I'm Damien the DM from adventures in Aurelia, a collaborative storytelling experience told through a game of dungeons and dragons, part of the Gunnegeek network. Just like the show you're checking out now, shows on the network are individually owned, and opinions expressed may not reflect others find other epically geeky shows@Gunnegeeknetwork.com.
And welcome to Play comics, where once again we are here looking at a video game based on a comic or a manga or I don't know, because there's so many things it could be based on in the entire world. My head is still spinning. Thankfully, today we have Billy here again to maybe try to make some more sense of Gundam and what is going on, because as much as Aaron tried to help, this is definitely a me problem because Gundam is still going completely over my head. Billy, how are you today?
I'm doing good. Got to take the puppy to the dog park, and it's nice to be back inside.
Yes. And for anybody who doesn't know, his puppy is very cute and not in the every puppy is cute kind of way, in the actually, this puppy is really cute kind of way. But Gundam, I just have to know, what is it that got you into Gundam and which flavor of Gundam did you get into first?
Like a lot of people my generation, it was Gundam wing because it was readily available on Toonami. It's kind of a weird place in the overall Gundam fandom, in part because it's the one that the hipsters like to hate on the most, because it's not a real Gundam, because it's not universal century, and it's kind of intentionally built to be sort of gundam light. And then it had some behind the scenes production issues that make it kind of a mess, and it never really recovered from them in terms of how the second half of that show goes. But it had big giant robots, lots of political scheming, and I will die on the hill of it having some of the best hero mecca designs of any friggin mecca thing ever. Best hero robots. They're all good.
I've really tried to get into Gundam and that whole this timeline versus that timeline versus every other timeline for some reason. I can keep it straight with Marvel. I can keep it straight with back to the future, although that is super simple. But I cannot keep different timelines straight with Gundam to save my life.
So the trick to it is, unless somewhere in it says universal century on the Wiki page, assume it's a completely standalone thing unrelated to anything else ever.
Oh, that seems simple.
Enough because for the most part, universal century is the original Gundam timeline. It's where the original Gundam series is. And there have been a whole bunch of series that are all in that continuity and they all to some extent care about things that happened before them in the timeline. Everything else, all standalones. So like the current series, the mobile suit Gundam, the witch from Mercury takes place in. God, I forgot what they've called this timeline. But the important thing is it's completely unrelated to any of the other ones ad Stella. Yeah, as 122 is when it takes place, but it has nothing to do with any of the gundams that we'll be talking about today in this game.
So one of the things that I've noticed in doing research for this one is that the game was made kind of to build up anticipation for mobile fighter G Gundam, which was getting is going to start airing on Cartoon Network in the US after Gundam wing ended. Yeah, and you said earlier that it's kind of the, this doesn't count of gundams, but what is it really about this series that people don't like?
There's a lot of universal century snobs in the Gundam fandom who think that it's UC or nothing, and that's definitely a faction that you kind of have to contend with in the Gundam fandom. But it's very much riffing on a lot of similar ideas to the original Gundam series. And it's really especially sort of the first half of it, and then it kind of goes off the rails a little bit in the second half. But especially the first half of it feels a lot like a kind of self done rip off of the universal century storylines with a little bit less bite to it. And some of that's intentional as a part of the production. It was allegedly or apocryphally one of the first Gundam series that was designed to like, that was intentionally designed to appeal to girls and women. So the protagonists are a lot prettier. Men, boys, really. It's Gundam, so everybody's a child soldier, they're very pretty boys. There's a more prominent female lead. And I suspect that with a decent amount of the sexism that always seems to come with 90s marketing, they softened things up a little bit in an effort to make it more friendly to girls. But it's also not a series that Tomino, the head writer of the original Gundam and sort of the steward of the universal century, it's not one that he worked on, which is also one of those lines that people like to draw for what makes a real Gundam. And what makes just a cash in. And then of course there's the hipster argument of Gundam Wing was the most available Gundam in the United States. So it's the mainstream one.
Is Gundam wing part of universal century?
No, it is the after colony timeline.
But it's still the mainstream.
Well, it was. It was the one that got the most widespread us release, so that one just doesn't count.
It's cool despite not being in.
No, no, I mean, it's not cool to like Gundam Wing. It's the one that all the people hate on. Well, that's not true. Nobody likes G Gundam. But that's because G Gundam is just goofy as heck. But it's also trying to be goofy as heck. And G Gundam is really the OD one out because it's just kind of tonally not really a Gundam series and leans a lot heavier into a lot of shonen martial arts tropes rather than the sort of gundamy things. And then Gundam Wing is the one that released in the United States. So it was the one that, there were the people who watched Gundam on, I don't know, bootleg vhs tapes way back in the day. And then Gundam Wing got the widespread broadcast and dub and whole bunch of new fans showed up that don't know what a universal century is.
Was this a four kids dub by any chance?
It was Toonami, so I think it was before four kids. It definitely shares a lot of voice actors with other anime dubs at the time because you can definitely play spot the voice actor.
I just ask because four kids is kind of notorious for changing things to be less japanese and taking characters out and complete storylines and everything.
Yeah, this one was not that. It's not nearly. Not nearly as sanitized as you would expect from a four kids.
Well, good. At least it has that going for it.
Apparently it got broadcast in two versions. There was an edited cut on Toonami and an uncut version as part of Toonami's Midnight run, which I didn't actually realize because I have the dvds, and the dvds are the uncut version. So that's the version that I've watched most recently.
So what is the overall basic storyline of mobile fighter G Gundam?
It's the future century, and all the rich people live up in space colonies that are loosely based on present day countries, give or take. And then every four years they get together and they have the Gundam fight where everybody sends down their ridiculously stereotypical robot and its pilot down to earth to beat the crap out of each other as a sort of olympics political grievance resolution, deciding who gets to be president of space, kind of.
So basically the world we're in right now.
Yeah, except with more robot martial arts and, like, it's kind of a couple of things to go for. For G Gundam, it was the first non universal Century Gundam series made, so that alone got it some attention for being outside of what up until that point had been the only Gundam timeline. And then it's a goofy and campy show. It's the kind of thing where everybody fights in what are basically skin tight mocap suits, and the robots mimic that person's motions. So everybody's like a martial artist of some sort so that their robot can punch and stuff. But then also the main character learns how to throw Hadokans like he's Ryu, and somehow that lets his robot do it. And we're just going to roll with that. And it's goofy, and it's much more a kind of traditional shonen tournament arc show with a little bit of Gundam's politics and the fact that there's still a whole bunch of people who live on earth and are poor and are having their cities destroyed by giant robots fighting around them, it's definitely less interested in some of the typical Gundam politics of war, and war is politics by other means. And how do you deal with fascism and authoritarianism and the way that governments use and abuse their populace? It has those themes a little bit kind of going on there, but it's very much the sort of thing where the power of love is going to supercharge your robot to fight the devil.
So love everybody, but also let the rich portion of the population destroy the pores because they want to have their fun and fight with giant robots. Yeah, that's sounding pretty accurate.
It's one of those things where the stereotypical meme of Gundam is the war is bad, and the guy going, oh, cool robot. G Gundam leans into the cool robot a little bit more, but for certain amounts of cool, like some of those robots are, choices were made. Holland's Gundam is a giant windmill. Tequila Gundam is Mexico's entry, and it's got a giant sombrero and just a terrible mustache.
So would you say that the nation state representatives here have not particularly aged well?
I would argue that they probably hadn't aged well at the time, but they're kind of fascinating in that they're almost all sort of over the top, ridiculous national stereotypes, especially the further you get from sort of the main character, mechs, but they're also like Japan's version. Like it's their vision of what these countries are, which means that it's not necessarily lining up with the United States stereotypes for the countries sometimes. But the US Gundam is a football player with cowboy guns on his hips.
I can see that perfectly, though, making sense.
Who fights as a boxer, because that's like his martial art is boxing mostly, and guns because America.
Yeah, I can see that.
They're all the kind of things that it's like. I don't think you meant any harm by this stereotype, but also, this is just ridiculous, and I feel like I should be offended on someone's behalf.
I guess that's better than some of the other anime that I have stupidly decided to watch lately with representations of entire countries boiled down into a single character.
Yeah, in this case, it's everybody's boiled down into a single weird robot. Technically, G Gundam came out, was created and released in Japan before Gundam Wing. It's just in the US. We got them backwards.
Do you have any idea?
Don't. Well, I don't know why we didn't get G Gundam first, but I know that we got G Gundam because Gundam Wing was a huge hit for tsunami. I don't know how we ended up with Gundam Wing, but I know that Gundam Wing did real big numbers on whatever metrics they cared about. So everybody involved went, okay, we need another Gundam. What else do you have? And G Gundam was the next newest thing and also not Victory Gundam, which is a universal century one and like, way far in the timeline of it. So you kind of got to have some idea of what's going on.
I'm with you, though. That seems a little weird that they wouldn't go with the completely self contained storyline first, just knowing that they wouldn't have to worry about people knowing anything they did do.
That Gundam Wing is a completely standalone one.
Okay, all of my thoughts are completely out the window now.
Yeah, no, Gundam Wing is completely standalone. It's gotten a handful of manga spinoffs and an epilogue movie depending on which edit of it you see.
It also has a really good Super Nintendo game that we didn't get over here.
I've heard that considering this is made by the same folks who made that Super Nintendo game, I would not be surprised that that is a good game because Gundam badble assault two is awesome and everybody should play it.
Well, on that note, we're going to shed some tears over the Super Nintendo game that never was. While I drop some promos for a few other shows.
If I asked you to think about japanese movies. What do you picture? Anime. No doubt you think of the beautifully rendered works of Studio Ghibli. Maybe you picture Godzilla and his coterie of city ravaging kaiju. Perhaps you see Toshido Mifune wandering the countryside and armed with only his wit and his blade. And I know you're trying not to think about the pale faced ghosts with long hair and creepy noises. And maybe you're a fan of the exploitation type of cinema where schoolgirls wield chainsaws and machine guns with abandon. My name is Perry Constantine. I'm an author and a teacher, and back when I was in college, I had the exact same image of japanese films as you did. It was my love and interest in these movies that led me to move to Japan. Now, almost 20 years later, I'm still here and teaching classes about japanese film. What I've learned in that time is that japanese movies are so much more diverse than just anime or kaiju or samurai. Sure, those movies are fun, but by exploring the wide range of japanese cinema, there's so much we can learn about japanese history, society, and culture. That's why I started Japan on film. In each episode, I'm joined by a different guest to help me spotlight just some of these excellent movies. We'll be watching the good, the bad, the popular, and the bizarre. Come along with us on a journey into the wide, wonderful, and sometimes very weird world of japanese cinema. Listen to the Japan on film podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and visit our website, japanonfilm.com.
Hey there, screen beans. Have you heard about Screen Snark?
Rachel?
This is an ad break. They aren't screen beans until they listen to the show.
Fine potential. Screen beans. You like movies and tv shows, right?
I mean, who doesn't? Screen Snark is a casual conversation about the movies and television shows that are shaping us as we live our everyday lives.
That's right, Matt. We have a chat with at least one incredible guest every episode, hailing from all walks. We've interviewed chefs, writers, costumers, musicians, yoga teachers, comedians, burlesque dancers, folks in the.
Film and tv industry, and more. We'd be delighted for you to join us every other Monday on the certain.
POV podcast network or wherever you get your podcasts, fresh and tasty off the presses.
What? No, that's not.
Can I call them screen beans now? Fine, screen beans.
So tune in and we'll see you at the movies or on a couch.
Somewhere because you're a whole screen beans.
Now she will be mine.
Aurora. Those are some great shows to check out, but first, let's finish up with this one. So, Billy, I committed the ultimate sin here, and I did not play a fighting game. The simplest of games to get to play to prepare for one of these episodes. And I feel horrible about it.
Well, I am going to run you over the coals a bit, because you really should play this knowing your love of fighting games. This is a big one. And by a big one, I mean it's one of those lost hidden gems that definitely got overlooked at the time, but is very, very good.
Gundam Battle Assault two was published on the PlayStation one and only the PlayStation one by Bandai, developed by Natsume. It was released in North America July 17 of 2002, and oddly enough, not released in Japan until October 10. They kind of treated it as a, oh, look, here's a fighting game. Have fun.
So there was a thing that Bandai was doing at the time that was producing smaller budget games for the PlayStation with the idea of kind of intentionally targeting. They would have been like $20 games, sort of target. They called them simple 2000 or something. They were like ¥2000, which roughly $20 in american at the time. And so this was one of those kind of. And it came out in the US first because they wanted know push that G Gundam. Honestly, it's a great game.
I did watch a bunch of videos for this one, so I'm not coming in completely blind. But also, it's a fighting game where you're not going to get a ton of story on this. And it's giant robots fighting, which it's super cool, but it's giant robots fighting. So you're either already into it or you're not exactly.
Want to talk about the structure of it?
Let's do that, because this one has an interesting little structure that it has going for it.
It's got a handful of game modes. It has street mode, which in any other game would be story or arcade mode. And that's the single player. You fight through a bunch of robots, you get the occasional cutscene, many of them voiced, and there's like no story. There's only eight mechs available for the street mode, for the story mode. And they're all generally sort of main character mechs of their series. This game covers the three existing Gundam timelines at the time it was released. Universal Sentry, which is the original Gundam, and Zeta and victory and all of stars counterattack and all of that after colony, which is Gundam Wing and Gundam Wing, endless Waltz the epilogue sequel movie OVA thing and the future century mechs of G Gundam. And I went and replayed through the stories just before this just to get an idea of how much story they have, and the answer is basically none. You get a couple of voice lines that are almost completely non sequiturs if you don't know already what the story is. The original Rx 78 Gundam, its storyline is kind of following the universal century stuff, roughly, sort of. It has you fighting other UC mechs and ends with battling char in the Xeong, and sure, both enough. I guess the other stories decided that they wanted to sprinkle in mechs from other series into them, which is weird, and potentially because the only cannon fodder bad guy mech that made it into the series or made it into the game was the universal century one, the Zaku two. So it's not like they could have the wing Gundam folks fighting leos or something. And G Gundam doesn't really have moocs for a lot of it. I know the ending has Devil Gundam's weird big army, but that's kind of more of a overarching threat than something that the protagonists are actually fighting the whole time. Most of G Gundam is basically a fighting game already. You use the story mode to unlock more characters. There's a bunch of characters. I looked it up at some point today so that I could say the actual number and then forgot. But you've got all five of the protagonist mechs from Wing, as well as a couple of the main rivals, all of them wearing their endless waltz designs for what it matters. So they'll look different than that Super Nintendo game if you played that Super Nintendo game. And then it's got, like, survival mode and a boss rush mode. It's got a lot of modes and classic verses. Fighting wise, it does some really neat things, just some different things. While most fighting games have best of three rounds, you've got three health bars, and you got to deplete all three of your opponent's health bars. When a health bar gets emptied, the mech overheats to attempt to sound like the announcer and gets knocked down and then refills. The health bar gets back up kind of a thing. Other interesting things is some of your special attacks have ammunition, so you could run out of ammo spamming your specials if you're desperately trying to keep someone at range. So you can't just zone forever with some of the mechs. Everybody has a super special move. I'm sure they've got some fancy nickname for it. I can't remember that. You get three uses of in a fight. They range from Wing Gundam's twin buster rifle big beam of death thing, to the original Gundam hammer, which is just hitting the other guy with a mace. That mace does an entire health bar if it hits. So you could actually three shot someone if you get three perfect mace hits. But I can tell you that's harder than it sounds. And if they block it doesn't do any damage. So you feel really dumb for wasting that super. Then there's the boost gauge, which lets you boost up in the air. It defaults to r one and that'll boost you up in the air or it angles, gets you a little bit more air than a jump. And then pushing two of the attack buttons at the same time will let you dodge, which is kind of like. The animation is like juking into the background a little bit, which lets you dodge attacks. And it kind of functions a bit like parrying in Street Fighter three or some of the other street fighters that have had that mechanic where you can quickly pop that to get out of the way of an attack to avoid being comboed and pick up a little bit of frame advantage and then presumably counterattack. That also eats into your boost gauge, which the boost gauge recharges over time. You're going to run out of it often in the fight, but it also comes back. You don't need to worry about it. It's not like a street fighter game where you have to constantly consciously be building meter by doing actions that will build your meter. Boost meter just recharges. And I mean, admittedly it doesn't cause damage, but it's nice for avoiding it. Okay, there's 30 playable characters. Cool. I found it may have done a wiki run to try to get the number.
I mean, it's a lot of playable characters and the fact that you have eight to start out with in the story mode, but can get up to 30, that's a lot of stuff to unlock in the game and a lot of reason to go back and play it over and over and over.
So you start with eight unlocked. You only start with five story modes available. You'll unlock more story modes as you complete the story modes that it starts with. But yeah, there's a lot of things to unlock which honestly, I don't like unlockable characters in a fighting game, in part because I find it. I don't know, it frustrates me to show up and not be able to play the character I want to despite knowing that they're in there.
I'm back and forth on it. Like the Marvel versus Capcom two style, where one of the ways to get to unlock that character is playing the game enough. I'm really good with that because you're going to be able to get them. You don't have to be good at the game, and honestly, you can fake that enough. Just leave the system on and let it run some stuff and you're fine. The ones where you have to pay to unlock them or even when it's in game currency to unlock them, just when I have to be good at something to be able to unlock a character, that's where I start to get frustrated.
This is definitely one of those where you have to be good at it to unlock a character. There is still a character that I have not unlocked on my game because I don't remember if it's time attack or survival, but there's one of those that I haven't been able to do at the level that it needs to be able to unlock psychogundom, despite coming very close a few times.
Oh, that sucks.
Yeah. The game expects you to be able to play the game to unlock all the characters. But also, Psycho Gundam is one of the boss gundams that could probably be banned from competitive play.
Okay, so at least it's one of those. Not a basic character that everybody would want to play as. At least if they're being fair.
Yeah, there's a handful of those. It's not quite balanced, like whichever Dragon Ball z Buddha Kai game was, where everything was basically balanced, like the anime. So if you weren't playing as the correct super Saiyan level of Goku and that season's villain, you were going to have an incredibly mismatched fight. But there's definitely a few gundams, or there's definitely a few playable characters because not all of them are gundams that are designed to be bosses and not intended to be balanced. Playable characters like Big Zam, who, if you've not seen a picture of Big Zam, you should Google Gundam battle assault to Big Zam so that we can hear this reaction on the air.
That's just legs and a body holding guns.
Yeah. Have you seen it next to another character sprite in the game?
They's little and he.
Big. Yeah. He also has five health bars.
Holy crap.
And then there's like, the ball, which is kind of a joke character who's not an. It's not an actual mobile suit. It's a ball with a gun stuck on it with little, like, manipulator claws because it's some sort of in universe mechanic thing. Be like the equivalent of taking a forklift to a tank fight.
So cute. And.
When me and my buddies were bored, we'd have challenges of kill Big Zam as the ball. And let me tell you, you'd never hear the end of it if you died as Big Zam and bossed the ball. The most powerful mobile suit man, the ball.
I mean, I'm a sucker for joke characters. There are times where playing super puzzle fighter two turbo whatever letters it has, like, I'm Dan on purpose.
Isn't Dan secretly actually kind of good? Because one giant block of reds is actually practical. I was never good enough at that.
Game to know the problem is he drops the one giant block of reds on your opponent. If them getting all those reds screws them up, then it's really good. But you got to be fast with it because they're going to throw a whole lot back at you when they finally get something that plays well with those reds.
That makes sense. But yeah, Big Zam is. That's one of the bosses. Its weakness is that it can't turn around.
Oh, that's weird.
Whatever direction it's facing is the direction it's facing. And it has some attacks that can attack behind it. Like it can kick backwards at people, but it loses a decent chunk of its firepower if you can get behind it. Like, it can't hit you with its super. So a decent amount of Big Zam fight is watching your blind spot and or trying to exploit that, depending on which one you are.
That just sounds like either the best or worst thing ever.
It's certainly a thing, and it's fun. And that's like, this game is fun. I've been on here for some bad games. Honestly, really, the only one that's coming up for me is Batman, which was like, Batman and Robin was. That was a bad game. This is a good game.
Like, spoiler alert. Sometimes when somebody's on here for a bad game, I let them pick a really good one to come back for, and that is basically what happened here.
I may have been bullying him for almost literally years.
It's probably true. I don't know how time works anymore.
Yeah, that's fair. But yeah. Gundam battle assault two. It's a fighting game. If you like fighting games, it's a good one. It's not your perfectly made Street Fighter three, but nothing else is. But it's fun and it's really straightforward. The button combos are generally easy to input. They're similar enough to street fighters, quarter circles, half circles, but they're not reliant on the diagonals. The game doesn't assume an eight way joystick. So instead of, like, quarter circle forward punch, the input is down forward punch, which still works if you just roll that quarter circle. But if you don't have that muscle memory, you can just tap, tap, tap, basically, and fire it off. So I found a lot of people that struggle with street Fighter style inputs can keep up in this one.
Overall, what do you think this game really gets right about either Gundam as an entire franchise or mobile G Gundam as a series in itself.
It's got all of the toys, it's got the big main robots. It's got a sense of scale with the handful of real big, large ones. And it's good for giving you a rough idea of. And it's a very rough idea because they mix them up a little bit in the story, but a rough idea of who's in what series, which you've said so before on this show, is sometimes hard to follow with all of the gundams.
From what I've been able to tell from Gundam, I mean, you all don't. My level of expertise here, it's not very much, but it has the big giant robots, and you can see the humans in there that are fighting with the giant robots, and people fight with robots. I wish it would get into more of the political drama and the social commentary and everything, but also, this is a fighting game, which might not be the best place for that.
Yeah, this is definitely not the medium for any of the parts of Gundam that people get into it for, other than sort of the aesthetic, but it's got the aesthetic down in spades.
What do you think this one really gets wrong about Gundam?
I would have liked a little bit more story. I understand that this was definitely made on a fairly tight budget, so they probably couldn't get the voice actors to do lines for anything more complicated or put the effort in to get much more complicated things. The stories are just so bare bones that you wouldn't know what's happening with these disparate voice lines unless you'd already seen the shows. And I would have preferred less mixing of series within the story modes, but I haven't actually done the math on it, and I don't know if there would have been enough mechs from each series to do that.
Yeah. Eyeballing a list from the Gundam wiki on fandom.com, it looks like you could maybe have done it with one kind of series, but it would have been like one and then everybody else.
Because it's eight stages per single player, and I'm looking at it, and 7123-4567 yeah, they've got seven from wing, seven from G Gundam, and then a whole bunch of assorted universal Century series. What would that be? 16 universal Century series, 16 guys from Universal Century series.
That math sounds right to me. It's too late in the day from real math.
That explains why they have a couple of random ones show up.
The main thing that pops up in my mind is I would have liked to have seen a better indication of which series these characters came from.
But.
Also that probably would have confused the mess out of me.
They are actually organized on the character select screen, roughly by series, or at least by timeline. But you wouldn't know that if you didn't know that. It doesn't actually point that out. Which I think that's really the thing that its biggest weakness is, because it's one of those things where we talked about it with X Men for Mutant Academy was, would you give this. I'm jumping ahead, but would you give this to someone as an introduction? And, well, it's got all the characters and their, you know, it might be good to be who do you think looks cool? And I'll point you at the comics about them. You could definitely do that with this. But just having a clear indicator of what series it was from would be way helpful for the person who stumbles upon this doesn't know what Gundam is and wanders into it. So they don't show up at G Gundam expecting to see, like, bethsythe or Fisalis. They're not going to be there.
I mean, I'm with you on this completely. Looking at it from all of these Gundam games for a little bit are basically going to be an introduction to Gundam for me. And I know basically nothing of what's going on in the story from the game. I know that there's big giant robots. I know that I like to see big giant robots punch each other and shoot each other with things. And from these, it looks like I can grab whatever Gundam series I want, and it will be robots punching each other and shooting each other with stuff, which is cool, but is also what I have come to understand from talking to people like you, Billy and Aaron from the last one, and Carrington from either the future or the past, depending on if I actually put these games out in release order or recording order here, that there's more to Gundam than just robots. Punching each other and shooting each other.
It's come a long way for a show that was originally designed to sell model kits.
That's the crazy thing with all of this. You have so many Gundam toys, cool things like that, and I appreciate that. People said, you can't just make a tv show that's basically a toy commercial. But these are some really cool looking toys.
So the secret is they wanted a toy commercial, and Tomino was more or less given free rein to do whatever the heck he wanted, as long as he used the robots that they had toys of for that first one. And then it just kind of rolled from there. Similarly, you know, cowboy Bebop that was produced to sell model kits of the spaceships from it, they had already made the toys for the spaceships, and they went, we should find a way to market this. And they just handed the marketing budget off and said, do whatever you want as long as these ships show up. And we got cowboy bebop out of.
It, and we get two of the most iconic animes ever made because people wanted to sell toys. See, selling toys is not entirely bad.
It's like if G. I. Joe were actually good.
Oh, God. Now I'm going to have to figure out if G. I. Joe counts as a comic, because for coming on here purposes, because the timeline kind of could maybe work.
So I'm gonna let you know something. G. I. Joe probably counts as a comic about as much as Gundam counts as a comic for this, because Gundam was an anime series that got adapted to manga and comic books, much like the comic books for G. I. Joe came after the cartoon and toys.
Oh, good. That might be my saving grace then. So, Billy, it has been great talking to you about all of this. If people want to hear more from you, where else can they find you around the Internet?
They can't. I did some writing for Commandercast back in the day. Haven't really picked up any other places to write for since. I got frustrated with wizards of the coast for just a continuing cavalcade of stuff. And yeah, the commander cast folks are good dudes. If you're still doing magic, go check them out.
One day I will sucker Billy into writing stuff here for play comics.
Tried to. It was just real bad timing.
We'll try it again.
Everything exploded. That was a real bad week.
And maybe we'll sucker you into doing the Star Trek podcast with our mutual friend who has also been on this show already.
Hey, and if you want to stretch real far on the definition of comics getting adapted to games, there was a Battletech comic book that happened. And if you need somebody for Battletech or any of the mech warriors, I am over here and can definitely explain it in more detail than you want.
Yes, and I know there's multiple because I have somebody lined up for one of them already.
Wait, which one?
Ps, two. No, that might be Robotech.
Robotech is. Oh, God. Yeah, that has relations to battle tech. But that's a whole nother podcast. That'd be an entire podcast. And it'll probably come up when you talk Robotech. Ask them about harmony gold.
I will have to write that down. But in the meantime, that is everything I need now, and I will do the rest in post. And of course, by doing it in post, I mean right now because it is now post because that's how time works. If you want to hear more from me, you can head on over to playcomics.com or the show notes to this very podcast. Did you know that podcasts have show notes? Sometimes there's things in there that are important, like links to social media or links to other random things, I guess. Yeah, they can be in there too. But anyway, you can find links to all the social media stuff because blue sky things are really horrible and awkward to read out. And technically, I'm still on Twitter. Yes, I don't care what they're calling it, it's Twitter. If you want to help support the show, you could be like our patrons in Ono lit class, Dan McMahon and Carl Antonovitz. And, you know, give me money because hosting costs money and other things cost money. And yeah, sometimes things cost money. Or you can just share the show with a friend, leave a review, all those fun things. Set up every single computer in your local computer lab to download episodes. Actually, don't do that. Or do. I don't know. But yes, definitely share with friends and other cool things like that because making the show is fun and it's more fun when more people listen to it. It's also more fun when I know that people are listening to it. So yay for a bunch of other wonderfully geeky shows. You can head on over to the going to geek.com network where you can listen to a little show called Legends of SHiELd, where right now we're talking about Echo and I made the stupid dummy decision to watch the episodes one at a time. Yep, that was dumb. But you can hear me talk more about it over there. If you like the music that I'm rudely talking on top of, head on over to soundcloud.com. Best day to check out best day's music. But most of all, just grab a game, grab a stack of comics, maybe some model kits, and find yourself a new favorite character. You came in a lot louder than I was expecting when you said to fire it up. So can you tell me five random colors?
Orange, blue, chartreuse, green, and yellow.
All right, good. I turned the knob a good amount.
Then you're listening to something on the Gunnegeek network. Come on down. We're going to talk about coffee and Star Trek.
Convince our mutual friend to do a Star Trek episode where he looks at it through the lens of being a teacher.
You might need to pump him full of coffee.
Yes, that can be done.