Bad North

'Cause at the moment I'm feeling a bit guilty that I'm really loving, really loving a game that I've already completed, uh, once before.

Uh, it's called Bad North.

It's a strategy game that I'm playing on my Switch 2.

It's, um, like a tile-based t- you know I like my tower defense-

Valhalla edition.

We already got this word recently with Bad North.

And so here we are again.

And there's Vikings and Rayman.

And so far, those have been pretty recent.

I think Bad North was maybe the oldest, but still, it's like within the past 10 or so years.

So when we started this podcast, I had the idea for...

We were thinking up run-based games, and I was racking my brain thinking about them and had this light shine that like, oh my gosh, Oregon Trail, the game I played growing up in school, is technically a run-based game.

It's wild.

I think that the thing that I did get from playing Oregon Trail and then playing, well, you know, all of the games we played, I think 80 days, the navigation is important because it's route planning is the strategy.

But I really did feel like keep driving would have worked on a single road and like it didn't bother me when i was playing oregon trail that i didn't get to do any navigation and i think if you wanted to make one of these types of games and really scope it down you can put it on a linear road as long as there's interesting enough stuff to do with the management and there's a like a good narrative reason for that right fto is kind of in the middle because it's like you have to get away from the bad guys but you can kind of dilly dally and take too long and like bad north has the same thing where it's You do get to navigate, but you can't just endlessly go around because stuff is chasing you.

That feels like a kind of happy middle ground.

But real-time strategy game...

Bad North from the Swedish studio Plausible Concept.

And so I had a hard long I was thinking a long time about a question to ask about this.

And I actually that what I say at the beginning of every episode about us being interested in pop culture and like what that reflects is.

you know medieval battles between again like the danish and the english and the normans and the vikings and the whatever right i forget the exact groups but you know like that's a hard and it's about a guy that's going to reject masculinity he's going to the new world right like it that's a hard pitch but it works right it's very very popular

Yeah, the students always love that one.

And it's interesting you're talking about signifiers of Vikings because taking it to Bad North, they're just kind of these stereotyped signifiers.

Not so much the horned helmets, although there's a little bit of that, but just kind of like nameless, faceless, invading zombies.