I missed Metal Mondays! I'll be happy to see it back m/

This episode was so good, it made me really happy that it was full of Nightwish and Battle Beast!

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Patrick comes out first. Since his beautiful ginger head is always in the clouds he needs to slowly descend from the rafters as this dreamy Majora's Mask song plays. I'd like to think he's dressed as Tingle and attached to a big red balloon while this happens. Come to think of it this idea may have its origins in some old fantasies I had about the pantless red-headheaded devil, but I think it'll work for a wrestling entrance all the same.

Julian comes out next and it's a bizzare pick but the title screen for Mass Effect needs to play. There's no percussion and it's very atmospheric, but just play it super loud, pan the arena with lights, run a fog machine, and it'll probably work out! There are two possible entrances I can imagine. Either Julian rides out to the ring on a parade style float shaped like the Normandy, or he gets launched into the ring human-cannonball style by a cannon shaped like a mass effect relay.

Angelo has to come out to this version of Bloody Tears and all along the entrance ramp there needs to be dozens of people dressed up like demons laying on the ground, so it's like he's walking over the corpses of his enemies. It's funny, you guys call Angelo the robot but he's the one I give the most metal and upbeat entrance, and I think it fits him! It's 2018 and I think it's safe to say Angelo's no longer the new guy! Geeze, I've been listening to this show for a long time

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4. Naked Snake with amazing mullet and headband on

3. Lara Croft

2. Ellie from The Last of Us

1. My canon female paragon Commander Shepard

Chrono Crossing 1989

We're getting back to when I was a baby in the the early 90s and my parents bought us an NES and I came home from school to play crappy games all day without knowing better. The games from 1989 that I played the most were Drakkhen and Astyanax on NES so that shows you what kind of shitshow we're talking about. Sim City also came out and I remember in elementary school our teacher in computer class let us play Sim City one day and it was fun, so I'll pick Sim City because it's either that or Astyanax!

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3. Star Ocean 4 The Last Hope - The story is full of annoying, angsty, melodramatic teenagers in space. But I kind of love it.

2. Metal Gear Solid series - Metal Gear is anime as fuck, and it's awesome.

1. Dark Souls - The artists and designers at From Software were immensely influenced by the Berserk manga and anime, and the Souls aesthetic and violent depressing atmosphere owe a lot to it. The amount of Berserk homages in the character designs, environment art, monsters, and even some story beats is staggering. If you're a fan of the Souls atmosphere you have to get your hands on Berserk, it's super fucking metal. There are areas and monsters in Souls games that look like they're right out of the panels, and players can straight up cosplay as their favorite Berserk characters in Dark Souls.

Chrono Crossing 1990

Super Mario Bros. 3 - This game is so good. Super Mario World is probably my favorite Mario, but SMB3 is a close second. Really awesome and timeless platformer.

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3. This song was especially sad to me as a kid playing Majora's Mask for the first time. As the world ends the game plays this slow melancholy song. The fact that it's slow takes away any sense of urgency and instills an atmosphere of hopelessness. There's nothing left but to watch the moon come crashing down.

2. I initially made a list of three Silent Hill songs for this stage select, but it would be too easy to make this an all-Silent-Hill segment, so I wanted to limit myself to just one.

1. Have to bring back this one from the Best Village Themes stage select you did, as it fits in quite well here, too. Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl excells at being depressing.

Chrono Crossing 1991

Definitely Super Mario World. I replayed this a couple months ago and it's still a really fun platformer.

Previous stage select and chrono crossing that I missed

The character I would've put on my toilet paper would've been Jacob Taylor from Mass Effect 2. He's so boring, I just can't care.

My chrono crossing for 1992 would've been Wolfenstein 3D, hands down. One of my favorite shooters. I just replayed it recently on PC and it's still amazing. Mein Leben!

The metro series is one of my favorites of all time. I replay 2033 and Last Light at least once a year. For a Nerds Without Pants podcast segment I picked Last Light as my favorite game of 2013. I'm also trying to convince people to play both games before Metro Exodus comes out so people can be caught up on the story. The metro series has my favorite atmosphere and post-apocalypse Moscow is the most beautiful and depressing setting. I love it.

Metro is my favorite shooter franchise and Last Light was my chrono crossing 2013 pick. You need to play the previous 2 because it's a continuation of the story based on the original novels more or less and each one picks up from the previous game. Play 2033 first, then Last Light, and then Exodus when it comes out.

I'm excited for the ancient Egypt Assassin's Creed. I've been waiting for them to get to that setting for a long time. The last one I played was Black Flag. I play the AC franchise the same way I play Call of Duty by skipping most of them and hopping back in every few games when the setting and gameplay seem to come together just right. 

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Naked Snake to Para-Medic in MGS3

Para-Medic: Snake, look at your body! 
Naked Snake: Yep... lookin' good. 
Para-Medic: Not there. 
Naked Snake: Then where? 
Para-Medic: You have leeches all over your body! 

Cave Johnson's combustible lemons rant in Portal 2

“When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons, what the hell am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the lemons! I’m gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!” - Cave Johnson

The first line of dialogue in DOOM 2016

"They are rage: brutal, without mercy. But you. You will be worse. Rip and tear, until it is done."

Chrono Crossing 1993

It's Doom. Doom rules. Rip & Tear!

Legion and Fawkes are amazing, those are some of my favorite companions. I was pleasantly surprised by how great their writing was and how interesting they were. Super good characters that made me totally rethink how I viewed the races I'd been killing

Stage Select (3 favorite video game tropes)

3. Space Marines. I love the lore, atmosphere, and visual aesthetic of Warhammer 40k. The series has had a massive influence on video games as you can see in Doom Guy, Master Chief, Gears of War, and tons of military sci-fi. Covering a genetically altered solider in massive armor and dropping him or her into the middle of a horde of numerically superior enemies is awesome, even though it's been done to death. For the Emperor!

2. Every story in a Splinter Cell game being a convoluted rabbit hole down into the military industrial complex. You'll investigate a terrorist and he'll lead you to defense contractors, private military companies, a computer programmer, and eventually you'll end up in the offices of politicians and CEO's that profit off the war. Nothing supernatural, no proper Shyamalan twists, just straight up politics, espionage, and the jargon that comes with it.

1. Metal Gear in all its iterations. It isn't that practical to have a walking tank that can shoot nukes since Snake proves in each game they can be taken down somewhat easily, and nuclear submarines or ICBMs can bomb anywhere in the world in minutes anyways, but the concept of a walking nuke tank is thematically awesome and audacious, so I loved seeing it come back in every game. Metal Gear?!?!

Chrono Crossing 1994

Didn't have to deliberate at all, it's Doom 2. Whip out the super shotgun and turn all of Hell into piles of guts!

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My dream team would create a game where you control a clan of ninjas building up your territory on a turn-based overworld like Total War or Civilization, but instead of leading armies into combat you would control a solo-infiltrator into stealth levels with flexibility in how you accomplish objectives. To do this game I would have:

- Sid Meier creating the gameplay for the overworld and making sure the turn-based strategy is addicting on the macro scale of controlling your ninja clan, establishing trade, working natural resources, and strengthening your culture and religion.

- Hideo Kojima would create the realtime stealth gameplay where you could assassinate enemies, spread propaganda, rescue prisoners, steal technology and wealth, or sabotage the infrastructure of other clans, and otherwise have a variety of options to weaken another clan from within, subvert them to your cause, or unleash unethical weapons to outright destroy a village. I'd also want him to cleverly insert situations that make you think more critically about the human costs of the imperialism that you're engaging in.

- John Carmack would be our lead programmer and he could build the engine.

- Satoru Iwata would be a programmer/producer in charge of everybody, and I'd use him to make sure all the input and inevitable messes resulting from these big personalities stay on schedule and get cut until we have a shippable game of high quality. I don't think anybody said our developer had to be alive still, so I think Iwata would be very beneficial to a team.

Chrono Crossing 1995

 My pick is MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat. As a kid I was a big fan of the movie Robot Jox and seeing people get into huge robots to fight each other, so I thought MechWarrior was an awesome idea. It was too complicated for me at that age so I never finished any of the clan's campaigns and I had trouble understanding all the customization for the mechs, but I still thought it was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen.

Exrian's list is perfect. Shadow of the Collossus is one of my favorite games, and Last Guardian was my game of 2016. From Software is amazing. I've only tried Armored Core in demos and I thought it was cool, but really complicated. I'm not sure where to start in the Armored Core franchise but it seems worth checking out. Duke Nukem 3D ruled. I could never finish the campaign but I had a lot of fun trying. My fond memories of Duke Nukem 3D are probably the main reason why I was looking forward to Duke Nukem Forever for so long and waiting for it. Even once it became clear that DNF was a huge mess and was likely to be a tire fire there was always a part of me hoping against hope, thinking, "But...Duke 3D was really cool, there has to be some hope for Duke Nukem Forever."

Stage Select (My 3 favorite video game developers, at the moment)

NOTE: I skewed off in the dumb direction of "at the moment" because my list of historically favorite developers ended up with Bioware, Valve, and Bungie; none of which I feel passionate about in 2017. Valve doesn't make games, I'm skipping Andromeda, I didn't like Inquisition much, I stopped playing Halo after 4, and I never got sucked into Destiny like Patrick did. I should've just sucked it up and went with that list but it would be unenthusiastic. Plus, I assume some of those three companies will get mentioned by people in our community anyway so I decided to weasel my way into a slightly different list.

TLDR; I'm trying to justify to myself why Bioware, Valve, or Bungie aren't on my list and I'm upset with myself about letting this happen.....but also kind of not.

3. From Software - I love the Souls trilogy. A lot of fans argue that Dark Souls 2 is the worst of them, and they're not wrong, but even Dark Souls 2 is awesome. It goes to show, when From Software and this franchise were at their worst, they were still way cooler than most other video games.

2. Bethesda Studios ft. Obsidian - This includes a weird cheat, but I hope Julian allows it. I'm a big fan of all five of the 3D Elder Scrolls and Fallout games made by Todd Howard's team, but my favorite Bethesda game is Fallout New Vegas, which was developed by Obsidian. So my #2 is Todd Howard's Bethesda team but I want Obsidian to get their due credit for New Vegas.

1. Crystal Dynamics - After I finished the 4th Tomb Raider on Playstation 1 by Core Design I was burnt out for years, but I eventually came back to see what Crystal Dynamics had done with the series once they got their hands on it, and it turns out they were actually making the best Tomb Raider games of them all. Tomb Raider Anniversary, Underworld, Tomb Raider 2013, and Rise of the Tomb Raider all knocked it out of the park. Lara Croft is still awesome and there aren't many other developers that have hit so many home runs in a row, making me a bigger fan with each new game.

Chrono Crossing 1996

My favorite game from 1996 was the original Tomb Raider. Not only was this one of the first 3D games I ever played, but around the time this game came out my dad had made me a fan of Indiana Jones. So I loved the idea of taking these exotic journeys to temples to solve puzzles and get mixed up in ancient mythology.

Stage Select (top 3 town or village musical themes)

3. Dark Souls 2 "Majula Theme" - My first playthrough of Dark Souls 2 was pretty special to me, and hearing this understated theme in Majula village makes me picture my character standing at the scenic coastal village itself and looking inland to see the giant Roman aqueduct traversing the mountains, as well as the King's castle in the far distance.

Majula Theme on youtube

2. STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl "Dirge For The Planet" - This plays on loop via a radio in the first village of the game. It's a melancholic dirge with acoustic guitar, violin, and vocal harmonies lamenting the state of the world and sets the tone for the sad and harsh world you will find as you wander out into the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

Dirge For The Planet on youtube

1. Mass Effect 1 "Normandy Theme" - Mass Effect has my favorite soundtrack in gaming and the Normandy is like a small village in and of itself. This theme fills me with nostalgia for wandering that ship and talking to my crew members.

Normandy Theme on youtube

Chrono Crossing 1997

My 1997 was mostly on the N64 and the two games I loved the most were also the first FPS games I had ever played: Goldeneye and Turok Dinosaur Hunter. Turok had the cooler premise, more enemy diversity, and had the gratuitous gore that made it the after-hours game I had to play when my parents weren't around to see what was really in this "dinosaur game" that I convinced them to buy for me. Meanwhile, Goldeneye was a total package that delivered a big single player campaign and a multiplayer mode that my friends and I became addicted to. For years afterwards, Goldeneye set the bar for what I expected console shooters to deliver. I pick Goldeneye because that's still the better overall package and is plenty fun in its own ways, but my heart is always with Turok in a close second place.

Chrono Crossing 1998

5. Tomb Raider 3 - The stories didn't make sense and it was difficult to navigate levels, but Lara Croft was an awesome female Indiana Jones with a British accent so I played the first four games religiously. Between '96 and '99 they released one Tomb Raider game per year and Tomb Raider 3 was in the heyday of my fandom before The Last Revelation burnt me out on the franchise the next year.

4. Body Harvest - I had never seen gameplay like Body Harvest before. It was open world and you could run around killing aliens or grab a variety of vehicles to drive, even fly a plane. It was a little confusing and I never made it to the end of the game, but I kept renting Body Harvest for weeks in a row because I wanted to see more of the world.

3. Tom Clancy's Rainbow 64 - This was the first game I ever had a co-op experience in, and was the first game I played that was tactical. Everything died in one to two bullets, and each mission would only take a few minutes if things went well, but you would spend most of your time planning the mission, deciding loadouts, and failing often. It was a totally new experience in gaming for me and I loved it.

2. Turok 2 Seeds of Evil - As a kid I loved dinosaurs, native american history, and science fiction. Turok 2 was a game about a native american warrior killing weaponized dinosaurs and their alien overlords, so the premise alone made it a winner. The weapons were awesome too. You had a bow, machine guns, a nuke gun that blinded you and filled the screen with white hot death, and the cerebral bore that latched onto the enemy's head and drilled their brains out until they died. A wildly disgusting game for its time, and I loved it.

1. Ocarina of Time - Up until this point I saw games as a toy to cure boredom. Ocarina made me see video games as an artistic outlet. Hyrule was filled with music, mythology, colorful characters who were suffering, and the story of the unremarkable child expected to fight for them all. Despite the fact that every boss he comes across is far larger and stronger than he could ever be, Link never quits fighting. In human cultures for thousands of years the themes of courage and tenacity have been important for any kid to be exposed to, but in Zelda you became an active participant thanks to video games. When Ganon fell in battle and the people of the world comforted each other during the credits I was so happy for them I became teary-eyed. My enjoyment of video games goes back further than Zelda, but my love of games started with Ocarina of Time. Historically this is the most important game I ever played in my life.

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3. Rainbow Six Patriots - Patriots looked like it was going to be a tactical single player FPS with an intense story, but we got the multiplayer-only Rainbow Six Siege instead.

2. Prey 2 - I just wanted another weird sci-fi shooter that connected with the first Prey, and now we're getting a shiny reboot that I doubt will have any of the 70's hard rock blue jeans wearing native american personality of the original.

1. Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance 3 - they started work on this but Black Isle Studios ran out of money and couldn't retain the Dungeons & Dragons license. This is one of the franchises that got me into RPGs, and I wish I could've had more.

Chrono Crossing 1999

It was between Syphon Filter and SimCity 3000. SimCity was completely addicting, but at the same time Syphon Filter let you wield an absurdly long-range taser that could electrocute dudes until they burst into flames! I have to choose SimCity 3000. Syphon Filter was a cool shooter with some novelty mechanics that I thought were hilarious, but SimCity was the game I kept coming back to after school got out.

That's a great one. Most of the TH games I played had good soundtracks. Jerry Was a Racecar Driver was good, but I liked playing Superman the most

Tony Hawk 2 was really fun, and I loved that soundtrack. Bad Religion, Rage Against the Machine, Millencolin, Lagwagon, Anthrax, Naughty By Nature, Public Enemy, and Swinging Utters were all really great

Stage Select (3 favorite consoles)

3. Xbox 360 - A lot of the franchises I love to this day were ones I played on my Xbox. Mass Effect, Portal, Fallout, Red Dead Redemption, and many others. The 360 & PS3 generation was almost a decade of really great gaming; I just happened to have the Xbox.

2. N64 - Nintendo 64 is where I first played Zelda and started to look at games as art. I loved Mario Kart 64, Body Harvest, Turok, and all the great wrestling games that came to N64.

1. PS2 - Playstation 2 had an incredible controller, a massive library, and it was my first DVD player! The PS2 also introduced me to new genres, the biggest one being RPGs. Shoutout to Champions of Norrath and Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance. I also played way more Kessen than a person probably should.

Chrono Crossing 2000

Majora's Mask - I was 11, slowly losing my innocence, and Majora's Mask was the game that uncomfortably welcomed me to the new millennium. It was apocalyptic, bizarre, and forced you to acknowledge everyone's mortality. You get to be the hero trying to save a world full of sympathetic characters & interesting cultures, but the designers require you to fail everyone repeatedly along your macabre journey before you can eventually piece it all together.

Look at how dark the TV ads were:

I have skills in shooter games as well as stealth games that mostly translates to other games in those genres. I started young with Goldeneye, Halo, and then the first Splinter Cell, so I've had a lot of time to build the coordination or expectations for how games in those genres get designed or how they feel.

I've been into action-RPGs since the Baldur's Gate and Champions of Norrath days on PS2, and I've played tons of games in the general roleplaying space since, like Mass Effect, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and others, but if we're being honest I don't feel like there are too many RPG skills that get passed on. Of course if there are common terminology (attribute names, HP, mana) or systems (economies, upgrade paths) it will make it easier since I've seen parallels in other games, but not much else. When I start a new RPG I usually feel a little overwhelmed and there are long periods of time trying to get comfortable in the game's universe or combat. I never hop into RPGs on a whim, I really have to be in the right head-space and do my research to know a bit about it. I tend to know which RPGs I'm going to buy months or years in advance, and I sink a lot of time into them once they get here. Whereas, I could buy and spontaneously pop in any random shooter game or stealth game and dive in feet first without hesitation. I tend to play shooters on higher difficulties than anything, like I start new Halos and Call of Dutys on heroic or veteran settings, which is like the 3/4 setting. I've never played Mass Effect or most other RPGs on anything other than normal or casual.

I love making big batches of dense vegetable soup that have as much stuff in each bite as possible and will last a few days. I've always loved vegetable soup since I was a kid but I got tired of the processed soups that are just canned water and the amount of vegetables in the entire can seems like it can be counted on two hands. I wanted to make my own and pack as much nutrition into each batch as I could so that when you poured yourself a bowl you were certain it wouldn't waste your time. It started out mostly for the utilitarian purposes of getting as much nutrition in with as little time-investment as possible, and have the soup last a while. I went online and looked up botanical resources to learn what vegetables tended to have higher concentrations of which nutrients. But once I started cooking it and getting familiar with the tastes and colors of the different vegetables in the market I started to see the art in it, so it's fun now too.

I sautee some onions, leeks, or shallots a little bit and toss in the rest of the hard vegetables so they have some time to cook and get softer, usually celery and carrots. Then I add either vegetable broth or miso stock as a base and bring it to a boil (miso if I'm craving more salt), and I add bay leaf to it. Then I reduce it to a simmer and add my greens nearer to the end so they don't get too cooked or wilted. The greens are the coolest part because I can change up the recipe all the time depending on what looks good in the market and there are lots of options. It'll be chard, kale, spinach, cabbage, or something. When I pick out greens I try to go for the things with the most potassium and fiber. Sometimes I throw in shredded chicken near the end if I have some laying around, that's always good.

I remember over the past few years Vinny and Drew have been doing panels at cons or answering questions in various places on the net about video production, editing, and other things they do at Giant Bomb. I imagine they'd be great sources of knowledge on top of the youtube stuff you find.

I'd like to see content that connects people with you and let's them into your perspective, history, and teaches them about games in the process. You have more retail experience than anybody I've ever known and it was during one of the more exciting times in gaming that a lot of people have nostalgia for, so you already have an interesting perspective out of the gate. I don't actually follow anybody that talks about gaming history to much extent, the closest thing I get is Jeff Gerstmann talk about it as it comes up organically on the Bombcast in conversations, so anything digging into history would be new for me.

And in the process, letting people get to know you through your own history, your journey with games, things that are happy, things that are sad, and everything inbetween. The people who are most likely to watch have probably themselves been playing games for a while, so they know what it feels like to go through ups and downs in life and be able to fall back on games for whatever multiude of reasons that games benefit their lives. Comedy and levity are great too, especially the type of persona you bring out into the podcast. The Pewdiepie styles of comedy are annoying like you said. Having a more grounded approach and nuanced opinion is way more interesting than treating each thing like it's the best or worst you've ever experienced, and you have a long history of nuance and thoughtful critique.

You can do it, Julian! I never work out and I don't eat as well as I use to, but my problem has never been weight, but cardiovascular health instead. Ever since I was in elementary school till now I have a really tough time running or doing any kind of cardio to exercise my heart. Just this year my dad had to get a quadruple bypass surgery and he's recovering well, but they found out his heart has been underperforming since birth most likely, because there's a valve that pumped very weakly and two of the three flaps were actually grown together into one big inefficient flap. So the whole system didn't pump normally even under the best circumstances. I may have inherited some heart problems that I don't know yet, but in the meantime I still want to work on cardio. I have no interest in building muscle or being fast, although those might be a nice bonus, my sole purpose of turning around my exercise and diet will be for the heart

Woolly World is so beautiful, one of the cooler looking art styles in a while

I liked Assassin's Creed Black Flag a lot. Did they do anything with the tablet for the Wii U version? I wonder if they took advantage of it for menus or gameplay purposes