Waffling Taylor's Lite: the pocket size podcast that packs a gaming punch.

In this serving of byte sized banter with a side of gaming goodness. We catch up with Anthony from Capes on the Couch podcast about Mega Man 2 for the NES.

Take it away, guys

— Squidge

My name is Anthony. I'm co host of a podcast called Capes on the Couch, and we analyze the psychiatric and mental health issues of comic book characters.

My best friend is a board certified psychiatrist, and so each episode we cover a character or a group or a relationship or a theme. And we examine the portrayals of the various neuroses in comic books and then how realistically are they portrayed, and what would treatment options look like for that character. We role play a little therapy session towards the end of what therapy with that character would sound like.

It's edutaining is kind of what we call it because it's educational but also entertaining. We have a lot of fun with it. We've got over 170 episodes, I think, at this point. We're currently on hiatus, although as of this morning, we did just release an episode to break the hiatus because we occasionally talk to creators about their comics.

— Anthony

I was probably an adult because I don't recall ever beating it as a kid, because it was always so hard and because the game and the series, especially the original series and those original Nintendo games, they're Nintendo hard for a reason. It's pattern recognition, that's all it is. And if you cannot nail those patterns, if you cannot nail the timing of those platforms that appear and disappear or the enemies that go in the same, if you can't nail those patterns, you're not beating the game. So I don't think I beat the game until I was an adult.

How long it took me, I don't know. What I can tell you is that I remember specifically one instance of beating it:

I was live streaming for a charity fundraiser. I do a lot of work with Extra Life, which is a charity where you raise money through playing video games and the money all goes towards Children's Miracle Network affiliated hospitals. I've been raising money for Extra Life for over ten years at this point.

And I was doing a fundraiser, I was live streaming myself playing Mega Man 2, and for every time I died, I had to do X number of burpees. And the more money I raised, the more burpees I had to do. And the plan was I had to beat Mega Man 2 in 90 minutes with taking breaks for burpees. So all of that kind of factored in and I've spent weeks practising. I had everything down, I knew my routes, I knew my order.

The day of I'm live streaming, I'm 2 minutes into the Airman stage and I fall off one of the platforms. Now I have to drop and do - I think I had to do was it like it was over 50 I had to do over 50 burpees every time I died. So now the game is running, I think I hit pause, whatever, like that, but the live stream is still going and here I am, one, two, three and the now I'm out of breath after doing 50 plus burpees. And now I have to pick up the controller and get back to playing.

And I beat it with I got to Wiley, I had no lives left. I'm on my last life, literally. There's two bars on the hit bar left. I can take one more hit and I'm and then the password screen went and I've got the bubble lead and I am timing everything because he's going in that infinity pattern as the snake thing, and I have to hit him with the bubble lead and jump and hit him and avoid the things and everything else.

And I got it done with one hit left on the bar and it was like I think it took me like an hour 25, because of all the other times that I had died and had to do burpees and everything. So I got it done by the skin of my teeth and I was like, "I don't ever want to play this game again because it was so traumatizing." I've played it since then and I'm 90% certain I've beaten it since then.

— Anthony