898: Deathtiny

Bye. everybody it's tuesday july 8th 2025 welcome to oprah's favorite video game podcast that's right the giant bombcast episode eight

I am your host, Jan Ochoa, joining me, co-captain of the ship. He took the title so seriously, he decided to see all the waves by the Great Lakes of Michigan, Jeff Grubb. You ever get that feeling when you go into like a wavy body of water for like two and a half days later, you still feel like you're moving around in the waves. That's right. Because he's juking and he's jiving. He's the most danciest member of this website. Dan Reichert.

Hey, what's up? How's it going? Look at him. Grub, you missed it last week with Delight Club because Kayla and Dan, I think, are some of the most musical dancey people I've ever seen. Yes. Yeah. Of the three of the people on that, I would describe the other two as the most musical and Mike the least. Yes. Yes. Yeah. That makes sense. Speaking about Mike. I can't stop dancing. That's my thing. Yeah. It's in the name.

Can't stop dancing. Jesus, dancing. Okay. And we have the bad boy of games media. Yesterday was his day. It's a day for Mikey's Mike Minotti. Hello. Breathing is bad. I'm going to stop that so people will like me more. Your comments affect him deeply. It's a problem. Everyone, please comment on the video. Mike, we need you to breathe. It's okay. We like your breathing. We just start making up stuff that Mike's not actually doing. Oh, don't do that.

I hate how he has flesh. It's really annoying. He has too many fingers. It seems like the comments that are affecting Mike are endless, and it's appropriate that we have our special guest today.

For Endless Mode, Garrett Martin. Welcome to the podcast, sir. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Garrett, let's get the plugs and the stuff out of the way, tippy top, because that's when people actually retain all of the information. Endless mode. Tell us about it, sir. It's a website. And we write about the things that we like, like video games and theme parks. And my associate editor, Elijah Gonzalez, loves anime. So I let him do anime, which is totally a foreign thing to me. I don't understand anime whatsoever.

Um, neither. Yeah. And I don't know, maybe we'll try to get wrestling in there somehow. I don't know if that'll happen, but I would love to fit it in, but no, it's a, so I, uh, I've been editing paste games at the pace magazine for a long time. And they were talking about, hey, maybe let's expand this into a whole standalone side of its own. And so we've done that. And it's called Endless Mode. It launched last week. Lots of really good stuff if you like to read stuff.

I'm a fan of stuff personally, so go check it out. I like stuff. Garrett, can I make a request for an article? Totally, yeah. Can you put out a guide of how to maintain this magnificent beard? I can't grow more than this, but I want to aspire to grow more than this and maintain what you have. I think you have three experts on this call every day. I got the struggle beard going. No, no way. Mine's kind of scraggly. I got to get cleaned up.

if you trimmed it up when I don't trim mine, it looks like Dan's, you know, it gets that sort of like a, you know, West Virginia mountaineer bootlegger type of look to it. Yeah. Yeah. Meanwhile, Jan's over here with the Dom Mysterio mustache, and Dom seems to be doing fine. Yeah, yeah. Honestly, it's a good look. Yeah, I have thought about growing a mullet, but then I realized I would just be Dominic Mysterio.

I mean, again, worse things to be. That's true. That's true. How's everyone doing? We had a holiday weekend last week. Grub, you're back from vacation. Do you feel rested at all?

You know, it was more vacation than a trip. I was talking to Jason Pennelly on Game Mess mornings on Monday, and he was telling me his wife has a distinction between a trip and a vacation. Like, going to Disney is a trip. Because it's not really, you don't get a lot of time to... relax and stuff like that this was definitely more relaxing and so yeah i felt i did by the end there i was definitely like oh i'm getting in the vibes of hanging out and

I played through an NES game because it felt like summer, and that's what I like to do in the summer and stuff like that. So, yeah. I'm sorry. Disney is called the vacation kingdom of the world. Oh, Disney's never lied. He's thinking about Disney Lying. He's got nothing.

But yeah, I felt really good. I'm happy to be back, though. You guys did a lot of fun stuff while I was gone. I was really enjoying watching a lot of it. That Baby Steps video, very funny. Oh, man, I'm looking forward to playing that. I was there the whole time. I was surprised Backlard had not heard of QWOP.

Yeah. Has he not heard of that? That bothers me a little bit because QWOP is important to me. I mean, Bennett Foddy. I mean, I'm sure like I'm sure you guys talk to like my family was talking and like laughing, watching you guys play. So I kind of heard a little bit. You guys talk about Bennett Foddy is the guy.

in the game uh the guy that talks to you i'm pretty sure that's him oh i didn't realize he's the dude walking or is he the dude like that's like following you around he's the dude that's following you around oh the rob cordry looking dude yeah the rob cordry guy yeah yeah and uh so yeah i i love the idea of a competition

uh because co-op is so good yes it is what's that yeah it was browser based right yeah it was uh it was a i think that was a flash game and then i think he turned it into an html5 game so you could still play it i was about to ask how you control it It's quap. The letters, yeah. It's literally in the name, yes. QWOP. Do they do QWOP at, you know, Good Games Done Fast or Games Done Quick? What's going on right now? Surely they did, right? They probably have, yeah. I've done that, right?

They did a blue prince race yesterday. It was like a bingo thing. That's such a good idea. So there's, yeah, there's this bingo board and there's two people. And like, if they did certain things in the game, like, oh, you had 10 gems or you drafted the. east hallway and the west hallway that like that would be a slot in the bingo thing you had to kind of like fill up the bingo board it's such a good idea like made a path to the empty chamber from the start it was cool

Oh, that's really cool. Wow. Okay. I had the urge to just do bingo on the website last week, and that was just shoot bingo, just regular bingo. Yeah. Now I want to do some type of game bingo. Maybe like a Hyrule Hustle like Breath of the Wild with Bingo. Let's just steal the idea. Death Stranding Bingo? I feel like Death Stranding 2 Bingo would be easier than like a race.

Yeah. Like, you know, shove a corpse into a coffin board. Sue the baby. Yeah. Yeah. Have a doll man give life advice. Yes. Yes. Doll man anime dance. I'll do it. I'll make a bingo board for some video game for you all. I'll be the bingo... What's the word that starts with B? Baron? The bingo baron? The bingo baron! I'll be your bingo baron, baby! You'll be the bingo bear!

You'll be the bingo Baron Bear. Yeah, the Bearstein Baron Bears. There it is. Anyone get up to grilling this weekend? I was going to. I ate ice cream. i was going to my uh my pellet growth though it's like i got it going first time like this year it's like oh the fan doesn't work

So now nothing can happen. I'm like, well, don't know how to fix that. Oh, no. So it's like, oh, oh, no. Am I ever going to be able to use this thing again? I need to. It's too expensive to just write it off. But also seems like a pain to fix a fan.

That's connected with electrical wires. I looked at the wires. That didn't help. I may as well have never looked down there. That only made me feel worse about the situation. So I had to like call somebody. I don't know. I don't want people coming over here. Leave me alone. I went to a 4th of July gathering and my, I guess, we'll call him a nephew because he's a friend's kid and he calls me Uncle Jan. He approaches me.

And he sits down, he's drinking his like little water bottle and goes like, Uncle Jan, I still have that dog in me. And I was like, hell yeah, I believe in everything again.

Alright, well, let's talk about video games since this is Oprah's favorite video game podcast. Don't look it up. It is strictly the truth. I would never lie to you. Like Disney. Yeah. No, no, no, no. I think if we just say it enough, it'll become true. What lies have Disney ever told?

I guess they told me that Toy Story 4 would be good. And it was great. So they did lie. Speaking of Disney lies, I bought the DVD copy of Love on a Leash. And it seems like, first of all, it seems like Bonk noticed the lady on the cover of does not seem to actually be the actress from the movie. That's even more than what Noobs did, because Noobs is like, we're going to put a busty lady that's not in the movie.

Yeah. And then on the back of the Love on a Leash DVD case, the top pull quote in quotes is, it's like the princess and the frog meets Pinocchio and it's unattributed. And you can't do that. You can't just put something in quotes and then no attribution at all. I mean, maybe they're saying it for the first time right there.

It's episode 898, so we're so close to episode 900. But three of you boys, Garrett, maybe you have partaken as well. I've been playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 plus 4. How is that? Is it everything I dreamed of? Is it like 1, 2? It's a lot like 1, 2. That's definitely the format they're going for here. I got a code early. I've been playing a lot of it. We did record a quick look that's probably going up.

later today so you'll see that uh Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 is my favorite Tony Hawk so you know as soon as we got one and two I like that a lot there's always a part of me like oh but I kind of want three and that's the best one so having this getting those three levels and it's like yeah this is the best one these levels are so freaking good foundry and airport and cruise ship just uh just so much fun playing through those still i love that campaign

The more contentious thing is the Fork campaign because they took what was this more open thing. You had kind of free skate until you talked to an NPC. And then they're like, go collect the letters of skate. Then you do that. and then they applaud you and then you go and do another thing so they changed all of those maps to the two minute timer thing with uh their own set of goals a lot of them inspired by those original goals

But not everything's here, especially some of the weirder ones from four, like go lose down this hill or play tennis with your skateboard. Stuff like that is not here. So they definitely took four and made it a different game. Now, the game they turned it into is very good.

I think that they did a great job adapting it to the two-time structure, a structure that I've always liked more than the open world stuff. I think the levels, I was worried that these levels were designed with, you know, the more open stuff in mind. They wouldn't really work for this. That's not the case.

They work very well. But it is different. And, you know, if you're a mega Tony Hawk Pro Scare 4 fan, you might resent that change. It's not me, though. I'm fine with it. And then they put in some new parks in this one. too and they're all kind of part of the floor campaign and they're great there's pinball uh which is kind of like water park yeah water park is amazing it's one of my favorite Tony Hawk's per skater levels and there's the movie studio which is a new competition level so

Overall, I love it. I think it's great. I thought you made a good point on the quick look that's going up where you were talking about how like, you know, we were really reminiscing about the first levels, you know, warehouse and foundry, you know, and hangar. And then you realize that.

Actually, maybe some of the best levels were the smallest ones, you know, just like very tightly constructed small ones. But yeah, the bigger ones like Waterpark is huge and it's really fun. A bunch of teleporters and stuff like that. I want to speak specifically real quick to the Switch 2 version. because that's what I've been playing on PS5 and obviously it looks good on there.

Yeah. So I played last night in one sitting. I did all the goals on three and I got about halfway through four and it runs well. I would say usually when you like start and load into a level, it kind of like it seems a little hitchy or almost like the frame rates a little weird. And then it just. pretty quickly just evens out. And then it seems to be running at 60 beyond that. Shaders. It sounds like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That doesn't make sense for the switch. Okay. Yeah. Weird.

Well, yeah, but it's a little hitch and then it seems totally smooth. I'll say I don't like playing it on handheld because that D-pad on the Joy-Con sucks. Just the four little buttons for Tony Hawk doesn't work great for me. So mainly on the TV. My one complaint. complaint would be like five or six times last night.

Just crashed. The game totally just stops running. And it was like, hey, there's been an error. You're going to have to close the game. And so I'd be in the middle of a run, you know, going for a high score or something. And it's like, well, I guess none of that counts. So I don't know if that's widespread, but I definitely ran into it.

a couple times an hour last night. I had one crash on PlayStation 5. Just one, though. That's kind of normal for playing a game technically before it comes out, so I didn't think too much of it on PS5, at least. I have been playing it as well. And I played Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 in like the last month and a half. And I think what I realized is... Wow, this is the old version of Tony Hawk, right? The two-minute structure.

The open structure actually feels older to me in a lot of ways because it's like they try to do so much more that it has just shown its age. This is like a more pure thing. So I just think like when you're facing this decision as a studio like Iron Galaxy and you're like.

Do we want to try to accommodate the weirdness of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4? You could do that and it would be more accurate, but I think it might actually result in a game that feels a little bit more dated than they want it to. I get it. A lot of people like that stuff. They like the variety.

So if that's a complaint, I get it. But for me, I just think they ended up making what feels like a tighter game because of that decision. And then it's still Tony Hawk. It feels incredible. It's really cool to like immediately get into the vibe of landing those perfect. perfect landings after doing your own sort of 70 or 700 or whatever 720 and then

kind of getting all the special moves going and finding your line and doing that stuff. That's how I like to play Tony Hawk. I like to try to get the massive combos and things like that. And it's just as good as ever. And then the roster of playable characters. Uh, you know, I've watched some professional skateboarding in the last couple of years. So, uh, like Nyjah and a bunch of others, just seeing them in there and looking awesome was very cool. Yeah.

Garrett, any experience or any fondness for the Tony Hawk franchise? Yeah, well, I mean, the new game, that pinball level is amazing. Like the best part of the game is when you're playing the pinball level and the very first time you realize. there's a gigantic Tony Hawk playing the pinball machine that you're skating in. So there's like this Galactus-sized Tony Hawk looming over you like he's...

you know, a malevolent figure, but no, the pinball level is really cool. I'm a big pinball guy. That's one of the sections at endless mode.com. And you could tell like when they designed the pinball machine within the game, they were definitely looking at real pinball machines and trying to make it. feel like how a real pinball machine would be laid out, you know, and they do some cool stuff. Like they have an upper play field that you can like get into and grind around and everything. And it's.

it's pretty cool um yeah and yeah i really like the structure of you you know go through both campaigns you get all the goals then it opens up the pro goals so you can go go back to all the levels this is where you have things like you know there's a new

score to get up beyond the six score it's more difficult this is where you have to do the combo letters we have to get all the letters like skate you have to do it in one combo and there's other like trickier things you need to do and for four a lot of them are inspired by original goals

From that game. Was anybody bothered by the soundtrack changes? That's another talking point. There aren't a ton. It's not all the songs from the original games. There's a lot of new ones. So it's like... You know it's in the news. Let me just get it real quick. It is less than 20% of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 plus 4 soundtrack is made up of songs from the original games. Only 10 songs from the original games alongside 54 new tracks.

tony alcus said that he's like oh i uh i wanted people to discover new music in this as well and so i'm like this is my decision i'm sure that's part of it but i bet a part of it is it's just probably cheaper to go get new songs rather than people having the leverage of oh you want our song back you're gonna have to pay us a lot more I'm sure that's a huge part of it they just wanted to save money and I'm of the opinion of I didn't think we were gonna get this game

So this is what is required for them to put it out. I'm like, I'm accepting it. Although, you know, the music in Tony Hawk is a little sacred. So I get if that's going to hurt some people. I think the new songs are good. So, you know, it is a new soundtrack. I guess there's a bit.

more with this one than maybe one and two where it's like maybe even then it's like oh these are these replacements for the original and with one and two it's like i can see myself maybe almost never going back to the originals and just playing these Um, with 3 and 4, and especially 4, it's like, oh, there's still plenty of reasons to go back and play China House Pro Skater 4 on the PS2 or even 3.

if it showed up on nintendo switch online right like the tony hawks pro skater 4 like that would make total sense those two things can stand next to each other right exactly so you know like these definitely aren't replacements in that sense but just as what it is, it's still just so freaking good, and I have nothing but a good time when I'm playing it. I think some people might just get really fixated on what isn't here, I suppose.

I get it, but it just doesn't bother me that much when I'm playing the game. I'm looking at the soundtrack and the new songs that have been added to 3, 4. I feel like they kind of matched the vibe of the game at least. They did. They got Iron Maiden, so that's fine. They added some Run the Jewels, right? And some of the new songs are old songs that would have made sense if they were in those games 25 years ago.

There's a Gang of Four song in there. Yeah. Natural's not in it, and that's a pretty awesome one to skate to, especially when you're inside a gigantic pinball machine. My one and two that I'd be pissed if they didn't make it are Ace of Spades and If You Must. And both of those made it. Exactly. Those are my favorites. I 100% agree. Those are the two that I needed and they're here. And I don't know if this is just that digital. deluxe edition or whatever that came with Doomguy.

but like doom songs will just come up on the playlist. Oh, that's fun. And I'm like, that's good. That's good. Any soundtrack that features King Gizzard and the lizard wizard is an A plus for me. It's just because that's such a fun name to say. Mike, can you be the lizard wizard for us? What does that mean? All right, moving on to the next game. I'm the wizard lizard. I'm going to cast water spells because I...

I am a reptile, which isn't really an amphibian, but still water adjacent. You have control over this, Gene. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Teenage Mutant. He's just going to keep going, Dan. I was trying to work in a segue in what he was saying, but the back and forth wasn't there just like the back and forth. There was no back and or forth. No, not with Mike Minotti, but there is a back and forth.

in rygar with that shield that's right yeah so uh i mentioned like nes in the summer so i would go to the beach a lot of these days or go to the pool and you know nice sandy beaches up there on lake michigan it was a really good day But then I'm like, okay, I'm starting to get tired and hungry. And what I would do as a kid, and this is a nostalgia-filled thing, is I would go back into the basement with the air conditioning.

get some pizza or something, make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and then play some NES. And so I was just, like, my brain's like, you should go play some NES. And I had to switch two with me, got NSO out, and I started Rygar, a game that I've... only ever like touched a couple of times just to see what it is.

and i'm like you know i'm gonna really try to play through this thing and i saw that uh you know people can beat this game in like 40 minutes perfect so i went in there kind of got some pointers about hey here's where you need to go to get some things oh here's something you never would have figured out you can use the

the the crossbow to shoot across this chasm and there's a you know a thing off the screen you can't even see and you need to do that to get across that chasm like oh okay now that i'm past that i'm sort of figuring out what this game's whole deal is

Turns out Rygar, pretty fun. That's a good NES game. Really holds up. It's awesome. I feel like I'm probably with you on that grub where it's like, I would see it in my friends' collections and stuff, but it's single player games. It's like we never really pulled it out when I was, you know, standing over or whatever. So I've...

never really played as much affinity I have towards the NES. Maybe I should. It's on Switch Online? It's on Switch Online. It works really great. I mean, it's one of those games that has kind of a checkpoint system a little bit, and there's no lives.

So you can just brute force it, but also, you know, it has the rewind on NSF. So just use that because you're effectively getting the same thing there. So Rygar, for people who don't know, it's an action game. There was an arcade game. This is different from the arcade game in that... It's kind of a light Metroidvania style game where you get weapons that unlock new paths. And your main weapon is.

sort of a Belmont whip, but with a shield on the end. And you can upgrade that so it has a longer attack area, things along those lines. And you are upgrading your character so it becomes more powerful and you have more hit points.

things like that and all that works really well and all that's just like you're gonna defeat enough monsters you're going to upgrade your character so you can do the thing where you sit in a corner and hit an enemy hit enemies that are spawning over and over and cheese it that way it's yeah it's got it's like really solid it's much more robust

than I was expecting. It's kind of a better Castlevania 2, right? I think so, yeah. I have enjoyed playing it more than I have the NES Castlevania games. At least two, you're right. Sorry to stuff in, but Simon's Quest, man, there was like a... mystery to it. Like there's so much weird stuff in that game that you don't really like that. You just sort of stumble across and Rygar, I would say is maybe slightly less esoteric, you know?

But I might be a little bit older than you guys. I think Rygar was one of the earlier NES games, and at least in my town, among my friends in elementary school. It was like one of the bigger ones at the time because it came kind of before, like I think it was before Castlevania II.

There weren't a lot of Metroid-style games on there yet. It was one of the big ones at the time in 87 or whatever. But most kids I knew seemed to be into Rygar at the time. And it infamously has those really jacked, bald... gurus with the big bushy beards that look like uh those like guys and those crappy ai ads about how to like build muscle mass in your 60s you know um the ones that like i've turned into a lion or whatever yeah right it's pretty awesome all right

They all have different either quotes to help you figure out what's going on. One of them was just like... it's 2 a.m time to party and let the monsters out what what is what is happening here uh or they give you a weapon uh and it's it all feels pretty neat like it has its own weirdness

But it is pretty straightforward once you figure out a couple of the tricks. So, yeah. And now I'm like, I never played Rygar on PS2. So that's what I was going to ask y'all. My only experience with Rygar is the PS2 game. um and obviously massive departure going from 2d to 3d in several plat uh console generations later but How was Rygar on the PS2 received originally? Really well. It was really well received. I remember at the time it was kind of...

The first PS2 action game that came out after God of War. And it was kind of like that. So a lot of people are like, if you liked God of War and you got to have more, here's Rygar. It's based off an old game you never played. To me, this is what makes that generation the best, the PS2, GameCube generation, because we could still get a follow-up to an NES game, and it would rule.

They were doing weird stuff then. Like they were trying to do like a vector man. They did an altered beast that maybe only came out in Europe or something. Yeah, I feel like Sega was trying a bunch of weird stuff. Final Fight Streetwise. Streetwise. Narc had a comeback. Fucking Maximo is a Ghost and Goblin successor. Yes, Maximo.

Yeah. So it's got me like wanting to like try to, I'm doing grubs gimmicks this week. I'm letting people vote. One of my ideas was going to be before I kind of had too many other ideas with control. I was like.

old versus new and i was going to play some old rygar play some new rygar play some old ghosts and goblins play some maximo things like that so we should um we need to do like old shinobi and then that ps2 shinobi before the new one comes out i really like the ps2 shinobi it's cool and then

There's Nightshade or whatever, which is the sequel where you play as the girl shinobi, and that's good, too. There's Strider. They did that new Strider, which is actually pretty solid. That was actually just another 2D one. It was in Metroidvania. Yeah, it was great. the Vectorman PS2 game ever come out? No, it got cancelled. I was upset at the time. I don't know why I was upset. I like Vectorman. I like Vectorman for a game I can't get past the second level of.

Either way, Rygar was awesome. I do recommend it. NSOs. There's a ton of NES games on there, actually. I'm like, I should play through a bunch of these. They have a good NES library. They have some sort of like... pointy quick adventure games that were any exclusives like nightshade that i never played that i might need to do at some point yeah uh mike minati you have been continuing down the splatoon train as of late

And finally, you have gone to the Octo expansion in Splatoon 2. Right. I'm sorry. I think I called two things Nightshade during that last segment. Any of them are actually called Nightshade. Are you okay today? Did you eat some nightshade? He told us when we started, before we were on the air, he goes, oh boy, it's a day for Mikey's. And then he couldn't explain if that was positive or negative. So something's going on with Mike today. Mike, I need you to analyze.

your chi and the cheese okay okay yeah uh yeah i've been continuing to play through the splatoon games and now i'm on the splatoon 2 expansion the octa expansion Which I always heard was good. I think for a lot of people it was weird. Because most people don't think about the single player stuff in Splatoon. Right? But for Splatoon 2 and 3. They actually just released whole additional campaigns as DLC.

And the Octo Expansion is just part of NSO Expansion Pack, I think, if you have that. And this rules. This is maybe one of the best ones yet. Because the structure here and all the other ones are kind of like, oh, you're in these sort of floating islands and you access levels that way and it's neat.

Here, you're on a subway. It's like a transit line. It's how you're accessing all these levels. No, it changes everything, Jan. It changes everything. Do squid kids pull off showtimes in the squid kid subway? No, everyone's very respectful while sitting there. It's okay. Okay. Right? But, like, you know, and there's a lot of lore drops. So, in this one, it's the off-the-hook girls, Pearl and Marina, who are kind of like your radio buddies.

But you're also in a text chain with them. And Gramps is like the old mentor guy. It was kind of like the person you talked to in the Splatoon 1 campaign back then. Oh, my God. It's just like everyone's like, oh, there's a new like message chain. You read these things. It's sometimes you learn about like.

their roles in the war and things like that and then other times it's like them trying to teach gramps uh how to use how to use a question mark and access emojis during the chat anything like that it's all that like flavor it's just really good and then all the levels here the splatoon 3 campaign is clearly inspired by this one because like the base splatoon 2 campaign all the levels are relatively straightforward like

you know go do splatoon stuff fight the enemies get to the end here every level has some kind of a gimmick so it's like you know break all the targets while you're on the grind rails or get through this level without stepping in any enemy ink or you know shoot this ball to the goal stuff like that and it's all really fun so yeah i'm like not i've been doing nothing but these splatoon campaigns for basically almost like a week after the switch 2 came out it's what i've mostly been doing

I still just been having a good time with that. It might take me all the way up to Bonanza at this point. Oh, wow. Okay. Garrett, we have a limited amount of time with you, sir. Have you been playing anything you want to chat about?

Yeah, sure. Sorry I got to take off early. I got some interviews to go do. But yeah, I've been playing a lot of you guys. Are you familiar with those M2 shot trigger games?

m2 it's a japanese developer they do a lot oh yeah yeah they take like these old shoot-em-ups like kind of like the ones that are considered like maybe the best by like the hardcore shmup fans sure and they make these new versions where they have like these panels on the side of like all this background data you're not supposed to see um and they're pretty amazing like they'll break down the games like

They'll take a map and break it up into like seven sections that you just like you can play that one section just so you can master it over and over, you know, and so that when you play the whole game, like you can, you know, know what you're doing. And I've been doing like.

just sort of bounce in between like seven of those for the last week or two, which is really bad because I can't keep any of them apart at this point. Like it's, they're all one massive game in my head. You know, does one stand out? Do you have a favorite among them? Ketsui something. Death-tiny? I don't know if it's death-tiny. Death-tiny? Did they combine death with destiny? It looks like death-tiny, and I don't know if it's pronounced death-tiny or death-tiny. I hope it's death-tiny.

Um, definitive edition. Yeah. Uh, that was pretty great. And battle Grega, which I think typically gets called like the best shmup. I like the shmup. I've heard of that one. People always do bring that up as like a favorite. I've been dipping my toes in the shmup world a little bit. So I still got to like, you know, I'm still like, I got to play our type. Yeah. Like that's like where I'm starting at here. I'm like learning what a caravan mode is and things like that. But it's like this whole.

It's a big part of gaming, and yet there's a separateness to it. It kind of stands on its own. It's like pinball, right? It's kind of like pinball. And hey, we cover both.

endless mode along with uh theme parks too big theme park guy um you looked excited about that there i love theme parks have you been to epic universe yet oh yeah yeah i went there uh back uh in may it's pretty amazing have you been yes yes uh I've been there a couple of times now. I just, just tell him you got to go to the preview. I went in March. I went in March. Oh yeah. But yeah, yeah. I was there in April and May too. Yeah.

Oh, well, March is earlier than me. It's not a competition. He's our guest. Stop it. It's great. I was just at the... Test Track, the new Test Track previews a couple of weekend ago. I was not the person who crashed into that door, so I'm okay. Good. I'm doing great. How was the new Test Track? What do you think? I think it's great. I think it's a big improvement over Test Track 2. I call it Chill Track. It's got surprisingly chill vibes going through it. Wait, what? How?

It's just soothing. It's like palm trees everywhere. There's just nice people talking to you on the radio. There's not palm trees, but there's pines. You're like going through like a national park or like a redwood forest or something, right? It kind of feels like, yeah, yeah.

Uh, and there's like some good effects and yeah, I just like it. Yeah. I just realized how broke my brain was here because I was thinking, I was about to ask you like, Oh, was that the new ride that you were on with Cody Rhodes? And then I realized that was a fucking Photoshop that someone made of you on the ride. The one where you were really scared? Was that Test Track?

No, that's the Guardians of the Galaxy one. Oh, I think you're talking about Guardians of the Galaxy. I never did a ride. Yeah, no. So it photoshopped you in a ride with Cody Rhodes, Mike, and Dan thought it was real for a second. That's funny. Do you like that Guardians of the Galaxy cosmic real? want i'm a bit of a wimp and i finally tried it it's amazing no it is uh i love it man like okay so that ride if you don't know it has six different songs that are like randomly generated you know

And it doesn't change the way it moves or its speed, but it feels like it's moving. Recontextualizes. Yeah, it recontextualizes the experience of the ride to make it feel like you're in rhythm with the songs. Have you gotten all the six songs yet? Oh, I only ever did it one time, and that was enough for me. I'm a coward.

He says he'll never do it again. Really? It's too much for me. It's a little, I mean, it's, I get a little discombobulated after it too. I got to like hang out for like 10 minutes or so before I do something else. I got to hang out for like another 10 years and then maybe I'll get some bravery again. Bring some Xanax with me. You can put me on there. Did you pregame some Dramamine before you hopped on?

Oh, I Dramamine the shit out of it. Absolutely. Dramamine to the eyeballs, this guy. I always got that with me because I always brag about how well I do in airplanes, but that's because I use performance enhancers. So I just sleep during them. He's bragging about their performance in airplanes. I picked him up at the airport once in Minneapolis here and he bragged about how good he was. I know. I was like, I slept the whole time. I do brag about it. I was like, five hour flight.

It was like instant transportation for me. I was fucking Goku on that shit. Bad Boy Games Media, the good boy of consumer aviation. I think he said it as a response to me being like talking about how I have like panic attacks on flights and I was really struggling at the time. He's like, I'm perfect. I was trying to help. I'm the one who told you maybe if you stopped having 15 beers before the flight, it just took the Xanax your doctor gave you.

better off turns out that's uh you don't have to pee as much and it works just as well yeah yeah yeah it turns out wow wow wow uh garrett i'm trying to remember there's a shooter game that i played for the first time that's like it's kind of like a it's a really popular series but it's um Got, like, a weird long name. That probably doesn't narrow it down. No, that is basically everyone except, like, our type, maybe. Yeah. Gradius. Yeah. Don't stop saying it like that. Zeroing. Yeah.

All your base art belong to us. Yes, it was zeroing, Mike. Thank you. It was Dodonpachi. Thank you, Merlin, in chat. Yes. I tried that. I had a Colorado night the other night. This was back a couple months ago, and I tried that for the first time. It rules. What was the gimmick of that one? It just seemed like it has really good bullet hell stuff going on. That is one of the big bullet hell ones, which is sort of very different from what shooters in the 80s were. They hadn't really gotten to...

you know, completely covering the screen with bullets. That one, it's kind of just, it's surprisingly kind of slow the way you move through the patterns of bullets. It's more just about like seeing the pattern and like very minutely like using.

the D pad or whatever you're using to sort of get out of the way. It's a lot of it is memory for, for those games. A lot of most shmups is memory, to be honest. But, um, I, yeah, I think the thing with that game was, um, it just feels like the the developer is like here we're going to throw all our tools at you and we're going to provide a path for you to get on the wavelength with us and feel like you are

a part of the action the part of what we're doing here and kind of getting on that wavelength was super satisfying so it's hard to maintain because you're right like i there was things where it's like oh if i didn't have this memorized i'm just simply not going to be able to do it there's moments there where you can sort of just play the jazz along with them, and it's like...

You know, the bullets, they don't fire in the bullet heaven. And that was super cool. So I'm going to play more dotem pot. It's a good one. And it's all like anime girls, but also bees. Like there's like a like a bumblebee or like hornet or something. It's a cool game. It's a good one. Garrett, because of time, I'm going to spare you for me talking about anime horse ladies. Okay.

But one more time for the folks. I got a heart out too, guys. No, no, no, no. You're stuck here. Oh, he went down the stairs. There's a mirror back there. I can see you're not going anywhere. Garrett, one more time. folks about endless mode y'all launched last week Please tell the folks at home where they can find you, where they can find more about Endless Mode. Yeah, cool. EndlessMode.com on the internet. And, you know, like I said, all kinds of video games.

Pinball, anime, theme park coverage, tabletop, board games, all kinds of playful things that people like to do for fun. And yeah, you can find me on Blue Sky. That's like the only social media I'm really on right now.

garrett martin two r's two t's so um uh thanks for having me it's been fun uh garrett i i have one more question for you okay uh we we have another pinball aficionado on the website what is like the top three pinball machines currently for you currently um i mean okay godzilla is the best of the modern sterns that's i don't know maybe three or four years old now

I was at a show in Atlanta a couple weeks ago where they had the new Harry Potter, and that is blowing people's minds. I am no way a Potter guy. It's a little annoying as someone who doesn't care about Potter to see like Epic Universe and this pinball machine, like amazing works of art built around something that I kind of actively dislike.

But yeah, so people love the new Harry Potter pen. And personally, I love a lot of the older ones. I've got a Cyclone in my house. I play Cyclone all the time. That's like a late 80s, like kind of a carnival, like amusement park themed one.

Have you played the new Jaws one? Because I like that a lot. The new Jaws is great, too. Yeah, Stern has been doing some really good stuff. The new Jaws is great. The new Godzilla is great. They just put out a King Kong a couple months ago, and that's really good. I haven't played the Dungeons & Dragons. Dungeons & Dragons won out earlier this year. I know a lot of pinball guys don't like it, but a lot of pinball guys dislike a lot of things.

What? No way. Not like the theme park fandom, am I right? Right, yeah. So yeah, Jaws, Godzilla. If you see a Potter, give it a shot. Okay. Yeah. Garrett, one more, one more. Sure. Is there any hot pinball lingo we can drop on someone that loves pinball? Like insider info.

Damn, that's a good question. I really have to think about it. I feel like I'm being put on the spot a little bit here. Wow. Great jam. Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. We'll circle back. I got it. We'll talk about the reverse flippers, and then he'll know. I will tell you, we almost called. Endless Mode Playfield. We almost gave it a pinball name. Playfield, but we went with Endless Mode instead.

Because the Earl was available, basically. That's the main reason. That's how it works. Once again, folks, thank you, Garrett Martin, for joining us. We're going to go take a quick break. Thanks so much, guys. It's been great. Check out endless mode.com. We'll see you on the other side of this break. Welcome back, everybody. We're still talking about video games. Special shouts out again to our special guest, Garrett Martin. Check out endless mode.com.

uh boys i'm i'm a little glad that uh here it had a hard out because i didn't want to embarrass myself and get worked up in front of a a person that i'm just meeting for the first don't worry we'll judge you very harshly as well yeah okay so um

You know, moving is difficult and everything, and I haven't unboxed my PS5 yet, so I haven't gone back to Death Stranding much. But I've still been playing games. The game that has been dominating my time, unfortunately, is... Uma Musume Pretty Derby. This, folks, you may have seen on the internet. This is the horse girl game. It is a gotcha game. So it's not a dating sim. Can you describe Horse Girl? It is an anime lady with horse-like ears and what I am assuming is a tail. They don't...

turn more into horses, right? No. When they go to race, they're not turning into horses and it's a horse race. It's just girls running around a horse track. Horse girls running around a track. Jan, what percent of this is intended to be sexual? Well, I don't find dealer's choice, baby. You know, I'm looking at the horse girls and I'm like, none of this is appealing to me. This is just stuff. This is just fun times. I see gold ship. I see ship gold ship is.

top tier horse for me i wanted to like not go with gold ship because gold ship was very popular amongst everyone playing uma musume right now i'm like you know what Let's give Gold Ship a try, and Gold Ship has been consistently winning me these races. Okay. The flow of this game is... There's several flows to this game actually, but there is a career mode where you can level up your trainee, and your trainee is the horse girl you are training up with. You are developing a...

platonic relationship, a professional relationship here where you have a set amount of turns before a race. And in these turns, you're choosing to either rest up to preserve energy. Do some recreation to improve your horse girl's mood. Embarking on smaller mini races to level up and gain more fans. And then the main thing you're doing is you're choosing different stats to train. So speed, stamina, power, guts, and wit. I don't know what wit has to do with racing, but it's there.

You pick a trainee, but you also have a series of six support cards, which are your friends. So when you're doing training, your friends will pop up occasionally and give you little stat bonuses as well. I have a question. Is it true that all these horse girls are in fact? based off of real life now famous horses from the japan racing scene that very well may be true i have not so there was actually a special week who was a shoot horse

And this anime girl called Special Week is a tribute to the real Special Week. Chad is saying this is correct. Well, there we go. It's perfect. I have developed a fondness for special week as well on top of gold ship, so maybe I will go explore that. I'm going to find the actual gold ship now. So...

The funny thing is, there is an obscene amount of dialogue in this, right? And there are light choices. Damn, it was sounding really for me until then. Damn, here's this. You have an option to skip all of that. And then you can continue on doing training and races. Gang, this game is actually going to destroy me because the races you could skip.

Right? When you finally get down to, like, oh, it's trying to get back to the just staring at horse girls? What are we doing? What? No, no. To get to, like, the light gameplay where you're choosing, like, stats to train up and everything and relationships. It's like general manager. mode of wwe 2k it is pretty much that but with horse girls yeah a gold ship was a real horse a japanese thoroughbred that right began a racing career in july uh 2011 all right oh 2011 fairly recently uh

But I have never like whenever I've gone to Vegas or I've passed by like casinos or whatever, I've never understood stood betting on horses. Right. I've never understood the excitement of that. I've never understood the excitement. I agree. Even NASCAR. F1, I get, right? Because that's like super fast cars. But...

I will skip all the dialogue. I'll skip through all the career stuff, all the backstory that's going on with each individual horse girl. I don't care that we're on summer vacation. I don't care that they're... building a new facility here i don't care about the luchador horse horse girls like uh cooking journey or whatever yes grub is there breeding There's a lot of reading. If you choose. No, no, no. Is there breeding? It's a breeding. Oh, breeding.

No. There's nothing scandalous happening here. What are you talking about? No, I'm talking about horse breeding. You got to like, you know, or Pokemon breeding. Grub, please. You're trying to make the best horse girl. These are horse girls with their own personalities and their own feelings. Life finds a way. Anyway, I have never skipped a race.

All right. I've never even fast forwarded a race because I will wait. Because this is some of the most thrilling action I have seen in legitimately years. I will get so upset because like, oh no, it's raining today and we're racing on dirt. Gold ship isn't acclimated to running on dirt, but we've made enough friends. That's the plot of Cars 1. The whole time, I'm thinking this is pretty much just cars. But...

Yeah, you level up gold ship enough that she's better at running on dirt. She has enough power and then she has the rainy days ability and she's made enough friends that as she's racing along. Her friendship and her skills proc that she just starts bolting down the track and she goes from the 18th place to first place it's great because also at the same time there are japanese commentators yelling the whole time while the race is going oh hell yeah

This is so great. It's so amazing. I love this game too much. I have not spent a single dime. I know there are folks with their phones ready to do a wellness check. Scout, it's okay. Dad's fine. But it has been a fantastic time waster and time melter because I'm just so invested.

in the journey. Go in for the kill on Dan. I'll tell him that you stopped playing Death Stranding 2 so you could play more of the horse racing game. I did stop playing Death Stranding 2 so I could play more of the horse game. Oh, my God. See, I feel like I'm just going into 2025 is going to be the year of the degenerate. I'm going to grow a mullet. I'm gonna just obsess over this horse game. It's a day for Mikey's, but it's a year for Jans.

Do you keep the horse girls in stables? Or do they get their own homes? They get their own homes. What are you talking about, grubs? How much are they girls? Like, do you own them? Do you own girls? No, it's like a team and they decide to join your team and everything. You don't have to put anyone down. No, no, you don't have to put anyone down. Should we do a spin right now? Let's do a spin right now. I'm fielding any more questions. Dan, you look perplexed.

Yeah, I'm glad everyone's got hobbies. Okay, I'm buttoning through. Oh, also, when you win a big race, the horse girls put on... Like a J-pop, K-pop style concert. Yeah, of course. Okay. Oh, I just got my login bonus. I got a bunch of carrots today. Yeah, literal carrots on sticks! No, it's gold carrots. No one's going to turn into glue, not on my watch. Okay, hold on, hold on. Oh, this is the luchador thing.

Kinda, yeah. This is the luchador horse girl. You can see that, right? Yeah, kind of. Yeah, we can kind of see that. It's definitely 95% girl. 5% horse is even generous. Yeah, okay. I'm gonna do this. Okay, hold on. Okay, that's not working. Uh... sean don't text me while the show is going on okay all right all right uh also with i i'm a big fan of like this gotcha where they just give you an obscene amount of rolls from the tippy top

So you don't have to spend money as long as you are like an early investor. They're coming out of the gates. Look at them. Oh, it's all silvers. Oh, it's okay. We got one gold. Okay. I mean, look, people have been. Hara Urara. Okay, cool. They've done a lot of research to make these gotcha reveals exciting. Nice nature. God, I'm just not getting... Okay, another Bakushin. I can't read that one.

What's Vakushin? What's Vakushin with you? Oh, no. Okay, we got vodka. Oh, vodka. Another nice nature. Okay. Alright. Okay. All right. That was a good roll. That was a good roll. Was it? It was. We got two two stars. Oh, we've got two two-stars. Dan is so upset. Dan, do you feel like you're guilty by association? Are you going to call the cops? I do think a SWAT team is about to arrive. Now, Dan, what if these horse girls were like...

I don't know, on like a magic, not magic, a technical ship to welcome you after each journey that you took. And then like, I don't know, there was like a doll man there as well. I don't, I don't trust the, the peku lady. The VTuber. Yeah, I'm wary. I'm wary of the VTubers and the anime girls and things. I didn't get hurt at five stars. Hey, is Lightning McQueen based off of like a horse or a racer?

Lightning McQueen, I'm sure. Probably Steve McQueen, right? A reference to a bunch of different stuff, yeah. Okay, because there's a McQueen, a Majore McQueen in this, and I just got so jazzed that I used my special voucher to get her. They're probably both named after Steve McQueen, yeah. There's another horse girl. I forget her first name or her surname, but the main part of her name is Top Gun, and that's just as cool as hell. I like that.

if i had mr beast money i would create the reichert prison and i put dan and paul reichert in there and i would only let the first one to like reach a certain threshold of gotcha in the horse girl game would get let out and the other one would have to stay in there for like 60 days. He would be much more upset than me.

Oh, yeah. And you would be very upset. So it's like, yeah. Through playing a lot of video games and stuff, I've had to be adjacent to anime so much more than him. So I do feel like my defenses are up more than his. I think he would freak out at everything. I think he would be... Psychically damaged, yes. I think last time the anime came up with him, I think he said like, the Japanese put a bunch of weird sex stuff in all their games because they love that animotion stuff, right? Oh.

Yeah, not wrong. Wait till you've heard how much porn the United States produces. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, he's aware of that. It's like when people had to explain to Jim Ross that people found Gail Kim attractive. They make porno just like that. What?

Folks, I'm going to subject these three gentlemen to the Jantucky Derby this Thursday right before the voicemail dump truck. I'm going to share the excitement. I feel like there is a high likelihood after that stream. At least one of them will be interested in horse girls. And I'm not going to tell you which one I think it is. Look, I know you think it's me. It won't be. No, no, no, no. It's going to be Dan.

It will not be dead. I'll go in with an open mic. Speaking about very anime, a game that is super duper very anime is Gitaru Man. Yeah, this is my great stream, guys.

So much fun. This was my Delight Club game. Got a week off after being a good boy who beat Rascal. PS2 Rhythm Game. that I never beat. Turns out from the people who would eventually make elite beat agents. One of the horse girls called me a good boy. Is that anything? Yeah. Yeah. Not sexual for sure. This is a sex thing. Uh-huh. Hmm.

This is a sneaky sex thing. Sorry, Guitar Roman's not about sex. No, no. There's like a romantic interest, but it's very sweet. Actually, maybe my favorite song was when you were just playing this romantic acoustic guitar lullaby at a campfire. I think that's my favorite song.

She's got like a health bar for like her love and she's like scooting closer as you're doing like guitar stuff. The game is so fucking great. It's very Parappa in that it's like each song is kind of a segment. What's wrong? Don't worry about it. Parappa the Rapper. Parappa. Yeah, that's what you said. I don't know, man. Parappa, the rapper. Parappa, the rapper. That isn't right. You're correct. I did say that wrong. Yeah, it's like Parappa, the... It sounds weird when I say Parappa, the rapper.

It's like that. It's kind of a song. There's like a story, and each song is like a story beat also going on there. It's also zany and kind of wacky. just like that stuff is. But the actual rhythm mechanics of it, of pushing these buttons with the directions and kind of wiggling the analog sticks so you're always facing the right way, it just works really well.

It's familiar yet unique, but it is so much just about that style and that goofiness. Jay, that's enough with the horse girls. Put it down. Put it down or else I'll put them down. Oh, I'm going to play this on Steam. I can just get it on my phone or I'm going to download it. Oh, my God. I'm a strong man. But, uh...

The stream was fun, too, because Kayla had costumes ready for each song. Fucking of course she did. That was incredible. She looked like the Buffalo people from Flintstones at one point. Yes, I thought the exact same thing, right? Exactly. The order of the... Buffalo. By the way, I was watching her play. She was streaming Death Stranding 2 last night, and she was trying to curate a playlist on Sam's in-game music player, and she kept...

Coming across all these, like, somber wood kid songs and stuff, being like, this isn't the vibe I want. I need more hype. I want more hype. And it's like, this is Death Stranding through this, like, introspective, meditative, like, thing. She's like, this isn't hype enough. Yeah.

Woodkid's not working for her. Oh, do they have that Woodkid song I like from the Assassin's Creed Revelations trailer? Iron? I don't think they would have that in another game, Mike. No one else remembers that song was in that trailer, but me, it's okay. But yeah, Guitar Man was great. Liked it a lot. Definitely a... I don't know if Hidden Jam is the word. I think a lot of people know about it. But it's a game that I should have played earlier. It's straight up my alley.

Another argument for why the PS2 may be one of the best consoles, because it had Guitar Man on it. It had a lot of weird stuff. It had so many games. Yes, yes. Yeah, again, weird shit and like major AAA, like it was just, I think it's the best console of all time. i mean yeah that generation clearly the best generation

At least for 3D games, yeah. Yeah, is there any other rhythm games of that era that may have been gone underappreciated? Mad Maestro. Mad Maestro. Check out, yeah. What's kind of the other big one? I mean, there's obviously like Frequency Amplitude. That wasn't really the right one.

guitar room man lives is it just guitar man again that was the psp version right oh yeah because i remember i was i was like oh i got this guitar man's kind of a rare valuable game back then and then the psp one came out and it like plummeted in value god damn it yeah now it's all fine it'd be like that

That's what's going to happen to my Cubivore once they put that on NSO. I know it. It's going to happen to my Chibi Robo, which was also pretty expensive, and that is coming to NSO. I am very excited about playing Chibi Robo. I've never played it. Oh, Dan. It is first.

Party Nintendo. It's a tiny little robot guy in a big world. Everything about this screams a game I would be very, very into. I love the idea of having to plug yourself into the wall. I remember thinking that was always really cool. Yes. I'm going to love Chibi Robo. I'm calling it now. Yeah, it was one of those games that I demanded to play at my friend's house that had a GameCube because I didn't have one. God, Chibi-Robo. Also, what a great name for a game.

Moving along to other games, Mike, last night on Mega Man, you played Fantasy Life Eye, The Girl Who Stole Time. Yeah. And a sex thing. No, this one's not. This is just the word fantasy. Does it sound like a sex thing? His mom made him think that Final Fantasy was a sex thing because he had fantasy in the title and now he's doing the same thing to himself. Just the word fantasy? That's why I got shit for wanting to win Final Fantasy 7. Fantasy baseball is about fucking.

What about the Mariah Carey song? Mariah Carey and ODB? Yeah. That's great. That's great. But I had to wait until college to get into that. This is like more Animal Crossing or... like Harvest Moon adjacent kind of thing. My Sims, I bet, is happening here a little bit. But the twist is that they do add more RPG stuff to it. So like the whole gimmick is that you have to pick a life and you can have multiple lives. And this is...

Basically jobs or classes. So you can, you know, become a wizard or a paladin, like a fighter. And there's kind of a, you know, leveling track for that. But you can also become a fisherman or a woodcutter or a blacksmith. Those have their own. leveling tracks and then you know there's kind of at least early on it's like uh it's a bit of that tom nook thing like well i need 10 000 gold or whatever it's called in this game

And I can get that any way it takes by completing quests with these jobs, by just collecting items and selling it, that sort of thing. But, you know, it's just one of those really kind of cozy, good vibe. kind of games it has that diorama look to it sort of like like animal crossing but even kind of like the lynx awakening remakes awakening yeah you know so it's just all sort of cute and chill

A lot of people are getting into this. Apparently the game opens up in a pretty insane way. It just keeps getting bigger and there's more and more freedom. Like right now, I'm still getting my handheld quite a bit, which makes sense. I only played for a couple.

of hours. But even I was beginning to see how it can open up and become something that is just very easy to lose yourself in. Very good kind of podcast game or something like that. It's got really good quality of life features where it's just like... It's going to tell you where to go get the stuff. It's going to make it easy to get around. It's just very friendly to the player. It's like, hey, we know what the good stuff is here. We're going to get you back to that really quick.

i am i'm like skipping the cut scenes because they're just they're not doing anything for me really And that works because as soon as the cutscene ends, if it told me something important, there will be a whole text box about here's what you should have learned from that or here's the thing you actually should take away. And so I am kind of just doing that and getting a good idea of how to play the game.

And I'm playing as an angler right now. I think, Mike, that was the next job you took. Yeah, I did the angler. So, you know, it's just a fishing one. It's fun because there's a fishing mini game and it's familiar but has some of its own stuff going on. And it's very satisfying. And there's like... you know so there's people all around the town with text boxes if you could take a quest from them

and if they're white basically just means you can you have a job that applies to the quest they're asking for if it's blue i think it doesn't apply to you so you probably shouldn't take those yet and so it's like you can go do these quests and make earn money

that way or you could just go fishing and then sell fish to the restaurant and stuff like that so it's kind of got it's right it's like giving you those options too is like sometimes i just want to brute force it and do my own thing and feel like i'm making my own choices the game does that so

Then when I get sick of that, I go like, all right, I'll go get back on the treadmill of doing the quest that they want me to do and earn money that way. And then you get big payouts. And so it just has this nice back and forth to it. And this is early on still. Even early on, if you are a mage and you want to go fishing, you don't have to go to a menu and become a fisherman. If you just go up to the fishing spot and push A to go fishing, it automatically changes you into the angler.

So from there, if you bring out your weapon to start fighting, you immediately change back to your combat class. So all that stuff is very snappy.

Okay, okay. Speaking about Mega Man, Mike, just real quick, I want to hear about Dune Awakening that you played on Wega Man last week. That's true. I did play that last week, and I liked that. A lot. Another game that I think a lot of people are talking about. I play a lot of MMOs, but not some of the survival kind. So, you know, there's a lot of onboarding and whatnot with that. This is, is it closer to like an...

a proper MMO or something more like a Valheim type of deal? Can I replay it? I think it's closer to a Valheim. I mean, again, I haven't played much of these. What it reminded me of was when I played my preview of Grounded 2 at, uh... the xbox's summer game fest thing right you know okay like it's you know you're collecting resources and then it's like okay now build your shelter now inside your shelter build this thing so you can build that thing

Go back out in the world so you can collect more resources. That was very much the driving loop of everything. But then it has all that good Dune flavor. I think a lot of people are really into right now. Even the traversal is fun because you have a grappling hook.

And you have Breath of the Wild kind of climbing, right? So you can climb on any surface until your stamina runs out. And that's just, I don't know, that's a very good traversal thing. Turns out those other people knew what they were doing. But yeah.

Christian actually jumped in and was kind of showing me around a lot. So it was kind of fun going where even just like the stuff to build my base was simple enough that I could see myself just having fun trying to get elaborate with that. Like, you know, early on. I'm just like, okay, just give me something that works so I have a space to be in. Because there is also the element of the sun and you do have to worry about your hydration and not being out in the sun too long.

One of the first things you build is a blood converter, so you can take blood from the people you kill and store them in blood sacks and take them back there and put them in this thing, and then it turns it into water. Eventually, too, I was able to equip the thing where...

uh it's like the pee diaper where i pee into the diaper and then it turns into water and i can drink it the still suit yeah whatever it's called i like the pee diaper personally i think that's a good name but you know you can drink your pee great Uh, yeah, I was going to ask, like, how deep into the Dune lore does it get from which you played?

I'm not super sure. It's an alternate universe, so it's not directly tied to the events of the movie. It's like, what if this didn't happen? Blah, blah, blah. I'm not super deep into doing stuff. I have nothing against it. I think it's good. I just didn't devote the time to it. But, you know, I think if you like Dune, you are going to appreciate all the Duneness of it.

It is mostly the visual style of the movie, right? That's what they're trying to, the current movies, right? I think that's clearly what they're tapping into here. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Sorry, David Lynch fans. In chat, is there a giant bomb clan? Yeah, I think Christian started it, right? Christian did start a giant bomb clan. Let me see if I can find... It's all nonsense words in this game. North America, House of Fiqh, F-I-Q-H, and then Sietch Arab, S-I-E-T-C-H, space A.

L-R-A-A-B. So that's the clan for Giant Block. For sure. I'm very curious. I'm not normally pulled into these types of games too, Mike, but... I'm not even that big of a fan of Dune, but just seeing, watching you play this, it just kind of had its hooks in me for some reason. Did you ride a worm?

I did not ride a worm yet. Christian was on some kind of motorbike thing, just doing laps around me while I was running around like an idiot. The ornithopter or what? Nah, I don't know. I was on the ground. He wasn't flying. Okay.

There was some of that worm stuff, too, right? Like, don't walk out in the open for too long. I didn't attract any worms myself, but I was being careful about it. This is a parentheses positive comment, and this is a compliment, actually, but I feel like Christian is our dunk in Idaho. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He's died many times. Come back. It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Before we get to the news, Jeff Grubb, you have something gaming related. You have the Steam Deck and Windows handheld woes.

My Steam Deck's broken, and I hate Windows handhelds. So my Steam Deck died, and I didn't realize the battery was dead. I thought it was charged, so I tried to turn it on, and then it went into the BIOS. And I'm like, oh, I'll just reset. And I think during that process of trying to boot in from the BIOS, the battery just went kaput. And so I think the BIOS is corrupted. And I've done a ton of stuff to try to fix it.

And nothing's working. So I'm going to have to call Valve, I guess, and maybe RMA it or whatever. I hate doing that. Whatever. I really want my Steam Deck because I wanted to play Tony Hawk on it. But I have these Windows devices. And I'm like... Adam, like an even lower point with these windows devices from this last week where the girls want to play a lot of Minecraft and it just worked out better to have the windows devices because of all the shit they were doing.

uh uh and like this you know because they would try to like spawn a million cats and it was causing problems even on the switch too so it's like hey this is running like let's use these windows windows devices they have a little bit more power and um

Windows just is still so terrible. If Minecraft goes into like sleep mode on the Windows device and I bring it back up, it just won't recognize the controller. So I just have to quit the game and restart it. And I'm like trying to teach the girls how to do it, but they're six and eight.

And it's Windows, and they haven't used that a ton. Are they more Linux? Yeah, they're much more into Linux. Yeah, actually, they're running Unix. I organize this. It's a Unix system. They're like the girl from Jurassic Park. Yes, exactly. And it's like, that's just like the start of it. But that's really annoying. You know, the girl will finish playing at night in bed in the hotel room. And we're all sleeping there. And she plugs in. She takes care of it. Sets it off on the table.

and it's just blasting these led lights to let you know it's charging it's blasting right my wife's face and i'm just like jesus christ i gotta go find these things put it in hibernate which is not an option that defaults to. You have to go in the power options and enable hibernate versus sleep. And then that does some extra stuff that makes it work better. But you have to go to a different menu to make that an option, like when you're trying to shut things down.

Having to update these things, everything's in a different place depending on each device. But even like within the device, it's like, okay, I got to.

update it into my asus bullshit and i gotta find the amd app and i gotta upload update that over here it is still such a pain in the ass to use and then it still does the thing where I will try to enter password or something and about one out of every 15 times, which is enough to be very annoying, but not so much that you can be like, well, it always does this.

the keyboard just won't pop up yes and then i have to like is there like a hot key or something that can make pop up universally yeah i have to go like to the windows like accessibility options and bring up the windows accessibility touchscreen keyboard and it's Oh, very frustrating. So I'm just like was ready to throw these things out of the fucking car.

By the end of the week, especially because it's like the girls were getting very into Minecraft when we were having like rainy days or whatever. Yeah. And so it was like all day one day of me just fixing problem after problem after problem. I'm just. kind of sick of these things. I liked my wind. I liked my, uh, raw galley and quite a bit, but you know, kind of as soon as I have a switch to, which is basically just as powerful, but in, isn't doing all the window stuff. And.

has you know needs me to open up four different apps to completely update the system and things like that it's like i'll use this now yep that's definitely where that's a big part of it too mike where i'm just like i've had the switch to now And I just want to be using that thing because they just got to figure it out. It just works. Yeah.

So I'm going to try to play most games on there and get this goddamn Steam Deck fixed up. God, that's frustrating. If anyone has any ideas about how to fix a BIOS, let me know. I would really appreciate it. But yep, that's where I'm at. Other than that, just... Looking to still play a bunch of Switch 2 over here. Yeah. Yeah. Y'all, I don't know if you know this. Donkey Kong Bonanza comes out next week.

Yeah. What is it, nine days? See, you're all looking forward to it. I have a colonoscopy before that, so I can't, like, I have to think about that first. You can plant during? You can have a bonanza of your own. There was a guy that told me he was playing Switch during his vasectomy. Can he not do it for the other side? So the colonoscopy is very different from a vasectomy. I will be put under. I will be not conscious.

I would like to be put under for both. I agree. Put me under for anything. But honestly, the operation is fine. It's the day before where I'm not allowed to eat anything and have to take the... evacuation pills all day. That's kind of miserable. That's the rough day. Evacuation pills. That's a good title of a podcast. There. Jeff Grubb.

The news. This is the news with Jeff Grubb. Wow. Mike Minotti did it last week, and it was great. You did a good job, Mike. Thank you. I helped. You did, actually. Yeah, I like that. Oh, right. That's right. My dog came. I had to go get my dog. Mm-hmm.

Dan read the news. Since then, that day where that was like foretold and a bunch of reporting that Microsoft was going to cut a bunch of jobs, it happened on last Wednesday. And it's like 9,000, 9,100 people across Microsoft. A lot in the gaming division, a lot in Xbox. The reporting says that this is them trying to reallocate money. So cut jobs in Xbox to put more money into.

You guessed it, AI. Fuck off. Because that's growing and Xbox isn't. It's kind of that simple. Although, you know, AI is not necessarily growing in terms of how much money it's making, but they see a chance for it to grow. this says there's i got a list of things that happened like half the xbox research team laid off what does that mean probably that they're just not that interested in it like that this is probably probably what led to them uh not doing their own

Xbox handheld is there like, well, we're not investing in that all that much anymore. That sort of thing. The head of Xbox family and child safety was laid off. The devs responsible for Warcraft rumble were let go. Xbox canceled Perfect Dark and closed the initiative. That one was wild. That's crazy. Aren't you embarrassed? I mean, I guess, like, my gosh, like, I'm.

I'm embarrassed for you after talking that thing up as quadruple A and promoting it and showing it off and making us get all excited for it to just cancel and close the studio. It's pathetic. It's pathetic. I had to rack my brain for when I saw the headlines pop up about Perfect Dark getting canceled. I didn't know if that was a different Perfect Dark project or like the Perfect Dark that we've been seeing for what feels like decades now.

nope the one from the initiative the studio they started like that was going to be their new big a california studio that you know was going to be able to take people that worked at naughty dog and worked at uh riot all these things and we're going to make this awesome thing and It's, you know, I heard a year or so ago there was a rough spot and there was a lot of pushback. People got mad at you and like, yeah, you were right again. But geez.

And it's like, okay, I kind of bought into it. I'm like, all right, yeah, they're going to show the game off. It must be in a better situation. Now we're like, of course, turns out that what they did show off. was mostly smoke and mirrors. I know there was people who pushed back against that and said, no, that was really it. And I'm sure there was real parts to that trailer, but a lot of that stuff was just not.

There's not much there that was real. Either way, like you said, it's embarrassing. Raven was affected by these layoffs. You know, one of the... Call of Duty sports studios. We're going to call of duty. We're going to lay them off too. My God. That's, that's it though. Right. It's like, you're going to do the same amount in terms of like call of duty. We're going to do less of stuff like perfect dark and all these other investments.

You're going to do the same amount of Call of Duty, but with less. We're going to save money that way and we're going to make more money because that's how we're going to see the growth is. We're going to use fewer people and an AI to make more Call of Duty. And that's the plan going forward. And it's just, oh, I can't think of a more depressing. end here for what Xbox has turned into. The phrase AI Call of Duty has triggered me in a horrifying way.

I mean, that's going to be the one where they really try to figure out how to make it work. They're going to hammer that home in Call of Duty Mobile and then... Carry that out onto consoles. Oh, yeah. Yes, exactly. That's a good point. Longtime Rare employee Greg Miles, who's been there for around 35 years, is leaving the company. He, you know, there's a director on Banjo. He's a director on Sea of Thieves, and he's no longer there. Turn 10 is effectively done. Yeah, yeah. Everwild is canceled.

Microsoft canceled a ZeniMax Online Destiny like that Phil Spencer had to be pulled away from because he loved it so much. That doesn't matter. Shut up. Uh, rumors that Phil Spencer is leaving. Xbox says, no, he's not. I've heard that he will be, uh, in not like imminently, but you know, kind of like he's looking to get that, get out of there. He's been grooming Sarah bond for that job for years.

so i think it's fair to say to like look at it and be like this that's what it looks like sounds like within the next year or two that that probably will happen um people are rightly rightfully laying blame at his feet although you know matt booty

My understanding is a lot of this goes back to Matt Booty, just not really understanding how to lead a bunch of these studios and kind of letting them fin for themselves and with the idea of go make what you want to make. And then when they come back, having made what they want to made.

Being like, oh, this is not what we wanted you to make. Cool. Sounds infuriating. Yeah. Yeah. Tons of other announced unannounced projects were canceled or affected in one way or another. I just heard people keep telling me. Contract studios, basically so many contract studios around the world have lost so much of the money that they had coming in because of this. Because Microsoft has just kind of cut all of that work off. So...

It goes deeper than you can even tell by the first, oh, 9,100 people lost their jobs. It's probably going to be a lot more than that. For example, at John Romero's studio, Romero Games, I guess John and Brenda Romero's studio. They have had to furlough or lay off almost all of their staff. There is still some staff left, but they had a game they were making with Microsoft without 100 people we're working on. Those 100 people no longer work there, at least for the moment.

While John Romero and Brenda Romero are trying to talk to other publishers to get new funding. But it's like those people that lost their jobs would not be counted in that 9,100. So it's a much bigger cut than we're even seeing in the headlines. You know, question is.

What the fuck happens with Xbox next? What do we care happens? I mean, I don't know. Yeah, it's just it just seems like such a big retreat from games and they're still talking about that next Xbox and things like that. and it's just it's just so hard to see the future because how does that next xbox do anything like what what is the pitch on that that can possibly make it do better than an xbox series x we know it's not gonna have exclusives

Right? They're clearly going that way. At certain points, they just commit to being a third-party publisher now. So I can't imagine anybody cares about that console. Meanwhile, they just kind of... have nothing to contribute to this industry except for their money i think that's what you said jeff and they're pulling back on that so they can invest in ai instead

You know, there's a large number of people out there who play games who don't know that this is happening. There's people who are going to be quick to forgive. I do think about Blizzard and how so many people... We're like, oh, I'm done with Blizzard forever after all that stuff came out. And it's like, ah, you give that a year and they make a good game and people are suddenly very quick to forgive. So I don't know. Maybe Xbox is still going to somehow...

bounce back from this or redivert, but I kind of just, I'm sort of over it right now. I don't like, I don't even like thinking about them because they just spent all these years acquiring studios and spending all this money just to... you know, retreat on a dime, especially when it's for the nightmare that is AI. Yeah. Um, that, that, you know, the AI train there is all just about, that is the next big.

buzzword for investors and so they are willing to like give you a lot of of rope there but i think they're at the end of the rope that's why like this is what's what's happening before it was like we'll just continue to get you know, fresh money from people who are very excited about this or we can invest some of this other cash. But it's like now if you start taking cash from, I don't know, what is...

Microsoft live 365, whatever the fuck they call it now, Microsoft office, you take money from there. It's like, well, that's the enterprise stuff. We want that growing in its own way. And that should be growing because of AI. It's like, well, we don't really want to justify that. But if you want to start cutting from stuff that's not growing, we could still say that's okay. And that's we're in that phase. The next phase is, okay, AI's got to start making money.

And I just don't think that is about to click into place. And so things could get a lot worse for a bunch of different aspects of all kinds of different industries. But the way it affects gaming could get a lot worse as these companies realize. AI is not going to suddenly be printing money for them the way they thought it was. Microsoft doesn't need Xbox. If they have to, they will just cut it all. They absolutely will. Yep.

And then, you know, it's going to leave a lot more people just kind of out in the dark there. It'll be kind of a horrifying, terrifying thing. There could be a world pretty easily where all their efforts really are just Call of Duty, King. maybe Blizzard, and just about everything else. I mean...

We'll be in real rough shape. We're in rough shape right now, but I bet even they're like, okay, we got to not close a Rare. We have to not close a Double Fine, like one of these beloved studios, and then who knows how hot the heat's going to get.

then but i could see those days a coming yep you have to imagine that the second call of duty starts like dipping in numbers or plateauing which i think it has to some extent it's had ups and downs yeah right there has to be someone in that exec board thinking like well i guess it's time to cut call of duty um yeah i i just think they'll like um they will cut everything else before they cut call of duty but yeah i mean i i think they will say

Time to spin off Xbox into its own thing separate from Microsoft and let it go fend for itself. And what does that look like? Who the hell knows? That's going to be weird. But, you know, like, are we going to get, you know, we did get this Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 plus 4 thing, and that's Activision under Microsoft.

That seemed like a miracle. And I'm expecting even less of those kind of things to somehow happen here. We'll go ahead, Jeff. Yeah. I was just going to say the other aspect of this is... How does Game Pass fit into all this? And there's been a lot of talk back and forth. People are like, this is happening because of Game Pass. And I would say, it is happening because Game Pass is now growing the way that they expected it to.

So yeah, if you want to say it's because of Game Pass, that's completely fair. But then it's like, okay. The whole idea behind Game Pass was you could get something out of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 Plus 4, and maybe it doesn't do as well as 1 Plus 2 did, but it's another thing, and Game Pass keeps people subscribed.

And that's great. And you want to every new subscriber that joins because every new game continues to grow the service. Doesn't seem like they're telling that story to themselves anymore. So do we just get fewer of the stuff like fewer things like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 plus 4?

or hi-fi rush something they already sort of abandoned yeah it sounds like we just get fewer and fewer of these things so i you know we're back kind of where we've been for like for a couple years now with these major publishers which is If they have a big game you like, great. But if you are looking for anything else, like the next big idea, the next small idea.

Just a cool distraction. It's not happening from these big publishers. It is happening elsewhere. It's so wild because like as a youth, I loved the summer of arcade on XBLA and it just seemed like there were so many fresh ideas and like little indie games and just. new cool things popping up every week and i just haven't seen that level of creativity coming out of xbox in a while all right uh you know the romero thing uh there was a little bit of an update there

He did go out there and say that several publishers have said they're interested. One of the things he did point out, though, going back to Microsoft, was the day before the... layoffs and the day before they were told that their funding was being cut off they had a meeting where with microsoft where none of this was mentioned that's fine um

Yeah, and it's like, oh boy, that's rough. Even if the people that had that meeting didn't know, it still implies that Microsoft was not going to give them a heads up at all and let them just run into this brick wall. Seems very unfair.

We talked about the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 Plus 4 soundtrack. I don't have a list of what the 10 songs are, but the one song that people are really complaining about is ACDC's TNT. There's a few others, but I'm happy with the soundtrack overall. I bet TNT is expensive.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's a tough one. Cause it's like, I think that was the like theme song of four and you know, they got gorilla radio for two. They got, uh, you know, it was, it was gold finger for one. I forget what the like theme song. Superman. The three is Ace of Spades. So you got like the other big song. So yeah, that's a little rough. But yeah, I mean...

I think they're at a point where this is the way it has to work with the soundtracks for Tony Hawk. I'm fine. I guess whatever they do next, I kind of hope they just do a Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. five and pretend the old one never happened and just make a new one, a new soundtrack. And that would be nice.

Ghost of Yotei State of Play is set for July 10th. Publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment and developer Sucker Punch Productions will host the previously announced Ghost of Yotei Focus State of Play. on July 10th. The broadcast will feature over 20 minutes of gameplay hosted by Sucker Punch Productions. Game's out October...

Second, you boys feeling pretty excited about Ghost of Yote? I liked the first Ghost a bit, but I didn't follow up with it the way a lot of people did. It's weird. I played through that whole game and liked it. There's not a lot of hype right now for me for the sequel. I don't know why.

I feel like I'm ready for it because I think I just played like that first big island of Sushima and I just kind of fell off it. And so it's like, well, you know, I always kind of wanted to go back to it, but now might as well just, you know, really commit to the new one. Isn't there just one island in that game?

I thought there was like three or like zones or something like that. There's other. I thought there was another. I like that multiplayer mode we checked out a couple months ago. That was fun. Oh, right. I forgot about that. That was neat. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know. I feel like I'm experiencing ninja fatigue. Sure, sure. Are ninjas the new zombies? Oh, wow. Who would win a fight and injure zombies, Dan? Pirates! What if a crusader was in there, too? They can't have cheeseburger. I don't know. Mike, say cheeseburger. Cheeseburger. Thank you. It used to be kind of exciting when we got one of these sequels. Like, they're going to improve so much. And now it seems like they often just kind of get bigger, but not necessarily...

Better. Like, you know, Horizon Forbidden West, which I don't think is a bad game at all. But I do think it's just, yeah, we're going to make Horizon Zero Dawn bigger. Yeah, it's definitely bigger. Or... you know, the, uh, the, that Ninja Theory game, uh, Xbox just produced a little bit. Heavenly Sword? Hellblade 2? Hellblade 2. Is that really what it's called? I'm like, that's not it, it's not called Hellblade. Senua's, yeah, Senua's Sacrifice, right? It's like...

When the games get bigger, do they get bigger? Even going back to, like, The Last of Us Part II, I'm like, that's a bigger game, I guess. I don't know if I like it any better, but just felt like the sequels used to always get better.

Speaking of Hellblade 2, the game that sounds a lot like it, Helldivers 2, is going to be going to Xbox with cross-play. August 26th, it'll hit the... Microsoft device, that game will do just fine on Xbox. Not every game would make a lot of sense to port to Xbox, like if you're PlayStation. But that one is like, yeah, we might as well. First of all, it's like from a studio that you don't necessarily own, even though it's a PlayStation game. They published it. Still, though.

This might be a dumb question, but it's one that just popped into my brain. Why is it that like, I feel like when you hear, oh, Indiana Jones is going to PlayStation, people like. have lost their minds about that but then like something like this i feel like i haven't seen the same oh well because i mean i think if if it was something other than like one of these marquee like Hellblade 2 is a game that, or I'm sorry, I just did it. Helldivers 2 is a game that the audience that plays that game

They want everyone playing because it's a massively multiplayer metagame where the more people who are playing, the better. So when PC and PlayStation are working together to take on all these different fronts on the war.

They're like, hey, yeah, we're all in this together, and we want the developers to let more people in so we can do even better, so please bring it to Xbox. This game's a little bit of an anomaly. So I see Marino in the chat saying, well, what if it was Spider-Man? They would piss their pants. They would lose... I don't know. Single player AAA blockbuster games, I guess, that are like the console mascot. Who gives a shit? That's right. Who gives a shit?

It is, I spent $500 on this console to feel special, and these games make me feel special because only I can play them because I own the right console. That's what it is. It's very childish, and there's no other way to describe it. Yeah, who cares?

And thankfully for Helldivers 2, the audience is like, no, we don't care. This is actually kind of awesome. That makes sense being an anomaly. They've already done the thing where it's like, okay, great. We won this one. Now bring it to Switch 2. So they're starting that campaign. We'll see if that happens. I would definitely get back into Hellblade. Or not. God damn it. There it is. I would definitely get into Helldivers. I would do that again. Fun.

What's good for that is Instagram reels of Helldivers 2 shit is so hype. It's so good. Just look at a couple of those things. That game's so cinematic when it's really going and everything's happening. All the... You're calling in all those things from the sky and all the enemy ships are flying in and you're using rocket launchers to take them down. Yeah, we should play some more of that. You know what game I think we should circle back to? A little older, but...

I, any of the risk of rain games, I think we should go back. I would do that. Yeah. You know what? We do that old and new one. Cause that's a 2d and a 3d game. So it's like, we would kind of play both. Uh, but I want to play more of that second one. Cause it's a 3d one. I didn't play a ton of it.

All right, fans think Nintendo accidentally revealed Switch Online's next wave of N64 games. Basically, back in May, there was something showing off N64, NSO features. There's the CRT shaders. The CRT shaders. And so when you go to the options menu... It puts a fogged glass filter over your game selection so you can focus on the options. But you can still kind of barely see smudges of colors and shapes.

through that fog you know glass effect and so people started being like looking at these things and they're like wait what box art is that and they started comparing and contrasting and they got to a point where like well that can literally only be glover

No other N64 cover looks like that's gotta be Glover. I watched that video where he was like going into Photoshop and putting like a mask over and being like turning it on and off and it's like oh that does look like yeah. So there's four games kind of for sure that have been confirmed by

that are in this video. Are they confirmed like definitely going to come to N64 NSO? It's a possibility that they were just testing these games and that none of them will come, but I'm hopeful. So those games are Donkey Kong 64. Forsaken 64. Glover and Super Smash Brothers. And someone thinks the fifth one might be Scars, which is an anthropomorphic or anthropomorphic racing game. It's actually pretty good.

SCARS. I don't think I've ever actually played that. Yeah, it's an acronym. Yeah, it's a super car anomaly racing. Assault racing. Yeah. Well, here's my one thing with this and why I'm skeptical. Because for Saken 64 is an M-rated game. So that would be on the separate N64 M-rated app. So it would not be in this background. Maybe they were testing it. Maybe they were just testing it.

For sure. I mean, it's weird we don't have Donkey Kong 64 already. I was kind of hoping they would do that in the lead up to Bonanza so I could, you know, play that before Bonanza came out at this point. I don't know what they waited for. To join? Can anyone remember? What's that? Some more rare stuff. Jeff Wars Gemini was not too long ago, right? Mike, you were saying you were hoping it would happen. I have a feeling when you do your 101% run of DK64, you're going to be taking...

I got shoot hardware for that. We got a cartridge for that. Banana yellow. Banana yellow. I know we keep teasing that, but I really desperately want to see Mike 101% Donkey Kong 64. Okay, well, we're going to have to have like a little bit of a fundraiser because that was the whole thing, right? Yeah. I want to set a big goal for him to do that. And, oh, man, that's what I want the most on this site right now. Okay, we'll commit to that.

Either way, I hope all these games come for sake. It would be neat to see Glover's weird and okay. It's wild that Smash Brothers isn't yet and also like Melee. like those have got to be not mainly weird because Nintendo well it's not weird because Nintendo's weird so they they

They kind of do a similar thing with Pokemon, although that's a different situation. But they want you to get the new ones, and they want you to focus on that, and they are holding back Smash Brothers because of that. So the latest N64 game was Killer Instinct Gold, which seems like... over a month ago or something like that, maybe around then.

So we could be due for one any moment. Yeah. Glover was like actually just re-released on everything not too long ago, I think. Yeah, we played it and it's not great. Right. Now, so was, you know, Turok was also just available in a... enhanced edition on switch but they still added that to nso so that doesn't mean anything apparently for second got re-rated to teen oh okay people have said oh yeah they made it woke

No, Sean, they made forsaken. Whoa. That would be the dumbest controversy industry full of dumb controversies. Whoa. Well, we were getting super chat for DK64 is 101%. ZachyZach says he'll donate a dollar for every percent. Oh, Mikey, DK64 is our cash cow. Okay. I got to pay rent, Mike. You got to do it now. You got to put food on our families. Food on your families. Like those sushi girls. Okay.

There's an EU lobby group that says forcing developers to support online games would make them too expensive. This is part of... A backlash from the industry towards the Stop Killing Games initiative, which has reached its threshold of a million signatures in Europe to force the EU to consider this legislation or to consider some sort of regulation.

basically to think about the issue. And developers and publishers are kind of freaking out about this and say, well, no, no, this would be terrible because then we won't be able to make live service games. And then everyone who signed is like, stop. trying to i already signed you don't have to convince me anymore um yeah of course they don't want to spend any more money i'm very skeptical that creating a little bit of support so that private servers are enabled or to

Make your single player campaign that has to check a server. Update it so it doesn't have to check a server. I don't think that's all that prohibitively expensive. I think they just don't want to be on the hook for anything ever. And that's all that's really happening here.

It might be too late for these big companies to stop this getting considered. So we'll kind of see what happens next. They might be moving on to directly lobbying the politicians to complain to them. Yeah. Put pressure on them. Make them have to figure this out. And if that makes them second thinking. Making as much live service slop as they do? Oh, no. Exactly. And it's, you know, it's their money. I don't care. You figure it out. Like, if this becomes the rule.

then you've got to live by the rule. And to me, that's a win. I want to see these games be able to live on. If I paid 40 bucks for it and I have a disc and I want to put it into a system, I kind of expect something to work.

All right. Last couple of stories here. Mind's Eye boss claims internal and external saboteurs. are to blame for the studio's woes a thing that you should just definitely say if you're leslie benzie's the head of build a rocket boy um I'm a truther on this. This is definitely what happened, guys. This is the one you believe. This is definitely the one I believe. Did you implement the Seb Getty code? I'll get in there. What?

God, what a loser. I'm sorry. It's just loser behavior. God. Oh, Samateurs. Shut up. And it's what they do. They make that the guy go spaghetti fight because that's the only thing we like about your game. Mean Tweets did that, yeah. They influenced every reviewer because the game has like a 34 open critics. So it was the saboteurs. Don't want to just decide they dislike the game. Like, you can't fool us. We see the game. It's there. It sucks.

Yeah, I think that Build a Rocket Boy and Mind's Eye are just not long for this world. Kind of feels like one of those situations where they got a lot of money to start this studio. Probably Leslie Benzies paid himself a hefty bonus. And he'll just go take that money and move on to the next thing. Great. Good for you, bud. Prolific Port Studio says any 60 frames per second Xbox Series S game will easily port to Nintendo Switch 2.

This is Virtuos. A developer over there said that the CPU is pretty close to a PS4, but the GPU is right behind an Xbox Series S, and then it has extra features that basically make it almost equivalent to an Xbox Series S. Knots and bolts. Nuts and bolts. Man, actually, I would love that. That would be fantastic, yes. Yeah, this continues to be good to hear. We're a month in to having the Switch 2, and I kind of think it's everything I was hoping it would be.

I'm very happy with it. How about you all? I think come next week with Bonanza, I'm going to feel real happy about it. I mean, it was pretty much just like... Welcome Tour and Mario Kart that I've been playing since it launched. Playing Tony Hawk on it has been nice, but I think Bonanza is the big one where I'm going to be like, all right, hell yeah, we're here. I think that's a good sign that we're just worried about the games. The system itself has been very solid. Yep, totally.

Yeah. Bonanza, I'm eagerly waiting for. Final Fantasy Tactics, eagerly waiting for. It's been fine. I don't think it's been a major letdown, as some people are claiming it is. Oh, no way. It's been fine. Also, just love the magnets on that bad boy. Yeah. I'll just sit there and disconnect and reconnect and all day. Yeah.

Uh, and then, uh, last story here was added. It looks like in a panicked scroll, uh, where's final fantasy nine remake? Sorry. I've just been thinking about it a lot. And I just want to make sure we're talking about it. Yesterday was the, was. the 25th anniversary is it vivi problematic they probably just don't want to like update that they're like he's the least problematic he is such a good boy they're the only i have no no problems with vivi vivi has never

cause anybody any problems aside from emotional distress because we love him so much. Do you remember when I had Mike thinking that Weird Al got cancelled? He broke his heart. I was like, not Weird Al. He was playing up in Traverse City while I was there. We couldn't get tickets. They were sold out, I guess. Doing all right. It's just, you know, they've been releasing all this new concept art. They have this page. They're talking about Final Fantasy IX constantly to a point where, like...

they're building up to something and it was in that nvidia leak and every other square enix thing in that nvidia leak the obviously tactics remake freaking kingdom arts 4 was in there before it got announced it all happened So how can this not be the one thing? But now I'm scared, because Nate DeHate is saying, oh, they were working on that, but it didn't work out, and maybe that's not happening anymore. So now I'm scared, Jeff, help me. Yeah, I don't, I mean, like...

It's weird because, like, there's, like, designer glasses and stuff like that that are Final Fantasy IX high-ends. And to me, it's like, that is such a level beyond it's the 25th anniversary. Yeah. Clearly something was supposed to happen here.

is it still happening yeah i don't i don't know but like my thing here is okay the the 25th anniversary did just pass for japan yesterday now they this entire year they could be like this is the 25th anniversary so they could still put it out at any time But if you're making a big deal about the anniversary now with all this stuff, wouldn't you want to say then, and here's where you should go if you want to play the game in a modern way.

Even if it's just pointing to one of those old ports you did, which are still available on every platform in one way or another. I mean, the website does mention those ports because they're on sale or something, but it's not making a big deal about it. Those ports were... It's only okay. It has the weird up-resing of the character models, but the backgrounds are still super blurry because they're pre-rendered. So it's not really a great way to play those games.

So, I mean, a couple years ago when it was Final Fantasy VIII's 25th anniversary, I don't recall them doing anything near this level of stuff for that. No way. No, they did not. It's like something is going on or was supposed to go on. And part of me is like, if you don't actually have the game, maybe keep some of the stuff to yourself because I am getting my hopes up here. Yep. It's weird. I don't know. I mean, there is...

People like someone, one of these leakers was like, hey, this week, that's all they said. And people like that means a Nintendo Direct. The guy's teasing a Nintendo Direct. I don't know if a Nintendo Direct is happening anytime soon, but I could see something like a Final Fantasy IX remake being saved for a big event like that. So maybe something in like...

September and they announce it for the holiday or something or early next year. Here's my real big word. Here's my nightmare scenario that they were making a remake and it was using a lot of AI. and they realize that it looks like shit, and that's why it's not happening anymore. That's my nightmare, Jeff. Square Enix would do it. They would fucking do it, and you know they would do it. I feel like Square is too behind. That's going to happen.

in two years right they were they're still on nfts that's great they kind of were maybe that's the other thing too it was a big nft game i don't know uh I like Final Fantasy 9, and I want to play it again. I want more people to play it because it's a good game. I think the one concerning thing here is that, other than your nightmare scenario there, Mike, is that...

All those games that were in the NVIDIA leak happened before that like recent, I don't know if it was a reorganization, but it was like a recalibration over at Square Enix where they're like, we released too many games and a lot of them didn't do very well. We're going to release fewer.

And maybe that meant, and I think they said like, you know, don't worry about Final Fantasy, but that might mean don't worry about Final Fantasy going forward. Maybe Final Fantasy 9 is one of those games that kind of got caught up in that. This is just like, you know, Dale Field Chronicles that we did. Well, let's just cut this off. It's like Crisis Score. We want to do fewer of those. Mikey.

tactics made it through right so it's like yeah maybe one did and the other one didn't yeah mikey here's uh if you want to put your conspiracy conspiracy theory it's a megaman game what if They were trying to make it into an action adventure game, and they realized, ah, shit, people like turn-based. Yeah, I mean, I tell you what, this is the one where you do a pretty faithful remake, and you keep...

the ATB combat system. Yeah. Optimistically, I'm hoping that they just wanted to space it out a bit more from the Final Fantasy Tactics remaster announcement. And that's all this is. And we're still going to hear about this soon. But I don't know. I'm worried. I'm getting worried.

I don't blame you. Last news story here. Amazon has just emailed me and given me a delivery estimate update for my 8-bit Doe 64 Bluetooth controller. which is 8BitDo's N64 controller that they're kind of shipping alongside the analog 3D. And it's now scheduled to arrive on July 31st. It was supposed to be here in Q1. Yeah, I was thinking like March or something. I have not got an email about mine yet. Damn. Yep. So a delivery estimate update July 31st, that Thursday.

uh one of these things like shipped early i think someone got one i'm like so it's like leaked and some people are talking about it i love this thing because it's got six face buttons you know it's the a and the b and then the c buttons but i like i like six face buttons in any configuration you're a saturn truther yeah

Saturn, honestly, yes. I'm like, I want to just get a Saturn controller and use that as a USB pad going forward. Mine does. Yeah, I just checked my Amazon account. It is arriving July 31st. Okay, so there's a little bit of light there for 8BitDo, who definitely was like...

having other issues and then all the tariff stuff happened on top of that so they pushed the analog 3d like way back that was supposed to be here in q1 um so maybe some of that stuff starting to shake loose i guess the other side of that is Trump started talking about tariffs on Japan and Taiwan and Korea again. So, hey.

Fantastic. That 90 day pause really did let up and he's going right back at it. So we're not out of the woods for those things. I guess the one good thing there is I got my switch to now. So I'm a little bit less concerned than I was a few months ago. We got two of them. That's right. All right, Jan, that does it for the headlines. I'm handing the show back off to you. Fantastic. We're going to go read some emails and some super chats right after this freaky break.

this is oprah's favorite gaming podcast emails bombcastgiantbomb.com is the email address send your emails to Write in about any and everything. You got a fun quiz. You got some random cues. You want to avoid an awkward social interaction. Or one of us said something that pissed you off. Write in. I don't read any corrections because the four of us, including the whole five of us, the royal five of us, have never made a mistake on the internet ever. Bombcast.com is the email address.

Special shout out they should have done at the top of the show though. Shouts out to Marino for compiling.

the top 100 games of the quarter century yes um very cool list mike what were your top 10 did you get to vote in that i didn't get to vote and it upset me so you guys know you were poor dan and jane had to hear it i was like having some kind of weird panic attack about it for some reason. I can't believe I missed that. How did I miss it? Jeff told me I had a lot of big problems. Yeah. Well, you know, it is a day for Mikey's. It's true. It's always a day for Mikey's.

I love how earnest it is, Mike, when you're like, my nightmare scenario, the worst thing. Is it Final Fantasy? Genuine breakdown. I didn't get to vote in the top 10. This is the worst thing that could ever happen to me. I love voting for stupid things like video games. I think my opinions on this stuff is good. I'll tell you what, in my mind, too, it's like, you know what's going to happen?

somehow half-life 2 is not gonna make it because all these fucking zoomers don't respect it it's not gonna make the top 10 then i left the list and it made it right at number 10 i was like okay now Mario Odyssey was in the top 10, and that's a little off-putting. Yeah, the primary demo for GiantBomb.com, the Zoomers. The Zoomers! We're always worried about them! That's my number three is Mario Odyssey.

I think it was my number one when I kind of did it myself. The Sentry, yeah, it's number one. I realized I didn't have a particular order of mine, but people construed it in some sort of way. Speaking of the top 100 list...

Chris from London writes in, hey duders, I shared the Giant Bomb top 100 list with a normie gamer friend who was shocked at the games on there. He couldn't believe Skyrim and Last of Us. were so low, and how many games of the last five years were in the top ten. Mostly, I suspect, because he's not played any of them. This led me to think, if it were possible to survey every person that plays games, what do you think would be at the...

top of this hypothetical list? Fortnite, Minecraft, GTA 5? Or would it be something even more casual like Wordle or Candy Crush? Thanks to GB and the community. Keep the good times rolling. Chris from London. I think a Candy Crush or like a Words with Friends or something would have a real chance. I think Words with Friends has passed its prime there, buddy. My dad played literally 40,000 games and plays it every day for hours. Would he put it as his number one video game?

He'd put it high up, I think. I think what would happen is, if you told people, no, you have to vote by what you've played the most, maybe. But I don't think anyone feels special putting Fortnite as their number one. Yeah. I mean, I'm a defender. Fortnite is a really good game. That's not what I'm saying. No, no, no. That's not what I'm saying at all. Fortnite's a great game.

I don't think a lot of people put it as their number one game because they're like, it's so popular. I don't feel cool when I make my top 10 list, putting it as my number one. So I don't know. The list would change a lot if we had a vast number of people voting, especially from a wider community of the kinds of people playing games. But I don't think that suddenly means the New York Times crossword puzzle app becomes number one, though.

Because I think people are like, no, I'll do The Last of Us as well. That sort of thing. I don't think it changes dramatically. Pokemon Go? Pokemon Go, right. I can see that. Yes. Is Clash of Clans huge or do they just advertise everywhere?

It was huge. It's not a Reign Shadow Legends situation. Castle Cans actually was popular. People actually play that, though? I thought that was just an ad. It's not Shadow Legends. That's one that I think is just like... brute forcing its way into making it kind of a profit um but yeah i don't you're right because yeah a lot of people play fortnite or you know candy crush but even amongst those people

I bet they played like one other game where they're like, well, that's my favorite game. I bet. Right. They would put Tetris or something. I bet even Last of Us would be like much higher than it was. Yeah. I think a lot more people would vote for something like that. Was NBA Street Volume 2 on there? Because it should be. Certainly not.

Jeez. In like the top 10? It was in my top 10. It wasn't in my top 10, but it should be on our top 100. I don't think it made the top 100. Damn it. Because even like us, I think there's a lot of people that that's their 25th favorite game of the century. Sure, sure.

Whatever it is on mine. I feel like Halo games would be pretty well represented. I mean, they are in our list. There's like several Halo games. There was some recency buy stuff for sure, but also... like a clear obscure did very well there but i feel like you know in another 10 years that game will still be on of the list it'll be in that range yeah yeah i think there was some recency bias stuff there with that i mean like it's fucking awesome but like that was high up

It wasn't in the top 10. It was like top 20, right? It was like 17 or something like that. I could see it dropping down to like 25. I don't think it's going to drop that hard. I think a game that probably if... If we surveyed like a different wider audience, maybe you think like League of Legends would be. Again, I think that's like, you know, I think that's one that people are like, yes, I played a lot of it.

And it's in my, it's all in my top 10, but it's low on my top 10. I think they're like, we don't acknowledge it, but I don't think anyone's gonna be like, I don't know, I shouldn't say anyone. I don't think enough people would put it as their number one to affect things too much. Do you think it's a travesty no one put subway surfers? Yes. Where's Fruit Ninja? Yeah. Doodle Jump.

uh damn it what's what's the game that i said was like subway surfers um yeah it's probably in there so there's plenty of representation any like late n64 playstation games make it because like I just have a hard time. There was a couple. I think there was one for each PlayStation and N64. Is Conker on there? Majora's Mask and God, I can't remember what the PS1 game was. A Thousand Times Resist is not on the list.

Oh, did Final Fantasy 9, let me see, Final Fantasy 9. 10 is on there. Final Fantasy 9 made it, so that was 17. Majora's Mask and Final Fantasy 9, and those are the only PlayStation and N64 games, respectively. Ooh, Katamari Damacy made it on. Hell yeah. That's a good game. I always thought so.

Metal Gear 3 got screwed because subsistence and Snake Eater were tallied as separate things. Oh, really? We have a little bit of that, yeah. Justice for Metal Gear. For folks that haven't seen the list, we're not going to go through the... All 100, but let's just go through the top 10 real quick. And people are pretty hot about this list, too. There was like 500 responses or something like that in the Reddit thread about it. Go ahead, Jan. Number 10, Half-Life 2. Yeah.

Nine, Dark Souls. Yep. Number eight, The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt. I like that game. I was just surprised it did that well. I feel like amongst the giant bomb crew, I... I never hear you all talk about Witcher 3 very much. I think Jeff straight up doesn't like it. I do not enjoy playing Witcher 3. I liked it for a while, and then it just fell off pretty hard. I've always been Witcher curious. It's just not a fun game to play.

Yeah, I don't want to apply oil to my sword every time I use it. Number seven, Bloodborne. Yeah. No, I'm not going to start spouting Bloodborne hot takes now that I'm playing all these games because I've already tried to once and people got mad at me. What is it? Give us a tease. I think I like Bloodborne. I think it's not like in my top three.

uh from soft games i don't know if it's in my top five from soft games i might need to play it again but like i i think sakura would be a better top 10 thing here than bloodborne sure sure um number six i don't think any of us really click with it Baldur's Gate 3? Wrong. I loved it. I think absolutely. None of us liked it. Oh, right, right, right. You fixed Shadowheart. I fixed Shadowheart. I think Baldur's Gate 3 is great. Is it a little high? Maybe. I don't think crazy, though.

I think it's an important game, too. I think this game's success is going to influence the industry and the kind of games we get for a long time. Number five was Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom.

I mean, you know, not for spoilers ahead, but part of me is like, oh, would Tears of the Kingdom kind of pay because, you know, Breath of the Wild is Breath of the Wild, but nope, Tears of the Kingdom still did very well. Yep. Yeah, I think I listed Tears of the Kingdom instead of Breath of the Wild. I put Breath as my number one. Yeah, Breath was my number one as well. Yeah, I don't know if I had tears in my top ten. Number four, Mass Effect 2.

This was a very popular game, and I do like it. There's a part where it's like, oh, maybe the popularity for this one has fallen off a little bit, but no, number four. This is like... For the person that likes that kind of game, Mass Effect 2 is the one that always comes up. I fucking love Mass Effect 2. No, it's a good game. It is for sure. I guess there was just a part of me that's like, that's falling off a little bit, right? Nope. People...

Which, again, makes it crazy that they haven't been able to capitalize on this, and who knows what that new Mass Effect is going to look like after the new Dragon Age kind of sort of came and went. I don't know. People wonder what we're talking about in chat. This is the Giant Bomb Games of the Century list. We put out a public vote. Everyone's been voting on it. Jan's going through the list right now.

Number three is Outer Wilds. Hell yes. That's awesome. I love that. Where is that on my list? It's probably not high enough. I should play this game, huh? Oh, my God. So fucking incredible. You know what I want to do? We should play this on Myst with Mitch. Oh, yeah. I want to do a special Mega Man where we go outside and play it on a TV, like in a backyard with a campfire and play all night long or something like that, like a campout stream.

You know what's interesting about this? So, like, Borders Gate 3, 96 Metacritic. Heroes Kingdom, 96 Metacritic. Mass Effect 2, 96 Metacritic. Outer Wilds, 85 Metacritic. People didn't get it. Yeah, honestly, there's a little bit of people not quite... jiving with it. Interesting. That kind of makes it more interesting, right? Yes, it's more interesting, for sure. Number two, Elden Ring. That's right. Yep, sure.

Is there a part of you guys that's like, oh, wow, three FromSoft games in the top 10? Or is that just kind of indicative of, you know, the century that they've had? I have three Metal Gears in my top 10, so I can't really complain. You're wild. Yep. Number one.

Mikey was alluding to it earlier. Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's Breath of the Wild. It might be the best game of all time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just number 11 was Mario Odyssey. I just want that in the top 10. That one hurts me. I think I would have pushed out a Dark Souls for an Odyssey for sure. Yeah, I would have pushed out a Bloodborne for it. But, yeah.

Okay, because, like, you all are largely anti-Red Dead Redemption 2. I know, Dan, you came around on it a little bit. I don't love it, but I also don't have this hatred for it. It was 14 on this. Wow. 14. You know, there's a couple games that I'm really glad that the Giant Bomb audience shouted out and voted. Celeste is number 48. Celeste rules. I mean, it's Celeste's.

Perfect. Hades was 13. They fucked up and put Disco Elysium at 12. I'm looking at, like, that's awesome to see. Hades at 13. Hell yeah, Hades at 13. Okay, wait a second. So we have original Resident Evil 4 at 16. Where's the remake?

No Returnal on the list at all, Dan, which is probably right. What the fuck? Yeah, shit. Oh, the remake for Zero 4th. Returnal's incredible. That is mostly just, well, I thought it was supposed to be Jeff, but it's not on this list, so maybe we're right. I don't know. I don't know. Rez isn't on there either. Well, Rez might have come out like 99. Actually, when did Rez?

Rez. Video game. That would have been like, yeah, right there. 2001. Eat shit, Rez. Go fuck yourself, Rez. Go fuck yourself. Wait a minute. Guys, there's no SOCOM on this list. What the hell? What about Mag? Yeah, mags are in five spots. It's crazy. I don't know what happened there. Games I think would have done much better if this list was 10 years earlier. Bioshock was 43. I think 10 years ago, Bioshock might have been in the top 10.

Yeah. No Infinite, which is correct. It's cool that Rock Band made it onto the top 100 also. I didn't realize how influential and integral to some people's lives Rock Band is. I know we're kind of going through the list and kind of mentioned, have we talked about the placements of Last of Us and God of War? How do you guys feel about those? I thought they would both be higher. God of War is 47.

God of War is 47. 2018? Yeah, 2018 God of War. I would put God of War 2. the oh yeah me too no I feel the same way yes the original games I enjoy much more yeah I think I mean you know I think those games where they came out there were a lot of people this is one of the best games ever and I think that has cooled off a little bit where everyone still likes those games and respect them clearly

I think there's a little less fatigue even amongst a lot of people. For a lot of people, there isn't. For a lot of people, that's still just the best game ever. But for a good amount of people, there is a bit of Last of Us fatigue, and I do not blame them for it. Bellatro at 40 is awesome. That's the show. Ooh, Shadow of Colossus at 44 is also sick as hell. Yeah.

I mean, Shadow Closs is just such a unique, like nothing else is like it. And so to this day, it's like you can go look back and there's... We're talking about all these games where, like, they've risen in stature. They've lowered in stature. Shadow Closs has just always just been that guy. Yeah. And, yeah, I always think so fondly of that guy. Hell, yeah. Just Final Fantasy XIV, Shadowbringers, the expansion at 50. There's also, like,

Titanfall 259, like, I thought maybe, especially with our audience, that might do a smidge better, but obviously still good. Marino says that if they would have combined a Rock Band 1, 2, and 3, it would have been, like, around 30th place. Oh, wow, okay. Yeah, I guess like some games where they have a lot of similar sequels are going to...

Struggle like that. Arkham City was 98. I guess I might have thought that would do better. Was Arkham Asylum. Where's Asylum? Asylum was 69. Nice. Asylum is higher than City. I think 10 years ago would have been the other way. I like Asylum better. I like Asylum better.

too, but I'm always operating under the assumption that, like, man, people talk about City a lot. City's very good, but Asylum was just so much more focused. It's a pure Metroidvania. It's so goddamn good. I like the setting a lot more. Yeah, I think it swapped a little bit recently. i'd be happy to i think uh well i think arkham city turned 10 just recently which is wild by the way because to me that's still a new game and that game is 10 years old oh no

It charted to only at 88. That's another one where I feel like, oh, people are kind of falling off of that. Because to me, that was such an amazing game and so important. It was. Only 88. Is there something about that where it's like these games that in that moment were like, this is it. This is where games reached a certain thing.

Maybe that just doesn't have staying power, that concept. I feel like the late aughts, early 2010s maybe don't have, we're not in that nostalgia sweet spot for those yet. And maybe that's a big part of it too. Yeah, you're probably right. Yeah, I think the uncharted nostalgia is still.

is still coming. Gosh, Diablo 2 is a pretty early one here, and that's at 80, because that was right at 2000. Right above that, a newer game returned. I'm sorry, I'm just like, I find this list fascinating. That's why I wanted to vote! Persona 5 also got hurt a little bit because it's at 90, but then Persona 5 Royale is just Royale. I keep calling it Royale. That one is a good deal higher.

I'm a bit surprised that Persona 4 Golden is at 49. I would have assumed this audience that would have skewed higher. I think 5 is more popular these days than even Golden. We'll see when that remake happens. What goes on there. One of my surprises though, it's funny because they come at 92 and 93 and we'll move on with the email segment, folks. 92 being Tetris Effect and 93 being Journey.

Journey was cool. Journey's awesome. I like both these games. I guess I just didn't think Journey had that... Like we were talking about staying power in people's minds. Oh, no. Journey sticks. It's such a unique experience that really nothing else is like, like, yeah. Journey higher on mine for influential to where it's like a lot of its online multiplayer ideas have now just.

You'd find him in Super Mario Brothers Wonder. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Death Stranding. Yeah. All right. Kingdom Hearts 255. Let's go. Hell yeah, brother. All right, moving on. Real quick, just not a lot of PC representations. Civilization games aren't really on the list, things like that. I think that's maybe...

audience a little bit. World of Warcraft did really well. He got stuff that's sort of PC first, like Return of the Obra, still doing pretty good. Sure, yeah. It feels like there's some other stuff missing. Yep, alright. Go ahead, Jan.

All right, Max from South Bend writes in, Hi, Bombcast. I was listening to the Bombcast, and the next thing to play was an episode of a role-playing podcast that got me thinking about what each of your potential D&D classes would be. For Grubb, he would be a divination wizard with the ability to see into the future. For Minotti, there is one and only choice, a bard. He could sing Disney songs to inspire and heal his allies and use his Disney trivia to distract his foes.

For Bacalar, I thought a battle master fighter with his hockey pads, his armor, and his ability to control and get his allies into advantageous spots. For Jan, I thought an artificer. I almost read that Artipicer, with his skills in getting equipment to work. And finally, for Dan, I believe a warlock would work for him. His patron could be the otherworldly creature named Kojima.

and he would stun his enemies with his various outrageous stories that have occurred in his life. It's not perfect, but I thought you'd like it. Thanks for all the laughs. Max from South Bend. Okay, moving on. I like making characters in D&D almost more than I like playing D&D, gotta be honest, so that was fun. Max actually has another email. Hey, Bombcast. After finally defeating the optional boss in the Abyss...

In Claire Obscure Expedition 33, I found it to be one of my favorite boss fights in a long time. Besides Souls games, what other games do you guys think have epic boss fights? Max from South Bend. I mean, go to Zelda.

Sometimes they're a little easy though. But I mean, so just the design, like I find them very, very memorable. I can think like everything to the past boss, which is an ocarina. It's just like the Twilight Princess, big bone skeleton. Like there's just so many very memorable ones. I mean, even the 2D ones like.

I remember in Link's Awakening, the genie in a bottle and figuring out, oh, I'm supposed to use the weapon I just got. As a kid, this is where I learned this idea. I'm like, oh, I'm going to use the bracelet to pick up the guy and throw him against the wall. I never considered that. I'm supposed to just hit him with my weapon. And I don't know, there's something pure about that. Yeah.

For sure. I like that one. I like the two bosses in League Between Worlds. You have to hide in the shield for a little bit. That stuff rules. That's great. I mean, Shadow of the Colossus. That's all boss fights. Punch out. I mean, I know it kind of inspired by the Souls games, but Hollow Knight has very good boss fights. There's some big ones there. The final one. Ori and...

The Will of the Wisps. That second one. Yeah, the final boss fight there against Shriek was very good. Had incredible music. I listen to that track all the time. Metroid.

Super Metroid, Kraid, any fucking boss where it takes them most of or more than a screen. The dinosaurs and Joe and Mac, Kraid, and Super Metroid. Super Metroid's great because, I mean, the fight against Ridley's harder, but then that mother... fight is kind of like cinematic and just cool and then there's like the baby metroid comes in but the metroid dread that final fight against what razor beak or whatever was awesome that was fantastic final fight awesome stuff

YouTube chat with a good one. Yoshi's Island. I love that thing where it's like, oh, we're going to bring in just like a little jabroni enemy and then he gets sprinkled with Kamek dust and I was like, oh, fuck. Yeah. Mode seven warping. And then that last one, I thought that looked so cool on Super Nintendo where it's like, oh my God, I'm throwing this into the back.

background. Big ass baby Bowser. It's just so cool because all of a sudden there's a different sprite for Yoshi because he's looking off in the distance. Yeah. God, that might be the best. There's that Mario Odyssey type planet with the things you stop down. It rotates around. Yoshi's Island kicks ass. I know none of you are all MMO peeps, but boy.

doing some of those big raid boss fights in an MMO with a bunch of people in Final Fantasy XIV or World of Warcraft. Oh, gosh, that stuff would be so pretty cool. Any of the Resident Evil boss fights? Four had them. Four remake had. Four. Very good boss fights. The one with Krauser. Because there's a lot of you're fighting monsters and it's great, but then you're fighting Krauser and it's kind of a one-on-one knife fight first and then later he's a bit mutated.

And you're doing all these knife parries. And before that, you're running this kind of American gladiator gauntlet. Oh, Resident Evil 4, I think it's so freaking good. Village had some good boss fights. Village did have good boss fights, yeah. It's another...

From soft games, so it's not really the spirit, but man, Armored Core 6. Oh, yeah. But Armored Core 6, like every time I got to a boss, it was just like, this is the coolest I've ever felt. This is the coolest video games I've ever been. Devil May Cry.

Devil May Cry's had a good one. Going back to Resident Evil, because people usually shit on the Resident Evil 3 remake, and I get the problems, but the final boss fight there against the giant nemesis were like... battle damage jill picks up that rail gun whatever that's like three times her size and you just like have to blast off his festering puss filled sacks oh it feels good it looks awesome

Uh, you know, going back to that whole thing of like, you know, you're so used to fighting gigantic monsters in DMC three, when you fight Virgil, it just, yeah. So fucking cool. That is what makes Front Boss so good often. This is a guy that has the same skill set I do.

And I have to, I have to figure it out. And they're just really good at it. Defense and offense and figuring out your windows of opportunity. And like, I love any boss fight where it's just like, you're on top of like a tower and it's a fucking circle. And we're going to fight on this fucking fighting game ass stage. Yeah, well, that's like the final fight in Wind Waker against Ganondorf. It's still my favorite Ganondorf fight because it is. So usually it used to be when you fight human.

Ganondorf, and then he turns into a monster. And there it's like, no, he starts in the monster. Then he just becomes the dude. And it's just a sword fight. What if he was just a samurai? Yeah. And then you stab him in the fucking head. It's so good. I know they said no from Sapa. but I've been playing Sekiro. I'm kind of getting close to the end, and oh my god, those boss fights are so freaking good. Yeah. Oh, god. Boss fights are cool.

Yeah. For a while, it felt like it was becoming a lost art. I think that's one of the reasons FromSoft spoke to a lot of people, because there was this emphasis on making boss fights cool and important again. Mike, any of the Kingdom Hearts boss fights stick out to you? I'm trying to rack my brain for that. Oh, yeah, sure. I mean, I think, you know, both of the secret Sephiroth boss fights at Kingdom Hearts 1.

And two are really cool. I remember fighting Chernobog in one towards the end was really neat because he was, again, gigantic. And he had to kind of fly up there and attack his face. The Hydra. into Get Up on the Hydra's Back or Cerebus and Kingdom Hearts 1. Both of those final ones, especially into the final fight against Xemnas. There's that bit there.

where uh you have to become riku and save you and then at the end there's like a million laser beams you get to push x in triangle and repeat to deflect all of them until you get the hit back on them actually pretty sweet Boss fights are cool, turns out. Oh, not Xemnas. No, wait. It is Xemnas, isn't it? It's Xemnas, yeah. Someone said Xemnas of Kingdom Hearts 1 and I got scared. But actually, they're wrong. It's Xemnas of Kingdom Hearts 1 and Xemnas of Kingdom Hearts 2. I'm okay.

Yeah, Dan will deliver the defined Xemnas and Ansem for folks after the podcast today. Thank you. Mike from Oklahoma City writes in, Hi, Bombers. My girlfriend and I are visiting Minneapolis for the first time in October. I was wondering if Dan has any spots he'd like to recommend for folks new to the city. I'm thinking things like breweries, restaurants, or parks, but I'm open to any and all suggestions. I've been a longtime listener, and I'm so excited.

To support you as a premium member in this new era of Giant Bomb, thank you for all you do. Mike from Oklahoma City. You want a fancy dinner? Go to Dario in the North Loop. Great Italian pasta stuff they make in the house that is absolutely delicious. That's my favorite place in the city. If you want some good burgers, non-Juicy Lucy style, go to Lion's Tap in Eden Prairie.

You want a Juicy Lucy, make sure you go to Matt's Bar. That's the real deal, Juicy Lucy. You want to do bars and stuff. I like the Vegas Lounge Northeast. The Vegas Lounge in Spring Street Tavern is a block away. You can walk there. You can get spring wings. I think I might be taking Jesse Vitale to get some spring wings on Friday, I believe.

Yeah. Yeah, so Spring Wings and walk over to Vegas Lounge. Northeast has a bunch of great little dive bars and stuff like that. Parks and stuff, go to the Chain of Lakes, Bademakaska, Lake of the Isles, and Lake Harriet. Do a walk around there and then go get some ice cream over at Sebastian Joe's.

Yeah, any number of things you can do. Just great food, great place to hang out, great place to drink. I think you will enjoy it quite a bit. Hell yeah. There you go, Mike from Oklahoma. I hope you have a wonderful time in October. Sean from Wigan. Wagon? Wagon. UK. Wagon Wednesday. Wagon Wednesdays. Sorry.

I'm just finishing up Jason Schreier's book, Play Nice, and looking for recommendations on what to read next. I've read Jason's other books, and also Masters of Doom, after Grub mentioned it in the podcast, Mike Drucker's Good Game, No Rematch.

Only releases here later this month. So I plan on picking that up then. What other video game theme books would you all recommend? Do you have any favorite novels you would like to recommend as well? Congrats on your independence. Love you all. Sean from Wigan Wednesdays, UK. I'm kind of looking for more myself because I liked Masters of Doom a lot. And I've kind of been doing more old computer books. Like right now I'm reading one about the history of the chip.

So it's, you know, it's not quite as game focused, but still adjacent to that because it's how we discovered and invented all this technology. Right. You know, there's one that's specifically about Atari that I forget what it's called, but I might dive into that and learn a little bit more.

there there's some i'm skeptical so you know you stumble upon these like the history of nintendo i know some guy i haven't heard of i'm like i already know one yeah there's a definitive history of nintendo one that everyone

Always talks about it. I can never remember it. I haven't read it myself, so I intend to do that. Maybe Power Up, I think, is what it was. Yeah. That might be it. Wada's book is pretty good, I've heard, right? Ask Wada, I did read it. Oh, Ask Wada's great. It's kind of just a compilation of the...

those things but yeah it's good but they they do like uh thread them together that like they like tell a story from one to the other so it does read like a book and it's i thought i thought it was very well done console wars i mean was very good i know Maybe there was a lot of hype there and people kind of gotten over it, but Console Wars was great. Yeah, Blake did a good job with that. That's a well-told story for sure. Backlar's not here. He would definitely say Ready Player One.

Yeah. You know, these days he's more into Ernest's poetry. That's true. Ready Player Two. That's a Spielberg movie, huh? Yes. What the fuck is this? William Spielberg. Steven Spielberg made a movie with Tracer in it. Yeah, it was. I thought he was going to like.

like uh because he's referencing a lot of his old own movies uh and i was like i thought he was gonna like deconstruct the whole idea and it's like nope it's just the it's the imagination land south park episode it's just that it's like a pretty lazy hero's journey thing pasted on top of it there's

It takes place in Columbus. Yeah, I don't think it's some terrible movie or anything, but there's something weird about its existence. Yeah. The book I was trying to think of was Game Over by David Sheff. Thank you, Mudron. I appreciate that. I will second Drucker's book, Good Game, No Rematches. I was laughing out loud throughout that book. I loved it, loved it, loved it. Dracula. That's a good book. Just one about...

Count Dracula. It's based on Castlevania. Bram Stoker was a big Castlevania head. If people ask for an audiobook, I think my favorite one still... It's called Rocketman, and it was about Apollo 8, the first people who orbited the moon and then came back. I liked that one a lot. I think I made Jeff read that at some point. I did, and then I read that guy's other book about deep-sea divers.

and that was great too so read that one you could also check out boss fight books yes dives on specific games a friend of the website shouts out to gabe Kelsey Lewin just did an Animal Crossing book that got turned into an audiobook for them. Did Kelsey do the audiobook? No, someone else. She was like, this is very cool. I did it.

Hi, everyone. This is Mike Minotti. This is Animal Crossing. Once upon a time, there were video games. Let him go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the video games... It used to be about jumping on people and shooting things. And then some brave man, Mr. John Nintendo, said, there must be a better way. He's so proud of himself. Kelsey's writing is different than what I thought it'd be. The Nintendo 64. It was called animal forest there okay we're learning yeah it didn't come out in the us and then 64.

The DD drive may have been involved. I forget. I was going to ask. I was going to ask, was it a 64 DD game? Siri, remind me. Look this up later. That is the greatest video game console ever. the Nintendo GameCube was released and uh All of humanity was searching for ways to increase its glory. They're like Animal Forest. We forgot to release that in the West. Oops. And also get Cubivore on there while we're at it. Right. And then Shigeru Miyamoto.

rose from his platinum desk and said, Animal Force is a stupid fucking name. My homies in the West will not like that. And they're like, shit. What do we gotta do? and he stood up with the god rays shooting behind him blinding his lovely peers as he just screamed the words Animal Crossing! And then money fell from the sky. And then as the years went by, there was more money because there was a pandemic.

And lots of people were hurt and died. But Nintendo sold a lot of copies of a video game. It's kind of insensitive for Kelsey to just skip over the pandemic. I know. But she wasn't taking notes. The end. Wow. Good job, Kelsey, Lloyd. Good job, Kelsey. Please someone clip this and send this to her. Yeah.

Email MinMax about her thoughts on the thing. Just everyone in chat deeply concerned about Mike and wondering if he's okay. Yes, he's fine. It's a day for Mikeys. It's a day for Mikeys, everybody. It doesn't mean anything. It's provocative. That would be the name of my book, a day for Mikey. Subtitle, it's provocative. I just imagine it's a picture of Mike sitting at a dock or something, kicking his feet. My twitters

Oh, man. Why don't you like tooters? I don't like it when grown-ass people talk like you. You say banana or whatever. No, because that's not the Donkey Kong thing. It was banana. So if Donkey Kong said booger, it'd be fun. and the Tudors is the bridge too far. No, I love cheese boga. No. I started saying that in my day-to-day life. Like, Fourth of July, I had a bunch of cheese bogas. There you go. Were you fair, Tudors?

I'm the last person you want to not say, if you want to say words right or sentences correctly. Yeah, Mr. Clibber. Yeah, exactly. There was like, was Jan saying all these words wrong on purpose? I was like, what are you talking about? We had a voicemail come in about that, and I just didn't put it with the show because I purposely and not... You gotta keep them on their toes. I need to keep people guessing. Does it shoot? Does it work?

but liz from the uk writes in during the nintendo switch to live quick look you guys threw hella shade at the wipeout games As a British person in their early 40s, I demand pistols at dawn. Oh, God. Satisfaction. They demand satisfaction. Love, Liz from the UK. P.S. Wipeout games are shoot good. You should really revisit them. Smiley face emoji. Hey, Liz, I am a tepid Wipeout supporter. I think I was keeping my mouth shut during it, but yeah, I never got it.

It's fine. It doesn't have a lot of personality other than like... Rave stuff. Someone did Molly and then made a video game. Here's my problem is that it was Psygnosis who then made Rascal so the hell with them. They also made Destruction Derby which that was good. yeah that was that was pretty good uh yeah i i just i would try to play wave out and i was just like this doesn't feel fun it just doesn't have a personal i just

I don't think I like anything that reminds me of, like, techno music. Yeah. Okay, well, that's not my problem. Is this why we're anti-res also? Maybe. Because it's just like that whole scene, like when I was a teenager and stuff, like you always hear about raves and stuff. I was like, this just seems stupid. And so I think anything that reminds me of that techno stuff. This is lame stuff. How do you feel about the blood rave in Blade 1? That's cool. The blood rave is cool. I'm trying to think.

Maybe you're right, because even that Germany level at Hitman 3 that everybody loved, I'm like, this level sucks. This rave is stupid. I hate this party atmosphere. Have any of us been to a rave? Yeah, it was a mistake. You went to a wave? You were the last person. I thought maybe Grubb and Jan. No fucking way. You. God, here's what I imagine. You're dressed as the baby from Messiah. And you got a diaper and little wings and nothing else. It was like exactly as I were talking.

loud everyone's touching each other like of course my one friend got mad because like their girl was grinding on some of their guys like all the generic shit happened i'm like oh like you can't get a beer because right there's a giant lion at the bar That was a big mistake. What year was this? 2024. Definitely like over 10 years ago, probably. I'm just picturing this, and that's incredible.

Yeah, yeah. I did not enjoy it. The next closest thing is those Twitch parties that they always hold at around. Oh, yeah. Oh, we went to that one in Boston and just like, we are. old. Yes, this is like physically harming my body being here in this room. And it was like there was a different DJ in three different rooms. It was crazy. Why are they doing that? It's like the World of War Tanks parties at PAX back in the day business. It's not my scene at all. No, it is wild.

Let me DJ in one of those rooms. Yeah. Yes. I would much prefer. Right. Even like we had like we had a party after at the one time. The DJ was too loud. Oh, I hate it. And the DJ looked like me.

Everyone kept like, and we had to yell like, the DJ looks like you. And it's like, I don't like this DJ. I don't want him to look like me. Okay, so I'm watching gameplay of Wipeout XL right now, which is supposed to be like one of the better ones, right? I think that's supposed to be like... That one's good, yeah.

The PSP ones were good too. Fusion. They're going like 100, maybe 200 kilometers per hour. That's like 120 miles per hour. It's just, it was a game that never felt fast to me. I'm like, I'll tell you what, give me F0. F-Zero is going like 500 miles an hour. What's sick is that there is a Wipeout for Nintendo 64. Could you imagine playing that instead of F-Zero? No, I never tried that. I might have played as much Extreme G as I did Wipeout.

Extreme G was pretty good. I like Extreme G. Any Kinetica guys here? No. Kinetica is one step away from Uma Musume anyway. That's what they always say.

put it on the box uh all right last two emails of the show here uh what second to last one comes from weed dear fuckos I was just offered the job that I've been trying to get for three years. Yay. Needless to say, I'm on cloud nine now. The only thing that would make me happier would be if tomorrow you'll finally use the Black Club theme song I made for you. All right.

Go re-up my GB premium now that I'm not perpetually broke. Love y'all. Weed. Thank you. I do forget to bring that. Yeah, we need to. Yeah, we got to do that. I mean. there's a new season tomorrow yeah yeah let's take a look at that oh that's right that is exciting do you have any any any uh guesses dan what your game is okay okay okay well I do have a guess. You showed it to Bianca and she laughed. I showed it to Bonk.

She laughed and said it was going to be good. And didn't... Yeah, one of you showed Kayla. Was it on the... I told Kayla what it was on a DM. You told Kayla and she laughed. So here's the thing. I didn't get the sense from their reactions that this was a game they had played, but they recognized it. And I'm thinking of Kayla too, because Kayla loves games and stuff like that, but I don't know if she goes like super obscure knowledge. So I am thinking it is a licensed...

game that is notoriously bad. And I'm thinking there's Simpsons Skateboarding. There is Simpsons... wrestling was on ps1 you told me this is ps2 so i guess simpson skateboarding is something i'm thinking that would be timely tell me as well i don't know yeah yeah so i'll tell to sean and jen right now okay and here's the thing too I have the package for the outfit and it's just one package.

And it's like from like Bob's costumes or something. And so, and it feels, it seems like it's the size of like, you know, you go to a party city and it's just like a whole costume in a bag and it's just got all the parts of it. So I'm thinking it's like. a Bart Simpson or something like that. I'm hung up on Simpsons, but I think it's going to be a licensed thing for PS2. Just told Jan. Sorry, I just saw a funny tweet.

But no, I don't know what... I guess that's the only thing I'm thinking of. What the fuck else is notoriously bad on PS2? Well, Dan, you only have one more day. Yeah, you only got one more sleep till Blight Day. It's going to be a day for Dan's. It doesn't have the same ring to it. A day for Danny's. A day for Danny's. Chet says Shrek. Hey, you know, Dan.

Ogres are like onions. There's just many layers, just like Blight Club. And we did have to check to see if it was problematic, so it probably is Shrek. Yeah. You did have to check to see if there was like a slur in it, which is very confusing. Is it like, bad day LA? What the fuck could that be? Could mean lots of things. Last email of the show before we get to Super Chats. Mikey, if you could pull up the Super Chats, I'm going to toss it off to you after this.

Sean says this is such a good pick. What the fuck is this? I'm interested to see the costume. Sorry, just remember Donkey Kong Bonanza is coming out soon. Chris from Dayton, Ohio writes in. Oh, no. Sorry. Kane Hywin just said. Family Guy, and I forgot there is a Family Guy PS2 game, isn't there? They better not be fucking. I mean, I'd be fine with it being Family Guy. Oh, my God. Are you not feeling Bonita?

Is that the problem? I just don't like Family Guy at all. Can I reveal something? Fuck, I bet it's fucking Family Guy. Can I reveal something? They probably know I don't like Family Guy. There would be a Peter Griffin in a bag costume. Sorry, my head's spinning right now. I actually enjoy Family Guy still.

i'm like coming back around on it mostly just because of youtube clips so yeah this is fun i see those clips and i'm usually like this is pretty bad remember when remember when peter falls and he just goes It's funny you're saying this, Dan, because you're kind of dressed like Peter Griffin right now already. Sorry, I opened my costume early. Oh, Mike Minotti, can you give us your best? Peter. Peter.

I can't do it. They accidentally drew me too sexy, and now everybody wants to, you know. Accidentally, yeah. Accidentally. All right. Last email of the show comes from Chris from Dayton, Ohio. This one goes a little bit down, but then it goes a little bit back up. Hey, bomb guys. I wanted to email you all this story for a while, but I kept putting it off. I've been listening to the podcast for a long time, since roughly 2012.

And I've never missed an episode, including the Beastcast, when it was a thing. A friend of mine, Andy, is the one who introduced me to the podcast. When we work... Sitting together next to each other at our IT jobs, we talk about the episodes and try out the games everyone on the podcast talked about. Well, a week or two before the old company decided to shut us down, my friend Andy passed away.

Young and suddenly. The whole saga of the shutdown is intertwined with my feelings of losing my good friend so suddenly. So I was probably more emotionally invested than I should have been. All that to say, I'm glad you're still around.

I always associate the podcast with my friend. You don't have to read this on air. It really doesn't match the tone of the show usually, but I just wanted to get this story out into the ether. Thanks for all you do. Chris from Dayton, Ohio. Chris, very, very sorry for your loss. Yeah, rip to Andy for sure. Rest in power to Andy. And yeah, I thank you for sticking along with us and I'm happy to be intertwined with the happy memories with Andy.

Another Ohio boy there. Have you ever been to Dayton, Jeff? Yeah. I can't remember why. I think I saw... college football game there once i can't remember do you think dayton is more popular than youngstone is like am i only yeah yeah you've heard of dayton's eighth oh my god it's rough i think i think if you're like a a small band

You're probably playing Dayton before you play Youngstown. That's rough. How far is Dayton, Ohio from, like, Quahog, Rhode Island? Pretty far. It's more on the west side there. It's closer to Cincinnati. So you got to drive through a lot of Ohio. Or do you mean like metaphysically? Spiritually.

Spiritually. It's basically the same. Physically. I used to go to Dayton for Ring of Honor shows. That's why we would go there. Dayton actually had a hot indie wrestling scene. Lots of indie wrestling shows were there. Is that AIW? Absolute Intention? That's Cleveland. That's all Cleveland. Oh, Cleveland, yeah. Dayton just had Ring of Honor show up there all the time. I went there, I saw...

Brian Danielson there when he was really young. It was when freaking what's-his-face, the British guy does commentary, but now Nigel was the champion at the time. You saw both those guys at Wembley Stadium later. That's right, we sure did. Mr. Minotti, if you could hit me with some YouTube super chats. Absolutely. Prenny Dude here says, so who is the GB Crew's favorite Una Musume? I think it's a gold week we decided, right?

Yeah, I mean... Let me go through the roster. Or gold chip. Excuse me. There's special week. There is a golden week in Japan. I know this because of Persona. I was there during that, and traffic was insane. We didn't know what Golden Week was. Apparently, it's just 400 holidays at once. Yeah, it's just... Yeah, right. It's mega Christmas. Yeah. Yes. That sounds good fun. You know, there's vodka.

Vodka's pretty cool. They just get a vodka, yeah. Rice shower I've seen blow up. I don't think you can say that. Yeah, that sounds like a special. No, no, no, it's okay. It only happens on anniversaries. Yeah. Wiley jacket says we had a cookout. My mother has a jar of relish that was years old.

She thinks that expiration dates are a suggestion. No, those are put there for a reason. There's different ones. There's expiration dates, and then there's Best Buy, which is a fake thing. Yes. Best Buy is like, okay, they might be kind of stale or something. It's like... no it's to create a sense of urgency so that when you see it you throw it out so you have to go buy more and it's like it's definitely just information okay expiration date is real though okay good to know

Sean J says you should do a 900 in Tony X Pro Skater episode 900. Or we should, Jeff, okay, you got a good amount of time. What episode number is this? Okay, you have two months. Can you learn how to do a shoot 900 in two months, Jeff Grubb? I mean, look. If I had decent health insurance, someone to train me, I bet I could do a, like, 540. You would get hurt before an injury would absolutely... It'll be one of those things where it goes off into the styrofoam. Yeah, right. If I was in a...

The perfect training facility with all of the advantages. I think I could do a 900 without landing it. I could do a 900 into the styrofoam. I'll tell you what. Out of an airplane, I could do one. You'll see me do a 900 in the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 plus 4 quick look. That's probably going to go up later today.

Grubb, if you lived at Rob Dyrdek's Fantasy Factory, you could train up in two months to do a 900? I mean, I think if it's like the way I obsess over things and if it was like if I was doing it every day for two months. I think I get pretty close. McTwist seems really hard. People are saying that would be, yeah, 540 McTwist seems very difficult. I don't know. I'm going to do a Ninja Turtles manual from the new one. Go ahead.

Is Rob Dyrdek still doing things? You think we could be friends with him? Ridiculousness is on 24-7 on MPV. It's all they play, yeah. We should just do Ridiculousness, but here. Yeah. Sounds great. Done. All right. Dave McAwix says, can we please have Mike and Grubb separately read a news article and layer them on top of each other? Love you all. I'll read one he said earlier then.

Less than 20% of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 Plus 4 soundtrack is made up of songs from the original games. The Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 Plus 4 remake features only 10 songs from the original games alongside 54 new tracks. While some fan favorites are included, many others, like ACDC's TNT, are missing. Tony Hawk stated he personally decided to include a mix of new and classic songs, hoping players would enjoy discovering new music as they did with the original games.

There you go. Well done. I literally am just like doing Jeff's cadence because I've heard him read news stories to me for over a decade now. Give it a shot. Dan, give it a shot. Oh, we're in the new section there. Less than 20% of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 Plus 4 soundtrack is made out of songs from the original games. The Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 Plus 4 remake features only 10 songs from the original games, alongside 54 new tracks. Wow.

While some fan favorites are included, many others like ACDC's TNT are missing. Tony Hawk stated he personally decided to include a mix of new and classic songs hoping players would enjoy discovering new music as they did with the original games. Well, thanks, Tony. When did you become Daffy Duck? I can't believe the nerdy scientist from The Simpsons fucked Daffy Duck and they had a baby together. I was saying Daffy Duck, but I'm also getting Weird Al Yankovic from that. Interesting.

Incredible. Rose, if you asked me before that what Daffy Duck's voice sounded like, I wouldn't know. And now apparently it's Daff. Willie Jacket says, can I play Uma Musume in public and not be judged? I got to be honest. Jan was just playing in front of me, you know, among friends. And we were judging. I was judging him. So I think the answer is no. I think the answer is no. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.

YouTube Super Chatter, be brave. Choose to be brave. Live your truth, bud. Al Gregg says, Turbo Sean was right. We should have stopped Jan from playing the Horse Girl game. Now it's too late, and Jan is approaching... Grub levels of degenerate. Oh, Dan and I are going to be the only good boys left here. We're the normal ones, Mike.

here we are okay all right all right all right i i want someone i i can't do uh run a poll from the chat interface i have here but someone run a poll who are the batter boys grub and jan or Mike and Dan. Oh, I think, I don't think we're going to do, despite my label as the bad boy. I don't know. I've seen Mike Minotti basically have a panic attack at the idea of jaywalking. I was at a rave.

It's not inherently illegal. The list of things he did at the rave was just notice things that were annoying or giving him stress. Yeah, it was rough. I bet we are just 10 years removed from the parody version of this where it gets real weird and you do turn the girls into glue.

Anyone? Anyone want to say anything? Do you agree? Do you disagree? We all just wanted a clean read on that. I just was very excited to let that sentence linger. Oh, Greg says Kojima needs to make an anime gacha game for Dan. I think I would not. I would not partake. I mean, it's not like you try playing Snatcher, which everybody loves, and you can't just force it because it's Kojima. No, it's got to be in a realm of something I would enjoy. Yes.

Willie Junkin says, I got a mortgage to pay. I don't care what console you are playing. Going back to our talk about the console. It is like... It's like the worst time ever to be a console warrior these days. It's so, so over. These companies do not care about it. It was dumb as fuck when kids at recess in 1994 were yelling about Genesis for Super Nintendo. It is just more embarrassing.

right but like there was maybe a leg to stand on there like oh they're pretty different systems they were very different yeah like different games even the games that were quite the same were often like a street fighter 2 is a different experience yeah mega man you know But now it's like, oh, you're playing 20X Pro Skater 3 plus 4 on an Xbox instead of a PlayStation 5. Wow, congratulations. There's no difference. Yeah. Alex W. Peace has put this towards Donkey Kong 64 101%.

What do we call that? 100 and Mitch percent. 100 and Mitch percent. What? I don't know. I thought that had a good ring to it. 100 and Mitch percent. 64 DK. 64 DK rap. Donkey. Donkey. Yeah. Yeah. what don't you talk don't go congo 64 no into congo yeah 60 mitch no We keep saying it that he's going to do this and he's going to have to do it. It's going to be amazing. I almost shouldn't say it because I guess people want to see me suffer. I don't think I'm going to mind it that much.

I thought that too before. Maybe I'm a fool. Maybe I'll be putting my plate. Tongi. Tongi. Tongi. Tongi. Tongi. Dumb Dumb Banjo says the DK64 fund is alive and well. Thank you. Matthew Zingale says now that felt that boxing has been announced, can we get a realistic kaiju game with realistic suits? So who's in it?

Pudgy Pig. Oh, that'd be good. Pigmont. Oh, I would love, like, a Godzilla game that is clearly man-in-a-suit inspired. That'd be awesome, actually. Oh, that would look so cool. Oh, someone has to do that. I'd love that. And then last geek here says, when I was 18, I had a son. And being a dumb 18-year-old kid, I named him first name Jack, middle name Daniels. Oh, are they going to say Jack Dexter? No. Let's be clear. I don't know why my mind went to that. The kid's middle name would be off.

No. I was Jack Sparrow, and I was going to be embarrassed for him. All yours were way worse. He is 18 now, and my question is, do you think this dumb bit can benefit him in any way? Free Jake's would be, oh, yeah. From 21 to 26, I think people will like that. His name is Jack Daniels. Then he's going to go by JD after that. JD's nothing wrong with that.

I was trying to think of how you could turn Hennessy to a name. Henry? Did you guys see what I named my island in Fantasy Island? This was very good. Fantasy Life Eye, the girl who stole time. Yeah, so I named it. It's like one word with a comma. No man is an island. Oh. No man is an island. It looks better when you see it. I loved it. I was cracking up and no man is an island.

When I tuned in to Mega Man last night, your character was wearing a turban and then I felt put off. No, it's because he looks like the Dragon Quest V character. I'm a mage. Okay. I cast spells. It's a day for Mike. Just like anyone with a turban, right? We don't eat a turban. It's high. All right. Thank you, Mike Minotti. That guy from Harry Potter who's actually the bad guy was a big... Remember, he was hiding...

Voldemort in the back of his head. Racially insensitive stuff from J.K. Rowling. I know. How strange. God, even then I thought the name Cho Chang was offensive. It's strange. It is. And I'm a different kind of Asian.

Thank you, Mike Minotti, for the YouTube super chats. What do we got going on for the rest of this week, boys? We got a new season of Blight Club starting tomorrow. Dan, any last minute guesses? I'm stuck on Family Guy now, Simpsons. I feel like maybe I'm being too myopic down that licensed, specifically Fox animated hole. I do think it's licensed. I'm just trying to think of what other possible thing it could be.

That Kayla would have known about. Are you familiar with maybe like the aughts of cartoons? Um, I had a weird hang up about that. Um, about like adult swim and stuff like that. Cause it was for stoners and, um, yeah. Sean, I'll just show you what the costume is going to be. Do you want to see it? Oh, man. Put it in the chat with me and Sean. Yeah, I'm going to. All right. Hang on. We have Game S Mornings popping off for the rest of the week. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Right, Grubb?

That's right. We'll be back. We'll have some cool people on there. Jan, we'll probably have you on Thursday or something. It'll be a good time. Looking forward to it. Thank God I'm one of the cool people. Some light changes coming to GMM fairly, fairly soon. Yeah, just visual changes. We're just sprucing things up again. Some cool stuff. I like what I've seen. Yeah. Yes, exactly. Some cool people helping us out to make things look neat.

And I'm all for it. Mist and Mega Man were yesterday. Mike continued his journey with Grubb and I through Mist. And Mike had played through Fantasy Life. I, the girl who, what is it, Mike? She stole time. I don't know which girl stole time yet. I have my suspicions, though. Fantastic, fantastic. Tomorrow we got Grubb's grab bag going to be playing through. So I put it to a vote.

And I guess the vote's still up. I haven't checked, but there was kind of a runaway winner early on, and it was basically, what should I do for this show? Should I do a Grub Snacks? Should I do this or that? One of the options was one of the steam grab bags, the grub bags where... We just do random weird stuff on Steam where I have you all choose a word. We search that word and then we just download a bunch of games and try them out. So we're going to be doing that likely.

during the Grubbs gimmick segment after GMM tomorrow before we get to Blight Club. Fantastic, fantastic voicemail dump truck with a very special guest this week. But before the dump truck this week, we got the Jantucky. Derby. That's right. We're going to race some horses. It's going to be a great time. I feel like y'all are going to... The thing is, I feel like I like to pretend that I give off a cool persona, a calm, cool persona here amongst...

y'all uh now that i own this company as well that mask is slowly coming down i love it yeah and the degenerate is just showing um break down to jail horse girls horse girls uh i texted barbara jan during the show of like hey how what do i got to do to get a mullet and then he was just he just texted me a gif

Um, of, of bird man, like rubbing his hands together. Uh, and then on Friday gang, we are going to a cruise. That's right. The four of us are going to have another punishment stream for UPF this week where we see who can get to the cruise at the end of Tony Hawk Brew Skater 3 the fastest. Should we, should it be like, are we going to need to beat the goals in the cruise or should it just be like hop in the water, you know?

First one to hop in the water. Go overboard. First to go overboard. Jan, can you Photoshop up? Is it Adam Sandler going overboard? Adam Sandler. I think the cover of it. Man. Okay, look at the images. It's the one where he's going like, we got to do that. So Photoshop is doing that thing. Yeah. Okay, I'll just copy and paste him several times of us going.

Yes, exactly. All right. Anything else we got going on this week, boys? Or things to plug? Oh, quick look for Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3-4 going up later today. You boys are going to go try and record another... derby of sorts, a demo derby. Yeah, no horse girls allowed in this derby. It's so fucking family guy, because that's the possibility of a slur that makes perfect sense. It's family guy.

There's always a possibility of a slur, Dan. That tracks with every single thing that Kayla would have immediately recognized it and thought it'd be funny. It's a bad game. It's a game that would have had a slur in it. It's Family Guy. And folks, that about does it for this week's episode of the Giant Bombcast. The road to episode 900 continues. Until then, he's been Dan.

He's been Grump. He's been Mike. I've been Jed, and you at home have been quite Bonita. Peter! We'll see you next week. Yes, these are all Family Guy references. Sopranos PS2! That's a very bad game as well. Road to Respect?