2014, to be brutally honest, wasn’t the best of years. Instead of brooding over it we decided to do something to brighten the mood. The solution? A quiz.
Participating were an assortment of regular (and irregular, and non-) contributors to Arcadian Rhythms, along with occasional guest star Mike of You Total Cult.
This is part 2 of the podcast, as you may have guessed by the title so if you want to hear the first part, go here.
We’ve included the questions for the second half of the quiz below for anyone at home who fancies participating. Sadly you won’t be doing so alongside us, but you can be comforted by the fact that participating won’t mean 6-7 hours of recording (and, admittedly, drinking).
Many thanks to those who wrote in with their contributions, both here on the site and on our Facebook page.
Questions
- July: Which Telltale series came to its seasonal conclusion this month?
- Bonus Question: Name the remastered Ellen Page Simulator which was re-released (remastered) this year for PS4.
- August: Name the disappointing third instalment in a franchise that was released this month.
- September: Pier Solar HD was released this month, but which console was its original Kickstarter for?
- October: Please explain why you haven’t played Alien Isolation.
- Bonus Question: Name one other horror game that came out in October.
- November: They are the same but they are different – which is the odd one out and why?
- Toybox Turbos
- Escape Dead Island
- Grand Theft Auto V
- Dragon Age: Inquisition
- December: Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris came out this month. Why were parts of the gaming community electing to boycott it?
- Bonus Question: What was AJ’s favourite game that he played this month?
- Extra Question #1: Which of the following games wasn’t released this year?
- Five Nights at Freddies 2
- Run Sackboy, Run
- Tears to Tiara 2: Heir of the Overlord
- Warface
- Poptropica: Forgotten Islands
- Murakami Baby
- Ar No Surge: Ode to an Unborn Star
- Xblaze Code: Embryo
- Conception II: Children of the Seven Stars
- The Witch and the Hundred Knight
- Akiba’s Trip: Undead and Undressed
- Extra Question #2:Â How many Final Fantasy games were released (including platform reissues) this year?
- Seven
- Eight
- Ten
- Eleven
Timeline
00:57 – Question 7!
01:43 – “I’m honestly not wrong”
03:29 – Dylan talks himself out of a full point
05:50 – Mike divulges that no matter how much you piss him off, he will get what he paid for (which is a broken game)
07:42 – Technical problems with the next generation
11:02 – Bonus Question
12:00 – “She’s not a goat, is she?”
13:30 – The gang debate how to make a game based on the film Secretary
17:13 – “I actually remember her from that”
18:54 – “So it’s like a Dora the Explorer game?”
23:00 – “Book of Eli can’t be wrong”
25:10 – Question 8 (to which there are three right answers!)
26:45 – Die Hard conversation
29:01 – “Is this another masturbation reference?”
30:15 – “Oh, fuck you”
34:30 – “This terrible oversight-”
35:42 – “Was that ‘lube’ you said?”
35:57 – Question 9!
38:00 – Mike changes his answer
38:24 – “Why is he standing up?”
39:25 – Shaun endeavours to make the podcast longer
40:50 – “Is that a console you can’t play after midnight?”
42:00 – “I bought this because Mike said it would be funny”
42:52 – “Does AJ stand for ‘Anime Jack-off’?”
43:15 – Question 10!
52:20 – “Why haven’t you played Locker Lunacy?”
54:25 – Shaun given ‘Potter award’ for failing to pay attention
56:04 – Rants about Michael Myers’ representation
46:20 – Anecdotes about EGX Rezzed and hiding in cupboards
50:34 – Bonus Question
58:40 – Question 11
1:01:51 – “Better as browser games”
1:07:19 – Potter gets very shirty
1:08:48 – The argument about spiritual sequels gets a little out of hand so we break
1:09:00 – Question 12
1:11:10 – “You’re thinking of the wrong Tomb Raider game”
1:12:22 – “Lara doesn’t have AIDS”
1:12:55 – “If you want epics in video games…”
1:15:28 – Talk of cutting the podcast go on
1:16:00 – AJ ad-libs. People are disappointed and booming sounds are aplenty
1:18:00 – Things are getting messy as the crew become noticeably more drunk
1:19:00 – “You demanded a bonus question!”
1:20:10 – Question 13!
1:20:50 – Shaun says rude words
1:22:50 – “Just give one answer you cheating bastard”
1:24:05 – “Do you guys have consistent listeners for injokes?” – “no”
1:25:02 – Question 14!
1:25:50 – “The moral, ethical, answer is ‘Fuck you Square Enix’”
1:26:58 – “To be fair, a lot of those were ports”
1:29:09 – “Hands up those who laughed when Aeris died”
1:29:36 – Question 15
(Oh god, this goes on for 27 minutes more)
1:30:30 – Potter is physically pained by Spann’s response to best games of 2014.
1:31:40 – Potter’s Choice of 2014
1:32:16 – Shaun’s Choice of 2014
1:33:03 – Mike issues an apology
1:33:56 – Mike’s Choice
1:36:22 – Claire’s Choice
1:38:28 – Dylan’s Choice
1:39:11 – Bex’s Choice
1:39:39 – “There was a lot of Ghibli put into that game”
1:40:09 – Naomi’s Choice
1:41:00 – The gang talk about Naomi’s choice in between crisp eating and table banging
1:43:30 – Shadows of Mordor marked out as the best Assassin’s Creed game
1:47:29 – ‘Ice cream games’
1:47:44 – Shaun, Claire and AJ reconvene the next day to get the scores and a final recap
Comments
15 responses to “Cast 23: 2014 Pop Quiz Hotshots (Pt. 2)”
I tried finding AJ's SEGA shirt on google based on the detailed description (and back story), fell on this:
http://abload.de/img/245f32f0f1f59764e320bdjrwd.j…
About buying games cheap, I feel bad for having paid only £2 for Vanquish. That game should never be this cheap. I know this is more or like 5 CAN$ (which is still cheap) but I couldn't help but think of that one time I went to a local game store back in the summer of 1998, and saw a used copy of MYST on Sega Saturn for 2 CAN$ which, in contrast, I thought at the time was WAY too pricy for such a piece of… wasted CD-ROM.
Just wanted to apologise for not making some kind of running joke about Binary Domain in this third year of recaps
something something Lyle Fernandez
eight equals equals FarCry2
Oh my sweet SEGA, I want that T-Shirt!
By the way the link is actualyl in the timeline, but here it is again:
https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/81635-sega-hard…
That was a fun podcast, and since one of my previous comments was referenced twice (sic!) I feel obliged to throw my two pennies in.
I wanna go back to the cutscenes issue you talked about. Some months ago I read that Dylan's article on The Last of Us and how it is an average game with an obove-average storyline as far as games are concerned. I have to admit that I enjoyed TLoS quite a bit despite my hate of Naughty Dog's recent (i.e. last-gen) efforts and the fact that it was through and through a Playstation game – great for trailers, benchmarking the hardware and not much else. Anyway, I remember that the opening sequence made a big impression on me and I wasn't even playing it when I saw it for the first time. I watched someone else play through it and it's safe to say we had a pretty similar experience. That's the thing, I enjoyed watching TLoS more than playing it. The cutscenes were done really good, better than in most games at least, so I would never skip them if it was possible. The gameplay itself quickly became boring and repetitive and I lost interest with it until later on when far into the game the winter comes and the game finally does become a competent Ellen Page Simulator. But take the cutscenes out of it and all that's left is just run-of-the-mill shooter.
That's one of the reasons I tend to appreciate story-driven games that try to push the narrative forward mostly without using cutscenes like Half-life 2, Bioshock or Dishonored. Still, I never skip cutscenes when I see them for the first time and sometimes they are simply cool to watch. Like in Bayonetta 2 where they mostly consist of ridiculously choreographed fights. Why wouldn't you want to watch Bayonetta changing her dress mid-air and fight angels on top of a flying jet aircraft?
I even watch all the terrible cutscenes like the Battlefield 3 interrogation stuff between levels which I'm not sure if were skippable. And that brings me to my breaking point, which is a game where for the first time as far as I remember I just couldn't endure watching the cutscenes and started to skip them. Tomb Raider reboot. I've seen worse cutscenes in games I guess, but maybe that was just the result of my overall distaste and disappointement with the game. Considering I had to force myself to play it didn't help in my tolerance for the game's cutscenes. Out of my pure and boundless hate for the TR reboot, I even founded a new blog of sorts, as to have a place where I can pour that hate down, which I'm totally not gonna advertise here, and please don't check it out under this link.
All in all, it's interesting that developers squeeze more and more cutscenes into games but put low priority on making them any good and really worth watching, especially since we are long past the times where due to technical limitations cutscenes were used to present something in a more detailed or spectacular way than normal gameplay sections were capable of.
P.S. If you check my twitter profile, where I have my real name, AJ should probably know how I got to reading Arcadian Rhythms.
P.S. 2 And I failed at smuggling the mentioned link *cough* http://www.aframeobeys.com/ *cough* which is kinda embarassing, but who cares.
Good article, pretty much nails everything I hated about the new Tomb Raider.
I also wrote a short piece on it:
https://www.arcadianrhythms.com/2013/07/mid-week-f…
Yeah, I think that is part of the reason I skip most cutscenes without bothering to verify the quality. The trend has been to make more of them and for them to have even less impact. Sure there are exceptions but those are so far and few between that I normally can't be bothered to weather the storm of a bad pre-render.
As for the other side – I think Half Life 2 has a few lessons to teach in terms of story telling but everyone seems to have learnt the wrong ones. Take Assassin's Creed's in-world story telling bits where you are forced to stand there and listen (or walk around and listen) without anyway to get through the dialogue – those are the worst parts of Half Life 2's story telling.
Also, look at Call of Duty's tendency to have you sit in place and have things explode around you – that is another bad lesson taken straight from HL2.
Bioshock and Dishonored are on the brighter end of that scale.
Great show, really enjoyed it, although I find myself wanting to back up Dylan on some of the games he likes that the others disagree on (pretty much standard).
Rob
The thing is, most of us have very similar tastes in games. However, the best conversations happen when we don't all agree on something and so a lot of my questions were pointed to towards trying to get a response out of him.
Near the end I became aware of the fact that it might be construed as bullying so I tried to back off a little.
I didn't feel that it was strong enough to be considered “bullying”, mainly because I agreed with a lot of the various arguments I guess. Admittedly I'm not to the end of the episode yet, so mileage may vary.For instance, I actually really liked “Remember Me”, but I wouldn't have been as happy with it had I paid full price for it. On a similar note, I totally agree that the main thing letting down “Murdered Soul Suspect” was the full price point. I picked it up for just over £20, and thought it was well worth a pop at that price. What did you make of the stealth bits though? I found them fiddly and unnecessary.Apologies if this comment looks squiffy, I'm not used to using reply-by-email!
Nope – looks fine.
I paid 4 pounds for Remember Me and that was too much money for the bullshit I have had to put up with. I thoroughly enjoyed Murdered Soul Suspect when I paid 13 pounds for it – I actually really got into the mood of collecting all the bits of tat around the world and helping people out. The stealth sections were fine – ti was easy to hide and being able to execute the enemies that easily meant that I didn't really struggle at any point. I would like to think I was good at games and that is why but Potter also played it and said that the stealth was a non-issue.
That's a relief – this reply to email thing is pretty impressive!I picked up Remember Me on Plus, so naturally I have no cause for complaint about the price, but even then I found the game pretty fun, even though the story was kind of naff. I totally agree about Murdered – I got into the helping people thing, which I guess is why the stealth stuff seemed out of place to me. I felt like the story coupled with the help elements were strong enough to make an engaging game, without having to jump swiftly back and forwards between ectoplasm clouds (which, 9 times out of 10, was all I was really doing to hide, rather than choosing carefully). Often, though, my frustrations with the stealth came from not being able to perform the executions due to some weird shift in the ghost that made it jump out of the cinematic.However, it is entirely possible that I suck at games; I have had this increasing suspicion recently. Also that my tastes are quite markedly different from my friends, but then it's different strokes for different folks, right?
Sadly, this may confirm that your skills at games needs improving. Sorry for you to find out here.
I agree with you on the stealth though – I almost want to imagine them not bothering with the stealth and that giving them the ability to lower the price or just focus on the bits that made the game good. It was like they were worried that someone might point at them and go 'BUT WHERE'S THE GAME?'
I feared as much.