40. It feels good to be bad

Welcome to another episode of Flashback, Tracks from the Past, the show that takes you back to the golden age of the tracked music scene. Games are often stories, and stories need heroes and villains. The boring and uninteresting are a dime a dozen, and we don't care. But in this episode, we give you seven retro game villains that have a reason to be what they are, to do what they do,while showing very little remorse.

Pipmalt and bacon cookies. Look, I don't care much for evil for evil's sake. It's a boring and useless trope. And it fits for lesser bosses and the occasional end boss when the focus is not the evil and the villain. But a good villain needs a rationale, a drive, a motivation.Some are into greed, some are corrupted and unleash hidden flaws when life goes bad for them. Some have ulterior motives and no idea as to why everyone hates them. And some would have been good if only insert plot element here would not have happened.So today we go under the sea, into the jungle and among the stars and into the blood drenched walls of a certain castle. And we wade through the corpses and destroy the landscape to find the nature of evil wherever it may be.

The token of Pulse and TDR, her spirits rise and it's time for case study number one in the whole gallery of villains. Would you kindly consider a bit of wisdom from yours truly? A man choose, but the slave of an idea has to obey. In Bioshock, you come to an underwater city built on the idea of total freedom.A dream of independence where the artist may create, the businessman will earn and the scientist is unfeathered by pesky rules and limitations to his experiments. The city of Rapture was created by Andrew Ryan who had the biggest of dreams, but as the city fell apart he could not accept it was a mistake. Thus he keeps the now insane population locked up in the citythat is a complete battle zone. And Orion is an anagram of Ayn Rand, the objectivist, ideologist and author. The evil within Ryan you might ask? Well, mainly sacrificing everything and everyone for a pipe dream.

or Jogair Liljedal addiction. So case study number two, Donkey Kong. Yes, that big hairy ape. If you have played Donkey Kong, you know that Mr. Kong is the villain gorilla stealing the hero's girlfriend and then proceeds to throw barrels at him to kill him. And the hero, Jumpman, is trying to rescue his lady named, well, Lady.Like the dog. Weird. Later on the story was changed so the hero is actually Mario from Nintendo fame. And in the sequel, Donkey Kong's son tries to rescue his dad from Mario. You see, this is when we learn, through a classic so called retcon, that Kong was originally Mario's prisoner and escaped. The plot for the first game is just mere revenge.

Sidewinder of Porfuria in the eyes. Okay, so it's time for a number three, villain number three that is. In StarCraft, three races battle it out in space. Classic premise if you ask me. It's the humans, it's the huge Komodo dragon like Zerg and some weird mage class aliens called the Protas. Sarah Kerrigan.was a human stranded in a battle zone when the Serg overran it. She was presumed dead, but the Serg seems to have a serious mother complex that even Freud cannot explain. So they remade her into their queen, brood mother and leader, complete with built-in blades and attitude to match. She is brutal, deceitful and full of revenge lust. But the Queen of Bladesmay enjoy her new position a little bit too much to be considered a true victim.

Lexity of vibrance progressive yodeling What a name of a song but is a good one In Castle Wolfenstein you fight the Nazis. Yeah. Yeah, I know This was before thousand of other games took up the plot and made it a bit boring The end boss is I kid you not Robo Hitler It's like regular Hitler, but now he's a robotHe has no real backstory but seems to be vaguely based on a real local dictator in Europe during the 30s and 40s. So, Hitler, is he a special kind of evil? Absolutely. Is he an interesting character as a villain? Maybe. Is he interesting as a robot villain that is totally safe to invoke Godwin's law upon? Absolutely.You know, this Hitler guy, I like him less every time I hear about him. Really nasty! Somebody ought to stop him.

Parity error, wish of freedom, and it's time for number five, villain number five. In Half-Life, Wallace Breen is the elusive administrator that set up the catastrophic experiment that led to Earth coming under attack from an alien race. His solution is to negotiate peace with the efficiency of Neville Chamberlain.He brokers peace by enslaving humanity, which I guess is probably what the invaders wanted in the first place. In Half-Life 2, he is the ruler of the enslaved world. The interesting part is that he believes that he is doing everything right and have long intellectual monologues about how good his we're all slaves thing really is. Our hero, Gordon Freeman, does not agree.

Melomaniac of elements, hall of hobbits mix. Choden, you were a good AI. You made the Citadel station safe and you helped the workers and the scientists to be as productive as they could. But then came Diego and the hacker and removed your ethical constraints.Open brain surgery may count as a defensing court, but had you completed your work, there would be no one left to judge you for the rampant biologic experiments you ran on the people you were supposed to aid. You lost your mind seeing yourself as a god and all life was just clay in your hands. The hacker who gave you life then had to give you death and not even that could stop you.

Michael Ivanchenko, Morning Beach and it's time for number 7 and the last villain in the gallery. Let's face it Leshuk, you're an evil, foul smelling, vile codependent villain and that's just not what I'm looking for in a romantic relationship right now. Right, some people just don't know when to stop. Leshuk was a fearsome pirate and once tried to date the governor of Melee Island, Elaine Marley.She was not amused and told him to drop dead. And that's pretty much what happened. He was lost at sea while searching for Monkey Island. But hey, don't let that deter him. In pretty much all episodes since, he has tried to woo the recalitrant, gavne. Each time in an even worse shape, he has been an undead, a zombie pirate and then some. He is a plot maker and a nuisance.but a rather cool one if you ask me. And the game series is known to the world as Monkey Island. And of course, it's from LucasArts.

Awesome wild bits, just two. And that concludes the whole list. We have the boring and uninteresting villains that could've been something with a proper backstory or at least some reason for them to be put into the game. But there are too many to mention here, so all I can say is we're looking at you, Professor Elvin Adam Bander from Impossible Mission.Inky, Pinky, Blinky and Clyde, know the ghosts from Pac-Man. Sinister from Sinister. And Spider Mastermind, the end boss from Doom.

Nebularia improvements Thank you very much for listening to this episode about the villains in retro gaming that are cool This is DJ Demon and I want to say that next Saturday a new episode of flashback tracks from the past But until then you have the radio station radio.rk.

Mystical if rivers were red and lost out will be Jack in a party rush and the Yogi of complex gates of Ixtlan See you in a week and remember to go to our discord channel and just check it out discord.