734: Shadow Labyrinth

... Absolutely. But in brainstorming, they thought of this idea and they thought of a title, Shadow Labyrinth, and people asked them, why not call it Pac-Man Shadow Labyrinth? And I was talking to Rolling Stone last year, maybe this year, I thought it said Pac-Man has historically been a family game and we wanted to brand this game in a different way. So they thought about Pac-Man, they thought about the maze, and that connected them to the Metrovania idea, but they didn't want to call the game Pac-Man because they…

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... So just keep that in mind. I'm going to try to capture the energy here. Excuse me. Good luck. Yeah. When we talk to the developers, they said you can do whatever you want for Pac-Man. But can we show you what we're doing for the next game? He told them to weekly. ...

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... Hopefully we can get to the bottom of it. There's quite a lot. So to talk about Shadow Labyrinth, I guess we need to talk about first about Pac-Man. Now, I trust our listeners know Pac-Man pretty well. I'd like to think he's one of the more iconic video game characters that have ever existed. Krista, I know you are a young person, but I trust you have grown up and you've lived a life rich in Pac-Man. ...

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... I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take. When people run in circles, it's a very very... Pac Man! Pac Man! ...

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Fast forward a long time in 2014 there was a game called Shin Goon Destroy Girls Tank Battalion and in the strictest sense Shadow Labyrinth is a sequel to Shin Goon Destroy Girls Tank Battalion a mobile game that was available for two years only in Japan. And so was it 2012 or 2014 anyway it's so that a lot of the characters in in Shadow Labyrinth are either related to or our characters from Shin Goon Destroy Girls Tank Battalion which again there are no remaining traces of the thing that is interesting about…

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All right. It's time to talk about the mazes. Let's talk with mazes. Now obviously the game itself is a maze of sorts but throughout the world you find these little like consoles and once they're active you have to find a special thing to activate them. Once they're active you can walk up to them and you basically travel into their dimension or whatever and you're sort of playing a kind of version of Pac-Man championship edition with puck in that you've got these you know every everything's on the rails. You've…

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and I don't think this is strictly true, the director worked on Kirby and The Amazing Mirror, but it gives the impression of like a bunch of old devs, like right about retirement age who want to just take one more crack at this thing, who just want to like one more time go like, "Well, if we dress it up like Pac-Man, maybe this UGS thing has legs." And, you know, I assume the sales weren't amazing, but it is just such a captivating, like, it's like suggestive. ...

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... Yeah. Also yes. Retress listeners at home. You can officially recount reset the counter. The Zevious counter. We've mentioned it again. So zero episodes as we talked about Zevious on the podcast. It's it's kind of a Zevious game more than it is a Pac-Man game. That's the kind of part of my my bugbear about this game. I will I will definitely drop a link to this timeline because it's it's so fascinating to read this timeline because you learn so much. You learn that Dig Dug is actually taking place way in the…

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... So I'm like, I'm not about to put these materials into a thing that's just going to go away. Yeah. Because spoiler alert, this I died a lot playing this game like way more than I expected to be dying in a Pac-Man video game. Yeah. Say that front. Say that front. I did a lot. It's hard. It's hard. Yeah. Yes. ...

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I don't know. I guess it was left on the planet after that war that we didn't see because that game was not made, but it is crucial. Yeah, it's like a big robot. It runs on all fours. I can't quite figure out how to describe it, but it's a big robot with like an orb for a stomach that is clearly like a Pac-Man shaped. And you can eat things by pressing the R3, which is kind of an awkward input. Was it R3 or L3? ...

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... And the music when you enter this game is like a it's like a riff on John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. I don't mean that hyperbolically at all. Like it really has the same sort of texture and like characters that which is just an incredible scene setting for a video game about Pac-Man nominally. And then your soul comes out of a like what appears to be solvulo from Xavius like you're like it opens the cockpit of like what appears to be solvulo opens and then the swordsman comes out of it implying that like the…

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However, the swordsman and puck do have certain symbiotic elements, for example, pretty early in the game, you'll stumble on to what looks like something from like Tron, and you'll discover it's called a derail. And when you stand on a derail, you and puck sort of become just puck and puck basically takes over. And then you're kind of playing like a Pac-Man platformer almost in that you ride the rail and you can go any direction the rail goes. Then you can just run up straight walls upside down. You just run the…

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... You know, they could have gotten with calling this game Namco Land, although that would have been a worse title. And it's not just it's not just the floating Pac-Man like head that comes with you and eats things sometimes like it's so much like you and I started talking about this before the recording and you hit me up with stuff like I even didn't notice before. So I'm going to leave you. I'm going to let you, you know, fly your flag right now and just go ahead and tell us about the lore here. ...

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