Hello everybody, this is Shane R. Monroe here in the passenger seat with me. It’s passenger seat radio.
It is Monday, the 29th of July, 2024 and you’re on my 13 mile commute home. Welcome to the show.
Well, I accidentally hit go live before I could do a picture or before I could tag the show as profanity filled. I don’t know. I don’t remember what they call that, but explicit content. Yes. So I have to watch my P’s and Q’s or I’ll get canceled by Apple podcast aggregator. So hey, what’s going on everybody?
Yes, it’s Monday. I’m coming home from work. There were some panel interviews and so I had to go in for, you know, face to face interviews. Not even for my own people. I got tapped on this one on the side. So it wasn’t even somebody I got to hire for me. You know, my team needs people, but everyone else is getting people. I’m not getting any people. So yeah, whatever. So I’m on my way home. I got to stop at the store. So the show’s going to be a little shorter and we just had a show, right? So I’m not sure I’ve got any great material here. And let me see.
I’ve been playing this Boar Blasters. This has been my new thing.
It is a twin stick shooter that has you going from island to island, unlocking new islands. And in each island, you drill and dig with your helicopter into underground, right? And as you’re digging, there’s gems to get. You’re kicking up dirt. You’re doing all this shit. There’s bad guys down there. And the idea is to get to the end or to the bottom.
And of course, it’s sort of got that rogue-like thing where, you know, eventually you’ll probably die, but everything that you’ve gained or unlocked to that point stays with you. So I’ve almost got all the abilities unlocked now and it costs a certain amount of money and they go up exponentially.
So I think I’ve got like three of six or three of eight different, you know, power-ups or stats, if you will. I’ve got three left, I think, to level up and they’re like five million, you know, five million coin and that takes a long time. But anyway, it’s a really fun game. If you’re interested in it, I did a video review of it. It’s up on my channel, YouTube channel. I did a video review of it, showing it off, running on the Steam Deck. It’s a very Steam Deck game. It’s almost what you would call a cozy game because once you’re sort of badass enough,
you know, it’s more of a game of running out the clock than it is actually getting hurt, you know. So you can lose two different ways. You can lose from collisions where, you know, you have a certain amount of shield. Once you use all the shield, you’re done.
Or you can just run out of time and then when you run out of time, which is fuel, you’ll
dramatically crash to the bottom of the screen until you hit enough stuff that kills you. So it’s a really good game though. It’s been a while since I’ve had one of these quick run, you know, high dopamine type games and this really did the trick. So I’m pleased to have had it. Even if I’ll probably finish it with another two or three hours of play, well, finish it,
meaning that there’s nothing else to chase. There’s nothing else to unlock other than to just finish off the last few islands that I haven’t conquered yet.
So anyway, that’s what I’ve been playing.
For a watching thing, I’ve been watching, you know, the new season of Cobra Kai. I just tidied that up. Well, they only released like five episodes. Then they’re going to release like three more and then like two more or something. It’s completely ridiculous. It’s completely ridiculous.
It’s just this whole bit about people binging shows and then canceling their streaming subscriptions, you know, it’s never about what’s best for the consumer. It’s about what’s best for the service. You know, we talked about this last week. It’s getting so bad, they’re bundling like four or five services for one low price, but they’re giving them away everywhere else.
Let’s see, it’s kind of cold in here. Damn. You wouldn’t think it was cold being that it’s 110 degrees outside, but good air conditioning in the car, I suppose.
Let’s see. So I did do a video recently, and this is kind of fun.
So I’m a huge fan of the Nintendo Wii. I think that was sort of like my last favorite console. I mean, I had a Wii U and it was fun. And there was some cool stuff on it. I’ve got Xboxes and all that stuff. But you know, the Wii sort of like was the end of an era, even though it was supposedly sort of a new beginning, if you will, a disruption in the industry. But one of the things that I really, really enjoyed about the Nintendo Wii was, well, obviously the motion controls and everything else sort of brought a different slant to everything. But I really enjoyed playing light gun games on the Wii because a lot of the old like Naomi system, light gun games or the Namco systems game. I can’t remember the name of the Namco systems, but yeah, a lot of those looked great on the Wii. There was like, it’s like, oh, we had sucky graphics. Well, yeah, but you didn’t. I mean, if you’re going to play House of the Dead 2, you didn’t really need killer graphics. And if you wanted a shooting game that had better graphics, you could play the Resident Evil light gun games. But you know, I sat down and you know, ages ago when I was running Review Lagoon, I used to do regular Wii, you know, Wii articles, you know, here’s the, you know, the top 10 light gun games, you’re not playing on Wii, that sort of thing. Nowadays I do it on YouTube. But yeah, so I mean, I have a huge collection of Wii. I mean, huge, it’s not as big as my DS collection, which is probably the best, last best handheld. But yeah, I mean, it’s amazing how many there’s probably there’s probably 30 quality, I’m not talking about 30 shooting games, I’m talking about 30 quality shooting games on the Nintendo Wii. And so, you know, obviously, you need a sensor bar and you need to have everything set up for that.
And let’s be honest, emulation with real hardware is kind of a pain in the ass. Well, it turns out and I’ve been I’ve been behind a little bit, I admit it, I’ve been behind. It turns out that they have like these all in one bars. They call them dolphin bars because dolphins the Wii emulator. Its purpose is to close the gap between emulation and real Wii hardware. So if you want to use a Wii mode controller on dolphin, up until these all in one bars, you had to go through a whole bunch of silly shit. You had to try to connect it to Windows and Windows doesn’t doesn’t play great with Bluetooth shit anyway. You had to do something special. It was just a bunch of nonsense, you know. But these new bars, they do it all. And that’s really great if you’re using them on disparate systems like say a Raspberry Pi or a Steam Deck, right? Or some sort of like a, you know, mini PC. So essentially anything that’ll take a USB-A port that has a dolphin build, you can now use one of these all in one guys to handle everything. You sync the controllers up to the bar, not to the system. So you don’t have to worry about sketchy Bluetooth support or any of that other nonsense. It’s literally, you know, power up the bar, hit the sync button on the bar, hit the sync button on the Wiimote and it connects.
That’s amazing.
That’s all you have to do is have power to the bar to do that. And then it actually will let you run the Wiimote in four different modes. So it can emulate a game controller. It can emulate a mouse and keyboard, right? Which would be kind of cool for like main light gun games. Just throwing that out there. Then they have another mode called, I haven’t figured this one out yet, keyboard mouse gaming mode. I don’t know what that means. What’s the difference between keyboard mouse and keyboard mouse gaming mode? I don’t know. But it has all of that built into the bar.
So essentially you plug the bar into the device like a steam deck or your PC, you go and you run the dolphin emulator. You say, use a real Wiimote for remote one.
And then you have to check a couple other boxes and then you’re done. That’s it. You got a working Wiimote and a working sensor bar in the same product. And it just works. It’s fantastic.
So yeah, so I did recently a video on kind of reviewing that bar and showing off some light gun games. Because that’s what I really want to play on the Wii, is those really, really obscure exclusives, right? The Excite Truck, Elibits. And then I want to play the myriad of amazing light gun games. And the list goes on and on and on. You got games like, what’s that called? Deadly, is it Deadly Enemies? Deadly, damn it, what’s the name of that game? Deadly Creatures. That was a shitload of fun too.
You know, Munchables. There’s just a ton of games that were just fantastic that never got a port anywhere else. And even if they had gotten a port, it probably wouldn’t have been all that much fun. I mean, I can’t imagine Elibits being any fun using a mouse controller, you know? Part of it is the interactive nature of holding and pointing and dragging and throwing. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just, you know, rose colored glasses. But yeah, so that’s the other little thing I’ve been up to, is trying to get through that and, you know, get that video done. That’s a lot of work to put something like that together. Hey, hey-o, Bruce Willard’s in. Welcome, sir, welcome.
I haven’t really been watching anything else on TV or movies.
I did go see, and I don’t know if I’ve got time for this. I think I do. I did go see Deadpool and Wolverine over the weekend. My son and I made a day of it. We went out to a nice theater, you know, had all the popcorn and all the other good shit that goes with the movie. I didn’t really want to go. My wife kind of made me go. She’s like, “You need to take him.” It’s like, “Yeah, but…” I’m a huge Deadpool fan. I’m a huge Ryan Reynolds fan. I really liked Logan, and I liked the one that was just before Logan. I can’t remember the name of that one. Maybe somebody who’s on the chat can fill that one in. But I liked those, and I liked Hugh Jackman.
It’s like, here’s the problem though. We all know that I’m not a huge fan of Marvel movies, and I have many reasons.
To have somebody that I really care about, like Deadpool, being absorbed by a company that does a lot of shit that I don’t like. I don’t like the cinematic universe bullshit. I don’t like the PG-13 quippy shit that they do in all of these movies. It’s always the same fucking story. Just change out the superhero.
End of the Earth is coming. End of the world is coming. End of the universe is coming. Fill in the blank with this. I just… I don’t like MCU.
To be fair, I don’t like DC shit either. So, I just… I don’t like superhero movies. Now, Deadpool gets a bye because he’s a filthy little trash mouth. You know what I’m saying? I go to Ryan Reynolds for cameos, references, Gen X references, inappropriate music to match everything else, and his entire, you know, “merk with a mouth” type. Basically if I somehow ended up being a superhero, that’s exactly the kind of person I would be. I’d be probably a foul-mouthed little shit, you know, bent on my own gratification. So I can relate.
But what I do not want to see is something that I care about mutilated by a company that’s basically fucked up everything they’ve touched, right? Which is, you know, pretty much every IP that Disney has purchased and done stuff to, right?
So I didn’t want to go. I would rather not see the movie and pretend that Deadpool ended with number two than to see it marvelized.
So I didn’t want to go.
So I waited for somebody I really trusted, like Critical Drinker, right? He’s my movie critic. He and I see eye to eye on so much stuff that I was going to wait because I knew for a fact he was going to drop a review ASAP.
And he did. I watched the review and it’s like, okay, I think I’m okay seeing it. I think I’m going to be okay because frankly, it didn’t really sound like an MCU movie.
If anything, it sounded like a satire of an MCU movie. And that’s kind of what it turned out to be.
The amount of fun that is made of Marvel, MCU, Disney, what else? Fox. I mean, listen, it’s self-deprecating almost to the point of being a spoof or a satire. And I liked that. You know, almost everything I hate about the MCU Deadpool had something to say about during the movie. And I thought that was cool.
Yeah, the CGI, that always bothers me because, you know, it takes me out of movies, man. If it looks fake, if I can see it, I’m fine with CGI, I can’t see. If you can trick me, God bless you. But you know, there’s not a lot of tricking going on here, to be honest, you know?
But overall, it wasn’t too bad. I mean, it’s still too much for me, but whatever. Anyway, so again, the plot was like right out of MCU shit. You know, universe is going to end. We got to team up and stop it, blah, blah, blah. Same stupid shit. But you get the same stupid shit with a very hard R rating. I’m surprised they got away with the R rating. I mean, there was, it’s funny, I don’t want to ruin anything. Let’s just say that there was so much like perverted sex talk in that movie, I can’t believe Disney allowed it, to be honest. That alone, let me just say that alone speaks to how desperate Disney is to have a hit, that they would be willing to forego that PG-13 MCU squeaky ass fucking view and let Ryan Reynolds basically shit everywhere. And he did. And it was great. I love that shit. Lots of quotables, lots of Gen X references, plenty of Gen X music, largely inappropriate, which is even what makes it more funny.
So yeah, I’ll give you guys a four review. I got to get into the store and get my ass home. But when I do the next show, we’ll talk more about it. Hopefully more of you’ve seen it then and I can kind of give some light spoilers because I want to do that. There are things I want to talk about, but I don’t, what makes this part of what makes this movie fun is not knowing shit going in. Unfortunately, the media and social media have completely fucked up a lot of the secrets and surprises that I wish I hadn’t known about ahead of time. But c’est la vie. All right, listen, I got to get out of here. This is Shane R. Monroe. Pass your suit right up saying we’ll see you next time.
