” for over 100 hours in-game with that one. It sucked, and yet the game was so good that I put up with it. Since then, I’ve yet to encounter anything game-breaking in a Bethesda game or felt a new one was particularly buggy. I’m also playing Skyrim of the Switch and it’s still pretty damn fun.
I just heard another podcast discuss at length how people use anecdotes to form opinions and that they are nearly impossible to change once they are formed. An example they gave was people who are anti-vaccines based on a personal experience or story they heard despite all evidence to the contrary. When Henry started talking about videos he had seen and how his opinion was backed up with anecdotal evidence he had sought out himself this was all I could think of.
From my own experience, I played over 100 hours of Fallout 4 and the only “bug” I ever encountered was a follow mission completing even though I ran away halfway through and never finished it but apparently the person wandered to the required area on their own.
QOTW: From the time I was 15 until I maybe 2 years ago, I was addicted to Runescape. Not so much that my life was in ruin, but at one point it was the only game I played. It was also during this period that I was really getting into Hip-Hop and finding a new appreciation for rap, slowly finding my favorite producers, like Nujabes and J Dilla while ripping Outkast off YouTube and Daily Motion. So naturally, every time I played Runescape, I was playing some rap in the background. I even times my boss runs to certain albums with the intent to play until the album finished. To this day I cannot separate any MMORPG, or RPG in general, from Hip-Hop.
Whenever I play Spyro I think of all the nights I had to attend choir practice with my mother at church. So you could say Spyro is pretty /religious/ for me…
QOTW: Around the time Super Smash Bros. Brawl came out (ten years ago, my god), I started heavily getting into the music of Ween, and to this day whenever I remember playing Brawl it’s usually accompanied by songs like “Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down)” and “Friends”. I was also in my first year of university at the time, so I also associate Brawl with going to my Introduction to Sociology course and learning about Emile Durkheim’s theories of anomie.
A different type of sad Donkey Kong Country 2 story. I was super close to my uncle growing up and he always had the latest games. Our favorite was two player DKC2. I remember playing it a ton with him in his sweet arcade-like basement. He unfortunatley passed away when I was 11 from pancreatic cancer. He left me all his Super Nintendo and Gameboy games and I still have our two player DKC2 save file that has yet to be claimed by a failing cartridge battery. I will go back sometimes and remember the good times playing that game. Anyway, DKC2 rules: “You all be haters, don’t hate my game!”
QOTW: 175+ hours in Fire Emblem Awakening is the reason I used to be up on all the superhero shows that are out there.
Of those show Agents of Shield is probably the shittiest of them all. The plot twist in the first season was HUGE. Then it was the same plot twist, but twice, for 3 characters in the second season (Bobby Morse, Lance and Jiaying) and so on and so on. Almost exactly every 10 episodes someone would betray the team or be revealed to have an ulterior motive.
Also they forgot they gave a character brain damage after about a dozen episodes! Also, don’t get me started on the Defenders… bleh.
I would have never have watched that damn show if I wasn’t balls deep in Fire Emblem grinding so I could make sure all my favorite couples got married and had future kids that fall through a time portal into their past to meet their parents in the past X-Men style (Rachel Grey, Nate Grey, Hope, Cable).
There should always be more VB references
I was recently telling this story to a coworker so it’s fresh in my memory. The first time I bought a DVD-ROM for my PC was in 2003 and I was playing the original Disgaea. Once the game started getting really grindy, I wanted to watch something while I played the game, which was a fairly unique idea for me in that pre-smartphone world. I mostly remember watching the first season of King of Queens on DVD (a show that gets a lot of hate by people who can’t look past the fat guy/hot wife cliche).
Yo! old tdar eps and minecraft. i can’t do one without the other
QotW: I will always associate the song Genocide by The Offspring with Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight. This was during the early eras of online gaming, and I got into the multiplayer for Jedi Knight up to the point where I ended up joining a Jedi Knight Clan for a short period of time. On the home page of the clan’s website, a MIDI called “offspring genocide” would play on a loop, and I thought it was really cool. I didn’t actually know about The Offspring at the time, and didn’t figure it all out until years later when I typed “offspring genocide” into Napster.
QOTW: How relevant! After the Talking Simpsons Futurama X-Mas episode, I began marathoning Futurama which happened to coincide with Monster Hunter: World’s release. Now the two have become completely intertwined in my thoughts.
I stand with Henry on Bethesda games! They’re released in a PUBG-esque mess every time, but PUBG at least has the excuse of being early access. If you like those games despite their flaws, fine, but you can’t say someone’s “wrong” for thinking a game should be finished before being sold for $60.
QOTW: Boy, do I ever have one.
I got into video games as a pretty young child. Much like any child, I played a lot of The Legend of Zelda, as did my Dad. When he wasn’t playing Zelda, however, Dad was playing the piano. And for a lot of the time while I was trying to figure out the ins and outs of Zelda, Dad was playing Mozart’s Piano Sonata #13. Like, a lot. Now I can’t think of that song without immediately thinking of Zelda. I’m not even sure how clearly I remember that, but boy are those permanently intertwined.
I remember swapping my cartridge of Donkey Kong Country 2 with a friend for his F-Zero cart for a few weeks. Playing one always reminds me of the other. Also, Weird Al’s Greatest Hits Vol. 2 on cassette was in heavy rotation at the time, as IIRC I purchased the game and that cassette at the same time with birthday money. When I wanted to change it up a bit I’d throw on the self-titled Presidents of the United States of America CD. They sure liked supernovae.
QOTW: When I was about 13 in the early 90s, I borrowed a PC game from a friend called Dungeons and Dragons: The Dark Queen of Krynn. I never touched it again after that summer, nor did I ever bother to learn the right way to play the game, but I would wander its dungeons aimlessly for hours while listening to White Zombie’s “La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Vol. 1” on repeat. Every few years, someone will put that album on and I’ll instantly have these vivid, almost pixel perfect memories of a game I haven’t thought about in years, and frankly don’t even really care about. It’s not like it was ever a favorite game of mine; it was just this random game that I guess I felt needed a White Zombie soundtrack.
Vidja response https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pHIzKKB3aM
I didn’t do a lot of dueling media until recently with my Switch. So the weirdest one I can think of is that I now associate the move Tickled with the lost woods part in breath of the wild. I think that one took hold more than any other thing I watched while playing that game because of how fucked up that movie gets.
VIDEO RESPONSE:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtN3ktihNzM
QOTW: The only thing that comes to mind is the first time I played through Darksiders 2, I had just started rewatching the newer Dr. Who runs, so now whenever I think of Darksiders 2 I think of Christopher Eccleston’s run as the Dr.
QotW:
https://youtu.be/NUtKTZv2AmM
QOTW: This one, much like Chris’s story, is going a little outside the bounds of the question but I hope it still qualifies because it is one of my favorite games of all time This was back at the end of March in 2003, mere days after the US invaded Iraq. This was a touch of bad news for everyone but on a more personal level I was not doing so well. The announcement of the invasion to was the catalyst my girlfriend needed to decide life was too short and end our relationship of 5 years. To further compound matters a mere week earlier I had lost all motor control on the right side of my face due to Bell’s Palsy. It was scary at the time because the doctors weren’t sure if it was just palsy or something potentially more serious like brain tumor. In the meantime I was put on heavy duty steroids to help counteract the facial paralysis , which if you don’t know about steroids they fuck up your emotional reasoning on a chemical level. So fun.
So here I was: recently dumped, fretting over war, unable to use half my face, taking some serious steroids and wondering if I’m going to die when little game called “The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker” was released. I lost myself in exploring the great sea. I explored every nook and cranny. Finshed every side quest. Relished the much lamented Triforce fetch quest. Completed the Nintendo Gallery. It was my solace when everything else was seemingly falling to pieces. I’ve replayed Wind Waker many times in the ensuing years and even still it is linked to that time in my life, though the memories are never sad.
This is gonna sound like shameless pandering, but my answer involves good old TalkRadar! I first discovered the cast in the 70-80 range, I believe, whenever Bioshock 2 came out. I got so into it that I was basically obsessed, so when my semester ended and I went home for the summer, I spent night after night just playing Hexic in the basement on my 360 and listening to the show, with some Always Sunny mixed in for good measure. It was perfect, indulgent, nerdy bliss and I don’t think I can ever play Hexic or go into my parents’ basement again without thinking of those nights free of responsibility and stress. So thanks to you guys, you’re truly the best! (There’s your shameless pandering)
QOTW: My friends used to play deathmatch on Winback on the PS2. We recently just watched Grosse Pointe Blank. In the last shootout, John Cusack slams a TV into Dan Aykroyd’s head while yelling out “popcorn!” It struck a chord with us so every time one of us popped out of cover to shoot the other guy, we’d yell, “POPCORN!” Plus, the guy on the cover looked a lot like Justin Timberlake, so we sang a bunch of NSYNC songs while we played.
I have a few super weird ones from the early 90s. Because I’m visually impaired I had free access to audio books at a time when they were pretty rare. These weren’t the fancy productions we are used to from Audible, they were mostly read by volunteers. I figured out pretty quickly that I retained the books best by putting on a video game that would occupy my hands and eyes but not my conscious brain, and made it through all my required high school reading that way. But 25-plus years later, I still associate Pipe Dream and Clash At Demonhead with “A Tale of Two Cities” and X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse for SNES with “Arrowsmith”.
QOTW:
In 1993 I was a freshman in high school. One Tuesday after school, my mom took me to a local record store and bought me In Utero by NIrvana on cassette, it was the day it came out (sometime in September, I think). After that we went to a grocery store that rented games and I rented Mortal Kombat for SNES (ugh, I know). And I spent the next few evenings playing that album and that game together non-stop. Ah, to be a teen in the early 90s.
QOTW:
It is impossible for me to think about Final Fantasy 9 without thinking about DMX rap praying. Either his album released close to the games release date or I just happened to listen to the album a lot while playing but I can not think about that game without instantly hearing a deep gravely angry voice saying Jesus wakes him up every day.
QOTW:
Cutting Crew’s “I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight” which of course featured in GTA Vice City. I had never played a GTA ahead of this so everything about it was fresh and cool to me. What really solidified the game as great for me was an early mission involving a helicopter taking off and going to rid a house of bad gu… other bad guys. Lance Vance, I think, piloted the Vehicle while the player got to use a gatling gun to mow down enemies on a rooftop. It was evening time in the game so the colours were perfectly neon 80s and that song came on the radio just as the mission started and continued to play throughout. Now, when I hear that song, I get reminded of that mission 🙂
QOTW:
This is kinda embarrassing. It’s Fall 2010 and I’m in my sophomore year of college. My PS2 was getting a lot of mileage because back then I could go down to Gamestop get a PS2 classic every week for around $10 to $20. I had just started a game of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and was taking break on my laptop to check Twitter when one of the posts on my timeline linked to the first episode of a cartoon that had just aired today. Since I’m a huge animation nerd, I watched it. Wasn’t expecting much, but by the end it actually seriously impressed me. That cartoon turned out to be My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
So I went back to Prince of Persia and while I was enjoying it, that first episode kept replaying over and over in my mind. Not since Adventure Time, which came out a few months ago, had the first episode of a cartoon stick with me so much. Even nowadays when I replay SoT and am trying to get through the Hall of Learning, I can still hear “Once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria…” play in my head.