August 21, 2017
EP. 199 — The Pros and Cons of Living in Grand Theft Auto and Skyrim
Imagine you’re just living your normal life, walking down the street and WHAM– a car slams into a traffic light and the driver bails out from the cabin, firing machine guns and rocket launchers at everything in sight. The police arrive at the scene, engage in a bloody firefight and eventually a high-speed chase. But, once the suspect leave their line of sight, they just sort of…give up.
You are an NPC (non-playable character) in the Grand Theft Auto universe, where the long arm of the law only reaches as far as the computer’s AI will allow it and even getting arrested by the cops only means a couple of hours in jail and a couple hundred bucks coming from your pocket.
Fun world to live in as a regular-joe? Maybe. Depends on how much you value your life, justice and going bowling with your cousin.
On this week’s episode of The Cracked Podcast, we think about the little people in our favorite video game universes. What would it be like to be an NPC in GTA, Red Dead Redemption and Sim City? Alex Schmidt is joined by Cracked’s Adam Ganser and Cristian Ramirez, and comedians Mike Drucker and Monika Scott to figure out which video game universe would be the best to live in and which one would be the worst?
Links, sources and footnotes: https://goo.gl/R5PQAT
Recent Episodes
January 26, 2020
Freedom sucks…and that is why we have to defend it. Because our democracy involves doing a lot of stuff that takes energy, takes time, and lacks that Michael Bay Quality that only a surprise missile launch can provide. So on this episode of The Cracked Podcast, Alex Schmidt and special guest Jason Pargin (who writes for Cracked as David Wong) are exploring the ways being afraid of everything (an easy action) can stop us from being free. Discover the decades-long tradition of some Americans wanting to give up everything in exchange for not needing to think, the centuries-long tradition of people inciting fake panics, and the reasonable ways you can help change things for the better.
Footnotes: https://www.cracked.com/podcast/why-fear-based-democracies-arenE28099t-free-with-jason-pargin/
January 19, 2020
How’s your local shopping mall doing? Have you checked on it lately? Swing by sometime, because its department store might’ve turned into a call center or a hospital or a go-kart track. On this episode of The Cracked Podcast, Alex Schmidt is joined by the one and only Kai Ryssdal (Marketplace, Make Me Smart) for a look at surprising, strange, and shocking stories from all over the U.S. economy. Discover an international pig flu, a 26-word statement that built the modern Internet, and more amazing ways cash is ruling everything around you. By the way, if you’re an American listener, you spent the past few years funding an astonishingly huge bailout. Surprise! Listen for details!
Footnotes: https://www.cracked.com/podcast/5-parts-u.s.-economy-that-are-stranger-than-you-think
January 12, 2020
Movies, TV, gaming: three things that are theoretically a waste of time. Oh sure, they deliver value in the art sense, and comfort in the goofing-off sense. But what if they’re more valuable than that? What if consuming shows and playing video games (accidentally) turns people into real-life heroes? On this episode of The Cracked Podcast, Alex Schmidt is joined by comedians/writers Caitlin Gill and Alex Watt for a look at the surprising number of times that exact thing happened. They’ll explore stories of regular people who saved a life thanks to skills gained randomly from cartoons, sitcoms, ‘World Of Warcraft’, and more silly entertainment.
Footnotes: https://www.cracked.com/podcast/9-times-pop-culture-accidentally-taught-people-to-save-lives/