Giant Bombcast 02/02/2016 (Premium)

Mmm, Hello, it is Tuesday, February the Seconds, twenty sixteen. It is the Giant Bomb Cast. It is Brad Shoemaker. It is Jeff Kursman, it is it is Dan Reicher. Hello, it is Jason A Striker. I think everything's recording, Yeah, I think so. This is week two in the new studio. Yeah. Yeah, it is noticeably sexier in here than it was last week. Well I'm here now, so well

obviously, yes, there's that is a crucial component. But yes, these lighting strips right, paint a word picture here, there's a whole lot of what looks to beat Well. I was gonna say it looks like Ikea led lighting, but I'm gonna guess it probably nicer. It's probably from Hong Kong. It's a nicer version of that. As I look around the room, it is alternately sort of a purplish reddish and then kind of an aquamarine.

Right behind you whatever blue and green makes. Yes, so if you look up you can see the lights, it's actually shinning out red and blue. That makes purple. Learning our our color mixing stuff. It's the witness all over it. Yeah, totally, just change the colors till you figure out which ones are always black and which ones are always white and marks off. We have a paid full of notes of exactly that thing, like oh and

blue and green lights. It's the looks like this, And then it seemed like we didn't actually need that to give it deep into those Oh yeah, we did a whole like grid and everything for that for the greenhouse area, right yeah, where it's like one floorabi green then green, slaights blue then blue then yeah. Yeah, then I think you just well, I don't want to say you could just kind of eyeball that stuff. Yeah, the Witness, unless your eyeballs don't work. Is that where the problem is in

the eyeballs, right rods and really sensitive something like that? Is that the Yeah, that's the issue. Yes, well, there's there's multiple layers of issues when it comes to that sort of stuff. But what does it mean anyway? What is yours? I don't see red particularly strongly or as strongly as other people do, I think is the case. I actually noticed that a lot when we were doing the division. The division was like the second

with the Witness. It was the second time I've noticed it. Like normally it's not an issue, but with the division with their bright red circles. There's a grenade about to go over. Yeah, and I don't see that super well, which tactically is bad. Last week not a great week to try to play video game. It turns out, it turns out my two favorite video games both uh screw me over in that sense, isn't it.

It's a it's a two pronged it's it's like a red green thing, right, So most people have like two colors that are kind of associated with each other. I am no expert so with with me. So it wasn't until I bought a pair of in chroma glasses, which are glasses that are supposed to kind of correct for this sort of stuff, and you you corrected based on you taking a color test. And the thing that's kind of I've realized

is that these glasses will kind of play up red. And they're sunglasses, so you can't really wear them indoors, so they're kind of useless for me. And you can wear them indoors, well, yeah, you can wear any of the stop indoors. No that it's just because they darken the image so much. It's like, actually not not great indoors. They have since

come out with glasses that are not sunglasses. But I'm not going to spend another seven hundred dollars or whatever it was on a second seven hund look for a pair of tinted sung I have been unable to see colors the right way my entire life, so at some point, like the the idea that I could give them any amount of money to try to do something about it and just to know what's worth it. So I don't regret that purchase, even though I've really only worn them twice. Some surprise, nobody's come up with

them. Maybe they have like a like a some kind of screen filtering solution, kind of like you know how flux will change the color temperature night for sleep. Well, it's color blindness is so individualized that it's yeah, I mean, you probably could solve for it by having people to say, what color DC here, what color DC here? But it's it's a collection of things. What what game have you played that has had the most that's been the most affected by this? I mean, as of late, it's the

witness period. I mean, is there any one game that I had like a critical element that you just could not see? There was an iOS puzzle game that I absolutely could not play because of the their their use of colors. It was like a combo base. I forget what it was called. How about Super Puzzle Fighter? So Puzzle Fighter Actually, yes, the yellow

and green ones look very similar to me. So there's there's additional factors to this, Like there's the I'm still trying to come to terms with the best way to explain this sort of stuff, and the witness and the division of kind of brought it back up in a way that has me kind of doing this again a little bit. But it's it's more than just your eyes inability to see the colors the right way or that that affects things in different ways.

Like if colors are right next to each other, I can usually tell that they are different, and in Puzzle Fighter, I don't need to know that one's yellow and one's green. I just need to know that they're different. So when they're next to each other, I can tell when they're on. When one's on the far left side of the pit and one's on the far right, I can't tell. Specially separated by a bunch of other colors,

Yeah, I can't really tell. So but that actually has worked to my benefit in puzzle fighter because it just means I set up a bunch of yellow and green combos inadvertently. Sure, so it has not I'm sure, you know, if I'm sure if I ascended to some kind of pro level esports puzzle fighter league, that at some point I would get chewed up. But at the level that I tend to play at, it it makes me an unpredictable savage that just can straight up murder people know what's going to happen

exactly. So so that's a weird Yeah, that's a weird benefit. I guess with the witness, it's hard because the witness is built around you not knowing what you don't know. So it's this element of like, well, this is probably a color puzzle, but I don't Actually it's hard for me to fill in the gaps on this. Yeah, So much of so much of figuring out and figuring out your way through that game is is process of elimination and like solving for variables and just like saying, okay, well I

know this and this, so what does that tell me about that? And so that that's gets compounded a little bit by not necessarily knowing the depths of the color puzzles themselves. As it turns out, they're not that, you know, They're totally doable for me, with like one or two exceptions. I know, I was at one point and I kind of ask, you like, hey, what what is this color? That basically i'd ask is this color the same as this color? Because they look almost identical to me?

And they I can tell that they might be different, but I don't know for sure. So those are the sorts of questions I had to ask, you know, I'd ask, you know, kind like, hey, what's is this? Is this same color? Is this? It's like no, one is white and one is blue, And I'm like, well, fuck was this in the greenhouse? Because it's kind of hard. You know, I'm not color blind, and it was still hard for me to tell like that looks slightly like grayish and that looks white. Yeah, So that

that that only compounds it. If it's actually hard for people that can see color normally, at some point that's like okay, well I don't is it supposed to be like that or not? Like so the psychological layers that get thrown into that when you can't trust your own eyes are what makes that stuff difficult. The fact that I don't see red as strongly as some others barely is a factor in the puzzles as they're constructed. It's really just a matter

of like, Okay, I don't know if I'm seeing this right. I don't know if other people are seeing this right. And yeah, I've had plenty of other people saying, oh, actually I had trouble with that one too, and I see color find like okay, well what does that mean? Like I still can't tell what that even means? What does any of it mean exactly? Who could say? But yes, so that was confounding

for about you know, seven minutes or so. The actual the the bummer that that did is once I kind of looked up a solution to one puzzle, like there's the concern that that just kind of opens the damn and then you're just gonna cheat. Yeah, basically like now I'm like, you know now that now that I've finished the game, and now I'm like I want to do the other thing, and now there's just temptation to just there's other

things. There's you don't have all the trophies, right, there's like there is but there is Okay, Well, there's one you'll get in one that's that you won't beating the game. One of the two achievements in the Steam version is the thing that we're talking about, and that's not just like,

hey do it with eleven lasers. It is pretty deeply buried yet. I mean it's not anyway, it's it's so the color blind just thing ends up being a psychological thing as well, where because I have lived a life not trusting my eyes, Uh, it becomes this thing of like, well, I don't really think about color period, So when asked to think about color, it actually takes a lot of focus, a whole lot of time staring at this stuff to try to just go like, okay, let's really break

it down. What can I see what? What's what am I looking at here? So when I bought those in chroma glasses, that was the other time that I did that because I put them on and it's not like something like oh okay, like my brain literally doesn't know how to fucking process any of that stuff. So it's like I'm putting the glasses on and then it's this learning process of looking at stuff and you're like, is that really a

color issue? Yeah? Yeah, because I would get like frustrated, Like you know, if I got hung up on a certain puzzle, thinking what the hell am I doing wrong? Maybe it's a color blind thing, but it's not really Yeah, that would be rough. But for me, it was like I put on those glasses and you know, it was like doing the commute. I wasn't driving at the time. This was a while ago,

and stuff like taxi cabs looked completely different in a way. That's like orange, as it turns out, is my favorite color, and when I put those glasses on, yellow things looked more like orange looks to me normally. It was sort of a weird thing of like, oh, maybe yellow ain't so bad. Yeah, yeah, so it's and like the difference between traffic lights and stuff like that is actually a lot different. You know, I can see the three colors of a traffic light just fine. It's it's

not an issue. Plus the position as yes, But like with the glasses on, it was a very it was a much more dramatic difference. Like a lot of green lights look really almost white to me because of the how bright they can get. At some point the brightness will wash out the color and in a similarly in a dark situation or even when like a red is next to a black or something like that, like or surrounded like a you know, in a dark environment, I will almost never see the red at

all. It'll just be black. And so like, determining colors in low light situations where other people seem to not have trouble is actually super hard for me, regardless of the color. But I think some of that is just because I haven't done it a lot, because it's one of those things that just like you know, early on, you learn like, okay, well my eyes don't do the right thing for this stuff, so you just kind

of shut it off. So the witness in a weird way forced me to turn it back on, which is fucking hard, yeah exactly, And wearing those glasses actually did the same thing. It was like, you know, and wearing the glasses was the first time that I was able to look like, oh weird, this sweater I have is the sweatshirt I have is purple, because like, purple and blue look almost identical to me, or getting on the shade, but you can't see the red in the purple exactly.

Some track yeah, yeah, and we all, yeah, god, but I but I like purple even more than I did before. Like seeing seeing what is supposedly real purple, I'm like, fucking yeah, ye, Prince

is all right, Yeah yeah, the guy was onto something. And but like that's something I can tell, Like the societally, you know, it's like there's there's this weird thing of like why, Like I don't understand why why there's like this weird Like at the time, it seemed like people didn't like purple, and it seemed like purple is kind of a weird color according to society. I've always always purple. Oh my god, I'll fucking I would wear purple pants right now. I'll give a fuck. This is cool.

Yeah, he is. I had a purple trench coat when I was like twelve. It was fucking red. I got made fun of so bad. It was a silk, purple trench silk for a twelve year old. It was amazing. You have a pimp at twelve, Like, what you have to match? Do you have a goldfish living in your heel? Yeah? What color was the goldfish? Just diet purple to match? Oh man, man, purple goldfish. It doesn't even make sense. Yeah, that's genetic engineering at its finest. So yeah, so it's it's it's a weird.

There are layers to this stuff. It's it's and it's a lot more than just like, oh I don't see red real good. Uh, it's a lifetime of seeing things that way. And then the minute you kind of take that away, whether it's the glasses are just like really focusing. I can see better than I give myself credit for most of the time, but it's just I don't since I don't trust it, it's it's hard to go

with it. Uh. And then you put on the glasses and you're like, well, what if the red that I see is different than the red the exact clothes far out bro exactly, but like green and brown look pretty much the same to me too, So is this lawn dead? Fucking I don't know. I was kind of like, on the one hand, I was surprised and then also not at all about the amount of criticism that game was getting over the color based puzzles, because like, on the one hand,

yes, like that is fairly significant portion of that game. I mean, well it's you know, it's it isn't it isn't. I mean, if you want to get technical about it. It's like an eleventh of the game, specifically about the kind of like swamp area with the greenhouses. And I mean there are like just in in terms of just like there are color puzzles. I guess the color The color puzzles do pop up in a few other places the sections specific primarily in the greenhouse or that's where you learn about

it. And then it was the greenhouse area was the part that I had trouble with. There's color stuff like later on there was not an issue really because later because of because of the way it's used. Right, Okay, do you mean the elevator specifically in the greenhouse? Is that what the ming?

I don't, I don't. I don't know that we want to talk specific stuff's talking about pretty late game, okay, but but I mean, you know, there's there's color stuff in the bunker area, so yeah, I mean, like, you know, on the one hand, obviously it is like it is tremendously disappointing for people who can't see that stuff to not be able to effectively play a pretty large portion of the game. But on the other hand, of like color is such a fundamental concept to build,

well, puzzles around you look at the Witness. It's really like and I'd be curious to know, like, how with the order in which things happened when the Witness was developed, because it really, you know, it's variations on a theme. It's it's how many different ways can this kind of line puzzle be presented and tweaked and twisted and contorted in all these different ways to you know, to fill out not only eleven areas, but then to kind

of culminate. So it's only natural that color would play a role there. I mean, it plays a role very early on in the game. It's just the colors happen to be black and white. It's only later on that you know that it becomes uh, you know, a little more serious than that. And then you know, like audio is the kind of the same thing. You know, naturally you would try to riff on all of the different senses, as many different senses as possible when it comes to kind of

constructing these areas and figuring out different ways to approach these puzzles. So I look at it and go like, well, of course you would do that, uh And yeah, so I think it's frustrating for people that are having issues with those two. Those two seem like the two uh, you know, it's it's an accessibility thing at some point, like the game doesn't necessarily have an alternative, because that's the very nature of those things to kind of

offer the option around it. At some point, you you're nullifying. You know, you might as well just have a button that says unlock all the you know, finish these puzzles to get around a lot of that stuff. So with the color area, I was able to go like, hey, tell me about this stuff that I know I can't see right and able to kind of puzzle my way through it as a result, because the logic is still there. You tell me that's green, I can go okay and then

write down like okay, green, green, white. Yeah. Once you have the information, you can reason your way through the Actually, the reasoning was never the problem, and that actually, in some ways would probably make it more frustrating for some people. Is like, you know exactly what you need to do, your eyes just won't let you do it. And if you just don't happen to have somebody there with you who you can see those

colors to help you out. And the response, I know Katuku dug into this a little bit last week can and the response from from Jonathan Blow, the creator of the game, one of the creators the game, was that, hey, you don't need to complete every area to finish the game, which which is? Which is? And sense and also like also like a disappointing response to me, because that's again, that's a game. The game

is good enough that you will want to finish. Yeah, that's that's what it will want to You will want to see it as far through as you can, at least that that's where I'm at. Yeah, absolutely, not only is a decizeable chunk of the game, but yeah, like I very quickly made up my mind to do everything I could conceivably do in that Yeah, So to have potentially one or two areas that suddenly you're just like, well, I guess that's that uh will at some point also inhibit your progress.

Uh So that's frustrating. But at the same time, you know, yeah, I think you know it's it's it's still of an amazing game. I still really do enjoy it. Yeah, yeah, not not to not to just build an entire second week's show around the Witness, but Dan, yeah you started playing it. I played all week over the weekend and Jason, if you played any of it yet, no, Actually, again,

got to be interesting. You just yeah, a ton of interests. But based on what I've been hearing from you guys and just like being a buzz around the internet, I know if I started playing it, you wouldn't see me for a couple of weeks. And I've just got too much going on. Yeah, man, oh, but yeah, I really want to play because get your child started early, and this some shapereak here, some basic logic, and god, that's a fantastic idea. You might be able to

sell this to It's like a Montessori school in a video game. Well, Dan had it to go. I think it's a really really good game. I think if you would have asked me after my first night with it, I would be a little more down on it because I spent a lot of that first night. So we want to go kind of vague with descriptions here, right, like not actual, like here's what this puzzle is like?

Yeah, I mean you know, we don't want to give away solutions, right, Can I give like basic Can I say I didn't like this area? Sure? Okay, So the first night I spent a lot of time in an area with a lot of trees. Okay, yeah, okay, and that kind of plays into the forest. Yeah, but there are a couple different ones. That's why I ask. Yeah, there's there's that one

with the trees, and then there's also the desert. So those two I did not like that much because so Jeff you mentioned earlier, like you know what you're supposed to do, but it's just you can't do it or whatever. I feel like with those two sections specifically, I would look at it and like two seconds to be like, Okay, I get it. That's what the thing is. I just have to do all this bullshit and screen cap and I'm playing on PC and it really helps to I'll tab over.

I've had to load up stuff and paint. My girlfriend built a Photoshop template for to rotate shapes and all this stuff. So I just I hated the ones, especially in the forest and the desert, where it's like, yeah, okay, I get it, that's what I need to do. I just need to figure out what lines up with what, and yeah, what's the right angle, what's the right position? And yeah, yeah, And that feels more like busy work than solving a puzzle to me because it's like,

again, I'm not solving anything. I'm just I know what the game wants me to do. I just have to do the busy work, just guesswork at like figuring out, okay, where exactly did this person want us to stand? Yeah, when we were looking at this thing? Yeah exactly. But yeah, as I played more over the weekend, got into a lot of different areas, like I've got six of the lasers going now,

it's solid progress. Yeah, so some of them, like it had several of those moments where I'm just staring at a thing for the longest time, thinking like, what is the possible solution here? Am I looking at the right puzzle? Am I not supposed to do this one yet? And then something clicks like the other forest, I think I heard you guys talking about how you eat like that one a lot. I had a major like aha moment there, and then it even fucks with you beyond that, I'm being

very vague here, Yeah it's a yeah, it's a cool area. Yeah. Yeah. I Actually I ended up liking each area in its own way, and there was something I'd like totally blazed through, even the swamps, the swamps were very difficult SPS but I enjoyed doing it. Anecdotally, I will say, like far and away, I see the most people on Twitter asking for help with those Tetris puzzles from the swamp. That part's really hard. Yeah yeah, yeah, but it's by far that I think see the

most. I think that is the hardest section in the game. Yeah, I agree, or that concept is the one that is the hardest to wrap your head around. Yeah, which is weird because if you like at digging through the PS four trophy stuff, like Quarry is much less finished than even Marsh. Yeah, which is crazy to me because Quarry didn't seem that difficult at all. Quarry, it's it's where the elevator is, and it's between Yeah, it's between like kind of the monastery and the desert. Yeah,

we're behind the keep. Maybe I haven't done Oh yeah, where there's like a box car. Yeah, and oh yeah I've done that. It's kind of near shady trees. Did you finish that area? Yeah? I don't remember that being that hard. What was the whole game? Once you know that, once you know the trick, once you don't have the thing works there the unique mechanic like it. Remember I for me, at least, I just kind of breezed through it once I grasped that. But does that

involved the black and white stuff? Doesn't There's something there, Yeah, but there's there's more to it than that anyway. Remember, it's been interesting, like, and I think everyone has their own story about like, oh, well this area. Like when I found the jungle, I finished it in twenty minutes. Some people are like, oh, this so hard doing. I'm like, no, what what do you figure out what you're doing there? Yeah? I think it's just cool. Yeah, that's that's a cool,

quick, easy thing. At least that's how it was for me. So that was very interesting to hear people complaining about that area. Yeah. I think outside of just kind of those those different puzzle things, the one thing that really made me roll my eyes was the audio log at the top of the mountain. I don't know if you guys got that was one of the few that I actually enjoyed on them an individual basis, like like taking taking you know, out of context, just just by itself. I was

like, okay, this one. But as far as like being a game and stuff, and like I'm all for the mystery, and like, I don't need some big purpose for the island. I don't need, you know, a conclusion for a story or anything like that. So you'd be okay with it just being like a series of puzzles and challenge. I like puzzles. Yeah, so like I want to do my line puzzles, not have this like it felt like twenty minutes and it probably wasn't this rumination about life

and everything. Just let me do my line. I mean, the witnesses let me too much. That should be a check box. I want to sit there with your reader's digest, doing your words and be left alone national borders and religion. Like yeah again again, I think that one that particular monologue that you're talking about is like very relevant in the present day. I just felt, but but why is it in that game? It felt very up its own ass at that point and the rest of the game, I

have not felt any kind of pretension or anything. But that audio log that it struck me is not great. Again, I will say, I can't believe that's the one year zeroing in on and I've only heard two. Oh oh, well, you've missed a ton of all right, there's one place with a bunch of statues, and I heard that one. And there's other stuff at least like a couple dozen in that game. I don't know. I don't find a couple dozen. I probably only found like four or five.

Really, I found a bunch of I can't wait for the other ones. I mean, I was ridden the process of reviewing it. I was going out of my way to try to find as many of them as I could. But then, shit, it's tricky. I don't know what I should say. It's tricky. Should they go further with that concept than I expected. If you do something with it, then cool. But as it is, kind of kind of kind of I'll keep listening, not exactly but kind of not yeah, not exactly, but kind of. It's really hard

to explain. It led me to like, I'm now, I'm well yeah, so yeah, I dug into some of that stuff. I'm I am. I am roughly where you are, although it sounds like you were straight up exploring, like the files in the installed directory on the PC version. Actually, so, I've still I've not I've not experienced any of the stuff that I didn't see in game. Okay, I just looked and saw names

of stuff. Okay, I've stumbled across a couple of forum posts this morning that like, so, I've seen enough of the things in the post post game, yeah, so to realize, hang on, there might be more to this than I thought. And then I saw those forum posts and now I'm just like, Okay, there's clearly an answer to all this, and I just haven't quite found it yet. I'm okay, yeah, okay,

I am curious to see if this game brings it all together. Actually, you know, point, you know what it really was was somebody tweeted at me. I tweeted about very vaguely this morning, about that thing that me and you were both stuck on. Yeah. Uh, and somebody came back with something along the lines of, yeah, can you believe it turned out to be blank? And I was just like, what the fuck are you talking a right now? I just want you to tell me what that is.

But yeah, but but I mean, like like the game when you quote unquote finish it, when you get the ending, which is just the thing you need seven lasers for, and then you find the last area, like the game very much comes off as like the game equivalent of like an art film that is very that takes itself very seriously. You know. I could see that and like there's you know, there's there's imagery and symbolism that

you can interpret or whatever, but there's no like clear through line. I will say that, like, yeah, that that's getting to that point. I did not. I was not satisfied. Yeah, there was nothing about that part that I was like, Ah, there were things. There were things about the final moments of the game. And I don't even just mean quote unquote the ending, but like kind of just like the whole last couple

of hours. Let's say, sure that I found satisfying. But yeah, you're right, yes, I I you know, you don't walk away from that feeling like whole necess All it did is make me go like, well, okay, all right, now I need to get serious about uncovering every last little bit of this thing. And that was the point for me where I was like, you know, I've I feel like I've kind of puzzled out enough, like maybe this is the point where I really do just start

looking at the internet. But did you not really? Okay, yeah I didn't either. I've encountered things here and there, We've asked, you know, a couple of days just you know, almost inadvertently, but but I have not sought out answers. The most infuriating thing is when, like it's one thing when you look at a puzzle and you realize there are symbols and things that you haven't seen yet, and you think like, well, maybe

I have to learn more before I come back here. The infuriating thing is when you get to a puzzle and you're looking at it and you recognize all of the elements that are in place, and it's like, I guess I'm just stupid because you don't know. You don't want to walk away from that puzzle because you feel like you've got the knowledge necessary, you're just not figuring

it out. Yeah, and those are the cases where I quit playing the game for an hour, came back, and then immediately would finish the puzzle. I'm bad about that, Like I just have to stare at like I

can't imagine going to bed and just having that sit unfinished. And so I've been really stuck on Like in the swamp, there is definitely one of the for me, it's just been it's just been literally like, you know, I just need time away from the game, from my mind to get back in fucking shape, and then when you reapproach the game, it's just like, well, okay, boom boo boo, and I will like knock out

another twenty places. I am so glad there wasn't like a hidden go pro or something in my living room the night before the review could run, when I was trying to finish this game. Yeah, it would have been embarrassing. It was really bad. It's finishing. It's part of why I don't think the game is a very good streaming game, because I think it would be a bunch of people that know that have the solution figure out watching the

stream going fucking what are you doing? Yeah? And I so I started watching a couple of streams here and there, and like you know, on launch day or the yeah, on on launch day because like I was way way past where anybody else was going to be, so I knew they weren't going to show anything that I hadn't done yet, and looking at that you felt the need. Yeah, it just fucking made me crazy just watching people

go like, well, this is fucking garbage. I'm like, no, you're hiddiot, sure damn it, But I actually don't mean like embarrassing for me in terms of like I couldn't figure stuff out. I mean of how much I was like raging at the television, like just like feeling that awful time pressure, but knowing I couldn't stop. I couldn't stop, I couldn't

walk away. Yeah, and like my girlfriend, like I started at like eight am that day, like wrapping up everything I could find and then going to the final area and vastly underestimating like how long and difficult that final area would be. Yeah, have you guys found that this is like a good

like significant other games? Oh yeah, totally totally. But she was sitting there's gonna like just calm down, you can do this, Like I actually I've I've talked to Dan about this was a little bit like I've kind of been dabbling with meditation a little bit, and I literally had to go sit down on the floor in the bedroom with the door closed for like ten minutes, set a timer, and focus on my breathing for ten fucking minutes. Well, my head was a giant jumble of like flying you know, like

yellow yellow blocks and pink stars and stuff. So as usual that's basically yes, But but it helped a little bit, but you know, it's just Jason. It is really good for that. And in fact, if you're playing on PC, we're doing it to where I've got the Xbox controller because she's got the like wireless keyboard and mouse thing, so you can basically have two controllers at that point. So if I say, like I'm stuck, she could just start doing stuff with the mouse. So yeah, it's really

cool. That was a really good idea. And also I think it's I thought about you guys played it on PS four Jeff and Brad. Yeah, and I mean you can do the screen and shot stuff there, but that seems like that would be a kind of a hassle having to go through that stuff. Yeah, yeah, because because then it's like, okay, these phone the images from my phone automatically push up and then I can very easily access them, access the moment from my PC. And then it's like I'm

not tabbing or I mean, have two monelors or whatever. I'm not tabbing or anything. I'm just like, okay, look at this, rotate this. They're all viable solutions. You know, on the PS four it takes like thirty seconds to navigate to the picture that you just took. But once you do, you can just double tap the PlayStation to the home button or

whatever and it'll like literally flip between the two. I found it really helpful to just kind of all tap over and you can open the screen shot and paint and then you can kind of draw on it and you know, cut things out. So, h yeah, PC has been really great for a

variety of reasons. I think it's really good. It is. I don't know what else to say about it unless we just convene like a and I feel like even the window and that is closing because the game's been out for over a week and I think I'm finishing it and stuff like I don't know how like how relevant a spoiler cast with me? There's not I mean, we're not going to be the ones to put it all together well I don't

even me know so story wise or even thematically. I'm literally just talking about I want to a bitch about the puzzles, Like I want to talk about that ending area and stuff like that, you know, like, yeah, just hey, how fucked was blank? You know? Right? Because now that you've been through that final area and there's like two or three types of puzzles in there that I just want to be like, man, fuck those things. Yeah, but we can't. Really what do you think of it?

I thought that, you know, like obviously they're trying to like culminate and build up to like having this final area be you know, more than the stuff that came before. But I think the way that they kind of tweaked the puzzle format, I didn't like really much of it. Almost like it's interesting except for the part where you're solving the like there's some stuff I'm like, oh, that's really clever, and then I just sit there and

do it and go like it's a case. I mean, it is a case where like you know, by the time you finish that game, or by the time you get to that point, you do know all the rules. Yeah, you know, so they're the discovery is gone. So so that's that's that was a little disappointing. I would I would have actually I think that they maybe could have introduced like another puzzle mechanic for that area that would have, you know, at least let you have that one more time.

Yeah, and that discovery is I think the best part of the game for me. Yeah, Like I think the Jungle was kind of that major aha moment where I was like, oh, that's fucking cool. Okay, yeah, yeah, like that that's the thing is like once you start to like like you know, go you go through the tutorial puzzles for an area or whatever it is, and start to piece it together, like, that's the thing in that game. That's the if that's the moment of the year.

Moment in that game is like discovering how these things are supposed to work and going like, oh, it's not banging out those rules over and over again across twenty puzzles. So so having you know, the so having that part of the game, like its like getting to a point where it's like okay, I've seen it all and having that be it and and any any puzzle at this point, anything that I'm stuck on is going to be something larger than just the line puzzle, right, Like that was a little disappointing.

I wish that there was a little bit more at the end, but there was a lot along the way, so you know, really it was about the journey. I guess, yeah, do you think that's enough for people that don't necessarily like a lot of puzzle games like it's not just kind of drive puzzles. You know there is a drive what is you know?

It Like puzzle game is such a weird thing because when when when we say puzzle game, I think about puzzle fighter, I think about Tetris, like that's you know, this is not that those those are kind of action puzzle games. I guess you would say this is sudoku, you know, yes, this is again this is like you know something that you know you would find it a CVS for six bucks, like more line puzzles. Yeah.

I think if you played like a couple dozen of these puzzles and it wasn't really for you, it might not be the game for you, because that is what it is. You mean, there's some cool mystery and stuff about the island, but I mean that's about the Like if that was strong enough. Yeah, I think that, like it certainly helps like it's a cohesive

package. Uh you know, like it benefits from a being an interactive video game because that you know, again it was if it was a book, it wouldn't it would not have it couldn't it couldn't do a lot of things another form. Yeah, so you know it's it's it's the puzzles themselves. Sure, yeah, you can print them out, you can do whatever you want. But the way they're presented in the environment, the way the environment changes the way you solve the puzzles, the way the environment plays into the

puzzles is super cool. Yeah, And also just like discovering that world was a huge component of why I enjoyed the game. So yeah, it's it's you know what, it's a lot smaller than initially seems, and that you can just get from place to like once you know where you're going, like you can book across that absolutely, you could be you could be anywhere on the island from anywhere else. It's so tightly it is. It is kind of great, Like they pack a lot of variety into a pretty small land

mass. That's yeah, perfect, which I thought I was fascinating like that. I that that process of actually like laying all this stuff out, I bet was really fucking arms. Yeah. It feels so open though. I love just like when I decide I'm done with an area or I don't know, the trick or whatever, it's fun to just kind of wandering and be like, well, I'm gonna walk until I see a thing and I'm trying

to do a puzzle. Like when playing it before release, when nobody knew anything about it, I spent a huge amount of time just wandering, yeah, just seem just to see what I could see, and I stumbled. That's how I stumbled into areas I didn't know existed, and you know, I found shortcuts like this. Yeah, that's all. It's just a really fun, pleasant environment to poke around it. Yeah, and then there's more to it every everything. Should I say something, it's usually like, even

when you think it's over, it's not over. God damn it. Even when you think you're done, there might be more in a really cool way that I'm really glad I did not look up on the internet. Yeah, because when I found it, yep, I knew there was something else there, but that's all I knew. Yea. And then finding especially because the way you find it, you're just like, oh, of course, yes. In retrospect, it's so fucking obvious that you want to like punch yourself

in the face, like, how did I miss this? It's it's awesome, It's man, it's great, all right, we should move on. That's It's a lot of witness talk over the last two weeks. But man, that's a That game is something I haven't played it in my head is swimming. Yeah, all this stuff, it's it's good cool. Uh yeah yeah yeah. Anybody playing anything else? Yeah what you got started Team Rader on p Yeah. Yeah, I played it for about ninety seconds just to

see how it ran on my computer. Looks real good. Yeah, I have some screenshots were floating around like a couple days before release of that thing on like max settings, and it just looks like CC at a certain point. Yeah, I can come on Max and it's incredible. Man. So how's the frame right with you? Max ten? It's mostly about sixty. There are some areas where there's you know, like a big waterfall or because you're on a TV. Yeah okay, but yeah, mostly sixty and it

looks real real sharp. Haven't played enough yet to really, you know, comment on the game as a whole. Everything I saw from the quick look with Brad looked great. But yeah, I just got to like the Siberia stuff where it's kind of starting to open up. And yeah, when you get to that first hub area and you start seeing the variety of stuff they have for you to do, is when it really come six off. It seems really promising. I'm looking forward to playing through it. I want to.

I want to check out the survival mode that they've added to this game

at some point. Yeah, what you heard about this? Like it's a no, it sounds a little roguelike in a way, like they basically you pick an environment, like you know, they've got different environments from the game, but you should drop you in. And it sounds like it's kind of randomized, like there's like random supplies and resources and like there's a day night thing going on and it's it's it's almost like sounds a little Don't Starvy or

something where it's just like you're scored based on how many nights you can survive. That is strange. Yeah, do you progress through this? No? No, no, no. I don't think there's any stories to separate mode. I think, yeah, this will totally standalone mode they've added, so it's not like a difficulty setting for the campaign. No, no, no no. And I assume there must be like random combat encounters that happen and stuff like that, like you unlock I guess abilities and stuff as you go.

But yeah, it's my understanding is that you can extract on any day that you want, but that's obviously gonna like kind of put a ceiling on your maximum score, you know, Like it's like I can't extract now and just leave with what I have, or I can keep trying to go like grind it out for another couple of days, or but it sounds really interesting. I want to see what that stuff's about. Yeah, and that's all

in the PC version as well. I'm not sure if that's a big draw for me, Like I like the progression of just like the normal stuff and the collectibles and slowly getting skills and stuff. But if it doesn't, I don't know. I wouldn't have been that interested in it until I've seen numerous people saying like, hey, this is actually kind of awesome. Okay, so I'm gonna check it out. Yeah for sure. Yeah, I'll check out that version of the game. I'll want to see it on PC.

You're very good things. Yeah, it's kind of crazy that came out as fast as it did, right, Yeah, what is that a Well, that's close to three months of exclusivity right well, I mean like first week November it is still not out on PlayStation before well, it's where their actual exclusivity. That's where it matters where they it's what they care about. I sure weird World. Yeah yeah, so I played The Division, oh right, yes, or the beta of the Division. Yes, I think that

game could be really good. I am cautiously optims like a very qualified sentence, but okay. Uh. It's the same feeling I had coming out of the Destiny tread Lightley, where it was like, Okay, there's really something to this Mechanically, it's interesting. I'm enjoying it. I like what they're doing with armor and weapons and how the moths on the weapons and that sort of stuff. Just in case people don't know, it is a lout shooter.

Right to top the bottom right or the core of this game, there are drops the stuff, you know, yes, or leveling up huffy coat. Yes, well you don't level up the puffy coat, you just that's the puffy coat cosmetic Okay. In the Dark Stone, yes, okay, it has color coded loot all right, but so but but at the same time, like the content, there's not that much of it in this beta.

There's kind of like with the first or not even the first they skipped the I guess the they start, you would at level four, you're kind of past the tutorial sequence and kind of dropped in and there's one mission where you rescue a doctor, and then after that it's like, all right, that's all the story stuff, but there's a bunch of side stuff and the

side stuff there, it's icons on the map. It's definitely like it doesn't seem procedural, procedural, but at the same time it feels procedural, and like, oh, I don't know, there's four guys in this store, you should shoot them, all right, congratulations, hold this spot down for a minute thirty we're gonna spawn some guys in. And you're like, well, this could happen anywhere, I don't you know, like maybe it's better

that it happened here because you built for it or whatever. But like that content feels thin a lot of the side it'll be like there are hostages, which just means there are five guys here to shoot, and there's a room that has hostages in it. So after you kill all the guys, there's a key that you have to find, which is highlighted on your map. You just walk up, grab the key, then the door appears on your map, you walk over there, open the door, and then you've completed

that side objective. So like, I'm worried that maybe the content will be repetitive or thin in you know, if you've if you've got this stretched out to a full game, but maybe there's more variety to it that we're not seeing. What was the what was the nature of the story mission you saw? Like are the cut scenes? There are cut scenes in the game.

It is telling a story and you are rescuing a doctor. Because the big part of the at least as far as I can tell from what I've played, a big part of the of the division will be building up your home base. And there are three different wings. There's like a medical wing, a tech wing, and a security wing. And the first thing you'll have to do, or one of the first thing you have to do upon getting there, is rescue the people that are in charge of those wings, because

they've all disappeared. Does this seem like something that's like instanced for each player, It's not like it's not something that belongs to your faction that people can share. Your home base is literally instance, like you walk in there are no other humans and in the quote unquote town. You might as well be town, right if we start breaking it out to like larger MMO concepts or something. So your area gets upgraded as you get upgrade points. So like,

basically you upgrade each one of those three wings as you go. So in the beta, you can buy two upgrade levels for the medical wing after you rescue that doctor. The first one you get is the first one you get as a result of rescuing her, and then there's a second one and then so basically, but as you upgrade those things, you unlock perks and

traits for your character. So it'll be like, oh, well, you know, because I did this thing, I now have a an ability and active ability that's like a first aid grenade for teammates or for myself or whatever I want to do. Healing grenade's healing grenade. Yeah. A lot of the skills aren't in the beta though, right, there are only like four skills. Yeah, and the traits. You know, you get a couple of traits, but the menu is not in the beta yep, so you

can't actually go in and see what you're getting. In some cases, the first trait you get for rescuing the doctor is now you can hold three med kits and set it too, and you can swap abilities on the fly their actor. You know, you have two active abilities on your bumpers, your you know your LBRB L one R one. You have to do that from your base or can you do that? Like I think you can do that

anywhere. Oh yeah, talking to you on Friday about it a little bit, like I was kind of you know, I was just thinking, you know, obviously I'm kind of in the Destiny mindset because I played so fucking much of it, right, I was just wondering, like, what if the loop was going to be you know, you're out in the field, you're getting ship, and then you got to go back to a place to do your stuff, handle your business, to do some administrative tasks sort of,

and then go back out. Yeah, but you made it sound like it's maybe a little bit looser than it's a little bit looser than that. Yeah. So it's like this when when you go on so this one mission that's in the game to rescue this doctor from Madison Square Garden, the missions on your map you can just run in there and go and you'll do it alone. But outside the mission there is a like kind of you know,

there's a augmented out as words in the world splinter cell style. Okay, the Clants is thick with Tom Clancy's the Division, and that's a almost like a signpost where you can stop and go, I want to match make and then you will get a team for this mission. So do you just stand there until other people spawn in? You know, you walk up to it, you hit X or square and say I want to match make, and it'll you know, there are menus involved. You can queue up for different

difficulties for that mission. There was that weird point where you during the quick look where somebody said like, oh, this guy wants you to join a squad or whatever. And I think we both kind of expected and hope that it would just be a seamless thing where it's like, oh, now I'm with these guys going this this place, but it loaded you into some different

loading screen the totally different area and you didn't know where you were. So yeah, what it was doing is like that was because we were on Xbox where I have followers and those people were playing the game and sending me party requests. Okay, so it wasn't because they were It had nothing to do with proxycha Okay, So I was basically like warping into their instance uh and

doing stuff, and then when you quit it, you warp out. So there's load times associated with joining and quitting parties because it doesn't seem like it's going to be desirable or even viable to play this game by yourself. Like, so I get the impression that the story stuff, like that kind of stuff that I'm talking about, like story missions and that storty stuff, like absolutely you could you could, well, who knows, I've only seen one

of them. I don't. I don't really know this. This one mission that I had, it seemed like its scaled based on how many people you had there. So I would suspect that a lot of that content you'd be

able to play by yourself. But then there's this other section of the game, which is the Dark Zone, which is what we saw a D three, yeah, which is kind of their PvP area, and it happens in a totally separate part of town basically, but you do walk into it, right, yes, you don't, like, you don't menu your way into it, and you like literally climb over a wall and you can't you can't fast travel in the game, so you probably fast travel to the wall and

then and then climb over it, if I had to guess, it's all fairly seamless though, yeah, okay, And so when you get in the dark Zone, it's basically so the idea is that that area is contaminated. So there's it's lawless in the Dark Zone, and you have a separate experience level that will help for like how it's grouping players together, Like players of certain Dark Zone experience levels will be clustered together in these zones to prevent like

super high level players from just fucking people up. And so this is like where it gets like this kind of cane and lynch, like are you going to fuck people over? Yes or no kind of thing because you're just out there and and so this experience seems like it could be a little thin because

there aren't really set objectives here. It's just like here's this area, run around, kill people the drop stuff, and the drops you get are contaminated, so you can't It's like the equivalent of like unidentified loot in a Diablo game, so you can't use it until it's been identified. But you it

is identified, you just can't equip it because it's contaminated. So you have to extract the loot, and that means going to an extraction zone, firing off a flare, and then there's a minute thirty countdown before helicopter shows up, drops a rope, and then any players in the vicina you can run up and attach their loot to the rope, and then the loot will be extracted and transported to your stash, which is not in the dark zone. As far as I can tell, this is where like most the action takes

place. It seems like, based on the quick loo's gonna up with you guys. I didn't. I didn't really, it's hard to say, yeah, but but yeah, the action will take place around the extraction for sure, because that's the point where people can go like, okay, here's a bunch of players that have shit, let's kill them all, take steal their stuff, and then will extract it. It seems like you can accidentally go

rogue just with like one stray bullet. Yeah it may. I don't think it's one stray bullet, but yeah, you accidentally like shot a guy a little bit, and all of a sudden you've gone rogue. Yes, So it is. It is probably a little bit, and he was mad. It was just a couple of bullets. So yes, that will turn you and your whole team rogue, at which point non rogue players will be incentivized to kill you because they get more out of it. So sounds like a

neat system. It sounds like a place you could just hang out and do stuff. It seems like you're saying like it doesn't end when you extract exactly. Yeah, you just like keep going out and fucking people over marauding. So the other thing that happens is when your rogue, there's kind of a timer on it, and the more rogue you are, the higher the timer gets, I guess. But like it. Basically it's a system by which

you can run away and become not rogue anymore. So So I was playing yesterday and I shot a guy a couple of times and it turned me rogue and what fuck fuck fuck and just ran uh and you know my it took exactly. Yeah. I mean the game does have voice chat with non party members, at least on PC, so you dude, sorry, as you're running away, and it eventually ticked down and I was no longer rogue. But this just leads to people just like jacking a bunch of people running away,

becoming non rogue and then walking out that I'm worried about. It actually becomes this system where you just have to remember the names over their heads and you know, fuck that guy, keep an eye on this fucker, and then sure enough he throws a grenade. You're like, fuck you fuck you know, you just like have to you have to fuck him into the dirt as quickly as possible to prevent him from doing what he's trying to do. So yeah, it's interesting, It's it's an interesting mechanic, but I just

don't know, like, is the loot they're good enough to care? Is the Is there going to be more to do there than just that, because it seems it seems kind of boring because they're not that many enemies out there. So it's like I'm just like, Okay, well, I guess I'll just go below into the subway and hopefully they'll be like three guys here, four guys here. You know, there's not some abundance of guys or opportunities for loots, So it really is this kind of like and for me,

I was playing alone. So it's just just like I'm just walking around this empty environment now. I guess I don't know, it got a little little thin enjoying the apocalypse. Yeah, because that what's going on? Do they even say is a viral attack on Black Friday? Black Friend? Okay? Also, New York is just quarantined, like the whole world has ended or something. Gas I actually, yeah, something like that. The gameplay stuff you're describing sounds great. I wish the game wasn't so like the look and

the setting are just so fucking drab and generic. Folk looks better on PC than yeah stuff, I'm talking more art design, Like it's just maybe maybe I'm like, maybe I'm super spoiled on Destiny, which has like fucking amazing art and like super cool, interesting quirky weapons and stuff like that. Space you know, they get, they get the chance. I mean, space gives, That's what I mean, more than you was like, Hey, it's New York, Like you know, obviously they're going for drab and an

urban and paramilitary or whatever because it's New York. Yeah, like the fact that there was a viral outbreak doesn't make it sucking Moore. It's just like it's fucking New York. Like I thought the environments were really detailed though, like walking around your home base and everything, like all this stuff on the

courts. Everything looks technically, it looks fine. It's just more of a kind of an issue of creativity or imagination or whatever, you know, Like, yeah, like going for a shotgun with slightly better stats, but it still looks just like a boring real world shotgun. What if I told you that you found skins that you could make your shotgun red or flum All right, purple? Uh so, I don't know, Okay, purples. I hear purple is in these days. Yeah, but I'm sure it'll be fun.

But I also think some people will really not like the shooting. It like it's the enemies are relatively bullet spongey like it's it's it's role playing game action shooting, so headshots don't immediately kill, you know, it's it's that kind of game. It's sort of like Destiny, and you at least hit

the stuff you aim at. Yeah, like dice rolls going on with it, and numbers come out of them when you hit, and those numbers almost look like the Borderlands numbers, like the font is weirdly similar in a way that is too close to be coincidently weird. I don't know if they're trying to evoke Yeah, I don't know. It's I kind of felt that too. When you stack the different trees between like security and the other two things.

It reminded me of when you went to your skill tree and Borderlands, Like, yeah, it's it's definitely there's some parallels to be drawn there too. But if if there's enough content and enough variety there, I think this could be really cool. Like I did enjoy my time with it. The other problem they have is apparently they do a lot of stuff client side, so on the PC version of the game, you can just fucking cheat. Wow that didn't take long. Yeah, I guess that's the point of the

beta. I don't. I mean that stuff seems like it should be fundamental design in a way, that basic architecture stuff that they're like a couple of months before launched, like maybe it's just turned off and they but like it was a weird thing that Like, so the PC version of the game is rife with people just that are invincible and fucking murdering people, which is crazy

in this day and age. I've wondered for a long time if that's why there's still no Destiny PC port, because you know, yeah, that they would have to then be good at that stuff, because like, if you remove the sanctity of like the hard to get items in Destiny, there is no game there, like there's nothing left. Yeah, you know, so if people can cheat their way around that, it stops being interesting. Well, I mean, the question there is like what did people do with the

three sixty version of Destiny? Did that lead to? Because the three sixty version of GTA five led to people giving themselves all sorts of money and all their stuff because the three sixty is is hackable. So I don't know if Destiny three sixty was an attack vector for that stuff. I don't remember it being yea, so maybe maybe they're better at that stuff. Then we're giving him credit for me. Maybe. All right, well this is good to

know. I would say, I'm more interested in the division now having heard what you said about it, I am as well. But after playing it, and I kept coming back to it throughout the weekend just like like it was just even though it was like, well, none of this progress matters, like that there's something about it that I hope it pans out. There's

something about it that that feels nice and I enjoyed. So, I mean, you know, shot a guy and he dropped a really cool fucking LMG, and then I opened a chest and there was a cool fucking scope in it. You know, there's like you're getting stuffed and you're attaching stuff to other stuff and going like, yeah, now this is cool. So there's a lot of crafting stuff, but there's also just like straight up blue drops like new guns. That's great, all right, it's got potential. It's

got a ton of potential to put this on my list. And I let a UBI soft employee know that maybe the threat indicator needs to not be read, or there needs to be a white line around it or some kind of option, and was told it would be raised. Yeah, cool up, fly powl up the flag. Sure, I'm sure that those UI decisions will be policed appropriately. Yeah, so yeah, all right, cool, all right. There's some video games that we played. Time we get excited about

news. Let's talk about headlines. Let's get excited about the end of the Street Fight er five, the last beta. Oh fine, it's over. Fine, it's over now. Yeah, it's over having separation anxiety. Yeah, big sign. Yeah. They started the the beta like Thursday night, and as it turns out, that was the only night that I really got to play it. But I got a lot of good matches in. Yeah,

I'm feeling we's right. You played it on Yeah, you played on UPF and I think you mentioned you got several dozen matches in the night before, right, Yeah, yeah, way into the double digits yet matches. Feel good about the netcode a lot better, Yes, it's yeah, a vast majority of the matches that I had spun on, and you know, they're they're using a new like you know, a rollback style in that code like GGPO but not quite. But for the most part, yeah, absolutely

great matches. There were a few that were in you know, far Eastern country that wow, that was really really bad. But yeah, most of the I mean, obviously that's going to be inevitable with anything on the internet, right yep. And they've got the fighters network up and running for the most part, not like all the stats and stuff where they drilled down like you know, what's your the fierce punch percentage? I don't know, I don't know, what the fuck they're gonna track with that, But like searching

through replays and stuff, it was a lot easier. They had some of that stuff in the previous game, but this is way more robust than It's way easier to find specific people's specific characters. So if I'm like having a trouble, you know, with a specific matchup, I want to search the top players that character, like Nash fighting against say Vega or something like that, and download dis replays watch them seamless. It's pretty cool. That's cool.

Yeah, very excited for it. Nice to see that thing actually shape up really well over the course of multiple beta periods, you know. Yeah, it's got a lot better after after the just unthinkable train wreck of the first and second betas. Oh yeah, they were terrible. Yeah, you couldn't even kind it's completely unable. Yeah, in a lot of cases, the neck which was just like completely unplayable. Also, it's like why I even bother at this point, but yeah, I barely got to touch those.

So this was an actual data and not just they had everybody in locked except for the one well, I just mean like they actually they actually made progress over the course of they derived useful data and exactly. They made a lot of balance changes along the way too, didn't they. Yeah, this has been yeah, changes with each new period, significant ones that but yeah, not there's still a lot of unanswered things, you know, specifically like lobbies. Ye, how that's all gonna work out? Oh? Sure?

Like yeah, we were even talking about it on the show. So I'm like, like, would you be able to create a lobby between both platforms? Like I guess none of that stuff is assumes so yeah, I'm assuming so yeah, because it seems like everything's tied to your your fighter and like ID so you should be able to send invites via that, but I don't

know. I don't know for sure. Fingers crossed. Yeah, so it's good to hear that stuff is working well considering you know, they delayed all the story stuff, Like that's kind of all there's going to be, right, Yeah, that's like if the competitive aspect of it wasn't working, right, there's kind of no game there. Yeah. I will say I'm a little bummed about the story mode, but it's like, I don't know, that's right. You weren't here last week when we talked about that news.

What did you say, just so the thing I would say, yeah, exactly. The thing I would say is that you want to have that story mode there for when your game launch is broken and you can't play online because the net code is fucked and the matching servers are down and all this other

stuff. Having a story mode really helps. Yeah, kind of also just having something that'll like, you know, expose like players to a lot of the different characters and some of that different stuff, like while they're getting started. I think it's it's probably something that matters more for people that are a

little less interested in the competitive end of things. Also, they released a trailer of like some of the features that are coming out, you know, the kind of detail things that are going on in the Fighter network and all

the networking stuff. But also like uh spelled at, like survival mode, story mode, shit like that, and some costumes you're going to be able to unlock by going through you know, story mode or survival So that'll that's kind of disappointing that it's going to be locked away for a little while. Yeah, was it three months? Four months? I said? For stories?

Sure, it's not too bad, I guess, but I mean this is I don't even think I ever finished Arcade Mode in Street Fighter four, like it, like the stuff I thought you unlocked something, but you get like titles and icons and stuff. Maybe you can you unlock the like per

character voice language setting. I think by finishing arcade mode, don't give it Yeah, yeah, no totally, And I think yeah for it's it's like a call of duty situation, Like you know, plenty of players will not give a fuck, but I think to fully reach this wider audience that they seem to be aiming at, like it would, they'd be better off launching

with all those pieces in place. I think without story mode, like story mode is the thing that you want at launch, not four months later, because four months later, anyone that bought it at launch will have either gotten good or stopped caring by then. Sure, so like launching it late, it's just like, Okay, this serves no purpose. Now it's surprising, but whatever. Yeah it's not, it's not that big of a deal. It's it's also yeah, not not the main thing I want at a street

Fighter. But Mortal Kombat showed us that there is room for good, dumb story stuff. There's a better way. Yeah, that game soon like two weeks or something right two weeks as of today's crazy well yeah as of recording, so yeah, sixteenth. Yeah, and the launch is right up against Project cross Zone too, So I don't know what the fun I'm gonna doing. Man, I mean, battle lines are being drawn, but also, like, you know, forget about both those games. Like, I'm already

so deep into Nitro Plus Blasters hero Eroine's Infinite Duel. I don't want to talk about this game. So yeah, Jeff sent me a code for this, just like you know, tongue in cheeks like, oh, exciting God coming your way to not tell him what the game was Like, we get st and loaded up. It's Nitro Plus Blasters Aroin's Infinite Duel. I'm like, oh, thanks, all my favorite visual novel stars in one fighting game. This is great. What games are represented here for super fant Phantom of

Something? I looked it up at one point I didn't even want to go that far, but Supersonico is in it. Supersonico is really fucking cool, my favorite. She doesn't like use normal attacks. She throws cats. She throws cats, and if she's an assist character, she just comes in with a whole band. It starts playing music. And little bubbles come out of the band and as if you as the fighter collect the bubbles, you get

better attack. But it depends life back stuff like that. So it is a pretty bare bones like anime fighting game, but it's so like fucking over the top. It's bare bones in a way that like it makes it accessible, Like it's not meters or systems that you have to really memorize. You know, it's Jordan. You can play it. You can play it. It's an anime fighting game that you can play. But like all the super moves are just like these really animations partners and stuff, and there's just so

much crazy shit going like Ultra or whatever you want to call it. Is like she's a okay, she's an assassin, right, okay, but she looks like a fourteen year old girl, but she's a murdering girl. And so she'll jump off screen and a radical appears and you have to aim the radical at the other fighter who can still move, and then hit the button and then it'll cut to anime of her fucking laying prone with a fucking sniper right bipod odd this is shoot though, and then fucking shoots and if you

line it up right, it hits and does a bunch of damage. If you didn't, then it just fucking cracks the screen. Uh and and then the fight continues. Say this game's got style. Sure, it has an anime stuff has an anime style, all right, And the story and the another story modes are just some visual novel ass visual novel. Teach your heart out street Fighter five. Yeah. Yeah, there's some guest characters see from like non visual novel stuff like arcand of Hearts and like, I think they're

not in there yet. I think they'll be available. They'll be free at launch for like the first four weeks. It's like downloadable add ons and those as like March first, they'll start charging. Yeah. Yeah games that game is is accessible and and actually pretty fun. I'm curious to see if the net code's any good because I've not found anyone playing it because it's not out here yet, so it would Yeah, I defin't been matching its like April one, P three or something. Wow, So it came out on PS

four in December over there, I think. Okay, despite the discussion that just took place, I don't think I can tell you a single one of the words in the title of this game. I mean, okay, Nitro Plus. It's the name of the company. Okay that makes all of these visual novels. Okay, this is nitro Plus Blasters Colin Heroin's Infinite Duels. They are the blasters. It might have Tilda's around those final words, like an anime. So each fighter is a blaster? Is that what I'm actually

yes, I believe it. Each fighter is a blaster. And in the story mode, they are all given evil smartphones that cause them to fight. Wait, they weren't fighting already, No, they were visual They're all from different times and stuff. So it's this kind of like Quake three O anime visual novel carols are speaking my language. We should we should do something with that. Yeah, we're yeah, we're gonna today. I think we're gonna do Okay, okay, great, that sounds like something that needs to be

on the website. It's it's not bad. Okay, it's not bad, all right. That's it was like a cautious stamp of approval. Take that as you will. I'm not ready to fully say yeah, buyer, buyer. I mean, hey, we're not applying we're not applying science here. That it's not This is just not being ranked or anything exact. Okay, all right, good to know nitro plus blasters, Rowin's infinite. Yeah, it took me got it to remember that? Got it? All right?

Now we know now we can lose. All right, let's talk about the news. The headlines headline the first electronic Arts. Perhaps you've heard of this company? Are they stalwart supporters of the Electronic Entertainment Expo? Oh? Yeah, okay, they made having They made the one on one Yes, Doctor Doctor j Larry broken classic. That's them. Yeah, that's where they have whatever happened to them. That's a cool game. They should make another one.

The angry Jamier had to sweep it up when you broke the backboard. He's pissed. Yeah. EA is not going to be exhibiting at E three this year. They have them they Yeah, they will not have a booth for the first time since the three started. EA will not have a booth at E three. Yeah, this is where the like do they lose their

spot? Isn't like as like that like white Konami held onto theirs? Yeah, like one of the most damn the damnest thing I've ever seen at E three was that empty ass Konami booth like I think it was two years ago.

Yeah, like a tiny little like meetings last year they had the fob set up right, yes, but two e threes ago it was literally a giant empty red carpet with like a little meeting room in the middle where you could see MGS five and you could even film the monitors at right right, but mostly empty floor space because they were literally just reserving their spot on the

E three floor because because that's how contentious that stuff is. Yeah, so I mean unless you know, I, yes, I would assume that they would immediately lose their spot and have to go to the back of the line if they wanted booth space after this. Yeah. Uh. Instead, they are having their own event, yeah, for like two days, three days, right La and London. Yes, it's called EA Play and these will be open to the public. That's why it's like people are like, why

would they hold something in London when everyone's at E three. It's because they're gonna let some people into this thing, so not like a Nintendo Direct kind of situation. They will also have a press conference that they will Yeah, so that's kicking off. This starts so basically E three. The first day of E three is Tuesday, I believe, and this is two days before on Sunday, So this is the day before the press conference day. Ye, it's like the Betheza spot from last year, right, yes, kind

of sort of yeah, yes, also worth mentioning Bethez. Like hours before this podcast is you know, they have announced that they are doing another press conference. What are they going to Sunday evening, just like they did this past year. Doom, Doom Rage two, Dishonor to Wet two thousands, like you know, Dom Doom and Dishonor Too Are those are definitely games to show they still have that free to play game that battle Cry battle Cry unless

that studio got shut down or something. I feel like I've it's been so long so we've heard anything about that game that I'm not wondering if it still exists. Did they mention it at their big E three thing last year? Yeah? Yes, there they should footage of Yeah I played that the year before. I think you know that you could see him, you can see him announcing the fallout for delC there or something like that. They'll have stuff, yeah, but you know they'll be Sunday evening, just like they were

last year. But I feel like that Battle Cry game will get totally chewed up by the all the action MOBI stuff that's happening right now. That that was not the game they were trying to make, was like a this MOBI type thing. But I feel like the kind of third person action has just suddenly all gotten swallowed up by people trying to make fancy mobis Paragon and whatnot. Overwatch Battle Battle Barns coming out soon. God, Okay, it's hobby grade. Yeah, so I hear. Are you guys excited to have like

an additional wells? So I'm looking at this story that Austin wrote on the site, and it answers the big question I had going into this, which was what would happen to eas traditional press conference slot because they're so they're doing a live stream thing at one pm on that Sunday to kind of kick this whole thing off, and it sounds like that live stream will replace the press conference they traditionally would have Monday afternoon. So what does that do to that?

Because that the Monday afternoon slot is an eesa, So does that mean another publisher gets to slide into that official press conference they wanted it, huh, if they wanted to Bubies get one of those, right, yeah, you's already got one, and then the three hardware makers obviously, so maybe kind of moving into that space if they wanted to know, they already announce Bethesa already anounced. Theirs is still Sunday Night, Okay, So maybe another

publisher joins the fray. I don't know, Activision, maybe you know, who would be big enough to kind of carry Yeah, that size of slot, It would make the most sense for sure. But no, Activision doesn't really do a lot at E three. Yeah, like compared to some other publishers, you know, they like a Take two or two K or Take two. Doesn't seem like they hit the three particularly hard. Really. They rarely do rock star stuff. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, the rock

star is pretty much not at E three. Yeah, in in that kind of capacity anyway. And yeah, it's we Actually they ended up talking a little bit about E three just last week and now this happened. Yeah, and E three seems like it's just become cyclical U and it rose out of the ashes of that Santa Monica stuff. And like I said, you know,

it's like people are. You start to hear more and more people questioning what the value for out of E three is, especially for a company the size of EA, which has the marketing cloud, the size and scope and breadth and connections to do everything they need to do without any three. Uh. You know, I got some questions for people saying, well, well, what about the retailers. It's like, well, you know, all the big publishers meet with retailers constantly, they travel around to do that.

They go pitch their games directly to retailer, retailers have their own events. No, yeah, exactly so, and increasingly retail is not I mean, it's still a factor, but it's not the soul factor. Like so, as you look at more and more publishers trying to line up their own direct conduits to the audience by passing the press, bypassing these you know, shows where they are competing with other publishers and all this other stuff, and kind

of trying to set themselves up starting their own blogs all this. Like you know, you do start to look at it and go like, well, I mean, just you know, from the business end of things, what is the return on investment for buying that big gass booth space at E three? What are you actually getting by letting E three attendees show up and player games there? Like? Who are these people? What? What? Again? Just like what's the raw value that you can't do on your own?

And that's for different companies. They'll they'll have different answers for E For EA, I'm sure that they have plenty of ways to do exactly what they do at E three on their own, right in their own venue, like without following the ESA's rules. Just kind of you know, yeah, they're kind of free to do whatever they want. I guess that's kind of it for this. You know, it's mostly just a kind of an end of an

era thing, you know. Sure, one of the last biggest publishers pulling out of the biggest trade event in the industry, you know, like Activision did, yeah, you know a while back, and they got back in and they're at the very back of the floor, you know, with their giant weird boots. Indeed, Yeah, I don't know, it's uh, we'll see, Yeah, it's it's you know, I don't, I don't. This is not the start of a trend. This is not like fucking

doom and gloom for E three. I don't think, although I will say it was this E three and not last three that there was a Sega uh story attached to right? Hasn't it been a handful of months that that Sega said they weren't gonna be there? I don't actually that wasn't That wasn't last E three? Was it? Maybe it was last three? I don't know.

They all run together. This couldn't tell you the last time we went and saw Sega three, To be honest, Sega, I remember Sega's conspicuously stopped having a booth a D three and I can't I remember they Sega? Was it Judges week? Like two years ago? With it was? It was the year that I had like was trying to pull people aside and go

where the fuck is pso two? What are you doing? So that's how long ago it was, Yes, And it was the year that they had whatever that that shitty fucking Sonic reboot which one generations, the one where where is fucking legs weren't blue? Where arms worth the right color? Whatever? One? The most recent one where they did the cartoon for lost Sonicom Booom Sonic Boom, Yes, the one they had Sonic Boom there before it was

out, So it was that year was that last year year before? It was two years Yeah, I think it's two years ago now, but that was so Sega was there with that stuff with like here's crazy taxi on phones and hot emikos over here in the corner doing her thing, and then they were they were not aliens. That was the aliens there too, So yeah, I don't know, it's I think that like the you know, whatever the world has changed and the return on like the money you spend on E

three. You know, everyone probably should be looking at that and trying to determine if that's the best place to to spend all their money. I know, like from from like the coverage end of things, like it's it's incredibly valuable for like traffic, you know, like websites set to break their traffic records at E three, that sort of thing. Advertisers like to be attached to big events, and a lot of advertisers have been convinced that E three

is a very big event that they should sponsor. So if that stuff starts to slide, then there's large problems for UH websites that build their advertising around that. Sort of stuff or that make a lot of their money on on the E three that that would be that could be bad for them with it's streaming their stuff directly, you know, but they have been for a while, you know, and presumably EA would still let those outlets. I mean,

this is still attached to E three. It's the day before, you know it the day before the week starts anyway, so you know, presumably they would still be like, oh, yeah, you want to restream our press conference, Come bring your internet in here, you know, come up here, hook up your boxes and do your thing. Like we'll still watch a stream and probably yell over it, I presume. Yeah, I don't

feel like this change is a whole lot for us. You know, that's one less booth to go see a show, one which more like one more event before E three starts, potentially to worry about going right and the I mean, I think the extent of my my EA coverage last year was like going and well so they're always a judge's week also, which is their opportunity

to talk to everyone about sports games. And they showed Unravel there and Planters Zombies to yeah I want to play that and they that was when they had first started talking about Need for Speed was there also, So they do that and maybe they would still be a part of that, who knows. But like at E three proper, like all I did with EA's stuff is I went and played Battlefront and I went played in Need for Speed. Yeah, I remember that, that's right, and that was I mean, Mirror's Edge

was there. I think Alex went and play mirrors Egge. So like they had stuff there was worth seeing, but it was like it was very just like you know, it's it's a couple of games. It's a few games that they show in a playable form. So if they're going to let the public into this thing, in some ways you could look at that as them trying to say like, hey, we've got enough stuff here that we want. We think the public will have a good time at our event. So

I mean, but like, what do they have. It's still Mirror's Edge that's out. By then it was spect Andromeda, another another collection of sports

games. Like they typically for E three they'll have Madden Hockey, they had Golf playable, they had FIFA playable, so like the those those sports games in a playable format is typically what they have and in E three time pramps, they could show that stuff, that stuff that doesn't necessarily play super well at E three because I think a lot of people in our line of work don't care about sports, and it's hard for them to get the coverage that

they probably think those games deserve based on how well they sell. Like, you know, it's just a lot of the outlets aren't don't aren't not equipped to care. Right, we even have a sports guy, but it's not even necessarily like like preview coverage of a sports game not really a critical, huge, critical thing for a video game website. I'm sure that a lot have plenty of stuff to fill out an event of this nature, though, I think so too. Yeah, I just you know, they've like it

feels like e A is a very different company now. Yeah, you know, it feels like they they've kind of turned it around, got their start price in order, and now it's like, well, okay, what are they really making? It seems like they're making less stuff, right, I mean, maybe I don't know. Was the biggest surprise that I've seen on it? Yeah? I mean I guess Battle for It was kind of their one and only huge Q four release, right, Yeah, like they just

feel like they're not putting out as much they need for speed. I guess that still tracks right as a major release, Yeah that game? Yeah, sure, yes, in a world where there are four driving games, it is at least a quarter of the Marks one of the Bears. Sure, huh. Yeah, yeah, I guess they have scaled down a little bit. But you know they also seem to be like that. You know, they seem to It's it's I say, it's not scaled down, it's that

they seem focused. Yes, they seem more like leaner, you know, like the investment world seems very happy with It's like they're trying to like make their hits hit. Yeah uh, and not waste bunch time on stuff that the people don't want. But they've already said that they'll have another battlefield this year, so oh yeah, you could see that being announced. Yeah for sure. Yeah, I don't know. It's it's strange, but yeah, I don't think it's a huge change. It's not like some giant doom and

gloom thing. But you know, I am looking forward to seeing you three evolved in some way. Yeah. It was one of the very stack. YEAHA was one of the first big companies to say, fuck it, we're launching our own YouTube channel, fuck it, We're launching a blog. We're hiring X game writers, X game journalists to run our blog. You know, like like they were, they seemed like they were pretty early on that

stuff. So it seems like they're they're always very keen on trying to figure out what the best way is to like talk directly to their customers instead of filtering it through assholes like us. Sure so whatever, Yeah, cool, Well there's all mass Effect is good. Yeah, that's that's the end of that stories. I fucking certainly mass Effect better be fucking good. I think I think we can all agree with that. Well, EA has cleared out a bunch of space at Eddie three. Maybe game Stop I'm moving to it.

This is a great transition. I just want to thank you. Yes, think how well done that is? Yeah, Dan, what the hell is going on with game Stop? They're publishing an Insomniac game? Yeah what? Yeah? Yeah? Yeah yeah, Like I almost feel bad for the Insomniac game. I feel like it maybe got kind of like washed away a little bit with this bigger story of like, hey, game stop publishing games in addition to selling them. Now, yeah, what what are you glowering

over there? It's just the taste that it left in my mouth. It's like a cool new Insomniac game, hushed by games Well, it's like it's it's a digital release that is also like physical copies will be exclusive to game Stop. Looka what's the name of the game, and they're gonna do a

whole like merchandise run and stores. That was a little weird to me, Like yeah, obviously, like you know, plastic packaged goods are are like huge profit drivers or whatever, but like this is an unproven property that nobody's ever heard of, Like it's maybe a little premature to like be making figures. Yeah, that's a little like Passion Project getting much of shelf space for

it. Seemed like that was the quote that Insomniac had a bunch of people down there to see the game, and also they had a game Stop person there too, like interview from the from the looks of the coverage, that's that's my guess. But the game sounds cool and like you hear you see the term like Passion Project, like it was like fifteen people like you see it like this is a super tiny game from Insomniac to be making it was

almost like the grow Home situation. Yeah, or you know, like I mean, they straight upset it. They used to use the word metroidvania. So yeah, you can envision it being something like a shadow complexity kind of scale. Maybe, yeah, maybe like that. It could be cool. And then game Stop will publish physic physical versions of it along with toys and stuff, which wonder what the trade in Billy is going to be. That's a good power to the players. Yeah, I said in the news story.

It's just not that surprising necessarily, considering you know, they're a brick and mortar store that has built themselves on buying and selling used games, and you know they're they're not idiots you would assume at the corporate level, and they see that that market might not be the same in five or ten years.

So they've been thrown shit of the wall for a while now. I mean they bought that congregate, that flash gaming site back in twenty ten, I think did a lot with that, bought all those like used max stores. Yeah, yeah, I just want I don't want to like like, look, I get it, flash games are funny, but trimps is on Concord game all right. Yeah, and then yeah, the Mac thing is it's just like phones if they buy and sell used phones mainly. Is this

mobile? Yeah, it's it's not even a max store, it's just called simply. I've never actually seen one of them. There's like seventy six locations and they're all owned by game Stop. But yeah, I mean it makes sense. They got to throw a bunch of shit of the wall and see what sticks. And yeah, totally. It's such a weird market, especially with like you know, best I get into like used game sales and stuff. Oh, Amazon, like they're what is it twenty percent off if you

pre order game through Amazon? Like why would I think it lasts like after the game is out so you can actually like wait and see if the reviews are any good. Shit, I still get a save. Oh wow, I thought, So that's the Amazon Prime discount, right. Sure we should point out I believe you have to have one hundred dollar Prime subscription. But but yeah, I mean they pre orders are a huge thing for them, and people going in and buying them physically, and the days of the midnight

launch and all that stuff are are gone. It's obviously way better to have a game at your door day of you know, twenty percent off with Amazon or preloaded on Steam or any of the consoles or whatever. So yeah, that's it doesn't surprise me. It's just it's weird to see them listed as

a publisher. I think it creates a really weird situation too, where you know, like game Stop has to work with every single publisher making physical objects in video gaming, you know, yea two K like everybody and all like like we just finished saying all of those publishers go and talk to game Stop and every other retailer and start to negotiate for like end cap space and you know, hey, we want to do this marketing thing or hey, you

know you're you're gonna get the bearded reu, which is the most popular of our alternate costumes because your game Stop and you're going to promote our games to be able to believe the proper term is hot. Sorry, he really is. Yea chun Ley is in a in a cop outfit is pretty good as well. Yeah, she's like Hong Kong cop like like we're talking yeah,

like John Luke kind of stuff. Yeah, okay, that sort of look all right, So, like all of these big publishers with their big games that will you know, probably out sell this Passion Project are gonna, well whatever, this game is not out in the holiday time frame, so it's not you know, a super crowded channel at that time, right, But like still the idea that like, oh hey, we're gonna totally put our own game with all these toys and all this other stuff and take up a

bunch of shelf space for it. Like how do you think they're going to be pushing those fucking pre orders? Like how are they they'll be pushing that stuff, you know, instead of some of these other publishers games. So you have to wonder like if they got too deep into publishing their own games at some point, would actual publishers be like, well, we're not going to work with you, Like we can't get what we need from you guys anymore because you're clogging it up with your own stuff. So you know,

hey, you know hot Reu goes to Best Buy next time? That can happen. I mean, I don't see, you know, a lot of hats on on the Steam Store. You know, Valve keeps their stuff pretty low key. I don't know, if I trust game spot too, our game Stop sorry, yeah, have the same exercise the same restraint. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, it's weird times that we live in, but we shall see. Yeah, you're right, that's Jeff, this is not the game that that's going to happen with no, but no, it could

get there. It's you know that that the game is out in April or May or something. It's like, it's it's not too far off, so you know, that's not going to be a super crowded time for retail. It's curious if it's a one off or not. Right, I'm sure it's experiment for everyone involved. You know, Insomniac probably you know, had the

resources and ability to totally publish that game digitally on their own. It was probably just a case of like, oh, you'd be nice to do physical stuff, like but why would we do it with you guys, And they're like, well how about we do toys, and like okay, And I'm guessing that's how one who knows, But yeah, I'm sure it's just you know, it's it's probably free money for Insomniac and free promotion for Insomniac, and then game Stop gets to try their hand at this fucking weird thing.

Are we going to the Game Stop manager's conference to get some hands on time? Sadly we did not get invited. Oh they're they're an event, being that we're not owned by I've gotten to a couple yet. Yeah, yeah, there's there's something else. Are they are there? They in Vegas? Uh, it was in Vegas, went in San Antonio another years, it was around. Yeah, I never got to go when I actually worked at the story level. Should should we should all become Game Stop managers and then

we can go. No, I'm okay. Stop managers are very proud of themselves that they get to go to those things. Yeah. When I worked at the story level, it is Oh we got a free copy of San Andreas? Is it? Is it? Every manager, every manager is invited. Yes, they're very excited about the opportunity and they have a great time. Yes, when I when I worked, when I've heard that, sorry, I've heard that these managers actually get out of control and fucking scary.

I've had a couple of people said like, oh, it's like a roving band of Game Stop managers treating me like I'm a piece of meat, and that I'm here to serve them drinks and nothing else. And like I've heard, I've heard stories about the Game Stop Managers conference from people that were exhibiting there and people that happened to be in the area, Like, it doesn't Yeah, I didn't really hang out with a lot of managers. I guess

I wouldn't paint them with a broad brush. But it just sounds like, you know, there's just a few incidents of a few incidents too many that have heard about to go like, oh man, that thing sounds like a fucking nightmare. When I worked at EB, which granted was not part of Game Stop at the time, my assistant manager was a little too interested in hitting on fifteen year old girls too, And how old is in his thirties

tool that too? He I mean this was about this was seventeen, seventeen years ago, so it was okay then, I'm just saying lots of time. My memory is a little hazy, but yeah, it was. It was a ski situation, as I'm sure the game that the manager's convention can sometimes be. Yeah, get all those guys together all at once in Vegas. We're San Antonio the Alamo. Hey, you know exactly how crazy San Antonio. It's true. I've seen the horrors firsthand. Yeah, true horrors,

lax John Cena. Management shake up at Bungee. Oh yeah, yeah, they're former they're now former president Harold Ryan whos stepped down. They have a new CEO. He's Pete Parsons. Pete Parsons, you've heard that name. I have because he's put at Bungee forever. Yeah, I mean he was always kind of like the face of Bungee. Yeah, yeah, so I was. I was not when this story came out. I mean they announced with themselves, they posted the thing on their blogs saying, hey,

this is happening. Was he pissed that, like the Arbiter get released in Killy got announced. I think that's why. Ow is that who it is? Yeah? Or is that one hundred per Second Firm? So yeah, there was like, yeah, there's a teaser out there that Ki season three, we'll have a Halo character in it, Arban, that's that's you know, that's a better choice than you know, just another random ass spartan that they made up for a fighting game. What unless unless it was the exact

same what was her name? Nicole? Okay, Okay, if it was the same one, that would be Spartan four. I think I forget the number, but but the arbiter is a pretty good choice too. That's that sounds okay? Yeah, that'll that's kind of cool. But but yeah, Pete Parsons is now the CEO at Bungee. All it says is Harold Ryan will be stepping down from his position as studio president. I assume that means he's no longer with the company. Yeah, I probably, you have to

guess. Yeah, uh, this whole thing kind of comes on the heels of like I feel like, uh, just discontent around the state of Destiny has been coming to a head in the last few weeks. Yeah, you're mean to read the thing that Pete Parsons posted, Sure, I mean if it's yeah, I guess I'm curious to know if it actually is trying to address the received discontent around Destiny or not. Yes, yeah, they The short answer is yes, I will read it. That sounds weird, okay,

Okay. I want to personally thank Harold for his friendship, passion, hard work, and dedication in helping make Bungee the great company it is today. As a team, we celebrated many victor victories and weathered many storms. To the players of Destiny, I want you to know that my number one priority and Bungees is and always has been, to deliver great games that we can all share together. I believe that Destiny is a one of a kind experience. I also believe you have yet to see our studio's best work.

My new role here at the studio will be entirely focused on fulfilling that promise. This is yet I knew that another new beginning and a new challenge for our studio. We remain committed to creating great experiences in Destiny. It sounds like this should have been sung at a tavern when it's a mead or something that probably was coat of arms on the wall. But I mean, you know, some of that language is pretty obviously referring to, hey, don't

write the game off yet. Well, I think I think you can take that context by, you know, some of the other stuff that has been happening around the game, or the stuff that has not been happening, and then like what the Kataku story about, you know, perhaps the kind of disc based follow up to Destiny, not making it assumed September release, so

we didn't talk about that when it ran a week or two ago. But yeah, Kataku talked to people close to Bungee who say that Destiny two or whatever it's going to be called, the full on retail follow up to Destiny that was slated for the September has now been de laid out of the September name, yes, which I think they're working on. I feel like we've been able to corroborate enough of Kataku's previous Destiny reporting who feel that they they

know people who know people or whatever. My understanding is they're fairly on point

with that stuff. Yeah, it seems to be. But but you know, on top of that, I feel like a lot of the a lot of it came to head, came to a head around the announcement of this Valentine's event, because now that's like, who knows, maybe this thing will turn out to be amazing, but like, to me, that's kind of for three on, Like, well, you guys are going to run a bunch of live events that are supposed to keep the game fresh, and like

they all seem like garbage. I didn't enjoy the first two really, and then like I like racing made a splash, but then kind of practice was bad. I didn't I didn't really have fun. Point like those those bikes just don't feel tuned to be fun to race. Uh And then yeah, like like holiday themed events are not necessarily the thing that I'm missing in Destiny.

I want more Destiny, you know, right, give me a good game that does holiday themed events, like fans they're online, Yeah, I mean the holiday themed events is like the bare minimum for a game with some kind of live team. Those are like, those are nice, yeah, exactly exactly, Like those are nice, fun supplement to the core of your

game, but that core is not being updated anymore. If you think back to when we you know, had uh Luke Smith and oh gosh Mark Mark knows on during E three, you know, it seemed like that they were kind of into this idea, or at least not like accepting of this idea of like, hey, you know, people aren't necessarily going to play Destiny every single day, right, you know, like it's a proper MMO.

It's like, hey, you're gonna you're gonna stop playing, and then when we've got new stuff, you're gonna you know, dust it off and get back in. I think that's a reasonable approach, and and you know, in some level they probably did it to themselves by trying to kind of chase after so much of this MMO type stuff is not people are expecting MMO like

results. Quantity of content like frequency of updates, Yeah, totally, which you know, the business probably doesn't work out in favor of right, but of bunch or you do that sort of stuff by all, by all accounts, they are not in a technical sense like capable of delivering that. Yeah,

that's maybe the larger problem. And who knows if you know, that could be a reason behind this supposed delay, and if that's the case, like that's probably a good thing, right, Like if they need more time to shore up their back end and their pipeline type stuff to make this,

I feel like they can't. You know, at some point, putting out nothing is better than putting out half ass, especially if it's a disc, especially if it's a full priced thing, Like yeah, half assing something out there and going like, well, we've killed the our ten year legacy because we stumbled one too many times in a row, especially after the Launcher's original game, Like you can't do that again. Yeah, holy shit, I say, kind of have to. You know. It's like they've they've said

a lot of the right things. Taking King was popular, yea and good, that was a fine add on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's uh yeah, they have fucking hard problems to solve. I don't envy any of them. Yeah, that's crazy, but you have to assume this kind of big management shift would be in the interests of doing that, or perhaps as a direct result of how things are gone right right, right right.

Yes, not a lot else to say about that for now, but I continue to hope that Destiny becomes the game I want it to be. Yeah, but at some point, like if if the problems with Destiny are in the nuts and bolts of creation and stuff like that, Like you know, switching out the CEO doesn't change that. Yeah, you know, there's pipeline that there's obviously, like management things they can do to be more efficient. Who knows, but like at some point, yeah, I don't know.

I don't know enough about the state of their tools these days that to know one way or the other. But that whole thing just sounds crazy. I'll continue to have high hopes for Destiny. We will see the division seems like a yeah good. I mean there's no fucking hover bikes in it. Do any of the guns talk, not that I've seen. See, that's what I'm missing. You got a puffy coat? Yeah, I did get

a fucking puffy coat. Puffy coat have stats on it, So there are there are objects like gloves and armor and stuff like that that have your stats. And then there's a cosmetic layer for your puffy coats in your hats. All right, could you baby like die the puffy coat different colors? Maybe not. In the beta, there was no option for attaching a paint color times cosmetic. They got a couple of months shaders. Can you see talk

again? Pratt talk wow talk. Okay, maybe they'll launch the game with zero cheat protection on PC, but you'll be able to paint your puffy coat. That would be an acceptable trade off, all right, I could get into that. Uh you got as we're gonna stream Mario Maker last week. Yeah, we were going to, and then some shit happened at the last possible minute. Yeah, and then Mario Maker Mario Maker went offline for a couple of days. Yes, they took it down for a little bit maintenance.

They said, yes, fixing something. They said, yeah, did you guys look into this glitch that supposedly happened? No, a little bit, Yeah, yeah, what could you tell me? Well, why don't you tell me what you saw? So, I mean this is based on the reporting of one Patrick Clevick. Oh well, yeah, that's supposedly maker expert. Yes, obviously it's a journey journeyman Mario Maker player. I mean he's made zero levels. Really, how does he not make levels at all?

He just plays them? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, according to his story, Uh, there was a glitch that effectively, would you let you edit the levels of other creators that you downloaded? Yeah, as you were playing them, yes, before you played them. Basically it was it's a glitch that would let you edit a level, then play it, and then that would those edits sound like they didn't those would not push back to the server just locally, but so, but so, locally you could make a

level way easier and get an impossible clear time. Oh so you'd set a new world record. You get on the actual version of the actual version, people people were posting clear times of like three seconds and stuff like that,

just a bit breaking the level. There have been problems with clear times since they introduced them on both ends of things, Like sometimes you would, you know, you'd see a level that had a clear time of like nine nine five nine nine nine nine, and you would obviously be at that time, but it still wouldn't update, like if there's just something broken with that levels time. So they've they've fixed that in the patch. But yeah, that sounds like they needed to do some more work. Yeah. Did they end

up doing a rollback or anything? I don't think so. I think it was another patch, another because the game and then they took the servers down for maintenance or to update whatever the problem was or something I happened to bring my way you in on Friday. Why is that, Bradford, because these a weak ass son of a bit. We have wanted those ab We had a we had a moment on a live show anyway. You're right, Yes, I pulled a patch for that game Friday morning. Yeah, ask the

servers were coming back up, so they clearly fixed some stuff. Yeah that was that was something felt pretty good, didn't That was pretty good? Yeah? I saved myself a good Like what thirty runs through hundred marios? That's fun though, runs that you'll take anyway because the game is so good. Yes, yeah, I did. I did a normal run Friday morning before I came in, and there was at least one auto play level in there. Well, they don't feel them out completely, you know, it's still

will surface new levels and they don't know if they're automatic. That's how many of those levels did you skip? Auto player? Just generally like three or four. Well, you have to finish sixteen to finish the challenge, so, Brad, thanks to those ambos, you can now finally make a Mario one level based around Digby from Animal Crusts. You're right, yeah, did I do that? Now? I got Digby? Which one's Digby? He's the the administrative dog from Animal crust right, Okay, yes, yes,

the very stern looking one, right, dud. But I think he's friendly. I would lean toward KK Slider or probably the best perhaps pac Man. I got I got a Rossetti. I got a shipping confirmation on my mister Rossetti. I am locked Rossetti just by playing, So I think, okay, I'm good there, all right, all right, but that felt pretty good. Yeah, it feels dirty. That's gotta feeling, oh man, duck hunt Rob and Game and Watch should be arriving today or tomorrow feeling dirty,

or would be owning the amibos right. I have them organized very well on my shelf, but how would you put them? Yeah? I don't know. Did you trying to get rid of stuff? I went to Michael's. Did you get the baseball bat? I looked at it. I almost got it. It was still like thirty bucks after tap off Christ and then I'd realize what the funk I was doing, and I'm like, oh shit,

no, I should count home. I should count because I think I have like fucking seventeen amibos now, and I've not I've not paid for any of these seventeen people. Nintendo sent a bunch some some friends of the site sent in a couple. You might be getting more because yeah, does somebody sent me a couple of the yarn? Yeah, she's thank you much. But then somebody else piped up on Twitter saying that they were working on a complete set, and I'm like, dude, thank you so much, but

I've already got him. He's like, oh, I'll just send him to Jeff. Jeff, you want to, I'll pass some like beef jerky or something on you. If we want to have a mail bag exchange program. I want that Blue one, though I don't. I don't have the Blue one. People are sick. There's a Mega one too, there's something wrong with you. I want the Mega one. We can make a Mega one. Does Shovel Night do anything in Super Mario Maker, I've not. I

don't think it does. I think there's all I'm pretty sure there's a shovel Nights, right, is there? I swear I saw this thing to the game, searched on the internet Google dot com, I Google dot com, uh, shovel Night, Amibo costs, and did not see anything. I might be wrong, So I don't know. I feel like I saw a little a bit looking in us sprite. I think you just saw a screenshot Shovel Night. Well, yes, but I mean I meant in Mario Maker, I swear I saw that. Maybe it is. I maybe I Google

dot Com did incorrectly. M hm. So you guys didn't run into this glitch and all those kind of main reason I pilt this to see if this affected you at all, no other than the fact that you weren't able to stream Maury Maker on Wednesday. Yeah, like you wanted to. All right, whatever we played Snatcher, that's true on the site. If you want to see the true bits of Snatcher. Now I know something about Snatcher. We will have to get back to Snatcher at some point. It warmed my

heart to see like all the positive responses. Yeah, like it. You know, I look back at that game very very funly because they're very influentiable to me. But then it's like critical, Look, it's it's pretty rough because it was so early. Sure, it's hard to it was. Yeah, I was actually a little surprised at how like the playability was not nearly

what I expected it to be. Yeah. I mean bear in mind, like you know, eighty eight is when that game came out, and there have been subsequent releases and they haven't really been shut to touch to gameplay wise. But yeah, it was nice to see how many people like really had that that's trying astylish for Somebody sent a photo of a Snatcher like throw pillow that his wife had made. Oh shit, it looked really cool. Okay, I'll have sure that's you. You'll throw it in the show notes or

something. Well, one thing I wanted to mention about Snatcher that I didn't get a chance to Is a Suit of fifty one actually wrote a radio play? What? Yeah? Yeah he wrote that. Yeah, yeah, he wrote it. He actually did some voice work. Wow, even did some voice work in it as well. But yeah, it's available translated on YouTube. Yeah, just the Snatcher radio play. That's cool? Is that stature? Yes? Yes, so there is an official radio play as well,

So don't confuse that with the Suit of fifty one one. But this is like a prequel to the Snatches. Oh, this is not just a dramatization of the game. No, it's like a separate, separate story. Okay, man, that's weird. That's weird and cool. I debated whether to talk about the Peter mahl News fake retirement, but here it is. I guess, for about fifteen minutes everybody thought that Peter mal neew had very unceremonioushly retired on Twitter. It wasn't even fifteen minutes. It was like, you're

right, it wasn't. It was very brief, but we all happened to just be sitting at our desks when it happened, so we all happened to see you unfolding real time. That was a whirlwind. Man, those tweets were holy shit. It just it was like three tweets and there it was perfect. It was like if you were gonna hack Peter Mullan, Who's Twitter and do this? It was perfect. It was like, what is it like? One of them was like, if go for it, Goddess will

be taken down. Please appropriate accent with them mediate effect. Thank you to all those involved one of two. This is also the time I would like to announce my retirement from the game's industry. It has been a long journey for me. Thank you two of two third tweet. Over All, my time in the industry has been bitter sweet. However, my biggest mistake was Fable three. It pushed me in my team to the limits. No steed in mind. Like, the first two hit pretty tight, and then there

was a lull where people went, what the fuck? And then that third one hit. You could already here It's like, oh my god. And that's when I believed it. You know, that was when I went, this is not him. Yeah, that's when I bought in. I was like, no, yeah, no, it was hacked. But then he started talking about three, and I'm like, maybe tacked by some guy that really hated Fable three. I didn't really Fable three. It had potential, but it was not one. It was not a fucking hot pile of fucking

flaming. But after Fable it's not Fable two. But it's still all right, Waitable two, it's okay, No, no, I'm not I'm saying it's not Fable two. Fable two is a better game, Okay, okay, okay, right right per game, at least up right up until you

assumed the throne. In Fable three, I thought it was all okay, yes, yeah, ends like really shit the bed when when you when they got into this like meta game at the end, Yeah, that stuff was not so great, very unfortunately was bad at signaling like points of overturns man. Even up to that point, it was okay Fable three, Yeah,

yeah, it's it's okay, it's not terrible. But but given the you know, the pedigree and what could have been apologetic about all of his probab jacks after the fact, and that one in particular, it seems to have like really taken a heart anyway, it was all bullshit, that's way it was funny to me. Yeah. Anyway, the Twitter account got hacked real Peter Malknew quickly also started tweeting from the accounts as the as the perpetrator was

being removed. Uh yeah, Like it kind of went nowhere pretty quick. But man, unless you were the type of organization who wanted to run news stories really quickly, in which case you then wrote a news story saying that Peter Malanu had retired, yes, and then very quickly had to amend it. I started writing one, I'm not gonna lie. I actually started like, ah, we should, this is something we should write up. Yeah, it's but like as I was writing it, I'm like, this isn't

Field Rice, doesn't none of this, None of this is right. Like I got like one sentence in and I was like no, no, and then like sure enough, like ninety seconds later, like I think you said, like, oh, this is some other other guy that and somebody from twenty from a former twenty two cans guy was started tweeting, going like I'm on the phone with Peter right now, Like those those are not that's not him. Yeah, Twitter of act it was the guy that uncovered the Curiosity

cube. Yeah, he's the only one who still read contact pay up or Yeah, seriously, as the god of Goddess, he actually has unfettered access to He could take it off Twitter account. He's yeah, he's the guy could take it off Steam too, So that poor guy. So I guess that I guess him. After all that was said and done, I guess that means that Goddess is still in active development. I guess though I mean

define active. I don't know, because if you go to the Goddess, like the twenty two Can's website, like the Goddess updates stop like sometime in twenty fourteen or so, like somethime in August or something, it's like they have not posted or or you know, maybe that's just they haven't just updated it there, but maybe the early access build is getting updated. I've seen

a surprise surprize have not been following the Goddess super close. Yeah, I've seen a couple of like update videos, you know with Peter, and he just seems so disinterested and just like out of the loop that it's like, I don't know what's going on with that. Everyone. He shot that video of like his kid pleading for half Life three? Yeah, what was that? This kid really wanted Half Live three? And we posted some video to YouTube. Hey, getting line, child Malan. A lot of people want

that game, child Malanu. Should make it Gordon Freeman and his dog that transforms into a crowbar. Okay, wait the dog is named Crowbar? Wait? Half Life two had a dog, right, yeah, it had dog, it had dog, but dogs not I mean, okay, yeah, all right, insofar as a crow bar is not a dog, I will accept the dog is as much of a dog. Okay, So you can have a robot named dog and a dog named crow Bar. I think that works out. Okay, just fine? Yeah, yeah, I mean still

truck back. So, like, you know, that can't be far behind r cigarette smoking Man exists, so the g man yep, thus cut from the same cloth. X Files is back. Yeah, I haven't watched any of it. People said the first episode was so bad. I didn't even bother. I wouldn't call it bat It's weird. Backtrack on a bunch of stuff to try and get it up to date. Like Snowden has mentioned, it's yeah, so I caught that I was never a huge X Files fan.

Again, with so like returning, I'm like, I'm not necessarily returning to it, it's just like watching it I'm like, all right, this is a little in a world where everyone already assumes that the government is keeping everything a secrete, a show based on the idea that the government might be keeping secrets doesn't really hold a lot of water because you just watch it. Like it led to a lot more showing than telling. I feel like old X Files. Like again, I didn't watch a ton of it, but

it was more tell than show. It was more like hinting at the mystery, whereas like this, they're like, here's a fucking spaceship straight up. Yeah, that's that's pretty overt. You know, check it out. It could turn invisible. Isn't that all out? The shadow government blows it up? You know, it's just like all right, yeah, a lot of

on the nose stuff. Don't they have like a limited like six sepid episodes or something like Episode three is going to be like a monster episode, Like really they're going back to like they're going back to like monster of the week stuff. Maybe I don't know if that's going to be for the entire run. Obviously, you know, they've got a lot of ground to cover, They've yeah, but just doing a monster episode. They the second episode didn't

necessarily tie into the first Oh weird, that's yea too closely. That seems that seems risky when you've only got six episodes to work with. Yeah, overarching thing going on? Is there any acknowledgment of the wall? Yes, since of the X Files is big, like to like, do they like time has passed? It's okay, it's modern. They're mentioning snowed In by name. It's like, you know, but I mean, but I mean, do they do they try to make from his cave? Like? Okay,

that's what That's what I meant. Like it's not like they've just been that's not what It's not like they've just been working on cases this whole time and nobody knew about it. Right, He's a doctor, so she went off and did doctor stuff. Okay, didn't the company leave the show at one point? Took over? That's Robert Patrick became the new Molders. Last just the last season, right or the last two? I checked out before

then. I was a long time ago. Yes it was, but it ran for too long probably, so I care a lot more about the Twin Peaks stuff, and like seeing this, I have this definite feeling of like like I already had a lot of really mixed feelings about the idea of more Twin peaks. Out of that back he backed back in. Yeah, okay, And so seeing this stuff and seeing like, okay, how do you handle this? It's real dangerous going back to the well, ye, it's first of for a lot of reasons. Yeah, it's rough. I don't

know. I don't I mean, I do not know how you make more twin Peaks and capture what twin Peaks was like. I don't think you can, not even just in the case of twin Peaks, but for practically, you know, everything is a product of the time in which it was created, right, you know, Like so that's why I like X files. They at least went for it, you know, you know, they're at

least like trying to acknowledge that the world has changed. But it's one of those things where it's like, you know, having Fox Molder would be like this super like you know, oh, the government's doing this and they're doing this like and still yeah, yeah, exactly. The reaction to all the viewing audiences like, of course, yeah, definitely, they definitely are. They definitely are. We don't trust them at all. A lot of time has passed. We agree, we also want to believe. Ah, I

think I'm good. I'm gonna see where it goes. We know that Kem Trails are real. Now you can't do an episode about it, at least not. The ground has been covered. All right, I have one final news story, Jason, Perhaps you can help me out here. Why does Loupe Fiasco want to fight Diego? Oh fucking oh my god? All right, so Loupai he's into video games, right, yeah, everyone is.

Yeah, he likes anime as well, So that's pretty cool. Lupe's pretty cool and maybe maybe you should turn him onto hang On but loup bait, Yeah, especially like Neptune, Neptune Plus Blazers, okay, Blasters, Kem Trail plus. He's been a party Kem Trail edition. Should let him know

about that one. Yeah, Loupe likes some some some street fighter and I guess he was playing some street fighter at an arcade cabinet and like a like a bar and like Denver or something like that, and he's like, yo, I got twelve wins and street Fighter with Ken and so so like people like you know, the fighting game community is like, oh man, that's cool, hey man, you play Marvel and he's like, no, I

don't play that shit. I don't have fucking ADHD or so all right, this is okay, this is better than anything Loupe Fiasco has done in years already. That sentence right there, it's like, all right, I'm back

on board. The daydreaming was pretty cool ten years ago. But yeah, the people of the fighting game community started getting a little riled up about that, so so like outspoken people were it's like, all right, motherfucker six million dollar money match evo and he, like Loupe is like trying to I'm paraphrasing, but he's like making conditions. He's like, all right, coin op only all right, it's got to be found at like a laundromat or

something like that, none of your custom joysticks. They eventually backed out, but mad Cats, Mark Coulio, Mark Man get involved and he's like, wow, I kind of represent I go, I can. I could probably get into this. He said, hey, do you want to do like a you know, First five or something with with Diago just mess around, and Lupe's like totally into it now. He got himself a fucking arcade stick. The actually actually posted a picture of himself at a game stop saying,

hey man, anybody got him sick? And he's released videos of him like sitting in his fucking like car that has a TV screen and he's like practicing light kick drills or he's only using light kicks. Okay, so he's posting updates to his okay and stuff. It sounds like it's good serious, he's yeah, he's getting serious about it. Yeah, this isn't gonna be an EVO special or no idea, nothing confirmed, Like I don't think Diego is confirmed, but I mean, you know, Mad Cats represents them, so

sure, yea, I think it'll happen. I think it'll be super dumb. Yes, I saw that. I saw that Mad Cats and Twitch are also are both working on making this happen. Now. Yeah, but just the fact that like Lupe Fiasco is like posting training videos and like his regiment and shit like that, like what he's doing to try and train for Diego stuff. Oh my god, worlds are colliding. But that's you know, if someone said, hey, do you want to fight Diego, I'd be

like I would say absolutely, I'll lose. Yeah, sure, I would love to lose. The Diego why not? And I think he did actually say that, Like, you know, he took that contact with it. Initially he's like, yeah, I'll lose the Digo, no problem. But then yeah he's getting serious Diego, so compete, Yeah heavily. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, he's still totally in the game. Still just still viable.

Yeah, totally by Yeah, you know, it comes in and goes, he's got it's bad days, but then he'll come back and he'll just like destroy somebody ten games in a row, put on a clinic. Yeah, still real good. That's a fun story. Yeah, it's like to see more of that. Yeah, shit talking between celebrities of various skilled Yeah, you've seen a lot of celebrities kind of work their way, like Jamie

Lee Curtis. We'll goat like Eva a bunch of tournaments. I remember if we talk about that back when that happens to the Holy shit, those photos that she posted were just magical. She's done a couple of different characters. Yeah, but like her, you know, her families into it, like her son and stuff. Yeah, yeah, that's a a little family. Did you guys see the Street Fighter five TV commercial they did recently? It aired during like a Broncos game, like recently, I don't think I did.

It was like a you know, it was like a TV ad for the game, but like it used some of the footage that when they first announced the game, like showing it just like people playing and you know, like the kind of competitive scene aspect for it. But in the context of a commercial that has then shown in the middle of a football game. No, it might actually be the best fucking video game ad in the world, uh, in that context, because it conveys the excitement of victory. Yeah,

it is very much like about hype. It's very much about like, you know, the feeling of victory as opposed to just like here's how many fighters are in this game. Like there's not a lot of footage in it, but it's just you know, it's a lot of that that footage that used when they first announced the game of just showing people. Yeah they've yeah, they've been kind of tapping into that for for a number of years,

and I think it's super effective. Like it actually it might even you know, I know they're they're separate things, but it might actually be a super effective like case for like es sports in a way to where you just watch it and go fucking yeah, totally. I really get very hype. I'm watching those. Yeah, but like in that context of like this is an ad that they're positioning the mainstreamist of mainstream. Yeah, like it's kind of

cool to see them kind of represent it that way. Sony marketing money doing work. Yeah yeah, maybe yeah, NFL spots all right, Evo's picking up. Man, they get the Tue well two venues from EVO now, which is one for each Smash Brothers. Yeah, god, what what do you mean? What are the two venues? And Pokin so Las Vegas Convention Center and I forgot then is a must going most good? I'm sorry I forgot the name of it. But they're both in they're both in Vegas.

Yeah, they're both in Vegas, but they're you know, two separate events. So like you know, the Friday, Thursday, Friday Saturday stuff is going to be at the convention Center and then the finals Sunday is going to be at the big event. Like how many how many players? Where they get down to you with it is like top eight go to the other place, or it's four. It depends on the game. It might be sixteen.

You might even be thirty two. I don't know. You know, we'll see how that how that shakes out, but I'm sure it'll be like a day long event. But yeah, you've got to have tickets to each of these. And the hotel was different than both of these locations. That's what really kind of weirds me out about it, because man, going to EVO is just like a big community thing, and I love going in the back of the you know, the room and seeing like all these different arcade

cabinets and people that all kind of custom sticks and run aside tournaments. And I don't know how they're going to do that. Yeah, if people are spread across, right, so that's gonna be weird, you know. I'm sure that there's still gonna be side tournaments held back at the hotel, you know, where people aren't going at the convention center. Where where will the Jackie Chan live. I don't know in all of us. Yeah, it's being played. I'm Jackie Chan and this is my game. But this is

a cool like it's a big, big step. I think it's in the right direction. I think EVO is the right one to do it. I still think that there's room for you know that that old dirty like stuff at all the other tournaments and stuff, or if you like anime games, go down to Florida, Yes, Florida, and then we'll build the wall all that you get to Florida. We're walling other news. We're walling off Florida as soon as this tournament starts. Oh well, Diowa caucuses have started.

So this is a very germane topic. All right, let's read some emails. You just sing some emails. I have to give you a few drinks in me first. Okay, I'm afraid. I'm happy to pass you this phone. If you would like to read some sing some emails, I should say, no, it's not my job. No, all right, out of my paid scale. All right. Well, in that case, bomb cast at jama on dot com. You know the email address I do. It's easy to figure out if I really need to say it. Probably what

if I didn't say it every week? I bet you would see the number of emails that come and go down? Crap, All right, I guess I keep saying it. Then Kenna knew the email address. That's how I got this email here. It's in about super Bowl. You mean the Big Game? Yeah, the big game. Uh, he says, what are your plans? As the impending Super Bowl is about to descend upon San Francisco. It'll undoubtedly surpass the typical nahem the previous years as it's the fiftieth anniversary.

So will everyone hide within the shelters of their own homes away from the drunken assholes, take part in the festivities get the hell out of Dodge, or will Dan just go to Taco bell. I'm not really worried about it, considering like now that I've gone down there to where it is, that Levi Stadium, are you oh right right? Yeah, yeah, saw a real show. Yeah yeah, a showcase. I mean that's actually what Santa Clarin Yeah, I mean it was like a one hundred and twenty dollars uber

to get down there, right. I don't think that the well, I didn't think that the city was going to be like descended upon by football fans or whatever, except for the fact that they built this goddamn Super San Francisco itself is rotten with Super Bowl shit right now. It's the way I have to. I'm taking a different path into the office every single morning to try to figure out what's the proper route, and every every morning I just get

fucked in a slightly different way. What is it? It's like super Bowl super Bowl Village is super Bowl City. Yeah, that's what they're calling it. I drove past it is there, It's it's well, I don't know. I saw a fucking sign that I saw the Verizon logo. I don't know. It looks like some super Bowl shit to me. Sure. Yeah, a bunch of stuff walled off, and they're putting up a bunch of cameras that have a bunch people worried that they're not going to take the cameras

away once super Bowl City is gone. There's a bunch of Homeland security devices on street cars. Yeah, I understand. I love it. My bus got diverted to the point that it drops me off closer to the office. Now that's a cool thing. But yeah, I'm kind of having a hard

time finding getting that positive in the hosting of the super Bowl. For us, it sounds like the people that like live in San Francisco and stuff are actually like the people that are digging into some of the numbers are finding that like San Francisco basically didn't negotiate anything with the NFL, and it's just like

paying for all of it. So it's like it's it sounds like it's a bad deal for the city as right, and they're like they're like, you know, they're forcefully uh moving homeless people out of the area so that it shows nice for the tourists. There's a bunch of really fucking garbage ass things that are happening in this city all the time. Double City. Yeah, what a cool city. It's so laid back and liberally and awesome. Man, fucking whatever, and the game is not even fucking being played in San

Francisco. On top of that, they should pass a fucking law that you cannot name your team somewhere other than where you play. Shit market, Like, obviously they'll sell more hats if it says San Francisco, it says the fucking Santa Clara forty nine. Should all be named after the zip code, yes, or they should. They should get rid of the ship and just fucking sell it. They should be the fucking Verizon forty nine. The Verizon Verizon will happen. Yeah, that is like if the XFL had had taken

hold, we would already be there, I'm sure by now. But Bence doesn't sell out. Yeah. Well, it's like soccer teams have uh, you know, logos on their uniforms all the time, like that has to or even on the field they have those like weird like they're not actually on the field, but home viewer sees it. It's like the the yellow you

know, first or do they do that in football? Now I thought Danny said something about that in soccer, but in football they do the yellow like you know, first down line, right, Yeah, but like that but with ads like a giant you know, Volkswagen logo on the field. Yeah, why not? Everyone los Volkswagon, those guys. That is that idea. It was way too dystopian for me. I'm sorry. They need to go all the way with it, yeah, like take it all the way

down. It needs to just be the you know, it's like what like all the college football bowl games are all like it's the yes, I mean all of all the all the stadiums are all the way. Yeah that way, it's the next step. Yeah, they'll get their eventually. Yeah, let's go for it. Yeah gross gross uh next because then you'll just go and you'll buy a hat that has the fucking Totino's pizza rolls logo on it, and they'd be like, oh you like the Jazz and you're like,

yeah, favorite basketball team. Fuck yeah, man, Totinos. Totinos just beatinos. I could maybe get behind Actually can you put what? Do you put it that way? Uh? Email from David pea Cube recently announced that gal Gun Double Peace is coming to the US, completely uncensored and unaltered. I'm into the Arby's Red Wings. They're my favorite. The Big Montana power play is my favorite part of the game. Man, they still make the Big Montana. They must surely they do. Oh, I miss I never

got past the beef and shudder. Uh. David wants to know if you were going to buy and cover that game. I mean, I hope I would ideally not buy one. Will contact them and say, hey, you should send us so we can cover it. I guess if it's coming out in the US, that's probably gonna work. Well. I think that's that's more formality than anything. He basically is trying to gauge your level of interest in covering the new gal Gun. Yeah, we should cover it. Yeah,

it's you know, we should trobably cover it. Committing to this publicly. We'll see yeah, all right, I mean maybe everyone involved in its localization will be put in prison before the game come out. So it's got gun the one that you played on UPF two months ago. Yep, yeah, okay, yeah, that game over? Okay, now wait is is that the game? Yeah? That exact game? Or yes? That that was the demo for the That's double Piece. Yeah okay, well an existing

coverage on the site. Yeah, you gotta finish it up. I mean, that's true. Should probably just probably don't play the entire rest of the game. I really want to see what the North American version is like. Yeah, yeah, yes. Uh. Shane writes in about The Blacklist, Jeff mentioned he was watching it enjoying The Blacklist. It's terrible. I can't stop watching help. Yeah is that true? It's not terrible, Yeah,

but it's not good. We got to the near the end of the second season and it slowed down significantly just because there were just a there was an arc that was I did not appreciate that slowed us down on it. But I keep thinking about watching it just because I love James Spader so much. Oh man, it's James Spader being some fucking James Spader, asked James Spader, He just scenery. Yeah, it's like literally every fuck you know, it's like he walks in to fucking shoot somebody, but he's got to tell

him a story about his childhood first. He's like, when I was a boy, I sat down. You know. He's like fucking convincing people to fucking lie on the stand for other people. And you know, but like in the most roundabout, like every word out of his mouth is just this fucking roundabout way to get what he wants. And Okay, it's just you're making a strong case for the show. Spader. Spader's amazing, man. He's He's most of the reason that I watched the entire run of Boston Legal.

Then, yeah, if you're every time, every time you modern day Spader, every time he would gear up for one of his monologues, I'm just getting James. And then sometimes like and that affords them the opportunity by making this very like loquacious character. Is that then when he walks into a room and just fucking shoots a guy, You're like, oh fuck, it's like fucking James Spader means mother fucking business doesn't even say anything that time,

and then he talks for a while. You know, it's like it's Netflix, Yeah, probably. I think the first two seasons are on Netflix and then the third season is is airing right now. I know I've seen it, so either there or Amazon for sure. All right, you've sold me.

It's uh, I mean he's really great, he really is. And it's like just fucking dumb like Surveillance State Task Force stuff, like just stuff that like, you know, here's the government's fucking secret black ops, fucking team that's stopping terrorism with the help of a fucking criminal James Spader mastermind. Yeah, it's it's great. It's fucking preposterous. I mean, no less monumental a figure than James Spader could get me to watch a show like that.

It's it's what it makes at this point without him, you know, I think a lot of the other characters in the show are well acted and stuff, you know, all that stuff, but it's just but I'm sure it's just network cheese, right, Yeah, totally. Okay, all right, I mean you've convinced me. Uh, this email is signed P from s Okay, that's all I got. Actually I've got more, but that's how we signed it. So all right, that's all I'm gonna say.

The Witness finally released. This is actually one of last week's emails that I had held over for this week. The Witness finally releases on Tuesday for the price of forty dollars. Well, I've got no problem paying that amount. There has been a lot of debate on yield Internet about whether an independently developed

a game distributed digitally is allowed to command that price. What Jesus. At times, it sounds like a number of people complaining are fearful of higher priced independently developed games, whether digital or retail, not because the games themselves aren't providing value, but rather because it's encroaching on pricing territory that they've been trained to see as the cream of the crop in terms of what the industry produces,

as if a forty dollars Witness somehow cheapens their sixty dollars purchase from a major publisher. Given the proliferation of independent studios and the democratization of development tools, I imagine we'll continue to see more and more games that challenge this notion of what const Tuesday triple a game and therefore take aim at the go to premium price for such a product. What are your personal redlines for game pricing?

Because the game's marketing budget entitle it to a sixty dollars price tag regardless of content, do any of you have biases that you feel prevent you from paying more than X for an indie game or puzzle game or RPG, etc. This is something that when we had Iron Galaxies, Dave Lang on the show that he kind of hinted at happening more and more. Is that notion of And I've heard other people use the term, and I think it's a

dumb term, triple I, triple indie. You know that, like if you think about it, you know, through the you know the over the course of the three sixty era of last generation, we lost those kind of smaller b game like like lower tier retail games. And what's happening now is

that the smaller indie games are growing up to fill that gap. So you'll have the games that are still in that kind of smaller, more traditional digital price range of ten to fifteen to twenty, and then I think you'll start to actually see more games that are trying to play around with price and starting

to do this stuff up at forty or thereabouts. Yeah, I guess the big difference was last generation or even two generations go, Like the medium tier games were still sixty bucks, right, because that's all they could be exactly.

Yeah, the prices were protected by console manufacturers, so if anything like this is better, you know, if you're getting games of that caliber for less than full retail, right, And it's it's one of the things where yeah, like I get it, like you know, like people don't want things to see things get more expensive, and the retail price point is held for so long that even even that gets played around with more on the lower end, right, the higher ends where you end up getting a bunch of

garbage, like here's a fucking statue and a helmet that you can't wear, or here's a bare bones multiplayer game with a fifty dollars season pass, right, yeah, or something. So it breaks down to just hours, how many hours of enjoyment you can get out of something like I love The Witness, and I know I'll probably spend a few dozen hours with it. I don't give shit how much the marketing budget was or how big the team was.

It's just Okay, forty dollars for like forty hours of gameplay sounds completely fair. Also, I think the marketing budget for the Witness is probably pretty low. Yeah, and it's just been him out there talking it up and yeah, covering it right. I just don't know why that should factor into your thoughts on the on the price or anything or I don't know. But also I would argue that hours is probably a bad metric. Also, you

know, it can be a useful metric. I feel like, you know, if you want to like contextualize it next to like movie going or something. But yeah, yes, yeah, but also it's not the end. I'll be no, absolutely not. And like, you know, I feel like like Limbo was a random early example of a game that like disabused me of the notion of like, oh it has to be x number of hours or I don't feel satisfied because it was like a three hour game. But

it were three very valuable hours and that's all I needed. I mean, you know, like I bought Golden Nacks for way too much money for The Genesis and finished it the day I bought it and was pissed. You know. I bought Super Mario Brothers two and finished it the day I got it and was fucking pissed, except it was awesome, so I played it over

and over. Yeah. You know, like the notion of like these full price games that are not lasting a day is you know if anything gaming got away from that, uh, you know, as as time went on and now it just seems like there are different games at different price points, and you know, it's I think it's it has to be a case by case basis, like do you think this product is worth this much money based on

what's there? Yes or no? And it's you know who made it and where it came from, if it's indie or not, Like that's useless, like who cares? Yeah, I guess we need to say it that way. Maybe Hours isn't the NDLB all for me because I think of Journey and Gone Home and I love both those. Yeah, I'd be in both in one sitting, and I didn't really worry about how much they cost at all. Right, yeah exactly. And you know, like I think, you

know, the hour a count and price sensitivity stuff. I think those are two things that go way up with people who you know, aren't who don't buy a lot of games. Who can't buy a lot of games. They see this happening and go like, well, wait, why would I buy pay full price for a game that I can you know, the Call Duty campaign is so short and blah blah, all these campaigns are so short. Now what happened to by eighty hour RPGs? And you know, like there's

there's the kind of that mentality which I get. I mean, you know, like I, you know, spend a long time not being able to you knows, to afford a lot of games. It's you know, you you want to buy games that that last. That's why you know that. That's where every little bit of my animosity for games like Strider and uh Super Metroid came from. Was this idea that like these are just too short. Like I went and paid a full retail in Strider's case, eighty dollars.

Yeah, that was eighty dollars in nineteen eighty nine or nineteen ninety money, and I was fucking just out as junior high and fucking that. You know, like whatever, the going rate for games was way expensive to be able to fucking put together eighty dollars for a game that I fucking took home and immediately finished that fucking sucked. So like, I understand why there are people that kind of look to those as meaningful metrics, because you know, it's

like they want to play video games for a long time. Hey, eight Mega I did not that was not turned. There's a mega bit that was that was a bad value. Yeah, Strider is a bad value. Yeah, you're probably right. The NES version, however, was a big adventure that you went around. You got to, you know, explore this world and go to different places. I thought I thought that the non linear.

I thought the video we did of Anya Strider a while back amended your view of India Strider look maybe not quite as sound as you thought it was. I'm not saying it was a great game. I say it aged pretty poorly, but it's still like like like buy on a Commando did more with the

home version than sure decade version. You're absolutely right about that. I mostly liked this email because I thought it was a kind of an interesting idea that he had that people might feel like like there's some tension between the sixty dollars big publisher game and like, you know, smaller games was made by smaller

teams. But moving into that pricing space, you know, like the idea of devaluing a sixty dollars game, like a Call of Duty style game, because this other game is a very different kind of thing, but it's getting close in price, you know, sure, like it's like that it might erode the price of the value of the Call of Duty or some of those other games. I don't, I don't know, if you know, I

don't know if he's onto anything or not. I don't know. Interesting way to look at, Like there's a lot of weird psychology wrapped up in Yeah, people's response to the price of the Witness or just prices in general. Well, yeah, yeah, I guess. I guess the Winnows is just more of an extreme example of that, right, and the kind of reaction that it elicited in people. Yeah, I will say that that to me,

that game seems like it is easily worth forty dollars. Yeah, yeah, although I mean that's a different conversation now that we all played it. Sure, this was you know, prior to release, when they announced the price and nobody knew exactly what was in there. Hence why reviews still hold some amount of value in video games where they might not in music and movies, Yes, indeed, or hold less. I guess I shouldn't totally discount

I think movie reviews are dumb. Well, there's definitely a lot more subjective, Yes, because you generally know how long you're gonna be sitting in the theater seed. Yeah, and the price is usually most fixed. Yes, indeed. Well, I saw my first time I saw Star Wars like three days after it came out for six dollars. I couldn't believe it in the middle of San Francisco mattinee like a Sunday matinee for six twenty five. It's ridiculous. Is almost illegal. I know, I didn't. Couldn't. I

thought I was getting away with something. It was bizarre. Did you watch it in the back of a van? No, let's not. Let's not talk about that, right Galen from Seattle? Uh, this question is for Jeff and Jason. If he's around, he got good news for you. Made it? Why is it? The fighting games used to always have a sound test mode in the options. I can see how something like that might be useful on an arcade machine to make sure that everything is working properly.

What's the point of including it on a home console version. One. It's awesome. It's awesome, and and it wasn't limited to you just fighters. But let me finish theme. Okay, it can't be as simple as they just didn't bother to remove it from the port. Since it's usually in an options menu accessed via a main menu, which wouldn't have been present in an Arcade version, this would imply that the path to that functionality was specifically added

to the console version. Yes, you're right. Sound tests existed in all kinds of games back in the day, and yes they were awesome. Yeah. Yeah, they to make ring tones. They knew, they knew that they were gonna needing tones or twenty years later, absolutely sound tests and music tests, text message noises. Very yeah, I very much appreciated. Uh, like Ninja remember an es Ninja Gaiden had a music test, so they're sound Yeah that in particular, like listen to music tracks, okay, but

just like covering the entire like sound effects library. I don't quite understand the magic or why that was gifted to us, why these sound tests are in there, but yeah, I'll take it. I wish they I wish they came back. I would, I really wish the sound tests would make a return. That stuff was super fun. Yeah, I wonder, but a lot of that stuff doesn't even exist in the arcade version. It's not it's not the case that like, oh this was like ported from arcade code and

that had it, Like that's not necessarily why was that? I mean, the Supernintendo routines are so different for the concept originate in the arcade though. It seems like something that you would have an arcade thing boot you would have arcades some arcade machines that would do different sound stuff or you know, like they have their cross hatch and color like boot up tests. Sometimes sound would

be a part of that. Like all the Midway games have that boom kind of thing when you when you fire them up and all the tech and machines say good morning when you turn them on. Its creepy. It is super creepy. All the was it like Bubble memory Konami games, like it was some kind of weird ram that had to be heated up to a certain temperature

before it worked. Oh so the boot up on some of these, like Gradius and some of these other machines was like two minutes or something, so it had a little song and a d no no, no, no, like this whole that is actually super hard to emulate because you know, hey, emulators got hot ram all the time, so you know, mame and stuff like that don't capture they none of them capture the true magic. I'm surprised they don't. I'm surprised they don't actually emulate the boot of the warm

up time the way they like a C sixty four emulator. It's the sort of thing that they could probably eventually do if if someone on the project or with the knowledge of it really like sat down and did it. But right now it's just like I think it's just something that checks the temperature, and right now they just go like temperatures fine, all right, and just boots

sound tests bringing back. Yeah. Absolutely insist seriously, and and like I think every single techn from the start has said, good morning, you're talking to the machines specifically, right, yeah, we can go turn on the fucking ones out there, and they still do it. The one that has the internet of a PS three in it. Yeah, the tech and TAG two that boots up to the fucking PS three XMB that the quickly vanishes and goes into weird arcade boot up. It's weird that that will eventually tell you

good morning. I think I'm good. Who is it? It's not he hachi. I mean I will never know. No, it's gonna be a mystery for the ages. It's the announcer. I think it's the tech and announcers that makes sense. Jason yo, I mean the emails from Jason. Oh, but also Jason, you can answer it, we can share it. Oh, this is a Jason from Illinois and you guys to settle a debate. I got into an argument with a friend. He said he shampooed after soaping. I told him that was insane. Always shampoo first, then

I'll shave, then soap. I was hoping you would side with me and I could continue to call this guy crazy. Yeah, shampoo first, Yeah, totally down, work your way down. But I that's just the you know, that's the process. I don't know if it's any better or worse. Yeah. No, I often shampoo last because I'll get my eyes full of soap and then get out and wipe my eyes off. You rent it

and then you go to soaping. Well, I rinse it and then like then I've got water in my eyes and I don't like water in my eyes. I don't open my eyes after after before they are wiped. I am super blinded by water. Yea, my eyes same here. It's terrible, it's painful, it's a bad scene. I'm with you, Dad, Okay, shampoo first, yeah, always, But but I just go on? Okay, all right, fine? Why the debate? Yeah, like this, this doesn't matter. We're all getting clean, right, personal preference,

you know. But I can get behind that. The soap sets from your head still wash down your body, whether you've soaped up or not. You're still getting the benefits of that soap on your body, whether you've washed it with soap first or last. Shouldn't make sense if you go from top to bottom, though, because you want to wash your face before you wash your butt. I could get behind that, right, Yeah, maybe the other way, right, We should move on. I think it depends on on

the methods and how many different times of soaps you've got you're using. That's fair. Yes, So if you're putting a bar of soap in your butt cheeks, then don't rub the bar of soap on your face afterwards. It's the old credit card method. Yes, Okay, if you're doing a tip drill with a fucking bar of soap. Okay, now we definitely in the shower. A high five, buddy, right and b at least I know you're all squeaky clean. Good to know. Can a bar of soap get

dirty? That's the real question. God's yeah, yeah, you'll see it sometimes since its got stuff on it. Well, then to hold it unto the shower for a little bit, yeah, yeah, but it does that. Like I've lived with enough like roommates to where yeah, they just use the bar of sub directly on their body, and it's like, probably shouldn't do that because you're covered in hair and now my bar of soap busy and you haven't cleaned it off. You mother fucker. What do you do if

you're not doing directly on the body? Do it one of the lufa things or something. You can do it in your hands, like I'll I'll rub the Yeah, I get enough soap from that, for sure. I'm not big on the like the body jail stuff for having to do stuff on your hands, because then you're just constantly having to reapply things and do things. I used, I used it. I went through a bottle of body wash

given that a try for for the first time and not a fan. I have to do it at the gym, and it's it's not great, but it had it had grit in it, which I appreciated, some nice like exfoliated rough stuff, scour yourself, yeah, which which is helpful. I do like the gem stuff because it's the same thing. The shampoo and the body wash is the exact same. So you just put a shipload in your hand and just go to town on everything that seems wrong somehow. It's a

shampoo plus body whatever thing. It's gotta be all right. I don't I don't like that you want to combine shampoo and conditioner. I'm right here with you. Yeah, Like, let's do it. I've got one, yeah, one thing that just does everything. Shampoo, body wash, and I think Dasher as well. It's got shaving stuff, it's got like aloe stuff, and I just get fucking covered in the stuff. It is for breakfast. I mean, how many different things does it do? Is it caffeinated?

I wish I wish I had a grit though. Now someone made it caffeinated, so yeah, you can definitely. Yeah, it's bad news. Uh. Email from Dominic Hey guys, My one question is where is Resident Evil seven? You think it's even being made? Or is Capcom stuck in remake mode? Didn't they say they were making one? Did they? They said they're remaking two, but I would assume it be a different team, right, Yeah, that couldn't be. Yeah, I thought they said,

well, I don't know. Yeah, certainly Capcolm is capable of making an R E two remake and an RD seven if they want, Yeah, because it's not like they're making other things. It's like why not, But they's got the time with all these remakes. Though six went the way it went, it was fucking terrible, and like also, I feel like, didn't all the stories out of there imply that like six happened the way it did because nobody wanted to make it or something. I thought the word on the

street was that Resident Evil was not like a hot property within Capcom. Yeah, so they like what intentionally sabbatized. No. I was just saying, it's like, you know, like somebody got a sign to it to do it. It was the opposite of a passion project. Yeah, that's what I mean. It's like, hey, somebody's got to make this, Like come up with an idea, you know, I'm not. I don't know.

I spoke with some of the people that were that made Are You Six, like as they were announcing it, and at the time they seemed reasonably excited. Oh you know, I guess you could deepen, but they were all speaking Japanese, so who knows. And sure, I mean they were ambitious with it, like it's a super long game with like what six different characters? Yeah, they were, you know, it was going forward in a way. Five certainly did not fucking reviewing that game, God damn,

it just kept going finding out how disturbingly uncomfortably long it was. It was like thirty hours long. Like a fourth campaign opened up up. Yeah, just when you thought you were done, just when you thought you had finished all three characters stories, Hey here's a fourth character. God damn it, just when you see now that sounds like a good value. Fuck. I don't know. Is there any like aspect of Resident Evil that you think they need to return? Like, what would you even do the remake? I

just want more of that old style. Like I hated six, I thought five is okay. I mean four is definitely my favorite. But like now that I get that old game play. I find it's just like a more militarized like shootery take on four co op and so. And even if you weren't doing coopy an AI part, so she never really felt alone necessarily. It's still played really well. Yeah, I like I enjoyed five quite a bit. Yeah, okay, but it's not as good as four. Vinnie

and I played the ship out of five. Yeah, like her trust Yeah we got we got all the achievements. Actually, now that I think about it, weird. Yeah, but yeah, I want more of the old style now that I've gone back and understood it. Yeah, just what I thought. That's what six was supposed to be. Like, returned to the six goes way hard because they because that was in six, they were like, zombies are back. That's true. I think maybe well the different poms

or whatever the fun they were. There's bows, bows, there's definitely bowl. I mean, the different playable characters had slightly different styles, like Chris was full on cover shooter, Gears of War kind of thing. Yeah, and then you had your mansion stuff with Rookie cop le n S. Kennedy, right, Yes, that's right. Yes, Leon was in one of those. I never got passed the first one. I thought, oh really, you didn't play Oh my god, No, I played like to the

end of the first story, right, this one sucks. Yes, Leon was kind of your your throw back to four or whatever. Okay, Chris was full on like shooter style. Uh god, I can't remember the name of the character, the mister of Unlocking, and she saw all these line puzzles, Claire, it was what's his name? I forget what his name was. He had all kinds of weird monster powers. Yeah, Jake, Oh that's right, and then stupid that I can remember that, yeah,

Widow. And then you might be able to guess who the the secret super secret character was. Yes, wait which one? Okay? All right, why is that guessable? Wait? Hang on, I don't know. They've always affect you pulled that out. I was like, wait, what they've always They've always played her up as like the shadowy operative who's making things happen behind the scenes four. When they listened on PS two, they had one mode, right, So if you're if you were going to have a hidden

playable character, it would it would be her. Sure about meat Hunk? I think I don't know I have meat was Mortal Kombat. Hunk is whatever? Wait is there a hunk and a Tofu? I think Hunk is just a dude tofu. Yeah, Hunk is just a guy in a has Matt gas mask kind of. I don't. I have no idea what they do with a new Resident Evil. I was still working on that a multiplayer game, right that hasn't come out yet? Yeah? Which one? Uh? I'm not talking about Operation Raccords. Yeah, that's the one. No that

they what's it called? Announced one? Break was original one, wasn't it? I cannot remember. There is some fucking shooter that they are It is all fast. I think they put out some new footage of it a week or two ago. Yeah that sounds okay, Yeah, I cannot All right, I'm gonna go out to this the fucking capcom Press site and fucking look up the name of this fucking game. Yeah, I do it. We need to know. Did you have to play that game for work or were

you just playing it? So the first one six I was just playing it. Yeah, Tim reviewed and you have the luxury tapping out whenever you felt like it. I think most people had g I played it just so they could try and improved Tim Rong. We yelled at him that last he gave it like a nine or something that he loved resme six still stands by it, and we gave him ship that in three, three and nine point six those are both mediocre to bad game nine point seven five we still give Tim.

They resonated with Zim though, Yeah, he really liked dead Space. Three is by far the least of the Dead Space games for sure, by far. And six, from what I've played, is the resident game. Yeah, well people didn't like three. Yeah, yeah, three is the only one I didn't really play. I'm having issue who was connecting to the wireless fireless wireless fireless? Wait? No, guessing there it goes. Okay, tell me your search methodology for finding the name of this game. I'm

going to site. That's probably a more targeted approach than I would take, which is to go to Google and type in Resideval shooter Resideval or just no, that's not it, uh, Dragons Umbrella Corps, Yes, right, haven't heard of it. That's not in make Did they announce that like three years ago or something? Nother thing to operate on you say, you're thinking of the other shooter that they announced that thing in Hawaii. Yes, okay,

Captivate, Yes, captivate. And then the last Captivate was in Rome, where I sat down with the RD six developers briefly and ate a meal next to them and we chatted. We chatted about how weird it was that the numbers were so high, and then they laughed at Final Fantasy. Yeah, and now they're making you know who's laughing out? Yes, it's like but they were making are six? Who's making the Numbrella Corps? Oh? Man, I don't work about it in this last Let's move on. Actually,

this is way too much talk about. Just say it's either Platinum or Gearbox. I mean that's usually m hm. They announced it in September at the oh Is, at the press conference for TGS. Okay, yes, right, okay, Yeah, it's being made in Unity. Okay you really? Yeah weird see a lot of big publisher games being made in Unity. I've gone through three articles that I don't mention. Yeah, yeah, that's all right. It might actually be just an internal Capcom teams. I don't

know. I've heard what I need. Here here's an email from Stewart in Birham, Birmingham, Alabama, No England, Birmingham. Sure, maybe you tell me High Bomb Squad. Just a note on the Xenomorph design in Mortal Kombat X. You said it looks like a dude with an alien helmet on it? Does? I mean it's like just a muscle bound looking human like

body with an alien head. I mean that's not too far from the Xenomorphs, were they It's just the triple age from Immortals, and they put a xenomorph lankier kind of thing, and uh well, the reason it looks the way it does is because this is a hybrid of the Xenomorph and a Baracca. Yes, suck it. This was done to please the fans looking for a new Baracco while also adding a completely new take on the character. You can see from the trailer that the alien bursts from Baracca's chest and has adopted

his blade arms as a trait. Just wanted to drop this useless knowledge and thanks again for the amazing content. Okay, yeah, that actually makes me feel way better about that character part Tarcatan. It's a real good word to say as one of five people on the planet who didn't hate Prometheus. All right, that ties that ties into both the Mortal Kombat and the alien lore having having it kind of you know, hybrid eyes the same universe, adopting

the genetic traits of the hoster. Whatever. Yeah, leather Face lives there. Okay, Tryborg, Tryborg. But I wonder if I wonder if well, I'm sure there's probably footage that would answer this question, but I wonder if that means the alien just plays like Broca. I mean, maybe you don't have multiple styles, some modifications obviously, you know, it's also got a tail and stuff to work with. But you think the blade fury is there? Probably, Yeah, it's gonna move if it's got the arm blades.

How do you not? Right? Yeah, I haven't seen any footage. I don't know. I didn't realize until a couple of years ago that Barack is actually making a spark with his blades and that's what the scrapes them together. I thought it was just like a weird fireball thing. But he's doing a cool thing. That's just weird because most projectiles and fighting games, they don't come close to bothering to just find out, like, how the fuck does Jack's make that thing he's gonna arm? Why can Jack's grow it

to be like twenty story stall. That wasn't a friendship that was just fatal And where does he get that arcade machine from? It's always just hanging out. He brings a crane of every fight. Okay, No, he turns into dragon mode and then he picks up the arcade machine, puts it up there, gets it ready. That's Luke Kang. I mean yeah, it's also Jaxson't dropping arcade machea. Was like, there are two arcade machine.

There's an arcade machines in a friendship, though, isn't there. I think there's one where somebody plays a game, but the only fatality is Luke Kang? And is it three? He drops the one block and run right, yeah right, and then Jackson it just gets big and steps on you. Yeah, that's was it? Run block run, No, that's the that's one where he tears off the arms and he just flexes. That's a really

good one and then he just staying there with blood squirting out. No. No, that's the one that's like hold down low, punch four down down. Know that the arm one is like run block run run blow. No, you're thinking about where it was block block block, block high kick. No, I think I used to constantly do the arm rip. One. Am I thinking I'm thinking of two? I'm always I'm never thinking of two.

Okay, you like playing three better than two? Yeah? Oh man, he didn't grow into No, he did not, but he had the arm rip. I'll I'll play two with you. I'm and I'll play too with you. No problem, world kind of bat two is a good video games. Yes. Stewart left a PostScript which says fuck most of London. Yeah, I bet I have Yeah, there you have it. Yeah time Louis and Chicago writes in with a message addressed to Dan. Okay, as we all know your friend in mind, Dan Ryker claims to love America and

to this effect owns several pieces of American flag clothing. Does he know that this is against Federal US Flag Code? Is he familiar with Section one forty six Subsection D, which respectively state the flag should not be dipped to any person or thing and the flag should never be used as wearing apparel, betting, or drapery. Does he know that he has the Benedict Arnold of our

time? Granted, none of this is actually against the law, but let it be known a baby bald eagle cries every time he wears the stupid looking American flag pajama pants. That is referring to wearing an actual American flag as a literal, like I took it off the flag pole and then draping yourself in it, made a jacket out of it or something. I am wearing clothing with the design of the American flag on it, which is totally different, subtle but crucial distinction. Yeah, okay, I would never sully the

actual flag. Okay, except for my actual American flag that I own still has red mist on it from when Alex spitt it at me. Who's so, I think that means that it has to be burned. That's the one case where you can burn a flag as if it's been soiled, right and wrestling related mist and then it's no longer an American flags to burn it immediately, wow, if it is involved in a wrestling event, even a pseudo wrestling event Madonna tried at one time, Yeah, got her? Well?

How many times was she champion? None? None? Yeah? I mean yeah, that's a good point. We'll see, all right, Well, I will accept your defense, I suppose, Okay, all rights up. Yeah. One more email from Teagan in Canada. Why doesn't know whatever? Bring up that only one of the Chaos emerald is green. Being green is literally the defining characteristic of an emerald. Otherwise it's a different gym, like a heliodor or an aquamarine. Why aren't they just chaos gyms or something.

Look, I'm gonna direct you to the other word in its name. Yeah, chaos. Okay, all right, that's your answer. Go on, No, is that it? Okay? Fucking chaos? What color is this emerald? Well, we think it would be green, right, No, fucking chaos, chaotic, It could be any We don't know too much. Fucking chaos might be one color one minute and then something else next. Is that in the comics that you get? Yeah? He likes chili dogs in the comics. Also. Okay, all right, Well there's your official in

world Cannon answer. No, no prize for you. Uh. That was depressingly business liking to the point. BombCast, Giant bomb dot com emails something there and stuff. Nothing from tumbler. Huh Nah, We're gonna take a tumbler. I mean I can take a look at it. I kind of had my fill. I had slight tumbler time out I had, I had my fill for a couple of weeks. There, I'll take a quick look, all right, quick look tumbler yep. Oh god, I can't put

that video on YouTube. Definitely not hang on only pull it up? What does donut create push? Dan actually had the answer to this question. This is like, Yeah, I was talking to my girlfriend about this, who was watching the upf and she started looking up the donut create push stuff,

or she saw the chat talking about it, or for him. I don't know exactly how, but she found out that it is a mistranslation of sorts no of U. Basically, what it's trying to say is donuts create cushion for the pushing yep, and donuts make you fat, which creates more cushion for for pushing. It's comfy, So donut create push. It's just kind of a weird translations, just a raw distillation of the concept. So that is what it means. It's not completely random. I'm sorry, where did

it come from? Where did you see it create push? It's from love Beat the Hot Korean Oh okay, oh yeah, it's not here for It's great time. Same it's free to play check it out. Yeah, it's called love beat got it? Real good stuff? Got it? Uh? Hummus or guacamole? Uh? Both great? Yeah, no, different, Hummus is healthier. I would take guacamole if I if I, if I can only have one, I would prefer guacamole. But I always preferred just

pure avocado. Take guacamole. Really, I mean they're both awesome. Yeah, I've kind of so good. Yeah, yeah it's gross. I'm still very excited about both those, having tried them like the last year and eating them a lot now. Yeah, yeah, they're great. Can't beat good. Thomas is also nest How hummus is great just like a dip you can feel good about eating it's seasoned, right, Yeah, I think it's really

good. I like it a lot. There's hummus season. Uh oh boy, more on a questions finally, Okay, yeah, you know, let's just you. You asked for this, God damn it. Uh any chance of witness spoiler cast? I don't think so. I think we just addressed that already. Uh. What superpower would you least want your significant other to have? I mean multiple choice? No, this has to be an existing superpower from fiction. You tell me open a new question. Yeah, that'll

be cool, I guess, yeah. I mean it's it's about that, you know. It's like you have to you know, trust is inherent to a relationship at some point. So do you want them to be able to read your mind or something? Sure? Okay, you're an open book. I just threw up playing The Witness should Steam Warren Players of games that have lots of reports of causing motion sickness, especially with VR coming. I have seen multiple people claim that there's an FOV thing on the PC version of The

Witness that they are not digging. Ye. Yes, I've seen that complain a lot too. Some people also seem to think it had to do with the lack of any kind of like a crosshair or like a dot in the middle of the screen. That's interesting. When I worked at the theater, we had Blair Witch and we had to warn people there was a lot of shaky motion. Oh yeah, we had people like running out of the theater throwing Yeah, so we made a disclaimer public disclaimer. It's good of you,

hi guy who threw up again. Have you ever been prevented from playing a game you really wanted to play? Because of motion sickness or something similar being too drunk. Yeah. Absolutely, I saw Jeff quit playing Mario three ones out of motion sickness. Yeah, that's that's true. I was almost gonna throw up. I had to stop playing Supermaro Brothers three. That'll happen. Can we what? Can we have some some real talk time here at

the end of the show. Sure. Yeah. It's something that I've been wrestling with after Super Mario Maker came out, and I've been thinking about it. And it's not a this is not all the year, this is yeah, yeah, this is not a hot take. This is this is just a take. I don't think I like Super Mario Brothers three. What what, dude? What? I'm sorry this I hear. I think it's a good game, and I have like no personal attachment or affinity for it. I did not own it came out, I didn't own it, and in

his hey day, I rented it and beat it and returned it. It was the first Mario game that I did not own upon release. It was after one and two. That was the first one that went really hard with like secrets and the overworld map and getting the whistles and the like that did so much more than I ended up renting it like twice. So I rented it, finished it, returned it, and then got it again and then

did the whistles and all that other stuff and returned it. And then, you know, years later, or you know, maybe even a year later or something, ended up with a copy of it just by virtue of you know, eventually that game was a dollar or less and just kind of end up with it. But I don't know, like, there's there's no other than I thought it was cool that there was the one world where everything was big. That was great, And I like the trick to fall through the

platform to get those two whistles and immediately warped to the end. Like I don't like the auto scroll tank level stuff. The Raccoon Tail is cool, but it's no cape. But Creebo Shoe. Creebo Shoe is amazing and not in enough of the levels, but when it's in a level, it's special. You see that shoe and it's like, oh fuck, it's gonna be a Crebo Shoe level. Yeah, you go across those munchers, yeah yeah. But I just I don't have I have no love for that game.

I never did weird someone who loved one and two, right, Yeah, when I came out. Yeah, and I feel like by the time three came out, it was kind of like, you know, maybe we're moving on to the Genesis, and you know, maybe it's like we're you know, this stuff was kind of around the corner a little bit, and maybe even I was already out. Maybe No, I guess it wouldn't have been. It's nineteen ninety when Mario three came out, right, it sounds,

but well, Mario World was ninety one Japan. Ninety two would have been. It's like, yeah, like I was kind of just yeah, I don't know, like I was losing interest in the nes at some point and kind of just like turning to you know, computer games and then The Genesis, and you know, by that time, then you know, Sonic the Hedgehog was out, and you know, that's a cool guy. I mean, I guess I have to wonder that he tapped his foot. Yeah, I mean that game was like everything to me when it came out. But

I was also five years old, right, so I don't know. But I mean I go back to it now and it still plays great. Yeah, Like I look at it now, and go like this is cool.

It's you know, this is it's a really well made game. It's it's in a lot of ways, it's the first true sequel to Super Mario Brothers, because you know, two in Japan was just the same as Level Pack, and then two here was its own weird thing, like if the first time they were able to iterate truly on their concepts to like this to the fullest well, and it laid the ground work for a lot of the stuff that Mario World just went crazy with year as you know, the over World

and the Secret Exits and Star Road and like Mario World perfected it. And I will say that Mario World is the best Mario game. Yeah, and then that's and I've always held that position, uh and but it's like it's one of those things that, like, you know, as I'm making levels with the Mario Maker tool sets and stuff like three just doesn't hold any appeal. And at one point I kind of started thinking, like, well, I just not like the raccoon tails, Like, well, I don't like

it over the cape. And I went back and played some Mario three, and I was like, you know what, like just I don't think I don't like their implementation of the overworld and my favorite parts of Super Mario Brothers three. It's a top two list and they're both tied for first. It is crebos shoe and the sick fucking drums when You're Underground. I don't like. I don't like the Couper kids. I don't like LP kids are totally

different. Okay, super Lings were originally as children, but yeah, all of them named after you know, like that stuff was kind of cheesy. The Nintendo Power coverage was so over the top and anticipation, but by the time it came out, like maybe I was a little done with it, And I think because of the age thing, I was probably a way more suscept to it because yeah, I was five and I had an in Power subscription and I read all this stuff. It's like, oh my god,

this sorks. I mean, so I was ten when the nes came out, you know, so by that point, yeah, like I said, I was almost you know, I would have been too cool for Brothers three exactly, and I was. I was. I was heading right into Sonic the Hedgehog territory because I like the cool so I love that too. I loved Sonic, but I was definitely tremendously susceptible to hype back then. Yeah, but there's there's and it's it's like this uncomfortable thing. Like the more

I think about it's like, this is an incredibly well made game. I think it is just literally like I did not connect with it then and like have no that's like zero love for it. Like I could play it and go like, this is really well made. There are a lot of parts of this that are like super well done and when it came especially for when it came out and all the other stuff, but like no passion, And yet with Mario World, you're kind of on board with most people's opinion that

game at the time. At the time, I wanted every exit. I still do. Yeah, I got him then, I want to get him again. I just still I can never far about the time to do it. I did it a couple of years ago. Yeah, it's offer fund Still it's so good. That game is so good. It's the best. But you know that was you know, buying a Supernintendo and you know, like, of course that's going to be like this whole next things. What do you think I think the wild it's a wild it's a crazy thing.

Yeah, I don't know. It's like preferring Mario World. I could totally see, but like straight up loving one and like not carry at all about the other. Yeah, weird. I don't I don't know it win or why you died inside. I don't understand that part, but like you brought him back to life. Sure, but like everything you're saying about the game is you know why it's so you know, universally, I think loved So

I'm having trouble understanding. Yeah, what's going on here? Like in general, I think it was just you know, it was it was a game that I just I didn't own, sure, and so I encountered it quickly. I stayed home from school, I called it I've rented it, and then was sick for multiple days, uh to finish it because I was so hot and heavy to play it. And then like I was done with it, and I was like ring out, all right, what do you prefer?

Do you prefer getting a wand at the end of the world and turning like a walrus king into a man or destroying a castle in a comical fashion. I kind of like doing get doing drop kicks to a castle. Yeah, that's pretty good. We're going out in the distance, like the rocket go off and a land on the hill and then the hill has a band aid. Yeah that's great. I love that stuff about some planes made out of donuts. Yeah. The Super Marinol World is the game that we can

all agree on. Yeah, as a as a society. That's what I've reached for first. And I'm perfectly okay being the person always got into the ready these the one person who just doesn't have it for Mario three, Okay, I wouldn't say I think about that game often, but you know, I don't have any animosities for it. I think about it a lot. It's just a slight step in the Mario pantheon for me, World is number one, Three is number two, and then the Galaxy games and then send

Shina, then sixty four. I see. Now if you're crazy, there's like congratulations, You've made me seem totally okay. This is the topic for another day. Jesus, the people live wide open, all right. Do you do half an a press and finish levels in Super Mario Sunshine? I don't think so. That's a heavy question. Also a question for another time. Bodcast at giant bomb dot com is the email address and bobcast tumbler dot com. Did you prefer ta get out of here? All right? I

think this lightning is doing weird things to my head. Yeah, we're gonna walk out and it's gonna be like that. I'm starting to see stuff. I'm just gonna go read Steve Kim's Twitter now and just look at all of the witness puzzles in real life. Just go check that stuff out. Yeah it's yeah, it's a real good, real good work coming out of there over the weekend. What's they doing like chronicling it? No? No, no, just like you just want to go. Let just go over the

Twitter. Alright, Yeah, there's some some there's some good material there. All right. Well that's going to do it for this week's podcast. There's some stuff happening this week, but I think the schedule is someone in flux. Yeah, I don't know what's going on and nail a few things down. Yeah, there will be things, but we're not quite sure what we're winning. Those Giant Bomb East folks got it's more curable space action, yes, and more on the way. Yes. Oh we're on SoundCloud now.

Oh, if people care. Yeah, it's an altern you know, if people we're gonna doesn't change anything about the way you're getting the show. But if you like SoundCloud, you can go to SoundCloud dot com slash giant bomb cast and you can subscribe to it there. It's a good service SoundCloud. SoundCloud. Yeah, I don't know good things. It's uh yeah, I've I've had an account there for a while. There's neat stuff about it. Audio audio through the internet. Yeah, you can get it, yeah,

a lot of ways. Great, all right, well let's go do it. Then we're gonna get the hell out of here and go to something else for seven days, and we'll be right back here next week for another edition of the Chip Podcast. M