The NOCLIP Awards 2022 - Glory to Video Games

For accomplishments in ball smashing

We are closing out yet another year, and like your New Year’s resolution or the mirror in your bathroom the day after a New Year’s Eve party, it’s time for some necessary but unwanted reflection. We had a year of pretty diverse games this time around, and so we have further complicated our awards, giving them inscrutable titles and measuring more abstract criteria than ever before. Not to say we don’t weigh in on quality, as our best and worst of the year are on display mixed in with our coolest ancient artifacts and Bunta Eve Classic awards. So prepare your bingo cards, drinking games, or your own lists and settle in to find out our thoughts on what was interesting about games in 2022, and what interesting games from 1998 can be made relevant with a silly awards category.

Thank you for joining us this week and this year! I hope you enjoy the awards and have had some unique experiences as well. We’re going to be taking a short break through the month of January, with only a pocket release coming up, but be sure to get in your suggestions for Fanbruary before the end of the month. We’re excited to see what we end up playing this year. Until that time, happy New Year!

Episode 142 - Grip It and Rip It (For Jesus) - Snowboard Kids 2

Podcast Kids 2!

Welcome back and happy holidays! We decided to look back to our own childhoods this month, and to cap it off appropriately during this year’s very unfortunate winter cold snap, we’re going to be talking about Snowboard Kids 2. This is an N64 kart racer, but still not the one you think of when you hear someone say “N64 kart racer.” And also there are no karts. And your snowboards evidently don’t need snow to function. Snowboard Kids 2 is an enigma. It’s a racing game, featuring powerups that are both offensive and defensive, races, challenge modes and boss battles, and a threadbare plot that centers around a villain who just wants to hang out with you, and who you ignore. It’s pretty standard stuff for the genre, but it gets by on its solid presentation and a killer soundtrack. Honestly, there isn’t too much to say or that you need to know going into this one, so tune in to hear us wax nostalgic about old favorites. We’re going to be talking about the sound design and the catchy music, why boss battles should never have been a thing in kart racers, and we rename a powerup in a way you’ll wish we didn’t.

Thank you for joining us again this week! This is a light, fun one that we hope will be enjoyable at this time of year. So we hope you’re staying warm and that any traveling you may have had to do has gone safely, and that maybe we can accompany you on the way back. We’re going to be taking a short break after this. We’ll be putting out the NOCLIP Awards next time and then one more Pocket episode, and then we’ll see you in again in February…I mean Fanbruary. So get your game suggestions in over on our Discord or in the comments or at our email address and we’ll announce what we’re up to near the end of the month.

NOCLIP Pocket E72 - Poisoned My Brain - Gorogoa

Podocasta.

Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re talking about Gorogoa, a puzzle game centered around manipulating the four discrete sections of the screen to progress. While not being too difficult a game, as many dedicated puzzle games tend to be, the depth comes from the sheer number of creative ways they use the core conceit. You can shift quadrants around, which can sometimes uncover additional tiles, create a transparent layer to overlay on another tile, or align two tiles showing disparate scenes into a single image. Add to that the ability to zoom in and out, with different levels of detail having entirely different functions within the puzzle, and it creates a huge number of possible actions for the player to take at any time. The game is plenty interesting from a mechanical standpoint, but the game’s art style feels unique as well and serves as its other main selling point. Because of the level of detail necessary to make the puzzles function, the visual design of the game has a more traditionally “artistic” quality to it, almost feeling like the illustrations in a book. With a solid use of color and minimal animation really highlighting the points of interest, it helps both communicate the minimalist and somewhat abstract story as well as the puzzles’ solutions to the player. We’re going to be talking about individual puzzles that we thought stood out and made a good use of the game’s mechanics, our interpretation of the games events, and we discuss the proper way to use an eldritch monstrosity.

Thank you for joining us again today! It’s pretty rare we talk about puzzle games, but this one caught our eye for whatever reason and seemed to fit well in the schedule to give it a bit of variety. Did you find this game interesting in the ways we did? Was its approachability a positive or a negative for you? Let us know down in the comments or over on our Discord! And hey, while you’re over there, or down there or whatever, why not toss us a few suggestions for Fanbruary? That’s coming up pretty soon. Next time, we’re going to be talking about Hidden Folks, our very first (and depending on how it goes, maybe only) game in the hidden object genre. We hope you’ll join us for that and that you’ll please suggest some games for Fanbruary, please.

Episode 141 - Distended and Flabby - Space Station Silicon Valley

That’s a hit podcast for groovy cats. You just don’t dig it.

Welcome back to the podcast and to the final month of the year! Today, we’re going to be talking about Space Station Silicon Valley, a fairly strange puzzle platforming game from 1998 from a developer that would go on to become Rockstar North. When I say “fairly strange,” I’m predominately talking about its concept: you play as a robot’s CPU and are able to jump into and control a variety of robot animals which you then use to accomplish different tasks. That rules. That’s just an objectively cool idea on paper. Unfortunately, whether it’s an inexperience with the medium, pressure to release a game that fits in with other bestselling titles of the time, or just plain bad decision making, the final product just does not do service to the idea behind it. The game is bloated, overlong and full of tasks and missions that don’t take advantage of the mechanics the game sets up. Some other strange decisions include the games tone, writing and music, but these are all things that need a bit more set up we get into in the episode. The game still holds some nostalgia value, and the concept alone is worth at least looking into it, but the strongest lesson you’ll probably take from this title is how to squander a very good idea. We’re going to be talking about early 3D game frustrations this game does not succeed in avoiding, level and mission design in a game where theoretically anything is possible, and we debate on what the main characters’ names are (and do actually get it right!).

The way our preparation works, we usually have games planned for October and November well in advance, October due to the Halloween theming and November holding the games we were excited to do earlier in the year and needed to find space for. Because of this, December usually ends up being a pretty wild time where we end up choosing games that are either recent suggestions or, like Space Station Silicon Valley, distant memories of games we have had in the back our minds for one reason or another and just never got around to. Does this game still hold nostalgia value for you? Let us know in the comments or over on our Discord! Next time, we’re closing out the year with a similarly long lost childhood title, Snowboard Kids 2, and then we’re preparing for the NOCLIP Awards at the end of the year, so we hope you’ll stick with us for that!

NOCLIP Pocket E71 - Lead Game Puller - WarioWare: Get it Together

Our podcast is finally finished!

Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about WarioWare: Get it Together, the first WarioWare game to come out on the Nintendo Switch. Unlike previous entries in the franchise, this is releasing on a console with few major hardware gimmicks that can affect gameplay. Yes it has motion controls and whatever intense IR, HD Rumble Joycon technology they used in 1-2-Switch, but this game doesn’t take advantage of those specifically and the result is maybe the first game in the series that really plays a lot like the original. However, the main difference comes in the form of multiplayer and character selection. This entry features a huge roster of playable characters to choose from (and cycle through in each level) who all have a unique mechanic set and play at least a little differently from one another. This is a cool idea, and some of them really stand out as inspired designs, but it does have one drawback. The games can never be designed around the mechanics of a particular character, which means they have a sort of homogenous air around them. This doesn’t suck all the fun out of the game by any means, but it is a pervasive sense of missed opportunity that follows it throughout its runtime. The multiplayer main story mode does make up for this somewhat, as throwing another person into the mix creates chaos and can provide fun social moments the game doesn’t have solo, which is a good thing, but this also comes with a host of pros and cons. We’re going to be talking about the challenges imposed by having multiple people playing a microgame at the same time, the various factors that you have to consider when choosing who to play, and we celebrate the return of Guy Who Drinks Water Too Fast from Smooth Moves.

Thank you for listening this week, and I hope you didn’t notice we did all Nintendo games this month. We did it as a sort of theme, but as it has spilled into December a bit, now it just seems like we’re being massive fanboys. If you’ve played this title, how do you think it stacks up against other titles in the series? Is the lack of a major control gimmick holding the game back, or did the multiplayer aspect save it for you? Let us know in the comments or over on our Discord server! Next time, we’re going to be talking about the puzzle game Gorogoa, which is considerably less chaotic than this game, but does still get a bit weird in its own way, so we hope you’ll check it out with us!

Episode 140 - Broke New Wind - The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

I was able to do this using only a fraction of my ancestors’ podcast.

Welcome back to the podcast! For our annual Zelda title, we’re going to be talking about Twilight Princess, the game that released on both the GameCube and as a launch title for the Wii. We, however, played the HD remake for the Wii U, released ten years later, so do keep that in mind going through. Twilight Princess is a Zelda game in its usual form for the most part, seeing Link swap between exploring an overworld and going through dungeons, with a host of items and equipment to collect and use. The main thing separating it, then, from other titles in the franchise is aesthetic and story and boy does it separate. There is a clear new direction for the look of this game, with characters being rendered in a higher detail than was ever done before (or was really possible before), and between the age of the game right now and the other elements incorporated into its aesthetic, this gives much of the world an eerie uncanny feeling. This could be a positive feature that was gained over time, as the visuals fell from being “top of the line,” but from the design this feels intentional. The game is intentionally much creepier than previous entries, with disproportioned or emaciated humanoid characters and the strange digital creatures that occupy the Twilight realm, and it helps this game form its oddly shaped footprint on the Zelda franchise. As far as the game holds up today, it mostly does, with the dungeon design being on par with previous titles while containing some real standout examples, but it stumbles in a few places, the beginning of the game and wolf Link’s utilization being a few notable ones. We’re going to be talking about gameplay and the expanded combat system, how the game’s aesthetic design actually meshes with the overall series, and we expose the secret inspiration for Dreamwork’s Boss Baby.

Thank you for joining us again this week! We’re love to come back to the Zelda franchise pretty regularly because it’s a series that commands a lot of influence on the industry and inspires a huge amount of argumentation. Is Twilight Princess one of your favorites, or do you hate it with a burning passion? Or more likely, do you think it falls somewhere in the middle for not doing any one thing to an extreme? Let us know over in our Discord or in the comments. Next time, we’re going to be talking about a possibly underappreciated (TBD) childhood game in Space Station Silicon Valley, a puzzle platformer about robot animals. So if that sounds up your alley, we hope you’ll check back for that!

NOCLIP Pocket E70 - Murdering Doom Bringer - New Pokémon Snap

You were close!

Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! Today, we’re finally doing the game we said we were going to do back in September before we got blindsided by the entire month of October. Sneaks up on you sometimes, I know. And that game is New Pokémon Snap! Concluding our now trilogy of episodes on Snap-alikes, New Pokémon Snap is the sequel to Pokémon Snap on the N64, and a game that was pretty heavily speculated on and vocally desired by fans of the original. Nintendo had released numerous consoles that seemed to be begging for a Snap sequel, from the Wii with its pointer controls to the Wii U and 3DS with gyroscope enabled screen devices, but we didn’t get a new entry in the series until the Switch, and that game ends up being very much like the original. Not that the game doesn’t have new content, with hundreds of new Pokémon being created since the original title, there is a huge number of new subjects to take photos of, and the system for grading those photos is improved a lot. In addition, you can store many more shots both in your photodex as well as to an album, which is compatible with the Switch’s system storage, preventing the need for trips to Blockbuster to save your favorite photos. The game also looks very good, which is important for the type of game this is, but also isn’t exactly what the series has been known for recently. However, there is an intangible element of the original game that is noticeably missing from this one that is hard to articulate concisely that we spend a good amount of time talking about in the episode. This is a passionate one, so strap in. We’re going to be talking about level design both on a mechanical and thematic level, how Pokémon lost its edge over time, and we bring justice for the Pester Balls who have had their free speech silenced.

Thank you for joining us again this week! We’ve been trying to get to this game for a while and are happy we finally did. Despite our complaining, this is still a pretty good game that we’d recommend to fans of the original, and if you’re capable of being a bit more objective than us, you may even prefer it. Did you notice the shift in design between the original and this title? Do you know of any other Snap type games you’d like to recommend to us? Let us know in the comments or over on our Discord, where we take suggestions for games to play and talk about the episodes! Next time, we’re going to be talking about WarioWare: Get it Together, so we hope you’ll join us then.

Episode 139 - Lame Designers - Kirby and the Forgotten Land

When I’m with you, everything is a podcast!

Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be palette cleansing after a month of horror titles and talking about Kirby and the Forgotten Land, a game that… takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth after the invasion of an alien species with reality warping powers. Like most Kirby games, this one is an action platformer with a focus on cute designs, ease of play and a mechanic set that revolves around Kirby’s ability to inhale and copy enemies and objects. This time around, the gimmick is mouthful mode, a contextual ability that allows you to inhale large objects and then do prescribed challenges with a modified moveset, and it works pretty well and most of them are fun to use. However, the bigger change for this title is its shift into a fully 3D world. In addition to changing the overall perspective and how the game plays, this allows for it to feature more complex levels, a strong focus on secrets and adds utility to copy abilities that grant movement skills. Not that this is a groundbreaking new perspective for games to have in the last twenty years, but its fun to see Kirby gameplay mapped onto a different style of world and level design. Overall, if you’re looking for something a bit more relaxing, Kirby is going to give you what you expect from a Kirby title while adding enough interesting mechanics to feel reasonably fresh for its fairly short run time, with a lot of content left over if you want to go for a more complete experience. We’re going to be talking about how the game designs around its secrets by making the rewards feel more rewarding, how the endgame content really shows what the game is capable of, and we slightly expand the lore of Thorpo Fantasy, the podcast OC.

Thank you for listening this week! We really took our time with this game, more so than it probably needed, coming out of a busy previous month and it was definitely a good choice for some people who were kind of tired. How do you feel about Kirby as a franchise? Do you wish there was a Kirby game that used its more interesting mechanics to really challenge the player, or are you happy with it as a simpler title? Let us know over in our Discord (where you can suggest games for us to play!) or in the comment section (where you can also suggest games, I guess). Next time, we’ll be diving into a more robust Nintendo title and talking about The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, so I hope you’ll be there for that.

NOCLIP Pocket E69 - Run By A Dog - World of Horror

The old god stirs. Click to reveal its podcast.

Welcome back to the podcast and happy Halloween! For our final horror game this year, we’re going to be talking about World of Horror. As a disclaimer, this game is technically still in early access, and we end up discussing it as though it’s a full release, so consider that some of the things we’re talking about may end up changing by the time a version 1.0 comes out. World of Horror is a throwback CRPG reimagined as a Roguelike game, with short replay times and a huge number of random elements. In the game, you are tasked with solving five mysteries to enter a lighthouse and prevent the return of a Lovecraftian old god. “Solving mysteries” in this case meaning surviving a number of random encounters while the story of your mystery solving is told to you by text. Not having to actively solve the case doesn’t mean the game doesn’t take brainpower to get through though. In addition to making some choices that will affect the outcome of the mystery and determine what ending you get for each one, you need to manage resources and make smart decisions (or at least, be ready to remember what decisions led to what outcomes) to survive through the session. While the game mechanically is a callback, the art style also, while rendered in the 1-bit style of old PC games, references manga artist Junji Ito, who proves to be a significant inspiration for both the look and themes of the game, with “cosmic” and “body” being the horrors du jour. All in all it’s a fascinating game to play that may fall just a bit short in the content department at the time, but it embraces community made content and still has some updates ahead that could really elevate it. We’re going to be talking about the slow drip of unlocks that make the game feel a little stale on multiple playthroughs, how the obfuscation of mechanics and the old style aesthetic lend themselves to the mystery inherent to cosmic horror stories, and we discuss the ins and outs of the Clap Bow system.

Thank you for joining us this week and this year for our annual month of scary games. This was, to my mind, a really solid selection for the season with a lot of variation on style and type of horror, proving that things can be frightening in a ton of different ways, and this genre of game is one that I wouldn’t consider at the top of my list for horror. And yet, it ended up being very good anyway. What do you think? Were you drawn in by the Ito-inspired art style to this very strange title? Do you think the game contains enough things to keep you interested for long periods, or better yet, have you delved into the community made content? Let us know in the Discord or down in the comment section! Next time, we’re fulfilling a promise we made last month and actually talking about New Pokémon Snap, and rounding out our discussion of Snap-likes. We hope you’ll join us for that and thanks for listening!

Episode 138 - A Coy Smooch - Realms of the Haunting

I just heard a riveting podcast with my father. Which would be great, except he’s dead.

Welcome back to the most terrifying podcast around! Today, we’re going to be talking about Realms of the Haunting, a 90s FMV adventure game with some FPS mechanics thrown in for good measure. This game falls well into the campier side of old FMV games, and if I was trying to sell you on the game it’s what I’d be focusing on. It is both laugh-out-loud funny and also impressive in almost equal measure between the absurd cutscenes and the level of detail they and other parts of the game contain. The lighting effects in the game are surprisingly good for the time, the voiceover is not terrible and is incredibly expansive, with dialog describing most of the objects in the environment and all your inventory items and things you interact with. That said, it is still an old adventure game and there are going to be some hurdles to overcome to enjoying the game. The level design, while pretty cool aesthetically, can lead to players getting lost and has a bit of an overreliance on that maze-style design of early FPS games (not to mention having several literal mazes in it as well). Where to go next isn’t always clear and using weapons and items isn’t as straightforward we would like, causing some hiccups in the moment to moment gameplay. However, if you can get past all that, or are just used to it because you play a lot of older PC games, this is a strange and interesting one worth checking out. We’re going to be talking about the missed opportunity to emphasize the survival horror elements of this title with meaningful resource management, how the silliness of the story and cutscenes really elevate the experience of playing, and we reveal what is the most metal of outerwear.

Thank you for joining us again this week! We only discovered this game fairly recently and knew almost instantly it was something we wanted to talk about and bring other people’s attention to. I give this game a lot of credit for what it was able to do for the time and for fans of the adventure genre or just campy old horror stuff it hits a sort of sweet spot between being engaging and silly. What did you think? It isn’t the most hidden, but had you heard of this game before today? Do you think the navigation and puzzles are just too obtuse to be fun? Let us know in the comments or over on our DIscord server! We still have one pocket episode to do before the end of Halloween season (and that one will be coming out pretty damn close to the holiday itself), but that’s all she wrote for the main episodes this month. Next time, we’re lightening things up a lot (or a little, depending on how much you buy into the “dark lore” part of the franchise) and are talking about Kirby and the Forgotten Land, so we hope you’ll stop by for that!

NOCLIP Pocket E68 - Jim Jammed - Bendy and the Ink Machine

If you make it out, don't ever return, because the podcast will find you.

Welcome back to the podcast! We’re trucking through Halloween, and today we’re talking about Bendy and the Ink Machine. Bendy is a horror adventure game that was released episodically, and it’s one of those titles that just isn’t satisfied with walking simulator mechanics. This game includes more typical object interaction and puzzle solving as well as combat, boss fights and even a few minigames thrown in. Does all this extra interaction add to the game? At times, it can, but overall the game lacks focus. It has some good things going for it, though. The game has a stellar concept, with the “Ink Machine,” probably the most overshadowed part of a title ever, being a real physical thing in the game, the implications of which are both bizarre and very cool. The art style and theme reflecting generations old cartoons also shows promise, especially in the context of a horror game, corrupting something of childhood innocence, though this concept has been done before. Still, the actual act of playing the game teeters between tedious and disappointingly unfrightening, which holds back a lot of the good ideas this title has. We’re going to be talking about how adding an abundance of mechanics can harm a game holistically, the importance of designing levels and quests in a way that hides their mundane nature from the player, and we have a senior moment and call back to a YouTube channel that hasn’t been relevant in years.

Thank you for joining us again this week! This was a game we had on our minds for a while, probably due to some level of internet word-of-mouth that made it seem like a cool one, but it ultimately let us down a bit. Did you try taking this on for a Halloween present or past, and did you end up feeling similarly? Were you able to dive into the backstory and extract something more valuable than what’s on display in the base game? Let us know in the comments or over on Discord! Next time, for the final episode of the Halloween season, we’re going to be talking about World of Horror, a manga-inspired throwback game wrapped into a rougelike, which is scary on at least a few levels, so we hope you’ll join us for that.

Episode 137 - Horror Hairdresser - The Evil Within 2

I’m going to stab the podcast out of you!

Welcome back to spooky Halloween! Today, we’re going to be talking about the Evil Within 2, a survival horror title from Tango Gameworks. The Evil Within 2 focuses more on larger areas than the game it’s a sequel to, with a pseudo-open world design, but gives the player an expanded action set to handle this larger space. There is a focus on stealth, and the bigger areas means that running away to hide somewhere else is more feasible than it would be in a more corridor-focused game. That being said, this isn’t really an open world game, with few options for returning to previous areas or completing quests out of sequence, which ends up working well with the survival horror mechanics. A truly huge area risks overwhelming the player and leaving them without any way to defend themselves once their meager supply of ammunition runs out, or alternatively, providing far too many resources for the game to maintain its bite. Sticking with the Big Rooms Game™ approach mitigates these issues, keeping it grounded in the genre, though the design can still be somewhat problematic for players trying to fully complete the game. We’re going to be talking about resource management (on the player side as well as from a design perspective) in a game that features semi regular boss fights, how the sci-fi elements of the plot can get in the way of the splatter horror theme of the overall aesthetic, and we point out several places in the game that could have just been doors.

Thank you for joining us for the first full episode of Halloween this year! We actually played the original Evil Within back before we were even doing the podcast, and a bounced off of it pretty quickly, so playing the sequel after several years mostly comes down to word of mouth about it being more accessible and maybe even a little better in some aspects. We found this to be pretty true, but what did you think? Were we just being baby gamers, unable to handle the masterpiece of the first game? Did you enjoy the more open design of the sequel? Let us know in the comments, or over on our Discord! Next time, we’re going to be dipping back pretty far to take on the shooter/point and click adventure game “Realms of the Haunting” so we hope you’ll enjoy whatever it is that ends up being.

Seven Years of NOCLIP - Spacetember in March

Some people say seven is a lucky number. I’m not sure where that comes from, but I’d say this was a pretty lucky year for us. We talked about your suggested games in Fanbruary, found our true niche with hit theme month Ape-ril, and were actually able to talk about a FROM Software game while it was still in the zeitgeist. We also won the lottery, the NOCLIP Awards finally got onto Spike TV to replace their terrible awards show and the film adaptation of the Super Mario Cereal episode is entering the final stages of production.

Okay, half of that is accurate, but we are very happy with the direction the podcast is headed as far as our content goes. This year featured a huge number of really interesting games both new and old, and we unironically think Fanbruary was a great success. Your suggestions have made up an increasingly large number of the games we talk about, and it’s upped the variety and generally rounded out our experience with games overall. So, as NOCLIP Day comes and goes, as it does every year, we reflect on the impact these games made on us, good, bad and sometimes stupid, with this bloopers episode. We’ve got TV show pitches, impromptu song parodies, and our usual technical issues, so if that sounds enjoyable to you, then today is the best day of the year on our podcast. We’re in the month of horror, so the upcoming few episodes will be on some scary games, but as always, I hope this serves as some comic relief and we hope to see you again next year!

NOCLIP Pocket E67 - The Heretic Pages - Games by David Szymanski

The whole podcast is made of a single piece of iron.

Welcome to the spoooookiest month of the year! To kick things off, we’re going to be playing four very short games by the same developer. David Szymanski is probably more well known now for developing “DUSK,” a horror FPS game that specifically harks back to the early days of Id shooters like Doom and Hexen, but his solo efforts, which stretch as far back as 2014 are more appropriate for our purposes here. They tend toward walking simulators in terms of genre, but have a focus that feels demonstrably different than most other horror games. Specifically, they focus on narrative and tension building in a low fidelity setting. These are games that do not go out of their way to wow you with impressive graphics or intricate systems. They are simple, and rely on your understanding of the story, as well as setting and sound to unnerve the player, rather than make them feel in imminent danger. This is true for all four games, though the way they go about it is different, whether through an eerie and oppressive atmosphere (a desolate island in a storm, or a place where the rain hurts you) or a crushing sense of claustrophobia (submarine, underground tunnels). Each game manages to get that creeping dread into the player, assuming you meet them at face value, and all within an hour and a half or less. We’re going to be talking about the difference in production value between each game as time goes on, the use of text and sound to do the heavy lifting in an atmosphere-reliant genre, and for the longtime fans, we touch on another video game character who is ambiguously a motor vehicle.

Thank you for joining us again this week, and for another month of horror titles! We always look forward to this time of year because we collect ideas for October over the course of time and finally get to do all of them at once. It’s very exciting. Were you also sucked into the Szymanski-verse through finding Fingerbones for free or playing Dusk and wondering “what else has this guy done?” or is this the first you’ve heard the name? We do recommend trying these games out due to the extremely low barrier to entry both in cost and time investment, so let us know in the comments or over in our Discord server what you think of them. Next time, we’re going to be talking about Bendy and the Ink Machine, similarly in the adventure genre, but with a much higher emphasis placed on visuals to sell its world, so we hope you’ll join us again for that.

Episode 136 - Ape Arms - Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Alright, I’ll start the podcast from here next time.

Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, an action adventure game that was released in 2003 and was one of the biggest triple A titles of the time. Sands of Time is a sort of reboot of a game that was released way back in 1989 on the Apple II and the creator of that original game actually worked on this one. Knowing this, you can see some design philosophies that apply to both in an interesting way. Both feature platforming and combat, with an emphasis on a smooth motion and context sensitive actions, and that smoothness is one of the things that really propelled this game to the heights it achieved at the time of its release. Not a lot of other games looked like Prince of Persia did, with the Prince running across walls and jumping between ledges in a way that felt almost realistic. And that is really the selling point. The platforming is close to movement based puzzle solving: the levels of the game are less likely to be described like playgrounds as you might in other platformers and come off more as prescribed challenges. This is still very fun though, as the Prince is responsive and stages are satisfying to complete. The places the game suffers are in all the other aspects of its design. It contains a lot of systems that developers tended to think were just necessary parts of games at the time, like combat and puzzle solving, and story that never really gets off the ground, even with an interesting setup. This game feels like a relic of the past, and a useful one at that, showing us that for a lot of games, having a focus on what you want to accomplish and cutting the things that don’t work is usually the path to a better game. We’re going to be talking about the game’s movement and camera and how they stack up against other platformers of the time, the combat system and its layers of unnecessary complications, and we debate what types of magic the final boss neglected to learn.

Thank you for joining us again this week! Often when we dip back to this era of games it’s due to a favorite we remembered from our pasts or because something was suggested to us, but in this case it was the game’s reputation. If you played games during the early 2000’s, Prince of Persia was a game you knew about and was considered a tentpole release at the time. Playing it back then would have likely been a different experience for us, but as two first time players, it’s interesting to see how far we’ve come in terms of design and development. Do you think the game holds up? Was the game at the time more palatable, and do you think that it had an influence on other games at the time? Let us know in the comments, or over on our Discord! Next time, we’re heading into our favorite month of the year, and beginning our selection of Halloween games! We’re going to be starting off with The Evil Within 2, so be sure to check back in with us then.

NOCLIP Pocket E66 - Old Man Territory - Audiosurf

Ride your podcast.

Welcome back to the podcast! This week, we’re talking about Audiosurf, a procedurally generated rhythm game that uses your music as the seed for all its levels. No need to worry about spoilers on this one, as Audiosurf doesn’t have anything in terms of a plot and all game modes are unlocked right from the start. In fact, that is part of what makes this game feel sort of weird in the overall landscape of games. It feels more like a piece of utility software than a traditional game at times, with it’s function essentially being applying a point system to listening to music. The game was extremely popular among the PC crowd around the time of its release because of its novelty, and there’s a lot of impressive tech going on to make it work, but it’s rhythm game elements are pretty soft. Difficulty can largely be determined in any given song by looking at tempo and the sort of noisiness of the track, and it ends up feeling a bit linear once you understand that. Not that there isn’t merit to what Audiosurf is doing. It’s a way to engage with music in a way that passive listening can’t accomplish, making you think more about the songs before you play them and letting you appreciate the nuances of each one that led to what its track looks like. It’s an extremely cool thing, and the different playable ships bring a ton of varying mechanics giving it a lot of depth in terms of practicing and getting better and it’s well worth checking out if you can get it running on modern hardware. We’re going to be talking about how your musical taste can influence the difficulty, sometimes without you even realizing, why most of the character choices can feel overwhelming, and how the bygone staple of leaderboards can make you feel like a World Famous Gamer(TM).

Thank you for joining us again this week! We’re trying to inject some variety into Pocket in the time leading up to Halloween here, and Audiosurf was a game we’ve had on the list for years and years and just never got around to actually talking about. For us, this is a definite nostalgia pick, something that we played years ago and remembered loving and getting to sit back down with it again did bring back a lot of those positive memories. Do you have any positive memories of Audiosurf, or other rhythm games you played when you were younger? Let us know in the Discord, or down there in the comments! Next time, we’re going to be talking about New Pokémon Snap in our quest to play every rail shooter photography game, so join us then and let us know if there are any others in that genre we’ve missed because this pointless objective is for some reason really important to me.

Episode 135 - The Headful Horseman - Xenoblade Chronicles 3

He is not a podcast, but a concept.

Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about Xenoblade Chronicles 3, the most recent release in the series and the game that is supposed to end the story that started in Xenoblade Chronicles. Comparisons to the earlier games in the series are bound to happen, with the two main factions in the game taking their aesthetics and even combat mechanics from each previous title specifically. However, even with many direct calls back to the earlier games, this game manages to be its own unique thing. With 6-7 characters active in combat all at the same time and the ability to freely switch between them, combat is even more active than it ever has been, managing “arts” to maximize damage and keep everyone alive. The world itself is a mashup of the titans featured in XCs 1 and 2, but still feels like a distinct place with an open world design that has an entirely different feel to it. It’s the rare game that has made its prequels a immutable part of its identity, but manages to incorporate them without it feeling like a pile of references and nudges to the player. The game is less noisy in combat, less stupid than the gashapon girl blades of two, and more accessible to the average player. Probably. We’re a bit too deep in at this point to be sure. We’re going to be talking about the feeling of the world and how it feels differently designed to the similar worlds of previous games, the potential and troubles with the class system for the ways we each engaged with it, and how enemies in these games compare to water balloons, or sandbags full of blood.

Thank you for joining us! If Xenoblade isn’t your bag, we’re happy to say that we’re done with it for the time being. This game really took over our lives, and with me playing the second one not that long before, I’ve been livin’ on Alrest for quite some time. If you’ve played it, did this game make you interested in the series, or have you been along for the long and occasionally bumpy ride Monolithsoft have taken us on the past decade? Where does this land in the grand scheme of Xenoblade, and do you think it’s a fitting conclusion to the story? Let us know in the comments or over on our Discord! Next time, we’re going to be reeling it way in and talking about Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a pretty classic title that was about as far away from the games we’ve recently covered as we could think of. So we hope your palette will be cleansed then.

Bonus Episode - A Little Bit Tasteful - Xenoblade Chronicles 2

This game makes me feel all blushy-crushy.

Welcome back! Today, on a not-such-a-surprise-if-you-listened-to-the-last-episode episode, we’re going to be “quickly” (by our standards) running through our thoughts on Xenoblade Chronicles 2 in preparation for our upcoming episode on Xenoblade Chronicles 3. As the third game more directly references the previous games than any other entry in the series, we thought it was important to have at least covered the basics of the second game to lay the groundwork. This week we’re going to be giving a summary of the important plot points and then giving our impressions and takeaways. XC2 is an RPG in the same style of its predecessors in the Chronicles series, but with an overhauled combat system and full of complicated interactions with its main differentiating factor, blades. Blades serve the game both as characters and your classes, in a way, with different blades using different weapons and having a different selection of arts to use, which makes your interactions with them meaningful in both a narrative and mechanical way. They are also largely embarrassingly pornographic. There’s a lot of give and take with this game. Your ability to stomach the more juvenile elements will probably be a deciding factor in how much you enjoy the game, and our feelings toward it are complicated to say the least. There is a lot more to the game than we get into today, but it should serve as a decent refresher and lay out what we’re going to be comparing to next time in the sequel’s episode.

Thank you for joining us for this bonus episode this week. We intend to do a full episode on this game at some point in the future, as the sequel being released early sort of quashed our original plan of doing it before that game came out, so take this one with a grain of salt. Emotions ran high and we took it out on the Nopon. Next time we’re going to be going full length on Xenoblade Chronicles 3, so we hope you’ll look forward to that.

NOCLIP Pocket E65 - Goopy Muck Boy - Hylics

Podcast: probably causes enemies to fall asleep.

Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! Today, we’re going to be talking about Hylics, the “recreational program with light JRPG elements.” If this game appeals to you at first glance, it will be almost entirely based on its visual style and a promise of something a bit more out of the ordinary. As far as visuals go, it fully meets that expectation. This game has an absurd art style, with a claymation-like aesthetic and designs, both for characters and for props and scenery in the environment, that are colorful, interesting and difficult to parse. Characters lack obvious human qualities, environments look more like someone’s messy desk than traversable locations and in combat actions are punctuated by hand gestures and visual effects that are as beautiful as they are strange. The parts of the game you actually interact with, moving around the world and engaging in combat, are also odd but don’t stand out quite as much. An obvious effort was made to make sure things don’t progress in the way you’d expect them to. You’re rewarded after your first few deaths, traditional leveling systems are absent and combat is pretty unforgiving until you figure out how to gain additional party members (or where to even go to begin this process), and that lack of direction is part of the uneasy feeling this game wants you to have. The combat is more basic, leaning pretty heavily on its aesthetic design to make it feel unique, which it mostly succeeds at doing. Hylics is a game that has earned its reputation and if you think it might be for you, it probably is. We’re going to be talking about the early parts of the game and how confusing and off-putting they can be, the indecipherability of characters and text, and how the game is exactly like Pac-Man.

Thank you for joining us again this week! This one was suggested to us, and falls under that elusive category of “exactly the thing we want to do on Pocket.” It’s short, cheap, and does a lot of things in an unorthodox way, resulting in a something that gives you a lot to chew on. This is one of those games that may not top many people’s favorite games lists, but you do want to go through if you’re interested in things that buck the rules of game design and use the medium in a more freeform way. If you are one of those people, what did you think of Hylics? Did it live up to your expectations? Are you more thoughtful than us and were able to pick out what the game had to say? Let us know over in our Discord server or in the comments below! Next time, we’re going to be talking about one of the earliest indie darlings, Audiosurf, a rhythm game that lets you play on tracks procedurally generated from audio files on your own computer, so be sure to check back in for that!

Episode 134 - Brain Money - Night in the Woods

I believe in a universe that doesn’t care, and a podcast that does.

Welcome back! Today, we’re going to talk about Night in the Woods, and we’re not going to apologize for how late we are covering this. We are late to this, though. Night in the Woods is an indie adventure game with other interactive elements coming in the form of light platforming mechanics and minigames ranging from Guitar Hero style rhythm sections to top down hack-n-slash games. And if you go back through our catalogue, you’ll notice that this is right up our alley. Possibly too far up our alley, because while this is a standout example of the genre, we can’t help but compare it to a half dozen other games we played and talked about on this podcast, some of which came out well after this game and were probably inspired by it. What makes it stand out from the crowd, though? The game’s subject matter focuses squarely on the personal lives of people who are a part of the younger millennial generation living in a world that is explicitly based on our own. They just happen to be like cats and bears and stuff. The way this game faces the struggles of young people attempting to cobble together a life while dealing with economic realities, personal relationships and their own mental health is unique in its bleakness and how closely that bleakness mirrors our own reality. This grounds the characters, with the help of some very strong writing, and makes them relatable to a wide swath of people in their core audience. Oh, and there’s a storyline about a ghost in here as well. We’re going to be talking about how the game handles personal struggle and makes it a main part of its theme, how its mechanics help and hinder the overall experience, and we creatively rename one of the characters in the game and just keep calling them that and don’t look it up.

Thank you for joining us this week! We’re probably going to take some time off from this genre of game because we had a bit of an existential crisis in the middle of this episode because we felt like we might be deeply pigeon-holed. That said, this is still a unique entry in the adventure game genre and one we felt like we needed to cover eventually. Did you play this game when it came out? Maybe even backed it when it was being crowdfunded? Do you feel as strongly about its characters as we do? Did you find a reason to play Demon Tower? Let us know over on our Discord or in the comment section! Next time, we’re going to be talking about Xenoblade Chronicles 3, the recent sequel that supposedly ends the story arc that series has had for almost a decade. And if you need a refresher on how the plot has gone thus far, we intended to do an episode on the second game until the third one got released early, so we’re going to supplement that episode with a bonus on Chronicles 2 that should come out in the next couple weeks, so keep your eyes open for that.