Giant Bombcast 05/13/2014 (Premium)

Ladies and gentlemen of those listening at home, those listening in your cars. You're listening to the Giant Bombcats. Today is Tuesday, May thirteen, Soldiers and sailors that see everybody. If you're in space right now, concentrate on what you're doing first, then relax and listen to the sound of Brad Shoemaker. Hello, Daniel Dwyer, Hello, Drew Scandlin Hello, and Greg Kasavin Hello. If you're trying to go to sleep, listen to Brad Shoemaker.

Good night, Daniel Dwyer, good night. Don't listen to true so listen away. Listen to Greg Sabin, good night. We're here. We're gonna do a podcast for you all, for your entertainment and ours. Uh and let's just kick it off with a little Brad Shoemaker. Once you've been up to the last week, Oh man, what haven't I've been up to? I don't know a lot of things. What have you not been up to? Most things? Have you been snowboarding? Have you been making clay imitations

of your own face? Maybe? All right, but I don't have access to a kiln currently. Okay, Yeah, I got a whole shelf full of wet form faces. Yep, just ready to go. Great. Yeah, it's good for practicing kissing, so it's like a fire up. That's what they use them for, kissing with your penis. Uh. If you're trying to go to sleep, don't listen to any caravella, Brad. What have games have you been playing? I dabbled with Super Time Force over the

weekend. Yes, what's dabbling? But I got through the tutorial world, okay, which was like the first three levels, and then got into the second set of levels. Yeah, but you played a lot more of it than I did. I like that game, so tell me about it any okay, just turning it back on me. Yeah, that game is. That game is really cool. It is not the breakneck uh just kind of action oriented shooter that I expected it to be. Though. Well, I'm

gonna tell you about it by asking you questions. That's that's that's a when the bids. We call that the turnaround. Okay, So tell me about

the time mechanic in it. Well, I mean, so it is a left right shooter, but you die in one hit, and you're gonna die a lot because there's a bunch of bullshit going on all the time, but the second you die, you can rewind time to whenever you want earlier in the level, right, and pop back in with the same character or a different character to you know, utilize whatever unique abilities they have, but the previous life will still be active when you come back in, right, So

you know, the layering characters on top of characters, basically ghosts will be fighting behind you or simultaneously. And each level is about start to off with like sixty seconds to get the level done. You can find some pickups to extend that time, but a lot of the challenge I found from this game comes from trying to beat the level in sixty seconds without rewinding, which I

find kind of almost impossible and probably by design impossible. Yeah yeah, I mean, like they've trained you pretty fast, you know, like that very

first boss you get to. You cannot just wail on that boss, you know, with one character and beat it in the sixty seconds, Like, it's just not possible, right, So a big mechanic of the game is to let's just say, for example, you'll be shooting a door that takes you fifteen seconds to blow open, right, but by stacking four of your ghosts there, that door now takes fifteen divided by four, Brad three, that's unfam So you have five guys stacked there and the door takes fifteen seconds.

So now the door is fifteen divided by five and it takes three seconds to knock down that door. And so then you pick up Every time you rewind time, you actually rewind the stage clock. So now you regain those lost ten seconds. That makes sense. Yeah, does this play? So that's a big, big mechanic in the game is basically taking her ghosts and stacking them over and over to uh, get past certain obstacles faster. Now,

each character you choose has a different attack. Uh, you know, there's a guy with a you have a basic attack and you have a special attack, and uh, you know there's a guy who just has a gun that shoots bullet bullet bullet, but you hold down the button. He has a spread and it's like a you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger esque. Actually I guess it's Rambo. I think his name is John Rembois. Do you choose characters right the starter or is it? Ye? You start off with three.

There's there's there's the guy he mentioned who's just kind of straight up seam gun guy, there's a sniper lady, and then there's a guy who only has a shield. Yeah, I think his name is a shield. I think it's his name. But they start layering new characters on like almost immediately. I think the very first level, you pick up a fourth guy. Cool. Oh you mean you start with three unlocked. Yeah, but they don't even imply that there are others, So it's it's kind of a nice

surprise. Every time you pick up in Your Guy, you start with one in the level, and then as soon as you rewind you you get to choose another character. Right, well, yeah, you pick your one for the level. You don't have to you don't have to use it. They just pop up them in you at the beginning of the level, and you pick here you want to start with, but it doesn't matter you actually change per Yeah, you don't even have to die to do one of the what

they call him timeouts time out. Yeah, you can do it whatever you want, so really okay, yeah, no, no, no, no, you can pop it whenever you want. And the fun stuff about pick upon new characters is they're all kind of context sensitive. For it. One that's a dumb word for it. They're all contact sensitive for the level you're on. The dumb word. Yeah, it's a dumb word. They're all look for contact sensitivemadically appropriate here you go for the level that you're on.

So like I was in let's say this Mad Max World, h that was a level like nineteen ninety X or whatever had turned into like this Mad Max World fighting in the Funderdome and in the Funderdome, yes, and uh wind up getting a character Melanie Gibson who was going to take me through I was in prehistoric times and found a dinosaur on a skateboard to help me out, and he was very helpful, chomping guys. I forget his name. I think of Zacha Source. Yeah, I think it was Zacha Source. That

sounds about right. It's a weird like cerebral game though, because you know, you played out things a certain way, and then you'd do a time out and drop another character in and you can change the flow of what you did before. You know, like you can shoot down that door two seconds faster, or like do something to a boss so he's in a totally different

position than he was the first time. And then you've got your clones that were locked into those previous actions, and all of a sudden making things line up in different versions of events is extremely challenging. Does that make sense? Yeah, it is. It's really it's like a really weird, heady concept. Does it have any multiplayer stuff like bro Force? No, strictly.

So imagine this boss that is a sphere, right, and he's got four red points you need to hit, but you need to hit them as quickly as possible, so you can basically shoot one of them, do a timeout, position a guy on the upper left to shoot the other one, and do that three more times or two more times, so that they're all hitting them simultaneously. So it's something that would have taken you again thirty seconds the dude to straighten around him. Get all those just happens immediately, and then

you just have guys waiting underneath the pumble that boss with the guns. It's really satisfying. Do you get bonuses for containing the levels in as far little time as possible? I think you do. You get badges. I'm not exactly sure what the reward system is. I don't know if there's also a reward for doing it with as few timeouts as possible. Yeah, there there are four medals that you can get for each level, but we didn't figure out what all of them are. It games at super Easy, yeah,

copy mad games. Yeah. Do you find that like with these time games, I often get like overwhelmed really quickly. No, are since you're controlling everything, are you kind of hanging with it the whole time? So the only thing that gets overwhelming is what's happening on screen, and that's kind of a you know, of your own digging. Yeah, Like you're kind of like if you keep on rewinding in the same spot and dumping a guy in there who's just shooting spread guns, like, it's gonna be chaotic. But

I found that primer the video game. No, there are no bleeding noses. The writing is probably going to turn some people off, but I actually kind of like it. It's got a very i would say, like forum ish vibe. It is cheesy in the extreme. There's a lot of zs it ends up. Yeah, there's like a you know, a couple of kay thanks buys you know in there, but the guys who are saying them suck and they kind of know they suck, So like it's actually I find

it totally appropent. Your characters never talk, so it's just your general it's just this kind of like total idiot, like it just sucks so badly, and so every time he says all the stuff, it's just nonsense. It is kind of charming. It's not that kind of Saturday Morning TV kind of vibe to it a little bit. Yeah, kind of the art style is,

ah, it looks very scum engine to me. You know, you'll probably reduce it down to just saying it's a pixel the art, but the animations are fun and the and the pace is really good, just moves. So I'm probably about halfway through it if I'm judging by the maps at the selections selection screen, there's probably like three or four levels within each world. But the story is it's Mega Man style, right. You can pick which time, which era you want to go to, and the set up for

it. In case anybody wants to know if you're not sold already, because I do think it's actually we Brett and now we're talking about this before. Whether there's a narrative to this game and that's a draw or not. I think there is. Is basically the scientist, just as he discovers time travel is immediately visited by himself traveling through time, like as he puts the last piece of chocolates, I did it. It's it's like, I'm from the

future. You discovered time travel, and it's like, oh, it's like and then the world basically explodes you everything about It's not clear whether you did it or it's a coincidence. It's like at this moment you're invaded by like alien armies and all this stuff happens, and the future you comes back and he's like a this great general who has led the world to saved it from

disaster by traveling through time and writing all these wrongs. So you quickly kind of saved the present day, which is nineteen eighty X. And then you're giving carte blanche by the government to go use time to solve other problems. Can't make it any worse. Well that there in lines of the story. So like the first thing I did was traveled back to dinosaur age, and you know, you're like, let's stop the dinosaurs from going. It stinks

like they'd be awesome to hang out with. So I didn't play through that whole world yet, but they implied that you were going to fight the asteroid they killed all the time. You fight, you take on the asteroid. Great. Yeah, so it's that kind of stuff, and I think it's super fund. You play anything else, Let's see you mean that's not Doda? Did you play Doda? Oh? You know, we could talk about just video games, Bronn of Craigs here, this is my chance before we

get to that. Well, I guess we could talk about Sunset Overdrive. No cool, because at Bargo Lifted. Do you guys all know what Sunset Overdrive is? Yeah? I remember it from the press conference. Yeah, it looks. I don't think anybody really knew exactly what it was after that because it was just your typical, like splashy marketing trailer that was just slice commercial. Yeah, totally, it'll you know what, I'm surprised when I

saw the trailer or when I saw the gameplay thing that came out. How kind of accurate too, Dott. It looks yeah, I guess that's fair. I got kind of a Jets radio vibe, yeah definitely. Yeah sure, yeah, well Brad, Brad give us the kind of elevator pitch spiel here, Yeah, jets a radio plus like I would say, Dead Rising is kind of where I would huh, that's really reductive this plus that sure

way to the kind of frame of reference. It's dead rising issue in that there are like tons of mindless enemies just rushing at you all the time, and you've got this ridiculous arsenal to moan down with creeps perhaps not maybe kind of fodder. Yes, haven't it turned to zombies because of some energy drink?

Kind of energy drink that either kills you or turns you into mutant I think, I don't wait, it's for real, Yeah, it is, actually yes, yeah, because I apparently have been mailing out this energy drink to people. Yep, oh you would know. Yes, how did it taste? Like every energy drink you've ever done? Like so just like sugar to taste? Yeah, the worst. But yeah, you've got a you

know, Insomniac has their reputation for being masters of ridicular this weaponry. So all that stuff is in there, you know, And yeah, there's there's a lot of a lot of grinding on stuff that those things actually work in tandem, because it's kind of kind of a neat system you are picking like I think they're called amps, Is that right? I believe that's right. They're basically perks. They're like some of them are weapons specific, some of

them are for your movement, some of them are for whatever. But they have levels they correspond to them, and you have this like combo meter that the second you start like grinding a rail or hit a jumpad or whatever, starts filling up. So the more you are using that traversal stuff and also fighting guys while you're doing it, the faster that meter fills. And then every time the meter hits a new level, the perks at that level activate.

So it's kind of a momentum based thing of like more you're moving around, the more you're killing stuff, the better your powers get and the faster you can do those things and stuff. So it seems like sometimes you're getting shocked damage now, or you're getting like a wider area of effect on something, or like I think in one of the cases we say you'd get a giant nuke. Yeah, well one of the maxill shooting dudes. Are you kicking dudes? You've got a melee, but you've also got like weir you

have like weapons, have like eight weapons equipped. At one time, I think they said they're gonna be like two dozen weapons in the game or something great. They're all patchworky weapons, kind of Dead Rising style, like a lot of improvised like things taped together and like kind of you know, unlikely weapons that have weird functions. Shooting records. Yeah, there's like a final like a record launcher or an a K. I think you just had a a K forty seven at some point, so the swear word in it.

Yeah. One of the one of the max level amps they equipped on that a K was a chance to prock a nuclear explosion on every shot of a weapon. And since that thing is just like a rapid fire a saul rifle like every three seconds or whatever, you're just getting this huge fucking mushroom cloud as you're like mowing down this this giant horde of enemies. It's kind of cool. Open world. Yeah, it's open world. You've got like mission

givers. There are different factions around the city and stuff, like a LARPing faction. Yes, yes, oh boy, it looks pretty cool. Like it's it's this type of game I get into, you know, just kind of being able to roam around, really being really mobile, nimble and just find a lot of different stupid stuff. Do you feel like Tony Hawk? All the grinding is a little bit like that. Yeah, when you're when you're not on rails, Okay, when you're not grinding, are you running?

You're just running around blades or anything? I bet there will be really roller blades in it. Is that what they call that pickup in the UK? Skates? Skates? Skates? Yeah, inline skates. Yeah, there's probably some Irish word for it too, but I don't know what that is. The whole thing is super colorful, and I think they're kind of pitch is, like, you know, it's a fun post apocalypse. Yeah, the movement and stuff, isn't they all? No? No, I think

most of them are pretty gnarly. I've never been to one. No, really, this one is more Narnar. What if I had to know, I don't even know what that is, and I don't want to know. Did that come from one of Brad's dark places on the internet? Well? Yes, no, but yes, So when you're not grinding, then you're running around the whole game does seem to slow down a bit. It does seem like a game that you're gonna want to be moving constantly. Yeah,

I mean that's the thing with that. It's the incentive to get on the right. That's the thing with that whole combos system. You know, you're you're constraining your abilities by not using that stuff. Okay, you know, so you don't want to just run around and shoot a guys because it's gonna take forever to max that stuff out. So is it always just taking out massive crowds of of zombie. There's there's a couple other types of enemies.

There's like some automated robotic stuff going on, and it's kind of like Fashak Infinite Is itppening around on rails? Well, it's all third person and uh, it's a little no, it's more it's like Infamous Second Son kind of vibe. Yeah, Like just in terms of the traversal, Yeah, it's kind of similar to that. But I didn't think the dashes and gliding and stuff in that game felt very good. I think, yeah, it's just seems a little yeah you know, yeah surprise, Yeah, yeah, big

surprise. That's that's a pretty good comparison. Uh, And it's very colorful and cartoony. Yeah, and big old bosses. Anything else going on? Brand? When's the coming out they haven't said, but I bet it's Poliday ish later this year. Fall uh anything. Just don't just had the best match your life, you said when you were streaming something best live match. Okay, yeah, on that on the stream we do, you know, ironically the one time that we weren't streaming from my perspective, extremely well,

yeah, that's multiple games. You can't see this video for this podcast now. But I look radiant today. It's amazing. My hair is back. I lost forty pounds, but I'll be gone by the next time I'm on camera. But just looking awesome to see. I'll leave that one alone. If you know, Greg wants to talk about Dodo when it is his turn, and I'm not going to stop him. Greg, what you've been playing? A little bit of back to the defense of the install? Like I

remember, like right around New Year's Day. I think you made a promise to yourself. That's that's correct, I I uh, yeah, I played. I played the game pretty obsessively for like the last I guess like two years when with trans Sister Have Combat. If you haven't been playing Doda, well it would still come out at the same time. But but yeah, if I if I had kept playing It's listening at the beginning of the year. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so I hadn't played it since since January

and finally reinstalled it. The first time I saw you fired up on s Team, I was like, wow, the game must be in good shame just getting getting close. Yeah, but yeah, I mean I I got I've been been pretty busy wrapping up my my own damn video game last couple of months, so I have a lot of catching up to do. But yeah, the first like non my own game thing that I started catching up

on was a yeah, reinstalled Dota two. Got Dark Souls too, got Heartstone, got the like multiple Blizzard games came out like while I was working on my own game, which is crazy to me. So well, let's take a second for folks who don't know, Greg, what are you working on? What is your own game? I have been working on a game called Transistor, which is out next week. That's pretty soon May seven days from now, Yes, soon. So I'm just sitting here trying to contemplate

the universe and so on while I still can before it comes out. Yeah. So so yeah, that's been fun. It's uh, it's definitely like you get into a certain zone when all you're doing is playing your own damn thing. So it's it's really it's really nice to go back to to playing other stuff. And I really really want to play the Like the south Park

game is really high on my list. That sounded really good, just came out at a time when when I was not in the mental state to play it, and uh, yeah, there there has been a lot is there? Dark Souls Too? Have you had a good buy it out chair the I have that game. It turns out that game is hard. Yeah, so I I enjoyed Demon Souls and Dark Souls a lot. So yeah, Dark Souls Too was right at the right at the top of my list. Did you see any of that beef Souls? I did think about what's it

called? Project Beast was right floating around. I was pretty excited by what I saw there. I mean, like my joke was that from Software. Well, so there's like some skepticism as to whether it's legit or it looked whatever it is. It looks like someone is making a video game that looks like that, But from Software does like the best filthy rags of any game

developer I've evereen. Yeah, like the Swamp pyromancer from Dark Souls. He's just just the best, just disgusting rags and this like Project Beast game. I'm like, yeah, man, I want to just be this raggedy ass dude with a shotgun, like shooting zombie dogs, Miss Gates, I'm in whatever. I don't know. I want to I want to know more about whatever that thing is. Yeah, it looks pretty familiar, you know, just visually, I think in like an entirely positive way for her. For

me, there's something too. When I saw it, and I was very excited about having a shotgun or firearm, and then when I actually thought about it, took a little longer to think about it, realized that the bad guys will probably have firearms, and that's not a game I want to play. Yeah. The zombies though, right, the zombies and Project Best. Yeah, I don't know. I haven't looked for anybody knows. Okay, Yeah, if it's anything like Demon Souls, they're sure there's zombies. Maybe

if they've gone maybe they are sharpshooters who've gone hollow. I have no idea, but I don't want anybody shooting in those games. Spears okay, sword, Okay, Yeah, you got magic. Okay, I don't want to dude with a sawed off hiding behind a corner that's just gonna like glowed my chest. Yeah. If history has taught us anything, it's that anything ranged in one of those games as a fucker. Oh man, all horrible. It isn't got so much. A part of those games is actually moving like

a wave, like defending yourself by actually getting out of the way. And that's one of the fundamental things you can't do with weaponry like that, I

guess not if the's got like a gatling gun like stages up there. Uh so, Greg, what do you do when when your knee deep in like the development cycle, you just un so, you just yeah, man, you just freaking work through it. There's like a you get to a point where you know, the whole we have the whole game, uh playable start to finish at the beginning of the year, which which is where we wanted to be, where we would just kind of then spend however much time we

want to just kind of polishing everything. But at that point when the whole game is like like like all all the work is unblocked, basically like you could work on any part of the game, and you could put like an arbitrary amount of work into like any given moment. So there's just a lot of stuff that you could be doing. It's a really fun time because like the game, the game just like rapidly comes together. Like every single day, people are doing stuff. You know, the folks I work with,

they're all doing stuff that is like super inspiring to me every day. It keeps you, keeps you motivated. But there's a there's a lot to do at the same time. But like we really you know, it's only our second game, so we don't release games very often, so we we have like it's it's a big deal for us. Just you know this. It's it's been almost three years. In July, it will have been three years

since the first version of Bashan came out. And so yeah, we have we we are motivated to do our damnedest to kind of put everything we want into the stuff. So we make it so since you guys are self publishing, is there was there pressure from anybody besides yourselves as to the timeframe for release? I mean like, no, did you guys? Did you guys? At some point you're just like, all right, May is the month we want to hit. Yeah, that's that's basically that is it isn't short

how it went. I mean that that's uh, that was entirely up to us. A lot goes into picking your release date, in my opinion, because there is like almost never a good time when you're a you know, a smaller independent game like ours, which is like you know, we were

whatever at like Sony's E three events stuff. We have like a relatively high profile for an independent game, but even still compared to like some Giant Triple A game releasing in fall, we don't want to release our games in like October, because even though some Giant Triple A game is in a totally different genre, totally different context, it's still kind of there's certain releases that just capture all of the Yeah, you just don't want to be anywhere. I

don't want to be anywhere near them. I think I think there's like some debate as to whether that is, you know, true or not, but yeah, we want it. And plus personally, just as a as a game player, I've always been frustrated that that like like a million games come out in September and October and then like the spring and the summer is just dead. Yeah, I think that's finally been changing over the last couple of

years. Like August last year was like awesome, there's like two really amazing I seem to recall if they're like multiple great games coming out every week in August, which felt like it was new. So yeah, we felt in short, we felt May was a good time. You guys are lunch in Saint days Wolfenstein. Yeah, and you know that before you'd I don't think I don't think we. I don't think we were like super aware of that. Yeah, but we we did. You know, we obviously decided to

not change the date. Yeah, I feel like so different. Yeah, I think I would probably only help. Yeah, I think the week after that has Watched Dogs, So yeah, the week after his watch Dogs and stuff like that. And again Track and Guard three is out the same day. So so again, even in May when like his, you know, traditionally not not a lot of stuff comes out, even May is pretty crowded.

But we wanted we wanted to announce our release date when we were like sure we could hit it and you know, get get the word out there ahead of time, so that people would hopefully know about it when the time came. So what happens now that you guys, Well, I have two questions. Yeah, right now, I have two questions for you. First one, you were saying that basically the content was or the build was near

complete. About it, just say, at the beginning of the year, I said that the content we had all the content there, we like, the game was playable start to finish. We had the whole ending and basically we build our games like serially, so beginning first, ending last, so we had all the you know, the game was feature it was it was alpha essentially, it was feature complete, so that their remaining time is all

just you know, iteration and polishing so on. So when you're at that point and you're you're playing through and you're kind of some of the adds something, there's a new code, it gets injected, you have to force yourself to play that build as a fresh player and not just kind of run past all the skip skip skips and skip and run past all the stuff that you've

played a billion times before. For sure, we we try to do that at certain points, especially like near the end, when it's you know, the thing is it like you have to acknowledge that it's it's actually impossible for you to to just go in as a completely new player. Yeah, like like you can. You can put yourself in that mindset for sure and sort of play like someone with no foreknowledge of anything and just not make any assumptions. And I I can, I can. I think I can make my

brain kind of work that way. But for sure it's not the same as someone just going in cold. And you know, we play test for that, like we can't. We can't entirely. That's so it really it really is like I know exactly where to go, and I know how to beat this enemy and like two hit or like whatever two seconds, but now I have to kind of walk, listen to the dialogue or whatever, bang on

the walls. Yeah, this weapon, especially near the end. Yeah, you you have to check all those assumptions for sure, and play it through kind of nice and slow the way a normal human being you know, probably will on the first try. And and just like looking all those knicks and crannies and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, for sure, there's a lot of that and and and you know, and and in order to like just make sure you're not crazy or whatever or overlooking horrible, horrible things.

Yeah, you gotta play test it with with other people and see see what their reactions are. And especially when it comes to like game tuning and stuff. Late latent development will have guys who've like, oh, well, I'm one of the developers of this game, and I find that, you know, this sequence got a little bit too easy. It's like, well, you've been playing this game for two hundred hours, like or or actually that's

like nothing. So we we have to take a step back and yeah, we have to be careful about that kind of stuff for sure, and have a really solid sense of who, like what are the who are we tuning the game forward? How do you guys handle playtesting as a small developer, I mean, do you just like drag in friends and family or do you go through a more formal like third party service that. No, we we

do everything ourselves. We we like we get people to play it in short that we get different types of people at different times, like different experience levels,

uh, stuff like that. We get different people. They don't know necessarily why we pick them, but we may pick them for different reasons because we have some sense of their brains and what we think that they're you know, which insights we think that they would be particularly kind of just great about whether whether they're like, like, for example, you know, there are certain guys that we used to work with. They're like super whatever. They

were like tournament quality real time strategy players or something like that. So it's like, let's get in the guy who's gonna just break this game, who's gonna like it's gonna be probably be a total quick cake walk for this guy because he just masters any game he plays, you know, within seconds. Let's see what this guy can find. So that's an example of a guy. We'll get other We'll get other folks, you know, where we're really

interested in their perspective on the narrative or something like that. We want everyone's we don't ever the way we play test, we never sort of give directed questions and we never like even try to help the person in anyway if they struggle with something that's the game's fault and that's something we want to know about. So we just let them go and then give us their impressions on on whatever whatever comes to mind, and you know, we're, yeah, we're

open to whatever feedback. And then the team is constantly playing and giving each other feedback. Also, do you ever get some just random I remember showing from Meadow Games said that their Tesco delivery guys, like the grocery delivery guy, they just let him play it and see what he thought about Joe Danger when they were doing that. We haven't had our delivery guys play, but like a game development version of a porn guy shows up the fix table and

then the controllers come out. For sure, we ask like we also you know, get impressions from people who don't normally play games and stuff. For sure, Yeah, because we want it. I mean whatever, I had

my like three year old son play it and stuff. It's like he's not going to buy this game on Steam as far as I know, But that's still interesting to see how you try to get as broad of a range of perspectives as possible, not because you're necessarily making the game for those people, but just to see if they can even just if they can even just navigate it at all. It must be just interesting just to see different perspectives. Yeah, definitely, especially a game like a game like ours, like we

do. While we want it to be like engaging and challenging, but we it to be really easy to pick up and start playing, so you don't

need to like read a manual or anything before you start playing. So I mean that's why stuff like it's really what's yeah exactly, they don't they don't have those anymore anyway, but but yeah, the you know, that's why it's cool to like take the game to place like packs and just see like okay, yeah, see if hundreds of people, you know, if the game, if there's some problem with people like understanding some core aspect of how to play it, then that's going to be exposed real fast. You are

there any feuds or like bidding pools that get settled. We're like that stuff is is actually like that stuff can be super like bitter in my experience. So so we're we're pretty we're pretty against it. Uh, I've I've I've worked at places before where that kind of stuff happened and it was it was fine actually, but at our with us, like we're like, like I told you so is like super super taboo as an idea because we don't we don't do that kind of like like we just we we move forward from like

consensus. Anyway, if if there's like a point in development where someone is like upset about something we're not. It doesn't happen where it's like, well, just deal with it and like move on or whatever. It's like, no, we're gonna hash that out so that we we have to move forward together, like with the decisions that we made. If someone is like, oh, you know, we shouldn't have we shouldn't have done it this way, it's like that that person's just gonna yeah, that's not going to be

healthy. Have to imagine I have to imagine the size of the team, Like you can't proceed without everybody being on board. Yeah, pretty much, that's that's exactly the idea. And it's also like we don't have that like it's it's just basically a group of people are like specialists within the team or whatever. So they like if Jen our art director, you know, wants

to do something with the art like like she makes the call. It's not so we all give feedback, but the person who does the work is going to do the work in a way that they are, you know, that they feel good about because they have to live with it and they have to do it. So that for us that that works out nicely. At least it has thus far, and and uh yeah, it's it's fun. It makes makes it so that you know people working on uh, they're part of

the game. They you know that. That's it's it's all our Yeah, it's a small team. We're we're some people on bashing. Were twelve people on this game, so we almost double. It's a it's expanding too quick man, twenty four now yeah, yeah, yeah, next, No, but we we we intend to stay at that size where you can cram everybody into a room and yeah, make make those kind of decisions to cover. Did you do You look at it now and say, how did we make

a game with seven people? I mean I think we not really, because I mean we were you mean, like compared to the twelve we have now, well I assume you're with twelve. Nobody's sitting there and being like this is easy. No, it's still it's still because like I got nothing to do today. No, I mean we have like we have like taken on we have like taken on more work, which is why we have more people.

It's it's pretty simple in that regard. And we have like another game that we've continued to we have an existing game that we've continued to support while working on this game and so forth. So yeah, I think I think the reason we could have done it with fewer people on Bastion is because in some respects the scope of that game was smaller and also like we didn't have

Bastion to support. So yeah, it's things like that, so we we we also just like the one of the big analogies or the like on Bastion, anytime we needed an animation, we had to like call in a favor, like we didn't have an animator, so and that game animation. So that that's something where after the game came out and thankfully you know, did

did well, we're like, okay, now we could. This is just we didn't have a complete team on Bastion as where we see it, and we had to shore up those kind of weaknesses as as we move forward on this game. Let me let me just wrap up the development stories with what do you do now? Like so like now you're pretty much locked and loaded to go, everything's ready the continue down this horrible metaphor. The sights are aimed and triggers, Yeah, yeah, yeah primed, and what do you

do? No, it's a weird yeah, you you say yes when Vinnie Carabella Caravella invites you to be on the Giant podcast, Yeah, you buy your time, man, because yeah, it's this is like, this is the eye of the storm for us. It's just gonna But is it the most nerve wracking It's, uh, it's not because you can't touch it, right, yeah, pretty much. No, that is nerve wracking for sure. It's just look at it. You can't touch it, and you just

yeah, yeah, nobody, I don't know what anyone. Yeah, no one can touch it and you don't Yeah, I don't know what anyone like. Yeah, we don't like the you know, like we don't know what anyone thinks of it either, right, do you like kind of like oh no, we're still playing it a bunch, but it's like yeah, but I feel like if you were to play it'd be like they're they're for sure. I mean, I forgot. We we've had We've had plenty. So the good thing about that stuff is we we tend to we tend to squeeze

in. That's I think we're more looking for the stuff that we still haven't There's always something you didn't know about, no matter how much you play it. I think, so we're we're we're on the hunt for anything, no matter how many times we've played it, is there's something that we overlooked whatever, because you can just never you can never play it too much, I think. But yeah, I mean, for the there's still plenty of kind of administrative stuff we have to do to get ready for next week. There's

a lot of there's a lot of stuff we have to prepare. But it's but but transitioning from the part where you've been like feverishly making the game to the part where you're you know, you know, like you're not working on it actively anymore, that part for me has always been that part has always

been really hard for me personally. Actually, I'm more comfortable when the hours are long and I'm just working away on the game than when it's like, well you're done, we're still yeah, So so I'm in short, I'm finding ways to keep myself busy between now and next week. And and is

it nerve wracking? I mean, for sure it is. What what's your What's I was just about to ask, actually, if you have like a ritual like bottomless mimosas or no, there's nothing I mean I should, now now that you put it that way, I feel like I should have something like that. I don't. I don't know why I don't, So I haven't. I haven't worked on that many games, Like I haven't worked on enough to be yeah, I always you know, take it, take a shot at tequila, and you know whatever. I don't. I don't have

any kind of ritual. Every single game I've worked on. The it's the context has been totally different when it when it came out and stuff. So when you be on forums and stuff just checking what people think, Yes, I'm gonna be looking at I mean, I you know, I I solid, Yes, I used I care, Hey, I care about what people think about this game, or I want to know. I want to know what people think about it. So I'm gonna be looking at that stuff with

interest. I'm just curious, as like a former game critic myself, I'm curious what impressions there are of the game. And and then yeah, it's basically a combination of that stuff. Uh and and you know, seeing what practical what the practical response is on on like you know, the game's coming out on on PS four and Steam and and on Steam it's like there's gonna

be every computer configuration under the sun playing the game. Like we've we've tested it as much as we can with a pretty sizeable team, but it's still nothing in comparison to the world. Yeah, to the world. So we're we have to be super on point responding to anything that we didn't anticipate there and and we and we intend to be. So we're just going to be on standby. You know, you're seeing if anyone has has any trouble. What is that I'm now I'm kind of adding more questions as we go.

What is that process? Like of like you see the hints of a bug show up and then like over time you kind of just watch it and then say, okay, this is a bu No, not really, I mean it's way more immediate than that. In most cases. Sometimes there's there's like sometimes there's a weird mysterious stuff where like you can't if you can't reproduce it, then then it's just tough. But but typically, I mean it's easy

to get ahold of us. Our our email is like you can like reach us like within the game, uh, and you know our emails on our website and whatever. So if anyone, you can email you from inside the game. Not not exactly, but there's like a link, there's a whatever is there's this team. No, don't with the web whatever the internet. Yes, the Internet is available on Uh there's a cool story about Meridian fifty.

But yeah, I mean people will just if they haven't, they'll just email us, right, and then we just reply and started getting stuff like all I get is the black screen and then I've got seven monitors up to this. Yeah yeah, yeah, I mean we asked, Yeah, we just it's all case by case and stuff. Yeah, and we you know, as we gather information, it's like, yeah, you put up like

a you just tell people what you're working on on the Steam forum. It's like, okay, these are This is just like speaking from from Bastion experience, where I think that game shipped nice and clean on on PC, but but they're still like random little features that people want. It's like, oh, I I want to be able to localize this game in Turkish? Could you add support for that? Like like, we're happy to whatever those random

little things are. We love like looking at that stuff. And someone may have convinced you to rebalance the leaderboards at some point, yes, thus removing the previous number one seen number one account. Oh did they get Uh? I forget what happened? Like something changed about with the way you handled scoring and I lost my acts? Right someone? I lost what I thought would be my permanent number one spot on the leaderboard. Yeah, sorry about that.

Probably deserves so some changes are really good. Yeah yeah, knock that guy off. Yeah yeah. Supporting your game launch, I mean it's it's it's fairly for us, it's fairly mundane. It's a it's a single player focus game. We don't have to like be worried about like sure can people

hopefully we're not worried about can people even like play this game? But they're still just hopefully, you know, enough people will be interested in this game where there's just going to be some people who who want one thing or another, and we want to know what they have to say. Can I ask

you a real inside baseball question? Uh? When you're for Steam? Yeah, do you like is there like a web form you're filling out with like release date and stuff like that, like time this should go live, cost this should like like drop down menus and basically like you know, like radio buttons that you're just clicking and are just like release, yeah, cost support,

multiplayer support, uh, drop down. That's like when like a calendar that comes up, that's just like when do you want this to be released? Here? Do you want this on a Steam sale? Ever? No opt out? Yeah? So so Uh. There are still many very good human beings working at Valve Corporation, thankfully, though they have the degree to which that stuff And I don't think I'm saying anything that whatever. I mean, it's it's sort of it's wonderful to work with with that level of stuff.

It is. It is highly automated and just you know, relatively painless. Like it's actually changed. This was interesting for us as a new experience because Baston also came out on Steam and it's changed quite a bit o time. Yeah. Back back in the Bastion days, we like email, you know, we like told a man all the stuff and then that man,

you know, created a Steam page for us. Yeah, whereas here it was much more do it yourself, which was pretty cool because you could just if there's a typo or something, you don't have to be like, oh God, should I email this guy? Is this is this? You know? Am I gonna be bothering this guy to ask him to like fix this one thing for me. Can fix it yourself, and yeah, I fix

it yourself. It's it's great. Like I just imagine this crazy form you fill out and then at the end it just says like browse file, go to desktop, upload the buyer. Yeah. So it's not it's not quite it's not quite that absurd, but uh but it's really Yeah, I mean

it's it's like I said, it's it's been it's been great. It's been great to like finally get our Steam page up there, or doing all the trading card Steam achievement blah blah blah, all that kind of stuff we think, I mean, I think personally as really cool as like an avid whatever. Did you get your team Fortis two hats in there? Nah? Yeah, none of that set. Did you look into it? The thought the thought may have well, we we much much. You you understand that it

doesn't take much to start talking about done, so we we. Uh, but yeah, we didn't think that kind of stuff made a lot of sense for this game. Okay, I know this is turning into twenty thousand questions. No, I have one more, just because you mentioned having been a

game reviewer for as many years as you were. Once the game was finally know content complete blah blah blah, and you could play through the whole thing, Like were you able to resist putting on your reviewers hat and looking at that thing as a reviewer and like like did you feel in your gut like I know what I would give this game? Oh? I mean, well, like answer the question, so why would I? I don't know why

I would resist that. I think it's like valuable. I didn't. I didn't do like I did not like write a review of the game during development. Sure, for sure. I here here's the thing, Like I used to work at places where they're like what but what will what will reviewers? Like? What will they think? And it's like, dude, they like, do you play games like they think the way you like? If you think something about this game is shitty, Like a reviewer is probably going to

think the same thing. It's not not not to again I speak, I say this with the utmost of respect. It's not rocket science. Like they're not coming at it from some completely insane mindset that a person, as a game player you know, cannot fathom. So for sure, it's important to play it with a critical eye. That doesn't mean, you know, I actually have heard studios that will sit down and like review the game themselves and then like solve for issues that they bring up as a result of their reviews.

For us, I don't know, we don't have any kind of contrived process like that. We do play test it a lot. We're very critical as game players, I think, and we're critical of each other's work, but it doesn't get too much more cerebral than that. I would like to think my past experience helps me as a developer in that regard. So yeah, I don't know if that answers your question, but yeah, I think I think that like publishers, you know, trying to get in the heads

of game reviewers, what do they really think? It's like you really just want to know if you thought it was like an eight point nine or a nine. But you know, I don't, I don't know, Like like I've been out of the I've been out of the that game long enough to where you know, you can you can control the quality of your game, but you can't control the context, and you can't control people's experience with it.

Like I don't know what what mindset people are going to have going into it, and that's yeah, we're not going the Cobo and you're not going to have the transistor review event down there and yeah not this year, not this year. Have them over your house, yeah, dinner, you know, just play it on my laptop and help you write it. You it's there's no there's no apostrophe, and it's you were with without it's just bioh you are. Oh. I'll wrap up pastoring you with questions with what do

you so what are you looking forward to playing? Uh? And let me let me ask you actually that and what are you looking forward to seeing at E three? I like the thing at E three where it's like I had no idea this was going to be the or thing I care about, Like that's always the thing I look for. I don't know, I can't. I mean that project Beast thing I want to see for that, that's the thing recently that like, right, I actually want to see what that is

for real? What do you want to see Nintendo do something? Right? Yeah? Man, I want to see him do something. I want to see them bring the pain. I think, like when when Nintendo Nintendo's a game is still I think they're the greatest. They're you know, quite possibly the greatest game developer. Like when they when they're at their best, when they make their best games, those games are really extraordinary. So I don't know, I'm the kind of guy. Maybe it's naive. I continue to

hold out hope that Nintendo will like make something new. I would very much like that. At the same time, I'm very amenable to things like Metroid and so on when they again are new, and I really like I still play the three DS in particular rather avidly. I like me some three DS games. Yeah, so if there's like a new freaking fire emblem announced, I'd be very happy with that. For example, Uh, do what do

you want Metal Gear to do? I don't know. There's no date on five on Phantom End next year, which okay, yeah, I mean I I don't want I want them to make that game good, you know. I just I haven't played I actually I need to play Ground Zeros. The reviews of that one we're a little discouraging for me, But but I want to play it for sure, as having played all all the other stuff. But yeah, I mean, I will forever sort of hold out hope for

that stuff to be. It's weird and interesting self. I like my metal gear nice and crazy and kind of insane. Just just ambitious, you know. I think like those games are nothing if not ambitious. I think, I mean, you're obviously gonna be any three. I think so, I would like to. Yeah, I think I'm gonna be there as a as a civilian this time walking the floor. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think so. So you kicked out of booths and yeah, exactly, I

don't. Yeah, I haven't thought very far ahead after the launch of this game, so I will have to pick up, put my life back together in some fashion and see what happens. Is there any kind of like alumni association for E three where like, you know, I think it's more of

a support group. Yeah, but like, if you're a developer, right, who's had a game, Let's say you've even appeared on stage at E three, you or a player in the E three theater, let's say, right, some door at the old Yeah, is it just like you were always invited back? Or is it just like who are you? No, you can't come in here. I can't get a bad I really like the idea of the thing you said, But I think it's more the second thing of like, man, you were just you were last year's news. I

get the hell out of here. Read the one that I swear it was you. I was talking to a packs about the idea of Transistor being at E three, and I swear you were the one that said, like, there's nothing sadder than a game being on demo that's already out at a trade show. Oh uh, that may that sounds like something I may have said. Yeah. E three is very much about upcoming games. Yeah, so

I don't. I actually don't. I don't know if if Sometimes there are games when it's like a big publisher's booth or something, it's like, oh, and here's the game that came out, but yeah, created it a little bit like what three weeks old er? Yeah, three weeks old ancient

history by the time E three rolls around. So yeah, it's you know, I think three as a as someone who enjoys E three, I think E three, you know, there's enough upcoming games just fighting for each other tooth and fighting each other tooth and nail for for attention at that show to where they don't need recently released games to try to steal any of their thunder Drew. Hey, what's it like making a game? Uh? Well, how do you keep yourself? That's a whole process. Tell me about achievement

icons. What was the resolution? Oh man, sixty four by sixty four? Is it really that small? Huh? I think yeah, it's pretty something came out sixty king came out what eight plus years ago? So yeah, that makes sense. But it was funny when Greg was talking about like, how do people on the team know, like how it's gonna be reviewed. I think I think you're right, Like some people are kind of blissfully unaware or like ignorant on purpose. But I think a lot of people they

know. M you think our small team and like I didn't you know it was all dudes working on the game, not like higher up people who hope it I mean everyone hopes it'll be good. Yeah, but uh, some people I think have a more realistic, h view of it. We'll have to imagine. There are you know, spreadsheets and lists of things that people would like to get to but budget and I don't. I think there are things that even though your your game overall may not be great, that there

are things that you're really proud of and that that you can create. Yeah, like crates, that you can take pride in that you that you said. Okay, I there's no way we're gonna make this a great game. We just don't have the time of the budget. But I'm gonna take it upon myself to make this one thing really really good and be proud about that. So what else? What have you been doing? Uh in your long hiatus from gamemaking? What did you do this weekend? This weekend, I

played a fun game called What Happened to Me Last Night? One can be tough? Yeah, I hate indie games or playing Yeah, no, what happened to you last night? This? It was? It wasn't it was the night before? That's this is that DLC, It's what is the Night before? Dot com? Okay, yeah this this has never happened to me before. But so I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and I'm standing there in your bathroom and do you open your

eyes and you're like on a subway platform. Blood. Oh no, not again, peeing on somebody or a Gammy figure. Your No, I swear I was in my bath what happened? I start to get kind of dizzy. Oh no, And I think it was because like I stood up real fast went to the bathroom, like locked my legs, and my head's kind of hanging down, you know, like, and I go like, okay, I may need to sit down because I don't think I can make it to the bed without like passing out. Like like I felt the blood rush

out of my Yeah, my vision start to close in. So I'm gonna sit down. Pull on some g's right. Yeah. So I was like, I'm gonna sit down, and I don't remember sitting down. Fell asleep on the toilet? No, no, I was, I was standing Okay, So you did sit down on the ground of the bathroom. Oh no, we're not even on the toilet. No, well I was. I was peeing standing up. Stop. Yeah, okay, take a seat on your bathroom on the floor. Yeah, uh, with my backup against the

wall. I would never sit on my bathroom. I had just cleaned it, Okay, But I don't remember the act of sitting down. So I'm sitting there and I like, I still can't see. So I sit there for a good number of minutes. I was kind of I don't know, I was woozy, sleepy, sleepy. I had some alcohol the night before, I was super drunk. Yeah. I think being dehydrated probably helped this too. But I sat there for a little while, collected myself and went

back to sleep. I roll over it in the middle of the night, and my butt hurts, which is not the first time I've said this, And I figure I must have like plopped onto the ground. Yeah, like passed out and then fell back. Wow. Uh so when morning came, did you land on your cockxics? Uh No, on somebody else's cocks. It's more it's more the flesh. It's more like the muscle of my right

the glute. But yeah, I go into the bathroom in the morning and turn on the light and there's a giant Drew's butt shape hole in drywall. Wow. What Yeah, I broke my own wall. You're with my butta really? Yeah, I mean that's gonna be some force. Yeah, let me tell you it still hurts. Wow. Yeah? Wow, so fighting your bathroom. But I don't know, I mean, you've kind of really episodes of flower behind that butt for us. I know, I don't And also, like my neck hurts. Also, didn't wake you up? Ord?

Like you know, I think I must have passed out. Yeah, but like like from the blood rushing out of my head. Sure, but like you know you, I'm gonna make no assumptions here, but like, but first into a wall passing out is like that's a that's a special pass out. Yeah. Like so usually people go forward or down, but like not like butt out into a wall. I must have just like you know, tipped back on my heels and just kind of slumped to the ground.

Knock one. Goodness, you didn't go ahead first into the or like like this to the right, to my tub, to my sink. It's a large that you've been a nice like compact bathroom. Right, I've been into his bathroom, beautiful. Did you punch him in the gut and shove him into the wall? Wake up, Drew, Come on, I'm just gonna leave. Like you're lucky you didn't hit something on the way down. There's a lot of bathroom. Yeah, there's like a towel rack which would have

been right above my head. I didn't. I didn't hit my head or anything. So you just think you just kind of like from X time to X time, passed out but put a hole in the wall and then spend some time on the floor. Yeah, that's frightening. Do you think you were abducted? Maybe that's crazy. You have missing time, that's right to my knowledge, I don't have any other missing time. Wow, So that was Did you do go like CSI over your bathroom to try and like find

other like traject Yeah? Did you put your butt to make sure it was your butt? If it didn't match, it's a red string from the impact. Yeah, yeah, totally like start going like you know, okay, I would have had to fall at this time, and like my watches stopped. You know. It's kind of a weird spot too. It's like right above the molding along the butt, so it's not like it's it's not like a couple of feet insane. Did you try did you reenactive to see what

the motion would have been? No, didn't. Human butt wasn't made to bend at this angle. Good for you for having a butt that could put a hole in draw all, though, that's something like my butt would have just spread out and I just would have taken the blow and shock absorption, Yeah, a lot of more shock absorption, or it would have just been a full body through the wall. Uh just kind of like you know, cartoon style like arms out. That's that is? That is really something?

Man? Yeah it was weird, but uh, almost as weird as the other activity I did this weekend, which was watch Eurovision. Oh yeah, yeah, I could see put your butt through the wall. Yeah that was on your revision, wasn't it one of the acts? Yeah, people put in their butts through drywalls? So hang on, was that a good goddamn it or bad? Because as the only authentic European in the room, I

want to know if this is like something that is reviled by Europeans. No, this is uh see, I have to watch it because I was born there. You have options to watch the Eurovision, which is something I find completely beside. Well, Danny, why don't you set up Eurovision and then

you can describe the American perspective? Okay, okay. Eurovision is basically imagine all the countries in Europe were teenagers and they all put together this band of Battle of the Band's competition, but none of them can sing, so they just try and stand out using flare, okay, using interesting aspects of like I'm going to dress up as Mumford and sons. One year, Ireland put

through a hand puppet that was a turkey. Okay, so it's a giant challenge show for all of Europe. Yeah, basically involving some kind of singing. Yes, but you're saying that aside since nobody can sing, we need spectacle. Okay. Maybe I'm being a little bit unfair. Some people can, some people can, but they're still one in nineteen seventy four, and that's why they're famous. Really from Eurovision. Yeah, wow, Ireland's have

the hot Maybe this is why I'm so bitter about it. We haven't won anything in like twenty years or something, but we're the highest amount of wins. In the nineties. We were dominant, killing it kick everyone's asses. That's where river Dance came from as well. It was the halftime show and your oversion ninety four. Yeah. See Greg's not on his head, so yeah, see yeah we have Michael. Yeah, thanks a well, So, Drew, you were watching Eurovision this year? Yes, you see,

well I took notes. Okay, so I mean see Danny's like, oh why are you watching Eurovision? I also watched eurovisions so well, okay, but I do still love it. It's a. So it's super it's super corny, but it's so self serious. So if you're if you're in like the UK, you can watch the BBC, which apparently there's commentary on top of it, like Mister Science Theater or a quick look. Okay, so there's a guy doing commentary on the Yes, the original one was Terry Wogan,

who was an Irish guy. He used to present it, but he because it was on late on like a weekend, he'd sort of be the only person in the BBC at night times. We'd sit there with a bottle of whiskey. Yeah, and when funny stuff happened, he would comment on it and that became a trope. And then the Eurovision was kind of serious up until like late nineties, and then it started getting kind of goofy. So then his goofiness continued and basically Graham North News, another Irish guy,

took over from him, and yeah, he becomes part of that. In fact, they crashed into his at one stage during the during the show. Yeah. Yeah. So but the feed we get, which is like direct from the Eurovision website, is the standard, strict, like clean and very self serious. And that's that's why I like it because they think that this is like the pinnacle of art. Uh And meanwhile there's a guy behind the singer in a hamster wheel running and dancing. Oh yeah, who is that?

What country was that? Ukraine? Okay, the very first So before it even starts, they uh cart everybody out here and they do like the you know in the Olympics, where they cart every you know, every country comes out and people cheer for him. Russia comes out and everybody booze yeah wow, which is kind of sad because it's like these two you know, teenage girls. But that's that's kind of going. Where is it held?

It is held in whoever wins the last one? So this year was no In fact, we wanted so many times in the nineties there is a theory that we intentionally lost it because we couldn't afford to keep putting it on. We wanted like four times in six years. Yeah, it's pretty good, father, So is it Copenhagen? Copenhagen? Yeah, I can imagine Russian not playing while there. Uh so let me just go down the list here. I took some notes highlights. There was a French Lmfao okay, with

a song called mustache. Okay, I'm just singing I want to have a mustache again. You can see how this is like cultures. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So at the end, part of the the intrigue to me is the voting process, which doesn't sound exciting but it actually is because they go around to every there's like a representative from every different country and based on

how many votes they so they vote like American idol. Everyone in the country sends like, oh, I want to vote for this country, this country, and you can't vote for yourself, You're all Each country is voting for other countries, so you get to see political lines drawn there as well. Sure, so like and they show you they show whom the country voted exactly, so like all the old so you block votes for Russia, you know, all the Scandinavian countries, but for each other. Nobody votes for US.

Are the UK anymore? Right? Yeah? Apparently? And France got total two points? Is that two votes or is that all vote? So when you're each country rates ten acts from one to ten, and I think they actually skip the number seven and the number nine, so the top three get twelve, ten and eight points. Okay, makes sense? And then it just goes by one down to the bottom. Okay, So that means two countries gave one point to France. And do you remember I don't remember,

Okay, probably Belgium probably. I think I've given Russia twelve points every year. Really, they just always give them twelve points. It's just creepy that that stuff is fascinating to me. So every and every year it's something has happened in geopolitics that people are like, oh, I wonder which on what's going to happen with these two, like or in sports or something. And this year everyone was like, I wonder how many points Ukraine are going

to give Russia and vice versa. Right, yeah, yeah, it becomes kind of weird. Yeah, what else did you see on their Let's see, Azerbaijan had a trapeze artist who was doing her thing above the singer worth Worth mentioning one of two countries in Eurovision that are not in Europe. Yeah, also in Israel. It's real is in Eurovision? Okay, It's like whoever is part of the European Video count the Broadcast Council or something, are we we are not? Okay? Yes, okay, you could be.

Okay, let's see the Russian twins got boot a lot, and Danny thinks that they started piping in applause. Yeah, it was so how much they were getting. There was a certain stage where the laugh the booze had a little bit of clapping over it. Yeah. Yeah, Switzerland had a guy who could whistle really well and playing the violin. I believe Montenegro had a lady on ice rollerblades because the stage he used to stay the same stage.

Yeah, so she's on rollerblades but dancing like an ice skater and behind her on the ground like uh sparks would fly or like glitter. You know, I missed her. Did she put on the sick grinds? Uh? No, unfortunately, Now it's question when. Yeah, the Armenian group had a guy in the middle of sort of like how Neptune has a has rings and they're tilted. There's a Saturn also Saturn. Saturn has tilted rings. It's like that, but a keyboard all the way around. Wow, So that

was stupid, now you're getting it. Uh would he spin around? And yeah? It was weird. Let's see, halftime was like a space scientist singing Beethoven while everybody else stood on ladders, like not not a frame ladders, but like the straight up ladder is they like balanced on top of them. And then like there was a fog machine. Okay, yeah, I only caught a little bit of that. I was making Swedish meatballs. For

a lot of this, there was a something like eight hours long. Yeah, it was like I think two or three hours of singing and then voting. What's what was your highlight? My highlight, well highlight for a lot of men Europe was Poland, okay, with a song called we Are Slavic. Okay. I saw a story about that song and a lot of the lyrics were like this is our nation, We're Poland, blah blah blah uh. And meanwhile the eye candy on stage was just say going through traditional Polish

things like washing and churning butter referred to as borderline pornographic. Yes, they are super busty. Quote Polish women. Women. I don't know they want the ones singing, so the ones singing or the act I assumed if they're on the stage they must be, but they didn't. They didn't do anything besides just like turn turned butter seductively seductively. That's how you turned butter and apparently the people the people who vote in each country is not necessarily representative of

what the points that are given are. So I think there's also like a judgment panel that takes maybe suggestions from the people's votes, but then says, you guys didn't actually want to vote for Poland because that was disgusting, so we're gonna do them at one point. Yeah, like I think the UK and Ireland gave like twelve points to Poland. Yeah, it's a bit of like proxy voting from the people out there and like we want this, like,

ah, you know, I can't really do that for you. One of the reasons as well, I always loved the bed of the sort of transient nature of Europe as well, is that we gave we've given Poland's points for a long time because it's actually quite a lot of Polish people living in Ireland. So either it was people who were they were away from home or just like families have been there for a long time. And it's the same

with the UK. So you see all these relationships kind of appear. Maybe you just make up the relationships in your head, but based on what you know, but it's kind of yeah, it's kind of cool, and everyone in New Europe watches it because it's a sort of a seth deprecating spectacles. We're pretty silly, huh, morbid curiosity? Who won Austria? What did they do? She was a bearded lady for realsies, yes, okay, a transgender woman okay, with a beard, a great beard, yeah,

like a Jesus better beard than I can grow? Okay? Uh? Who's sang? Sort of like a kind of James Bondy sounding song like that you would. They are all original songs, like everybody writes, they're not allowed to be commercially released before the show. It's kind of like Adel's Skyfall song. Okay, yeah, but uh yeah she crushed it, like she ran away with it. The last two countries they didn't even like. Yeah, it's a formality at this point because it's possible for anyone else to win.

Oh wow, that was actually one of the closest ones I've seen in a while. Oh really, usually the winner is obvious by halfway. Oh wow? Okay, Uh any other Eurovision highlights or tidbits that you want to share. My Swedish meatballs were great. They were They were a real winner. Yeah, they were a real winner. Is that the night you got poisoned and put a butt hole in your wall? Yes? It was okay,

they were fantastic. Yeah. Uh did you do anything else? It sounds like a solid weekend, Drew, but I'll ask just for be a completionist. Anything else happened? That was it? I got it, took it easy after okay? After that? Oh wow? So what do you have to do? Do you have to gonna spackle your wall and fix it? Egither, try and explain this one to the homeowners association or something? Right, I don't know, would never believe you, Like, Oh, I

passed its button the wall? Yeah, look it's the same shape. It was weird, man, I flushed the toilet and a book exploded. Uh, Danny, Well, how was your weekend? It's pretty good. I feel like you've shared your embarrassing story. I feel like I should share my embarrassing Okay, last night I was catching up my good friend Alexa Skadia on the vis and I decided to walk home. It was a nice enough evening.

It wasn't too late. I'd had a couple of beers, but I was okay, and I was crossing the Visadero and sort of scampering across the roads, no cars or anything, across as quickly as you can. Yeah, I don't want to, don't I'm gonna amble. It's the roads for cars. But there's like a central dividing thing which was hired than I thought it was. I didn't really know. Yes, that's in the name, and I jumped over it and clipped my toe and just ate it just on

the road. Felt like an old lady fall downstairs, just no control over how I fell, so sprawled out elbow, my pants, my leg was bleeding a bit like my hand had that you're not gravel thing it happens to put your hand down and get all those things. Yeah, that's all kind of nasty, but that's not me the worst part. I got home then I was fine, just like you know, pants are done for clean myself up. Fine, you know, it went to bed in my haste.

I guess I tried to ramshackle some sort of a bandage situation. I don't have any bandages. Bandages are like the sort of things that somebody who moved to a country five months ago just never buys. I just never acquired them. So I woke up this morning and there's this dude, a buddy in mine who's living one of his friends is staying in our place, and he's walking in the hall. I walk out in my underpants a shirt. I'm going to go have a shower. And I only realized then that what I've

done is I've actually duct taped a sock to my arm. Where'd you get duck? I was doing some weird green screen stuff in my own Oh yeah, I was gonna say a bandages, no, but duck tape like day one, wrapped the sock around my arm. It obviously didn't stay, so then I duct taped this completely. Forgot about this and looked down. I was like, oh, I don't usually do this. How did it worked, sir? Oh yeah, SOX covering blood not on the bed. Gross

job done? Yeah, job well done. Careful crossing the street, Yeah, I'm gonna use the pedestrian one cross so we have them. We cross the road. We paid uh yeah, we paid a lot of good money for those blinky signs that are on the corners. Should use them. And they are everywhere, they are everywhere, and they count down here. There's so much fun with Alexis though, so he wanted to sprint as far away as quickly as possible into the road. What else did you do? Game

wise? Played a bunch of It was the last game of the Premiership in the UK, so I played a bunch of FIFA, played a bunch of f one as usual. What I got into was, sir, you were being hunted. Yeah, yeah, I've played a bit. It's great, it's I've I've been interested in this for a while because it's made by Jim Rosenald, who is from the sort of golden age of PC Gamer UK magazine

and where like Kieran Gillan was there and stuff like. Those guys are like some of the best writers, like wanted me to work in you know, games, journalism and stuff. And so he's the second in one because Tom Francis released gun Point last year, so it's kind of it's crazy, this new this breed of guys who wrote about games for so long, much like Greg actually who are releasing games. I really like it a lot, actually more than I thought I would. For folks who don't know, it's basically

I know you guys did a quick look of it. You are first person stealth game. You are being hunted on this like archipelago of a bunch of islands, and you have to collect these objects in the world to piece to get a a machine to get off the islands. And essentially you start with no immunition or objects, and you have to dodge these sort of quaint tweet English robots that are walking around with shotguns. It's kind of like to jam and earl, is it? Yeah? Yeah, collecting something. I just

realize that. Sure. Yeah, I think funky plus funky and more. It is quirky. It is quirky, but not as much funk. You're right. Uh, yeah, it's got a lot of atmosphere. Yeah. I found the world to be a little empty, Yeah, sparse. I've found that. I've done a couple of different plates throughs, and I've had ones where I've been quite bored, and I've had ones which were immediately amazing. And I think a lot of it is based on how early you get

a gun. Have you finished it? No? I'm still then games like that, like any sort of open world sort of like first person thing likes Skymer fall Out. I really enjoy just spending time there, taking my I'm

not really looking to complete them super fast. But what I found is that it's one of these games where once you get a weapon, because the stuff like ammunition is relatively scarce, that it actually creates really compelling shooting combat, which I think is kind of one of those rare things in first person games. And you're outgunned for sure. Yeah, I mean even if you have

a pistol or something, and if you shoot one. I got a blunderbuss at one stage, which was taking them out in one shot from like forty yards. But the thing was so loud, like they all came in, they just and then suddenly you realize you've got you haven't got enough ammunition. But I really like it. I tried to make a swim for it. Did that robot thing get you? Boy? Something in the water does not want you to leave that island, just the fair warning. Yeah, I

found it interesting. I think, like you said, I think you can roll the dice and have a hit or miss scenario, like am I gonna wander around for a while and see nothing? Or is this action gonna pop off immediately? And sometimes it has gone like I can loot these houses. I find it awesome. Item I found like a radar in the quick look that just pointed me in the direction of the of the Yeah, yeah,

which I thought was awesome, like it just bepep. But then another time I ran around and never found a gunner and axe and was just throwing bottles the whole. Yeah, it was actually very hard, and I like how they're not too upfront a bed telling you a lot of how that stuff works, Like you don't know how far the robots can see. You don't know. You know you've learned it. If you go and grass you can actually get around relatively easily. How different it is a nice the stuff like the

birds when they move. If you run past the bush and the birds go, the robots will see that and come looking for you. Like it's just a fun game of like discovery, where many first person games, when you play them, you understand ninety nine percent of their rules right off the bash because they're just established, whereas this is there was so much stuff that you got. I was discovering while playing it and dying that like dying was enjoyable

because I was learning more about the systems. Yeah, it's an an interesting game for sure, and not very expensive. I think, No, it's I think it's like twenty bucks. I think is it last year? But maybe I got it on there was a little sale on it. Yeah, anything else. I played some Assassin's Creed for Have you completed that? Yeah? You have. I think you're like the only person in the world. I think the only person in the work on top of the leaderboards checked me.

It's very hard to find a game. But no, it's something other people have. I'm having the same problem I have with three. I think it's a good, enjoyable experience, but I just can for the life when we get into it, skip board of it at some point. So I feel like I'm checking boxes. Yeah, one too many, like languild follow emissions. Yeah, you can't get too close, but you can't get too

far away. Yeah. Like it's cool like the Yeah, the boat combat was I really liked how you like didn't win mission two nights score right, blew up a portion and then hopped off the boat and went in like you do impressive. Yeah that's see. That's the thing. And maybe it's knowing that I'm going to have to do twenty of them, knowing that these games take twenty hours. I'm like, you get sick boat up grades? Man? Yeah, what's wrong with you? I feel like that I don't like

our gameplay loop. Let's see. That's like if you were to like sum up what last generation was for like so many like that genre of of how open world games work. Like I just I don't know, I don't understand actually why that game I find so trite. Yes, infam a Second Son I really enjoyed, And they are so similar in terms of I think one is like four to six hours, the other is thirty to thirty five hours. If you're going to collect everything. Infamous Second Son was like, here's

everything you collect, it's on your map. Do you want to collected? Go for it? Probably get it all like three hours. Yeah. And Assassin's Creed, for though they it is the most game like of any Assassin's Creed. They kind of just dismiss all the pretense of, you know, you're a serious assassin stealth or whatever. It's like, no, here's a gun, and like, you don't know, here's like eighteen swords you can

wield. At the same time, they still have a lot of you know, go here and find all these things on this island and it takes a while. Yeah. I liked it because let me do some of the things. It got rid of all, like I said, the pretense. So this is why I liked it and didn't like it. It got rid of all the pretense of trying to justify itself through story. Yes, it just said forget it. You know, you're not even an assassin. You just

found some robes on the beach. You're a pirate, you're morally ambiguous. Yeah, just go for it. You can climb because you're a pirate. I don't know, they all climb, right, uh? And that just go And then on the flip side of that was the whole meta part of you know, Ubisoft is making this game while you're playing this game, and I like that because their story had really got away from their narrative. I've really gotten away from them, and I feel like it was a good chance

for them to try and reset some of that. But at the same time, I did enjoy the Assassin's Creed narrative for the most part, Like I thought their story was a hook for me to come and play those games. So one hand, yeah, I find it to be some of the most fun. On the other hand, it was something that can probably be told in five hours that stretched out the forty. So yeah, I hear the criticism. I think they're fair. I like it. You should play more.

I really, I really hope watch Dog because I doesn't succumb to that kind of repetition. But it does have a whole lot of those repeatable activities. You know, there's like there are twelve gang I'm just pulling that number out of thin air, but you know there are X number of gang hideouts that you will take over over the course of this game, and stuff like

that. You know, like, ultimately, I guess if the minute to manage like action is actually engaging and fun, then, like I often, then I wonder did I enjoy Assassin's Creed games in spite of the core mechanics that actually just did I not like the sword play? Maybe I didn't. Maybe maybe the wonder of those games is what's lost and all that's left is what's the game is, and I don't like it. So I don't know.

Yeah, I Watchdogs looks like I feel like that has a game as a sense of place, and like I feel like that's what's missing from a lot of these new open world games, whereas now they're they feel more gamy than they did just when they first came out. You know, like even Sunset Overdrive kind of looks like it's very aware of itself. And infamous second

Son was you know, it was super gamy. It was like here's your magic powis and and it's kind of cool in one way, but I missed the sense of you know, place and ownership of the world and stuff. I think that's why I like the Assassin's Creed one the most for that, there's a reverence to the assassination, right, like even though the mechanics really they had to duplicate a lot of those scenarios and it got a little whatever. Every time you assassinated somebody was a big deal, and like you were

trying to do it without you know, being discovered. You're sneaking up memory had to like listen, we find clues. Like and if you contrast that to four, like you're literally double two hands with swords, just running through guys, spinning in circles. Yeah, just like you know, like a Queens and Art you're just you know, like I would just run through a door and like they'd be like, hey wait, stop, get into a back alley and be like all right, let's counter my way out of this

and like have a mess of bodies around me. Yeah, you went from you went from like kind of the somber Warrior monk in the first game to like Han Solo basically yeah, you're you're yeah, And I wouldn't even say Han Solo. I'd say like general grievous, like you're just kind of like just spinning swords around killing everybody. And even two had a kill with a purpose feel to it, right Like two was like you're moving the story forward.

These are big figures you're assassinating, and four is just like Sandbox kill everybody. Uh, you know, he's not even speaking Latin when he's killing somebody. What are you doing? It's like it's like that feeling you got with those early games that those places existed ambiguous to you, like that they were there before the game was and they'll continue to be afterwards. Whereas for

it feels like a playground that somebody's created for me from my characters. It's a difference between like a real, living, breathing world versus like a contrived

video game play space. Right, So, to be fair to four, they completely acknowledge that by saying that it is a game space that has been created exclusively fair because they're making that game as you're playing, Like, don't they go out of the other way multiple times to say like this is probably not what happened historically, but we think it's more fun this way, Yes, And like you're supposed to be the curator of what's fun or not by

rating those missions as you're doing it in game, and it's really really fascinating. Yeah, anything else, I don't think. So I'm doing the thing. Arsenal are playing in the FA Cup next week, which is like the big finale, a big cup tournament in soccer in the UK football, and so I'm doing my nervous thing where I'm just replaying the game over and over again. So I've played Arsenal Versus at Norwich probably I don't know, twenty

times at this stage a sorry Hull probably been twenty times. So if you do it enough, it becomes reality. Genuinely makes me feel less worried about the game. It's always send them to my Hey guys, I took notes. That's gonna go down? Uh when's that? When's that airings Saturday morning? Like? What time? And nine am? I think our time? Yeah, the f one started at five in the morning. That sucked on

Saturday. Will you be in a bar for that? I will. There's a there is an Arsenal supporters club, and there are the Bay Area Gooners, which the bag. Yeah, obviously I'll probably have to get there nineteen minutes before the game to get a seat, so it's probably gonna be fun fun Saturday. And then I'm doing the live stream with Rory on Saturday as well for operations supply drops. That's right, a little charity pledge drive.

What time is that? Slur starts at nine am. Rory's doing the first twelve hours and then I'm going to do it with Alexis and some more from nine pm until nine am. So very cool, very cool. Well, fellas, shall we get into news. Let's all right, fellas, that's the news music and that can mean only one thing. Emails. Get out, fuck out. I'm sorry, I gonna tack that again. That's the news music and it can mean only one thing. Emails. God, that

is the news music, and we're gonna go straight into emails. Thanks for joining us, Patrick for our new second Hi Patrick Clapping, You're here with today's news only only today's news only today's news of what happened in the last eight hours. Patrick, you are joined by Grecosovan, Daniel Dwyer, Brad Shoemaker, and Drew Scandlin, and they want to learn all about what's happened over the last couple of days. Well, that's that's a tall order.

That's a tall order. I brought a tall man. Kick it, baby, there was I'm well, krimly if I'm wrong on things that have happened since the last podcast, But I think all of this stuff is the stuff that you guys haven't talked about. But well, I guess the big thing today was that so like game Spy is shutting down, like the you know, the long standing multiplayer service that powered I don't know. As it turns

out basically everything in the last ten years or so. It was also bought by IGN, which for some reason I didn't I realized Game Spy was like dead five years ago. The last thing I saw GameSpy in was Borderlands. Is that? Yeah? I think Borderlands one had it. Yeah, I think so what they're just that's it. They're done to close the doors. Yeah, they're closing the doors. And like a bunch of developers started like

patching their games, like coming up with different solutions. I think Bungee like sourced part of Halo on PC and then like worked with the users to find modifications. But EA is shutting down just straight up fifty games like games like Battlefield. Uh was it the Well what does that mean? I mean, what do you mean when you can't play him on the internet anymore? What does that really mean? It means you have to use himachi? Okay,

good, thank you? Really you can't play Battlefield on the internet, not those old ones. What else you gonna do with Battlefield? Nothing? Uh? Anything that uh you know about in terms of why they're shutting down aside from being not a service anybody uses anymore of GameSpy. I that was a little while ago. Let's see, uh I have there's a link here? Uh it's O. They're just effective January first, twenty thirteen. I guess this was a while ago. GameSpy has ceased to make it software available for

licensing. Oh and then effective made thirty twenty four, game spy will cease providing all hosted services for games still using GameSpy. So I don't know necessarily the sequence of events. Sequence events are why but yeah, it's I don't know, it's it certainly makes sense that some games they would just you know, sort of figure, hey, these games don't need to be supported anymore. But I don't Battlefield two nineteen forty two. Yeah, there's a good

many and conquered games I met. I realized they're I think the ultimate shitty part about this kind of news is the couple of developers that said, fine, just you know, open source to code, let the community figure it out. If they want to support it, they'll find a way to modify the game, which is what a bunch of developers have done. That seems

like a reasonable way to compromise with the community. But I also imagine there are a bunch of legal issues why open source code doesn't make it out there. Brad sounds like he might know something about that more than I would about stuff. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure that they'd have to go through a zillion corporate approvals and all kinds of legal wrangling and stuff. I mean, I was lamenting nineteen four two in particular on Twitter earlier because

it's one of my favorite multiplayer games. I mean, it's yeah, it's a it's an indelible classic in that genre. Uh, And like I I lost count of the number of people who responded to some variation of like a wooden win was the last time you played it. It's like that's not really the point, you know. I mean, it's not an issue of an active player base so much as it is preservation, right, Like this game

is just no longer going to be playable new generation. How are they ever going to put Battlefield nineteen forty two in the Smithsonian now right where it belongs? How are folks is going to find out what's really happening on Wake Island

exactly people need to know? But yeah, I mean I'm totally with Patrick, Like it's a shame that, Like, sure, it's not gonna make EA any money to go back and invest the resources to update these games and make them playable, but like some kind of compromise with people who are willing to do that for free would be nice. Yeah, well, they'll just rerelease it. I you know, I don't know we'll get a Battlefield nineteen forty two two two that was in fifteen. One of the most frustrating parts

of this, I think is that I it was Argent's Twitter account. So I'm not sure if this was followed up by an actual announcement, but they did say three weeks so they were going to try something, do something to preserve these games. I think in relation to like Battlefield specifically, Like I used to be involved in clan stuff with Vietnam and I played BF two and clans and whatnot. You like, shit, man, I was there.

I can't even tell you the stories on these podcasts. Yeah, but they have lost a lot of their community with some of the stuff that's happened with three and especially four and like to rub salt in the wounds of be like oh and all these games that actually a lot of folks who play those play these games and clans actually do go back and play those games to also just say oh yeah, and we're also like not going to do that thing we said we do and back them up. Is I don't know, just a

little too much. Yeah, I feel like if whoever is in charge of the Battlefield community should do as much as they can to ensure that you do whatever legwork is possible to just or to very least make the server stup open to a lot of the community. We did games for Windows lives passed it all in good luck. I guess it does say here that unfortunately, due to technical challenge and concerns about the player experience, who would have a solution

at this time. However, we're looking into community supported options technical hurls remaining at the time, we don't have anything to announce. So I it appears

they have at least considered that. But you know, it's not like it doesn't It doesn't sound like anything is going to change tomorrow in that regard, because I want to remember, at some point I read that John Carmack had in his contract with Zenomax, you know, severer from like the Oculu stuff, that he would be allowed to continue releasing his code open source in the future because that was important to him, and that was something he eventually got

into his contracts. Yeah, matters anymore, But I don't know much about the Yeah, we all know how much Enomax loves letting John carrac spread his

code. I don't know. I don't know that much about the legal mechanics of putting that stuff out there, but it seems like it's pretty much an athema to the corporate mindset, you know, of it being a protected trade secret, and why would anybody in the right right mind put that out there for free or just once you've released it, you have removed your ability to you know, you know, like Vinnie said, do like a quick update or rerelease it if you wanted to. If the community has already kind of

taken that on for you. I wonder if it's like a combination of you know, preserving code and also just well, we don't have any plans to do anything in the next fifty years, but maybe on year fifty one some idea will strike us. So why why remove a revenue stream when it's not bringing in any revenue, but maybe it could in the future. I mean, I think that's a shitty attitude, but it wouldn't surprise me if that's

what it is. What else you got, Patrick, Well, all the all the Tomodachi Life stuff that went down with Nintendo was one of those big old things last week. They that weird kind of animal crossing sims like Sandbox Life simulationship game, Tomnachi Life. It's coming out on a couple of weeks student six, I think, and there's a big kerfuffle a couple of months

back, maybe longer than that. When due to exploiting a glid in the game, players were able to sort of create homosexual relationships in the game that was sort of removed through a patch that was you know, Nintendo claimed the exploit was modifying save stuff, so they were actually just trying to fix the game. But obviously that you know, looks bad. Even if even if

that's true, that looks pretty terrible in the optics. And then there was a campaign by a member of Neo GAFF called me Quality, where rather than boycotting, he basically just asked Nintendo would be nice if you in the localization process, you know, maybe thought about the fact that this is pretty important to Western values or is becoming more important to Western values, and fondoe to put that in the game. And they put out like a real tone deaf.

I think it's probably the best description statement. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but basically they said that by including homosexual relationships in the game, it would be tantamount to social commentary, which which really irked a lot of people. When they have just said, hey, we're just localizing a game, we'll think about it next time. Social commentary implies it's just it's just it's probably the worst wording they could have picked. Yeah, we'll

describe something like that, it's an acknowledge. Well, I guess tone deff is the right way to say it, because you know, by not including it, of course they're not doing any social commentary, right, so, uh, well, they kind of followed that up with another press release, right. Yeah, they put on another statement, which is basically what they should have said at the beginning, was that it's hardy. We we realize that this is important to people. We will can take this into consideration and

incorporate in the future Tominachi Life collection games. We just cannot do that for the localization process, which you know, it's not the fact that they didn't think about it in the first place when it was a known issue in the Japanese version, didn't have a better statement ready at the beginning, or at least this one, you know, you know, maybe suggests some problematic parts about Nintendo, but it's I don't blame people for being pretty pissed about it.

I think part of the localization process is sort of a you know, acknowledging cultural norms. It's you know, why in the nineties and Tenda was famous for taking out all references to religion from SNSs games. They actually have a long history of weird censorship going back years and years. But uh, it seems like they it seems like they understand, you know, what they

stepped into. But uh, it seems easily avoidable. You're not talking to your fan base the way you should be when you're kind of saying like, oh, we're not gonna get involved in this because we don't want to get into politics, when what you're doing is super political and charge. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean like Nintendo is a company that considers himself soon he makes games for everyone, and you know in their statement they sort of to the exclusion of some people, right yeah, yeah, maybe a technical hiccup, but it's it's certainly one that you know, when bringing it over, you know, probably should have been accounted for in some some fashion. What else are you guy going on? They're maybe new on real tournament. What are

they are is? What's going on? We're making a new tournament? Yeah yeah, I heard Drew was making it. Actually, Oh okay, but I'm gonna need some time off. We talked, We talked a little bit about this last week when they were saying, oh, we've got an announcement. What did they announced? Well, they announced it. It's basically going to be a sort of crowdsourced Unreal tournament created with some design, you know, some work coming out of out of Epic. It's gonna be free,

but not free to play. They were kind of trying to be very pushy on that term, because everything that's offered in the game will be free, but there will be a marketplace kind of like Valves Steam Workshop where people can create material and then you know, Epic takes a slice off of the profits. I don't think they said what the margins were, but uh, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if it was the seventy thirty split you know you see elsewhere. But yeah, it's like they it was kind of cool.

They launched a two extream and then forked the Unreal code to create to start the game. They did live. Yeah, I think it was staged. Do you think actually working doesn't really matter? I still think it's kind of cool. Is it gonna be called Unreal Tournament? Fork? Patrick? Can can you follow this up? Verified? From it below? I can follow this up up by quitting my job. Uh, that's cool as you're

any kind of date or timeframe for this stuff. They said, like prototypes are months off, but that you know, you'll see all that stuff in real time as it comes together. You know, I think this is a really smart way to bring back on Real Tournament, like like these types of shooters, which I had a deep affinity four and still do. Facing World is probably the best multiplayer map I've ever played, and they don't work in sixty dollars big box games anymore. Like that's just a market reality, but

making it free, having you know, moders incorporated into the marketplace. I mean, Steams already been doing that for a while, so you know, it makes a lot of sense that they would try and adapt on Real Tournament to that because you just, I mean, on Real Ternament three was not a great game for a lot of reasons that went beyond just selling that game for sixty dollars. But I just don't think you can make a new on

Real Tournament and sell it for full price anymore. Yeah, it'll be an interesting I'd love to see the tech that comes out of it, you know, I hope it's gorgeous looking game. But you think they're developing a platform for this or will be integrated into something like Steam or an existing plato. I think Unreal Engine four has hooks for the stuff already. Okay, so you just getting executable and we'll kind of have all this you know, mod

support in it. I mean, I don't I don't know if the consumer facing tools for integrating those stuff are out there yet, but yeah, I mean what they're doing is effectively yeah like Steam Workshop, okay, you know, I mean this is this is TF two or Dota two, Like that's how these games work. You know, they're totally free right mechanically, you know, but they're making tons of money on just you know, people making

stuff for him. Not to mention, they have an engine that they want to get out there, which which I think, like they had the announcements around GDC that they're they're you know, Epic is finally making Unreal seemingly like a lot more accessible to smaller teams, which you know, the previous console generation is like dominated by Unreal, right, It's like so many BioShock and Batman, all these games borderlandes ran on Unreal, but now that they're kind

of few frankly like fewer and fewer are these bigger studios using using Unreal, tons and tons of little studios have been using Unity. So I think even just this just my own speculation or whatever, but even just from a business standpoint, it's like, hey, we need to like kind of adapt something here. And so I found that Unreal tournament announcement really cool, and you know, coupled with the earlier announcement about what they're doing with Unreal Engine,

and it seemed to just make a lot of sense. It's like, oh, that's cool. Put it in people's hands, get give a lot of people incentive to like learn this stuff and to feel ownership over it, make it better and whatever, and then see what happens. Yeah, They've they've

got some adaptable, nimble business people over there. Yeah, And I mean that stuff has been that type of mindset seems like it's been like monstrously successful for Unity because Unity has its own you know, built in store ecosystem where you could just like make stuff for Unity and as it's like middleware and stuff. Yeah exactly. I mean, they're these there are a lot of independent games that are made you know, with Unity and with like kind of these

so called like a quote unquote off the shelf. You know, you buy it, spend fifty bucks on the Unity Store and solve some major problem that you're having. I've I've I've I've hung around multiple Unity developer or people working with Unity at different developers and like just listening to them talk shop about like

the plugins they're using and how much easier it makes their lives. So I can make for like Unity that lets the controller be detected if you powered on after you've launched your game, because you know, I know there must be a market for that. I want to make one that just makes trees real fast, just like just like speedy, fast fast fully. Yeah you got it? Now did you do it? Patrick? What else is kicking? Well? Harmonics launched to Kickstarter. They did that was like a that was

like a week ago. Yeah, sometime in the middle of sometime in the night. I think it's last Monday. Actually, is it last Monday? See what they're up to now? Yeah, they're they're bringing back amplet or trying to bring back Amplitude. Yeah. They I'm trying to see, I'm trying to see what they're at. They were asking for a two tientficant amount of money seven are insist seventy five they million dollars. Think I think, I think as the days a couple of days ago, they were projected to

not hit the number who projected who like what is? What is? Who said that like pack it or something? Comes like no, no, no, no, no, they're There are sites that predict I don't know if it's algorithmically or if people are sitting there eyeballing everything, but yeah, there are sites that say they're like side bets and this one, this one has a sixty percent chance of making it. Oh wow, go to go to

kick track. It's and that's the useful tool that uh, you know, it's not specific, but uh or it's not you know, necessarily always right. It doesn't take into account necessarily the the emotional end of Kickstarter where people are really excited in the beginning of the end, because it can't it can't

account for that an algorithm, but it does. It does use the amount of money being submitted each day and then try and figure out what it's tracking too if it stayed just on that path without you know, accounting for the emotional beginning at an end and right now it is trending towards five hundred thousand dollars, so so significantly under Currently, Uh, do kickstarters have anything where it's like kind of like you you can't resubmit the same project within a certain

amount of time. I think you can that that game Treachery and beat Down City. Just like they their first Kickstarter failed, they just like did another one the following month and they succeeded. So I mean, I think I think he had they change your goal. I think he asked for a little bit less, but it's a it's on an order of magnitude lower than the Harmonics one. But you could definitely relaunch a Kickstarter if at first you don't

succeed. Interesting, Okay, this is Harmonics's first Kickstarter. Yeah, they've they've never done anything like this before, and they're you know, certainly probably on the higher end of studios that have turned to Kickstarter for a crown fighting

opportunity. But it seems like they're running into some of the problems that a lot of these six starters tend to have that are one console specific in that, you know, one of the ways that Kickstarter projects tend to try and you know, get a lot of people on board over the course of a Kickstarter is by announcing multiple platforms, and so this is inclusive to PlayStation because Sony owns the rights to Amplitude. But you know, things like a PC

version, you know, would probably go a long way to getting a lot more people on board. I tend to wonder if them committing to the name Amplitude maybe backed them into a certain demographic of people who would be willing to contribute, that maybe wouldn't have been as much of a problem if they just said this is pretty much amplitude, guys, I don't know that Amplitude and frequency. Yeah, but I mean that rock Band PSP game was basically Amplitude

unplugged by Great Crates in that game. Yeah. It's an interesting news story alone in just the sense that seeing bigger companies go to Kickstarter for what you know, I'll say, are like passion projects, right, These are projects

that might not have mainstream appeal. There are things that people probably have come at them, audience have come at them and be like, you should make an amplitude and you know them being like there's no market for it, and trying to go out to Kickstarter with the realistic or I don't know, I've never made a game before a lot of money, which I assume they have budgeted to be like this is how much it's gonna cost or a portion of it, and to see if the audience will back if it's interesting, and

I wonder if it will see more of that coming down the road, you know, when will Activision do one? You know, like when will we

see the big guys just the big story about this for me? I mean, Harmonix is one thing, but to have this occurring under the auspices of Sony, yeah, like they make a video game console, you know, yeah, but they're part of a major multinational corporation, you know, and it's not their kickstarter, but they are allowing it to happen, you know, yeah, And like it's probably the biggest video game company to be involved

in one of these things, even tangentially very interesting and it'll be interesting to see, you know, if this fails, If this succeeds, set me. Will this be a barometer for that kind of stuff? I think what's really useful about kickstarters like this, though, is that games cost a lot of money to make, So, you know, as much as I'm you know, sort of criticizing some of the approach and Harmonics has taken with this

one. I do think people don't realize that when you say, hey, go make this game I really want, but you also want developers to be paid well, how of health insurance, you know, all the things that go into uh supporting you know, like a proper development culture that isn't just scraping by like that should costs real money. Like I really doubt that seven hundred and fifty is you know actual Yeah, no, yeah, I think they've already said there if they hit the number, they're going to invest.

Oh I'm pretty sure I read this that they're invest like something like a million dollars. But they need to you know, make sure that you know, they have to hit a certain certain threshold to make sure they can do that.

And even if that even if I'm pointing that out in my ass, like it's essentially games are really expensive and I think people have so little understanding of how much games lost and something like this where I think Harmax is not a company that's going to bullshit you like, even if they failure, if this doesn't work, I think all that should really tell people is that, you know what, like when you say, hey go make this game like

that's a lot of money, Like it's not. I think people don't have a sense that seven hund fifty thousan dollars is actually not that much money. It is a lot of money, it totally is, but it's also not much money in the context still making video games. It's not. Yeah, you know where they should just start pitching games instead of kickstarters, just like they should just have like Star Citizen, where like Star Citizen will make a planet that is your game, like you just land on this planet and it's

amplitude At this point, is what are they up to now? Eight hundred and fifty billion dollars? Think there is when you say, yeah, we need know one point seven million dollars to make Amplitude, and then you know, see something like Star Citizen just basically absorbing cat like enough money, million dollars, enough money in some vault that is just now absorbed like a black hole sucking in all the money. If people walking by it like money's just

duplicated, it's crazy. That game better come out and it better be fucking amazing, or better come with a ferrari for like each person who buys it, because like I don't know how to make games. They don't know how much money it costmates games. Greg, you're probably the know the most. Here's forty two million dollars a pretty good budget for a game. Uh well, so even that, I think, to Patrick's point, so that's an

extraordinary amount of money to generate game developer. But but relative to like Triple A budgets, it's not world. No, it's not out of this world. I mean there was I mean, Patrick, this may be on your on your list as well, but there was like the recent Activision news going around that like Destiny is like a five hundred million dollars bet that they're placing.

So compare like five hundred you know, it's an order of magnitude even greater than yeah, Star Citizen, but you know, Destiny is is definitely on the high end. But yeah, I mean, uh, for for a crowdfunding project, Star Citizen absolutely boggles my mind. To me, it's really it's really amazing. I agree with your your impressions. But yeah, like once you're in that crazy, you know, Triple A stratosphere, I mean, that's like your freaking marketing budget for like a couple of weekends or

whatever. When you're getting crazy TV, crazy TV spots and whatever else. It's just on operating on a totally different level. But yeah, and then it goes all the way on on down. I mean, Patrick, I agree, it's like the three quarters of a million dollars sounds like completely insane relative to most kickstarters, but even smaller, medium sized developers can burn through that kind of money, you know, really really quickly in some cases.

I mean they're saying, they're saying, you know, March twenty fifteen is when they're going to deliver the game, and that's you know, a little under a year from now. Imagine. I don't maybe it's somewhere listened to hear what the team size is, but let's say, you know, it's

you know, ten to twenty people. Like those people are all season developers that are probably making salaries well above you know, between fifteen one hundred thousand dollars, Like you get to seven hundred and seventy five thousand dollars really damned quick. And actually, and that's not even counting like the fact that they you know, work in a studio. You you you get to that number

in a couple of months, no problem. So you got you gotta pay rent on your office space, You gotta worry about equipment and software licenses. You gotta worry about like rezillion things. Yeah, Like part of it is that the Broken Age Kickstarter was like this this sort of like Revel, you know, the Sea Change moment. It was this like amazing thing that happened. And what they asked for, I forget what they asked for, but they got like they're over. Over was the initial goal. Yeah, so

they made almost ten times more or something like that. But even still, like, you know, three million bucks to make a game like that, and I think they I'm pretty sure they said they went and invested more there in absolutely, I mean, and and frankly I think it shows. I

think it turned out. But but yeah, I mean, I think like if you're if you're a game player, who you know chips in ten or twenty dollars here and there on Kickstarter, you know these days like because you're guaranteeing your your download code or whatever, and plus you're getting some other cool reward or something like when I it's not necessarily I don't know, I don't

I really don't envy like games made made that way. It seems incredibly terrifying to me because instead of having like one publisher to answer to, suddenly you have like thousands of people who who will be justifiably very demanding about every aspect of the game. And you know, the game is not done when you're pitching it to Kickstarter, so things are going to change during the course of development, and then you're gonna have to like convince everyone as to why your

plan is changing and all that that seems hard. I just I'm baffled by this kind of suspicious mindset that emerges when kickstarters like this come out, where a lot of people seem to assume the goals are set because the developers like want to light cigars one hundred dollar bills, like yeah, when when like the reality is like, like, we budgeted very aggressively for this, and

like this is what we need to get this done. I think the whole thing has been very eye opening in some of the corridors of game development of like, you know, budgets seemed to be able to range, like you said, Greg, anywhere from you know, twenty dollars to twenty million to forty million, right, Like, all about the scope and the scale of the game, and I think some of the stuff, even that Skull Girls stuff with like adding characters and this is how much it costs, has been

very interesting to see and I guess we'll see where Harmonics ends up at the other end of this. When does this end? Patrick? In ten days? They went they normally kickstarters are thirty one full month. You can change that date. That's not something that's required by the Kickstarter terms of service, but they believe. John Drake said at some point on Twitter that that was like a scheduling thing, you know, because obviously they have lots of projects

going on and people that shuffle between them. So I think the eighteen days was here's our window, if we're going to do this, this is the eighteen days. And I think it's interesting, you know, one way or the other. I think there are always lessons out of the whether they succeed or fail, or how they succeed and fail. And knowing those goopballs, I'm sure they have you know, some announcements lined up in between now and them to try and spike interest, but certainly it's, uh, it's not

looking super great right now. Patrick, who has he got for news? I mean, I mean the Oculus sending you know, you know, firing back at Xenomax over the John Carmack stuff is kind of interesting. But I don't know how much there is to say about the fact that they just said nope to everything that Xenomax was alleging regarding CarMax involvement, like without us knowing what CarMax contract is, and a lot of things that just aren't you know,

we're not privy to. It's basically just two media giants pissing in the wind in front of the media, trying to see who which one will either back off or which one can produce, you know, enough of a narrative that they're forced to, you know, back off a little bit in the the inevitable settlement that will happen as a result of this. I just think it's interesting that Xenomax turned down equity in the company ahead of the acquisition, and they seem to want more than that. Wait, I thought it was

the other way around. I thought they canceled Doom three because they wanted equity, an Oculus wouldn't wouldn't give it up. That was my understanding. Oh well, so it says Zenomax canceled VR support for doing three VFG, and Oculus refused Zenomax's demands for a non delutable equity stake in Oculus. I guess

I don't know what. I guess non delutable means, so so I guess maybe that that there was, you know, handwringing over what exactly equity means, because I guess you would have to imagine that Oculus is trying to minimize whatever their equity would actually be worth. But I don't know. It's I think it's interesting to see how all this stuff play out, But I don't

know. These these kinds of stories are tough to say too much about, given that what they're releasing to the media is so incredibly selective that it's it's almost entirely to paint narratives for everyone to just jump on board with Patrick before we get you off the horn, he uh, do you got anything you want to share? We got E three coming up, and I think we're

out of news stories. But anything any insight from Chicago from the mind of mister Kleppick that you want to share before we let you go for E three, anything you're looking forward to I don't know. I mean the same thing I do every year, where I sort of stop asking sources to like let me know what they've heard or what's happening. Like a lot of the reporting I do is not in the business of X game is rumored or why thing is going to show up, like breaking that games are in development is.

I don't find that particularly interesting or a good use of my time with sources, So I actually sort of just maul myself off from that stuff on the weeks before, because you know, I really like games, but I like the idea of going to a press conference and not knowing what's going to be

coming up next. It's like it's one of those few things I can hold on to to stop me from becoming a horribly dark, cynical person, which which seems to happen a lot when you when you get into a position that we are in our jobs, and so I don't know, it's the same as every year, Like I just I'm hopeful to see some new games.

You know, Sequelitis and Guns is like the last thing I want to see, even though I know that I see that every year, But it seems like if there ever was a year for there to be a lot of new stuff that's really surprising. It seems like this year, is it? Although I feel like I kind of say that every year, And if I can come out of E three having played Project Beasts or whatever, I'll be a happy man. Let me ask you these let me ask you three questions here

and you just say yes. No, Ready, a connect list, Xbox one, Buddle No, so, no chance. It doesn't sound like anything is going to change tomorrow. No, nothing. No, I mean I think there I still think there might be. No. Okay, don't you think it's a little premature to be making these kinds of predictions. I mean, you know we're really close to April and PDS. Don't you think you would like to see the context of the sales figures before you really put your

foot down on this. No, it doesn't sound like anything's going to change tomorrow. No. I mean I think it would be fascinating to watch two companies like duke it out at the same price point. I mean, no, two media giants pissing in the wind in front of the media. No, no, No, I think that's a little offensive. I don't know, Patrick, do you want to walk that one back? Maybe a little bit? No, Okay, I mean, did you could say what you

want? Pissing? Pissing, pissing? Are you aware that your views represent all Giant ball? I don't find that particularly interesting. Are you aware that there's an article on our site pissing written by you? No, proclaiming the connection has been dropped from the Xbox One? No, what if I told you that there were? No I could see it. Patrick, It says your name right on it. No no, no, no, no,

no no Patrick, No this news bro No no it did pissing? No no, yes, no, yes, I don't find that particularly interesting. No connect through ninety nine? No, Patrick, do you have anything else to say? It doesn't sound like anything's going to change tomorrow. Okay, let's move on to the next question. How would you describe Dave Lang Giant pissing in the wind in front of the media. Okay, a price drop for Xbox one? Does a bundle count which is a fake price drop?

No? Yes, really, Mario Kart on Xbox one still beating the Drone Man, How great would it be if just a Nintendo Lodo just show it? I know it'd be the greatest. E three just makes noom, just no business sense. But if just like at the end, like with no like you know, sometimes they'll show a teaser just to close out of press

conference. If at the end it was just Nintendo logo up and just it's a meme Mario and then cut the black Yeah, and then yeah, that's you no explanation of like what the implication whatever money Microsoft has left in socks and mattresses whatever, just needs to pay the half that happen. Uh, there was there was one other since we're talking about E three speculation, there was one other. I don't even know if it counts as a news story.

We didn't run it, but the uh that alleged uh kind of comprehensive Sony press conference league. Yes, that was floating around And if you guys have any thoughts on that thing, I mean, did we talk about that last week or no, I think it happened after podcast, Like it all seemed maybe a little too convenient and a little too wishful to me, which is how most of this stuff. Yeah, it's like that's that's what that's

the genius of. If you're the person who is fake faking this stuff, that it's really easy to create something that is a mixture all you need is like six things that sound real and two things off a wish list. I'm sure that and that that thing hit that that ratio just about perfectly. Yeah, and this stuff happens every single year, like it totally could be right, Like I saw that too, and you know if that happened, would

like would not be shocked. But and you know, obviously with you know, the project be stuff that's coming out, you know, people have access to you know E three materials are are certainly in the hands of folks larger than just the small teams planning it. But yeah, it like it could be or could not be. Like it's part of the fun of the three honestly, is like seeing that stuff and just watching people go ape shit. Uh, it's you know, it's all part of the E three hype train.

Whoo whoo all aboard. Uh well, thank you, Patrick, and uh we'll if not talk to you soon, we will see you very soon. All right, talk to you guys there, Take care, see you well. Brad Shoemaker. You know what that music means. News. Time to hit the news. The biggest news this week, the emails. That's right, the emails, biggest news. Brad shoemaker. You pick these emails. I did well. I did a first pass and then I didn't know

if you wanted to come over. Do you want to read them? I can hand you this laptop if you want to read them, Yes, I could. Yeah, I wann't you read them? This is weird. I mean, somebody else has to say it now. This is your magnumocus. I know, man, this is my moment, this is it. This is my greatest test. This is like some weird singularity happening. All right, but you have to read them. Yeah, in an Irish I'll know, I'll know who's gonna weird. Okay, well here hang on, let

me put on my best brogue. Okay, I mean, dear bomb cast, what do you think the proper cast I should make you do a Kevin Spacey accident? All right, Brad, let's have it all right. Here's an email. Okay, here's an email from John in Los Angeles, who asks, what do you think are the proper number of pillows on an ideal bed? I see pictures of beds and magazines with like six or more pillows. Personally, the first thing I do when I'm traveling is take all superplous

pillows and throw them on the ground where they belong. I only need one at most, and sometimes I just don't use a pillow at all. Is that strange? I was hardened by sleeping on a Japanese bed for a few years, But extra pillows are blankets when I'm trying to sleep make me angry anger. I was totally with him until the no pillow. Yeah, it's

like, WHOA, sure, that's that's hard. I think it depends what your last remaining pillow is, right, Like if it's like it's if it's a sheet that's masquerading as a pillow with no stuffing or anything in it, then like that's garbage. You're gonna need like four of those. Yeah, I've got a John Drake body pillow. If it's John Drake body pillow,

I need four of those. Yeah. Uh. Like I I have broad shoulders, so when I sleep on my side, I actually need about a foot and a half of like pillow, otherwise my neck is kind of tilting him over to the side. So like, if I don't have enough pillow, I've got to shove like an arm under there and then like stack like candlops or something under there to have enough. So it's kind of depends on

what the pillow is. All pillows are not created equally. I'm totally totally with him on the hotel thing, like all that shit, like you get one of those giant foot pillows, Like the packs hotel we were in had that giant cylindrical foot pillow like the width of the entire bed, like you drop your ankles up all night. You have. The worst thing about that was as well, it was that they we had four pillows on the bed. It's going to sound like some awful privileged nonsense, but there's four pillows

on that bed. They were all the same size. Give me options. Do you want different one variety? Yeah, like big one. They were all massive. Couldn't seep a massive pillow? YEA to two? Yeah. I always put a pillow on the other side of my head. What what? Wait? Yeah, so if I'm laying down on my on my right side, I put a pillow on the left side and on top of your head like a sandwich, like a head sandwich. Exactly. Wait, why in case somebody like falls through a bathroom wall, Like why to cover my

ear? Is it loud? I think I just I got used to it in college because people would study and spiders. That's smart. Yeah, well wait, like really all the way even now, Yeah, it's weirdness. I'm nice. Do you ever wake up choking on feathers? No, nobody has feathers in their pillows anymore. What are you crazy? You ever weak up choking on styrofoam and peanuts? Uh? Gregor you're you're a single pillow? Yeah, very much, one pillow, No sheets, sheets, No,

she's on a wooden plank. You'd be surprised. Man. In La. Yeah, in La, I rolled with like a deflated air mattress even blown ups. Yeah well it was it would Yeah, it had gone flat and was not replaced. I just need enough support to keep try and keep my head at like ninety degrees. That's, you know, really what it comes down to. I never, I really never quite get it. Do you all sleep on your sides? I sleep facing down? You really learn

a lot about people and you're asking you're basically just the weirdest things. First, face pillow is the weirdest thing. But you you turn your head to the side. Yeah, yeah, dude, I don't sleep my face. Well, then it's just kind of like to just body face down into the side. Just that seems like it would hurt your neck, though, I guess yeah. Sometimes I sleep on my back is up, but the side thing is usually like just to rest the shoulder for a while, and then

when I know I'm ready to sleep, I sleep on my stomach. So when I sleep on my back, I take the fluffiest pillow, fluff it up, put it behind my head, but angle it so that like rotated along the longitudinal axis ninety degrees, so that it's like standing up on its longest side. And then I I thumped my head into the back of it so that the pillow fluffs up around my ear. But I really don't want to hear anything right again, this this was developed in college studying in my

dorm room. Did everyone have night terrors in your door room where they they studying by shouting? So pubs up behind my ears, and then you take the other one and you put it over your eyes, oh my god, but not over your face because so you have to tilt that with ninety degrees too, so it's just like Jordy Laforage over your eyes, and so your mouth can still breathe, but you don't wake up the like in the same

position. No, just right. Yeah, So okay, did you make exceptions if you're ever like sharing a room with somebody or you're just like, I gotta wait for them to fall asleep, get my thing on, Yeah, I gotta like or just like, hey, heads up, I know we're sharing a room where you're staying with me or something like that. I don't want to hear anything you say, or I want to hear your breathing, so I'm gonna cover. I'm gonna block you out. It's nothing personal.

I put pillows on my face. Yeah, I guess I'm a light sleeper. Okay, I wish I didn't really know. I mean, I guess with the whole ear thing. Uh, it would make sense. But like recently, I got woken up by a mouse in my apartment. Like the noise of a mouse in my wall I've had, I've gotten Yeah, I think that like that scratch scratch, I got woken up by a cockroach behind my bed ones that's a big uh. Well, I've got a solution for all you guys that have pillow problems. I have a kid, and

you just never sleep again. Yeah, and you just don't have to worry about putting your head down for years, Brad, you want to take it's the next email? Do I ever? Uh? Stefaun Stockholm says hello, Hi, I have developed a theory that any game with a good rocket launcher is automatically also a good game. My friends, However, do not see him convinced? Could you please help put this argument to rest and back me up here? I see you chose the emails for this week's show. Would

yeah, I can't correct. All of the classic rocket launchers come from the classic games, you know, so what you have no kind of modern rocket launcher show piece? How do you find modern? Uh? Let's say in the last asking what's my favorite rocket launcher? No? Rocket launchers are all realistic now. Yeah, it's like take like eight seconds, you know, two two rounds of AMMO and it'll take whatever take. Yeah, okay, Brad, what's your favorite rocket launcher? I think you know? Yeah,

there's the correct It's the Quake one. It's Quake one rock launcher. That's the one that matters. The only is the only one that matters. Okay, it's never been as good before or since? Uh? Can you name some bad rocket launchers or quake the Quake two rocket launcher, Okay, fair enough, was was garbage? Does that mean quake to a bad game? Then they it was just there to showcase the rail gun. Yes, yes,

so it was real gun almost made up for it. But Quake two grenades were best in class though those were all right, yeah, twisties. Then Quack three came out and it had a better rocket launcher in the rail mon. So was Dafan saying? Was it was his kind of theorem here that good rocket launcher equals good games or bad rocket launcher equals But he didn't

go that far, But I guess that follows. I would say, like, yeah, his his, I think he would agree with this that, Like there's no game where he could say that game was terrible but that rocket launcher was awesome, Like there was no that does not happen. Sure, so yeah, interesting, the rocket launcher is great, then the game greatness follows. You have you have the skill to get the rocket launcher right, you could probably do the rest of the work. Rock launcher a pretty good

rocket launcher and a pretty good game. Uh. I like the way that thing looks. Yeah, it's like shoulder mounted the Yeah, games are the sums some of their rocket launcher, the one part, Brad. I think it's to another email, all right, this time from Norway? Uh egg gil Okay, I think hello, dudes. I don't think this question has been asked, so I'm gonna ask it. How did every game back in the day have chickens as health pickups? Because it's a globally liked food.

Everyone knows chicken, everyone likes it. Is that why they use chickens? Help me out here, follow up? When did they phase out the chicken and straight up go from med kits instead? It happened right under our very eyes. Yeah, I can't seem to remember exactly when. Yeah, man, that that's that's like the transition I think from the from the side scroller to the FPS. FPS is for the most part, never had like the giant chickens and stuff like even like I don't remember what you were getting in

like, well you got like meals and stuff. That's yeah. Well here here I'll kind of follow that up with, let's say three D was the death of the chicken because curved surfaces are tough, much easier to do a MEDD right cross on it. You're done? Yeah, And sprice. That's right. Yeah, so there we go. Three D killed the chicken. The health, Yeah, the industry was health. But yeah, I think to the first part. It really is that like it is just like the

iconic representation of like a feast. Right, it's just like a giant you know, final fight. You smash open a garbage can, there's just like a giant, delicious roast chicken in there. Of course, what do you think it's gonna do. Of course, it's gonna give you all your health back. But if it's so, is everybody throwing it out and putting in boxes or bearing it in stone? Yeah? Yeah? Why? Yeah? Why is? Why is Dracula's castle? Why the walls full of chicken?

Well maybe he's maybe he's hiding them because they're so good. They're just like you know, I maybe Dracula and I sucked love, but nobody needs to know. But my yeah, I'm just gonna go out and go check in the courtyard and stretch out a bit and definitely not eat chicken. Just not gonna. I'll bring this trial with me just in case that Belmont out there. But man, brads a guy from email, uh, Colin writes in I think I might know him. Actually, if it's the same guy,

I think it is. Uh. I recently accepted a new job in New York City and I'm planning on relocating soon. However, the weekly horror stories I'm hearing it are starting to make me wonder if I should beef up my nunchuck skills before I enter what is being described to me as a toxic urban waste plant. Okay, given a decent enough he said, no, beef emales man, this is this is more like life advice. All right, given a decent enough salary, where would you recommend living? And does commuting

from Jersey make you a wiss? I will say a community from Jersey probably does not make you a wiss. Uh. Jersey has become a or it has been for the like last decade or fifteen years, let's say safe forever. It's been a commuter city that you know, people travel to and from Manhattan, not a worse a Staten Island. I don't know. Well, I actually gotta take that, Fay, So you're probably a tough motherfucker. Uh. Where did I live given a decent salary? Was the question?

Yes, I would if I made enough, I'd probably want to live in Manhattan or on the island of Manhattan. Uh, probably the only place I could afford with a reasonable amount of space would be up and up north a bit and like the one forties, one sixties, So probably up there is where i'd probably wounded up living if IM is up there. Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I'll have to consult the sitcombat. Yeah, I have no idea. Uh, it's it's affordable up there, at

least it was when I left. Everything else was just kind of too much, like below Columbia, it's just too much money. Uh So, yeah, I don't know. I want to be on the island, especially for my first job there and my first time in New York, because like it's kind of awesome, like you basically live on top of everything, you know, like downstairs is Delhi Pizza Place, whatever, the god Walk two feet everything is there, all that noise is there, and it's all you need,

like five pillows area. But it's kind of awesome to spend a little bit of time in the city. Do you guys have any any where would you live in New York? Yeah, Roosevelt Island. Okay, you gotta take the it wasn't the tram and they called it something else? Yeah, oh wait, no, it's what was it, North Brother Island, the Leopard Colony? Okaya, Queens seemed alright, Yeah, Queens seemed kind of

like my stees. Okay, you know, it's kind of it's quiet, but there's some stuff to do, but it's not super overly expensive, although maybe it's getting that way. Some parts sound like it. Yeah, everything is, though, Danny. As somebody who was recently moved to an American city, I would agree with the stay close to where the stuff is happening thing. I tempt messed around with the idea of moving to the East Bay when I came here. Yeah, and I am infinitely delighted that I didn't,

just because you need to you need to learn to play there. Yeah yeah, yeah, I'm with you. But I think New York actually has functional public transit between boroughs, right, they do. But there's nothing quite like living right now. Sure sure, I'm not saying live in Times Square, I'm just but I'm contrasting with here. So here it's fucking impossible to get anywhere. Well, that happens though in New York though, Like if you get out of work. It's nice if you just moved to that city.

Let's say you're single and you just moved to that city and you're young and you want to go out. Is much easier to go out, stumble home or stumble into a cab than's a ten minute ride than to try and find a cab to Queens, even at night, because you're not going to get your friends who live in the city to come out to Queens. It's just not going to happen, sure, or even sometimes Brooklyn. But if you're living in the city, you can do whatever you want. You can

stay up all night and just walk home and do whatever. Greg Any, I don't know my New York, but my brother has been living out there forever in Brooklyn seems to love it. Do you know whereabouts? I don't know the geography of it that well. And darn and Logan, who I work with at super Giant, they're out there too, and I think Logan in particular really really loves it out there. Yeah. I have not, Yeah, I haven't spent enough time out there. New York's hell of a

town. Yeah, and the outer boroughs and stuff, including Jersey even Connecticut. Just everybody funnels in there's plenty of places to live. But to go back to his original question, I would even sacrifice space and money for your first year, even like a studio somewhere in New York, to live on the island if you if you plan stuff, because when you move somewhere for

the first time. When I moved to London as well, you're like, you plan where you're going, but you meet so many interesting people through the spontaneous Oh I'm just going to go out to this place thing, And if you have to commute somewhere to do that, it just it eradicates all those moments you could have had. Like, yeah, I found that too when I moved to San Francisco. It's very easy to meet people and socialize because I was always a cab right away and it was a lot easier Washington nights.

It's a cool neighborhood and maybe still affordable. Next email, All right, I apologize this is a long one. Okay, Hey, they're BombCast. This is Josh from the government. Oh wow. After last week's email about contractors ripping off the government, I thought I'd joined the dogpile and share a little bit about how much the military spins to conduct a single air operation. Hey, can we can we pause for just a second here and update

Greg. We had a email from a government contractor I believe they're making parts for planes. Yeah, and was talking about the price it costs to make something versus the price it costs to sell back to governments. And it was like the craziest one was like a washer that was like ten cents. They sold for one hundred and some dollars. Yeah, it was amazing, pretty good stuff, all right. In this particular case, I was flying for

the Air Force. We were running airborne counter narco operations out of a Caribbean island in northern Venezuela. May was he flying you? Two's Our primary objective was to catch go fasts or speedboats, low level air traffic, and semi some mercibles or homemade submarines, all of which might be smuggling cocaine out of South America into Mexico. By my best estimate, we were spending somewhere between one hundred and twenty five thousand and one hundred and fifty thousand per day at

a minimum on this particular operation. These costs included approximately one hundred and ten thousand dollars for two hundred thousand pounds or thirty thousand gallons of JP eight jet fuel at a standard price of three seventy three per gallon, approximately approximately ten thousand dollars for per diem one hundred and twenty per person, and rooms at

the Hilton. Approximately seventy five hundred dollars for personnel costs. Again, this is per day, and it doesn't include any incidental costs like spare parts,

which as we saw last week, can be pretty damn expensive. The costs to fly, refueling planes and crew for our midair refuelings, food, medical costs, or any state side support that we had now one hundred fifty thousand dollars per day might not seem like much for a military operation, but this was for two planes and two crews in a third world, a low cost country. As a group, we had ten items. I'm sorry, as a group, we had ten times that number of planes and crews doing operations

around the world. If you then extrapolate costs even further to the whole Air Force, and even further to the whole military, you start to see how much gets spent every day just on operations. The best part at the end of my four months, we hadn't caught anyone or seized any drugs. But I was being paid three hundred bucks a day by the taxpayers to play blackjack at the casino in the Hilton on a Caribbean island, so I can't get too mad. God bless you. That's pretty great. Also, there's a

PostScript. Yeah, while I'm here, Colorado says, fuck Dave Lang, fuck the rest of his cronies in Chicago, and fuck that Pepperoni castrole dog shit the passes for pizza out there. Suck at Dick Lang. You did, I said, no, B female. There you go. You had to start out. That one was so eloquent. I had to And not only did you read a B female, you had to poke the dragon. I know, you had to just finger out in the side. I had to provoke a response. I feel like the phone is ringing right now.

He's dingling somewhere. He just perked up. We got more mails, Brad. Oh yeah, uh, all right, there's an interesting one with apologies to Jeff Green. This is from Jim from New York. Lately, I've been watching Jeff Green stream Dark Souls, and while he's entertaining. I can't help but notice that his reaction times and memory are pretty bad. He is old as games mature, do you worry that one day a game will have an amazing story, but you'll be too old to beat the final boss and

see the ending? Or will that problem be solved by something like mass efect three story mode for example, before we have a substantial population of senior gamers or are games just the province of the young? I know that's a good question. Yeah, maybe there's a market for them. Maybe hire like online, Like you can hire a kid to just take over your game and get you past that boss for like five bucks and just move on and be like we just never happy. Yeah, Like I don't, Greg, I don't

know. Maybe you can identify but as somebody in my mid thirties who plays Dodo with people ten fifteen years younger than me, Like I have definitely thought about this issue before. Oh yeah, like the pro players are all you know, the old The old ones are like in their mid like a twenty six year old Doda pro players like an older player totally when you're in your early thirties, don't you start losing? Like the it's the fast fibers that

are in your fingers don't react as fast. I think, yeah, I think that actually, yeah, partly in Counterstrike, I remember there was a thing that if you once you reached thirty one or something, you your reaction speed was like diminished this rather quick. We should try this. There's gotta be a way for like like a mouse click test in this office to be like who can who has fast reaction time? Huh? Yeah, I want

to. I would love to try that and chart at all. Yeah, and see like I mean, we are in this office here, We've got a pretty good spectrum of you know, from geriatric to kind of feel we can we can totally test it. Yeah, I'd like to know. I'd played games before where I don't know, I've never used to note like is this a result of me being old physical? Yeah? Or a might just

lame, right? I mean I think for sure, there's all like a really big difference between like having the like the physical dexterity of like a pro StarCraft two player versus just like being able to finish Last of Us on easy mode or something like that. I think, like to the particular question, I think it's a really good one. I think narrative driven games, you

know, they're not. I think it's at odds to have like a highly narrative driven game that's also like extremely difficult, because like, if you're having to replay part of a game over and over and over, unless like the whole narrative is about that for some reason, which it's probably not, then the part that you're like dying over and over, it's it's actually just hurting

the narrative at a certain point. So I think people trying to make narrative games you're seeing increasingly you know that they're not trying to make those games super super difficult. So I think they do where they're providing it as an option. Yeah, it's exactly they're providing it as an option or or you know, conversely, just making it so that there is a there is a way you know, for people to who are just more interested in the story to

get through it that way without like breaking their backs whatever. Man, even Baston had an arena mode right where you're like, you know, for leaderboards and stuff. I remember playing for that thing and being like I gotta take down bread well, but Baston was also designed like where the default difficulty setting was was like meant to be approachable, and then you can make the game harder from there, once you had gotten into the game and gotten a feel

for it, you could elect to make the game harder. But but like it wasn't meant to be excruciatingly difficult for like the average you know. Our goal was like, if you know how to use a game controller and you're like paying attention, you should be able to finish. You should be able to finish that game. Do you ever worry that as you get older and you play more games that like the wonder that you had when you first got into started playing games, that like, you'll you'll get that less and less.

I mean I I and my whole my entire goal is to like, see, I do worry about that, But my entire goal is to like make sure that that doesn't that that can continue. But but I think that's a content issue. I think that's just a matter of making games. I can still do that, And I think games like that come out every year that I'm like blown away by just like, oh man, this game could have could have been made ten or fifteen years ago, but no one thought

of it until now. So for me, the wonder has never gone away, but it's but it is rare. But I I sort of live for finding those moments, you know, because because they're they're still out there. So I'm not I think by you know what, what the I forget? I'm at an age where I like forget how old I am. I'm one of my thirty six Yeah uh and I you know, I think if I

would have gotten over games that would have happened by yeah uh yeah. Follow up to this, do you guys ever feel like the games you played as a kid, because I just I just played through Castlevania, right, and I remember as a kid being like that Grim Reaper is impossible. Yeah, but you know, having played through it now and you know, maybe it's Ah, the circumstances are different because there's the Internet. You can look up strategies and stuff like that. You know, I was able to beat that

game. Do you feel like some games you can go back to now as an adult and play and find easier than when you were a kid. I doubt that personally. I think games were harder back then for sure. When I like, I remember I went back and played like Ninja Guide in two for the nes which I remember being easy, like relative to the first Ninja Guide, and when I played it for the NES and then when I went

back and played it, it was freaking impossible. Would I ever? I mean they were designed, you know, they're they're short games, right, these games, Like when you're good at them, you could finish them in like an hour or whatever. So they're designed all around, like replay and mastery and so on. Do you feel like as an adult they've become or they stay as challenging, if not more challenging, Like there's not like I played, I have twenty more years of gaming experience under my belt. I

can think like a designer now. I think it's that like modern modern concessions are just much more forgiving. Like games didn't have checked points and stuff like you you know, you had three continues and when you ran out, start the whole goddamn thing over. You know, no savee system, no nothing,

like people don't really make games like that anymore. And you get so I think games are just you know, they they are much more forgiving of people playing like very sloppily these days, and you get you get sort of out of out of shape as it were, as a game player. But but I mean you can, you can sort of. That's why I think stuff like Dark Souls it was such a breath of fresh air for so many

people. They're like, oh yeah, I forgot like what it felt like to like earn stretch out and just well, just to like earn my wins and how good that that can feel and when you just kind of dedicate yourself to it and get better at it. I feel like Dark Souls for me, is a great example of well, and maybe games like this will happen in the future where you can be very very good at it, or, as I like to put it, use the wisdom of my age to cheeze a boss. Uh, you know I can. I'm older, I'm wiser.

I know that there's probably some way the internet has probably found it, and I'm going to use the resources that are available to me to find the coiner I can stand in to hit that monster with eight hundred arrows and leave the folly of youth to go charging in and dodge. So maybe somebody in the future there'll be ways to bring your life experience in or just have your what did you call it, fast fiber Yeah, yeah, fast muscle fibers. Yeah. That's gone. I lost all the fiber Marle fiber that was

gone like a twelve Brad, Do you have any more? Emails? Are? How many? Was? Two? More? Here? Grab a couple more? Okay, couple hit it. I don't know if I can support this one though. From Dana Nashley four Wayne, Indiana, Hey Podcast. My wife and I are struggling to come up with names for our first child. We're extremely excited, but cannot agree on any names. So far, We've only had a few that we both liked but can't settle on one.

I thought you guys might like to help us out and suggest some names from characters and video games. I'm sorry that you think would be a good name for our son. A couple of we've been tossing around that our families don't hate Arteitis and Arthur's yeah, really you go with tas or no. No, I'm just saying like this it would be all right. I don't want your son to grow up to become like a level twenty five anti Paladin or whatever like destroyed. I have his mind over run by a spectral being from

spoilers for Warcraft. Yes, so, so they have to be pulled from video games. That's that was their request. Master Chief master Chief. It's a pretty good John John master Chief, Mega man. Uh, Gordon, there you go, Gordon, that's actually the worst run, worst one. Michael Hagger Okay, yeah, uh you know, Rex is a I'm a big fan, you know. W Now you can take it off if you want, take lead many Manny Okay with an eye though, Ray okay from

Raymond, Yep, that's what you're going from, Metli gear Ray. I can't, I just I can't get behind this notion of naming kids after characters from popular media. I just can't. Yeah, I don't know, I'm sorry. Did you see that list that came out that Game of Thrones infographic is folding around? It was just a list of the most popular names, and they are all inferred by popular media, like most TV shows and pop star. I actually really like the name Dante, and it's kind of a

shame that it's become so associated with uh devil may cry. Well Uh, well not so much, Clark says. You know, I feel like anytime I mentioned the name Dante, do you know, uh which, But you can name your kid Durrante, which is actually I think Dante's full name, which was shortened to Dante. Just it's a kind of a dumb sounding name. I like Dante. Yeah, don'te Caravella. Max could have been a

Dante Caravella. Think about that. Uh yeah, I don't know. Link is like, don't don't do it, Like, yeah, I don't know. It's tough, tough. You got to think about it, fan clef shre you go, Mario, Like that's just a terrible Who would do that? Uh? Yeah? I think about the future, right, maybe who will know Link in the in the future, in twenty years in the future made it'll be awesome. Name doctor robot Nick. That's pretty good. I'd go with Eggman. I've two friends who are called Barry White. Wait,

one's Barrying, one's white. Are Like they're both their names are they were named Barry they are from families white. Okay, Well that sucked. I also have an ex girlfriend Na named her son Max on her surname is Power. That's pretty cool. So just maximum power max Power. Yeah, that's pretty good. Never stop. Uh is he like did you go into some like crazy profession like construction or did he started walking like like two days just

sprinting there's an Indy car driver named will Power. Oh that's graz pretty good. Yeah, he should be like a self help coach. Then, uh when when and my wife and I were expecting a son, I tried pitching her on Geese but it didn't really you know, that didn't didn't fly yea to jam yeah? Or or if you have twins yeah? Uh we I think Trace is a really cool name. I think you have to be like a cyborg though, you have to like race card drop. Yeah right with

that trade. The headlines just right themselves, perfect, Brad. Let's take our final email. Oh man, looking around, Yeah, trying to decide what to read, and then I landed on one I hadn't noticed before from Mike. Okay, hey, bomb Cast, I'm writing in to set the record straight on all things Golden Tea. I'm an artist here incredible technologies, and I've worked on the franchise for the past few years. Now I know.

I'm also a big fan of the BombCast. Ours are some of my co workers and I had to shoot you guys an email when I heard all the Golden Tea talk on the last week's show. We should just start a tea podcast called t talk yes T time with Trace. Golden Tea has made right here at Incredible Technologies, an Illinois company located in Vernon Hills. We used to be located in Patrick's hometown of Arlington Heights. He once mentioned the Portillo's near him, which used to be one of our go to lunch spots

before we moved to our new office. I haven't read this email, so this all new to me as well. Golden Tea Charging Horse, It's got beef. Oh man, I'm kind of worried about what we're getting into here. Golden Tea has long been the company's flagship product and is still a very successful game. A lot of people call it an arcade game, when in fact it is really a bar game. Interesting that's still exists. Didn't know there was a distinction to be made there, but okay. Golden Tea also

does feature a home edition. Since the move to HD, we've redesigned the cabinet, which is now a pedestal. Players can buy the stand and connect it to any flat screen they want. Weird, really, why don't we have one of these? We should probably expansive, We should look into that. We also do a yearly update to the game. That always features new courses, new gameplay modes, new equipment and clothing to customize your own golfer.

It's a crazy game and I really enjoy working on it. While we aren't in the most trendy of places, you'll see our products almost everywhere else, including Buffalo Wild Wings Okay, Sam's everywhere. I feel that I also need to mention our games end up in some crazy locations too. One time we sent our marketing team to do a recording for a sweepstakes winner and one of our other games, Silver Strike Bowling. The bar fairly normal during the

day, turned into a swingers club after hours. Nice. No, they weren't pretty people either. There should beef also, also, I guess so also Incredible Technologies is in fact the company that made Street Fighter of the movie the arcade game. Yeah, a few of the people who worked on that game do indeed still work for the company. Thanks for a great podcast each week. Keep out the great work. Also shout out to my buddies Vincent, Eric, there big fans too. That's awesome. Ps, it would

totally be rad if Giant Bond did a quick look of Golden Tea. Yeah, we get one of those nuts. We just gotta send Patrick down there to like Heart of the Beast to like finally go and find like where golden tea is made. Man, that's a source. That's awesome. Yeah, that's nuts. Thanks for writing in, Mike. Yeah, that's that's sweet.

I did not realize they were even a real company. I thought they just kind of like just like materialized out of the either kind of like kind of like a dud in a room, a bunch of cabinets got together in a bar and decided like what the next version is. That's yeah, like it was made by like like frat house, sweat labor or something or something just like came to be, you know. Uh, well, it's gonna do it for emails and let's Brad, do you have anything else that we

skipped over tapped up? Uh? Thank you y'all for joining us on another amazing bomb cast. Thank you for the laptop. Uh, Greg, when can people see your wares? Maybe twentieth less than I guess in a week? That's yeah. Yeah, So that's steaming PS four on the same day, right, correct? Uh? And Danny, what you got the pitch the lobby. We're gonna have a special guest on tomorrow. Who's the one of the guys who made Transistor? Oh, fantastic, get around dude,

you got a mirror? Holy are you're really coming back here tomorrow? Yeah? And I feel like we could have timed this better. Yeah, no, no way, man, you timed it perfect. Hook. Yeah. Now I got something to do for two days, not just one. I'm gonna play some Thief Deadly Shadows as well because it's video game history month GameSpot dot Com. Yeah, so, I don't know, to be an episode of a point up on Friday as well. Also, the point is fantastic.

Good job, and my regards to my regards yeah, some my regards to stay real piece. So are you gonna be playing Transistor on the show? Yeah, you're gonna. I'm Greg's gonna play that Thief as well. Are you gonna Are you gonna like announce anything on the show? Show exclusives the Daniel, Yes, because if it's yes, then I want an exclusive here. We'll give us some game is out in a week way Yeah. Yeah. What was your just okay exclusive question? What was your most favorite

snack food while developing this call? There you go the hard questions this journalism. People say there's no journalism in the sense. Take that, Patrick, There's got to be an answer for this. I don't know. I ate like I ate a good amount of jerky, just like protein is important. Yes, how about this for the For the real answer, you'll have to

tune into the lobby exclusion. This is the most cross promotion. And then that you gotta promise me on the lobby that you'll pitch Greg another question that will only be answered on E three. I don't know. Yeah, if you're around any three, Greig, you should totally come and uh see us on the show and hang out E three. It's coming three ready for you three? No, alright, fantastic. Drew sent me say he's got a list of set pieces that we need to look at. I'm very excited.

It's gonna be a fun show in like three weeks. Indeed. All right, guys, thanks again for coming by, and thank you all for listening to the Bomb Cast. No.