first episode

Jade and Mason introduce their podcast, The Virtual Campfire, where they discuss their favorite games. Jade enjoys story-driven games with good lore, while Mason plays a wide variety of games, focusing on visuals and graphics. They briefly review the games they are currently playing: Alice Madness Returns, a twisted third-person platformer with a dark storyline, and Pal World, an action-adventure survival game similar to Pokémon. They plan to delve deeper into specific games in future episodes. The podcast is a cozy and welcoming space for gaming enthusiasts. Welcome to the very first episode of the virtual campfire. I'm Jade, and I'm Mason. Take a seat and get cozy while we talk about some of our favorite games. In our first episode, we're just going to be kind of talking about who we are and what this podcast is about. And just, you know, give you guys kind of a knack for what our genre of game is. There you go, yeah. We'll show you guys how large the gaming spectrum between the two of us is, between our experience and the games that we've played or watched. To start off, we are going to just get a better idea, like what we look for in a game and stuff like that. So, Jade, what do you look for when it comes to your type of game? My type of game is the story kind of games. The lore. The lore, that's what I look for in a game. I really like to piece together the lore. And if it's a good lore with a good story, I'm all game. I'm all game, no pun intended. I'm sold. Yeah, for sure the story and the dynamic of it. It also depends on the content of the story. I tend to like the more gritty, grotesque horror elements. Not that kind of gritty. I'm so glad that you could not see that. Yeah, that's what I look for. So what about you? What kind of games do you look for, usually? Well, I've played a huge variety, a very wide variety of games. Everything from first person shooters to Minesweeper. We are talking, yeah, huge, like, every game. Every single game that has ever existed, he's played. I've played a very wide variety of games. Dunroys, first person shooters, survival, action adventure, RPG, virtual reality. Yeah, that's a lot. Puzzle games, I like puzzle games. Metrovanias, like Hollow Knight. Oh, yeah. Hollow Knight is definitely going to be one of our episodes because it's a good game. Anyways, I guess when it comes to what I look for, I'm very huge on story as well and visuals. Like, the graphics, those are huge for me. I mean, the sound and everything also has to play a part, but when it has realistic looking or really good looking visuals, I mean, it feels like you are in there. It's awesome. Like, Last of Us 2, breathtaking visuals. Red Dead 2. Oh, yeah. That was crazy. Oh, yeah. I'm so excited for GTA 6. I bet that is going to look phenomenal. The videos looked great. There were some videos you couldn't even tell. Right. Some of the clips is like, is that real life? No. That's exactly what I thought when I watched all the Backrooms videos and the game, the Backrooms game. That's something that I want to touch on because the visuals in that game are really great. Crazy. They're really good. Anyways, so, yeah. I guess that's pretty much what I look for. Yeah, great. For this first episode, we are going to do like two mini reviews of the games that we are currently playing right now. And so, to start, Jade, what do you have in store for us? Alright, we're going to start off with the very first game that we're really talking about. Yep. This is crazy. I feel honored. So, I'm bringing to the table Alice Madness Returns. This is a third-person perspective game. You control this character named Alice Little, and for the majority of the game, you're in her little wonderland. It follows a lot of the same story aspects of the original Alice. They have the Cheshire Cat, Mad Hatter, Caterpillar, all those characters when they're in there, but they're a little bit twisted. That's why I like this game. It's a little twisted, the story. It's a little grotesque. This woman, this Alice, she's suffering from a lot of trauma from her family. They all died in a house fire in her house. She's the only one who survived, so she's carrying that trauma with her. She just got discharged from a psychiatric hospital. Right. Keep in mind that this is also in Victorian London. Right. She's not getting the care that she really needs, so she's going through it. She really is. She's going through it. The entire game, you're doing a lot of running and a lot of jumping, so much jumping. A lot of attacking. Yeah, there's quite a few. It's like a platform game. That's how I would describe it with their boss battles, and those are pretty intense. Yeah. They have posed quite difficult for me. To be honest, I needed help with the game, but my gaming experience isn't very advanced. I feel like we should disclose that early. I've watched more games than I've played. Yeah. But this game is so good, and even though it is a little bit difficult at times, it's really great. I feel like it doesn't get played or talked about enough. The story is great. The gameplay is great. The graphics of the game, because we were talking about graphics earlier, it was a game made in 2011, so the graphics aren't very modern, obviously, but they're really pretty, and I think that they're great. I think that the whole game is really pretty. It was released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 when it first came out, and it was really a spicy horse, which I haven't seen any other games personally made by them as of late, but that's fine because this game is great. It was directed by American McGee, and this game is actually a sequel of the first game that he made, and that was made in 2000, and the graphics and the gameplay, I tried to play that one. Couldn't, just too, I don't want to say it was too old, but it was. Yeah. So, yeah, I think that that's pretty much all I've got to say for Alice. It's a great game. I'm really enjoying it. Yeah. It's just a little bit twisted, the storyline, but that's okay. All right. Nice. All right. Well, what about you? What are you playing right now? So the game that I've been playing is a bit newer. So new, in fact, that it was released pretty much this month. So the game I'm talking about is Pal World. I know there's a lot of controversy about this game, but, you know, we're not going to get into that because that's a whole other can of worms, and I'm not ready to open that up yet. Nintendo is, though. Yeah, Nintendo is actually, what are they? They're looking into it. They're looking into Pal World. So Pal World is, basically, it's an action-adventure-slash-survival-slash-monster-entertainment game, and it was created by the Japanese developer Pocket Pair. And, yeah, like I said, it was made January 19th. Like, the release date was January 19th, and it has, like, it went crazy overnight. Like, nobody heard about it, and then there was, like, two million people just overnight, which I think is insane. It's crazy. But, anyways. Now, the way I would describe this game is if you took Pokémon and combined it with Ark Survival. So it draws a lot from Pokémon in the aspect of, you know, you go out into this open world, or I guess in Pokémon it's not an open world, but you go out into the world, and you find these creatures, these pals, and you get them low, throw a palsphere at them or whatnot, and you can capture them. And then you can use those pals in your party, and they can fight with you, and you can also just assign them to your base. And when they're at your base, you are able to make them, you know, gather wood, gather stone, gather different types of Mystergials, cook food on your campfire, stuff like that. Like, the fire Pokémon, they use their fire to cook your food, which I think is really cool. It's a different take on a Pokémon game. Which, I mean, Pokémon has, for the past however many games they've made, it's pretty much just been rinse and repeat. But that's controversial. Not saying I don't like the Pokémon games. I love the Pokémon games, don't get me wrong. But it's been rinse and repeat. So, it's cool to see a different take on the same style of Pokémon. Yeah, the story, I mean, it's in a beta right now, alpha testing, game preview, whatnot. So, it's not finished. And so there's not really a whole lot of lore to it right now. But I think just the concept alone has a lot of potential. And I guess there are these boss fights. You go to these towers, and think of them as gym bosses in Pokémon games. Go to these towers, you go into them, and you bring in your strongest pals, and you fight this boss. And you've got to work together as a team with your pals, you know, switching them out so the other ones can heal while the other ones do damage. It's just, and you don't have to do this, it's all optional. Like, if you just wanted to make a base with a bunch of cute pals or whatnot, I feel like it's very diverse, too. Because there's not one set thing that you have to do. Like, there's no storyline, as of right now. That's kind of nice. Yeah. Just free roam. Open world. And then, yeah, you can invite your friends, and you and your friends can build this great, cute, awesome base. You know, just have fun, whatever. I think that's about it for Power World for right now, because there's a lot of different things to talk about, like, different types of traits and the controversy and all the different types of items and everything, so it might have to be a different episode, but that's just a small review of it for right now. That's our first episode. Just an introduction to who we are, what we like in our games, and what we're playing right now. So that's probably going to do it for today's episode. In our next videos, we plan on going a lot more into, you know, one specific game and just really getting down to the bone, getting into the nooks and crannies of the game. We want to thank you for having a seat at our very cozy... Please don't sit in the fire. Yeah, please don't sit in the fire. You can sit around if you're with us. Thank you for taking a seat at our virtual campfire. And thank you for tuning in for today's episode. We hope to see you very soon. Thank you. Goodbye. Bye.