What began as Aftermath’s unofficial Boat Day has evolved into Aftermath’s unofficial Boat Week. With Riley freshly off a boat and me in the general proximity of many, we figured it’s finally time to fulfill one of the site’s original purposes: to serve as a repository for Riley’s countless stories from his various times at sea. Also, secondarily, to talk about video games.
On this week’s Aftermath Hours, Riley and I are joined by Chris “Peg Leg” Person to discuss boats, boating, and a flotilla of related matters. First we talk about Riley’s recent voyage, which involved reading Moby Dick as quickly as possible while on a boat. Why? Riley enjoys punishing himself, I guess. Then Riley regales us with tales of the time he lived on a boat during his youth, up to and including his convoluted waste disposal process.
After that, we move on to a boat-related news item at the opposite end of the wealth spectrum: Gabe Newell, billionaire co-founder of Valve, recently purchased a yacht company. Why are rich people so obsessed with big boats? Listen to find out. Lastly, we list the best boats in video games, including the GOAT boat.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can buy a boat and go bow-to-bow with Gabe Newell’s yacht armada – or at least start a band and call it Gabe Newell’s Yacht Armada.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Nathan: Riley, given that you’ve lived on a boat and you have this fascination with them, do you generally enjoy boats in games, or are you kinda whatever about them?
Riley: I’m trying to think of games with good boats. I was actually just thinking about the game Dredge, which I bought forever ago and haven’t played. I should finally play that game.
Chris: Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag is a pretty good one.
Riley: Oh yeah, I met the kid at Mystic Seaport who performs sea shanties and gives little presentations – “songs of land and sea” – and I was talking to them, and I asked them “Oh my gosh, did the sea shanty trend reinvent your career?” And they were like “No! But thanks to the soundtrack of Assassin’s Creed games, little kids are always asking me to play these incredibly obscure songs, and I’m like ‘How on Earth do you know about this deep cut sea shanty?’”
Then this other kid there who also did sea shanties started praising and praising the Assassin’s Creed soundtracks, and then I told them I was a games journalist, and they were like “Oh wow.” I was telling them about the whole Ubisoft split up thing, and they were like “That sucks.” But anyway yeah, apparently Assassin’s Creed is reinventing interest in sea shanties. Screw you, TikTok.
Nathan: Alright so, other good video game boats. I put together a list. I’m gonna just take it from the top: The boat in Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. Do we think it’s a good boat or a bad boat, because obviously it’s also a character. But as a boat, as a craft, what do we think?
Chris: It’s pretty agile given its circumstances. The problem with that isn’t the boat; the problem is that the Triforce quest near the end sucks, if I remember correctly. It’s not that the traversal was bad.
Nathan: I think also that for all the openness Wind Waker brought to the table relative to other games at the time, the exploration was underdeveloped.
Chris: Yeah, it was pretty sparse.
Nathan: I think the promise of that game was greater than what it delivered, at least in the sailing and exploring department. Still a great game!
Next boat: Sid Meier’s Pirates. Probably my favorite boat-based game. I love Sid Meier’s Pirates.
Riley: My sister and I had a pirate game as kids that I keep trying to hunt down, and I’m 90 percent sure that’s the one it was. But you know when you’re trying to find a game from your childhood and you just type words to look at pictures, and you’re like “At some point this picture will emotionally resonate with me, and I’ll be like ‘That was the game’?”
Nathan: When I was looking up games for this list, I scrolled past some screenshots of Pirates, and it had that effect that some older games have on you where you’re like “Man, my brain up-rezzed that game so much.” Now I see actual screenshots, and it looks… not bad, but very quaint. The boats are far less realistic-looking than I remember them being.
Chris: Sea Of Thieves is probably the best boat game, generally.
Nathan: Yeah, that seems to be the consensus pick.
Chris: For as cartoonish as it is, people are like “Yeah, but it does feel like you’re on a boat.” The boat stuff is really good, and it does have those moments of panic where you have the bucket, you’re shit’s sinking, and you have to plug it up. That always feels very nice.
Nathan: It’s also about the boat a lot of the time. It’s about sailing, which a lot of these games aren’t – or they partially are, but they don’t consider the boat to be a physical object or space. They think of it as a vehicle, as opposed to a thing with its own needs and its own unique characteristics. That makes Sea Of Thieves really cool.
Chris: And people will fuck up your boat. They aggressively love fucking up your boat.
Nathan: Sea Of Thieves I think is one of those games that’s become sort of a fixture, albeit in its own niche, and as a result does not get the credit it deserves – especially because it came out in a way where it wasn’t fully baked yet. It was a little bit sparse as a game. It didn’t review super well. But it has been improved tremendously over the years and still has an active community. It’s a really cool thing.
