Episode 000_Introductions

Two friends discuss their plans for a podcast where they will play and discuss games from their backlogs. They talk about the criteria for choosing games, including narrative elements, length of play, and feasibility. They also reflect on their gaming experiences as kids and how gaming has changed over time. They plan to alternate between longer and shorter games to avoid overload. They are excited to start the podcast and hope to improve their gaming skills through the process. Well hey, you want to transition seamlessly into our little intro? Yeah, I guess that's probably a good idea. How do we even do this, brother? You know, I don't know. Are we doing an intro episode right now, or are we going to do... I think we need to at some point probably tell people that are listening, all one of them, who we are exactly. Hi mom! Three... Two... One... BACKLOG! All right, so let's introduce ourselves. I'll go first. My name is Alec, Gamertag Bromantana for 30-some-odd years. I'm 34 years old, been gaming the whole time, right out of the womb, married with two kids, and we're in sunny Florida. James, what about you? I'm James, yeah. Been gaming about 30 years as well, since slightly after you were born. I'm in rainy Florida today, and my Gamertag changes constantly, but right now it's Pockets. I go by Pockets today. Nice to meet you, Pockets. Yeah, nice to meet you too, man. I'm glad we're finally getting to meet. So what are we trying to accomplish here on the podcast? For me, I've got like everybody on Steam has a thousand games that they haven't played that they've either gotten on sale or gotten for free, so I'm trying to get through a lot of them and at least give them a chance, because like I said, man, there's hundreds of games that I have that I've never even installed or loaded up. And then there's some games that I just really want to play, or I need to finish them, but I just haven't ever, you know. I've played through some of them and I just determined like, yeah, it's a good game or something happened and I got busy and I couldn't get back into it. So I want to, you know, maybe even restart some of them and, you know, maybe the idea of having you play through them at the same time, we can talk about it and kind of get through some of it so I don't die, and my legacy is that guy owned a million games, and that's all. At least I can say I beat them. I definitely agree with a lot of that. Because we talked about this a little bit. I think I understand the general concept of what a backlog is. I always looked at it more of like, I guess kind of like a wish list of like, oh, I really want to play that game, but I either can't afford it, so I'm not going to bother and buy it, or my hard drive didn't have enough space, so I'm not going to download it and add it there. Of course, this all started, you know, pre-Steam days, which seems to make it a lot easier. Yeah, I think I always looked at it as like a game that I just would want to play for whatever reason. My library is much smaller than yours, but my mental backlog of all the games that I missed out on is definitely what is going to be filling the majority of my list. In my earlier gaming days, we had big gaps at my house for like what we could game on. From Atari, I think it was Atari 2600 with like Frogger and Space Invaders and all those really old joystick and button games. We went from that and jumped all the way up to Super Nintendo because we had that Atari for years, and then from Super Nintendo made a jump all the way up to PlayStation. So I missed out on a lot of the Nintendos, all the Sega stuff, so like all those games completely out of my view. Yeah, I never touched a single Sega game until I became an adult. I never... I got... mine jumps around too. I went from Nintendo was the first thing that we ever got. Mario and Duck Hunt was like the only game that we owned. And then I got a Super Nintendo, I think when it... I got a Nintendo because Super Nintendo came out. It just made it cheaper so we were able to get one. And then I remember I got Atari 2600 when I was 12 or something because I found it at a pawn shop when I was on vacation. It was just a cardboard box full of them, so I've jumped around a lot too. And I never... I know there was like the division at some point where everybody owns a Nintendo console now, but back in the day, you had to make that choice. Are you going to be a Nintendo guy or are you going to be a PlayStation guy? Or you're rich and your parents got you both. But we had division in our neighborhood, so we didn't get both. And I remember we picked PlayStation over Nintendo, so N64, GameCube, and there was another one in there, right? Dreamcast happened. We didn't do that. I've never even seen a Dreamcast. I don't think they're real. No, they're just Dream, dude. They talked about it in South Park. But yeah, we never played any of those, right? I don't know how name-dropping we want to be, but one of our oldest friends, I think they had an N64. What was the James Bond Golden Gun on? That was on N64, yeah. Somebody had, in our old friend group, somebody had an N64 because I remember we played Golden Gun a couple times, and I was terrible at it. Oh, it was terrible, yeah. I mean, if you go from the controls of PlayStation to that, it was pretty lousy. Yeah, and back when I moved to Palm Bay, one of my neighbors had a lot more of those older consoles. And this would have been in the Xbox PlayStation 2 days, but I think they had Sega N64. I know they had a GameCube, and there was a couple games we'd go over and play. So as I got older, I played more of those older consoles through other people that were in our friend group. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Me staying in the same neighborhood when you abandoned me kind of made it like we all, our friends, we all had like the same console, so it's kind of crazy how big of a gap there was. And that's not even talking about the huge gap of handhelds that we had. Yeah. It went from Game Boy Color to Nintendo 3DS. I think that's like 10, 15 years of not even playing a single handheld game. I never had PlayStation Portable. No, my first handheld, and I think technically my grandfather owned it, was the Game Boy. It was the original brick, you know, you could throw it through a window, Game Boy. I'm looking at one. Because it had four double A's. Yep. The screen was impossible to see. Oh, yeah, forget about it. I had one of those, and we had, I think, two games. It was Mario and Tetris, which I actually still have the Tetris cartridge. I've since lost the Mario one and the console itself. But, yeah, we had the original one. We got Game Boy Color. We had the Advance. I think I might have had more Game Boy options than I remember you did. I'm willing to bet that you might not have your Mario cartridge anymore. I don't think I do. Yeah, if you ever want it back, I bet you I can find it. Now, it doesn't have a big chunk of plastic missing from it? I don't remember if it has plastic missing or if it has, like, part of the label scraped off or something, but I'm pretty sure I have your Super Mario Land. Yeah, it was the one. We've been friends for too long. Bro. Anywho. So, yeah, I definitely had more handheld consoles than I did actual consoles in the time where I was having to rely on my parents to buy stuff for me. So I had Game Boy, had Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Advance SP. And I think that's where it ended for me, and then I started going outside into the sunlight. And then my younger siblings had the Wii. I don't think we ever had a Wii U. Yeah, that's a cool thing, too. I was the youngest in my family, and my older siblings didn't play video games. So you had, you know, more people you could steal video games from, I guess, and get a hold of them. And that's pretty cool because you were the oldest, so you had all the, like, lower generation kids getting consoles. You know, my wife and I joked about this, and we wanted to, but as we've looked at some of the games in the last hour or so, they're expensive. We had the idea of when our oldest was born, when they started playing games, like, okay, what if we, like, forced them to try to appreciate where it came from? So we'd go find an old Atari and, like, have them play. I don't know about that. They could play in the order that we were given the stuff. Start on Nintendo. Don't start your kid on Atari, man. Look what happened to us. You don't want your kids to be like us. Oh, my God. I have a lot of those consoles still. I mean, if you ever wanted to, I could always lend. I'm not using them. They're in a box. But if you ever wanted, I feel like your kid would probably. They're indestructible. So not the kids, the consoles. There was a Pinterest or Reddit post. I can't remember. Somebody had either found, like, an Ikea cabinet, or they built a cabinet where it's just the square cutouts, and they had gone through and backlit everything, made it look all nice. But in each square it had one of the consoles. It had all of them. And they were all wired together through one TV with all these adapters and switches and stuff. So you'd be like, anything you want to play, hit this button, plug that in, and you're good to go. And it's all right there. There was a guy, well, I'm sure a lot of people have done that, but I do remember watching, like, a long video from the Angry Video Game Nerd. There was the other guy, Mike, that was on that channel. And he had all of that, and he showed how much work went into it now that HDMI is kind of the main thing. Yeah. I mean, you have to have, like, those weird switchers. You have to have, like, converters to go from RCA to HDMI. And that's, like, when I was a kid, I thought that's how I was going to do it. Like, I thought I was going to have my own house with all these old retro consoles, and I was just, that was going to be my life. And I didn't really think about, you know, like, the reality of the situation. And then we didn't know HDMI was going to come out and all this stuff. So, like, you know, emulation works well for that if you own the games and everything, you know. You really want to have that all in one. Yeah, for sure. Being able to play some of those old games with a USB controller on your very overpriced and overpowered gaming rig. Like, it's so convenient. It's almost too convenient, and then you end up getting all these games, and then you create a backlog for yourself, and then you go full circle. And then you start a podcast to talk about that backlog? Yeah. You can't even get through them. You get choice paralysis, I think. It's like when you want to figure out what you're going to eat for dinner, and it's Friday night, and you can go anywhere you want because you're a grown-up, and you can't figure it out. And it's the same thing with games. Oh, yeah. I mean, we've already solidified a handful of games. But, I mean, from our initial conversation trying to figure out what games we're going to start talking about first, we've already gone through, like, three or four iterations of it. Because there are so many choices. So, how do you – we'll talk about that. That's a good thing to discuss. What methods do you think we're going to use? Like, what do you want to do to try and figure out which games we're going to play and how to pick them? Because, I mean, hundreds of games, millions of games we can play. Yeah. How do we pick each one? Obviously, we're – well, I'd say we each bring one to the table from each of our backlogs. So, you'll bring one, I'll bring one. How do we figure out which one I'm going to bring? So, I want to bring a game that is, one, on my backlog, makes sense. I also want it to be a game that we can have an actual discussion on. There are going to be games that the concept of the game is very simple. Flappy Bird. Flappy Bird. We wouldn't have a whole podcast episode on Flappy Bird. I've got it my way. So, I think there needs to be, for me, a narrative element, regardless of how big or small it is. There needs to be something there. There needs to be a substance. Yeah. And we can bring this back up when we talk about the first game we're going to talk about, because it can be argued that it's not much narrative stuff there. I think length of play is a big thing. We're talking about Flappy Bird. It's not how long the game is. It's how long you can stand playing. So, it's not going to be – it's not a thing that I would put on my backlog. I've already played it, so I'll just swipe it off, man. There you go. Call me ahead. And I think the last thing, or I guess a subsection of length of play, is going to be, is it feasible for us to play it in the given time and then come back and discuss it with an educated outlook, actually being able to play through the game. Like, if we pick a game like – spoilers on my backlog – is Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2. I don't know much about the first one, but I know the second one is, like, almost 100 gigs. It's a huge game. There's so much content in that game. Are we going to be able to turn that over in a couple weeks? I think you could if you set enough time aside. I mean, yeah, probably. I mean, remember, again, when we were kids, like, you could play for eight hours straight and just rip through a game in a week. Very true. But we also have to deal with a thing called life. Yeah. And, I mean, your job keeps you very busy. My job keeps me moving a lot and hard to nail down time. But then when I am home, that down time turns into family time. So it is definitely hard to sit down and pull your energy into one massive game. I love the Assassin's Creed lines. And, honestly, since I had my oldest, he's seven now, since I've had him, my one big game of the year is always whatever Assassin's Creed comes out that year. And if there isn't one, I just keep playing little games until the next one comes out because I've been, like, saving my energy for that one game I know I'm going to like because it's been so consistent. But I'm hoping that this little project we're doing here will make me get away from that comfortability and force me to play something else that I wouldn't normally sit down and take the time to play, that I wanted to. We should start a podcast. We should start a podcast. What do you think? What are your parameters going to be? I guess, I mean, we kind of discussed it a little bit ahead of time, I guess. But, yeah, I would say the same thing. I'm going to have to take time. You know, I don't work Mondays, so I can kind of take that day and, theoretically, I can, you know, really blast some time into a game and try to get into it a little bit more than I would. But otherwise, I mainly play before I go to bed or, like, first thing in the morning before I go to work if I happen to wake up early enough. You know, I want to pick games that I want to play, but I know I have a lot of games. Your definition of a backlog makes it, like, theoretically you're going to have a better time than me because it's games that you want to play or you haven't had a chance to play that are kind of on your wish list. I've got some games that I probably, I can tell you looking at them, I'm not going to like them very much. But they were free and, like, I own them, so I have to play them, right? Yeah. I mean, it definitely, it opens up, I may have a better time as far as what I enjoy, but you're going to have a lot more content to pull from. Well, yeah, but we'll have a good time either way, man. Oh, sure. Yeah. It'll just be a matter, I think, of some weeks I think we're going to play a game that's on my list and it might not be the funnest game, but we're going to try it. And I think the discussion of it is going to be the reward more than the game. Right. Or maybe some of these games, they look bad or I just don't think I care, but they're going to be really good. I don't know, maybe House Flipper is my 10 out of 10 game and I just haven't figured it out yet. No, and I think that's going to be pretty evident on our second game we get to because already we've put a little bit of time trying to get into it. And it's hard trying to go back to some of those controls, spoilers a little bit. It's an older game, but, you know, we've been so used to playing these next-gen consoles and they're super responsive. And I'll tell you what, auto save is a lifesaver or a game saver, really. Going back to games that didn't automatically save your spot has been frustrating, to say the least. It'd be pretty cool if at the end of this we both got better at video games because I think when I was a kid I was really good. Well, I mean, comparatively. Oh, for sure. But we're out of practice now. Like, put me on a platformer and I'm going to wish I had saved things and everything. Back in the times where we would all do our LAN parties for those our age or older, everybody bring their Xbox to one house. We've got screens in every room, you know, doing that. When we played Halo, there was a couple probably months there when we were like real big into Halo. I was killing it on our little LAN parties because you just find that groove playing over and over and over again. And now I'll get into a game for 15, 20 minutes and then I'm out for a day. Yeah, well, you've got to look, too, now, like kids these days, man. Oh, my God. When we played these games, like if we played them online, we were on really bad internet connections, not necessarily dial-up, but, you know, we had pretty terrible internet connection. We had the controller we had, you know, it was probably like a third-party Nyko controller with a lot of joystick slop. And that's what we played with. You look at kids now, man, or anybody now, and everything has changed. Everyone has high-speed internet, these crazy TVs. There's controllers you can, like, map a button combination to. People hold controllers differently. I didn't even know that. Oh, my goodness. I was watching a stream. Sorry to cut you off. I was watching a stream of somebody playing either Heroes of the Storm or League of Legends, but they were on a keyboard, and they had their keyboard, turn your whole keyboard 90 degrees. Absolutely not. And it was the weirdest thing. I was like, what is this guy doing? And, yeah, it's crazy how much of a focus and just skill these newer kids have at playing this stuff. It's wild. There's a way to hold a controller that I wouldn't, like, you know how there's, like, paddle controllers where you can remap the buttons? So prior to that, I guess there was a big thing where people were holding a controller where their index finger would go on X and Y and, you know, or what, X, Y, A, B. And their index finger would use those face buttons, and they would hold it kind of like it's called claw grip. I don't know. That's crazy because that's something, like, that I didn't even know existed. I didn't even know my hand could contort that way until I saw someone else doing it. Oh, my Lord. Kids these days, they don't know how good they got it, you know? Oh, yeah. Oh, man. That's a good tangent, right? That's such a good tangent. We could get a little back on topic. We'll try to pick a game, and I'll bring it to the table, and we can discuss it, I guess, every week or, you know, every so whenever we have an episode. We'll kind of discuss the game ahead of time and kind of get into it. I think it's a good idea to split up. If we have, like, a longer game, maybe pair it with, like, follow it up with a shorter game. You know, you got, like, an RPG game or something, and then pair it with, like, a platformer where it's kind of more to the point. That way it's not going to overload us or, you know, anybody with content or something. And I don't want to miss out on the story of a game because I'm, you know, have another very large game behind it. Like, if we're going to play Red Dead Redemption, maybe do a. Flappy Bird. Flappy Bird the next week. Yeah. Or if we're going to play, you know, Grand Theft Auto, we're going to play Flappy Bird the week after that. Right. Or if we're going to play Max Payne, which is a big story-driven game, we can play Flappy Bird after. I just want to play Flappy Bird. Flappy Bird. We're now 3-2-1 Flappy Bird. Actually, did you play that game ever? I think I played it for all of, like, five minutes when I was probably on a lunch break. You got it. You got it. And then uninstalled it initially. Yeah. I think the guy that made it, like, canceled it himself or something. I don't know. It was so addicting. Like, that was such a huge game. He was getting death threats and stuff, too. Yeah. It was wild. I need to think of different words than wild. Dude, it was wild. Wild. So, yeah, and then, okay, there's also another thing. I saw a YouTube video a while ago on this. There's a program or a website called PlayNight, and I guess you put in your Steam username. It'll upload your whole Steam backlog into it, and then you can sort it into different sections, whether it's, like, the type of game that it is or alphabetically or game length or something. And then you can have it randomly pick. So if you're ever, you know, because I have a lot of Steam games. If we ever have that choice paralysis and we're not really sure which one to pick, then we can have, you know, like an AI or something like that pick it for us because that's, you know, kind of takes the choice out of it. And then you kind of never really know what you're going to get then, which is kind of cool, too. That's true. Because I think that's, you know, kicking it all the way back. It was like that before the Internet. You would just go into a pawn shop and, you know, trade them a bicycle that you found for a video game. And then, you know, eventually if we get enough people listening, besides just my mother and my father, we could have social media polls or something like that, I think would be a cool way to pick. We'd have to give choices so that way we don't get trolled because if the Internet's taught us anything, you don't want to just leave it open-ended for the Internet. You've got to give people choices or else we're only going to play, like, the longest, most ridiculous or the worst games. So, yeah, some choices would be good for people. Oh, for sure. And then you had another cool option, too, you were talking about. You want to run that by? Right. So we're each going to bring a game to our episode, right? So how are we going to pick who gets theirs talked about first or which one we play first or whatever it is? So to keep it in the spirit of gaming, we can pick a game that we have been playing for a while or just a game maybe we haven't played, but anything that has a measurable statistic, we could use that to determine who does better and we'll play their game first. Easy example for, say, Fortnite. We'll both run solos. Whoever places higher, we'll talk about their game first. Or another game, like, there's a game that I played it for a little bit called Mini Motorways. It's a very simple game. You have this little area of, like, cars and buildings. You have to get the cars to the buildings. Anyway, it's how long can you last, right? We can just pick one of those. Whoever does better, we'll pick their game first. But we're still going to talk about both of them. We'll just, that person, whoever wins that metric will go first. And we actually did this last night for our first one. We played a game we've been playing in our current gaming group for a while now, Heroes of the Storm, which is from Blizzard Entertainment. I posed the challenge, could I out-heal your damage? And who did you play on that match? I played Orphea, which is, like, a mage character but very close range, well, the way I had played it. And it was, dude, it was funny because we were kind of, we were very neck and neck. I was actually surprised. I thought I was just going to, like, stomp it. But there's a lot of unknowns in that. You've got, you know, the other team and what they pick and then, you know. It was just, it was complicated. It was funny too because I could, for me at least, I was kind of changing the way I played. You were trying to out-heal the amount of damage I did to other players. And it was kind of funny because I found myself trying to be slick and avoid heals a little bit, you know, just to handicap you some. But then it was cool. It was fun. I liked that. And I feel like that is like a little game inside of a game. And I think just in general, even if it's not related to picking a game, sorry I talked over you, but I think if we could just do that in general, I feel like that kind of spices things up a little bit. Oh, for sure. No, I was definitely changing the talent I chose. And I was definitely over-healing what I didn't need to. We ended up winning the game. So it was fun on multiple levels. Yeah, we didn't lose no matter what. There were no losers. But if we had to pick a loser, it was me. But it was close. I thoroughly enjoyed it. So I guess having that outcome, we can talk about, I guess, our games that we're bringing to our official first and second episodes and give that little teaser of what we're going to be talking about next. Okay. So I actually, like ahead of time, I picked the first game here, The Legend of Zelda Wind Waker on GameCube. I don't want to get too into it because it's for a whole other day. But Zelda's been around forever. One of the first games we got ever was a Zelda game. So I feel like I've never really gotten the whole experience of a Zelda game. So I wanted to try it out and see what it's all about, moving into 3D Zelda games. So that was why I picked that one. And what did you pick? I went a little older and very nostalgic for mine, a game that I had overplayed. I think I burned this cartridge out, the SNES, Disney's Aladdin platform game. I had played it a bunch. I brought it to the backlog because when we were talking about games to do, I don't think you had ever either played it. I think you watched me play it a couple times, but you never got a chance to play it. So it was, yes, I had played it before. I never beat it. So I never got, you know, the credits never rolled because it was early, early days in my gaming career. And I think I maybe got to, like, the third or fourth level, and that was it over and over again. So I definitely wanted to revisit that. And it was, I loved that movie. I loved that game. So I went definitely nostalgia on my first pick. Yeah, and that's great because it's, you know, it's a comfort pick kind of thing. And I'm sure everybody knows this. It's common knowledge every household. It was on Sega as well, and it's a different game. So that will give us, we can experience it in ways that you, there's something new for you out there. Yeah. Yeah, and I only played the Super Nintendo version. I never got a chance to play the Sega because I didn't have a Sega. I didn't know it existed until you had mentioned it, which is funny. I loved that SNES game. I loved the movie, and I had no clue there was a second game. I hope you still have the same opinion after you've played it that you love the game and everything because nostalgia can be pretty rough. Oh, man. Yes, it can. Yes, it can. So, yeah, any final thoughts before we wrap up our little episode zero? No, man, I'm just looking forward to doing this. I feel like, you know, gaming is, as you get older or whatever, you get more responsibilities and stuff. Gaming kind of takes a back seat, and then you get a backlog going. Everybody has a backlog. It doesn't matter what it means to you or how you define it, but everybody's got a long list of games that they either want to play or they need to play them. So it's going to be a good time. You can play along with us. We're going to always let you know a little bit ahead of time what games are going to be in the mix. So if you have them, have access to them, or haven't played them, you can just jump in, and then, you know, you can join in on the discussion with social media or any other way that we decide. Thanks, everybody. Thank you, guys. Thanks so much for listening. This has been 321 Backlog by Alec L. and James T. If you enjoyed this episode, please let us know with a thumbs-up, a comment, or sharing with your friends and family. Our show music is Liftoff by Amy Waters. You can find this song and more of their work at amywaters.bandcamp.com. You can connect with us on any of our social media pages and by sending us an email at 321backlog at gmail.com. Until next time. Until next time. .