Speaker 1: Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Game Informer Show, a weekly
podcast covering the video game industry. Join us every Friday
for a discussion about the latest gaming news, reviews, and
exclusive reveals, alongside Game Informer staff and special guests from
around the industry. I'm one of your hosts, Kyle Hilliard.
I'm joined today by Charles Hart. How's it going, Charles?
How do you? Who? How are you? Oh? Good, good question.
Eric Van Allen is here. I'm kind of catching you
right as you're taking a sip.
Speaker 2: No, I was blowing on my coffee to cool it
so it doesn't burn my tongue. Today I'm terrified of
burning my tongue live on air. It hasn't happened yet,
but it will one day eventually.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 1: I can't wait. I'm gonna be there. I'm going to
be there. And Wesley LeBlanc, what's up Wes?
Speaker 3: Hello? Hello, excited to be here.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Hey, Today we are diving deep on the state
of play, which at the time of this recording, I
don't know when you're listening to this, but we covered
it in a big way last night, and we on
Thursday and now Friday morning. First thing we're doing is.
We are talking about everything that happened there, and along
with all the announcements, I have also played a little
bit of I've already forgotten the name God of War
Sons of Sparta. I've played a little bit of it,
so we can talk about that too. And then after
a break, Charles got to play some Pokemon Pacopia, West,
reviewed re Animal, I reviewed Romeo as a dead Man,
and played a bunch of Cinny Cross. It's a whole
dang episode of the game and former show, and we're
gonna dive right into it. Guys, let's talk about state
of play. I don't know who wants to go first,
but like, what did you guys think of it? Like?
I thought it was I thought it was a good show.
I thought it was dense. I thought there was a
lot of fun stuff. But yeah, what did you guys think?
Speaker 3: I thought it was the best one. I would need
to go back through all of them to say it's
the best one, but in recent memory, it's the best one.
It was the first one in a long time where
I was like, not really any segments that felt this
could have been an email or a press release. This
was like, this felt very event worthy. I'm actually surprised
it was a State of Play and not a PlayStation showcase.
To be honest, I think it could have easily been
their more hype exciting thing, but there was less first
party representation. That's probably why I was a State of Play.
But yeah, lots of lots of good stuff to chew
on in, and I think.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'd have to think back to like maybe there's
there might have been some E threes that maybe out
did it. I'll always remember the shadow that oh for
sure remake kind of like just like blowing my mind
that that thing would even exist. But yeah, I I
it was. There was a lot happening, and there was
there was a lot of stuff that I was I
was really surprised by, like opening up with is it
Kenna or Keena? I I know, I actually only Keene.
I never played the first.
Speaker 4: However they said it in the trailer. I'm gonna play
it right now so I can remind myself. However they
said it. I was surprised because I had been saying
it a different way.
Speaker 2: Okay, Charles is doing the research right now, Nana, what's
my name is that?
Speaker 1: Is that what it is?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's y'all forgot about that song until now. I
guarantee you you did not really over that song.
Speaker 1: I don't know what you're talking about.
Speaker 2: I forgot about a Rihanna song, not a song but
Nana what's my name specifically.
Speaker 1: But that I don't know how you guys felt, but
that one surprised me in a big way because as
cool as that original game was, which I'd meant, I
only played like about an hour of it, but I
love the way it looked it. My prediction for a
long time has been that studio was like, hey, we
made Kenna, and then Sony was gonna be like, great,
we're gonna put you on this license. It was kind
of my thought, you know, I don't know what that
license was. I don't know what it was gonna be,
but it just didn't occur to me that they would
continue that franchise. In the game looks great, It looks
really good.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The first one is like a very PS two game. Right,
it was like a very uh like classic action character
action platform or type game or character action type game
like a Jack or a Ratchet.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's visuals though, We're stunning that. I think it's
I'm shooting off the top of my head. But I'm
pretty sure this was a former animation duo like movies. Yeah,
and that was like the big cell was we are
an animation studio and now we want to make games.
Speaker 4: They did a Majora's mask fan film, Is that right?
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is cool, Like it's like it's kind of
if I've seen it before, and it is. It was
a nice calling card and like sort of showed their
chops and yeah, this one some it looks emotional and
like the action looks cool, Like I am I'm more
interesting jumping right into the sequel, I think personally after
enjoying the first one but just not finishing it. What's
kind of where I was at with it?
Speaker 3: And then I I was gonna say I had a
weird moment when this played because I was guiding the
first kind of game for IGN. It was my last
freelance assignment when former editor in chief here Andrew Reiner
had called in like pitched me the job that I
originally took in twenty twenty one, and it was like
it was one of those weird like wow, time has passed,
like that was we're coming up on five years ago
when I was offered this job here and now I'm
seeing the sequel of this game.
Speaker 1: It was really lost it twice.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's a whole saga. Like I
don't even know what my I don't even know what
day to celebrate my like this is how long I've
been working here. I just kind of like, guess. But
the first Kenna is actually really great. I can understand
when to jump with the sequel. I do think the
first one, like is a really good time if you
know what you're going in for. As someone who it
because I had to for work, it's really cool. And
I like the Pickman little dudes. I don't know, I
can't remember what they're called, but you can built little
hats on them, and I think, yeah, you collect, you
collect more and more of these little like carry black
Bob things, Yeah, and then you can put little hats
on them.
Speaker 4: I did find, by the way, it's Caina Cane. It's
not Kenna, It's not Keina. It's Kana.
Speaker 1: Legacy of Kana is how I will which announcements to
a new two D action game and a remaster of Defiance.
But I I think the next thing I want to
touch on is Konami, which Eric you kind of added
it to our sort of podcast notes, is like Kanami
is back, which I think is like a share question
question mark. I think you could put an Entaro bang there.
I think they're like, I think they're I think they're back, right,
and I think they've been back for a while. I
think Silent Hill f was a success. I think Salent
Hill to remake was a success. I think Metal Year
Solid Delta is a success. But this is arguably, I
mean with Castlevania, which you guys please tell me about
Castlevania because I was I was writing things. So that's
like one of the trailers I haven't had a chance
to sit down and watch yet. Like this feels like
an in Silent Hill town Fall. This is like, Okay,
now we're getting into new stuff and not necessarily just
like remakes and remasters, which I feel like was necessary
to get Konami back on their feet. But yeah, what
what the what I saw of Caslvania looked really nice?
Was there something like what did you guys who were
paying attention more closely to again from it?
Speaker 4: So I wrote that story that it's it's one of
those stories that like the the odd thing where the
development story of the game makes me feel like hopeful
about games as an art form in a weird way
where it's it is Kanami in partnership with Evil Empire
Motion Twin, which are two studios that made the Dead
Cells games. Motion Twin originally did it, and then Evil Empire,
I believe, was like spun off from Motion Twin was
doing the post launch updates and now they have like
separate projects. Motion Twin is working on I think it's
called wind Blown. I believe Evil Empire is doing the
Prince of Persia roguelike, and it's like they they made
Dead Cells inspired by a lot of things in Castlevania,
reached out to Kana and they're like, hey, can we
make Castlevania DLC. This is also, I guess West a
similar thing. This is like one of my first significant
features I did for Game and Former where I was like,
oh time, oh yeah, I remember that, yeah yeah, where
I talked to them and they were like yeah, it
was really it was kind of weird. We were so
excited to do it and they were like, I don't know,
got a vibe of like they were flattered that people
were interested in this way and they really got like
free reign to do whatever, and they made this huge
expansion to Dead Cells that was like old Castlevania themes.
And now they are making a new Castlevania game and
it's a it's a sequel to Dracula's Curse, which is
the third Castlevania game. Yeah, or it's like twenty three
years after that, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was thinking of Dracula X. By the way, Charles,
you are correct, it was it was the third NES game,
right yeah.
Speaker 4: And it's also I think the series fortieth anniversary. But
it's it's I think it looked the gameplay looked really nice.
It looks like a modern I mean, I mean Motion
Twin and Evil Umpire really know what they're doing with
like two.
Speaker 1: D action and all that.
Speaker 4: But it is like Castlevania with a very modern look
and feel to it has a cool kind of like.
Speaker 1: Painty kind of art style to it.
Speaker 4: And I'm excited because, like I am someone who I
never played the like Lords of Shadow games, and like
I don't I don't know if I like had known
really what Castlevania was in a time where like a
new one was coming out, Like this is a new
feeling to me where it's such an influential series, and
I've seen the influence and I like, I be like, oh,
it's that thing. I've seen the Netflix show. But I've
never played a Castlevania game. It's like where my fandom
of Castlevania is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I and it's not a rogue game to
be clear, right, it is it?
Speaker 4: I don't. I didn't. There wasn't any indication.
Speaker 1: That it was. That's good. That's what I want. I mean,
this is for a few years now, as Konamia is
sort of you know, bringing themselves to a boil. That
is this is what I've wanted frankly, is like I
don't need you to reinvent Castlevania. You can do that,
like you can do Lords of Shadow again in the future.
I love the first Lords of Shadow, but like, for now,
when it's been so long since we've like been a Belmont, like,
I just want like a nice get it. Get a
really talented, smaller developer who knows how to make these
games that you sort of started and like, you know,
make put put a bunch of effort into like a
two D Castlevania game. So this is exactly what I
wanted for the franchise.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So That's why I wanted to bring it up
is because Konami has kind of found a new like
like coasting speed by saying, Okay, a lot of the
stuff we're doing now is either remakes or collections of
our old stuff. Notably, in this state of play, we
got the Metal Gear Solid Volume two collection, which means
MGS four is no longer locked. The PS three, which
is honestly kind of incredible in and of itself. I
believe peace Walker is packed in with it.
Speaker 1: I've been I've been eternally threatening to myself to plug
in a PlayStation three play replay Metal yes, the last
couple of years, you know, like I've got one on
a shelf collecting dust. But yeah, this sounds like weirdly exciting.
Speaker 3: On that peace Walker note too, This was kind of
like hidden because it wasn't announced in the state of play.
The multiplayer is coming with it, which is like, that's
what Peacewalker's whole thing was. Yeah, it was the that's
really cool.
Speaker 1: So everyone who's playing the Delta multiplayer mode, which is
all of us, right, we've all played the Delta multiplayer,
We're all just gonna move right over to Peacewalker right, Sorry,
I don't think anyone.
Speaker 2: So so that that's like one fork of it, right,
and the other fork is either contract or bring in
studios that are going to do cool things with our properties.
Whether that's bringing in outside talent like with Silent Hill
f where they brought it with Yukishi and stuff like that,
or you get motion twin in on something like this,
you get Blue berr in on something like this, And
I think it makes a lot of sense. I mean,
if you it might sound really simplistic to say, well,
if you have a ton of really good price properties
that everybody loves, then just get somebody else to make
them for you and reap the benefits, and everybody kind
of gets what they want. A studio gets a really
good shot at a property, people get in New Castlevania,
a new Silent Hill something like that, and Konami gets money.
Speaker 1: But like, that is.
Speaker 2: Really a winning strategy that is seeming to work right now,
and of all the companies to figure it out, I
don't think, you know, five ten years ago, any of
us would have guessed that would have been Kanami, you know,
in the wake of all the Kajima MGS five stuff
and all that, like it's it's there.
Speaker 3: Too, where Kanami was like, we're kind of done with games.
We really like our casinos and our slot machines and stuff,
and then everyone was like, Okay, that sucks, So like,
ok the fact that we're yeah, the fact that we're
back to like Kanami as a game maker is really cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So do you guys remember when the Metal Gear
Solid three slot machine debacle happened? I read God, I
don't know if you guys remember it, but like it
was way before the proper remake existed, and this like
trailer went online that showed like new visuals for Metal
Gear Solid three. It was like a trailer we saw
the boss and like all these high resolution It's like,
oh my god, it's happening, and then it cut to
like a pachinko machine. It was like, yeah, devastating thing ever,
but it was hilarious in retrospect. Yeah, do you.
Speaker 3: Think that their Konami is doing all these smart moves
incrementally to eventually get to we have a small studio.
We've contracted a studio to make a new Metal Gear
Solid Because it feels like they are politely tiptoeing around
that large elephant that will always be in their history,
which is what happened with Kojima and Kanami, and they're
bringing back their other franchises. Metal Gear has just been
releases in this remake, Like how far until a small
stealth studio is given the reins to a new Metal
Gear Solid or is it just off the table?
Speaker 4: You think they did say like when they were talking
about Castlevania, they were like, we've been They didn't use
these exact words. It was basically like, we've been releasing
old Castlevania collections just to make sure people didn't forget
that they liked these games. So now that when we
come up with a new one, people will actually play
it because they have all the nostalgias. So like the
concept of that is something they are doing with one series,
So I wouldn't be shocked, But I don't know what
studio would do it.
Speaker 1: I mean, my my bet, like the place that I
would put my chips is actually the team that made Delta.
Their next project is a is a fully original Metal
Gear Solid. I think that that among you know, the
Konami franchises Silent Hill, Castlevania, et cetera, Like sound Hill
and Castlevania are flexible and like have been handled by
other people, and they can hand them off to others
they have before they can give them another studios. But
metal gear is like a very specific, precious thing that
costs a lot of money to make and demands production value.
So I don't think Gear ever gets handed to a
smaller team. I think it will always be internal. I
don't know if that means it'll be good. I don't
know if the next Metal Gear Solid I don't know
if they call it metal Gear Solid six will be
a good game, or if we'll play it and will
be like this doesn't work without Kojima. I don't know,
But that's where I would sort of guess the series
is right now. I bet, I bet the Delta team is.
I bet they're working on something original more than I
think they're remaking something else.
Speaker 3: As someone who's not I have not played the metal
Gear Solid series because I've been waiting for this moment
that we now have, which is I can easily play
them all. Are they as like that or no, don't
say that. Are they as wild as death Stranding is?
Because I know of metal Gear Solid and I know
that they can't kind of get a little kookie but
like now, seeing where Kojima is at with Death Stranding,
I'm like, there's no way this dude's making metal gear.
He would be making metal gear solid anymore.
Speaker 2: Four is the one that I think jumps the shark,
like I think one in two are certainly goofy, weird,
a little bit over the top in ways that I
think people sometimes overblow a little bit, especially too, like
two's got some wild stuff in there. Yeah, two is weird,
Like two is where they talk about memes and stuff
like that in the year of whatever it was, and
the PS two they were talking.
Speaker 1: About and they basically totally called the current Internet and
how terrible. Yeah, it is basically way.
Speaker 4: Three also has like like inexplicable like live action footage.
It's a game that, like I could tell you details
about it, you would say that's weird, and then you'd
start playing the game. You'd forget everything I said because
it wouldn't make any sense, and then you'd encounter it
in the game you're like, oh, I guess Charles did
mention this, but it I had no Anyways, I don't,
but in the somebody who played that within the last
few years.
Speaker 1: I do think two.
Speaker 2: Is in the context of Kajima is clearly a sinophile
like who enjoys like mediums and messages and stuff like that,
and and especially like if you watch a lot of
art films and stuff, you're going to see a lot
of the ways in which he takes ideas and brings
them in and you can kind of see it as
a you know, uh, I don't know, a mixing pot
of all that stuff. And the three is obviously like
the most grounded, I would say, but still a little
bit goofy, still a little bit wacky. Four is where
it jumps the shark. For me, that's the one where
you have like the models that he brought in to
be the the fem fatale bosses that you fight throughout
the entire thing and really long.
Speaker 3: He posts them on his Instagram first as like a tease.
Speaker 2: For Yeah, I was like, when when was that happening?
I don't think that was Instagram time. It was like
coming up on it.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, yeah, no it was. Uh.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of stuff in four that I don't
want to spoil for you that gets absolutely bizarre. But
still really I think the ending to that game is
absolutely amazing and in ways that really only Kajima tries
to go for so.
Speaker 1: I appreciate it's interesting the Death Stranding sort of like
level of lunacy comparison. I think is interesting because Death
Stranding does break off into what I mean, genuinely magic
in the sense of like you are you are going
between the world of the living and the dead, and
what does that mean? Right, Like that's a that's a
thing that like they don't explain away with technology and
death strand, right.
Speaker 3: You just have to follow Kajima and the studio with
the games.
Speaker 1: Like, yeah, you can die and there's another world where
you die, and you know what I mean, Like that
kind of that's where Death Stranding goes crazy. But like
Metal Gear doesn't quite go to that line. But like, dude,
there's like there's a situation where that exact thing happens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there is in the moment, Yeah.
Speaker 4: Where there's a world of the dead and it's kind
of magical and explain it.
Speaker 1: I guess. I know you guys are totally right that
is true, but I guess it's the yes right right.
Speaker 3: I guess what I'm curious about is is like post
Death Stranding one and two, Kojima would he be making
metal Gear Solid six h today still yeah maybe?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like metal Gear is a world that he has
created that totally gives him the freedom to do whatever
he wants it so to speak, right, Like it's not
like it's not like he broke away from metal Gear
and I can finally do something crazy, like he could
totally like if he if there were if you know,
if they announced that metal Gear Solid six, Hey guess
what this is crazy? Kojima Productions is making it. Maybe
that's the outside company that makes metal Gear Solid six actually,
but like if that happened, like I wouldn't be like,
oh no, he has to rain himself in again, No,
absolutely not.
Speaker 3: I mean he's making phissions, So we're gonna see. I
guess what metal Gear Solid six would be theoretically probably.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, lots of cool, very stuff.
Speaker 3: Very excited check out metal Gear Solid now.
Speaker 1: Yeah all the way four is my least favorite, but
it's still a game I really enjoy and like I
want to play again because I was at a weird
place in my life when it came out where I
was like full time student, working full time and I
was getting really frustrated with that game because I had
like an hour and a half to play a video game, right, Like,
I was very busy. That's a cut scene, literally, like
genuinely literally, I would I would boot up the game,
watch a cut scene, not even get to finish it,
and like have to go to class, you know, so
like so I got really frustrated with it. So I
would like to revisit it now, knowing what I'm getting
into and being like I'm gonna watch a movie and
at play a game sometimes basically, which is not the
thought process I had while I was playing it at
the time.
Speaker 2: I've never played a middle Gear Solid. I just watched
my friend play all of them because he had all
of them on PS three and so I would just
sit there on the couch and watch him play them.
And I don't know if I want to play middle
Gear Solid at this point because it seems like a
good game series, But there's something about experiencing that with
like people around and be like, dude, what is happening
right now? Are you seeing this experience?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I did forever shape the way that I see
this series, So yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Eric, can you tell me about I'm sorry, Charles,
go ahead, I didn't mean to cutch up.
Speaker 4: I was gonna say real quick that I was like,
I my perception going in, as I knew they were
this is I've played the recently one and one through three.
Perception going in is they're like these wacky, crazy games
and all this stuff's going on. And then I did
play them and I was like, oh, they're also fun.
People talk about that it's fun to play these games,
and that's something that I'm excited to play with yourself
for because I I I may maybe it's not fun.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 4: I assume it'll be fun, and then everything else I'll
just be like, it's crazy, this is.
Speaker 1: All happening, and my eyes in front of me. But
I'm I'm very excited for this. I'll be I'm excited
to hear your because you will play it like you committed, right,
like you've played I definitely recently. Right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like almost a sunk cost thing at this
point where I'm like, I put up with too much
craziness in this series to not know.
Speaker 1: How the like end of the timeline is or whatever. Yeah,
I'm excited to hear your sort of thoughts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there is no end, right, I'm excited to get
to five because the way people talk about five has
always been so fascinating to me. But like it just
like you don't get a climax, right, Like.
Speaker 1: You just have to live with that, Yeah, because you
have to. Yeah, Like four is the ending, like truly,
Like I mean, it's there's some open ended nature to it.
I'm not spoiling anything, but it's it is a satisfying
conclusion to the Metal Gear solid saga because five is
a prequel. Five goes back to like the early timeline,
So like it is interesting the way that all fell
apart where I mean not, I know, we're like sort
of getting sidetracked with Metal Gear, as we always do,
but like there is a complete story here that he
was able to walk away from, right, It's not it's
not like there's unanswered questions in the Metal Gear franchise.
I mean there are, but like not the big important ones. Yeah. Yeah,
but uhh, Eric, I wanted to hear you talk a
little bit about tokn Marvel Tokon and and and because
they shared new fighters right.
Speaker 2: Well in their release date, which I didn't even realize
they didn't have a release day locked in, And now
we have one set for August sixth, which does kind
of put it in the window for EVO, which is
kind of interesting. I don't think it'll be an EVO
game this year. That seems like too tight of a
window to manage. But maybe it gets some spotlight shine
at the show.
Speaker 1: That'd be cool.
Speaker 2: But yeah, So we got the trailer that confirmed that
there was some additional stuff on the PlayStation blog about
an episode mode that wasn't exactly clear, but seems like
there will be some kind of storied single player type
mode and it'll have comic slash manga panels that cut
in and things like that kind of try to do
something that adds a little bit of story and framing
and setting to this. But the big news is three
fighters confirmed. We already knew Storm was in the game,
and that's like Storm's classic NBC that makes sense. Another
classic NBC inclusion is Wolverine. You really can't make an
x Men any like, like an X Men game, much
less an X Men fighting game without Wolverine in it.
But then Magic is really sick. I think Magic has
slowly become a more popular X Men character over the
last like five years or so, her being rivals Marvel's
Midnight Sun's games that really put a spotlight on her
and how cool her kid is. She's just big sword,
teleport demons, it's it's it's awesome.
Speaker 1: I love Magic.
Speaker 2: And then Danger, who might be one of my favorite
characters I've seen somebody come up with for a Marvel game,
which apparently is just the Danger Room from Xavier's Academy,
became a sentient Android and is fighting alongside the X Men,
and so she's like a hot Sunae Miku or like
Echo from Overwatch Android that.
Speaker 1: But she's also no, she's a she's a robot. I
thought was Wasn't Android is hot? I mean, I don't
know the fiction.
Speaker 3: Of I know that it's a hologram, but I don't
know what she is.
Speaker 1: She's a hologram on stage, Yeah that's what. Yeah, I
don't I'm not sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think Fortnite as well.
Speaker 2: If you know things about hots and Aku, please leave
a comment below. Please.
Speaker 1: You know, I've been playing the Fortnite uh Festival because
I bought like a guitar break.
Speaker 4: That's really got so so authoritatively, as if it would
answer all the questions like, oh, she's a Fortnite.
Speaker 1: Too, Oh okay, Yeah, Fortnite. Yeah, but her her Autumnagucci
song that she did, which is a great song. I
love that song is in Fortnite fest War was recently,
so yeah, not as as I'm sorry, G.
Speaker 2: I show lovest Meku. We we say this all the time.
Uh a friend of the show ons and Amy too.
She could probably be a guest, right yeah, Vocalo, We'll
reach out, We'll have our people talk to her people androids, holograms,
I'm not sure. I think the text message like into
like the ether, right, you just like send a message
without a recipient and it'll get to her, I think. Anyways,
Danger is the Danger Room turned into an anime Android girl,
and that's awesome. Man's that's sick. All the moves are
like throwing out the different obstacles and like buzz saws
and lasers you might see in the Danger Room. And
I think that's a really cool design. Marvel Tocon looks
really good. They also tease that their teams, which if
you've played like a King of Fighters game, you might
recognize that sort of framing of different teams of fighters
that kind of form a loose framing of you could
make a team of these characters and they'll probably click
together pretty well, or they'll have like similar ideas, be
coming from similar backgrounds, that sort of thing. So I
like that. I think that's that's a fun framing device
for this game. But Token continues to look really, really good.
I think the fighting game community is in a strange
place right now, where we've got some really really good
games at the top. I think Street Fighter six is
still fairly healthy. Tech and eight depends on who you
talk to, but I think Tech and eight is still
a pretty solid game. Two XKO I think is the
big elephant in the room right now with all of
the layoffs that just happens. And I mean Riot coming
out and saying that it did not launch in the
way that they expected. It did not hit launch expectations.
I think that's really strange coming from Riot Games.
Speaker 1: But well they're also a company that they're probably they
they want like the biggest hit in the world. Yeah,
I mean they like if it doesn't if it's not
like the most successful thing ever, it's like that's considered
a failure for RYOT I think, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they've been sting a bit too with the legal legends,
like spin off, third party games. Things they were doing,
they stopped doing that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they stopped doing those. I could talk at length
about Riot games. I don't think we need to make
this podcast episode. But the short version is that I
think there were expectations they had for that game and
how they thought people would engage with it that were
different than what reality was ever going to be. You know,
they saw it as, oh, people will treat this like
League of Legends, and they didn't. And even League of
Legends has been having its own problems with the reception
that Riot thinks it should get versus what it does get.
But in that light, Marvel token Arc System Works kind
of the golden child of fighting games at this point
has you know, I think once Dragon Ball Fighters came around,
people just immediately woke up to the fact that Arc
System Works as like an st here a high talent,
high caliber, high talent fighting game studio that can make
really cool stuff. And seeing them do all this stuff
with Marvel, I mean, it looks fantastic. It rekindles that
fire that Dragon Ball Fighters had for me all those
years ago, in like twenty eighteen or whatever. So I think,
to con looks great. I really can't wait for that.
I think it's going to be a really really cool game.
Speaker 3: So yeah, crucially, they have the word Marvel in the title,
which I think, honestly, I think two K xo's biggest
issue was like, you didn't put League of Legends in
the title, and then you made a really bad name
to Fighting Souls, not the greatest name. But I think
having Marvel in there is going to help a bunch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because people will just say, hey, guess what, Win's Marvel.
That's already a thing in the fighting game comedian. Now
they can once again say Win's Marvel and it's a
tag fighter again. It works so well with a new
Marvel Fighting game, is like it's alternative title. Yeah, yeah,
you kind of brushed past it, Eric, But there's a
danger the Danger Room Fighter.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's that is not from the comic. That's like,
I have no idea.
Speaker 2: Is that a comic character?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I looked it up beforehand. But yeah, well, I
this is a good segue for me. I was gonna say,
I when I went to see Marvel Cosmic Invasion a
few months ago, at like the end of last year,
was talking to the team at Tribute about their relationship
to like the big Marvel Games team, and they were
saying they don't really have any strict like you have
to have this character in your roster or whatever, but
they are generally like.
Speaker 1: It it shouldn't be all a listers.
Speaker 4: You should have a good mix of like obscurity in there.
So like you're probably gonna want Spider Man because he's
like the most popular character in the world, so every
Marvel game would have Spider Man.
Speaker 1: But they really encourage it's like.
Speaker 4: If you can find like a weird character to put
in there, or a slightly lesser known character. And I
think Danger is like the perfect example from this that
we've seen where it's like people are going to like
from Marvel's perspective, they're like, this is a character that
exists in the comics, and maybe if someone is exposed
to this game they really like the character. That's like
a way into more Marvel stuff for them. But I
like it too because it just makes like it makes
the roster more diverse in a way. Honestly, I think
that's why Magic is so prominent in a lot of
Marvel stuff, because I mean, she literally looks different than
a lot of characters, but also like giving her a
giant Sword is a thing. I think a lot of
developers are like, well, you know, adapting Thor's move set
into this thing might be kind of tricky because of
how his powers work, but we know how swords and
fire works, and so we can put that into a
game pretty easily.
Speaker 2: I think even the fact that they're announcing the release
date alongside the X Men is a subtly like masterful move,
like acknowledging that Marvel does have a rich history in
finding games, but the X Men specifically have a very
rich history in all these games, going back to like
Children of the Atom and stuff like that. But even
like the start of Marvel versus Capcom with stuff like
X Men versus Street Fighter, like the X Men have
been core for a lot of like Marvel's fighting game
presence for a long time, and it led to even
in games like NBC two, a lot of the Big
Four was mar was X Men characters, was a cable,
was Storm or Sentinel like like these these very iconic
characters that became the face of Marvel as a fighting property,
and so having them roll out like this, I think
it's just very well done, very well played. So yeah,
I uh yeah, it seems like Arc system Works is
doing everything right.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Uh, let's talk about Project Windless.
Speaker 3: Uh yeah, which.
Speaker 1: I this was. I had a weird memory this we
talked about a little before the start recording. It's based
on the Korean novel series The Bird that Drinks Tears,
and that kind of like sparked something my brain. I
was like, why is this familiar? And when I was
the mobile like at lead editor at GameSpot dot com,
I remember like assigning a story on this announcement for
at the time it was called it was just it
was just untitled. It was untitled based on this game,
but they had this sort of cgi like the Art
of the Chicken and this this was back in like
twenty twenty two. So like as we were watching this footage,
I was like, God, this seems so familiar. I've seen
something about this. And the trailer just kept getting like
crazier and crazier, and there's like this giant chicken like
playing Dynasty Warriors. Like I think we were all just
kind of like, what is happening here? This is insane?
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a so this the trailer starts and
it's this reptilian looking like goddess woman we're talking about, yeah,
purity and soulless people and blah blah blah. And she's
part of the Reptilian Naga race in this novel series.
This is a high fantasy series of novels from South
Korean author Lee Jung Due. It was first published in
two thousand and three. So this isn't like a folktale thing,
which Crafton is doing a lot of as well. This
is like this would be like what's currently happening is
like Brandon Sanderson's novels are being adapted into other media,
and it's this world of like four races. There's the
reptiles that we saw, and then the chicken is part
of a race known as the Recon or Recon. That's
all the lord stuff happening. No, no, I'm this is me.
This is the research I was doing for the story
I wrote yesterday. And uh yeah, so that's like the
lore that's happening, and you kind of get taste of
that in the trailer. But then you watch the trailer
and there's an anthropomorphic super buff chicken with two swords
who was just slashing through hordes of enemies dynasty warriors style,
Like I don't want to say it's I don't want
to say it's quite Dynasty Warriors, and I recognize maybe
that's a turnoff for some people. I quite like that
kind of combat, but it's like mixing the more traditional,
like over the shoulder third person action combat that we
see everywhere now with like Dynasty Warrior hordes and the
ability to just like rip through them, and I think
that's really cool. We see giant like monkey beasts, like
all kinds of stuff happening, and this chicken is just
like this buff, sword wielding chicken. I have no doubt
the Internet will soon grasp onto this chicken, and we're
not far from calling him hot. In fact, I saw
ash formerly. Yeah, yeah, like, I think people are gonna
be hot for this chicken. Lots of good jokes out
there already, and it looks sick. It's under the name
Project when List, which should indicate this is probably a
good bit of ways away. We have no release window
or anything. It's being developed I think exclusively for PS
five currently, but again we're probably years away from published,
so who knows where it goes.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I think to your point about the action,
I would almost call this like a spectacle action because
we used to have more of these games, and then
I think Souls got very popular and people kind of
started to go in that direction. But you go back
to the three sixty era, you have games like Dragging Guard,
You have games like ninety nine Nights that start to
expand out what the character action game can look like
on the ground. And this does have a bit of
that flavor to it, a bit of that. It's hack
and slash action. It's not quite DMC, it's not quite Souls.
It's like a third point on the vectored triangle of
character action. And I'm all, I'm all game for that.
We're back in the air. The three sixty is so back.
We're getting games like Pragmata, We're getting games like.
Speaker 1: Three sixties. Big thing early on was like we can
put so many characters on screen. You don't even understand.
You think, you think tens a lot just to wait
like that was like the whole like first six months
of the Xbox three sixty.
Speaker 3: And then Dark Souls happen and now it's like you're
gonna fight this one person in before five minutes in
a duel. You're gonna like, yeah, this game. It was
just like it's it's one of the trailers of all
the trailers during the show, I would say, watched this one.
You're only somehow watching one because it is just bonkers
off the wall and it looks cool. It's going to
be a single player. They called it an action RPG
in its open world as well, which you don't really
can't really tell that in this more cinematic trader, but
I think it's really interesting. This is Krafton. This is
a South Korean based company we are seeing post blackmuth
Wukong Development is a lot of the East Asian markets
outside of Japan, so talking like Korea and China have
been kind of like stranded in mobile and gotchland because
their player base is they play a lot of mobile
games there. And I've spoken to a lot of South
Korean devs for Game and Former and basically what's happened
is they've kind of tapped out on that market, like
the well is running dry. They have their whales that
keep those games afloat, and those games are still doing
really well, but they're finding that younger generations want to
build PCs and play BF games on bfpcs and maybe
by a console too, And so now these companies saw
what Blackack Myth Wukong did, which, mind you, that's like
a twenty five million cellar game. That's huge for a
brand new IP And I think they're going to tap
into like their culture's history, which we see a lot.
We see comic games based on American comics and this
kind of stuff. Like they're tapping into the media that's
popular there and creating these big action games, and I
think it's we're going to continue to see that, and
whether or not this game performs well in the US
is irrelevant. I think this game is going to do
really well the same way that Black Myth Wukong, Like
that audience in the East Asia is like hungry.
Speaker 1: For I mean, Stellar Blade is like a similar story too,
And that was kind of like they I got the sense,
you know, which is from a translated interview, Like it's
always tough to tell how emotionally a developer is feeling,
but like I got the sense from them that they're like, yeah,
we made a lot of mobile games and we're doing great,
but like that's not what we want to do, Like
we want to make bigger things, and so it seems
like they are, which is good.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Fantom Blade Zero's coming out of China this year.
Like we're seeing China and South Korea are absolutely new
markets to watch. I mean I went to China last year.
That was the first time in GI history, I think
that we've ever been to China to cover a game,
and like it's I'm really excited about what's coming out.
I mean, obviously Japan, we know that industry very well,
but it's cool to see China and South Korea kind
of jump into this market.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's talk a little bit about God of War,
which was if I remember correctly, that was that's how
they ended the show, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah,
I don't know how I feel about that, because what
they did is they brought in the I don't I
don't have his name off the top of my head,
but the actor who played Cards Credos Okay, yeah, TC. Right,
it's like any TC Carson. TC Carson who played Krados
in the original trilogy and you know the PSP games
and and Ascension and stuff, and he was on hand
to say, hey, we're uh Sody, Santa Monica is remaking
the God of War trilogy. Hello, I'm very care and
I'm going to tell you that they're they're and I'm
going to be involved with it. I was like, that's great,
but like, I don't know, man, Like I don't know
how I feel about those kinds of announcements of just
like we're working on something, you know. Like I think
it even.
Speaker 3: Had like the warning of like it's gonna be a
while before you hear anything more about this, and it's
games do that, and it's very frustrating.
Speaker 4: Well, and I think there's there's like two like uh things.
I think one of them is they don't want to
get leaked, like they want to have it come out
on their own terms.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And the other thing about it that's like good broadly speaking,
is that if you're a developer working on the God
of War trilogy, you can talk about it. You don't
have to be like secretive about it. So to an extent,
I understand it, but I also get like it's frustrating
of like, I don't know, it's weird to be anticipating
a game that's like however many years out, like five
years out or whatever, if it takes a stupid long
amount of time.
Speaker 3: But they do it for recruitment too. I know that's
something do they announce games early, and it's like, if
you want to come work on this, you should do that.
But as a fan, it's like you get excited for this,
like we were popping off in the chat and so
is social media. But then, I mean, we're probably not
going to see anything about this for at least a year,
maybe a year and a half.
Speaker 1: Like this is like, I mean, I know it's a
lot to ask because they're probably very early on, but
I just want to know the visual direction, Like what
is a screenshow about I don't even need you know,
I just want to know, like a visual identity of
this thing.
Speaker 2: You'd be like a concept art or something like a
little bit of something. I personally like this. I think
the games industry is often too secretive for its own good.
It's it's a little too precious about confirming that, hey,
that series that is super popular, that will make us
a lot of money when we make the next one
in its installment, you know stuff. Yeah we're working on that. Yeah,
we're we're thinking about the next plans for that. Instead
they're like, we're not discussing anything about this. It could
or could not happen. Who could? I think it's fine
to get out there and say, hey, yeah, we're working
on this. I mean, Kingdom Hearts four is in that
box right now, Mass Effect five is in that box
right now, and it's fine that that stuff is getting
worked on. There's extenuating circumstances with at least one of
those games that maybe casts a dark shadow over it,
and maybe that's Ultimately the thing is, the video games
industry is never stable enough to feel like you can
get out there really early ahead of something and still
feel like it's going to be on track three years
from now, because our timelines are so long, because things
take so long to turn around compared to, you know,
twenty years ago. But all that being said, I mean
trilogy remake. It's interesting. I don't I'm not the hugest
fan of God of War in general, but I know
a lot of people are. I think I have a
lot of questions, certainly about what it means that they're remaking,
Like how much do they remake? Is it going to
play like a twenty eighteen game. Is it still going
to play like the PS two game Sames? Is it
going to rewrite that character? Is it going to retcon
anything like we've seen with like the Kawami series of
Yakuza and all that is, like how do you retackle
this game? I think that would maybe be a question,
and maybe they don't feel like answering that at this moment,
or maybe there's stiff like that right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think that's all fair. Eric. I like
knowing that things are being worked on, and I think
that that is good. I think that the sort of
annoying consumer thing that I'm complaining about is like the
pace of the show. It's like I want, you know,
it's like I want like fun announcements and gold things,
and it's like, oh, it's great to see. I'm like,
you know, Wes, I think you joked at the beginning
like there wasn't anything here that couldn't have been an email.
This is taking that we're remaking the God of Rtrial cool.
You know.
Speaker 3: I think for like old fans, the voice actors like
the big thing there because there's people who, I mean,
I love Christopher Judge, but even you know, since it's casting,
there's people who are like why did we recast? TC?
Speaker 1: Is great?
Speaker 3: Like he's Credos. So I think it's really cool to
like bring them back in. Yeah, super charismatic dude. I
was not familiar with his game, but like I was like, oh,
this is hell. Yeah dude.
Speaker 1: That's why they decided to do it that way, because
they're like, yeah, this guy, Like you're gonna want to
hang out this guy, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 4: I would also argue that, like the well, I also
want to talk about Sons of Sparta, which is another
the the way I was hanging it in is that
we would also maybe feel differently if, like last Summer
Game Fest they announced Sons of Sparta was coming out,
then we have this and then there's less of a
because we have like a we've had a drought of
what Sony Santa Monica is working on. I think is
part of the reason they feel the need to like
compensate for this gap of information, and I think if
we just had this thing, it would be like okay,
that would tide us over a little bit. I also
think they were like, it's like you're having a birthday
party and then at the very end, you're gonna have cake,
and they're like, you, guys, I gotta say next year,
it's gonna be a huge cake. It's gonna be remember
your favorite cake ever it's gonna be like that but
even better. Anyways, here's a plate of cookies and you're like, oh,
I wasn't expecting the cookies, but you spend a long
time talking about this cake that I haven't seen and
have no concrete concept of, so much that like I
did forget that I got cookies just now, and it's
so Anyways, I think they should have maybe spend more
time was as a Sparta or had someone come out
and talk about that also, so it was more like
we're finishing on something real and tangible.
Speaker 1: But yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: Now am I I don't know, Well, Kyle, you've played
this game.
Speaker 1: I'm curious of what you think of it. Yeah. I
was gonna we'll finish up this section of the podcast
talking about Sons of Sparta because it was it was like,
I don't know, I had the emotions you guys went through.
I am a big God of War fan. I have
I have played every game, including even which I reference
in my story about some of the God of War
portrayal like the Nokia like pixelated God of War game.
I have seen Credos full story like and I enjoy
his story. I like that. I have seen every facet
of his life, and I know, you know, there's the
version of his life where he's a married man with
a daughter. There's a version of his life where he's
a widowed father with a son. You know, like I
like tracking this guy's life, you know, So Sons of
Sparta was like I was like, oh, this is like
a cool thing. Like I was like, I like going
really like the like the furthest back in Cretos timeline.
In terms of gameplay, you know, I've we've seen sort
of bald Credos and his brother in like sort of
like old cut scenes and like cut content from the
original God of War and stuff. But I was just
kind of like, okay, like this is cool. And then
the announcement of like it's about it's out now was
like genuinely surprising, and I was like, oh great. And
I started playing it this morning. I'm on the review
so I'll have a proper review of the game soon,
and I played about forty minutes, so like you know,
Grain of Salt and all that. With like everything I'm sharing,
opinions could change, but like I I've I've been generally impressed.
It's it's more metroidy than I realized because I thought
it was gonna be more just like a straight up
action game, kind of like a Shnoby from last year,
which is like not a Metroid game. And Ninja Guiden
as well also is not right. It's like it's it's
just a straight ahead action game right with levels. Yeah,
this is like you're you're running around Sparta. I'm recalling
the recent Prince of Persia game, which is funny because
the Spartans are currently like at war with the Persians,
which is like a funny thing. I do think like
it doesn't need to be compared to Prince of Persia,
but that is like the recent apex of Metroid design.
In my mind. Yeah, it does not feel as good
as that game. It is not as smooth. It's like
a little hitchy and like there there's like combat mechanics
that are like yeah, if you hold down are one,
you do a little less damage, but like you know,
you get these benefits, and I'm kind of like at
this stage, I'm kind of like, well, I don't understand
like why I should ever be holding down our one
at this point, Like that could change, right, I just
don't understand the mechanics yet. But like as someone who
really follows the God of War narrative and is invested
in it, Like I'm excited. It's fun to hear TC Carson, right,
that's his name. It's fun to hear him playing Credos
again and he's telling his daughter a story, so like
the sort of framing is like a version of Credos
we don't often often see, like the father of a daughter,
and then we get to see him as this sort
of abrasive child, which I don't we haven't really seen either,
and it is fun to play kid Krados and him
being like, yeah, I really want to be a powerful spartan,
like that's what I want from my life. And I'm like, dude,
your life is crazy, man, Like you don't even know,
like what's gonna happen. It's gonnas, It's gonna be bad,
but it's also gonna be really fast and engaging and
emotional and moving at times. So like that part of it,
like I'm I'm into, Like I'm thinking maybe the developer
who I looked up has mostly done like backyard sports
games as it kind of been their recent like sort
of gamography, which just makes them an odd pick for
this is like I imagine they're kind of like doing
the sort of design and the and the development the
gameplay and like you know, making sure the combat feels
pretty good, which it does, and then I think maybe
Sony Santa Monica is like, yeah, no, don't worry, we'll
take care of the sort of an emotional side of this.
And maybe to the writing, I don't know if that's
what it is. I'm just making assumptions here, but like
the writing seems solid, the action seems okay, i' and
I'm having a good time exploring, you know, building a map,
you know, like finding something here and realizing I have
to come back to it later, like those kind of
Metroid sort of mechanics. Those all seem really solidly implemented,
and like I'm eager to see it to the end.
So like positive first impression for sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it has a stacked voice, guess too. They put
out like a little blog post yesterday night, and there's
there's a pretty uh robust cast of characters. I know
Shelby Young, who I follow on TikTok. She does like
all kinds of voices. She was Leah in the recent
Star Wars Lego games. She's in it. The guy that
plays Decord in Detroit Become Human is somebody. There's a
lot like they put out like a little trailer and
it was like thirty names, like it is stacked.
Speaker 1: I don't want to put you on the spot. I
probably don't know the Do you know who's playing the
brother Damos because he sounds so familiar? Look him up.
Speaker 3: I don't remember, but I'll look him up.
Speaker 1: But yeah, this.
Speaker 3: Is a thirty dollars game.
Speaker 1: That's a good question. I don't know, And it's a
good it's PlayStation five. It's funny. As I'm playing it,
I'm like, you know where I would love to be
playing this on the switch?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, thirty dollars game. Just a PS five game.
I am surprised it's not a Switch game, considering that
they're playing playing a bit nicer with Nintendo. They did
the Horizon Lego game. Yeah, it seems like it would
be a good fit for War Switch. But it is
also God of War. Yeah, that's like that's.
Speaker 1: Arguably their most precious franchise. Maybe, I mean, because like
you could say Spider Man, but like that's Last of Us. Yeah,
you know, you guys are Last of Us. I I'm
sort of more invested in the God of War story personally,
although I do really enjoy Last of Us as well.
Speaker 2: I'm not trying to us we say Last of Us,
but they sure do find an excuse to trot out
one of those two games every time they do a stream.
Speaker 3: And cancel the multiplayer game. Yeah yeah, yeah, Traded t too.
So it's not even.
Speaker 1: Demos is voiced by Scott Menville. Oh he plays Robin
and Teen Titans doesn't.
Speaker 4: Yes, Yeah, we've also got Jack Quaid.
Speaker 3: That was another name that I was like, his I
is from Star Trek.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's the main thing that.
Speaker 1: I was referencing Jack Quaid on our podcast recently, and
I was like, you guys know that the actor. He's
got a famous dad, and of course we all know
him from his appearances on the comedy Bang Bang podcast.
Like that, I totally bypassed the boys to talk about
an obscure improv comedy podcast that he shows up on. Sometimes.
I like Jack Quaid. He's very funny. Yeah, who does he?
Do you have that list of Charles? I don't Demos?
Oh he wait?
Speaker 4: Oh sorry jack Quaid ace e, I S.
Speaker 1: I don't think i've met that character yet, Okay, cool, yeah, yeah, sweet.
Speaker 4: I am excited for the trilogy Remax. I've never played
those games, and I always I really really like the
two new games, and I've found it an interesting way
that I have. Some people are coming in with Kratos's
perspective of his life and the things he's done. I
came in with a TRACE's perspective of, like, I guess
my dad's done some bad things and he's kind of
feels bad about it.
Speaker 1: But I don't know all the details.
Speaker 4: I have seen, like a video essay that like kind
of breaks down anything that happens. I like, these games
seem wild, so I'm curious to see how they are
reimagined in whatever amount of context is this.
Speaker 1: Two D game.
Speaker 4: I'm curious to play it because I don't. It doesn't
really uh scratch the God of War itch for me
just looking at it, like I'm if I want to
play a God of War game, I wouldn't look at
this and be like, Ah, that's that's the thing I
should do. It's just like a different occupy's a different
part of my brain, And I'm curious of how much
like Kyle, do you feel like? Even translated to d
that you're like, oh, this is a God of War
game or is it more just like this is a
different game that has God of War characters.
Speaker 1: I think it's more the latter so far. It is
a different game that had that like like sort of
character wise so far, like it does feel like who
I imagine Credos as a child to be right, And
the framing of of having the original voice actor talking
to Calliope is helpful and important, like I yeah, Like
there's a couple of really interesting sequences with Calliope in
the first PSP game, like truly like heartbreaking stuff like that.
Like so I like seeing him be a dad to
a daughter, Like you know, that's that's important to me
as a dad of a daughter, I guess. But yeah,
the action right, Like you're right, Charles, it doesn't really
feel like God of War. Like I am collecting you know,
glowing little globules for health and experiences.
Speaker 4: Yeah, globules.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I always say there's two types of games. There's
there's the game where the globules come to you, and
there's the game where you have to collect the globules.
And that's like that that's all video games.
Speaker 3: So that's a feature that's a feature.
Speaker 1: To yes, exactly, but I mean it would be it
would be it would be kind of insane if you
got the Blades of Chaos, like you know what I
mean like that, like if he's swinging a blade, I
mean may maybe they could say, like, yeah, this is
how we learned to do it, like he had to
learn to do it at some point, but like right now,
I just have a staff, you know, I have a
like a.
Speaker 2: Sword with a chain on the end. He starts swinging
and he's like, I don't know, seems unwieldy and like
the camera and like throws it away. It is the
like the Gotham problem where I don't know if you
guys remember the TV show Gotham, which is about Bruce
Wayne as a like fourteen year old boy, where it's like,
we're gonna have all your favorite Batman stuff, except none
of it's as it is yet, and when we do
make it like more accurate, it feels way too early.
But when you don't get enough of it, you're like,
this isn't anything.
Speaker 1: Why do I care?
Speaker 4: That's Gordon's not even a commissioner. And then he becomes
a Commissioner're like well, now there's no prequel. This is
just what his job is.
Speaker 3: Such a weird show that I watched every episode of.
Speaker 4: You know, my my cousin was on that show.
Speaker 1: Really he's an actor, Commissioner Gordon.
Speaker 3: He Jerome or Joker or Jake Jerome or Jeremy Jeremy
that's right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there, Jerome is the Joker and then he dies
and then turns out to a brother Jerom.
Speaker 3: That show went the last season or two of that
show went like bonkers.
Speaker 4: My cousin play. He was in an episode The Mad
Hatter where the Mad Hatter was mind controlling everyone and
he was.
Speaker 1: At that point a common career.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he mind crows everyone to go up on a
roof and they're about to like all jump off the root.
I can't remember why, but he's gonna make everyone kill himself.
I think mister Gordon realizes, like in the My Controls instructions,
they're like, and you're not allowed to save yourself, and
he goes on like the radio station. She's like, you
can't save yourself, but you can save each other. And
my cousin is the guy that stops Harvey Bullock.
Speaker 1: From jumping off the ledge. He's credited as Youngster on Roof.
Speaker 4: Oh hey, I watched the whole episode knowing he was
gonna be in it. I hadn't seen like the entire
season preceding. It was like, man, this is a weird show.
And then he had no lines. He was just youngster.
Speaker 1: That's awesome. There you go. You know, Brian Jay is
in the crowd scene of Dark Knight Rises, so oh yeah,
maybe I mentioned that they could chat about their experiences
Gotham extras. Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 4: Anyways, that's what God of Words. It's like my cousin
being in the Gotham show.
Speaker 1: My hope is that it's more focused on like, you know,
Credos and his brother like stuff that we haven't seen
enough of yet. Ghost of Sparta has some cradles brother
stuff the second PSP game. But like, yeah, I don't
want to, you know, I don't want it to be
winking too much to the future because the fun part
is like just hey, this is a kid who like
doesn't even know what he's in for it for the
rest of his life, you know. But yeah, Stay of
play a great show. I think I think it was.
I think there was a lot of good stuff in there.
And a lot of fun surprises, and it didn't feel long, frankly,
even though it was yeah you know, yeah, I agree.
So cool. Well, we're going to take a break and
we're going to come back and we're going to talk Pokemon,
pop Cope, re Animal, Romeo is a dead Man, and
Cinny Cross and then uh yeah, we'll call it an episode.
So stick around. Hey, everybody, we are back from the
previous segment. You just heard us talking about the state
of play and I'm sure we had a lot of
amazing things to say. We're recording this out of order,
but wow, what a show that was and what a
conversation we had. I love it.
Speaker 2: I can't believe they went right to the PlayStation seven.
That's crazy, you know, I really thought the six would
be next.
Speaker 1: And let's get away from PlayStation stuff. Who cares about
PlayStation Charles tell me and I guess Wes and Eric
listening to if they want about Pokemon Pacopia, which you
went to New York to play recently? Right?
Speaker 4: I did? It was it was the one game I
couldn't talk about until later. Uh, and it was my
favorite game that I saw there.
Speaker 1: That virtual boy. You're saying, definitely actually hands down.
Speaker 4: I would actually say there's no part of virtual play
I enjoyed more than Pokemon.
Speaker 2: You couldn't play Pocopia in the virtual boy, right, Uh.
Speaker 4: No, I mean I'm sure I could try, but I
don't know if it would work. Yeah, it was. It
was like a venue. I talked last week about how
there's all these like waiters showing up and they had
like platters of food and I was like, Oh, this
fancy little steak bites or whatever. That was all the
first floor, the whole basement was exclusively dedicated to Pokemon Pucopia,
which was fun.
Speaker 1: So it was all just set up for that.
Speaker 4: I went in, I sat down, and I got to
do I played about an hour of the game, and
I played in two chunks. My first chunk was like
a fresh save, and then after that we got to
do some local multiplayer, and.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was.
Speaker 4: My honest opinion with most Pokemon stuff lately is like
I always loved Pokemon. I'll always have a soft spot
in my heart for it, but I don't know that
I'm excited about it anymore. It's not a thing that
I'm like, I'm not always actively looking forward to it.
I'll check it out when it comes out. But I'm
not like, I'm not like first in line like I
used to be for a reasons, and this was one
where I I honestly, the premise is so obvious. It's
one of those things that it's like, it's amazing it
took them this long to do like a Pokemon animal
crossing kind of a crossover where I was like, uh, there,
this is probably gonna be a nothing game. It's probably
gonna be boring, or it's not gonna be all that
interesting because it doesn't have to be. And then I
played it and I was like, oh, this rocks, and
it's now I'm now like actively excited for it. I
see myself playing this like in bed each night, as
like a nice reset at the end of the day.
Speaker 1: And you are an animal crossing guy, right, like you
like animal crossing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I played animal crossing. I'm not like a super
intense about it, but it's the thing I enjoy.
Speaker 1: Which I'm gonna this is probably a question you're getting
ready to answer here, but like you know, it's like
farming sim right Stardy Valley versus like animal crossing, Like
is it more on the animal crossing side of things.
Speaker 4: Yes, I would say it's definitely more on the animal crossing side.
There's like, uh, from what I played, farming is not
a super relevant part of the experience in that like
you're not trying to get specific berries to do things.
When I was playing, there were trees that produced berries
and that refreshed your like power points, your PP which
you use to like use your moves all the time,
gifts berries to people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we just had the parental advisory sticker on.
Speaker 4: You know, I intentionally said power points before shortening it
because I was like, We're not even gonna go there.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna avoid it. But like Kyle had a joke
that I'm sure has never been made before ever on
any other.
Speaker 3: In Pokemon history.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, uh but yeah, it uh is I think.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 4: The other part about it that I think is interesting
is I am I don't think they've said this, and
I'm not sure it's confirmed, but I suspect this is
at least some people that worked on the dragon Quest
Builders games.
Speaker 2: That's what I was gonna jump been with is that
I believe Omega Force is working on this, and that
is the crew that made dragon Quest Builders, which for
my money is one of the best dragon Quest spin
offs ever, made extremely good duology of games, and for
years I was like, where's where's dragon Quest Builders?
Speaker 1: Three? Where is it?
Speaker 2: Where is it? It turns out it might actually be Pokemon.
Pocopia is the follow up because even just the way
you move around in that space, the way you plunk
things down and can kind of rearrange the town. And
for those who hadn't played dragon Quest Builders, there were
a lot of mechanics that were about not just building
stuff all on Minecraft, but building little homes and places
where people would go do things and it would start
to automate stuff. So if you built a kitchen, people
might go in and start baking things and stuff like that.
So this looks to do a lot of that, but
with Pokemon, which makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And it almost makes me more excited for it
to realize that because there's a sense of like it
was just I was talking about, like the concept of
a Pokemon's been off before, where they're like, oh, well,
just ship this off to like, you know, a smaller
side developer. They'll throw it together. But the main thing
is that it's got the Pokemon licensing and a bunch
of kids will play it because X y Z and
this is all I feel like a lot now that
I know it's a team doing the type of game
that they know how to do, but with Pokemon instead
of Dragon Quest as a license, it kind of makes
more sense to me when I was opening it up
and being like, oh, there's a lot going on here,
which is exciting. So you play as a diddo who
is transformed into their long lost trainer. Not super clear
what happened to the trainer. They might be dead. You
just kind of wake up in a cave and you're like,
I don't know what my trainer is.
Speaker 2: And then.
Speaker 4: There's a tang growth known as Professor Tang Growth that's like,
I's this old poke Decks has been sitting here forever.
And then it wakes up when it sees you, and
it's like, oh, the Trainer's back, and I'm like, did there.
I'm sure they'll answer the question. I hope they answer
the question, but no, it seems like talking about it
like there's a plot to the game or something like
there there was some like slight for it. Just it
felt like, honestly, it felt like the start of.
Speaker 1: A Fallout game.
Speaker 4: It's like I woke up in a bunker, I don't
know where my dad is, and then I go outside
and the whole world has ended. There's no Pokemon, like
tank growth is not just like holy crap, a human
and then like, oh wait, you're a ditto, Holy crap,
another Pokemon. I haven't seen any of those around here
in a long time. And I'm pretty sure they refer
to the surrounding area as a wasteland too, So it's
like a surprising, just like a vibe I wasn't expecting.
Speaker 1: And then you go outside.
Speaker 4: There's an unconscious squirrel and you use you learn water
gun from him. You wake him up with some water,
and then you there's like a kind of tatorial section.
But the gist is that you're the main mechanic. Is
this habitat's mechanic where you are placing objects in the
environment or growing natural features in the environment or something.
Basically make little clusters of decorations that can spawn in
Pokemon kind of the way that like in a Pokemon game,
you'd run around the tall grass look for something, so
like four tall grasses is like a tall grass area
and that can spawn in a bulble sore or a
charmander or some other pokemon I didn't get to see.
If you put some grass around a tree, that's a habitat,
you put some grass around a big rock, that's a habitat.
I'm sure if you have like three little rocks and
you put them together, that's a habitat. And then also
extends to some like non natural features too. So the
one I saw there was like a punching bag next
to a weightlifting bench, and that can spawn in some
fighting type pokemon. And I'm excited for that as a
concept because I've always been very much like in an
animal crossing, for example, I'm just like, well, what's the Charles?
I Like, my favorite color is green, so I'm like,
what's a green bed? Or like, how can I make
fun geometric styled green curtains or whatever? And once I
have that, I'm like done. I don't need to make
stuff anymore. Maybe I'll get some as like gifts for
my villagers, but there's like a clear cap on creating stuff.
And this is like a very good incentive to be Like,
you're gonna want to get as many recipes or decorations
as possible because it'll be like, oh, You're gonna spend
a lot of time, you know, looking for this item,
because that's how you can get the toy volcano, which
is how you spawn the chartis art or something like that.
Speaker 1: So I thought that was exciting. The Minecraft Builders reference
is surprising and not surprising at the same time. I've
played a shocking man of that game, like both of them, weirdly,
even though it's not usually my genre. But dragon Quest Yeah,
I say, did I say the wrong thing? Minecraft? Oh yeah,
dragon Quest Builders? Thank you? Yeah, no, thank you for
correcting me. And the thing that I didn't get from
looking at the videos and trailers and stuff that I
did read about in your preview, which you can read
on gameformer dot com, Like you talked about like getting
off the island and going to like a different island.
Is is it pretty large? Because like Dragon Quest Builders,
world is shockingly big, like in both of those games,
and the early that first look at Pacopia made me
kind of feel like, ooh, this is gonna all take
place in this one little area, Like what what's your
sense of that part of the game.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm not really sure because the the section I
played was at the start, it was clearly like a
crater of sorts, so I was surrounded by like high
walls on all sides, and I didn't unlock any like
climbing or flying or even like block breaking abilities. And
then the second chunk I played was on an island
and I could see another island and I had like
rock smash and stuff, so I could we could get
around more, but it was like it was sizable. I
also like there was an ocean I was swimming across
slash flying over that I assume I could fill in.
Speaker 1: But I don't.
Speaker 4: I don't really know. It wasn't super clear to me
whether like that starting area was a part of the
same area, or like how it all connected, or if
the the map could get bigger or smaller depending on
like what we discovered.
Speaker 1: But I didn't. I I think there was. It felt
like it felt spacious. I didn't. It didn't feel phostrophobic,
at least in that section I was playing.
Speaker 3: YEA, is it is there like objectives or is it
just kind of like, hey, here's a blank space. Have
fun because I like animal crossing. But I always sputter
out quickly because I just don't have an aim, and
I prefer games that give me something more than my
own creativity.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's definitely like a I was saying story mode,
but there definitely is a sense of like linear progression.
And I'm very glad that we did like the start
of a save file and then we went on to
the multiplayer stuff, because the start, the start of the
save kind of did feel like the start of a
Pokemon game, where they're like holding your hand through like
every little specific mechanic.
Speaker 1: Interaction disrespect for the player's time is how.
Speaker 3: Yeah, pokemont.
Speaker 4: There's text, there's texts, and then you learn water gun,
and then there's more texts and the water squirrel, and
then there's more texts and they're like I wonder what
else you could water? And then you find a dry
thing you water, then there's more text and like I
wonder what else you can water? And it's like that
where it was like I spent more time reading textboxes
in that first section than I did actually playing the game.
But then like there's like challenges and stuff in the
PC that give you some I imagine what would happen
is the story would slow down a little bit. There
they'll be like you have to focus on, you know,
leveling up the environment, area or whatever it's called. There's
like a name for the level that you're operating at,
and then those are little more like macro goals of
like make X number of furniture or do xyz and
I when I was doing it, I was trying to
be very specific and stick to the goals that I
had because I wanted to do it. But it opened
up a lot more then and it's like, oh, if
I wanted to just go around and like move a
bunch of grass around or kind of just do my
own thing, it's very easy to get like sidetracked even
though I have like concrete objectives to do.
Speaker 1: So that was like the start.
Speaker 4: I like played there solo, and then I went into
a multiplayer local wireless game and this was really so
that first section, I was like, Okay, I'm interested. I'd
love to play more of this, but I don't have
like a real sense of the gameplay loop yet. Then
I go into this next section and I'm like, Okay,
I understand why the game is appealing now because it's
like the world is way more open. I had a
bunch more like moves I could use. I can just
smash blocks. I didn't really know going into this game
that it was like, no, you can go any point
on the ground. You can mine down like it's Minecraft,
and you'll collect blocks and you can place those blocks
in different spots, like you have full, full range of
command over that sort of thing. And they we saw
in this area people had used it to like make
houses and make sculptures, and they built a bunch of windmills,
and I'm pretty sure that was like a pre built accessory,
but it was like, wow, they really like windmills. There's
ten windmills on this island. And quickly went from a
thing of like, Okay, this is just a place items
or whatever to get Pokemon. And I was like, okay,
I could make a town here and I'll visit someone
else's town will look way different from my town. It's
not strictly guided. And then there's also like a thing
I didn't really get a taste of, is your relationship
with the Pokemon that end up like living there in
the houses that you make.
Speaker 1: They all have like dialogue, like spoken dialogue. Social Yeah yeah, okay, yeah,
you talk, you talk to everyone. I guess. I guess
their rule is like if you are playing as a Pokemon,
you can talk to other Pokemon. I guess it's kind
of like, yes, yeah, I watched uh.
Speaker 4: The they did like an extended trailer on the features
in Pocopia, like a few weeks ago or maybe like
in December, and they have they announcers like in the
very Nintendo voice, let's look at what these pokemon are doing. Hmmm.
I can't quite understand them as they're recorded here. I'll
do a little bit of translating and then does like
voices for professor Angle or whatever. So like even in
the meta world, they're like, you don't understand what this is,
but Ditto.
Speaker 1: Does, so that's I'll accept that. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4: But then it's stuff of like they all have like
likes and dislikes of furniture items that are near them,
and they get mad when you take them away, Like
someone took away Arcannines likes. Like it was like a
bus stop signpost outside and I didn't see anyone take
it away, but he ran outside and he's like, ah,
where's my sign post. I'm like, oh, geez, he needs
a side post. And then I brought it back and it.
Speaker 3: Was like take those from him?
Speaker 2: He does, yeah, yeah, that's his entry. He breathes fire
and loves bus stops, loves public transports. He's a huge
fan of public transportation.
Speaker 1: Anyways.
Speaker 4: Uh so there's all that, and then I guess there
can be multiple Pokemon living to a house. The ones
we saw there was just like one in most of them,
but they had living together, which was very cute. And
then in this multiplayer section, we were with rebuilding the
Pokemon Center, and it was like we needed a few sticks,
a few leaves, and then like two Pokemon to act
as like the builders to come in here and do it.
So we needed a dragon Night. We needed just a
build type Pokemon. Which is another thing that there's each
Pokemon has a like category of like work it can do.
So like I think a lot of fighting types are builders.
They'll have like a hard hat image on their pokedecks entry.
So there's an element where it's like you want to
catch as many as you want, but there's also an
element of like, well, if you have one of each
of the main worker types, you don't have to stress
about like filling out the poke decks necessarily. I just
happen to think this is a cool way of filling
out a poke decks it's just gotta catch exactly what
you need and no more yes uh. And then I'm
I'm very much a very much a goodie two shoes, like, oh,
this is where the developer wants me to go. Oh, Like,
if there's a paved road in a video game, I
will walk on the paved road. I'm I'm a immediately
go I played. I played Grand Theft Auto Uh before
I ever got my driver's license, and I know the
rules of the road, but I had a hard time
getting around because I just kept crashing into stuff. So
there was a point where I'm just like, you know,
sometimes you can just stop at the red light and
it will make your life a little easier.
Speaker 1: That's the kind of person I am.
Speaker 4: The people I was playing with did not have such
courtesy for their natural environment, and I enjoyed that.
Speaker 1: While I was like, all right, guys, let's get to Makuhita.
Speaker 4: You can help us prepare the Pokemon Center.
Speaker 3: I like this voice you have going.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna be the best Pokemon Copia resident ever. I
looked over to my right and logan plant of ign
was immediately dug straight down, gathered a bunch of blocks,
and then called my attention. I looked over and he
had found the build height limit in the game straight up.
And then he said, I do you want to know
if there's fall damage, And then he just jumped off
the edge of it and there's no fall damage, so
I'm going he checked. He turned into like a diddoe splat,
and I was like, I'm glad you did that, because
I never would have thought to do that.
Speaker 1: But that's the exact type of thing that.
Speaker 4: Like on a podcast and be like fault damage. And yeah,
so we at a certain point we just started going
around breaking stuff also because it gives you a sense
of like what you can put down. And I was like, okay,
these houses are built by people. It wasn't just like
a here's the whatever kit you can it exists, it's
the house now. It was like mitigly crafted. There are
like housing kits that create more of like an animal
crossing house where like you open the door and then
there's like a loading zone and it's in a different
area that's like a little more specifically decorated. But there
was like u there was like a fountain that had
water in it, and when we broke the side of
the fountain, water spilled out everywhere, and then we were
like all floating. It was like Minecraft water. It just
kind of like stayed in the area and everyone's like,
why is there water everywhere? And are like, I don't know,
someone broke the fountain. And also crucially, we were all
this wasn't even our island, so we could just destroy
whatever we wanted, and it wasn't like it wasn't like
we had to have special host permissions, or maybe we
did have host permissions.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I didn see how it was set up.
It was nice thing, right you have to have a
best friend, yeah, and then if they want, right, yeah,
they could terror form. Yeah.
Speaker 4: But knowing that you can get grant that to up
to three other people at the time, it's nice because
like this is something I will probably play alone, but
would love to play with another person and just like
build an island together. So yeah, it is exciting. It
seems like, uh, there's a lot more room for creative
expression than I realized. But then also that kind of
like Pokemon specific collectithon, there's like a new method of
doing that that I think blends really well with.
Speaker 1: This like genre of.
Speaker 4: Game, which is always the thing I want a spin
off to do is it's like it's not just uh,
I'm trying to think of a thing like if it
was like a Pokemon pit Cross, which I think exists.
It's like, I don't just want to do Pitcross of
like a Pokemon I wanted to then like get added
to my POKEDX or something like. Don't just take the
esthetic part of it. Make it clear you understand like
the spirit of the game, the.
Speaker 1: Core, you know, franchise. Yeah, yes, exactly, Yeah, I mean
reading your preview and talking to you now, I mean optimistically,
it does seem like it's a step above like Pokemon
spin off, Like you know what I mean, because there's
like tears of Like I don't have any great examples
off the top of my head, but like there's a
lot of Pokemon spin offs are rough and they're just
they feel cheap and quick. I get a sense that
this does not feel that way, which is reassuring. Like
I'm wondering now because my I have a daughter who
loves animal crossing like just well just nu Kerr Island
and restart every couple of months. I'm wondering if I
need to get another switch to so that she can
play and not you know, because March fifth and it
is switch to. It is not switch one.
Speaker 4: There is game Really yeah, I might. I think games
you might extend to the switch one, but I might.
Speaker 3: Be taking that up unless it's game by game. But generally,
anytime I've read about game share, it's always like you
can play on a.
Speaker 1: Switch because you're streaming, right, You're not actually like, yes, interesting,
that's kind of cool. Okay, so she'd be able to
play with you. I don't want to have the trailer. No,
I'm not. I'm good.
Speaker 4: Okay, Okay, man, I'm not.
Speaker 3: I don't want to she will just take over the
switch to that you need a second switch. That's what
I wanted to say, that you can play games I
got to do.
Speaker 1: You can't be just but I mean, like, I I know,
I sound like I'm being like harsh. This is not
my genre, Like it's not really I'm not like I
like Pokemon, but like, but I am excited for like
fans who saw that trailer and reacted like me. I
was like, this is like smart and this needs to exist,
and I worry that it's not going to be as
good as we want it to be because we we
want this thing to be as good as possible because
it seems like a great mashup and and you came
out on the positive end of it, which which is exciting. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think especially in the in the context of a
lot of uh. I think most of the Pokemon spinoffs
I can think of nowadays are like mobile games, yeah,
which all have.
Speaker 2: Like Pokemon Unite, Pokemon Masters stuff, vaguely.
Speaker 4: Icky monetization strategies to actively icky where it's like either
it's like Gotcha pulls or it's like Pokemon Friends was
like you can play one every day unless you spend
twenty dollars and then you just have the game. But
it's like a just like odd sort of things like
that where it's uh, not doing what I was saying,
where I'm like, I want the spirit of Pokemon and
this was like, oh no, this is this is a
capital G game sense.
Speaker 2: What if this one monitored your sleep rhythm instead?
Speaker 1: You know that's great teeth.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it might. I want to say, there's a uh.
Speaker 1: It might.
Speaker 4: It might be a real world day night cycle. I'm
not one hundred percent sure, like animal crossing is uh.
I do know that there is like there's like daily
furniture and stuff, and there might be challenges. I didn't
I didn't write down that my notes, but I think
I remember it is. But it is kind of incentivizing
you also to like, if you want to play an
animal crossing style and just like play a bit every
day and check back in and see what's new, you
could also do that.
Speaker 1: And it's kind of built for that sort of play style. Cool,
So I'm glad you got to check it out. Charles too.
Hey everyone, we've been talking a lot about animal crossing.
What about reanimal crossing our desk for review? Wes, please
save me? Yeah, so fantastic.
Speaker 3: I think the animal does not treat its animals the
same way, to put it.
Speaker 1: Lightly, don't make a world for them to live in.
Speaker 4: And I do want to say we talked about this
in slack a little bit of just like on the
scale of Kyle Specifical talking about games his daughter.
Speaker 1: I know, I know, I We're talking about it all
the time.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, No, No, I think it's useful just as
a metric of like age and just like subject matter
of what people are interested in. Were like Copio probably
then we were talking about mugenics and slack a little bit,
and I'm like, like, it's not It's not a great
game for animal lovers.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say if you're like sensitive to that.
Speaker 4: And then I think at the bottom of whatever the
spectrum is is probably Reanimal.
Speaker 1: From what Wes has said about it, you made.
Speaker 2: A comparison a like is to blank as blank is
to blank that I think you should repeat on the podcast.
That was useful for like the Little Nightmares.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so yeah, over the weekend I started playing it,
and uh, as just a quick way. This isn't in
my review, but it was a quick way to tell
the colleagues here at Gaming Form or what's going on
with this game, because I think I'm the only one
playing it. And I said, if Tarsiar's studio they made
Little Nightmares one and two, If Little Nightmares is their
Tim Burton take on adventure games, re Animal is their
ari Astor take on adventure games, which should paint a picture.
You can take it in any direction you want, any
of the ari Astra movies. I haven't seen Eddington, so
I don't know if there's any re Animal in that,
but like, this game is h I keep wanting to
jump to more adult language that I won't use here,
but it's just messed up. It's a very messed up game.
It's not particularly fun, but I don't I'm not someone
that thinks every game needs to be fun, like they have.
They have something they're trying to do here, and they're
using familiar gameplay mechanics and verbs to tell a very
like macabre and grueling story about war and children's place
and war. So like if you're watching, if you watch
the game, if you look at the game, it does
play a lot like Little Nightmares, and so mechanically speaking,
I'll start there. It's it's a lot of moving across
a screen, pretty visuals. There's some very scary creatures trying
to get you, ranging from elongated men who have broken
legs that walk and trample on screen to really messed
up animal creations and.
Speaker 1: You puzzles two and a half it's not two and
a half D. Yeah, this is a pretty game, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3: This was like a big I don't want to say
marketing point, but I spoke to the team of Games Common.
They were very proud of their work they've done with
the camera, which isn't a very flashy thing to write
about or anything. For them to speak about, but once
you play the game, it's very clear what they mean.
It's a very cinematic game compared to Little Nightmares, which
is moving left and right for the most part. They
take advantage of all space in all dimensions that you
can use in a game, which goes a long way
to make this feel refreshing. I've kind of after Little
Nightmares three. I think I'm set on that, like I'm
not craving a Little Nightmares four. I think the genre
was kind of a bit stagnant with that game, And
of course the people that kind of started the Little
Nightmares trilogy have come back to reinvent this genre, I think,
and they're in their new horrific take and yeah, they
use the camera in very interesting ways. You're coming at
the screen, you're running away from the screen, you're going
left and right. You drive a boat, you drive cars,
you drive a tank like you drive vehicles. You have combat.
They went they did a lot of work to add
a bunch of new mechanics, not even mechanics, just like verbs,
to the vocabulary of these types of games. It's not
just jumping and grabbing something and holding X to pull
something anymore. Now there's a bunch more that you're doing,
which is something I really appreciated. I reviewed Little Nightmares
three like months ago, not too long ago, and I
enjoyed it, but I was like, Okay, this is getting
a little stale, and it was really nice to play
re Animal and feel renewed coming.
Speaker 1: Out of it.
Speaker 3: All that, to say, renewed is not the word I
emotionally felt when I rolled credits on this game.
Speaker 1: It is a very.
Speaker 3: Thought provoking, but gross and disgusting and I don't I
don't know all those all those types of adjectives, like
it is just a gross game.
Speaker 4: I was gonna say, is it like forst some reason
I'm imagining? And this is partially with the comparison of Ariaster.
The most recent Areastra movie I watched was Bo's Afraid,
which is like so much of a movie, h is it?
Is it a game that you finished and you're like,
I need to take a shower?
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, I think so that's a really good way
to put it. I mean, uh, without getting too much
into detail because I don't want to spoil it, but
also like trigger warnings ahead. But for some of the
things I'm going to talk about, like you are beating
animals to death. There is lots of suicide, and suicide
is a mechanic in some of the like escaping and
platforming you do.
Speaker 1: There is.
Speaker 3: Like the animal noises you hear, and the pain that
some of these animals go through, the types of like
hybrids that are created between like humans and animals. I
think I don't even know if that's the proper way
to describe them. Like, it's just a very messed up game. So,
as Charles alluded to earlier, Yeah, Kyle, your daughter should
not play this game anytime soon. It's very like animal
lovers period. I don't and I'm an animal lover. I
don't know. I don't want to say, like, if you
love animals, don't play the game. I think it's okay
to engage with art that is antithetical to your beliefs sometimes,
but like yeah, exactly, but just know that, like you
do have to press the button that like takes a
crowbar to scold to seagulls and kills them, and you
do it a lot, and the game does not really
give you any grace to avoid that kind of stuff.
It's all very head on. There's not much that's optional
save for some collectibles. Like, yeah, it's a very chilling game,
but it's one that I thoroughly enjoyed because for me,
what I got out of it, and I'm very excited
to read other people's reviews and thoughts is like, this
is a game about war, but specifically what war does
to children, and I think it's a very timely and
punctual story and narrative. Like, yes, we know war tears
up cities, and we know what it does to the adults,
but this is a game about like the children who
have to live through war and maybe what happens when
someone in their friend group is affected by war, and
what lengths they'll go to save themselves and save that
friend and save their innocence. And Yeah, it was really really,
really like stimulating to engage with. It's the first game
in a minute where I was like often pausing just
to kind of think about what I was seeing on
screen and what I was doing. Uh, It's My review
is like almost kind of like a big warning in
the sense that like, it's not a fun game, and
it's a very gruesome one, but it is one that
like if you're someone who wants to like wrestle with
your thoughts after a game. It's it's really good for
that as a game itself, their big highlight is co op,
couch co op. Finally, I don't know how we didn't
get that in the Little Nightmares trilogy.
Speaker 1: It was yeah, very strange.
Speaker 3: Yeah have local, it had online co op and not local. Unfortunately,
the big miss of re Animal is that it's just
not a very good co op experience. And I'm actually
a little shocked they built it as a co op
game or not even co op, like, because I played
most of it solo when you have a because I
preferred it solo you have an AI companion. But like,
I almost feel like they could have completely acted that.
It felt like they did that because that's what they know,
and that's how they did Little Nightmares, so they continued
that here. But yeah, it seems very antithetical to what
this game is trying to do, because it's like it's
like if you're watching Hereditary to bring back ari Aster
and you and your actually note Hereditary is a bad example.
It's like watching Schindler's List and you and your friend
are like laughing and yelling and talking to each other
about it, and it's just like, it's not the vibe,
it's not the this is not the kind of game
I want to be playing with the friend and smiling
and thinking about things and trying to figure out how
to solve the puzzle. Fortunately, The AI Companion does a
really good job of mimicking a person, like a really
really good job. It's probably the best of these types
of games so far. Like, I didn't have any issues
with The AI Companion, but yeah, just beware, Like I don't.
I think it's a very good co op game. It's
cool there's local co op, but I would not recommend
local co op. It's I think it's best served as
a solo game. But yeah, it's short. It took me
two play sessions, I want to say, like four to
five hours. There's some you can go back through and
find collectible masks that you can wear, which are also
so disturbing. Some of them are. There's a I had
a pighead one that is so the physics on it
and like the texture of it is so gross that
I like had to take it off because it.
Speaker 1: Was grossing me out. Like it was just nasty.
Speaker 3: It was very nasty, which you know, if you're a
horror sicco like there's probably a lot in here to
chew on, but yeah, it's a I gave it eight
point two five to mention my score, Yeah, yeah, gave
it an eight point two five, which for us at
Game of Former is basically like it's a great game,
but like arguably so. And that's kind of where I landed, was, Uh,
some people will really love this. I came out really
liking it, and some people it will be a turn
off for them off the rip, like, and I can
totally understand why it would be. But if it's something,
if these types of themes and if you're okay with
this type of imagery, I do think it's worth checking out.
It's a thought provoking game, that's all. I keep saying
that word. But yeah, I really.
Speaker 1: Enjoyed it for that. I mean, I like Little Nightmares
one and two so much that this was kind of
like one of those Tartsier had has established themselves. It's like, yeah,
I'll always see what they're doing, you know, like I'm
always going to be sort of investing in checking it
out and trying it. So despite your warnings, I still
am excited to check out for sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I hope I haven't like over sold how dark
it is. It's not like dark web type dark like something.
It's just like it's very heavy, and I don't know,
I guess for me personally, like when there's animals involved,
like it does get a little more gruesome, and the
game does not. There's no like fluffing it up or anything.
There's no smoothing it out. It's like it's in your
face and you can't avoid it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think I think you're clear about how it's like
it's about the subject matter, and it's it's subject like
we're used to seeing like the average if you played,
you know, see them Mortal Kombat fatality, that's like more
gore than you see in a lot of movies. Like, yeah,
there's a there's a types of violence or horror stuff
that you're kind of used to seeing in games. And
you're saying it's like, it's not like that. It's other
disturbing stuff that's like not that it should be like
band or whatever, but it's like, yeah, the heads up,
it'll catch you off guard.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, I think so.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's kind of like oh go ahead, or go ahead,
go ahead, No, you go ahead.
Speaker 3: I was just saying I remember watching to Bring It
Back to ari Astra, like Hereditary. I love horror movies,
and that was the first one in a minute where
I was like, Ooh, that was like some crazy stuff
to see on screen, like the the big first moment
that happens in the movie with the car and all that,
and you're like, I've seen more gruesome than that, but
the way that played out was a bit like unnerving.
It's kind of like that, or when the moms on
the ceiling with the m Yeah that part. Sorry, go ahead, Charles,
what was your question?
Speaker 4: Well, I was gonna say I found the co op
note really interesting because I you were like, it doesn't
it's a game that feels a little more like meditative
and something you like would play alone in the dark
at night or something just to kind of like.
Speaker 1: Grapple with it.
Speaker 4: Do you do you think that in contrast, if like
Little Nightmares one or two had couch co op, do
you think, as someone who hasn't played any of these games,
do you think that would have taken away from them
at all? Do you think that's a game that's a
little more prone to being like if we're having fun
on the couch together doesn't take away from the experience.
Speaker 3: No, because for me, Little Nightmares has and like the
big difference between it and Reanimal kind of is that
Tim Burton versus Ari Aster, like both interested in horror,
but tim Burton almost has like a whimsy, a fairy
tale s feel to it, whereas Re Animal has none
of that. Is it's just horror.
Speaker 2: It's not like a brother's Grin type situation. It's more
like a modern, like darker horror type thing.
Speaker 3: Yes, for sure. And I think Little Nightmares one, two,
and three are more interested in puzzles, which is where
the co op gameplay I think would really shine, especially
on a couch, because three had a online co op
and it was fun. Re Animal has some puzzles. It
has one particular puzzle. It's not even really puzzle, just
like a platforming segment that was very reminiscent of Brothers
where you're tethered and you have to walk like you
have to move forward together, and I was like, Oh,
that's so cool. I'd love more of that. Otherwise, like
you're kind of just oh, there's a door that you
need to open together, and so both the boy and
the girl have to go to the door. And press
the button. There's nothing really, I didn't feel like it
was engaging. What two people are needed to solve something
like it's very Yeah, puzzles are not like the big
highlight of this, whereas I think puzzles are a bigger
deal than little nightmares.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Cool. Well, let's move on to a game that
is weirdly I don't know, almost the opposite in terms
of just like it is also violent and has some
gruesomeness to it, but it's like it's like delicious candy,
Like it's just so like stylish and weird. Like I'm
talking about Romeo is a dead Man, which I played
and beat and reputed West. I think you played a
little bit of it, as I asked you, just as
you're taking a sip of water, and it's it's it's
kind of it's like chaotic and crazy, right is Romeo
is a dead Man. It's like you are a FB
a space in time FBI agent who died because of
an early incident in the game. So now you're like
half dead, so you're kind of like a cyborg and
what you have to do is like chase your multi
dimensional girlfriend through time with the laser swords. And gun,
and it's just like it's it's kind of ridiculous in
that way.
Speaker 2: These two sound like they would both be midnight double
features at like a college town theater, but for like
different nights.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's it's a suit of fifty one joint,
which I still think he flashes on the screen. I
actually don't know if he. I don't think it happens
here because he's a producer on this one, which he
wasn't like creative director, so it doesn't get to be
a suit of fifty one joint. But he's deafuly involved.
He's out doing interviews about the game. But it has
that tone for sure. And I'm not really the biggest
Sudah fan. I like Shadows of the Damned a lot.
I haven't played it since it released, but like I
Killer seven, I remember playing the day came out. I
was excited for it, and I remember just kind of
being like, I don't know, don't get this man, I
don't know what this is. And a number of his
other recent games have it's it's pretty rare that they
click with me, but this this one I like quite
a bit, and sort of the Suda canon I would
put like this in Shadows of the Damned is like
my favorite, although I haven't I kind of like asked her,
I haven't revisited Shows the dam in a long time.
I don't know. Maybe that game probably doesn't hold up
very well.
Speaker 3: No, it definitely holds up. Just don't worry about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, cool, Just embrace your memories. But yeah, it's
it's a wild game that like shifts art styles all
the time, and like you go to different eras of
Earth that has like mostly evaporated into nothingness, like like
like now there's just like one town that exists. It's
all very weird and it's like and uh. And then
like you between these like larger missions, you're in your spaceship,
which is like sixteen bit pixelated visuals from like an
overhead perspective, and you're walking around and meeting people. Your
mom's over here and she can cook curry, and your
sister's over here, and she has like a garden where
you can plant these things called bastards, which are basically
zombies that you take into battle with you Like you
can you can have a bastard who like shoots lasers,
you know, so if like you get into a rough spot.
You can just like you know, throw one of these
out and nell shoot lasers and stuff. It's it's a
pretty it's pretty wild, and I do I do like it.
I gave it an eight point twenty five. You can
read my review on gameformer dot com. I wanted more
from the from the sort of the narrative, Like the
narrative is a lot of like isn't this wild? Like
like we're like we're hopping between dimensions and like this
is crazy, right, We're like FBI agents and you have
a motorcycle and you gotta like drive through space and stuff,
and like I like the characters a lot, but like
I didn't really feel like emotionally invested in the story,
which is meant to be like you know, the like
Doomed Lovers because you're playing his Romeo who is a
dead man, and uh, your girlfriend that you're sort of
chasing through time is Juliette. But it's like it doesn't ever.
I didn't like the game doesn't conclude in a way
where I felt like emotionally fulfilled or satisfied as much
as I was like, oh that was cool, like you know,
that was kind of my reaction. Most of the time,
I was like, oh cool, that was a cool thing
that just happened. I didn't expect you to do that,
but uh yeah, it's cool. Romeo is a dead man.
I liked it. I liked it more than I thought
I would.
Speaker 2: Frankly, does it feel like the spectacle is kind of
the draw then, rather than than other stuff, like just
having the sort of style and verve that this game
would have.
Speaker 1: I think so, yeah, because like the combat's pretty basic
but like fun. You know, It's like it's you're not
like memorizing a lot of combos and like you have
to switch between shooting guns and swords in the sense
that like some larger enemies have like weak points, but
it's like it never really pushes you that hard and
that's okay, Like it's I didn't really want to be
challenged because I just want to see what else the
game had to offer in terms of like just you know,
it's weird sort of aesthetic, right, So, like I it's
the combat was like good, but like not the sort
of thing that you play this game for. Wes, what
did you How far are you doing? What are you
enjoying it?
Speaker 3: Like I felt, I'm like five hours in. I'm really
enjoying it. I pretty much agree with all your points. Yeah,
like I haven't really even seen enough of the narrative
or story to like even have feelings really on Romeo
and Juliete's escapades. But yeah, just to kind of stress
a point you mentioned, like that the changes in visuals
and like it is a very uh it's eye candy,
like I think you said candy earlier, Like it's delicious
in the sense that, like your eyes are constantly being
refreshed with some crazy thing you did not expect to
see on screen, And in that sense, I am very
much like I like the combat. It's fine, it's it's
standard action combat, but it's like I'm fighting these zombies
to get to the next I don't even know what's happening,
which is cool because at games Com I spoke to
Suda and I was like, even in the fifteen minute
demo I played that the amount of visuals and art
styles I saw on screen was a lot, and I
was like, what's going on? And he was like, ah,
we kind of just told everyone to like what would
you want to make? Like, what are you what's your
favorite art style? What are you good at? And he's like,
if this person wanted to do a comic book style thing,
and this person wanted to do a claimation type thing,
like we.
Speaker 1: Just threw it in there is even inspired, Like yeah,
he was.
Speaker 3: Like, they're the artists. I just let them make art.
And then me and the and the director found a
way to put it into a game cohesively, and he
talked a lot more about the challenges of that. But yeah,
it's fascinating, Like the game has so much going on
and it's a really cool I put this on Blue
Scarre but it almost feels like a game where the
studio heads were just telling everyone to run free, like
do what you want, Like we're going to do an
action game with swords and guns. Everything else up to you, guys.
Whatever we'll find, we'll make something, we'll make a story
to put it through, line through all this, and it's
it's really really cool, Like I'm just enjoying the ride
it is.
Speaker 1: I think it works right, Like it's there's disparate stuff
going on and like you'll just like play these like
one off little minigames and things like that, but it
like it works, you know, like I like it. It
feels like a bizarre sort of you know, like Suit
of fifty one is a guy who puts his name
on games and and like he he meets that definition
of a tour that we ascribe to various graders and stuff,
and like this does feel like a pseudo game, but
it also does feel like more so than like maybe
a Kojima game, that it's like it is coming from
a larger group of people with interesting ideas, and it's
not perfect, you know, it doesn't always mesh up and
there and then like I had frustrations with some like
the level design and like you kind of go between
dimensions to like get around corners and stuff like that
in a weird way, like yeah, like I don't know, yeah,
do you guys know his Dark Materials that book series,
like The Subtle Knife, the Whole Knife. The idea of
that is like you can cut through a dimension and
like go in there and then like walk over here
and cut back in so you can like get around
locked doors and stuff. Like it kind of feels like that,
but it also kind of gets confusing and frustrating sometimes.
Speaker 2: But yeah, yeah, yeah, go I set above. It definitely
reminds me of something I love from last year. The
hundred line where you kind of take like the odd
tours in the in the building and use that as
like the ten pole, the like big banner that you
say like, hey, it's the next game from this studio
and this person. But then you just let the creatives
run absolutely wild and go crazy with it. And that
honestly makes me about like twenty percent more interested than
I was previously. So maybe I'm going to mark this one. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Music's really good too. Yeah, I really enjoy love a
good soundtrack, musical taste of it.
Speaker 1: And I think this is like a weird thing to pitch,
but it's it's about fifteen hours. It's not like crazy long,
you know.
Speaker 2: It's like that's a great thing to pitch.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like a good Uh, it's a good length.
It doesn't overstay, it's welcome. So yeah, Romeo is a
dead man? Is there?
Speaker 2: Uh?
Speaker 4: And I don't think there has to be of curious
Is there like an in world reason why the art
style is changing a lot?
Speaker 1: It's just kind of like this is just how this is.
It's just crazy. You're like, you know, you're jumping around
through time and stuff like that. It doesn't feel it's
not like confusing. You're like, wait, hold on a second,
why am I looking at a comic book?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 1: You know, it's like it's not explained, but it doesn't
need to be.
Speaker 3: You know, it's kind of like yeah I felt about yea,
it works, but what score did you give it?
Speaker 1: You give it a eight to five? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
and you know same as we animal, so they're like
basically the same game.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the double feature.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I also wanted to shout out sort of sort of
our last sort of game discussion here because it's just
kind of like you guys know Warrior sixty four of course,
just randomly sort of shared a look like, hey, this
is this you can play the demo this has coming
out to and like that social media count does sometimes
where it's just like I don't know if they's just
like random stuff comes out of that account. You want
to discount on like chocolate bars from Amazon, and you
also want to get like a switch to when it
comes out. I don't get it, but yeah, Sinney Cross
was something that he shared which I had not been following.
I believe there's a demo out. I think by the
time you're listening to this podcast. It is out on PC.
I'm playing it on my Steam deck. And what it
is it's a rogue game, but like the primary mechanic
is piccross puzzles, nonograms. So if like, if you can
imagine like Blatro as a sort of point of reference,
and if you swapped in like the poker mechanics with
pick Cross mechanics, that's kind of where you are here.
I like this game a lot. I would not elevate
it to the height of Blatro, you know, like Blatro's
you know, masterpiece arguably, but I like this. I like
this game a lot because I love Pick Cross. I
play so much Pickross, and usually that means just solving
a bunch of pick Ross puzzles back to back to
back to back. I just like I just solve them.
They're fun, they're satisfying. Where this is like, hey, what
if like you were solving puzzles and then you sort
of unlocked like abilities to change a little bit how
those puzzles work, and like you also are like solving
pick Cross puzzles with like weird mechanics that you have
to overcome that function as bosses, and like you you
make progress and the puzzles get bigger with each run.
It it works really well, Like I really like, I
love Pickross and this is just a new framing of
it that is just totally I've locked into it a
big way, Like it is what I want to be
playing on my Steam deck a lot, Like I just
want to do another run, you know. So Yeah, shout
out to Cindy Cross a game. I don't know if
I'll do like a proper review. I'm just kind of
playing it on my own because I just liked the
idea of it and I like reached out to the
dev and then when I send it, nice to send
me a code. But it's really cool. It's like I
don't do any of you guys play pit cross or nonograms?
Do you guys know these this style?
Speaker 2: When I travel, Yeah, I love the Jupiter Pitcross games
when I'm flying because like I get a little motion
sick when I'm on a plane somehow, even though that
shouldn't make sense, but I do if I try to
like read or play something on a plane. But pick
Ross like somehow does not trigger that has historically never
triggered that for me. So pit Cross is usually when
I go to for stuff like that, and Yeah, it's
super chill.
Speaker 4: I love pick Cross, and I had a similar thing
where I played. I probably played like one hundred hours
of these like two pitcross apps that were like I
would put my phone in airplane mode just to get
around the ads that would play every thirty minutes or whatever.
And I was gonna say, it's always It's always a
game I've liked, but I've never you've You've completely sold
me on this game, I guess, is the bottom line
on it. My fiance loves Squeak Cross. It's like a
pitcross game where you make furniture, you can like decorate
a house, and it has like all these good times.
Speaker 1: Played a little bit of that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I played some Murder by Numbers, yeah, which is
a like Ace Attorney Pitcross kind of crossover where you're
like solving mysteries. That one I didn't love because the
farther you get in the game, the hearder the pitcross
puzzles get. So when you get to like what would
be the climax of the story where you really want
to have a lot of momentum, it's like, all right,
time to sit down for a forty five minute super
large pick cross. Every you know, ten into dialogue whatever.
So this sounds exciting to me where it's like, uh uh,
it understands what pitcross is and yeah, is it on
switch or is it.
Speaker 1: Just it's just steam right now? Yeah, it's yeah, it's
it's good man. Like if you if you like pickcross
at all, like you're like, it's like it's very rewarding
because you get to solve a lot of little pickross
puzzles like quickly. Yeah, Like that's like the challenge. It's like, hey,
you only have so much time. You take damage, you know,
you have health when you, you know, get something wrong.
So it's like, hey, you want why don't you solve
this five by five real quick? Solve this five by ten.
We'll give you some bonuses to make the next Like
it's cool man, It's it's really working for me. I
don't know if I could really recommend it for like
a non pick cross player. I don't know if this
is the entry point for pickross necessarily, but like if
you are like me and Charles apparently and Eric and
you and you have an affection for solving those kinds
of puzzles, Cinney Cross is really working for me. I
really like it, so we did it. That's that's the
game in Format show this week, you guys.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I was expecting. I was expecting one, one
last elaborate segue.
Speaker 1: I had one in me with the reanimal cross.
Speaker 4: That's how we know the show is over, is that
you don't have another elaborate segue. Maybe this is in
effect at elaborate segue, just my acknowledging of it.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I'm just excited for Final Fantasy seven Incarnation,
which Shadow dropped Shadow yesterday.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, we'll see. Yeah, it'll be fun to listen
back to that first segment having recorded out of over.
But hey, if you're listening to this on your favorite
podcast app, why not check out YouTube dot com slash
game Informer. You can get the video version, can watch
the video version. You can see us reacting to each other.
And of course this whole thing operates basically uh with
our subscription, get the magazine Gaminformer dot com slash subscribe.
Everyone's showing off there copies. I think I have first
light with me.
Speaker 2: And don't don't look at my Ninja guide in copy
because my cat got to it and it looks crazy. Now, yeah,
there's there's some battle scars on him.
Speaker 1: Now, yeah, subscribe. I believe at the time of this
recording you can still get the first Light issue if
you subscribe, which Brian Share wrote a huge cover story
on the new Bond game and you went.
Speaker 2: You went with Brian for that actually, but by the
time this is live, I do think subscriptions will have closed.
Speaker 1: So they're always open.
Speaker 2: You can always subscribe, but yeah, yeah, for for first
for first, like, yeah, we got head to your local retailer,
head to your local retailer and pick it up. Yeah, yeah, No,
I went on that trip. We got to talk to
all the lovely folks at Io Interactive, I got to
see the lovely town of Copenhagen.
Speaker 1: Uh it was.
Speaker 2: It was a really good trip. Learned a lot about Bond.
Keep an eye on the YouTube channel for more videos
and interviews about what we learned out there. And uh yeah,
got all kinds of good stuff still cooking up.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And of course, did you I've never asked you this.
Speaker 4: Did you ask them about the epic rap battle of
History between James Bond and Austin Powers.
Speaker 2: That no.
Speaker 4: Agenda or yeah, that just somewhere like just where you're
going through the Bond can and all the most important
people bond the pillars of Bond more movies?
Speaker 1: Is that history? Yeah?
Speaker 2: That one didn't come up.
Speaker 1: One I was bonded.
Speaker 2: I didn't ask about was the rubber ducks because I
didn't realize that rubber ducks were such a thing. But
then we were in Copenhagen, and obviously if you've played
hit Man, you know there's rubber ducks everywhere in hit Man,
and I thought that was just like a thing for
the studio. But then I saw rubber ducks everywhere in Copenhagen.
So now I'm like, really curious about what's going on
is there? Did they invent the rubber duck in there?
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I feel like I need to do a follow up
and figure this out. So maybe cover number two James
Bond Rubber Duck Edition.
Speaker 3: I have a James Bond rubber Duck from them from
games come at the previous loves Chew one.
Speaker 1: Something's going on over there, Twitch dot Tv, Slash Game Informer.
We stream about twice a week. Charles, Uh, do you
have a Friday replay stream plans? You guys finished Sonica
in the Black Knight Right.
Speaker 4: We finished Song in the Black Night, we played the
opening of Sonic Unleashed, which is unleashed uh, and I put,
I think our plan for this week is to play
Warrior World.
Speaker 1: Is that what the game? Yeah? That was a game.
Speaker 4: It got announced for the Nintendo Preview or the Nintendo
Classics Collection, and I felt crazy because I had never
heard of this game before. I was like, I feel
like people hold the GameCube library especially as like a
holy artifact.
Speaker 1: If look at all these beautiful.
Speaker 4: Games, I'm like, how was nobody ever mentioned me that
there was a Warrior game? And so I think I
don't think we're.
Speaker 1: Gonna do it. You guys are about to find out.
I think.
Speaker 4: I don't think we're doing a full replay, like it's
not like a super replace, just like a classic replay episode.
I think we're just gonna poke around at some weird
old games until we find one that we're ready to
really sink our teeth into.
Speaker 1: But that sounds great. That's the plan for this week.
Speaker 3: Shadow of the dam.
Speaker 1: Could Shadow of the Damn you could could? Uh? Never mind,
that was something we're talking about before record But yeah,
Twitch dot tv, Slash game in Former, and I believe
now we're streaming on the YouTube channel as well, right,
Like it's like, yes, yes, so you can wherever you
prefer to watch. Uh hey, follow Game Informer on you know,
all your favorite social media channels. Blue Sky is the
one that I pay attention to the most, so that's,
you know, that's the one I would suggest. I'm Kyle
Hilliard dot com on Blue Sky. Charles, where are you?
Where should people follow you? I'm chucked duck three six
five everywhere everywhere. Wes how about you? Where where should
people follow you?
Speaker 3: Wesley Leblon on Blue Sky? That's really my main platform
these days.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and Eric, how about you at C moosey s
E A M O O s I on mostly on
Blue Sky these days. I've I've really tampered back on
my social media on purpose.
Speaker 1: So h help person. Yeah, yeah, we're trying to be
healthy first ten thing. Yeah, but hey, thanks for tuning
in this week, everybody. Thanks for listening or watching the
Game Informer Show. We will be back next week with
a whole bunch of new stuff. Bye, everybody.