M it is video games. Super Tuesday here on the Giant Bomb cast is
uh Tuesday, November tenth, fifteen. I'm casting my vote, yeah for
video games. Oh, you might have to get more specific than that.
I'm walking in the booth and there are two switches I can pull. One
says video games. Are you gonna vote for Lara Croft? No? First
woman president? Noting No, Well maybe when you put it that way,
maybe I don't know. Jeff Gersman is here. Hello, Dan Ryker is
here. I'd vote for her as president? Have you ever voted before?
Yeah? For anything? Yeah? Okay, presidential election. You've already surpassed
my expected yeah, waiting line. I want to like in the freezing cold
Minnesota, they let anybody vote. Let anybody in here these days think so
yeah. Even Starve, stage and screen noted author, famed philanthropists wreck on
tour. David E. Lang is here. How are you doing? I
don't even know it's Jay, but it's docks Docks right away, I figured
e sounded esteemed. We had Vinyaki on last time I got him to say
his middle name out loud, which last time we talked to him about it
years ago, he was like super evasive. Yeah, what was it?
It's Gallagher. Yeah, he's not a fan of his middle wave Yeah no,
yeah, no, yeah. Actually, after after the humorous comedian slash
destructor of waters Out, they were like they were big fans. Really you're
actually serious? Yeah wow, No, Okay, I don't know, dude,
he was born in slash. There's like, honestly there, I don't.
I can't. There aren't a lot of things you can tell me about
Johnny that's true that I wouldn't at least think about, believe, at least
consider. Yes, that sure anyway, Dave Lang, you're here, Yes,
you're fresh off of the airplane. Yeah, I just landed like an
two hour and a half. Yeah, and fresh off of staying up all
night before that, almost all night. I didn't quite make it. No,
So I signed up originally for the twenty four hour shift, and I
realized I can't do twenty four because I have to get on it. So
my flight this morning was ten fifty and the ten hour shift would take me
to ten am, So like, okay, I gotta stop at seven.
So twenty one hour shift now. I start my stream yesterday, set the
clock for twenty one, and I realized, Oh wait, I need at
least a couple hours of sleep. I'm gonna pass out and die driving to
the airport. Oh right, lack of lack of sleep is bad for the
heart. So I punched out after nineteen hours. But I still feel pretty
good about it. We raised a lot of money. Yeah, yeah,
it sounds like everything went well. I caught the very beginning. The beginning
was rough. Of the stream beginning was rough. I tuned in off and
on. I saw some trials. Yeah, trials is good, a lot
of until dawn, I think, in order it would started off with Destiny
with Adam, which was garbage because my Xbox One was trying to download FIFA
at the same time. I thought like upload and download are independent. Wait,
if you're playing Destiny on the Xbox No, no, we're playing on
PS four. Okay, we just talk about talking about the internet. Yeah,
I had my Xbox downloading FIFA because I thought like upload and download were
independent. Right, It turns out they're not. When you got fucking bullshit
Comcast excuse my language, Comcast, Chicago Comcast, Chicago Comcast, And so
that didn't work out so well. But the min I turned off my Xbox.
Everything was fine and then the stream resumed normal. We were good.
Then we did that, did some Spelunky was awful, a Splunky, did
Capsule Force, did N plus plus, did Trials where I discovered that DLC
where you can be a unicorn that breathes fire with a cat with the lou
Kang banana with a golden gun. Yeah, oh my god, that's the
best deal. Season didn't shoot the gun, can't shoot, the gun doesn't
pop off. I was hitting every button. Yeah, every sat I just
got a way to shoot. I kept resetting my run. Yeah. That
was disappointing, but it was still pretty awesome. It's fusion DALC right,
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's the best nine nine ever spent
without it out without a doubt. We messed with that a little bit.
It's it seems like they're trying to tell a story with that thing. I
don't know about anything. Yeah, so you play the but I don't know.
Those guys are crazy, Like did you see the thing like that.
They've got all the hidden stuff in the game. That's like people are gonna
have to find keys and wait one hundred years in real life. And yeah,
the secrets of Trials HD. Yeah, the insane fucking arg stuff they've
done, like it's nonsense. All I know is I bodied all brands times
and yeah I only played through all those courses once. It showed for the
quick look, Yeah it showed, but okay, I'll take that. It's
valid criticism. Then did Until Dawn? Yeah? Did you play through the
whole thing? Through the whole thing in one sitting? Okay, tune out
because I hadn't finished it yet. I love Until Dawn. Yeah, oh
my god is that game. I feel like that's like a like a sleeper
slash breakout hit for the year. Yeah, it was amazing. I feel
like I think kind of came out of nowhere. Is it short? You
said you did it all one sitting? It was like seven hours seven okay,
but it's completely different every time? So is it like I have yourrain
situation? It's like more so. Really my understanding is that any one of
those kids can die, but every one of them can live, if that
makes sense, Like it's like unless unless I've been misinformed, like the who
lives and dies can be completely different. Yeah, there there are a couple
like the one play through the next I know without without like kind of getting
into all the there's some there's something. There's the beginning characters I think have
to go away, yeahitorial stuff, because that's everyone else. I think they
can all live or all die. Yeah, paying on the outcome, I
was pretty bummed out because I like, I didn't really know, uh like
what the hard parts of the game works. I didn't know anything about it.
And I actually like, there's this character Jess who you have to go
through like twenty quick time events in a row to like save really in the
middle of the game, is that how the machinery works in that game?
It's like a bunch of bullshit. It's one of the men, like you
have to do all this stuff perfectly for somebody to live. Well, that's
I think. I think she is a hard one to say, Okay,
and so not every character is like is she the blond She there's like three
blinds, she's one of them. Of course she's Mike's girlfriends. Yes,
yes, she's the first one that died when I played. Yeah, and
uh so that's what She's almost impossible to save there, there's like one way
to save her, one way or only I just got lucky and picked everything.
Really, like I went left when you should have went left. I
got the quick time event right, and then I just she died at the
very end. Anyway, I screwed something. I was so dumb, so
I was pretty mad about that. I only end up saving I like everybody
alive going to the last hour, and then I only walked away with three
people surviving. It was a It was a cruel end of man. That's
rough. Yeah. Yeah, when I I got like two thirds the way
through the game and then I handed the disc off to Jason and didn't get
back to it. But yeah, like I my group was dwindling by that
point. I had like three people left for four people. It's not the
mass effects suicide mission you hoped for. No, not exactly. Yeah.
Uh. Then we played a bunch of Steam stuff. Uh did Door Kickers,
which is godlike. Uh did some dive Kick Ruck Fools Online and dive
Kick did. This is where my mind starts getting wonky. Uh. I
know. I played more Steam games, can't remember singing one of them now.
Then played some Rise multip pretty typical Steam experience, I think, uh
Rise multiplayer on Xbox One, and then tapped out Wow, Rise, that's
fun. You guys ever done it just just even had probably around launch,
just enough to do the review, which was like two matches or matches.
It's really cool. Yeah, it's basically like Arenas. It's like you and
a friend, oh right, we did play something. It's like horror mode
with objectives like you have to go set this camp on fire. Wait a
minute, are you team Rise? My team Rise? Mean like in that
you don't hate Rise? I love Rise really like Rise is great. I
think Rise is okay, yeah, Rise. I get a lot of shit
about that around here, like it's really cool. I mean it's a game
with just frames in it. If you got just frames in your game,
there's like there's could only be so bad, right, okay, so yeah,
it's got combat system is amazing. It's like pretty good. Yeah,
I mean it had its problems, super sure, it's not it's not an
amazing game, but it's not a bad great was great launch title? Yeah
yeah, stand by Capital G great? Dan, Dan looking at me incredulously.
I hated that game. I'm gonna say it. It looked Capital G
great, but playing it was Capital P poor. You know, different strokes
for different folks. I guess yes, we should probably point out that this
was for Extra Life. I don't believe those words have been uttered since you
came on here, but see Extra Life. This was Extra Life Weekend.
Yeah we did, Okay, we did. Uh. I was trying to
come up with new ways to get I played a lot of FTL two.
I was trying to come up with ways to get people to donate ups.
At one. I saw some of those pushing club Push Up Club. So
the rule was when I yell push Up Club, I drop and do fifteen
good ones, talking like ninety degree bend and the almost yeah. And then
you have a choice as a viewer. You can either drop and give me
fifteen or kick in fifteen. But there's no there's no freeloaders on the stream.
Either the kids are getting paid or you're getting healthy. That's the way
it works. Man. Do you think anyone cheated? I'm sure a hundred
people on a lot of people cheat. But I also did see donations coming
in fifteen push take push up club. Now he had set up club.
Set Up Club was twenty and I was gonna go to squat club and squat
Club was gonna be sets of thirty three. But I was too tired to
do squat club at three in the morning, a squat rack in your room
or no, no, just like standing, okay, proper form and all
right. But yeah that was good. A lot of people tweeting at me
this morning. Their arms were tired, you know, they haven't done that
much exercise in years. Yeah that was good. But yeah, no,
it worked out really well. Like every time I did that gimmick, people
started kicking in fifteen or twenty bucks. So nice dummies. That's for a
good cause. But the kids, you can't knock it. It's I like
tricking people to give anyone money. That's the bottom at the end. I
mean, it's great, it's a charity. It's going into your pocket.
That's great. If it's it's great it's for a charity, this time duping
people out of their money as a passion of viewer. You gotta love it.
Yeah, when went in doubt right, I mean one ceo, yes,
indeed it takes a sip of his drink. But yeah, it was
extra life weekend. We did dured twelve hours stint here in the studio on
Friday. Austin did an overnight, Vinnie did an overnight. Jason and his
wife did an overnight Yeah. Yeah, Drew and Alexis did a full twenty
four Yeah, and then Dave. You can tell his kid it's catching up
with Drew. Yeah. As the years go on, it's getting harder harder
for Drew. Yeah, he's gonna get there. Last year was my wall.
Last year was when I was like, I don't know if I could
do this anymore. That said, there might be some more extra life on
the way. I'm not sure yet. I've been talking talking about maybe a
little bit of it. You can't say that out loud and then say you're
not sure yet. If you if you're saying that, you're you're probably gonna
do. I already said it in the chat in the Lang's chat yesterday,
so the idea is already out there, all right. That's what they sucked.
Like. I was playing until dawn, which was like at least a
third of my entire stream. I was trying to not look at the chat
because I don't want people saying things like like early on I saw like,
uh, people saw about get monked. Get monked. Yeah, I had
no idea what that was. I thought that was like new slang for Mrked.
I thought that's like, oh, that's absolutely that now it is.
Yeah, but so that would Actually the monk thing happened the game I lost
my ship. It was the funniest thing I've ever seen. Then this,
Yeah, we play donating four twenties said get munked, get mumks to get
monked. It was amazing. Yeah, it was really good. I know
what moment you're talking about. That is pretty funny. Yeah. Yeah,
it was a good weekend. A lot of a lot of charity dollars were
raised. Yeah, we know what the total was the kids the Giant Bomb
team going out with to bed is like one sixty two, Yeah it was.
It was in the one sixties. Yeah, yeah, which was a
pretty solid number. I'd like to think. Yeah for the kids. I
hit a cask all this morning. I DMed him. So like last year
we got we did an ig with Patrick, we got nineteen k in and
I think I beat that this year. Wow, which is all I wanted
to do with yourself? Yeah, well, I think think about it.
Right, you get rid of all the Iron Galaxy dead weight, right,
oh yeah, you get rid of Patrick and his dog costumes and crap like
that. You just get the main traction in camera all the time. Yeah,
the money comes in, people are just throwing it at the screen at
that point, I'm pretty sure I beat nineteen by l confirmation. I'm pretty
sure. So we'll see you did well for sure. And now you're here.
What a here? Yeah, it was a good time on no sleep
something the plane. Yeah, fine, that's good. It's a game day.
Yeah. What do we do on game day? Brand We play?
We lace them up and play. Okay, good to know, thanks coach
Jeff. Hey, hi, you had another marathon of sorts of your own
overture. Yeah, yeah, something like that. It's been a weird run
here for a bit, but that's I mean, review season is always kind
of that way, but it was this weird run of like Halo and Need
for Speed and then some Black Ops three happened on both sides of those reviews,
and then basically like I was playing Need for Speed with a copy of
Fallout in hand and needed to get through that before I could kind of move
on. How did that feel? Fine? Yeah? Yeah, you know,
we're like dying to get the cars out of your face. I mean
for totally different reasons, like Need for Speed as issues, and those were
frustrating but like, you know, moving on to fall Out, you know,
it wasn't a situation where I'm just like, oh god, you know
it's it's you have to you have to approach things in some kind of even
measure or else you will go insane. Sure, that said, I pretty
much played Fallout all weekend and finished it at like eleven o'clock on Sunday night.
Well, I was gonna ask how many hours you would estimate you put
in, but you probably could just tell me it's the game save when.
Yeah, the saves, your hard saves have an hour count on them,
and I want to say it was a little bit under forty just this weekend.
No, that's a total, that's total, okay, And that's taking
your time, right, you're that mainlining story anything. I did a lot
of the side stuff, Like I got most of the trophies in that game
really the way which most of them are. You know, there are there
are ones that are like find all the bobbleheads and you know, all that
sort of stuff. But like I got one of my companions all the way
through their kind of you know, to their top affection rating and no,
okay, no, I don't know where about I don't know where the dog
went. At one point I dismissed the dog, and I don't know where
the fucking dog went. Nope. I sent back to Sanctuary Hills, which
is where I've was established my main base of operations. It's near where you
start the game. That's the the workshop I put all my shit into,
and like, this is where I'm gonna This is my hub. I'm gonna
treat this is my hub. I'm gonna send all the companions here. All
this sort of stuff went back there. Nothing ran around that place for a
while. No dog, I don't know where that dog is. Gotta move
to Diamond City. You get a little porch on the roof with the doghouse.
I don't know where the dog went. He's off, he's off growing
another head somewhere. It's like the opposite of that Shabuoya dog or whatever.
Yeah, I haven't seen mine in about ten hours either. I assume you
did the same thing like you met Nick, and I was like, oh,
okay, let's go with this guy. Uh yeah, yes. And
then there's a quest where the dog comes back. For dogs do to do
some dog stuff, like story dog stuff. Some dog time is required here
and and then I rolled around the dog for a little bit longer, and
then and then at some point I was like, well, there's this perk
that lets you hold more if you don't have a companion, you take less
damage. That sounds good it So I got that, and I'm like,
okay, well I'm going to send all these things away and run around on
my own for a while because I gotta steal some shit. But isn't that
counterproductive, because when you have a companion, you can just unload a ton
of shit, Like, I haven't even seen a limit. Fuck has time
seriously manipulate the inventory of a companion. Thank you all of my weapons and
I would rather fast travel back to base and put it in the workshop and
not have somebody they're shooting people for you. Insane cool dude, Do you
always use companions? And that Skyrim and Oblivion was the most I've ever used
one. Yeah, I've never been this one. Mainly, this was the
most I've ever used one, But I never I never gave him any stuff.
It's like, I think it's infinite storage. Face. There's no numbers
or whatever on his like trade screen that I saw. At some point I
was like, I didn't want to manipulate that, like I'm gonna do that
inventory thing. I'm gonna do it where I'm eventually gonna put it and not
have to take it all back from him and then deposit it, because it's
not like that's a smooth, one step process when you get back to basse.
Yeah, it's better than having to like constantly drop ship though I never
dropped a thing really, yeah, man, I'm constantly at like my absolute
limit. Yeah. No. I I got to a point though where I
stopped picking up a lot of stuff because you just don't need it. So
are you not picking up stuff for like building materials or you know when you
see like a fan, you're not like, oh there's a screw in there.
There are certain items that I picked up every single one I could find
because it seemed like they had components though, like every microscope I could steal
though, which is like like my creepy uncle who was since passed away,
had a thing for optics, and I felt like him running around the fucking
waist on going oh look these fine optics. Take this and yeah this is
you know, to keep this one. Can't look through this one, it'll
ruin it. But this one, I'm keeping that the voice in game two
is it that same voice? No, it's not. No, that's that's
my that's my crazy uncle. It was no longer with us. I could
I have stories, but not, this is not the time or the place.
So yeah, there was definitely there were definitely things that I gravitated towards,
like, oh, I should probably get some of that because I know
it breaks down to nuclear material. So every alarm clock I saw, are
you saying there's nuclear material in alarm clocks? Yeah? Really, how is
he going to keep time? That's okay, that's if not for the power
of the atoms A good point. I haven't thought about it that way.
Yeah, so I guess I should say that, Like, that's the thing
they changed in this game, is they made all the trash matter because now
it can all be broken down into components you can use to build a base.
And it seems like the way they I am like two hours in the
Fallout for I don't have a whole lot to say about it yet, but
but it seems like they handle that stuff very smartly because you don't have to
manually go break any of it down when the one thing you have to break
down is if you need leather. Uh, it won't automatically break down armor
because that comes out of armor. Okay, you wish you might want to
wear yeah, point yeah, but yeah, like you want to put a
new barrel on a pistol or build a picnic table or whatever, it will
just break down like some of those. The only two things I built picnic
tables and pistols stuff. Yeah, put the pistols on the tables. But
yeah, like you yeah, it just it just automatically converts the trash you
pick up into Yeah, so that's cool for you know, the the weapon
upgrades, the armor upgrades, all that sort of stuff like that's that's sensible.
You're like, I want to put a stock on this, and you're
turning pistols into rifles and stuff like that. You're like, Okay, this
has a pistol grip on it, so it calls it a pistol, But
the minute I put a full stock on it, it just becomes a pipe
rifle. Can you rename it on console? Yeah? Okay, but why
would you I do that? I want to if you get really attached to
one weapon, that's crazy. That's crazy. If I want to look at
my inventory and see what is on this weapon. And the way to do
that is to keep the generated name that it gets. If I had a
full keyboard at my disposal, I might want name my weapon made. What
if your named give me some weapon names. Oh, it's just like if
you attached like a comfort grip to a pistol or whatever, it's like,
oh, that's my and like a long uh what do you call it scope
or something? It's like, oh, that's my comfy long shot. Okay,
so I know it's comfortable and it's got a long shot. Would you
type that in when the game will will yeah, because it'll be like tactical
bolt action pistol. You know, that's all useful. Infant get dumb it
down until you. I think those names are funny. They're like eight words
long. Yeah, they do get they get longer than the UI is,
which is pretty fucking dumb. Right. Yeah, so so whatever, Yeah,
Yeah, the weapon upgrade system, that's that's new and that uses those
components and that's cool. The armor same way. You know, it's like,
hey, I want to pad this armor. I want to put some
lead in it so that it has radiation resistance, you know, that that's
the sort of stuff you'll be doing. And then there's the base building stuff,
which it throws you into a tutorial pretty early on, which is kind
of poorly put together. I feel like calling it a tutorial is a little
generous. It's more like, hey, build this thing. I feel like
they barely tell you which buttons to hit to bring up the building interface,
and then they're just like, all right, build and I was I was
like, why there are into what end? So I inched the game and
I don't know why shit in terms of like what you know, like,
okay, So there there are benefits to building in in a couple of different
ways, but none of them seem like that meaningful. One of the things
is that you eventually get the ability to kind of like you get you get
a flare gun and you can use that to kind of like call in the
minute men, or you get other items that you can use call in different
factions also that aren't necessarily based on your encampments, but it seems like if
you're close enough to an encampment, they'll come and help you out in battle,
which, like having the AI come help you out in a fight,
seems like the worst thing you could do in a Fallout game, but I
guess whatever, you don't want to add any more unnecessary variables to the Yeah
yeah, but yeah, so so there's that, and you know, you
can have beds at these places, so if you had if you had more
bases around, you'd have more beds to sleep in, and then you're well
rested and you get more XP for a chunk of time or whatever. There's
there's like kind of mechanical stuff like that, and also the settlements where will
occasionally get attacked or they will find like ghoul camps, like it seems like
that's how it will generate quests for you to do, is like hey,
this camp is getting attacked by gouls. Go to this location and kill everything.
So it's like more of like a pointer or two locations full of things
for you to kill, which didn't seem necessarily like, hey, there are
plenty of things to go kill and plenty of reasons to do it in that
game. I didn't necessarily need like people going like we need help and endlessly
every yeah, endlessly. Yeah. So yeah, I mean I don't get
why someone I saw someone saying that there were a lot of building mods for
previous Fallouts. I've seen some similar comments, So it makes me think that
maybe this is just them trying to like take advantage of that. But it
doesn't feel fleshed out, like maybe there's some endgame to it that I just
missed. Yeah, because like in the quickly what you were talking about,
like you can plant crops in your settlements, you can build supply lines.
They need different settlements, is like, what does all that stuff do They
the settlers in your place need food, they need water, they need beds,
they need to defense. Wait, so you're improving the settlements just in
service of having better settlements, Okay, Like I assumed that would like generate
resources for you that you could use in other situations. They will. They
when they don't have anything better to do, they will scavenge and put things
in your workshop. So it is kind of a way to get screws and
gears and this the stuff you'll need to build, I guess. But but
again, by spending the first third of that game picking up everything I could,
I did not need for any thing for the rest of the game.
Granted I wasn't I did not get the perks to access advanced gun mods or
advanced armor mods or the science perks which lear what you'll let you start modifying
laser guns and all that other shit. So can you get any of those
like gun nut or not even one? Oh wow, No, because I
looked at what level one required. By the time, I thought like,
well, I've got most of the other baseline stuff I want, so now
I can start fucking around a little bit. By the time it made sense
to get one point in gun nut, all the guns I had required rank
three. Oh so it just wasn't worth it to do with that point.
I went for stuff like I wanted. There were things I wanted to experiment
with, Like the supply line stuff is not built in. That's a perk
totally. You have to you have to spend a perk point on that.
So anyway, like whatever, like to you know, I'll sum it up
a little bit here for people like this. So it's got that new stuff
in it, But I don't like that stuff not necessarily great. I think
the shooting is a lot better. It's better as a shooter. It has
shooting. It has shooting. Now. Now, yeah, Fallow three arguably
did not have first person shooting, and you technically could, but it was
so Yeah, you could you could point and try to shoot, but yeah,
the accuracy was so bad. Unless you're using like a fat man or
something. You had to you had to vats your way through that game.
Yeah, you see, that's not counting vats, right, Yeah, yeah,
that's great. I'm talking about like the real time act of pointing and
shooting a gun like that was terrible and Fallow three, but but vatzing was
was pretty much necessary. It was Yeah, it was kind of like the
only way to play more or less, all right, you know what,
you could get around it. It wasn't it was not great. This feels
a lot better, is the point. Yeah, there are still cases where
I put a radical on something and pulled the trigger and it didn't hit.
But you know, it's it's it feels a lot less like RPG dice rolls
and more like yo, I shot that guy so so that that feels a
lot better and that's cool. But yo, this is a Fallout game,
yeah, like top to bottom alarmingly so yeah, like they made some changes
around like those aspects of the action. They kind of rebalanced the way VATS
works in a way that I don't I'm not necessarily on board with how do
you feel about running taking your AP down? I think that that's a smart,
balanced thing. I think because it prevents you from running away from someone
until your VATS is full and then turn shooting them. I just always have
the thing where I'm just like sprinting from place to place and there's really nothing
going on, and like some mutant hound or a bloat fly or something shows
up and I try to go into VATS and it's like, oh shit,
I've been writing, I can't do any Skyram did a similar thing with stamina.
Yeah. Right. I didn't use VATS for probably the first half of
the game, and then on the back half it became a lot more useful.
I put most of my like perk stuff into that. Like I'm constantly
using VATS. Yeah, sometimes I like again, I just start playing it.
But like like with bugs and stuff, a dying one hit, I
would rather just pop them off, you know. Like so because the VATS
animation takes enough time that if you can do it, and that's me it's
where like the shooting and the frame rate is what kind of gets in the
way of some of that stuff, because you know it's like, yeah,
you want. You could shoot the bugs and one hit and kill them,
right, you know, it's not that big a deal, but they move
arout a lot, so they're kind of hard to pin down. And also
that becomes exacerbated by the games erratic frame rate. I played it on PS
four. I hear Xbox one is actually worst. Digital fenders put out their
big performance eval this morning, and yeah, that one's got some stuff going
on. Yeah they both. I mean the PS four has is no cakewalk,
it's no joke. Like it is crazy in some spots, like like
how bad are we talking? There's one spot so you know, like in
the quick look you see it, you know here and there. Uh,
and it's like stuff like you know, when you're reloading your gun, it
seems like just the gun taking up most of the frame and just like it
drops a bunch of frames right there and just looks like messy. But like
who cares, right, It's just you're just reloading a gun. So you
know, it'll get weird out in the open world, but it seems like
inside it gets worse. So I would be going through a location and then
just like anytime actual combat anything, anytime anyone thing was trying to kill me.
It seemed like that's when the frame rate was just like not cool with
that. So there's one mission pretty late game, uh that I won't say,
I'll leave out the specifics, but like it's a very tight area in
terms of just like corridors and but you can see kind of a lot of
an area, but it's kind of walk around catwalks and stuff like that,
and there are a lot of enemies, and so I'm just like, I'm
gonna get in here and do the thing I need to do and leave.
I have some stealth boys, it's turned invisible. Let's just try and it
was let's try to do the stealth thing, which I did not have great
luck with throughout the game. So I got spotted almost immediately as soon as
I got inside and became like me running around doing something to then escape,
and it ended with like probably like fifteen guys all shooting at me all in
this one tight space, and the frame rate was like probably under ten jeez,
you know. And it's just like and and so VATS is really the
only option, but because everything still moves while you're in VATS, VATS runs
like shit too. If VTS not does not freeze time. Yes, so
it doesn't make you safe, it doesn't, you know, like it it's
it buys you a few seconds. Yeah, which you know whatever that's about.
Like in the PC version where there it's probably you know, far less
of an issue, right, Yeah, that's fine. In this case,
it was like this is broken on top of broken, like I can't like
I just had to sit there and and just pop healing items and try to
jump over these guys and get out and eventually made it and it was fine.
But it was one of those things where it's just like there's an extended
sequence of gameplay here, this like a cool moment that is just fucked.
It is crazy how bad it gets, and that's you know, really unfortunate.
You know. I think that this game, like I said it,
they made another one of these games, and that's that's good and bad.
You know that not a lot of people make games the way, but as
IT makes games, you know, it's people like to point at like oh
the Witcher than MGS and all these other like open world games of late then
and go like oh, well, you know, like you see it's kind
of starting up, I mean, follow ut it's not out as we're recording
this, so it's not necessarily like a full on discussion just yet. But
like those games don't let you pick up everything in the environment. Those games
don't. That's always been one of the keys really funky shit going on in
that game. Like these other games are just tighter experiences in terms of what
they allow, right, And the Bethessa ones are just littered with random stuff.
If you're just walking around, like I was just walking through a field
the other day and there's some guy there with like a wooden shack just like
he's got a kiosk like eliminated staying where he's just selling booze in the middle
of the wasteland, like no buildings around or anything, and you know,
you just walk twenty minutes or twenty feet in the other direction and just random
unscripted things show up. Like I saw this raider and I was like,
oh shit, I should kill him. When in the vats blew his head
up and realized he was like kneeling down at a grave of another raider.
It's like, oh shit, Like it's just littered everywhere you look in that
wasteland. Like I think it's awesome in a way that Witcher and meddle gear
does not. Yeah, those games have always given me the impression that there
are a bunch of clockwork ais running around everywhere. Yeah, in a way
that other games like kind of keep the range of motion of the different actors
a lot more constration. So you know, it's like they're trying to do
more. It's kind of how I look at it. But I really with
this game, I feel like they're doing two much, and it's it's it's
gotten away from them, like the result is Yeah, it's because you know,
the game is still jankie and fucked up. You know. It's like
you still see just like these like physics gone wild moments of like this skeleton
is gonna just rattle in the corner for no reason, death rattle. These
two two headed cows are gonna like walk with their front legs up in the
air going down a hill, and they're both gonna sit there and just kind
of do this weird dance for a while because they're broken too. I was
getting way more of the thing where it's like, hey, go into this
church for this mission, and you go up to the door and you hit
a to open or whatever, and it just kind of grays out and it's
like, wait, what the hell is going on here? And you back
up and go forward a million times and eventually it just randomly like yeah,
especially if like AI walks through the door first, like back can jam you
up. AI does this thing where you know, like when you walk up.
Tell me if there's there's a term for this. I was gonna say
that it's a bark, but it's probably not a bark. A lot of
people talk about their combat barks. What do you like in a game like
audio cues and stuff like that? Oh no, I've never heard it called
that. I've heard other people call that. So when you walk up to
an AI guy and he just without you hitting a button, he acknowledges you
and with like some kind of hint as to what you were doing for him.
Gotcha? A lot of those things are studio dependent. Yeah, Like
that's what I figure. Yeah, So the game does a thing where you
you'll walk up near a guy, say you know, the guy from the
Minutemen at your base or whatever, and he'll say did you clear out those
goals yet? To remind you that you are supposed to be clearing out goals.
But if you hit the talk button. While he's doing that, it
will not activate the dialogue. You have to wait for him to finish,
then hit it, and then your character reacts. Your character starts another conversation
as if that guy didn't just say that, and he says, clear out
those goals for you, and it's just like you are both idiots. What
is going on? Yeah, like, it just it's just it's a it's
a waste land full of morons with the way that the dialog kind of connects
sometimes that much radiation to kind of scramble your brain. Yeah, yeah,
but you know it's it's you know, that game is still weird in the
way that their games always have been. You know, I was in the
middle of a conversation with someone and another AI guy just decided he wanted to
walk where I was standing, walked up against me. I couldn't move because
I'm in the dialogue, pushes me out of the way and all the way
out of the conversation, and I had to go restart the conversation again.
You know, it's like it's it's this is the game where you're talking to
another person and the AI guy walks him and says his you're standing nearby,
like, hey, general, how's it going line to you? I remember
that would happen you, Like that would happen in Skyram too, where the
random NPC would be close enough to the camera that it would be too loud
and you couldn't actually hear the important company. That totally happened to me,
Like I had AI dudes photo bombing my fucking conversations and Walton in there and
trying to talk. I made a comment during the quick look that I had,
like when you were saying, like, you know, you hoped this
would be the game where they fixed that stuff, like I had those hopes
for sky Iron, And then I said something along the lines of like I
made my peace with the fact that they're not going to do it when Skyrim
came out. A lot of people seem to take umbradge with that comment,
but like, maybe a better way to put it is I gave up,
like I stopped expecting that, you know, yeah, Like I just like
until there's an indication that something's gonna change, Like I've just accepted this is
how it's gonna be with the best RPGs. Well, I like what you
said about how they deal in scale it's not that minute polish thing or whatever.
It's just this, well the breadth of content. I stand by that,
but a lot of people would say, like that's not enough of an
excuse that, like they should either like kind of scale things down, or
they should spend the money and fit like I'm sure Lang has got some more
like well insightful thoughts about this as an actual game developer. It's just one
of those things where the possibility space is so much bigger in those because you
can pick up every bowl. You can't move every spoon. You can take
like you know, all the stuff and move it in the center of town.
And then what do you do? Right? And I think you know,
people like people at home that run into real problems. It sucks,
right. They don't want to hear like, oh, most people don't don't
see these problems, or most people don't do the thing you did that causes
a problem. Right, It's I don't really want to hear that. But
at the end of the day, it's like, you know, you make
the game you want to make, and you you make and you accept the
trade offs you're willing to do to make the game you want to make,
and I you know, I think they have a very one makes games like
them. Nobody, right, Skyrim did really really well. I'll just Squirrels
did really really well. This game's gonna do really really well. You know,
I hear that. I understand people getting mad about it. The person
that doesn't bug me at all, Like, I love that you can do
anything you want in those games, and I'm willing just to live with the
jank in the process. You know, That's kind of where I'm at.
For me, it was just a case of like, you know, kind
of hoping like okay, we're we're moving to a new set of platforms and
like, yeah, like let's see that power used for good. I mean,
you'll get me wrong, like if it do. I wish it was
like as polished as like a Kajima game and you can still do all those
things. Well of course I do. Sure, yeah, same here.
Yeah, it's for me, it's a it's about realistic expectations and like it's
it's I'm fine with how it is. It is what it is. It's
its own thing, and you know, not everyone's fine with it. That's
cool. You don't have to be you know, I am, you know,
as a gamer and I guess I get for me, I guess there's
a distinction between wishing it were better and expecting it to be because, like
you said, like nobody else makes games like this period much less better,
you know, So, like I mean, is it I mean, do
you think that it's just like not possible to make a game of the scale
and variability and have it worked properly all the time? We never say not
possible, right, Like we're not realistic. Yeah, now you're kind of
asking me to speak for them, which is comfortable doing. But like it's
ctrictly a theoretical sense, right, Like the more the bigger the possibility space,
the harder it is to QA, right, because it's it's not only
things like when you think about queaing a game like that, it's not just
like oh I moved Jeff's pop over and I took his laptop when he wasn't
looking right, It's like the order of those things can matter for bugs too,
you know. And you start stacking up all these possibilities in top of
all these possibilities, and it reaches a point where it's literally impossible to QA
the game. You could never do everything that or it's impossible to replic every
single possibility. But you can do obviously like a thorough q A job,
but you're there's like no like like games like Madden or whatever, they have
testing matrixes matrices where we're gonna play every team versus every team in every stadium,
or we're gonna make sure they all work, they all run well,
like those are those are the backbone of QA departments for years and years and
years, and they still are. But that kind of testing methodology just doesn't
work for a game like that. Like there's no matrix big enough right that
you could test. There's not of hours in the day with everyone Planet Earth
testing it for the Mountain. They test games for it, right still five
billion years. Yeah, Like and it's just and they are they made the
choice that they're fine with that, you know, because they get to do
what they want to do and they feel like they get enough of the bugs,
you know. Once again, I don't want to speak for them,
but and I think most gamers agree, you know, based on how they
sell, you know. So for me, it's just it's one of those
things that like it's I'm fine with those games being messed up in a handful
of ways. You know, like like again, like like you said,
like it's the difference between like you know, the game jack in the games
and like procedural bumps. So that was the thing of like, you know,
it's all fun in games until like I had a quest where I needed
to go up and activate a grave and to you know, dig up a
body or whatever it was. We were doing stuff you do in the waistline
and dig up a body dirt, walk up to it, hit X,
nothing, nothing happens. Just like I'm looking on the iPad and it looks
like the iPad when when you're interacting with an object. So I was using
this the iPad app, the tablet app or whatever, which isn't bad.
It pops up some things, just says view mode when you're not actually openly
wandering around, so you can fuck with the menu, but you're not actually
able to change anything because you're interacting with an object or you're in a menu
or you know, you're paused or whatever. It would pop that up for
a second and then nothing would happen, and I would go, Okay,
so I'm gonna I'm gonna make sure there aren't no enemies around and try it
again. Nothing Okay, great, I'm try it a few more than nothing.
Fast travel out of the area, fast travel back, nothing, quick
the game, relaunch, it, reload it, nothing. And it was
this thing, this moment of just like, great, is this is this
quest just permanently fucked? Am I? It was it a story like a
main story quest. I don't think it was main story because at that point
you just straight up can't finish the game, right, And it was it
was infuriated, you know, but I did regardless. It was infuriating because
it's this thing of just and finally, like after about an hour of kind
of just trying to restart the game and do all this different stuff, like
it finally just activated. Wow. So you don't actually know what you did
to fix it? Nope. Man. And that's the sort of stuff,
right, And and you know it's it's for me, especially, you know,
trying to like review that game and wanting to see it through and stuff
like that. But but just even even sot like you know, caring about
the story and I think caring about the quality of like the game and wanting
to play it and see it through because I'm generally enjoying it. It instilled
in it reinstilled in me this feeling of like this thing could spin up heart
at any moment, and like I would get worried every time the framework of
getting like, oh this is gonna break some like something's gonna happen and I'm
not gonna be able to proceed. There's one spot where, like I was
having some trouble with an elevator then that was a main story quest, and
I was like, well, this is this might be broken, this might
be broken, this might not work, you know. It just it's one
of those things that shakes your faith in the entire product in a way that
like I'm now approaching the entire thing like scared to do things exactly. So
then all of a sudden it's like, well, I don't know if I
want to funk around with this stuff because who knows what it's gonna break.
I don't want to break my save And and I think that's a bad place
for a game like that to be in. That game is all about possibility,
you know, save early and often. Yeah, it's a good policy,
yeah, definitely, you know, And and the saves are pretty poorly
named in that game. So also the icons. Yes, yeah, the
image is attached to your save at least on PS four are wrong. It's
mismatching. Mismatching. Look at him and go like, oh, that's the
one where I'm right before this like point of no return with this faction.
So this is the decision point. This is the save I want to reload
when I want to see the other ending. All my saves so far have
thumbnails from the tutorial area, so I have no idea where they actually.
They're all super broken. I've got what seems to be a permanent gledge where
you know, in Diamond City, if you want to go up to the
Mayor's office, there's that elevator. It looks like a scaffolding like you're cleaning
windows, and it's supposed to like extend this bridge so you can get onto
it, and then you press a button and the bridge folds up and you
go up and then it folds out so you can walk out. Uh,
it's opposite for me, So the bridge is out when I am going up,
and then it gets up to where I need to actually get off the
thing, and the bridge folds in. So the only way for me to
get into the Mayor's office or back on the ground is to try to do
this like perilous jump from the railing of the scaffold into the Mayor's office.
I tried to make that jump forgetting that the scaffolding folds out, and felt,
Yeah, so every time the scaffolding has not folded out for me to
save every time, Yeah, you can do it. It just feels really
imployed. No, I mean yeah, I mean that's that's pretty that's that's
that is a really crazy way for that to break and to have it work
in reverse for me, it's it's yeah, for me, it's like these
issues that have kind of permeated their games for years now, and yeah,
and they and they've risen to a very solid level of success to where like
you know, like they're not like scrappy, crazy little Bethesda. They're like,
oh, those guys that made the Terminator game, Like no, it's
fucking Bethesda, right, you know, And and and you know, like,
yeah, it's the sort of thing where you look at it now and
go like, you're like a major video game developer, you don't ship a
lot of games very often. Like I understand that this is hard, hard
expectation to have, but like, fucking for reals, yeah, that's that's
why. That's why I was curious to hear Lang's perspective on this, because
like I'm I'm very curious about like the technical reality of the whole thing,
you know, and whether it's actually even realistic. Well that's other things too,
Like it's not even fair for me to answer that. I know,
I know what you said was pretty illuminating already, I mean just because like
those guys have made this game like a very similar game a lot of times,
and they know much more informed. Like you know, it's like if
when we're working on fighting games, right, like I know, if a
bug is something just instinctively to worry about, like oh, this might be
like a larger systemic kind of issue, or if just a one off thing
and it'll get fixed in the next but whatever it is, right, you
just kind of know these things, and these guys probably have like a very
like to the bone feeling for all these bugs you're talking about right now,
and they know it's like, oh, it's probably because they did this,
or if it's like no, just some weird scripting thing that we know just
is messed up, we have to fix it or whatever, right, and
it's it's really hard to talk about because without that knowledge and without understanding the
scope of the possibility space, and like I, like I said, I
played the game, I probably just have like a if a testament understanding of
how big it is. Right. So yeah, it's like the I mean,
the market will ultimately tell them if they can keep making that game or
not, you know, because they seem that seems to be the games they
want to make, you know, willing to trade a certain level of jenk
for just a it gives you. And yeah, we'll see what happens.
Yeah, I think it'll do just fine. And you know, I think
that there are really good characters in this game. Yeah I wanted to hear
every single character, but you know, there are some of the characters are
good. I think some of the writing I was I was left, so
I was left pretty unsatisfied by the ending of the game, the one that
I saw anyway. So it's a Fallout game, yep, And there are
multiple right. Have they said how many endings there are? I don't think
they've said, but I can well remember they said how many endings there were
in fall Out three and that did not go over well because their idea of
different endings was like one or two lines of dialogical. I don't know that
this does that. I don't know that this necessarily has that like stitched together,
like here's what you did, insofar as like that was an unsatisfying part
of the expert anyway, you know, I won't talk too much about how
the game ends the day before it comes out. I did want to just
hear about the game, though, like technical issues, not not to minimize
them, but setting them aside for a minute, just like, like,
how do you feel about the design of the world, like the quality of
the writing and the quests, and well, you know, I think the
quality of the writing is can be hit or miss. I think, you
know, certain characters and certain like quest lines I think are really good,
and some of them, including the main storyline, I think, you know,
wraps up a little ham fistedly at least the way that I went with
it, and I kind of want to see the other side. Basically,
it's a lot like Fallout three so far in that I had a specific kind
of like way to outsmart things in mind about how I would wrap up.
Like so if you think about the games as like being pretty open, you
start to think about ways to attack these problems, like you know, realistically,
and hey, you know, maybe these factions could resolve these things this
way or this way or this way or this way and the ways the two
or three ways that I thought of that like seemed like they would be good
ways to resolve the situation. We're not even presented as like options to be
shot down by an ENDPC. Yeah, you know the feeling of the fields
that's like an athema in a game where everything is about doing things however you
want. Yeah, so it's this feeling of like, well, maybe if
I go the other way with this faction stuff, that option will present itself
on this end, Like I don't know, it doesn't seem like it would,
but maybe I'll give it a go. What was the thing? Was
the thing at the end of fall at three? It's like they wanted you
to walk into it. Yeah, that was like does a radioactive chamber that
will kill you? Or you can send you or you can be a coward
and send in your companion, right, but you also can have a super
mutant companion who was fucking immune to radiation, right, so he could go
in there flip whatever switch needs to be flipped. No one dies. It's
a good time. Everybody wins in Baseball out three. They were like,
he was like, nah, I don't want to deny you this honor.
Yeah right, It's like, well, you's dick. And then post patch
when they change the ending post DALC, I think, d DLC, you
had to pay for the DLC that did this. They let you do it,
but then the ending refers to you as a coward, the same way
as if you sent in any of the other companions, as opposed to being
the smartest motherfucker in the waste land or no one has to die. Yeah,
what a bunch of bullshit that was. Man, Wow, that was
super frustrating. Like seeing that the actual legitimate, fucking logical solution in front
of you and having the game turn you down and then they patch it to
address concerns and make it worse. It's like, wow, man, yeah,
so that that's hopefully nothing that bad here. I don't know, uh
yeah, yeah, no this, you know, I was not satisfied with
the conclusion that I got, but I'm interested in seeing the other ones.
At least. I think that story goes some places that you don't necessarily expect.
There are a lot of people out there that think that they've fucking got
a handle on it. They're like, oh, well, clearly it's this
clearly is like no, no, it's not. It's not the thing.
Like even people trying to piece together like limited spoiler information, I've seen people
just have it like way way wrong unless there's some other ending that like validates
all that stuff. That just wasn't the one I got. But yeah,
you know, there are things to see in that game. There are places
to see their impressive moments that I think, like, I really want to
play this game on PC because there's there's stuff that deals with scope. There
are some big gass explosions, there's some just there's some stuff to see at
a distance that happens that I want to see on a platform that can run
that at a good frame rate without like N sixty four levels of fall some
of that stuff, Like you know, there's some turret sequences up in the
air and stuff that it's on PS four. It's rough, man, it's
really rough. The console versions of this game are are not as good,
assuming the PC version. You know, I again, i've not seen it
yet. I'm gonna start on it tonight again. The problems I've seen are
very much just that kind of be as the jankiness, ye, robotic characters
and weird glacis. You know, that game installed on a proper system with
an SSD and all that stuff sounds awesome, Like the reduced load times like
all, you know, that sounds like the way to play this game.
Yep, I got a great frame rate. Everything looks really good. It's
been I mean it's crashed like twice on me in sixteen or seventeen hours,
but overall it's well. The PS four version did not crash right just and
no stuttering just got scary y. Yeah, So it's it's it is a
mix. There are things about that game that I think are really well made,
and I think it's a shame that the technical aspects of it are not
up to par at presenting those things as well as they deserve. That's that's
my my My main problem with the entire game, I guess in a nutshell,
is that there's stuff in that game that I think is really enjoyable,
and a lot of it gets dragged down by technical aspect. So again,
like you know, I think that it's this is a case where like the
PC version, you know, like I said, you know, it's hard
to aim guns when the frame rate is bad. I was kind of shocked
when we recorded the click look because it's very, very noticeably worse. Yeah,
and so you know, I think that'll be a game though. My
understanding is the mouse and keyboard Inari faces straight trash. Yeah. Skyrim's was
not amazing either. Yeah, just in terms of just manipulating. You know,
there's a lot of inventory stuff to do in that game. I don't
think the pit boy. I don't think the comp old you guys is fantastic.
They made some of the inventory manipulation stuff a little bit better. I
couldn't get the iPad thing to work. Yeahosab Nellie and I'm on the same
network, is my PC that's running in And yeah, I just kept saying
no devices. I had no problem on the on the PS four getting it
up and running. And and it's not like I would never wear that thing
on my arm, right, because the whole point of pulling up your pit
boys it pauses the game, Yeah, you know, to give you time
to heal, to give you time to do stuff like the idea of like
holding it up to my holding my wrist up and they're going, I gotta
double tap this tiny text to use a stem pack and then it'll go into
the animation. Meanwhile, I'm just being shot over and over again. Like
that's a bad way to play it. It's like looking at you're watching Golden
Eye and dudes, you're still shooting. Yeah. So you know, the
the iPad I thought was good for having the world map up at all times.
Okay, I was. I was gonna ask, like, what is
the advantage there's Yeah, that was useful. You know you're walking around,
you're seeing the local map fill in as you walk, you're seeing the world
maps. You know you're going in the right direction. With more than just
a compass, you fast travel through. Yeah, you double tapping an icon
to go. That's that's not bad. That's not bad at all. It's
like the metal Gear app like that was pretty handy seeing the map all the
time like that. So so I if you've got the means if you have
a tablet, because the phone would be too small, even whether it was
on your wrist or not. Like I set my tablet kind of in front
of my field of view, just kind of set it in front of the
TV, and I was just kind of right there. Just you know,
I was like I was playing a DS game. That's it wasn't bad.
When you finish the story, what was your light level? It was the
two nineties, so I'm just barely raid ready. Nice. Yeah it's pretty
good. Yeah, yeah, that's solid. Have you you you rated?
Of course I'm not rated yet. Oh no, no, I might got
to two ninety seven last weekend. Dude's been too busy. How the hell
do you get to two ninety seven without rating? Do a lot of the
legendary strikes, the two eighties strikes. That's a lot of grind Man two
eighties, the Nightfall, the two sixties strikes. Because everything in the Raid
drops a three hundred plus, so it was just a very quick movie.
I guess I'm really lucky. Drops like I got a three ten shell just
a strike. Wow, that's yeah, super rare. I got like a
really I guess it's just good drops. But yeah, yeah, I've I've
just been too busy. I think I'm gonna run it. I'm back in
town next weekend or next week I'll run for the first time. I'm looking
forward to it. Yeah, that'll be good. Excellent, it was.
It was a fun time. Yeah, I liked it. Everyone. I've
heard nothing but good things about the latest raid. It's good. I don't
know that I'm gonna do the heroic version. Like people came out of that
thing saying like, yeah, it's not that much different or harder, and
the loot is not amazing. Thatst thing with the anytime. I mean,
how many times did they play it? You know, it's such it's a
random, right, I just don't know. I guess so. But then
there's nothing else, you know, It's like you get the better loot out
of the Heroic Raid and there's literally nothing harder in the game to apply it
to. So that just gets back to that point I had of it,
just like, and I think a lot of games are like this, right,
It's not just Destiny, but like, just stop playing because when you
pick it back up again, all the loot you have wably trivial, and
you'll be getting better stuff right out of the gate. Taking King was one
hundred percent that yep, absolutely so, dude. There's a certain statisfaction for
me though, about getting to like so our crew could do like Qrota hard
with no wipes, you know, like there's a certain statisfaction from like mastering
that rage and vogue hard and all that stuff. Like I think if I
was, if you don't, you don't get like loot satisfaction at some point.
Yeah, but it's like if you still have fun playing the game,
you have unmastering that experience, like it's still a lot of fun. It
was for me anyway, that that end, that just that was a time
that I used playing a different game. You know, at some point it
was just like, well, yeah, I mean I could just like hone
in on this thing, Occupational Hazard, find a crew, Yeah, I
guess so. Yeah, all right, I'm just gonna read this email from
later in the show right now. Whoa, it's about fucking unpreced It's a
bad destiny is not so precedented and barely precedented email? Yeah totally yes,
bobcasts John bomb dot COM's email address. Oh you listen to the show.
Uh, it's about destiny. I know Dave Lane likes destiny, so here
it is. It's from Brad. Uh it's not not not wait me,
he has a different last name. I'm not gonna say it out loud,
but he does. I know. You guys talk destiny too much already.
But I haven't heard you guys really discussed this. Have you been keeping up
with the weapons tied to the daily heroics? I just recently got my Black
Spendle, and I was really surprised at how much fun it is or was?
I'm sorry. There's something really awesome about stumbling into an entirely different area
and doing a different heroic mission and then getting a unique item. Plus it
doesn't require the huge commitment like the raid does. Now I've followed down the
rabbit hole, I'm researching other unique weapon quests and starting to use the one
hundred dot io which is a finding site. And if you guys don't know,
I didn't think Destiny would keep me around this long, but god damn
it has. So what about you Black Spendle no time to explain? Sleeper
Simulant do any of these interests you? Or are you pretty much clocked out
of Destiny at this point after finishing the raid? Those are neat? Yeah?
Have you done some of that stuff? I have? I still haven't,
like I was the first thing I heard about it was? I think
it was the sleeper Simulant. Yeah, it's like and my crews like,
we have one guy who like checks Reddit every single day for like new Destiny
stuff. He's like, oh, there's some day you do the day you
can start off this quest line and get this thing. You gotta go through
this weird part of all to Glass. You know we've been to. You
gotta get these three shells to kill this boss, this crazy hard boss.
Yeah. Then you gotta go to future War Calt and you trade the shells
for this other shell. It's like, well, this, okay, let's
go. We're in. It turns out though you had to, you had
to already have the shells in the previous run. That's the thing that people
seem to beat up so happy about. I didn't know that. Yeah.
And so going through all this stuff and you go to future War Calt,
it's like, wait, this this bug something isn't happening, but it's going
on. It's like, oh no, the I have to wait for a
show up again and up daily working in and it showed up last week when
I was out of town. So my whole crew has the freaking gun.
Yeah, and I'm sitting here with without it, and they're not gonna do
it again. That's the worst your crew has left behind now, and you
need you need some help on some of this stuff. I kicked off the
sleeper simulant and no time to explain quest lines over the last week because they
both pop back up. Yeah, it's cool that it seems like they're doing
them frequently enough where if you miss one, you'll be it'll be recoverable.
They come around every every couple weeks. But yeah, what he's talking about
is like set like the initial conditions for starting those quests. Uh, Basically,
you can satisfy that first step on the same day as you can do
the next step, but you can't do the first step and then immediately do
the next step. So you can do the first step and the next step
should be available, except you just arbitrarily have to wait until the next time
it comes around. It's uh, it's frustrating. Yeah, it's kind of
a it's unclear why. Yeah, that is right, like, uh,
but yeah, I think that's what's frustrating about. It's like it seems doesn't
you can't think of a logical reason why it has to be that way.
Yeah, I had missed those two just from traveling and stuff. So I
had done all the initial stuff and then just had to wait until they randomly
came back up. So like that sleeper simulant one's super fun. Yeah,
that boss is super hardy once we figured out you know where, like because
it's that place. Is that the one where it's like it's multi glass and
it pops between the left side and the right side and there's like the the
the minotaurs keep yeah, and the boss is invisible. Yeah, and nothing
sucks. We finally figured that one how to do it optimally. But it
was fun figuring it out. So it's the combat puzzle, yeah, but
it's the bungee combat puzzle. You're still using that super cell like electric gun
things. I love that. It's so fun. I bought I bought a
super cell from zero a couple of weeks ago. I don't I don't know,
man, I haven't upgraded all the stability on it yet, but it
kind of jumps around a little too much for my taste. I like it
for the Crucible Yeah, okay, yeah, it's good. I mean it's
really good with with like crowds, like dense crowds. Was the Lightning chains,
Yeah, really really good for that. And plus I just play Warlock
Arc and so it's like it's just it's fun to have another arc thing that
does the same thing my super does because it feels very complimentary. It's got
like if I didn't play at Warlock, I probably wuldn't like it as much.
Just it doesn't make it sense. But that's why it's just fun.
Yeah, it's a lot of lightning, Yes, all the lightning. I
hope, I hope they keep adding some more stuff like that. I hope
there are a few more weapons in there, because that's that's kind of all
of It's bringing me back to Destiny at this point. There's some weird stuff
with Zer, like like the exact game they popped up as a zero item,
right, yeah, And I remember there's like someone I don't follow,
like the Destiny News that tightly ask to like get digests or whatever. But
what I've friends played Destiny we're saying is like, well, Luke Smith said
they're gonna get rid of like Elemental Primary. Yep, yeah, right,
and then sort there's an almost the primary. The week before that, there
was a Warlock helmet like the Skull of ak and Rama or whatever it is.
That was a didn't come over from season one to season two, but
it was a two eighty skull of ak and Rama. So it's like,
how is that possible? Like, is this something that exists? This feels
like a bug. I better buy it in case it's a bug, Right,
So I bought that. I I you know what, I have a
soft spot for games that are willing to break their own rules, and Destiny
does that a lot. Like another thing they do that I think is crazy
is like, for instance, the Vex Mythic class from Your one was a
fusion rifle which is supposed to be a special weapon, but it equips in
the primary slot. Yeah. Like the idea of a weapon that equips in
the wrong slot that is not supposed to be allowed in is like, yeah,
kind of interesting to me. And they do a lot of weird shit
like that. That's kind of I mean, it's a little bit different as
they've been doing it for years now, but it was kind of that was
kind of the point behind the wild card systems and call of duty. Like
when you're building your your class or whatever, it's like the you can deploy
three wild cards, up to three wild cards that then let you break the
rules on one of those things. Yeah, so it's like I want to
put more attachments on my gun. It's like, okay, well, they're
gonna cost you two points a set of one because it's one point for the
wild card than one point for the extra attachment. But you can do it.
So you end up in the situation where it's like, I want to
have a gun that's got a zillion attachments, and I want to have any
grenades or anything else. But because of the point, and you know,
they've they've codified it in such a way that that's just those are just the
rules. Now, it didn't feel like you're breaking anything. But but at
the time it was like, man, that's nuts. It's exciting to feel
like you're getting away with something. Yeah, I got six perks, that's
fucking crazy. No guns at all, but as if I can pick up
a gun, it's on. Yeah, all right, last question about fall
out, and then we have to take a break, okay, which I'm
sure Lane will be thrilled about. How you doing down there, buddy,
doing okay? Yeah? Feeling strong, feeling good, feeling strong? Right?
Uh, do you feel much compulsion to get back into the game and
just kind of keep roaming and doing stuff. As soon as I finished it,
I turned it off, okay, but you know, I'd been playing
it all weekend at that point, and so there was like, you know,
I saw the ending and dropped me back into the world, and I
was like, all right, or do you even have like outstanding kind of
side quests stuff like the stuff. There's stuff that I didn't wrap up.
I mean, you know, there's stuff, But the stuff I want to
see is stuff that is before that point in Overturn with those factions. So
it doesn't make sense for me to go back into the world post game unless
I want to see if anyone says different stuff. You know, Drew said
he beat Fallout three and twelve hours. That seems like something you could totally
do, because he never likes doing side stuff at all. I'm learning that
meddle of yourselid. But yeah, it's crazy to me. Yeah, he
mainlined Fallout three. That's so crazy. Yeah, that seems totally I mean,
yeah, I'm sure just doing the main story quest you could, you
could totally do that, but that just I don't know, that's that's kind
of ignoring what makes those games unique. Yeah, yeah, you're missing a
lot, I think, But the main question that game is like relatively weak
you know that's You're You're Sky is the same way. Yeah, the main
story it was not the major draw there. I remember the reviews saying the
main story wasn't great in Skyrim. So I kind of mainline the story and
Skyrim and then when did all the guild stuff. I mean it was okay,
it was okay, It's not fiable, but it's not any better than
a lot of the side and like and it's arguably worse than some of the
side comes. I always like the Dark Brotherhood stuff more than the main storyline,
and that's the best. Yeah, but yeah, it's you know,
there are there are more things I would like to see in that game,
but it's not necessarily post game stuff. So you're just gonna cheat engine your
way through the No. I mean that game's got a console sure, yeah,
yeah, Like I you know that game's gonna be modeble is back,
so you know there's and it's the thing that like, as I'm playing it,
like that game is this game about scavenging, you know, Like I
was out of AMMO a lot of the time, partially because I wasn't using
vats that much, and you know, sometimes you just fucking miss or sometimes
you're like, I'm gonna empty a full magazine into this bug and it's a
time any bugs. So I missed because I'm an idiot, And so there
are things I would you know, like like you feel really like, you
know, as you're spending per points and figuring out, you know, okay,
where am I going to get AMMO from next and and all that,
Like, you know, I definitely felt like there were things in that game
that I didn't get to see because I didn't have my lock picking upgraded when
I passed to buy a lock a door I really wanted to see, or
or hey, you know, I didn't get to Chrisma ten, so maybe
there's a speech check I didn't get or something like that. So I actually
for all those games, is that something that actually like bugs you about that?
Because like I think that's something like I I think that's like novel and
awesome like about those like yeah, like I like, on one hand,
I totally get it, and and I think it's cool that you go through
like yeah, and you know, and and Dan and I are having conversations
about Fallout where he's just done stuff that I didn't even know existed. You
know, It's like oh, this chain of quest that comes off of this,
Like, oh, that's that's cool, Like everyone should have a slightly
different story. But also when I pass by something and see it obviously and
then I can't do it, that bums me out. There's like a line
that it can cross where it goes from novel to annoying. Yeah, and
and so like and I you know, I would never want this to be
my first play through, but there's a part of me that wants to just
go back, give myself every single perk in the game and play through the
entire game and see how it feels. Yeah, you know, not necessarily
like god Mode, cheating or anything like that experience. Show me the full
content experience as a result of me being ten and everything and all these perks
and all this stuff. Let me unlock everything. Let me hack every computer.
By the way, the the member of the Fallout three hacking and people
came up with like a website that is like enter the words that are in
the hacking mini game and we'll tell you how to unlock it. That exact
tool still works many they you know, do need it, though I never
thought that had I just at some point I would just fucking lost patience for
it, especially when it's like seven character words or whatever does get harder,
Like I just don't want to stare at these words anymore. I've got a
lot of game to play here. I'm just gonna pop this open and get
through this door. Ye yeah, it's it's It is enjoyable in the same
way that those games always have been, and it is messed up in the
ways that those games always have been. And the new stuff they've layered on
top is nice and some of it is convenient, but it's not going to
change anyone's mind about this if they already have strong opinions. I think it
comes down to you, like, are you up for this kind of game?
And I think the thing that I've discovered is I'm somewhat less up for
this kind of game now than I was last time out, because it's because
it is so similar and and for me, I think, you know,
and I think, like you said, I think the market will dictate to
a certain extent, and I'm sure it will do just fine. It seems
to be reviewing very well. But for me, I think that I want
to see them. We had this exact same conversation before once wants on the
BombCast. It's almost like when you come around like broken game discussion happens.
Yeah, I feel like you guys like save the good ones from we do.
We've got some stuff to talk about. Yeah, but yeah, for
me, like I want I want to see them tackle that stuff and you
know, and and get ahead of it a little better than they have,
you know. And and I'm sure like if if they had, if they
had set the PC version first and the console version second, instead of sending
the console versions first and the PC version second, this would probably be a
somewhat different conversation, sure, because at the very least the performance issues wouldn't
be so fresh in my mind, right, But so so that's my advice,
like, like, really, if you have the option to play it
on PC, which you know, you hey, you don't need me to
tell you that, maybe play the PC version if you can. Well,
it sounds more egregious than well, that's all loaded issue. I was gonna
say, it's more sounds more egregious than the last time around, but then
that ignoring the Skyrim PS three debacle, which was a fucking horrifying shit show.
Yeah, but on three sixty at least Skyrim was playable, like the
low times were too long, but otherwise it was basically fine for me.
A lot of those games and I know a way to take break, But
for me a lot of those games when they appeared on three sixty, it
felt kind of like magic. It felt kind of like, man, these
are games that, like console players would normally not even get to play,
Like how crazy is it that Oblivion is here? And like and is the
same game? And is this huge sprawling thing? Like, man, these
consoles are crazy. Even if it doesn't run great, it still feels like
it's beyond the scope of what those machines were built to handle. One generation
later, it feels like these machines should be built to handle some of the
most popular games from the previous generation. And I know it, you know,
there's a lot of give and take and a lot of compromises stuff that
I'd be made along the way. But to get to this point and feel
like this game still has all of those exact same proble you know, all
these years later, all this money later, is a bummer. It doesn't
feel like magic anymore. That's fair to say. All right, there,
you haven't fall Out four in stores now Man broken Games. That tells you,
yeah, she's been a lot this year. We had we had someone
right in last week who wanted to specifically ask us to get to the bottom
of Batman Arkham Night, which came out this year. Yeah, did it?
Yeah? That was this year? Did it really? Yeah? Well,
okay, it came out. Then one version of it un came out
I think it's the technical term for that unreleased, and it was re unrea
and then rereleased unre released. You could buy that game now, I understand
this, although I don't believe the purchase is binding. U why I bet
if you? I wonder if you buy it now if you can still maybe
not if you were still governed by their like by the end of the year.
Refund anyway policy Warner Brothers ship that game? Uh, Dave Lang,
you're the studio you're with Iron Galaxy, correct, which I'm the CEO of
which you are the CEO had a hand in the PC version of that game.
Is that bucks? The buck stops with you? Oh? Definitely.
Then the buck never stops with me. The buck goes down at Iron Galaxy
O Bucks. The buck goes down like the all the way, like whoever
the lowest person is receptionist. Buck stops with rolls downhill, trickle down Buck.
Yeah, that's just the way it goes. Reagan with a great man.
All right, now you're talking crazy, you know? So? Yeah,
so you you your studio had a hand in the PC version of that
game? Correct? What what happened? What? Why is it so broken?
Uh? Why was it broken? Then unbroken? Then rebroken? Unbreak
our Batman? Unbreak the Batman. Please, I've got some bad news for
you, gentlemen. Are you ready say you love us again? I love
you all deeply, Jeff, I love you Dan. I don't know you
that well, but I love you already. It seemed like a great romance
brand I love you. Yeah. And Warner Brothers is handling all communications for
this title. Okay, okay, Well, judging by my request to get
a Lego Dimensions review copy out of them, we will never get an answer
to those questions either. So I realize that answer is very unsatisfying to people.
But like you know, it's not uncommon for us not to be able
to talk about what we do on some of these games, like cap Com
never wanted us talk about anything we did. Does different publishers have different policies
about who can talk about what, and it's never a problem until someone wants
to know something from me, right, Yeah, and then I'm just not
at liberty to discuss details of that for a variety of reasons, all of
which are contractual. You know. Yeah, that seems like you know that's
you run into that. I mean just you know, just in terms of
like internal company like people who work actually at a publisher would probably not be
able to comment on that generally, either I assume, because or or just
across a lot of companies, we run into a lot of cases where we
run into people that we want to interview and they're like, I'm not a
cleared speaker for the company, right, Which is one of those things where
you're like, that's an insane thing to say in twenty fifteen, But like,
corporations are corporations, y'all, and that is how it works. Yeah,
Well, so do you envision this something like that someone would be able
to talk about more openly down the line. I think there's a lot of
things to discuss about it that aren't super incindiarya or whatever. For sure,
Like, I don't think this like there's there's things you can talk about in
constructive way. I think it would be informative. So I think all parties,
I think for variety of reasons. It's like the whole situation is nuclear
right now, and there's not a lot constructive dialogue to be had. And
I think maybe when that settles down, maybe you could have those talks.
But at that point it's probably also too late, you know. So yeah,
Like I think there's like there's two varieties of kind of talk. There
is the tell all style, which I'll never do, right, just don't
don't be shitty business partners. Just don't do that. Or it's like I'll
expect Warner Brothers not to do that to us, right, Like, don't
don't throw your partners under the bus ever, even if they're wrong about something.
Right, it's just the way it is, being like good business partners.
But there is like a dialogue that could happen about just like normal topics.
But I think, without speaking for anybody in particular, uh, like
any there's it's it's it's under such scrutiny right now. Anything that gets said
just kind of gets picked apart by somebody, and so it's hard to like
it's hard to construct that dialogue when everything is just getting like when it's under
the microscope like this, you know, yeah, yeah, no, people
got mad, people are still mad. As it turns out people didn't get
mad, they're still angry. It's it's it's one of those things that like,
you know, there was the end for me, it was it looked
like the initial batch and then like it kind of just as most news stories
do, you know, like can we do a podcast every week? Things
move on, like you know, at some point it was like oh yeah,
oh right, So I feel like we've had conversations that were like literally
it was like, oh right, Batman came out this year, like that
was you know, yeah that launch week sucked, like that was I was
it? So that was the week after E three and I was at Disney
with my family and it was kind of casually checking Twitter and I'm like,
it's like something's wrong with Batman. It's like, oh, put my phone
away, check it six hours later, Oh if I got a billion text
messages too? Yeah yeah. And then it's like realizing that this isn't like
a run of the mill thing. This is something that needs my tension right
away, right and like, uh, like that was We've never had a
launch like that, Like Third Strike was probably the previous launch that it got
not even close to that level of ire, but it got ire because like
some components of the online or the port weren't perfect. Those people like wanted
to be like this, this or this, and it's just it's like,
you know, it's like when people when fans are super passionate about any game,
right, and the passion the fuels their expectations aren't met. Uh,
you know, Deck can get reflected back at you as one of the people
who worked on the game. Right. In this case, it's like even
more frustratingcause no one knows who did what. No one knows what Rocks did
he did, No one knows what Iron Galaxy did, No one knows what
Warner Brothers did. So everyone's just yelling at everybody. And yeah, I
think I think that is something that doesn't help the situation either. Yeah,
that that comes along at the same time, like you know, yeah,
it's people spent money and we're pissed, and then that always gets weird.
Yeah that people always always be like any this isn't anybody like rolls up on
me in the mall or whatever, and they're like, hey, man,
you're the game you did sucks? I hey dive kick or whatever. Right,
it's like, if you bought it, I'm not here to tell you
how to feel about it, right, Like, you can feel however you
want about it if you bought it. Like, I'll listen to you and
I'll take what you have to say. But like, I'm not like I
understand why people are mad. I totally get it. I'm not here to
say this shouldn't be mad about stuff, you know. Yeah, well this
concludes your Batman Arkham Knight minute. That wasn't even mostly about Batman. That
was about generic game launches. You're a com right, Indeed, you guys
ended up I'm not allowed to comment on bat You guys ended up paying for
a Third Strike patch. Yeah, that was the right, So we did.
There was yeah, the very last Third Strike patch. We It's interesting,
I don't know if I would do that again. So that was like
Third Strike was like the first kind of big title we ever touched big in
terms of like intellectual property or whatever. Sure, and we did the normal
kind of launch. And you know, anytime you launch an online game that
doesn't have like a huge support network. Odds are something's gonna be broken.
It's because you can't test, you know, like this guy in Japan versus
this guy in Sweden or whatever, and they're go, one guy's behind this
shitty router, one guy's but you know, you just can't test all these
configurations and you find stuff, you find it works and what doesn't, and
you do a patch and like those kind of patches like Coom was paying for,
but then there was one more that was like, uh, like the
hardest of the hardcore fans wanted these handful of fixes done, Like so we
did. We did all the net code for Third Strike, then we did
Marvel Capcom origins, then we did Dark Stokers, and by the time we
got the Dark Stokers, we kept refining on the net code, iterating on
it. Yeah, and like the net code for Third Strike was really good
actually, but based on anything or was that. But there's like GGPO is
like fifteen twenty percent of it, you know, it's it's it's like it's
like the most houred facing twenty percent, but it's twenty percent. Yeah,
But we did a lot of things they didn't like, Like we didn't give
ping numbers in the UI, we gave like green, yellow, red,
you know which on console is pretty much the standard. That was My thinking
is that I'm the one that made that decision. It turns out that was
incredibly wrong decision because everyone that played Third Strike on GGPO on the PC had
numbers right, and so the way GPO on the piece we should have emulated
how it worked in the PC in hindsight. But and so a bunch of
things like that, and a bunch of things of like, oh we can
coalesque packets. You know, we were when we won't lose perform. It's
just a bunch of technical things we figured out. So by the time we
got the Dark Stalkers, like the net code for that kind of port of
arcade title was a reach against like theoretical maximum. Yeah, and we wanted
to bring that back in the Third Strike, along with a hand a handful
of other fixes, right because like for fride reasons one, I love Third
Strike two. It's sold a lot more than those other two games. It
had a bigger community. People are still playing it now, and there's a
hangingful of other things at Capcom's like nope, we're not you know, we
were not understood in doing that anymore. We'd rather like look for you have
you guys look forward to other stuff. And so I'm like, okay,
guys, don't do that. And then one of the guys just kind of
kept working on it on the side, and then he's like, oh,
I've got all this stuff done. But then it's like, okay, well
that's like it's cool you did that on the side, but now we have
to QA and we have to do this stuff and we have to do all
this, and so kind of made the decision as a company. They're like,
okay, let's just like put some of the money we made on it
back into it, even though it's not ours, right, And that was
interesting, Like I don't know if I do that again, Like I know
Third Strike players were super appreciative, but it's strictly like ice cold businessman term.
Yeah, it's strictly a business move. I'm not sure it was the
smartest thing I've ever done. Yeah, Like that was that was me being
a fan of Third Strike, not me like being smart about what's probably best
for Ryron Galaxy. Thinking with your joystick not your wallet. Yeah, that
happens a lot. Actually, you'd be surprised. Maybe you wouldn't who could
say, I see indeed? Yeah, all right man, we got to
get you in here for business talk more often. Stuff's interesting. Ask me
a business question. I haven't talked business yet at all. Shit, uh,
I got nothing business minute. M it's the giant bomb dot com business
match. That's what people come here for. So how is how how does
your studio find work these days? I know in the past, like you've
you've had an agent and stuff like like there's there's this agent side of the
business that I think a lot of people never hear about, and all this
other stuff like do you still have an agency that's out there finding you work
or at this point have you built up a reputation that people either definitely want
to work with you or never want to work with you. It's all of
that. So we So the way it typically gets handled, companies either have
dedicated internal people to business development, like we'll hire a bisdev guy, or
they have external agents quote unquote agents or agencies that work on it. And
I'm pretty much dedicated to just business development Internally. We also work with agents.
We work with CEA now they do like respawn and yeah, and people
like that, right, And so we used to work with Flashman, and
Flashman was awesome for us. We work with them for like five years.
But kind of the nature of like the studio agent relationship is, hey,
once I've kind of met everyone the agent knows already, Yeah, they've kind
of exhausted their usefulness. And so I flashed, like, the Flashman guys
are awesome. I loved them, but they weren't. I kind of met
everyone they know, so I don't really do I sign up with them again,
or do I get somebody with a different rolodex. And at the same
time, we've got like higher profile stuff with Sea. It's definitely a higher
profile Flashman and so h yeah, and so the way it works is,
well, I shouldn't say the way it works the way it works for us
and c A is. I talked with Derek, who's our primary agents,
and I say, Okay, I want you to try to accomplish these things
this month, like get us in with EA, who we've never done a
deal with or whatever, get us in with these people, try to get
us an RFP from Activision or whatever it is. Right, Sure, RFP
is request for proposal. They they want those. They have a game,
like we want to make this game. We're gonna send a request for proposal
to studios. They'll come in and they'll be like the first pass it like,
what studios gonna work out? Are we on our end? We get
RFPs or our sales team gets RFPs from clients? Yeah, like you know,
hey, we're the beef jerkeymen and we want to spend a zillion dollars.
What kind of package can you put together? Okay, these zillion very
similar thing? Yeah, and then what I so? I FCA going after
mostly new stuff or people we've never worked with, or maybe projects that are
bigger than we've ever done, and I focus on people we've worked with a
lot, like Microsoft or Bethesda or Warner Brothers or whatever. I focus on
them and existing clients and kind of running it like it like no matter who
finds it, like, oh, we generally need to generate a bid for
the work we're gonna do or whatever, like because they published needs to know
how much they're gonna pay us. And I'll kind of lead the process internally
no matter who finds it, to generate the bid, and then at some
point Sea hands it off to me, and then I kind of try to
get the deal done. But cool thing about agents too, it's really cool
is like they've seen probably many more deals than any bizdev guy has, and
like they know it's like, oh, for another client, you know,
I negotiated like like Capcom standard contract, right, I know they'll they'll fade
on their clawback claws or whatever it is, right because like I got them
to drop it for this other clients, So I know they'll do it.
Don't even bother about this other thing because they'll never give up that in a
billion years. So you have a better idea about how to spend your kind
of like negotiating bullets. So sure, and so just having intelligence going into
those kind of talks is always super helpful. So that's cool. And then
the reputation, uh really really helps. Like we we like we have people
like just finding us now because of all the stuff we've done all you know,
like like the you know, the bulk of our work, the number
of things we've done, and the overall Metacritic for it is like really really
impressive for studio like us, and so people just find us from that.
And so yeah, now it's definitely more of a situation where we kind of
get the pick from different things we're doing as opposed to like scrambling to find
the next Thing's LIKEA is calling you a going like we love to wrecketeer.
We want you to make the next boom blocks do still never called me,
That's not true. He had called me twice, but it's for things we
couldn't do because we're doing other things. But like, yeah, ea,
proper is never called yea. Yeah, Like it's always like the thing is
too it's it's weird the phone rings and it's like I don't know who this
company is a lot of times it could be like very natural to like,
oh, you know what, just some of an email or whatever, but
like it's like your only job is to like vet all these leads. Sure
you take every phone call you talk to it, even though you're gonna waste
a lot of your time. You know. It's like definitely like a fifty
to one situation, like you can take fifty calls that are a waste to
get that one that is worth it in a cool relationship to have or whatever.
Right, But yeah, it's a it's not like I think it sucks
about bisdev is like the like you take a lot more losses than you do
wins. Right, you get told no a lot more than you get told
yes, and so the yeses have to be amazing, like to outweigh all
the nose. And they rarely are. They rarely are. This is why
all bis deep people are alcoholics. Yeah, yeah, but you can take
solace and like those yeses are what keep the lights on. And yeah,
you can take solace in that until all the employees bitch that they don't want
to work on that game, like they're gonna have a job forever if you
didn't do your shit. Fucking employees are the worst everyone gets. When I
didn't win to work on this game, you spent the last six months getting
us to do. I think I think it's it's not for me, it's
negas. Doesn't the line my personal brand? Hey, how does unemployment align
with your personal brand? You fucking turn get typing fuck because we's so mad.
Yeah, now that's a business minute. That's the giant business minute.
Hang on, let's extend the businessman to it a minute and a half.
Here, where's the money coming from these days? Like I think you know,
you guys are primarily doing console console and PC and stuff. Like that.
But like it seems like there are a lot of people out there taking
Chinese money, the big the like the new the new thing. But like
the thing you hear a lot more of than you did last year, like
the China free to play thing was like, oh, you started hearing about
that a lot more than you used to like three or four years ago,
right right. The thing you're hearing now more this year and last year you're
hearing is the Japanese mobile publishers, your gung hos, you know, like
them you're starting they're starting to like want to do more and more stuff like
doing business with more Western developers and stuff like that. So that's like the
new thing. But like for us, we don't really chase markets like that.
We focus on just you know, the core of what we do and
we've got that on lock and so you know, we try new things all
the time, but it's not a like chasing down all those new things isn't
really focused. VR is also really hot right now. Yeah, like a
lot of people want to invest in VR in case it hits right. See,
there are definitely people throwing money at it. Yeah, and we got
one VR thing we're doing now it's pretty cool, but it's very much that
scamming kind of thing. It's like, oh, let's make a little investment
in VR. That way VR does hit, we can one say we have
experience doing it too. Maybe part of that it hitting, you know,
and if it doesn't hit, you know, it's just like so it's you
know, you main an investment didn't pan out? Like everything else? Is
it? First person di kick your first person fighting games? I don't know
how Namco is going to do a first person fighting Yeah, like TECH and
VR. So if you remember though Tech and one had first person camera view,
it's select enough times, so that's not the same as VR. No,
and that sucked. But like so I look at that and go like,
well they could do something really shitty and puke, yeah, because like
you know, there's hit reacts in fighting games, and how are you gonna
have hit reacts? Like I envisioned them doing that. I don't know if
Insomniac had a demo running on an Oculus back at E three that was just
straight up a third person behind the back game that games actually great and it
just didn't but it just didn't seem I played it it like looked cool but
nothing about it seemed like it had to be in VR, so there is
a very VR thing to it, so I always forget. Like so the
things that got me in on VR were air meck uh yeah, the E
Valkyrie yeah, and uh that that Insomniac game actually got me all into because
like so I played it at packs and the thing about it's really hard to
describe, right because it's like at first, blush, It's like, wait,
the right stick doesn't control the camera. This is just frustrating, right
right, But then you get passed on that thing. I've never gotten the
vertigo feeling like from that from any other VR stuff. Like it's it's like
it's impressive looking and stuff, but like my body just whatever. I'm just
good at it. I just I don't know. I had neither until E
three and then once it happened, I was like, I am done.
I want off right now. Yeah it fucking sucks. The bike thing it
was, yes, so it was the thing. It was the Morpheus thing
that was hooked up to a bicycle and I don't see that. I don't
know if that had anything to do with it, because it felt like the
bicycle was going to tip over. At all times, and that didn't help
either, And that's always I was always a pro. Leave it up to
Sony to ruin a new market for everybody else. Damn. Yeah. So
so the Intimiac thing actually sold you on it. Yeah, it's one of
the three, like exactly so that it's like, oh, sure, of
course you could do like a spaceship game, and of course, but like
between the Airmack thing and the e Valkyrie, which is like exactly what you
would expect to be, right, and then simic thing, it's like,
oh, there's actually a room for a bunch of different games in VR,
more so than I would have thought originally. Sure, I think rtsque like
like Airmack makes a lot of sense, and like some of the stuff that's
like board games or whatever, like you know, like somewhere you actually like
I'm literally walking around a table and moving units around. Yeah, Like there's
something kind of cool military man with the push stick fucking pushing tanks around like
that. There's something kind of awesome about that. And so we got something
working. It's gonna be cool. We'll see, And I'm oh, fuck,
sorry for the language. I played Oculus Touch for the first time,
like three weeks ago, I played Bullet Train by Epic. Oh my god,
so you were not the first person to fucking flip out at bullet Train.
Bullet Train, it is amazing. That's that weird little tress that like
the two gun demo thing they did, because the footage of that did not
look incredible. So bullet Train is so first of all, the oculus touch
is just awesome. Yeah, right, Like it's got like two triggers on
it, and it's like, why do you need two triggers? Like,
oh, go just bend over and pick up the guns on the chair in
front of you, and you do it, and you squeeze your hands and
then you grab the guns. Right, It's like one of the triggers are
for shooting, the others just for holding like the guns. Right. So
then I started so and so they got around the problem of like if you
have acceleration in VR and like a first person thing, so that's when you
get sick, right, right, So they got around it by you warped
from spot to spot to spot. Like if I want to get where Brad
is, I just kind of point my cursor at Brad, hit the hit
the X button. They'll let go and I'll teleport to where Brad is and
so you're zipping around this train station like that, and then they start encouraging
you to play with the physics of it. And that's like by itself isn't
fun. You're shooting people, you're zipping around. It's kind of like a
by the numbers like VR experience. And then once you figure out like the
physics of the world what they mean, Like like I was like throwing my
AK forty seven to like where Brad is teleporting me, catching it out of
the air, and then shooting people with it. Man, you can flick
so the accus so the touch knows when your hands are open or closed.
You could flick bullets back at the enemy like they're like swallow bullet time stuff
Like the Boston Bullet Train is this huge robot that shoots missiles at you.
You grab the missiles out of the air and throw it back at Is that
the demo where they had they had a demo ago where like cars are flipping
past you and slow motion different a big robot and there they might have changed.
They might it might be it might have been that that may change it
to this, right, Okay, but no, Bulltrain is amazing, Like
uh yeah, Like once you figure out like what the physics mean and those
mechanics and like the grabbing and the teleporting and the physics of it, it's
like, oh it's fucking awesome. Yeah that sounds awesome. But it's just
like the teleporting instead of walking thing. I think it's totally fun. It
felt powerful, But like, does that seem like something would would you play
a dozen games where you do that, where that's the primary means of moving
in every video game? Oh? I don't. I don't think about it
like that. Like I think like, oh, wow, this is the
first real like kind of locomotion innovation in VR i've seen. Yeah, and
of course there's going to be more sure right, like uh yeah, it's
not like oh if every yeah, of course, if every game does that,
I'm not gonna want to do it anymore. But like I'm just confident,
like, oh wow, some really smart people figured this out after monking
with it for a couple of months. Like that's pretty cool, you know.
Yeah that thing sounds bulltrain thing sounds that sounds wild. Yeah, that
does does sound pretty awesome. I now wants to try that. Yeah,
all right, business minute and a half. Yeah, several minutes. That's
more like the VR minute. But that's well VR business, Well business and
VR go together. I guess. I guess she'lling counts this business. I
guess. So I was shilled out for epic. That's cool, all right,
Well, uh, there's another big release today. I like to think
it's a big release, Yeah, because I just spent the last week playing
it. Rise of the Tomb Rater is out today. Yeah. I a
review on the site I played through that it's an Xbox One exclusive. You
may have heard. Yeah, so, I mean you have talked about it
in this way and it seems like it's they're they're. What they're saying about
as well, is that there is more rating of tombs and tomb Rater.
Yeah, it's uh, well, you know, the first game was pretty
linear, pretty like shoot through these encounters, like climb on these things,
and the way that we want you to like get from A to B two
C follow the story. Like this game is way less linear than that.
I mean, the story is still linear, but there is much more of
like a like a hesitate to use the word open or the phrase open world,
but like there are parts of this game that almost feel like an open
world game, like like way bigger areas, a lot more kind of criss
crossing paths, and just rounded design, you know, yeah, like mission
givers that hang out and give you a little side quest to do, like
it's nothing super involved. I was gonna say, because like the the idea
of a big round area in a game that was formerly linear almost sounds like
what Black Ops was trying to do with some of their which I guess we
haven't talked about Black Ops yet, got more games to talk about. That's
like they have like that. It seemed like that's how they were gonna do
co op is like, oh, here's gonna you're gonna bowl out into this
area and and fight here for a while and then move on. But it
really seems like it's just the one area that they showed an E three Is
that right, and the rest is not. This game's got a handful of
them. I think they call them hubs, like the marketing called them hubs
or whatever. But there are places you go back to between story beats basically
like the story beats like kind of happen in smaller, like more tightly designed
like levels that kind of spoke off of these bigger, bigger area is And
there's a lot of metroidy type stuff in this game, like you're getting you're
getting gear onto the ball. Yes, that's the first thing you get.
Great, can you shoot messals? Uh? Later on? Are there red
doors? Maybe some of them might be read I'm trying to remember. There
are a bunch of doors everywhere that you can't get into until it's like,
oh, these this type of door. Once you get the rope arrows,
you can shoot an arrow into it and yank it and it'll break over.
This other type of door you need like explosive arrows to blow up. You
know, like there's a lot of like, oh, you can't swim through
these places because you need underwater breathing gear underwater arrows. Yeah, you're just
say that every single thing was an arrow shot the underwater arrows arrows. Uh.
You know, like they close a bunch of paths off to you,
but like tease you with them enough that like the second you get that gear,
you're like, I want to go back and see what was in those
places. You know, like a lot of the h a lot of the
optional tombs are behind stuff like that. Not all of them, some of
them you can do as soon as you get to them. Yeah, it's
a lot of backtracking, but like they make it feel worthwhile cool to go
do that stuff. You can fast travel and stuff. The first game had
fast travel, but it was not great or just wasn't It doesn't seem valuable,
Like, right, there was not much reason to ever go back and
do stuff. Did you do a lot of that you can travel first game?
Right, Yeah, I love all the optional stuff, all the side
tims and sad, but I never really went back, right unless you just
felt like you had to get every achievement in the game. Yeah, Like
there wasn't a lot of value in traveling back to earlier areas. Uh,
whereas this game, Like there you see tons of stuff in this game that
you just straight up cannot do in the context of where you're at in the
progression and you have to go back. But you know, it's super easy
to fast travel back and forth. But also like like the world just feels
a little more alive to me, Like when you go back to older areas,
like it'll be a different time of day or like there'll be some other
weather going on, like they've repopulated a lot of the enemy encounters with like
slightly different enemies and stuff like it seems like a minor thing, but you
know, yeah, like it kind of makes things feel a little more lively.
Gosh, what else is there to say, Like, it's just it's
just a better game overall. Like I found the story a lot more interesting,
like the reveals the builds up to, like kind of the you know,
the ancient mystical truths that come into play and stuff like that are are
handled a little bit better than Animus the whole time. Yep, you got
it. Yeah, you're that guy. Spoiler warning, You're that guy who
pieced together all the little trailers and marketing and figured out exact about Desmond Miles
the whole time. This is where he's been. It's not dead. They
wanted you to think he was dead. They sold him to Square. Yes,
that's what they did. I mean, it's just like right across town.
You know, I got an email from someone at Square that I someone
in like the mobile end of Square or something like that, that said like,
hello, I'm I work. It was this crazy emails like I worked
for Square n X. You may know us as the publishers of Final Fantasy
and tomb Raider. It was just weird to think of that company introducing themselves
that. I mean, I guess that's like that's it. Those are like
the two biggest things that they do, right well, I mean Dragon Quest
maybe sure, you know, on a worldwide basis, maybe not here someone
maybe not here these days so much. I guess, I guess those are
the biggest thing. It was just a weird It was a weird thing of
like, hey, I'm the guy from Square, you know, the tomb
Raider. But like it's still it's still a weird feel. It's it's weird
to hear them building themselves that way after they were out there in the press
saying that the first tumb Rater was like a disappointment financially, never that well
yeah, and you know, and Microsoft said like, well, hey,
well we could use one of those. I guess. So I'm still not
clear what point Microsoft came into that conversation, though, sure, like you
have to assume the game was already being done. I mean, it's coming
out on other platforms, right, I don't know who knows. It's a
good it's a very good game though. I really enjoyed, like it's just
a better mix of like you know, the shooting and climbing stuff from the
first game, but but a lot more exploration, like the tombs are that
that makes more of them. I'm gonna I'm gonna play some of this game.
I'm gonna get because like the first tumb Rater really put me off with
kind of just its initial like quick timiness. Yeah, there's ways of good
because it was that thing of you know, it is the thing that I
saw multiple times over the course of the game being promoted, and then it
was like, you know, one of the first things you see when you
get is like just kind of shimmying sideways through this tight cave, and it's
just like I just need to keep holding up. This is barely a game.
But then I feel that way about the climbing and uncharted a lot of
the time too, is like there's zero stakes here. I'm never gonna fall.
I just have to keep pushing up. This gets away from that a
lot, like like there will be a lot of things like where you like
you'll have to make a jump to a handhold, but then you have like
it's not a handhold, it's like a surface you can bury your axe in
so you have to jump and time it. Okay, Yeah, it feels
like you're doing something, you know, even though games, Yes, like
it's still a very tightly constrained like there's only one way to do this,
but you at least have the time a button press to catch it, you
know, like it feels like you've got some agency there, even even in
those sequences debating whether to wait for the PC one or to go ahead the
Xbox because I have a feeling it's gonna come up in game of the year
discussion. But I played the last one on PC and it ran great.
Yeah, and just from seeing the quick look that you did, Brad,
yeah, it looks gorgeous and I have a feeling it would look great.
Like the visual design is fantastic in this game. There are parts of this
that the environments are just like unparalleled, but the animations on yeah, like
all the well, now, yeah, the animation is really good, except
for like the way they blend together is kind of jankie in a lot of
cases, but it's really the environment sign The art design is is just top
fucking notch uh, And it mostly looks totally fine on the Xbox. But
there's a few spots where it's like, man, like, the performance is
not really like living up to what this deserves. I mean generally, like
if you want to play a new tumb Rator and you've got an Xbox one,
like you're totally fine to just play it on there probably might have.
But the PC version is gonna look really good. Have they given a date
to those? They said, they said, Q one for PC, Q
four for PS fourth. Yea, it'll be a year away on on the
PS four but but yeah, it's just it's it's the story is better,
the like, the mix of action is way better. The exploration is a
lot more prominent, like it's not just shooting your way through a bunch of
merks. And then, like you said, like all those all those kind
of like scripted escape sequences from the first game. You know, it's like
you're running along this path that's crumbling and you can only go one very specific
way. You have to kind of predict like where they decided to break up
the bridge in front of you and just kind of follow that stuff. Like
there's way less of that cool, way more tumor like it. You know,
it sounds shitty, but there's way more tomb rating. Yeah, that's
there were things about the way that she controlled that I that I really appreciate
it. Yeah, but just yeah, there's some good stuff that it was
cut with too much of that other like I was, I was showing Dan,
Like even the combat feels more varied, Like you've got more stealth options,
you've got more ways to like craft weapons that you can throw dudes and
stuff. But like there's some really good stuff in there, Like that little
scramble move that she has. It's not a role necessarily, yeah, you
know, like it doesn't it doesn't displace you as much as a role in
most third person game against do you know, Yeah, where you end up
like you know, kind of ten feet away or whatever. It's just like
a real quick dodge thing that just gets you out of fire enough to like
kind of get behind cover and stuff. Like there's some some good stuff there.
But but yeah, like reviewing quick look up on the site. Should
go check that stuff out if you're more interested, But I highly recommend it.
Cool. Uh. I didn't know we had to talk about Black Ops,
but I guess we have to talk about black It came out Friday,
right, so we have not had a podcast discussion Black Ops three. I
didn't. I didn't really just time for that, but let's go. Call
of block Ops three was released. Yeah, okay, gun game is back.
There you go. I like gun game game. Yes, gun game
is good. I think Gun Game is good as well. I think last
year's a game is better. I think this game has a ton of stuff
in it, Like it's it's one of the This is a game that like
you look at on paper and you go, man, they really pulled out
of the stops, like they they made a second secret campaign that unlocks after
you beat the first one that is like zombies focused, which has been popular
for them, but it's incorporated in a way that you still get to do
the fun stuff movement wise from the campaign. It's not like, well it's
a noir thing, so stand around, I guess, and become the beast.
You know. We still have a robot suit and the like story of
the zombie thing because it's it uses it's an unlockable thing, but it reuses
the cut scenes from the campaign and they mute all the vo and it's just
your character talking. It's replaced by like your your character kind of like reminiscing
about these events to a doctor and but she's talking about like the zombie apocalypse
and all this other shit. It's just it's this crazy reuse of assets where
they're able to to you know, you go through the same environments in different
order, but it's the same basic flow through a level. It's just the
combat is totally different, and it's like weapon power ups that drop instead of
you you know, uh, just picking your load out and doing all the
stuff that you do. It. It's an interesting alternative mode that it's but
it's like that's just there's free running in this game. There's like a four
player wave based co op thing. There's you know, there's just you go
on the list. There's a ton of shit in it. I just don't
think it's that great. Uh. Did you feel with the campaign? Like
I feel like there's almost less big set piece call of duty feeling moments.
I feel like it's more open areas to fight, but it's all kind of
saying like here's a bunch of robots. No, there's the real tough robot
guy. And I didn't feel like outside of like you know that flood thing
from the quick look and like there's this ferris wheel thing that looks kind of
cool, but it feels like they're trying to really create almost like a Halo
level of sandboxy puzzley type stuff, because it's like, hey, you have
these cyber abilities, Uh, go ahead and use those how you see fit
on these enemies and and try to get through this encounter in a different way
maybe, but really, once you get the ability to just set off grenades
in people's pockets or set robots on fire with your mind, so like that
seems like the ability in that game, with like a few exceptions. Does
everybody roll around with grenades? Yes? Sure, everyone in this world carries
a grenade. Even if they've thrown a grenade at you, they've always got
one to say, bad guys. Maybe grenades aren't a great idea anymore,
gets the mind soldiers, Uh, you know, leave your grenades at home.
Uh. It really makes me wish that syndicate had done better and the
EA had made another syndicate with Starbreeze or something, because this does sound kind
of like that. Yeah, because you know you're you have abilities like that.
When it's not the idea of hacking enemies and stuff like that, you
know, it's it's there are some similarities to be drawn, but you know,
it's a duty game. I think the mobility stuff is it's okay.
What was the Giant Bomb company name? Corporate name in syndicate, there's a
Giant Bomb heavy Industries heavy industry. Yeah. Uh, you know, like
you were saying, they crammed a bunch of stuff into this game, and
like split screen was there for campaign and zombies and all that stuff, and
I was super excited about that. This weekend, me my girlfriend were like,
let's sit down and just play the entire campaign. And we did split
screen, but it is not optimized at all for like using the screen real
estate. You can't read anything. So when you're going to your like loadout
and stuff, Like, we scooted the couch across the room and I've got
fifty six HTV, I said, seven feet away from it. There's your
mistake. Oh okay, get closer, get two feet away from your TV.
I don't care. I'm bigot. He basically did. We basically pushed
the cow's probably will fall out. We're probably literally three feet from the TV
and we're still like, you know, anytime you have to change your cyber
cores or mess with your load out or read something in your kind of hub
area between missions, it's completely unreadable and also it takes a huge hit as
far as frame rate and just you know the details four it's PS four.
We tried it on PC first, but that was freezing anytime a grenade went
off. Cool and I've got a really good computer, but I was having
the menu problem that you had. Yeah, it sounds like there's non issue
at launch that Yeah, you know that it just wasn't running, right,
said that was with five zone. I got nice seven and so I don't
know, we just got some other fun problem it. Yeah, it was
not working well. So we switched to PS four and the games am I
right, what's going on? But it's still like it's fun and it's playable,
like I'm glad I can do split screen with my girlfriend, but it's
it's not that optimized by Yeah, you know, it's the for me.
Black Ops has always been where they've done interesting campaign stuff, and this game
is interesting, but it's like barely tied to the previous the events of the
previous games directly. It's more like thematically you think about the mind control stuff
and they're kind of telling those stories, but with Cybernetics. I think Christopher
Maloney's pretty good in it, yeah, but I think Christoper Malone's just Malone's
just good. Yeah. I like that guy a lot. He's good and
stuff. So so that kind of that was like a point in the game's
favor before. I'm but like, oh wait, this dude to this yeah,
which I didn't I did not know when I sat down to play it.
It was just like at the beginning of the game, you know,
not to play through the first mission, and then your idiot, fucking generic
military man walks up to this other guy goes, hey, how's it going,
and then he pulls back and you're like, oh shit, that's Christopher.
Which that reminds me another thing in coop. You can't pause the game
and coop, so that the part where Christopher Maloney is sitting on a train
at the very beginning explaining something to you, we both like tried to pause
to go do something and came back later and it's like, wait, why
are we in this hub area and it says we beat the mission or whatever,
and they keep alluding to this big thing that happened at the beginning when
chrispher Maloney was talking to you, and we're like, what is this train
thing they keep referring to because we did not see it at all, because
apparently it does not register as a pause even when both people pause in the
co op flit screen. Weird. Yeah, that's that's a bummer. I
have to say, I only watched it over your shoulder a little bit.
Yeah, I don't think that fake Christopher Maloney looks quite as good as fake
Kevin Spacey did. Pretty it's pretty good. It's not bad. Like,
don't get me wrong, I've seen worse, like digital celebrities or what you
were saying at the eyes. Yeah, like the eyeline of the eyeline stuff
is weird because all those cut scenes are all real time, so you can
still look around and move, but you can't move completely. But you do
get some opportunities to move a little bit, or at least move the camera
around. Yeah, it's like if you're looking the camera just right, the
island lines up perfectly by default. Yeah, that's a game where you end
up with like cut scenes that are happening with your back their backs to you,
because you know you still have full movement control while these characters are talking.
I mean a lot a lot of games do handle having people look you
in the eye pretty well, even as even as you move around them.
But I have to go back and look at advanced warfare. Maybe that aspect
of it wasn't great. Also, Kevin Spacey's not in that game a ton,
I guess not, though it seems worth good. But a lot of
those were pre rendered even in some yea, yeah, you're some of them
sort of different, some of them were thing but good on Christopher Maloney though,
man running in that crowd. You know, well, now you are,
you are headlining a call of duty, but like you know, at
what cost, like you know what like two years too late? You know,
just like this well I well, I mean more than like to follow
up a guy like Kevin Spacey who was like well respected actor, Like that's
a that's that seems yeah, it's I you know, this game reminds me
a lot of Call of Duty ghosts in like in that it's it wasn't certainly
a call of duty game and does seemed like a nice thing to say.
Yeah, I like is bad. Ghost is not bad. I think on
the scale of good to bad, the call of Duty it is down there.
People like Ghost is the most negative I've heard people be about a Call
of Duty in a very long time. But Ghost did have the Snoop Dogg
voice pack, so it kind of wins some points back, there's what's the
lowest market? Yea, I assume we're counting that in the evaluation. I
assume that, well, it wasn't available to launch, so it wasn't you
know, it wasn't factored in the review. Times you update the review though,
No, I did not mean because I find that's super useful. Like
when I'm thinking about a game six months after it launched, I I'll always
want to know what people think about it after, like really really part of
the current actual like thoughts about this game. What did they date is their
opinion chain? I gotta know. I find it super useful. Yeah,
that's why we have the podcast so we can come back, you know,
three years later and go ghosts am I right, and then move on.
It's just you were kind of ghosts am I right then if I remember,
No, yeah, totally, that's my prevailing memory of it. Was like
everybody was very underwhelmed with that. I put that on my time. I
put that pretty high my top tesla did. Yeah, I really liked that
game. It's it's a Call of Duty game, but I just they make
one a year and that was that Church slid off into a cliff Man.
That was that was pretty cool. Was pretty cool. Yeah, it was
all grave shit. But like the end of that campaign and then like there
were no UAVs. That Satcom stuff I thought was was a little like I
understand they got to change it up, but man, no, uh So,
anyway, this is a lot like Ghosts and that they've made another Call
of Duty game, and if you're up for that, like it's it's a
there are there's quality there. You see the money on the screen. They
they spent the budget and then some I'm sure you know, like it's or
whatever. It's there's a lot of fucking game there. But I think the
movement in advanced warfare is just better. So like the multiplayer, I think
it's more fun there. Across the board, it's better. Yeah, yeah,
there's nothing Black Ops he does I think better than warfare. I think
advanced warfare is it's a it's generally a better campaign. I also think that
like you know, if you look at Black Ops two, what they did
with like the branching campaign, and just like well like cool moments of just
like oh you shot this guy here and this happened, or you know,
it's like stuff that they've done in Black Ops previously that this is. This
just seems like exceedingly linear and exceedingly set in stone in a way that is
disappointing. It was Black Ops two, the one that had like the RTS.
Yes, those missions they were terrible because I stopped. I played Black
Ops two and I was really digging it, especially like the branching stuff,
and I got to that first RTS mission and I tried it twice and I
couldn't beat it. I've never played. It was just broken. You had
you had to do everything yourself to pass those missions, like you could never
rely on your your your AI guys. You're supposed to be like, hey,
this team, go protect point A, but you pretty much just have
to run between every point everything. And that was the only way through that.
So I don't know if they patched that later or not, but that
we did do an update to it, and I was like, I should
go back and check that OCS. I really liked that game. And then
just you know, yeah, right, it's just like who who has time,
but everything else in the campaign was pretty cool, I thought. In
Black Ops two, yeah, and I think that Black Ops three's story goes
some interesting places, like places the franchise has never gone before. But at
the same time, you know, the stories a little straightforward, and I
think, like, like, the nicest thing I say about it is that
they seemed to lift major story beats at both the beginning and end of the
game from RoboCop. Like the nicest thing I could say about it is that
it reminded me of RoboCop twice, so pretty good on the scale, pretty
good about RoboCop multiple times. Today. It was a good day. But
yeah, you know, it's it's like Ghosts and I'm all in. I
liked Advanced Warfare a lot, a lot, a lot, and I don't
know that I'll play much more of this. I think it's the weakest Black
Ops for sure. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean Black Ops
one was. I mean, they put Treyarch on the map when at a
time when the franchise desperately needed something like that, you know, that was
huge. You know, they're like the everyone talks about the numbers, even
people, you know, people shit all over Call of Duty. Campaigns like
who employs that go? That's right, everyone fucking talked about that dampaign.
Everyone fucking played that campaign. People were excited about that stuff. Yeah,
and then they you know, they with all the branching stuff, like they
seemed poised to take Call of Duty campaigns in a fresh new direction after Black
Ops two, and then the game after that was just like right back to
just like man with the word follow written over his head and that's what follow
him. I wonder if they got cold feet with doing weird stuff like that
because of the reception to those RTS missions. I don't know, maybe or
maybe just you know, it just sounds like there are so many different things
in this game. Maybe they couldn't just focus as much on right, maybe
like the raw thing of like the numbers, they're just like you know,
the numbers, Mason, The numbers say we shouldn't invest in the campaign as
heavily as we did last time. I don't know. There's definitely big moments
in the campaign. Uh, and yeah, there's some that's there's some weird
shit in that game in the same way that Black Ops one had it,
but in a futuristic Cyberman context that I think is like pretty fun for what
it is, but playing the game is just it's flat. It's all flat.
I think it's it's a good game, but it's probably like a bottom
three Call of Duty for me. I'd say it's this Ghosts and three or
my three lowest. Probably World at War was a war is like that's a
contender, but yeah, three, I don't. I don't like three much
at all. But actually, I mean I never I didn't really get into
that franchise until four came out. Okay, yeah, one, two and
three, Like I recognized them as quality products when they came out. It
was just like, man, there's some fucking awesome, crazy next level shooter
shit going on. But I remember, you know, we talked about it
every time it comes up. But I remember the E three when they showed
Call of Duty four, and when Jason Ocampo came back from his appointment at
game Spot and he was just like, you need to fucking go see Call
a fucking Duty. Like you just like, yeah, eyed in a way
that was insane. It's like, no, you need to. And then
I went and saw it and I was like no, yep, you're right,
yep, absolutely, And then that game came out and was fucking killer
man. Wow, they should you want to do business with Activision, Go
convince them that someone needs to remake Call of Duty four. Make it Red
dawnny your Yeah, even more Red Dawn the same, Yeah, a little
more Red Dawn. Yeah, let's go just multiplayer only, just those maps.
Just say whatever, we're gonna make those maps, but look good.
The same James, the whole pitch, same tell me need nine bucks,
same rules, Just nine bucks. Yeah, that's all you needs to tell
right, you're just uppressing existing maps. It comes for free. I don't
give him a game, and he's getting nine bucks. Yeah. You say,
like, I don't know. We shut down, don't call here anymore.
That opened up a new company. Uh huh, Iron Galaxy get them.
Yeah. I like the way this is going. This is smart.
There's nothing wrong with this plane at all. This is everyone scams money out
of me. Boy on the phone, Yeah, okay, what could go
wrong? Hey, what's your name, son Murphy? Wrong? Your name
is news. Let's move on. It's a news Okay, that's waiting for
improved already. Uh yeah, you're not getting anything out of me for your
RoboCop transition. Fine, go, fine, that's a mobocop Callmack. I
think you pick up on that. Yep, uh, he said Murphy,
he did, that was his name. I know they talk about this on
the Beast Cast a lot already, and maybe we should decide officially what we
want to do about rehashing from the things. We're here to say them,
we've been here longer than that thing. We'll be here after they're going,
Yeah, that's right, flash in the Pan New York podcast this year's Giant
Bombs Chicago. Yeah, after after, long after the bombs fall. We've
got a vault lined up. We'll figure it out. Uh yeah, well
I know that they talked about the the Activision King acquisition. Yeah, at
length. They are card king and armor King. They got they got the
market sewn up, all the costumes on Army single one. The woman spikes
on the fucking shoulder things amazing. Bobby Codick owns all the leopard men now.
Bobby Kodick throws people into volcanoes like three days a week, like he
is. That man is like the living embodiment of Hey Hachi. He just
doesn't have he doesn't hasn't grown the hair yet. Yeah. Do you think
he styles his hair out towards Ailie at night when nobody's when no one's around,
when no one's around, it does it naturally, he's suppressing it.
It just it pops out. And then he looks in the mirror and goes,
I was in Moneyball and then just like throws dudes into volcanoes. Does
that make like Zampella like devil Gin? Yeah? Pretty much cast out?
Yeah, pretty good. Oh man, I don't really know what to say.
Yeah, they probably they paid just I have six billion dollars to acquire
candy crush maker King, which Austin gets into a lot of detail on the
side about nerd. I thought the business minute was over. If you if
you no longer become aroused with the thought of six billion dollars, I don't
know what to tell you. It's only half cash, and that cash was
off shorecast dodging the tax. But that's that's a lot of the detail that
Austin gets into in the story. Yeah, they they saved themselves about a
billion dollars in federal taxes by buying foreign interests with that money rather than bringing
it back into the US. Yeah, So I guess make that what you
will the American way. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, I mean this
gets some a ton of users. This seems like, this seems like the
sort of thing that rounds out their portfolio. And you know, I was
talking to Stan who we work with here on some some business stuff for about
Giant Bomb and kind of asked him has taken He was just like, yeah,
this, you know, this is like like Wall Street will probably eat
this ship up totally. Business Insider ran a nice little pie chart that was
very illustrative because currently the mobile share of Activision's revenue was a tiny little sliver.
Yeah. I mean what they did Skylanders, that did Guitar Hero,
but those are like they sell those as like full price products. They're not
playing in the mobile space in the free to play end of it the way
that everyone else. It's also in territories that don't matter, like like the
US, US doesn't really matter, right, It's like you want to be
Japan, you want to be Korea, you know, by Asia, China,
like that's where you need to be and that's why they did it.
So yeah, so the before and after pie chart of this thing was like
very visually instructive because like even just combining King current revenue into their kind of
total offering just outside of even revenue. Like if now you have access to
like the entire world of game players. Yeah, like before you didn't have
Asia exactly exactly. Yeah, but yeah, it brings mobile into their portfolio
in a way that it absolutely was not before. Yeah, a third pillar,
if you will. Yes, indeed, business all the slices of the
pie we're the same size you right there? I love bus. What's Bobby
Codick's favorite pie? It's pie a mud pie. Uh yeah, you can
go read this new story and look at lava on a Graham cracker crust.
Oh geez, check out all of the business figures, the dollar amounts.
Spent too long to think about what his actual favorite pie is. Yeah,
but he got I don't got nothing. There's an answer, though you ever
met him? No, what do you think you ever will? No?
No, no, you don't run in those circles. I I think the
people I didner face with are two levels below Bobby. Okay, yeah,
that's pretty good. That's only a couple of rungs. Let's just say keep
climbing the ladder. Yeah, we'll see like good and what way? Like,
what is this world? I don't like that's the end goal to get
to me. The best thing about like meat and CEOs like that and being
tight with like like I'm really tight with like CEO of this company or that
company. Yeah, is your dinners are awesome, Like your business dinners are
fucking rad. It's amazingly Bobby Kodick doesn't go to fucking eyehop man, it's
pretty cool. Oh he doesn't. He doesn't know what he's missing. Yeah,
you know their holiday menus coming up. It's true, it is true.
It's good to have options. Let me just say it like that.
Yes, that is true. Now Activision has four hundred and seventy four million
more options in the form of King's user base. M let's move on Overwatch.
Remember that. Yeah, it's that new Blizzard first person shooter that everybody
thought was free to play, except it's not. It's coming out for money.
Yeah, it's going to be forty dollars for the base package on the
PC. Okay, sixty dollars on the consoles, which I guess was not
officially announced, although come on, yeah, it seemed pretty obvious that was
gonna happen, that that thing would end up on the current consoles, So
it'll be sixty bucks on on Xbox and PS four for the looks like they're
calling it the Origins Edition, and that will also exist on PC for six.
So it looks like, yes, you can get to go the Way
of the Skins and get all that extra stuff or whatever. So I understand
this correctly. It looks like even the forty dollars based version on the PC
will have all twenty one heroes in it. So they are and they're calling
them heroes. Uh, that's the type of game they're making. I don't
know if that's official nomenclature. That's the thing that Call of Duty Black Ops
three does that kind of just slightly, doesn't. They call them specialists.
But they're trying to they're trying to come up with a brandle a name for
their well, they're trying to establish characters in a mobilike way. Okay,
like these characters have these abilities, especially when so in their esports mode there
are picks and bands. When you told me and that thing, I was
like, I don't I don't know, man, it's yeah, that that
is something that I look at and go like, obviously, yeah, you
want to be an esports thing. But at some point I feel like they're
they're going into that direction at the expense of the rest of the player base.
A lot of a lot of attempts at forced esports this year. Uh
huh, Well, I think that's how everyone sets out when they plan to
do their esports. The thing they sit down, they play, let's try
to force an esports, right, everyone sets out fail. You can't.
Amazing, Yeah, you can't. You can't force it. You gotta let
it grow organically. The community will decide like that if you want to fuck
up, like the like on the e sports tip it is, bring your
unreleased game two packs and fucking announcers shouting over it. Yeah. Yeah.
And also I just well, I guess Doda proves that I was gonna say,
don't have weird fantasy shit in your fucking esports game. But I guess
Doda and League and smider all that. I feel like when it comes to
like action games, it just doesn't read to me like evolved specifically, Like
you look at that game as like, you know, the way they were
trying to say, like this is gonna be a big esports things, like
the fuck it is? What are you talking about? No? What do
you mean fantasy though in that context, I mean in context of like I
feel like the sports are best when parts of them resemble a sports sport I
see, I see as opposed to just saying the competition here. You know,
so like Rocket League, yes rocket well no, well yes, like
Rocket League Monday Night Combat. Yeah, Like I feel like that's that's can
be a way to go to just make that stuff make sense, even DODA.
You know, it's like they have the casting, the scores at the
top of the screen, the timer, you know, like the things that
even even good field of stuff, like the custom banners you can have around
the world that show which team is on which side and stuff. Yeah,
that's that's one that well whatever, I'm you know, what's the new Sony
one, like you're talking, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Riggs has
the look of a thing they're gonna try and make like a vr E sports
thingy, And they said as much, I guess, but like it just
yeah, I don't know, like whatever, you can only go so far
with future sports before that looks corny too. I'm not saying like make everything
cyber sports, but at the same time, I just yeah, just just
let let it let the community form. Just make it. Just make a
good ass game that is properly competitive, and support and foster that community from
the ground up. Don't don't come in going like its gonna be big,
that's adorable, so cute. Yeah this marketing teams. Stop stop marketing teams.
Let's just let's let's make a game, not spend any money launching it,
and just that way launching it. Let's do that, but get it
in front of people, like set the stage for it, but don't tell
people. Don't trying to preten you're trying. All you're doing when you're saying
those things, you're trying to pre select an audience, right and say,
hey, I think if you like this thing, you might like this thing.
That's all you're saying, right, You're trying to give yourself make sure
the right audience is like, oh, I haven't interest in this thing,
I should check it out. That doesn't mean they're not I don't think it's
ship yeah, but that that audience in particular is super protective of it's scene
and is very skittish about the appearance of like sleazy suits coming in trying to
I mean, fighting games I'm familiar with this, but also at the same
time, I would say that, like the sports has been sleazy suits from
day one. That's fair. There when when it was like fucking people playing
Quake for money, it was like people going like this is gonna be on
TV? Is the next poke? Or this could be this? Well,
I mean that was largely like the people try to organize around it. Yes,
not the people playing it necessarily. I mean the notion that, like
Legan Doda is this organic thing. They're just people that exploited this warcraft mod.
It's all like, good, it's not this thing. It's like,
dude, Doda, Doda is as grassroots as he could possibly get. Like
it is literally a mod that became popular in the Internet cafes as a competitive
thing. Doda. Yeah, yeah, Doda. Two well, lego legends,
which are completely different things. Sure, our exploitations on that organic thing.
They found those audiences and they said, hey, bro, if you
like this thing, check out my version of it. But they no,
but bullshit. They were almost completely literally making that. Remember when they went
to internationally that million tournament the first one no one know who Doda too was
a bunch of bullshit. That was not true. That was bullshit man Dendy
played in that game. Many guys are the worst fucking sellouts, Am I
right? I want authenticity? Yeah, okay, well there's no appearances.
To me, there's no parents and Blizzards taking that tack with Overwatching does not
skinny cigarettes and talk about how these man have you guys? Have you guys
seen any indication that, like, maybe I've missed something, But Donkey Kong
a competitive Donkey Kong and now we're talking it's my shood. That's real in
the South suburbs in Illinois. As will we play it's gonna blow up.
Nah, man, We're not gonna let it blow up because I want to
keep it real, keep keep it in the basement. That's right. Overwatch
does not. Overwatch does not look like an esport to me. Yeah,
I don't think. I don't know, have you said, I haven't seen
them put out any any shout casted competitive matches. I mean there aren't they
having tournaments for it at blizzcond and they bayed stuff like that, like yeah,
but they do that with it. I don't think Blizzard makes anything that
they don't want to be an esport. Sure, oh sure, have a
logo that has Blizzard Esports on it, like, but they're not. They're
not pushing that angle hard with this game right now like they do. They
put the bat out there like they're just letting people play it. Yeah,
yeah, you're you're right, but I think that game, actually he gets
to like that game is the tipping point for like everything basically everything is for
Diablo maybe where it's i mean even Diablo has got seasons and a leaderboard.
Sure it's not quite the same thing, but I think that they're never going
to make a game again that doesn't tie into that stuff, whether they're overt
about it or not. Like they already have a machine in place to promote
esports things as esports, so they can let the game be the game.
Yeah, and then have their dark division over here. That is just like
let's chop up this adderall and get going all. I mean, I'm not
saying that Overwatch won't get to that point, but they're not coming out of
the gate with like shoving that stuff in your face, you know, righting
it right now, they're just talking about, here's what the game is.
OK. Yeah, you're right. I might I might say that one hundred
percent of that game looks like it is esports, I would start, probably
the only difference is you kind of like Overwatch and you didn't care for Evolve.
I wouldn't say that. I bet that's one hundred percent what it is,
But I'm not saying that I'd like Overwatch, Like I played it and
I think it's well made, but it didn't really do a lot for me.
Now what you got, I stand by my stamment. Okay, stand
by it. How's it working for fighting games these days? I mean nurturing
a killer instinct community that was like highly skeptical out of the gate, like
you guys took the reins on it, and it's fighting community is like a
fraction the size of these things. Yeah, it's like a bunch of publishers
trying to you know, like I think everyone's like everyone's kind of like,
why aren't we as big as those things? Right? We should be Like
these games are easier to get into, they're easier to understand what's happening.
They should be better on stream, right, And so I think it's like
people are waiting for that to happen, but until it happens, it's a
bunch of people just kind of like you know, fighting over the same tiny
pool players relative to those games anyway. Sure, yeah, it's it's true,
it's it's yeah, it's hard. Yeah, I get the impression that
we I mean, like killers think community is growing for sure, like it's
doing well, and like the fact that anyone there's an Xbox One could play
it for free and check it out, you know, like definitely helps.
It's like competitive advantage for us for sure, and the communities like received us
really well. But it's like at the same time, it's like, you
know, fighting games. No one considers fighting games esports, you know,
and that's because like a lot of the players in that community came out I
think it's very seriously and said we are not this, like, do not
brand us as this, Like we're actively pushed it away, right Uh yeah,
I mean it's there. They are. What's the word, what's the
generous way to put it. Let's say slightly xenophobic. Let's say that,
like they just want the games they want and like, you know, everyone
says it's classic, like we want new stuff. As long as Capcom made
it, Capcom make the new stuff, like you know, like Mortal Kombat,
it's probably gonna sell more than like Street Fight or five, Right,
but like Street Fighter five is gonna headlin all the tournament still, Right,
It's like the competitive scene in fighting games is not dictated by like what people
actually play. Really it's weird. Yeah, But I don't know, Like
I think that it's one of those things where like not the people don't not
that it's not well, it's not dictated by the games that people play on
a wide scale, because like you think about Mortal Kombat, it's kind of
a special case of like there are people buying Mortal Kombat that have zero interest
in any other fighting game because they always liked those games and largely Scorpion is
dope or you know whatever. I think it's largely unique. It might be
wrong about this, but I think that's largely unique to fighting games. Like
I think, like you know, the proportionate size of like the competitive scenes
and like StarCraft two League Legends dot to two, they're relative to the size
of the player base. Right. I think that's a lot more true in
that than isn't fighting games. Yeah, And it's weird, and it makes
it hard to because like you have to capture the hardcore competitive fan base and
fighting games you have to otherwise, like no one's gonna give shit. But
then you've captured a very tiny audience, and maybe the people that buy Mortal
Kombat don't give a shit about your game anymore, you know, because you
made it too hard to get into or whatever. And like like there's a
there's a complexity, not even necessarily a depth, there's a complexity that the
hardcore fighting game fans want. Uh that's that's does not translate to sales on
a mass scale. Sure, and it's I think it's relatively unique to fighting
games. Yeah, I guess you could say, also, well that's that's
been true in rts. Yeah, you know, mobus to some extent.
I mean yeah, yeah, but you know, is there like a good,
easy to pick up and play MOBI that has been super successful? I
mean here is the Storm is trying to be exactly that. Yeah, Okay,
you might say it like Smite and some of these more actiony ones kind
of doing okay, yeah, m Yeah. Fighting games have always been weird,
especially like this recent like the most recent resurgence of them in this like
streaming world of internet fun. Like it's just gotten weirder. So it used
to just be people have fun on the internet. No, no, no,
no, no, the stream. Running a stream is fun. Hooking
up the gear is fun. Like I think about it, like when Capcom
was super exploitative of all their IP like PS one PS two era, when
they were just like actively driving all that shit into the ground. It's just
like fuck it. Street Fighter Anniversary Collection three, how about that, this
one's just got the Alpha games. I don't know, uh that that stuff.
Like as someone who was, you know, super into fighting games as
much as you could be at that point, you know, more or less,
Like at some point it's just like this is just too much, Like
it's the games aren't any good anymore. But at the same time, like
I miss Bloody Roar, I miss like busted weird ass fighting games. I
miss like four Guys Robots. No one misses four Goods. No one misses
Goods, bio Freaks. That's where it's a cardinal said. But like you
know, like all just the when when there was when there were so many
fighting games coming out that you could just you could just find crazy shit.
You could import wild Ship from Japan and just go like this is fucking nuts,
uh, and no one's ever gonna play it. But I'm glad it's
here and I don't know it's it's it bumps me out that that I think
that's now that's that's like turned it into the anime scene. Oh man,
that's like your that's like your zerd and your that's that's what that that's where
the anime fighters. Yeah yeah yeah, those but those got so everything got
technically complicated because everyone's chasing after that dream, right of the complicated competitive fighting
game that like I kind of like some of the simple shit. Yeah,
there's that middle ground is missing, but fighting game minute. Yeah, a
lot of minutes in this podcast, and we's just talk about different things.
Let's move on. Unless you have anything else to say about Overwatch. It's
okay. I put some of it on the extra life stream like it.
I want to pla play it for myself, but watching you play it made
did not fill me with like super excitement. I don't know. Yeah,
it controls well. To hear the heroes, I guess what they're called are
you know, they're very nicely differentiated. They all have very different abilities and
stuff, but like, I don't know, to an extent for me,
when it was just like it's like, well, all these characters play very
differently, but it's all in service of this very generic old feeling escort mission,
you know, yeah, which just this type of war kind of very
very very like kind of stock standard like team versus team, first person shooter
objective stuff. You know, maybe maybe they'll differentiate this stuff a little bit
more from other shooters at some point. Anyway, last news story, The
full list the initial list of Xbox One backwards capatibility for three sixty is out.
Yeah, this thing launches this week. God, you're right, yeah
that dash right, yeah, Thursday. I believe that's pretty it's pretty funny.
We went to a meeting here in town to see Microsoft and talk to
some of their I guess the engineers about the new dashboard stuff, and they
were very much like, oh, we don't have a date for it.
It's you know, it's like we're just gonna ship some time in November,
but we don't want to necessarily nail it down. And then it was like
less than forty eight hours later, it's like, come out of the twelfths,
like, oh shit, how those guys feel right now? All right,
then get it done. I guess all right, I'm just gonna read
this list to you very quickly you've stopped me, or chime in if you
feel anything strongly. It's hardwood spades on there, let's let's make let's go
Ya's okay if we like it in fart noises if we don't, all right,
oh okay, okay, alright, the app out or mouth part.
Okay, We've got a lot of games to get through. Let's go here,
Okay. A Kingdom for Kathling's, A World of Keathling's. Yeah,
Alien Homedd HD, Assassin's Creed too. Yeah, it's the only Assassin's Creed
on this list. Yeah what Yes, Asteroids and a Deluxe ya. I
don't even know what that is. Uh, Banjo Kazooi, Nuts and Bolts,
Yeah, yeah, yes, yeah, yeah, Clash of Heroes huh
uh, I don't know Banjo Kazooi and Banjo TWOI sure Battle Block Theater combat
fuck is that was? That was the remake? Yeah? Atari did that
run of like shitty. It was like stainless steel, like I don't think
I've ever seen no, it wasn't it was. I think Asteroids and Deluxe
was one of those. Also, I don't think i've Centipede two that it
a centipede like d X or something. How the fun did they remake?
Combat was okay though, I think and I didn't know about it. What
Gallagher Legions was all right? Yeah? Man, the d X one is
the one I'm talking about. The better a billion definitely better. Yeah,
just you know, looking coming at it after like pac Man Championship Edition,
it was like, X is not that right? Uh, let's see,
I lost my place. Should have done a mappy pitch namconam dude offered to
do Mappy Championship Edition d X for NAMCO. Oh. The formatting on this
list is very bad. Give me a second. When Jammer's Championship Edition DX,
what are we doing? You know what? I'm sorry the word raps
of Combat wrapped down from a different game. They posted this list in a
two column format that does not copy and paste. Well awesome. I don't
know what they were thinking. I apologize. Combat is not one of these
games. It's gonna say, like I know, however, when Monday Night
Combat comes off later on though, then you know, yep. Uh,
let's see. How sad is it that half titles of games also sound like
games Monday Night yep? Winter Game? All right, let's whip through these
battle Block Theater, be Jeweled two, Bellatoor Mma on slot Beyond Good and
Evil HD. Yeah, Blood of the Werewolf, never heard of it,
Blood Rain, Betrayal Borderlands however, not Borderlands too. That's because it's already
for sale on the XPO. Welcome. Yes, over the Call of wirez
gun Slinger. Yes, Castle Crashers, that's a good one, Castle Storm,
it's a pretty good game. Test Crashers come out when it's already already.
It's free too, if you had cast Crashers free for fun. Comparison
between two wait did it come out of and it was? I think it
was free if you had it on you. So maybe they're just counting that
as that. Oh they wouldn't do that. I don't think so. Castle
Storm said, Centipede and Millipede condemned criminal Origins, Yeah, but not condemned
too. Yeah, that's okay too, Crazy Taxi, Yeah, Deadliest Warrior
Legends, No Defense Grid, The Awakening, No, uh, Dirt three
and Dirt Showed Down? Okay, okay, Discs of Tron Yeah, George
Gomez, thank you. Sure. So that's a great game. Oh,
Doom and Doom two. I didn't realize those were on here. Those are
those are good ports, Dungeon, Siege three, Earthworm, gym HD right
the Due three Fable is okay, yeah, yeah, it wasn't. That's
the first game I'm read you had a mule. You could just put shit
in send it off to sell it. Hey, good things. Fable two,
no, Fable three, fall Out three Okay, yeah, that's just
free with Yeah. Yeah, Feeding Frenzy and Feeding Frenzy two Showdown. I
like Feeding Frenzy all four years of Wars one, two, three in Judgment,
which are also free four if you if you have that Ultimate Edition,
you get those for free. Golden Axe yeah, okay, Halo Relation of
an Emulation, Halo, Spartan as Salt, Hardwood Backgammon, Hardwood Hearts,
oh fuck, and Hardwood Space yes right over. Those were like launch games.
That's that's ridiculous. Well, right after Heavy Weapon comes Hexa heavy Weapon,
it was good. Poker Smash in there, Poker Smash, We'll get
there, Poker Smash launch trailer. Yeah, Bananas. I was like when
we were getting ready to reveal Giant Bomb. I think that was right around
the time Poker Smash came out. It's like that and Burnout Paris. I
remember that around that time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Poker Smash was
cool. Was Wake in the Fable of Souls? I like that game.
It's all right, so launch So yeah, the Hardwood stuff is the occasion
where I'm like, yeah, that's kind of weird. Three of your one
hundred games like those are three different slots on whoever the publisher is of that
is still solvent enough to sign a deal to make that come out. I
guess, so, I guess Heavy Weapon, as I said, hex hd
Ekruga. Yeah, it was a great one to have on here, jet
Pack refueled. You know that some of these came along with the rare thing
Joey Ride Turbo just cause two Cameo Elements of Power, Yeah, Lego Pirates
of the Caribbean, Lego Star Wars, the Complete Saga, load Runner,
Lumines Live. Not a great version of load Runner, version of Luminous mass
Effect okay, just mass effect, get you gotta get you started on one
something. I guess forty hours later they'll add mass effect too, maybe metals
like three metals like xx. All right, those I remember being Yankee online.
A lot of those new Geoports were weird. Might Magic Clash of Heroes,
that's a good game. Mirror's Edge, okay, Missile Command some of
these are like some of these that Missic Command is one of those, Like,
we made a new Missile Command and it's not a good game. Some
of these just read to me as like very subtle marketing for like upcoming sequels.
Are you saying there's a new missic Command in the works. Yes,
that's exactly what I'm saying. Shit, there's definitely a new Mirror's Edge coming
though, I've heard of that. Yeah, I bet you have Monday Night
Combat, Monkey Island Special Edition, Monkey Island two Special Edition, Missplosion,
Man, m Blobs, Attack En Plus, NBA jam On Fire Edition,
Nights Into Dreams. It was on Xbox very sixty. Yeah. Yeah,
I didn't realize that nights in there. I don't think so. That game's
godlike. It would have been three, it would have been right at the
top. I guess Operation Flat Point, Dragon Rising. Oh yeah, pac
Man Champion and Ship Edition and Ceed x plus are on that list. That's
fucking awesome. Those are both great games. You know, I got past
the g's and I didn't see Geometry Wars on there, even though that's been
in the preview program. Weird, So I guess this list maybe isn't Maybe
they're pulling that back. That original Geometry Wars is still the best reason to
have this feature, so I can play that out of three sixty hooked up
Perfect Dark and Perfect Dark zero, fandom Breaker, bat Grounds, Pinball Effects
Lance versus Zombies, fan Breaker, Prince of Persia. I guess that's probably
that twenty eight one. Oh yeah, weird or I mean they made an
next bild like the Sands of Times. That one would be No, no,
there was like a remake of the original. It's that one, okay,
Sands of Time. No, no, there was time. There was
a reboo. It was just called Oh that was the one with its purple
and pink cover is all very uh like, kind of painterly, painterly looking,
and old North did the voice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I
like But I bet this is the XPIL I bet you, I bet you
right, the remake of the original. Yeah yeah, yeah. Charrotica is
on there. Nope, dude, repast what you think of that? They
made that new Charrotic. I liked it. It was weird. It was
weird and it wasn't good, but I liked it. Yeah, it was
not good. It was not good, but I liked that. But I
liked that. Someone said, let's make another charrotic Yeah, and they tried
to do something they knew. Yeah, they the Bird Bird, That Bird
Bird. Uh Putty Squad, that's that game that we did a quip that
that game came out on disc on PS four, Yeah, right, okay.
I was like, yeah, this is one of those ye like it's
it's an Amiga game. It's very British. Yeah, very British. Yes,
I remember that Rayman three HD our type of dimensions that games? God
like our type dimensions? What is that? What's the one that came out
on PS What's the PS two one? You had? Like hundreds of ship
Oh Delton? Was was Final type? Final Type? Final? Final?
Was PS? Okay? I never Dimensions is what I think. Dimensions is
not a new game, right, It's like a remake of I was thinking
I was thinking of Final. It might be the remake of the first one.
I think Final is Sacred Citadel. Here we go. This is when
it gets crazy. Saga Vantage Collection Alex Kidd and the company Saga Vantage Collection
Golden Axe. Hey, remember when Golden Axe was also mentioned earlier on this
list, weird Saga Vantage Collection Monster World did that? Did they make Savage
Collection Streets the other Golden as a new Golden Axe? Did that game come
out? I think working on the studio get Yeah, okay, that all
got like there is out there is a very very really for PS two is
terrible. There's a very old like Launch era three sixty xpla port of Golden
Axe. Oh and then it must have come back out under this Saga Ventage
Collection label, and they're both well I mean, you know, if people
bottom they're not putting these out to sell more really I know, but like,
but when you've been going the main thing for me with this list is
that they've been going around since E three going like we'll have a hundred games
backwards compatible at launch, and like four of those are Saga Vantage Collection games.
Yeah, you know, yeah like it. It's it's mildly underwhelming.
Shadow Complex that's a good game. Yeah. Our SEP Dimensions appears to be
our type in our type two in one okay with like it was not good
with with like with like new graphics, but it wasn't good. I was
about to go buy that once I realized what it was, but it was
not good. Okay, uh, Sonic the Hedgehog one, two, and
three and CD. That's four games on that list. What about Knuckles three
came? They were separate the things. Yeah, there's originally gonna be Sonic
three and Knuckles, but then it was separated into two. Did they sell
knuckles and this just not on the list? I don't remember if XBLA got
Knuckles. Yeah, I don't know. It's not paid DLC. Don't give
my tears. Maybe they would have gone the other way with I don't know
whatever. Pay to pay, man, it's a new model, super meat
Boy. Have you've been in meetings where people literally use the term paid to
pay? The first time I've ever seen it is when people are describing Overwatch.
It's the first time I've ever seen. Yeah, and I just it's
the most immediately struck me, the most cynical things and one could possibly say,
and I wanted to punch the person in the face. Also kind of
accurate enough. I don't know if whatever, super me Boy, super meat
Boy. Yeah, that's kind of exciting to me actually because I tried to
play that Vita version that came out, and like, I'd hate to say
it, but I guess I'm one of those people where the lack of the
music really bums me out to the point that I don't remember what the old
music sounds like. So I played that new one and kind of didn't like
what they had going on in musically. So I remember multiple songs from the
first release very distinctly. You played a lot more of that game that I
did. I did play a lot of Super Meat Boy, but I also
just love Danny b Stuff, Supreme Commander two, Tom Clancy's Rainbow six Vegas
that comes with Siege Right Yes, uh, South Park, The Stick of
Truth, Torchlight, Toy Soldiers and Toy Soldiers, Cold War Tron Evolution,
Buckle up, It's back Tron Evolution, Back in the Saddle. Addition,
basically Ugly Americans Apocalypse Now. To get it to work, you have to
put figures on the portal and now man, then you get the Jeff Bridges
figure and you put it on there and it says sorry, just counted how
many these games we worked on. Viva Pinata and Trouble in Paradise, Wolfenstein,
three D. Yeah. I don't think I even realized that there was
a part of that on XPLA and Zuma. Zuma's all right, yeah,
I bought Zuma. Yeah, that's all right. I guess all right,
Well, there's your backwards compatible games coming on Thursday along with that and dashboard.
I wonder how frequently they will update that list. I hope it's frequently,
because there's definitely a lot of stuff on there that I wish was there
that was Capcom stuff at all. Yeah. Yeah, the publishers just said,
I guess no, no rock Star stuff. Uh. It just seems
like the sort of thing that like like that, like if publishers would rather
you buy their new games, then let give you easier ways to play some
of their older stuff, Right. That's that's kind of how some of that
strikes you would hope. Yeah, if there's some weird it's it's kind of
spotty in cases. You know. It's like like lots of Sega stuff,
Yeah, lots of Sega stuff, like a decent amount of you Be stuff
stuff, but like the Sea stuff like whatever that they could generate new sales
on some of that Sega stuff because it's still fucking Sonic the Hedgehog, Like,
why not show you know, have it for sale in more places?
Right? Uh? Yeah, I don't know. I do hope that list
expands dramatically in the coming months. That dashboard has gotten a lot better for
me in the last week or so. Oh yeah, yeah, I don't
know if you've been using it much. I went straight from Halo to reviewing
Two Raiders, so I've been spending a lot of time on that platform.
I went from I mean, I'll turn on an Xbox tonight to start on
that version of Fallout to give it a look. But I have not touched
it since the end of Need for Speed. It's it's less. It's definitely
less buggy and quicker than it was. Uh. I'm excited for that final
version to come out. What's the what's the idol? This is? Give
me a ten seconds on this. It's the Giant Bomb collective thought on Halo
five. I like it. It's good, it's fun, it's it's good
and solid. It's a good, solid Halo campaign. I think the card
stuff and multiplayer is an unwelcome edition, But all right, ten seconds you
asked for it, Good job, Yeah, emails BombCast a giant bomb dot
com to whip through these. Nick from Portsmouth, New Half shure right into
it. I've been reading articles as of late comparing the sales of the PS
four and the Xbox one. Fun yeah right, this biz time, we'll
have another business minute, get my guns out. It seems the PS four
is f are ahead of the Xbox One the Xbox One in sales. Excuse
me, but does that mean that the Xbox is doing bad? If we
were compared the sales of the Xbox one two the three sixty, isn't the
Xbox one ahead of the three sixty? That seems more like the PS four
is doing insanely well while the Xbox one is just doing well. Dave,
if you got any being on the biz side, you got any any kind
of feelings about like that's my understanding of the whole thing, is it?
Like I think the interesting question and I don't know, it's going to very
publisher publisher genre genre. It's not so much installed base as it is attach
rate, Like who's who's buying games on what console? Like PS four has
got Like I don't know even I don't know what the like the number of
different consoles is right, but like if everyone that has PS four is only
buying those games, you know, that's like a bigger problem than like just
the install base. Like that's the w problem, right, Like everybody went
out and bought a we and then never bought anything. Yeah, like the
sports for it, the console console number is super important because it's like a
it's like a necessary but not sufficient and condition to be successful, right,
but it's definitely not the most important determinator. Like yeah, yeah, it
kind of makes me think of like those there were those months where we were
getting to look at the mpds and seeing like Destiny out selling or Destiny selling
more on the Xbox than it was on the PS four, and like trying
to like figure out some reason that that was actually happening, and not being
able to come up with anything. For me, that's the reason is just
that that's where the Halo fan base lives, right, and they'd be the
people would be most likely to immediately jump onto Bungee's new game. That seemed
to seemed to be the explanation we came up with. It's like when the
like fighting game tournaments right at the beginning of last Gen, they are all
played on PS three, even though like the Xbox version rans right usually ran
better, and they were because everyone had PS two USB sticks that would work
on PS three, right, and so the community started playing on PS three
even though it was like not the preferred platform, like from a performance standpoint
or a network options and feature standpoint at the time. It's just weird stuff
happens around, Like these little genres have their own kind of issues that uh
yeah, business it's hard to figure out. It's almost like it's a job
or something, right, who my job? That's why I just make it
up as I go along. Yes, that is my understanding that, like
even the Xbox is doing better now than three sixty was at this point.
So I don't know if that's still true, but maybe maybe not. It
was true as of like a couple months ago. Sure, yeah, if
they're off to historical great start, right, like the console business is strong.
All just seems like people wants yeah yeah, except for the week.
Yeah well yeah, uh okay. Joe from Hungary writes in I hope you're
hungry hungry Joe, uh yeah, because in the last podcast you were talking
about brains and that you wouldn't eat brains. Well, let me tell you
guys, you are missing out. Brains are delicious. I would try a
brain, calbrain, pig brain, chicken brain. Would you eat human?
No? I mean that's that would that's would be like that. Don't don't
say you'd try everything about it's not known bad for you? On let's eating
human bad for you? Yeah, they just go what do they just cook
it like I'm not saying. I'm not saying, like go bite into it
while he's smoking a cigarette or something like that. I mean, let me,
let me, let me outline the rest of Joe's argument here. Seriously,
in Europe we eat brains all the fucking time. You saute the brain,
season it with salt and pepper, and put it in scrabbled eggs.
What a lovely breakfast or my favorite food ever brain filled pork Cutlet take a
slice of boneless pork meat shoulder or pork tenderloin. Tenderized the meat until it's
nice and evenly thin. Season the meat on both sides with salt and pepper.
Put the pre saute aid brain in it, and roll it up nicely.
Don't forget to tuck in the sides. Use toothpicks to secure the meat.
Then dip it in flour, then scrabbled eggs and roll it in bread
crumbs, then deep fry it until it's golden. Brain scrambled eggs involved in
this brain welcome. I I love scrabbled eggs. Eggs actually had brains at
Iron Galaxy holiday party two years ago. Yeah. It was placed in chicag
called Frontier and they have whole animal surface. It's like gross, like a
whole hog or a whole pig whatever, and they do that, then sure
if they roasted hole and they pick it apart in like on a table at
the front of the party and there's everything, there's brains, eyeballs, everything,
god, And so we actually did that. It was yeah, who
ate the eyeballs. I think Tommy Carbone junior head and eyeball. He was
not a fan. That's so gross. Do you try the brain? I
did that wasn't didn't like it. No. What was the texture like like
characterizing It's exactly what you would expects, like rubbery? Uh, kind of
chewy, yeah, not like a little crunchy like kind of ana sushi ban
sushi, like a snap to it bad sushi texture. Okay, it's like,
oh was it? Ok? Maybe it's softer than I'm in. Then
it's like, you know, I think of bad sushi is like you bite
and it doesn't he don't sink into it. Yeah, okay, yeah yeah,
man, Yeah that doesn't sound super apetizing and yeah like bad eel.
Joe also goes on at length about the virtues of bone Marrow, which I
can god like, dude, bone marrow is delicious on some nice crusty bread.
Yeah like this Joe character. Man, we should go we should go
out go to Hungary. Yeah yeah, no, right, she could find
this guy. I'm doing it right out there, all right. Next email
comes in from Ryan. It's about VR. There was some news last week
of a nine to eleven VR experience being developed by O eight six Studios that
would have players in a quote narrative driven experience designed for virtual reality, playing
as an office worker in the North Tower. Personally, While I'm not sure
this will be the project to cover nine to eleven in a tasteful manner,
I am excited for the potential stories VR will assist in telling in the future.
I'm curious as you guys thoughts on this particular project. I see a
number of parallels to the canceled games Six Days in Fallujah, which also covered
some very touchy subjects and never made it to consumers. Is the fact that
the game is in VR way at all? In your opinion, is there
a particular story or time period you would like to see invoked in a VR
game. I think it's you know, it's one of the things where why
is that subject matter being taken on? Is it like literally a case of
just like, well, we think we can get some headlines if we do
this, which just just ends up being kind of exploitat Yeah, which I
you know, I think it sometimes it'll go into that territory, even if
that wasn't their original intent. Like, you know, there were probably some
people working on Six Days of Fluja that that felt like they were. I
mean. The difference too, is that game had like a I remember it
had a relatively large publisher on it too. Was I was gonna say,
like Namco or something, but maybe I don't know, though I thought it
had like there was someone on board that got scared off. It had a
publisher, and that's this It just sounds like like that's like it's like an
Indian. Yeah, it sounds like some some dudes with the VR rig somewhere,
so it was gonna be theres always be like indie people making weird stuff,
Like it's the difference the six folution thing was I think got picked up.
Yeah, uh, I don't know. My feeling about this particular project
is like, you know, think about the particular horrors of being in that
situation, right, like the smoke, the noise, the instability and the
building and then the you know yeah yeah, the the possibility of having to
jump out the window instead of facing all of this stuff was like kay with
with the six Like, I don't know, it's like think of the think
about what VR does with things like like like heights and other kinds of like
really like deep sort of bodily threats, you know, and like what that
does to your subconscious and stuff like that could be a super effective way to
put somebody in that like maybe too effective. It seems like the early big
no no for people is never take camera control away from anyone. Uh,
And like the constraints around VR games are extreme, like otherwise like amazingly non
trivial percentI of people get sick if you just take the camera away. You
do, like a bunch of things like you move the camera like it's so
it's like, how do you do any game with those constraints? And how
do you do the things you just said are interesting with those kind of constraints?
You know, it makes it really hardy, Like we're just gonna say,
like, I think the answer your question is like any game of tastefully
done could be fine, right, but like, what are the odds that
game is one being tastefully done and could be good in VR? You know,
I think that's a different question. Sure, yeah, yeah, if
it's even gonna be a game, Like who knows what the intent of this
thing is? And it almost sounds like more of a kind of an interactive
art exhibition type thing, putting you in this position. Brandon from Columbus,
Ohio? Why why why don't games release on Fridays? Were a full time
job? Games coming out on Tuesday's suck. I'll pop in Fall at four
and I'll play it for a bit and then be thinking about the weekend the
rest of the week, because that's when the real binge gaming happens. Is
there a logical reason that games release on Tuesdays? It was always a holdover
from the way the retail worked right, well, like other stuff came out
on Tuesday's right, Yeah, stuff like everything on Tuesday. The trucks were
already going to the stores, right. But I don't know what the underlying
reason is for that. In general, I think it was so they could
be driving over the weekend, get there on a Monday Tuesday, so it
doesn't get there on a Friday, then have to sit there until Monday or
whatever it is. I or have to have a chance for the product to
get out to all the stores equally or something. I guess maybe we would
get shipments a lot at Funko Land on Tuesday morning, like sometimes we're lucky
to get it changed. At some point, yeah, that changed where like
it was less trucks. It was less like the truck is here with the
stuff from the distribution warehouse, and it became like we're getting games FedEx into
the store or whatever, right, So at some point, yeah, that
just when they offloaded it to just kind of commercial shippers or whatever it was
for some of the different stores than maybe that just the Tuesday thing didn't matter
as much. I don't know. Mortal Kombat Tuesday made a lot of sense.
So but yeah, that was sometime, and I want to I want
to say I didn't notice it until like the PS one was out. It
feels like that's when it kind of solidified, Like Genesis games just seemed to
fucking just show up. But also there was no internet to like keep track
of dates, and magazines didn't keep good track of that ship. So some
release data from games released in North America from like the sixteen bit arab back
are surprisingly hard to come by. Really, there's like a pretty good article
of people trying to determine the actual release date of Super Mario Brothers in the
US because of the way that the NES rolled out in eighty five. The
territory, like the test market stuff, like some of that stuff was just
unclear. It was less about like hold it for this date and more like
when you get him, sell him. I don't know. So I got
an email that I did not pull I think, last week from a guy
who lived in see It, like right near Nintendo headquarters in the eighties,
and like supposedly he was saying that like one day a month you could go
down and buy an NES from the warehouse at Nintendo. Huh. I have
no way to verify if that was actually true or not. It's weird.
It's just a guy he knew was selling it right back. Yeah. Maybe
it's like, Yo, we got all we got, we got mock Rider,
but the battery backup works. You could save your tracks. I don't
believe you. Also, fuck, they opened up that Nintendo PlayStation and we
didn't talk about it. I'll have to talk about that next week. Yeah,
super disc Yeah okay. Nick in Queensland, Australia rights and I've been
playing excuse me, Need for Speed twenty fifteen. I still have plenty of
races to complete and collectibles to acquire, but I've already unlocked all the one
thousand achievement points for the game. Uh, and not having achievements to work
towards makes me not want to play any further. Wait, he still has
events to complete, that's what he says. I'm pretty sure it's not possible
that. Okay, I don't know. Well, the question stands even if
he's not right about this particular case. How do you guys feel about games
that hand out all their points before the game is one complete. I think
it depends on how the game is built. Yeah, I don't have a
problem with that. You know, there are some games that, like the
full one hundred percent of that game is not a reasonable thing to expect out
of a player. So this is not like an official Iron Galaxy position,
but like I personally do not give a shit about achievements. Yeah, they're
invisible to me. I don't even know when that happened to me. At
some point, yeah, and I used to still love them. Yeah,
like three sixty early three, early into mid three sixty, I was all
about that ship. And at some point I remember you, Adam Johnny,
I remember that, like, yeah, uh, I never got it like
you guys did, but I was into it. And then now I just,
oh, like, don't even look at him anymore. Yeah, yeah,
it's I think part of it is just the three sixty was better at
well, it was first at doing the achievement stuff when PS three didn't have
it. So when PS three rolled out was already kind of too late.
Like I had already built up a big number over on three sixties. So
that's the number that is worth caring about. And now like everything's more up
in the air, like steam achievements never mattered. Ye, don't make a
sound, you know that. Well, Yeah, that's you don't make you
don't hear a sound when you get your achievement. What's the point? Well,
also, if you can download a thing to unlock achieve in the game,
I know what the actual argument is. Yeah, uh yeah, it's
I used to really be interested in in like achievement design and like how those
things get determined and all that sort of stuff. But at some point,
like it all just went away and I was like, I don't get a
fuck. It's weird. I don't know. I can still get down with
some really clever achievement design, you know, even if I don't, I'm
more thaying like I won't even be aware that exists, right, Like,
because I used to like look up what the achievements are before I play the
game. I still do that, and I'd look for stuff I used to
back in the mid like mid three sixty I would go on like X three
sixty eight out of ORGEA. Not only that, I would if I would
find their guide, and I would specifically look at like, all right,
what are the missible achievements? Because I want to make sure I can there's
nothing I'm gonna lock myself out of my first play through? What do I
make sure I'm doing yeah, like what gun do I need twenty kills with?
Right? Like, but to the extent that I would like read what
we're basically like spoilers based on like they're all like, all right, well
on this mission when you're fighting this guy, make sure you do this because
you can't go back and do It's like I would like ruin plot points for
myself to make sure I didn't miss stuff. Definitely not that crazy about it
anymore. I think that's, you know, a similar argument but in a
different way about like Fallout and like how you spec a character determining like you
know what you can do in the game and all that sort of stuff.
Like there is that feeling of like, well, I don't want to miss
anything. Yeah, so I want to make sure I can hack every door
on to make sure I can read every single like email that fake email that
they wrote to somebody else, even though they're all bad. Uh tum Rider
does something like what he's talking about that I am way into their achievements for
getting twenty five and seventy five percent of the collectibles in the game, but
that's it. Uh far cry Forward did the same thing. Yeah, you
could get all the collectible trophies and achievements in that game without getting everything,
which I am all for. H Jason Atlanta, Are you guys ever getting
ready to record a podcast and then are just like, man, fuck video
games. I do not want to talk about this garbage for another three hours.
No, no, yeah, yeah, no, yeah. The podcast.
This podcast is probably one of the most enjoyable things that we do,
or that I do. It's fun, it's fun. It's fun to wrap
about the stuff you're playing. Like we don't always. We don't always have
these conversations during the week, especially not on Mondays because we're getting ready to
record, So there's always like we did some shit over the weekend and we're
not going to talk about it until we get up here. Kind of have
to save it. Yeah. He has another question, how come no one
ever uses buns as a term for buttocks anymore until Dawn did it and it
seemed weird? Dave, do you remember that? I don't remember when somebody
said buns? And then probably the reason I don't remember it because I don't
think buns is not it doesn't strike me as like a weird thing to say
anymore. I don't know, but I'm old, so sounds very eighties to
me, like buns, Buns of steel. Absolutely. I think it's only
fun to talk about buns if you use a z Okay, sure giving him
buns, you know, yeah said buns. So I think we're like late
eighties. We're talking about that Nicki Minaj song that samples baby Got Back,
like just came out this year. So buns are back as far as I'm
concerned. They they never left left, all right. Always incredibly important.
That's good to know. They'll always be around. Buds will always be around,
that's true. Uh. Next email comes in from Cereal the podcast.
I hope I'm saying that, No, hope finally break through. They're gonna
give us the name of the person we decided to release this on another podcast.
Don't block this guy's name. I don't know if I said it right,
Okay, I think I did. Uh. My friend insists that pizza
is an open faced sandwich because pizza is ingredients and block his address. Jonathan
writes in, and hang on, I'm gonna skip that one now. This
one's from Wesley and that was face sandwich. That was decisive. Fuck yourself,
that's great. God. Uh greetings from Wesley in Belgium. What's the
best Chicago pizza? And can I get it here? Pe quads? No,
you cannot, John, the one that some dude is making in his
fucking garage. No, how is Georgiana. I was looked upon by natives.
It's a beat here. Really, it's good, really good. Have
you have you had any of San Francisco's deep dish off of not nothing?
No, I've never been. When I'm here, I'm I you can get
that anytime, right, Well, no, it's not that i'd like to
see. I'd like to try it out. Just most of us are a
laugh at it. But uh, the people that I hang out with here
aren't like, let's go get deep dish, right, yeah, just get
a little star going out here on business and they're taking you to fancy your
places. Exactly? Is cornmeal crust the thing in Chicago is. Okay,
yeah, that's a that's a that's a hallmark of a A and S tire
pizzas. Okay, yes, wow, okay, Yeah, a little star
is all about the corn meal. It's probably yeah, it's probably good.
It's good. Yeah. Crust is like the stealth most important part of pizza.
Yeah, steps the best nothing, it's the it's the thing it is
on the good crust is step crust. Well bad bad crust can really fuck
up an otherwise good pizza. Yes, that is what I would say.
All right, Wesley writes in from Belgium. I want a pizza real bad,
Yeah, really good. I'm really hungry. We need to get out
of here. It's dinner time. Two more emails. In a few months,
my baby girl will be born. And because me and my wife are
frequent gamers, we are thinking of some game character names. Just stop.
So I wanted this to serve as a cautionary tale. All right, go
on, we couldn't find a lot of names, and now we're stuck.
The name's Faith from Mirror's Edge and Gladys no portal, I mean Gladys's real
name, so it's Faith. Are now our favorites? Yeah, but that
was that was glass Doss right. That wasn't Gladys right, it was it
was It's os differently, but it's pronounced like Gladys is like a crazy old
lady name. Like don't Gladys is dirty? Like that's that the like,
let's bring back these names that we're only given to people years ago, and
so you think of them as like, you know, my really old aunt
was named It's like I would, I would stare clear of faith, even
if it was not video game related, like don't give any obvious angle to
be made fun of it. Like like if your kid's name, like you
know, like hey, you know, just use your name in a phrase
like don't do it, don't do it to him? Buns y z with
that? Who would make fun of that? Man, that's awesome, that's
great. Yeah, I don't know. I can't. I cannot, Sorry,
Wesley, I don't think we can endorse the naming of your child.
The weird naming kids is weird because it's like before the kid's born, it
seems like the most important thing in the world. And then the minute the
kid's born, you realize, like, oh, any name would have been
fun for a while, like we totally debate, like my boy, we
waited three days to name him. Wow, And it was like yeah,
it's like it's just really weird. It seems like it's super important, and
you fight over it, you get an arguments about it, and you trade
stuff you like ghost shatter, and then the kids born it's like, oh,
any of those names would have been perfectly fine, Like thank god,
this kid's healthy. Yeah you know. It's like, yeah, you're right,
Adolph. It is oh no, oh boy, all right. Last
email comes in from Jonathan, also mister Hitler, if you're nasty, yeah,
very nasty. Jonathan wants to know if he's screwing up as a father.
Chances already. Yes. Recently, my four year old daughter has been
watching me play Metal Gear Solid five. I should probably stop there, but
I'll continue. While I was playing one day, she asked me, what's
that man's name? And I said Snake. She repeats Snake. He's cool,
daddy, I laughed. She proceeded to ask me more questions about Snake
as her interest screw. She would cheer when I choked out bad guys and
scream if I got detected while sneaking kids. Seems cool. Deep down,
yeah, deep down I knew she really should not be watching, but I
was enjoying our strange bonding time. To make a long story short, she
is obsessed now, and it's all my fault. I finished the game and
hope she'd forget about metal Gear, but she hasn't. She now watches people
play it on YouTube. This is a four year old that's obsessed, has
unfettered access to YouTube. Yes, yeah, kid's gonna be president officially doing
a bad job. Yeah, I don't know. But also let me let
me you're doing a bad job. But it also doesn't matter because the kid's
only going to play Minecraft. That's the reality of it. Yeah, like
that's probably right, fostered the metal gear thing, but then also add professional
wrestling. If you fostered the metal gear, you'll be ensuring that she does
not give a shit about metal gear when she turned seven, that's true,
Like you can't push Yeah yeah, Like I know someone who named their daughter's
middle name Shell from Portal and then the whole room is all like Portal crap
and mirrors and stuff. Like you're just gonna make them hate video games?
Yeah, what are you doing if you're plus, they're only gonna like Minecraft?
I mean, so I think it's weird. Let's get serious here for
a second. You don't mind, Like, do you think Minecraft has like
the legs to be Like when this kid is like like the inten in ten
years, will it will it be a Minecraft too? Or will it just
be Minecraft as it exists today, will always exist and be built on and
be built you know. I mean it's we think. I think, uh,
Microcraft has to sell it to people again. Ninety million units of the
game, right, Yeah, there's like more YouTube videos on Minecraft than like
almost everything else put together. So I heard some sane stat like that,
right, like the Yeah, Minecraft is like Star Wars, right, It's
like this generation Star Wars. It's gonna be here for twenty five years.
Like half my kid's wardrobe is Minecraft ships. It's all Minecraft ship That's all
it is. We're Doomedraft is good. But at the same time, you'd
like to think it would change at some point and evolve and like the ways
that it only can when it becomes an entirely new game, right, I
don't know, I mean we're not. I don't know what. Is it
too complete already? It should just be left as is. I don't know.
It's highly modeble. It's yeah, maybe they don't need to do anything
else. It seems to be too fine, I guess, so they'll probably
be fine with it. I mean, there's more question of what could they
do if they broke from what they had and completely started fresh, right,
But I mean they're getting the premise. I guess what Jeff's getting at.
It's like we're doomed, is like why would they ever do that? Yeah?
Like if right, yeah if like like and when I say we're doomed,
I mean like it becomes like if there's one game to serve everyone,
there is no game business. It's a Minecraft business. Yeah. See,
I don't think it's like that at all. Like I think, like like
my three kids, I have a twelve year old and nine year old and
a seven year old girl. Boy girl. They all play and love Minecraft.
The two on the outside are not video game players. The differences Minecraft
gets non video game players. My boy loves Minecraft, plays Minecraft all the
time, but he also will play other stuff, like he loves Mario stuff
like you know, you like they're but he loves Minecraft most but he still
plays other things. One day, I'm sure we'll get sick of Minecraft,
like eventually, like I got sick of playing with my Star Wars figures,
right, We'll move on other stuff. But like every kid is gonna play
Minecraft and love it obsessily for years. I think it's just like I've not
like literally every kid, but I think, uh, now, it won't
be metal gear. It was never gonna be metal gear. Yeah. I
mean, they're never gonna make another metal gear, so maybe they'll do metal
gear skins for Minecraft. Yea. Also, like Venom, Snake is not
a hero for your daughter to look at and applause. Probably pretty cool,
but like cool doesn't factor into it. He's a noble soldiery. Dan never
have children. I'm not planning on it. Okay, yeah, all right,
I mean he turns bad, but at this point he's a noble soldier.
Bombcasts a giant palm dot com see email address Dave Lang. Yes,
sir, thank you for being here, Thank you for having me, Thank
you for hanging man. Thanks for asking me questions. You know some people
are afraid to ask. Yeah, we stepped it up and you're still awake.
Did it You made it? Hanging on? Yeah? I made it.
We even moving it back forth in that chair. I'm to get my
movement. This is why I was doing push up club yesterday, because I
knew if I to sat in the chair for too long, I would just
flowing ten. I got going now. It's a little shimmy. Plus it's
just sexy as hell. It's true. I wasn't gonna say anything because I
was audio and I don't want to deprive people. But that's the real reason
we have to end this podcast. I was having trouble containing myself over here
time, so we have to get out of here now. Stuff happening this
week, I don't know. Reviews of things are up. Yeah, I'm
finished up a Fallout review right now. I just need to mess with the
other versions of the game to check that out. And yeah, man,
games, I believe some stuff will get live streamed. That's that's probable.
It seems to be the case. Yeah, don't stop. Uh, there's
a hey, there's a new StarCraft coming out, all right, remember that.
No, it's a new episode of Teams GFP Radio. Oh yeah,
yeah, that's right. It's got hype. Yeah, what do you what
do you want to plugally's one of our worst episodes ever. Fantastic people going
on a good note. Great, that's actually all I want to plug.
It sounds like a good type to get in. Yeah, yeah, that's
that's always gonna let you plug, right, Just Team GFP Radio blown up
out of Chicago. All right, Well that's gonna do it. Then let's
go. Let's go get some bone marrow. What do you say, it's
just a heaping glass of it. Yeah, it's just like salty butters.
They don't give you enough of it. They don't give you that much,
like did you Yeah, I gotta stay. I went out for a steak
not that long ago and got like I would say, too much bone marrow.
So that was probably bone marrow butter. So it's not bone marrow.
It's probably bone marrow with butter. It's probably you got on a steak.
But it wasn't on the steak. It was like here's a bone with a
buch of stuff like interesting. Yeah, but and it was like the quantity
of it was like almost alarming. Yeah, you don't want it because it's
super savory. It's super salty, like too much of it is. Yeah,
it was. It was up to me to apply it how I wanted
to, so you know, it was like sparingly at best. But also
I should probably say that they said the steak was for two people, like
might go to steakhouse. It's impressive. Uh, they have bone marrow butter
they put on top of the steaks and oh my, oh man, jeez,
that's intense. I'm going back home right now and cock on the plane.
Oh I really want a steak? Now what kind of what was the
cut? I didn't have all kinds of I usually get just uh fifty five
day dry aged filet nice I'll get yeah, yeah, I usually go for
file at these days kind of smaller and eight medium rare. Ye get a
lot of sides, okay, spread the calories around. Man, so angry?
I go back and forth. Was your for two? Is what I
was? Like? I want to forget like the Porterhouse or something. I
go back and forth like there's something be said about the nice smallest steak.
But man, sometimes just lot you just want to slab a beef. Sometimes
I just like want to go, like, give me whatever the fucking massive
prime rib you've got, casino, give me this fucking like you've advertised a
nice eight dollars prime rible, let's fucking see it. Put, I'll give
you sixteen dollars double up. Put the beef of your mouth is yes,
that's that's my intent. Yes, finally, all right, Well on that
note, we have our path is clear. Now let's get that all out
of here. Uh. See next week for another edition of the Jenny Bob
Cast. Bye bye,