Howdy ladies in Germs. It is Tuesday, August eleventh, twenty fifteen.
You are listening to the Giant Bomb cast. Jeff Kursman's ear, it's crisp.
You got a crisp voice coming through that microphone. I'm like, man,
he is splitting through. Yeah, the noise cut through the internet.
Yep, Jason a striker, Yo, how's it going man? Mr Crispy
in my ear? WHOA hang on? Now? Hey, I don't think
I know you that well yet. I don't know, but I like it.
Let's talk later. Okay, we meet up tonight, Dan Chort,
I'll call you a cookie Crisp. It's a good cereal, is it.
Yeah, it's cookies that you get. It's incredible, acceptable cookies for breakfast,
barely on ice cream, no joke. That sounds great. Yes,
there's a yogurt place that has like Captain Crunch and stuff like that and Sos
crunch to put on your stuff, and that's actually pretty All rights are great.
Yeah. I've been getting this Briar's like Reese's peanut butter ice cream and
putting cocoa buffs in it. Yep, that'll do. That's my little tree.
We got a fascinating and link the email back to the origin of Captain
Crunch this week and really sad that I didn't throw it into the LISTA.
It's originally used to scrub the decks on ye ships. I really done your
homework here. Yeah, no, it's I I'm I was in the Navy.
Captain Crunch has a much more cynical and kind of sinister like in a
motive because it just yeah, yes, Captain has goddamn sog monsters. It's
just more your sog monster propaganda. If I were to tell you the Captain
Crunch came about in a very manufactured and calculated way. It's a consumer product,
like you know, like absolutely of course. But this was even this
is even back in the sixties. Yeah, Captain Crunch was scientifically formulated to
be the crunchiest cereal on the planet. Damn it wasn't calculated and formulated when
there was a problem at the factory which resulted in the accidental production of oops
all berries. Yeah, the greatest time of Captain Crunch Choco Donuts, which
like, what the fuck is that? And I've never even heard of that?
Yeah, I know, it's just it's like a little donut shaped chocolate
donut things. Is that? Is that like an accepted piece of Captain crunch
apocrypha the oops all berries. That's how they explained it on the box.
It was called oops all berries. It's like somebody at the factories like,
oops, this whole batch is all berries. The cartoon they were winkings whoops
yep, And it was the best cereal. And they made crunch berries obviously,
Yeah, it was just Captain Crunch with crunch berries. And then they
decided what if it was all crunch berries And the result is actually total bullshit,
Like it's no, no, no, Like crunch berries are like okay
in moderation, not a whole site. This is how you eat a bullet.
When I go for Captain Crunch, I'm there to eat fucking Captain crunch
in the Captain No. No, here's how you're accent but by themselves.
This is how you eat a bowl of crunch. Peanut butter crunch. Yes,
yes, yes, that is incredible. Peanut butter crunch is the secret
best Captain Crunch. This is how I've eaten every bowl of crunch berries my
entire life. You poured in and then you spend the whole boring first,
like three quarters of the meal, eating the stupid little barrels or whatever they
are, and then at the very end the berries. What. I don't
know if I could get past the part where you just refer to Captain Crunch
as a meal whatever. It's part of the perfectly nuala next to it,
the most important meal of the day. Yeah, it's a bowl sized confection,
but please go ahead, okay. And then once you're your bowl,
all right, you sludge through the boring little barrel things. And then when
you're done with that boring healthy stuff out of the way, you just have
the big sugary berry things and the healthy default Captain Crunch healthy food. As
a kid, I always assumed it was like, oh, this is probably
like corn cereal that my mom, This is probably the healthy part, but
cocket, I want to get to the berries. That's where the sugar and
the taste is. Turns out, it turns out even corn not that good
for you. Yeah, it's a vegetable kind of not into not so much
the starch really, Yeah, it grows out of the ground stocks to potatoes.
Also, you should take a look at what corn used to be.
What ten thousand years ago, maze what people call our clock, it was
not really edible nor yellow corn has evolved. Take a look at it sometime.
Yeah, wait, did you have to do you say something about potatoes
not being healthy because I know it like when they're fried like French. But
it's still a vegetable. And our vegetables kind of across the board good for
carb. Yeah they're not. Carves are important too, you're right in moderation.
Yeah, like good carbs, complex carbs. There's nothing. There's nothing.
There's nothing healthy or like good for you about the regular ass captain crunch
pieces. I'm sure. But as an idiot kid, I told myself,
like, I'm gonna get through this health food so I can get to my
candy. Yeah. Who's nut kicks in my goddamn cereal? Yeah? Yeah,
it kicks like the healthy stuff. All right. That was one where
all the moms liked later sugar corn flakes. Mom tasting kids proved, Yeah,
so yeah that's it mother tests. Yeah, mom test Lately am I
as I've gotten older and my tastes have gotten more cultured? World world,
Yeah, yes, I don't go over the sugary ones so much. I
try to keep sugar down in general. So I'm big on anything with a
shipload of like maple pecan honey cluster type things, like a honey bunches of
oats type stuff. Trader Joe's has this maple pecan clusters stuff is just fucking
awesome like that that stuff is healthier than like tricks, right, one would
assume I would think so, right, But it's the Trader Joe's that's a
healthy place, right. I mean you can get all kinds of fucked up
shit of Trader Joe's, like like Trader Joe's in the sense that it's all
relative. Yes, maple clusters are probably better. Okay, got tricks,
but they still got sugar in tricks is better. They still make tricks.
Yeah, Do you prefer the tricks that was just all the balls that were
the different colors or the ones where it's like, oh, the banana one's
gonna be shaped like banana and the raspberries gonna be suck the fruit shaped ones
like they concentrated it was harder, like they were compressing it into these fruit
forms that changed the texture of everything, like the ruined tricks because the raspberries
were like six little tiny balls instead of just one big guy density change there.
That just wasn't right. I thought they were going to be like,
you know, Captain crunchberries, and they totally were not. Nah, they
the old skull tricks, some sinister ship. Yeah. I could never really
go in for the fruit cereals except for fruity pepples. I don't like fruit
loops and I couldn't deal with fruity pebbles also because it was just it was
too grainy. It just became a slop. You have to eat it.
It was like a fruit real quick. It's just maybe I was just always
getting the ratios wrong. But it was just like I would fill up the
bowl and then it pour as much milk in as it can hold, and
it was just like forty five seconds. It was just this multi colored fucking
mess. Specifically you have to be careful with You have to do a little
splash and then you get they dance around and they swim around a little bit.
But you don't want to completely submerge the fruit into things, right,
Yeah, I put it in a spray bottle and I just spray a dust
thing. I just never I never really encountered the fruity or the cocoa pebbles
that much. Like I'd never really liked the chocolate cereals, cocoa buffs and
that sort of stuff, Like it was just never great cookie crisp I thought
was cool. But those were shitty cookies. I agree. I mean compared
to other cookies and cereals, it's the best. What other cereals had cookies
on them? I mean yeah, but like I would rather there. There
are a zillion other cereals I would rather eat than shitty cookies. I'll give
you that too. I'll take a bowl of sent him a toast crunch.
Them were French toast crunch. Yeah, yeah, that was weird. It
was kind of good. Yeah, remember waffle was it waffle crisp? Yes,
swaffle crisp was was were good? I like that? A big honeycomb
fan. Yeah. What about smacks? Yeah yeah, yes, sugar great
honey smacks. At some point they became yeah yeah, oh no, that
like the burnt cart I loved it. It was great. Yeah, yeah,
super good. Dan. I've got a mission for you. What's that
puffed rice man? Yeah, let's talk about it. What if you just
went out and got a box of cookie ass cookies? Uh huh, crumbled
those up in a bowl. Uh, poured him some milk. You know,
I don't think I've ever dipped a cookie in milk. People who told
me that that's like a good combination kind it supposed to be warm chocolate chip,
And that's what I was seeing the movies and stuff like that. Yeah,
you could. I could see that being good, and so I could
also see the crumble up the cookies. I'm not much to a cookie guy
though, except for cookie crisp. I don't I like cookie chris more than
real cookies. Yeah, cookies like they're gonna integrate and milk. You don't
want to do that. You want to find a hardass cookie that's like,
you know, chemically engineered to withstand the properties of milk so it'll like seep
into it and make it tastier. I want to clarify. Yeah, chocolate
chip cookies, I'm not big on. You get me a good snicker doodle
or I just got a big bucket of ginger snaps. Snicker doodles specifically is
my favorite thing. Ohmeal raising way better than chocolate chips. Are you unanimous?
I know? O mere raising over chocolate chip. Well, I'm not
gonna get that far I'm gonna get it depends on the chocolate chip cookie.
I think they're subway yep, specifically pretty good. I was at a over
the weekend. I was at a an ice cream sandwich store. They they
that's specifically what they had cookies and they had ice cream, and they were
like, tell us, what two cookies you want and what type of ice
cream. We're gonna make one artisanal arcosonal, locally sourced, sustainable ice cream.
But they had two vegan flavors. They had multiple vegan cookies as well,
and so I I shied away from that because he was gonna make a
mess. I got a brownie Sunday, which then I was disappointed by because
when you think brownie Sunday, you're gonna think someone's gonna take a brownie and
put ice cream over the top of it or something. Right, Yes,
it took a fucking bowl, put some fucking ice cream in it, put
the toppings I wanted on it, and at the end just kind of shoved
a brownie in the side of the middle. It here you fucking go.
You went the brownie drenched in ice cream. One way or another. That
that I had to that that did not happen. And then I got a
bite of an ice cream sandwich as well, and it was some of the
driest ass most horrific cookies I think I've tasted a good long time. They
were sticker dal was. They were real bad. Wait, so vegan,
the vegan part is for the cookies or the ice cream both talking about put
turkey and cookies, damn, but no they put butter, dan oh,
I forgot. Vegan is the one where anything that comes from an animal,
right, It's like, you know, like ice cream as milk and cookies
have eggs. Yeah, I mean, I got regular ice cream in my
stuff. But my lady friend she's she doesn't eat that stuff. So I
tried a little bit of that, and yeah it was you know, I
mean, vegan vegan cookies can be a little dicey anyway, but they don't
something too well dicey or like you know, taste winse or I mean,
like you never know what you're gonna endup, but taste wise it can be
fine. But like in this in this case, you know, and it's
hard, you know, if you're not gonna put real butter and some stuff
like it would just end up with like you dry, just consist. So
what that was? Can you do margarine? And uh prob. I just
found that there's a billion things that you can substitute for butter that tastes is
fine, Like you believe it's not butter like that. Yeah, that's the
black seeds. It was like a flax seed thing. It was a nature's
nature's button nature that there's some harvest, nature's harvest. Yeah maybe maybe,
but there's it's a fake butter. That's totally fine. The only thing I
ever used butter for is for when I make macaroni cheese craft and you know,
I've used it with real butter, marjarine, flax seed, whatever.
I can't believe, Like I would not if you lined them all up and
like a police lineup of mac and cheese, I would not be able to
tell the difference between any of the crime committed being way too delicious. Okay,
yeah, yeah, it's crap for talking about it or Stofer's frozen mac
and cheese, But yeah, I think that's the problem. That's the problem
with vegan butter. Then yeah, there's a billion different things that would probably
be just as delicious. Yeah, yeah, I think you can Like I've
definitely had vegan like baked goods. They're totally okay and moist the way you
want them to be and all that sort of stuff. These particular ones were
ass so yeah, yeah, damn butter damn should taste so good. I'll
be a crime. I didn't eat visible butter until I was like twenty seven.
I would only eat it in macaroni and cheese. I wouldn't put it
on bread or anything visible. Yeah, like I knew some part of my
brain knew that, like it was in macaroni and cheese and and all these
foods that I liked, but something about like if I saw a roll with
butter on it, I wouldn't go anywhere near it. And then eventually,
once I got to like my mid to late twenties, I realized, like,
well, if I love this taste, Like when I made macaren and
cheese, I went like twice as much butter as you're supposed to put in
there buttery flavor. But for some reason, like the physicality of biting into
a chunk of butter, you were not cool with. Yeah, but I
would do like the butter pop like at AMC theaters and stuff, you'd do
the butter. The butter is totally different. Yeah, right, but anything
that's well voting the kids consistency of it. I mean, there's a textural
thing to butter that like you go bite into butter. Sometimes that's weird.
Yeah, but sometimes you get that like whip butter or whatever. Like if
you like I was in another recently, Yeah butter. Yeah that's soft butter.
You get like the thing. It's just like you're gonna pour it onto
You're gonna drop it on the pancakes, the little ball of butter they put
on a pancakes. Yeah. Stuff. Once it melts in, it's fine.
But like when I'm looking at that butter, I'm like, I'm like,
the last thing I want to do is go like, yeah, let's
bite a thing that has this on it. But putting butter, like spreading
butter on rolls and bread and stuff, is fantasy. One of life's greatest
pliers. I have learned butter into that. Yeah that's great too, that's
great, good for pop worn. I like spray butter a lot. Yeah,
I think it made a problem with it. Maybe I got freaked out
early on because my little sisters used to I always do this thing. When
my mom was cooking, she would have the thing of butter out, and
my sisters would just come up when they were like four or five and just
dip their hands in their tach like a handful of butter and just eat it.
I remember looking at that and being like, that looks gross. That
is gross. Okay, you're you're right, that is gross. Put butter
on things. Don't put butter in you. But your song. I think
I was like that grossed me out so much. I think I was like,
yeah, I'm only going to do this ignorance is bliss thing where it's
like I'll eat butter if I can't see it. But eventually it's like,
well, I love everything with this flavor, so I'm just gonna put some
on. Some butter's pretty great. Yeah, it's fantasts pretty good. But
substitute butter, I think is just as good in some cases, maybe even
a little better than than regular butter, depending on what you're putting it on.
That's all good, Dan. Yes, keeping with the theme of your
slow and steady development as an adult human being, Yes, I want to
talk to you about Star Trek. It is a real good show. You
have embarked, I want a continuing mission. I watched like five hours of
a Star Trek this week, really like I really like this. Wow,
next generation? Nice. Okay, so I'm following Max Timpkin's guide. He
did a thing where because I was gonna start from the beginning, and when
I tweeted that out Brad immediately he was like, oh no, you can't
do that, Like I started doing that, like it's terrible at the beginning.
Wait, it's a dark fucking road, it is. But there are
a lot of episodes of that, Like you there's something to be said for
seeing the full development of it and all that. Yeah, I don't know.
I'm starting. We're in the process of actually going back and watching season
one from the beginning right now, and I almost feel like there's some value
in suffering through it. Well, I mean, do you consider like those
first couple of Farpoint episodes or that longer episode far Point it is terrible?
I see, I love that. I mean, it's that was the pilot.
I remember thing like this is cool, Like maybe the pilot's really good,
and then it gets back you love that. Then I get the campy
stuff you're talking about, Like it almost seems like it's from the sixties,
like when is it Tasha? Yeah, and when she gets frozen and stuff,
it's like the effects are terrible. Well it's not. It's not even
that it's like she's terrible. Yeah, she's all right, But I mean
but it's even like the musical cues and like the pacing and a lot of
the hammy delivery. Like it's amazing how much the first few episodes just feel
like old sixties Star Trek. But yeah, like I watched the Skin of
Evil episode and that's one whre the crazy like oil man on the planet,
like as just being a total dickhead to everyone. Yeah, and uh like
just seeing the effects on that whatever they put that dude in that like goopy
Poncho or whatever. It reminded me of like when you see Gifts of like
Shatton or fighting the Stupid Lizard, you know, like totally shitty all attacks.
But still it's like, I like the idea of it, and it's
it's super duper different than like even these old episodes like this kind of Evil
one, for example. I'm just used to all the movies and TV shows
I watch, at least the ones is kind of like an action serious thing
or whatever. It's like, hey, that dicky guy did a dicky thing.
Let's go down there in a helicopter and take a bunch of uzukas to
his fucking face. This one was like a cool TV show. Yeah I've
seen. Yeah, they're plenty good TV shows, Like twenty four is a
great show for that. But this one, it's like, oh, this
crazy goopy man like killed one of our crew. Let's go down and talk
to it about its feelings and try to work something out. And I'm like,
what the fuck doesn't how TV works? That's that's that's accurate a lot
of the time. Diplomacy. Yeah, but also you know what, huh,
Jehan luccard punches people with his words. He's good at that. Like,
he's a great character. He seems very fright and granted I'm so early
on so I don't and when his words don't work, Riker is there to
actually flash. Okay, that is what I wanted to say. It is
like, I like everyone, all the characters that have seen so far.
Piccard seems awesome, but I think Riker is my guy so far. Because
I just watched a Matter of Honor and that was the episode where there's the
Clingon ship and they do some weird like officer exchange program and they put Riker
on the Clingon ship, which, by the way, Clingon seemed real cool,
just like super hardcore like tough fighting dudes. It reminded me like when
he goes on the Clingon ship, it reminds me of what it must be
like when like a new guy gets into a wrestling locker room. Lots of
like, hey, Joe's your man, Like hey, you are, You're
gonna be You're gonna be whimped by this, like all this like alpha male,
Like yeah, stream Clingons have two hearts. I did not know that,
so that if they get stabbed in one heart, oh, they can
keep going. That's cool. But I like it because they like keep testing
Riker to see if he's a man or whatever, and You're like instantly kicks
one of their asses, and then it starts like questioning him if he could
like handle being with a Clingon woman, and he like asked for a threesome
with cling On whom like he's just taking everything they're throwing at him and be
like fuck it, yeah, bring it on, Like I'll eat this weird
fucking gack thing or this living squid he's grossing fistfuls of their blood worms,
or yea, he's just being a complete badass and then outsmartsmall at the end,
Like that was a fucking awesome episode. That's the only Season two one
I've seen so far. The next one is a Measure of a Man,
which I hear is supposed to be a great one. I mean that that
I don't remember if it won an Emmy, but like it's thought of as
one of the kind of the fines, which one is that it's never it's
with the episode titles. It's the is data as an android? Is he
a sentient life? For sure? He does. He does. He deserve
the rights and he's afforded every other living thing. You know. So it's
like Ted two. Yeah, basically, yes, exactly that I haven't seen
that. I haven't seen Ted one. You're fine just watching more Star Ture
I instead, I'm going through, like, honestly, as much as I'm
liking it in these seasons that are supposed to be bad are So here's the
one on the ones I watch, you would be in two, I guess
if you're Yeah, I'm just following Max's guide. So I've watched the two
part or one part far point whatever, if there's this one long episode or
two whatever. I watched Skin of Evil the Neutral Zone, which is one
where they find all the frozen earthlings, like the like Wall Street due it's
like, oh, all my stocks must be worth a ton of money now,
but then everyone's been like super dead for four hundred years. Uh you
know what I'm talking about with the homemaker and the crazy country guy is trying
to get data to like put together a kegger. Like this show is weird
and awesome, Like I really like how if every episode keeps up this thing
of being like a totally different weird thing, I think it settles into a
bit of a groove and and like it maybe it loses a little bit of
that. Okay, they're they're actually we've been rewatching it here and there,
and there are actually a lot of episodes where like like the show takes on
a lot of different forms, like like it tackles different genres, like like
there's one episode that's effectively just die Hard, but then okay, there are
other up like the episode you're about to watch is effectively a courtroom drama.
Like there are horror. There are horror episodes like they like it really runs
the gamut of of like different styles. I could say to handling it really
well, like it seems to be written very smartly. Like I need to
know though, because this is one thing I can already tell I want At
some point, do I get to just see Warf kick someone's ass real bad?
Warf seems super cool. Warf will definitely fuck shut up on occasion.
Yeah, Okay, he just seems like he says he's keeping his ship together
and everything because he needs to be on this like classy ship and everything.
But you know, he's a cling on and he just wants to fuck shit
up. Like Warf is still a cling on. Okay cool. At the
end of the day, I like him. He will never get his own
spin off show. Is still out the painting for to this day. Michael
dorn Is, Yeah, yes, he's been running a campaign on social media
for a while. God every years, though, I see that creep up
one goes back and he's like, it's gonna happen. Wait, I thought
that was happening golf. I would watch that. I would watch that,
totally watch that all right, But yeah, I'm super early on, but
like just knowing that apparently the best is ahead of me, I could see
myself finishing all this and going back and wanting to watch all of them because
this guy is supposed to be like watch the best Star Trek episodes in forty
hours and he kind of explains why and everything, and like once you get
to like season four and five, like it's like, hey, watch these
twelve episodes bo season one. It's like, here's three, here's two or
three from season two, but then it picks up. I would actually just
start at the beginning of three and just go from there. I've watched almost
all of three over the last couple of months, and it's, oh,
you think, just watch all of them. Two or three. The best
episodes of the entire series are in season three, and also the end of
season three is thought of as the best two part in the whole ark.
So how many seasons are we talking about? Seven? There are seven seasons
episodes per is it like it's twenty two, twenty three something, twenty six
something. Yeah, Yeah, it's a lot. These are forty five minute
episodes a lot, but it's a it's a great show. But yeah,
like I need a show, you know, because I do like forty five
minutes on the Elymptical every day to the gym, and like I need something
that I can watch every day and like knowing that this is going to keep
me going for probably if I watch all of them. How many episodes are
there, one hundred and I don't know a lot, it could last me
like the better part of a year. Yeah you know, like that's awesome.
Yeah, yeah, it's it's fantastic. I really like, yeah,
it's I really really love it. I did not know what to expect going
in five years ago. I probably would have said like, yeah, it
sounds like something for nerds or you know, like now I like, yes,
absolutely, but so yea yeah yeah, but that's that's fine. Star
Trek has things to say and teach to all people. Yeah, yeah,
I don't know. It always seems like people were either like you always heard
the like Star Trek for Star Wars babe, but like now that I've seen
some Star Trek at least, it just seems like such a fucking different conversation,
Like they're not the same comparable thing at all. Like no Star Trek
is good and and something that like resembles some kind of future science as opposed
to fucking magic swordmen. Yeah, it's also really cool. I mean the
ship they have such incredibly different origins, you know what I mean, and
formats and Star Wars is campy serial, you know, high flying action and
Star Trek started out as as as like thinly camouflaged morality plays on network TV
in the six Times. Yeah, it was like it's like branded kind of
heavy handed social commentary, but it was absolutely there. Yeah. I love
both. I read and will happily reread the Star Trek Technical Manual. Yeah.
God, I've been meaning to eBay a copy of that thing for so
long. Yeah, what is that? The tech like for the Enterprise really
like fucking just science, fucking tech docs about how the sh it works.
Like here, here's an exploded diagram of how a phaser is put together.
Yeah. I like when I used to sit on the floor of the aisle
in the Walden Books and just read that thing every time. It was so
good. I like when they explained the tech on the ship too, because
it's like the unfrozen, like Wall Street banker. Dude, it's just like
using the comm system and stuff just to be a dick, and then the
card comes down it's like, hey, why are you using our comm system?
It's like, well, why would you let me use it? Like
I didn't even have a commander key. It's like, yeah, no,
we're all just civilized adults that know how not to be dicks. Like yeah,
I mean, the ideals of Star Trek are genuinely like super inspiring,
especially like in a contemporary context with all the ship going on these days,
Like it's you know, though, some of those ideals. I think like
it's one of those things where it's like, you know, to get to
that utopia, a lot of fucking current shit has to be destroyed. And
I think that there are maybe some people out there in the tech world that
are trying to get to Star Trek a little too quickly and destroying fucking jobs
and lives along regulate. Sociologically, we were headed in the exact opposite direction,
right, it's like, no, fuck that ship robots everywhere, like
sharing economy, like we're just gonna do because we want to do. I
mean that's no, you're no, it's not the thing. The thing about
Star Trek when people say like it's it's absurdly utopian, and its vision or
whatever. You know, like that whole society is based on a like a
post scarcity sort of lifestyle. Food is not a food, and energy and
all that stuff are are literally unlimited, you know, like nobody wants for
anything basic anymore. So it's like, well, what are you gonna do?
Yeah, like how are you going to spend your days? That's what
the banker guy said at the card. It's like, Oh, what's the
challenge? What do I work for? You know? The money is not
a thing. It's like, oh, it's to inrest yourself, to to
improve yourself, like to accomplish things. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's
it's real good. It's a fantastic thing. Yeah, it exists. Enterprise
Voyager, Deep Went, It went sideways, like DS nine is extremely well
thought of, Okay, for kind of different reasons. I couldn't get in
get into it at all. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, you know,
the purpose of Star Trek is that, I guess, exploration, but
they're on the space station for the most Parker. I mean, I think
that's a very different story. Yeah. I didn't. I didn't watch all
of it, and it got into a lot more kind of political tension and
stuff like that, although the the one of the primary drivers behind DS nine
and also Next Generation went on to be the guy who ran Battlestar Galactica.
Oh okay, yeah, so if you guys watched that, stuff like DS
nine, I think is sort of like proto BSG in terms of the types
of stuff and like the the style of storytelling they were going after. I
watched the hell out of that. I saw all the Voyager as well.
Yeah that was that was pretty rough. But yeah, really wanted to like
Voyage. I think he was Voyager. Yes, okay, yeah, that
would have been seven of nine that would have been around at the same time.
Okay, yeah, ninety nine. I think maybe we should move on.
Thoughts on Enterprise. I people say it's kind of not as bad as
it should have been, but yes, that's true. That's all I know.
I couldn't. I watched the first couple of those, yeah, and
I had and had to stop. I couldn't. That's I went deeper into
Voyager than I did Enterprise before going like all right, I'm not gonna watch
any more of this, and PRIs is back heelow right, yes, okay,
Like they got really deep into the kind of an awful genre fiction tendency
to just like reference itself all the time, you know, like they had
to even though it's set before everything else that's ever happened, They had to
bring the Borg into it and the Romulans and like everything. It's like,
hey, you remember these guys right right? Yeah, It's like, no,
I don't need that. I just need you to like tell a good
story. Were there supposed to be two enterprises between, like, because there's
the part where DeForest Kelly makes the cameo as McCoy and he's super duper old
in the first episode of TNG, And then you see a thing where it
looks like two enterprises going past each other. Is that supposed to be like
the sixties Enterprise passing them? Well, so that ship is a class of
ship. Yeah, it's like, okay, Faxie class or whatever. So
there are theoretically other other ships in the fleet that would look the same,
but not named not named Enterprise, right, Okay, But it looked like
that's just what dropped him off, Like I think that why we just watched
that episode like a week ago, week and a half. I think that
was actually a different ship entirely. Okay, I also didn't realize that the
saucer park because I always assumed when you see them on the bridge that they
were tip of the circle thing. But that whole circle thing is just like
a fun space hotel. And then the rest is like what is it called
the StarBridge fart or something? Okay, the fucking battle Bridge man, And
they separate that fucking saucer section. Yeah, and they do it so many
times. It's like a period of time with that series where they were just
like, check out our effects. But bucket man, we are separating the
safcer section again. We're gonna go to the battle bridge because we built this
other set. How cool is that. That's how they tested Riker in the
first one. It's like, oh, you gotta do it manually, like
we could do it automatically, but you're supposed to be good, So sit
down and do this. And he nails it. Ryker's awesome. He's the
best. Yeah. I like that guy, and his name kind of sounds
like mine. M M okay, I didn't notice, Yeah, and just
put it te there. Oh I see you got a little extras. Yeah,
so I'm better than Ryker is what I'm saying. Okay, yeah,
yeah, still number two. I wouldn't I wouldn't be able to do that
docking thing without I'm going to a plane poker. Hold him, I'm okay,
you need to be better than Okay about Is he good at poker?
Yes? Is it like some crazy space poker it? No, it's just
it's just poker. He plays trombone, trombone. He's a big jazz guy.
Okay, I'm not better than right, he's a lot better than me.
Yeah, I'm glad you're having fun with it. Oh, I'll check
back in with you here in a couple couple of months or something. Liking
it way more than I could have ever expected you. It's good stuff.
I'm surprised. That's cool. How about video games? You like those?
Oh? Yeah, I's been playing some quite a bunch. Yeah. What's
on the docket? I played a ton of Diablo three quite yeah. Yeah.
What's on Reaper of Souls Ultimate Evil Edition? On PS four? You're
playing co op with my girlfriend on the couch, which is a that is
a great couch co op game. She actually, yeah, she heard me
on last week's podcasts say that, like there's an email about like what game?
Haven't you finished that? You keep starting, and like I started two
Diablo three characters and she was like, hey, why don't we start characters
and just go through the whole game. Yes? Please? That sounds split
screen or is it? No, it doesn't. It doesn't do the lego
thing at all. It's always and it works really well. And every time
I've played it, I've been so impressed at how they took a game that
was, you know, the series was essentially just a piece C series forever
and mapped it to a you know, dual shocker Xbox one. So well,
like that interface is great, it's great. It's real quick to get
into your stuff, get out some stuff in the interface dealing with items and
stuff like that that you know, like I find myself spend all time reading
the numbers and go like wait, wait, yes, one better than it,
Like I think some of that stuff, even though they made it clearer
than they did when Dabo three first launched, like it's not the navigation is
a little clunky in spots, but yeah, it could be a lot,
it could be a lot worse. Yeah, absolutely, it's actually one of
my I'm almost close to saying it's my preferred way of playing it. I
think a lot of people. I think I think I might be there.
I think I might be there on PC. How do you do like the
evade because he totally new Wow, okay, so shit, I didn't realize
it was exclusive. Yeah. Yeah, and rolling through barrels, it's so
it's so much fun. Yes, it's the best thing on tables and statues
and yeah, yeah, that game is just fantastic. Uh, Like you
know, I never played one or two really, and so I my experience
with loot driven games was always like Borderlands, you know, which is a
totally different thing. So like seeing kind of the originator of this like super
loot based thing. I love because you feel so much of a sense of
ownership over your character because you have so much customization on Like you know all
the gear you wear, the gems you put into things, and then you
know the items are not items, the upgrades you have. You know your
passi abilities, your actiabilities, and when you turn on that elective mode and
you can just put on anything onto any button totally like if it feels like
it's your character, Like it's one of the only games where like I like
to hit pause and zoom in on my character and just be like, oh
man, I look pretty cool with all this gear on and stuff. Yeah,
I got like these you know, two crazy knives that bleed all the
time. Like I don't know it visually gameplaywise, like it dangles that carrot
perfectly, I think, with actually substantial upgrades and they've added, you know,
just in the process of like since launched, like the things they've done
to that game to get it where it needed to be increasing drop increasing drop
rade, like adding like a healthy amount of like repeatable content that actually feels
fun to repeat. God, God, Like how far we've come with the
Opla three since I I really enjoyed I did two out. I did too.
I'm not you know, I played through the first two difficulties when it
came out. It's like sixty plus hours and like I've I was never the
guy who was going to go through all four tiers. You know, it
was Inferno the last one or whatever, the one that Torment. So that's
all new. That is like they have changed so much. They have a
patch coming that will add like what five more six torments. There's six total
ones, like as I think now it goes up to well, Torment is
leveled also so you go up like Torment ten or something like that. Oh,
okay, the highest I like mine, the five six and the highest
right now. But I think they're increasing that to I think that's right,
okay, thing in the next patch. Yeah, T six is what it
was this weekend. So what's what's the new leveling system they put in on
top of the regular character level? Is it? It's when you hit max
level you start getting those account level Paragon Yes, yes, it isn't.
Did I did I see that that's effectively unlimited? Yes? I think I
thought I saw a headline a few weeks ago going around of a guy that
hit like Paragon level two thousand or something that's saying like that, yeah,
you can just kind of just keep. It's crazy to me that people can
just go and go and go in that game. Was that paraground system not
in place when the Ultimate Evil Edition Launchel four? I think that's where it
first, yes, okay, okay? Or shortly after maybe, yeah,
because I know where I got patched into the PC right around that time,
right, yeah, well yeah, because before the four you might be right
now, yeah, I think so shortly, Okay, I guess maybe I
just haven't had a character. Like I've beaten Act one a couple of times
as far as i've gotten, so maybe I haven't even dinked around with that.
They've added an insane amount of stuff like more mechanically you show up until
you hit the level cap. Oh okay, then I wouldn't have seen it,
not really content wise, but more just like the framework around the game,
you know, like the different waste level and what is it like the
adventure mode that let's you just kind of like randomly poured into different aroundies and
do stuff where there's the rifts that you can open and go in there and
all that stuff. It gets super fun. Yeah, I love the adventure
mode. Yeah, it's so good on PS four two. Like there is
a lot of stuff happening on screen at any given time, Like there's parts
where there will be forty fifty enemies, tons of just particle effects and all
these you know, powers going off, and there's it seems like it's running
at sixty the whole time, and it looks great like it. It's a
really impressive version of that game. Yeah, I've never played on PC,
but yeah, the PC version, you know, obviously you get the resolution
enhancement. You know, it does look sharper and stuff like that, but
I still think I prefer playing it with a controller. Yeah, it's actually
so they're doing it again there with Marvel Heroes. They at one point change
the name from Marvel Heroes to Marvel Heroes twenty fifteen. They're doing it again,
this fallactic thing. So I think they're just at this point, at
this point, the game is good. So the first time they did it,
it was like, oh, well, the game launched poorly, got
a bunch of bad reviews, and now they're trying to wipe that away.
But now that they're doing it again, when the game actually is in a
kind of a position of strength, it's like, alright, alright, but
they're adding controller support this fall Okay, So that's kind of cool and I
think potentially paves the way if they ever wanted to bring that to consoles.
I think that I think would be a smart movie. Seems like a no
brainer. Yeah, I feel like that game has a fairly active player base,
right, I think so. Yeah, But yeah, it's the same
type deal, you know. But yeah, I'm kind of interested to see
how that feels with the controller. Having played so much Diablo. Yeah,
I kind of wish the PC version had patched in controller support. They were
very much like, nope, never, I'm not gonna do it. Nope,
separate game. Uh but but yeah, that is what it is.
But but yeah, like I had to pull this up because I thought I
had seen this, and sure enough, last week the life to date sales
figures for Diablo three came out. Thirty million copies. Totally shit, thirty
million. That's across PC consoles, everything, I guess. So I'm sure
that's everything mostly PC, right, probably, Yeah, but that's like,
dude, I mean that's that is like like the heyday of the Wei Territory
with like Mario Kart and stuff like That's it's a lot of games that's about
isms three probably ends. And then they did the ultimate thing, you know,
the updated and I'm sure it's way fewer than thirty million people. I'm
sure quite a few people double and triple dipped on a lot of that stuff.
But still, like that's just man, that thing just goes and goes.
It's definitely one of those time where I'm glad that, you know,
I usually play everything right when it comes out, and you know, not
at the time, I definitely didn't have a PC that could run stuff.
I'm glad I waited. Granted it was two three years or whatever until the
PS four one came out, But there's just so much content now, Like
the Act five is a deal c thing rights like that right, right and
like that. Yeah, okay, so that wasn't in that initial release on
three sixty and p s three because rehearsals didn't exist yet. So yeah,
by waiting for PS four, I think I have like the full experience.
I didn't have to deal with any of that like launched, Like, wasn't
there a big fuffle over the auction house and everything? The auction house was
weird and yeah that was real rough at first. Yeah they were they were
the right to get rid of it. It was weird because you know,
you could you could just buy items for real money. Yeah, like that
was the whole thing. So if I started out and I was a level
one character and I just want to throw down two hundred bucks, I could
get some blame because oh so I wouldn't be able to equip it. Okay,
yeah, but yeah, like I had I had a friend who sold
an item a weapon drop for like two hundred dollars the week the game came
out. You know, but people were throwing down all kinds of crazy money
just to get the best ship rather than actually playing the game, and their
drop rates were adjusted, you know, accordingly because they didn't want to flood
the market. You know, it just it added a lot of concerns about
the just the economy of the game that made it less fun than fun.
Yeah, yes, that game has changed. So I got a lot of
gems that way. I needed a lot of red gems. Putting those gems
together. It was kind of fun. They've added like so many more levels
of gems. Now, how you look crazy? How do you combine gems?
The duel crafter or whatever that he'll he'll the guy from Big Trouble and
Little China, right naturally, Okay, Yeah, it's honestly one of the
best, like couch co op experience. Yeah, it's so so absolutely Yeah,
like they the camera doesn't you know, Yeah, because it's not bad
at that weird split screen thing. Yeah, I mean, you know,
if you're on the right difficulty even it's not a girlfriend game. I don't
want to say that, but just like my significant significant another is not very
good at video games at least I love you, but man, she kicks
ascid Diablo. So, like, you know, just because you know the
game is, I don't know. It's easy to play, it's easy to
jump into. Like we can both have a lot of fun with The early
levels are way too easily. We cranked it up as far as you can
go before you beat the game once. Uh, because they had normal and
hard are just it seems like you almost don't even lose health. I now
we're just like they had of Fact one right now, but we haven't really
been in danger hard. Yeah, I think experts as high as you can
go before. Yeah, that's where it was about, right from from when
I played it. Yeah, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna deploy the
card Maneuver. Okay, I'm gonna jump ahead to a news story. Whoa,
whoa, all right, because moments before were a news story. Yes
there are in fact yes started eight. See Dan, you're not gonna know
what thecard Maneuver is until you go back and watch season one. I'll probably
do that, okay. Uh yeah, Like right before we came up here,
this headline started circulating that Blizzard has posted a job listing, oh,
which normally I would just be like, come on, you know, like
in a lot of cases, it feels like you're just reading as much as
you can to a very standard set of job requirements to try to generate headline
or whatever. But in this case, it's a it's a it's a highly
experienced position. It's a it's a they're looking for ten years experience, at
least five years as a lead artist or art director. But it also ends
with a passion for games and a deep understanding of the Diopplo franchise, So
that seems fairly clear cut. I saw another screenshot. I don't know if
this was just a joke on Twitter, but it was like, you know,
spot the mistaken this job listing, and it said, you know,
Blizzard, unnamed project whatever, lead and then underneath it it's said the word
Diablo. Yeah. Yeah, So I wonder if there might be something similar
to this. But yeah, I mean it's not to say that Diablo four
is immediately in production or something, but it could be another expansion. That's
That's the main reason I want to bring this up, because like over the
history of the franchise, they had always only done one expansion per Diablo game,
which seemed insane. It seemed like they were probably leaving tens of millions
of dollars on the table because there's such an appetite for more Diablo. But
also, you know, if that appetite exists, like maybe it just means
that they would be inspired to begin full production on an actual sequel. Maybe,
you know, like that's that's a certainly a valid approach. I guess
it's been long enough, but I mean, under the dark yoke of Activision,
sure, but I don't know. I mean, it was god,
what was it fourteen years? Yeah, thirteen, fourteen years between two and
three something like that. Yeah, look between like the StarCraft one and two,
Like it's like they will take their time. Yeah, but I don't
I don't think that's a good thing. And you know, I guess not.
You know, I don't think that's something where you're like, oh,
that's honorable. Hopefully they'll way another fifteen years to make another Diablow. But
there was so much pent up demand for those games by the time they would
finally roll around, like when they announced StarCraft two, like when it finally
showed up on the screen, like you wanted to jump out of your fucking
chair. Yeah, because it was like when they so long. It was
like when they showed Halo Wars two for the first time. Yeah, exactly
like that. Yeah, I mean, who who's to say what this is?
You know they could be we need to make more Diablo characters for Heroes
of the Storm. Exactly. They have a witch Doctor and Heroes of the
Storm because I don't know what I think they have Diablo Okay, let there.
Oh no, he totally is because you can buy a skin for him
that makes him look like Godzilla. That was That's that was my one takeaway
from my time here is the Storm. I don't think I've actually seen what
Diablo is. It just supposed to be Satan. Yeah, okay, Eric's
kind of the devil. Have you have you not beat the game? No,
I've only gotten as far as the beginning of Act two. Ever.
Oh wow, yeah, yeah, so we're gonna be to this time.
But never seen. I assume he's the big Satan looking dude on all the
artwork and all that. Probably spoil it for myself, but really incredible intuition
you've got there. What else you've been playing? Try to beat the swindle,
and I I hit a point that I almost never hit with any game,
where you know how I talked a little last time about how you get
to this final swindle and you have to Yeah, I did it a little
bit on UPF last week. I gave up completely because it turns out even
if you do everything right in that final swindle, like the big thing,
we have to infiltrate Scotland Yard. I went through the whole thing, didn't
set off any alarms. I took down every security station, got into the
thing. You have to steal the end, stole it and then no matter
what, it just like alerts the cops and all these fucking helicopters burst through
the house you're in and start shooting at you. You still have to try
and make it. Yeah, so you don't get rewarded for perfect stealth at
all. And so they shot me dead and I was like, fuck it,
I'm done. Like I enjoyed the game up to that point, but
that was like an unforgivable thing. And like I searched and pretty much everyone
had the same thing where it's like, oh man, it's such a bummer
that this cool idea in the school game ends and such a bummer. A
way outside of that, I played like an hour, hour and a half
today of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. Oh yeah, it's a game from
the Chinese room. Yes, they did the machine for pigs and dear esther
right esther or esther esther. Okay, Yeah, I have a lot of
patients for kind of like narrative driven games that you know, like I heard
a lot about like, oh, it's kind of like just a walk around
and look at stuff narration in game, and like I'm fine with that,
Like I love Gone Home, you know, I like Journey. You know,
I don't need to constantly be like doing gaming stuff all the time.
With that said, the movement speed, not just the narrative is fine.
The movement speed is tremendously slow, to the point where it's it really simulator.
It's like a tiptoeing simulator basically. Yeah. And it's not like all
in man, it's not like Gone Home where it's like a little quick one
movement speed or you know, gone Home. You're in a house. You
know, like I could forgive this movement speed if it wasn't Gone Home.
This one. You're like exploring this whole village and this forest and everything,
and it doesn't even speed up. Like there's parts where you are in houses
or you're in a neighborhood and I would understand it. Maybe it's a little
slower then, but then when you get to a forest path that kind of
picks up. Or if you could like hold l one and do a light
jog or something, but there's nothing. It is always just super super slow.
I mean, I like the design of like a lot of like this
village and these houses and everything, like it seems cool. I'm curious to
see where the where the narrative goes, but yeah, it's it has been
hard to get into so far. What's the what is just the mechanism of
their storytelling because like and and dear Eswer is like you're literally just walking through
environments and like triggering audio cues. Well you get that in this I you'll
find cassette tapes and phones and voicemails. Well that's already more tangible than because
like, like my memory of your esser is they literally would just start like
you would like walk up for an invisible trigger and you would just start playing
a way file or whatever like this. No, you'll walk by like a
radio and you'll hear like a female voice, okay, a series of numbers,
and if you go up and hit X, you'll hear like a science
explanation that what about the numbers? It's just the lost thing. Basically,
this already sounds a lot more grounded in the environment though well than the setting.
The main way outside of just those audio tapes that it pushes it forward
is like there's this glowy ball that you follow around and it'll get to a
place and it'll kind of stop and you have to rotate the controllers. It's
almost it feels like a lock picking mini gamehe you have to find the right
angle or whatever, and then when you do that, it'll like you'll kind
of see shadows. I guess the best way to describe it. It's like
light. It's basically like light and kind of humanoid form talking to each other.
So like it'll be like two humanoid light things talking to each other,
and so you're just kind of getting pieces of the story. It's like kind
of learning to you. And they say, Desmond, we're going to tell
you about it. Shit, what was I gonna say? It's a oh
yes, I was gonna say turn on subtitles because it's it's a lot easier
to discern which characters are talking, because you'll see, like Jeremy says this
at the bottom of the subtitles, were otherwise there are all these identical just
light blobs talking to each other, and you might not connect that, Oh,
this light blob from the beginning of the game is the same one talking
here and here, whereas if you see Jeremy and then the dialogue's like,
oh, this is the Jeremy light blob, and it's a lot of just
you know, everyone loves Jeremy. Yeah, Jeremy's a great guy. Yeah,
So yeah, turn on subtitles if you want to play it. But
it has not grabbed me to her yet. So PS four exclusive, Yeah,
it's part of their play twenty fifteen thing, along with the Galaxy and
and plus plus. I don't believe there's a PC. Those all exclusive at
least for now, I think, I mean, well, maybe it could
be he's definitely going to PC. Yeah, it could be time, but
yeah, I don't actually know the specifics of that. Yeah, yeah,
but yeah, not not not getting me too much yet. Yeah, there's
something about movement speed and games even games like that, Like you know,
there's if I move the stick all the way and it's something that I don't
necessarily have the problem on PC because it's it's a little less connected. But
like when an analogs, if you push it all the way, the last
thing you want to feel like it is like it's just like he's running through
molasses, like something just holding the character back. Yeah, like you want
to smooth ramp up to some kind of acceptable movement speed. I don't think
I've played a game where this has felt more oppressive than this game. That's
why he got left behind it a little exactly. Need you need to find
the jet boots? Yes, yes, that's my next step. I'm sure
that's I'm sure that's tricky if you're a designer and you have strong feelings about,
you know, the pace at which your game should be experienced. But
if you're playing this game, I assume you're the type of person that wants
to take in that story and take your time looking at stuff like No,
I can't imagine anyone's gonna buy this game and try to sprint to the end,
because like that's not the point of this game, Like it's a story
driven game, why would you like, would you say that you move slower
than the story? Uh? No, I if I could move faster and
still take all the story in so yeah, yeah that's the thing. Yeah,
yep, all right, what's good to know. It's it all rests
on the story if that winds up being satisfactory, and then it might be
good. But were the individuals like, uh, it's tough because you know,
like if you play like Vanishing of Ethan Carter on PC, which is
kind of similar at going through woods and stuff, Okay, yeah, yeah,
I don't know, Like I've played that and that kind of ruined me.
On like that that looks so fucking gorgeous, Like I said, I
like the design of of the neighborhood and the houses and the trees and everything
in the forest. But I wouldn't say there's anything particularly stunning. Okay,
yeah, like the night sky and stuff looks really cool. I there are
moments where where things are really really cool, but overall there are better versions
of that. All right, it's good to know. I'm gonna jump in
here, do it, uh because I played a game last week with a
lot of commonalities here called Tacoma. Yeah, from the makers have gone home
those dudes, yeah, and ladies. Yeah. Yeah. I got to
sit down and play like the first twenty thirty minutes of Tacoma, but I
didn't really I wasn't really like trying to progress the story so much as I
was just kind of wandering everywhere I could and sort of taking an overview of
how it's put together and stuff. Is it in space or you in space?
Yes? Okay, I believe that's the case. Space Coma. Yes,
Coma sits at the l one lagrange point. Actually, if you were
wondering, Yeah, like that. They're you know, they're they're immediately striking
similarities to to Gone Home to to you know what you're describing here with this
game, Like it's it's very much a you know, taking this environment and
absorbed as found narrative. You know that like these these email conversations and like
these remnants left behind by these people who were no longer here for reasons,
you know, not at checking a bunch of bodio logs. Yeah, okay,
but they're and from what I've seen so far in this they're they're interspersed
throughout the environments in really interesting ways. Because things like aar are a very
prominent feature of like just life in this world. It takes place in I
think it's twenty eighty eight, okay, uh, And there are references after
the last human family fell to the robotronics exactly and this was the result.
There are a lot of interesting touches that kind of ground it in in what
we know as modern life. Like the station was built by a company called
Virgin Tesla. Uh. Like I found I found an audiologue at one point
where they're talking about like the ramifications of of AAR dating and like what would
it mean if you were to date somebody in AAR but you were to modulate
your voice slower and I wanted to make yourself look thinner or whatever. You
know. It's like like, yeah, it's some interesting stuff in there like
that, but like I said, very similar. You know, it looks
you're gonna be exploring and reading a lot and stuff like that. Have you
seen much of a drift? No? Although so I did a little podcast
interview thinking with Steve Gayner that's on the site now. Yeah, and the
Giant Bond presents feed and he actually mentioned a drift briefly in comparison to this
game. But no, I haven't seen that game firsthand at all. You
have, right, Yeah, yeah, you're you know, you're in space,
you're looking at stuff. Yeah, it seems like but there's an oxygen
component to that name though, where you are kind of constantly I mean presumably
you will find areas where that that's not the problem. Yeah, I got
the sense of that game is maybe a little more action oriented or kind of
like disaster oriented. Is that the case? Yeah, gravity and stuff.
Shit happened here. We're not really sure what, but boy, you're gonna
need to like swim over here and get some oxygen, right, you know,
this seems a lot more methodical. It's not like there's a leak on
the station and you gotta, okay, figure shit out before everything explodes or
whatever. But there's a gravity component to it. You you've got like mag
boots and you can basically look at a ceiling at almost any point and hit
a button and then the ceiling becomes the floor. Like you just kind of
jump up there and switch surfaces and like more to you traverse the environment,
or if you get access to additional logs, it seems like both Okay,
like it seems like you have to do a lot of that stuff to uh,
just to find your way around, Like it seems like the station is
built with that stuff in mind. Like I don't. I'm really curious to
like dig into that environment more as like kind of a potentially plausible sort of
vision of what like, you know, public space travel might be like in
the future. You know, like it was a it was a cool environment
in that regard. But I did not dig into the story at all because
I'd rather just kind of wait, yeah, experience that stuff kind of start
to finish once it comes out. But yeah, it seems really promising so
far from from what I've seen of it. But we got into a lot
more detail on the thing that cools on the other feeds. So go check
that out. If you like listening to stuff, Yeah I do. Yeah,
it turns out its popular activity. I did some listening to stuff over
the weekend while I was reinstalling every single Xbox One game on my account to
an external hard drive. So I had erased a bunch of stuff off my
Xbox One your storage, and yeah, so I have I got an external
drive. And then it's like, okay, well now let's just install everything.
Yeah, of course, and so I had redownload stuff, and that
kind of took all weekends to redownload the sixty or seventy things that it had
to, you know, and some of those are like small DLC. Some
of that's some of that stuff that had to move from the internal to the
external, which obviously is way faster, probably like a good portion or like
twenty gigs or more. Yeah, yeah, I mean, like I think
Master Chief Collection at this point is like eighty gigs or whatever it is about
that just something fucking crazy like that. So rare is like fifty yeah,
and also the rare replays. So I don't know if this is just because
I was installing everything in bulk, but installations on the Xbox One just like
to fucking stop. Yeah, I've noticed that from time to where it'll just
it'll just kill it and go on to the next thing. In the quay,
installations stopped. You're like why no, And I can go back and
resume it and it'll pick a pack up, but it's just like it's had
enough. It's like, you know, you don't need you don't need Dead
Rising three right now, You're good. You're good. I feel like we
all ran into that with Rare Replay, didn't we like yeah, so yeah,
we all three of us ended up getting early access to Rare Replay.
And I don't know if that has something to do with it, but like,
as a result, like it's doesn't patch write getting it to install.
Like now I have two copies of Banjo Kazooi on my install list two yeah,
and and two copies of like jet Pack Refueled and like the stuff I
owned all three sixty Originally, I have doubled over because I you know,
I bought Banjo Kazooi and then I relearned my lesson and didn't get Banjo TWOI.
I see, yeah, okay, but you own it now. Technically
I do technically own Banjo TWOI, so I can get in there and stop
and swap any time I want. And yeah, like that stuff was just
kind of screwy. I still can't figure out how to reinstall Killer Instinct one.
Oh yeah, that's right. I problems who I think you like?
I launched Killer Instinct to the new one because that was originally how you got
acces to. You would launch it and it would go, hey do you
want to download Killer Instinct? You need to say fucking yeah, and it
was its own separate tile. Yeah, it's its own separate game, but
it's not. It was only available as part of like the like you know,
I bought everything from season one KI packet. Like, you couldn't go
to the store and just get Killer and it's not in there. I don't
think I want to say it was like under like additional const You might be
able to search for it somehow in there and find that it's not under Like
when I go to the like manage game on on new Killer Instinct, that's
not there as an as an item, you know, So I I'm not
sure what to do. You could just not play Killer Instinct. I mean,
yeah, shut up, it's not about playing Killer Instinct. Yeah,
sure, it's it's about inst It's about using It's about fucking putting everything I've
got onto that drop. It's about utilizing your god given hard drive space.
Exactly do you not have a certain cutoff, like a bar of quality?
Because I was doing the same thing. I think, did we all buy
that too tearabyte external drive? Okay, that's what we all got. And
so I went from like eighty nine percent full to like fourteen percent full,
and I had that initial thought of like, well, I'm gonna scroll to
the right and I'm gonna hit download on every fucking thing that's on this list,
but certain things like I'd look at like Crimson Dragons. I reinstalled Crimson
Drags, Crimson Dragon, Power Star Golf, I reinstalled Loco Cycle, wouldn't
I started reinstalling the Connect Rivals demo and then went, wait, no,
what No, okay, so that's the cutoff. That's your bar demos,
And okay, so I did not install the Gears of War Ultimate Edition Beta
that has long since expired. I did not install both copies of Banjo Kazoo.
Okay, be full, installed all of the Dance Central Spotlight DLC that
I own. Okay, all full games that you that you have on your
system you have download? Yes, So is there any chance whatsoever that you
will ever play Local Cycle again in your life? As it was installing,
I had a moment of like, man, I should go look at Local
Cycle some more. And then I was like, you know what, I'm
good that sign right where it is? Yeah, Power Star Golf, any
chance? Whoever? Everyone loves Power Star Golf. No, I will never
play. So why did he download? Because it could because I could.
There's got to be a bar of quality. What if I wanted to play
power Star Golf, then you can in that instance, you can. You
can download it now, I don't have to. I guess you'll do.
You've got so much hard drive space that it doesn't matter it's done. I
guess you will be ready to win. And if that day comes, I'm
screwed. When I get ahold of you and say we're gonna play some multiplayer
power Star Golf, You're gonna be like, wait a minute, hang on,
hang on, hang on, hang on. Maybrow be like you're like
all right. As of this moment, everybody who doesn't have Power Star Golf
installed right now is fired. As I want. You know how I can
get that's a less moonvest things power No, he's more of a scream ride
guy. Yeah sure I didn't install that. Yeah, so yeah, I
reinstalled. I could. In some cases there was like I now have all
of the add on items for Sunset overdrived installed in both the internal and external,
and I can't delete it from the internal for some reason. Weird,
like so that stuff is just really fair. The management of like add on
content and DLC and stuff on the Xbox. I hope, I hope that
stuff is part of what's getting redesigned for this fall board update. And because
it's a mess, right, I think we both are more than just me
ran into the case of like Banjo TWOI wouldn't launch or uninstalled or anything hard
read. I had to hard reboot the system still made it. And yeah,
it's just there's a lot of weird stuff. And I don't know how
much of the stuff with the rare replay games is related to how we got
access to rare replay, but that's but rare replay is just a fucking weird
thing anyway, so who knows. Yeah, I still think I couldn't get
the achievement for like play all the games with the stupid Jetman thing because I
couldn't load up and get pack refew because I had the old three sixty version,
Like I just can't start that game. Weird. Yeah, but I've
played like every other game I got that achievement. I launched all the Jetman
games. I eventually got Banjo working after doing the like hard power cycle thing
or whatever. But jet Pack is still fucked weird. Sometimes you'll see it's
two tiles for one is the standard one and one says the gold like banner
like My Banjo Kazooi and My Banjo two. We don't say rare replay,
but all the other ones do. It's it's really weird. It's really weird.
Yeah, or all the double Talent ones games that you could own digitally
over Yes, Banjo. Yeah, the double is call is caused by like
me already owning some of those games. Assume it's because the rare replay version
has something just slightly different about it, right, I guess well they would
have to, because you can actually exit those games straight back into rare replay,
so there must be something going on. Yeah, you can all the
start button to bring that thing. But I think that's something that they probably
patched into all versions. Maybe so Games Duo knows, No, you would
think, but it's that that's a little strange. Dan, to your question
about the bar of quality, Yeah, I understand. I had a chilling
moment over the weekend whenever I happened to look at my remaining storage on my
PS four, which has got that too too terror By drive in it.
I've only got seven hundred gig left. Shit, that's a pretty good I've
only got seven hundred gig left. Do you have every one of your games
downloading everything everything? Okay? Then you're like, I don't have the Destiny
Alpha and beta. Okay? Do you have like Kills Own Shadow Fall on
there or something? No, there's some two you have stuff that you can
There's quite a few disc games I don't have installed, okay, every the
only so the only disc game I have installed in the Xbox One is Call
of Duty, okay, because at some point I just erased all of those,
right, and you always throw that back in if you really had to,
I would still have to download patches and all the add on. Like
if I wanted to play Forts of five or whatever, it would be hours.
Yeah, yeah, that's true. If I wanted to play Rise,
and I'm just kidding, I've never wanted, right, It's not that bad.
But yeah, like you know, it's like immediately obtaining and downloading every
like free PS plus game every month, and you know, etcetera, etcetera.
Like it's like sure enough, you know, slow and steady, and
I've got a things fill it up, and I'm in the preview program.
So I now have an increasing number of Xbox three sixty games and then installing.
So it's like now I've got Gears of War and I played like the
first hour of Shadow Complex. Sure it's great. Week how did it run?
Like I've found some some of the three sixty games run better than others.
Yeah, well all that stuff is in beta, you know, I
guess, but I mean some of the rare stuff was not amazing. Like
I played a little bit of Banjo Nuts and Bolts and it was not great.
It was chugging a little bit. Yeah, I don't know. Shadow
Complex for the most part, rand fine. There was the sequence early on
refrightened the helicopter U and as the other guy in the suit, and I
think that was always phrasing. Yeah, yeah, it probably was. Yeah,
that'll be the hard things, like you have to go back and compare
and go actually this was fucked on a real three sixty two. Like it's
not necessarily the case that they're going to fix all that, but uh,
Shadow Complex is a great game, yes, but it's like there are parts
of it, the movement and stuff that like you play it now and you're
like, man, this could have been so much smoother in terms of just
like jumping and character movement and stuff like that, like he's kind of all
over the place. Uh, And it's fine, but yeah, I was
wondering because I wondered if it was just a good thing for its time,
because I remember I played the game like three times in a row, and
I never do that. I got all the achievements, I had the max
like level cap and all. I loaded it back up, and like it
was like the room with the gold guns opened up, and I was like,
oh right, And then I had to look at him and go,
like, I don't know which the best one is. It's probably the one
in the center, the weird auto shotgun thing, right, that thing is
just deadly, and like the full map shows up and stuff. So it's
like it's actually hard to have the real progression of the actual game now,
and there's no real way to delete that like save as far as I know,
okause it's I mean I just downloaded the game on my Xbox One.
Well, if if you had a cloud save on the three sixty that's where
it's pulls from, so you could theoretically delete that save out of and then
we three sixty cloud and restart and that might work. And alst they're doing
some other weird larger leaderboard based or other kind of server side but I was
also unlocking like gamer pictures and stuff. I went to the options and it's
a gamer picture unlot nice all right, Yeah, I couldn't find it anywhere
I really wanted. Yeah. Yeah, that's a cool game, and I
wish they would make another one of those. Yeah. But at the same
time, like like going back and playing that game, I mean, it's
not that old. It's like oh nine, right, but like there's there
are things about the character movement in that game that like could be just so
you could feel a lot better than it does. I remember it feeling really
good when you got that upgrade. They let you sprint across the lake.
Yep, that's awesome. Okay, yeah, that's still cool. That's awesome.
Okay. But yeah, the more I think about the game, the
less that. I mean, not that I even loved it at the time,
but like the setting of it is kind of somewhere between generic and like
slightly off putting. Yeah. Well yeah, I mean, like I don't
know something about going back to that now, and just like here's some kind
of weird paramilitary thing trying to operate on American soil and the government implications all
that sort of stuff, like you know, Jade helm Man, Yeah,
maybe it took itself a little too seriously. If they absolutelyan of course,
you know, with you know, the creative Yeah, and put us behind
that thing, that would never happen. But like if what if it just
went like full Gi Joe or whatever, you know, just completely ridiculous.
I could get into that. Yeah, yeah, I would still like to
see another another one of those. I think that that team Craft that a
really good game in that style, and I think that that they you know,
if those people are still together as a team, Yeah, totally.
I'm making Infinity Blades somewhere. They made three of those three is the legally
allowed maximum of video games you can make, and one complex too. The
time is now in one franchise. It's time to get back to see the
dollar disc based shadow. I don't wait to hang on now the fully blown
out But then what if they felt compelled to put it in third person or
something because they had to because it was on a disc or something. That
would be tragic and sad. But I agree, Yeah, I kind of
want to go back and watch that quick look again. The one that you
stitched together just to just to remember. That's exactly why I bring it up.
Yeah, man, we should we should go look at that. We
should go comment over that quick look. But I wonder if we need be
able to notice. I don't know. No, that's how good a job
I did. That's how good good a job you did. They brought that
game by the office. I've probably told this story before they brought that.
It was it was Donald Mustard. Yeah, the head of chair brought the
game on a debug three sixty by the office and like sat down and did
like one of the first quick look he exes with it. Yeah. Uh,
it was like twenty minutes long or something twenty five. It's on site.
And after he left, we went back and looked at the recording and
something had gone bad and like it had dropped like half of the frames in
the quick look or something like that. But we also got retail codes for
the game in like right around the time that we realized this had happened,
and we had like what at least like a week or something before the embargo
was up. So I set about taking the audio from that quick look and
listening to it over and over and fucking over. Yeah, until I could
replicate every single thing that he did in that quick look to enough of a
degree of accuracy that nobody would notice Frankenstein's Monster of a quick look. Like,
so you should we should talk Drew about it sometime, because he was
the one that cut it all together, because we had to figure out,
like, Okay, does it do the metroid thing of when you go through
a door it pans over, because that's going to be impossible to stitch rooms
together, or does it like hard cut the black and then like we like
we just need one frame of like black too, and sure enough, like
it was just enough that we could stitch like actions in one room together from
one take with like separate actions from a different take in the next room.
Do you have we record the whole thing or was it just part of it
that was it was the whole thing start to finish. So there's one thing
that changes between rooms. I think it might be like an on screen timer
or something like. Drew pointed this out at the time when he was putting
it together. He's like, it's like the only way you're gonna notice is
if you're looking at this one thing every time you change rooms, they're going
to see that change, and they would know this would all been put together
from like eighteen. It was like ammo count. Maybe that's what it was.
It was one little detail that nobody ever picked up on, sure unless
they're looking for it. Oh, that was such pain in the ass.
Is it the worst, man? Yeah, because you've got the boss fight.
Because the boss fight. He commented on some specific things he did to
the boss, like lobbing a grenade into the thing at exact time that I
had to mimic almost perfectly. It was fucking horrible. It was really fucking
awesome to like sit and watch you fucking maniacally that it took so long,
Sane, that's impressive. It took so long. In retrospect, we probably
could have just re recorded our own quick look with it. Well, we
could, but we were able to run in a week earlier. Oh,
that's what I think. That's what it was. It was because it was
something that was reported separately. That's what it was. The embargo for that
visit. It was earlier than if we, like the review embargo, so
we could have You're right, we would have just had no video for the
first embargo. Shere back and look at that thing. I think I'm still
I'm still very proud of it. And props to Drew for cutting that cutting
that Frankenstein's mess together. Yeah, it was fun, stupid. That was
a weird basement. Yeah, Jason, Yo, how are you doing?
Man? We are in full on nesting mode and yeah, baby's coming mid
October and she's just like like piling blankets together in specific ways pretty much,
but get extra comfortable. No, Actually, what we're trying to do is
just like clear out room. So we decided to stay at our place right
which is really small and babies are still really small, but there's stuff takes
up a lot of space, like you know, cribs, you know,
activity centers and playpends and all that junk. So yeah, we're trying to
get rid of stuff, move it down to storage. And that was my
entire weekend for the most part, with the exception of after she went to
bed, I got to play a Little Galaxy, which is which pretty fucking
rad. I like that game an awful lot. Not normally into rogue les
really yeah, like Rogue Legacy. You know, I'm kind of like,
it's a great game. I just I couldn't see myself through it. The
same thing with like Splunky or something or anything like that. I understand the
draw to those games doesn't necessarily speak to me, but Galaxy's totally doing that.
Yeah, so yeah, right, amount of challenge and stuff took me
a little while to get use to the controls. But once I'm in it,
man, I had Yeah, I had a great run. I got
up to two five and just fucked up. I fucked up dead. Yeah.
Did you make it to the boss or was it before? It was?
But it was before the fucking boss. I mean that level gets pretty
thick. I just beat that one and I haven't played it since. Like
I just I was so pissed. I was so pissed they pile it on.
I mean, like the feeling of desperation playing that game is genuine.
Yeah, you really feel it. It's it's intimidating. There were several times
this weekend where I wanted to load it up, and like I'm on season
two and I would just look at the icon and I wouldn't be ready to
play it. Just like, I don't know if I'm ready to be that
tense all the time right now. Totally, it's super intimidating. Uh yeah,
I had that save at two five for like five days without touching it
because I was like, I need to be in the right like head space
before I go at this thing. I was streaming. I was like,
you guys were recording more metal gear stuff, and I was just running a
stream out of my desk. This was like Thursday. Uh, and yeah,
I got it two five and just was fucking around and fucked up and
fucking died. Yeah, and you didn't have enough credits you continue, And
I just kind of accidentally left the stream running for like another forty five minutes.
I set the stroller down, presumably just like rage quick. I don't
I don't know, I continued once. And I don't know that I'll ever
do it again. I don't know that it's worth it to me. It's
a sacrifice all that starting man. No no, no, no, no.
If you get it, if you get to the right load out,
that's it's so important. If you're having a really good run and you're just
like, I want to just get all that stuff back, and because there's
no guarantee that you're gonna get the same stuff, but there's also to guarantee
that you're gonna make it to your corpse like the box of your ship before
you And yeah, it's a little bit of the fun right there. Yeah,
it's the thing that inserts like the care required to play that game period
is like that feeling of like, well now I don't even have my shit,
sure, so I need to play it super care. The one time
I did it, I had to like just bypass every encounter to get my
stuff. You know. It's like I literally like, you don't have the
robot fort caring about the vision cones. Yeah, yeah, like you don't.
You've all you've got is the p shooter, and it's like I cannot,
I literally cannot go toe to toe with these enemies until I get my
stuff back. Totally changes the way that you play, and I've actually kind
of adopted more of that into just like the normal game play because then I'm
starting to recognize like really bad trouble spots, so I will use like stealth
or quote unquote to get around enemies and stuff, and I'm using the robot
form a lot more. And man, that game's uh, yeah, super
good, especially since they announced you know that that patch I'd tried since that
hit. Yes, it came out over the weekend. It definitely seems to
help performance. So I've still had a hitch up a couple of times,
but it's been generally a lot, a lot smoother in the big fights.
Yeah, I've had like one lock up and you know, just countless like
you know, framy situations. Also, Jeff, you'll appreciate this. They
toned down the number of combat bark Yeah. I saw in the patch notes,
like the characters are just less chatty. Yeah. The game the game
was on the verge of becoming a drinking game that would be real, real
bad. It repeated itself quite a bit, pitching space jobs. Yeah,
and there was one level that it glitched out and they just kept saying the
same thing over. It was like a three person dialogue, just the entire
levels over and over. The one big bullet point that I like got really
excited about is the robot transformation happens a lot quicker. Yes, and you're
able to buffer, Yeah, like your grappas like as you're transforming now,
so that'll meet up. Yeah, the combat a little bit. Yeah,
I found myself doing exactly that thing, you know, like I'm gonna grab
the electrical thing with robot and throw it at these guys who immediately take their
shields down and then transform into the ship and lock on missiles like before they
can even respond. Yeah, totally. It feels really good. Like the
combat in that game is super interesting, hard fucking game. It's Yeah,
I'm at the point now where I just beat the third season. I'm into
five. Wow, I died right away, but can you know because you
carry over, you know, some of your money. Yeah, so you're
able to get some stuff and died, didn't get back to my corpse,
and now I've just got nothing. And man, that first level, I
just I just not having my robot and not having any of my weapons.
It is so frustrating. Uh, and it's so hard to like start from
scratch. Yeah, I've kind of hit a wall. I feel like you
earn it when you pull it off though. Yeah for sure. Yeah,
absolutely think Austin Wroth review and I think at one point he actually was going
back into previous episodes to try to have a good crash coin. I can
see that he could start four ship. I'm starting to think that, so
could you do could you do like two and then go straight to four and
take those coins? With you. Yeah, thinks so interesting. Okay,
huh, and like he had to do that to beat it. I think
that's what I think that was one of his approaches at one point. I'm
not sure I went. But there's uh, there's some stuff in like in
the combat that is not maybe especially well documented that has been helping me out.
Like a friend of mine told me that if you're if you're the robot
and you grab a ship and throw it at a wall, it will be
bounce off and take a stun Yeah, like it'll be it'll literally be stunned
for a couple of seconds, and then you can just wait in and beat
the ship out of it. I try and do that. Yeah, just
keep in stun locks. Yeah, that's that's a good way to like neutralize
one of the bigger enemies in a big fight and trying to kind of get
him out of your face for a minute. Yeah, so you've got one
thing. Can you just throw it to the wall over and over again?
And it seems like you probably kind of could. I don't know if you
can do it like indefinitely. I got through a couple of loops though,
and it seems to work well generally if you're down to one ship, I
feel like if that's enough to just like, yeah, tear it apart with
the really fast sword does a lot of damage. I've not gotten good with
the robot form. Yeah, it takes us very spare. Yeah, it
takes them. It takes some getting used to, especially the like the charge
sword specifically is what does so much damage. But you have to figure out
like the range you need to be at to hit with it and stuff like
that. It'll come in time. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like,
in fact that we're even having this conversation, I feel like kind of
indicates the sort of depth in the combat in this game. Yeah, I
was. I was really surprised by it. Yeah, agreed. Other than
that, yeah, that's about it. Rising Thunder. I tried to play
this weekend. I never found the time. But uh, they're continuing list
continuously making updates to that. They've added new variants to a couple of the
you know, the characters, and it is now in like open alpha and
really can just sign in and play. Okay, so no more codes needed.
Go check that shit out, sign up and yeah it'll do. Yeah
that's cool. Have they have they given any any longer term plans like a
roadmap for like, here's when more characters are coming or more knocks. We
should see about getting them in here, and yeah, picking their brains a
little bit about that thing. Yeah, that'd be cool. I might try
and talk to them at packs as well. We'll see, but yeah,
i'd love to have them right here. Yeah. That thing we are I
think is really interesting. I have one more game to talk about. What's
that? It's now the only game? Oh, betting on Doda. That's
not that's not. Yeah, I guess it is. All right, I'm
in. It's trusted because it's not Doda. It's betting on Dota, betting
out we had. I had this conversation with any earlier than he was asking,
was like, all right, can I so I just need get in
there and like fire up Doda and buy some items and get I was like,
no, you could just go to the web store and do this.
You don't even need Doda. You never even you don't even have to install
Doda to go buy some items and start putting them down. It's ridiculous.
I can't believe that I did it. So you had your first taste of
it, but I did. Now you're going to throw away off the entire
life I put. I put seventy five dollars worth of items down on this
thing, some some nice items that I paid cash money and straight to valve
for. We watched live on air. Yeah, that didn't play out quite
as dramatically as I had hoped. It was pretty dramatic because I bet on
the underdogs in that matchup. They were I don't know how to convert this
to like more standard odds. They were at thirty percent. It was thirty
seventy in favor of the other team. So it was about a two to
one payout, okay, which is why I've bet on them. It just
so happened that the other team was the American team, which was having an
incredible run. Yeah but sorry, guy, Yeah, the hats come first,
I get you. They did, all right. This is this is
a video game, like yeah, and the teams are named after like total
garbage, Like yeah, it's one of the It's one of the things that
like seeing people going, like, finally an American team one. It's like,
no, it's some fucking like peripheral company or something. It's sports company,
won Doda, It's not America. Well no, but I mean,
in this case, it was the only team with like a decent share of
American players on it. Yeah, which is mostly where that came came from.
But but like getting nationalistic about your fucking yeah sports, it's not the
Olympics, you know, it seems super dumb to me. It's not the
Olympics. But I mean, it is a situation where China has been so
dominant in doda for so long that Chinese Doda, although not not so much
this year, but like last year it at TI it was absolutely that,
to the point that it got kind of boring because the style was very similar
and like the game's kind of all played out the same way. But whatever,
Yeah, you got hats. I got a lot of hats and free
hats. It's amazing how much more exciting a spectator activity is when you got
something right. Who would have thought? Who would have thought? Uh yeah,
Fantasy Doda website, I mean, I'm working on Fantasy Doda is absolutely
a thing that exists, and you can totally get into that. I don't
want to get no that crazy shit too. But it was fun. I
don't know if I would do it again, but it was a good time,
all right, it seemed. It seemed super fucking shady. I mean,
most of the processes documented on upf if you really want to see it.
But yeah, you know that when I did look yet, I couldn't.
I couldn't get the I couldn't get the bet in because I waited until
like five minutes before this matchup, and then they were just getting slammed and
all of their trade bots were occupied already. Yeah, so you trade in
your stuff and you get contacted by a bot, like when it when it
finally takes your when it finally takes your wager. When the website actually worked
well enough because I told it, I was like, because it only lets
you bet six items, and I was like, all right, here are
the six that I want to get rid of, and they take them up
front, they hold them in reserve. Yeah, otherwise, and like finally,
once it finally, once it took the bet, it was like it
was like it popped up a little thing and it was like, all right,
wait for a trade request from Obama eighty two yep, and sure enough,
and you have to log into this. You have to have like you
need steam running or the website that can handle the trade stuff. You know,
whatever, the Steam stuff has to be accessible to you, so you
can get the trade request and give it those items. So at any point
is actual cash being exchanged or is it just items that cost not in this
transaction. So so this is technically legal. There are ways to launder money
into and out of Steam though, because there are there are shady other marketplaces
that will let you take your virtual items and cash them out for actual cash
instead of Steam like marketplace dollars, so you could conceivably get actual money.
Yeah, okay, here's what we're here's what we're gonna do. Okay,
we're going to sell let's say, a lot of cocaine. Okay, I'm
past recording. Yeah, that's gonna turn into a lot of cash. But
like it's a lot of cash, Like, what are you gonna do with
it? Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna drive around. We're gonna
go on a little road trip with all our cash and just go to gas
stations and fucking targets, and we're gonna buy steam Wallet gift cards with all
of our drug money. And now we've got all these Steam cards, then
we're gonna use those steam Wallet cards to buy fucking hats. Then we're gonna
take those hats and cash them out for money. We won't get as much
money as we put in, but it will be clean money that will not
come from the cocaine directly. It will be enough steps removed that, like
unless something flags a hit on these transactions, which the cash trade for items
is already kind of shady anyway, so they're not going to be too inclined
to go like, hey, i rs this guy's like turning a lot of
hats into cash over here, and then we're gonna take that money and reinvest,
go buy more cocaine. Seems like a plan. Exactly is the problem
with the cocaine money? You say it's not clean? Is it because they're
marked bills? Like how would that be? How would it be traced back
to? If you want to do legitimate things with money? If so,
the minute you spend over ten thousand dollars in cash in any one transaction,
there are forms that have to get filled out, there are legal proceeds.
So if you're like I'm gonna go buy a house and pay cash for it,
they will know you're talking like real cash or do you mean like,
hey, I'm using a debit card cash. So like if you deposited that
cash to a bank to make your debit card happen, that's a trend.
Yeah, even even even taking it to the bank and trying to put it
in there will raise a bunch of red flags. What if you did two
separate five thousand dollars transactions, you know, if it was just two,
yeah, you could probably get away with it. But it's one hundred.
Eventually, the paper trail is there no matter how you broke it up.
Yeah, you know. And so like there's a lot of like traveling concerns
about going out of country and stuff like that too, or like you can't
travel with more than ten thousand dollars in cash or some number that I think.
I think it actually is still ten thousand, So you could have like
a dollar less than that strapped to your body as you go through customs or
something like that. Okay, and hope for the best, but like,
you know, the point being, at some point questions get asked, which
is why people launder money. Uh, And like when I look at the
fucking hats for real money or eve fucking plex uh turning into real money and
stuff like that. All I can think of, and maybe this says more
about me than about any of these services, shady or otherwise. But all
I can think of is like, well, if you had a bunch of
drug money, there you go. H No, I think that's think that's
a genuine concern, sure, yeah, or concern or like the lifeblood of
these operations on the low maybe, Like I wonder like if anyone is caught
onto that. It sounds like that would not for a really lame episode of
the shield. Yeah sure yeah, the lottery stuff for eve or SVU,
but you're sure enough. I was looking on upf at that site and their
loan contact info is an email address. Yeah, Like that's it. Like
I don't know what country that thing is based in. I don't know who
runs it. I don't know anything about the mount Gox guy still on the
run somewhere. All I know I think they caught him. Okay, yeah
uh. All that said, I willingly put my steam log in into that
website wow, and then accepted a trade request from one of its bots.
But it was it was the steam log and stuff that was like connected to
Steam direction. It's like it's the Steam api. So that's people people assumably
people on Twitter, Oh, because they never steer you wrong. Said that
the steamy API is quite secure, actually fatal if they're using the real valve
stuff and you're logging in that way, and then it's, uh, you
can be pretty confident. Yeah, and sure enough I got all my stuff
back and a whole bunch on top of it. Bang, it was the
best. Eighty two came back with your goods. It was a different bot.
Actually it was like six different bots. Like the first time it came
back to give me stuff, it only gave me five items out of the
like twenty five that it owed me, And I was like, oh my
god, that's all I'm ever going to see, isn't it. That stuff's
all gone and it was all garbage. But it finally came around. They
just got real busy. Yeah during the tournament. That was pretty cool.
Also, the International was amazing this year. Yeah, so I heard bucking
incredible, Like everything about the production values that I saw, the quality of
the matches, like the drama, the upsets. I should have gone,
what were there kind of like stream numbers? Were they in league territory?
I saw some insane stuff I wish I couldn't Emili. I don't know about
that, but I mean I couldn't. I didn't track down any kind of
aggregate of because there's so many different ways to watch at this point, Like
there's like watching in the client, there's watching on Twitch. Now they have
like their like Valve has a new web based streaming solution, all right,
they built all that stuff in this like it's like shoot dot com. Well
this exists on a web page right now. It's in Beata, but it's
like Dota two dot com slash watch. The purpose of that stuff is to
give you all the data around the edges that the client would give you.
Yeah, so where you've got real time like item float outs and all that
ship updating on the sides and stuff, like they're on YouTube streaming now.
Like the point being like, you know, it's kind of hard to look
at a single number to really get an idea of how big something like that
is at this point. But uh, during the finals, I saw people
passing around screenshots of like three million people watching it in the game client or
something insane like that. So yeah, it was it was really big.
Trying to think like what the big league numbers were during the league tournament that
everyone would throw around and be like insane numbers. Yeah, and it seemed
like the International, even in previous years wasn't necessarily close. No, No,
like League League in player base and in viewership, seemed like it was
always the thing. But I mean, this was like far and away the
biggest prize pool in the history of competitive video games. Does does League do
the same thing with a big live deal or you know, at an arena
with commentators? What's it call? Because I've heard of the International year after
Okay, I think I've seen that on Twitter. Yeah. Yeah, I'm
kind of woefully uninformed about the League stuff. But they they rent out staples
like they it's a big o. I remember, like once a year I'll
see people say LCS and what's everyone talking about? Liberty City story Hall.
I just forgured they're talking about Baseball CLCS in Baseball League Championships here, oh,
which is probably like probably this is like the ALCS the oh right a
l DS. Yeah. I've I've heard great things about like Riots production and
stuff with that sort of thing. Yeah, I haven't seen any of its
first hand. Tom. You know, No, at the end of the
day, it's it's they're watching Legal Legends. So yeah, yes, either
you're into that or or not. Uh and then yeah, Dan American one
finally awesome, finally final that the evil geniuses, evil geniuses on top against
the odds. Although they were there, they were pretty highly thought of,
but nobody necessarily thought they were going to go all the way. Justin Wong
himself, yephy Brad. Yeah, those guys, those they were playing,
they were they were playing, they were playing with fights dicks. Cool.
It was amazing. I've never seen anything like it. And mac Roy here's
here's I mean, here's your fucking American dream though. Top to bottom.
The Star Breakout player, who was a new player on EG as a sixteen
year old kid from Pakistan got awesome. Damn. Like his family immigrated here,
like he got into Doda over there and like like whole story about like
he sold his bike over there to have more money to play Dota at the
PC cafe whatever. Yeah, and so now this kid is like rich.
Yeah, that's awesome. Six point six million dollars split five ways sixteen Yeah,
oh man, that's really granted. You know, the team takes a
cut. Yeah, yeah, but I mean he s he's for a sixteen
year old, he's doing well. They actually they won the other big Dota
tournament this year so far, the Dota two Asian Championships. They won that
too, So he's he has chosen well in his life's career, life's path.
But yeah, like like Valve, Valve actually pays the taxes on all
the winnings and this thing, so they get they get the actual amount of
series, get the actual money. So when they say like seventeen million dollars
prize pool, it is seventeen millions lottery bullshit. Actually it actually was way
over eighteen by the time the finals actually happened. Is it a lump pay
out or I assume I guess. I mean they split it among the players.
Yeah, they're five five ways. But yeah, like every every one
of those kids on that team got like won well over a million dollars by
winning this final, plus the team whatever, the team and the team who
knows what the team Obviously he's going to take. I hope there's nine dollars.
He's super big, right. You know, they've got a ton of
different players to support. I don't know where they're getting their money from.
Lots of ships and yeah, most teams. Most teams are doing a lot
of sponsorships and stuff, a lot of fucking shitty mice and keyboards out there,
and someone needs to stand next. I mean Gunner Glass More and more.
Like the bigger name players are breaking a bunch of money in streaming on
Twitch and stuff like that. Like their viewership numbers are fucking crazy, really
crazy crazy. Wonder what kind of cut yeah they take off, Like I
I always get the sense that the winnings are just kind of like icing on
top of the actual business model. Really yeah, okay, like if you
can win, it's great, but like you know, you're definitely other ways
to bring in revenue, so conceivably, you know, this kid specifically could
be twenty years old four years from now and made a ton of money,
be set for the rest of his life, and when people ask him like,
oh, how do you afford all this stuff, like how come you
don't have to work, he could be like, oh, I just got
good at the game in high school and that paid for everything for the rest
of I mean, they're there are there are people in their late twenties in
Korea who live that exact story, you know, like where where esports has
been a thing for way longer, you know, where it's been around for
like fifteen years now. Like there are retired StarCraft players who are just done,
you know, they like the cow Ripken like like yeah, like the
Bell Jong and Korea, Like he's the most earning StarCraft player of all time.
I don't know if he's still playing StarCraft two or not. Do they
build up players as like phenoms are just that they they're they're dedicated and they
practice you know, eighty hours absolutely. You know, they've got public personas,
Like there's a there's a dynastic component to a lot of it, you
know, depending on what their legacy is like like it is it is real
sports in every way other than like the physical athleticism. But like, how
do you think it's changed? I mean you went to Korea and yeah that
was twenty ten, twenty ten, Yeah, and saw some of that.
Yeah, uh, how do you think it's changed? What's the your impression
of how different it is from that over here versus how it was there.
Yeah, I don't know that. I wouldn't say it's that different. I
mean I was it was a smaller theater that I was in over there.
I think it held like three four thousand people or something like that. It
was StarCraft. It was kind of a different era. Well not only that,
but it was StarCraft two at a time when brood War was still the
dominant game in Korea by far, Like that's brood War was selling out arenas
and StarCraft two was kind of the scrappy. I thought I saw some story
going around that some League teams were thinking about jumping too Doda. Yes,
I was talking to talking to a friend about that earlier today, Like like
League is the big thing in Korea right now, but but the money,
I mean, god, you know, like the money has to be the
driving force here, right, yeah, like it's so big and Doda,
dude, do most of the basic strategies of League transferred to Doda and vice
versa. I mean, like not really at any kind of specific level high
level that they're playing at. Probably not. Yeah, they're too because they're
very specific character based stuff. Like, yeah, there are too many differences
at that point in a base level, like you know, to you and
I, the games are indistinguishable. Yeah, right, but like it's five
on five and there are three lanes, like that's common. But beyond that,
you know, like, yeah, the characters are so different, that
kind of thing. It's Canadian football. But that doesn't mean like if you're
if you're adept at that stuff and you've already in a lot of time,
and it doesn't mean you can't switch over, like players switch games all the
time, you know. It just it takes a while to ramp up.
Yeah, but that was it was. It was a health and exciting final.
That was a really great way to spend a Saturday. That's great.
Yeah, it was the early afternoon, wasn't. Yeah they started in the
morning like ten am and it went to like five six, okay, but
it could have gone on like it was. It was the best of five
and they ended on a game four, So it wasn't quite as nail biting
as as you might have hoped, but it was still pretty tense, interesting,
it was. It was good stuff. It's a lot of money,
no joke when playing, but yeah it is. It absolutely is. But
then when you get into the splits and the team cuts and stuff like that,
like it's not actually million dollars payouts that top team. Yeah, I
mean absolutely, I mean, you know, even even retirement money, you
know, no, but even teams finishing fourth fifth place, like they were
still each player looking at like healthy six figure payout totally stuff, you know,
like it's it's pretty good. Yeah, if you're super young and you
can that's that. It could be pretty good when you're young and you know,
when you're earning a salary from your team already. Yeah, yeah,
that's the thing. The machine seems more interesting. Yeah, the money perspective
on the weddings. Yeah, it was just it was it was a great
story like some male the sixteen year old kid I was talking about. But
also I did you guys watch Free to Play the Valve documentary, Like the
American player featured in that is like he has a good story and that thing.
And this was basically his last shot. Like people call him like an
old man and Doda you know he's twenty seven. Uh yeah, like he
was out last. I thought you gonna say twenty four. No, no,
like he had he also he couldn't play in in TI last year because
he had an arm injury. The George Foreman of Doda. Yeah, it's
kind of exactly that, you know, like like he was out for an
injury. You know. It's it's like sports sky stuff and he came back
and like everybody's saying, like, oh, you know, maybe he's going
to retire after this year or whatever. So to see them go all the
way in those circumstances, it was it was really exciting. You guys should
he's getting into losing his fast twitch muscles up every day. Yep, you
guys should play Toto. I'm about to start hearing the storm. I'm excited
about that. I'll be the old man. I'll be the thirty one year
old. I'll be the Diamondallas Page. He doesn't start till his thirties and
then takes over. Yeah he did, you be the tampats. He started
training when he was thirty five. Wow, Yeah, he's the manager for
years. Yeah, so he's in the business new people. But like he
didn't like how long did he wrestle after he started? Boy, his run
is probably like ninety six to two thousand and two. And like his run,
the decks anything into into his forties. Yeah, yeah, see,
it's never too late. Okay, I'm going to give it a genuine try.
I'm looking forward to seeing what you think. Yeah, well see I
heard it's the right one to yes, give it a shot. Absolutely,
the like the most like the least inscrutable, the kind of the friendliest and
shortest matches. Yeah, that would be the place to start. So all
right, Oh, let's uh get out of this room for a minute,
stretch our legs, and come back for some news. Sounds good, All
right, let's get into a few headlines here. There's not a whole lot
though, after kind of games calm, kind of test took the wind out
everybody's sales, everyone's flying back. Over the weekend, the game's industry collectively
vomited a huge number of headlines out in the space about thirty six hours.
No, not that many, actually just gagged him right up, and not
like an E three sort of number. No, but since then, not
a whole lot has happened. Who in this room and be excited if I
were to say, hey, there's a new World of Warcraft expansion coming.
Yeah, all right, all right, now moving on, They're raised in
the level cap to one ten. Yes, what it is? Right?
I never thought i'd see the day new classes or anything. Demon Hunter hunter
a uh, yes, demon hunter is the new class. Okay, only
night elves and blood elves can be a demon hunter. What do Yeah,
of course, come on, you know, no one, no one else
can hunt demons. It sounds like you will finally be able to get into
the Emerald Dream, which is actually kind of crazy to me because but I
remember people speculating about that in two thousand and four when that game came out.
Yeah, Emerald Dream, everybody, Yeah, yeah, that's the Emerald
Nightmare. That's that is good stuff. That the Emerald Dream is like the
weird like Earth Magic Stasis that Malfurian storm Rage is dreaming in. You know
what I'm talking about? Anybody storm Rage of course? Yeah? Remember that
guy? Right, Yeah, I've said mel Urian from Storm Raid. No,
there's mal Urans from the World of Warcraft fighting game. Yes, that's
correct. Yeah, yeah, I don't. It is kind of neat though,
to think like, oh, people were like because those there were teases
of that back when this game first shipped, and here we are, like
there's so much lore for them to or another way of looking at it is
they held it back for so long. Yeah, well I could be curious
to see show straint. Yeah good if this does it for them and gets
people to come back and stay back, because it sounds like the numbers are
while while great for any other game, are low by Warcraft standard. It's
weird like this, this long list of bullet points. And I should probably
say what the things called World of Warcraft Legion. Okay, sounds like a
kind of a not especially dramatic name for something when you think about the other
names they had for their lords and the Burning Crusade, Blank of Blank and
the Statue of Real, real grandiose, dramatic stuff, and then it's just
here's Legion. Also, like, one of the big things I kept seeing
about this thing was, Hey, they're bringing Illadin back, And I'm like,
didn't you kill him in another expansion already? Which I was pretty sure
I think that was the case. Yeah, like like to the point where
we're already recycling major villains out of previous expansions, Like I'm back. He's
double pissed. Yeah, I'm gonna have to be a level one hundred and
ten to beat him this time. Yep, that's how mad he is.
But yeah, I'm sure the Blizzard can't be stoked that, you know,
with this long list of new things they're adding to the game. The headline
out there is just, hey, they've got half the subscribers they did last
time they put out an expansion. Yeah, which is still five or six
million. It's like five and a half million I think right now. Which
yeah, which for like like most MMOs can't get away with a monthly fee
period, right, yeah, so that's still pretty good. But I don't
know, I mean, I think that ten million takes into account the full
bump of people who just like bought the expansion and came back to play it,
right probably and then stopped playing again when they had again. Seen were
talking to Matt Rory, it sounded like the last expansion was not particularly content
rich or the well received. I don't know, it sound like that he
kind of people can chewed through it and got out again. But the Warlords
one, Yes, it was like about a year ago. Yeah, yeah,
a little over I think, but uh yeah, Rory made it sound
like this is the first the first expansion since they kind of made their comments
about how they wanted to start pumping them out on a more regular basis.
Yeah, but that hasn't quite borne out because they're still taken a while to
get them out there because of the bizzard. But yes, that is happening.
I will probably get it check it out and really get the fuck back.
Have you? Have you played every expansion they've released? Yes? Really
I didn't. I did not know you were that big a while guy,
No I'm not. I'm really not. You're you're one of those one of
those the interloping five million that come. Yeah. Meanwhile, I was looking
at getting back into Anarchy Online. Yeah, yeah, what about ABV I
couldn't. I wouldn't stop you. Hell, hell I was. I was
talking to somebody about Dark Age of Camel out over the weekend. Uh,
that game sounded pretty cool. Get into Age of Conan. The combat was
crazy in that game. Yeah, they had boobs in that game. You
could come at the boobs. Those those are pretty cool too. I'm trying
to find the date for the you know, some kind of time frame here,
you know, next year sometime. Let's say there's typically fifty launch.
I want to say, is the price and you can get vanilla well or
just you know something without any of the expansions for free now up to certain
levels level twenty or something like that. Okay, yes, yeah, and
then even like the early expansions, do you have to buy those? Bern?
Do you have to buy them? But I wonder if you can get
them cheaper at this point, yeah, I think you just add them digitally
to your account and it's not a big deal. Yeah, okay, I
would hope they discount them because just like just by the nature of moving the
player base onto later content with each new expansion, like there's just not going
to be that much for you to do by yourself, like a battle chest,
you know, the expansions they included, they would put those out there
a lot, So that was that was kind of one of the last link
or ring big pieces of news coming out of Games Calm. Didn't they have
a whole convention just for that though, that Blizzy thing? Yeah? Okay,
what else did they do with that? Like costplay contests? Oh yeah,
I mean, have you been to a BlizzCon. No, they'll play
Overwatch Okay, yes, Overwatch will be there. I'm sure it's just a
Blizzcon's fun. I mean, if you're in the Blizzard games like, it's
just kind of a giant celebration of all things Blizzard, you know whatever,
full freak out and play Hearthstone okay, because they're lunatics. Yeah, there's
tons of costplay, like they do a lot of panels actually like they have
pretty good panels at blizz Con about you know, just naturally about Blizzard stuff.
But but they kind of save they're big game news for Yes, they
do a lot of that. Rory actually pointed out that, you know,
the Warcraft movie is still happening, and it's like actually getting close. It's
getting trailers and stuff. Yeah, I don't think that they haven't put out
a full, actual public trailer yet. They've shown it at events and stuff.
Yeah, there's been some like leaked shitty camp stuff. But you know,
he pointed out, this expansion might be timed with that thing in some
way. It's so crazy to me that that movie is like move it's still
happening. I mean, it's done, like it they shot it a while
ago. It's almost finished. As far as I know, did all CG
and stuff. I believe there is a lot of CG and a lot of
Yes, Okay, it's gonna be Jim Henson's studio made all of the all
of the works. Ye used all the stuff from a Labyrinth. It's just
that over and over again, so so much. Don't see a brother man.
That would be great? Would that would be good? I'm working on
my Labyrinth. M mmo, god, that would be great. Yes,
no, of course there's a Labyrinth game for the Combat of sixty four.
That's fucking awesome. It's so fucking good. Really. Yeah, it's like
a LucasArts adventure games. Oh wow, like like that that visual style.
I want. I want to see sixty C C sixty four. David Bowie?
Should I see Labyrinth? You get it? It's good and this like
good to watch now. I don't know. I don't know how I wouldn't
hold out. I like David Bowie, I like jimfer Connolly, and I
could I can deal with it. I don't know this. This sounds a
lot like the time that I attempted to watch Goonies for first time at the
age of twenty one. Yeah, and like kind of couldn't do it.
Yeah, I don't know. I don't I couldn't say about Labyrinth though,
I don't know how that would come over there, how that would go over
That might not work out. Okay. Describe yourself a couple of forties and
should probably be fine. Okay that thinks the most time, Yes, smooths
out doubt. Yeah, most movie watching experiences. Should we talk about the
Time Magazine cover. I don't know, there's much to say. There was
definitely very much in the moment, like like at the time that was that
was a very hot day, yes, and the hottest of takes flying of
to and fro. But man, that covers terrible. Yeah, awesome,
awesome that he's on the cover of Time magazine. So unfortunate. I thought
it was awesome industry and for kind of how little he gave a fuck Yeah,
like he was into it, right, yeah, he said they loved
it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Like game Spot talked to him.
I think at games Come, I believe that sounds. I think they're in
Germany when they talk to him. But they asked him, uh, you
know, they asked him how he felt about it, and he said,
I don't get too caught up in it much. I think it's fun.
I love the covert. Like I don't know, I just think it's one
of those things that it just ends up. You know, VR is going
to have such a rough time like getting over the consumer grade hump of like
exposing people to this thing, getting them to understand why it's cool and all
this other stuff, and a cover like that, regardless of the article,
I mean, you know, the article is like pretty neutral. You know,
it's got some stuff in it where you're like, I roll in your
eyes and just like the some of that stuff. So if you've seen the
full thing, because like the cover story in the magazine is different than what
was on the website, and I want to I want to actually read that
it is different the cover story. But you know, like the image problem
of VR is tough. Uh, and you look at this cover and you're
like this, this doesn't help that. If anything, it starts to reinforce
that, like you're gonna look crazy on this stuff, Like I don't you
know everyone always says like everyone looks crazy when they're wearing this VR. They're
like, no, no, actually, uh, if you find that picture
of me going around, you can look pretty fucking rad wearing a glowing fucking
VR helmet. Yeah, but you also have a glowing gun in your hands.
Did that help? That does help? No? But I think that
you know that like that's that. I just don't think that's true that everyone
looks crazy in VR. I mean, if you don't know anything about VR
and you see it, you're gonna go what. But I don't agree that
everyone looks completely stupid in VR. I would say that most of them do.
However, like it still looks goofy to me, it still looks awkward
large extent, there's like weird social awkwardness. I guess so. But I
mean it's not a it's not an inherently social activity though, it's not like
you're generally by large you're not gonna be doing it talking about the thing that
people are going to be in the home doing usually buy themselves alone in a
room. You're not gonna be doing this on the bus or anything, you
know. Yeah, I mean, here's gear VR will enable that you can't.
But I mean, just like you know, people could play you know,
real gyro heavy three DS games and stuff on the bus whatever. You
don't see people flail on their three DS is around, you know, people
just generally don't do that. There's no fucking way I would put on a
gear VR on like the subway. No, yeah, you can. You
imagine being on the subway with something depriving you of your senses. You robbed
immediately, Like how some people fall asleep on the train. I guess it
happens. Probably you could probably wake up and defend yourself faster than you could
get out of VR and to defend yourself. Yeah, you're probably right,
but yeah, so I mean that that's my thing with it. I look
at it and just go like, man, like it just puts like this
campaign that has to start, this this process of exposing VR to more and
more people and getting them to understand that it's real and that it and that
it is full of potential and all this other stuff. Like you look at
that cover and you're like, fuck, yep, that's that's it. Does
it does kind of perpetuate those stereotypes that have lingered since the nineties about VR.
Absolutely, I think so yeah, Like I was, it's not like
they were They weren't drawing fucking lawnmower man shit behind him, but like fake
beach from you know, like I said, it's just like was he trapped
on the fucking island from neuromancer or thing? Like what the fuck? Uh?
It just yeah, like that stuff is disappointing. On the other hand,
like I would argue that VR is so aw like so far off for
the mainstream consumer that like by the time it comes around, like this is
going to be long in the rear and then the rear view mirror. You
know, I suppose yeah, like this is just a minor bump that will
be forgotten. Yeah, Like you know, think about the barrier to entry
for these first round of headsets. You know, it's like it's not only
the three or four hundred dollars for the item, Like what is the PC
that you need to run all that stuff? At least a grand right?
But you know, like yes, but like and and that, and also
like the console that has a VR headset before it within a year's time,
Morpheus is a slightly different conversation. You know. That's that's something that is
definitely aimed at a mass market because it's a it's a fucking video game console
like that one should be a lot more plug and play. Like with the
Vibe and the Rift, I'm still wondering, like and you know, they're
development kits out there, so people kind of know, but like what is
the setup involved? You know, like how difficult is it going to be
for the average consumer who doesn't mess with PC's much right to get all the
stuff work? And that's what you know, you had Microsoft out there around
the Windows ten stuff or around the that lost that pree three Conference for Oculus
Contuning. We're supporting the oculus directly and blah blah, you know, to
try to make it easier for people to hook that ship a right, It
just it seems like it's ways off. I guess what I'm saying is that
the people who are likely to buy in the VR for the most part anytime
soon are also the people who are savvy enough not to let that cover you
totally right, affect anything they think about this stuff. But it's it's one
of those things where it's like, I, you know, I saw this
stuff kind of happened, but last time, you know, and saw like
VR, you know, and the tech wasn't there, you know, so
it was easy to make fun of. But like every single time you saw
VR anywhere, it was like, was it like a like like Jared Laniar
or whatever fucking wearing this stuff? And then it was just all the imagery,
all the techno hippie fucking bullshit, New Ag fucking well dot Com era
fucking trash, just like that fucking Berkeley just all that shit, just admit
it. Hate Berkeley fucking funneled into just all that fucking early nineties techno fucking
new age hippy fucking crystal raver bullshit fucking funneled through it and it fucking destroyed.
Any chance did that stuff happen? And so like, you know,
like it's all funny gage like, yeah, exactly in today's world, until
the product will be strong enough to stand on its own at some point,
and that won't be a problem. But I watched this fucking shit get destroyed
last time by the mainstream media, by the way they were covering it,
by the people they were approaching, by the things that came out of those
people's mouths, and the fucking garbage. Fucking like, yes, Kennedy R.
Changed the world. Yes, absolutely will it probably in some ways that
you might not expect. But you go back to some of that stuff from
then, from the nineties, Man, holy shit, here's the unlikely ray
of hope for you. Back then it was all about like you know,
transcending your humanity and achieving another plane or whatever. And now it's about cold
hard corporate profit fucking a So if I can count on someone to present something
in a way that people might actually want, so you know, that can't
be stopped a bunch of fucking bullshit corporations that have a lot of stock prices
riding on that if you want, if you want an assurance that they're going
to get behind this thing and make it and ram it down. He placed
throats until it's accepted. There there you go. Look at the Facebook logo
for a while. Yep, when does Alphabet Incorporated get involved in this hot
new product that's the cardboard many are? Yeah, that's the answer. Uh
yeah, if if nothing else than just the companies and the money that are
behind the stuff this time, Like they're not They're not gonna you know,
it's not gonna go gently. Yeah, but make no mistake, AAR is
the thing long term, you think, totally, because you could black out
AAR glasses to do VR if you want it to. So that seems so
far off though, Nah, Nasa na maybe right, HOLLI len seems super
fucking early. I mean hollow lens. Yeah, like that that thing seemed
super early. But that that stuff we'll all get there. Yeah, I
don't know. I just think about the images you get on a cell phone
screen versus what you can do with that weird overlay stuff. You know,
like there's a pretty big gap there. Anyway, It's all pie in the
sky stuff VR probably be all right, goofy as magazine cover or no,
yeah, print magazine. I mean, yeah. How many people are subscribing
to Time right now? Yeah, I have no idea. At most you'd
see it passing it in the grocery store and no one's gonna remember thinking about
it. I've been thinking about it, of course. You have about getting
a subscription to Time early and watched network television. I know, I get
up early and watch the news every day. Are you sixty five? Yes,
that's fun over here, going to bed early, getting sleep, that's
good stuff. I'm starting to learn that. What kind of early are we
talking lately? Yeah, like pine thirty. Damn, yeah, I'm on
like ten, ten thirty. Yeah, it's pretty nice getting there. I've
I've definitely been like ten to eleven last night. It was a little last
night, was a little late last night, like twelve thirty. It's kind
of nice. But yeah, yeah, like I I'm fully moving into Like
it's it's like morning paper status with everything but the paper. You know,
there is no newspaper, but it's the same process. Oh, I don't
wake up like I I wake up like a fucking mess. The same way
if I had stayed until three or four in the morning. So it's like,
I'm not I'm not reaping any benefits from this early sleep. You're just
getting more sleep. Yeah, okay, yeah, which is probably theoretically better,
but yeah, I'm still yeah, no, man, whatever, whatever
it works for you. Uh, Mafia three is being made. I announced
it. Can we go back and talk about the World of Warcraft expansion somemore
or this sounds kind of interesting? And I say that as somebody who was
pretty disappointed with Mafia two. Yeah, to not think it was an amazing
game. Did you guys play that? Yep? What do you think?
I think the first one. I had not played Mafia one. Yeah,
I didn't either, But Mafia one is like very well, remember it was
doing a lot of things that world games weren't it then. Like Mafia one
was a game that were like it was the game that enforced like fucking traffic
laws, right, I mean, it was like the game that was like
if you were speeding, then if you ran a red light. You know,
it's like the stuff where it's the stuff they don't put into open world
games now because they because Mafia happened. But that was pretty early on,
right, like what what are we talking like? Oh, godf Vice City
was probably out by then. Yeah, it was like kind of early two
thousands, it was. It was an early open world game, yeah for
sure, and uh, you know, so they were still learning about stuff
like that and that was you know, at the time, it was super
interesting. Like at the time Mafia was. It was a very interesting game,
like I seem to I think it was right before I got here,
But I think you guys gave Mafia like PC game of the year, right,
probably like people the people who liked Mafia really Maia, Yes, I
remember Greg being a big Mafia fan. You're like a man, Wow,
really did not like Mafia because of those restrictions. It was. It was
the stuff where it was like, oh, you've made a more realistic world
and that's super interesting, but it didn't make for a fun game for me.
Uh yeah, it was. Yeah. From what I remember, I
feel like they'd dumbed down a lot with two because I don't remember any kind
of like harsh restrictions or you know, I don't think they had that like
for me. I just remember like there was this weird paucity of like content
of like like a justification for the open world. In Mafia two, it
was like they built this big city and then it was just like a point.
It was nothing to do. It was nothing but story mission after story
mission with almost nothing, but like you could collect Playboy magazines and it was
like one of those things where it's like everyone complained about how side stuff in
open world games was shitty and how you know, there was a lot of
it was poorly done, but like the answer wasn't take it all out either,
as it turned out, didn't it go through like a few decades.
I feel like when fifties, sixties, seventies, like I went to jail
and came back and had to get revenge. I think into Driver three or
Driver three or Parallel Lines. Oh, I seem I think this. I
think you went to jail for like eight or nine years, I think Mafia
two and came back and it was like, oh, it's like it's the
sixties. I feel like I feel like I remember it being feeling very much
Godfather inspired in that it covered those decades. Yeah, like kind of from
the forties to the sixties or whatever it did. Yeah, this game's got
an interesting setting. It's nineteen sixty eight in New Orleans. Okay, that
sounds really cool. Yeah. Uh this uh I read this uh this uh
impressions piece from Kataku where they actually saw like thirty minutes of the game at
Games Calm, and then they point out like, you know, like sixty
eight is like arguably, you know, it's one of the most tumultuous years
in the history of the United States. Like that alone is a really cool
setting for something like this, Like New Orleans just adds an even more kind
of cultural flavor. On top of that, it sounds like they are going
much more like quote unquote open world with this, in the sense that there
will be a lot of side stuff to do. Looking over this, uh
this list of what was in this demo, like it sounds like you will
be taking over territories, and I wonder how accurate it'll be with the open
world, like because you know, some of them have that slavish devotion,
like that getaway type stuff. Yeah, I'd love to see a super accurate
New Orleans. I remember the what was this what was the city in two
and Mafia too, Yeah, it was it like it was just like a
Jersey ficual city or was it. Want I say it was New York.
Huh, wasn't it? I remember it being well put to fire bay,
Okay, yeah, fictional, Yeah, I guess so. But I still
remember it feeling like well put together, like it was a nice It was
a nice world in which you did kind of nothing, you know. Yeah.
So if they're if they're gonna populate it with a little more stuff,
I'm okay with that. Uh, can we get like a Nolan North talking
to Nolan North talking to North? Escalate that one step? Why don't you
just make the main character voiced by Nolan North and then you've got that covered
like the whole game through, you know, Yeah, make everybody voice by
Nolan North. Right, he's got range. Uh, let's see, I'm
gonna read. I'm just gonna read a quote from this right up. Protectonist
Lincoln Clay grew up orphaned, is just back from combat in Vietnam and had
found a sense of family and belonging in the Black Mob before the Italian Mob
double crossed and murdered them all. M He is extremely angry about all of
this and is on a revenge quest. So like, you're not actually rising
through the ranks of the Italian Mob, which is like the Godfather slash Goodfellas,
like cliche of all cliches and the genre like Instead, it's it's like
you're actually trying to take him down. So but it sounds like you you'd
be able to team up with the protagonist from Mafia. Yes, Veto from
Mafia two is one of the guys you can actually our wiki page has a
really good like sentence on it that makes this sound like a totally different game.
I'll read it to you now. After being betrayed and murdered by the
Italian Mafia, Clay seeks revenge against everyone who has wronged him and his family.
Mafia goes up. So that's that sounds pretty good. Yeah, yeah,
I would. I would probably rather play that game. This sounds promising
to me. I mean, the setting sounds cool, and you know,
it sounds like they're addressing my biggest complaint with Mafia two. So yeah,
yeah, but yes, you're absolutely right. I guess. Like my my
thing is like my need for open world games has changed dramatically, and and
like open world games set in urban environments, uh doubly, So you know,
it's like the stakes for that are super higher the bar for that is
sure from stuff like g GA five, you know, especially crime story is
SATs Row isn't. Yeah, And also I mean this seems sounds like an
interesting flip on the Mafia tails, but also like I don't know, like
some people still I think would say that it's evergreen, but I feel like
the Mafia stuff generally U is way out of style. I feel like it
comes and goes, you know, like it was way back in vogue with
the Sopranos, back like ten fifteen years ago, and then it kind of
went away for a while, and it's not like super huge right now.
Yeah, would Walk Empire maybe kinda that's sort of similar. That's sort of
what this is going for in a way. It's like anyway, it's not.
Yeah, it's it's hard to say, I don't know, uh yeah,
like you know, to even even from a mechanical aspect, like this
is a game where you will have to drive a lot because it's not like
you can fly or something, you know, and you oh, man,
if you're a murdered me, if you are a Mafia ghost, then yeah,
yeah, it's not even it's not even like the open world urban games
where they give you crazy superpowers or play with the traversal and some interesting way.
Yeah, so you know, like they can hang their hat on story.
This is a new studio. Also, this is out to Hanger thirteen.
Jesus, I completely missed that detail. This is uh, this is
the studio that Rod Ferguson went to and then left at two K. So
they're just up up the three away from us making this game. Wow.
Yeah, interesting. I don't know. Okay, we will see. So
it's like they're pretty far along with it and it'll be out next year sometime.
Yeah, so there you go. Uh. And then lastly, the
only other story I've got is an update on that Mighty Number nine delay story.
Hey guess what, it's actually delayed really really we gave them the benefit
of the doubt. Yeah, but sure enough they're pushing it too next year,
all versions, all versions, all versions Halo Wars two. Man,
you guys play that at all? Mighty number nine. There was the like
the three oh oh they were showing it. No, I saw it.
I looked at it for a while. I didn't I didn't check it.
Did you get your hands on it? No? Yeah, I don't know.
I think they've they've put some demos out for backers, right, there
was like some kind of alpha. Yeah, I feel like backers have sampled
that thing. At least they sighted bugs and issues with a direct effect on
the enjoyment of the game. Right, there's a reason to push it to
Q one of next year. But it's yeah, I don't know. I
thought it was about time. Yeah, it feels like it's been a while,
and especially with the red Ash stuff crashing and burning, but then kind
of not like it's kind of not not a great look for them, is
red Ash like the Mega Man Legends? Yea, yeah, yeah, so
so that Chinese company Fuse came in and yeah, actually ended up funding it
after the kickstarter was well on its way to failure. There was a like
a technical alpha that was released. Yes, for that that I checked out.
Oh did you try that thing? Yeah, and you're just in a
hallway. You get to play really Yeah, you walk around the hallway,
you can maybe interact with one or two people, and yeah, and check
that thing out. But I saw people saying like this was very clearly slapped
together when it became clear that they were going to not make their goal.
And there's like a web Base one Unity stuff. Yeah, you can kick
a can just like all right, yeah, man legends. So yeah,
it's kind of I'm in kind of rough dodgy times over there. For comceps,
well, they just come up with the concepts and somebody spills the games,
so they're fair. Whatever they're onto. They're like three games down the
road at this point. They've got an old white board full of comceps.
They've got kickstarters of concepts to launch for fucking months. They'll be fine.
Yeah, yeah, we will see. I guess, uh is that all
your news? That is all the news that Doctor Dre album came out?
Yeah, I got that. I had an email about that. Yeah,
I was trying to wait. Okay, but you know like emails, whoa,
whoa. I actually saved the Dre email for the end. Actually there
were quite a few of them, but Wade from Hamilton, Ontario is the
one I pulled. What do you think of Doctor Dre's new Compton? Didn't
we deserved talks? What? No, it's who cares. The important thing
is that King Mez, one of the rappers that contributed heavily to this project,
straight up references the x Xbox three sixty Red Ring of Death no ship
on this album? Is he from North Carolina? Yes, yes, I
thought, okay, yes, I thought I had seen that. And it's
just like this crazy thing, like you know, that's you know, there's
it's been a long time since Doctor dre put an album out, and you
have like a thing in mind about like the subject matter that might go into
that thing. Sure, and like, at no point are you like,
yeah, man, the Red Ring of Death? Is it just like one
throwaway line. It's it's it's one line, like you know, in reference
to kind of something larger a little bit. But I think, you know,
I went back and forth on a lot, but the more I listen,
it's well pulled off. Uh and uh. According to Twitter, king
mez Is is anxiously awaiting the release of Metal Cares. Okay, it's good
to know. So it goes a little deeper than that. I suppose its
been a long time since since Biggie invoked the sixteen bit era. True,
so true, it was about time. What do you think of the album?
I read? I read pretty I like it a lot, pretty positive
things about it, and the question of just like don't we deserve detox is
like insane because this is what is that? That's that is that the album
he made the announced name of an album that you know that was gonna be
next, the next album from Doctor Dre. It was his like Chinese democracy
that he talked about for years and years and years, but instead this is
the thing that got put out. And you know, you're always assumed that
like music was constantly being worked on and thrown aside, and as it turns
out, like there was a quote from him saying like, yeah, it
just wasn't good, so we didn't put it out. Okay, So this
is absolutely not just that with a different name on it. Right. So
there were a couple of singles that came out over the years that you know,
that were supposed to be and I think this may have been what led
to that decision. But like those singles came out and fucking no one cared
that one it was I Need a Doctor. A couple of reference tracks leaked
with like TI pretending to be Doctor Dre, which is super fascinating, and
uh yeah, they just they weren't great, Like people were not interested in
in that. Uh, And so I think, you know, it ends
up being an interesting album because you have like this guy who has been producing
rap albums for a really long time is over fifty now, and like,
you know, like what are you gonna get like another fucking like West Coast
party record about how much weed he's smoking And you know, it's like it
just didn't make sense at some point, So what if you missed that stuff?
Though? I think there's there's plenty people out there that are and there
are guests guest versus on this album. They were contributing that. But like
Doctor Dre himself, like his presence on the album is he's a billionaire now
is very different. Yeah, you know Jimmy Iveen talks on this album,
Yeah weird, it's weird. Yeah, but I think it's a it's you
know, it is a hell of an album, and it's a it's a
fascinating look at like how do you make a relevant hip hop album when you
are over fifty and have sold this company and or a or an Apple executive
on the board. Yeah, you're you know, like like all the sorts
of things that like are making him so far removed from uh even the subject
subject matter of his last release, let alone the stuff from the eighties and
such. Yeah, he's been he's been putting our records for thirty years,
althose and and like he found a way to pull it off, Like the
crew surrounding him is very talented. Like it's it's a it's a fascinating record.
There's not a whole lot of Dre actually rapping on there. From what
I've listened to, there's not a ton there's enough, and it never really
was right and one was had a lot more featured things, a lot of
Dre. Yeah, I guess so he was always but there was always it
was always about who else was on there with him, right, you know,
because that also gave you some indication ast to like who was writing the
stuff for Dre too, right, and you kind of wouldn't hear his style
change. He's always more of a producer, right, Absolutely, Yeah,
I hear, I hear the beazz are dope these things. It's yeah,
it doesn't sound like anything else that's come out, you know lately, Like
it's you know, it sounds a lot. I think you could draw some
parallels to like Kendrick Lamar's album, Like it just has that kind of cohesiveness
that that you don't get out of rap albums because it's just like that's a
bunch of fucking singles, and you know, it's like here's the hot track
and then the rest is just you know, we're gonna say pipe it up
over and over again. I mean, the name of the album makes it
sound like almost like concept album type thing, and I'm like, it's clearly
like meant to be taken as a whole. Yeah it is. And you
know, there are a lot of people on the album that are not from
the area, but that doesn't say anything, you know, negative about it.
It's a it's a really it's a strong project. But yeah, specifically,
the only thing I thought to brought up would bring up would be that
red Ring of Death. I have to I wanted to listen to the album
anyway, but I'd have to go here that now for sure. It's it's
pretty good. It's a better than the CB four soundtrack. That's that's my
knowledge. I mean music Sweat of My Balls and Straight out of Low Cash
are a powerful duo of tracks they're covering of rappers. Delight is subpar,
ye, and then the rest of it's not even them, it's like a
bunch of other right. Uh So, I don't even that's I don't I
don't care, that's just tracks for a movie from Balls. Yeah, you
can feel it. You can feel Have you ever heard talk like sex by
cool g Rap? I don't think I have. It's the song that is
sweat from most from My Ball is the actual song. That's the beat and
a lot of stuff like the Yeah, Chris Rock did not do the rapping
on that. He did not know. They actually got other real rappers to
come in and do. That's why it was so good. Ghost rap.
Yeah, they ghost rapped so that Chris Rock and you know, the other
people from the movie could wrap along to that and yeah, mhm, the
more you know, all right, bomb cast a giant bomb dot com.
I neglected to mention that earlier, just in case you don't know by now.
Uh. Former intern Perry wrote in m yeah, yeah, cool.
I pulled the email because it was a good email, and then I only
later noticed that it was by him, So no favoritism here, that's right.
Uh. He wrote it about the future of consoles. Hey duds,
You guys seemed pretty calm while discussing how this might be the final generation of
consoles given you all make a living. Covering video games. I assume that
means you believe the games industry will continue to grow in different ways rather than
suffer another crash. I guess my question is why CD Project Red said they
couldn't afford to make the Witch or three with its current sale scale without the
console market. So what do you guys see the console market becoming? Will
everything become customizable PCs like a steambox? You think streaming games on less expensive,
longer lasting hardware will finally become viable? Or will VR of all to
the point where all the hardware is within the headset itself and no one plays
on TVs anymore. Consoles have their weaknesses, but the idea of Microsoft,
Sony and Nintendo dropping them only sounds like a huge setback for games. I
hope you're all doing well. I think it's a little too early to tell,
but I think any one of those you know things is not completely out
of the question. Yeah. I don't think the air is ready to take
off to Yeah, but yeah, I think, you know, PCs will
continue to get easier, you know, hybrid devices, streaming, uh sort
of technology. You know, phones are still very important. Yeah, I
think that, you know, game developers will continue to make games because that's
what they do. And even if you know, those platforms don't exist in
the same way that they used to, I think that there's still plenty of
potential. You know. That's the sort of thing that you know, if
if that market was suddenly not as viable, then I think you would have
more PC hardware manufacturers stepping up to find ways to better reach those players.
Yeah, those players, the kind of less technically minded players out there,
you know, people that don't want to dick around with installing RAM and and
all that sort of stuff. You might see an increase in those efforts,
I think. I think for me, there are just some archaic elements to
the traditional console model, specifically, like the locked hardware for five to seven
years, you know, like the kind of the limitation, but it's a
limitation, but like we're not seeing the positives of it in the same way
anymore because games are broken, you know, Like the whole thing was like
you know, oh, testing on the PC's impossible, like QA testing across
all these different sound cards and graphics hardware, you know, like all the
different stuff just over the years that have made uh, you know, the
tech end of PC stuff like a hassle like that's was supposed to go away
on consoles, but we're still seeing games launched totally. Fuck. I get
the sense that the you know, a lot of developers are targeting so many
platforms now they can't necessarily develop against the advantages of a specific console the way
they used to. You know, yeah, and they didn't. I mean,
you know, you think about the PS two and Xbox Era, like
that was the case, right, you know, like the Xbox got PS
two PS two ports that looked slightly better but nowhere near as good as you
know, games developed explicitly for the Xbox could look. But also, you
know, like if if developers are on like Unity or un Reform or something
that's cross platform like that, like to an extent, they are dependent on
God or they're dependent on the engine that they're running on to kind of make
the most of each platform, right, you know, like they can't necessarily
spend a ton of time optimizing each or you know, maybe they farm the
pull it out or whatever, like like you're kind of spreading a you're casting
a wider net and not necessarily putting as much time into one version. Yeah,
no one really specializes like the concept of the lead platform doesn't exist quite
the same way as it used to do unless you're just straight up first party.
Yeah. Another thing about it for me is that it seems like the
market has identified like four hundred dollars as being the price point that it's willing
to bear. You know, That's what it was last time, and then
you know, setting inflation and stuff side, that's what it was again.
But every successive generation, the power you can get for the money that they're
going to charge is less and less, you know, yeah, because the
value of that stuff is going to drop. So at a certainly, like
people already maybe I were, you know, looking at neo gap too much
or whatever, but people already seem pretty dissatisfied, I can guarantee. Yeah,
a lot of people already seem fairly dissatisfied with the horsepower in these boxes
and what they can do versus even like a modest PC you know, two
years in. That's kind of scary. Yeah. So like at a certain
point, when does this, when is locking yourself into this one platform that
you have to live with for this many years kind of stopped making sense?
Well, you know, it's one of those things that it's only bad if
you know, right, if you're sheltering yourself from gaff. I'm not calling
it neo gaff and but you know, if you're just like some general consumer,
yeah just out there. That's just like I got an Xbox because that's
what I got last time I got my Maddens. Well, you know,
in their defense, there have been some conspicuous cases, like the Witcher is
a case where it's like, you forget what it does on the PC,
Like this runs unacceptably, you know, in absolute terms, you know,
just on by the standard of this console, like this runs like shit,
you know, yeah, like just just like you said, stuff broken,
stuff running poorly, like forget what the other guys have, you know,
Yeah, this is just this is just not Look at Assassin's Creed last year,
right, like right, there's just stuff happening, right, is unacceptable
regardless of the power of these platforms, yea, even if the lack of
power the platforms is you know, forcing people to cram too much into these
spaces, right, So, like to an extent, there seems like there's
a horsepower question that needs to be answered. And also they just have to
be competitive with like stay at sales and you know, offering value the way
that stuff like Steam does. And I think you know that you'll, yeah,
they'll there will come a time where, like if the consoles were not
viable next time around, you know, I think that there are a lot
of people who like to play games enough that that would be the thing that
would spur them on to look for something else. And the conversations about like
oh, the Witcher couldn't happen unless we put it on consoles like that at
some point starts to maybe fade into the background. You know, there are
a zillion hurdles between here and there. That's not something that happens automatically.
That's not something that you know, happens overnight, but you know, you
could see it going that way, or you know, but these sold well
enough that you know, you'd think it also might just kind of inspire the
console manufacturers to get at one more go. You know, I think you
have to have a hard failure of consoles to drive those companies out, right,
Like, even even even even after the WU Nintendo, they're still pressing
on, right, Yeah, And that thing is about as big a failure
as you could imagine, like worse than the GameCube you know, by the
time we get late enough into the cycle this time around for like the power
problem to be even more noticeable because you know, we've got another generation of
PC cards or you know, whatever ends up happening, like, too many
people will be invested, too many people will have purchased consoles. At that
point, the install bases will be large enough to sustain it regardless of what
happens. So unless sales dry up in a heartbeat because people suddenly care about
frame rates, which I don't think the mainstream consumer really does. Uh that
no one's going to notice until someone has to bring it out, and it
has to it would it would have to come out and suck out of the
gate. Word of mouth would have to be totally tanked, and no one
wouldn't you know, get to a point where no one just buys the consoles
to begin with. Yeah, I mean, you know, there's no doubt
we haven't seen remotely the extent of what these things can actually do. You
know, like if you sat through that Uncharted four demo, But like you
said, you know, that's a game that's being built specifically to that platform,
and you know, taking advantage of as many optimizations as they know about
and then some they're good, they'll invent some plenty of along the way,
you know. Uh. And but yeah, for for developers that are deploying
unreal interest before Unity, you know, like whatever they're using, if they're
going multi platform all other stuff, then yeah, they don't get those advantages.
That's true. Yeah, So it's it's it's tricky, yeah, I
mean, I just I don't think that consoles are dead. I think consoles
are very much alive. You know, we were seeing good sales and people
want games in that format. But like, when this generation ends, what
will the kind of the total, what will be the total you know,
our totality of our feelings about the generation? Right, I'm not sure yet
everything's going to be Tap Titans in five years. Day. I've cast my
lot with Secura Clickers. Sorry, it's a bad game. It's Securit clicker.
I've never played it, for the record, but jeffs I put about
twenty minutes into it. It's a bad clicker, like regardless of you know,
like the anime girls, you're clicking, it does click, don't.
I'm kind of alarmed that you have feelings about what Constant is a good clicker.
So the UI is fucking terrible for upgrades and buying stuff, like like
a lot of that stuff is pretty bad. The way you kind of unlock
the skills and stuff like the skills are not interesting. The artifact system when
you reset to kind of spend things on kind of more permanent boosts is like
just it feels behind something like time clickers or or clicker Heroes, just there's
more nuance there. This feels like very ham fisted. It feels it feels
like crap. It feels like someone said, like, well, we're gonna
put anime girls into it, and that's our hook, and like fuck actually
making this game that is their hook, like removing any you know, it's
weird to be talking about depth in a game like that, but like they
have found a way to remove some of it and skirr click man, that
game is fucking crazy. There's like it's like the enemy is an anime girl
and she changes so sometimes it's a wolf anime girl, sometimes it's a snow
anime girl, and you click on them and they disappear and they make moaning
noises while you do so. But then there's another character off the side that
is like the main character and that's supposed to you or that's just the main
character, and there's no animation there at all. That character just fucking sits
there and does jack shit. And you can spend real money to dress that
character up in different costumes and hairstyles and facial expression. Is this a free
to play game? Yeah, oh it isn't that. They all, well,
you can spend about seven or eight dollars on like costumes and fucking school
girl outfits and total like that. Yeah, yeah, thank you for all
for your character which doesn't animate and doesn't actually do anything. It's just like,
here's an anime lady standing next to the anime lady that at least has
off frame of animation. Okay, it's a fucking bad thing. Like even
if you were like I'm going into this for fucking awesome perverted anime party,
it fucking still sucks at that. It fucking sucks at that's to screw up.
Yeah, uh wow, man, I ran cheat engine with time clickers
over the weekend and got a fucking ton of time cubes and so I have
broken myself up there. Clickers. They they issued another patch ree balancing some
stuff, and you know, good on them, but I balanced patches like
patch notes for a clicker. Yeah. Yeah, Jesus, I turned on
the speed hack and said it to five hundred. I hacked it so whenever
I clicked to buy an upgrade, it was giving me gold instead of taking
it away. Nice. I didn't go through the full progression of all the
perks and tech trees and stuff, but I saw enough of it to know.
I saw enough of it to know that I was done. Done.
You're free Now I'm done. Are you on the other ship? Now?
No, I installed That's when I installed Secura Clickers, and that thing sucks.
Okay, time clickers, quality clicker. So your clicker heroes pretty good?
Cooky clicker. Hey man, my dudes and tans are still making me
money. The game's not even on. I just yeah, they're working for
me in the background, playing for me. I've not installed Tap Titans yet.
What do you think it's? Uh, it's good looking, But you've
just fucking tapped the screen, don't I don't get it. Yeah, Like,
I've tried to devise new methods of tapping. I've gotten pretty good at
tapping phone screen quickly. Yeah, so I'm doing like a double finger method
here. Uh, Dan's looking intend Dan rolled over there in his chair to
see what you're doing. He's tapping the screen with two fingers. Does that
count as two inputs? Yeah? Double doublepending on depending on the respect.
I can't speak for your Android device because I don't really know, but I
find a three fingered rolling galloping method would be pretty good. I seem to
be getting the same kind of DPS with that, okay, or yeah?
Or both thumbs is another yea double tapping the thing is. So my mobile
clicker of choice is adventure capitalist, and it's not really about the clicking,
Okay, so much like at the at the outset, you'll have to tap
a thing to get some money coming in. But it's very much about like
as soon as you buy the managers that make it go automatically, like you're
you're never tapping those things ever. Again, you kind of can't actually once
you get them going. I have three point twelve trillion coins a lot.
You could have more. Uh My DPS is two hundred and thirty six point
five one million. That could be a higher number that probably could, I
can't assume. I mean, yeah, there are higher numbers than that.
I think it could probably could run out. Yeah, I mean eventually everyone
runs out. But I am super bored already. Okay, I just shut
off tap Titans, all right, Well but they're still playing for me,
man, exactly. That's the best log and again, and I'm gonna get
like two billion goals. You could be and you could be managing the storage
on your Xbox one. Yeah, you're still making money in these games to
make those Titans work for you. Time cubes still coming in while you're overplaying
Killer Instinct. God, I'm so happy. I just peeked in there just
long enough to kind of like, okay, that's what's going on in this
room. And then I just left the room and the abyss yep ever dumped
that out and you leaned away. The numbers keep going, they did,
Yeah they do. There's only one way to go, and it's up.
Oh yeah. Braden from Auckland, New Zealand about nuts, got some Hello
bomb cast. What is the best nuts peanuts? I say, the cash
you narrowly amans almonds. Yeah better are good, Okay, he says.
I say the cash you narrowly best the macadamia. But my friends insist nothing
beats the peanut your thoughts, please. Wal Nuts are good. Peanuts are
good. Yeah, wal nut I feel like kind of way down the list.
Good walnuts only work if they're baked into goods, and even then,
yeah, thank you. You don't want a handful of all nuts. Yeah,
but like if you had a brownie that had walnuts in it, you're
like, well, this is okay. I think about just eating plain walnuts
and there's like this woodsy like earthy like stuff on. Extra understanding is that
cashews can act as an antidepressant. Really, yeah, huh. Cashees are
delicious. Cashewes are fantastic. I can go in on some pistachios. Oh
yeah, yeah, so many they become a bone in wing situation where in
the act of shelling them so long that it's like I just want nuts.
I can't do it. Yeah, but if you get them like pre cracked,
you just it's just feel it open. But most of them are sold
that, but again, that takes time. If I could just get like
shell to pistachios, you can. I want to dump these things my goddamn
mouth. Yeah. What are your thoughts on sunflower seeds? Because I thought
it would be great to just have a ton of something like when you get
just the seeds and you just pour them all in your face. It doesn't
work. It doesn't work. No, it doesn't work. You would think
it'd be awesome if it's all that worked just to get one of them,
and that's good enough. It's like what if I poured like forty in my
face? Secret though with that is that there's so much salt on the shells.
By putting the shells in your mouth, you're getting like the flavorful salt.
It's big time. That's really what you're there for. A you may
a ranch and barbecue and all that stuff. Like I keep a bag actually
in the control room, and it just kind of occupies my time. Like
I'll put like, you know, five or six in my mouth and work
them from one side of the mouth to the other, cracking them in between.
It's a system. I don't know if I've ever had some flower seats
since one of them shattered my moll or like ten years ago. Yeah,
that's a good reason to know. I used to eat them all the time,
and then yeah, it sins my moll are shattered, all right.
I think there's nothing wrong with peanuts. They're they're the standards, the gold
standard nuts, good reliable, workman like nuts. Yeah, they're I think
peanuts are at the top regardless. Like did you ever eat the shells?
No? Okay, And maybe that was that a kid thing. I used
to go to Rols games and you'd get the peanuts at the ball game,
and I used to like eat. I think, I come in the shells,
but I don't eat the I mean, yeah, maybe I tried to
eat shells once, and I learned very quickly that you should do. I
think I think the one way, the one way you can eat the shells
is if they're boiled. You ever had boiled peanuts? No, Actually,
they're really good. I think you can eat the shell that way because they're
all soft. And okay, yeah, I got a honey roasted peanut.
That's good. Yeah. Well, all dressing beside except maybe salt, all
dressed cash. Cash is the most naturally delicious nut. So for so many
years I would have agreed with it. Yeah, I grew up with cash
shows as a constant in the household to the point where I like them less.
Now, well, see that was that was peanuts for me. We
just had peanuts around. See, I wanted peanuts, but there were always
cash shows and then you know, and my mom was very heavy when she
was baking. She was very heavy on on putting walnuts into things, to
the point where like, I wouldn't say that I like walnuts. She's amazing
at baking things. And when she leaves out the walnuts, it's even better.
I just thought of a number two potential tie for number one. Pecan.
Really, pecans are great. I'm not I'm not super. I don't
have a I don't have a long history with pecan. I really like,
I will say, I will say that the pecan pie is among the best
of all pies. One sounds great is the best? That sounds great?
It is. I love almonds, Uh yeah, smoked, not smoked.
I get some less sabi flavor one. Oh no, those are gross,
Dan Dana. Pecan pie is basically a pie crust with a mixture of sugar
and butter slathered all over the pie crust, and then a thin layer of
pecans. On zero chance that's not it's fuz there's only one way to make
it better, and it's if you add chocolate chips, oh man nuts.
I would maybe put them the macadamia up against the cashew. I think they
are equal in my mind. If I had to like pick nuts that I
thought were fancy, it's cash used macadamia nuts. Yeah, sure, I
mean you I wouldn't. They're expensive as shit, especially like I bought a
thing. I bought a thing off cash used macadamia's and almonds at the store.
It's like a big, good, jumbo sized jar. But it was
like eighteen dollars. They are not cheap. You know what. I need
to buy some of those Virginia peanuts, like shell, those ones that Shelly
used to send us. Yeah, I think I might still have some of
those. They're great, really good peanuts, really good peanuts. That was
That was a solid Christmas guest. That was a nice thing to show up
in your mail, was a thing of peanuts. Absolutely. The thing about
expensive nuts, though, is that I wish I had figured this out earlier,
that nuts are incredibly high in calories. So you see there. I
mean, yes, there's some good protein, but man, they're some moderation
is key. I don't think I've had a macadamia nut by itself. I
think the only place I've had whatever I have some of my bag downstairs.
If you want to have them. I want to try that because I've only
had them in those subway cookies. I think these are really good. They're
right. I think they're right up there with the cashew and texture and flavor.
Yes, they're similar to a cash Okay, I want I want to
try that. Get the tropical that's from Hawaii and stuff. Yeah, it
sounds good. Higgins is there? Yeah? Yes, nuts Apparently we have
strong feelings. Nuts are pretty good. You're right, I love nuts.
Yep. Yeah, I'm nuts for nuts. Uh Ben writes in Jason and
Jeff Yo, we'll have some thoughts on this. The discussion of Rising Thunder
and It's focused on strategy over execution on last week's bodcast got me thinking about
whether a turn based fighting game could work. It seems like this could be
the ultimate way for a fighting game to be purely strategy. There would be
no skill to executing the move, just in choosing which moves to do.
To be things up, there could maybe be a thirty second time limit to
choose your move or something. Has this ever been done before? Do you
think it would work? Let's play Rock Paper scissors, basically, I guess
so if you want to if you want to go super crazy, go get
a Yomi Dick. Yeah, yeah, that that actually could work. Uh.
Tory Bash actually is the free to play turn based fighting game of sorts.
You might want to check that out. But ultimately, like a lot
of the fun and like a strategizing is like done in the heat of the
moment, you know, so, uh, in turn based you're gonna lose.
I think some of that. Do you find you find that you're just
acting on instinct in a lot of cases? Yeah, yeah, stuff,
Yeah it could then, And like just being quicker than your opponent is like
a valuable skill to have, right, sure, like that's part of the
skill set. Yeah, for sure. Like this this sounds like an interesting
idea. It just sounds like it would be more of a pure strategy game,
right than it would really have anything to do with an actual fighting Yeah.
Also, there was what Speakeasy, which was essentially like a glorified rock
paper scissors. Yeah, that is like a fighting game. Rapper, but
did that have a cool art style? It was like an old thought villain.
Yeah, I thought I remembered seeing that look kind of neat there you
haven't Shifty from Kansas Shifty shell Shock maybe from crazy Town. No, no
last name given, So Kans could very well. Shifty rights in about gnarly
enemies, skeletons, the throw bones, enemies that can travel or shoot through
walls, bad guys that spawn or resurrect other bad guys. What is the
gnarliest recurring enemy type in video games? Any that regenerate their own health?
M that's pretty bad. That's infuriated. Although I would give the nod to
what he mentioned. The guys that res other guys. Yeah, yeah,
the fucking arch the arch file, arch files and motherfucker basically Brad, you'll
know Kingdom Rush, those guys that Yes, that ship was terrible, Yeah
that was that's it. Yes, that's a conspicuous example. Yeah, I
definitely think yeah, yeah, think Dark Souls has people like that, right,
like dudes that bring back other dudes, or Bloodborne had it. Yeah,
Bloodborne totally have those. The bell ladies where the enemies would just keep
reso. That's right, until you kill the bell lady, grind your way
to the Bell lady, you kill her, all the other enemies would just
keep coming back every like minute. Yeah, I would always We're not in
Blood Born or Dark Soul. Serious because they would have made the game too
fucking hard, and nobody likes medusa heads. You're telling you, I guess
sod ads are really fucking sucked. Yeah, some situational like if the meduce
Heads just show up and you're like on flat ground, it's like, you
know it's a hassle, but whatever, but like they only show up,
Yeah, they only show up like when your platform jumping. Ye really fucking
shit up, you know. I think I think the little hopping hunchback guys
in the first Castlevania are worse than the medusa Heads because alave on a predictable
pattern. Those fuckers just jumped Willie Millie. That's true all over the place.
Fantoo, Yeah, fantos, you get it was the worst. Yeah,
you get like worked up when I can't handle fanto. Yeah, it's
the worst. Also, the Sun from Mario play berserk Atto, it's basically
fanto really, like when you pick something up, it comes off if you
if you take too long in a level, Evlado is a fucking bouncing smiley
face that comes after you and is invincible. That sounds terrible. When they
made a sequel to Biserk called Frenzy, you could shoot Evilato and kill him,
and he would his smile would turn to a frown, but then he
instantly responds and comes at you again. Jesus, I remember, as he's
a real motherfucker. I wanted to get either he man. I think it
was buzz Off the b guy or I had a choice to get that or
Berserk, and I got Berserk and Evil Otto was in it, and I
really regretted that purchase because he scared the shit out of me as a kid.
Invincible, Yeah, no, good constantly. I guess Fanto was definitely
invincible. I want to say the Sun and Mario three, if you did
have a star, couldn't you actually not think you could? But wouldn't he
just come back after a few I think he would, but you could.
It's like lack of two kill the Sun. It was fucking all. Yeah,
it was like lack of two. Yeah, you can get rid of
him and then just try to get as far ahead as you can before he
comes back. Both of those characters have really sinister looking eyes. Don't think,
oh yeah, because that have something to do with it with them being
terrified. Thing. This should be fun and exciting, like a happy,
smiley face like Evelado and then the sun it's like, hey, Teletubby's have
a good time. Yeah. I think it's more the idea of something just
constantly pursuable. Like it's like the guy in clock Tower. But the systems
they are Fantos, Baders and defender. They're a little subway the submarine sandwich
looking ships to show up if you take too long in a level, kill
them. But they just keep fucking coming relentless. Yeah, Fanto was nothing
if not relentless. Yeah, that's why you just pick up the key,
you throw it, wait from to go away, pick up, run ten
feet, throw it again. Just don't even mess around. You know.
What I hated was how quickly he could rubber band at you, like,
oh, he dropped the key and he get the fly away and then prematurely
picked it back up. Hey, but he would wrap back around so fast.
Fuck that ass wars, especially in the vertical levels too, where there's
all the spikes and stuff. You gotta get all the way to the bottom
of this key. Like hated this. He could just like come out the
side of the stroll and while as you were falling and just clip you on
the way. Yeah. Yeah, it's the worst. He's pretty bad.
He's my least favorite game and character. Ever, there's there's video out there
on the internet. Got you, oh not not dealing with fanto Will.
Yeah, yeah there is. Go find that kids, all right, Joel
from London. During last week's bodcast, you commented on the announcing of a
Halo Championship having a prize of one million dollars, but that it's sort of
paled in comparison to the International Five's stalkingly big eighteen million stalking Indeed, I
don't know he's he's English. Yeah, I'll just let him have it.
It's a game called Stalkers. Really yeah, is it British. It's like
a real time strategy like a proteus. Yes, yes it is, Yes,
on that up. Stalkers, Yeah, Stalkers. Now. Obviously,
a million dollars is still a lot, and the Internationalists something of an outlier.
However, earlier this year another Dota two champion or tournament, Dota Asian
Championships, which is that thing I mentioned earlier that DG also won. DAK
raised three million dollars as a prize pool through crowdfunding and other tournaments and dotat
me let me try it again. Dak raised three million dollars as a prize
pool through crowdfunding and other tournaments and DODA are catching onto the idea of a
compendium or some sort of buy in increased prize pool, get goodias model.
Could the same thing be applied elsewhere? Naturally, Dota is utilizing it's free
to play structure with this, But I have to wonder if other publishers and
developers aren't looking in at what's happening with Doda and going how can we get
in on that? For example, what if this Halo Championship came in tandem
with some promotional DLC for some armor goodies or whatever, and took some of
the earnings and put it into the tournament pool. You'd probably get more people
caring about the tournament and maintain people's investment into the game and franchise in question,
which would help the competitive scene grow. Right? Or is this all
just a mad phenomenon associated with us loons who played Dota that worked for Mortal
Kombat X, right? I mean they sold that that blue Steel subzero skining
the some of the proceeds are all the proceeds. Some amount of proceeds from
that went into kill In as well. I wish they did a community like
Shadow Jago pack, and I think some of that money went into Wow.
I feel I feel like I should have known that that's crazy. It's a
great idea. Yeah, it's yeah, as long as it's you know,
cosmetics, as long as it's stuff that you don't really need, right right,
like hats stalkers, Oh you need hats. Trust me on this.
All that said, like they are amping up the DODA competitive scene in a
weird way where like they haven't announced all the details on this, but they're
basically going to be what are called majors, where the International is one and
then there are three other majors a year. I believe is the case,
and they haven't said, but like Dak might end up being one of them.
But the point being, if they end up trying to sell four compendiums
a year, I think I'm out, Like I think I have the appetite
for one of these things a year. Yeah, I don't think I want
to always be leveling one compendium or another, like every time I'm playing the
game. Like it's a fun once a year thing. But it could go
too far. It's certainly they could definitely oversaturate with this kind of stuff.
It's like you look at some of the cosmetics they're selling, and you know,
I don't play Dodo, but I look at some of this ship and
they're like it's an autographed thing, and you know, like they've gone so
far down the road, and I'm sure there's plenty of road left to go,
depending on where they want to go. But I just look at it
and just like, at what point the players say, like, you know
what, I just I can play the game. I don't. I have
the hats that I like, and I'm going to keep using those hats,
and you keep putting out new hats, but they're not hats that I love
as much as my current hats. So like, at what point the players
like enough players kind of get out of the buying new shit game. In
my experience, there is no in between, Like in my personal experience and
among the people I know, you either have no hats and you want nothing
to do with it at all and you just play the game, yeah,
or you can't stop really yeah. I don't know. I could see myself
just getting maybe one or two. I mean, there are some people who
like, you know, items drop from matches, Like there are people who
are just like, oh, I got the cool sword, I'll equip that,
like I get emotionally attached to. Yeah, they're definitely people who just
like equipped the stuff that they got as drops and they just continue playing the
game and that's it. But you know, once you buy in, it's
kind of it's hard to Okay, yeah, I can totally see it.
I mean I spend a fair amount of money on Www. Supercard cards.
Is definitely like did you say spent or spend spent h And it's uh,
there's definitely like yeah, once you cross the line once, yeah, it
just gets easier, and every subsequent purchases are just like yeah, the first
time I bought an Arcana, the thirty five dollars item, I like hemmed
and hawed about it for a couple of days. I was just like can
I It's not it wasn't even the money as much as like, can I
sink to this level? Like am I going to become this kind of person?
And like, ever since then, pretty much every time they put one
out, it's just like instant purchase. Now. Wow, it's it's bad
that with like costumes and fighting games, I yeah, yeah, you know
it is. Well, it's even gotten worse because they've now started offering like
a discount and like an like an extra like rarity tier if you preorder it
like the last one I got for like twenty eight dollars by by buying it
the day before game. That's beautiful. That's beautiful. Like they are horrible
people. So when I mentioned to you earlier that one of the items I
got back from that bed was a forty five dollars item, it's because it
was exalted status. And the only reason it was exalted is because somebody bought
it before it came out. Huh, all right, and that made it
worth an extra ten bucks. Good Will from Minnesota. Hey, hello,
bomb Cast. My apartment was recently broken into, and among the things taken
was my GameCube and memory cards containing a couple thousand hours of Fantasy Star Online
saves. Just hack it. What do I do with my life now?
Yeah, it's just just the hack a save or something like that. That's
totally doable, like on a game cube, I assume, so I would
think, so I know that those adapts. That's yeah, what worth is
up to? Like PCs and stuff? What were the PSOs on GameCube.
It was original, it was episode two, it was one and two in
one pack. Right, Oh wow, I didn't know that they put all
of them on the GameCube. Yeah. We also three the Car three a
car as well, which is not bad, really not good. People didn't
love that thing. Well, I don't think many guess it's not. I
did not love that. It's not it's not PSO. Right, so exactly
what you was holding a copy of PSO episode three Card Battle twenty four hours
ago. Man, thousands of hours of PSO. That's Fortunately there are people
running private servers for PSO Blue Burst on the PC if you wanted to easily
play with other humans and start over from scratch, like they're editing some of
the drop tables and some of them you level faster than you would in normal
vanilla PSO. You know there's still there's still one Rappie, get my ninety
nine spread needle, yep, done good, and then log out. It's
you've been I think the bigger question for me here is who would steal a
game cube? Like? Why resale value? Yeah? I sure, obviously
it's just sell it ten bucks for that meth fiends, I guess yeah,
well does who would steal anything? It does have that convenient handle on it.
Yeah, you just pick it up. This is like tanks man,
that's true. I was holding my GameCube no less than twenty four hours ago.
I was putting it into a box. I was putting mine into a
shelf. I was taking mine off of a shelf and putting it into a
box. Colors, you guys have the wet orange or purple? I got
purple. I got platinum? Great will PLATINU? Didnt platinum come later?
Yeah? Mine? The metallic gold? Was it? Was it just I
think we've had this conversation before. It Was it just orange and purple at
launch? I think so? And latinum was later around like metro orange was
not in the US. Yeah, I thought it was just purple and black.
It was purple and blacker. Yeah, and then they did I went
black and then got it painted gold. Oh that was aftermarket? Is this
custom? Yeah? A company that painted consoles wrote in and said, hey,
we'll paint a couple of consoles for you if you want to test out
our service, and maybe right about it, We're like, I don't know.
And then Ryan and I sent our game teams in and got him painted.
And when they sent mine back, the fan was not hooked up.
So I just discovered that by when you turn it on to play. I
was I believe I was playing one of these SmackDown games or whatever was coming
out on the Wrestling twenty one something like that. Uh, and it just
kept overheating, overheating and just shutting down. And I was like, well,
well fuck. They sent me back a broken fucking game cube and I
took it apart and just saw that, like I just needed to clip the
fan back onto power and then it was fine. I don't remember the name
of the company. There we go. We covered that all these years later,
years later, years our coverage of Ye, sorry, I think I
was wrong. I think it was Day of Reckoning. Might have been Day
Reckoning. Yeah, oh yeah yeah Jac. Resting twenty one was the Xbox
game. Yeah it was terrible. Yeah, Jac writes in about to Ball
two. Finally my favorite subjects. Hey Brett and the Bombers. I have
heard that you may or may not that is not here. We don't have
enough ads this week. Took some time off. Yeah, he only comes
in to read the ad. Yep, I've heard it. You may or
may not be ranking all fighting games. I am unnaturally obsessed with grin cuts
and toe Ball two cool. I bought a Japanese PlayStation just for this game,
and I think it's the best three D fighter. It was my first
dualstick PlayStation game, sixty frames a second and a great grappling system. I
even printed out a fact from the net capitalizes the nets, so you know
he's serious, and played the excellent quest with the fact for the movie the
Net. I don't really know what that has to do with it, but
yeah, I mean they'll probably fit on a floppy disc, right sure.
I even printed out a fact from the net and played the excellent quest mode
and unlocked almost all of the fighters and the choke a bo awesome. Yeah,
yeah, that quest it is cool. Yeah, that was neat a
fan translation of that game out there? Is it really? At the time?
I got ahold of that game when it came out or the import,
you know, yeah, and was super bummed that that quest mode seemed awesome.
Yeah, it is you try in English? That was It's a it
is a roguelike thing. It's like, man like, I even think to
all number one is fucking awesome. Yeah, like that game was so cool,
Like it looks so cool Nick. Combat mechanics, Yeah, like the
fighting in that in those games, especially the first one, just felt kind
of a little bit unlike any other fighting game. I can remember clicking the
stick to throw fucking fireballs. Yeah yeah. Character designs, the charactory,
Yeah yeah, I like the little the spindley robots and all that stuff.
I just remember. I feel like there was such a weight to the punches
and kicks, like the way that you felt like you really were putting your
like your all your room behind your when you did a roundhouse or whatever.
For me, it is a little more accessible virtual fighter, like, yeah,
like it did. I felt like that game. I don't know,
man, Like the grappling was so crazy in that game, right, Like,
like I liked that part of it was. There's like a struggling aspect
to it, right didn't you kind of Yeah, I think so struggle you
can move around while you you had them help you kind of kick them to
get them to shift them around back and forth and try and position them for
like a ring out. I thought that was nat I feel like at low
level, well, I don't know, maybe maybe we'll rank it as a
fighting game someday and we can have this. But until yeah, I know
better than to ask this question without you guys going through your appreciatingly scientific process,
right right, But he does say, I wonder where this gym sits
in the pantheon of fighting games. I wonder, Yeah, I guess find
out. And then at the end he says, and a totally on a
totally unrelated subject, how is the PlayStation emulation scene? I think it's really
like gotten, that's n better, right, it's quite a good like is
it is? It? Is it practically like at equilibrium at this point?
Is it basically Done's ever done? Because there still work? It's ever done.
But you know, like I think the vast majority of games seem to
run well, they've gone down that rabbit hole that a lot of N sixty
four stuff goes down where you can run things at a higher resolution. And
then in those cases you run into some situations where like you'll get black bars
on a thing because it's not the textures don't line upright, or and it
wasn't meant to be seen at the higher resolutions. It looks a little weird.
But you know, there's there's some of that stuff does exist, and
it's interesting. I was wondering recently because we're doing Middle Year scanaling four and
we got to the part and Meddle Year four where you play a PS one
game on the PS three hardware, and like, as it faded into it,
it was a longer loading time significantly, yes than usual, And I
was sitting there wondering, like, is it actually in the background having to
boot up a PlayStation emulator because the load afterwards? Right, well, yeah,
I mean whatever, they it's not. I mean that thing is custom
built for MGS four, right, it's not. I mean they have to
like load all new stuff because none of those assets are going to be in
memory cash already. But it's not like you're I don't think that's an emulation
of MGS one. I mean in terms of look and feel and everything.
I mean, it's virtually identical, and I'm sure that's you know, they're
able to duplicate that, but but I doubt that they are emulating a PlayStation
one behind the scenes. That does super far fetched. But I totally agree
with you. There is an extended yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
before and after. I don't I don't know for sure, Like, yeah,
if anything, that would have to be software based because the PS one
emulation was like taken out of later models of right, wasn't I thought that
was just PS two. Yeah, can runs bad, Huh. I wonder
if they were able to leverage in it that hardware or yeah, if it
was all just custom done, I would assume it would be custom Yeah,
but I don't know. Yeah, just for that brief, like minute long
a joke. Yeah, it's a good joke. It's it's a real good
one. It's it's really good. My cousin, who I've mentioned before,
who bought the p S three recently just to play that game, is basically
playing it in tandem with you guys without even realizing it. Like he has
no like he just doesn't watch the series or like anything on the site really,
but like it is like right at all. Well, he might be
a little further than you guys now. I think he's in act five watching
it now. I'm getting so much more of an appreciation for four than I
had when it first came out. I think I was just I played too
long, you know, like i'd played for like eight hours straight, you
know, when the night it came out, and I think just so much
stuff was getting thrown at me that I didn't really take it all in watching
it now and knowing that the broad strokes, uh, it really does everything
really well story wise. It's not nearly as complicated as I remember it being.
Yeah, no, I mean it's you know, towards the end,
I think it starts to dump a lot of fucking dumb info on you.
But but most of it at least makes sense to were like in my head
for a long times, like, Okay, I know the basic stuff that
happened in that game. Boh, yeah, what the fuck was going on
there? But watching Drew play it again, it's very the convoluted fucking mess.
How can you call it? I understand the entirety of that game,
that entire series. G W, yes, right, he's GW is run
by John Doe, and if they take down John Doe, then g W
takes priority number one. Oh they've got a nuke, GIMS nuke John Doe,
which is AI. Yeah, you got a nuke the AI. Wait
I thought g W was the AI. GW is the one that Oslot has
control of, But it is an AI, right, it is. They're
different. John Doe is the overseer AI, that oversees the other ones in
the Patriots system. But GW was the number two. So if he can
nuke John Doe Osla would have control of the entire system because the priority of
GW would get bumped up one. Bear in mind, it's a literal nuke,
not like he's like he's gonna say nuclear missile, a nuclear missile at
an AI. Take that computer, Nana machine computers and holy shit, I
was about to say, every time I looked over Jason shoulder in the control
room and seeing you guys playing that game, it makes me want a little
bit more to fire it back up now this conversation, I don't know,
it's great. It's great. I don't know it's so good. Don't never
sell it. I feel I feel like it's a great game. It is
a great game. But you were talking about like everything it makes it ties
everything together. Yeah, the right dow. Many loose ends existed in that
story after two, and they tied them all up, even the tiny little
ones like Olga Kid. It's masterfully done. Stalkers mess Man, Yeah,
that game is Stalkers Stokers. If anything is good, Lord, also on
the spectrum, I would play that game. Oh speaking to the spectrum.
Maybe maybe a different spectrum does the x One. Oh that's the same one.
Okay I had. I had a really good email, and I don't
think I put it in here about Damn. I'm I'm pretty sure I left
it out about Rare replay because apparently they had done a bunch of streams leading
up to the release of that thing where they talked a lot about, like,
you know, a bunch of the work they did on it, and
like even their selection process for what games made it in because because apparently apparently
Rare has put out over one hundred and twenty games over the years, so
they actually had a ship ton to choose from. Maybe I'll try to pull
that one for next week. Also, the Grab Grab by the Goolies is
the only game in that collection that was actually poorted to the Xbox One.
Like that is a native version of that game. That makes sense, which
is why it looks so good. Let's see, how about an email from
they made a game called Cookie, Rare did, Yeah, I should play
Cookie. They made a game called to trans Am with a Z Okay,
yeah, I don't know any other way to spell it. It's a big
catalog that they have. Next email from Aaron, Hello, bomtastic, very
fantastic. Let's cut to it. I fucking love Viva Pinata word right there
with you. I remember working my way through all the achievements on the original
except the fifty hour one because I could never be bothered to leave my console
on overnight. Come on, Uh, that being said, do that?
How do you get right? But the one that requires the least effort on
your part just leaving on for dam because you probably played forty hours just leaving
on. Yeah, seriously, that being said, I remember the inordinate amount
of hours my at the time girlfriend put into trouble in Paradise. Her goal
was to attain the almost chelodic Checklodocus. I think it's like the plodocus,
a pinata that is basically a dinosaur that looked cool as fuck. She wanted
not just any Panada, however, she wanted one of the limited edition ones
that were granted to the first one thousand or so players who were to attain
this feed in the game. Yeah. My question is will this legendary special
be in rare replay or is it gone forever? It's runs on a three
sixties so it would you know, those people already got it. It's the
same game. Yeah, so those those people have had that pinada for years
at this point, right, that's gone by it Chi No, I have
no idea. Yeah, it could have been by achievements or something. I
don't. I don't remember actually remember that. Yeah, I don't. I
want to go lick this up now. I don't remember hearing about that pinada
when that game came out. I did see some people saying that, remember
how Trouble and Paradise let you scan was it? Was it QR codes or
something else? Did it? Yeah? Yeah? How did I not get
you? Dude? I got so many fucking extra piniadas just by like cards
going around on the internet and scanning them on the was preconnect though, so
it was using the Xbox Vision camera, which backwards compatibility does not support at
all on the Xbox One, nor does it let you like use the connect
as a surrogate. Okay, so all of the cards scanning mechanics and Trouble
in Paradise are just gone or non functional, at least in Trouble in Paradise.
Yeah, it was great. It felt it felt like cheating, sure,
like because that whole game is built around you customizing in your garden and
just the right way to get certain pinadas to show up. And if you
could instead just wave a card it's camera and get the pinata that way.
It was like, Yeah, it trivialized a lot of what you played that
game for. To be honest, that's why you need to put in different
CDs like a Monster. It's cool. God, dude, fucking I would
cut off my big toe for an Xbox one Viva Pinata. I would cut
off Brad's other big toes for an Xbox and offer up my toes for the
good of all new Monster. Andrew just put USB sticks in. Yep,
what it's not the same? Hold up different ship to the camera. There's
a pillow. Yeah, here's a sandwich running and just running through deep dream
or something which gets you some super cool shit. I'm not gonna tell you
what. How about like two more emails? Maybe here we go Ryan from
Utah and for Dan from the Overblood Facebook group. Wow, hey whatever that
means. Yeah, it's a secret society. Okay, I don't worry about
it all right. On last week's podcast, you Guys talked about the Halo
Wars two announcement. As soon as Brad read the title, you all proceeded
to burst into laugh ter sy I'm doing it again, then followed it up
talking about how it's so unexpected, unneeded, and nobody wanted it. I'm
just confused about why you guys feel that way about it. I haven't gotten
around Halo Halo haloers, haven't gotten around to Halo Wars yet. But as
a big fan of the Halo series in general and someone that follows the Halo
community, I can tell you that Halo will it, God damn it,
keep doing it. I can tell you that Halo Wars has a rather strong
falling and fans have been hoping for a sequel for years. The post on
the Halo subreddit announcing Halo Halo Wars two has about three thousand up votes.
People are clearly excited for it. I guess my question is, am I
living in a Halo vacuum? Are you guys really out of touch with the
Halo community or is it some combination of the two. Was your reaction to
the Halo Wars two announcement common in the gaming community as a whole. I
definitely heard from some other people that were like what the fuck. Yeah,
they were like actually straight up negative about it, And for me, it's
just like that's a crazy move. It was, especially at the end of
YEA, it has nothing to do with the quality of the original Halo Wars.
It's more like, hey, we're making another RTS out of Halo,
right, really, Like for me, I mean yeah, I think,
I think, I like we were dumbfounded just by how like what a crazy
curveball. It was more than anything, like if you go back and look
at that stream, like I'm pretty sure we said straight up the idea of
creative assembly making a Halo RTS sound kind of awesome. Yeah, but for
me, as much as anything else, like fucking Microsoft like dropped Halo Wars
like a ton of bricks, likely after it came out, right like they
were not like they put out some DLC for it, probably because it was
already in the roadmap, but like, yeah, you like, do you
remember the ensemble ceased to exist at a certain point after that, right,
like the develop they shut down the developer that made Halo Wars. Yeah,
Like it wasn't some like watershed moment in the history of the Xbox three sixty
like there was not much rejoicing and partying in the streets when Halo Wars came
out, right, like, it just did not seem like something that would
ever see the light of day again. Yeah, it's not at all to
say that I knew when can't be good or something, right, it's just
weird, super weird. Yeah. Uh, searching for the last email and
here it is Chris from Minneapolis. Yay, it's got some things to say
about Burdo like hewn Man, Yeah, that's great and other weird fansies.
After listening to last week's podcast discussion about Burto, I had to look up
the hole. I had to look up what the hole in his head actually
is. Fan theory claims that it is, I hope I'm saying this right,
a klowaka a multi purpose orifice for eating, digesting, defecating, and
mating. The fan theory also states that because Berto is actually male, those
are not actually eggs coming out of his orifice m kidney stones right. Though
after researching in sneer quotes this, I fell into a spiral of reading various
fan theories about other Nintendo characters, such as Mario is not a person but
a race of people. Mario was never is never reincarnated through extra lives there,
Italian Yeah and Booze are just ghosts of dead Mario's killed throughout the game.
Next theory, you could make a fun jpeg of that theory and write
text on it and send it around to people. You could do that,
forward it to all of your friends and they'll send it along too. Luigi
dies in Luigi's mansion. There's another fan theory. I'll never believe that that
that he uncovered, never ever believe that they made a sequel. I mean
they did make You're right, Luigi SE's dead people see yeah, little Mac
is a dying Make a Wish kid. That's just that's a terrible That's pretty
bad, right, Hey man, I didn't I don't think the Make a
Wish would go for that. Brad, I can't believe you came up putting
this one all on Nintendo fans and my personal favorite. While Luigi being a
clone of a derivative of a copy of Mario doesn't really exist and is Luigi's
imaginary friend whom all the other characters just go along with because they feel sorry
for it's they perfected it. He's the solidest snake of the Mario like it
was the perfect clone of Mario. Okay, like the failed ones were like
Luigi and Warrio, they were the solid and liquid. Yeah, Mario's big
boss, while Luigi has gotta be the all of this. He's the president.
Think Luigi is a clone if we're just spending off of the Mario and
Luigi were grown in the test tube? Is that what you're Jeff, Jeff,
Jeff said you wanted to see the Mario series go in a completely different
direction. You're going forward, and I think this is a good roadmap.
If you plug the controller into port two, you can jump underneath the goombas
to kill them too. Get to me, sneak you all right, boy?
Yeah, that's a good note to go out on for sure. BombCast
John bomb dot com. Shut this fucking thing down. We're out of here.
Uh, stay tuned for some stuff on the site this week. I'll
metal gear every day this week. Yes, you're standing a week. You
guys are pounding metal gear out. Good stuff in longer episodes, well,
story heavy episodes. A lot of watching going on, Yeah, trying to
cover some territory, A whole lot of watching going on. Threat on the
boards about our pre packs event on the Thursday night before packs. There's also
a Facebook event for that thing that you can find on our Facebook page,
I guess which is called Giant Bomb I think right. That is the website
and the Facebook page that pre pre packs events. Man, that's sold out
real quick. Yeah, we had a we weren't even charging money for it.
But yeah, so yeah, that list filled up quickly. But that's
there's still you know, that's that's not the full capacity. So if people
want to come, yeah, after that, Yeah, then the main thing
happens and everybody's welcome. Cool, come on down. Excellent, that's gonna
be I think we should probably we could probably start talking about some of the
other stuff we're gonna be doing it packs. Yeah, I'm not ready at
this point. Oh yeah, what you got far enough into these production meetings
that it's just gonna happen one way or the other to kill it. If
you say it now, it's relate to kill it. So I'll say it.
Me saying it doesn't actually put us on the record, because we're already
on the record internally. We are gonna play Mario Party five live in front
of an audience. The Parlor Live, fifty turns. Yeah, does this
one do fifty? I heard that at a certain point, but they stopped
doing yeah in a sense, so I think like nine or ten, they
might have got weird at that. But then again, I didn't play a
lot of five or six. I have no idea about any of the Mario
parties other than they're all garbage. So this is not the microphone one.
Right, that's six. That's six, okay, So this is going to
be the official Mario Party party. Five. This is a this is a
real, this is it. It's the if you've seen the first four,
see it live. You can root on your favorite Sperio. You can yell
why would you do this to yourselves? And now us from the audience.
I want everyone to get their chance. Ready, Oh they're clever wrestling inspired
Mario Party chance or they're clever Mario bartn party inspired wrestling signs. Yes,
yes, this sounds like my dream it was you have shitty dreams, Dan
record. I'm gonna have to get I'm gonna have to get very drunk during
this thing. Yeah, it's also early enough that bad choice. Yeah,
and everything about this is I will get the times on the side at some
point that move around. I thought that later. I have no idea,
I mean, anything about packs other than like, we're doing a bunch of
stuff. Last I heard it was at four on Friday. They we're taking
over the YouTube stage for a couple of hours. I don't know what we're
gonna put on there yet. Can we talk about the other coasts plans or
is that for them to that's for them, They're they're doing some stuff too.
Yeah, but yeah, we're doing a handful of things at that theater
over the course of packs. So we'll have details on that as soon as
yeah, uh, some other stuff. It clicks all over the site this
week planned out a bunch of them, you guys, might I might rank
some fighting games plan on Wednesday. We'll see about that. No, I
can confirm that we've already chosen the games. Did you ever accept guests on
that thing? I don't know. We talked about it. We're maybe I
don't want to influence your decision making process. I mean, it's gonna be
hard getting anyone who adhere to our strict scientific method. Yeah, they're going
to bring their own biases into it. We have to make sure that douse
they just want to come buy for like color commentary or something that maybe then
okay, all right, what if the guests is not allowed to talk while
you were making your decisions at the end. Yeah, that might. If
this was just not allowed to talk, then Dan would be welcome. Okay,
I just want to play to the ball now. Well, at some
point we will play the toe ball games. All right, that's for another
day, I guess. But for now, let's put an end of this
podcast and go live our lives and we'll crank out some more content this week
and bring you another Giant Bomb cast the same time next week. See then,