Giant Bombcast 06/02/2015 (Premium)

Mmmm, Hello, it's Tuesday, due the second, twenty fifteen, and you are listening to the Giant Bomb cast two weeks till E three thirteen days, well, twelve days, I mean by the time you hear this, it will be E three. Well, what do you consider are you talking about when we fly down there for the first day of the show? The fourt show? Okay, the fourteenth that but that's the thing I think is is ground zero three three? Well, that's like no show the show floor

opens, that's E three saying Tuesday morning. Yeah, okay. If that's the case, then we got a solid two weeks. Yeah. Press conferences, like the press conferences are almost more exciting in the actual show. Yeah.

Four is gonna be sitting in a room like this with you know, air conditioning, eating sandwiches cand In Yeah, talking about stuff like can we get customer sandwiches because usually whenever they're sandwiches catered there brought up so there was someone someone in marketing asked and I actually Drew brought it up, I believe, and I said like, yeah, don't put mayo on some of them.

You did, so we'll see how you are. You are meddling with forces you do not understand, I mean just gonna like the minute you start like very I mean whatever, Like at least you can guarantee the sandwiches will suck. But now they're going to try to make some special ones and those will probably suck in a totally different way. Like I have zero faiths Yeah, I have zero faith in is that in any kind of sandwich that I'm not ordering myself any kind of meeting where they're bringing in pizza, No,

they're not. It's not gonna be any good. Just think about how many people though that that that mandate has to pass through. I just need from you to the sandwich arriving. Do you think about how many different people have to understand and implement that, and then in a box of sandwiches gets delivered, you know, will they be labeled in a way that prevents someone else from having those sandwiches first? There's so many points of failure in this planet.

And I don't want, I don't want. I have an alternative idea for you. What's that? This is a way easier, solu. You're just going to tell me to eat whatever comes out, learn to eat mayonnaise. No, And here's the thing, I'm not asked, so any one thing. Generally speaking, these sorts of like convention floor sandwich is the ones that will be in like the weird like war room area. The mayonnaise is on the side, So it may just be that we have to pull like

tomatoes and lettuce. Not actually that crap off of it, think of it. I think that's pretty much how institutionalized sandwiches are delivered, right. The condiments are always on generally, but we're we're in the weird space where it's not the same. You know, we're not on the convention show floor,

so siches might be made right there, no idea what will happen. But in those circumstances where you know, just me because being a fussy eater and everything, If forty sandwiches come out and they're catered in and there's nothing I can eat, I am never mad about that. I'm always like, you know what, Yeah, I'm the weird one here, I'm the one he needs. I'll go hungry or I'll get my own thing. That's my own dumb fault. Yes, I don't fault anyone for that, if that question

whatever. As someone who has been a bit fussy himself, I have never once gone like, how dare you? You didn't bring the sandwich the way I ordered it? Like the minute you cross that line, just you're a monster. You Yeah, I don't know that. I don't know. The special dietary needs is how I would characterize dancer. Like, it's not like I have an actual allergy or anything. I'm just an idiot. So you know, I can't be mad at anyone for anything that sounds I mean,

that sounds like a condition to me. I don't know. I don't want to eat maio either, You're idiot. Dietary needs, Yeah, but they're specific, they're not needs, they're fussy. If you have discussed last week you have record syndrome, I do. I do a pretty severe case. How long about almost thirty one year? How much longer do you have? So I got a good five or ten? Okay, I'll be nine hundred. Sure. Oh, how's everybody feeling with the show? Looming? Really

good? Yeah? Continuing a pace? Yeah, absolutely, there's a lot of stuff that has to get booked on our end gear that's got to get fiddled with. I feel like we got ready to take appointments about a week after the industry started saying, hey, let's take appointments, which is normally

how it goes. I think it's a lot of emails where it's going we're not ready yet, hang on, I will get back to you next week while I'm out of the office, Like I'll be out of the office for a whole full week, and people go like, hey, I need to get this locked down by tomorrow, and I'm like, well, you're not gonna sorry, because I'm off in the middle of nothing and it's impossible for

me to do that. But yeah, I'm especially excited because this is like a completely different experience for me. You know, I was a gi last year and it was just like balls of the walls the entire time, and here we get to hang back and we'll be broadcasting the conferences and talking over them in our own little speet. Yeah. I like that. I'm down for this idea. Yeah, it's it was a good time last year.

But there was that nagging feeling that even as I'm like turning down the RSVPs for the press conferences this year, I'm just going like it feels wrong. Yeah, it's strange. Yeah, I had like a chaotic moment, like kind of a little a little bit of stress. I'm like, oh shit, I didn't register for these conferences that I didn't respond anything. I'm like,

oh wait, I don't have to this year. It's just an objectively better way to cover and experience E three conferences because like the first year where they basically what you're saying, we're so good. No, no, I'm saying anyone who decides to sit back in their hotel rooms and stream it or like any news outlet or anything, that is an objectively better way to do it, because like I've done the thing where I'm trying to post news articles

from the Nokia theater or something. You're trying to cover the press conference, don't do it from the press conference. I'm we're trying to write like Kirby's epic yarn announced things from like the squeezed and little seats. Sonny added a separate thing. Whether it's like if you you know, the blogger zone where they get like you know, pays places where your plug in your laptop and like slightly bigger seats like desk type of things, and that's a little bit

better for people that want a live blog or whatever. But like that's do

people live blog anymore like the texture that people do constantly. I feel like in games it happens way less now that it's on Twitch, and just like, you know, like the streaming of a press conference used to be, and in some pockets it still is, but it used to be this like big negotiation where it's just like, well only IGN and game Spot game trailers maybe are big enough to handle this press conference and it's coming over a satellite

feed, and there's there's like at least one truck involved. Yeah, there's there are trucks and all sorts of stuff for or sometimes there weren't. You you'd be like it used to be like okay, well you'd go into the press conferences going, well, Microsoft hasn't send us the IPS that we're going to have, and we need static ips to send out to whatever bullshit thing we have to hit to upload the thing, and then it always breaks because

they say they have good internet, they never have good enough internet. So I think that's why they started getting a satellite truck, is to just fucking stop having that conversation. Sure, yeah for now, yeah they have plenty, and it's it's a weird. Yeah, I don't know the now that just everyone's on Twitch, everyone's on YouTube or where wherever streaming their press conferences

themselves like that. I feel I even like that rat race is just like insane that there are people still out there, like still doing Hey three coverage still comes in many and varied forms. It's true. Absolutely. The difference is that if you are if you are carrying your own feet of the stream instead of their Twitch stream, you get to put your own ads before it. Yeah yeah, yeah, but believe me, trying to get those direct

feeds as a huge en in the ass. There's been like a sharp decline in the past couple of years where there's just not nearly as many people backstage doing their own streams from the direct feed. How's the Riser looking lately? The Riser is still I don't know. I feel like the well, we didn't the Riser here. Every time I went, the Riser looked like a

very cutthroat place. Yeah, like everyone describes Rise like any any of them, Like everybody's jockeying for Like those are usually cast ones, so you'll see people with you know, broadcast quality cameras. But then there's also like a subset of people that are just like getting a direct line, popping it into the laptop or there. They just have they just have a box or whatever.

I've definitely like gone like downstairs at YOUB saw often seen Vinny like fucking crawling under a table full of cable he just covered in cables, hooking up a pix or something to capture this thing. Yeah, and and in fact, Vinny saved my ass two years ago at like Ubisoft. I got there a little bit late. Uh and actually I jacked into Vinnie's picks and I got a feed off of there because like all of the spots were taken. Oh yeah, yeah, I will always look out for each other out in

the field. Yeah seriously. Yeah yep. And actually yeah, somebody jacked into mine as well. So it was just a it's like a fucking daisy chain. It was. It was. It was cool. But yeah, there was fewer people at all of those last year for sure, so I don't think there's gonna be many. It was maybe that was just because like Vinnie and Drew are so imposing, they create such a presence. Fucked them out of that space. Yeah, they're absolutely, it just seems empty.

It's very conspicuous. Well, if Vinie and Drew right there. I'm not going it fair enough. I'm not going either, that's not Yeah, OK, let's not go to the press. We're sitting the confines of our late night show space. He's sandwich and yeah, all right, you talked me into it. Jeff Gerson, all right, great, Jason a Striker, the voice of the voice of production here this week. How are you Dan with the eating habits. That's me, that's his that's his true last name,

Dan with the eating Belgian. I'm Brad Triebaker. We're back in the small room again. Yeah. Sorry, I'm hugging the mic this time. Yeah, we have to it goes. Last week, I was talking more out here, and I bet you can tell the difference right now as opposed to right here. Get up on that might eat And this problem. The problem is, uh, this pop screen, these pop screens has a lot of dust, little stuff. So when I when I took them home, it just they kind of sat in a corner and got dusty. But I

don't think I dis this dust. Yeah, I didn't do anything nasty to them. I thought this was like desiccated spittle because these yeah, these are these are the microphones we used in as of like two thousand and eight, like in this very podcast and Saucelitos so because the podcast studio here in the building has it is basically on fire. It is all the time studio in one way. But there's yeah, once equipment in there that's been giving us

some trouble. But yeah, a lot of road miles on these MIC's pop screens. It's true. This one's got like we brought these microphones to trade shows, you know, these these been to Japan. These have been to Japan. There's been to E three uh and and I never expensed them. So they're my microphones just in case you need them exactly. Yeah, in case I'm gonna start like a barbershop quartet, I've got actually have five total. It's the premium feature of working on exactly bomb. WHOA, So what's

going on? I don't know. I don't know, man. That was just like a full stop. At that point, was like, all right, I don't know how far are we going on this barbershop quartet. We got at least like five more minutes before we can talk about videos. Okay, no, no, we could talk about we could talk about what we can talk about other ship before we get to video here. I don't know what you talking about. What do you got? I just played video games

all weekend, like the whole weekend. It's pretty I went hiking at one point, but otherwise that's all I did either. I had thought about maybe going for a hike, but my my old roommate who no longer lives there, came back to town to get some of his stuff and he ended up being around all weekends. So I hadn't seen him like a year more and he's had his stuff there for like a year or more. Yeah. Yeah, we talked about some criminal friend of ours that is a criminal, and

it's just like weird crime stuff master criminal. No, No, we're talking about the jail time he may or may not be doing in the near future. So some weird stuff, not a good not so good at beating his wrap. Then we'll see how it goes. I mean, sentencing has as yet to happen, but as holy shit, Yeah, I didn't think I did. But then all of a sudden, I started actually thinking about it in the wake of some of it, and I was like, oh, man, like whoa, I'm glad I got out of it. Yeah,

situation I had to move away from a lot of friends. Sure, you know it's the snooa county difference exactly. Yeah, it's it's crime time off. Everybody's a criminal. Uh. Speaking of moving, Yeah, we were actually looking at new places. Like the place that we moved into is great, Dan, you've been there, but yeah, school spot, but it's pretty goddamn small. And uh, I got really high ceilings. Yeah, that's very true, but I can't really stack stuff up to the ceiling.

We have like four thousand arcade sticks in there. I might have a lot of space. I might have to bear down on some of those. Really, I guess what's the criteria. What's first on the chopping block? First on the chopping block, I want to get rid of, Yeah, some of Lisa's books, maybe arcade sticks. I gotta get rid of books first. That our first. I mean these books that they're probably I think they're romance novels are just that's uh. Yeah, we we have to make some

space. Actually, so we have I think I can talk about this now. We've got taught. Is it under embargo? I know you signed a lot of stuff. I think the yeah, it led up about an hour ago, but I got the okay to talk about it. So, yeah, we were expecting we're gonna have a little baby, expecting arcade sticks. Wait a minute, Yeah I am that would that would be great. Yeah, but no, I knocked up. Knocked up. My wife got damn good going, thank you. Yeah. Yeah, it looks like we're gonna

have a boy. She's about four months along. So how long have we known the gender? Yeah, we just found out last week. Okay, Yeah, so that's super exciting. But yeah, we have to find a new place, and that's always super scary and not fun, especially in this market. You look on this side of the bay. Yeah yeah, yeah, well part of anything. I know it's not going to happen, but I'm looking. But yeah, we'll probably end up out in NICs Bay. Still, okay, yeah, we shall see. It's a rough time.

I think I saw I think I saw the medium rent. Medium rent in SF is like five grand that's right now for like what a one bedroom or no, no, me, like it's like the medium It's like, oh okay, yeah, that's that's everything from you know, I think that's everything from like down to one bedrooms and studios. It's weird because you know, if if we do move farther out. You know, the rent is gonna be a whole lot cheaper. Butt, transportation everything is gonna you know,

increase as well. So it's it's always always trade off. Yep. If you if you want to pay a less and have a bigger place, you got to spend more time on the bart. Sunset's good. I like the sunset. Text me twenty five minutes to get down. Here's all right if you want like quieter places. But even those places, the rent is so fucked right now. It's just high. Yeah, it's bad news. And

then the East Bay is not, i mean not getting any better. No, it just seems like people are San Francisco like they're fleeing East totally. Is it is? Most of Oakland pretty stabby from what I've heard, because no, no, no wrons alright, isn't it like any But I mean over in my area is fine as well. There's a couple of yeh, kind of shady neighborhoods, but I do you have that is it's scary like

going over there and not knowing where the lions are. Like okay, if you go across the street, it's you know, really high crime and everything like I thought about moving out there, but just watch for the railroad tracks. Is that wire railroad tracks associated with crime? It's just the way it works. Just don't walk over. Yeah, everything on your side of the railroads. If you were on a side of the railroad tracks and haven't been stabbed, then chances are on the good side of the tracks. I get

able to assume. So that's weird. I don't know what that is. I think driving around in the area, you can get a pretty good feel

for what the neighborhood is. Like, yeah, I've only been over the for like hood slam and to go to your place, so yeah, see, and my place is fine, yeah yeah yeah, but then like you know, four or five blocks away, it's like, I don't I'm not going to dan if you got a place that you're remotely happy with and yeah, and you're not paying normonal legs, hang on, I just resigned a lease on Saturday. Yeah there for another year. Just hang on for dear

life. If it's especially if it's rank controlled, I don't know if it is. No, it went up forty dollars, Yeah, you're probably okay, wait, no, per month, Yes, she said that, like the maximum San Francisco allowed rent increases like three or six percent or something here. Yeah, and so she did that. But I mean it's like, yeah, I went up like forty dollars a month. Okay, you're probably fine, Yeah, you'll probably be fine there. But Jason, let's commit

this audio. I got DIBs on Uncle Dan. No, you have DIBs on crazy Uncle Da. Okay, but I will have the official uncle Is there another dand in the running? Uh, I don't know, No, there's I haven't heard of it. We just need to make sure that you know crazy is the prefect. Okay, Okay, okay, all right, that child needs to know what he's dealing. But he's gonna call me Uncle

Dan. He's gonna call you crazy Uncle Dan. That's fine. I love like kids are awesome because it's so like I feel like in terms of sense of humor, it's so easy to just kind of click with them to where like I remember at a game from Kyle had that little kid Claire Claire. Yeah, and I would just started doing like arm pit sound effects and stuff I gotta do make like art pit sound effects and like weird faces and stuff, and they start laughing. It's like it's the best audience ever, pretty

easy to please. I feel like a shame to admit this, but i am. I've always been unable to make arm pit noises. Really, I've never I've never figured out how to do it. Arm pit quartet. It gets harder as you get more hair under theirs. Not no live studio. Yeah, well, it's another new high this week for in all of podcasting. I think it's pretty good. Man, my hand's sweating now, okay, yeah, you wanted to talk about video games, right, yes? Fortune, hang on? Whoa? I can do this with your hands,

your hand the palm method. Yeah, I can do the thing where I put my hands together and then blow into it. I used to be a hang Can you do the crazy whistle with the two fingers? I can't do any finger whistling, none of that ship it doesn't I can't. I can't do regular whistling. Can you do the tongue talking? I can whistle,

yeah, I cannot get all my tongue. I can do it, which plays yeah super well on a podcast, But yeah, whistling, it just has eluded me from my Apparently, I can't do the thing where I put my hands together. I'm making a little noising. Wow, that's pretty good. You're just whistling. You're not doing anything cool. Feel like there we go there, Like I need to find this podcast or this moment and put it in the show notes. Welcome to the Giant Podcast. You're one and

only source for all things bird calling. Dude is great. It's such a cool game. It's pretty cool. Yeah, it's all right. We're we're all right. It's one potential issue is I don't think there's nearly enough of it. Yeah, I'm not tired yet. Like, what what level are you, Jeff? I'm like level six or seven? Okay, I think I'm the seven or twelve. And I feel like I have UI like issues with the UI, and there's some stuff that I think could be tightened up

there. And I think and I worry that there's not enough of it. Yeah. I wish it was easier to equip like different weapons like between just like this little spawns or something. I wish if you just go like, well, actually I want to use the role or this time out. You know, we got to change. It was pretty quick to bomb out of there, change a weapon and walk back into the matchmaking room. Surely that's something the three minute matches. It's like, I feel like that is the

perfect length of time for that game. Absolutely. I think the four no three, that's three three really yeah, pretty sure. Anything less I think would be too short. Anything more, I think they'd get a little too protracted. It's enough time for you to kind of cover the majority of the space, or almost all of it, I mean, with between the two

teams. Eventually it would be this like tedious war of attrition right right, Like you've cover their stuff up, but but then they just cover it right back, and someone would would be behind you and you know, payle stuff back there, and then you'd be like, oh well I need to respond to this. Yeah, that's the right amount of time for that game. Yeah, I find it. I found it really weird that they don't let you spend any of your money or buy anything until level four, because I

was like, buy that. Like the second I hit level two, I was like, all right, let's go. Time to buy new weapons to be freshman. I was not nearly fresh And I think you can buy a weapon it too. It's the Gears four, it's the hat shoot really yeah.

Oh dude, So I check all the closed stores and they said no, and I didn't bother to go, So I said, you get your first paint roller pretty early on because two or three or something because that p show, Well that sucks because I used the I forget what it's called. The default gun is, isn't this is incredible? Yeah? I use that thing all the way up the level four and that was not a pleasant experience.

But I don't know, like I used the regular splatter shot for a while, and then there's a variant of that splatter shot that has the same gun stats but different items I've got, Yeah, and you unlock that through like story mode the single player stuff, right, No, I don't know why those I mean I had to buy it. I think I think you find yeah, whenever you beat a boss, and the single player stuff you get like a weapon schematically seems to be like an offshoot of an existing weapon.

Okay, huh okay, I don't know. All the weapons in the store just have a level on them and just says on the locks at level whatever. Yeah, and I started, uh, you know, doing some of the ambo stuff. But it's like you can talk to me about that. So it's uh so the single player or these challenges that I didn't think we're that great, but I haven't. I haven't played into deep. Alex actually said they get better and that the final boss is really good. I

read. I read some stuff saying, yeah, the final missions are right up there with some of the Mario but there it's good stuff. It sounds like it's good stuff. But I'm with uf of that first mission was pretty Yeah, I played the first hand full of them. That first boss. Uh, yeah, boss is pretty cool. That like cube guy that falls over and gets climb up. Yeah, second ones to do. Yeah, I like the boss metals so far. But yeah, the I took the amibo, what I took the boy amboy and you know, hit that and

then it just gives you these challenge levels. But you it's just those single player levels again, but with a roller weird okay. Yeah, and and then you unlock gear for completing that, so there's like a reason to do it, like get their clothing. You're like shit, so all that stuff and the single player comes back out into the multiplayer stuff. No, like when you buy the stuff like those those up grades, No, none of

that comes out. But you can only play with the amibo. You can only play levels you've already completed in the standard single player mode, so like I hadn't gotten very far and at that point, so I'm like, well, crap. So I played like the first couple levels of the rollers. I'm like, man, all right, well, doing those with the roller doesn't sound great because there's a lot of like airborne enemies and stuff, and that little flick doesn't have too much range to it with roller. You know,

Yeah, I think the rollers awesome. I love it. It's so good for just like staying back and covering ground and stuff like that, and making sure that your area is a very thoroughly painted out. It's kind of why I wish you could change weapons mid match, because I feel like there's like a first spawn roller second spawn Like was it like the the fifty two caliber or whatever it is whatever, Well it would be would be like a

neat strategic way to go, but you know, I don't know. Plus, sometimes like a round will start and you'll all turn out of your squid forms and it's like, oh, all four of us have rollers, great like, and then you'd like to switch and be like kind of more of the offensive. I feel when when people I didn't actually play when they were doing those those very short beta sessions, but it seemed like I saw people

complaining about the roller being overpowered. It's kind of like the shotgun, I think as far as like in terms of combat, like you can get up on someone up close. I just exactly like I haven't had a problem dealing with people like other the other team having rollers, Like obviously they cover a lot of ground with paint, but like the guns, keep your distance, Yeah, keep your distance because it's on it's one it's killed. Well's that is, Yeah, But like the roller, the standard guns, it's like

three hit kills, so it's whatever you're killing. You're mowing people down in that game. Wait, and as soon as you see a roller coming at you, you can just turn into a swimmediately out of there, right So yeah, yeah, yeah, the squid stuff is good. Like the I'm having some trouble like kind of it's kind of saying like, oh, you know, paint your way up a wall and then get up there and then jump to get up better or get up faster, And I'm like that that

doesn't seem to work. Yeah, feel like I'm doing something wrong or I'm not. I'm not reading that the weapon us, and you can't do that at all, Like if you have a roller, you can't paint your way up you can you can flick it usually you can. Yeah, yeah, the flick will work. But it's like you eventually paint your way up there and it's like, Okay, well I need to keep going. Can I something kind of hop out and do it? Flick? It's not the best. It's not the best. So, like I wish that kind of the

vertical movement was a little more streamlined in some spots. But did you switch over from because we talked a little bit about motion controls and you told me that you like turning it off at first, and so I played first few levels with just the right stick or whatever, and then Alex was saying that he loves the motion control and that's not a lot of reviews mentioned that, right, And actually, now that I've gotten used to it, I do

think the motion control is better. Have you have you switched back to that? No? No? Yeah, I think it's a lot quicker as far as covering around. Sure, yeah, no, I bet, because it's just you can look up and down a lot more quickly with that than you can with the stick. Even if you, you know, turn the sensitivity up, it's you know, theoretically you're going to be more precise, I think, But I just I haven't had any situation where it's like I couldn't

look up fast enough to shoot something. Yeah, so I find the vertical sensitivity is way higher than the horizontal. I don't know if you've noticed that. Oh, I can look up and down with a stick way faster than you can turn left right, And there are no independent settings for that, which is just like an overall camera. Yeah, which I didn't really appreciate it, but I couldn't turn the motion controls fast or offa I tckled it off the second that it let me in the return back. I think it's

so much faster that way. Like I like faster for what I mean to what end? Though? Like what what what is it giving you? Specifically? What I like is like if I'm playing with like the thirty two gallon

or whatever, I like to get to kind of elevated positions. And then especially like at the end of the match, when you're just doing that mad dash to cover as much space as possible, so get to an elevated position, and then you just want to spray everywhere, and so I you're just moving the game pad around like crazy, just covering all this ground way faster than you'd be able to. Which is the right stick? I mean it's real scatter shot, but I mean at the end of a match or something

and just trying to hit anything. That's yeah. I mean I turned the sensitivity of the stick up when I switch off the motion controls, because it's the default is bad. It's way too l yeah. Yeah, you so once I turned it up to like one, yeah, or maybe even two. At that point it was like this, this is fine. I saw some people were strapping we mote to pro control. I thought, put out that picture. That's it's official. Yeah, that's the official way to do.

Yeah, controls with a two players, like same screen or whatever. I did a little that two player mode. Yeah yeah, yeah, it's fun. Yeah, two players same screen or same console, same console. Yeah, it's one on. I did some of that. It's fun. Yeah. You're attacking balloons and stuff and you get power ups. It's kind of like a Mario Kent thing where it's cool you grab a thing and cycles between like oh you'll get the ink missile or whatever, and a bubble whatever

game feel like it should have been on the Dreamcast. Anybody, Yeah, is like a smile Bitch or something that's like this, but it definitely feels like yeah, like that era or maybe even like you know, just some random PS two game that you imported and went. Man, this game's got fucking style. Yeah, like sure, yeah, it's I really really like

it. Like I haven't felt the need to keep playing over and over to level up and get new gear and stuff like the last three Call of Duties I feel haven't hooked me as much as as this, and I like call it. Yeah, I like the recent ones, but this one I really

was not able to see. Like I'm into. I'm enjoying it, but I'm definitely like playing it in short spurts because I feel like if I sat down and played, like I'm gonna play for six hours straight, like I'd be nope, Like I would burn through the entire like my entire time of the game in one sitting. You're like, I don't want to do this

anymore because there's like there's only six maps. Yeah, and like some of the UI stuff that I feel like, you know, like it actually would be nice if you could create different loadouts of equipment gear and then switch between them if you're like, well, this time, you know, let's I'm gonna use this weapon and then with that weapon, I want to you know, use less ink when I shoot or whatever it's fast or yeah, yeah, you know, like like that sort of like load out mentality and having

multiple settings I think would work well for them instead of like, I mean, I go through the equip men, you like, Okay, what's this one do? I'd turn it around, see what the bonus? Dad is like that stuff's not great? Yeah? Does some of the later game gear have like more slots for special adalities on the okay, okay. So that's one of the issues I've been running into, is because I've been playing it pretty much all weekend a little before that, and so I'm, you know,

level eleven or twelve or whatever. I'm fairly leveled up. I've got some pretty good gear and everything, but most of my gear is like this two star levels, so it's like I have two or three abilities per clothing thing. And then like I'll see I get killed by someone in a match and it'll show like, oh, they're wearing this stuff and they have like nine or ten abilities. Wow, oh my man, Yeah, like they'll cross their entire wardrobe is nine or ten or nine? No, the entire

thing. Like I think I still a lot though, yeah, because when you start out you have like what six maybe yeah, I think six, Well it's one per with one unlockable and then no, it's like nine totals, so like, you know, I think three backs per clothing item. But still it's like, oh my god, they've got two defense things, two inkory fills, a fast squid thing, a fast run thing, like all this stuff, and you know I've got you know, five or six

things on. So I wonder how good the balancing is going to be, Like if someone picks it up a week from now and they're trying to jump into things while they're level two, if they're just gonna be getting creamed by people that are you know? Sure? I found I mean you gain XP by painting stuff, so like you can still paint stuff. Kills not influence that at all, uh kills emit paint. So I think that there's probably

something in the long those lines, but I'm not sure. Some of the matchmaking is seems a little dodgy to me, you know, like you'll end up in cases where like like when I was really low level, it's like, oh, there's a game where like two ten level ten people get matched and they both end up on the same team. Yeah, against a bunch

of people who are way lower than them. But for all you know, they for all you know, they could have been like, hey, I want to play with friends, and maybe it automatically puts them on the same time. Yeah. I read. I read that it actually jumbles the teams after each match, so you can't you can't put somebody constantly. Yeah, Jason and I played a couple and I feel like we were on opposing teams at least once, at least once. Yeah, I think, Yeah,

it's like you never three times were we played? And yeah, two times we were together, and yeah, it just scrolled us to or dropped us in another team. Yeah. I once on the first time I tried to join a friends game, it just like popped up a like an error message, so like failed to connect the partner's device or whatever. You haven't getting that one a little bit. Are there any bots in that game? Because a lot of the ways the names are displayed made me wonder if some of

them were boughts, you know. But it seems like it's just simplifying using your like like first field, me's name, okay, you know. And and when I first started playing, it was like the day or two before I was out in the US, and it was matching me up with Japanese players. I was just showing me all these Yeah, I played a few matches before work and it was one hundred percent of Japanese players in my matches in me. Yeah at seven am or whatever, I've had a lot of

those. So they're adding a new map and a new weapon to or it's by the time you hear this, yeah, well it'll be out, and that's kind of cool. I just wonder where they're well, they'll get two with it in terms of what their eventual map count's going to be. They're turning on Ranked play two, which has some different games. I guess, yeah, that's a different mode. When I saw that it was ranked, I was like, oh, great, it's the same mode but ranked.

No. But it's not like it actually is new stuff. It's different. There are different there are different variants in there that yeah, I don't know that it's fastly different or not, but there are differences. Yeah, and I guess there's a I don't think they've said when it's coming, but there is one actual new mode coming in the next few weeks called like tower Control.

I think it's supposedly it's a lot like the payload mode from TF two, Like you're kind of moving a single platform back and forth, fighting for control over it. I'm curious to see how like how you know, because the level of communication is well, you can say what come on and boo yahoo yeah. Yeah. So you know, the more they go go into mode variants that might require actual teamwork, the more like the lack of communication might expose itself. But I mean whatever, I don't ever want to talk

to anyone while playing any shooter or ever. So it's I want to talk to friends, you know, if we do form a team like banks or something like that, Yeah, that would be you know great. But you know, I can I can certainly see why they did not turn on voice chat in this game. The ink stuff is such a unique mechanic in that genre though, you know, I mean, somebody those games are literally just

based on kill counts in terms of who wins me. You know, It's like there's stuff where I'm going, like you know, six and one and in a game or something like that, and then it's like that none of that even matters taching third because there's there's such a you know, they emphasize the aspect of territory control so much that like, there are definitely spots where you could see it would be nice to be able to coordinate with people.

But they do such a good job of like that second screen to find out where everybody is. And one of the things that I love the most does like after you uh, you know, respawn, you can actually tap one of your teammates and you just jump directly to the use that all the time. That is so cool. That's it. I really wish I could use the proof controller, thinking yeah, I know, yeah, what what what would you get out of the I don't like the game pad really what.

I don't really okay, I mean, because it's like it's just like it's the button placement is almost identical. It's just just stretched apart a little bit. You know. It's like there's no yeah, I wasn't getting bad cramps, but it does make my hands kind of ache after a while using a thing. It's just like a weight. Maybe maybe that's what it is. It's just unwieldy, Like I couldn't imagine using the motion controls with that thing.

Oh it's great, because it's just it is so cumbersome. I like looking at the map and noticing that there's a huge war going on in one part of the map and then seeing like the enemy's color somewhere and no one's over there. It's like, oh, I'm just gonna go over there. It is a little janitor guy and clear no one's messing with me. It is fun to get sneaky. Yeah, and you go take a bunch of stuff. Uh. People out there who are not immediately painting their own base,

Yeah, y'all are crazy. Yeah, Like I keep getting that. I like, what are you doing? Which I have found that one of my favorite things to do now is to make sure, like if I do the paint roller, I hang back in like my half of the map, and I make sure that every area is very thoroughly covered, because I find that the winning team is usually one that like doesn't have a lot of splotchy things on their side, because you know that all kind of adds up.

Yea, it's gonna be harder walls. I don't know. You get points, you get the p points or whatever it does. Okay, it does, Okay, that goes with the percentage, Okay, okay, cool. Huh. It's it's so much fun. I like, I like to jet to the middle of the map as fast as possible, Like too, I'm gonna die out there an awful lot, but I'm gonna paint you know, more of my base. You know every time that I that I respect.

That's why I'm taking the bas is so important because the like the areas the skirmishes are taking taking place are almost never in one of the two bases. It's always in the middle of the maps. I'm definitely like respond. I've been like, oh, there's like three people from the other team here, like occasionally occasionally got bad, they'll warm their way in there. Sometimes.

I love that feeling sometimes at the end of the matches when it just kind of zooms in on the map and you're looking at it and it's like, I think we might have more paint than them, and you do the good guys bad guys thing like that. Stupid cat. Yeah it's cool, that's that's stupid Cat's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah, I really like that game. It's it's a fun game, you know, it would it would be

almost unforgivably thin though if this free content wasn't coming. Well yeah, and I'm curious see how much of that that there is, because I mean it's one of tho things where you look at it is like a sixty dollars product with like a single player mode that's really doesn't seem that great and you know,

six aps for multiplayer. I feel like, I feel like this game would be if this were like a call like a you know, you're kind of typical online shooter, it would be getting vicerated for absolutely what's in there. Yeah, it's the thing would be like a twenty dollars downloadable or something in a lot of other cases or something. But it's fucking rad. But but also since they are making good with this, these all these add ons

that are supposed to coming, like they're out there. They haven't been very specific, but they've been using language like summer of free content or something. That's the headline. I've been seeing like they're committing to some number of weeks of stuff. As it's actually like the way that like the you know, the maps rotate, Yeah, we have the old TV station come out.

Hey, these are the two maps are gonna find right now? They have they explained, like what the philosophy is though behind limiting it to only two of them. I mean, you're asking Nintendo to explain philosophy. Yeah, I don't think you're gonna. So, I just don't understand what the goal is there maybe, or how is that supposed to be beneficial? Maybe? I mean I'm just guessing here. Maybe it's for load out purposes to where if you see it's like two maps that you know, it's better to have

close range stuff. It's like, Okay, hang on to this load out for an hour or whatever, because I know it's not going to go into this big like oil rig level or whatever. Sure, So I don't know. I guess that Dada stually makes a lot of sense. I like the skatepark, Yeah, skate parks fund. The mall's fun. Actually. I

like all the maps. Yeah. The warehouse is good. Yeah. The skatepark's weird to take a roller into because of all those curved surfaces that you kind of came from the Yeah. I like the mobility stuff when you're a squid, when you're just trying to get around real fast. It's like hopping off those little like half pipes and stuff. It's pretty cool. Often does the clothing stuff the accessories rotates? I I can check every time I level up, okay, and I try to see if there's like new stars,

because you know all my stuff. I'm two or three stars now, I'm like, yeah, level six or seven, and nothing has rotated to you. I don't know if it's a daily thing. It's based on level, but every time I level up, I want to say that there's new stuff available. That's for weapons for sure. Yeah. The clothing stuff, yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not positive. I'll check again tonight. We'll see. I have way too much cash. And there's a weird peedy guy.

You can order clothes from the urchin which last time I played, I ordered clothes and I haven't gone back to since to like pick them up or whatever it is. I don't know that's you keep right, But like you said, straight up, he's like, yeah, you're probably not gonna get the perks they have on their clothes, but you'll look just like them. So like, do you keep the perks you had on your previous quarters? I kind of assumed that it would be like it would be the clothing would

show up, but it would be different perks, that's my guest. Yeah, or when you level it up, you know, you go through that slot machine thing again, like yeah, I think you just get the look of it. She goes play that weird arcade game. Yeah, yeah, squid Jump, Yeah yeah, what is that based off of it? Will do? It looks like, yeah, I do wonder if you hit a certain score, if you get some or something that was I wonder if that will be Nintendo's first mobile game. They just put that out on iOS.

Go there you go fake any s game phone, right, Have you guys figured out what the thing is? It looks like a little like dollar sign or a dollar bill with eyeballs on it. At the lobby screen smoking idea plus time, So yes, the I'd went and talk to the cat and the cat told me about it. It's the sort of thing where like when you get on a roll, I think you get a multiplier but also give way more to lose if you then lose the most, okay, because yeah,

I might sit out at like plus nine. It said like smoking and I was trying to tell it it doesn't make it clear points or think it is something of a multiplier, okay for your stuff. Huh, yeah, it's a nice game. Yeah, it's all right. Man, that's pretty unanimous. Cool. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I I it's hard to imagine the person who could sit down and just hate that game. Yeah, I don't like. At worst, you can think

it's just a neat novel. I can understand why people, like, some people could come away disappointed just from the like the amount of contents there are things, the amount of multiplayer content in it or something. You know, the fundamentals are pretty strong. Though you look around, it's not getting like tens or whatever. But everyone's like, yeah, this is really fun to play exactly. Yeah. And they you know, they tried something new in

an online shooter. Yeah, it's commendable. It's a very Unnintendo game, and it's it's really kind of cool to see them do that. Yeah. Yeah, it's not all you played this weekend. No, I just played end your whole weekend. I played a lot Latin in the other the thing I played the most this weekend. I also I played a lot of Witcher. You know, nothing to beyond what we've talked about the last couple of weeks. Followed a couple of quest lines pretty far that go into some weird

places, the bloody barren stuff. I've done a lot of that, and that's all pretty cool stuff. You gotta finish that up. It's I'm going to some weird places with that. I don't want to get spoilery with it. That's where I put the game down. I made. I made the very painful decision to put that game down until they fix it. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. There's just too many people having some crazy issues with that game, like game breaking stuff with the XP bugs and stuff like that.

So that's been lucky so far. Yeah, I mean, it's it seems like the kind of thing that you wouldn't notice unless you were really paying attention, because like they just there's like severe problems with the leveling progression.

It's all for a lot of like our forums there there's threat on our forums full of people who like people were like, oh, I was playing all weekend and then I realized I hadn't been getting any experience and I'm not leveling up for doing like major story quests, and it's like, huh, that's the only viable way to level up in that game because monsters give you shit for XP so they said the fixes. The patch is coming very soon on PC and like pretty after for consoles. So I think I've done that so

far because yeah, like it's obviously it's not gonna hit everybody. But it's one of those things where if you didn't catch it until after you had been playing for a few hours and then realized it had been a problem, it's just like fun. I don't want to go back and do all that again. So outside of that, I beat Strangers Wrath awesome game. That twist that Jeff brought up. I guess there was one guy on Tumblr that said, please don't spoil it. Is it fair to say we can spoil this

ten year old game? Untill that guy to stop listening right now for a second. I'm gonna I don't want to hear it like I actually do, And yeah, I actually want. It's a really cool moment, okay, And I'll say it plays well in twenty fifteen. I played it with no nostalgia or anything. First time started, you know, a couple of weeks ago. It's a great game. It's pretty cheap on I think it's just on Vita. I looked on the PS three story search for its three,

and I've played a bunch of it on PS three. It is absolutely on There is there any unless I know it exists because I saw it on YouTube and stuff, But like I searched for Odd World, unless it's I didn't imagine why they would have taken it down. But huh, well, regardless, play the game. It's super cool. I think the whole way through is really fun. So beat that. And then Brad, I had the same thing that I know you've got, were that promotional credit we had to

spend, and so I was, what am I gonna buy? I've got fifteen dollars left. I can't find anything. I had thirty five. Actually originally I had sixty, but I got it down to thirty five. I wound up buying on Friday night. Where's that? Where did that even come from? I had, Like, I don't know where the twenty bucks in my account came from. I don't either it's the first box rewards or I

don't know. Yeah, one of those things where they credit you some it's like, oh, you bought this than this and this, there's five bucks or something. Yeah, yeah, and it seems crazy to me that that stuff expires. But yeah, I because I have credit on PSN two and that has not expired. So I don't know what's going on. But Friday night, I was like, well, okay, and six fires on Monday. I need to just buy a bunch of stuff right now. And there's

no sixty dollars stuff I wanted. Anything I wanted to pre order, you couldn't do yet. You know, it was all stuff that comes out much later. So I got I wrote them down. Sixty second Shooter Prime, yep, nut Jitsu, beach buggy Racing okay, and I bought shovel Night again. Yeah, so those are what I bought. And then I just

spinxbox one. They'll just let anybody in there. Well, the thing is like, everything's that thousand achievement points now, and for the first time in years, it's like, you know what, I'm just gonna have an achievement hunting night. And so Friday night, since I'm not going out because I don't want to drink since Mexico, I just sat around just trying to get achievements all night, and sixty second Shooter Prime is actually pretty cool. Yeah,

it's it's kind of a paired down geometry world. Yeah, there was this video that on the side. I mean for those forty five minutes I played and the like nine hundred achieving points or whatever, I go. It was fun, you know, and it was like seven bucks or something. Uh, nut Jitsu, You're a little spot. That's Is that from the

Kingdom of the Keflings guy? Oh, isn't really sure. The UI is weird because the game, the part of the game you actually play, takes up like sixty percent of the screen, so it looks like like a High West game that they just put borders on or something. But yeah, you're a ninja squirrel and you run around and you're you're collecting nuts and avoiding foxes. And then Beach Buggy Racing I think is a mobile port of a cart

racing game. That's all right, So that's that was my Friday night, was just playing those games and trying to get achievements, but had a good time. You like to live on the wild side? Wow? Yeah. Yeah, it turns out when you're not going out and drink and you just sit around playing beach Buggy Racing. Yeah. Nut Chittsu is from Ninja b oh yeah yeah that's Kels folks. Yeah, crazy yeah cool. Yeah. Just a ton of games this weekend. Next well much Jeff, Hello,

what is happening? I don't know? Man been wild? Yeah yeah, so yeah, I don't know. I played some Splatoon since we last spoke, mean like five minutes ago. Yeah, you've been over there, like playing it under the table totally game. Uh. And then some of the stuff that I saw while I was out of the office is now like available to talk about. I don't necessarily have a ton to say about this stuff, but uh yeah rock band four they had an event. You played it?

I played it? Okay, It's cool, all right. Like the stuff they're doing is cool stuff. It's stuff that you wouldn't necessarily think of, Like you think about like, well, what do you do for the like the next rock band? You think like, you know, structural changes around how some of that stuff works, I guess. But like the the some of the stuff they're doing, I mean the stuff that they've previously kind of talked about, like vocal improvisation and stuff like you know, you're singing

in key but not exactly the way the song was written. You're still getting some points for that, they kind of string together songs into uh you know, uh like shows. They have a whole shows concept where it's like, you know, at the end of the song and be like, ah, you know what song you want to play next? Or Hey, the crowd really wants to hear this, do you want to play it? And then maybe they'll demand noncore of playing. I feel like they did that in another

rock band game. Sounds familiar, like in their kind of story mode thing or something, but like this is a little more strung together, and there's like banter so like between songs, like it'll just straight up and say like,

how are you doing out there? And then city it's just the bill just at a city name, which I imagine they're just going to have a you know, document full of city names that they'll pull in name, it's good to be back here, city name, and uh and yeah, I don't know it was it's it was good to see, uh, you know, more rock band, but still rock band. It is still rock band. I hear it's an RPG. I don't know, it's the case one of the headlines going around. No, I mean, I don't know,

like we just played rock band. It was it was. There was no, there was not much of a look at the kind of some of that stuff string it together. But there are new systems in place for like drum fills and some of the stuff that are pretty interesting. So uh there it's they're making gameplay changes to that game that I think are cool. I can wait to see. What else? Can you talk about? Batman? Batman?

Yeah? Have you heard of him? I like that guy. His parents died from crime, shame, so he decided to fight crime as the Man of Steel, and the they're making a video game based on his exploits. Finally, Yeah, it is about time. Yeah, I'm waiting for years. Arkham Knighted. It looks really great and it was a four four really yeah, I don't feel like there's something people are saying a lot about console games lately. Uh yeah, yeah, it just it looks awesome.

You know, it's a really great looking up grade. I mean, you know, the Arkham games have looked great, super super strong arts. It just it looks very nice and it's a Batman game. I don't know, you like this. I feel like, you know, like the one of the core things they like if he seems like the core change they're making is hey, there's the Batmobile. And the more I see if the Batmobile, the more I don't think gets a great addition to the game. I think

I might be with you. How necessary is it to get around? I mean, can you still do the grappling? So I'll give you an example. There was a quest that I had to complete. There was like, I don't like you have a big radial menu with all your available missions. You kind of selects, like the selected the Penguin, and it's like, here's the next penguin mission. So I walk through a door. There's two

turrets around the corner. If I walk around that corner, I'm just dead and there's kind of nothing I can do except wait, there's a like a little fuse box or something on the opposite wall that when I hit they roll up. Door rolls up. And then from that point I still can't walk around the corner. Somebody get shot. But I can call the batmobile, which can you know you can control remotely even when you're not inside of it. So you got to switch control back and forth between you and the Batmobile.

So the situation there is you switch to batmobile, drive it over through this roll up door, shoot those turrets apart, and then switch back to

Batman and then continue forward. And it was the sort of thing like it was like to cover basically four feet of space took me switching back and forth a couple of times in a way that wasn't especially fun or interesting, And it was the sort of thing like this, this is not making this game better, Like, shouldn't I also be able to just throw an exploding batter rang around this corner and kill that thing? Yeah? Do you get the sense that it would be literally impossible to do it on foot? Like is

it required? I believe that's my understanding was that that was the solution to that particular problem. Uh and yeah, so I mean driving the Batmobile, there's like some cool stuff about it. You know, launch yourself out of it and then like right in the flight, right right right, Yeah,

she stave way up in the air. And then as you're in the air, dive vombing, kicking people, doing you know what, whatever the fuck you're doing, you then can as you're floating down to call the Batmobile and then you land right in it, and so you're going they've been they've been touting that for a while is that something you aim at It just seek No, you just you hit the call Batmobile button while you're in the air,

and you're just gonna lay the rest of it happen no matter what. Yeah, okay, So, and it's you feel kind of rad as you're doing it. You're like, fucking ay Man jumped out of this car, eat the guy's ass and then landing back in the car. Yeah. Uh, and that's that's neat. What reminds me of what Batman or Batmobile designed they're

going with. Is it like the Christopher Nolan like militarized tumbler looking When you pull the left trigger, it turns into a fucking hover till I know that, you know, like it is all armored up and has a tank and is very dark and black and dark. Okay, so it's it's looks like a piece of military hardware. Yeah. Yeah, I feel Tim Burton yea, even I love the Tim Burtons, even the first one. It's yeah,

it's it's like the Cadillac of batmobiles. Yeah. Yeah, so this thing just yeah, I mean, at any point you can pull that left trigger and start hovering around, which you know, it gets back to like a lot of the weird car combat stuff I think we were talking about last

week. It's just weird having a car in general in there, because even in Larkha City, you know, like the best way to get around the city was just fly over it. I didn't actually play it for myself, but there's a Riddler mission in there that where you're just kind of driving in a tube and ceiling and rotating. That's gonna be like a lot of those. Yeah, that was practically like a race slash like obstacle for mission.

Yeah. No, one's very clearly just like contrived for a car. Yeah, And I just spend some time looking at us like that's not that's not why I'm here. It looked kind of dumb, yeah, you know whatever, Like you know, those most open world games have little racing side missions

of various types. You're you're absolutely right, so and you know, as far as I combat's concerned, you know, I was talking to someone over there, and it sounds like they've had a lot of more situational awareness for Batman bashing the people's heads into walls if you're in the wall and that sort of stuff. But Nightwing is there, so in this mission, it was like, uh, you know, the situation was like, okay, well, as soon as I get to these guys, Nightwing you should show up

and help. And so as soon as you get there to where you like, as soon as you start the fight, Nightwing arrives. And then there are takedowns and dual takedowns where you basically switch control to night Wing midfight and you are playing as Nightwing for a while and you have the full same combat system and then you can switch right back to Batman, but you can switch as you're doing takedowns. So it is the same kind of like relatively easy.

I mean, you know, it's the same basic concepts for combat. You know, you're you're doing your thing and just fucking up large rooms full of people. Yeah, and and that's still super fun. And the night Wing stuff, at least in that demo, like I don't know if they had everybody upgraded or whatever it is. It just felt like like I'm gonna switched to night Wing to win this fight and switch back and forth between two characters, because each time you switch it was a takedown. Just when you

switch it an auto take. It's like the on screen prompt is like night Wing dual takedown, you just hit the button, you switch to the other character. You fucking murder somebody in the process, or like basically it's like you kick someone over to Nightwing, he crushes him, and then then you're playing his Nightwing. So but it looks great, Like the process of all that stuff looks awesome. It's almost like in a fighting game when you do one of those moves to summon in your other guys in. Yeah, but

it seems like it all happens automatical. It seems like the kind of thing that looks great the first time and by the twentieth time, I don't know, it's yeah, well we'll see. I'm yeah. I mean, I think that game looks really nice, and obviously there's going to be a whole lot to it, but I worry that, like the things they're adding aren't necessarily making the game better. Yeah, I mean that was you know, whatever, personal preference. Not everybody feels this way, but I already felt

they had that problem with Arkham City to an extent. You know, like like Arkham Asylum was such an incredibly well designed and focused thing, and then they kind of deluded that a little bit with you know, by by expanding it out in the city and filling the city to an extent with content that was not as strong. Yeah, yeah, but I think that you know, that was like it was cool to see kind of a larger open world to take on that concept. I think that, you know, for what

it lost in focus, it gained and just kind of breadth breath. Sure, And and I feel like that third game, like Origins, I think was not a good game. Yeah. Yeah, I didn't just say definitively it's a bad game, but I mean it was a different studio, you

know, like yeah, totally totally, but it's for it. But at the same time, like you know, it does mean that now this is the fourth one of these, like Rocksteady can get up there and talk about the end of their really all there all they will certainly do, but this is the fourth one of those games that Warner has published, and and you know, it's a little long in the tooth at this at this point, also, everyone has stolen Batman's Combat. Yeah, I don't know that too

many games have done it better, but everyone has taken it. I'm trying to think if anybody's done it better. I think it's always just has it's a suite of cool special moves. Moret I always thought of Mortar is like a sloppier and more forgiving and kind of like, I don't want to say more fun version, but it was definitely a lot more forgiving, you know, a lot leading do you drop a combo in mortor if you hit and miss or if you've mist someone like you was still very much that like you

hatch the buttons, you're gonna drop your combos. That was Mortar. Yeah, let you get away with a lot more missus and stuff, and there's a lot of slop there. Like Batman, is still precise in the way that you expect it to be, like I thought it, Like in Asylum, it was such an like a revelation that I did every fucking combat challenge I let's do in that game. I was like, this is incredible.

I need more of this. But at the same time, I even even if no one has done it better, like the number of games that have cribbed from it, and and you know, kind of built onto that system or just taking that system whole cloth, like it, it means that it even if they're still doing it better than anyone else, it is not as impactful as it was, I guess, especially four games in so like I

still better enjoy. Absolutely, I'm not saying it's a bad system. I'm just saying that, like now having done it through let's say two and a half games, because I didn't finish Origins, Uh, I don't know that I want to. It's it's not a draw. It's not something that I'm like, oh, I can't wait to get back to that combat. It's like, I've done this multiple times and it's not necessarily going to be a big differentiator at this point. Yeah, they're a little more going through the

motions. Yeah, but you know, they've got an upgrade path for you and all that sort of stuff, like you're you're building, you're building your own Batman. Is it a bigger city now that you have the Batman bill and everything to feel like a new city, It's still you know, I didn't I didn't transcribe all the points about the demo, But yes, I'm sure that one of the things like this is the biggest Batman ever. I'm sure at some point someone said that very excitedly. They'd almost have to have

for them to be making this game. But yeah, I'm confident that it will be another Batman game, and there will certainly be some pretty awesome moments in it. I just wonder how it'll all shake out in the end. I'm absolutely fine with it, man. I loved the first three games enough to where it's like, Okay, give me more. I'm okay with that. Yeah, yeah, one more, Yeah, yeah, one more fun that's it, And that's that's seems to be what they're saying, is that

this is the last. If the rock Steady turned around and made a fourth one of these, like, it would go against absolutely everything they have said. What if they started a new trilogy of Batman? I would I'm like, I'm super excited to see rock Steady do something that's not Batman because they kind of came on the scene with Arkham Asylums they've never done. There was all that talk for a while that they wanted to do Superman and take on

that challenge, and then I think it wasn't. Wasn't there also a rumor about them doing and then Turtles game. Yeah, Well that's just probably because they were named rock Steady. I don't know if it was a rumor getting that one. Yeah, but yeah, yeah, super excited to see that studio do something else. Yeah, and then I don't know, I think we were going to talk about it in news, but well, I've got the press release in front of me. We just talked about it now.

So Lego Dimensions, another Warner release. This is there. There, buy some figures, put it on the portal toys. It's part. It's part of the Toys to Life category, the burgeoning Toys Life category. Oh I figured it was. That's kind of everywhere at this point, right, Like, so yeah, if if if if, if the deal had not been sealed already, Ambos came along and turned it into a bonafide on. I just feel like Ambos are a different thing a little bit. I mean,

it's it's definitely separate from you know, like Skylanders. Yeah, like when when you put Skylanders or Infinity things or even these Lego things on the thing you play as that character, it's a it's a massive gameplay change, whereas Ambo seems like, you know, you could here's a way to unlock collectible things. Say, Ambos are a bad version of of what this type of thing can be. Yeah, sure, but you know, but still kind

of like the same. It's still a collectible thing based on characters. Yes, yeah, so Lego Dimensions is their version of this game, and I just I think they're just like so far away from what like a Lego when you think about the Lego brand of bricks swearing you build your own thing. Yeah yeah, I mean, but the figures will come with bricks, Like the figures are real Legos that like the versions we saw, you could remove

them from the bass. It was like, here's a Batman, dude, and you can take them off the base and he's just a Lego man. Can you take them apart? Like? Can you take these vehicle? Figures will come with additional pieces, so you can you can build your little batmobile or you can rebuild it into a sonic tank thing with the additional parts.

But that's not what adjust things in gameplay. At no point does it know what Legos like you rip all off and just put the bass on there if you want, But that's that's their thing for the endgame thing is you every vehicle can be upgraded multiple times, so at some point you turn the Batmobile into some kind of sonic batmobile that can blow up blue brick. Someone tells you, like, oh, follow these instructions now make it look like this

on screen. It will show you the instructions and you can look at any time to say like, hey, here's how you can reconfigure this toy to look like the one in game. But you don't gotta. It's kind of cool though, I mean I would do that, you know, if you're a kid, that'd be fun. But what if you needed to switch back to the regular Batmobile? Would you then take it apart again? Like, like, will pause the game and take it apart? I assume it's like

a permanent like, oh, you upgraded the battle. It seems like it's more situational. Oh okay, well but but I'm not sure about that. So is the game? I mean, you know, like the Lego video game franchise is lengthy and storied at this point, Like is it one of those absolutely? Yeah, you were walking around punching stuff. They have different abilities. You can you know, who can build things on the platform? Who can you hold down the button to make these legos? You're building something,

You're building things, you're finding the gold bricks. Yes, okay, okay, I mean they're like you know character gates where it's like, oh, you cannot go down this area unless you buy it's character style. So I think I think it will. It'll end up being a little bit like original Skylanders where they had the kind of the different affinities, the elemental stuff, and I think you will have characters like you know, even in the

other like Lego Games has done this textbook Travelers Tales. It's like, oh, you need a you need a building character to get in. Yeah, so instead of being able to unlock like a hundred characters in game, or maybe they'll still do that, but you know, you could just go buy them at a store, are they gonna be kind of insidious? Yeah? They seems here's this thing where sixty fires. Well, so yeah it is.

It's a weird thing because there's such a precedence for them doing these sorts of games that then bolting all the toys onto what is sort of similar to their existing concepts seems a little crazier than just starting with that from the get go, the way Skylanders and Infinity did. And in their defense, the

range of properties they're incorporating. One thing is they've got a story mode that is based on the mash up. Like you think about Infinity, it's you know, you're going to play in the Pirates play set, and you're gonna use Pirates characters to experience this store end a fucking story. If you want to match things together, it's in the toy box and they're you know, the toy box is cool and then to all this other stuff, but it's

not the story mode in a video game. So the one thing Lego to mentions is doing is like they are they are bringing together all of these things into something resembling a cohesive story from the looks of it. So it's like the starter kit will get you Batman, uh Gandolf and some lady from some property that I think it might just be Ninja Go or you know, some Lego pros. Lego Ninjago is listed here the fan fiction what's her name? Her name is a star fire cool lady. I don't know DC, and

there's just Warner Brothers Marvels in there. Mark Warner owns DC. It's a Marvel. But I'm so confused because there's Disney Infinity, which is also that Marvel, right, but then they made publishing the game, so Marvel isn't with Disney infin of the and Lego dimensions, they made, didn't they make They made a Lego Morto. There is no Marvel, and they made a Lego Marvel. There is no Marvel Lego dimensions. There is no Star Wars in Lego dimensions, but there is Midway Arcade? Are there nark guys?

I don't know. They didn't say anything of it, so they just spit out a list of properties, and it's like it's crazy stuff because it's like they should make Lego narc figures. They're not doing like Mortal Kombat guys and stuff. So there's a trailer that is going to hit alongside this that I could have sworn I saw raiding in, but I don't. I'm not familiar enough with the Ninjago or some other Lego things to know if if that's true

or not. But it's it's just they're listening to property as Midway Arcade. It doesn't say specifically say Mortal Kombat, So I don't know what that ends up meaning other than like it's probably like paper Boy. I don't know. Saldavita, Yes, you play a Saldavita soul okay le soul Lego Saldavita. Yeah, I would buy I'd buy that as a separate product. I don't even want to play a game, but I would buy the figure. I feel like I feel like I should just round flies because property a lot of

really good things. It's ridiculous. The previously announced list of properties that are gonna be in this are DC Comics, Lord of the Rings, the Lego Movie, Wizard of Oz, Lego Ninja Go, and Back to the Future, and then today they also just announced the Simpsons, Doctor Who, Ghostbusters Portal, Jurassic World, Midway Arcade, Scooby Doo, and then Lego Chima. Is how you say that, c H I m A. I'm not

familiar with that property. I don't know. Yeah, anyway, anyway, that's just like a like think about the number of rice holders involved in the ship yea, and pulled all this stuff together into one game, and it's gonna be a storyline where you go to these different worlds, and it seems like the story will be based around those three characters in the starter set, like in terms of like cut scenes and stuff like that. But the portal

holds like seven fucking things. So at some point you just go like, well, let's add Scooby Doo to the mix here, and then run around as a dog. And then they showed a little bit of Scooby Doo level and actually they're kind of shading it and the music and stuff they're bringing in and voice work. These legos talk, so you can it actually looks cool, like the Lego Scooby Doo stuff actually look good. I was like, man, that that's actually really nice looking Scooby Doo legos. I mean the

plot of the Lego movie revolves around this exact concept. Yeah, so it seems like the properties mashing up in the Lego world. Seems like they did a lot of that Lego they've been they've been. It seems like they've been building up to this for a while. So you could be like Gandoff and Scooby going through like a Batman level. Yeah, yeah, that's pretty cool. That's weird. Yeah. The part that I played was a Wizard of

Oz huh. So you're you're on the Yellow Brick Road. You are looking for this gem that then the Wicked Witch comes to try to steal with flying monkeys and that's like kind of a boss fight and you could fight the Wicked Witch is Batman yep, Okay, all right, Yeah, this press release refers to these fourteen brands in the language. Yeah, so I yeah, I wonder if that's all of them, or if they're more that they still have to announce or what the deal is. But that's it seems like a

lot. Have they talked about price for an individual figs M. I don't know, that's not it's not in this press release none. But yeah, I don't know. Like the for me, it all broke down when it played like a Lego game. Yeah, I just I just don't want to play those games. Those traveler sales games have been so prolific for so long, it's crazy. I fell off around like the second Indiana Jones one or maybe the second bat I thought that they were inventive and really cool, but

man, I never liked playing any of those. I kind of like the Star Wars ones for co op that was fun, Like the first Indie one, the first Batman one. Past that one's actually really good, Like, yeah, is that the one that came out around launch of PS four and Xbox one? Yeah, very well, could be. I played a little of that. Yeah, that's right. That was Yeah, that was Lord of the Rings was okay. There was some interesting stuff in that one like, and then the first one where they talked. Yes, I think it

was. Oh, I think it's been longer than that. Well, I think I think the first Lord of the Rings one was the first one long Batman two or something. They used soundclips from the movies. I want to say it was. That's what it was. They had they had recorded their own their own dialogue. Oh wait, previously had Lord of the Rings used movie dialogue? Yeah? I think you're right, that's probably what it was.

I wanted to say one of the Batman ones was the first time that they used I think right, maybe that would have It was Batman two. Is that the one where they had the open city? Yeah, that's the thing they like they kind of said like, oh, Lego goes open world, but it didn't really. It was kind of like a very Yeah, it was a very limited facsimile of an open world, Like if they made a real open world Lego game, like that could be cool. But it

wasn't. But it wasn't that. What was that way you game the Lego City stories? Yeah, isn't that Lego one? Oh? Sure? Yeah, yeah, but that's a that was a different thing entirely right. It's hilarious. Oh my god, I mean to play that game. It's really funny. Yeah, so I don't know, like I played a little bit of it and it was like, oh, it's yeah, yeah, it's totally one of those and that kind of that kind of soured me on it.

But their list of licenses, like the idea of like a lego doctor who thing in the world of Ghostbusters or you know, like all there's just a bunch of weird potential there. I wish they there are vehicles, so like like I said, you know, like you put those vehicles on the portal and then you can get into them the drive around. So it's like, okay, I'm gonna drive through this roadblock in the Back to the Future Deloran. Yeah that's okay. Sure, sure you could do a lot worse.

Yeah, you could do a lot worse with that stuff. But they should have gotten Lord and Miller to make this game. Mm hmmm. Yeah they made the movie. Is that good? Like a movie is fucking It looks like it's the guy that they had talking about the game had worked. I had done the movie. Oh no, shit, it was okay, I heard it, remember his name. But it's like it's sort of Pixar issue in the sense that it plays It plays well for children, but it's

also got plenty of things for adults to appreciate. Actually, I would say the humor is a little bit more nuanced. It was a lot more nuanced actually in this movie than in Pixar. The director of someone who Miller. Those are the guys they did the Jump Street movies, and they did Jump Street. They didn't think Last Man on Earth that was serious. Show like they're they're pretty awesome, Like they have to keel the pools throughout the entire

highly recommended the movie. I'm not sure. Okay, that's good stuff. Yeah, that movie is a lot of fun. Okay. See, I started playing You Must Build a Boat, which is out this week. I started building a boat. Yeah, I have not yet finished the boat. I mean i've I started with basically a canoe, and now I have a boat that I could have a below decks. Why must you build a boat because you have to go up river and you need a bigger boat to hold

all these people as you're kind of traveling through this world. If this is the sequel to ten Million, yeah I didn't. I had no idea about that. Until I looked at you playing it and I was like, that looks a lot like ten Million, Like yeah, like yes, the sequel, And I was like, oh, yeah, that guy doesn't give a

shit about branding his games. Or ten Million was just like you just fight like a dragon or something at the end, right There wasn't like a story like yeah, you're building a boat, so there's yeah, building a boat. It's it's sounds like there is a bit more that from what I've played of the early game, it is, it's exceedingly similar. You are, you are kind of building, You're getting you're getting materials to pay for upgrades.

You're you're unlocking upgrade shop guy, you're finding it, you know, like like completing quests on your runs and stuff like that and just running over and over again and getting a little more powerful each time you go, and like that. That part of the game seems very similar. But it sounds like that this one goes some different directions in terms of just like a story and and that sort of stuff, but I haven't seen any of that yet.

I'm super excited about that because ten Million did the same thing that like Mario Puzzling Dragons did for me. Because like, I'm not a typical match three guy like Buduel or whatever. But if something has a cool twist on it, which ten million. As soon as I started, I was, oh my god, it's so incredible. Yeah, so this is a lot like that. It's awesome. I'll play the hell so far. Yeah,

so I'm I'm excited to be playing that again. I saw you planning that on Steam, right, I think you said it comes out on iOS the same time. I think it does. I don't actually I all me, you know, because I'm gonna I'm gonna wait, I'll buy that up here. I'm actually gonna gonna poke around on my email here and and see if I can get the answer to your question. What if I went to the app store and typed in, Well, it's not gonna be out till the fourth. Oh okay, so oh it's not even out on Steam yet.

Yes, I see, yeah, okay, yeah, it's coming out June fourth, and yes it'll be out on PC, mac Lennox iOS. And it looks like at the same time from the sounds of it, so price, I do not have a price here. I'd pay upwards of ten bucks for another one of those that first one was so good. Well yeah, but it's uh, it's it's nice. This this seems like a solid sequel to that game. Awesome. There's some some good little changes right off the bat. And and yeah, and if it's you don't need to have played

the first game to enjoy it. Understand the understand the books. So yeah, I we will record something with that if you want to see more of it. But I'll just say that I think it's a really cool game so far. Ten million was three dollars, so I'm probably be fun so much gameplay out of that. Yeah, I never I never bought that. It was it's like a top three game. Wait for it. Oh oh shit, uh ah. The app store is thrashing. It's ruining the moment.

God damn an app store. I was about to be all I just bought it, Okay, I just yes. Is that don Android as well? I don't know, Okay, I have not played it, so it's great, Okay, yeah I did. I did eventually come out on Android, I believe. I'm pretty sure I read that this this new one's built in Eugeny, so I imagine that it's very easy to spit it out everywhere. Better I say that as a non game developer, Right, push buttons and it goes. Right, it's all exactly. I mean, this computer language

just just you know exports play four Yeah totally. But yeah, hit go paid. Pretty sure that's how that works. Yeah. Uh Jason, Yo, what have you been playing? We had we already talked about this stuff. We talked about this platoons, Yeah, the Witchers, the Witcher Yeah. Yeah, trying to IM trying to get uh, you know, just like my gear up to stuff. So I've been doing a lot of the treasure hunting stuff, the Griffin school whatever, and that stuff is really really

freaking good. You finding a lot of I'm reaching like a week back into my past because I'm played it in that long, but were you finding a lot of like Witcher gear? Uh, that's exactly what Yeah, that's exactly what I'm looking for. So like those treasure hunt lines, they'll they'll give you like locations to where you can find those diagrams specifically for Whitcher. Oh is that what those quests are for? Or like is that why they're in

their own category in the quest log? You got it? Yeah? And yeah, I'm pretty sure you know, it's all just for witcher gear. I haven't seen anything else to the contrary, so which I'll see okay, But yeah, just getting myself up to the snuff gear wise, doing a bunch of side quests. I got to the the one main town, met some familiar friends and stuff. Yeah, so sorry wit witcher gear. Do

you just mean silver swords? Is that kind of sm Like there are full sets of I don't know if are there set bonuses for wearing the whole set doesn't seem as such, but they do tell you once you created that you should hold on to these because there's gonna be a way to upgrade them. So that's what you can't do with the normal stuff. Like I don't know if I did a treasure hunt quest out of order or something, but I ended up with a full set of plans for it's some tier of ursine gear.

It's like superior arsne or something like that. But then I look at the what the requirements, and it was like one of the required maps was the enhanced version of that gear. Like you say, you like you upgrade through the tiers of it, but I only found the plans for like the top tier, not the like three tiers below that so I can just never

make it. Yeah, it's all unless I find the plans for all those other parts where like it's weirdly like I feel like there's like there's a lot of really excellent gear in that game in extremely unassuming places, you know, surely, yeah, Like there're a lot of those schematics I found for like level twenty four stuff, and I'm still like level twelve or thirteen, but a lot of that stuff can be contained in loot containers that look like like

you if you didn't go into like witch er Vision, you'd probably never see that it was even there to loot. Like, there are no there are no big like exalted glowing lute chests in that game. It's just like, oh, I found this incredible silver sword in a crate, or you'll see

like an unassuming hut in the middle of the wood, Dania Watkin. It's not really tied to a quest or anything, and you know, it might be some string in linen and one thing and the next one's like, oh jesus, here's the super rare and get or you know, a piece of arms. Totally like incredible rare items could be literally anywhere in that game, and like in like a weird way that feels like it violates like what's considering considered like good game design, you know, or like the kind of game

design that like leads the player toward things they should be looking at. You know, I feel like this game violates that in like eight different crazy ways. You know, Like they've had a lot of like gameplay stuff, like you know, they're they're very much doing their own thing. Yeah, Like

I'm not I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It just it defies your expectations when you've played a bunch of games back to back that are very much about like, oh, let's not let the player go anywhere that they shouldn't be where they might have a bad time. I can for sure, Yeah, totally. Like I've had multiple cases of like it's like, oh, I've got a quest that's at my level. I know where it is.

I'm just gonna set the marker and run to it. And on the way to that quest, I'll hit a mob that's so high and level that it doesn't even show me its level. It's just question marks. And it killed me in one hit, you know, which is like I thought I could be here. You said that this is my level, you know, that's true, But it's a little bit of believing ability to the world. I guess. Yeah, like dangers everywhere. It's kind of frustrating in the moment

because the load times are so savage in that game. But but at the same time, it's like, yeah, it's like, oh, I thought I was safe here, I let my guard down and then I got punished for it, like always be saving something a little dark soulsy about that. That's kind of cool in a way. I guess. How bad are the

load times on PS four? We're talking like Bloodborne worse? Oh serious, full minutes to load back in after you die PC I have like a ten second thing at the beginning where it's telling me the story or whatever, and then zero load time after that. I tried the PC version on the machine here in the office, and even that took a little while told in at home minutes. Yeah, yeah, me too. Yeah, that's great. I can't even like read the tooltips or whatever during the loading screen because it

just goes so fast. It's awesome. We'll lucky you. Yeah, all right, that's a great game, though, I'm dying, dying to get back to it. Yeah, I had to take a break from like mainline stuff just because like I wrapped at the Bloody Baron and I'm just like, fuck, that was so good. I feel like I feel like Bloody Baron is becoming It's that phrase is now being spoken on Twitter and the same tones that you heard people say like dark Brotherhood back when O Bolivion came out.

Yeah. Sure, like everybody's going like, oh, that's the quest line, Like that's where you see like how good this game can be. And that's like the first major one too, So man, I hope they keep it up throughout the entirety. Well see, I saved at the beginning of that thing and haven't gone back to it, so they're chomping at the bit. Some tough decisions in that one too, I know, just even would

seemingly weird side stuff. Yeah, yeah, I wow. That game, for all its faults, man, shit, they do so much good. I just I hope they keep sending it with with these updates that are coming out. You know, they've already said they're they're trying to you know, rework the UI to make that less shitty. That would be great, Yeah, because I I trying and played you know with couch play, but you

know via PC. So but yeah, they've been on top of a lot of the PC stuff, Like they're in patch what four or five four four, and yeah, they're they're trying to keep the consoles up to date as well. We'll see. And Jason, the thing you talked about last week, I think I think we actually ran into the same mission. I just love when you're just going around trying to clear up all the question marks. Oh and you know, like one of them it will just be like,

oh, here's some idiot drowners guarding a chest. But then you'll find like whole stories that are like really well written, like really interesting quests that you could just completely miss if you walk past that question mark. They do a good job making the world feel lived in, you know, it's like this this feels like a place where things have happened, where there's like history built

into this place. Yeah. That's why I like, I think I'm going to have one of those two hundred hour playthroughs, because every time, like you know, I'm walking someplace and somebody will walk up to me and be like, oh, this thing's happened. I can't find my wife helped me out, Like I might say no in another game, but in this one, it's like, hell, maybe this goes into a three hour quest with a bunch of amazing things that I'd miss it if I just said no.

Ear Yeah, so I just accept everything. Anytime anyone asked me to do anything, I'm like, yeah, totally, yeah, I'm there. I'm the Witcher. Let's do it. Yeah, that's what I'm here for, witching. Ye, it's good. Yeah, all right, got anything else that's that's talk about it? Yeahs hunting and ship like that. So Washington TV and just trend chill. The apartment directly below me is renting out right now, so if you want to directly below. Yeah, you know,

I messed around a little bit more with that killer Instinct shadow stuff. Oh yeah, I wanted to talk about that too. Yeah. I'm gonna have to stop you there real quick. Okay, great time, take a quick pause here, uh, and then we'll come right back. All right, and we're back. We are back. Oh, thanks for having me. It's good to be here. It's great, Jeff. You're looking a little pensive over there. No, I'm just it's this a chair in the room.

It's just a little weird. We don't have a fancy podcast studio like those suckers in New York. Man. These guys are living the highlights I know out there compared to how how how the tides have turned, how the tables have changed. Yeah, and they're like using that podcast studio now too, right, I think? So? Yes, they working out there now. We shouldn't We should just go out there every week and use their studio to record. That's probably true. We should just take over the Beast caste

the Giant Beast Cast from them. Better. Yet, what if we just let them handle the podcasting gool see it, We'll retire this thing. They're here now. No, No, we just sit on a beach somewhere. No, I was thinking we would. Instead, we would just have double podcasts, okay, on Tuesday and a Friday. This thing's already like close to three hours. No, that thing, hey, that thing is? That thing's on if you're out there is that's the Giant Beast Cast, which

we've been talking about it here in the past couple of weeks. Here you can go to iTunes and to it. They have their first official episode out as of last Friday, rounding out the cast with the addition of Austin Walkdon and has joined us. Yeah, his first official day this week. Yeah, he's already putting in work too. Man, totally came out of orientation. I thought he had news stories going up on day one, like raually. I figured he would be like trapped in a dark room being forced to

watch like clips of CBS program corporate corporate jazz videos. Yeah. That was our first day. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. After chatting with Austin, I am now happy to realize that five it's out numbering five to three. Giant Bomb staff are wrestling guys. M I'm gonna start that site. Did you so we with him when you decided to call him a wrestling guy? I think he would be okay, okay, are you calling me a wrestling guy? In that case, what did you watch last night? I

don't know nothing, I don't know. It's four to four as far as I'm con say, I'm out. No. Yeah, he also watched last night, or so I'm tweeting about it. He's he's he's been public in his stay yepatch, I mean varying levels. Yeah, you know some of us are you know, nightly viewers and everything. Some of us are yeah, five to three in a minority. Brad, Great, somebody's got to go against this fucking green ros on tonight, Brad, bring some beer and

pizza. A good it's you're probably better. There was some good stuff that happened over the weekend. But don't don't be fooled, Doune'll they'll suck it up. I can't wait to hear about it on your wrestling podcast. Yeah, let's get it every week. I'm right there a whole host of podcasts, Power Bomb Cast we've done in a while, terrible and we've been busy. But yeah, no, the Giant Beast Cast is out there if you want to sign it for that. Yep. Anyway, what we're talking about

shadows, shadows, shadows, Shadow Lab. I went to the shadow labea weekend and built up my jay go. We played someone Friday on the show. Let's let's let's let's bring it back for a second. Plain this shadow mode to me. All right, I'm gonna played dunk. Okay, all right. The fighting game is where you it's like you are a guy or a lady or a beast. Yeah, and you can punch and kick people and sometimes shoot fire. Out of your fists, punches on top, kicks on bottom. Got it? Okay, you got it? Okay, I'm

that far all right? Shadow shadow Jago? Yeah yeah, shadow to Jago. Yes, is that where we're playing shadow? No, we're not. I made a Jago shadow totally different, Okay, So yeah, it's There have been modes like this in some other fighting games. It was like tech in five Dark Resurrection for the PSP. He had it, and I think a couple of the techn games NBC three did something kind of similar where you weren't creating a shadow. You were like, you know, fighting against an

AI appointed that was supposed to be kind of like whoever made it? Yeah, it was weird. This seems like more advanced than those things. So it starts out, you go and you create a shadow, you go, get in three fights, and it watches you fight and then tries to mimic your style, so based on how you play, it will react in a similar fashion. And then you can go on and kind of continue to play

more matches and use that to update your shadow. It was kind of brain your shadow brain, and then other people can challenge your shadow for like a certain amount of points or something like that. Yeah, that's a bit of a risk reward versus, you know, like stuff in there where you can kind of challenge other people's shadow. You can just go into a survival mode and just fight other people's shadows all day long, just random strangers. That's what I did. And at the end of that fight is like, hey,

you want to upload that and add it to your your profile? Yes? Absolutely, Okay, So it's not like automatically taking samplings of how you're fighting. No, at the end of every fight it says like, Okay, do you want to add this? I feel like that should be like automatic. It should be the sort of thing where it's like if you fuck if yeah, boss, if you fuck up, then hey, your shadow is not as good. Yeah, that's it should reflect you at all times.

You can kind of be selective. If you have like a real bad match or something, maybe you could. I would be so goddamn like I do. I wouldn't upload shit unless I had like a perfect match. I've been uploading everything really yeah, and building my guy out. Actually, so we played a few matches on the show on Friday, and I kind of uploaded that guy and then I when I got home and tried it on Saturday my shadow and fought like twenty times. Okay, how did you do?

Did all right? I want to say, like one over half of the matches? Damn? Yeah. So and then then I put in some work and I don't know if I made my shadow better or worse. Okay, but it actually the AI of the shadows feels a lot more like an online matter or you know, like you're fighting a real player. I'm not gonna say it's like one hundred percent identical or not. It feels like the AI

is more varied and interesting than typical fighting game AI. It got to the point where like I was fighting somebody's shadow and bear in mind, this is a this is an AI opponent, and they were te bagging me and on taunting in between rounds. I got a couple of taunts in so my shadow will now occasionally taunt. I think, uh, but still bad at manuals and bad at you know a lot of like guessing on combo breakers and stuff.

But there's certainly some like uncanny stuff that that happens, like you know, I know how I play right, and then watching my shadow play against like like you, I'm like, fuck, yeah, I actually do that. It's really impressive and kind of scary at the same time. Yeah, it's it's good stuff. I was. I was pretty surprised by it. On the other hand, there's some jagoing on that with that as well. So initially made my shadow as Jago, right, and I was playing against

you know, all kinds of other Jagos. So if you know, another Jago throws a fireball, I'm gonna shadow kick through that fucking thing. Yeah, But then my shadow starts doing that all the time against opponents that don't throw a fireball, so like full screen shadow wind kicks. Yeah, that's not gonna be Yeah. Somebody played one one of my shadows and uploaded it and I'm like, I would never ever do that, But maybe you need to get more matches in to further refine it because it will also, you

know, it seems like it's building it. So I read up a little bit on it. They've been kind of putting out some stuff about how they built this stuff in the first place, and it sounds like if it's a character that you haven't necessarily fought against a lot, it will try to pull from some of your existing data, but it's not going to be as good as you actually uploading data of you fighting against that character. It seems like you've got to put in a lot of work to get like a good,

well rounded Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I don't know, it's really interesting. Yeah, texts super impressive. Yeah, I actually want to go back into the game. I just like trained my shadow a little bit. Yeah. So yeah, it was not embarrassing fun to do it there. But yeah, it's one of the things I hope kind of makes its way to a lot of other games, you know, just like Fighting Game AI is

awful and a weird like roundabout benefit. It's like, you know, I want to play against you know, some of my friends, but schedules never sync up. So it's kind of cool to just like, you know, have that back and forth kind of a synchronous like, hey I beat your shadow, you're terrible. Yep, exactly. They can kind of you know, run back a synchronously. I guess it has too been good to kill her instincts. Yeah, I guess it's not not just eight new characters.

They put a story mode in, they put this thing in. Yeah, it seems like they really flushed that thing out. Yeah, they've got like a Maximilian, who's a huge Killer Instinct fan working on the storyline, you know for that. And man, all these new characters are just like super smart. They're not straightforward, you know, mashy characters. You know, like they're real crazy in a way that is kind of intimidating, honestly.

Yeah for me, yeah, because you really need to geez, like, you know, even fighting against them, just like these there are systems coming at me that I'm not even away. I don't know what's going on, Like, what the fuck do these characters do? And it's just, yeah, that stuff's been so like that's intimidating it for new people, but you know, people that have stuck through this game, it's really really refreshing, and it's you know, yeah, they're not just like here's another guy that

shoots fireballs. I don't know, like, yeah, so there's definitely more to it than that. Yeah, I don't know. Let me curiously if they do anything more with it from here, they're doing a great job. Thanks for not sucking it up, Davely for once. There's still time. Yeah, that's true. That's true. It's always time, all right. If nobody else has any other games to bring to the four. Let's move on to the headlines of the week. Okay, what do you say,

Sure, let's talk about some news news item. The first x com two. Yeah, yeah, got a fucking sword man. You fucking take the sword and you chop they are. It's great. I wonder if they had intended to announce this this earlier, if it was just so leaky that they were like, let's just the league. Stuff was people, it was stuff they were putting out them. Yeah, I know, I know they were. People were connecting the dots, maybe a little more quickly than then they

thought. I'm not sure that was that was definitely happening. Yeah, I feel like I saw the word x COM two even before that. But yeah, the official title is an x coom. I don't see anything whatever. There's no subtitle as of yet. Just they're just calling an x com And they're also saying it's only coming to the PC. That is. That is by far the craziest part of this. Never really I thought they did really well on contract. But yeah, I mean you do that for facts,

No, I don't. I don't, that's the thing. But you know, they scored a ship ton of rewards. I played it on both PC and three sixty and I thought it was great, but yeah, oh yeah, totally like yeah yeah. And so it's one of the things whether it's like the announcement was accompanied by some coverage. I think IGN had some stuff, and it sounds like they are kind of commenting on like, yeah, by not doing on the consoles, is allowing us to do more stuff.

Okay, so or they straight up says there there's it seems like they're design that were only on this game will have modding, this game will have it, you know, like there's there's stuff that they are attempting to So it's one of the things where was like, okay, well you know, because and you see this announcement, you're like, oh, well, obviously it

would come to consoles, they just haven't announced that yet. And there's a lot of people going like somebody in two weeks, we'll say we're getting it

too right. But now that they're out there kind of like commenting on the like with with specificity about how going to a single platform has changed the way they're thinking about the game, then you start to wonder like, oh, well, maybe there won't be a console port until they ship on PC and then if it does well, they will get someone to port it after the

fact or something. You know, maybe maybe they're actually like sales trends or market research or whatever they tell them, hey, this is actually the right thing to do. Maybe, Yeah, I would think that's distinctly possible. I actually don't. Yeah, I thought about in trying to dig up sales data for like X common consoles to see if maybe it just wouldn't be worth it for them to do it, because that version, I mean, like

they were fine, but it's like, you know's there's loading involved. Yeah, that was the way to go. Yeah, the version was heads and heads and tails. For a game like that, I think they did a surprisingly good job. I played the controller on the PC. But wait, man, I mean you just don't get out in front of as many people. I mean, if you're not on I would not at all. I mean that game had a very long tail, I'm sure on the PC, and I'm sure they sold a ship ton of units through Steam sales stuff like

that. So like, I wouldn't be surprised if the you know, that was the highest selling platform for them, And certainly, you know, like for access is enough stranger to just putting out games on Yeah. Most most of the stuff is you know, like a Sieve and stuff is just PC only. Yeah, well, just this last one. I mean they certainly have done Sieve on console. Yeah, well, but they made it for console. It's not a uh this game assumes that the Aliens won the first

game, which that seems to be out went for like people. It seems like, hey, yeah, it seems like uh, it makes it sound like humanity is on the run in this one. The twenty years later, Yeah, you're kind of you're kind of a ragtag, scrappy band of survivors who were trying to fight back against the Aliens who sword Yeah yeah, you

guys will have swords. Those screenshots look good. Yeah, that's uh yeah, I wonder how that's going to affect, like, you know, the idea of being this like resistance, you know, the humans or whatever, like, because that was such a big part of the last one was just this command center and you know you're going all over the assets ready to build

a new base. I would assume that the resistance would have a base, right, I mean they would build because they I would assume they would move into a vacant space and have to build that base up room think so, I think you're probably right, But then there are stuff where it's like, oh a UFO crashed and poland you know you got to fly out there or whatever, like I would think, Yeah, I think it just changes of

the mission structure. I think they're they're getting out there and saying that a lot of the maps and stuff will be procedurally generated so you won't run into, you know, some of the prefab fit together pieces you ran into in the last game. I feel like there were so many of those UFO crash in the woods, you know, go check it out, right, So, but you know, at the same time, it would make sense that all the UFOs were designed identically because you know, why would you build a

unique UFO every time you built a UFO get board. Sure, yeah, but you know if this time, if it's fewer crash Uphos because you're on the attack, then you know it's more bases. It's more you know, either Earth areas that have been taken over by aliens and there's a lot of potential there. I think. So, ye, did they say anything as far as release window or November? Yeah, this year six months awesome by the way, here you go, here's your new X come game. Yeah,

that's kind of it for details, but that's an exciting announcement. Yeah, that's great. It's also nice to see some announcements before you three. Sure, yeah, give us some of it now. I like instant gratification. Uh, Twitch will no longer allow you to stream adults only games.

What it seems like that they've they would have. I didn't think it would have any anyway this, but it gets it's like them formally saying like okay, hey, no, don't yes, yeah, you know, I saw I've seen people out there on message boards and stuff going like, oh this is this is suspicious with right happening right before Hatred comes out of them.

There's nothing about it at all. They implemented this policy to stop people from streaming hatred, but also they just haven't had two before they there have not been any other high profile AO releases the Yo games, Yeah exactly, and that sort of stuff is you know, I think they probably had I don't know what their terms of service said, but I assume it said like hey, no nudity even in games or anything like, hey, we're not allowing this, this and this. Well they this is a little more blanket and

spread out. It was like, hey, if it's got this rating, don't stream it. I mean they you know, they even cracked down on like the amount of skin that streamers were showing. Yeah, a year or two ago, and it's never been the sin. I haven't streamed on Twitch since. Yeah, seriously, Yeah, it's gone to the dogs. But yeah, you know, like the last, as far as I can tell, I looked at the Wikipedia page, the last AO game that came out that was not like a hentai game, like some kind of manga type thing

was the uncut version of man Hunt two in two thousand and nine. Yeah, so that I must have been just pec Yeah. But but but you know, the point being like Twitch, Twitch has not had to deal with a big game coming out since it existed. That extends to other territories as

well. So like their equivalent of an AO game is that right? I'm almost positive it might be eating that during the whole hot Coffee thing, Like, did they they never actually put out a version of San Andreas that was AO right now, like the yes, we said, oh it's AO, and they're like, well we gotta recall it. Yeah, okay, Yeah, they didn't go back and sell like, here's the full version. You don't even need a game shark anymore. Let's do this stupid mini games.

Yeah, yes, what a terrible Jesus. Yeah, it's uh so I think that you know that they run into situations where you know, as a like they sell ads on on their audiences, on their users streams, uh, and if those streams are adult in nature, the advertisers are going to get spooked, uh and not want to advertise. And you know it's it's you know, so at some point, like there are great business reasons for

them to do this. On top of that, you know they're there the perception angle of like a huge portion of the Twitch audience is made up of fairly young kids. Sure, and Twitch is part of a giant, multi billion dollar corporation now right, Like they're going they're going to foster a family friendly and they're going to have to lock down a lot of rules. You know, it's like streaming has been the wild West for so long, and you know it's been cleaning up over the years, and you know, it

just makes sense that you're going to see more rules, not less. Yeah, Like the bigger and more popular things get the more buttoned up they get, and and kind of look at video like the less edgy. You know, public companies. If you really need to do it, there's lots of other services out there. Yeah, yeah, it's stream I'm sure Like Box at this point is like, fuck, you want to stream porno games? Come to us. I don't actually have no idea what their rules are,

no idea. Yeah, I don't know. I played a little Hatred today before we came in here. Yeah, it's it's postal, Okay, Like someone sat down and said, like, let's make a new postal and then we'll put out a trailer that makes it look like this something and people will fucking take the bait all over again. And now that it's out, I look at it and go like, man, everyone is an idiot, every top to bottom. We are all idiots across the board for very hard.

It's not even pay any attention to this. Yeah, I mean it's the sort of thing that's just Yeah, it's a It seems super lame. And also like I think if you were trying to make that kind of gruesome ass game, you could do a lot better. Like it seems like it's bad even on that front. You know, it's just like, man, this sucks. It's like I'm like a weird, fucking goatee version of Glenn Danzig running around a French coat fucking just randomly shooting people in this shitty isometric environment.

Like it it's just it's a fucking half assed across the board. It's just like it's, yeah, I don't know, like I I don't know what I was expecting, but I thought it would be more than like a fucking like weird like revisiting a fucking postal, which makes a lot of sense, I guess in the In the end, is it all isometric because there's like trailers made it so yeah, and stuff during these groups are executions, so you if you get up close to someone who is you know, is

not dead, you can hit the Y button or whatever it is on keyboard, uh, and it'll go into an execution animation. The cash with that is like the action doesn't stop, so you're just getting surrounded by guys with guns shoot you. There's there's a toggle. Yeah I think they don't.

Maybe they don't shoot you until I'm not sure, but it's like there's a there's a toggle and the options called safe executions only that takes that removes those, but yeah, like those don't look good like if you were if you were out there going like, yeah, let's see some murder porn, Like

it's it's bad with that too, you know. So it's like it under no, Like I'm I'm struggling to find like some area of this game that like it does really well, and it's like the shooting is bad, Like the controls are pretty rough, like visually, I think it's it's ultra rough.

So even for that demographic that does want to see it, for the controversial edgy stuff, it just seems like it just seems like fucking like this masturbatory, junior high fantasy thing of just like we're gonna listen to fucking death metal and here's this fucking polish death metal that plays over the end credits.

It's just like fuck you. Like you scroll through the credit, like so I watched the credits and at some point, like it gets through their names or whatever, and it's like all the it shows all the executions over that with with these you know, the developers names over and then it's just like I don't know the exact one of the exactly says, but it says thank

you to fucking no one. Yeah, and then it prients season scrolls, accept our fans and this people, and it's just like the whole thing just seems so half assed that it just it starts to look like a cheap attempt to cash in on that stuff, which you know, that's maybe the worst thing of all. It's like they couldn't even commit to their dumb, fucking

weird thing and make something cool. It said Junior High earlier, and everything you're describing it sounds very very Junior High, like trying to be edgy. Yeah, attention grabbing totally. Like it's just it really seems like that. And I don't know, like the the idea that it generated as much fucking fervor as it did Obviously it would, yep, obviously it would. Yeah,

as as Layman without merit as hatred sounds like it is. Though it kind of does make an interesting point that there is potentially, like it a life for AO Games at this point, you know, like thinking back to when AO was Like the last time I thought about AO Games was like on I don't know that's what it says. It's thank you to no one except Lord Gabin. Yep, it literally says great, Like when when was the last time that AO stuff was really in the news, like hot coffee?

Yeah, but it's you know it, you know, since no retailers would

stocking and no consoles would allow it. That is the thing. It's like AO games didn't exist, Like the AO rating was basically the kiss of death for a game, and games weren't going through ESRB ratings because they weren't being sold in any kind of legitimate fright, So it's kind of if nothing else, it's just a reminder of how much the market has changed or get placed, rather like the distribution methods, you know, like the a game that

a game that like embraces its AO rating can still like make its way to consumers now, you know, And yeah when years a few years ago, like it just couldn't right, you know, yeah, like AO games basically couldn't exist until you know, just within the last few years. Yeah, and maybe someone will do something interesting with it, right some day, Right was the guy game AO? No? It was actually I swear I saw it on that Wikipedia. I think it was because it was just boobs and

then didn't it get like recall so something. So the thing they ran into is that an underage person signed a waiver about light light about their age, and then that led to a sudden situation where it's like, oh, this is technically way illegal. Yeah Jesus Christ, there was a real so not AO but super illegal, yes, super illegal. I reviewed the Guy game it's from, and that was at a time where we were kind of reviewing game for like what they were and and and kind of leave the people out

of it. And it's like you look at it and you're like, for what it's trying to accomplish, this is all right? At it you did? It is just a trivia game where you see boobs if you're right or

something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is like the typical guy questions was that the whole gammick was like, I forget questions were now, but that game was like like X Retro or X like Turrock, Like really, I want to say it was like Dave distant beer worked and then he's just like, all of a sudden wanted to make you know, shitty like Girls Gone Wild. Right, Yeah, it's like we went out there and shot all this footage. Yeah I'm actually typing that in right, now it's got

a terrible cover. That guy looks like a big idiot. Where was I working at the time that I got recalled? And I'm like, no, I'm just gonna like cash us out to myself or something. You own the guy game? I think I don't think I do anymore. But I also used to own the There was a Tiger Woods game. Yeah, Cyber Tiger. Uh it wasn't Cyber Tiger. I mean it was like that is a Tiger Woods tame but like buried on the disc is this like episode of South

Park. It's like a Divic's file, right, Yeah, something like that, like somebody just forgot to take it out of like the repository or whatever. When the Jeff Spangenberg, who was a producer, was yeah, he was at Iguana and retro and so like part of that kind of Texas and sixty four scene of like Tarak or whatever. It was fucked up. Iguana had a cool logo. It was Iguana spinning a basketball on us. I

think that was just for NBA. That's when I saw the most for him, laying on the logo being cool and laid back through to their word. That was a fucking Iguana yeah, yeah, it was. I remember like when they came by to demo The Guy Game before it was out, it was like there was this yeah they went on the road with the Guy Game. Uh, and there was this like weird pedigree associated with it. Was

like, whoa this you talked to? You just worked on these you know, popular shooters and sure, you know, just like Metroid like what but they had a really classy three booth. I bet yeah, I don't know. I don't think they ever made it. I don't know they ever made a D three. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Wow, yep, wow, Okay, And it was just like, yeah, it was ridiculous. A lot of video games are, to be fair, you're you're not wrong, Like a lot a lot of them are, and some of

them in a way that is like creepy. Some of the way that's just sad. Yeah. Speaking of which, I'm just gonna read you this next headline Verbatim Okay, Laurie full of Special Editions, Splatoon, Ambo Stolen a Whole, Laurie Full Tire, Lord Tire Lourie England. Yeah that's correct. Do you guys, did you guys see the story going around? Yeah? Yes, like the so the the big retailer or one of the big games

retailers in the UK. Game I had a massive shipment of the special edition of Splatoon that's got like special Splatoon Ambo with it straight up hijacked and stolen, and that shipment is gone and they had to cancel a bunch of people's pre orders of that special edition. Why are they not rioting? Right? I don't think people were particularly happy. Yeah, sure, it can't be that fresh. No, that is not fresh. No, not at all anymore freshness, you know, I mean this is a you know, specifically,

this is a shitty situation. You know, people obviously are not getting the thing they wanted like that. You know, there was some olive branch extended with like oh well sell you the regular edition and take an extra ten pounds off or whatever, like they tried to make good or anything. But mainly I pulled this story out because what the fuck is going on with Ambo? Like it's baffling, It's we have no idea that that's it's directly related

to that. Who knows they could have just stolen a truck not knowing what was on it, just seeing like it was this this truck has something on it, I guess, And it just seems like a very strong coincidence. Though maybe I think they'd robed like a fur coat truck or something if they wanted to like sell this stuff, not a fucking splatoon ambo truck. Yeah. Have you seen how much some of those amb and you've seen like the people don't like for coats. As it turns out, they're expective though,

right, probably all right because no one makes him anymore. So now you want when you gotta go, you got to go on safari yourself. I

see, I don't know if someone probably still makes wore coats. A small a small handful of people that I fall on Twitter, I see them strategizing like hours or days in advance of the new Amibo shipment's coming in about like what their plan of attack is going to be, and then like they always come back talking about what they did and didn't get and they seem very disappointed on a regular basis. I want to jump ahead to an email real fast.

How about that? Okay, I was at fries this weekend and they had a boy Amibo and I had it in hand and I put it down. Wait, which which Amibo? The squido. Okay, I saw boys and girls that Target. Really when I was there over the weekend? Did they sell the three pack? They did not have the three pack in Yeah? Wait, what's the third Amibo? Squid? Just a straight up squid? All right? Here's a short email from John Hey bomb cast on. Here are currently standing in line at the Toys r US waiting for it to

open. I'm sorry, there's a line of about twenty people. I set out today and all I wanted was a Robin and Lucina amibo, being a fan of fire Emblem Awakening driving around my small town in middle Georgia, and every game stop, Target and best Buy already had similar lines lined up. Every location already had Robin and Lucina already claimed by the first in line. So here I am waiting in line and an employee steps out handing out tickets

for certain amibos. I took a ticket for Charisard and Granninja. I don't even want these two. Why am I buying these? I've reached a low point, so I have a Granninja and Charisard. I didn't even want these? What are people doing? How many people do you think? Like? What person do you think are buying them for gameplay purposes and how many are just putting it on a shelf. I don't know. I would guess it's way more collect I would. Yeah, I would absolutely agree with you.

There's definitely a certain scene out there that wants to train their amibos for Smash. There's there are people out there that are you don't need that heavy into it, but you don't need like eight Well, I guess do you need a bunch of them? Like is it one character pert? You might even want multiples of them because there's different ways to train your character up to.

Yeah. Yeah, it's it's a deep dark hole, Dan. I messed around with that mode and smashed Like it did not seem that cool that there are strategies to it. Yeah, there's Yeah, it seems like Yeah, I don't, I don't I feel like this. I'm sure that's a small percentage of the people buying it. I feel like this is just part of like growing pains for Nintendo and then eventually they will figure out the supply chain on this and this won't be a problem. If you think about the first

year of Skylanders, especially at launch, it was a fucking nightmare. You couldn't get anything. Ever. It was just like everything was sold out and

it just that thing blew up immediately. Uh. And then eventually Activision kind of figured out the finer points of being in the plastics business and it was never a problem again unless they wanted it to be with certain they're like, Okay, well this edition is limited to Target, so that one's going to be hard to find stuff like that, but generally speaking, the standard Skylanders figures seemed like way easier to find after about six months, so that they

sort of that ship out. Do you think Nintendo's gonna get to that point? Are they going to start this stuff is popular enough that I think they'll have to. I mean, they've already kind of said they were going to make more Marths, but I think it was a different Mark Martin waiting.

But I suspect that this is just like them not wanting to be left with a warehouse full of fucking shit they can't sell, understandable, and they're still trying to ramp up, Like what's the actual you know, we go through when we launched T shirts to a certain extent, like what how many T shirts should we do with the first run. If we don't do enough, then people have to kind of order some and then we have to wait for the next printing and we bring them back and stop like that sucks for us.

Wasn't damaged on the scale of Nintendo. It's even fucking crazier. Wasn't that What really fucked over THHQ was that you draw tablet? I didn't they order a ton of those? Yeah? Yeah, yeah they were. They were clearing those things out fire sale. Yeah. I was just holding I was holding my you Draw tablet about a week ago. Why I was putting it into a box so that it could not be so that it could be out in the garage with my outfit three sixty face plate and some other stuff

that has no business existing. They belong together. It sounds like what you should be doing with the uter in twenty fifteen. Yeah, all right, mornon Tendo News, Who's ready? The Nick, the newspaper in Japan, is reporting that the NX, the next Nintendo console, will be based on Android and right, it's a really good track record for home console. There's a lot of really great stuff partnered with Nintendo, who's very forward thinking.

Yeah, yeah, this is all the markings of great success. There's there is very little other detail to go around this nugget of information. An insider tells neither the Nick that the nx is quote operating system is loaded with Android. This this would be able to speed up getting all the game developers on board. Uh, and the story continues that it would also mean development could

be expanded to smartphones, tablets and other devices. You know, it seems seemed like a move that largely would be centered around kind of helping cross platform stuff, I would think, right, I yeah, I don't know, I don't know what the benefit of that. Android developers are they looking top? We got to get these Android developers on board because otherwise, well,

I mean, I don't I don't mean specifically to other Android developers. I'm saying that, you know that all the Nintendo consoles so far are on entirely closed platforms that don't have anything in common with the other consoles or PC. You know, yeah, yeah, what does the Android typically run on as it arm? I think, I mean, yeah, I mean most devices are armed these days, but but I think you know, it could be

poored to anything. It's just Unix, yeah, like everything is Unix deep down pressure un once it comes out of Microsoft, it's running some kind of some kind of old Unix Core or whatever. But you know, like the like the PS four runs on DSD or like a modified BSD, right, Like everything has got kind of similar underpinnings when you get down to it at a certain point. Yeah, so maybe that doesn't matter, but it's it's

a little Yeah. When you think about what Android has done in the like televisions cooking up to a TV space, it has not been the super encouraging sure, but you know, I think if you probably threw enough hardware at it, like that's a lot of that. One of the other problems is, like you know, the UA, A lot of these other boxes they're out there running Android that you know you are theoretically gonna play games on is it's they're too slow to do that, and everything runs like shit from the

menus on down. So you would like to assume the Penex will be a bit more powerful than the HYA, you would like, Yeah, probably, I would hope. I mean UIA is like similar to phone hardware in a box, right, Yeah, more or less. The Amazing Frog was really

pushing those pixels. Yeah, that's where duc game debut, not a whole lot else to go on powerful yeah with that stuff, But the story does point out that the UK has been very good at at predicting accurate into the rumors in the past, with citing some other examples, so that might very well be happening. By the time they get ready to announce it. This might not be happening anymore. It's hard to say I'm a sucker for intend

of Properties. I mean, if this is just like some weird offshoot and not something that they're going to be doing full time, it might be well. Opening up that operating system is is like that's something they need to do, you know, like running these continuing to run these closed proprietary platforms seems very bad for them strategically the way things are going, but we shall see. Uh. Lastly, there's a new Monster Hunter. Yeah, yeah,

Monster Hunter Cross. What the hell is saying? I don't know that they're doing super moves and stuff, so this is like their way of bringing it into like some stylish action game. I don't think it's gonna be like mon Hunt May Cry or anything like that, but yeah, you get super moves now, so it's kind of class based as well so, and it seems to be like bringing in some of the stuff from Frontier, which is like the uh the PC version okay, like overseas. Yeah, yeah, it

looks nice. I've seen videos. I was like, man, that looks really good. It looks really good. It's also like not translated as far as I know, unless there's like patches. But yeah, I don't I really don't want to go down that road. But yeah, this is interesting. Yeah, the supermoves add add a bunch of flash to it. Uh, And I don't know if this is going to be like you know,

the new engine going forward or anything like that. They're recycling a lot of you know, locations that they've been to already, saying really yeah with monsters as well, and there's really like a handful of new things to see and do. But yeah, they're putting a large focus on on the supermove stuff. But I don't know, I don't know how I feel about this. This could be really bad, you know, because this is like in in like stark contrast to how a lot of the Monster Hunter games have been previously,

you know, very methodical. Yeah, totally, maybe this is them finally coming around, yeah, which which yeah. No, we're gonna make good games that people want to play. Could be but you might ail in it in it, yeah, exactly, like we're into it. That doesn't seem like Yeah yeah, considering how popular the right is over there, people that like Monster Hunter seem to like it just the way it is. Yeah, so kind of, I mean, and that's why they keep doing what

they've been doing. Now, what if they went out and got the Dynasty Warriors team and said, why don't you guys make us a Monster Hunter game? Okay, I'm done with that. Man. I played you can just over and over and over. Yeah yeah, and then win get a lock onto stuff. Yeah? Great, Right, did you keep playing that at all? No? I fell off pretty hard on that thing. I don't know why. Yeah, it's a bumpy road. Really into it for like ten hours and then just I don't know, but man, you ride it

out. You tame that bucking bronco fu. Yeah fuck yeah, it's so good. I could see the appeal. All right, that's all I got from news. Let's move on to emails, all right. Bodcast a johnbomb dot com is the email dress. First email comes from Julian in the Netherlands, who writes in about spiritual sequels and a big publisher copyright everybody's favorite topic.

With the ever growing amount of these so called spiritual sequels like Mighty Number nine, Ukulele and blood Stained, do you think eventually the big publishers who own the original ips will try and to block these efforts for their own gain. We've already seen that happen to Jeff Minter when Atari stepped stopped him from making anything resembling Tempest. Ever, again, seeing as these studios are usually small studios when compared to the big publishers and their hordes of lawyers, I'm

inclined to think they wouldn't last a day. Is this something you think you can see happening? And if not, why not? Depends on if they have like a legal fun stretch goal, I guess. I mean, what would the claim be with something like you know, blood Stained, something that doesn't share any names or you know, anything with Castlevania outside of just a general style of gameplay, You can't you know, like the look and feel

isn't something you can protect. And you know that goes back to you know, like do you think about the number of pac Man clones and you know, it's like you think of because I think they could go after Shadow Complex if that was the thing, right, you could go after Galaxian if you were Tito, because like it's a lot like Space Invaders, except the ships

dive, and we don't think that's enough. Yeah, I have heard of cases, like talking to developers of smaller games of like of like you know, like, oh, the copyright for game X actually encompasses more than just like the name of the game, you know, like there are specific elements to the way that's built, where like we couldn't do X, Y and Z even if we were making a game like that game, we couldn't do like X and Y because those things or those elements are contained within their copyright

or whatever. But but surely nothing like Mighty Number nine or Bloodstained it could like those are so general, right, right, Like what could those things do that could actually infringe on like those specific properties that already exist. Yeah, yeah, I think I think you're right, it'd be it'd be a

hard case for that. With the case of the Jeff Minter stuff, I think it's a little different because there's a lot of just like audio visual information in t XK that you look at and go like, that's from something else, Like he lifted stuff, right, I mean he lifted stuff from his own well, but at the same time he did work here. Yeah, well, he mean he made Tempas two thousand and four Atari. Right.

It's like John Fogerty getting sued for sounding too much like Credence. Yeah, it's like it's it sounds insane philosophically, but legally like it's it's totally correct.

Yeah. Like the the t XK situation is super weird because you're like playing that game, You're like, oh, the guy that made Tempas two thousand for a tari is making another one of those, and he has made games you know, like Space Draff is similar in look, but it's a very blatant flip on the mechanics in a way that makes it feel really different.

T x K is kind of returning to I mean, it's not identical, but there are things about it that like you just go like, yeah, there, you know, he's he wants to make a sequel to Tempas two thousand, but isn't calling it that because he can't. And that's a weird situation. Like I ain't no lawyer, but I looked at that thing

and one like yeah, kind of sort of what they're doing. They did like video interviews with Jeff Minter leading up to the release of that game, and the number of times they said tube shooter instead of saying tempest was super weird, Like they really went out of their way to not use the word tempest in other classics in the tube shooting genre, like two Nights Huge Love That of course, Yeah, Gyrus. I was just about to ask if Gyrus counted as one of those. I guess so, all right, Nanotech

woert no no perish the fault all right. Next to email is entitled fuck Destiny. Hey guys, the names Liam and I'm from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Over the holiday weekend I had I went to Combo Breaker, the Chicago fighting game major Yeah late one of the first nights I had gone to, say hi today of Lang and check out the Iron Galaxy booth. Oh but when I went over, I found him grinding shards and Destiny, but Dave Lang ten feet away from him. World class Mortal Kombat X matches were

happening on the main stage. Fuck Destiny, ps, fuck Dave Lange. Maybe langs of Destiny guy. He really Wait. I look up to Dave in so many ways, and this is kind of a disappointment to hear he has way into this new expansion. I can tell you from personal experience. Yeah, I don't know about that. They're I deleted Destiny for my PS four yesterday culturate. I don't think I want to talk about it anymore than that. I just wanted to say that I'm proud. I'm proud of you

and I support like pouring the bottle down the sink. Basically, wow, really dark moment with that game. O bad. We got your back man, Hey, you want to run the second raid with me? I still haven't seen it? And fuck Destiny going back to DODA clean Yeah, yep, sure, yep uh. Next email comes from Ashley. It's about the complexity of game development. High long time listener, first time emailer. The

podcast is a great soundtrack to covering people in in Spatoon. Anyway, As a recent computer science graduate, I've been getting increasingly frustrated by the flippancy of comments about how developers are stupid and should have done X, instead of why that seems to come from the gulf of knowledge about development between actual developers and the general public. Do you think that as time goes on, people will become more appreciative of how hard development of a game is and be less cutthroat

to any single mistake a developer could make. Could game development becomes something that is covered in general knowledge, Like how most people can appreciate that it's not easy to be a musician, for example, I don't know that's how people probably probably not even even a lot of shitty albums take a lot of like musicians ship and the work to come together, and no one appreciates like, oh, there's very few people are like, well, at least it was

well played, like the drums were on time. No, No, the general public doesn't care, and honestly, like, in a sense, they shouldn't have to. You know, they're for them. It's a it's transaction. They're out there spending their money on the thing. They want the thing to be good, and they're not always going to have nuanced criticisms of the thing that they but but they love acting like they know, oh yeah,

I mean that's not Yeah. There are certainly people out there that basically basic human psychology, like the less you know about something like the more over confident you are about what how a bunch you know about it? How long a

video takes to render out? But but yeah, like there's there's no reason that people should ever really be made aware of this stuff, you know, or that they would be you know, like sure, it's not like they're going to be instructional videos out there necessarily with the next call of duty saying

like here's how many thousands of man hours. Yeah, it's like if someone says, like, hey, there needs to be more guns and call of duty, like they could put out all these videos showing how long it takes a person to implement one gun and call of duty, But that doesn't you know, no one's gonna look at that and go, oh, well, I guess you know you have something. Well it's it's not people aren't looking for the actual answer to the question. They just want to be satisfied.

That's absolutely true. I mean, at the same time, I can absolutely understand Ashley's point that, you know, like a lot of the language that is employed against the people who make video games is incredibly try and cut those people out of my life. Yeah, that's mostly possible. Like the amount of invective out there about like, oh, lazy developers like how they were they like, they're fucking so lame and stupid, you know I could do

it. Yeah, like armchair everything, you know, armchair quarterbacks, armchair game developers like you know that that sort of stuff is. It's one of those things where like you know, like, yes, a lot of games ship buggy and they shouldn't like it's not excusable necessarily, but like the idea that they were just like too stupid or lazy to fix the game before it came out. Yeah, Like yeah, it's like you know, when you hear about you know, QA and how like oh you know, like,

oh we know about every major bug the ships. That doesn't doesn't necessarily mean we have the resources to fix all of them, right, you know, But like I get, you know, the more developers you talk to, you the more you get the sense that they buy and large like no, what's wrong with their games? You know? Yeah, it's it's the funny.

It's the funny thing like when you know, like on the reviewing end of things is like you know, running a review of a game that points out some specific the shortcomings of a game and then having like fans of that game go like no way, they made it perfectly and it's you you're fucking wrong. And then like having a conversation with the developer who goes like, yeah, no, totally, we know we I mean, yeah, we would have loved to have fixed this, this and this just ran out of

time. A lot of developers are pretty realistic about it. Yea, you know the the this person was a monster and the project went sideways here, here and here. You know. It's like they know, right, it's like we had we had to reorder half of the levels at the last minute, and that's why the story doesn't make any sense or whatever. Yeah, we're just like, oh, the voice acting fell through and this happened and

blah blah blah. Yeah, yeah, that that's always It's it's like frustrating in a way because you can't exactly get out there and say like, oh, actually, everyone who worked on the game knows that I'm saying things that are true about the game message board guy, right, But at the same time and again, at the same time, you can't. You can't. That's not to excuse the things that are wrong with games that you pay money for, right, No, totally, you need to be vocal about it,

But it's more it's constructive ways to do it right. Unfortunately, the people that are on message boards that are talking in all caps are but they're not. Unfortunately they're the loudest, and marketing, you know, here's them, and Marketing will go back and say it, all right, you guys

got to fix this shit. But it's the way that Twitter and other kind of forms of social media has made it like a lot easier to contact someone directly is where the thing is. Because you know, people on a message board are gonna have conversations about whatever they're going to have a conversation about. It doesn't necessarily include you the person being talked about. You know, it's like they're and they're free to go off and do it like who cares,

you know. But it's when they can specifically target the people that are of the decision makers and bomb them with like you need to do this, this and this, and you're fucking terrible your job. I could balance your game. I mean you're like, that's no, Like maybe they're not great at their job. I have no idea but to come at them that way, it's still super shitty. Yep. Sorry, A twenty year old Internet guy, you might not know as much about game development as you think you do.

Just be a fucking nice person. Ye, yes, Like find a way to articulate and express your complaints in a constructive way that could actually help somebody improve something, and don't be a dick. Yeah yeah, yeah, it's it's I don't know, I feel like we at least try to be respectful here and there. I'm sure occasionally there are probably some people that feel like we're crossing a line with the way we talk about games on this very podcast, But you know, like generally speaking, try not to. I

mean they're fucking trash. Yeah. Well well yeah, I mean they're fucking bad at their fu job. Trash made by amateurs, right, Yeah, way to fucking compress a pilot horseshit onto a Blu Ray disc. Fuck? Were they thinking, I don't know I could fuck I don't even know you could do that. Yeah, So I guess it's impressive in that sense. Yeah, yeah, that like cleared sirt. God. Yeah, at least

they accomplished something. Yeah, but that last spans would come on. Moving on next to email from Peter, who writes Son about the E three drive. I guys, this will be my first E three and my first time driving down to LA from the North Bay. Myself, I'm familiar with the five and the one, as I used to drive to Santa Barbara a lot

with my kid with my dad as a kid. But I was wondering if Jeff has any travel tips for the drive, any specific spots I should check out on the way or just good places for food and a pit stop. Also, any non E three related places I need to check out. I know Roscoe's and Portillo's are favorites of the site, but are there any others? Pill it's down by Disneyland, but you could I mean, if you have a car down there, you could go. Yeah, I've done that, but it's not near E three. I will do it. I might

do it again, man. I usually go to a Polipe, the original supposed to be like the originator of the French dip sandwich. Super good. It's kind of like near downtown LA, kind of close to Yeah, it's a quick cab ride from the convention center. Yeah, super super good sandwich place. Roscoe is for sure. I would Rosco's once and wasn't super It was all right, you know. I didn't like the first time I went

there. But I found a good way of like eating their stuff. It's just like you you cut the waffle in like quarters, and then they that forms like a taco. So you take a little bit of whoa chicken on top of that, okay, kind of drenched the syrup and then roll it up like a little mini taco. You get the entire I just don't think I don't like the taste of the syrup and the chicken together. I think that's I think I just like, that's not huge for me. Stick right

in there. Yeah yeah, then if you don't like that taste in Rosco's is not for you, because that's the whole right thing, you know, Like I love chicken and I love waffles. It's not together. Yeah, I love it. A little Tokyo has some really good like authentic Japanese like tonkatsu curry and yeah. Yeah, it's a gas station near the convention center that'll sell you, you know, drinks for a dollar each, sushi knows all what was my one la thing? But that closed so I got nothing.

Now I gotta shi play something tape of that's incredible, yeah, super good. Yeah. But yeah, in terms of the drive down, you know, just stop when you're hungry or we have to use the back. There's there's there's the Andersons. There the split pea soup place. That's cool, let's see. I mean, but there's probably a little hot weather, you know, you like, stopping in the middle of a long drive for split pea soup might lead to some crazier stuff a little later on the drive.

I mean, the you know, the classic is the Santa Nella. They'll talk Sla. So the Andersons is that is at that exact exit, Santaella. So uh yeah, but I always thought that thing was a little too early in the drive. Yeah it is. It's only like an hour in if you have a car. I think I've said it before. The best barbecue I've seen west of Kansas doctor Hoggle Woggles Tyler, Texas Barbecue. I've already got it pulled up. Oh yeah, right, yeah, this

is in Van Nuys. Uh. Let's see one thirty six. Seple Veda, my favorite, my favorite medal for Seplevita. They're really good. It's it's affordable. It's affordable. They give you a giant goddamn plate of of me. Fries are really good. The sauce is incredible. I did not expect to find good barbecue in California. I'm damn another bottle of their sauce once another. I had a huge, like half gallon thing. Yeah,

but god damn no, it's it's so good. It's a ways out though, like we'd packed it out there once and it was like sixty bucks or something. So good. You have a car kind of sword on the way, it's a little bit yeah, if you're driving. Yeah, it's really not that going through some parts of the valley and stuff. Yeah, yeah, it's great. It's good actually driving down just so I can go there. Are you driving down? Yeah? Really? Yeah, I don't know that. Yeah. At Leasta hasn't really seen much of it. La la

oh. I mean I keep telling her that it's a fucking shit old Yeah. She wants to. She wants to see it. So yeah, she's gonna be hanging out there. Didn't know she was there. It's a nice place for four to five days. Yeah, no, even that's about all I got in me real bad. I was just there for four to five days, and I say, Santa Monica's all right. I was near the beach. Yeah, I was in Santa Monica Santa Monica iss al right, like, yeah, it's all right, La, though you could do worse.

I always feel like I've been smoking a packet day by the time I get out of there. For me three or spending time in Silver Lake, I've been over there a little bit, you know, Like in San Francisco. I think there's probably a good forty percent of the population that I want to punch in the face all the time. Silver Lakes to solid sixty five, I could see that not being your favorite place on that it was no

good. No, sure, I don't know if it's like that anymore, because I don't think anyone's quite like that the way that it used to be. I went, like when I was crashing on couches during you three years ago, my friend took me to I guess Kei for Southerland's favorite bar, Like that's gotta be awesome, Kei, I trust Keef for Southerland's fast in places to drink, And oh no, it was still rough. Yea not your scene. Huh Well, Keif for Southerland is an actor, it's true,

and might just have slightly different tastes than maybe his characters do. He's so cool though it's Keifer the man can drink? Is I understand? Yes? I think who was in a who was in a bathroom next to a drunk key for Southerland? God, I've heard this? Yeah, anyway, whatever, somebody in the press right, I don't know. I feel like I don't know this person. If we know you and you or if we don't know you either way and you paid next to drunk key for Sutherland,

Please get in touch. Yeah, we want to hear from you. Uh. Next to email comes from Matthew Uh, he says. Brad has been talking up The Witch or Three lately, and in the same breath has also mentioned its glaring flaws. The positive aspects of the game seemed to eclipse the flaws for him, and I can really appreciate games that do that for players. There's just so much good about the game that it overshadows the shortcomings.

The issues that Brad has mentioned have largely been about movement speed, though imagine there are other issues that he's not mentioned. I started to wonder about what it would take for Brad to reconsider his opinion if other major issues plagued with The Witch or Three. My question is this, what are some of the essential features of a game that must work operaly for you to consider it to have potential, i e. Character movement to something Brad can overlook. But

what is non negotiable for the rest of you. What are some other games that were so good in certain areas that they're major issues faded into the background. I think if there's any risk of like corrupted save data, I think that's a yeah, a deal breaker. I feel I feel like we can sort of like set aside, like you know, became breaking technical flaws because I think everybody can agree that that stuff is a deal breaker. But I

don't know. The character movement thing for me is a huge pet peeve, Like I don't like it in Rockstar games either, But again, like you, it's it's something I can like grip my teeth and get used to if the rest of the game is that good, especially when like it's such a huge, vast, you know, open world. Like, I'm way more forgiving than that, because you know, Skyrim had its fair share about Fallout,

did you know. You know, as long as it's working nine five percent of the time, I'll forget because like, yeah, the Witcher has been jankis a couple of times with me, but most of the time it works fine. So yeah, and you get used to it after the a while, and I think typically I would have thrown that game out the window, like if the writing and everything else were not so good, Like the controls are they're asked, Yeah, they're They're really not good at all.

They're point about three hours into the game in that first town where I was just trying to like negotiate the little pathways through that first town on the horse and just going like I don't think I'm gonna keep playing this game, Like I don't think I can do this. But then like it just I hit a couple of side quests. It just like hit me just right, and I was like, dope, fuck all that. I gotta keep playing this forever and stuff. Man, Like I've got a good I have to like

have a good overview of the game. I guess, like I factor in a lot of different things, and if something's good, then you know, it might cause me to overlook other things. Yeah. I think the answer is different depending on what else I've got going on. Yeah. Yeah, you know, if I've got like nothing but time, then you know I'm willing to overlook more. If it's just like, all right, I've got a limited window with which to get in on this thing before I've got to

do something else. So if it's if it's rough out of the gate, it's just like at some point it's like I can't, I can't do it yet better places be. I don't think I've ever abandoned an otherwise good game because of like minor ish technical issues. It has to be something like Code Veronica. I had this one save and I got to a boss fight and I totally didn't have the weapon I needed to kill it, and said, well, okay, I'm quitting this game because that's a major thing that sucks.

Minor things like Stu I'm seeing with the Witcher, like I'll overlook that. Yeah, there's no one thing, no one like aspect of a game I can think of that has to be like good for me to stick with it. You know. It's it's more of a just a it's like how many other things in the game are good? And how good are they? You know? It's like if there are other things, no matter what they are, that are that are quite good, that I can kind of overlook

anything being mediocre. Uh, I booted up expen Destiny at one point in the GAMEPLAYE not not that great? Oh man, isn't that that Silicon Nights? Yeah? Like that last one thing? Yeah, follow up to Ultimate Alliance too, kind of like RPG, right, yeah, but some of the voice acting and the writing in that game was just so fucking bad. Like, yeah, there was one point where just like your name's Piro damn means you control fire, and that is that is as far as I got.

I don't know, I don't Yeah, I'm in. I'm gonna open up. I'm gonna pop the shrink wrapping my copy of x Mendestiny going on it. Good luck, just those all you can take. It was one of the few games that I've just like, no, I have no time

for this. Yeah, no time, Ye all right. Gabriel from New York sends in an email that says, Hello, bobcast, I'm wondering if we're still two or three years out from APS four or Xbox one hardware revision, or are there any rumblings about new revisions at this pending E three M. I'd be surprised. Yeah, it seems way too soon for that. They probably have warehouses full of the existing you're talking about specifically, like cosmetic, Yeah, like the shrink. I would love us Xbox trust, but

I don't expect it this year by any ye. Yeah, I mean they're always provides the internals of consoles as they figure out cheaper ways to make them and stuff like that. But in terms of just like like the shell itself, like that's yeah, that's give it a couple of years. Smaller Xbox one seems inevitable, Like that thing seems so oversized for what it does and for like the heat that it doesn't generate. Surprised we never got that with

the original Xbox. That thing was fucking cute. Well they killed that thing early, yeah, like they basically cut its life short, like at the point where they would have made one of those and instead said this kind of infamously only gave that thing four years at market and the three sixty came out. Three sixties. Slam was one of my favorite cosmetic upgrades. That's a

good one. I thought it was for sure much better also because I went through nine of the old ones because I would do it, and then I've been using the Slam ever since and no problems. Yep. Yep, I got one of the third version three sixties, the ease, the one that was redesigned. I think that one even looks for second. No, no, it's the one that sort of looks like the Xbox one. Yeah, I think that thing looks nice. Huh okay, yeah it look Sorry.

The PS four, if anything, I wish it was a little bigger, because the fan in mine is already starting to get like uncomfortably loud, which is the exact same thing that happened with my launch PS three launching issue. It was like within the first year, but like same thing, the fan just got louder and louder over time until I literally bought a new PS three when when it was a Black Friday sale, just because my old one was

so loud. Like, I feel like, I don't see any reason for the PS four to be as small as it is with that kind of issue going on. But maybe it's just me. Uh. I wonder what they do when they shrink the Xbox. Do they take like the TV stuff out? Yeah? I could see him taking the like one of those htm I ports out. Maybe does anyone really use that? I've never still running through

there, but I talked about it like a month or whatever. I use the antenna through it, and that's pretty pretty great like that, Okay, yeah, I haven't. It gives you some nice features. Uh, did you guys see the new Xbox one controller got confirmed? What it's it's like a very well so it leaked and then they kind of confirmed it. It's uh, it's adding an actual just straight up headphone jack like the PS four controller as awesome. Okay, like you could get that with the current controller

with an adapter, but there's like a twenty five dollars adapter. Yeah, because they've only got that digital port on there now, so I don't. I'm actually not sure if it's still gonna have that digital port and a headphone jack. Were just moving to the heaphone jack. But it's so nice on PS four because I've got Turtle Beach PC headphones and just to be able to like unplug it from that and plug it in. Yeah, it is. It is a fantastic feature. But they didn't they didn't talk about whether there

are any other new features in that revision of the controller or not. I guess we'll find out. Uh, let's move on to one all wireless man, fucking I want that fucking PC wireless, like the official microsofting to come out chords on anything. Yeah, well so that I'll have to I mean, I think they have to wait for Windows ten on that one, because like Windows ten will have built in support for the Xbox one drivers. That s stuff. It's a different it's not x input, it's a different really

standard. Oh weird, I guess I guess that explains why some games don't support Well, it's a different standard. And and then like there's some software that like a will fuck up. It's twenty fifteen and most of my gaming has done wired because I play through Steam on my TV. Yeah. Yeah, chords are a bomber. Uh. Let's see email from Jordan about game of the Year. Who's ready to start talking game? Yeah, we already talked about the Witches. Start building our list. It's a contenda. Yeah,

it's out there. Yeah, it's a good game. Uh, Jordan just wants to know it. Seems like January and February are usually really slow months of the year. Four new releases. December releases usually get get shafted in most of the discussions. Talas Principle, Oscars, Emmy's Golden Globes, et cetera. Already do this, Uh, why not do your Game of the Year podcasts in January or February because we like having things go up between

Christmas and New Year's when when we're not at work. Alex say that answer, it's kind of nice to have something in that window when there's kind of nothing else. I like. I like having a coda on the year's worth of games, like right at the end of the calendar year, you know, as opposed to like, I don't know, I feel like if you do it a month into the next year, people kind of don't care so

much. But it is sticky. You know, there are always a very small handful of games that, yeah, it gets hard to include in that discussion, and always hate when something falls through the crack. Yeah, Talent, this is a good example. Like that game is pretty fucking cool, and I wish that's time to play more of it than it seems. Like Far Cry three and four we're both late enough to where four four came out, and like the Tuesday before Thanksgiving that was like that it was three that

was like three. Yeah, but you know it's counterpointed. This guy's email, like farkr three was like pretty heavily lauded in our Game of Year awards despite coming out like deep into December. That's that's a crappy feeling too, because like we used to have those discussions a Game Informer, and you know,

with print lead time and stuff. It's like we played most every I had not played far Kright three that was the one had not played, and so I put my top ten list in for the magazine and then I played Parkright three and it's like, oh, this would have been like way up there on my latest. Like crappy feeling. Yeah, that's that's Print man. It is Print. Yeah, yep, it's the Print Life. Yeah,

let's see. Carlo writes in about Tech and seven cabinets. Yeah, techon, guy, but talk to me, hey, bomb cast crew, emailing you from Sacramento if you can get Jason on the next BombCast for this. I did what's she need? Last BombCast, you guys talked about the Star Wars battle pod with Jeff ending the topic talking about Tech and seven cabs. That's how I know he's serious. He calls them cabs. If you ever want one or want to make one instead of waiting for console, here

you go. In terms of av the Namco system, the powers tech and seven has HDMI for controller input. The board still requires some form of arcade input JAMA or JVS I've never heard of JVS uh in the playable builds featured in many US tournaments uses a PlayStation to arcade input board found in older Japanese Namco cabinets. PS two sticks, dual Shock twos, and personal PlayStation sticks

have worked in that setup. EVO will have units with Hocus Pocus Pocus Mumbo Jumbo drivers so players can use their own arcade sticks of newer generations for a tournament. For the board itself, it will come in at possible possibly ten thousand dollars or more for one unit. Since local versus mode requires two units, you will need to buy another one. In addition, you have to make sure you're able to connect to Bandai Namco's Arcade network for content up.

Basical balance changes. Man, you sound like you really, which they may not be in allowing you to connect to that from outside Japan. Yeah. While you can make your own cabinet or use an existing HD cab, the official noir cab can vary. Do you know what that means? He does

not say he does not mentioned what the term noir means. That's probably just the brand of the cabinet, okay, because he says he says the Tech and six Noir is the cheapest at maybe fifteen hundred to three thousand, but outputs at seven twenty P. Newer models such as the Tech and Tag tournament too noir in our office, apparently, yeah, are ten ADP pricier and

harder to obtain, harder than mud too. Yeah. I believe that in Korea there was a case of a player buying his own tech at seven cabinet where he could play against others from different arcades and PC bombs that carry second seven totaled at fifteen thousand dollars. That's super expensive. But now that's kind of cool, like it's it's crazy because I mean, so it's all like PC base now right, Yeah. Yeah, if you look at these cabs, yeah, you'll see very familiar at PCs. So that's why you're able

to cobble one of these things together. Yeah yeah, Well no, you said, when you buy the board, you're getting the whole. The board is still the thing you plug in. It's not like you have to go supply a CPU or so right, I got it. But the internals yeah, very similar alert to what you would find in a PC. Okay,

interesting, all right, while there you go. Yeah, there was a story of while back, like a lot of people would speaking of the online verification stuff, a lot of people had kind of hacked some DDR stuff because like Konami had implemented, uh some kind of online checking for their stuff, and and it sounds like a lot of services, like there was a service that people were using to connect to in lieu of Konami's official stuff. I think that got shut down a while back and some kind of it was a

d MCA thing or what. But like, yeah, arcade games have weird DRM on them in some cases. It's kind there some of the old school stuff like on capcom boards where if you remove the battery like it would it would actually like I kill it. I have like four CPS two boards that are slowly dying. Right, one died. I think a capacitor blew up on it and it's done. That was my zero to alpha board. That's a shame. Yeah. So so also with these new tech and there's like

HDMI out to it as well. So I've actually saw like an ad of averymedia was like connecting little capture boxes to the back of these tech machines. You could like, you know, pop in your own SD card and record your matches and then pop it up. I don't I don't know if there's that's kind of cool. Yeah, that's that's kind of neat. That it's neat seeing that stuff. But like the controller pack on NFL Blitz cabinet,

exactly just like that, all right. Mitchell writes in about making beer using Wu Tang beats at Bomb Crew. I wanted to know your thoughts on the brewery Doc Street in Philadelphia using Wou Tang clan to stimulate the fermenting process. Personally, I think it's a genius idea and I'm a bit upset. I never thought of it. Maybe Giant Bomb could start doing the same. But with insane clown posse or guns and roses, they're pretty much two identical things

there, they're equivalent. Sure, it's like playing Motzart while the babies in the crib kind of Yeah. I personally, I want some ween beer. Mmm, I want I wanted. I want a chocolate and cheese. Give me a chocolate and cheese stout chocolate beer the worst. God, I do not agree with that. I don't want fear to taste like anything, and chocolate tastes like way too much stuff to be in my beer. We've got

some chocolate wine. Actually, we do need to try that. So what band would you what musical act would you pay with your with your beer production? It has to be beer, it can't be I don't know. He doesn't he doesn't go to a lot of detail. I mean, I assume, like I assume it's the vibration from the base in here that's like kind of causing the beer to sort of jostle around as it's fermenting motorhead. Okay, all right, sure Maiden and yeah, okay, Like I don't know,

some bass CDs like DJ Magic Mic or something like that. Just something for maximum shaking, you know, you want to constant bass tones? All right? Just point sub wiffers your beer and see what happens, all right? Uh. Alex from Atlanta writes in about the high cost of video games in response to the email you guys received last week asking why games are so

expensive to make. There was a particular tangential point that I thought very few people consider when the emailer stated how Saga declared Alien Isolation a failure as well as other titles. There's definitely a different bar for success that developers and publishers use that isn't immediately intuitive. Some will see games sell millions of copies and think, wow, surely they made their money back. They'd be correct if

their goal was to break even or even generate a small profit. What they miss is that these blockbusters aren't shooting for two x or even three X return. They're hoping for five x ish to cover the inevitable duds that will be released subsequently in either the same or different franchises under that company's control. It's no doubt a stressful situation for dev's when a games goalposts of success are to carry itself plus however many other games between it and the next big Squeur hit.

There's no surprise, then, that when you see developers and publishers looking to other models and revenue streams to try to make each title stand on its own, DLC and micro transactions, et cetera. On a slightly different note, there's a weird dichotomy and that gamers are so vehemently against different business models. Eg. How dare they charge from more content on top of sixty dollars so close to release, but in the same breath lament the lack of variety

coming out of bigger studios. Yeah, I mean that squares with everything I know about yap of stuff. You know, like you see, no one, no one's in this business to break even. Well no, but but also like you know, at least at that at that level high levels, right a companies. But you know, it's it's it's not only hey, we want to make a lot more money on this game than we spend on it, but it's also you know, this is a super hit driven business

and not everything is hitting. Yeah, so based on you know, they're their goals, right, well, it's like we need the hits to hit really hard to make up for all the things that didn't even make their money back. I guess you know, it's kind of like what happened with tumb Rator, right, yeah, exactly. Tumb Rators sold like three million dollars or three million copies sorry, and uh uh, and they declared that they failure. Yeah, right, because like a lot of the stuff coming out

of Japan was underperforming, you know, and like basically it didn't. He didn't do what they needed it to do to make up for the other things that the company was kind of whipping on. Murder was a failure. That's uh. I wouldn't say that. No, not at all. Great game. Yes, it's a great fucking game. Financials the roof uh Scott emails about old portable game reviews the BombCast. I was listening to the podcast Retronauts from a few weeks ago, an episode about the Neo Geo Pocket and Wonder

Swan. In it, one of the guys said the game Spot used to not review portable games because they were seen as substandard, and it wasn't until sometime after the Game Boy Advance launched they started to give them a fair shake. Is this true? And if so, what was the idea behind the portable hate? But now we we outsourced tons of reviews to free answers for like Frank Provo made a lot of money reviewing game Boy games for game Spot. Yeah, we didn't always do them in house, right, because we

just had a lot of other stuff going on. But yeah, I think I reviewed a few game Boy games. Yeah, maybe possibly, I have to go back and look, that's where I remember that though, Uh yeah, video games just like everything else. Yeah, that's so no truth to that whatsoever. Yeah, no, close in that book. Well there you have it, all right. Two more emails Vinnie and Dallas. I don't know what he's doing down there. It's supposed to be running the podcasts and

stuffy subject line. Play all video games, No, don't do that. You have to play all video games ever made to completion of the main story, or seventy five percent if there is an in game completion counter. Otherwise, we can't talk about ship. That includes every game someone labeled as done or released for sale from the dawn of video games through January first, at midnight of twenty seventeen, including games you've already played. Games made on GameMaker

software don't count. But indie games totally count. Indie games that they're not real game, I mean, what about indie games that were made on GameMaker. You can choose one of the three following supernatural abilities to allow you to do this. Number one, eternal life. You will age until fifty five, then no further, and if dismembered or beheaded, your body will fully reconstitute, and you will still require but you will still require sustenance and air.

Number two. You can pause time and unpaused time at will until you reach age eighty five. When time has paused, you can only affect objects you were touching. The game you were playing will still work. I assume he's also saying that you will not age will time has paused here, Okay. Number three. Each minute you play a game, you will travel back in time exactly one minute. Choose wisely. That sounds super confusing that I'm voting Number two. I've always wanted to stop just be able to stop time,

pretty cool, I have. I have very frequently thought I wish I could stop time while playing video games, specifically show you what like every Monday morning, I'm like, I wish I could actually play the two hundred hours of content in the which or three and not have it take away from the other things in my life. That would be pretty awesome. Number two for me. Yeah, number two, Yeah, Yeah, I'm gonna go number one because he does he doesn't say that the eternal life ends when you finish

all the games. Yeah, but then you're just gonna be some dude floating around in space after the world blows up or whatever. The sun the sun's gonna get huge. You want to be fifty five forever? You got billions of years to figure out a solution, though it's a long time. You're gonna get bored. Yeah, you're probably right. Somebody destiny expansions. Oh god, you're right. Fuck, I should just go now. And if

fifty five would your motor skills of deteriorated a little bit? Like I feel like if it was more like, you know, thirty five or twenty five or something, I'd be a little closer to sign up for that. You can still have a perfectly fine quality of life of fifty five? Sure, sure, especially these days as opposed to eighty five on these other conditionals. All right, I guess that's everybody's answer. A lot email Aaron from Houston writes down about the bomb casting couch. No, not like you think,

not yet. You're not live in a world where Bad Dudes has been turned into a movie. Enough cast of the movie Bad Dudes? All right, I'm in it? Like, can you take people? Can I pick like eighty stallone or what it would be twenty fifteen? Also, what do we got here? We got get the rock? We got the bad Dudes? Was it blatant striker. Yeah, you get the Rock for one. We got the President, yeah, the Ninjas, well and Dragon Ninja. Right, it's bad Dudes versus Dragon Ninja to fight Karnov in that game. Oh

really okay? Uh the President's daughter. Mmmm, this is getting it casting. I just don't remember enough of the characters. They're the ones, dude, the four I just rattled off or from the Wikipedia page, right, bad dudes, president and Dragon Ninja. President's daughter is the one who's kidnappedy Ninjas. Wait, no, no, it's the president right, No,

yeah, you're right, the President's been kidnapped Ronnie. And then there's the guy who's the guy with the sunglasses and the flat top that's telling me that uh Gyle okay, dam I think that's you know, actually I think that's a secret service agent. I think that read that and the synopsis, M who are the bad dudes the Rock? I don't know. I was thinking Channing Tatum as well. I was thinking Channing Tatum and Channing Tatum in the

Dual Rules that will surprise you. The Rock is gonna be Jack Burton, like this is the new parent Trap. Yeah, hmmm, uh, I'd have to see a picture of the bad dudes. If you wanted the Rock to play like, you know, the Dragon Ninja, then maybe I bet he could pull that off. Bill Pullman is the President Rock. The Rock seems a little too bulky to play a ninja to me. Yeah, yeah, that guy's look scary, but I have to see what looks like it's

been a while. The Rock can like slim down and bulkuve just at will, basic like you seem in painting the Game. You could just like inflate himself. Basically, he's the Rock. Yeah, huh. It's pretty cool power to have. Yeah, he only has it until he's eighty five, right, Okay, he's gonna play the president President. I don't think like CG running Reagan. Yeah, okay, it's the only choice, all right. I like your dual Channing Tatum. I do them. That's pretty good.

Sure, all right, there you go Everent haircuts though, right, one of them gotta go to Yeah, okay, cool? Tell you told apart? All right? Is he evil? I mean I wanted to look like the game. He doesn't. He doesn't play by the rules. Okay, clean, clean, clean shaven can't. Channing Tatum is straight and narrow. Right, he's the other guy's loose cadden. Yeah, yeah, all right, that'll work. Bobcast is hiantball dot com. Yeah, send emails to that thing. Okay, we made it. Yeah, we're done with

this podcast. Rough. Yeah. We started off upstairs around like crazy people, difficult. He's got a late start, all right, and here we are. We did it. As we get clawed our way to the end, the finish line, we're done. Uh you three's coming, so we got a lot of stuff to do for that. But there's some stuff happening on the website, such as such as you're gonna bang your head against that fucking bloodborne boss for another several hours or something, right, shoot through that

thing in ten minutes and keep going. Okay, how much more is there after that? I don't know. I'm not that much, okay, h And everybody says that's by far the hardest part. So I'm optimistic that last episode you pretty much just fought that boss over and over again for two hours. Yeah yeah, yeah, that was That was two hours, which is is still a fair sight less than I've seen a lot of people saying it took them to be yea dude, I've seen people say, like it took

me four hours. It took me several days of trying off and on. Yeah, yeah, like it's not it fucking try that thing. No, sit down and try it. I haven't played that game in a while, and now I feel like, you know, I wouldn't have the muscle memory to go back to it. I mean it's it's one of those where they cut your bar and half. Oh and that thing that things at least a couple has a couple of the tacks that just kill you in the one hit. Yeah, it's pretty much just go level up a bunch. Yeah,

that'll do it. Yeah, I wouldn't do ship. Uh yeah, I'm looking at the non non Galaxy PS four and some of them. There's a new episode of Dancers Up with the guy named Paul Reichert from Kansas. Oh No, I gets some life advice from him, bringing the riff raff in. Yeah he's next week. Yeah, we're all right, yes, Yeah, we'll look at you must build a boat. Yeah, we might talk about some wrestling. Uh yeah, we're seeing if we can get everybody's schedule

to line up for that. Hopefully you ever doomed yourself now? Yeah, Well he's up talking about wrestling. Yeah, it might might happen, might not. Well, we'll hopefully we'll get it to get it in. But all right, great, excellent stuff. It's happening. It's pretty exciting. Yes, we'll be in a marketing meeting about E three stuff. Yeah, go over when the truck is coming to we have to load the gear onto the truck. About the mythical truck. Yeah, the truck. We're bringing

the couch. We're bringing the couch. We're bringing the couch in the chair like that couch right over there. You got it instead of buying new couches. Yeah. Could I run the back of a truck to E three? Yes? I should not always still could? Please? Can I cancel them? I love riding in the backs of trucks. Can I don't want to ride in this truck? Any trucks fund to ride in the back? You can give a shot. You know, I've written in the back of some

trucks and then had a good time. I think I'm probably with you. Pickup trucks, Yeah, this is not going to be a pickup truck. I know it'll be a big leg truck with the box roxy truck. Then you'll sleep on the couch in the back of the truck. Also, see that sounds fine. Also, you're gonna get unloaded from the truck by teamsters. I don't know how you feel about that. I'll be laying on the couch like a nice smooth ride to the hotel. Yeah. When does the

truck have to leave? Are we gonna be cauchless for a few days? Yeah? We really? Wow? That should get interesting. Yeah, yep, Well, exciting times are ahead. Yeah, that last Friday show on right before you three will be interesting. Oh, there'll be no catch. Great. We're also not gonna have anything to stream with. Oh right, we'll see, we'll see, we'll see cameroscope, pope something. Yeah,

we'll come over something. Should be a good Ye. Drew is already like nope, not doing a show, but we're gonna try come over something. Yeah cool, All right, stream out of a ps FO one PS four I don't see why not with the with the camera hooked up for feed, and then we'll play a game streaming out of another PS four do UF and Second Life? Yeah sure, let's say I've been doing UPF and Second Life for years now. I see okay, all right, well, wait to

see your broadcast. All right, it's gonna do it for this episode of the jib Onodcast. We're gonna get the hell out of here. Come back next week. Maybe we'll give you another one. See you then,