When I was a young boy, my father took me into the city… to see the marching band… or rather, “vaguely aspirational hero characters from the mid-aughts that were marketed to boys of about our age”. Cough. Plenty of deep cuts this ep: David frames a discussion on the titular Action Man in musings on plastic capitalism, while Sam beams a computer-generated spotlight at the BBC’s long-buried kids’ multimedia outfit, Ace Lightning. There’s also our essentially live reactions to the now-infamous “Willy McDuff” AI-generated nightmare from a couple of weeks back. Let the truth go out that we bought stock early in The Unknown!
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Games discussed: “Willy’s Chocolate Experience” in Glasgow, Red Viper (Virtual Boy emulator for 3DS), Action Man: Robot Atak (also mentioned: Search for Base X; Operation Extreme; Destruction X), Ace Lightning (both the TV series and the games for GBA/PS2)
Brief mentions: Westlife Fan-O-Mania, What Remains of Edith Finch, Football Manager 2024, Virtual Boy Wario Land, Wario World, Waterworld (Virtual Boy), Blitz Games, Magic Pockets (developer), Thunderbirds, Piczo (website builder), Tiertex, BBC Multimedia
Music used:
- International Superstar Soccer 2000 – Menu 3 (“Okay Fellas”)
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (GBA) – Wriggle-Sweets Room
- Everything Stays [from “Adventure Time”] – Rebecca Sugar, Olivia Olsen
- Hypnospace is Cool (Xtra Hypno Mix) – The Chowder Man / Hot Dad
- There’s A Hero [from “Ace Lightning”] – Foursquare