Hey everybody, It's Tuesday, October first, twenty twenty four. Welcome to the Giant BombCast, Episode eight one hundred and sixty powered by NZXT. I'm your host, jan Oh Shoah. Welcome everybody to Infrastructure Week. We have the man that is building all the bridges. He's bridging the gap from us to you to the news co Captain of.
The Ship Jeff Grubb. I'm building bridges between you and me, jam between everybody, happy to be here.
We got the master of paths. He's building roads. He's learning about asphalt. He's painting the lines on the floor as we speak. Dan reichert are woodpeckers infrastructure because they are in my walls right now and I just had to bang on my wall right anti infrastructure if we think, yeah, they're just the infrastructure destroyed. Yes, yes, okay. We got the bad boy of games media. He's knocking down all of your Jenga towers as you play politely with your friends from games Beat.
Mike Manatti.
I literally bought my tickets for a w as we were starting this. They have a heck of a car Pasberg Tomorrow. I rubbed somebody into it.
Wait ticket he said, tickets play no, no, no no.
I rubbed someone into it, someone into it.
I'm not going by.
People get really mad if I if I say, like some kind of freaks a joke, you can go things by yourself.
I don't want to go to a wrestling show by myself.
I don't know why don't you want to go to a wrestling show byers?
Nothing wrong with it yourself?
I know, I want to become like a social paria. I just think doesn't sound as much fun to me. I just want to go with someone.
What are you becoming?
I like going with a group, but like, there's nothing wrong with going by yourself. You just want to see Danielsonokata?
Yeah, I know, but I want to see dan Seltata with someone. Yell all your jokes loud enough so Danielson will hear you.
Yeah, he'll really appreciate it. Yeah, bring a bunch of signs, Mike, He'll be fine.
Do you think Danielson would like me?
He would be fascinated at least our special guest, mister infrastructure himself, Chasten try or everybody.
Hello, when you're talking about building bridges, let me let me explain you how my mind works for you. For a second, I thought, I thought about Death Stranding, and then I thought, oh, he's going to introduce Sam sam Porter Bridges. But for some reason, I couldn't remember the name of the hero of Death Stranding, and so my mind went to Sam Bankman Freed, and I realized, Oh God, in this thought process, I realized that Sam Bankman Freed
would be the perfect name for a Deo Kajima character. Yeah, it does kind of feel right, but yeah, would has gotten to jail big Man is now in jail with Diddy?
Must have.
You?
Oh man, what if?
What a different world it would have been if Hedeo kojimad teamed up and like putting Diddy in a game.
I just don't want to very different.
Yeah, he hasn't done a lot of musicians.
It's always like filmmakers and and uh twenty five year old models.
Music.
Yeah, well he puts music in his games. He had a lot of music industry.
No, it's not. It's like health And I'm.
Only thinking you have the credit so from Elgar Solid four that's my only thing.
Oh, there's that. Here's to you the sixties songs by songs.
Yeah, yeah, that's fine.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's old Minati. Were you a death stranding guy? Mm? Okay cool? Uh?
Jason, sir, thank you for joining us on the show today. Thank you for devoting uh at least maybe two to three hours spending with us. I also apologize nothing else to do. Fantastic, fantastic.
So we got you on the show because you got something coming out I do.
Can you see it?
Like right there? Wow? Right there?
Play nice of the Rise Fallen Future A Blizzard Entertainment is my new bucket comes out on October eighth, and I'm very very excited about it. I hope everybody reads it.
First question, ever, I like that cover. Did you have to did you try to fight to get the Oxford comma in the subtitle? Or is it just like that's not cool anymore?
Guarantee no, I put Oxford commas in every In fact, Bloomberg has a no Oxford Comma policy, which has driven me to quit like four times, but Mike Bloomberg every time, Mike Bloomer calls me up, but he's like, Jason, you can't quit. I can't.
I can't. I get this issue with the Oxford comma. But please no, I'm.
A big fan of Oxford Commas and clarity in writing in general, there's no reason, not like why would you not. I think it's clarification things beat.
Like a while ago there was like we're doing We're not doing Oxford Commas anymore. As I had to, I kind of just slowly like I'm gonna put them back in there.
See if so far.
Grab.
I want to say, I feel like I've been able to relate to you heavily the past few days because usually when people aggregate my work, it's written and so all of the context is there. But recently I've been going on all these podcasts is part of the book tour, and I've experienced the Jeff Grub effect where everybody like takes parts of my quotes and interprets whatever they want out of them, and it causes all sorts of havoc and.
Clarifying doesn't ever work either. It doesn't it never helps at least. Yeah, it's a real, real pain. I mean you kind of like you're in those place where it's like you're promoting the book. You want to like talk about stuff, get people excited, but like the story of the book is this interesting story about these people and
what they actually went through. It's kind of a telling of a history, like a memoir on behalf of a studio, right, Like you're not trying to go out there and a bunch of scoops that's sort of just been a byproduct of this process.
It's interesting, Okay. So I set out to write this book to be the kind of a chronicle of Blizzard's history that kind of tells a specific story about Blizzard over the last thirty three years. And I'll get into what that is in a second. But when I do a book, to me, there's no point in doing it. There's no point in me spending three years of my life on something like this unless it's going to bring information into the world, reveal information that has not been
made public before. And so my books are always based on like firsthand interviews, and this one is based on interviews with some three hundred and fifty some ridiculous number of people, and so a lot of the stuff in the book has never been reported before, whether it's kind of like human perspectives on pr disasters like Diablo Mortal, on Blitzchung, or like just tidbits from Blizzard's history that
nobody knows about. Like the cancelation of a second expansion for Diablo three that never happened, or like the real story behind the making of Hearthstone, or how StarCraft one was like for a brief hot second and almost a Star Wars license game. Potentially maybe I don't know. You have to read the book to find out. But the goal is to tell the story. But all of that stuff comes out in the making of it. And that stuff is what different websites and podcasts have been kind
of wanting to talk about and seizoning on. And I'm happy to talk about that. I don't mind the aggregation. It's just funny to see like the context stripped out of some of these quotes.
Yeah, it's the game of telephone every time, and it's just it gets to eventually an audience that was never listening in the first place.
And yeah, and just judges. Yeah, And what's funny is that, like what always happens with this is one outlet will listen to the podcast and transcribe it, and then every other outlet will just take that quote use that they won't actually even listen in the original source. And I don't like blame the people writing for these sites because they're doing it for pennies on the dollar and like overworked, and I feel bad for everybody involved in the system. But it is a heavily broken system.
So I guess I haven't read the book yet. I can't wait to do so. But what is it the big thing that you hope people kind of take away? Like, did you learn something about the overall narrative of what happened with the with the studio and the publisher that you hope people take away, or is it the several like little lessons and things like that.
Yeah, it's a whole story. I'll get into in a second. I will say that Dan's wife sent me a very lovely text. She was one of the earliest people to read it and really enjoyed it. I appreciated that. Shout out to Bianca. Yeah, so it is. It's really it's
the story of Blizzard over thirty three years. So there's a lot in there, everything from like the development of all these mega franchises and how they became these billion dollar franchises, like how Warcraft exploded, how World of Warcraft really like became a cultural phenomenon, how StarCraft became a national sport in Korea, it follows a lot of these
kind of overarching big stories. One kind of crux of the book that you were hinting at there is the battle between Blizzard and its parent company, Activision Blizzard, which is a really fascinating one because that is that that story is really what made me kind of decide to
do the book in the first place. It was like, I started working on this thing in like March of twenty twenty one, and it was basically the pitch that I made to my editor and my agent was like, Hey, I want to do the story that is like a hostile corporate takeover in a lot of ways, because Activision came in started playing a bigger role in operations at Blizzard, drove out the CEO and co founder Mike Moreheim and a bunch of other veteran Blizzard people, and it led
to some problems and there's a lot of nuance there. There's a lot of comp complexity behind that relationship and reasons why Activision felt the need to come in. But it's a really interesting story, and so yeah, a large chunk of the book kind of examines that dynamic and how it happened, why it happened. The clash between Bobby Kotek and Blizzard people. I tried to explore bobbi Kotek's kind of business philosophies and perspectives and why he does the things he does. It's really interesting.
I think, Yeah, it's kind of thing where it is. It definitely touches on something I've been thinking of a lot about recently, which is I don't know how to feel about what the corporations that have kind of come into these gaming spaces and these gaming companies and and kind of took things over, Like what had they brought to the table, And I don't know, did you do you do you on the other side of writing this book?
Do you feel like you have an idea of what they bring or is it just them sort of exploiting a resource to make the most money possible possible.
So, okay, you have these two companies in Activision. For simplicity's sake, let's just call it Activision, even though for the corporate part it was Activision Blizzard over Blizzard, which is very confusing. So let's just say Activision versus Lizards. So on one hand, you have Blizzard, which is a company that was started by video game enthusiasts who loved games wanted to play games. For a long time, they had had a rule that they would only hire gamers.
They would only hire hardcore gamers, which had it's good and bad. Like, on one hand, all right, that makes it so everyone's familiar with the products, can like test out, can really get it. On the other hand, it kind of cuts you out of a lot of demographics if you're only hiring people who play your own games. And the book gets into that as well. And so that's the philosophy a Blizzard from the beginning. It served them well. It led them to make a lot of awesome, beloved hits.
And then by the time Activision came in, they still kind of tried to embody that philosophy, but Activision came in with a very different sort of way of doing business, which is, as Bobby Kodik describes it, finding a hit franchise and then quote nquote exploiting that franchise, which essentially means releasing a new game every year.
Tony Hawk Guitar Hero Scott Landers.
The only franchise that this actually worked for without dying is Call of Duty, And so that philosophy worked for him. And and Bobby is kind of like, instead of hiring gamers and game developers in his executive circle to run things, he would hire consumer product goods people, people from like Procter and Gamble and like Nessley who knew how to ship and al soap and shampoo and diapers.
And yeah, well that's the thing.
I mean, I think I won't say who, but at least two of the five of us are wearing diapers right now, so I don't get it. Yeah, And it's like, it's this philosophy of like, these are commodities that must be shipped every single year without missing a deadline, like unpredictable schedules versus this kind of we are creative game developers who must innovate and iterate and take all the time we need, like when it's ready. Was always the Blizzard philosophy. And the two are like oil and water
when they meet and start clashing. And it's interesting, I think one of the takeaways that I had from writing the book. I'm very curious to see what other people think, but at least one of my takeaways was like, uh, you have the spectrum of like the we are the ultimate artists. On one side, and we are the ultimate business people on the other side, and they couldn't find a way to meet in the middle, so it just became an eruption. It just kind of everybody like clashed
instead of finding common ground. And yeah, I mean there are a lot of reasons for that, and I think people who read the book will come away with their own ideas of who is to blame for what. But it's definitely not as simple as like good guy Blizzard versus bad guy Actavision, And I think there's a lot of nuance and complexity there.
Yeah, I was covering Blizzard a lot, kind of like right after Overwatch came out, in that period where it was that and Hearthstone just really popping off. I think most of my time gaming was spent on you know, battle net like all that.
You didn't like, have you steam that back then? I remember talking to you were like, I'm on Battlenet all the time.
Yeah, because there's just so many gains playing there.
It's funny because like you know, there was it seemed like this weird period of incredible highs, like wow, these games are really popping off, and then just these incredible loads with things falling off or you know, the Diablo Immortal situation and then the actual controversies. I can't imagine the sort of whiplash effect that was happening for the kind of you know, rink and file staff inside of Blizzard at that time, right, And you know, I'm you
talked to tons of people. I just wondering what the sense was kind of having to work through these ridiculous periods of highs and lows.
Yeah, it's kind of I mean it's almost like that now in some ways too, where like every time morale kind of stabilizes and people are feeling good about like the war within launch or something, Microsoft comes in and lays people off or like does something stupid and everybody is just bummed out.
Yeah.
I think it was really rough for a lot of people the last few years being a Blizzard, and I think people kind of tried to make the best of it, stuck together. And I mean, I think working at Blizzard you still get to like make games all day, you still meet a lot of people who you're close friends with. I think for a lot of people it's still pretty great,
and it's always been pretty great. I think it's worth getting into the cultural stuff too, right, because that was the biggest controversy surrounding Blizzard is that in twenty twenty one, the summer of twenty twenty one, incidentally, like four months after I started working on this book. I was like, Wow, this is a twist. This is definitely changing the course
of this book. California, the California government sued Activision, the parent company, for sexual misconduct and harassment and made all sorts of allegations, and the book actually gets into how the lawsuit is actually pretty sloppy and misleading in a lot of ways. And the book calls out a few specific cases such as the Cosby suite, which.
I can I was going to ask about, like I still don't know, like what was the sort of how do people come down on the Cosby sweep? Because I'm like, it seemed like maybe that wasn't as real as we thought.
It was not at all. I'll get into that in a second, But just to answer your question, Mike, I think that like throughout that it was really miserable to work there because even if you personally hadn't experienced the kind of discrimination or harassment that like other people had, just knowing that it had happened was like so painful for people, And I think what ultimately happened was even though the lawsuit had a lot of inaccuracies and was some of the stuff was old, some of it was wrong,
it was still it still captured a broader truth for a lot of people, and a lot of people were like, look, even if I wasn't like sexually assaulted while working up Blizzard, I still face discrimination. I still face a grost comment here or there. And the book really dives into the culture that made that happen. It dives into a lot of like what made Blizzard unique in both good and
bad ways. The best way I can describe it is, I got this great I had this fantastic conversation with the woman who worked there, and she spoke to me anonymously, but she told me that like working at Blizzard, working at most companies, it's like every day is like on a scale from one to ten. Every day is like a five out of ten, a six out of ten.
It's like a normal day. At Blizzard, you have so many days that are ten out of ten, and then you have some days that are zero out of ten, and it's just an exercise in extremes and I think that really defined the experience for a lot of people is just this kind of really extreme, just kind of contradictory feelings all the time. But you're still I mean, you're working on Blizzard games. You're working on games and millions of people love. There are a lot of highs
to go with that. Yeah, I can tell the whole Cosby sweet story if you guys are interested.
I'm pretty damage. Yeah, and I definitely want to kind of just get the gist of it.
Yeah, yeah, because it made a lot of headlines and it became kind of like this shorthand for like blizzards problems. It's like, oh my god, they had a suite dedicated to Bill Cosby.
Holy crap.
So here's the actual story of what happened. So the lawsuit mentions the Cosby suite. They actually call it the Crosby Suite, which I think shows how sloppy the whole lawsuit was. And they say that like this guy Alex Eferciabi had the suite at BlizzCon that was dedicated that was named after an alleged sex pest. And then this was elaborated upon by an article on Kataku that had this big picture of like like eight different Blizzard employees kind of smiling and laughing in front of this free
picture of Bill Cosby. It had a bunch of other stuff that I give into in the book, like involving textbostages and stuff. I'll skip over those details, but the gist of it was this picture that looked absolutely horrifying of like top Blizzard employees. Some of these were like high level employees just posing in front of Bill Cosby. It's like horrendous, especially in the wake of this lawsuit, Like what do you make of that? You think it's horrible.
But what the article didn't mention is that even that picture was actually taken in twenty thirteen, and nobody knew about the Bill Cosby allegations until a year later, twenty fourteen, when Hannibal Buris, the comedian, came out and mentioned that Bill Cosby was an alleged rapist in a routine and that just was the first domino in this whole cascading like allegations resurfacing, new allegations coming up, and essentially the
entire consciousness cultural understanding of Bill Cosby changing within a week or two. That happened a year after this picture was taken. And then when you think about that, you kind of think about it a little more, and it's like, why would people be smiling and posing in front of a picture of Bill Cosby, even if they did horrible things? Does that really track? And then the pictures were found on Facebook? Would people really be putting a picture like
that on Facebook? Like maybe if they were like doing some dark ironything, but like, something about this doesn't feel right,
And then you realize nobody actually knew about it. And then I dug further and it turns out that this was the suite itself was like a run joke named after the hotel carpet at some convention a few years earlier that looked like a Bill cos sweater, right, So yeah, and so they became it became this running joke that turned out to be this horrible timing thing where it was just this horribly awful coincidence that, as I reveal in the book, led to two different people who both
told me their stories who were pictured in well, actually one of them told me their stories, the other one kind of like wouldn't comment on it, but I found out it happened. Two people who were in that picture on Kataco, and because of that Katako article of them being pictured next to Bill Cosby, they lost their jobs
at companies they were at after Blizzard. Two different people lost their jobs because so it's kind of it's a lesson in what kind of I think misleading reporting and misleading lawsuits and just bad information can do to people. It was also like, remember when this came out, it was this hugely emotional time where people were like, oh my god, Blizzard had this really awful thing like this hap a Blizzard, Like Blizzard is my favorite company. Ever,
I can't believe this happened there. So a lot of heightened emotions were surrounding that article too, and people were just shocked and appalled seeing it. But I think if you give it some scrutiny, it kind of it's it's not what it seems. And the book dives into that too. But here's the other wrinkle, and then I promise we can move on, but just one more quick wrinkle, which is that the guy who ran the suite, Alex Epferciabi,
was an alleged sex predator. A lot of people spoke out about him both in public in the lawsuit, on Twitter and also to me for my book. So you have this kind of twist where it's like or this muddied situation where it's like the suite itself that's misleading. The people posing in front of this cosy picture, they're not. That's not what it seems. But the guy who ran the suite and whose sweet it was was accused of all these awful things and fired for his behavior at
Blizzard in twenty twenty, a year before the lossuit. So whole complicated story of things there.
That's kind of what my takeaway here is like it's way more complicated than you can imagine, and it's you can say, oh, there was this bad culture, but maybe it was as bad as the average was. Oh it's a boys club, And then there were these extreme individuals who actually were as bad.
As you might have imagined, right yep, yeah, yeah, one hundred percent. And I name a couple of them in the book. What's really scary about Blizzard is that one of the people who was fired for well he was technically fired for like lying during an HR investigation, But someone who was accused of bad things was this guy Ben Kilgore, who was in the C suite at Blizzard. He was the chief technology officer and then chief development officer, and he was actually, as the book reveals, he was
lined up to be Mike Morheim, the CEO's successor. So like, this is a company where it's not just like some bad apples and middle management or whatever. It's like some people who were really high up at the company who were accused of doing bad things and reprimanded or fired as a result. He was fired in the summer of twenty eighteen, Ben Kokor.
Yeah, talking about Morheim's successor, I think about Jail and brack Alan and I still always have so many questions about that situation, right, Like, was he in a possible situation trying to lead Blizzard in this really rough time. Was he kind of part of the problem, you know, did he have to go? Or was he a bit of a scapegoat? That's kind of one figure that I'm interested in learning more about.
Yeah, I mean, the book dives into he did not have a good relationship with Activision, So in terms of the business end of things, Activision versus Blizzard, that really kind of hit its peak when Mike Morheim left in twenty eighteen. Mirk Moreheim left, as the book reveals, because he was sick of dealing with Bobby Kotick, Jayleen Brack took over. Jyalen Breck was seen within the company as like a Blizzard loyalist, someone who would really defend Blizzards.
From World of Warcraft.
Yes, World of Warcrafts executive producer had his own kind of issues that the book gets into a little bit, but also someone who was pretty widely respected there, and he notably was given the title president instead of CEO. Bobby Kotick then became the only CEO at Activision. Blizzard worth noting there, and it was very clear from the beginning to Blizzard people that like he did not have
the power or the clout that Morheim did. Morheim, just because of his tenure, because he was a co founder of the company, because he had a lot of leverage and a lot of respect, he could do more to protect the company from Activision than Brack ever could. And on top of that, this was the period going into twenty nineteen and then twenty twenty and twenty twenty one.
This is a period when diablofhorn overwatched you kept getting delayed and Jay and Brack had to like go to the board and like defend, like explain why they were getting delayed, and face all these battles of his own with the Activision people. So his relationship with them was also just kind of totally deteriorated by the point that
the lawsuit had hit. I won't kind of speculate as to what Bobby Kodig was thinking, but like, there's certainly you could certainly see why it would be it would be useful to have someone else in charge potentially and ahead a blizzard. You could also see a pierce of like a situation where like someone had to go when all these allegations were floating around and a lot of One of the other really sloppy things about the lawsuit is that if you read through it, it just confuses
like Activision, Activision, Blizzard, Blizzard, Blizzard departments within Blizzard. It's very confused about what it's trying to do. But a lot of the allegations centered on Blizzard itself. So I guess Ahead had to roll and it had to be him. He I don't think there have been It's hard to say. A lot of people have asked me like who knew what, Like who was responsible? Like ultimately, at the end of
the day. But like to me, I don't think short of seeing HR investigations, which I have not done, it's very difficult to prove who knew what or when I think it's more the more, the kind of more reasonable conclusion is that like, if you're in charge of a company, you either know and you do nothing or you don't know, and both of those options are pretty badly bad. So
it's it's a tough spot to be in. But yeah, I don't really think it matters who knew what because that's ultimately more high And then Brack were running the company as all this stuff was happening. That said, under Brack. I mean some of this stuff was like Alex Stuffer Siabi was fired under Brack, Like there were some things that were Blizzard was cleaning house. One of the responses from Activision Blizzard when the lawsuit hit was like a lot of this stuff is old, it happened in the past,
And that is one hundred percent true. A lot of the stuff in the lawsuit was old, and Blizzard had been cleaning up some of that stuff. That said, judging by the fact that after the lawsuit hit, they fired or punished like dozens of people at the company. Clearly they had not done everything. Then again, the flip side of this is that, like HR, not everybody reports things
to HR. And I heard stories from women who like wouldn't report things to HR because they were told by HR, if you were going to file a formal report on this, we have to contact the police and you have to like put file someone's name and file a police report. And they were like, I don't want.
To do that.
I'm not going to report this at all. But when the lawsuit hits, a lot more stories start bubbling up because a lot more women feel comfortable sharing their stories. They feel like, oh, it's not me, Oh this is something where I can have my voice to this and maybe help clean up the place. So it winds up
having a cascading effect. So you could also argue that, like those dozens of people who were reprimanded or fired after the lawsuit hit, maybe nobody would have ever known about that if not for the lawsuit in the first place.
So it's all very.
Message and complicated, and yeah, I just I don't like to say I don't like to explain that like or I don't like to blame like this person for knowing or not knowing because it just feels like the truth is always so.
Much more common. Humans are more complicated than that. Yeah.
And also something that executives told me while I was reporting on this book, and I thought this was a salient point, is that a lot of the times, just because of the way this stuff works, is if I am an employee of Blizzard and I fire a file an HR complaint about someone, that person might be punished in some way, have their salary doctor be put on suspension or demoted, and I would never know about it because HR can't necessarily tell me what they did to
that person. So sometimes people at the lower levels felt like their HR complaints weren't listening to, but they were. The people at the lower levels just didn't know about it. And I thought that was a good point as well. So again, all very complicated. And if there's one takeaway
I hope people have from this book, pltaty nice. It's like that the reality is so much more nuanced and complicated than like these headlines are tweets about how Blizzard was a sex den full of Cosby suite and stuff like, Blizzard had lots of problems and they were complicated and it's worth thinking about and seeing the whole picture, which is one of the reasons that I'm glad I was able to do this book and I'm excited to put it out there because I feel like it's got some
nuance that, hopefully people gives people a broader and more like a multifaceted perspective than they had before reading it.
Yeah. I always appreciate searching for nuance because it is something that is so frequently lost in day to day reporting. One last thing and then we should like reiterate when the book's coming out and all that stuff. I remember maybe, god, it's probably about ten years ago now. One of the things that kind of first it's like, oh yeah, Jason Trin know, as we was talking about I was thinking at the time, boy, these Triple A games are getting more and more expensive, and it seems like they're on
a path towards unsustainability. And then I think I read a story that you did or something like that where like, yeah, that's kind of the feeling a lot of people have, and as we look at stuff, it's kind of the feeling I have. Has that feeling dissipated or is it kind of seem more obvious than ever that it's unsustainable. How do you feel about the future, especially companies like Sony Microsoft, big publishers like Activision selling to Microsoft so
they can kind of justify their ongoing existence. How do you feel about all of that in the future of big games from big publishers.
That's a debacle. There are too many games out there. You When the book is written about like the last few years of the games industry, it'll be really interesting to see how many problems can be pinpointed to Fortnite, Grand Theft, Auto Online and like the other games that just cannibalize the audience.
Yeah, black Hole games that they.
Just yea kill the market, right, Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, my last book, press Reset, was about the volatility and unsustainability of the videogram industry. So and that came out in twenty twenty one, so things on only stayed the same or gotten worse since then. And yeah, it's really it's hard to imagine what the future looks like, especially for these big budget extravaganzas.
I don't know.
The one thing that gives me so less in terms of like looking at the broad industry is just how much cool creative stuff is coming from the indie space, and a lot of people feel that way. But playing games like Animal Well and like the Latro and UFO fifty, it's just like, oh man, there's so much cool stuff out there that it's you can't get too depressed about the future. Right.
It feels like the answer is already built in, right, we will, we know the solution to the problem. We're already playing those games exactly. The problem's not going to pop up at like Microsoft Sony.
Acts problem for them, so and it's curious, yeah, se but.
Not a problem for me who likes playing games, right, Yeah.
Online Horizon to solve all the.
Mike I was about to be like, well, the future is enough life everybody wants.
And we'll talk about that in the news again the Jason Tryer segment. So don't worry about that. Yeah, yeah, tell us, Yeah, tell us what's again? Like, when is the book at? Where can people get it? Where should they go to pre order it? Yeah?
If you think it sounds cool, and I hope you do, it's called plain nice. The Rise, Future, Rise, Fallen Future BISI Incertainment comes out on October eighth, so just a week from today. The day we're recording this, and you can get it in hardcover, you can get it in digital on your Kindle or whatever ebook, and you can get it in audio. It's read by uh Ray Trace Ray Chase, the prolific voice actor best known for Final Fantasy fifteen. He's Nactus. He also plays Warcraft. He plays
like uh what's his name in Warcraft? One of the orcs he plays in Warcraft, and most notably, he's the subway announcer in Persona five. And yeah, you can preorder it now. I recommend pre ordering it because I called a couple of Barns and Nobles near me and they bill told me they've only ordered like three or four copies. So pre order it so you can make sure you get yourself a copy, ideally at your local indie bookstore.
Help support your local indie bookstore, unless you're gonna get digital or audio, which is also totally fine, and get that online. And yeah, check it out. I think people will really dig it. I mean, I think it's it's my best book to date. I'm really proud of it. If you liked my previous books or any of my reporting, I think you'll really you'll really enjoy it.
I'm really excited for it. I can't wait.
It was just really in the trenches with Blizzard for a while there, so really going deep in those stories is going to be a ton of fun.
I hope you dig it.
I hope the enjoyant. Mike. I'm looking forward to it as well. Jason.
I find that these books are, you know, little mini museums in pay per form and speak about museums. Dan Reikert, you just came back from maybe the most Dan museum in the world.
If it wasn't about what I thought at all, right, oh god, it's bigger than I thought.
Honestly, tell the audio listeners.
It's got a giant the ten to sixty four control and it's just so much bigger than I was even expecting.
As I bought extra luggage to bring this home, I knew it was gonna be a problem. I didn't bring any check luggage to Japan. I brought a backpack and a little carry on thing. And I saw that at the gift shop and I was like, fuck, are you kidding me? It's like and I tried to like, but it's like really puffy and hard and stuff, and like I could not squeeze it down. So I had to go to a don Quixote at a mall in Kyoto and buy like a fold out luggage thing for that.
So I just filled it with an N sixty four controller and a shit ton of candy and that.
Then I checked that.
So somebody like inspected that it's just like, oh, the eight year old is flying to Minneapolis. Yeah, so I wrote an entire big article thing on Uh.
It was very good, Dan, Thank you, thanks. It's funny.
I've been doing a little bit of writing for it a metal gear and this. It's fun to kind of you know, go back to that. But so, yeah, check it out on game spot. Just look up into museum Dan Record on a game spot and you'll see it.
But yeah, yeah, I go into the details there.
But the short version is I thought it was incredible, you know, as a lifelong Nintendo fan.
Obviously it is.
Pretty uniquely laid out for a museum, and that it is not a lot of plaques or placards or information or text. It's a lot of like it's a lot of game boxes, it's a lot of displays, it's a lot of audio and video.
The backs of all these.
Displays have like like the fronts you saw in the direct word, it's like here's all the different territories you know of every box art, So here's you know, the North American, here's the European, here's the Japanese. But then on the back it's all the hardware stuff. There's like it's I counted all of them. It was almost like thirty variants of the sp all next to each other,
all pristine. Like my collector brain was just going insane looking at everything, like they're all complete in box, every single one of these games.
I asked them about it, and seeing all these.
Sps, like the weird like Mario Tribal tattoo one, so like a case with every Fantastic Transparent sixty four in there. Seeing an Ultra sixty four in person, Yeah that's yeah, the older sixty four it's right there, and like I got right up to it and it's got a big chunky analog stick and it's just like crazy because that was like everyding EGMs and game informers in nineteen ninety five.
You know, as we're building up to the sixty four, you saw all these images of it and it's like, oh, I can't wait to get an Alder sixteens.
So I remember playing Happened Cruising USA and Arkide I think right, and had the ultore logo blog like that was so almost the name of that console.
And then seeing like an actual one along with like a bunch of prototypes and stuff. They have a ton of like prototypes of like the DS and just like wacky ways they were trying to like figure out that technology. And like the first Game Boy micros was just like four big buttons and then one little screen up top a we remote prototype that was a Frisbee with an Invincibility star in the middle of it. It's just that there is a lot more than just the game boxes.
Like the main thing when you go up the escalator is seeing all the displays of the boxes. But then like I spent pretty much two days walking around this place taking everything in, uh and it was like a small or media thing, and a lot of the media folks,
like you know, left after lunch. The place stayed open and fully staffed until six both days, so like I had hours where I was literally just like walking around the Nintendo Museum by myself and then going to the lower level with all the interactive stuff and trying like I guess I'll do every one of these batting cage rooms with the like ultramachine pitching machine, and.
Like I played all the big controllers.
I was doing speed run strats on a fucking or As controller the size of my door it was. And I went in there and they were like, they're like, well, you know it's suposed to be done with two people, and I was like.
No, I got this.
Playing Mario one with like I had just done a bunch of the like NES World Championship, like see how far you can get in uh in Mario one. So I'm literally doing speed run strats on this giant NES controller and like all the intendings and stuff are watching.
And like clapping and stuff like that.
Ah, that's awesome. Gosh, you said you had enough times like that. You're supposed to get to the end of one one, but you got to like four to two or something and.
The four three four three in the whole goal of the thing, and they have like X amount of seconds and you have to just get to the black ball one one was like fuck that.
I'm like in the in the video trailer they revealed for the museum, there was like a shot of Mimoto in front of a stroller and a gun. Did you see that?
What it was?
I saw the gun?
So that's the thing is like I didn't really know, Like, you know, I was born in eighty four, so like my earliest memories were like Mario one playing it when I was four years old, and like, you know, eighty eight, so I knew vaguely that you know, they had made a hunt of food, of cards and toys and things.
And then there's that bad stuff in Warrior where that I never placed.
And then yeah, the amount of things that I saw from like old toys and stuff like the ultrahand grabber thing and night thing. It's like, oh, that's from that Warrior worre thing the or the cowboy we have to shoot him over with the gun.
It's like, oh, that was a Nintendo.
One of the toys they made like before the nes Yeah. Yeah.
And learning about like it was so crazy, Like you know, it goes chronologically, and I started at like the nineteen fifties there and seeing all these like a lot of Disney license stuff with Nintendo logos on it, which was weird.
And somebody cares about Mickey Mouse it's weird that they in the fifties they did. And the fifties, right, that's when many realized there were better things.
Yeah, yeah, Jon, Do your kids know who Mickey Mouse is?
Yes, they get more excited if you got them like a backpack of Rosalina from Mario or of Many Mouse.
They wouldn't know who Rosalina is right now. So my son Dan, my son is too and he got very excited because he got an Alma backpack. That's the stage there. But no, okay, okay, but my daughter is five and she I've played some games with her to the point where she's excited because I got that stupid three hundred dollars Lego Deku tree and she's excited to build that way.
H huh.
I'm excited to do that too. Yeah, did you know Peach or Mini Mouse more?
She would know Peach better than Miny. She's never like she only knows Mickey just because I've been like, oh that's Mickey Mouse, not because she like absorbs anything. She knows Peach from playing Mario Wonder with me.
So, but it's not gonna be showing the dollar bill like this is George Washington, like that's that's the context of many mouse.
Yeah, like, there's no Mickey is not part of like they watched Bluie and Daniel Tiger and like shows that have nothing to do with Mickey. Mickey is not even.
Part of our diseasi properly to the US. So there's kind of a thing.
Okay, all right, calm down, comes an al bud.
Sorry, it's not You always ask video people like what do your children who grew up with all your feelings?
I agree.
I just wish that Drake was here so I could be like nobody could about Mickey.
It hurts me more than Drake. Dan.
You're still burying the real lead here though. You had a big scoop, and I think you should share it with all of us about the States mainline Maria.
Game, just to show that I'm an honorable man.
I could have buried this, but I I looked at the situation and I was like, I have to report on this.
I love the idea of you being like, I got this hot information I can't let the people know, but you like and everything.
Yeah, I knew it was funny and I knew I had to say it.
So Jason, are you aware of my longtime crusade of saying that Yoshi's Island is a mainline Mario game.
I am.
I am with that.
I don't have strong opinions about this. I'll side with Dan Reicher as for.
The walls, just sryer, Okay.
So they have in a corner they have like it displays by franchise, so like the biggest one is Mario, and so you know, it kind of goes chronologically co introduced in nineteen eighty five, you know, Yoshi introduced in whatever, Kirby Donkey Kong, all this stuff, and the Mario one's huge, by the way, side note, it's hilarious. This is in the back corner of the exhibit room and in the furthest corner of this back corner exhibit, they have some
stuff from the movies. And so here's a few things from like the successful movie from last year, and literally just like they're trying to hide it while still technically acknowledging it. There's a DVD of the Bob Hoskins in front office.
I love it.
But yeah, so there's a big center ring in the Mario exhibit and it's the mainline platformers, and you know it's got Mario USA.
You know, our Mario everything, the Mario series.
Just you just look at it and there's like a huge, like wallpaper like borrow, it's a clearly grand wallpaper. Yeah, and it's like, oh, here's all the party games, here's the golf stuff, here's the tennis stuff, here's the carts, all that stuff. And I immediately when I realized what they're doing there, I'm like, hang on, okay, this is the platformers. I'm like, okay, Mario one two three World goes right to sixty four? What And then I was like, hmm, okay,
maybe it's somewhere else in here. I turned my head to the right. Here's the Yoshi series, big green display here. First one on the Yoshi series is Yoshi's Island.
And I just can't.
Believe that Yoshi's Island where you play is Yoshi is a Yoshi game. Mario World two Yoshi's Island.
But I will always be able to fall back on the fact that I asked Miyamoto and Miamoto said it's corn.
Translation and all he said he was like, yeah, sure, Yoshi's a Mario game. He didn't see it, like, yeah, Yoshi Island is a main line Mario game, And yeah.
Were you did read the quote again, read the qute again? Trust me I did.
Were you equally surprised to learn that Mario Wonder is a mainline Mario game?
The son of a big all right?
I can guarantee you was thinking to himself, who gives a fu?
In Japanese going Dan originally asked the question too. It's like, oh my god, get this man out of this room.
It's one hundred percent that itching scratchy panel they do or yeah, two distinct tones like I'm that guy, yes, but no, it was really incredible. I also went to the Nintendo store in Kyoto and I got all the I startered with children to make sure I got all of the gotcha's all these little key.
Cho these little Japanese children.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was awesome. It was honestly, everyone won because everyone's happy. Everyone wound up getting the things they wanted because we're all around, We're all trying to get as many as possible. And I have all these doubles and I'm like, okay, hey, I'm not hovering over these, like five, which one you get?
You get? You get this?
The Japanese at least with like ears, like we're keeping an eye of the situation.
But the dinner store employees were looking at me. But I wasn't the only one doing it, So I think I was good.
You could say that you were the one doing it the most or the loudest, right, I was.
There until I got all of them.
Yeah, definitely, Yeah, Okay, you go home.
You were there, so you had an army of children to send to steal hats for you throughout all of us.
Sokka, yes, yes, uh, there's a nice couple from Calgary. We talked about Brett Hart for a while, so yeah, everybody was trying to get away the international language.
Yeah, was that?
Did they bring up Brett Hart? Dan?
No, they said they're from Calgary, and I immediately started talking about Brette Hart and they seemed somewhat aware of him. Hey, hitmen, Yes, that's what they brought up the job.
Did you do anything?
Kyoto?
For funzies are just mostly around the Nintendo stuff, mostly Nintendo stuff spent.
I had one afternoon to kind of explore, went to a retro game shop and bought a good amount of stuff, got some great Everything's just so cheap there as far as like CIB stuff.
So I got a bunch of sixty four stuff.
I got Mario World Complete in box, I got a Majora's mask and box had a great moment.
First.
Ay, we were going to the Nintendo Museum. It's rush hour at Kyoto Station, which is this giant train station, and you know, it's just like I am in those situations. I just don't want to be in anyone's way. I don't want to bother anyone. I just want to you know, I'm confused, and I'm the dumb American. I just don't want to like fuck anything up, you know. And so I'm just like, I'm gonna follow whatever this person does
in front of me. And I had a card, a plastic card that had all this like preloaded, you know, money for traveling on it or whatever. And so I'm all right, I'm gonna watch these people do in front of me at the turnstiles. And they went up and somebody had something in their hand and they put it in the slot. It comes out the other side. They grabbed the things open up, they move on. I was like, okay, got it, got it, I'm gonna do it. So I
put my plastic card, you know, the slot. Yeah, not realizing that people in front of me had a paper ticket, I put in this like credit card thing just rush hour, everything freezes, fucking meltdown. People have to come take the machine apart and take my gnarled card out.
Of this thing. Everyone behind me's pissed off. I'm dying.
I just apparently you're supposed to just hold the thing like that instead of put it through.
So yeah, I fuck that up real bad.
So they should send all of us to Japan, is what I'm Yeah, we can stop.
These things from happening exactly.
Yes, it was my first time in Kyoto. I'd been a couple of times. It's been like ten years. Last time I went was before Middle Year five came out and I went out there for game informers. So first time in Kyoto for some of Japan ten years. Man, it's just a cool country. Like the seven eleven situation is ridiculous there. It was great before, and I think it's gotten better. I got to my hotel and I was like, oh, fuck, yeah, there's a seven eleven a
block away. If you don't know, seven eleven has all this like Coonbani food that is just amazing, Like all this like Gonigari and like these pre packed like just great.
Snacks basically, and it's a block away from my hotel. Awesome.
The next day, I'm coming back in an uber and I see my hotel and I'm like, wait, what is that. It's another seven eleven attached to my hotel. That's bigger. So they're like every block, every train station, airport, everywhere you go, these seven elevens are there with all these awesome snacks and candies and everything, just you know, fried chicken on a stick, these pizza buns that I kept buying break coffee, and it seems like they're not as
big on soda. They'll have like coke, but like Bakari Sweat had a lot of that, and you got Pikachu vending machines. Yeah man, Yeah, I went to Coco Chibania. I know that it's a big chain that we've got him in the States somewhere, but like I had it and it's just the fucking best. I remember meet Tim and Ben Hansen go into Coco Chibania a million times when we used to go, so so good. Wow, what else it's I just I love that country. It's really cool.
I rode the bullet train, So I flew into Tokyo direct and then I bullet trained to Kyoto, which is like, you know, a little shy three hours and so comfortable and just everything's just so clean and nice.
And what was it like coming back here?
Coming back? Well, I came back to Minneapols. I like Minneapolis, Okay, also really good in a different way. But yeah, I don't know, it was just it was a great time. The museum itself is just like it's you know, people talk like you Mike talk about like the Disney magic of Disney World and things like that and the care that goes into everything. There's a lot of that here where it's like there's hidden Pickman that you can find.
I loved looking around and like, you know, even like late on the second day, still finding like little Pickman's and you know, oh that bush has a little Pikachu tale coming out of it or things like that.
Making the hat of Food of Cards was really nice. I kind of thought that, like.
You seem like you're in the zone. Yeah, yeah, I.
Don't really have like a connection obviously to the Hana fooda cards or anything. And I've thought like, okay, I'll just do this because it's one of the things they offer here, but it's actually really nice and like kind
of a calming thing to do. I talked to a lot of people, like press people there, and I think we all had a similar feeling of this is a unique museum in that, you know, if you go to a historical museum or an art museum or something like that, you can appreciate the exhibits obviously in the historical aspect of it, the artistry of it, but you don't have
a personal connection with a lot of it. For me, you know, I was going chronologically and you know, walking around and like I really got almost overwhelmed with the amount of memories of just like my life. It was almost like I'm time stamping my life. Like you know, I'm walking through the NES exhibit. It's like, oh, I remember watching Dad play the first Zelda here and it's
like it's Superintendent. It's like, oh, there's Ken Griffy Junior, like, or here's Mario cart I remember when Dad used to race home so we could get a Grand Prix in.
Before you had to go back to work. Here's sixty four.
Oh me and my sisters, you know, trying to get my grandma to learn no buy Mario Party and you know, just like time stamping all this stuff like oh the Wei you know, like not the best library, but it brought me back to like in the last months of my grandpa's life, like he never was able to play video games, but then we Bowling. I remember being in
the nursing home with them playing we Bowling. So it's like you kind of bring with you if you're a lifelong Nintendo fan, you know, all these personal memories, and it made it very affecting to me to have all this just displayed so so beautifully. Everything's so pristine. The big controllers are so so cool, like not just the ones that are interactive that you can play, but like above every exhibit they have, like here's a giant Weu
game pad, there's a Virtual Boy exhibit. There's like they don't shy away from the failures.
You know.
There there's we You, There's Virtual Boy. All that stuff is there. So yeah, it's I'm curious. The thing I'm curious about is like I realize what a specific experience I had where it's like, Okay, I pretty much had the place to myself. I was able to do all of the interactive things where you know you'll have to like pick and choose because it's on this like coin system once it opens.
So I don't know.
I had the most ideal possible thing as a lifelong Nintendo fan with this access. I do wonder once it comes, once it's open, which is tomorrow, you know, if somebody makes the whole hike out there, goes out to Kyoto and all that, I wonder what the line situation is going to be. Like, I wonder how people are gonna feel about like the interactive things, which they were fun.
I like the interactive things some more than others. But I don't know if it's a thing we're remember like a Super Nintendo Land when we were there, yes, and it's like, oh, okay, I would love to go do this.
Thing where Bous Junior stuff. Yeah, yeah, you try to hit.
A thing to get a blue coin or something like that, but it's like an hour wait. It's like, okay, I'm not I appreciate that they did this, but I'm not waiting that long. I am wondering if the coin system, which is like it loads up your pass with ten coins when you go, and there's no way to like earn more, so you go, you get ten coins per visit, and so some of them, like that shooting gallery thing from the direct is four coins, and actually I kind
of thought that was one of the weaker ones. You know, if you want to do the big controller stuff you're supposed to do with two people, it's two coins per person per thing. So it's not like two coins to get into the big controller room and you can just go to town. It's like, okay, two coins to do
this link with the past challenge and your friend two coins. Okay, you want to do a sixty four two coins for each there, So like I wonder if that's a way to try to keep things from getting too busy definitely, you know, line wise and stuff like that. So yeah, I'm curious to hear, you know, experiences from people that didn't have this level of access.
Yeah, go ahead, Yeah, I was just gonna ask, like, like, it doesn't seem like you're disappointed, but do you think there's a chance of some people coming in to this place will be like I wish this was even more educational because it does seem like vibes based, like it seems like they are trying to illustrate a feeling that you're supposed to feel when you engage with Nintendo products, and they're trying to capture that and put that in a building, which I think is great for me, But
I also kind of would like like more displace like explicitly explain the history of Nintendo. Do you think that stuff's missing or do you think that this is just a Nintendo way of doing things.
I think it fits with like Nintendo's whole philosophy. You know, They've always been very big on just kind of play and fun, and like I think that's very much. You know, this is a playful type of museum. It's not one where here's a room where you go sit down and it's going to play a fifteen minute documentary or something like that. And they have some stuff like that where it's like, Okay, here's this plaque that explains what this place was in the sixties, what this building did and
manufacture these cards. There's stuff where like in the in the cafe, like they've got the palettes with the old like Nintendo's stencils and stuff on. It's like, oh, this is the palettes from when they were making on a fooda cards and stuff like that. Like, there are elements of that, but if that is the primary thing you want out of this museum, there's not There's not a ton of that.
The most interesting part of that to me was seeing all of the actual toys, because they have all of these boxes and all the actual toys, and and above it they have.
All the commercials.
So it was really cool watching like, oh, that's cool commercials from the sixties of like these wacky Nintendo toys that you know, you fly around your room or whatever.
So, yeah, I don't know.
For me, uh, I would I would rather see Nintendo presented this way than like a bunch of like lengthy plaques and documentaries and stuff like that.
Right, And like you said, I think it does fit. Sure, I just want to stare at a Kickle cubicle box.
For a while.
Sure, And I want that. I want that for you. Yeah.
Yeah, folks, we've been running a little long. Let's go take a quick breaking break and we'll we'll talk about games and news in the same segment right after this been so long talking about Nintendo that I want to hear about another Nintendo game.
It's right, we're talking about video games now. On the video Game Podcast. Here's here's my big problem. Gents. Yeah, I think I've broken another switch. Dude, what is how? You know what? It's the luscious hair. It gets in everything, it's what it is. Fine, I just keep rubbing the switch on my my hair off. Yeah, you know, I comb my hair with the switch. Actually, it's actually very good.
I think I've bricked another switch. It's like dead. It's like dead, like, uh, are you just specifically turning it off when it's saving? Like what are you doing? No?
No, no, no, no, no, it's I let it sit in its little dock for like maybe a week, picked it back up to have a fire up. Zelda played it fine and let me let it down over the weekend. Not charge Jing picked it back up on Monday. It was plugged in the whole time.
Charger. Yeah, I tried a different charge.
Do you have the official one?
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Okay, try a cheap one. Then I'll try a cheap one. I'll try. I'll you know, the taco truck outside has saved me multiple times. Now, maybe I'll just plug into their generator. Okay, there you go. Perfect.
I can't magically summon an item to help me. Fix the situation. But Dan and Grub you have continued to summon tables, beds, spiders, and uh the cool armadillo guy to save you.
How Well, yeah.
You'll get attached to something for a little bit and then it's like, oh wait no, now.
I I'll never use the bed again after getting the water cube.
Like that dead to me.
Well, you use the bed to get your hearts. I used to be all about trampolines. Yeah, I'm a trampoline over.
Bed guy on the water cube over trans a trampoline over bed guy.
Now, well's the thing is, like, I okay, so yes, this Zelda game is it has dungeons like Zelda typically does, but since everything's based around these echoes, it's not like it's not like here's the dungeon where you get the hook shot, here's the one where you get a bow and arrow. It's more like you will get certain echoes that are like, oh this kind of changed this one.
You'll get a category of echoes yeah yeah.
Or here's here's a fish with a bomb in its mouth and that's basically your bomb. Here's the yeah, the bomb fish is school the tile that you can stand on it. You know those tiles and like to the past.
Like the first legends all them the dungeon where you walk in and they start zooming at you and you can sword to break them. You can summon those and stand on it and it will zoom you across the room.
Yeah, it's just like a little like coverboard that you can go like. And so that's the thing, is like they are bigger than the other ones. Yeah, sure you'll get a bunch of different snakes and birds and stuff like that. But then there's these ones that like open the map up in a smart way.
Well, then that's the important part. Is the is open. So you see a border between the desert biome and the jungle biome, that's not a border. You can use these items to jump over that, and then suddenly you're just exploring the open world. And it is such a cool feeling. That is so cool to the point where I did started like messing around with summoning. Two things, like if you summon a piece of meat or like a dead fish, you'll notice that some of the guys
that you summon will just stare at the thing. And so when you've been like capture them with your buying tool and you'll be holding them and as you're moving around, you just see them staring at the thing, which gets you thinking like how can I combine these things? And then I saw someone actually do like, Okay, if you summon the bird and you bind them immediately, then you turn around and summon a dead fish or a piece
of meat. I use the fish, and then you pick up the fish, and then you hit the button so that now you move along with how the bird wants to move. The bird will chase the fish, and you'll be able to fly across the world. And now I am just like a zooming across the sky. This game.
That's incredible.
This game is awesome. It's so much better than I thought.
When I first say, you seem to bit like your niche, I presson seemed a bit reserved, Jeff, Yes, and it was.
I wasn't fully understanding all of the possibilities. Part of that is you're limited in the possibilities when you start. And of course the big thing is combat's weird because you're zeld in. You could only be. The link mode really is what it is, but they call it the Swordsman mode for like limit like ten seconds at the most at the start that does, you can expand that
later on it becomes much more powerful. But so you're not gonna be able to walk up everything and he with your sword, which means you're summoning the weird moblins that have the spears, and when you summon them, they're the dumb idiot AI guys that take thirty seconds to realize they even have something in their hands to throw. So you're kind of like, how do I solve some of these basic combat encounters? And that is something like you just got to push through that because you will
come up with some cool solutions just by accident. You get the bombfish. I was I'm throwing that bombfish at everybody. That feels great. It's stupid because it's a fish with
a bomb in its mouth. But once I got of like, okay, I'm just gonna go to these, they're like, oh, open world dungeons kind of similar to Skyward Sword, where it's like you're gonna go to an area, they're gonna give you a bunch of puzzles to solve to get into the dungeon, and then the dungeon itself is kind of like a typical sella dungeon maybe a little bit smaller because you've already done a lot of stuff leading up
to that. But I've also gotten off that beaten path, and I am just like I want to just go see what's out there. I do see this border, I'm gonna jump over it using my trampolines or now the water cube, and I'm just gonna go see what I can find. And I'm getting all these other tools and now taking that in and like having all these other things I can use like a level three liss Alphos.
I did feel like in a dungeon.
I felt like a bad boy, Like I was using a bird to kind of get through like a big desert barrier that felt like I wasn't supposed to go to.
I didn't know about the meat things, so I was just bound to this.
Bird kind of randomly for to fly where I wanted to. But like then I let go, and you know, I find a place to go to. And it's not so much that there's a heart piece, but there's this character.
It's like it's basically like a swomp from Mario, but the top as five as you can stand on it, It's like, oh, I feel like I got this maybe earlier than the game thinks like I would, and this seems like a very useful item, and I just, you know, it feels like I'm sequence breaking, even though I probably am not, And that feels great.
Yes, better, because I'm pretty underwhelmed it's by this game.
So I was clear of that way for a while. Like how many dungeons would you say you've done?
I'm on the second, I'm on the desert one right now.
Okay, okay, yes, that's after the desert one is when it started picking up for me.
There were like three no spoilers, but like after like a thing you have to do with hyroll Castle, like that's kind of where I'm at now, where like side quests and stuff are opening up, and like that's when I really started liking it, because like the thing I wasn't loving for the first few hours was this like the process of like Okay, I got to go to this desert place or I got to go to this
water place. And there's like a weird amount of talking for a Zelda game, where it's like pretty frequently yeah, and it's like okay, so I got to talk. There's some problem going on with this village. I got to go talk to a fish and you got to play a harp or whatever. You know, it's just like a lot of that stuff.
It's just got to save jazz, yeah, exactly.
And then you have to go into this like rift and it's the same thing every time, where it's like, okay, I got a find five of these shiny blobs or whatever, and then I can go into the dungeon. I was getting very bored with that loop of like, talk to these characters I don't care about, do this thing that's kind of the same thing every time, and then I get to do a dungeon.
And every encounter along the way takes you twenty seconds to be because you have to summon a thing hope that the enemy actually attacks it.
Well, I was thinking with that too.
Well.
I started remembering things where it's like I forget that I have that sword fighter thing, and that helps a lot if you just go into a room with like three or four enemies just sword fighter, and.
Then you run out of time and you're like, this is not fun at all. I don't know, I don't want to be too much of a bummer here, but yeah.
I had all these same prints too.
Yeah, I felt all these same things too, and then I'll like remember the tools at her disposal where it's like, oh right, I can just bind this fucker and drop them over a cliff, you know, like that type of stuff.
Like there's you know, it's very easy to go into normal Zelda mindset and just be like why I wish I could just slash my sword at this guy, But you forget that this is a different type of Zelda game and you have different tools, and like, as I'm kind of clicking with that, I'm enjoying it a lot more. Plus it just opens up so much more like where me and Greg are talking about, where it's like, Okay, I'm actually enjoying this a lot more. These side quests
are very interesting. I've got a horse in an open world Zelda game or in a top down Zelda game, which is you know, m used to having happening on the three D ones.
But yeah, I've been I'm in this like, uh, I find myself frustrated with it. And also I'm playing this other game than I am deeply in love with, but embargoed on that is running on my Steam deck that resembles Persona five.
Sure well because it sounds fantastical because I've drawn to that.
I'm also just kind of even more frustrated Zelda and don'tant to play it. But but I'm glad to hear it gets better because I will stick with it because it's a freaking Zelda game.
I love Zelda.
Stamp Guy best News react in a while, love stamp Guy, but I do that this one.
I appreciated the writing where they're like, it looks like it's handmade, because it is like when you hands you the stamp card and then you get to see it and it's like it looks like dog shit, and I love it. Yeah, yes, yeah.
A lot of quality of life stuff, like things on the map that just kind of tell you like, here's how many treasure tests you've got here, or heart pieces you know it's got the like breath the wild tiers of the Kingdom, like stamps on the map thing you can do, which is nice in a top down one.
By the wayst log the waypoints, which felt like very like they are funneling you to the next thing you're
supposed to be doing. Feel I really appreciate them. Once I'm like, wait, I'm gonna go do my own thing instead, and now when it is time when I feel like getting back on the path, I know where to go and I'm not lost, So it feels like this good anchor to the main main quest when I do get off to do and all this side stuff, which again has been like completely changed the game for me, just making me feel like I can go find my own fund whenever I want. And yeah, that's when it really.
Clicked, so very more Breath of the wild ish and it comes.
Yes, Yeah, at least it's evoking the same feelings. And I wasn't expecting that. Actually, I was like kind of thinking we would be more confined than like a link between worlds, and it's like, no, it's actually way more open than even that was.
And getting around the map is like it's a big map, and the quantity and ease of like warp points is very nice, even with in dungeons and things like that.
Yea. And then they kind of put the main things that are going to happen near those warp points. So if you are doing one of these main quests that has you going back and forth and talking to one kind of Zora and then the other kind of Zora, and now they're like Okay, well we're going here because we're still fighting and you got to come here and talk to us there. It's like, well, no, just warp there and we'll be right in that next room and
talk to us. And it kind of makes it all pretty easy and go buy pretty fast.
So how do you guys deal with the fact that when you open up the echo, I don't Therefore I hit the star.
Button of them? Okay, do you hit the star button and just go right to the journal and then you get the grid? This is something we discovered in the line you've been doing.
Okay, I know you can do that, but I didn't think about that being easier.
That's the main way of doing it for me at this point, because if I have the line, it's so big that by the time I get to the end my terrible memory, I forget what was at the beginning. So I'm like, God, what did I even come here for?
So can't you start a favorite spar like a bar that is just.
The there's most used, which I I default the most used, And it's like, all right, I'm always gonna have the water cube, is always gonna have the bomb. All these obvious ones, the one that lights fire.
You just got to change the filter. Yeah.
Yeah, but then it's like I'll kill a cool new enemy and have this new ability, but like it'll be tucked all the way in the back and I'll forget that's there.
So I think the start menu is organized pretty well where it's like here's the stuff that kind of catches on fire, and here's the furniture, and here's the water stuff. So it's just like visually, it's just very easy to jump for one category to the other. And if you kind of use that menu frequently when you hit start, you'll just go right back to there. And then of course if you do want to go to other stuff on that men, you're going to have to go back.
But ninety five percent of the time I hit start, that's the menu I'm at. I can find the thing very quickly. It's much easier to navigate that way. Now. I think there's a argument to be met to be made that the when you hit the LB it should just kind of have a menu like that. There should be a grid instead of the long line. But hey, whatever, at.
Least they have this solution making so many smoothies.
Oh yeah, yes, And like the sort of meta game of make ten recipes for me, it's like, oh, I'm gonna make the I want to make these smoothies now because I can get this reward if I do that, and now I have to make thirty smoothies, and then by byproduct of that, I am full of smoothies in my inventory, so that when I am occasionally in a situation where it's a little bit more dangerous and I do feel like maybe I'm gonna die, I have plenty of things to get me life, or to make me
swim faster, or stay under water longer, or be immune to electricity. When you come across to a boss that uses that it's their main attack, it's like, oh, okay, fantastic, I'm actually using these smoothies. Where in a typical game where it's like, hey, if you want to think about that, go do that before you come to this room, and now you have it, it's like you don't have to. The game is kind of encouraging to encourage you, encouraging you to experiment with the smoothie system before you even
think about needing a failing me. The Princess Zelda is juicing. Yeah, I was gonna.
Say, you have to get careful because if you have too many smoothies, she gets way too small, and then you just cannot beat the game because she just crushes her staff.
Yeah off the drug test too. Yeah it's bad for her. Yeah. Absolutely.
I feel like we all had a me Grub and Jason.
I feel like we've had similar experiences where we were a little underwhelmed, like in the earlier part, and then Jason, I wonder if you're gonna have a similar turn where it's like, Okay, actually really enjoying this more.
I think you enjoy it more will whether or not you like it as much as we do. I think that's to be open to most people. But it seems like most people kind of got to this point before we did. Dan, everyone seems to like this game.
I mean, I just feel like it feels like the combat is wasting my time, and I hate it when deans feel they're wasting my time, Like it feels like it's wasting my time to have to go into my inventory pick up something, figure out how to beat the enemy, like where I should just be slashing enemies. My initial impression was like, man, this would be so cool if it was just a puzzle. Game, and there was no overworld encounters because those are such a waste of everybody's
like why am I doing this? But maybe as I play more, I'll feel differently. I don't know, yeah, just it's tedious for me. So far, it's been very tedious.
Yeah, I think kind of learning the handful of things. It's like, in this situation, this, this enemy that I could summon is going to be very useful, and it's right there my most used So I'm just gonna bring it back out. Or I'm just gonna throw this bomb and it's gonna explode while I'm off doing something else and it's gonna kill those It's kind of how most of these encounters are going for me right now, and it's kind of become a non factor. Awesome. Awesome.
A game that is incredibly similar to Echoes of Wisdom, actually not at all is a game I've been playing called kill Night. The developers are touting this game as a Hades meets Doom game, and I see the similarities and I think y'all would really dig this. I would describe this as Gothic satan cyberpunk. In the look of it, it's a you have a whole lot of tools.
It is basically a.
Survival game, not a survival game, but wave based survival game where you are just taking on a flood of enemies constantly. It is a constant brage of just little spider things and demons constantly trying to get you, and you have several weapons at your disposal. You have a set of pistols that you're constantly shooting off an active reload.
You get a shotgun that you refill the AMMO by using a sword to hack and slash at folks, and then you're also ony musha styling sucking the souls of all these demons once you defeat them, to charge up a spectral cannon that refills your health as you kill more enemies with it and is incredibly punishing. There's three difficulties right from the jump, and I can't stop playing it, and it's hurting my eyeballs as I play it because
it's just so deeply entrenched into its style. It's funny because they totally recommend from the jump, like, hey, just set it out of the easiest divility just so you can learn the game. Also, you should one hundred percent play the tutorial otherwise you're going to be absolutely lost. Because they introduce mechanics where there's also a pairing system.
There's also a remote detonating system in the game where you have to use your spectrum can at the right time to fire off at a specific enemy, and once you hit that enemy, they will remotely detonate and blow up a bunch of other enemies. And there's also a combo meter going on at the same time of like, all right, you got to keep killing all these mobs. You got to keep going constantly. It is just sensory
overload in the best way possible. And as you complete each run or die in each run, you're progressing and you have a set of objectives like kill nine hundred and ninety nine enemies in one run with your pistols or your overcharged pistols, and once you complete that objective, you have the ability with the points you're making each each run to unlock modifiers or upgraded versions of your weapons.
The active reload. They do something very smart with it, where you could hit the shoot button to do the active reload and you'd get an up graded mini burst of your pistol fire. But instead, if you want, if you see a bunch of the demon Gem souls around and you need to suck really fast, and it also times out that you need to hit your active reload. You hit the soul suck button and then you automatically consume all of them around you in the immediate vicinity.
Or say you're in a bind and you hit the active reload, but you hit your sword instead, you do an upgraded sword attack. The parry's also really sick. This whole game is just sick out the wazoo. It looks it makes me feel some type of way kill night. I believe it's coming out later this week.
It's it's out tomorrow. It is a good name. It's out tomorrow on Steam. It says October two jan is it. It's not dual stick? It is?
It is like Haites right, it's it's kind of dual stick because with your right analog stick you're aiming your guns with it.
Okay, so okah, all right, that sounds even.
Better to constantly be moving as well. I made a mistake of like, oh, I'm just gonna sit here and shoot my weapons off, and like I was immediately getting swamped. So you constantly have to be moving. You have to be using all of your weapons all the time. Uh, it's it is not a game to unwind and relax.
To as I mean, they describe it on Steam as a bullet hell and that sounds like what you're describing and and yeah, I think you're right. Looks very much like Haiti's me to do.
That's exactly Vampire Survivors, aside from the whole auto attacking thing, just seeing how many enemies there are and how much you're dodging.
Yeah, like Smash TV is also like a people.
That's what they'd say to me if I brought up Smash TV.
I want you to know how weird? Okay.
Also just a fantastic, fantastic name of a game. I just wind up saying to myself as I'm playing with a K with a K. Yes, yes, another game that has been occupying a lot of our times and it's.
A bunch of games is UFO fifty Yep. Yeah I played this now? Yeah, how do you fratulations Mike?
I did it.
I was like I got over my like being grumpy that is not on switch and just bought it very good on the stand deck too, yea or rag Alley. Actually I got I got a rock Ally X and installing stuff on it. But I'm pretty excited about that because I love my old rock ally But uh yeah, this is pretty great. I was just kind of going through games chronologically, not trying to, you know, beat all of them, but they're just something that would naturally stick
with longer. I was surprisingly into paint Chase early on, which is.
Like, yeah, I like paint Chase. You were good at that. That was impressed by that.
That was the first one. Yeah, there were something I definitely bounced off of pretty quick, and Paint Chase was like the first one where I was like, oh, I actually want to see how far I can get them against.
Like a game where you're playing as a car, there are enemies that are painting the floor red, you're painting your color. You need to basically chase them and kill them. So you want to stop them from painting the floor, and while you're doing that, you're covering the floor. And at the end you want to have at least fifty percent, although there are some like I guess Boss levels where it's like you need to have seventy five percent on this level and it gets gets pretty challenging.
It's my favorite is Attack Tricks.
You guys played Attack Tricks?
Oh, I'm not.
Yeah, that's that's the one where you put the guys in the columns right like in the rows, and then you gotta line them up and defend your castle.
Right. Yep, I beat that one, superfeated okay, super fun level.
Oh I did do this one? Yes, yes, yes, okay, that's not really one. Yeah.
Have you guys beaten any of the other ones, because the only ones I've beaten so far off Barbada the very first game. Wow, yeah, yeah it was. It was like a sort of I kind of accidentally locked in, which will happen to me sometimes where it's like I don't love this, but I'm like, I'm I've already learned two things and I'm not going to let that go to waste. So I'm like, I'll just keep hitting my
head against this wall. And I found like the one thing where it's like, oh this love is not really a lot, but the.
First one the first one I want to beat, so I played more and I did really like it. But right after that is velgris the one we're just kind of jumping upwards the whole time, and it kind of reminds me of that one Metroid Nintended World Championship Challenge that we were all playing for a while. I don't know why Belgris really speaks to me. It's been my favorite one so far.
I also be the Pilot Quest, which is the clicker IDOL game.
I started that.
You should definitely started. It's addictive immediately. Apparently I did. I just played it. I raw dogged it. Apparently you can let it run in the background while you're playing other games. I guess, so like moon Sharks whatever.
Play it first, so it starts running for you.
I didn't know what's going now.
While you're playing. I wonder if I have a bunch of shit, Okay, that'd be great. Yeah, But that that was like I'm like, oh man, okay. But I just mainlined it and played the whole thing until I beat it, and that was that was a lot of fun, as.
Soon as you realize like, oh, I can plant these trees and just like yeah, they're popping off there, and it's like, okay, that feels very very good.
Exactly. You played an IDOL game before.
Dan, Was that an adventure capitalist game?
Oh? Sure, okay, yes, I like that.
I've done a couple of years. Assistance tapped out that seems like maybe you would like.
Game after twelve years.
Yeah, yeah, not not a ton, but enough to see how it goes. Yeah, Oh, how many moon shirts I haven't.
It's a man, It's just so much fun going through these things.
Kick Club was very much my alley because it's basically bubble bobble and that's like a game I associate with the NS as much as anything. I played a ton of that back then, and like I was, I had a great time playing it the first time, playing it for a couple hours, and I got through like eleven or twelve of the fifty games, and it does seem like it's not like they necessarily just get better as you get for long, but they become a bit more complex,
a bit prettier because it is chronological. So I don't know, I'm just like so excited to see these other thirty eight games and how many other ones here?
I'm really gonna dig.
What's gonna your mind is when you get when you get towards the end, you're kind of like, oh my god, how much did they put in here? And then you discover a full on j RPG.
Yeah, have you played that one? I was. I've been like wondering putting one back in that.
I mean, the problem is it came out when there was a lot of other stuff coming out, So I imagine I'll be revisiting you for fifty a lot in the like months to come to check out games like that. And I also I really want to play that point and click adventure like shadow Gate style game.
Oh yeah, that just came out, right, Yeah, no, the one in.
Adventure that's kind of like modeled after the ane scheme shadow Gate where it's like it's like your mansion or something. I forget exactly what.
Literally, it's just a new shadow Gate that came out that's based on in the n S sequel.
Oh yeah, that's yeah, that's all the other things.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, not enough moon drops.
So I got to de pluged it and now I've got it running in the background on podcast Crypto Minor.
Now you're just sucking up energy you can get exactly. I have never really encountered any of the meta stuff beyond like reading the descriptions of the games, though people keep hinting that there's maybe more there, but I'm like still not sure. How I'm going to come across that. And I'm like at a point where do I let that try to happen naturally or do I seek it out and just try to force it to happen so
I don't miss it. And I'm kind of leaning towards letting it happen naturally and if I never see it, oh well, and then a certain point I'll go look it up. The reddit threads about the people who did find everything, But have you guys seen anything beyond that?
Yeah? There, it turns out there are fifty more games. No, I'm just kidding. That's Freshnick's Freshnick like said that to me, do it I believed about?
Yeah? I bought you.
No, it's there's a terminal. You guys have seen the term.
A terminal, and I don't know what to do with it.
There's like codes you can enter and you can unlock all sorts of crazy stuff. I actually have message Derek you, who's lead designer also known as the designer of Splunky and Right Muster games, and he was like, yeah, there's there's some stuff going on there. It'll be interesting to see like when people discover it all, which is pretty wild. It feels like between this and Animal. Well, like the meta the meta secrets games are having a moment this year. It's the year of Metal.
Hill Fish likes. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, people love that.
Yesterday last year was the year of metaverse and nobody wanted that. But meta gaming we're okay with.
Yeah, it's it's it continues to be a very cool thing that I'm impressed by and having a good time with, and I just I do fear like falling off of it. At some point something else comes along and it's like, okay, am I going to get back to it, but sticking with it for now?
Too much?
Too many games? Ye, too many.
It's like there were ready too many games, and here comes fifty more games, literally, fifty more games for you to play. Someone. I think I was on the Besties the other day and they were comparing it to like looking at your Steam while like getting a game that's Steam Library and suddenly you have this massive back this new Steam library backlog.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's incredibly difficult to try and attack the backlog and other games that are coming out When a game that's already out comes out again and now it's on my phone, Dan record, this is the worst thing you've ever done to me by by sharing access to this with me. I can't believe you've done this to me.
It's bad. It's Blatro. It's good.
It's one of the best games of the year, but I am in a bad way with this on my phone at this point. I played for five hours on the Flight of Japan, and that was a pre release one that I had like a cloud sink error, and so it like overrode it with my iPad one, which I hadn't played. So I had to restart, and I was like, oh good, I get to do that five hours again. That was excited about it. I will So my sleep has been fucked up since I got back from Japan. I woke up at like two two thirty
in the morning today. I just reach over grab my phone. I played Bilatro from like two am until breakfast out this morning.
Daniel, I ate it?
Or I played it during breakfast. I went on a run. You ate it.
I went on a run.
And when I was stretching after my run, I was stretching for much longer than usual because I was down on the ground holding like a pigeon pos playing Blatro. Took a ship play an a way too long playing. It has been since two o'clock this morning, every element of my day has involved playing Blattro on my phone.
Okay, Dan, can I all right? Let me tell you how I stopped playing Blatro after many I don't want to stop, you know, Okay, if you don't want to stuff,
that's fine for me. So I like hit I got the optimal run in Blatro, which is basically when you just do single high card kings with with Barren and Mime and all the kings have like red seals and you get into the exponentials and you break the game essentially, and once you do that, it's way less fun to play because others are playing just don't get you, and it's kind of it's like mid max in the game almost, but that's how you get past like level Anti Anti
thirteen and fourteen and stuff, which which I got to like Anti eighteen or something like that. And this was after like I don't know, one hundred hours of playing Blattro. And once I got to that and did that, I was like, oh, if playing with like a flush or a straight or any other bills.
Yeah, you kind of just kind of feel solved or yeah.
It's solved. You solve the game exactly, I'm not the way of putting it. Yeah, so that's the probable. Yeah, if you if you ever want to stop, just do that and you'll be like, oh, I don't feel the need to play this game.
And I'm mad that I even have this knowledge that that's possible now, because.
I'm sorry, man, I think you should be.
Arrested for doing this perfect experience.
I am afraid of falling into it. So I bought it on stream the other day and I just did one run while the Bliants were playing last night, and I I did, really, I did way better than my first runs when I was originally playing it. Almost got to the end I failed, and I'm like, okay, I'm just gonna put it down now and go play some other games so I actually have something to talk about on the podcast and I could stick with Zolda and all that stuff. I have a fear of being in
the situation you're in. Down. I have kids. I don't have time for this, man, this is a time. Yeah.
I already get looks for looking at weird stuff on my phone, but now I'm getting even weirder looks of people seeing me play something that looks like poker and now amend.
That energy though gambling. Yeah.
Well, the people in the underground majong Den don't appreciate when you're playing a different game and.
Not Yeah, you don't want to offend them.
Yeah yeah, yeah, especially when like all the lights are purple neon and here you are with your phone at full brightness, like breathing out of your mouth playing bulatro.
Yeah it's great right there, that's good. Yeah. The repeating music that is like not that long of a loop is still so good to me after all those it's uh god, what a good game.
I keep the audio on. Yeah, I listen to it every day.
Did just get the physical copy, which I think I'm love, I mean the way we showed that on the BombCast couch for the Giant Bomb Coutch. Yeah. I just got the physical copy for the Switch, And like, man, it's just everywhere right now, everywhere I turned more blatro. So I can't fold down that pit, not right now.
Like the fourth or fifth time I've started on a different device or platform, and like I've been unlock everything again.
I'm gonna I can't wait, I.
Can't wait, I can't wait.
I can wait to play more games. But in celebration of Infrastructure Week, Mike Manatti, thank you for doing the work and checking out frost Punk two.
Yeah you have New city Builder. I did not play frost Punk one. I always meant to, and then before I could, here's this sequel. So just dove right into this pretty pretty good stuff. For people who don't know the frost Punk thing. It's kind of in an alternate world where the planet was frozen over sort of during the Industrial Revolution. That's kind of the level of technology we have. It got a bit more advanced than that.
Kind of like a snow piercer. It's a little bit of a snonow piercer.
I don't know if it's my sick Midwestern brain, but the whole game is supposed to be very dire and kind of depressing and sad, but I'm like, oh, snow, this is cozy, yes, even though it's like like one of the best things the game does is when when things like bad things happened, that like kind of like you know, twist things up and like give you a crisis.
They kind of like make it personal, like a poppable come up and first it'll be like a person like talking like in their diary, like, oh, like the kids they have too much free time and they're starting gang wars and whatnot. And then like a little bit later
you'll get the gang war problem. So it is need that kind of makes a person like that, but still because it is like a city builder, I have this god like I view I'm able to be somewhat dispassionate about things, so you know, I could do things that I would never do, like you know, send the children to the minds, which I hear them they yearn for
what time I had a coal mine. It's like a big loop of the game is that you have this kind of central part of your city and there's a furnace there and it's a very resource heavy game, right, so you need to kind of balance all of that. And when the big resources is coal or fuel to keep the generator going, they always have these coal mines or whatever, and there's this emergency like oh uh oh,
the coal mine's like gonna blow up. Do we do we just like sacrifice the home mine or do we like shut off this door and some people will die, but we'll get to save the mind I was like, oh, I guess we'll just I guess we'll just close that door. Did immediately get like text bubbles coming up, like, no, my brother's still in there. I'm like, it's like, you know, I said some people will die, it's like six hundred people died. Yeah, that's more than some people.
This is what I like about the original frost punkin and now what you're doing here with this guy, which I guess there is like some ramping up of like the level of control you have over Frostpunk two compared to frost Punk one, But what you're doing here is exactly what I enjoyed about it, which is you're making decisions and then you're coming away with stories about what that meant to the people in the world and what
it meant to you as the leader. And it was like for me in the first one, it was starting the religious police that would punish people if they didn't work too hard, and it was like, again, you're becoming this evil villain that is making the hard choices so society can continue, and it puts you in that in that situation and that's a lot of fun. And I think Frostpunk two sound it's like it's kind of striking the same tone. So I'm excited to start this.
Yeah, And there's just there's a lot going on.
There's a lot of systems, you have tech trees that you can invest in, and there are different factions at play. You kind of have like a counsel or you know this government like at Congress and you want to pass laws, that'll be like, oh, you know, there's there's free necessities for people, or people have to pay for that kind
of stuff. Or like when I had that children problem and there was a child gang war, It's like, okay, well you can pass the law so that all children have to go to school, and maybe that's going to keep them busy. Just give them fortnite and just give them a fortnight, they'll be fine. You sometimes you have to like play these factions kind of to get more votes. Like you'll see how many votes a law is gonna get yeas and nays, and there's a lot of undecided.
You can get one faction on your side, but then you have to promise them something like getting another law passed or uh, investing in a specific tech tree kind of thing. But if you do that then they're happy. You get you know, points with them. You don't do that, they're unhappy. And then off top of that, eventually I was expanding to exploring the area outside of my main city because we had to get more coal. So eventually I have like a whole nother settlement going on, and
I'm sort of trading between these two things. So even just after a couple of hours, the complexity was pretty intense. In a way, I was still enjoying, but it was I was like, when I was done, I was like, Okay, good head, kind of hurt. That's a lot of stuff to take care of. Who knew that managing a post apocalyptic snow city would be so stressful and hard.
Yeah, that's another thing. Like you're like riding the line and you're just trying to like straight by there so that you can get everybody to the wind scenario. And when it works out, it feels like you know, in the Forts or Horizon races where they're like faking you being in a race with a train, so it's always
so close that it feels cinematic. I kind of have the same feeling in Frostpunk one, where it's like, oh my god, we're just barely getting across the finish line with the resources we have, and it feels cool while you're playing, like now you're a very empathetic I mean, you wind up empathizing and sympathizing with an anime character that you've never fictional characters mostly empathizes with.
Yeah, is any of the dourness of this game bugging with you or sticking with you at all?
It's funny because like I, you know, I streamed and allow people my chapping like worried for me, like oh this Mike might not like this is like depress them. But again, for one thing, when it's a video don't care about their children for some reason, video games already sometimes have a better degree of separation from than other media,
just in terms of that stuff. I still get invested, but you know, I won't get super depressed necessarily, But again, that kind of god side view of things, it's like another layer of separation. Even though they do do things like those kind of testimonials from the on the ground characters that help make things feel a bit more real, it is kind of still all numbers on a spreadsheet, right, Like it's like it's terrible, I get that, but it's like, here's how many workers I have and oops, now two
hundred died because of it an outbreak. That's a shame, But I'll just go an expedition and find more workers.
Something like that.
It's bad, but I can get more game.
Me about it.
I think more games should have child gang wars.
Yes, that's an incredible I mean, I, like I said.
Before, I'm a little underwhelmed by Zelda because of wisdom. But like if it started off with a I don't think gang war. I would be like, WHOA. I can summon children and make.
Them fight each other village town.
That's what every persona game is. You are a child gang going to war. Yeah, there you go, Dan Reikert, how do you think a child gang would fare against the Horde of zombies?
Advising zombie a child gang very quickly?
Uh?
Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster. Not a ton to say about it other than just it's it's a really good remaster. It it looks, it looks great, runs great.
Uh.
You know, some of the sticking points that bug people originally about the save system and things like that have been kind of ironed out.
Auto saves, it's you know, everything works there.
Obviously, the small tech stuff got fixed forever ago and that's not a problem here, So.
Ye're still playing on a CRT that that yeah, that must have helped.
Yeah, yeah, well no, I actually so I played this a lot on I got the Rock Alix as well, and so I thought this would be a good one to test on the Steam Deck versus the rog Allyx. And because I'm trying to, I haven't used the rock stuff before, and so I'm trying to figure out like the use case for It's like, okay, when would I play a game on the Alix versus the Steam Deck?
And I think Dead Rising was like a perfect example because it's one that I noticed that like, Okay, I can crank everything up to pretty much max on the rog Alix and it runs very smoothly, good frame rate and everything. Where is it really chugged by doing it on the Steam Deck. But then I know, like grub, you've you've been in that ecosystem longer than I have,
with like the ally stuff and everything. Here's my takeaway is that like, if it's a game like a Dead Rising, that's going to kind of you know, push the hardware a little more. It's better to use the rog Allyx. If I'm like at home, I'm gonna be on the
couch watching wrestling for cup Flowers or something. I can charge it, maybe not the thing I take on a flight to Japan or something like that, Whereas like the steam Deck is better for if I want to play a bunch of UFO fifty or indie games or something that will get more out of like you know it, the battery life seems longer.
You turn down the TDP on done all five and it's fine, yeah, yeah, yeah, and so but the Rock has that too. It's got there's three different stars.
It's got like the Turbo one and everything, and if I go Turbo and everything, like it'll run dead rising very very well. So yeah, it's like I'm finding that like steam Deck will probably be my long haul kind of flight stuff indie games and things like that, and then the ally X I'll play on my couch, you know, maybe like the Star.
Wars loss on my original ally for example. So yeah, totally. Yeah.
The screen's really good, Like it just seems pretty powerful. I like the form factor of it and everything. So I'm definitely impressed with it. And I think I'm starting to understand because I was reading conflicting things about the batteries. Some people were saying it's got more battery than the Steam DECKO led and some were saying it has less.
And it's like, I kind of think it's depends on what you're playing. Yeah, if you have it on turbo, it's using more power than the steam Deck would ever use, I think, And then if you plug it in with the adapter that comes with it, it gives it like five extra watts, so you get even more power. So that's why I like plugging it in and playing in bed. When I'm playing Star Wars Run pretty well.
Yes, I use my rock mostly.
It is kind of like my in bed device, which is like how I pretty much exclusively use my switch anyway. So I just associate this kind of one to two hours is that I give myself to play games in bed, which isn't maybe great for sleep schedules, but very comfy. It's very cozy. I get a lot of good gaming done that way. And yeah, it's like the big problem with the rog Alley original was the battery life. I know the ex is supposed to be better, and I am curious to see how much better it does feel,
But I bet at the end of the day. I'll keep it plugged in anyways one because you don't have to worry about it until you do get a little bit of a performance boost when you do.
And the Windows stuff doesn't bother me. I know a lot of people don't like, you know, the Windows stuff, but has not been a problem with me. And also like, I don't miss the track pads. The track pads a ton I love. So would you use it for like FPS.
On well, I'll use it for mouse and keyboard games. I don't use it for FPS, but I use it for like when I am doing emulation, I will add a lot of stuff to the radial menus and stuff good for that, yes, and then and then when I am in Linux, I do like having that as an option, whereas you are always in Windows on the the ally and then using the right stick for the mouse. It's fine,
It's that's fine. The issues is just Windows kind of stumbles when it doesn't have a keyboard and uh and you and you can't get like access to certain parts of the screen because the Windows get in the way, and then you have to update things and it's three different apps. It's just a little bit more of a pain in the ass that it's it's getting better over time though, Like I've always said, once you're in a game on the ally, it's great, there's no issues. Yeah
I've been I've been really impressed. And uh, you going back to Dead Rising real quick?
So I just kind of forgot, Like I remember really enjoying that game back in six or whatever, but it's not one that I really went back to a lot. I don't think I ever played four. I remember, you know, liking two and three, but that first one was just such a novel thing and that setting was great and the photo element and all that stuff, and uh, I'll be damned, but it's still it's really really funny. It's still very fun like all of that. That tone really works.
It's it's it's a great one to go back to, and I beat it so and I want to do the thing because it's like, what's that, Mike, Why do you look like that?
Nothing?
I just wanted to camera. I just wanted to gym the camera for a second.
Don't worry about Oh okay, okay, yeah, I remember being a fun one to go back and restart with. Like you know, I'm on super levels up now and now I can just kind of mow through everything. So I'll probably play more of it, and it's a great game.
Very excited to play this. I actually never played the original somehow I just enjoy it. That was very anti zombie for a while, I was too anti zombie. So but now, especially for Spooky Season which starts today, Happy October everybody, I think this is going to be a good one to check out this month.
Mike, I was the same way I did zombie pop culture and games. I think it's lame and boring, like Walking Dead manias. This shit sucks. The Telltale Walking Dead games that everyone freaked out about. Those games suck, so it's fu yeah, But Dead Rising is the one where it's like, no, this is very very good.
I like this, folks.
There's a lot of video games coming out, and thankfully we have another podcast later in the week where we will talk about the rest of them, because I've also.
Yeah, well up on something that we didn't have time to talk about today for sure, Wizards of Blood. Of time to play it. I'm your Beast Expeditions, a mud Runner game.
Jeff Grubb. I played more of this game afterwards he did, and I can't wait to tell you about it, because I mean, it's a lot to make.
I ditched the bus and then I think I understood more of you by playing. Yeah, it is about the struggle, Like I get excited when the truck gets stuck in the mud or especially in snow ridder. Getting stuck in
the snow is a very special kind of hell. And having to get three other trucks out there to get the main truck that has the cargo on it that you actually need, and then starting to use the crane, it just becomes this great mess that I don't know, I find very satisfying speaking about a special type of hell. Let's get into the news. Yeah, I'm maxed out on moon drops? Who congratulations? Really worried? Did you update your silos so you can have more?
I don't have silos yet, but I got twenty five hundred moon drops.
Are you getting yoyo's? Yeah yet? Oh you got upgrader, Yo, you got to get the wizard Yoyo.
I keep dying every time I go into the field.
Oh yeah, yeah, me too. I did that for a very long time. All right, let's let's make the news pretty breezy. Star Wars Outlaws is highlighting Ubisoft's current woes. They apparently only sold a million copies according to one report in the first month. Part like the response to that has led Ubisoft to delay Assassiness Creed Shadows into February, and Ubisoft says that they're board is launching a review
of the company. H it's kind of a mess over there, and the mess seems to be associated with them doing the thing that they very frequently have done, which is release big games made by a lot of people in a state where it's like, maybe we can get away with this and we'll kind of update it once it's live, and they've regretted that in the past. They've done it once again. Now they're doing the thing they've done every single one of those times, and it's delay all their
other big games right now. That is just apparently Assassin's Creed Shadows US stock price dropped to the lowest point in eleven years. It's not looking great over there. I certainly do not know the answer for that company, but how can.
I just find out? You mentioned the board is doing a review. Sportive directors have the last name. Five of them are Gilmant brother.
Right, so this doesn't exactly spell the end of Yeskimo, when they when something like that happens, right, because who is reviewing him?
Yeah, well, so what happens is if shareholders pressure the board. I mean there are a lot of different methods in which board control and they don't have like complete voting control as far as I know of the company, and even if they did, I mean, corporate like, they're hostile takeovers all the time. We've all seen succession.
Things can get dicey, and it's they're certainly this is what this is. Same things are certainly getting dicey right now.
But yeah, one of the problems with you isself one of the reasons they're in this situation in the first place is that they're a family owned company. Like they were started by the Guillmant brothers in nineteen eighty six or whatever it was, and the Guilmant brothers have remained in control ever since, and that has its pros and
its cons. One of the cons is, whatever the last few years have been, it's just constant trend chasing and just spinning their wheels and making bad bets and like just seems like disastrous coming if Shadows is not.
A hit, right, and they seem over confident in their way of doing things because it is so big and complex and using so many people in so many studios all over the world, and like part of that is like impressive that they're able to make games that way, and it is bigger than kind of any of the
way anyone else does it. But now when they're in a situation where it's like, hey, these games aren't finished and we do got to get them out so we can make some money back, and then they're forced to delay it, it looks really bad, and it probably because
it is. And Assassin's Creed Shadows has it's in a precarious situation where it was maybe one of the bigger games come out in the second half of this year, and now it's in a February that is very crowded, and of course people keep wanting to go to Yota that just got announced as being some competitor next year. But there's an Assassin's Creed audience that is hoping this game will come out and be good, but a lot of it's just going to be left to be seen
until they can actually get it out. The big issue apparently has been that the game it was going to be messy with bugs and other than that, it was finished, So they're just talking about polish as they frequently do, Jason, when you talk to people that make games, this amount of a delay, is it enough to sort of deal with that kind of issue with bugs?
Yeah, definitely. I mean three months can make a big deal, a big difference when it comes to launching a game that feels polished and a game that doesn't. Yeah, definitely, three month's going to make a significant difference. But notable of that, Like they're still keeping it within the fiscal year, which is at the end of March, and that strikes vias something they have to do for fear of really upsetting investors. Investors already spooked, and that's why the stock
is plumbing. But yeah, three months is a good amount of time to fix bu because it's not enough time to overhaul the whole game. Even a year wouldn't be enough to overhaul the whole game. But it doesn't sound like they need to do that. I think they're pretty confident. What I've heard from folks that Ubisoft is that like Shadows is pretty good, and that like if it if it's in if it's fixed and in shape, it should
be pretty good. It's not like mind blowing. I heard that the next one hex is that what it's called Neo I think was the code name. That one is supposed to be like totally different and unlike anything that like the Holy Roman Empire, which is stuff that one's supposed to be very different. But if they make it that far right, but Shadows, I think is just going to be another like good like Origin Slash odysty Slash Valhalla style Assassin's Creed game, which I'm all up for.
I loved all three of those games, so I'm for that.
Du soond pretty interested that maybe hear what you think is the cause for Wars Outlaws Looes. That's a pretty soft launch for that, And it seems like there's like so many things you could point the finger to, like maybe Star Wars is kind of lost a step is
in a bit of a bad way. Is it just that the game came out too early and in sort of a rough state, or is it is it because so many people do know they can wait and buy you be soft games on a sale, like even in fact they're all of that in I'm so like a little bit shocked that a big star Wars game like this is only going to sell like a million units in its first month.
It's kind of kind of bizarre.
Yeah, the oversaturation is a big part of it. The kind of mediocre reviews is a big part of it. I think Star Wars games, Jeff, you might know this better than I, but if I remember correctly, the second Jedi did not hit expectations.
It's not the first, right, That's why they did the pay release on PS four Xbox right, right, yeah? Right? Or right? Yeah, so I think that.
So.
Yeah, part of it is that Star Wars is oversaturated. A big part of it is, like we mentioned before, those black Hole games, Like people aren't buying new games of the same game today. Yeah, Like nothing is hitting quite the way that people wanted to. If you look at all the Triple A games this year, other than Black Mith Fukong, which is an exception because it's mostly Chinese audience who are just super into that game. There, I can't think of many Triple A games this year
that have like done beyond expectations. Maybe Warhammer maybe, I guess Hell divers Too is the biggest example anyway out As a service game, you look at Rebirth Fantasy se Rebirth, that's probably the best reviewed Triple A game of the year, and even that like failed to hit like Square Innix's expectations. So yeah, it's kind of it's the industry. The vide game industry is in a weird place at the moment, and it seems like a lot of people are just kind of like treading.
Water for a while.
I think a lot of people are waiting for GTA six to come out, which will then like buoi sales of the PlayStation five, which will then lead to more people buying PS five game games.
I think that maybe or maybe they only PLAYDTA six for the next ten years.
Well that's the thing, right, So the thing that I'm really keeping a close eye on is if Dragon Age Vailguard does well critically, like if it's an eighty five plus Metacritic and like people really like it, which I expect that it will, and then it doesn't sell quite as well as hopes, then I think we're like Triple A is really in trouble because that game is like it's set up to be doing really well dragon Age. It's been ten years since a dragon Age game, so there's a big appetite for that.
If it does.
If it's like critically well received and people still won't buy it's multiplatform, Umike reworth. If it's critically well received and people don't buy it, that's a concern for Everybody're right.
Yep, it's and it's nothing kind of thing where it's like what it like, because a game like Boulder Skate three can come out and shock the world and take over everything, but these publishers keep, even when they have a good game, can't seem to capture that same kind
of success. And I don't expect them to capture that kind of success, but to still have a big hit here if it's like eighty five plus you said, yeah, and if it misses, it will maybe illustrate some other issues that are deeper seeded, which I just think is maybe if I were trying to diagnose that, it's like, I just gamers don't seem happy with gaming right now, and that is a weird and scary thing for these companies spending a lot of money on everything. Tony Hawk
is kind of suggesting maybe there is more. Tony Hawk's pro skater. He says there will be a future, even though he's not supposed to tease anything about what the future of the series is. That can mean anything. I am choosing to get my hopes up because I am a fool, and I'm hoping this means more Tony Hawk's pro Skater for real, Tony Hawks pro Skater one plus two best selling Tony Hawk games by my understanding, So why not make more of that? Would have rather had?
Good?
What if he's just going to guess on the Hawk Tour podcast and now that's a possibility, of course, number three podcasts on Spotify, you know, the Tony Hawk to you know, yeah, pro Skater.
I'm never going to listen to that, but I'm always like, yeah, I get that bag, mean girl, all.
Of course, Yeah, I'm proud of. Of course, we're all proud of.
Would you rather have a three remake or a new Tony Hawk take what I can get. I think those would both be fantastic. Yeah, the Underground I want Underground. I want to punch the face.
I'll take any of that American Skateland too, I don't care.
Yeah, I guess I'd be a little bit worried about the new thing, just because like the scars of Tonyaks pro Skater five still hurt a little bit, whereas I know, a remake of Tonyak's pro Skater three it's gonna be amazing. But I would also like respect them doing a new game a little bit more. I suppose I also think they did a new one now. I don't think it'd be another five situation, considering one plus two was like done properly, you know.
Yeah, if I carry his visions now, Blizzard like, there's no chance those people come back and work on Tony.
Hawk, right, Jason, I don't know. They're Blizzard Albany now. They're all working on Diablo and Overwatch too, so it seems unlikely that they would move to a game. But like near Microsoft, you never know it's going to happen with any of these studios and BECAUSO changes its minds every three months about everything.
So Tony Hawk's cooler than those games.
Maybe, yeah, maybe the hell Blay two team is gonna work on Tony Hawk. Now, I's like, forget this narrative garbage.
Yeah, is Tony Hawk getting his legs stuck under a rock and grimacing for twenty minutes?
Great? That sounds fun.
I mean that's the whole thing with Thug was the rich narrative right right, No, you could get off your board and walk around and then you could import your face to connect.
How did you do that? Because I remember game Boy camera yep. No, I remember, like I.
Had to upload a jpeg of my face to like a website. But then how the fuck did I get it? Did I have a network adapt at that point? Did you have to for thug.
Card?
You were using a deck track? Are you using a PlayStation? I maybe you're using a PlayStation. I an eey, No, I think I might have gotten the network adapt.
Yeah, I was through the website.
Outbreak or whatever that was.
Oh, there was a Rattet and Clank online mode P two that I tried. No, No, they had one in like one of the norm rag and klanks like a mobile or something. Wasn't it like a mobile?
Like a mobile? I mean, I don't think old.
Men trying to remember video games anyways. Of the.
Man learning about Activision and talking to people in the Activision sphere for Activision's history, Like there's a chapter in play I is called Bobby and it's all about his rise to the Activision Empire to run the Activision Empire. That it is fascinating. It is fascinating.
Is what cool is that?
Bobby?
Guy Cool Bobby, I'll let.
I'll let readers be the judge of is surprisingly good as an actor.
In Yeah, I do like his role in Moneyball got lost in the role some people. Yeah.
So he he like he would take a hit franchise and then just turn it into I have an anecdote in the book that is like this guy who is running the Guitar Hero franchise for a while, and he was talking about how he's in a room with Bobby and they're putting together presentation and Bobby looks over him and he's like, great job, But I want to get to a new Guitar Hero game every quarter, and then I want to get to a new Guitar Hero game.
Yes, you understand over saturation at some point, right.
He just believes that like players are just like insatiable, like content. And then he also believes that like.
If it's going up into the right, the arrow just keeps going up into the right.
I understanding, I'll just kill the franchise and move on to something else.
It doesn't work.
It always worked, didn't Yeah, And for college Udio it worked forever and still works to this day. So Tony Hawk was a victim of that, which is why nobody can remember all the different Tony Hawk games and who which is what and which did what, and there's just so many of them. It's fascinating.
Man Loo can forget Tony Hawk ride I got on the board in the other room.
You won't be able to forget it when we make you play it for Blake clubs. So damn it.
I don't have a fact that I will not get one.
We'll get you one. Yeah. My dad did just find my unopened connect and he threatened to send it to me, and he doesn't understand that it's a threat. So all right, let's go to the shryer zone. You've been out doing.
A lot of podcasts for like two hours now, Yeah, a little bit.
This is the deepertcha. Uh, your book's coming out, So you've been talking a lot of tidbits. People like Ben Hansoon won't let you leave the podcast until you give them scoops. So I have a handful of things here. I'm just gonna say the names and you could tell me what's really going on. For example, apparently they're working on a new StarCraft shooter at Blizzard, the third one in a long lineage of StarCraft shooters that never come out.
They cannot quit StarCraft shooters. It's true. Yeah, the first one of StarCraft ghosts.
That one.
I think a lot of people know the story. I remember that one was well well documented. I mean it was announced that it was like demo trade shows and stuff. People played it, and it went through to developers before
it was finally killed. One of the reasons it was killed, fun fact, is that it was like set due to come out, or it was like heavy in development during a console transition as everyone was moving from the Xbox one to the Xbox three sixty xx one, Xbox OG to the Xbox sixty or like ps PS two to p S three era, and and everyone was worried that like the Target and the Walmarts of the world wouldn't stock an old gen game like at the front of
their store. And it's crazy to think that that once mattered, like yeah, six and it really made a difference if you were getting were top shelf placement at Walmart and Target. And so one of the reasons they killed it is because because of that, and because it it was one
of the reasons that Walmart and Target did. That is because the new generation was sixty and the previous generation had been fifty dollars, and so some people at Blizzard thought that the multiplayer for StarCraft Ghost at the time was super cool and that it should have been released as like a standalone digital title or something like that, but Blizzard did not did not seize that opportunity and was very distracted with the rise of World of Warcraft
at the time. Anyway, World of Warcraft was just absorbing everything, So they wound up shutting down that project and putting all those people on what they called like the Blizzard Console team and started prototyping other stuff and then eventually racing too into game. Yeah, I don't think Rock and Roll that would have been cool now, I don't think that was one of them.
So that was one.
And then Aris project Arias was more recent that was like a StarCraft battlefield game, and that was canceled after like three years of development in twenty nineteen. That was canceled during after kind of the Mike Morheim to j L and Brack transition, and there was a lot of pressure from Activision and it was kind of like, hey, diablofore and Overwatched two were already super late. Why are you guys working on this other shooter when those people could be working on Overwatch two to get that at
the door, like what are you doing here? And so there are a lot of pressures and conversations about that. And then yeah, and then earlier this year, a game called Odyssey code named Odyssey, which was the survival game of Blizzard that got canceled, and a small team under Dan Hay who was the executive producer on that game and brought in from Ubisov best known as the far Cry far Cry guy for a long time, that small
team started prototyping another StarCraft shooter. And the purpose of this me sharing this is not to be like, oh, look at the scoop, look about what Blizzard's making, but really just to point to this pattern of like Blizzard not being able to part ways of the idea of doing a StarCraft shooter. And here is hoping that this one actually comes out.
Yeah, that's I mean almost twenty five years of shooter, yeah, on and off, like a quarter of a century of trying to put one out. That's wild.
Yeah, I try, I mean, that's that would be nice in all part of me is like, boy, it should be nice to get a StarCraft RTS again, maybe first, And I know you a little bit about some people want to do Warcraft and StarCraft artists again, but doesn't really seem to be that much of an appetite, or there's a worry about how well that would actually do today.
People wanted to do it and they couldn't, so they left, and a lot of those people, led by Tim Morton, who was the production director on StarCraft two, went on to start a company called Frost Giant that just released in early access a game called Stormgate that I think has gotten mixed reviews, but it's an early access so
they have time to get it better hopefully. Yeah, those guys tried to get a new arts game offic on, but yeah, there was kind of this belief at the highest levels of Blizzard that arts games just were not selling anymore, and I think there was good reason for that. StarCraft two was still popular and is still popular today. Like you can log on and I do starcraf two is my game. I log in every once in a while and it'll take me like ten seconds again a one v one match, So still a lot of people
are playing it. But there was a belief within Blizzard on a dev ad executive level that like uh MOBAs had killed arts games, and like or like other types of strategy Clash of Clans ish games had killed artist games. So they did work on a strategy game and it was called Warcraft Rumble, and it came out late last year, and I don't think many people played.
It come out, didn't it?
Yeah plans than it is RTS and the other thing.
And this is interesting another part of the nuance that I was talking about, because this is like something you wouldn't really think about, but a lot of the people who would be like, they couldn't find a director, someone who would be like a good position to actually direct a game like that, because a lot of the people who were designers or directors on previous RTS games were either no longer at Blizzard or didn't want to work on arts games anymore because they'd been working on StarCraft
two for so long, and so they wanted to do other things like for example, Ari's at StarCraft Battlefield Shooter I mentioned earlier that was being directed by Dustin Browner, who was the director of StarCraft two, so he was in his own world he didn't want to do like Warcraft four or whatever StarCraft three, and now he's a dream haven where he's working on a different project. I don't actually know what it is, but it's something else.
So like the other thing to consider is that, like sometimes you just can't find the right person to lead a project like that who has the experience and know how to with the genre, and so that can also cause problems.
Uh star blow, Yeah, damn right, she does. Yeah, So this is another one that came up. Is this a real thing people should ever imagine could come out?
No?
So this was Okay, a little bit of history here is that Blizzard North was the creator of Diablo that was in the San Francisco Bay Area, separate company than the Blizzard that we know of today that was in Irvine. And so they made Diablo one and Diablo two, and after Diablo two they have this period of just complete chaos and floundering where like everyone was burnt out, they were playing games all day at work, they were just kind of hanging now. And for a long time they
were split into two teams. One was working on Diablo three and it's early early stages, a version that would never see the light of day, and the other was working on something called Project X, which they called it that because it changed every three months based on whatever. David Brevick, who was the president of the studio, just kind of came in and was like, no, let's make it this, Let's make it a superhero game, Let's make
it a game about dragons, whatever it was. And then one day he came in and he was like, screw this, were making Starblow, and everybody applauded because they knew exactly what that meant. Basically, what StarCraft is to Warcraft, Starblow is to Diablo. It would be like, it's sci fi. It's an action RPG. You're in space, you got a spaceship, you fight aliens, YadA YadA, yadah. The works what a
lot of people would have loved to play. And they started working on that, but it wasn't long before Blizzard North imploded for a variety of reasons that I detail in the book, and that game was canceled and they
switched to only work on Diabo three. And then two years later Blizzer North shut down and Diablo three was rebooted again back South in Irvine and started didn't start from scratch, but it was essentially rebooted, and then Diablo three took another six years after that, so no, Starblough was long gone.
That is not happening. And then yeah, apparently yeah man. And then the other thing that you popped off this week or maybe reminded people about, is that Horizon Online coming before Horizon three or whatever that will end up being and that is a vestige a part of the ongoing live service initiative at Sony. Should people be expecting that to be a really big chance or chance that they're taking over at Gorilla for their live service initiative?
Yeah, I guess. I don't think I said that Horizon Online is like coming before Horizon three because I don't even know that Horizon Online is actually going to come.
Out, like it's the thing that they are working on.
Yeah, And I actually I didn't think that was a new I thought people had an idea of that because they've been very public about the fact that they're working on this online. I think the name even leaked during the Insomniac leaked. It's called like Hunters Gathering or something like that. It leaked out, it got it is public. So I didn't think that was a big secret or
news or anything like that. But yes, that was that's that's the thing that a lot of people at Gorilla have been working on as far as I know, and Horizon three last I spoke to people, there was pretty pretty pretty early, pretty conceptual. And games take a long time as it is. I mean it was five years from Zero don to Forbidden West, So yeah, I mean the res in three, I don't. I wouldn't expect that for a very long.
Time, right, all right? Is yoship trolling Final Fantasy nine fans Square Enixes and a Naoki Yoshuda has hinted that a potential Final Fantasy nine rebake could span more than one title do the game's extensive content. Basically, it was like someone asked, Hey, if you were going to remake another Final Fantasy game or any game, what would you want to do? And he said, I would do Final Fantasy three, But then look at this Final Fantasy nine.
There's so much content there. If we did that, wouldn't we have to put it across several games, kind of like seven Final Fantasy seven remake. We've seen that this game has been part of that. In video week before the suggestion there is that this is something that has been happening. He's not really saying that they're going to do the same thing they did with Final Fantasy seven remake, right.
Can I Can I read you a quote? This is June fourth, twenty twenty. This is the please Japanese. This is Google translated Japanese, but it's still close enough. Producer Naoki Yoshida denies rumors that he will be the main director of Final Fantasy sixteen. Quote. It's a rumor that is false and annoying. I intend to continue working on Final Fantasy fourteen for a few more years.
Interesting, So maybe he is trolling Final Fantasy nine fans. It definitely feels that way.
I mean, not for one thing, I don't think they're going to want to do another multi part remake after sales have kind of gotten so soft for the seven remake.
True, and it would never make sense in the first place for nine, something that's going to have a narrow room, more narrow audience.
Nine was never Yeah, I mean that project, I don't know. I mean, I know it's real, I have no idea when it's coming. I don't know the development status of it or anything like that, but from everything I heard, it was not like the ambitious translit like Final Fantasy seven remake is the brand new game. This is not that.
It's like Persona three reload is the kind of thing that everyone.
Kind of a better comparison. Yeah, that sounds kind of what, that's all.
I kind of went from it too.
And you know, it was that Pax East this year where the Yoship had a panel for Found Face fourteen down trail before it came out. Dontrill has some funal Fantasy nine illusions and references, and one of like the pre order things was like a little character minion based on a Fountasy nine character, and at the time he was like, oh, you'll see later whether there's so many
fun Fancy nine references. And at the time people freaked out thinking he was talking about the remake, But that might just be talking about again, all the illusions that are in don trail for Found Fancy nine. But he's been kind of coy about this stup before, and as Jason's pointed out, he can be you can kind of have fun with this stuff and he will just sort of you know, uh, well lie sounds strong, but you know, intentionally mislead because it is the thing that he should
be doing. Because of course, brother now and say these things. It is a I kind of wanted too, because it's sort of a depressing truth of gaming now to be like, well, that game from A two thousand is too big to make.
Now like oh cool, we have to think the game smaller.
Now do you remember, Mike, you men grab you guys must remember this, And like there are mid two thousands when Square was like, HG, towns are too hard to make. So that's like we're Final Fantasy thirteen just corridors.
Right because we were.
It's like, hey, there's no towns in Final Fantasy thirteen. There's like a city that's more of a cinematic than anything.
You used to have one guy make all this for the entire game, and now that's not possible.
Games are worse because the graphics have gotten better.
Yeah, I mean, it's what.
He has hit JRPGs like, and especially if you're a Square Enix and like your whole bit is that you have and make the prettiest RPGs ever, Like, yeah, it kind of becomes a major problem.
And then at the same time they made one of the best therapygs like ever in Octopath Traveler two last year, and that is because it has awesome graphical limitations. It still looks gorgeous, So like, how about more games like that?
It'll take HD two D Final Fantasy seventeen.
Hell yeah, that.
Would be h I wonder if they will come to that decision at some point. It probably won't be seventeen, but they maybe start doing the Final Fantasy HD. Yeah. Yeah, all right, Jan you were thinking that a Nintendo mystery thing could be a watch a wearable, there's some more like look. People looked deeper at some filings at the Nintendo made with the FCC for this mysterious box that has a twenty four gigahert millimeter wave sensor inside of it, and they said it sounds a little bit bigger than
a watch. Maybe a small cube that like sand sits on a desk. What if it's a clock you wear around your neck. Well, what if it's a clock that watches you while you sleep for Pokemon Sleep. It's maybe some of the speculation at this point. Yeah, either way, it sounds like it will have a small screen, or it could have a small screen. Will is such a strong different word it could have a screen and it will have this these they'll have the two point four
gigaherts for Wi Fi. No mention of five gigaherts, so it's not It doesn't seem concerned with like a strong fast connection, just something that we'll be able to have a long range. And then this twenty four gigahertz radar that can sense bodily movements in a room. It sounds like something maybe does sit on a nightstand, tells you the time you could set an alarm, and then it tracks your sleep and could be like a health product.
So yeah, something along those lines seems likely. Nintendo also apparently has a history of filing these sorts of things on behalf of the Pokemon Company, so this could be something like that as well. Kojama showed and talked a
lot about Death Stranding two at Tokyo Game Show. The takeaway is it looks fucking weird still maybe weirder weirder than ever with doll Man's dance moves and the polaroid photo shoots of el Fanning and her friends, and then the release date is decided they won't tell us because he said unforeseen reasons.
It's just crazy that he got Sam Bank and freed too.
He's not so busy these days. He's more available than ever in a lot of ways and less available in some he uh yea Kojima. I said, they'll tell us the release date in twenty twenty.
Five, greb, can't you tell us the release date right now?
Oh? Please? No, don't. I've been avoiding asking you to get me all your scus because I actually.
Okay, so I've heard you've probably heard the same thing, because I heard this from people close to first party studios that like a lot of people are going to be announcing games for twenty twenty five and just leave it at that twenty twenty five until Rockstar announces their plans, because that is going to be like Ripple. Nobody wants to be close to GTA sex and a similar thing happened with The Red Dead two. But this is like five times as big as this.
Is way bigger than Yeah sure, yeah, yeah that that that's kind of thing where it's like that's just assumed by everyone that's talking, like, well, of course we're worried about gt A, so but yeah, these kinds of dates will be more common, although they've been more common in general recently where people in that state's pretty late. But you think that's what unforeseen circumstances means in the situations is GT six Can we cannot handle g T A six that actually rules? Did you guys see the photo
shoot stuff and the dancing doll man? How are you feeling about dest ranting too and Kachin's latest efforts.
That doll guy. I'm into that dude.
He's he's a big fan of doll man.
Yeah, I wanted him to be.
It's like, remember the annoying head on your belt in Ragnarok and he just was like, he's great.
It looks like that grounder is cracked.
Be you could jump through.
Shut up, let me beigure it out.
Story is not annoying?
Funny version of that for destranding to I I like that doll dude a lot.
I feel like the PC version of Ragnarok had a toggle.
To like they did Slider.
Yeah.
I don't want to go against the wind too much here, but I'm a little bum a little bit over all.
The god you're such a funny Dutch kind of over you don't want to take fun polaroids of your friends with me? Okay, No, one said they were into that. Jan I don't want to be.
Like dude with a little doll. Gut we're off on that one. I'm just gonna say it.
I don't know a Pokemon snap layas to do, but I want to hang out with that doll dude.
Yeah, it does feel like he just didn't press the button that makes all those ladies show their feet. That's what that whole segment felt like.
It was very awkward, just trying to capture friendship. I don't know why you're turning into something weird.
You're right, that's this is all on me. And then Sony had their stay to play right after we did BombCast last week. Go to Yota is coming in twenty twenty five. Uh pstra but cld I wrote here DLC is coming with five speed runs just this fall date. Horizons zero Down Remastered is real. It's launching October thirty first, and then other things look cool. Monster Hunter Wilds a Lunar remastered collection.
Is awesome. I'm excited. Yeah, can I just say Horizon Okay, so we all know. Horizon one came out the same week as Breath of the Wild. Horizon two came out same week of Eldin Ray Horizon remaster comes out same day as Dragon Age four.
Yes, wow, they always find a way every time. Yeah, Astrobo DLC continues to be the thing I'm most excited about. But uh yeah, Ghost to Uta looked fantastic. It really shod trailer. I have none like they show it like Astro No no for Yote.
Yeah yeah school Yeah, female protagonist, which has some people whining the usual sure.
Yeah, sure, okay, yeah, kind of already attacking the voice artist, who seems incredible. Yeah, it takes place three hundred years later. There are like muskets, I think there's like guns and stuff like that. Yeah, so it's going to be, you know, a spiritual sequel in a lot of ways. But yeah, no, not a lot of connect the tissue beyond that, although as far as we could tell, who knows. That is probably a second half of the year game. I would imagine next year, yes, right, which.
Is like depends on GTA is yeah, obviously yes, because it's easy to imagine a world in which they either bump it back or pull it forward depending when GTA, Like if GTA is September, which I know, I have a feeling it'll be delayed. I mean, this is not a Butta game, but if if they're like GTA f roxters like in March, GTA six is coming September whatever, it's very easy to imagine sucker Punch like pulling their game to August or pushing it to December or something like that. Good.
I thought it was a pretty good state of play just because of Ghost and Astrobot and stuff like that. But how are you all feeling about Sony's slate overall? I continue to be like, Hey, we're kicking it off with Ghost Uta. I bet there's a lot of other stuff in the works coming soon.
Yeah, there's some interesting stuff in terms of like big things, though, you're desjointing two and I'll go so Yota, and it seems like to me those are both probably second half twenty twenty five games, so it could be kind of and there's already been a lot of these. It seems like it could be another pretty big drought in terms of big first party PlayStation studios releases until we get to that second half of twenty twenty five.
Again, I don't know why I've suddenly become Horizon curious what happens play play the Lego game. It's really funny.
Okay, when you hit a certain age jam, most men go through certain changes and become little Horizon curious.
They acknowledge their regrets in life. Absolutely.
The real question that I'm asking is is Naughty Dog going to miss this generation?
Yeah? We've been wondering that constantly. We bring that up in pretty much every time we talk about Sony. It's like, we could go through this whole generation without a Naughty Dog game, and that feels like like an actual distinct possibility.
I get that things are have exponentially gotten more expensive to able to make, but is wild to me that we could go from a PlayStation three with four major giant Naughty Dog releases to now zero in a console generation.
You have some things like remakes and remasters. It's nice, but man, is that a problem.
I mean, that's what happens in P three with so many years into an online game that doesn't happen.
Yeah, you're saying PS three had four yeah, all three uncharteds and last of Us Yeah wow.
Yeah.
I mean a lot of factors here, right, Like one is that people were crunching a lot more in the mid two thousands than they hopefully are today. And another is that, yeah, like the the costs are just so
astronomical these days. And the thing is like a lot of these companies they hire more people to get like the graphical fidelity up and to get to try to produce a lot more content for their games, and hiring more people can make games even slower to make because you have this like these communication challenges and all of this middle management you have to install, and it can create all sorts of like blocks in the pipe.
And it creates like a need for these remasters to sort of train people on their processes, and so it takes even longer because these things start to get in the way when they were supposed to be the solution.
And you combine that with the fact that like a team might spend seven years on a suicide squad and then it completely flops, and it's just like, yeah, we talked earlier about lack of sustainability in the video game industry.
I mean, yeah, you have this is it? Yeah, this is this is all that like just in one spot. All right, Jane, I'm gonna say that does it for the news. I'mone hand the show back over to you.
Bud Oki dokie this this podcast is getting a little cranky. It needs to take a quick little nap and then we'll read one email, uh and the show. It better be a good one right after this. Emails Pomcasti giant bomb dot com is the email address to send your emails to Please, for the love of God, stop fucking signing us up for so many lists. This is my actual public cry for help to stop.
And this is when you have learned that you cannot acknowledge it. You have to ignore it. It is a temper tantrum they're throwing and you just have to pretend it doesn't exist.
In one in a span of five minutes, we got signed up for ten different newsletters and then I had to go in and unsubscribe us because this is the reaction they want.
This is it.
They love mentioning it. Yeah, triggers more.
I'm just going to try a new style of parenting. It's gonna work. This is work.
This is it.
You're gonna break break after lipshits.
Yeah, yes, all right, And we just got signed up for three more fishing magazines.
Yeah, I really, I'm going.
To really get into fishing, like in about fifteen years. I think.
I can't wait, Mikey, I will have a newsletter printed out ready for you to go. Oh yeah, all right.
The one email we will read for this show is a hot dog is the natural enemy of the hamburger? Sent from my Verizon Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
That's it.
I don't read two email.
I feel like they can collaborate, their their their buddies. They together.
I think, like the burgers is it's ego has gone too big. You know, we get a smash.
Their natural enemy of a burger is a salad.
Ever, was this a thing that everyone had when they were a kid, or is it just my dad? He didn't make a lot of stuff at him where he would take two hot dogs, okay, and he would slice it. I haven't thought of this in forever. Two hot dogs and slice them the long way, flop them open, throw them on a bun, and throw a slice of cheese on it. And that's kind of like a hot dog cheeseburger, right, yeah, right, second cheeseburger form.
It's fine, that's just like a hot dog.
Two hot dogs. But when you slice them the long way and flop them open, there's hot dogs next to each other. Do you need to make a burger. I don't think that makes the.
Move, but flopped open, so it's like it's form widthwise, you.
Could still use one hot dog, cut them hot dog style and then hamburger style to make a raft of four hot dogs, and then that's a hamburger raft.
Yeah, hot dog.
There's a famous restaurant near me called Walter's hot Dogs here in Mamarnick, New York. And what they do is they cut the hot dog open and then like grill it on butter and then serve it un abundance.
There was a good hot dogs that really good.
And then also I assume at least some of you watched The Sopranos. The Sopranos has a truly disgusting moment where Carmela makes for for a j Twinkie hot dog sandwich, which is a Twinkie cut open and then like a hot dog in its.
Gross don't don't not until you try it. I'm okay.
Actually, do hot dogs come fully cooked?
Yeah?
Yeah, yeah, get them up.
Yeah. I used to microwave in college, but like bacteria does not choose the hot dog naturally, so yeah, you're probably fine.
Okay, So I could because I've never most of the time I haven't made me and god, you know twenty plus years probably so like I but I'm afraid of it, like salmonella stuff, and I.
Know you're not gonna find like I get salmonilla from your hot dogs.
I gotta thank doctor Ryan. And chat is that twinkie thing sounded so familiar to me? And I've never seen the Sopranos and it was in You Ain't Chef the weird al movies.
Oh yeah, you know.
Maybe maybe on Sopranos is Devil Dogs. I don't remember exactly. But anyway, Dan, have you when you say even made meat? Are you saying that Bianca makes all the meat?
Are you are?
No?
No, we different things, And like I have like a meal service thing that I just all of my dinners are just from this like meal service thing. It just shows up in the maimatch every single thing.
I would talk to you about your food habits for like a two hour podcasts every week because every well.
You should listen to this week's voicemail, dump trunk, next ye, reaction, next.
Week, next next week, next week, Okay, yes, yeah, I mean the only thing I'm comfortable doing these days. Cooking wise, is that casey Joe's barbecue that like comes fully cooked and literally all your bag is like boil water and then just throw it in and let it sit for.
Twenty minutes in the bag.
Yeah.
Even the like turning on the stove part is like kind of scares me to do if Punk's not home. So, but the thing is you get to turn it off and then it just sits in the hot water for twenty minutes, So it's like, okay, there's not like an active flame for twenty minutes.
That would probably be too much.
Can you describe to me the process of boiling an egg? What do you think it is.
Boiling an egg?
So?
Is that hard boiled? Soft boiled?
What is that? Either one?
Does it make a difference if I never had no hard boiled oiled, Dan, I don't think I've had hard boiled or soft ooil.
Did they look the same.
Form?
Yeah, both hard boiled and a soft boiled both looks like an egg, yeah, yeah, showing everything.
Yeah, but that soft oiled is like a looser yolk in the middle.
Yes, a looser yolk.
It'll be less cut.
You probably boil water and then salt in it. So doesn't stick to the bottom.
That's okay, you're.
Salt.
Actual cooking I know how to do is like I do the velveto shells and cheese. Now I know to put a little bit of salt in there so the noodles don't stick.
No season the noodles has nothing to do with sticking to the bottom. What are you talking about?
But the salted This might be an urban legend, but the salt in the water can help you peel the shell more, I believe.
Okay.
I thought I was keep it from sticking on the to the bottom of the bottom.
Something will only stick to the bottom of the pan if you run out of water, they can kind of on the bottom.
Do I need to do this thing?
Do I need to put the salt in there? It seasons the noodles. Even water, wouldn't it come off in the draining.
So noodles absorb the water when they cook, that's why they're holding And.
If it's salty water, then it absorbs the salt.
Also. Oh that's cool, okay, So I should do more. I can do it.
I didn't know it was impacting the taste, that's very much. So can I put like garlic salt in there.
I would do that after Yeah, but what if I want to infuse it?
Like if it's like suck it, you're losing a lot of the flavor.
I mean, like what you should do, like is finish all of your pasta.
You should cook your pasta like a minute before or two before you think it's actually done, and then finish cooking it in the warm sauce because it'll absorb some of whatever that sauce is.
And yes, that is the it's it's slipped back. Who's weirder? Dan Reikert with forty four, Mike Minaughti with twelve, and Jason Trier with three.
Okay, I mean this is a new like I honestly between the Casey Joe's barbecue and the velveta shells and cheese thing, this is the most I've like cooked in decades.
That is Casey j'es. Is that the barbecue we had when I came to your house a couple of years ago.
Yeah, that's yes. You can get it delivered and they delivered with dry ice and it's frozen in the bags And he's right, you just throw the bags in the boiling water. And that's why I'm going to do that every year for Christmas.
Now it's dan when when we're all in town for the Game Awards, We're going you and I are going to make fried rice together. I would love that. I love fried rice and it's just an easy thing. We're going to walk through the process. Don't worry about anything. No google for eggs.
Don't be scared when you see the eggs I put eggs and fried rice that you got to Yeah.
I usually screwed out aside when I get trying to use food, I realized I don't know how the eggs.
I like the peas and the eggs.
I just kind of like shove them over to the side, and if there are any visible onions, I'll do that.
But would get along well with my five year old.
He wouldn't actually he would be for your children at all when he was at my house, Jason, he was the five year old. Specifically, she would be like, hey, look at the sonic doll that I love and be like that's Mario and she lost her mind and he would not let it go, and she wouldn't actually.
Protected the whole time I was there, I didn't fucking break kay fame. Once she actually lost them before he did, which should tell you because like his daughter was screaming at the top for lungs and I turned to grab I was like, I'm sorry, I can't.
I have to protect the business.
I can't, like I'm not ever going to get the.
We We can't gloss over the fact that Dan said the sentence, I don't know how rice happens.
Which are well, I think at no step along the line. I don't know where it comes from. I don't know how you cook it. I don't know how it gets soft. I don't know how you flavor it. What we learned this week we learned I love Rice.
We learned that Jason Schreyer is releasing a book next week called Play Nice The Rise Fall in Future of Blizzard Entertainment out next.
Week October eighth. Where Rice comes from and then comes from you.
Shred up my book into trees. It's actually called play Rice.
You did it? Jason's Rice Grow in America?
Uh, Jason work? Can folks find you on the internet? Where can folks pre order the book? Once again? Yeah?
You can find me on the Triple Click podcast, which I'm about to record in like an hour. And I'm just gonna be completely drained. So that's gonna be fun. Sorry, this entire week for me is just a blur. So
go check out Triple Click. We just made a super cool announcement where which is that me and my co host Kirk Hamilton and Madda Myers we are doing a three part like standalone kidnapped Matt Mercer, the kidnapped members that we're doing a D and D campaign And we were like, hey, we want to get a DM, why don't we just get the best DM in the world, And so we call that Met Mercer got him to come and do it for us. So that's gonna be super cool. And then uh yeah, the book play nice.
You can get it in stores, pre order it at any store, any bookstore or Amazon or whatever you want. Also digital version and audio version. I know a lot of a lot of people are into audio. Fun fact, like so many people are buying audio books these days that it's like almost comparable to print sale. It's like a huge chunk of the book market.
I'm a big audiobook It's great you listen.
To audiobook while you're driving, you can listen while you're playing games. It's really cool. And also like my book happens to come out the same day as a new Diablo four expansion, so you can listen to it while you play Diaba four, which I think is perfect. So yeah, Ray Chase, like I said.
Before, is the narrator.
He's really really good. I love his work and he's really good reading the book. So you can go check that out too.
Awesome, fantastic, Jason, sir, thank you for joining us on the show today.
Thanks for having me guys. Thanks please, if we can schedule like a two hour just let's talk to Dan about.
Food and his and we'll make it happen. I've been for the last five minutes. I said, it's a semi aquatic plant. What does that mean to you?
That makes me think it's like seaweed? It doesn't grow underwater?
Does it?
Semi aquatic?
Semi aquatic? So a little bit, it's like amphibious. Yeah, it doesn't climb onto the land. Okay, what's the rice infrastructure week here at dot com?
I don't have any calories, cake, I'm thinking of different.
Let's see it very another episode of the Giant Podcast.
Thank your special guests, Jason. With these oh crap, they're like crap no with ds, now with ease. I'm sorry. What do you say now with these nuts? Let's podcast somebody