@zombiepie: There are a few ideas I am kicking around for NamCompendium Gaiden entries: Namco/Sega rivalry, Namco vs. Nintendo in the late 1980s (which I've touched on but I mean really blow the fuck out of this idea), and a real dive into the UGSF fiction are on the table currently.
@arbitrarywater: In terms of actual mechanics and game design, Baby Pac-Man is about as weird as things are going to get until we get to Golly! Ghost! in the next century or so. Does sorta remind me of weird tossed off DS ephemera, like the SM64DS minigames or (shameless plug) Point Blank DS, which I reviewed right here!
@ballsleon: It's one of the strangest golden age arcade cabinets I've ever seen, but in terms of raw horror it doesn't hold a candle to Professor Pac-Man. That game was supposed to have multiple sets of questions for different distribution avenues! Imagine hundreds of shitty visual trivia questions!
@mento: Just spitballing, I'll hit Pac-Man 2 in about nine more years so I've nothing to fear for now.
I've said it already but I want to say it again: I've rarely felt more vindicated than when both you and Gino agreed the game falls off a fucking cliff once you get to Pulse.
I guess to sorta answer the question you guys posed in the podcast, my enjoyment of the game (while muted) came mostly from appreciating the novel ideas that could have been boons for a better game (auto healing after battles is nice, the paradigms lead to some potentially interesting prostrats around battles, etc) and from the Progress Quest-esque forward momentum of the pre-Pulse chapters. The game's story is laughably told and each new trip to an equally nondescript and geographically unspecified location is bewildering, but it at least goes in a direction kind of. It validates Newtonian models of causality, for a time, in that the thing inexorably marches on doing its stupid thing. But once you get to wander empty plains talking to rocks for forty hours with little to no payoff, things just sputter and fucking die.
I think I played Final Fantasy the correct way last time: the game simply requires you to bring more to it and do the leg work for it. Setting a self-imposed challenge upon myself made the experience significantly better, as otherwise it is a fairly paint-by-numbers game. I would encourage anybody seeking to try FF1 again to set some stipulations on yourself. I played with three characters and managed to get through the game. You could also limit the weapons, spells, armor, etc. that you allow yourself to use. I've seen variants where players could only equip gear found in chests. Solo runs with different classes are a real challenge. This is certainly not what the original authorial intent of the game was, but we're talking about a "solved" thirty year old JRPG with not a lot going on for most of the run time. Bring your own fun.
Looking forward to Final Fantasy II, a game with keywords!
That and "accommodate" trip me up miserably. When I think about the number of words in English that still slip past my eyes, it makes Norwegian seem even more insane.
...playing Galaga on the Bosconian 4-way stick (the arcade Galaga stick is 2-way) is surprisingly disconcerting.
I would imagine so! Having any sort of step between "all the way left, holy shit" and "Jesus, move to the right!" in Galaga sounds like a bit of a nightmare.
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