Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, it's Friday. It's Friday. Holy smokes, it's Friday.
Speaker 2: Gotta get down on Friday, September twenty seven, twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1: And you know what that means.
Speaker 3: Since it's Friday, it's time or bomb Cat Revengers.
Speaker 2: I'm your host, also powered by n sixt, just as
the show is powered by NZXT. Jan Ochoa. I'm barely
hanging on by a thread. My brain is breaking down,
woken up by sharp my grains. But that's fine because
we're here to talk about games. The Ultimate game Master,
he's the mass of bones. That's right, he's he's commanding skeletons.
He's summoning skellies. The bones are their money, and his
money is time. Jeff Crupp, welcome to Giant Bomb.
Speaker 1: Give us your bones. Just send us your bones.
Speaker 4: That's our new that's what we're doing for Extra Life
this year. We're gonna take your bones as donations. Donate
the bones. I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker 5: All.
Speaker 1: I got I got a skeletons.
Speaker 5: Skeletons behind you than the ones yesterday.
Speaker 1: There's two. I could get more if you want you.
Speaker 5: Here, Slowly make it so that you have an audience
of skeletons.
Speaker 4: Watching right here, you can't really tell that's a skeleton.
Speaker 1: Bat right there that's messed up right next to.
Speaker 4: The one of these controllers I think is an not
an OOA controller, maybe a Stadia controller.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, that's what.
Speaker 4: I haven't touched that bat, but I haven't touched the
Stadia controller in a longer time.
Speaker 2: We and our special guests on the show, we've got
the Stadia controller of games journalists. That's right, that's right, yea.
The connectivity is very promising. Joining us on the show today,
Lex Bloody.
Speaker 5: I don't think Irish WiFi is good enough for stadium.
I'm very upset that right now I'm wearing a backwards
cap and I look just like Deacon Saint John and
it looks like we're looking at each other and we're
in the same room on stream. This is oh no, yeah,
I'm never doing that again.
Speaker 1: Never do Good luck you chose to put the hat on.
Speaker 5: A little while ago, I I tweet out a screenshot
of like what I was playing on my PS five
and one of the games installed was like days gone,
and everyone was like, why do you have that installed?
I was like, oh no, moment of weakness. I thought, I,
I know you don't have a good answer.
Speaker 2: Honestly, I I have a bunch of games that I
don't know why are installed on my various devices. I
was trying to install a very big game that I
can't talk about yet onto my Steam deck and it
said that I didn't have any space, and I thought like, oh,
that's weird. I have one of those terabyte micro SD
Jimmy jams. And then I was looking at the games
I had to free my storage and was like, oh, okay,
right right, I've never played that. I haven't played that
in a while. I haven't played a while. And then
I realized. And then it came to the decision time
y'all of which games to delete? And for whatever reason,
I still couldn't bring myself to delete Suicide Squad off
of my off of my Steam deck.
Speaker 5: As someone who finished again just ask I finished that game.
I have an endgame character. I finished that game this year.
I bought it for twenty oh this year.
Speaker 1: Oh, you can run us through, you can level us
up and stuff. You're gonna carry us. You're gonna be
our herdcare squad. Sure, But the thing I.
Speaker 5: Land was, boy that game's like pretty okay, Like the
story is pretty okay and it's pretty funny in places,
but then they're like, hey, this is a this is
a loop game now, and you're just kind of like, nah,
I not I'd rather not run the same missions forever
in fucking these like space worlds, because they make it
a multiverse thing in the last five minutes, right, Yeah,
And that's how they justified their seasonal content was multiverse shit.
Speaker 1: And it's like, god, so sweet.
Speaker 5: Yeah it really instead of fighting the Justice League, you're
just fighting Brainiac. And it's like, you know what, I
don't actually give a shit about fighting Brainiac.
Speaker 1: Who knew?
Speaker 5: Yeah, she's not the most interesting character.
Speaker 2: I find it so interesting how I do not care
about anything DC related when it comes to majority of
the movies other than anything Batman. Yeah, and then the
games got when you were, uh greg, when you were
talking about rock Steady trying to make another Batman game,
and then forgot who you were with, but you were
you were talking and speculating about like, oh, they should
just make a Batman Beyond game.
Speaker 1: Oh man, Oh yeah, since then I've heard it's not
a game.
Speaker 4: So yeah, it's a bummer. Uh yeah, apparently when I
because we were like hoping right like it wasn't even.
Speaker 5: Like the ages that they were going to do a
Damien Wayne game that was like the Luma before a
suicide squad.
Speaker 1: Right a Damien. I certainly don't.
Speaker 4: I don't what Damien's deal is that he's the son
of Ahul's daughter and Batman. Yeah, okay, yeah, you're right,
I don't care about him. I I think that as
long as they do something stylistic, like something that has
a like a oomph to its look, which apparently maybe
is what they're gonna do, uh, I would be in
for it. I think Batman Beyond was just such the
easiest one to go to that it's like that's what
they should have done.
Speaker 1: But sure that's not gonna be it so uh but.
Speaker 4: Yeah, in terms of it, like what else like DC, Like,
is anyone holding a candle out for that Wonder Woman game?
Speaker 1: No, not at all, And I'm sure like it could be.
Speaker 4: Good, but right now, I'm not like thinking about the
wonder Woman game at any time.
Speaker 5: People care less about wonder Woman right now than they
have in a long time because that second movie was
like real unwatchable. That's a lot of people.
Speaker 1: Yeah I did not.
Speaker 4: I did not enjoy playing that video, or yes, all right,
I've been out enjoy that movie.
Speaker 1: That movie was bad. I was.
Speaker 4: I sat down, remember remembering really liking the first movie,
and then I started that and like forty five minutes
in I turned it off and never went back to
it because I found it so repulsive.
Speaker 1: I don't know what.
Speaker 4: Honestly, I don't even know what it is repulsive about it.
I just could not stomach it.
Speaker 5: I sat through all of the Flash and a theater.
Jan did you go see that?
Speaker 1: I did not, because it would make you angry.
Speaker 5: It would make you so angry. It's so I had
like a movie past thing so I could go see
it without giving them any money. And I was like, listen,
I'm fucking curious. And then when fucking the Superman guy
who like died allegedly because of stigma relation to playing
Superman and shows up in that and they just cgi
his face and it looks terrible, and I was like, Oh,
this is fucking awful, and like, this is just the
worst fucking thing I've ever seen. I did also watch
him The Batman the Matt Weaves one this week, and
it turns out when you like light a movie like
it's an actual movie, and it's like shot like it's
an actual movie, it kind of feels like one hundred
times more important than everything else.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that Matt Reeves guy. He knows how to make
a movie. We should just let him make more movies.
Speaker 4: Yeah, put more apes in his movies too. That worked
out really well every time so far.
Speaker 1: Isn't there like a bad ape man in DC?
Speaker 4: One of everything in DC? They got them all.
Speaker 5: There's there's the one that's literally like he was a
recurring villain in the Flash TV show.
Speaker 2: Oh my God, put Gorilla Crod in the bed?
Speaker 1: Love it.
Speaker 5: And the best thing is is Matt Weaves has been
out there being like, yeah, we don't want to make
this too like fantastical or like not grounded in reality.
So just be a fucking gorilla.
Speaker 1: Just be a normal gorilla.
Speaker 4: Well that would be fair that actually like a criminal
real gorilla. Did either of you watch Penguin?
Speaker 5: I'm gonna watch it this weekend. I was watching The
Batman so I could watch the Penguin again.
Speaker 1: It seems good from a distance.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let me Okay, everyone knows that I'm a big
fan of comic books comic book related things, So take
my opinion with a grain of salt.
Speaker 1: Yo, that shit banged.
Speaker 2: Like I normally don't like when an actor will just
put on a bunch of makeup, put on like a
like a fat suit or something to like dramatically change
themselves so they can get lost in the role. But
I could not tell that it was Colin Farrell. I
completely forgot. And it was very charming, it was very good.
I never cared about the Penguin until now.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that's where I'm at, where it's like,
I mean, but I don't know. People are like I
care about and Or to that show came out and
I'm like, well, I cared about and Or, But whatever
Penguin seems like it could be doing a similar thing.
Speaker 2: I don't want to say that this is uh DC's
and Or moment, but it could potentially be Kristin Malatti
or Miliati in this show absolutely fantastic. Most of my
exposure to her has just been in the last season
of How I Met Your Mother's fantastic in that, but
here absolutely unhinged. The supporting cast is also very fantastic
and great. Yeah, yeah, I I would even take a
penguin game based off of Colin Farrell's Penguin.
Speaker 1: Okay, I want to see it.
Speaker 5: Okay, uh video games, Guys, Deacon isn't talking to me. Well,
we haven't introduced Deacon yet on the pot.
Speaker 1: It's a strong side type two.
Speaker 2: So like the the general rule is you don't, you don't.
You're not allowed to talk yet until you're introduced on
a podcast.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's right.
Speaker 2: He's very quiet. He loves his wife, he loves his bike,
and folks, my my, My life has been absolutely ruined,
not just because of current circumstances, but also because of
current circumstances of Blatro now being available on mobile platforms.
How to translate incredibly Well, it turns out no, uh.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, oh man.
Speaker 2: So we got access to this a little bit earlier
than when it came out on Apple, Arcade and Google Play.
And let me tell you the looks that I've been
getting in the public places where I'll pull this out.
I was waiting to get my COVID COVID booster and
flu shot, and I was just playing up around a
couple of hands of Blatro, and then the kind nurse
looked at me and said like, oh, really into poker.
Speaker 1: Huh, you've been real money here.
Speaker 2: This looks like a crazy poker going on. And I
had to explain to her that it's a single player
poker game that isn't really a poker game per se.
And then she just politely nodded her head and it's like,
all right, honey, which arm do you want the shot?
Speaker 5: It is really bad when a video game like that
you don't think of as people having like a stigma
around has a stigma around it. I tried to play
Final Fantasy seven we make on a plane and there
was an old one next to me, Come on, and
it got to the Honeybee in part, and she was
just like sharing at me as we got off the plane.
Speaker 2: So, God, Billatro, if you haven't played it and you've
been waiting to play it for whatever reason, if you
have bought a phone, an iPhone, you probably have like
a three month trial to Apple Arcade, if you bought
any Apple device, teachers Arcade.
Speaker 1: I forgot about it.
Speaker 4: Is it at the moment? No know, you can also
buy it, I think separately. Yeah, you can also buy it.
And it was the first game like that. Actually that's
watching an Apple Bark and you can buy it separately.
Speaker 2: Yeah, normally it is like an Apple Arcade exclusive for
a hot minute and then they'll they'll jump over to
you can buy it separately like Grindstone did. But yo,
you've heard us wax poetically about Bilatro if you've been
waiting to play it. I think this is actually the
perfect platform to play it. The touch controls translate incredibly
well as far as I can tell.
Speaker 1: Oh. Also they do, like.
Speaker 2: I don't know how this is on androids, but on
iPhones at least, they're big on the haptic feedback when
it comes to the vibrations, just like sense God, it does,
like the little ticks, like when you shuffle the cards
and like they go back into your phone you drag
them out.
Speaker 1: That feels really good, Yeah, feel really good. Feel real.
Speaker 5: Feels like walking through sand, you know, just just all the.
Speaker 2: Hits, right, Yeah, you know what. I My one my
one thing is that daunch Eagle in the Giant Bomb
chat brings us up.
Speaker 1: I was kind of.
Speaker 2: Hoping that there would be a hot Dog mode for
the game, a Tate mode for the game.
Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, minded mode, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because man, in case you need to do other things, right,
you need to like put your money, yeah, yeah, handle
your money. Maybe you're drinking coffee in one hand. Perhaps
it's on a steering wheel and you're just chilling with
the steers.
Speaker 1: Right, you're not driving, not driving.
Speaker 4: No, you're just having a good sit in the car. Yeah,
you're wiping your butt. You're wiping your butt.
Speaker 5: It is weird, though, to see like a non Genshen
style game that is in portrait mode on mobile phones anymore,
because basically everything that is like a puzzle game or
is like an idol game, they're all vertical, now, right.
Speaker 1: That's true.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it wasn't. I mean on DC originally wasn't
like the screen like four by three. So it's like,
maybe wouldn't have been that hard to make it vertical.
Speaker 1: But I don't know. I'm no designer. I'm just glad
it's on phone.
Speaker 2: Me too, me too, get it now while it's out.
It's kind of crazy.
Speaker 4: Hearthstone was always horizontal on mobile right, it is always
never evermode.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: And you know, I was just reminded that, holy smokes,
Bilotro is like a lock either for one or two
for game of the Year for me personally, I don't
want to speak for anything. I mean, it's it's gonna
be up there for sure. I know it's gonna upset
Mike because he doesn't believe that indie games are real games.
But yepna, how is he going to feel that now
a phone game could win Game of the Year.
Speaker 1: So I'm set.
Speaker 5: I'm not sure if you heard this, but at Games Colm,
when I was hanging out with Mike, I was like
talking to him and being like, hey, you should go
to the indie booth, and he punched me. She fucking
He was like, fuck, you go to the indie booth. No,
I'm only going to see Amazon. I only care about
a WS servers.
Speaker 2: That's right, That's right. And then he sat in on
a presentation about AWS servers.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Wild the other quick game I've been playing before we
get to everyone else. Just because I was on my
phone again, I redownloaded it, folks. I thought maybe my
cards have been satiated. But no, no, no, oh, no,
no no, I wish I redownloaded Marvel Snap everyone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Okay, there it is.
Speaker 2: And let me tell you, I don't know what the
current meta is. I haven't really looked into it. I
haven't investigated.
Speaker 1: I just I still move dex.
Speaker 2: There were people doing stuff greb where like their card
was like being eaten by one card and it wasn't
like the venom one or a symbiote. It was like
a different I guess it was a symbiod because it
was like Spider Man.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I didn't really investigate the current meta or what's popping
or not. I just refamiliarized myself with the deck I
was playing as and turn one I snapped and then
I kept emoting because the toxic person in me came out,
and then I go to the other person into snapping.
Speaker 1: So then we got to eight cubes, and then I
won those eight cubes and then oh, okay, all right,
so now you're fully hooked again. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And then I looked in a mirror and I realized
I'm a monster of a person.
Speaker 1: You were salivating?
Speaker 3: Yeah, uh, Lex Luddy, how.
Speaker 4: Do you feel about that? Deacon Saint John? Oh oh oh,
he's rabbing his motor.
Speaker 5: I was.
Speaker 4: Okay, Well, he gets excited. That's how you communicate, you, guys.
Speaker 5: He's we have to be careful. We're on twitch. He
will ride his motorcycle like he rides.
Speaker 4: His beautiful wife, right, yes, yeah, he will bust the
hog out.
Speaker 2: Uh, Lex Luddy, have you been playing anything that you
can talk about?
Speaker 5: So I can't talk about the main thing. I'm playing
something that Sean is also playing for review, And right
before the stream started I found out I am not
nearly as far in it as I thought, which is awesome.
But I have been playing some stuff on stream. I
got set up working to play a bunch of PS
three games.
Speaker 1: Like how old when the PS three came out?
Speaker 5: I would have been six when it was first released.
Oh yeah, oh no.
Speaker 1: Again.
Speaker 5: So first thing I've been trying to do was download
things on a PS three, which, let me tell you,
that's fucking Buying things on a PS three anymore is
real fucking difficult because.
Speaker 1: You have sweet Summer child. Yeah, and the.
Speaker 5: Way that they haven't discontinued the shop. But what you
have to do is you have to buy credits out
a store. So I went into a store and I said,
give me one hundred and fifty year of PSN credit
and they were like, are you laundering this? And I
was like no, And then I went back to my
house and I had to register the code on my
PS five. You can't do it on the PS three anymore.
Then I turned on the PS three and I tried
to spend it and was still pinging my credit card,
and I was like, we can't use your credit card.
So then I had to turn on my PS five again,
get the PS five to forgeth my credit hard, like
delete my credit count for my PS five, and then
go back to the PS three, And then I could
buy Tokyo Jungle. And That's what I'm doing with my life.
And yeah, so I've been playing like some PS three games.
We played Yakuza Dead Souls. Not a good game and
really pretty fucking rotten in a lot of ways. People
who defend that game, Guys, there's allowed to be a
bad Yakuza game.
Speaker 1: It's fine, that's the one we found it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, played Stranglehold, which is it's really good for the
first two or three hours, and then they're like, okay,
let's give you some bosses that have a shitload of
health and do a load of damage to you. And
the big problem with that game is it's really cool
that you can do the John Wu jumps and you
can like dive, but then you can't shoot when you're
getting up from the dives, So then you're like, why
would I ever dive because I'm then just taking damage
when I land. So you just play it like a
cover shooter for the final half, which is really annoying,
and then we would we are finishing up. I tried
to play kill Zone one. Kill Zone one is dreadful.
Kill Zone one is a real nightmare to go back to.
It is hard to go back to.
Speaker 2: That game would specifically about kill Zone makes it hard
to go back to.
Speaker 1: I haven't playing it. Oh if one.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's it's a PS two game, and it's a
PS two shooter, and like it looks very impressive as
a PS one or a PS two game, but like
it doesn't feel good to move around it. There's no
sprint button, there's no like anything. It's very bare bones.
It's kind of coward or shoogerie. And there's no aim
down sites. It's very bare bones. And like something that
I've noticed in going back to a lot of these
all games is a lot of them are just silent.
There just isn't like ambient music in them. Kill Zone
is like dead quiet in gameplay, there's just nothing.
Speaker 4: The Fully Chip on the PS three just wasn't very powerful.
They didn't have a good Fully guy outside of that thing.
Speaker 5: And then I've been playing Infamous One, which plays great,
but I fucking hate everyone in it. Cole McGraw is
a piece of shit, asshole. I've decided that Cole MacGraw
was there on January sixth, and I've decided yeah, and
I've decided that his friend is like one of the
guys writing all of that stuff online. That's like causing
them to start the conspiracies, like they just fucking Q Yeah,
yeah he is. We seeked his cue and so that's
a weird game to go back to because I'm like,
I'm enjoying playing this, but also I fucking hate these
people because they're ridden. Like do you remember, like in
the early two thousands when they remade a bunch of
horror movies and they just made all the characters the
most awful people imaginable and so like you just don't
give a shit. All the characters are written like that too.
Like a whole three hour stream the other day where
I was playing Infamous one was dedicated to Zeke trying
to get his Dick Wet and I was like, I.
Speaker 1: Hate I hate the different Yeah.
Speaker 5: And it was kind of wild to go back to
because it was like, oh, this is where Sony, this
is where Sony decided we're going to be like this,
you know this worse only decided everything was going to
be a third person action game because up until then,
like they had kill Zone and they had Resistance, which
were first person games, but that other than God of War. Yeah,
other than God of War, they didn't really have like
a cinematic action game in any way.
Speaker 1: And the name really Cole McGrath.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's col McGrath.
Speaker 1: And he he.
Speaker 5: Doesn't sound like Irish or even Bostonian. He speaks with
like a weasly voice. And I'm like, this guy doesn't
sound like a Cole McGrath.
Speaker 2: We we should do a Mount Rushmore for worst protagonist names.
Speaker 1: Oh sure, yeah, I'd put Cole McGrath up there for sure.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Related to Mark McGrath, of course. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Miles Kilo was in Best character Names.
Speaker 1: Oh wait, who's Miles Kilo?
Speaker 5: The main character in the reboot of Syndicate Grub, a
game which I have never played but I will always
think about because they named the main character two units
of measurement.
Speaker 4: Yeah right, and that completely unrelated to Miles Prower because
that's a different last name.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's what.
Speaker 4: Really threw me off. I've played that Syndica game. I
forgot that that's that character's saying.
Speaker 1: Holy crap.
Speaker 2: If y'all had to guess how many Resistance games there were,
how many do you think there are?
Speaker 1: The were on console and two on handhelds? Did you
get right? Ding ding ding? Yeah? Really? Yeah? Okay, Wow.
Speaker 5: The real question is how many Siphon filter games were there,
because there was a shitload of those on hondhelds.
Speaker 1: Uh, there's a lot on PSP. I think at least two.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'll say like six total Siphon filter games. I
don't know seven, Okay, seven sounds right. You get one
more for like the PS three era stuff. It is
very much like, No, you get three on the PS
three and then we're gonna do two on handheld. That
just felt like what I would answer for any series
that started at that time, Resistance. I think a lot
of people do really like those games. Still, I never
really cared for them.
Speaker 1: All that much. I definitely tried them a couple of times.
Speaker 4: It was like, I don't get it, but I kind
of would like to go back to it now and
see see how.
Speaker 1: They hold out.
Speaker 5: I don't know, and then when I finish in, I
only have one mission left in it. I'm going back
to this game which nobody seems to remember.
Speaker 1: Yo. I thought. I thought the girl on the cover
of Folklore it was cute.
Speaker 2: Yes, I have. It's just that plaid skirt. Is that
a plaid skirt?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, plaid skirt.
Speaker 5: This is a role playing game developed by a Japanese
studio published by Sony, which takes place outside of Dublin.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, so that's why I'm playing it. I'm
just how you haven't started it yet.
Speaker 5: I haven't sawt it yet, but I'm fastin report.
Speaker 1: Back about like what's going on in that whole game? Yeah,
I bet.
Speaker 5: It's just like the church that I went to yesterday
for the conference I went to a I went to
a video game Biz dev conference yesterday and it was
held next to a rugby pitch in an old church.
We're not We're not beating the fucking allegations, really not.
So that was weird.
Speaker 4: That's just that just sounds like where most things happen
in your country.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, in a church somewhere.
Speaker 4: Right next to the rugby pitch in the church. H Okay,
now's a god.
Speaker 2: You know, I never had a p S three until
I had one. Way after it was like already retired.
I kind of want to circle back to some stuff, you.
Speaker 5: Because that was the PS three was like the first
console that I was playing when I really was starting
to like enjoy video games as more than just a toy.
But also I was a fucking dumb ass idiot who
like wasn't reading magazine, so I didn't know what was good.
So it was usually like, hey, what can we get
for cheap? Or what has my brother got in as
a recommendation from one of his older friends. So like
I played Dark Souls and I played Last of Us
was one of the big like PS three games in
my mind, but I'd never played the early PS three
games because we didn't get awes until like twenty eleven,
and so.
Speaker 4: Now it's time to go back to Layer and get
the six access out and really enjoy the game that
the way it was meant to be played.
Speaker 5: There was a copy of Layer sitting down says literally
underneath me right now.
Speaker 1: So yes, there we go, all right, make it happen.
Speaker 2: You think we could get PlayStation All Stars up and running?
Speaker 1: Yes, I promise you I could do that.
Speaker 5: It's I have it. I have it insuled on my
PS three right now.
Speaker 1: Fantastic, fantastic, will I will.
Speaker 4: I'll make it happen for us and we can play
it online and stuff.
Speaker 2: You know what game I always had so much fomo
about on the p S three. Uh no, No, I
experienced Haze in my own way, Fat Princess.
Speaker 4: Oh sure, yeah, man, that was weird. She was in
She was in PlayStation Battle All Stars, Battle Royale.
Speaker 5: It's weird that she wash.
Speaker 1: They're they're saving it for the DLC.
Speaker 2: That's what I'm panned for, right right, right right, Jeff Grebb,
have you been playing any other games for the big game.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about this app just.
Speaker 4: I spent some more time with you at UFO fifty.
Right after the BombCast, I started up pilot Quest and
got super addicted to it immediately. That is the clicker
idol game that has the sort of wilds you can
go out to and kind of turns it into a
little of an action Idol game and I'm saying Idle
as an id l e as in Idle Hands, not Idol,
although there might be an IDOL game in the here
as well.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 4: I haven't played all fifty yet. But it's you crash
land on the planet. There's a big crystal in the
middle of your camp. You need to hit the crystal
with your yo yo more moon shards come out. You
get a hundred or a thousand of those, and then
you could turn that into a moon ingot. You get
five of those, you can build a house that attracts
little alien friends that are not slaves that you could
put to work for free, and they will make more
moon ingots for you, And then if you improve their houses,
more will move in. Then you can go start doing
science research. If you find a cog out in the wilds,
you bring that back to the science praying mantis you
install that he'll let you research them stuff. For example,
you can get stamina pills that you can give to
your aliens who aren't slaves, and they'll work even harder
and make ingots even faster.
Speaker 1: It's it's fun. Glo quitlo.
Speaker 5: You know how like game developers spend ages trying to
figure out ways to tutorialize their games and like it's
basically an art form. This GDC talks on it, and yeah,
the real trick is just to get you to like
record off the.
Speaker 1: Top just on cassette tape that comes with the game. Yeah.
Speaker 4: The thing with the game is like you're just supposed
to poke at everything and then eventually something will respond
in a way where it's like, oh, I can keep
doing this, and then you start to see the numbers
of like, Okay, I'm getting these little moonshars by punching
the crystal with my yo yo, and I see how
much that requires. That seems like a lot. I could
probably speed up this process if I look around a
little bit, and then you find ways to like just
slowly build up your efficiencies and make everything more productive.
It's I mean, it really is capitalism, colonialism just going
right in your veins.
Speaker 1: And of course thanks for prepping for colonial colonialism.
Speaker 5: Yeah, guys, I meant to say, I've had some real
red flagspin ways about this.
Speaker 1: I am listen.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of really good game mechanics that just
are like, is it colonialism?
Speaker 1: The shit?
Speaker 4: It's like, okay, look, I know it's in my bones
and my blood, but we don't have to say it
so out loud. Yeah, it's it's just another really fun
game in UFO fifty, which every time I try one
of these things, I'm like, I'm like, at least like, hey,
that's cool in its own way of what it's attempting
to evoke from classic video games, or it's just legit
a great game, and that's been a really fun experience
so far.
Speaker 1: So pretty amazing. It's the thing. It's amazing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's it's Playing it. At Summer Games Fest, there
was like such an excitement around everyone that played it
because everyone played different mini games and we only had
ten minutes to play it. So like whenever you talk
to someone who was like did you play UFO fifty,
they were telling you about a different game, and like
it did actually feel like trading stories with your like
friends at school. It was really like, yeah, that game
seems so cool.
Speaker 1: I got a I got a wizard yo yo. Oh yoyo.
Speaker 4: I got to start with the regular yoyo, then you
get the medal yo yo, and then at the very ends,
like I'll look at the wizard yo yo and you're like,
I'm at the end of the upgrade tree. I'm not
gonna be able to use this, and they're like, no,
there's more stuff you can keep dealing with the wizard
yo yo, don't worry.
Speaker 2: More games should have yo yo's yoyo should be back.
Uh er, guys, God bless the ring. There's a character
that uses a yo yo as a weapon.
Speaker 5: I feel like there has to be like fifty or
pgs where there's a character that uses yo yo's as weapons.
Speaker 1: I think it should be back. As an insult too,
could be on such a fucking.
Speaker 4: Yo yo.
Speaker 1: Say that you can say, I like, that's for my people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well I like that, all right, all right, uh
I like that. Let's we're gonna introduce that into the vernacular,
just like diez Ohiso.
Speaker 3: News slur unlocked, damnit fucking yo yo's. See it sounds
good like it does. All right, I'm gonna do my
best Colin Farrell as the penguin imitation.
Speaker 1: Hey, you have a goet the slush puppies. You know
you mixed the red and the blue one your fucking
yo yo. Oh you made him excited. Calm down, Calm down,
exactly exactly.
Speaker 2: Please, Alex is too young Uh, Jeff Grubb, you and
I have been playing I'm gonna say the game of
the Week or the game of the BombCast Revengeance.
Speaker 1: The Legend of Zelda Echoes of Wisdom.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I am really kind of getting the hang of it,
which is I think there might be can you come
into it with a lot of Zelda experience, even the
recent tiers of the Kingdom, Breath of the Wild stuff.
I think you're still gonna be in this situation where
it's like, where's my sword?
Speaker 1: How do I hear things? The sword?
Speaker 4: And that is where like you're like, you're gonna get
into combat scenario and it gives you so much freedom.
It's like you know, no, you need to figure this
out on your own. That it can be a little
bit paralyzing sometimes. And so again this is the top
down people call two D Legend of Zelda game where
you play is Zelda and she has a rod that
can summon any sort of enemy or object that she
first like absorbs with with the with the wand uh
soap like tables, beds and a lot of these things
have multiple purposes. But in any enemy you defeat, you
could then get their soul added to the rod and
it becomes part of the It becomes part of the
roster of things you can summon at any one time.
They all have costs associated with them, and you can
upgrade how many you can summon any one time as
you play the game.
Speaker 5: Some of my best friends are women with rods that
can summon things too.
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 4: Yes, it's beautiful and I'm glad games are finally representing
them and with them we stand with Yes, women with
rods dot com.
Speaker 1: It's a very it. It goes to Giant Bomb. Now,
this is.
Speaker 4: The kind of game where it's like, I want this.
If they were to ask you what kind of new
zeld again would you want? I would like, give me
one where I can just have any sort of object
and that the physics is there and the chemistry system
kind of works, so if there's a fire, it catches
everything else on fire. And then now that I have it,
I'm like, oh no, Now it's up to me to
make this game kind of fun.
Speaker 1: Like it's on me.
Speaker 4: And so in combat, I am trying to be as
playful as possible. I'm trying to not just fall into
a rut of using the same thing each time and
then when I do that, and it's like I'm kind
of flailing because I'm sending the bokoblins out there with
their spear and they're taking ten seconds to throw their
spear because they are still those same enemies you fight
as Link. They're dumb and they're slow, and it's like, Okay,
they're not really doing anything. I'm gonna summon something else
which makes them disappear, and then you go back to
kind of the tried and true, like the karmadillo, which
is the armadillo that you could send out and he
rolls into a ball and he carams around the place,
and it's like, Okay, I can just shoot that right
at this guy over and over and kill him.
Speaker 1: They do give you.
Speaker 4: The swordsman ability that we saw on some of the trailers.
This is a limited time thing that you can repower
by getting some of the power up juice in the world.
But for like ten to fifteen seconds, you could turn
into basically Link, use your sort and attack things, and
that might take some of the edge off the confusion
of trying to figure out what's the best way to
handle any combat scenario. Now, inside of combat, all the puzzles,
it's like that is almost always fun to be like,
how can I figure this out on my own, especially
when I got to the point where I'm like, there
probably is some very specific, obvious answer that is the
best way to do this one thing.
Speaker 1: And if I were to like play the game the
right way, I would have that tool. It would be
occurring to me and I'd be using it.
Speaker 4: But because I'm kind of playing this game a little
bit like a jackass, because I'm me, I've just been
sort of going around and trying stuff before I'm going
to the obvious thing that I'm supposed to be going to,
I found myself in situations where where it's like, all right,
time to use the bed again to figure out how
I'm gonna solve this thing that I'm I'm clearly not
actually capable of solving in this right moment. And that
has been really fun. And then the best thing is
you're on this classic legend iszel a link to the
past map, and they got the big ridges that separate
the various towns and stuff. But if you have the stuff,
like you have a couple of trampolines, you can get
on top of those and you can just take a
short cut from like the desert back into the town
immediately by jumping over the wall.
Speaker 1: It rules.
Speaker 4: It's so much fun. It makes the game feel so
open up and free. I'm enjoying it more and more.
Speaker 1: As I play it. How about you.
Speaker 2: I've definitely run into the same issue Grub that you've had,
where you try and do everything else except the thing
that the game is kind of pointing or directing you
to do just for whimsy's sake. Yeah, it's the same
problem that I had with scribble knots. Scribble Knots think
that's a good point of reference. Yes, super cool game
where it's very open ended on how to approach a
challenge level. But it's a little different here and echoes
of wisdom because it's not necessarily a segmented level or mission.
It's just existing in the world and navigating it.
Speaker 1: And I am.
Speaker 2: Tempted to try as many different solutions as possible, only
to see that, Okay, well this was this was much
simpler than I was making it out to be.
Speaker 1: The UI stuff.
Speaker 2: Very very frustrating. If you don't dip out to go
to the grid menu.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you want to start with the grade menu. That's
the biggest tip hit the start button, go to the
grad menu.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you you can copy a bunch of different
objects the game. You can't copy everything. The game points
out what you can. Greb mentioned you can copy the
souls of enemies, but it'll when you're switching the item
you're copying or summoning, it'll at first shoot out a
long horizontal line. If you've played Tears of the Kingdom,
you're familiar with how the items are are managed. But
as Greb said, hit the start button, go to the
overall grid, because it is incredibly frustrating to like cycle
back and forth on that gigantic line, especially early that
you have stuff.
Speaker 4: If you do it that way, yeah, it's like it's
gonna be on the other side and you're just gonna
not end up using it.
Speaker 2: An hour and a half into the game, you already
have like a substantial amount of objects to copy that
you'll wind up forgetting. But Greb, I fell into the
same pattern. I wound up using the Armadillo dude to
handle a lot of the situations. Honestly, I wish this
game didn't have the combat into it, and then you
would just you could still summon the enemies, but you
wouldn't use the enemies for combat. You would have to
use them for to solve different puzzles.
Speaker 5: And it is kind of like it's a weird way
that they've chosen to go about it, because it does
feel like someone that Nintendo is like, well, we can't
give Zelder sword. She can't she can't hit someone with
a sword herself. And then they're like, well, we still
want we still do want combat, and we still do
want to be able to be like, yeah, Zelda can
take care of herself and a fish, but not with weapons.
You know, It's it's very weird.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I could see that that probably did happen, but
it just seems like they were like making that Zelda
matt Maker game. Yeah, and they were looking around like okay,
it probably worked like a little bit of reverse but
the exact same thing where it's like, we're gonna make
this Zelda matt Maker game and now it's actually more
fun to just place to solve puzzles with these tools,
But it doesn't make sense for Link not to be
using this sort all the time.
Speaker 1: Wouldn't we just use this sword?
Speaker 4: Well, who wouldn't, well, Zelda, And so it's like the
same thing but in reverse. But yeah, I think that
they got most of the way there, and I bet
as I get more tools and more enemies that are
more powerful, like I got like a level to one
of the mummy guys, the Gibbetos or something like that,
and I have a level to Karam Dillo and Karam Dillo. Yeah,
and it makes it a little bit easier, like, Okay,
they're taking things out quicker. I feel more capable already.
It's just like some of the things are a little
bit more useless than others in combat, and it takes
some experimenting to figure that out.
Speaker 5: I do appreciate how open ended it seems. Because Link's Awakening.
I really enjoyed that remake, but as someone who hadn't
played the old game was inscribed, Yeah, and it's it's
also quite up juicing places if you're not paying like
very close attention. And so I wound up just like
having a guide open next to me for the whole thing,
because I was just like, I just want to actually
like get through this game. Was I do like the
idea coming across a puzzle and like just being able
to boot face it.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's and that that rules.
Speaker 4: And they like they lean into that, and you should
be like, if you're at a puzzle, you should just
be like, give it your your best, go with anything
you have, because you're you'll probably be able to come
up with something like there was that one. I'm like, Okay,
there are these little guys that are related to your
the dude that is your like your navvy in this game,
and and so you're trying to find rescue their friends.
And there's five instances of these places where they're hiding
in this little room and I've got everything except for
one that was at the top of a pillar, and
around the pillar was some quicksand so I couldn't necessarily
like build something like trampolinees on top of this thing
on top of that thing sort of bounce up there.
And the pillar was tapered, so I couldn't also do
the thing where it's like I'll put a spider on
the side of the thing, and then I will bind
to the spider and then I will follow it, and
that means the spider can do its normal path going
up and then I'll start floating up and then I
could just get up there as it climbs over the
other side. It was tapered so the spider wasn't climbing
up there, so there was this kind of cliff over
to the right, and I built just the sort of
the bed bridge and this felt like very like just
duct taped together. And then I turned into link because
Lincoln jump higher because he's a man, and then I
jumped further off and I was able to just barely
make the jump and get this little item. And I
put this on Twitter and other people were mentioning how
they solve this, and some were like, I had a
bird and I just attached myself to the bird and
waited until he kind of flew over in that direction
by chance. And it's like, yeah, like that's another way
to do that, and a bunch of a bunch of
people hat a bunch of other answers and stuff. I
think the actual way to solve that a little spoiler,
but I mean, I'll just say this one, so it'll
just like ten to fifteen seconds. There's a a flying
a tile like from Zelda. I apparently you can get
those and add those to your repertoire and then you
could sit like put that on the ground, attach yourself
to that and it will just fly right in that
direction and it'll go straight, so you could just like
line it up perfectly.
Speaker 1: It's like, okay, fair enough. I two things.
Speaker 2: One, I want to see these tools in a Tiers
of the Kingdom game. Yeah, just because I loved the
different abilities they give link and how those would you
could break the game absolutely, Like I loved ascending up
the rock enemies in Tiers of the Kingdom. It was
my favorite thing to do. And yeah, I kind of
felt like I was violating that those rock people.
Speaker 1: You do go inside them, you do go inside them.
Speaker 2: But being able to like copy a bunch of stuff
and kind of like duct tape haphazardly stitch things together
like you could in Tiers of the Kingdom. But as Zelda,
I feel like you could add another layer where you
could kind of avoid combat better and just magic your
way through any of those instances. My question for you,
Grub is we've seen a lot of talk now since
the game has been out for a bit, and I
say a bit by like a day, that the performance
is a little bit all over the place. It is
super I've noticed it getting super freemy when I specifically
enter in more of the open areas versus the dungeons,
the dungeons feel like they run a little bit smoother.
Do you think that is particularly the case because this
may have been designed with being a Zelda Maker instead
of like a fully open world.
Speaker 4: I mean a lot of these problems were in links Awakening,
and the very specific problem that seems to be plaguing
links Awakening, and this is the game is trying to
stream in open world data while you're walking around. And
you know I mentioned that thing where like you can
climb over the walls that typically were the borders between
zones previous Zelda games, Well those borders don't really exist anymore.
You can climb up there, take the trampolines, hop over,
And so the game needs to be ready to bring
that information into the game at any moment, but it
can't keep it loaded all the time because this map
is eight times the size of links Awakening, And we
already know links Awakening was too big because the problem
there was loading in the world at any one time.
So I think that the issue might have been, like
maybe the Zelda Maker side of things was going to
solve some of these problems by just avoiding them and
letting you have like smaller dungeons or something like that,
where the game does run much better. It's not perfect
that there are some frame drops in the dungeons, but
it's much better. That's where like when I was at
Pax East and I played the game, I was playing
mostly in the dungeon. I'm like, I didn't notice anything this,
this seems fine, and it was like, oh, but it
was the open world where a lot of that stuff
was still happening. I am bothered by it, but I'm
also used to it now, especially after Links Awakening. Like
by the time I finished Links Awakening, I was like,
I'm mostly over this. I wish this game ran better,
but here it's like it's not bothering me that much.
I'm still kind of like just focused on the game.
So I wouldn't let people. I wouldn't be let people
have a be hung up on this specific thing as
a reason not to try the game. There's a lot
a lot of cool things going on here, and yeah,
it does seem like maybe when it does come to
switch to it could see improvements, because people are showing
it runoff on some emulators and it's running like one
hundred and sixty frames per second or something like that.
So maybe Switch two comes to the rescue here pretty soon,
So if you want to wait for that, maybe I
don't blame you. But I'm enjoying this game right now,
and like I said, the more I play it, the
more I get on its wavelength, the more I am
enjoying myself, and also the less I'm thinking about the
performance issues.
Speaker 5: Question for the two of you, do you think that
the like flexible gameplay style is now if this game
does really well or does whatever they wanted to do,
do you think that flexible gameplay style is now the
core thing for Zelda and for that franchise, or do
you think they ever go back to a more traditional
game at all?
Speaker 1: I think that they.
Speaker 4: I think this is like the thesis statement for Zelda,
and I kin think it's always has been to a
certain extent of we want people to feel like they're
making discoveries about how things can work and what they
can do, and we want them to have their own
ideas and then work on expressing those ideas.
Speaker 1: And that does go back to the legend.
Speaker 4: Of Zelda on the nes of We're just going to
set you free and you go figure out how everything works,
and if you have an idea, maybe it'll work, maybe
if you like that bush on fire or something's hidden
underneath it. Now the game that game much more rigid
in terms of what you actually could do, but this
is them expounding on that idea, So I do think
that they will mostly stick with this going forward. That said,
as I'm playing this, I am finding myself being like
kind of wish for the next time, the next top
down Zelda that we're getting here. It was more like
a link between worlds, which I think is one of
the best games ever made, and I think that they're
still room for that also to exist alongside what they're
doing with these games. And now I do pair this
up with Cheers of the Kingdom and Breath of the
Wild as being part of these games of very creative,
expressive games from Nintendo in the Zelda franchise.
Speaker 2: I think Nintendo doesn't want to go back to the
well too much with the type of game of flexibility
like you're talking about. Lex And I never really grew
up with Zelda, wasn't one of the ips I really
cared about growing up. But I would be interested into
seeing a different take on this and something that feels
better and performs better overall, I could see like a
different twist on the isometric Zelda format. Also, I guess
I wouldn't mind there being both. I see definitely a
place where you can have your link with weird goopy
abilities in one spot and then also have, if not
a more serious version of Legend of Zelda, something that.
Speaker 5: Would move in the timeline jan.
Speaker 1: Timelines. I don't care about timelines anymore. Uh um got
the grand calculus of the universe. I see it in
front of me.
Speaker 2: I don't know, let's go back to wind Waker, because
there wasn't anything super goofy in that except water, right,
That's right, just water.
Speaker 5: That will be like a fantasy in a couple of
years time when the water was stash.
Speaker 2: Exactly starting Legend of Zelda.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I honestly, if you know, switch To comes out and
we get another like big, proper Legend of Zelda.
Speaker 1: Game, I don't think it'll be.
Speaker 2: Within this specific timeline of Hirol I think, yeah, maybe done.
Speaker 4: Yeah. A couple of other things. The game stops you
way too often. The psychic character wants to tell you
everything you're saying. You're like chasing what looks like maybe
link game's gonna.
Speaker 1: Tell you you're chasing someone and it might be link And then.
Speaker 5: Watching somewhere yesterday it kind of reminded me of watching
people play Skywood Sword for the first time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm like, I'm like, did the Skyward Sword people
go over to help Grezo or something? Because it is
out of control. It's I guess maybe it's not as
bad as Skyward Sword, but it is very frequently stopping
you to talk to you, and it's never something that
you really need to hear. And the story is basic
to the point where you don't need a lot of
characters telling you how they feel about it, Like, yeah,
the king got sucked into the goup and he comes
out and he's evil now and he wants to wants
to imprison and maybe kill Zelda.
Speaker 1: Cool, got it. Everyone has an opinion on it.
Speaker 4: They're going to tell you, and the game's going to
stop to listen to it, and it's just it's not
helping this game at all. One thing that is helping it, though,
is that Zelda wanted poster that you do see and
apparently they're gonna have a wanted poster tote bag reward
in the My Nintendo Store or twelve hundred platinum points
and it looks really cool.
Speaker 5: I should get this because for the last like year,
and at Games Calm last year, the Yakuza TI were
giving out like bags with their logo Honish, the ORGG
logo Honish, And I gave that to my mom and
she started using it for like as her medicine pouch,
and so she just puts it around everywhere. That would
be a fucking great replacement.
Speaker 1: Ah, that's all I oh, it's.
Speaker 2: It's nothing like seeing a short Filipino woman and I'm
talking about my mother wearing each other.
Speaker 5: You're talking about my mother.
Speaker 2: Surprise, seeing my like four foot eleven mother walking around
town with a giant bomb shirt and it's just hilarious.
Hell yeah, that's good stuff that big said. I am
having a bunch of fun with it, Greb.
Speaker 1: It's very charming, games damn cute, very cute.
Speaker 4: I'm like, I've grown to really like this this art style,
especially when I am when I can extract it from
Links Awakening, which is so important to me, and gain't
the game Boy Original one, not game Boy Color one.
It was like, that's what I want this game to
look like. But now that's kind of standing on its own.
I'm like, yeah, really enjoy the way it looks. I
think it feels mostly pretty good.
Speaker 1: Does it go quite as good as Link between Worlds?
Speaker 4: And all of the puzzle solving stuff is excellent.
Speaker 2: I think it is absolutely cruel that they tease you
with a fantastic jump in this game, only to rip
it away from you.
Speaker 1: Yeah that is weird. Huh.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so as Link, you do have a really good
feeling jump, and then Zelda has this kind of tiny
little jump, and again it's like to force you to
use these other abilities you have. But I know that
still doesn't feel good as a player to be like,
have this really good and you could get that jump
back by turning into the sword.
Speaker 1: Fighter, but it's limited amount of time and everything. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I know I said this last time Grub, but I
think I would actually like a I'm forgetting the actual
name of it for swords Adventure. Yeah yeah, in this engine,
I mean fingers crossed, it would be run smoother. But
I like this art style, yeah, and I think they
should do more with it.
Speaker 4: I think now that they are sort of gotten to
this point where it's like, okay.
Speaker 1: Two big Zeldas.
Speaker 4: In this new style of here you're gonna have all
these tools and then now a new top down zeldam
in addition to the to the Wings Awakening remake. It's like, Okay,
they got Zelda in a really good place. Maybe now
is the time to go back to that period. It
was after the game cub Era, where it's like or
during the game Cubert. Let's experiment with a bunch of
different takes on what Zelda can be and a multiplayer
cooperative game after everything they've learned from making games recently.
Speaker 1: I think that could be very cool.
Speaker 2: Simple you have I can't think of a fourth one.
So you have three characters, all right, You get your
your regular decular link, you get a cool jump, and
then you get the Princess. You get Princess Zelda and
she can still summon beds, spiders, armadillo's oh my. And
then the third player has to play by the beat
because they're pulling from Cadence of High Rule.
Speaker 1: Oh.
Speaker 5: I thought you were going to say the third player
was tingle.
Speaker 1: Fourth players tingle.
Speaker 4: You're all secretly tingled, but you're wearing a mask that
turns you into these other characters.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yes, it's also a Majora's mask, not sequel,
but pero equal. That's the new term, folks.
Speaker 4: What if there was a tingle game that just was
Astrobot that'd be perfect, like Tingle running around collecting other tingles.
Speaker 5: It is so fucking wild that they gave that creepy
motherfucker two games of his own.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but those are good games. Rosie ruby land Is
is the the other best game about capitalism other than
pilot Quest. And then the dating game is actually pretty funny.
Speaker 2: I think that about does it for video games this
week shorter up, but lex, Yeah, you got something special
you wanted to share the folks at home.
Speaker 5: Yeah. So, after five years of running a website dedicated
to helping young people break into the games media, and
we decided to finally start a Patreon for start Menu,
I've just shut it and shot there. And basically this
thing has been ever since this second month, been run
by me. The people who founded it got jobs and
then they were like, hey, can you take over? And
it's like I just got here, but okay, and so
I've been running it out of pocket since then, and
we've been running this website and the idea of the
website is that we're a website where anyone can come
to us and say, hey, I have an idea for
a piece, or I'd love to review some games that
aren't out yeth, and we give them a chance to
work with an editor who's usually me, and we get
it up on a really nice looking website with no
ads on it, and we'll stay up there forever. And
they can put it on their muckcrack, they can put
it on their portfolio, they can put it on their CV,
they can do whatever they want with it, and we
basically try to make it as flexible as it can be.
The website can be whatever it needs to be in
the moment, So if people want to do scored reviews,
or if they want to do unscored reviews, or if
they want to do features, or if they want to
do news, we try to just facilitate that so that
they can show off what kind of right they are.
And we're currently trying to grow and we're trying to
do some different things with this Patreon and the big
chain is that we have four tiers. The first one
is a chuck and a buck tier, which is just
one dollar, and that's if you just want to send
us any money that you have laying around and will
more than happily take it. The second tier is probably
the best value tier, which is five dollars a month,
and we used to have a monthly news round up
that was done by the very talented Alex Green, and
he is now stepping back from that and it's going
to become a weekly thing that will come straight into
your inbox on Patreon, and each month that will be
written by a different writer so that people get the
chance to experience what it's like writing news. And then
at the end of the month, we'll coalate the four
pieces of the three pieces you know, depending on the month,
and we'll put them up as a monthly news round
up on the public website so that you can still
put it on your CV and you can still show
it off and it's still publicly available. Then we have
a ten dollars year which we are trying to expand
the type of training that we give people. We used
to do a sam Menu podcast and that was always
very difficult to organize and making sure everyone had the
right equipment. So we're now going to try to get
people in with some of my live streams. I live
stream on my own personal channel, and what we're going
to do is every every two weeks we're going to
do a live stream on my channel, which will usually
be on Fridays, where we'll get some people from the
sam Menu discord into a discord chat with me and
we'll either play something or we'll watch something, or we'll
do something that will be voted on by our patrons.
So the current idea for next week's stream, and one
of them at least, is to go through some of
Daniel Dwyer's videos of all the tapes like he's saying,
say from GameSpot, and get like some younger people who
might not have been around.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and six to watch the.
Speaker 5: Yeah, to watch this PlayStation three reveal or something, which
I think could be really fucking fun. And then the
other thing we're gonna do is we're going to do
game nights, which were also going to live stream, and
we'll let people vote on that. And we're also gonna
let people vote if they want us to do a
game night or a quiz night, and if we do
a quiz Knight, you can submit questions so you can
make young people feel really dumb if you want, and
then punch down Yeah, that's what the website's been about
from the start, is punching down. I've just been trying
to find a way to facilitate it. And then the
final tier is a letter from the editor tier, which
if you is twenty dollars a month, but if you
subscribe for even one month, you'll get it, and at
the end of the year I will be writing like
a personal letter to you. And also we are going
to get pieces of art commissioned, which we've done for
our third and for fifth anniversary, with like some really
cool characters and some in jokes from the website hidden
on them, and we'll send those out and we might
get them made as postcards, or we might just get
them done as prints and you can keep the print.
So yeah, that's what I've been working on, and this
has been a long time coming. I've been running sat
Menu while I was in college for the last four
years five years, including the pre college course sided and
it was very easy not to try to monetize it
because it was just a side hustle and I could
just be like, well, I'm just doing this in my
spare time, even if it was like eighty percent of
my time. But now that I'm freelancing, and I'm trying
to like actually cover games as a whole. I want
to be able to justify putting in the time to
satmen you still and say, hey, if there's money coming
in through this, then that justifies me not taking on
a new shift or review shift and things like that.
And that's the other thing that we're also going to
do is all of the reviews that go up on
the site for the longest time have been volunteer based.
So we haven't been able to pay for those because
I don't have any money to pay people for those.
And Bosh, when we got really big games, when we
got Baldersgate three and when we got a game that's
coming out next month, I felt really bad that I
couldn't pay people for their time. So I was paying
that out of Parkish. And so now with the money
that we're making from the Patreon every month, we're going
to pick one longer or bigger game from a bigger
publisher and that isn't just an indie game that you
can beat in a couple of hours, and we'll pay
someone to review that. So yeah, that's that's where we're
at with it. We're really excited about it. And the
thing I was super curious about was I wanted to
ask you how you got into games media because I
think that it would be interesting to hear a little
bit about your journey compared to Compared to this.
Speaker 2: My journey is I kind of fell into it. Folks
may or may not know. My general background is in
video production, so I had trained to be a camera op,
video editor, all that jazz. I originally wanted to just
do that and only do that for the longest time. I'd,
you know, been a camera guy in reality shows. We
know the big show that I worked on, That's right.
I followed Paul White around.
Speaker 6: Fine, you make the joke all right as he vaped God. Hey, no,
I think I I think I would.
Speaker 2: I almost accidentally admitted to an actual crime that you
could still prosecute.
Speaker 5: Me and will kill it.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, okay, okay okay.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 2: But I'd always been a fan growing up. I bought
video game magazines all the time. If I couldn't buy
them because money was tight that month, my mom would
just drop me off to the babysitter. The babysitter being
the local Barnes and Noble magazine Rack and I would
just read and write down as much as possible from
video game magazines.
Speaker 1: And then when the internet became a thing.
Speaker 2: Obviously big fan of Jeff and Ryan in the early
game spot days that also transitioned to the One Up Crew.
The One Up Show very very formative as well as
Jeff and Ryan. Of course, of how I wanted to
perhaps approach covering video games. And then I fell into
this job because the spot was open, and then I
dove right in and y'all fuckers can't get rid of me.
I'm going down when the site goes down.
Speaker 1: And I will I'll make sure. I'll make sure, won't.
Speaker 4: I always kind of wanted to do this job. I
was reading game magazines in the nineteen nineties. I remember
finding a couple that really clicked with me after maybe
seeing a couple of Nintendo Powers and not like like, Okay,
this is cool to find about games. But when I
found personality driven magazines, it's really when I got into it.
And then as EGM was kind of becoming more and
more online, One up dot Com started, I started blugg
finding a community, finding a lot of other people that
I became friends with, and a lot of those people
now work in the industry, worked as journalists worked at
There was just a massive welling of well well springs
of talent there of like people who knew what they
were talking.
Speaker 1: About and now are in charge of very big things,
and look at you and at me.
Speaker 4: Just just yet based with skeletons, just yelling into a microphone.
And then the financial collapse happened and EGM was clearly
going down and one up was falling apart, and everyone
was leaving, and I kind of decided I got to
start trying to do stuff on my own, so fund
some people.
Speaker 1: We did some stuff on our own.
Speaker 4: Uh Dance Hue started his own thing, kind of fell
in with some people who were like, hey, maybe come
help with that, and I helped volunteered with him on bitmob.
He left bitmob. I was like, hey, can I come
with you to this, to that thing? He said yes,
And then I started writing about games at games Beat
kind of contractually for a long time. It was was
freelance at first, and then it's like full time corac
for a very long time, and I was still we're
up into that point. I was still like working like
daily like jobs as a delivery driver, as a courier,
as a pizza boy all that kind of stuff. And
then once I got you know, first job where it's
like I'm kind of gonna can rely on a check
each week.
Speaker 1: That's something.
Speaker 4: I quit everything else focused on that, and then eventually
got hired like real full time years later. And yeah,
and then when I started breaking out and having some
pretty good scoops, Jeff Beckler's like, hey, come take over
Giant Bomb and make sure that Jan doesn't have to
do everything by himself.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, okay, I guess, And here we are now,
and here we are now, and we're going down no
matter what. That's right.
Speaker 2: We keep the ship afloat. We are the buoyancy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2: I do want to give a special shout out though,
to one Austin Walker, because seeing Austin Walker joined the
website and then just being such a prominent person of
color I in games media kind of rekindled a desire
to get try and get it into this field because,
you know, predominantly white dudes. But I foxed with my
white dudes, they fox with me, bang gang. But seeing
Austin Walker being a very prominent face at a website
that I absolutely adore and loved growing up. Mean, we think,
oh okay, there's space, there's space for me, So shouts
out to the god Austin Walker and Jan.
Speaker 5: You're super right because like when when I was getting
the Patreon ready, I was gathering all of our reviews
into one place so that people could look at them
all from the last five years on one Patreon post
and looking at like all the names that had come
through and like had job and have jobs now, Seeing
like Jess Reyers, who we hung out with that summer
games first, I had totally forgotten that she had written
like a thing about a toeh game for us all
those years ago. And seeing like people who I know
know in pr and in like publishing side of things,
having written for us and seeing those people go on
and do things. It does really help people feel like
they can do it too.
Speaker 2: And you you two can do it at home whatever
you want to do. Uh deeke not you though.
Speaker 1: You can't all you're not allowed to do it.
Speaker 2: We still haven't introduced you, all right, Just because we
mentioned your name, doesn't we mean we introduce you to
the show.
Speaker 1: Doesn't count. Doesn't count.
Speaker 2: Folks, you're watching live, stay tuned for a blight club.
That's right, we're doing blake club on a Friday. I
don't know what's going on with a week, but we
will end the week with uh, just a collective blink.
We're just gonna blink and clear our eyes.
Speaker 5: And I feel so bad for my Yeah, I was
gonna say, what a fucking awful way you You work
for a whole week, a whole week, and your Friday afternoon,
when you should be getting ready to wrap up and
plan your weekend, is playing that fucking piece of ship.
Oh you're the worst. You're all the worst. I don't know.
Speaker 1: That's you know, we're we're actually gonna blame Dan for
shoot because this is all Dan's fault. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was ready to do another upf We could
have played Deadlock or something.
Speaker 5: Sure he wasn't so busy reviewing bullet trains in mystery countries.
Speaker 1: Saudi Arabia? Yeah you want to sit there? Yeah? Have
I told my Saudi Arabia story on air? I don't remember.
Is this another felony? No? No?
Speaker 2: Uh, anyway, folks, that about does it for the BombCast
Revengeance Lex, where I know you just spent some time
talking about the start Menu Patreon. But where else can
folks find you on the internet.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so you can find Stopmanu Stopmanu dot co dot
uk is or website if you want to read some
of the content Patreon dot com, slash slash stop menu
is our patron or Twitter is at the stop menu,
not stop menu, which is a forty five year old
woman from the midwest of England who I had linked
to as my employer for several years. And yeah, you
and find me on Twitter at basically Lexi both spelt
with eyes at the end. You can find me on
Twitch under the same name as well. That's where we'll
be streaming start menu stuff. I have a bunch of
stuff from recent games, calm things up on shak News.
I have another piece from Shark News. I will be
going up sometime next week from an event that I covered.
And I'll be in a couple of upcoming play magazines
as well, which you should all check out. And yeah,
that's that's everywhere I'm at. Oh, if you do want
to if you do want to write for us, if
you do want to get involved in you do want
to start trying to break into the industry, And hello
at startmanu dot co dot uk is or email address
reach out to us and we try to get as
many people in and we try to find something for that.
Can you know, give you.
Speaker 1: A voice, fantastic, fantastic.
Speaker 2: Can use that voice, folks at home, use that voice
and tell your friends about the Giant BombCast. That's right,
And then I want you to tell yourself, Wow, I
love this podcast. I'm gonna give it a thumbs up
on a platform that allows that, perhaps YouTube or something. Folks,
That about does it for this week show. We'll see
you again on Tuesday. She's been Lex, he's been Grubb
and Deeke rub up the engines. We're gonna end the show.
He's he can say, John, Oh, that's that's unfortunate. Just
as Lex started to pay true, is.
Speaker 4: That when you played Jinga so good that the government
took notice?
Speaker 2: Yes, that's why the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia offered me
to come to a video game convention in Saudi Arabia
to play Jenga.
Speaker 1: That's a good story. It's completely for shoot folks. Every
every word of that is real.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like, because we've went to DreamHack, we came up
with a bunch of ideas and I just played big
Djenga really well.
Speaker 4: It really well, and some Saudi Arabia is like, hey,
we noticed you from across the room.
Speaker 1: Hey, it's a growth market. Okay, that's what they pitched
me on. It's a growing market. They really liked me
over there apparently. Yeah.
Speaker 2: That's that's it. That's it, there's no more to the story.
I love you, bye,