Speaker 1: Welcome everybody to the Game Informer Show, a weekly podcast
covering the video game industry. Join us every week for
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 today, Alex Van Aiken, and
I am joined by Marcus Stewart. Hey, Neil, Marcus, Hi.
Speaker 2: What's up. It's a reference to our Resident Evil Outbreak
super replay. Shout out to George, one of our hapless companions.
He does that a lot. He just goes hi, and
then he gets like, staff.
Speaker 1: I saw that. Y'all are what seven episodes into that?
How's that going?
Speaker 2: It's going great. We're stuck in scenario three. We're like
in the middle. We have a key that we don't
know the bad luck goes to. Yet that's our occurrent
sort of hurdle camming. Over All of our companions are idiots.
Cindy died because she carried three red herbs that are useless.
But yeah, it's going it's going good.
Speaker 1: It's it's been like, yeah, listeners of your Curious Resident
Evil Outbreak is the what spiritual prequel to Resident Evil
Requiem there's some characters introduced in that.
Speaker 2: There's one one, Alyssa Ashcroft, who was who we're playing ass.
Speaker 1: He is the only she's the mom of the protagonist.
Speaker 3: Yes, and.
Speaker 2: Then also dies in requiem like they just showed that.
Speaker 1: Okay, great, yeah, sure that's sign Thanks Capcom. We're also
joined by Eric Van Allen.
Speaker 4: How you doing, Eric? I'm doing good. I don't have
anything to reference.
Speaker 1: I could.
Speaker 4: I could be like a Pokemon and just say Eric, Eric,
that's my name.
Speaker 1: Eric. We're gonna be talking about that later on in
the show. And we're joined by a special guest, Bill Fairchild.
You might know him from the nerd nest On YouTube
or Patreon. Bill. How you do?
Speaker 5: Hey, how's it going everybody? I'm happy to be here.
I didn't know i'd have to have a reference ready,
so you normally don't.
Speaker 1: It's you know, they're feeling really, they're feeling extra wild today.
Speaker 2: You could reference something that just happened on this show.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just hi, yuh, there you go. Oh wow, it's
a residentieval outbreak.
Speaker 2: What a callback?
Speaker 1: Wow? Bill, thank you for joining us. You and I
met back at Paseas through a mutual friend Bob Wolf
and Hit it off, and yeah, I wanted to have
you come on the show. Your expertise is on PC handhelds, right.
Speaker 5: Well, I wouldn't say that I have any expertise in
any area in particular, but I do use a lot
of PC handhelds.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And of course the Xbox rock Ally and la
X are out. Now you've spent about a week with them,
if I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 5: And yeah, I'm going to pick your brain. Yeah, they're
sitting here at my desk. I've been using them a bunch,
putting them through their I think Microsoft has done some
pretty cool stuff, but maybe it's not quite far enough.
Speaker 3: We'll have to talk about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll talk about it in just a second. But
I did want to give you a chance to let
our listeners and our viewers know what nerd nest is
all about and kind of what you get up to
over there.
Speaker 5: So nerdnest is my YouTube channel, which is also where
I have my podcast, and basically I do gaming news stuff,
mostly focusing on PC gaming that kind of thing, but
I also will talk about what's happening in the rest
of the industry, hardware reviews, things like that, and then
every week I also have a podcast where it's myself,
the Fox Retro gamecre and Fan the Deck and we
sit down and we look at what's going on in
the industry and just kind of talk about it, and
then in the second half of the show, we usually
talk about the games we've been playing.
Speaker 1: Awesome. Well, that seems like a natural recommendation for folks
who listen to this podcast, so make sure to go
and check that out. Nerd Nest is and that's the
name of the podcast as well.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, everything's nerd Nest which is actually the name
of this room because when we built this room, my
wife was telling one of her friends about it. Yeah,
like that we that I had like this studio and
she said, well we her her friend called it the
man Cave, and my wife goes, well, he doesn't do
anything manly in there, so they called it the nerd Nest.
Speaker 3: And I don't. I mean, she's right, I don't do anything.
Speaker 1: Likewise.
Speaker 2: You like curling a controller, that's probably manly. Yeah, it's
pretty light though. You got to get a lot of
reps in order to get in a good workout.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, more about tone than than muscle. Yeah. Uh well, Bill,
thanks for joining us. Let's not waste any more time.
Let's jump into the Xbox rock Ally. Of course, listeners,
if you need a primer, this is the new Xbox
partner with asis Zeus. Who are They've previously made the
rog Ally, which was a very well regarded PC handheld.
You could still buy it today. It's probably what I
would consider to be the main competitor of the steam Deck.
It is more expensive than the seam Deck but has
been known to get better performance and that kind of thing.
And Xbox this new Xbox rog Ally and Ally X,
which are the two different skews. The x is the
more powerful version. These are kind of the the successor
to that first rog Ally, And a lot being talked
about this week about these handhelds and in their performance
and the new sort of Xbox you know, dashboard of
sorts that that it's got on there. But Bill, I'll
kind of toss it over to you to kind of
continue and expand on that primer and kind of kick
us off with the kind of your thoughts on these
devices so far.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So just to give everybody background on it. There's
there's two versions. There's the white one and the black one.
The white one has the a M D rise in
Z two A chip set, which is very similar to
the Vangu chipset which is in the Steam Deck, which
they're they're like these these very low power chips that
can't really do too much to push games, but if
you keep the resolution low enough and you turn off
some settings, you can play a lot of different games
on them. The other one is the Xbox ally X
and this one has the Z two Extreme chip set,
which has a lot more power than the Z two
A chip set. Uh, this one will give you a
more power. It also has a bigger battery. It has
the Xbox I forget what they're called, but the Xbox
triggers that have Liketic feedback. Yeah, it has those in it,
but they and then they have seven inch screens, one
hundred and twenty hurts with VRR which will smooth out
that gameplay if you are running into hitches because these
are low power devices. The white one six hundred dollars
and the black one is one thousand dollars, which is
pretty expensive. Yeah, large pill to swallow, it is, and
I think that I think that this would have been
the for the audio listeners. Sorry, I'm holding up The
white one would have been better off at five hundred
dollars and the black one probably would have been better
off at eight hundred dollars, but according to Microsoft, market
conditions forced them to raise those prices. So, yeah, things
are pretty expensive right now. I mean everything's expensive right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, of course, yeah, it's no strain. I mean everything's
getting all prices are getting raised lately. It's a shame.
But you know, what do you think about the devices? Like,
how are you enjoying them? What's kind of your use
case looking like the past week with these things?
Speaker 3: So I think that.
Speaker 5: When you're trying to like when people ask that question,
usually they're trying to decide do I want this or
do I want that? Like which device do I want?
And I think that for the most part, when when
people kind of get stuck in a console war mentality
that this is better than that, it isn't really like
that because all of these play essentially the same games.
You want to buy a Steam Deck, then the Steam
Deck is going to play the same games that these
are going to play, and so they're just PCs.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 5: The fact that they have an Xbox logo on these
new ones that introduces like this expectation that I think
that people have that oh, okay, well it's going to
be like an Xbox, and they're not like xboxes. They're
more like Xboxes than any previous Windows PC handheld that
I've seen. But still I think that Microsoft has further
to go in order to get the UI really where
it needs to be, to where you never really realize
that you're just running Windows. Of course, the advantages that
these play Steam games, they play Epic games, they play
Goog games. You can play whatever the hell you want
on this Really you can play everything, and that's one
of the really great things about devices like this. If
you're trying to decide between, say a Steam Deck and
one of these things, it really depends on what kind
of games that you're going to be playing and how
important Windows is to you. Because with Windows it plays everything.
On the Steam Deck, you lose the ability to play
games that are like that use anti cheat or DRM, or.
Speaker 1: A lot of multiplayer games are.
Speaker 5: Exactly Or if you really are into game pass, even
though it's now thirty dollars a month, then these are
the devices that you would want to get over a
Steam deck, because you can't do game pass games on
steam Deck for the most part.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there are some you know, some workarounds, but I
think that the average user is not going to go
through the trouble of doing what you need to do
to get other launches to run on the steam Deck.
I remember when I first unboxed my It was the
first it was the LCD Steam Deck had just come out,
and I went to the trouble of installing battle Neet
and I was playing Ward of Warcraft with like this
controller mod and it was it was very cool for like,
oh this thing can do this, but it was a
massive pain in the ass anytime I wanted to actually
go and play it or like have a smooth experience.
And there's a lot of that kind of stuff with
the steam Deck where if you put in the effort,
yeah you can, you can. You can get stuff to work,
you know, you can get emulation to run and all
that sort of stuff. But having a Windows handheld, you know,
just opens the door to so much more you know,
native support. And I think particularly games like like a
Marvel Rivals, for instance, I would love to play that
on this device, or a Fortnite right something that previously,
you know, I haven't been able to play really because
of anti cheat yeh, but but yeah it.
Speaker 2: So is it fair to say as someone like me
who is like, I have a gaming PC, but I
am a console person. I just like the convenience of console.
Is the rock ally better? For like, if I don't
want to fiddle with anything and I just want the
closest thing to just like, I just want to install
the games and they're most likely just play. Is this
a better option than the Steam Deck?
Speaker 3: I wouldn't.
Speaker 5: I would say that it's pretty similar. It also does
depend on what games you're gonna play, Like, if you're
just playing like a bunch of indie games or mostly
single player stuff that you never have to like go online,
then when you like, the Steam Deck will play of
the vast majority of my library, it won't play anything
that's on the Epic Games Store because the Epic Game
Store doesn't support Well, that's not necessarily true, because you
couldn't do the things that Alex was talking about before.
Speaker 1: Not out of the box.
Speaker 5: Yeah, not out of the box. You will have to
jump through hoops. Honestly, if you are a console player,
my recommendation if you want something to play portably is
to just get a switch to, not because I think
that the switch to is necessarily better, but it doesn't
require any thinking on the part of the end user.
You'd never have to sit down to play a game
and be like, how the hell does this work?
Speaker 1: Again?
Speaker 5: Oh I remember now, or I have to go look
something up. There's just a lot less friction that way,
if that makes sense. But that also closes off a
lot of games to you if you're playing only on
the switch too.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: Something that I've been really curious about is this has evolved,
this entire market that kind of just sprung out of
Valve deciding to do Steam decks and and try to
make these at home PCs. Is that even going back
before steam Deck to things like it was the Steam
machines and things like that, you know, it always ended
up being kind of almost a pro sumer product because
you needed to be somebody who was willing to tinker.
You needed to be willing to Even if you play
on Steam Deck and you boot up something like say
Trails in the Sky, you might need to go into settings,
you might need to tinker to get the experience that
you want that you you kind of hope for. Whereas,
like you said, switch to you boot it up and
what you get is what you get, and to some
degree that that can be good or bad. I mean,
on end of switch one life cycle, we kind of
saw how that got a little tired after a while.
But the flip side is that you aren't going to
have to deal with those menus and stuff like that.
So do you feel like it being a Windows platform
does at least smooth out a little bit more of
that for steam Deck and for the Linux side of
things where people might not be as familiar or even
like ready to do that kind of stuff. Or are
you still kind of having to go into menus to
optimize to kind of deal with the things that come
with kind of a PC environment.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So I guess the way that I would put
that is, like, let's say you're playing a game on
the Nintendo Switch too, you don't have to worry well, okay,
you don't have to worry on these new devices either,
but you might want to. You don't have to worry
on a switch to how much power the device needs
in order to run the game that you want to play.
So if I'm playing a game like let's say I'm
playing Animal, well, I don't need twenty five watts of
power to run Animal Well. I can run Animal Well
at six wants of power and still get like sixty
frames per second, no problem. On a device like these,
you in order to get the best battery life, you
would want to open up the menus, which admittedly Microsoft's
new full screen experience, which is launching with these devices,
is a lot easier to manage those power settings. Basically,
you hit the Xbox button, you push left, and it
brings up Armory crake, and then you have these little
buttons there that say six watts, thirteen watts, twenty watts,
and you say, all right, well, I'm playing a simple game,
so I'll set it at six watts, and now the
battery isn't going to run through nearly as much. When
some a developer submits a game to Nintendo, Nintendo figures
all that stuff out for you, so then you say,
I'm going to launch this game, and you never have
to think about that. So, even though I do think
that there are a few less hoops to jump through
when you are talking about a Windows style device over
a Steam deck, I still think that these are things
that you definitely want to keep in mind. And I
would say, though, the thing that you have to think
about less is which Proton version you're using for a
particular game. And for the listeners who aren't aware of that,
Valves tried to get developers to make games for Linux,
and developers said god no. So then Valves said, fine,
we'll do it ourselves, and they translated all of the
Windows APIs over to Linux. So then when you go
to run a game that's made for Windows, you can
run it on Linux and it just says, hey, I
need that API, and then Proton says, oh, here's the API.
Don't pay attention too much that it doesn't look like
what you're expecting and then it runs. So sometimes you
play a game and the game won't start and you'd
be like, oh, I'm going to switch to a different
version of Proton, and then it starts. So there's usually solutions,
but you do have to jump through a few more hoops.
But I don't do that very often, if that makes
any sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I did a lot of that more when I
first got my Steam deck. I think that was you know,
that's as time goes on, you know, the you just
kind of want to sit down and play a game
and I'm like, I'll sacrifice a few frames here and
there if it means I'll just you know, launch the
game and and and have it do my settings default.
That kind of thing. Most with most games, I would say,
outside of modern Triple A games, that usually works all
right with the steam Deck. Now, I'm currently playing a
game that we can't talk about yet for review, and
you know, it's a bigger game, and I've recently kind
of been on its steam Deck kick again. I kind
of go back and forth between my switch to and
my steam deck. I've been playing Silk Song for a
while on my switch and I kind of am and
done with that. I'm like, okay, back to steam Deck.
And you know, it's it's a real bummer when you
when you open up one of those games and you're
getting you know, sub thirty frame rate and you can't
even hit like thirty frames on the low. And that's
kind of like where my steam deck has started to
let me down a bit. And that's natural, right, It's
not meant to run these games, especially you know, Unreal
Engine five has had you know, a lot of those
games don't work on the steam Deck or run very poorly,
which is another point I want to ask about in
a second. But yeah, if you're just looking to play,
like Bill said, Animal Well or ball x Pit, which
is what we're playing we're going to be talking about
later today on this episode. I've been playing the hell
out of that put, you know, fifteen twenty hours into
it on steam Deck and it runs perfectly. And I know,
like when the steam Deck first came out, people were
you know, we had like God of War on there
and you know, Death Stranding and you can hit thirty
fps with those, but you know, those games are what
you know, six seven years old now, depending and you know,
if you want to play games that came out last
year or even earlier this year, like clar Obscure is
one that I would have loved to play on my
steam Deck, but it's just it runs at an unacceptable
frame rate, Like it just it's not really playable. And
you know, we still see developers release updates here and there.
Baldersgate three just recently got an official patch for steam
Deck that we've talked about on on Gamemanformer dot com
a bit. But yeah, it's I'm kind of at that
point Bill where I am like, Okay, I think I
want to upgrade to something a little beefier. I'm kind
of stuck between the Ally and the ally X. So
that's why I'm kind of really especially curious about your
experience kind of running these modern, more modern games on
those devices. Are you getting better performance or is it
kind of on par with what you'd expect from from
something like an Ally the first generation Ally? Curious to
your thoughts on that.
Speaker 5: So when you say the first generation Ally are you
are you talking about the Xbox ones? Are you talking
about the original white rog.
Speaker 1: Alli, original white rog Ally?
Speaker 5: Okay, that one got That one one runs the Z
one Extra Stream chipset, which is not as powerful as
the Z two Extreme chipsets that are in here, but
a little more powerful than what's in the Steam.
Speaker 3: Deck, which is the van Go chipset.
Speaker 5: And I feel like what I would say about those
in particular is will you get a performance boost? Yes
you will, but it's not really going to be all
that noticeable. And then when you look at the rog Lix,
not the new ones from Xbox, but the one that
came out last year or the year before, I can't remember. Yes,
this one that's black and it doesn't have it doesn't
have the extra handles on it. This also has the
Z one Extreme chipset. So the big difference between this
one and the white one is the form factors a
little bit better, the curves are a little bit better,
It's easier to hold, it feels nicer in the hands.
It has a giant eighty hour battery in it. The
original one I believe had a forty hour.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 5: So when you compare the steam Deck to the rog
ally the not the Xbox Ones. Basically the Z one
Extreme chip set is very is more powerful than the
van Go chip set, but it does not sip the battery.
It chugs the battery, so it just like burns through
your battery really really fast. And they could not compete
on efficiency with Valve. So what they did instead is
they just said, well, I'm just gonna brute force it
and throw a giant battery in there that'll just last
way longer. And that solved the problem for them. And
this is a really really great device. I don't know
how much it costs right now, though.
Speaker 1: That's fair. Yeah, I think I was looking. I think
it's in the five to six hundred range on i've
seen it. There's been some sales that kind of thing, and.
Speaker 3: If you walk into a best Buy you can usually
find one used.
Speaker 1: Oh cool, I didn't realize that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because the best Buy carries these devices, and so
usually people will buy them. They'll think that it's going
to be a console like experience and they'll have to
jump through hoops and they'll be like, man, I'm not
doing all this, and they'll take it back to the store.
There's nothing wrong with it, you just have to If
you're a PC gamer, you're going to be fine on
these kind of devices. But if you're a console gamer,
you will hit a wall where you're going to be
annoyed at some point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, fair, fair, But yeah, what kind of games are
you playing on it? I know you've only had it
for a week. Are you kind of just jumping around
for testing purposes? Have you? Kind of?
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's all I was doing, was just testing and
testing and testing. So, like I put on Cyberpunk twenty
seventy seven on the new white one. That's this one
is about the same power envelope as the Steam deck.
This one on Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven, I was getting, Oh,
the best would be thirty.
Speaker 3: Three frames per second.
Speaker 5: Okay, And then with the steam Deck on that particular
on Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven, I was getting about thirty
five frames per second. So the steam Deck actually beat
that one in Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven. That's not a
huge surprise though, because Windows is it's very I'm going
to use the word bloated. My friend Carrie is going
to yell at me because I use the word bloated,
because the point that I'm trying to make is it
doesn't deal with the hardware very well, and Linux is
just so much more efficient. So Linux it every time
you install like Linux on one of these devices, they
just run better the games. You get slightly better performance,
and that's why the steam decks beating that one. I
played Borderlands three on the Oh I forgot to tell
you the Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven that I got sixty
two frames per second on the Black one.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, that's this one. That's the thousand dollars one. Yeah, yeah,
that's the that's I mean double the nearly double the
frame rate.
Speaker 3: Yes, but it's also one thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, very true, very true.
Speaker 5: And then the same similar examples with games like Borderlands,
Three Shadows of the Tomb Raider, Assassin's Creed, Valhalla. I
was getting very similar results between those three things when
I tested it in my video.
Speaker 1: Did you have a chance to check out the Oblivion remake?
I'm curious, so.
Speaker 5: I okay, I have not installed Oblivion Remake on these sure,
but I did make a video where at the when
Oblivion Remake came out, I installed it on all of
the devices that I had and tried it, and I
don't remember what the results were, but it's not good.
But it's an unreal five game. It really like these
devices struggle with Unreal five games usually.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's totally fair man. Any any other take
aways in general that you think, like the general you know,
our audiences. Honestly, we have a lot of console players
in our audience, but I think there's a growing contingent
of people who have like picked up a Steam deck
and really enjoy it or or are on the fence
about that or a steam deck. But any any kind
of takeaways that might general folks, might people who aren't
necessarily like really into this more niche section of the hobby.
You know, they're not watching you know, nerd nests. They're
not watching wolfed In or the Fox, you know that
kind of thing.
Speaker 5: I think that what there's there's a couple of different
ways to look at it. These devices do have those
speed bumps in the friction that I talked about before.
But at the same time, when you're playing on PC,
you have those Steam sales and there's like one hundred
thousand games on Steam. Yeah, so like everything is pretty
much on PC with the exception of and like PlayStation
in Nintendo exclusives. Eventually it's going to come to Steam
and eventually it's going to be on sale. And so
I think these devices are for the patient gamer. And
if you're a patient gamer, if you're willing to wait
for sales, if you're willing to wait for a game
to come out and you know, work on your backlog
instead of buying the new hotness, well then you might
have a really good time with devices like the Steam
Deck or the Xbox Ally or the ally X, or
the Lenovo Legion Go two, which just came out, which
is eye watering thirteen hundred and fifty dollars. Oh my god,
but that screen is insanely beautiful. From what everybody told me.
I haven't got hands on with that one yet.
Speaker 1: Man, Yeah, I totally agree with that. I mean, Steam
is such a great ecosystem to get into, and even
if you're if you're looking at getting one of these
newer devices, maybe you haven't started building a PC library.
Stuff like Goog and that sort of thing. Are epic
games excellent platform to kind of get those games.
Speaker 5: And one of the things about these new devices over
the Steam Deck is when you press that Xbox button,
it brings up a little menu and it has the
launchers that you have installed on the device right down
below the last couple of games that you played. And
so you can press that button, drop down, open Steam,
drop down open I don't know, Epic Game Store if
you want, which like gog or any of the other ones.
Like on the Steam Deck, you have to jump through
hoops to install other launchers, which isn't a big deal
because you only have to do it once, but it
is something that you do have to do, so that's
another advantage that a device like this might have.
Speaker 4: I do also think it's interesting when we talk about
these devices. I feel like the rise of a lot
of tangential devices when it comes to retro gaming and
things like that have also seen an uptick in the
years since the Steam Deck started to take off. Things
like Ambernick and Me You and all that have also
been booting up in popularity over the last five six years,
And I think it maybe shows just a general inclination
that people, especially as they get older and want to
play some of their older games, They're a little bit
more willing to tinker.
Speaker 1: They're a little bit.
Speaker 4: More willing to say, I I'll deal with an ecosystem
that is not just plug and play, but if you
smooth it out a little bit, having that device that
can play a lot of stuff theoretically across the entire
board really does appeal. I mean that's the Steam Deck
kind of opened my eyes in that regard to saying like, oh,
I have this handheld that is just a PC can
do PC things and not just you know, game boy things,
switch things, you know, like I was used to with
a handheld. So I think in some respects it can
be a device that can be as difficult or as
intricate as you want it to be. If you want
to just open it up and play Steam games, it'll
do that. But if you want to like tinker with it.
It's open to tinkering too, and especially with the Windows environment,
it might be a little bit more comfortable for people
to tinker with than say a Linux environment that they
might not be familiar with.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I never used Linux before the steam Deck. It's
it's actually pretty similar. Like the number of times that
I've needed to go into like the command line is
only because I'm doing crazy nonsense so that I can
make a tutorial or something like that. It's actually fairly simple,
and if you buy the steam Deck you'd never have
to go into desktop mode.
Speaker 4: Now you want to, Yeah, it sounds scary and it is, realistically,
and I've done some of that stuff and it always
you read the documentation, you're like, I don't know about this,
and then you actually do it and you're like, oh,
that wasn't bad after all.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think that if you guys have these things,
the little little retro guys instead, I've got.
Speaker 1: In my closet. I think we've kind of got a
smattering of like the annber Nicks and that sort of thing.
Speaker 4: I remember an sp here nice. I also recently, I
don't play with it enough, but I've got the MEU
like six button one as well.
Speaker 3: Oh cool.
Speaker 1: I remember when we met at when we met at
PAX to your friend the fox is his kind of
screen name is YouTube channel. He had a DS like computer.
I don't remember what it.
Speaker 5: Was called, I think, but the GPD GPD something I
don't know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that thing blew my mind. I was like, this
is and he's like, yeah, that was like at least
it was like something like a thousand dollars or twelve
hundred or something. It's something ridiculous. And I was like,
this is so cool though, like it was the clamshell. Look,
it's super cool. But yeah, I mess I mod game Boys.
Actually have a mod that I'm waiting to do when
I get some free time this weekend. But I typically
try to I play a lot, like a pocket that
kind of thing. Okay, usually on my desk. But yeah,
I don't know. I know a lot of people love
using their Steam deck for emulation and stuff. I haven't personally,
uh done that with my steam deck yet, just because
I have I do that on other things other devices.
But yeah, I think, like this conversation is super interesting.
I think I'm one of the things I've been thinking
about actually the last couple of days as I've been
kind of pondering my Steam Deck and if I want
to upgrade it or not. Is I really just want
to rig one of my extra PCs that's laying around
to just boot into Steam os Steam Big Picture Mode, Yeah,
and just set that up in my living room. I
think that I think that might be a weekend project
coming up, because you know, it's just having your PC
library in like a place that's not my work desk,
which is where I do all of my PC gaming.
I'm like, whether it's the Steam Deck or you know,
one of these new devices or rigging a PC. Like
I said, I'm really kind of looking to, you know,
put a little work in and then have a smoother
experience of a more console like experience with my PC
library because that's where I get all my games.
Speaker 4: But I've got a Steam Link that I picked up
like back when they were doing the going away sale
for that, and I'm still I'm mad I never got
a PlayStation TV, and I'm glad that I thought to
pick up a Steam Link before those kind of went
the way of the DODO because it's like the coolest
little device that I had it set up in my
old place. I haven't set it up at the new
place yet, but it's really something else to be able
to just connect like that and move things through. And
the steam deck is actually like kind of decent at that.
I haven't done it in a hot minute, but there
was It might've been Balder's Gate or something that I
did a little bit of streaming to my steam deck
and something where I didn't necessarily need the super high latency,
but I wanted to just be able to I don't
want to sit at my desk right now, I want
to sit on the couch and play this.
Speaker 1: And it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it worked, it functions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you for reminding me that I have a
steam Link too that I forgot that I owned until
this very second.
Speaker 4: But it all looks under their chair right now, they'll
see they all have a steam Link.
Speaker 2: I think I also bought it when it was like
three dollars and when they were just like please, we're
trying to get rid of these, and I was like, yeah,
I guess so. And I wasn't even PC gaming really
at all, but I was like, well, it's like so cheap,
I should probably just get it, because.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I missed it. I missed it unfortunately. But you know,
Steam has its own you know, streaming between computers that
I use on occasion, and that works fine.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and they have like they're just like steam Link
is now just an app on most set top boxes.
Speaker 1: I didn't realize that that's great.
Speaker 4: That's the crazy part is we're getting to the point
now where I don't use the set top box on
my TV anymore because it has the built in streaming apps.
And I was having that thought. I was like, we're
probably not too far removed from the day when you're
gonna be able to not have you know, a gaming
PC's horsepower inside a TV. But if you've got a
gaming PC that you can just stream it to your
smart TV and you don't have to worry about all
the connections and the hoops and stuff like that. You
can just run it right through an Ethernet cable and
be set.
Speaker 1: So damn, I just realized. So, my my wife and
I we recently got I we have been using like
the first Gin Chrome cast for like the last decade
and finally gave out. So we recently, within like the
last couple of weeks, bought like a whatever, the new
Apple TVs are, and that just reminds me I should go,
I bet it's got a steam a steam on it.
Yeah that I could. I'm that it does, but I'm yeah,
yeah that that sounds like a plan. Yeah, I just
checked it does. Yeah, so that's awesome. But even though,
so the.
Speaker 4: New the Xbox Allies, I assume can also do the
sort of like docking situation where you can hook it
up to a TV and run things off of it
and things like that too.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, Actually, there's one advantage that these have over
the steam deck. The steam deck has only one USB port. Yeah, okay,
so when you are docking something like the rog ally
I'm sorry, the Xbox Ally it has two USB ports,
so that means you can plug it into the wall
and then have the other plug go into the TV
so that then it's docked to the TV.
Speaker 3: With a steam deck, there's only one port, so that
means you have to buy a dock.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but they're like, if you turn the wrong way,
you're going to trip over eighty three of them. Like,
there's so many steam deck docks out there that are
incredibly cheap. I would I would not recommend buying the
Valve one because it's eighty.
Speaker 3: Dollars, yeah, which is expensive, but.
Speaker 5: It also comes with an extra power brick so you
never have to unplug that. So like, there's that one
advantage that it has. Plus it gets firmware updates from
Valve and stuff like that. The Xbox ally Ax the
black one also has two ports, but one of them
is a thunderbolt think four. Don't quote me on that,
I can't remember, but that means you can also buy
a very expensive external GPU for a device like this
and then dock it, which I've never tried, so I
can't say how well it works. But you can buy
an external GPU and then because these things aren't CPU bound,
they're GPU bound, like they just don't have the GPU
to deal with stuff, you can go buy an external
GPU and then you have the same games that you're
playing playing on your TV, and it's a much you know,
higher resolution, higher frame rates and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Huh, you just sent Eric down a down a rabbit hole.
He's going to start.
Speaker 4: You could build some to the prices, though, Eric, I'm
too I'm too busy. I'm in the realm of I'm
going to build my own like media server and stuff
like that. That's where my next tech hole is going
to be, is falling down the media server pipeline. But
I do find that stuff fascinating as somebody who travels,
because you know, I kind of stopped traveling with my
steam deck because of how bulky it is and then
having to throw a dock in with it and the
cables in with it. I was like, the switch is
so much smaller, it's so much easier to pack. Or
even these retro consoles are you put them in your pocket.
You put them in a pocket in like your backpack
or whatever. It just fits right in. And so I'd
been going that direction for a while, but I'm kind
of waiting for the point where we get to where
stuff is going to be a little bit more portable.
And it seems like even just knocking off the need
for a dock on some of this stuff is going
to help with that. Because you get to a hotel room,
you want to set it up, you want to be
able to play on the TV in the hotel or whatever.
You have to then have a dock. You have to
plug it in. You have to find how to plug
into the TV in a hotel room. I'm sure all
of us have done that at some point is where
where the HDMI ports on the Hodesel TV. So yeah,
any anything that can make that process less painful helps.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Little pro tip if you're bringing your switch or switch
to with you someplace, bring a deck of cards. Put
it inside the dock. That way, nothing can make the
dock break.
Speaker 1: Ah. Oh, that's very smart. Yeah, that's smart. I usually
just travel without a dock, but it's been a few
times where I'm like, especially like the recent release of
like Lego Party, Like, oh, I think I'm gonna put
that on my switch and like bring that places. So
that's a very good tip.
Speaker 4: Live out that switch commercial Roof of the Park.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm trying, man, I'm really trying. Well, Bill, before
you get out here, any any other games you've been
enjoying lately that you want to shout out or talk
about real quick? I know I didn't.
Speaker 5: I know, it's kind of putting you on the spot.
That's okay, anything you've been enjoying. Yeah, Well, before I
answered that question, I have a question for Marcus. Marcus
asked me the question earlier. Should a console gamer pick
up one of these things? After everything that I said,
how do you feel about steam Deck versus the Xbox
ally stuff. Are you interested in picking one up or
do you still think that's not for me?
Speaker 2: I would So I've yet to buy a steam Deck
or any handheld PC, like I've really like I want
one just because you know, the idea of being able
to play my very large PC libror anywhere is fantastic,
especially for work purposes too. But a lot of it
has been the price of them and some of the
like jumping through hoops that I you know what you
guys have talked about the wrong ally like that price
is it's very oppressive because I I'm the sicko where
it's like, if you give me two versions, I'm gonna
want the best version because if I get the like
you know, like I have a series x Xbox and
not the s because like, well, I want the one
that's always gonna run the things well and I have
to worry about it. So I'm gonna want the thousand
dollars one. And it's but I it's like, what would
you since you guys are sort of like you know
more about this idea, if you were to recommend which
one you think I should get between like a let's see,
like a Steam deck o led, which is the one
I've been eyeing of, like, oh maybe if I get one,
I guess it'll be this one or like the wrong Alley.
Speaker 3: What kind of games do you play?
Speaker 2: I mean, I have mostly my Steam library. It is
probably like I played my game's there more, even though
I have a very large Epic library and then.
Speaker 1: You know my it's a it's a mixture for work
at least.
Speaker 2: Oh, I play like I mean for work, but I
even personally I play like pretty much a bit of everything.
I don't know if there's like is there.
Speaker 4: Type stuff for like more pixel arty type stuff like fidelity?
Why is because that's kind of that that's going to
swing it the most one way or another. I think
if you want to silent hell f that's going to
need a little bit more horsepower than say Animal Well
or Stardew Valley or something like that.
Speaker 2: I think being a switch person has sort of conditioned
me to play lower end stuff on a handheld, just
because I just I just expect that to run without
issue and not want to roll the dice on bigger
triple A stuff. Even so, Yeah, I guess if I
had probably like mid tier smaller things most.
Speaker 5: Of Yeah, Yeah, are you playing a lot of online
games where you're playing against other people where you might
have to worry about Marcus hates multiplayer.
Speaker 2: He won't admit it.
Speaker 1: He won't he won't admit it.
Speaker 2: I don't hate it, but yes, I'm a I'm a
single player minded person pretty much ninety percent of the time.
Speaker 5: Then, I think for the most part, not one hundred percent,
but for the most part. Steam Deck o led the
one that you're thinking of, probably the mid tier one,
not the most expensive one, because you can easily upgrade that.
The thing that you get when you get the more
expensive one is you get an anti glare coating on
the screen, which makes the oleed a little less punchy,
which you kind of don't want that, but at the
same time also less reflections, So there's that. But then
you also get a you know, more storage. But swapping
out the storage on the steam Deck in any of
these devices pretty much is dead simple. It's literally a
couple of screws, take it out, put it in, screw
it back together, and you're fine. Yeah, So I would
say probably the five hundred and fifty dollars Steam deck
OLAD is going to be the one that would probably
work best for somebody who plays games like you.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's half of a raw Yx too, Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: For like context, Like I have started to pick my
steam Deck back up, and it's mostly been for things
like Persona three, Reload Trails in the Sky first chapter,
Digimon's Story, like turn based RPGs that just feel cozy
to kind of sit on the couch and play while
you have a second screen going because I am a
child of my generation and I need the subway surfers
on top of the video. But it's really effective for
that kind of stuff. If you want to get into
like clear Opscure, then that's going to need the horse power.
But I've found that a lot of what you would
say a kind of mid range RPGs over the last
few years in terms of what they need from performance
and horsepower, do really well on the steam Deck.
Speaker 2: Okay, one day, I'm not planned when I'm gonna make
the plunge either way, I just kind of look at
them from a far and go, hmm, wait for like.
Speaker 1: May maybe when I put on my clown makeup and
pay a thousand dollars for the ally, you can buy
my old lead. I think I've got the mid to
old d one.
Speaker 2: I like the the clown makeup is a I like
that that's a pre's part of the buying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, especially because I posted already online that there's
no way on God's Green Earth that I'm gonna pay
a thousand dollars for a handheld. There's a there's a
very real chance I will be paying a thousand dollars, which.
Speaker 4: Absolutely I've said before that I would never become the
type of person who would spend a lot of money
on cardboard, And then I started playing Magic the Gathering,
so like, there's a room for all of us to
change for the better and for the worse.
Speaker 1: You know, well, Bill, before you get out of here,
you've been playing anything you want to shout out or
talk about real quick.
Speaker 5: So I've been playing a lot of which is I
have tons, so many games to play, and I can't
stop playing two games. The first one is Cloverpit. Have
you guys been playing Cloverpit?
Speaker 1: I haven't played Overpit's sick.
Speaker 5: It's so fun for the people who were watching or listening.
You think, Billatro, which everybody knows about because of the
Game Awards, last year, but instead it's a slot machine
and when you lose, you get killed, and that's the
whole game, and it's it's super fun. The other one
that I've been playing is MEGABONK. Have you guys been playing?
Speaker 2: No, that's another one I need to play. Happen Hearing
a lot.
Speaker 1: It's on I think it's on a couple of our
lists to touch before the end of the year. I'm
very familiar. It's it's it's a rogue light right, like
sort of like Vampire Survivors Risk of Rain a little bit.
Speaker 5: Right, yeah, very much like Risk of Rain, like, yeah,
because you just can't you get these swarms coming after you,
and you can just do some crazy things. I was
playing yesterday as Calcium, who is a skeleton that rides
a skateboard, and longer he goes without getting hit, the
faster he goes. And then I ended up picking up
a power up that may that tied my damage multiplier
to my speed. Oh man, So I was doing tons
of damage, just throwing bones at people or at these
goblins or whatever, and it like it's got this ridiculous
ps one esthetic. It's so ugly that it's charming. Yet
the same time, and I've been playing the hell out
of that game. I think I got it two weeks ago,
and it's like, it's the kind of game that you
pick up and you play for ten minutes and then
you're done. I've got seven and a half hours in
this game already. Yeah, and it's it's that it's not
the kind of game that you spend that much time in,
but you can't stop playing.
Speaker 2: I know I don't need We're gonna talk about balls
Pit later, but I don't need another one of those
when I have so many other big games to get through,
but also can't wait to hear about that super good
as someone that spent way too much time with Vampire Spers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, clover Pit is one that's been on the top
of my wish list for a while. I think Eric
was showing I was over at his place recently, and
I think Northern Lion's been streaming it, and that thing
looks can't put me on blast like this. We can't
let the people know that you come over. I just
show you Northern Line videos. That's that's what it is.
I recently saw a post that was like, dudes love
showing you YouTube videos. It's like part of their culture
was like that describes Eric to a t. And they're
always Northern Line clips. But that's okay, I love Northern Line.
But yeah, clover Pit has been on my list since
seeing that. It definitely has that inscription look to it, right,
like the really yeah you know like.
Speaker 6: Buckshot Yeah yeah, yeah, Like all the textures are wobbly,
like they kind of just shake like you guys probably
aren't old enough to remember this.
Speaker 3: Do you guys remember Doctor Katz? Yeah, comedy.
Speaker 2: I love Doctor Katz.
Speaker 5: Okay, Doctor Katz had this squigglevis and that's what.
Speaker 3: Cloverpit reminds me of.
Speaker 2: It's Squigglevision, the Doctor Katz and video games. They call it.
Speaker 4: Finally Yeah, we finally made one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, Bill, thank you again for joining us today
on the show. Before we take a quick break, will
you just go ahead and plug where folks can find
you online? Social media, Patreon, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you can find everything that I do over at
YouTube dot com, slash, nerd Nest or nerdnest dot tv,
and I mean you can find me on Blue Sky,
but I think it's nerdnest dot tv on Blue Sky,
which is how Alex and I have been talking. Yeah,
I don't really post to any of the other platforms
all that much, and honestly, I don't really post a
Blue Sky all that much, but you know, every pretty
much everything is on YouTube, YouTube, dot Com, slash nerd, Nest.
Speaker 1: Awesome. Well Bill, thanks for joining us, and hopefully we'll
have you back on soon.
Speaker 3: Thanks so much. It was really fun talking to you
guys and meet you guys.
Speaker 1: Yeah, by welcome back everyone to the Game Informer show.
We've got still a packed episode. We're gonna be getting
into our Ball x Pit review impressions in just a second,
as well as Vampire the Masquerade, Bloodlines two, Battlefield six
by Sweet Carol at the very end, well, we'll we'll
talk a little little bit about legends, which I think
we've got like a collective hour in our first impressions,
Pokemon legends.
Speaker 4: Yes, we're just talking about legends, Yes, various myths.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, the legend I am Legend. I am legend. Yes,
that's what we're to get into our exclusive review of
I Am Legend. Guys, let's get into Ball x Pit.
This is uh from I believe. I know it's being
published obviously by Devolver Digital, but It's being developed by
a fellow named Kenny Sun, the Legend. The Legend Kenny
Sun previously worked on mister Sun's hat Box. That's where
I know that name, from which I believe, Marcus you
were a fan of if I if I remember correctly. Oh,
I've never played it, but maybe it was Alex Stadnick.
Speaker 2: Do you think I would like it?
Speaker 1: I think so, yeah. But ballocks Pit is is Kinney's
latest game, again being published by Devolver. Is a brick
breaker ball fusing rogue light that's describes itself on the
Steam listing, and I think that's pretty dang close to
to what what the real experience is like. There's also
a sort of base building harvesting system that you know,
you continually expand. But the whole premise of the game
is at the very start, giant sort of meteor hits
this big city called ball Balon, which is this great
city looks sort of like Menace tier at from one
of the rings a little bit, and it creates this
huge pit and pretty much all of humanity is much
wiped out save for some you know, loan survivors, and
you're slowly building up a settlement by diving deeper into
the pit to find resources and uncover new townsfolk to
come back to your settlement and kind of help build
things up. But the main sort of mode that you're
engaging with most of the time is this brick breaker
style game where you're playing a character. At the bottom
of the screen. There's a vertical scrolling battlefield with legions
of enemies coming down, and you are playing a brick
baker game where you're throwing special balls that do special effects,
as well as what they call baby balls, which are
just sort of like normal balls that bounce around, they
bounce off balls, they bounce off enemies, and you're slowly
kind of taking out these hordes of batties while slowly
upgrading your character from the sort of XP gym that
you get from defeating those enemies. And there are mid bosses,
there are are big bosses, and there are you know,
you have to do runs multiple times to kind of unlock,
you know, the next area. I'm having a lot of
fun with it. It's been really my main driver on
my Steam deck, and I think I probably put probably
fifteen hours into it at this point, and it's one
of those games that reminds me of loop Heiro and
the way that when I first looked at Loopierro on Steam,
I was like, I heard it's cool, but it's not
really a looker, and I don't know if it's for me.
And then I played Loopierro and I was like, oh
my god, this thing is great. You know, I have
hav any very similar experience with ball x Pit, where
it's kind of my radar wasn't sure if I was interested,
and you know, it was pleasantly surprised. But I'm curious
Eric and Marcus where you guys are at with the
game and how you're enjoying it or if you're not
enjoying it.
Speaker 4: I put it pretty decent amount of time into it
so far. I I don't know that I would call
it so it's weird. I don't know that I would
say I'm like a roguelike guy, But then I play
basically every roguelike that comes out and have an opinion
on it, so I guess maybe I.
Speaker 1: Am like a roguelike guy. I just look.
Speaker 4: I got into FTL and Binding of Isaac when they
were both like coming out, and I think it just
like it hooked and and I bring that up because
I do think Ballpit. Well, first of all, I'll call
it Ballpit. Much like Hunter Hunter I believe, I believe
the ex is silent.
Speaker 1: But in the review and the review, I did ball
x pit and then I recorded some alternate takes with
just ballpick ball, cross.
Speaker 4: Pit yeah, all times pit yeah pit. Yeah. So with Ballpit,
it's been really interesting. I do think it's a really
cool game. Like, like to be clear, I am, I'm
very warm on it. I do kind of wish some
of the base building stuff was a little bit not
the way it was, just because there's I think as
that starts to grow, it's it's novel at first, but
then kind of started to degrade on me over time.
But I only bring that up because I think it's
a really clever idea, and that idea plays out very
well when you're actually in the pit and climbing through stuff.
Because you brought up that it's brick Breaker, it's a
little bit of Pinball, it's a little bit of Vampire Survivors.
I think there's a lot of touchstones that if you've
played any sort of run based game in the last
five to ten years, you're going to see that here.
But what it's the reminded me the most of just
in terms of general concept and idea, has been stuff
like Galaga, where you're kind of managing this ever approaching
wall of enemies, and yeah, there's kind of just always
constant pressure on you, the player and the There's an
interesting push and pull between how much you are willing
to see ground or try to push forward and play
the way that you want to play to then risk
it them eventually getting to the bottom and starting to
hit you, because once they get to the bottom of
the screen, or once they get close enough because you
can't actually walk forward on the screen, and then enemies
if they're in melee range, will start to actually attack you.
Because of it, you can kind of play around with that.
You can play around that space. And there's a lot
of balls that I think do more interesting things than
I thought there would be. I kind of went in
expecting like, Okay, you're going to have chain lightning ball,
You're going to have some sort of damage over time ball,
You're going to have a ball that turns into more balls,
because that all seems natural, and those are all there.
I think the more interesting parts of this game to
me are the ones that say, Okay, this ball will
have higher krit chance if you hit it hit something
from the right hand side, or this ball will do
more damage, but once it hits the back of the
screen and starts bouncing back down, now it's going to
do less damage. Or conversely, this ball does less damage
until it hits a wall and then it starts picking
up damage the more it bounces. And you can combine
that with things like the wind ball, which kind of
pass It moves slower, but it passes through enemies instead
of bouncing.
Speaker 1: Off of them.
Speaker 4: You can do really cool interesting things with that. I
think the physics of this game, the actual feeling of
balls ricocheting around and how you can manipulate that to
do really cool things, is one of the more interesting
and novel parts of Ballpit that have really like resonated
with me. I think it would have been very easy
for this game to just be You're playing brick breaker
and you get like cooler ways to break the bricks,
but it's kind of just that. And I think the
ways in which the developers have thought to expand the
playspase of brick breaking Galaga style like very retro feeling
concepts and infuse so much new novel into it really
really works for me, and I find that really really compelling.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, Marcus, I'm curious. I'm curious to your
thoughts before I dive into a rabbit hole that I
was about to go.
Speaker 2: And No, it's a lot of it's a lot of fun,
I said earlier. I it's got a lot of the
same hooks that Vampire Survivors had in me of just
this kind of like endlessly replayable, but very easy to
play because it's an auto shooter, like you're just shooting
the balls, like so literally all you have to do
is just move the character.
Speaker 4: So uh oh, I you're not wrong, However, it is shooting.
Auto shooting is something you toggle. And I will say
something that did impress me was it starts you off,
not letting you auto shoot, and then you turn it
on and I'm like, well, why would I ever turn
this off? And then you start to get some balls
that make you go like maybe I don't just want
to auto shoot? Yeah, I think that's pretty interesting.
Speaker 2: Okay, Yeah i'ven't. I don't think I've encountered balls that
would have made me question that. So okay, that's interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there are some balls that deal damage to you
when you shoot them.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, gotcha?
Speaker 1: Huh yeah. And so if you have auto shoot on,
you're just like slowly you.
Speaker 2: Know, yeah, because I turned it off. Yeah, I turned
on auto immediately because I was like, I'm playing a
controller and I was like, oh, I don't want to
hold down to the trigger the whole time. It's like,
I'm just gonna play it like it's Vampire Survivors and
just have it, you know, I just want to focus.
Speaker 1: Most builds you can get away with auto.
Speaker 4: I think that I would then draw comparisons to things
like Binding of Isaac, where the first time I played
Binding of Isaac, I was like, why would I not
just walk around with the fire button held down all
the time? Why would I ever use my bombs to
not just blow things up?
Speaker 1: Why would I? You know?
Speaker 4: And then suddenly you start to understand that the play
space is a lot deeper than you think it's going
to be, but also that they're doing more things with
those verbs than you normally expect a video game to do.
I think a lot of video games, broadly speaking, love
the idea of you do thing and then you do
more of thing. But I think What often sets a
really good run based game apart for me is where
it makes you have those moments of careful consideration where
you say, I need to play differently than I do
for every other run, where I need to like consider
my playset and my play style a little bit differently,
because now I'm playing something that is going to both
encourage me to play differently and reward me for playing differently.
And I do think Ballpit nails that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, It's there's a primal satisfaction that I have and
probably all of us do to some degree of just
watching balls bounce around and break up, just like I've
always really loved the Arcanoid and this is just like
this is basically like fancy, more involved Arcanoid to me. Yeah,
with a little bit of Tetris, because I think of
Tetris when I see the kind of like enemy scrolling
closer and closer and how but instead of like reaching
the top is bad, reaching the bottom is bad, it's
like reverse Tetris. This game is so weird in terms
of the different sort of like things it takes. It's
like the watch a McCall a bar of video games.
Just like it's got a little bit of everything, and
it manages to blend together in a way that is
it's amazing how kind of like quickly you kind of
pick up what it's putting down for how sort of
like for how many different things it sort of mashes
together that you won't think on paper it wouldn't work,
But then you only need to play like around and
you start to go like, oh, oh, okay, I think
I get what this is cause and I think when
you just watch a trailer it's even hard to sort
of kind of like understand completely what you're kind of
getting into. I think once you get in there, And
I think it's one of the reason why I Steam
Demo did so well when it was available on Next Fest,
Like I played the crap out of that, and thankfully
your progress carries over from the Steam Demo, which is
greats Like I just fired up the full game and
it's just like, hey, we saw you played demo. Here
you are just start off where you were. But yeah,
it's uh, it's fun. Like it's it's one of those
games you get I get so lost in, like you
get that zen state when you're like on a really
good run and you're watching all of your balls kind
of like do what you want them to do. And
I also get really excited with like it does the
Vampires of Ivors like weapon fusion stuff. So every time
you pick one of those up, I'm just like, oh man,
I'm gonna like I would just combine things together just
to see what happens, not even like I don't know
if this has any strategic advantage, like for this current situation,
but I just want to see what it does because
I haven't mixed these two things yet. And then even
when it's something that's like Okay, I don't know if
that did exactly wanted to do, it's still like a
it's fun to just experiment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like a discovery element exactly. Yes, that that
piece reminds me of Alchemy, the old mobile game that
people would play where you would have different elements and
you would just like combine them to unlock another element.
And I think in that game they were like over
three hundred of them. In this game, there are significantly less,
which is kind of a bummer because I think that
is my favorite piece of this game, is the fusion system,
and I think like as as you go, it kind
of slows down quite a bit.
Speaker 4: I do think one thing that I kind of have
with this game in regards to that is that you
have two different kinds of so for the people at home,
you have a ball, so you pick up the chain
lightning ball or the frost ball, the one that freezes
random pieces, which I think is probably one of my
favorite ones, just because the ability to stop the line
from advancing is very helpful. You level it up three
times and then it has hit basically it's max level.
But once it's at that max level, you can either
I forget which one is, which there's one that is
combining it with another max level ball to kind of
just stick the two things that those balls do together
to make them do the same thing together. And I
think that one once you do that, it is kind
of completed. It is finished, or you can fuse them
into something completely brand new that will kind of have
elements of both, but maybe do something that is kind
of brand new. I think one of the ones that
I remember getting that I really thought was interesting was
it gave the ball an AoE around it that was
kind of burning the whole time, and it did some
really cool stuff with that.
Speaker 1: That one.
Speaker 4: You can then level up and I think eventually fuse
with other things as well, And I ended up getting
just a little annoyed by that, because then if you're
trying to min max, if you're trying to say, I'm
making the most use of every single one of my
limited slots, because you have a limited number of slots
for how many balls you can have and how many
passives you can have. So if you're really trying to
max that stuff out, suddenly one is technically a better
and slot option than the other one because it can
get stronger, it can continue to grow over the course
of the game, whereas other ones kind of the evolutionary
path stops, and that in the same way the Vampire
Survivor is. The one thing that annoys me in that
game is when you have to pick up something that
isn't going to then play into an evolution of a
weapon somewhere down the line. I go like, I'm not
playing optimally. I don't have the best possible build in
this moment. Is this run just crap now? And it's
it's good to force yourself to not play that way
every single time, And in other games, I think they
give you ways of forcing you to not play optimally.
Every single time. But I think when it dangles it
over your head like that, it does like annoy me
just a little bit where I'm like, ah, just just
let me fuse them and make something new and then
keep growing that that way instead of having the path
cut off suddenly. It doesn't It doesn't feel great when
I'm like I had to settle for this because I
just needed an extra slot, I needed more firepower, and
then like, oh, I'm just have a suboptimal build now
and I hope I can kind of squeak out something
with this.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I guess that's a consequence of just the rang
with the power ups, like you don't know what you're
gonna get until you get it, just like, oh, well
this is the one I yeah needed, but I gotta
roll with it.
Speaker 4: I do think their way of doing rerolls in the
game is really interesting because it's the currency that you
want to bring back to the base to spend on
certain buildings and stuff like that. So the fact that
you're kind of gambling with it in that way where
you say, Okay, I don't want any of these available balls,
but it's going to cost me a decent chunk of
change to reroll. Do I want to bring that money
back or do I want to spend it for the
chance to stay down here longer and get more cash.
I do think that's kind of compelling. I think that's interesting.
Speaker 2: When you I haven't done a thing where you retry
a run. I usually just go back to the base,
Like what is that?
Speaker 4: Do you just you start over again?
Speaker 1: You just do a new run?
Speaker 2: Oh okay. I didn't know if it's like like with
like risking anything by not just taking whatever I got
back back to base. I probably I'm surprised I haven't
reatryause I'm kind of with you, Eric, were like the
base building stuff, It's like it's like fine, it's like novel,
but it's definitely like I don't necessarily look forward to
going back there. I just kind of keep doing ball
runs and then I just kind of ye, I kind
of like treat the the base building stuff as sort
of like a means to an end of like, well,
I guess I need this to to upgrade.
Speaker 3: Get that progression.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And I think Eric, you're talking specifically about the
reroll the items that you're getting in.
Speaker 4: The world, and talk about rerrolling the items that you get,
which that that is for gold, which is one of
the resources you can get in the pit, that you
then bring back to your base to spend on, say
building a new building where a character might live. And
then you have to you basically have workers who are
ex balls that you fire off, and you play a
little pinball game where you, like dark Cloud build out
a town and then kind of bounce your workers off
different resources and buildings to either construct the buildings or
harvest the resources that then turn into more things that
you invest into that. I do think that's an interesting
inner loop of the game. I just don't know that
I particularly love. It starts to feel samey after a while.
You just kind of get into a monotonous loop of
it where you're going, Okay, well let me arrange everything
that I have that needs to be built.
Speaker 1: I'm constantly rearranging things.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and not in a way that feels very exciting.
I didn't feel like it's.
Speaker 2: Yeah, kind of like this was already like I need
to expand this land because I probably should have the money. Yeah,
do you guys have a guess have a favorite character?
Like I just unlocked a third character. I haven't used
them yet, but the second the guys.
Speaker 4: I like the twins a lot, the ones that both
shoot a ball and basically invert the shot depending on
where you're aiming. They're they're pretty fun.
Speaker 1: I think I've got like eight characters unlocked, and there's
a ton to unlock. I have a guy who he's
a shield bearer, and his shield is like the classic
brick breaker platform that you would typically like scroll back
and forth to hit a ball. It's yeah, like yes,
sort of yeah, yeah, like a pong paddle. Yeah, like
in the game Pong, and like the platforms that you
move around the game the game the video game Pong,
not like ping pong paddles, but yeah, like a pong paddle,
legally distinct Pong. Yeah. And so he his bonus is
essentially if you bounce balls that bounce off his shield
gain extra damage, and so you're kind of like moving
your baby balls around and like pushing kind of you're
almost like shoveling enemies back. Because there's also like a
little bit of melee damage. I think that he can
do or you can modify it eventually to do damage
when you're in melee range. And so that's an interesting build.
I do, like I was talking to Leo Vader about this,
and it's funny. Leo told me he was like, and
I'm curious, I need to listen to Two Men Max
to see if his house opinions ended up shaping. But
it was like the first day or two we had
copy of the game, and I was like, we went
on a we had like a double date plane and
was like, hey, have you had a chance to play
Ballpit And he was like, yeah, I don't know if
the game is fun or if it's just hard to
put down. And he was like, I don't know if
I mean too cerebral, but he was telling me and
we kind of were talking about there's a character un Locke,
who just auto picks all of your upgrades, and so
it's the most turn off your brain. You don't even
pick your upgrades or evolutions. You literally just like aim
and moves.
Speaker 2: Kind of fun actually, just kind of having to roll
with whatever happens and just make the most of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I remember when when Auto Chess started and people were like,
why would you ever play that game? You don't even
control your units. You just put him down and watch
him fight, And I'm like, dude, there's nothing better than
just you put thing down and get immediate feedback and
then slightly tinker with it and then put thing down
and get immediate feedback.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I'm a Final Fantasy twelve defender because I love the
Gambit system so much and I felt like when I
got to the point where the party just took care
of everything with minimal input for me, I was like,
this is gaming right here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's really the manager.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're like, I've set this up so well, this.
Speaker 1: Is my reward. Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: Some of the best gaming is just middle management.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Oh yeah, I need that. I need that bad.
I need to check out that grocery store simulator because
that's probably real good.
Speaker 4: No, that's that's You're not middle manager in that because
you're doing all the stuff.
Speaker 1: Is that not the final boss? Like you find the middle.
Speaker 4: Management, you need the one you need like factorio where
you're you're putting down the stuff that does the stuff,
and ya the one that make sure that everybody's doing
the stuff right. You know, you gotta get back into satisfactory.
Oh man, there's okay, so this is kind of a
crazy pivot, but I think someone told me that there's
you know, arc Knights or R Knights the anime one
of the mini anime games out there, and specifically anime
gotcha style games. I think there's a new one coming
out that has like Factorio elements in it, and I
was like, that's messed up. That's why would you put
Genschen in Factorio? That's that's too much scratching my brain
all at the same time.
Speaker 1: That's dibolical. Well, Eric, I'm gonna kind of put you
on the spot and I want I want you to
talk aboutause I didn't do that to myself. Yeah, Vampire
the Masquerade Bloodlines too transition to that game, you are
a massive Bloodlines one fan. Uh and and though you
weren't quite working here when we went on the cover
story for that game, you were kind of finishing up
interview phase, we did reach out to you as like
a behind the scenes hey, we got some questions for you,
Charles and I did as we were kind of prepping
for that story, and so shout out to you for
helping prepping us with that cover story, working for free
for like twenty minutes on a Discord call. But you're
kind of our resident Bloodlines expert. I would say out
of anybody out of anybody else on staff, and so
I kind of hold your opinion. I hold your opinion highly.
So I want to know what you think about this game.
Speaker 2: Yeah, before you say what you're gonna say, can we
acknowledge that it's kind of wild this game is actually
coming out this week.
Speaker 4: Yes, that That's where I was going to start, is like,
we need to talk about the path that Vampire Bloodlines
two took here, because that is an important part of
the story. Vampire blood Lines two was originally set up
to be the you never thought it would happen seql
to a game that was kind of a cult classic
of its time that got overshadowed by many other games
that came out around it's whendow. I believe Half Life
two came out around the same time that Bloodlines one did,
and Bloodlines one, even though it was made by a
very legendary studio, kind of was a bit of a
buggy mess at launch, had very notorious technical problems, and
despite being this incredible story, an incredible world, incredible atmosphere,
just was kind of against all odds and led to
the closure of that entire venture and was just an infamous,
like almost made to be a cult classic type story.
You know how you hear about the production of something
and you're like, oh, okay, that's the story around. It
was too good for it not to become this, this gem,
this thing that people would appreciate later. And it almost
makes sense in hindsight. But so Bloodlines, two potential sequel,
people coming back from the original team to work on
a follow up seemed like, oh my god. We never
thought this would happen. We never thought this was possible.
Over the years, development troubles ensued. There was a demo
of the game that was playable at some point that
you can still go find the footage on YouTube of it.
But eventually the studio behind it was taken off the project.
The project was put in limbo, and finally it was
given to the Chinese Room, which is the studio that
worked on a number of horror games. Still Wakes the
Deep and things like that that you might know of
not really done what I would say are RPG's action
RPGs in the past.
Speaker 2: Not In fact, you might say they've done the hard
opposite of that, dear Esther and was that everybody's gone
to the rapture.
Speaker 4: Definitely have narrative chops not quite as experienced, at least
in their published work when it comes to more action
of all stuff. And I mean, I'll be the first
one to tell you that the worst part of Bloodlines
one was the combat. It's bad not what you show
up to that game for. It's a means to an
end in that game. And with Bloodlines too, my feeling
has largely been that is that I think the story
is interesting. I don't know that it has hooked me
the way that Bloodlines one hooked me at this point,
I will say, at this time of playing, we will
have a review up. By the time that this review
is out. Charles is writing that review and has put
more full, complete thoughts. I've put about probably somewhere in
the vicinity of seven hours or so into the game
at this point personally, and I think the thing that
has struck me the most is just that it's definitely
doing vampire things, and it knows what the vampire appeal
is in this specific mythology, in the ways it talks
about how the vampire society works, in the ways that
it leans into a lot of the stuff that I
think even broadly of vampire you know, just fiction will enjoy.
You know, Vampire the Masquerade is all about the masquerade.
It's about the idea of what does it mean for
vampires to live amongst people? And they have to maintain
the masquerade yea. And so in this game, the first
section you're in, you're an elder vampire that's awaking from torpoor,
which is kind of a long sleep, and you break
the masquerade because you are basically blood starved and there's
a bunch of cops that are all kind of flooding
into this building and you just kind of gotta go
nuts on all of them. And so that is considered
a break of the masquerade because pretty soon, you know,
work gets out, newspapers get onto they're like.
Speaker 1: Oh this supernatural killing.
Speaker 2: People were torn apart.
Speaker 1: In this building.
Speaker 4: It's like that's a break of the maskerade. People are
going to get suspicious, and so you kind of get
locked into all this while you also have what I'm
going to call is basically a Johnny Silverhands in your head.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The Yeah, you have a the disembodied voice of a
Malcavean vampire in your head kind of talking to you
throughout the game. And the way that if you played cyberpunk,
you had Johnny Silverhand, or you played Batman Arkham. Was
it night where Joker was following you everywhere?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the same thing.
Speaker 4: And so your your vampire fire is an elder vampire
and you're kind of trying to figure out what's going
on while you're also trying to figure out why there's
this dude embedded in your brain. And they use that,
and especially the Malcavian aspect. Malcavian vampires have kind of weird,
surreal but like ability to tell the future and see
through truth and kind of do that, but they're also
kind of spacey and weird and say weird things all
the time. They play with that a lot to do
some really cool storytelling things. And the vampire politics are
pretty good too. I like vampire politics. I think it's
really fun when you get into the stuff of there's
the kind of hierarchy of vampire rulers, the camarilla who
enforce the Masquerade, who are kind of the established power,
the old money of the vampire world. And then you
have the anarchs, who are kind of the new bloods
who want to support thin bloods who are kind of
weaker vampires. Of a newer generation that aren't considered as
strong as older vampires are, even older vampires like you
are as an elder, and it's a lot of really
interesting parallels to class, to society, to all that kind
of stuff that vampire can really dig into and have
some fun with. I think when this game is doing that,
it's doing really cool stuff with it. My problem is
just not doing enough of it, and a lot of
it gets bogged down in kind of you need to
go here because that's where the combat set pieces, and
that's where the cool thing is, and you have this big,
open world, but it's not fun to move around in,
especially because they give you a lot of movement tools,
but a lot of the movement tools you can't use
because if people see you flying and leaping up buildings,
that's a break of the masquerade, and so you have
to be a little bit sneaky about it. But even
the ways that you kind of would lure somebody over
to feed on them, to refill your blood gage, to
use more of your meters and more of your abilities,
and things like that aren't very well explained to you
and aren't really intuitive in the ways that you would
use them. And so what it ends up feeling is
like I'm going from combat arena to combat arena in
this open world city and then occasionally getting cut scenes where.
Speaker 1: I'm making.
Speaker 4: Somewhat interesting narrative choices. I know that one thing that
Charles said to me was he did not feel like
it was immediately clear that he was making a lot
of choices that actually had an impact on the story.
He and I are playing two very different characters. He's
going more of the I don't care an arc route.
I've been playing more of the Camarilla route, and I
will say I've had the exact same experience. So take
with that what you will. But uh, I've I think
there is there's enough here that it does scratch a
certain itch for me in terms of just enjoying the
vampire world. But I also think it is abundantly clear
that this is a game that was made from the
bones of other games, that was made from the attempts
to It's very clear in the same way that when
I played Vailguard, I was like, you can tell in
some ways that this game's been in development for a
very long time. There's just kind of lingering aspects of
it that feel like, this doesn't make total sense for
what they're doing right now, but it would have made
sense that the game was slightly different. There's kind of
that here where you have this really big open world
and all this cool stuff, but for a large portion
of the early section, the open world is just there
for you to run between waypoints in. There's not really
anything interesting happening in it. You can find occasionally some
people that you can feed on that will give you
bonus blood points that kind of go towards learning other
resonance skills.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, is it.
Speaker 2: Closer to something like Mafia's open world where it's like
their open worlds have never been interesting that Yeah, it's
been about like no, just just get to the next mission.
It's just background dressing.
Speaker 3: Really.
Speaker 4: I would absolutely draw comparisons to Mafay the Old Country,
which I played some of earlier this year and felt
the same way, where there's an open world here, but
I don't necessarily know that it adds anything to the
experience right exact. Yeah, it suddenly makes me question like,
is would this just function better as a linear game,
as a more directed game, or even just not bothering
with throwing me out into the open world and then
putting me back in, and a lot of the open
world stuff ends up being So you choose a clan,
which also feels weird because they kind of acknowledge that
you're an elder vampire and that means that you have
a lot of different powers. Usually your clan would determine
what kind of powers you have the same way that
a class would determine them in a D and D
campaign or something like that. Here you choose kind of
what clan you've been sired into, but also you can
kind of just learn the other ones as you absorb
blood resonance from feeding on the right people and then
spending them on that stuff, more or less.
Speaker 2: Just choosing your starter clan, but you're the other stuff anyway.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think some of the abilities are kind
of novel I chose. I wanted to pick something that
I don't normally do when I played Bloodlines. One my
favorite class to play is the tor Door because that's
just like your charisma class. That's your smooth talking narrative
class that loves to kind of talk their way out
of things. But you have a lot of other interesting
options there. If you do a no sfaratu, which is
literally your You look like the old movie monster vampires,
and so if you get seen by a normal person,
that's a break of the massquarade can't be seen. And
there are no Sparatu in Blood Lines two, but you
can't play as a no Saratu. There are Malcavian characters,
and one of the things in Blood Lines one was
you could play as a Malcavian and you would get hallucinations,
and you would hear voices and you get weird dialogue
choices that would kind of hint an almost fourth wall
break at various times. There are Malcavian characters in Blood
Lines two. You play as a Malcavian character in very
specific story segments, but you can't be a Malcavian in
that moment. All of the choices that you make around
your clans seem like they just funnel you into what
kind of combat you want to play. And I think
that's the biggest miss for me, is that the appeal
of Blood Lines one was, Yes, you can choose to
be a Bruha and you can play through that game
as just a ripper of just like tearing people apart
with your claws and.
Speaker 1: Things like that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, or you can choose to be you know, a
Malcavian and like a very different narrative experience and then
have like difficulty added because now you're going to have
less combat tools, fewer combat tools to work with. Everything
in this game feels very based around the combat and
you are going to fight and you're going to have to.
It reminds me almost of when dis X Human Revolution
came out and a lot of people had critiques around
you know, you could do cool stuff with a lot
of the narrative in that game, but ultimately you're going
to get siloed into fighting in certain areas no matter what. Right,
same thing here, only you're not really getting any of
the narrative anyways, because outside of a few times when
the game kind of acknowledged that, oh you're you're a Tremere.
I played a Tremare in Bloodlines Too, which is like
a blood sorcerer kind of. There's one character who's like, oh,
that's why you're stinky, because like the stereotype around the
Tremare is that they just love to be around blood
and they read their books all the time. They don't
really care for themselves hygienically, and that was about it.
It's about all I've had so far in terms of
recognition of my clan in the first seven hours or so. Yeah, yeah,
I got called stinky, But.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: It just it bums me out because I think when
I think back to Bloodlines one again, one of the
big things in that game is is it gives you
a lot of almost imsign type elements. I think, as
much as it is a CRPG, it also has a
lot to share in common with games like dis X,
where you have multiple ways of kind of approaching different encounters,
of handling them in different ways of stealthing or talking
or doing combat. And here the play space feels much
more narrow, much more head towards the combat. I don't
think the combats all that interesting either. I think the
perry system doesn't feel great. I think a lot of
the combat abilities don't feel great for some reason. You
don't you don't pick up guns, so you don't have weapons.
Speaker 2: At all that you'll have the franchise.
Speaker 4: In Vampire blood Lines one, you could absolutely pick up
weapons and you know, keep a keep a few things
on you for for when things got messy, and usually
in that case you would also use your clause because
a vampire's claws are usually going to be more powerful
than most other stuff you have in that game. Sure,
but it is still acknowledged. And even in Bloodlines too,
they acknowledge. You know, there's a section where Fire wakes
up and is talking to some vampires, is like, hey, like,
what's different in this time right now? And one of
the characters says, guns are pretty powerful right now, like you,
they've they've gotten a lot stronger in the hundred years
that you've been asleep. You know, they're not muskets anymore.
You might want to be afraid of them a little
bit because one of the ways to actually kill a
vampire in the Vampire series is to take their head off,
And boy, howdy are there shotguns and things like that
in this game that can absolutely do that, and so
so it's weird to acknowledge that. But then what Fire
has is basically a telekinesis that lets you grab something
and it's kind of your way of picking things up,
so you can throw bottles and bricks to distract people,
instell sections, or you can just hit them with it,
or you can like telekinesis a gun, and then Fire
will like point it and shoot it with his telekinesis like,
what if Jean Gray fired a pistol by just thinking
about doing it right, like that.
Speaker 3: Sort of thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that feels like a very strange decision in
this moment, And I guess the idea was that they
want you to be kind of in the moment and
finding characters and not relying on just oh, I'm playing
a shooter. But guns still end up being a very
crucial part of big combat arenas where you're dealing with
a lot of enemies that are all swarming you at
the same time. You might not be a combat class.
It's built for that, so you might need to be
knocking people's weapons out of their hands, picking them up
and firing them back at them and stuff like that.
As a tremeer, I was having to do that a
lot because my other move was just curse somebody with
a blood curse. That makes it so once they you
have to like kind of concentrate and kind of your
casting magic on them, and then once it's casted, the
next thing they get hit by will just kind of
make them explode in a blood explosion and deal damage
to everybody else around them. So I would kind of
curse somebody from the stealth from the Shadows and throw
a brick at them, and then they blow up and
kill a bunch of people, and then I'd go in
and sweep up and take out everybody left. But a
lot of times that meant I needed guns, I needed pipes,
I needed weapons that I could use to kind of
fight people, and it never really felt that great to do.
So yeah, Bloodlines too. I think it's another case of
this game was about as good as it could have
wound up being. And I have a lot of sympathy
for the people who worked on it for years and
got laid off. I have a lot of people a
lot sympathy for the people who had to pick up
a project that had been in development for so long
and see it across the finish line. But I think
it wears a lot of its long development on its
sleeve in that way, and I'm hopeful that it picks
up a little bit more steam. I do think the
way in which you could salvage itself for me would
be if the story gets more interesting, if the characters
get more I do find the characters very interesting. I
think their vision of Seattle as a vampire town is
very compelling. I think a lot of the characters that
they've installed, there's a new princes, there's a fight for power,
a clear divide between what the thin Bloods wants and
them wanting to see Seattle as kind of a refuge
city for thin bloods, where other cities will not acknowledge
thin bloods or will oftentimes hunt them down and kill
them because they see them as weaker vampires. And I
find that tension very interesting. I find the politics of
this game very interesting. But I think that's kind of
going to have to be the saving grace because I
don't know that the combat or anything like that is
really going to do anything for me in this game.
Speaker 1: Mhmm, damn, that's a bummer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you think else like what it see it through
the credits.
Speaker 4: But I probably will. I probably will. I've seen a
lot of Vampire games through just because I do like
this world so much. I think if you're listening to
this and any of that sounded appealing, maybe worth checking out.
I mean, I will tell you that Vampire the Mass Grade,
but Lens one is still one of my favorite games
of all time. I was actually replaying it ahead of
this game coming out. And it it stands the test
of time. It's very, very good. And there was the
I think fairly underrated Vampire the Mass Grade Swan Song
that came out a while ago.
Speaker 1: Yeah or something.
Speaker 2: Yea Ryan really liked that one.
Speaker 4: He reviewed that it's a very I don't know that.
I think it also has its own problems, but I
think it was a very interesting take on the vampire
world and did some really cool things in that realm,
especially if you have often missed the sort of telltale
style of games or that sort of adventure game set up.
It does some really cool things in that respect. So, yeah,
I've been sitting on that game. I have it on
thick Steam or the Epic store.
Speaker 2: Cool. Yeah, that's a bummer. I was looking forward to
playing as to someone that like, this is gonna be
sort of like my gateway into Vampire to Mask Greade.
Like I've never played the tabletop game or the original game.
There was a point where and it might still happen.
We even thought about playing the first game as like
a super replay, which could still happen. It's eric gets
you to do that, who knows, But yeah, I just
I like the the things that people complain about with
this game in terms of the action, it was like
for me, as someone that I had no attachment to it,
I was like, oh, it kind of looks like a
little bit like dishonor. That's that seems cool. I like Dishonored.
I don't know, that does sound like it's exactly accurate,
especially like immersive SIMP stuff like I'm sure it's not that,
but just like it tickled that part of my brain
of like, maybe this will be for me as someone
that is not precious to this, to this series, but
here in the combat is not great. It's actually that's
a really big bummer.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I think this is not This is not
a Dishonored Tier M sim. This is not a like
you know, I'm trying to be vague here, But other
stuff I have played so far this year has done
more for me in sort of the realm of narrative
choices and narrative decision making and character crafting that I think,
I just don't know. It's it's it's kind of a bummer,
but it is what is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, taking a wild turn here from from bloodlines
to different kind of blood line. The front Line Battlefield six,
which I've been playing.
Speaker 2: Quite everyone related on the front line.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, it's like the family civil war situation. A
lot of a lot of unbred stuff happening, you know,
a lot of a lot of family family ties on
the on the battlefield, you know, fighting your brother in arms. Yeah,
you know, it goes, you know, it goes. I've been
playing Battlefield six and really really enjoying it. If you're
looking for single player impressions, I have none. Okay, you
can skip this part of the video.
Speaker 2: That's like the main thing in this game, isn't that
what the series is all about? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, everyone loves Battlefield. It's known for its single player campaigns.
Nobody pays an interest to the multiplayer, so uh no.
But if you're looking for single player impressions, go read
our review written by Jake we saw. He did a
great job talking about it. It sounded like it was
kind of like, eh, yeah, not much stake in what's
happening in that single player. But no, I've been playing
the multiplayer. Uh and you know, I've kind of been
been on the Battlefield beat a bit in the lead
up in terms of you know, we went to several
preview events that kind of thing, and you know, had
a good look at what that what was on offer,
you know, at launch ahead of time, and going into it.
Really enjoyed what I saw on the preview builds and
all that kind of stuff, and that that enjoyment has
continued into the final release. I've really really enjoyed getting
back into just the the loop of you know, grinding
out levels on my character and getting new attachments on
my weapons and really kind of customizing that getting into
the settings. And I've been finding a lot of guides
on TikTok of all places for like, I play a
lot of sniper. I play sniper a lot in battlefield
games specifically. I think it's called recon in this one,
but typically with snipers and battlefield you really have to like,
you know, take into account your bullet drop and all
that kind of stuff and your fire rate, and that
can be a challenge for some players. It's always a challenge.
I've really liked figuring out in a battlefield game, you know,
getting to know your scope and like the range on
it and worry how far up you need to kind
of like aim to hit your shots right. To think
about bullet This.
Speaker 4: Is his way of saying that he misses a lot
of his shots.
Speaker 1: Now this is my way of saying I broke the system.
Well somebody else did h and I am Now I
follow this TikTok guide where essentially, if you attach a
range finder onto your sniper rifle, you can then go
into your key bindings. And I was showing this eric
this earlier, and you can set essentially you can set
it number one. So when you press right click on
your mouse, which is look down sites right looking into
your scope, you can also have that be steady aim
like hold your breath. And so by default, now when
I click the right the right mouse button, not only
am I zooming in, but my characters automatically holding his breath.
So I've got the study is shot possible, which it's
not a big deal. Normally you can just hit shift
and you know you can do it yourself, but it's
nice to kind of have it right when you ain't
down your sites, it's ready. In the same way I
have bound the rangefinder the zeroing like zero in your
scope and your sniper, which essentially I've bound that to
the left click. So the order of operations is when
you right click you scope in, you're holding your breath,
you left click. The order of operations is that it
zero's your sniper first and then you shoot the bullet.
And so I'm expecting this to be taken out of
the game very soon because as it stands right now,
you can pretty much be at any range and if
you have your key mindset like this, if you have
your weapon the radical pointed on a person, no matter
how far away they are in the game, you will
hit them. And boy is it fun. Just like real life.
Oh yeah, just like real life.
Speaker 2: You know remember when.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's.
Speaker 4: I think the Geneva devs worked on that one a
little bit, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, getting triple quadruple kills with a sniper in your
hand feels amazing. Uh and and and it feels like
everybody has the tech to do it. It's not like
a exploit, like anybody can go and do this. So
it's fun. That makes it okay. It's definitely not going
to stay in the game. I can almost assure you
they're going.
Speaker 2: It wasnt you just called it out for everyone.
Speaker 1: Well I got it from a youth, Yeah that's me.
Speaker 4: But in general, going to catch the heat for it,
not not the TikTok creators. Yeah, learn this lesson the
hard way.
Speaker 1: It is what it is, you know. But I man,
I'm really enjoying Battlefield. It's it's taken me back to
battle Bit when Eric and I played that, when that
just came out. Yeah, and battle Bit was just, you know,
it was came out in a time where the Battlefield
series was hurting, and you know, it just there's such
a fun, sticky, unique feeling to Battlefield that other series
just don't can't replicate or haven't, and battle Bit was
the closest thing, and battle Bit did a great job.
But to have the real thing with all the features
and the polish and the backing of like seven studios
behind it and a one Mega studio, which is problematic
in other ways, but for the sake of getting a
good Battlefield game, I think I think it has paid
off for them. I'm really enjoying the maps. There are
some levels I don't love, like I kind of prefer
the bigger ones where you have all the vehicles in play,
but there's a fair amount of modes that you can
choose from, and each of them are, you know, pretty fun.
I think the Escalation is the new mode where Jay
called it out in our reviews and I think I
might have talked about it in this show previously. But
sort of like you know, you start with five or
six points and you're slowly the map is slowly kind
of closing out as like as the longer you hold
like a zone, eventually it just becomes your territory, and
so the amount of points on the map you're fighting
over gets shorter and shorter and thus get more intense.
Every area gets more intense because it's getting more focus.
And that's a really fun way to play. But I mean,
just getting in there and playing Breakthrough is really my
preferred way to play, like attack and defend, and yeah,
I'm you know, that's what I want to play tonight.
I just want to get out of battlefield after work
and grind some grind some attachments on my weapons, and
you know, have fun with friends, get on some voice chat,
and just get up to shenanigans.
Speaker 4: The shenanigans happen pretty fun. As someone who has been
on that voice chat, I mean when we were playing
the other day during our Cuff Bust stream, yeah it
was I was reminded of what one of the greatest
joys in gaming is which is the first time you
boot up a battlefield, and it doesn't have to be
your first time play battlefield just has to have been
a while. But the first time you get in a
helicopter and you have to attempt to fly the helicopter,
I don't think I've laughed that hard in a long time.
Our good friend Jesse Vittelli was flying the helicopter and
I was on one of the side gunner positions, and
at multiple points we were on solid ninety degree angles,
wedged between buildings and flinging around and just all the
alarms going off and then being like, don't worry, we're fine,
we're fine, and the rotors chopped through fuselage and things
like that. I love Battlefield when it's doing that. I
think it's one of the funniest games that is not
supposed to be funny out there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it.
Speaker 4: I think those games are incredible at player interaction when
you get down to that, in the ways that silly
player interactions can play out, and if anything, I wish
they leaned into that more. I'm somebody who really loved
I would play a battlefield too a lot. In Battlefield
nineteen forty two, back when that came out, and I
loved those games because they would often have those kind
of strategic emplacements. But I would sneak to the back
of the enemy lines and plant C four on their jets,
and then I would wait, and then somebody would hop
in the jet and start to take off, and I'd
wait for them to just get off the runway like wheels,
just starting the lift into the air, and then boop
and watch it explode and be like got em. And
then I'd wait for the next jet to respawn. I'd
do it all over again. It was good stuff. I
haven't really found ways to do that kind of chaos
in Battlefield six yet, but it does just have some
good chaos. I wish the maps were a little bit more.
I don't know, individual that makes sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of.
Speaker 4: The maps outside of the New York map, even the
New York map at times feels a little samy because
of the level destruction. At some point, all the buildings
just start falling to pieces, and they kind of just
maps start to feel very samey as they all turn
to rubble, and I wish they had a little bit
more personality to some of the points that you're holding.
They tend to fall within kind of the usual suspects
of what you would expect from that sort of stuff.
I wish there was a little bit more dynamism in
that regard. I think that's my only major critique of
the multiplayer so far.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would agree with you. I think that's my
major critique as well, But it's not really necessarily hindering
my enjoyment most of the time. It's it's something I
would like to see them addressed in future map updates,
like as they bring out new seasons and that kind
of thing. With this game, I'd like to see some
more personality in those maps for sure. If Wake Island
ain't in that game right now, you know Wake Island
is going to be in that game itself. Oh, there's
there's no way they're not going to put a Wake
Island in there. So yeah, but they need they would
need boats.
Speaker 4: They do need boats boats.
Speaker 1: There are no boats in the game right now. Yeah,
there are no boats, but I must Wake Yeah exactly,
I need them to add that for sure. But I
really want to see Yeah, you can absolutely nobody's ever
crashed the boat boat.
Speaker 4: A boat has never crashed before. Yeah, there's no icebergs
in this game, so we're fine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I do. Oh, you had said something that triggered
something in my brain.
Speaker 2: It's about boatsm Titanic.
Speaker 1: No, No, it was about battlefield. But that's okay.
Speaker 4: I don't know Wake Island boats. I have no boats,
but I must Wake. Yeah, that was all good stuff.
I don't know where I like that the Wake Island had.
I think it was the nineteen forty two one had
the aircraft carriers. So you did the aircraft carrier take
off because people, yeah, so bad at aircraft carrier takeoffs,
and it's it's hard, that's a short runway, and if
you've got to refuel that thing, good luck. Like, honestly,
you're just crashing the plane and respawning it at that.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I don't know anybody. I've never seen somebody
actually the plane. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think in modern battlefields you don't have any
sort of need to refuel or restock or anything like that.
I was driving one of the anti air tanks because
I'm a nerd that likes to operate the anti air vehicles,
the big radar dishes and stuff, and I was noticing.
I was like, oh, normally I would be like I
need to be an engineer so I can repair and
restock and things like that, And I was like, Oh,
I don't need to. It just kind of like auto restocks.
Speaker 1: There is a pass Yeah, there's a passive for engineers
that if you're in vehicles automatically yeah. Yeah, but you
don't have to worry about refueling. Yeah, which i'd like
to see, you know them kind of tinker with that
kind of McCain.
Speaker 4: Supply lines in battlefield, you know what I'm saying. Yeah,
I do like running some tank shells to the front
line to restock the abrams and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: That'd be kind of fun. That sounds like the kind
of shenanigans you get up to. And what is that game?
Oh god, I played it for a little I played
it for very little. Hell what loose? Oh yeah yeah, yeah,
they've got some of that kind of stuff in there
a little bit.
Speaker 4: That's that's because it was old timey war. Now we've
invented ways of not having.
Speaker 3: To do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: It's like when mass effect Mass Effect one came out
and they're like, we just don't have clips anymore because
we invented guns with infinite bullets.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly what we needed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's we all needed that.
Speaker 4: Finally we wiped out bullet scarcity.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's about all I got to say about Battlefield.
I just want to be playing it. You know. It's
it's it's scratching the itch. It's not doing anything wild.
It's very straight forward, but it's it's hitting the spot.
Speaker 2: Seems like it's like a good back to basics almost
from what I like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would say sat Battlefield kind of yeah, yeah,
it kind of needed to be. H it feels it
feels like a foundation for something bigger. Oh, I remember
what I was gonna say. Uh, I'm very curious to
see how Portal evolves, which is their UGC platform for
people making maps and modes and yeah, that kind of thing.
I would like to see what emerges from that. I've
thought about tinkering that with my tinkering with that myself,
because I messed with it in twenty forty two a bit,
and I know they've kind of upgraded what you can
do with it a fair amount. So I want to
get in there and tinker with that and see what
see what's what.
Speaker 4: I don't know that I would think of Battlefield as
the kind of space that you would have incredible room
for for verbiage to evolve in a in a UGC environment,
Because when I think of UGC within a game like this,
I think of Halo and how you really cool stuff
came out of people being given the tools to just
make whatever they wanted to in Halo. But I don't
know that all of the mechanics of Battlefield would lend
themselves well to that. But also, like I don't know,
prove me wrong. I like, go out there and do
something cool with it, even if it's just we made
only up but you're playing as a bunch of random
Army soldier.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, honestly, I would like to see just
like maps, you know, user creative maps, see what comes
out of that. But yeah, and I think right now
it's mostly I've just seen modes. Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know if there's an actual level editor. I
think there is, you have to. I don't know how
they've got it all working. It's kind of separate in
a weird way, like you can log into the browser. Yeah,
I know, it's edible maps, not edible maps, editable maps.
I loved one custom logic, and like you can mess
with the AI stuff too, So I want to dive
in because I used to be big into Forge and
I like at least dabbling with these things when they
come out. But but yeah, I'm gonna toss it over
to you, Marcus. You've been playing a game called by
Sweet Carol? Is that right?
Speaker 2: Yep?
Speaker 1: I don't know anything about this game, so please enlighten me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this game caught my eye God, probably like a
year ago with a trailer. To thing about this game
if you've never heard of it is the art direction,
which it's very evocative of classic Disney's or specifically like
maybe like old animated movies, but like I think Disney
is probably where your mind's gonna go, especially in particular
like the work of Don Bluth, like his era of
Disney and his films. It's not like a one to one,
but it's like the closest comparison. And it's also like like,
despite looking like a whimsical Disney movie, it's a bit
of a horror game where you control a sort of
almost like prototypical Disney princess esque character who is an
orphan at this sort of like all Girls' School it's
set in England in the early nineteen hundreds, and it's
the school's called Bunny Hall, and it's this girl that's
kind of like looking for her friend Carol. Like the
girl's name is Lana, and her friend Carol has gone missing.
She doesn't know why. They're like best friends, and everyone
at the school is pretty horrible to Lana, Like there's
like sort of like the mean girl group there that
kind of bullies her all the time, and then her
like I don't know if she's like the head mistress
or one of her teachers is kind of mean to
her too, and everyone's just kind of like out against
her just for being like different and weird and not
like a proper lady. So the game itself, it's it's
basically an old school point and click adventure combined with
like a little bit of a platformer, but it's got
the like it's got the point and clicks kind of vibes,
Like you're exploring these environments, you're picking up items you
got like an inventory, and you're just trying to pretty
much complete like a complicated order of operations to get
out of like a of a room or to escape something.
So there's there's like stealth involved. There's a bit of
like hide and seek stuff where you're like hiding from
characters and you have like like you can hold your
breath kind of like an amnesia thing to make sure
that uh, creatures don't find you. Like it's it's like
a mix of a of a couple of different genres.
And I think so far, like I'm on the fourth
chapter right now, so like a few hours in. I'm
enjoying it just because I love the presentation and I
just like the like it's got like a soundtrack that's
evocative of old Disney movies, like kind of like swelling,
and it's like inspiring. But then you kind of get to
the kind of more subversive stuff of like, oh, there's
like a creepy owl here with like glowing red eyes,
and oh, I'm being chased by like a a weird
bunny creature that looks like it used to be a teacher.
But it's like now this like horrifying rabbit that's chasing
me with a giant like meat tender rising mallet, and
I have to hide from it as I'm trying to
solve a bunch of puzzles around this thing like it's
it's pretty it's been pretty enjoyable, if not just a
little like you know, like kind of buy the numbers
like adventure game stuff. You know, you read like a diary.
It's like, oh, okay, you need to find a key.
Oh there's a lot dealer here, or here, I need
to divert electricity to activate this machine to grind up
some meat to then do this. Like it's like a
lot of like you know, kind of seeing the solution
and and working backwards in the way that a lot
of adventure games are. I think my biggest problem with
the game so far is that it's a bit janky,
at least on PS five, which is where I'm playing it.
It's on I think, like mostly everything I know. It's
on BC and Xbox. It might be on Switch, I'm
not sure, but there's a bit of a there's a
hitchiness to some of the animations because you can like
do some like light like I say, a lot of
light platforming and jumping around and like climbing stuff, and
there's a I don't know if it's something maybe with
the animation or if it's like I don't know, but
there's like a little bit of like a almost like
a tech demo feel to some of the interactions, or
it's like, ooh, it feels like this could have been
a little bit more polished to make this a little
less like a little less rough. Yeah, like and even
some of the like voice acting and like the like
the lip sync is is pretty off with certain characters
like I. The other big thing that I unlocked recently
is that you get the ability pretty early on to
turn into a rabbit, so you could transform into a
rabbit at will, and that opens up new gameplay where
you're kind of the rabbits faster and you can kind
of like crawl into areas that Lana has a grown
or I guess like a regular sized person can't access.
It could be good for running away from things. The
rabbit smaller, but the rabbit's also more vulnerable can't take
as many hits as as Lana. I also interacted with
another character that you kind of switch between, who is
a guy. He's like a weird looking like he's the
way he's drawn, he almost looks like he comes from
a different game because he has a little bit more
of the like kind of like early kind of like
tube animation look to him, like if you like think
of Cuphead a little bit as a modern example, Like
he's like the only thing in the game that kind
of looks like him, and I'm wondering what that's all about.
But there's like a segment where you're switching roll between
Lana and this guy who you're controlling his head and
nothing else because it's been separated from his body. This
game's weird, guys. I don't know if that was evident.
There's a lot of weird stuff in this game. But yeah,
so far it's been it's been fine, Like it hasn't
like blown me away once you kind of settle into
sort of like the novelty of the presentation. But there
is a story that is The story being told so
far is interesting, Like it seems like there's like a
bit of a like Lana brushing up against this alternate
sort of like reality that has all these fantastical creatures
are kind of bleeding into the sort of like mundane
world that she occupies, and that she seems like there's
season like she might have a bigger destiny than she's
aware of, and she's trying to, like I said, just
find her friend Carol. But it seems to be a
conspiracy around her, like maybe some maybe the school staff
maybe knows more than they're letting on. And there's and
there's a lot of like the sort of like the
rabbit motif that keeps appearing between like the bunny monster
and the name of the school and Lana turning into
a rabbit. It seems like there's something like a larger
lore with like rabbits that they like where I stop,
they kind of like open the door a little bit
more on that. I'm kind of interesting to see where
it goes.
Speaker 1: Cool. It certainly grabs me, like visually it's but I
don't know, like the horror side of it seems.
Speaker 2: I will say the horror is okay. I say this
as like I love horror. Somebody tolerance for horror is
pretty high, Like I can, I can endure a lot
of really scary stuff. This has been very mild, like
very very mild. Like it's been more like ooh, like
almost like Halloween spooky.
Speaker 1: This is a whimsical horror.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you're like, oh, that owl looks a little creepy.
Speaker 4: What little I've seen of it kind of reminds me
of clock Tower in that way. Like it gives me
some clock Tower vibe, maybe not wholly in gameplay, but
just in the sort of esthetic and vibe it's going
for somewhere in the realm of like clock Tower meets
Alice in Wonderland type vibes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like I could see that. Like it's there's like
a few like mild jump scares here, and Narrator's only
been one like jump scared that like really got me
because it was so unexpected. But I think if you're
like if you're in this game because you think it
looks cool in the art direction and you like sort
of like classic adventure styles, but the horror is the barrier.
So far, at least from what I've played, I think
it's been more than manageable, and I think sort of
like there's like plenty of levity between the sort of
like more overtly scary stuff that kind of bounces it
out gives you a nice break from it. So yeah,
I again, I can't speak for the rest of the game.
Maybe it goes off the rails and becomes like terrifying
later on, but I've actually been sort of surprised. I
felt like a lot of the trailers were leading into
the sort of the the thing of like, oh, it's
like a Disney movie, but it's terrifying, and it's like
it's not really so far.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's fair. Yeah, well cool. That was by Sweet
Carol in case you missed it. And to round out
the show, I'm gonna toss it over to Eric. I
want to hear your your very very early impressions of
Pokemon Legends Z to A. I've got my copy right here,
which okay, I want to I'm gonna say something real quick.
Number one, Nintendo, what are we doing with this box?
Speaker 2: Number paragraph? They did? They put it back on the front.
Speaker 4: There.
Speaker 1: Yes, there's a back of the box quote that says
includes the Nintendo Switch game and Nintendo Switch To Edition
Upgrade Upgrade Pack. Upgrade Pack also available separately. For details
visit and then it's other languages, and then the support page.
There's a QR code. Please the love of God. Just
like you've already got so much text on the back,
just add some more texts. Okay, Alex, the thing I'm
curious about, can you turn it back around to the front.
I'm not sure how I'm supposed to know that this
is the Nintendo Switch To version of the video game,
right what the red bar and the text underneath the
logo and then the giant block of text at the
bottom of of Oh don't worry, Oh okay, thank god.
Speaker 2: It Also, it's gonna be found the switch to section
of whatever story you get it from.
Speaker 4: I'm only being a little facetious because I know that
there's still going to be people that are like I
accidentally bought the Nintendo Switch one version of those games.
Speaker 2: They get what they deserve.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but also I don't know, like Nintendo, you can
leave the dumb people behind a little bit, okay.
Speaker 2: Like has never done that. They are like have you
seen their games?
Speaker 1: Yeah, listen, let's let's raise the bar a little bit, Nintendo.
You know, let's expect a little more from our players.
And also, why is Pokemon the Pokemon Legends logo is
blurry if you get close. That is not my camera.
That is like there is just an inherent blur. It's
a little like not It's way easier to see in
person when you hold it up, like, you know, five
six inches from your face. It looks like they took
the logo and like upscaled it in photoshop. It doesn't
it looks like a rastered image.
Speaker 2: It's a artistic choice. It's the blur for how fast
you're going to be open to camera.
Speaker 1: Showed it off.
Speaker 4: You can tell even here that it's like not quite
as sharp as you would expect that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what's going on? Man? It feels like I'm curious,
we're gonna find it.
Speaker 2: I hope that's not I hope that's not an omen
for like the graphical fidelity.
Speaker 1: Hold on, let me see, is there like a clean
version on the back.
Speaker 2: Ax, he's taking the oh Alex for audio listeners. Alex
just took the box art out of the box, and
I guess the inner art is a math. That's cool.
Speaker 1: Well, I was hoping the switch to cartridge. Yeah, I
was hoping there was like a clean version of this
without all the dumb text on the front cover.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what it was.
Speaker 4: E ten plus. Does the the fantasy violence really put
it over?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 2: Someone dies this?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 4: They gave they gave Pikachu a gun. It's crazy. Isn't
shoot it? But he does wield it?
Speaker 1: Agree? I mean the end of Scarby is kind of dark,
you know, like, yeah, maybe they're maybe they're ratching it
up in this one, But yeah, I'm just kind of
disappointed and in the production quality of the physical version
of this thing.
Speaker 4: This is probably like the thing that I say that
gets me the most heat, So I'll just say it.
I've been a digital buyer of games for a while now,
and so that doesn't really bother me because I just
know I did this thing last night at like eleven
and it was golden.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's fair. I go back and forth for the
Pokemon games. I like to get them physical, and I
only do it for Nintendo. I don't all everything else
is digital, Yeah, but I try to get their first. Yeah.
Speaker 4: A lot of the Switch games I have are the
ones that were like very low print, so like I
have like House and Fota Morgana and things like that,
like very date, they weren't going to have a big
run anyways, Pokemon Legends.
Speaker 1: Tell me, tell me what this game is like that
I haven't played yet.
Speaker 4: So we we will have coverage coming of this in
a more robust format.
Speaker 1: Brian.
Speaker 4: She is currently locked in the review chamber with with
no sunlight or no very.
Speaker 2: We said we're not letting him out until he catches.
Speaker 4: Them all exactly exactly. He's he's going to catch them
all or he's going to stay in there trying.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 4: So he's working on that for us. I did boot
this up last night and play about say, like an
hour hour and a half of zaw my early takeaways.
I feel like I got a sense of this when
I was you know, we did the NGT a while ago,
and then we also there have been previews and stuff
like that. It is really interesting the way that they
have kind of reinvented Pokemon combat in this game, because
I think I had noticed before that it seemed a
little bit different than what you would normally expect from Pokemon,
while still maintaining a lot of the core tenants of
what Pokemon combat is. But then when I was actually
playing it, I thought it was a little bit interesting
the way it played out. Basically, you are running around
on the map and I'm not outside of what looks
like the mega fights where you're dodge rolling around big
attacks and things like that. I'm not really sure what
the idea is behind letting you just do the Dark
Souls dodge roll all the time, but you can. But
the more interesting thing is that you kind of issue
these commands to your Pokemon to use different moves, and
those moves have individual cool downtimers that were I mean
a lot of Zeno blade uh. And so there is
I what I what I think I like about it
is that encourages you to use those status moves a
little bit more because it means that you're kind of
getting this interesting DPS rotation in that feels almost mmoi
compared to say Pokemon, where you're kind of going my turn,
your turn, my turn, your turn. Now there's a little
bit more incentive to say, well, I'm going to use
tail or a leer and then I'm going to follow
it up with some attacks and and I'm kind of
doing things on cool downs, and it incentivizes that play
style a little bit more. Also makes battles a little
bit faster, I feel, because you do, I mean, things
died faster. You know, Pokemon are kind of out in
the open world. It's a little bit easier to just
kind of like beef with them real quick and then
and yeah, settle it.
Speaker 1: I'm curious on that on that front. And Scarby, there
was that ability where you kind of throw your Pokemon
out they would just go fight stuff. The fast battle.
Speaker 4: Yeah, is that in this game no, well kind if so.
The way it works now is you basically just have
a Pokemon out like you.
Speaker 1: Have your your Did you play Arsius at all? Yeah?
Is it similar to that?
Speaker 4: It's pretty similar to Arsius in that way. There's also
kind of the free range Pokemon catching where you throw
the ball and you can kind of aim it and
things like that and sneak up on them with crouch
attacks to get you know, stealth captures and things like that.
A lot of that has returned from Arsius. I think
that has really surprised me. I do think the world
of Lumios is delightful.
Speaker 1: I love it.
Speaker 4: I was actually it's really embarrassing of me. I was
taking a lot of screenshots of the hotel that you
go to stay in, because you go into this hotel
and there's just all these different chairs laid out with
a rug and some coffee tables and stuff like that.
I've been kind of in that zone because I've been
I just moved to a new apartment and I've been
kind of decorating and things like that. But I was
really kind of taken aback by how the Pokemon Company
and game free game Freaks specifically are really good at
just creating these lived in environments that feel like they're natural,
like people exist there.
Speaker 1: You know. You go into the.
Speaker 4: Hotel room and there's a little station where the cookies
and the water are that you kind of get whenever
you go to a hotel, and there's there's a night
stand that has a lamp and a phone next to it,
and a little outlet for people to plug in their
charging stuff, and there's kind of the little luggage racks
set out for you that your character puts their travel
bag on. And I know it's a really weird thing
to hone in on, but it played out. The more
I played this game, the more I was like, there's
a lot of just little touches throughout each area in
Lumios that makes it feel very you know, vibrant. As
as a landscape, I was worried that going to a
city would make every block kind of feel the same.
Yah you just have building by building by building, and
instead there's definitely a lot of storefronts and buildings that
just kind of exists as blocked in resting when you're
in the wild areas and things like that. But even
within there, you'll go buy a stall and somebody selling
some goods or something, and they'll kind of have it
laid out and it'll look like somebody actually like went
to a city and set up their stall, just like
you would see if you were in name a major
metropolitan area.
Speaker 1: So it's.
Speaker 4: I find that really surprisingly appealing out of all this.
The fashion, from what I've seen, is very very good
for people who like character customization. I think Pokemon when
they do that, they do that very well, and that's
really fun to see. And so far, Like I mean,
I'm not even close to being able to comment on
a story or anything like that, but I do like
the general setup of Lumios is kind of having these
nightly battle royales where people are competing in the streets
for points to become the best trainer in the city
and stuff like that. I said this on Blue Sky,
but I was like, you know, maybe having a walkable
city where everybody at night challenges each other and my
latest hyperfixation would fix me.
Speaker 1: I at that moment.
Speaker 4: Where I was like, it'd be pretty sick if I
lived in it. I live in a fairly walkable city now,
but like, if I lived in a walkable city and
then at night everybody just went out into the streets
and started, you know, doing magic the gathering Commander duels.
Speaker 1: That'd be kind of sick. I'd be pretty into that.
You should play the Pokemon Trading card game on game
Boy Color.
Speaker 4: It's hey, look, that's that's an all time goat right there.
Speaker 1: That's that's the best. I think that's like the most
slept on Pokemon game in my opinion. Absolutely.
Speaker 2: I know the Legends series is different than like the
I guess, the mainline Pokemon games, But are are you
still picking like a starter, like who is your first Pokemon?
Speaker 1: I went with Tepig. My my options were Tepeig, todad Isle,
and Chickorita. I don't particularly love any of those options,
if I'm being honest with you.
Speaker 2: It's way Why are two of them from the same
Jen and then tepegs from like the later Jens.
Speaker 4: That's weird, I think, if I remember right, the Fire
Pokemon of that one was that's the last and Sinda
Quill was in RCS as the fire option, So oh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. I will say Tota Dial is one of
my favorite characters in Pokemon, and so I will be
picking him. But I do want to say people hate
on Tepig and like his evolution line like m bore
and all that. I I'm a Tepic defender.
Speaker 2: I just want to say I think he's cute. I
don't know, I've never played his games, but he's like
a cool fire pig.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, I didn't.
Speaker 4: I didn't play his original gen, but I picked Tepig
just because I was like, I don't really love Tota Dial,
I don't love Chickorita. So because I went with Sindquill
in that gen.
Speaker 1: So did I.
Speaker 4: It's like I'll just I'll just It's like I'll just
go fire on this one. I tend to like the
fire starters a fair bit and Tepig. You want another
thing that this game nails is the animations, just little
little animation. So you picked Tepig and you have your
first battle on then Tepics like yeah and walks up
to you and you put your fist out to fist
bump it and it does like a little hop and
spin and like slaps your fist with its tail, and
then it's like ha ha, and I'm like yeah.
Speaker 1: Man, right or die?
Speaker 4: And so yeah, I think they nail that. One thing
that I will just say almost immediately apparent, and probably
what the largest complaint of this game is going to
end up being no voice acting is that the game
voice acting. No, but it's it's really become a problem
at this point, Like I can't sugarcoat it anymore. There
are entire cut scenes where people are talking, having conversations
like we are right now, and they're just mouthing. They're
just like pantomiming to like their subtitles at the bottom.
Speaker 2: Okay, so I do like the like, oh, okay.
Speaker 4: This is this is going to be bad audio for
people listening on the podcast. But they're basically like yeah,
it talking with their hands. It's yeah, and talking with
their hands. I'm exaggerating that, Like they're kind of just
saying things and then like like mouth movements and then
there's subtitles at the bottom.
Speaker 2: I'm why. The first thing that came to mind was
the NP season Sonic six talking with the.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, and it really there are a lot of
big not even big story moments, but like things happening
and characters getting involved where I even had moments where
it felt unclear who was talking in a cutscene because
of the fact that there was no voice acting.
Speaker 1: Because I imagine it came like it does.
Speaker 4: But in one specific cut scene, very the first one
that you see, there's kind of three characters in a group,
and it feels undetermined which one is specifically talking at
which time, And I was kind of going, like, I know,
I'm not supposed to be following everything that's happening right now,
but this feels like intentionally unintentionally ambiguous, and that's I
don't know, that's it just feels like my thought on
it is, if you're not going to have voice acting,
then don't do the cut scenes. Just have it all
be text boxes that you thumb through, because then at
least it's like, okay, well you still have textboxes that
have characters' names on them and you can kind of follow,
like who is talking, right, But if you're gonna have
cut scenes, I mean, the most annoying one, the one
that always gets brought up, is in Sword Shield, there
was a fight that happens in kind of a rock
venue where someone is literally playing music and singing a
song and is just headbanging and singing into a mic.
But there's no noise whatsoever. It's just like the same
background music is playing. It has not changed whatsoever. It's
and it's not like reflecting. There's not somebody singing. It's
just someone pantomiming, and it's like very strange.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it kind of feels like like there's plenty of
games where there's no dialogue and it's supposed to be text,
but I feel like they're, like I said, they're shot
in a way where you're like, oh, I'm not supposed
to hear this, but like what you're describing sounds like
it almost feels like, oh, there was going to be
voice acting, but we ran at a time, so we
just there.
Speaker 4: There's plenty of RPGs that straddle the line of they
say like, okay, well Final Fantasy fourteen, does this, Trails
in the Sky it just came out this year. Does
this where there's not going to be text. There's going
to be text in a lot of scenes, but it's
not always going to be voiced. It's only going to
be voiced for the big kick scenes, for the big moments, right,
that would work fine. It's really weird that Pokemon is
doing even more of these cut scenes and even more
of these big moments it is not voice acting them.
Speaker 1: It's weird. It's just weird, and.
Speaker 4: I think that is annoyingly one of the biggest knocks
already of this game against it, and I think will
continue to be as I get deeper into the game.
But otherwise, like I a while back, I might have
talked about this on the podcast, actually, but Pokemon Legends,
Arsius is the reason that I care about Pokemon again.
It's straight up like I had fallen completely off the
Pokemon train. Wasn't really into Sword Shield. Like I thought
it was fun, but I didn't think it was amazing
and it didn't reignite my love that I had when
I was in Red, Blue and Gold Silver Days. But
Arcius was like the breath of fresh air that I
wanted from that series, and za z through a feels
like it is doing the same thing where I'm just like,
this feels fun, this feels new, this feels interesting. This
is a side of Pokemon that I've always wanted them
to explore. I love the concept of what is a
city like when Pokemon live in it, when they're part
of that world, and what are the tensions that arise
from it? Like Detective Pikachu kind of touches on this too,
But the idea of a different angle of Pokemon life
and the sort of battle royale thing. God, I love
a tournament arc like it's it's hitting a lot of
big buttons for me in terms of this is the
sort of story that it feels like refreshing and new
and different and intriguing and fun and and so in
that way, it's like cool game freak still has the sauce,
still has the juice when they need it, but there's
still a few things that feel like they're holding Pokemon
back from hitting those like Breath of the Wild, notes
of like this is becoming this giant, like defining piece
of this series. Instead, it's like, we got a really
good Pokemon entry, and I'm happy to have a really
good Pokemon in tree that can be excited about because
I liked a lot of aspects of Scarva, but it
had a lot of hang ups. It had a lot
of problems with it too, and I like that I'm
I get to be a little bit less hung up
on the problems here. But there are still a few
like asterisks with zaw So. But that being said, I'm
really enjoying my time with it. I can already tell
like this is the game that I've wanted on my
switch to for a while, Bonanza didn't hit as hard
as I wanted it to. Mario Kart World is Mario
Kart World, you know. I was never going to sit
there and play like sixty hours of Mario Kart World.
I was just going to raise friends that be that.
But this is the game that I think I've been
waiting for on my switch too, much like Arcius was
that game for me on the Switch one, and I'm
very excited to play more of it. When van Aken
is out there in the battlefields of real war doing
crazy stuff with his whole breath, drop shot crap, I'm
going to be out in the streets of Lumios beating
up kids pidgies for points.
Speaker 1: Maybe I'll maybe I'll join you. Yeah, I know.
Speaker 4: There's multiplayer. Okay, so the multiplayer is kind of crazy.
I was joking, jokingly calling it Pokemon does Commander because
it's essentially four players in a battle arena, all bring
their Pokemon out and ring their teams with them and
then fight for knockout points and take down points and
things like that. So you can do kind of a
weird like it's for player, free for all, so you
can build alliances and then break them and stuff like that,
and you're doing kind of fun stuff with that. I
have not played it yet myself, but I'm very excited
to do that because I think that's a really fun,
interesting way to reimagine the Pokemon multiplayer space. I think
in that way, they announced Pokemon Champions a while back
as kind of the this is our competitive thing. If
you want to do turn based competitive Pokemon, go play
Pokemon Champions. I like that this might free them up
to do some weirder things with Pokemon multiplayer moving.
Speaker 2: Forward, call the last I guess big thing is this
game running all right on switch too?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I was playing it handheld last night kick stand
it out because I just didn't want to hook up
my dock to anything, and it ran super well. Maybe
like a few random moments of like oh, going into
a new area and it was like oh, okay, okay,
we're good, and that was it. Otherwise it ran really
really well. I was really happy with it. I haven't
tried doc yet, so we'll see how that pans out.
But definitely, I think the biggest thing I remember from
games even like Arcus, where you would see a Pokemon
off in the distance and it would kind of look
like a slideshow. I have not had any of those
moments yet in in z through Ray, and that's been
very reaffirming. This is also on normal switch right, No,
I'm playing on switch to. To clarify, I am playing
on switch to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was like, I don't know if we heard
anything yet about how to switch one version.
Speaker 1: Go via condos on that one go with us, my friend.
I mean, I've been.
Speaker 2: Very curious about just the I'm not like into Pokemon.
Speaker 4: Can you can you pull out the box again and
check to make sure that there is a Nintendo switch
to version. I wasn't clear on the box.
Speaker 1: Also, while I was looking, I also realized the top
it's one screenshot, but like different cremes, it's all the same.
They're they're like trying to show an animation playout.
Speaker 4: I think they tried to put a gift on the
back of the box.
Speaker 2: They could they could have had five different photos off
the game.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, we got a gift. We also
let's cover up the entire Oh my god. Yeah, this
is bad product design. I'm just gonna we should.
Speaker 2: Start reviewing box arts. We just started like accounting that
into our review scores is how good the box art is.
Speaker 4: I still don't understand the giant red bar across the
top of the box art that just says didn't to
know switch to. That's I think maybe the most danding
thing for me that I because because for a while
I thought that was part of the actual box and
it was just built into it. But no, that's just
something they're putting on all the box arts for switch to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, gotta let them know it's easy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're really concerned about people buying the wrong edition.
Speaker 1: I guess. I guess. So well, that's gonna be it
for the show this week, everybody. Thank you for tuning in.
Of course, head over to Gaminformer dot com slash subscribe
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stay tuned for next week on the Game Informer Show.
I've been Alex, that's been Eric and Marcus be sure
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And you can follow me at its Van Aiken. That'll
do it for the show this week. Thanks everybody, goodbye,