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Episode 517: Great Games That Never Clicked For Us (Patreon)

Published:
2023-02-24 13:07:19
Imported:
2026-06
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Hello and Happy Friday to you. (I don't think the international date line has flipped to Saturday yet, so I should be safe with this well-wishing.) This week's patron-exclusive episode takes the form of one of those free-form episodes with a premise crafted to spark conversation that will naturally lead to discussion of classic games and video game history, and—hey! it worked out. 

I think you will enjoy this one, provided of course that you can put aside the groundswell of rage and frustration that comes from hearing people talk trash about games you love dearly. Except that we don't talk trash, really. This topic could easily have led to two hours of people decrying the wretchedness of a variety of beloved games, but instead we—that is, myself, Bob, Kat, Stuart, and Henry—accept that the fault lies in ourselves as we each take turns bringing forward a popular or acclaimed game/series that just has never appealed to us, despite our best efforts. One part confessional, one part support group, one part commiseration, we learn to come to terms with our feelings this week. And if you have pointers for how we can overcome our innate dislike of these greats, leave ’em in the comments below....

Art by Nick Wanserski. Edits by Greg Leahy.

16:33 - Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles: Escape from the Laboratory

27:22 - Super Smash Bros. Melee: Hyrule Temple

39:31 - Halo 3: One Final Effort

56:25 - Super Mario 64: Bowser's Road

1:10:05 - Metroid Prime: Magmoor Caverns

1:23:56 - Psychonauts: The Meat Circus

1:34:21 - Assassin's Creed II: End Fight

1:47:43 - Pokémon Emerald: Intro Theme

1:58:24 - Ash: "Lose Control" (Gran Turismo US Soundtrack)

Closing - The Critic (TV): Title Theme

Files

Comments

Normallyretro

I hope this gives me comfort for games that were acclaimed and I'm like, uh, meh.

Stephen Maurer

I haven’t listened to Ash in a minute! Great band

Dave Dalrymple

It's interesting to think of "Mario 64" as a spin-off of the Mario series (akin to Yoshi's Island or Mario RPG). Rather than being a continuation of the spirit of Mario 3 and Mario World, it created its own subgenre or action platformer: one where the objective was to perform one or more challenges within a level, rather than to simply reach the end of the level.

VariableMog

Immediately knew Kat was gonna be on this one from the title, lol

Kormakur Gardarsson

Fantastic discussion on a fun topic. I hope we get the sequel soon. Also, thank you Bob for coining the term “game loaf”.

Christopher Hughes

Kat's initial comment is comforting because RE4 is the only one of the series I have ready to play. It will be my introduction.

TeamVenom

Oh wow, "Golden Sun". A lot of text in that game. I remember the game looked nice, but I couldn't tell you a thing about the plot other than it ends on a cliffhanger.

Paul

Thank you for speaking truth to power on Golden Sun. Every time I see Nintendo fans begging to bring it back or put Isaac in Smash I just shout "But Why!?" I do like that the magic you learn then gets used in the overworld to solve puzzles, but that's about it. My entry in this would Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. It's not as funny as the others. The others have better music. Almost every map in this game is a straight corridor you go back and forth on multiple times. The combat is overly long. I love every other Paper Mario way more. Yes, even *those ones*.

thatcamjones

Halo? More like Hey-no. That’s it, gottem.

James Krusling

I really enjoyed this episode and I was pleasantly surprised that I wasn’t crushed by all the takes! Stuart not liking Mario 64 that much I think is totally fair because I still love that game…but both Galaxy games and Odyssey are a thing and you guys mentioned the 3D Land and World games too. It’s a great foundation that led to even greater heights in the 3D space for our favorite plumber! I had a feeling somebody was going to say Metroid and I was stunned it was Henry since he’s such a big Nintendo guy! I would encourage him to keep playing the Prime Remaster but Zero Mission is definitely a great way to go if he still can’t quite click with it. Also Bob’s right about Prime 3 being really solid! I don’t love 2 because I wasn’t a huge fan of the dark/light works system in that one but 1 and 3 are stellar! That’s all I got, and since Jeremy said his second game was a “bag of worms” I’m gonna assume he was making an Earthworm Jim joke because that’s funny…also those games are REAL weird without getting into the stuff about the creator 😅

John Simon

Zelda 2 has the bones of something truly interesting but it’s held back by FDS 112 KB floppies - resulting in pallet swapped dungeons, towns built from the same assets, palette swapped enemies. In the Gigaleak - the few leaked sprites of a side-on Zelda 2 Link in Nintendo’s late SNES style blew my mind “Here’s a thing you never knew you wanted but can never have.”: A 16 bit take on Zelda 2 that did what LTTP did for Zelda 1. We can never have this game, so, for better or worse we have to turn to indies, etc. I’ll have to check out Adventure Time: Ice King.

Komsomol General

Amazing episode. Need to have Bob, Kat, and Stu on the same podcast together more often. Is this the first time?

littleterr0r

The only thing missing is Diamond because I know he's been playing a lot of Resident Evil lately.

Joshua

Agreed on Assassin's Creed and Gran Turismo not clicking with me, and I haven't played enough Pokemon to give it a fair assessment.

Craig

The Critic outro needs to be the regular outro from now on

Andrew O.

Wow, some nuclear level hot takes! I've been saying for years that Halo (campaign at least) isn't that good. The latter half of the game you just backtrack through the first half. Perfect Dark came out a bit before and is SO much more impressive. Also, Jeremy had me in stitches crapping on Golden Sun. After listening to Kat on Axe of the Blood God this past week comforting Reb about Retronauts being hard on Golden Sun hearing Jeremy come out swinging was hilarious. This was great and I want more episodes like this. I want people to analyze games more critically. There are many games that aren't as good as they seem! (BotW, Undertale) That doesn't mean they're bad, but why do people refuse to acknowledge faults? IGN recently gave Metroid Prime Remastered a 10, okay sure, but the review was all praise. I've been playing through and it hasn't been all joyous. I'm an adult now and have limited time. Traveling between areas in the endgame has been overwhelming tedious. I want fast travel. I also want a means of tracking item locations. Despite tinkering with settings, I can't see a damn thing in the bowels of the Phazon Mines. The game could've been better. If we want better games we need honest, unbiased, critical analysis about their faults too.

Michael Castleberry

My two big ones were Yoshi's Island and Super Mario 64. For Yoshi's Island I was about 15 when it released, so as an edgy teenager, a platformer that looked like it was drawn by crayon with Baby Mario was NOT what I was interested in, now that I was fully into RPGs and the PS1 was upon us. Mario 64 just didn't feel like a Mario game to me, and Mario with a health meter punching enemies seemed wrong.

J.P. McD.

WOW at “the” Bob take. I absolutely know where he is coming from, I didn’t love Psychonauts on release, and the general DF fan base in its heyday was an incredibly annoying bit of gaming groupthink. Every online gamer from 2004-2013 pretended to love Tim Schafer whether they’d ever actually played one of his games or not. However, I do like Costume Quest a lot (it’s a charming experience for a few hours on a Saturday in October, it’s obviously not Undertale) and am cautiously optimistic for Psychonauts 2.

Ben Love

I let out an audible gasp when Stuart said Mario 64 🤣