Trumpets.
This month, the GameCola crew got together to talk about trumpets! I mean, videogames. But, also videogame trumpets.
Join Alex Jedraszczak, Joseph Martin, and Matt Jonas as they talk about all of your favorite trumpets topics such as:
- Help Jeddy decide on a game to give away!
- Final Fantasy XIV was so bad that they had to destroy the entire world.
- Is it weird for some of the main, numbered Final Fantasy games to be MMOs?
- What next-gen consoles do people even own?
- Did Stu Gipp really get the original development materials for Dizzy?
- How did game developers actually get anything done in the ’80s?!
- The wonders of the DPCM channel.
- Is that the EarthBound trumpet in HAL’s Hole in One Golf?
- Oh, yeah—today
iswas the birthday of Mother! - The stupid reason behind the name “HAL”
- Did Kirby’s Dream Land 3 use the same soundfont as Arcana?
- Jeddy and Joe sing a duet of the theme from Crash Man’s stage.
- Videogame song mashups!
- Listener mail! And, it’s not late this time!
- Videogames are weird.
See? Trumpets were in there at least once or twice. I think there’s more if you actually listen to the podcast. Why not listen and see for yourself?
I used to play the trumpet….
Whew. I was worried I hadn’t sent the email soon enough. Just in the nick of time. To be honest, it feels like my duty now to keep sending in fan emails for the podcasts. Oh, and in case you’re interested, I’m going to be working on writing a second game review article, so you can look forward to that in the next couple of weeks, if I can apply myself enough to writing the darn thing. Which I hope I can, because school starts next Wednesday…
So anyway, look forward to that! Thank you again for making the podcast! I have enjoyed listening to it, just like the others!
Oh, and “Who do you serve and who do you trust?” was a reference to the half-season long Babylon 5 spin-off, Crusade, where that is one of the core questions of the ancients.
Actually, we looked that up later in the podcast, but that part got cut out. I kind of figured it was a reference to something!
Love the ending. I’m not one for regular golf, but I might need to go find that game just for the music…
I have yet to hear a legitimate criticism of Chrono Trigger from you lot. What I heard was a lot of complaining about fan hype inflating your expectations to the point where you can’t enjoy the game for what it is, and defining “tries too hard” as “unique in a variety of ways”, without actually explaining how it tries and fails or is overwhelming in its novelty or complexity. So…I call shenanigans.
In general, I try to steer clear of Chrono Trigger talk since I prematurely stoped my playthrough near the end of the game back in early high school. Most of what I said during the podcast was me trying to put what other people were saying into other words that I knew could be problems in RPG’s, like how Sticker Star tried to change everything and it was just soooo bad even though they were trying so hard to be different.
As for Chrono Triger itself, if you’ll allow me some leway since it has been a while and also SPOILERS: I didn’t particularly like when they gave you they gave you Magus and then pretty much immediately sent you to one of the most difficult bosses in the game. It felt like they were still hammering in the whole “Look you don’t have your main character anymore isn’t that weird and also look how much you relied on him everything is so much harder!” even though that had pretty much already played out wonderfully before. It was so frustrating that I legitimately though I had skipped an area of the game because of the difficulty spike, and it seemed to just be for the purpose of “wouldn’t it be cool if the “bad guy” joined them ‘cept we can’t make him that powerful.” Even the sidequest stuff that opened up at that point made me feel way underleveld, and I feel like it was just them trying to drive home a nuanced point, but I stopped having fun at that point.
Chrono Trigger is a great game and I love a lot about it though. Again, this is from memories from several years back and perhaps when confronted with it now the challenge would seem more fair.
See, THAT’S valid criticism. Well, some of it, anyhow. 😉
Technically, Magus is optional; you can choose to fight him instead, in which case you get a different ending but no additional party member. I think a lot of the difficulty comes from party makeup and tactics at that point in the game, assuming you’re up to speed with all the best equipment. Even if you don’t pursue any of the sidequests available at this point, there’s a lot of GREAT equipment you can pick up from the sealed chests you’ve been seeing all game.
Plus, it’s an RPG; grinding for EXP before proceeding is still a valid strategy. I recall the mountain where you recover Crono being one of the toughest parts of the game, but I had also gotten Crono to Lv. 4 or 5 before beginning the adventure to ensure I was always at or above the minimum level for any given section without needing to grind again. Realizing the Lavos Spawn enemies counterattacked if you hit them on the shell instead of (or in addition to) the head made a huge difference in my survival rate.
This is definitely a topic for the next podcast!!!
I’m game! “Podcast 77: Your Favorite RPG Is Overrated.” Let’s be sure to also talk about Final Fantasy VI, Final Fantasy VII…actually, I think I know what my contribution is going to be.