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Nerds Without Pants   

Nerds Without Pants Episode 243: I Love It When A Plan Comes Together!

Hannibal, we hardly knew ye.

Welcome back to another Nerds Without Pants, where we kick things off with a special announcement: NWP is going weekly! Sort of! You’ll see. Anyhoo, this episode is a chance for Julian to right a great wrong as we talk about good ideas in games that didn’t quite land the first time. Then we have a handful of games to go through before having the first-ever Fatal 4 Way in Video Game Cage Match! Sort of!

This episode is going up late, so apologies for the lack of time stamps.

NEXT EPISODE: THE NEWS!

IN TWO WEEKS:

STAGE SELECT: What are some video game baddies you love to kill again and again?

VIDEO GAME CAGE MATCH: Punky Skunk vs Easter Bunny’s Big Day

SUBMIT YOUR COMMENTS BY 7:30 CENTRAL ON 3/24 TO BE ON THE SHOW!

Twitter: @NWPcast

Email: [email protected]

Our theme song “Relax” and interstitial tracks “To the Maxx” and “Moody Grooves” are written and performed by Megan McDuffee.


 

Comments

Cary Woodham

03/19/2023 at 06:45 AM

I've found that enemies that are fun to beat in games have some sort of satifying sound that goes along with it.  Like stomping on Goombas in classic Mario games.  Or chomping ghosts in Pac-Man.

SanAndreas

03/19/2023 at 11:14 AM

Stage Select:

Lynels in Breath of the Wild. It's satisfying to beat them after a hard battle. Also, they gave me a hard time in the original NES game. 

I like setting God mode in classic Doom games and playing them on Nightmare difficulty, where they respawn, and setting up a bunch of infighting. The best places to do this in Doom II are Level 17, Level 18, and the Cyberdemon and Spider Mastermind in Level 20, where you can watch the four toughest monsters in the game kill each other over and over again. Usually Cybie kicks everyone else's asses and it takes them a few rounds of respawning to take him down.

The "Mover" enemies in the Northern Cave of Final Fantasy VII, mostly because you can power-level materia with them by loading the materia into your triple-growth weapons. They give out 1000 AP each. 

Cage Match:

Imma go with the Easter Bunny because Cadbury Creme Eggs and Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs. 

Booky

03/24/2023 at 11:04 AM

Stage Select: Argh, I had so many I wanted to bring up, notes I started last week and everything, and then of course this week I forget until Friday morning after having shut off my laptop and am well into OTC melatonin haze.  So this'll be a fast one!  Or at least one that makes less and less sense as it goes on.  It's going to be that one.

First is every enemy where the developer is like, "Come on, you know, I know you know I know you know."  Like when they put Foot Clan soldiers right in front of those hydrants in TMNT 2: The Arcade Game (or I think there's ninjas you can baseball shuryukins at, that's a great feeling, any counter) or those Willys early on in Double Dragon that just so happen to be right in front of that huge industrial pit or whatever that's supposed to be.  If they could model little tennis shoes on the Famicom I bet one or two of them would choose that *exact* moment to tie their laces.

The second one that comes to mind right now is from Nioh 1, this is going to take some explanation.  I think it's Tachibana Muneshige that was in the Beta before Nioh's release.  There's a skill called Composure that the Ninjitsu branch gives you where, and I don't know the details, but you get a skill where as long as you're unarmed you can do a counter move by grabbing the human enemy's blade or weapon with your bare hands, twisting it out of their grip, and using their own weapon against them to stab them in the gut for massive damage.  I couldn't find the details but I'm fairly sure the hitbox frame time is much, much smaller than the normal counters that you can do with weapons normally for good but not amazing damage.  I can't stress it enough, you don't want to be unarmed for a long period as it's not even a style really, it's just you can't really attack or defend hardly at all (even the dodge is funky).  During the Beta I got really, really good at baiting in a certain 3-hit combo from Tachibana and hitting the Composure counter at the last one.  I even beat the boss that way without taking damage, which still takes a bit of doing even being perfect with the counters.  Thankfully, doing any sort of counter like that is still really good in Nioh, especially when the game throws 2 or 3 human bosses at you at once as a challenge for the end and postgame.  So learning counters early and just having a laugh doing the hardest version of that over and over again actually paid dividends in the end.  Take that, Nobunaga's ambition!

VIDEO GAME CAGE MATCH: Okay, skunks are more terrifying than bunnies, sure.  *Normally.*  But being "punky" just kinda means being cool which actually makes it less terrifying, power-wise.  And a bunny with the power of organized religion?  That's just super terrifying.  Easter Bunny’s Big Day wins.

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