Giant Bombcast 06/09/2015 (Premium)

Hello, It's Tuesday, June the ninth, twenty fifteen, and you're listening to the Giant bomb Cast, the Internet's one and only audio home for video game talking. It is the only into microphones. It is the only one of those. There are no others. This is really the only game in there. I know. You would think someone else would have started a video game podcast right now. We have a patent, right, yes, exactly, but system I gave Adam Curry nine dollars and some hairsprayed. I said,

cool, all right, we own the rights to podcasting now. Yeah, no one else can podcast about video games. If you catch any one else podcasting about video games and they don't have a license from us, please let us know, let us know, Please, let let us let us the authorities handle it. Please do not take justicines. You're in hands exactly. No, that's they are probably if, I mean if if they're willing to break those laws, they're they're lawless. Yeah, they're dangerous. There's

no, they're very dangerous, vigilanti pod podcast justice stuff. Probably probably armed. They're probably armed. Does nobody in the good I'm Brad Shoemaker. Jeff Gersman, Hello, Drew, scandal. Hello, Dan, one week warning, what's going on next week? You got plans? Next week is when I can no longer lean on E three coming up as the thing to kick off the podcast. Oh you start talking about next year's E three. It'll be great after in two weeks we'll have a podcast. Right E three?

That was crazy? Right? Oh man, you're right. Then we can ride that out for about a month, two more weeks and this would be like, ah, summer barbecue season. Hey yeah yeah, Formula E championships wrapping up? Oh yeah? Is that a video game? Not yet? I don't know. I don't know what to say about it. Then it's right, we only talk about it talk about one subject here. That's how the patent is written. I mean, we can only talk about video games.

It's we probably should have like penned a little more broaden. Well, it works out for me. I can only keep one subject in my head, that's true. So so let's talk about video games. Huh, Tapper, you're serving beers to people, they're walking in the bars. You're the baseball game. It's crazy, right? Are you sure they should let kids play? That? I don't know is a root beer? There's a root Beer tapper. There's also butter wise your tapper. There's also a sun Tory

tapper. I mean think about it was like literally branded, right, it was literally brand? What is son Tory? It's a Japanese brand. Okay, Oh yeah, so you guys are saying that word earlier. What does that word mean? I hope, I hope Suntory notices me. It's like it's a title. Oh okay, it's like designed to honor someone honorable. Oh yeah, so it's like a cool title. It's one that you'd brag about. Doctor is doctor an honorific? I think it's a it's a script?

Yeah, okay, but don't I don't really know. It's like, sir, you know how people get knighted? Yeah yeah, Paul McCartney, he's legally a sir Peter Maloney, is it? Sir? Isn't he he's an OBI don't know about I believe I believe he is. I believe he did get something. Really people say Sir Peter Malany a lot like I you know, I got nothing against Peter malan you, but has he really reached that echelon? I think that first tier is actually pretty wide? Okay?

Is he not actually when you ascend up to the next one. Okay, so is everybody at that. I'm sure we're getting a million things wrong here, but if you that is I just I just filed the extension to like actually say that we are experts in h anything anything, anything pertaining to any part of the United Kingdom, the crowns honorific system, any part of it Ireland, London and Germany, like whatever parts of the United Kingdom there are, we are experts in all. Well, talk to me about German colors.

Yeah, what is what is the what are the colors of the German flag? Drew, go, U, B and d. Okay, well that sounds right. That sounds right yep to me. So can you kidom all knew is an he has an ob E? So can you Can you be an Order of the British Empire? Can you be an O B E without being a sir? I think so. I don't think you probably can't be a serve with that? Yeah, that, I'm sure. The opposite is the five classes of appointment to the Order are I'm just reciting this from

memory. Order Yeah, I thought, yes, the Order of eighteen eighty six. It's the sequel's coming out, and you can play as the Night Grand Cross or Dame Grand Cross of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. That's a g b E Night Commander or Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the Knight Empire. That's kb E or or dB EKA Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. That's yeah. Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. That's O b E. And then

the bottom is member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Bucks and got a card MBE. So which one is Molan New? Obie? Oh? Really? Did molk New have his shoulders tapped by a sword by the Queen? Is that still how they do it? I mean I don't. Yes, I'm saying Jagger tap shoulders the sword tapping. I thought I thought it was somebody below the monarch that did the picture MC Jagger getting it. It'd be cooler if it was the Queen, right, Jagger doesn't seem

like he should be knighted. He's Mick Jagger. No, I mean like he should have like like laughed off the offer his rebel days are behind him. Ye molan New was inducted into the AIAS Hall of Fame in two thousand and four and was honored with an OBI E in the new Year's Honors list announced on the thirty first of December two thousand and four. So I think maybe it might be that people that are getting into OBE, there's so many of them. I assume that there's so many special effects. Yeah, you

know, you're not getting tapped by the queen. You're like you got a thing in the mail and you're like, oh fuck, do you get a sword? I mean you can get a sword. I bet there's a sword. Do you need a sword? I don't. I used to have a sword. I don't anymore, actually know I do. I have a big like Devil May Cry for a sword. Yeah, but that's my actual like, if anybody like breaks into my home, I'm gonna grab with this, like not actually sharp sword. I think it's heavy. Think's got some real

stopping power to it. You gotta rev it's from Devil May Cry for it's the Red Queen. Oh, I think that's the one you rebbed, right. I had the motorcycle handle on it. Yeah. Yeah, Because I have like a battery packet it or something. No, that's my real plan though, if anyone breaks into my apartment. She put that up against Vinni's warhammer like chain saw sword, a giant heavy one. Well wait a minute, no, someone break into your house talking. I was I slept through

that? Okay, yeah, all right, so you're actually actual plan. Yeah, i'd sleep through it, hope for the best runner out in my boxers. It's my Dante sword or is it narrow sword? I think it's narrows. Also, I can't get that straight before you go attacking anybody exactly. Yeah, you wouldn't want to pull the wrong sword. He's my devil bringer, and if they're a beast, you need to get a silver sword. True, right, right, careful with that stuff too, got an

Igny shirt in it. Wait did you play more? No? I don't know. It sounds sounds you were saying that the movement is about. Yes, it actually got me excited on PS four. I didn't really. I played yesterday a ton on PC and I didn't feel a big difference. We're talking about The Witcher here. In case anybody was a video game. It

is The Witcher three. The Witcher three O B. E. I don't know the girls is especially O b E. If I had to guess, I mean, it's a lot of people, so so what you did not notice the difference and I did not play it, but but no you you said you. I watched you after patch play it and goes, holy shit, this feels way different and that that got me kind of excited. Like

I'd say, way different, but it is better. Like the character movement, you know, you had you were complaining about it like two weeks before release, and I was like, maybe it's just something that rubbed him the wrong way. But then everybody complained about like even people like the game don't like the movements, So I felt I felt secure in the group. Think of that one to year knowledge. Does this patch also come out for Xbox One? I didn't check today. Actually I was a Friday. It had

not How about PC? Because yeah I played it was yeah, PC and PS four both got the patch last Friday. I played for like five hours last night. I didn't notice anything. But the movement never bothered me that much to begin away. I mean it's somewhat subtle. It's not not complete reworking of it. You know, there's still a good sort of ramp up

from standing still to actually moving at full speed. But it's a little smoother, Okay, it's not the like before you would move the stick and he would just kind of stand there rigid for about half a second before he even thought about taking a step. Yeah, and now it's like like he'll turn, like his turning radius is tighter, you know, so you can kind of maneuver in tight spaces better, which, yeah, part of the problem,

because that's how you loote stuff. Like right, they're all a lot of cases of like three or four like containers you can loot right on top of each other. And it was like, I mean, Dan, you I'm sure you've done plenty of this. You know. It's a lot of just like nudging the stick to try to point him at the right thing. Yeah, there's like three sacks and then a chest right there, so you can actually loose like they actually so they disabled things that you can interact with

near chests, near like treasure containers. If that tells or anything. They're still like that was like they're like, yeah, like handles and stuff. I mean, maybe they missed some spots or it's not but yeah, I saw in the past fix. They were like, oh, we made it so you can't. You can't interact with the scandals and stuff in your near chest because that's how hard it is to line him up with lute containers.

And I actually noticed some some jankiness for the first time yesterday, like I was doing something with It was specifically the bloody Baron's daughter in every cut scene, every time it cut to her, she'd be completely bald, and then like three seconds have passed and then her hair would just kind of show up. Did you just save a clip of that effect? Oh? I don't know. Does it have tress? I don't know, does anything. It's

got hair works, but not on the not on the console. But I've got I've probably got half a dozen saved clips on the PS four of just stupid ass stuff happening. Can you save Steam? There's some wide things we used to do it, but computer record that No, not not like it's not constantly recording in the background, right, so you know you have you have to turn on the recording. But that is a Steam built in thing, that's a third party you can broadcast out to the internet directly for Steam.

Yeah, I don't know if Steam markays locally or not. I know, you take screenshots and a larchive all that stuff. You could just run like open Broadcaster or something like that in the background if you wanted to record your stuff or that with that that Nvidio, the Nvidia g Force experience, that does what you're looking for. And that's so that's the big thing about Windows ten is that the Xbox App has that same sort of game DVR functionality.

Is the Xbox one in it the Xbox App on PC on Window step, Yes, Okay, when does that come out of July? Yeah, that's just announced. Yeah, that's soon. Yeah, less than two months. But yeah, the a big Witcher patch came out, and yeah, I'm super impressed. I mean, you know, they've CD project has always had that reputation of like supporting the ship out of their game's post release because they need it. This doesn't I mean, this is not the the yeah

I wasna say. Yeah, it's the parts that that's impressive about them supporting the Witcher is when they revamp large portions of it and like release all this free DLC talking about like what they did with Witcher two. Yeah, but like that the part, the part where they're fixing a ton of stuff about their game immediately as people are playing through it is sort of a bummer.

Sure, I didn't you know the other shoe there is. Yeah, all the stuff they fixed so far is kind of stuff that you wish had just been right the first time. And now it's time for the other shoe with your host Brad Shoemaker. All right, there's your new weekly segment, got it where you take you take up an alternative approach to the common h thinking around a topic, sort of like playing Devil's Advoca sort of something like that. Yeah, I mean it's uh, you know, the moving stuff got

better. The swimming got way better because it was terrible before. It was fucking infuriating. So make it like I came close to drowning a couple of times because he just refused to ascend. I was sitting there holding the like, hey, swim to the surface button. What do you see? Just didn't What are you supposed to do when you're like going down to get a buried treasure or something and there's like four drowners and every time you go down,

they just hit you when you can't do shit them. I finally just like I booked you know, I held down the swim Faster button and just like flew through there and like looted as fast as I could by hammering the X button and then swam the hell out of the pay because there's no way you can't like upgrade anything to attack underwater. You can, you can shoot the crossbow underwater, but that's it. They're like out in the middle of

the ocean or whatever. So I found just swimming straight at the chest that was on the bottom and just hitting the lute button as fast as you could to get the stuff and then getting out of there. It was the only way. That is where moving around has been a pain in the ass when there's gonna be like a canoe at the bottom with a chest in it and I'm getting attacked by drowners and I'm drowning and I can't get to the thing. Yeah, so that the onland and swimming movement have both gotten better.

They fixed that shitty quest XP bug that was kind of actually messing the game up for a lot of people. Yeah, yeah, uh god, I'm trying to remember. They change a lot of stuff and like, yeah, again, you know, should have been that way to begin with. Any frame rate improvements on the PS four. It's hard to say. I went back into the swamp that's causing the most problems for everybody, and it still sucks. Rain still sucks. Like it's still definitely bottoms the frame right out

and spots like that. What are we talking bottom like twenty or less. I've definitely seen some spots where it's just like hard to play, yeah, which is a bummer. Yeah, I still haven't gotten yet. I don't know if I'm gonna get it on Consolar PC. My PC isn't that great. If you're moving toward a PC upgrade, think about waiting. But I

would just wait. And with the with the rate, yeah, with the rate of patches they keep issuing if you're not like dying to play it right now, like it seems like the longer you wait, the better that game will be. Yeah, absolutely, like it's it's gonna get true, It's gonna get more and more refined about almost every game though, right, I mean, well, but that's the thing though, I mean, yeah,

there are a lot of bug fixes and stuff in this. You know, they did a lot of things that are just technical problems that needed to be addressed, But like how many developers would go back and actually like fiddle with the way the character moves because people say, don't like it kill Zone. Yeah, I don't know, that's it like it's it's not. It's not a very common thing to see little touches like that being being addressed. So that was nice to see. Yeah, which minute? Or are you back?

Are you playing a bunch? Yeah? Yes, I got back into it pretty heavily over the weekend, which is a stupid idea because it's now we have to leave down for a ya. It's weird because like most big open world games, I feel like you have some way to gauge kind of how far you are in it. Were like, yeah, Rockstar games, you can always see the percentage of missions or whatever, and like some games even have like you've done five out of twenty nine main story. It's like

I think Skyrim does that. Whereas I've put thirty hours into this and I feel like I'm barely scratching the surface, Like, oh, I don't know if I'm a third of the way through it or a fifth. You know. My sense is where are you still in Villain? That first big area? Now I'm in I'm up in Novgrad right now. Okay, if that's the next area I have to go to, But I've got so many things unfinished in Villain that I'm like, should I just hang around for another twenty

hours doing all these side quests? What I was what I was going to do is right around and because I got all the question marks from that first area before I moved on to vellin the White Orchard are yeah, yeah, basically like the tutorial. Yeah, an eight hour long tutorial area. Yeah, and then I was gonna do that again before I went to Novegrad from Villain. But then you realize a lot of these side things and Villain are

like required level or recommended levels, like twenty seven. It's crazy. It's like way higher level than you could possibly be at the time that you picked the quest up. Yeah, So I gave up on the idea of like doing all those question marks before I move on because it's like, Okay, this is not going to be possible at all. So I'm going to keep kind of moving the story forward and doing question marks as they come along in tons of side quests. But I want to do everything and game, so

I'm expecting kind of you too. But yeah, that's the thing. It's like, do I just commit myself to Like at this point, I feel like I either have to decide, Okay, it's gonna take me another two months to finish this game, or I just need to ignore a bunch of the side stuff. I'm committing to it because the side stuff is so good. So often there's a lot of value in that stuff. I mean there's a lot where it's just like, oh, place of power, or here's

a bandit camp or something. But then there's the occasional thing you run into and it's like, oh, this is more fun than most of the main missions I've done. Yeah, Like I buy and large anything that it has a named story quest or not story quest, but anything that has a named quest attached to it, whether it's like a secondary quest, a witcher contract,

like even the treasure hunts, like they're all worth doing. Yeah, Like if it shows up in your quest log, there's some value in it, either narrative or like even just a sword you get out of it or whatever. Like there's always a reason to do it. Like when you go to the notice boards, do you just grab everything because That's what I've been doing. Yeah, Yeah, everything, that's everything that is obviously a quest. Oh, I grabbed literally everything, because they will add the question marks

to your thing, even if it's not an obvious named quest. If it's just something like that, I saw a creepy thing outside my oh like even missing dog or whatever. Yeah, you grab it and then it'll say like, oh, location added to map. Really and that'll add the question mark to the maps. So I thought only the letters on the noticeboards that you know, a bunch of them, the ones that are like contracts that are

major quests have a red stamp on and wax seal looking thing. Yeah, yeah, those are I thought those were the only quests as far as I understand. Those are like named like witcher contracts. Right, I'll show up on your quest log, right. The other ones I think show up as questions are just like my dog's missing or whatever, like yeah, and I so some of those are like places of power or things you would want to do, you know. Wow. So yeah, I just grabbed everything at

every noticeboard I go to. My problem for me is just that my inventory is just rotten with bullshit at this point, Like the inventory is everything. They though that was another thing they did, you know, they made like a lot of the fonts and kind of the UI presentation a lot bigger because it was something that people were having problems with, like yeah, you know, I said it like ten feet for my TV. It was straight up hard to read some of that stuff. But other than that, the inventory

UI stuff is a complete mess. Like it's just why I wish you could sort. I wish you could sort it by weight and things like sporting would be huge, like kind of quarantining certain things, like you know, more subcategories would better. You know, it's like, oh, put all the books and notes into a separate page, which you can do in the Alchemy thing. You can turn on filters that are like oh, I only want

to see the things I can craft right now. Yeah, but they don't have any kind of filters or anything for like, you know, there's that whole books and notes section, and I didn't know, like, well, if I sell or get rid of all these notes that are clogging everything up, that doesn't delete the quest, does it. So I just I got rid of everything. You can keep the quest and there stuff, but you know, sometimes I kind of want to keep it around in case I want

to read it later. But but then, like do you have a limited inventor, yes, well not you have encumbering. So there's there's a weight system. I haven't been overencumbered one time, really, where it's like Skyrim, I'm constantly overencumbered. Yeah, but I'm not one time. I just got a thing I can carry up to one sixty now, oh my god. Really Yeah, but even when I was at ninety, I was at ninety for most of the time, and I never once was over encumbered.

Encumbrance is not fun. You just gotta make It's never good. It's like, why as long as you're not picking up every like Mason Blackjack and overgrad sword or whatever. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, I stopped looting weapons from people that were obviously shit, you know, like it's just yeah. And I actually got as a potion you can craft that gives you, like what is it, like, I can't remember if it's several minutes. I didn't look at the time, but it's a potion that increases your encumbrance limit

by like a huge number for some number of minutes. It's clearly a thing. It's like, oh, I'm encumbered. I need to get back to town and sell stuff. I'm gonna drink this potion. Skyrom actually have a spell that you can tap a button and then you're not over encumbered. Although this thing, like it raises your toxicity to one hundred percent when you drink it, so like you're not gonna go often do combat while that's active.

But like it's weird. It's like you put an in world work around for your own encumbered system into the game, like maybe just get rid of the encumbrance. I don't really understand what the value is there. Are you keeping how much like bear pelts and wolf pelts and stuff, because I guess the

thing pelts are really heavy. Like I finally I'm finally at the point now where I'm like, all right, I'm gonna stop looting everything I find and I'm going to figure out what what are the main offenders here that are really weighing me down and maybe stop getting so many of those. Is there any kind of like player housing or like that's the stories like off character storage or

zero like stationary storage in the game. Although some people have said that the lout never goes away that you drop, I haven't verified that, Like some people were saying, like oh yeah, I went to like the bloody Baron's bedroom and use that as my stockhouse or storehouse, so you can just go to his like cabinet and just throw or even on the ground pelts. Right, honey, Why are there these pellets come from? Why are there thirty

seven notes and books stacked in the corner here? Yeah, Like, apparently you can do stuff like that, or at least some people have told me that Skyriom was actually all the Elder Scrolls have been good about that, to where you can just like go to a town and just throw it clothes on the ground and they're just gonna be there for But I think it did again supposedly does work that way, but it's still yeah, it's still just makes for a lot of kind of tedious busy work that gets in the way of

actually playing the game. And I don't love that aspect of it. But you know, the rest off it's really good. Yeah, it's it's an incredible game. Yeah. Are you gonna pay any more of it? I mean yeah, sure, probably. I don't know, like at this point or if you're not that into it, maybe give it a couple of months. I mean, I mean, at this point, E three is gonna force you know, some amount of time for me to not play it and then yeah, well we'll see what happens after we get back. Yeah,

well, what have you been playing? What have I been playing? Let's see, Well, I've been messing with Marvel Heroes where the loot said they don't do encumbrance, but it's a limited number of slots. Well, Captain America is like the strongest man in the wind, right, so he wouldn't

have any problem. No, So it's it's actually it's shared inventory across all your characters in your inventor, like when you question press I. But there's a stash where you can put stuff, but you have to like basically spend real money to buy extra tabs of stash and in a lot of cases, and that's a little frustrating that whole system. I feel like they could totally overhaul how the stash works because it's clunky. But I don't know. They're

having some kind of anniversary events. So I logged into that for a little bit and didn't see Like people were like, oh, you should log in, you get a free character, and I'm like, I logged in and didn't see anything to that, and I was like, all right, well whatever anniversary of the game launching. Yeah, yeah, I think it's been a couple of years now, but whatever. I so, okay, I have I have an announcement to make here. I know this is we have.

We have gone back and forth on this topic for years now, years, like the last seven or eight years. We have devoted hours of our lives to debating this hot topic. Sus patient's killing me. What is it? I can confirm right now for you today here. Huh. Fortnite is a video game. Wow, it's not where I thought you were going with that. That's Fortnite is a video game. But you're going to tell me something about Calf's shield or something. Nope, Fortnight is a video game.

Okay, how do you know this because I played it where not in this town? What mode did you play? Uh? It is a mode. It was a I don't know. I played the early parts of the game, which, yes, what's Fortnite? That is still kind of a good question. It's okay, hang on, it's a video game, okay, Okay, that I can wrap my head right. So it's so it's a little bit of building and it's a lot of like base defense from AI enemies.

Okay, that's that's more starting off with a stick and a rock and a loin cloth kind of sort of not really, You're you're kind of starting with your base that is not necessarily a gameplay location, but you're at your base. You're kind of unlocking additional character classes there and building you know, different buildings there. But it's not like you're clicking a box to put a building on a spot. You're not like, okay, physically building a building.

So it's not Minecraft. No, not in that sense. Not there not at that point is it Minecraft. No, so's it's not a persistent world per se. So you're in a match, yeah, yeah, you are. You are joining a level with in this case, there's three other players twenty minute, uh, and then the four of you are Yeah, I mean so you they had is going into these kind of like areas. We have kind have to close a portal. So the first thing you have to do is find the portal, or not necessarily the first thing, but

you need to find the portal and then trigger it. And once you trigger it, waves of enemies will attack the portal for a set amount of time. You have to fight them off without portal blowing up to win Okay, you are as players cooperating, Yes, but if you just walk to the portal and say let's go, you're fucked. Like it's you know, you can't. You have to build defenses such it's just too hard. Yeah,

No, it's just there's too many enemies. There's too many. You know, if they walk into the portal, they do damage to it and disappear. It's not like they stand there necessarily swiping at it. It's like they are constantly doing Actually, they might actually swipe at it. I've been playing a lot of different games lately. It's kind of hard to keep and like what so you buile of games, Like it's been so long I can't even remember if it's a first person shooter or if there's a third person action.

It's a third person action games and weapon range weapons, you have tools, so basically you're you're kind of starting out like there's some persistence with your character. You're you're leveling up. The tools and inventory on your person are carrying from match to match. So if you craft a good gun, at some point, you're gonna have it. But basically you're you're being dropped into this

world and then you have to go mind resources. Uh, you know by hitting trees with a stick or hitting rocks with a stick and then upgrading your stick to an axe so that you can hit the trees better or pick axe you can, Yes you can, Yes, you can swing a stick at

cars and then parts will come out of the cars. Uh. They've got a mechanic with the swinging where like a little after you land your first hit, an icon will appear on the item and you So it's kind of active swinging, active swinging, so you're not necessarily you're getting bonus damage if you are aiming at those targets, or you can just hold down the button uh

and just let it do its do its work the slow way. But yeah, so you're you're getting all these resources that then you use to either craft items for yourself, like Okay, I need some duct tape and I need some of this, and I need some of this to build a shotgun, and then I need this to craft AMMO for the shotgun. Uh. And you know, kind of going down that path, you're like, hey, I need a sword, so I crafted a sword, but you need the

blueprints before you can craft. And that's stuff that comes out of card packs that you buy for real money or some other stuff. Is this free to play? I'm fairly certain of that. They haven't going for sure, I don't think they they they said that. I think they've been kind of open to kind of like, hey, we're not They've they've been good about not

talking about Fortnite. But I guess when when I it was like a year and a half ago, though I did that GI things for it, I went out to Epic and they were saying it was free to play then. Yeah, because I remember asking a lot of questions about how they were going to make I feel like every time we've asked them about like the business thing, they're like, hey, we're just developing it, man, we'll see what happens. Like it's it sounded very holistic, and they'll see where the

design takes them. Yeah, they were very cagy about how they were going to make money off it, but they were pretty clear that it was going to be all right. Maybe that maybe that's how it was then, and since then they've rolled out you know, the Unreal tournament stuff with the player run store or the store that players can sell user made items for money and all that other stuff. Paid mods. It's weird who thought so maybe they'll

do something along those lines fortnit as well. But anyway, yeah, you you then can also use those same resources to build a fort. So you basically get to the portal and build a fat ford around it. Like are you literally placing walls? You are building? There isn't for there's a three nothing there. Okay, you find a portal and a fuck all right, this we got to defend this thing. It looks like the storm is coming from this direction, so that's probably where the enemies will come come. So

let's build our fort that away. And then once you feel that you've build a substantial fort, you and the other three players going all right, let's fucking let's do this. Are they frequently leaning on the word fort No, Like it's not really okay, there's not some like huge play on words with the name of the game or something. Well, I mean you're you're you're you're building a fort. Yes, materials, you know, you're it's the

fort. You're building steps like you're it's all pre fat stuff. Yeah, it's the wall building still that three by three grid and so like you're gonna make a window, you can just knock out that middle line and you can make it a door. Yeah. It's not like individual like parts like my dropping a block nothing to to build it. It's like you're building a a wall and then if you want a door to be in that wall, you

can say put a door here and it will do it. Which is kind of cool because you can build a fort like a pretty big four pretty quick people. Like it's pretty easy to get four people that have like properly mined resources and to do it. Now are you not? Are you? Are you doing this with any urgency? Is it like you have X you have

five minutes till the first wave? I want to say, I think there's a speed bonus for like, so there's a day night cycle, and I think it's it's the situation where like if you, hey, if you finish this level by the end of night three, you'll get more stuff. Okay, but do you do You basically get to build until you're ready and then hit a button then it goes okay. Yeah, then someone walks up to the portal hits go, and then that starts the waves coming at you.

You've got a little bit of time between waves, but it's pretty standard stuff at that point, you know, you're shooting these zombies. You know, they've got kind of wacky looks to them a little bit. I remember being pretty fun to make the traps where it's like you could build like a flinger thing here, so if husks or whatever walk on it, it flings them

up to the air. Or you can put up like spike walls and stuff, so you can set up these more elaborate like Okay, this thing is going to fling into this spike ceiling or whatever, but it only trigger every so often. So I like, we built this really elaborate fort and with all these traps and all this other stuff, and then just we stood in front of the fort and hit them with sticks until they were done. So

I mean, obviously you're gonna have more. So the you know, there are levels that will have multiple portals going at the same time, so you have to build a fort that encompasses both of them and then kind of split your like figure out like, Okay, is there a way we can funnel all these guys down one pathway so we can deal with them all at once, or are we gonna have to you know, have two people over here garden the lower one, two people up top that sort of thing. You

know, different characters with different skill trees and stuff like that. It's like, you know, ones that are better at kind of constructing, you know, Ninjas, all that sort of stuff, like kind of going for like a fun art style. The maps uh generated in any way, I M. I don't know for sure. There were people when we got into our second map they looked at and went like, oh man, that's crazy,

So I think they might be generated. But also it's hard to say that they've been running like limited time kind of alpha test here and there and then taking the game around and letting people look at it for an hour or two for kind of a long time. And I get the impression that this version we played was not the most recent version, and there was a bunch of stuff that it even happened since they had that build together that they were like, oh man, this stuff is this stuff is old to us now.

But but hey, did you see any of that hex grid kind of that helb world before you go into it that I'm talking about. That's where you you pluck on your buildings and uh and pick your level and all that sort of stuff. Okay, that might be different from when I played it because yeah, the hex thing, I thought that was randomly generated, so like you might go from the snowy area to the suburban area where maybe that's generated. But yeah, you're getting kind of a yeah, they opened up everything

for us to like pick with what our second level was. So it was just like here's this completed kind of hex grid. It's like, okay, do we want a city level? Do we want a suburb's level. Let's let's find a city level that has one more than one portal and try that one out. Yeah. I don't know, man, It like it was fun, it's kind of cool. I had a good time playing it in a cooperative fashion, but I don't know how much I would stick with it

based on what I saw there. I mean it sounds like they have a lot more to go, but but I mean a lot more to show or a lot more to develop both, I think. So let's yeah, how does it look? Because in my mind this game is still the Gears of War of Unreal Engine four, where it's like, all right, Epic is gonna make their game with the new UB before anybody else. But but like that ship sailed a long time ago, because like numerous UB four games around

the market already. So no, this isn't like some technical like artistically, it's like I'm almost like a t F two sort of thing where it's got a very distinctive kind of, you know, slightly cartoonish art style to it. Yeah, since Overdrive not not really, it doesn't have that kind of attitude to it. I think that's exaggerated. Yeah, cartoon. And then you know the walls you're putting up and stuff look a little ramshackle, look

a little like I also put a metal wall here. Let's put this, you know, it's like the contraptions look a little goofy like, you know, it's got that kind of look to it. Did you see any of the destruction stuff to where I remember like in the downtown area I played, I knocked out all of the lower floors, walls and like the whole like building will collapse if you do that. No, not really. I mean

you could knock down whatever wall you wanted and stuff like that. And I was certainly mining a lot of minerals, but you know, maybe I didn't take out the right supports or something like that. But there were some like three story buildings or whatever where I was doing that, and you know, they said, oh, you should try this out, try knocking out all the walls, and sure, and I would take down the whole thing. Yeah, No, that's that did not happen in the hour or so that

I played physical stuff. It's not really physically, it's not like red faction or anything. It's more like like the whole building will stay up if even one wall or staircase or something is connected to the ground. Yeah, and so you know, as soon as you think out that last one, right, get out of there, and it's all going to do it kind of

canned collapse animation. How long are the rounds? I think it depended on, like we it depends on how long you spend building really, you know, I think you could spend forty four, like forty five minutes on a level if you wanted to, maybe longer, which is fun because like you can if if you want to go like way overboard, you can make like a super crazy fort, like you know, just a giant one that reaches in the sky and everything with a ton of defenses and everything, and then

you hit the button and yeah, actually everybody have to hit the button, No one guy, just right now. But I think like my big disconnect in that game is like, yeah, yeah, you could build this big elaborate fort, but it's going to disappear as soon as you finished the level. Yeah, so like nothing like it. You know, like I don't know, people are gonna be min maxing it very quickly. It's just like, let's throw the thing whatever we can get, throw it together. Is

the fastest the design to build this fort and go. I remember it was rewarding though, when you like you want to do something elaborate, because like we built a fort near this huge cliff side once and we tried to do a thing where it's like let's just build flingers, so any husts that come by or whatever, it'll fling into another flinger and then fling everyone off the

edge of this cliff. And then we all got up in the fort and press the button and we watched and it mostly worked, like you know, eighty percent of the hust that ran in just got thrown off the edge. Like the end, it's overs Okay, So as you're saying there's more, there's a room for creativity here beyond just like let's funnel everything into a show

point and then shoot it for sure. I mean you can see the two sure, but yeah, yeah, I don't know, man, It's it's uh yeah, Like for me, it seemed like, yeah, you could spend a lot of time like that. That's where it broke for me in a lot of different ways. It's like, okay, like I when I build stuff in like a Minecraft game or something like that, there's a permanence attached to that of like, you know, I can load back into this thing and hey, look at this cool thing we all got together and built

it down. Well yeah, exactly, that's that's what you're hopeful. But it's the circle of life. Yeah, But like this idea that like, hey, you're just like building this thing as a temporary set up to beat this level. Like I mean, obviously the game's gonna have more modes and stuff, so I wonder, you know, what where they'll go with it. But from what they've showed so far, like that's that's my big sticking

point. It's just like, well, wait a minute, Like you have all these things in here that I can build, uh, and you know, we could build these elaborate, cool looking like structures, but they're just fucking gone. It's like, well, what why, you know, just give me a I'm gonna build a big box and then put some traps around this part of the box and then wall off this part and so that they

go this way instead and handle it. You know, they just didn't seem like it could be a good reason to like fully engage with all the building tools. You know, it's on them to come up with like types of waves and enemy combinations and stuff where you can't just get away with it. Yeah, did they did? They tached on PvP at all? No, Okay, when I played that, that was very rough and it's just kind

of like a concept thing, but there is PvP. Yeah, yeah, they kind of mentioned that they were still working on some stuff like that, but yeah, yeah. The one I played is super basic. It's like

each side, it's like five on five. Each side had like a unicorn rocking horse that you had to protect, and so like, you know, you would get people whose job it was to hang back and protect your rocking horse and build a base around it, and then you'd have like ninjas and stuff going off to try to destroy the other teams rocking horse and weird. It was super basic, but I remember being super fun. Did just have penetrated the fort exactly. Yeah, those those flingers, you can build them

for your own team too. So you need to get around your base, or I need to get up top here. You can put a little uh you know, jump pad down there and in the enemy variety thing I remember being pretty cool in that. Let's say you build a ton of ground offenses around your base, but then you've got some higher up levels that aren't quite

as defended. Yeah, there are some husts that are like you know, toss or husts or something they're called, and they will throw other husts up to the top so they can get in and get down and you know, destroy the Yeah. I don't know if we saw anything like that, but yeah, it's uh sounds kind of cool. I would try it there. Yeah, yeah, I think it's it's neat, but yeah, like it.

It's I feel like that there's got to be some large bit to it that hasn't necessarily been shown, because it's just it just seemed like that some kind of meta game level. So you're stuff is your is your base? Well yeah, you know, and that's where you're plopping down buildings and you're you're getting resources by winning these levels to come back and build or upgrade, like you're you're taking you're getting troops that you're then assigning to buildings as like

you're the manager of this building. So now you get twenty percent more of this, you know, like stat bonuses based on how you kind of are putting different people to work in your fort or in your base or in your city. I don't know what the actual name for that is, but I don't know. So that is kind of a larger game to it. But that's not like you're not running around an area and building that part. You're just kind of right clicking on stuff and going like, we need more storage.

So here it is. And that sounds like a free to play game to me. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure they say anything about platform release plans and consoles, still playing it on the PC. I imagine that thing will definitely come to consoles with a controller, But now we're playing on most and keyboard. But you know, like you you the crafting and stuff like that I think would be slightly cumbersome with a controller, but not

out of the question. Crazier more cumbersome games than that have been brought to game pads. Sure, yeah, yeah, I mean I think at this point, like that thing's been like off in whatever weird land where they've been making that game now for ever, that they're probably just like, let's get it done on PC and then worry about whatever else for its Holy shit, it was the last game this shift, was it yours three judgment? No,

they didn't, would have been after three. Well, but those also those people can fly if that was not I mean, I know Epic touched it in some ways, but well it's well bull Stormers than them too, I guess, yes, yeah, like has That's what I meant, like Epic proper people can fly. I was just doing like maybe multiplayer or something. Yeah, because that was another one I went out. I mean, the fact that they were showing it an Epic doesn't mean that I went out

there. Erson was doing the presentations. Oh no, yeah, I mean he yeah, he was like the guy like running that game or whatever, like the the guy that you were interviewing for that ye, you know, like a couple of high level Epic guys of course would be. That's that's what they had showing it at E three also, But I think that that game came out of people can fly. Yeah, that's my understanding for sure. Like I don't think Epic proper has fully developed and ship. I mean,

this new Unreal tournament is them. Well yeah, you know too. But saying they didn't put out a game in a while, yeah, well, I mean they're they're all engine licensing company. You know. Because so history has been made this day. It's true. We now let it be Let it be known. We have at least a tenuous grasp on what Fortnite is. Let it be known. Fortnite is a video game. It will presumably come out one day and you'll be able to play it. I don't

want to go that far. Okay, so I get ahead of ourselves. Jeff, did you play anything else? I know, no, no, nothing, I've been playing. Look at this E three calendar. Yeah, on schedule appointments onto this E three calendar. I've got the platinum trophy in that one. Yeah, I mean yes, I mean you've definitely been you know, you've been doing the heavy lifting on a lot of that. You

and Alex Alex deep into it, uh, going back and forth. But then there's a bunch of stuff that I have to schedule for myself specifically, and weird judge stuff. Yeah, it's all that weird shit, so E three man, Yeah, like coming Like I looked at my schedule, it's actually like kind of fucked at the show. Uh, there's there's kind of like normally I feel like I have like larger of time to just kind of get around the show floor and see other stuff. Not this year, man.

Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of stuff booked at the same time. I don't know how I feel about things, like just existentially, like like I just I mean, I mean, like what to expect out of the show. Oh sure, yeah, Like I just I don't know. I hope. There's a lot of stuff at press conferences. Yeah, like

that's not of course, that's not stuff we would be aware of. Like, yeah, stuff show floor appointments we book would not give us any real insight into what's happening in press conferences because to their separate things and also the things that the press conferences are often not shown in playable for booking appointment for them, they're often not far enough along to be showable, or they're just not you know, they're choosing not to yet, right, Yeah, Like

the I'm trying to think, like what the EA appointment was last year, right of, like, like, what was the big stuff at EA last year? After the press conference? It was just it was pretty much just they had Battlefield Hardline running and which I had already seen prior to the show. And then it was Dragon Age. I played Dragon It, Yes, but I want to say that was the only thing at EA that I did that was like, let's go play an unreleased game that is not a sports

game. Yeah, despite the fact that they announced a whole bunch of cool stuff. Generally, I think the general rule of thumb is like, is it coming out this year? Yes, Okay, then it'll probably be in the booth in some form. But if it's but if it's like, oh, it's at least a year and a half away, if it's going to be a next holiday game, then there's a very good chance it's not going

to be represented on the floor. And like, you know, like Microsoft was just like wheeling out one announcement after another last year, and I was like, crackdown, Fantom, dust, scale down, you know, and then none of those things are in the booth because they barely exist, right yeah, yeah, beyond like business deals. And so now you hope that like they make good on all of those things in some form, right, But I don't know and see some of that stuff. But there will probably

be announcements they think and hope. Let's let's say they would better be announced. Yes, yeah, yes, all right, Drew, Yes, what has happened? Oh? You know? Oh I don't know. That's why I asked, do you want to hear about video games? Do you want to hear about non video games? I don't know what you got. I discovered a new sport. Okay, no, dude, Soccer has existed for generations, and it's not a sport. It's I mean, it's they No, they play play it outside of the United States, right, but here

it's not technically No. No, our sports invented are discovered that they're discovered by me when I don't know about them. I think they're discovered and then they're invented. Okay, what is this new sport? Uh? It is a so all right? So I was at a barbecue in hell and hollow in beautiful Golden Gate Park. Wait, is that really a part of going Yes? It always weirds me out that there are all these little subdivisions of Golden Gate Park because to me, it's just Golden Gate Park. There's a

part with buffalo. Yeah, yeah, buffalo. And I'm sure that field with the buffalo and it has a name, but I don't know what it is. I just running around. I saw, damn buffalo. It's the Buffalo Zone. I ran by it and it says it says, there's some sign theres is like kept up or donated by or money. Contributed to by Marissa Mayer of Yahoo. Yes, oh ye. So the only bar San Francisco moment, The only the only like geographical touchstone in Golden Gate Park that

I can remember is the hill with the big drum circle. Anybody lands end, No, it's like toward the hate Ashbury and yeah, there's just a constant huge drum circle going on. There is a wind. Yeah, it's like that. It's like that. It's like that oil or coal fire, the fires that never go out right fires, the drum strum circle that never stops. You should bring a hacky sack over there and see if you can break up their drum circle. Maybe, so, hey, anybody want a

hack and then to start like kicking the ball. I mean a lot of people with drums talking, but all of them like Hackey sat talking like dozens. I like. I like drums, yeah, drum circles, no, okay, drums that you play with your hands. I mean I think like some bongos, like a congo drum like, nothing wrong, They've got their place. Yeah yeah, what about a duck playing the drums not into it? I could get how many that's not real. How many cars of Donkey

conga bongo drums do you have in your house? None? I don't think. I don't know any Yeah. Wow, that game was lame. I have that tie of a PS two Tycho drum master controller though, because that game is good. Yeah, that's a good one. I have no thick drums anymore, sold their Rock brand ones or no, I give it to Goodwill. Here you go. I have three sets of video of like those types of video game drums. I thought that good Will stopped taking. Rock

stopped taking at one point. I think it was when I was moving. I tried to get rid of my guitars and they literally would not take that for free from me. That's so incredible. Yeah, yeah, that's how much people wanted to expunge plastic instruments from their lives. There's like a whole section of good will where there's just like forty guitars. Man, I went to my good will and there wasn't anything like that. I was looking for video games to see if they had anything, and then there was like one

Nintendo game. It was like a game cube game off in the corner that they wanted way too much money for loneliest game. My sister wanted rock Band three for we last Christmas, and my mom emailed me because she could only find it for like one hundred and seventy dollars or something on Amazon. This was last Christmas, rock Band three on the original we right, and she was about to buy it, and I had to try to talk her out.

Please do not do this. You'd be better off. You'd be better off buying like you used three sixty and that version of rock Band three. Yeah, yeah, right, there's Craigslist or something because it's some weird Amazon thing. But that's all say. It's sealed copies of games on of old games. Maybe this was used, Oh it was, yeah, Okay, it was just like they were like two available and it was just some stupid thing. Right, it's just not much Amazon will sun Bends. Yeah,

I was well it's not Amazon's third party sellers coming and go. Yeah, I was. I was trying to wise there are no copies. Yeah, I was trying to find a copy of a DVD that came out nine years ago and obviously hasn't been printed again since then. And yeah, Amazon, whoever was selling it through Amazon, had one sealed copy for four hundred dollars. I don't want to say it's Transformers the movie. I just wanted to have it the cartoon. Yes, okay, there's a two disc additions that

came out, Yeah, like almost a decade ago. I might have that. I just I haven't seen that movie in like fifteen years or something. I just kind of wanted fair enough to peace of my childhood, tell us about your park adventure. So I'm there, I with some friends barbecuing in helmet and hollow, okay, which sounds like you should be beside a thicket.

Uh. And I saw these people with foam swords and shields beating the the Jesus out of each other, right, like trying to like cause harm or like like swinging up for the fences, or they just doing like a little tab larpee stuff. I mean it was larpee stuff can be both, but they were really Kate, you're just like Larpe, like your life depended

on it. This is basically like that's basically what I ran into. So it was way cooler than like normal, like we're just gonna say numbers and pretend to throw stuff at right lightning bolt, etc. So I went up to them and talked to this guy and I actually periscoped it, so if you could probably go watch that. Actually someone archived it to YouTube and posted that and I put it on my tumbler. But if you use like a whirlwind of services and products all coming together, and then I tweeted about it.

So it started with a Twitter product, went through nine different services and then at the end, Yeah, did you post it your LLO page? Oh I gotta do that. Oh my god, I forgot the thing exists. I'm on I'm on LLO. I mean I've got an account, I got my name, but but you use it. I barely used Twitter. Have you been back on there since you signed up? Once? Okay? Like an emails. It sounds like they're doing things to the service anyway. Anyway, anyway, not really like this is Larpe but only the combat.

So are they like trying to like large, like are they talking. It's no, it's not at all. They just got bump swords and they're fucking hitting each Yeah, I mean you can. You could cosplay if you wanted to. There are a couple of people dressed in packs ish garb uh. It's a great term for any of Yeah, I mean it's like it's vocatiately talking about foam around your body is a little too thick, kind of painted on colors. Yeah, some some of that stuff, but like there's no,

you're not counting hit points or anything. It's just hey, you and I are fighting. Now. If if I hit one of your limbs, you lose the use of that limb. If I hit another one, you're dead. Or if I hit your body, you're dead. That's it. I think you should have to go until you actually make the limb unusable, like physically, until it's like that dead from getting hit by foam swords. I would probably take a lot. I mean, I can't imagine these folm

swords actually hurt and anyway, they don't. They don't. They actually have spears and javelins, and the I think the javelin it is the only weapon where it's legal to hit the person in the face. Okay, because the end of it is just like the squishing material that you could that you know doesn't hurt when it hits you. By the way, this is called Bella Garth. E E L E gives me the sport. This sport is this something that exists outside of these people doing this in the Yeah, okay,

oh yeah. You can go to I think it's just Bella Garth dot com and you can see different groups around the United States, just something like Europe and South America. But there's swords homemade or there's are they're actually people selling foam swords. There are people on like Etsy selling these swords. But I think for the most part, I think, come on, man, make

your own sword, like that's I mean, it's part of it. This is a rite of passaging and that's how you exactly, that's how you how you become ob right, Yes, you have to make your crystals in official Bella Garth Empire. Yeah. Molla Knho was the first champion. He was yeah yeah, and he'll be the last. Really good with the broad sword. Yeah, it was fun, tiring, Yeah, just get some good

aggression out. Yeah. I went up against Joe the Gray Haven, which is the San Francisco chapter of Bella Garth and I went up against Joe, who seemed to be the kingpin there, and he was very very good, trying to get low and fast. But yeah, we work. I got I killed him once. Okay, Like, how seriously did they take the rules? I mean, like you know, I'm sure it's kind of on our system system you need to It's kind of like paid ball, right, so it's like, hey, man, I hit you because you take a

shot, it's on you to call yourself out or whatever. Right. Yeah, And if you have your sword in one hand and they hit that arm, are you like expected to drop the sword? You switch hands? Was it like bushido blade? Like we get hit in the head, are you just done? Uh? I imagine the one weapon the javelin. If you do get a head shot, then you are dead. Yes, yeah, that sounds like it could be kind of fun. Yeah. There are also

weapons that like break your shield. Okay, there's like a color coordinated system on each weapon. It'll tell you how it how it works. But apparently there are also like big matches where they get a bunch of people together and it's not just one on one it's like a melee. And then you do have referees. They call them something. It's like an in universe name for the referees. I can't remember what it is. But uh, I don't know. Everyone was super nice. They were like a dozen people out there.

They they come from eleven to five and just hang out and then go drink afterwards apparently head down to the mead hall. Yeah it was. It was a good time. So oh check it out. Yeah, I mean fake sword fighting is awesome. Yeah, probably not awesome as a real sword. Is it anything like movie sword fighting where you get these kind of like

protracted volleys of like peris and blocks back and forth. Or is it just like it's like Russian like he'll he'll block you and then you won't really have enough enough time to come around for another hit and by that time he has hit you already. Or at least that's how the New versus the Pro went for me. But like, I don't know, modern quote sword fighting is like like, uh, in the Olympics is real weird? It's just fence. Yeah, it's just fencing. Yeah, So I don't know, I

don't know what's more real. Jeff m hm. This is probably more real than fencing. Word, fencing, you have to where there's weird like beekeeper suit things. Yeah, probably don't have to do that. These people's no safety gear. Also, the except for the swords being made of foam. Oh yeah, fencing swords are all are super flexible. It always wears me out how much they bend. Yeah, I guess that's safety. I don't know, that's just fencing. Man. Okay, don't don't question, all

right, I won't. Yeah. Fine, so sounds fun. That sounds cool. Uh do you got any video games talk about or is it? Yeah? Well, I mean Dan and I looked at for Done, which I thought was really cool. Like I said in the video. We uh it made me think of like old Half Life one mods, like back in

the heady days, browns and firearms and the specialists. Oh yeah, right, it's a it's a World War one game, and it's it's kind of unique in that, uh, you alternate, you the opposing team alternate between attack and defense, and if the attackers win, the map moves basically along the sort of linear path until one end reaches the other side or you know, I think it times out eventually because like World War One, a lot of stalemates happen, but it's the first Verston Shooter. Uh, it's like

one shot, one kill, bullet drop, et cetera. It's that kind of level suns team. It's it's it's out. I realize it's kind of a horrendous subject. But is there any representation of chemical weapons in this game? Actually? Yeah? Really so like it's you, it's very squad base, right, and four people do a suss the game where if you walk too far away from your squad mate, you instantly die, right as a deserter. Uh no, if you walk outside, if you're defending and you

get out of your trench, you'll git shot for desertion. Never gets out of your trench. A lot of people were shot for them that very thing. Yeah, what do they call it back then? Was it shell shocked at that point? I mean shell shock? Is that what happens to you when you like basically you going crazy? Well yeah, but I mean, you know, like what we would and modern times refers to as PTSD has yes, had a lot of different names over the years, and there was

a lot less tolerance for it. Yeah, that's true. I was just saying it's like weak or whatever. Absolutely, and you spend a month under artillery barrage and see how you handle it. Yeah, it's like space dementia. Like if there's any any sign whatsoever that you're doing less than the fullness of your duty, you're dead. Jesus. Yeah, it's pretty fucked up. I would if I was in World War One, I would build a trench in my trench and then just hide in that until the war was over,

until it fills with water. That soundsanderus too, Yeah, and then you get trench foot. What's that? You don't want it? Your skin comes off. That doesn't sound good at all. No, anyway, there's a squad leader for each squad of four, and he can call in stuff like recon like a UAV and a little biplane flies over it's go. Or you can call h mortar strikes, or you can call him gas and you have a gas mask with you at all times when you put it on, really hard to see. Uh. Yeah, we're done. Huh. I

think it's cool. Let's play a little there A lot of people plan it actually, yeah, yeah cool. Also played some Elite Dangerous. Their power Play update finally came out. I think I mentioned a few weeks ago that it was out, it was not now out, So this is like it's like political. Yeah, so you can you can align yourself with a power, like a nation sort of and then go do missions based on who you're

aligned with. Right. It sort of just gives you, like Elite is a very open ended game, and this kind of gives you a little more direction, a little bit of structure. Yeah, a little more structure, I have I have seen some complaints about that game getting pretty grindy, yes once you like not because there's there's only a few things that you can I think that's that was the problem, right Yeah, like like there's just there's only so many activities and you kind of you get to the late game and

it's just well, I'm just gonna cure more of these. I'm gonna keep doing those because that's all there is to do. So yeah, I actually can't speak to much about the Powers upgrade because I don't think I've played enough of the game to even unlock that stuff. Ohka, but if you own the game, you're just getting these updates, right, Yes, Like they're

not selling piecemeal, they are. This is free. But yeah, I also it did not come with any sort of like here's a video tutorial about what this update is or how to do it, or because there's a lot of they introduced a lot of jargon with the the powers, you know, they have to get voted in, or like this collection of planets is. I don't know. I my eyes sort of glazed over. I'm sure there's like articles I can read on their website or in the forums or whatever.

But the game itself, like when I loaded it up, I couldn't tell that anything had changed until I like dug in some menus and then said, oh, this is where I can align myself. It doesn't really teach you how any of that stuff works inside the game. It's all about the second screen. It really is the companion app, yeah or something if there is one. Daniel, Yeah, what's going on? Played a lot of The

Witcher just talking about on man, tell me about your life. Oh I'm having a good time, Yeah, good stuffy, alright, good stuff. There's your weekly Dan update. Ya doing good? All right? Video that's the update everywhere? All right, things, things are good. I played a lot of The Witcher, still loving it, like, yeah, we talked about it earlier. But I have kind of committed to, like this

being the main game I'm probably gonna play for a couple of months. Yeah, so I'm gonna trying to think, like I'm sort of doing the like, all right, what's coming out right after E three that we're gonna have to worry about Batman. Batman's coming out, but that's probably not a super long game. And then no, don't think there are a lot of other major releases after you're fifteen hours. I'm Batman. And when I put the when I had made the kind of conscious decision to stop playing the Witcher until

they fixed that one bug, I was very fearful. It was like, all right, I think this game is really good, but I'm afraid, like Inertia or whatever he is gonna take hold and I'm not gonna be able to get back to it if I put it down. I really want to make sure I can finish it, you know. Yeah, like having a game this long that you interrupt multiple times for like a week plus at a time can be kind of dangerous. Yeah, it's gonna be the big summer

game for me. I think that's what happened to you with Bloodborne, right, Like if you more or less, I just kind of have to leave if you have to put a game like that down for a certain period of time, Yeah, like maybe more than a week. We can have something like that. Yea. Like a lot of that can be mitigated with how they do their quests. Yeah, does the Witcher do it smartly? Like could you just jump back in and say, oh, the way point over

here or I have no idea where I left. There's tons of stuff. Yeah, Like you can just kind of pick a side quest that you haven't done and just sort of set away point and go well, and as far as the main quest goes, like you know, when you first load up the game, it does a smart thing of like the Bard or whatever being like Siri ran off to whatever and the Crowne saw her do a thing like

it kind of reminds you as you load the game again. Yeah, you get a little narrative like here's what happened last in your story or okay, so that kind of helps. But yep, outside of that, the last couple of weeks have pretty much been nothing but Witcher and Splatoon. The ranks stuff showed up in Splatoon. Yea, how was that ranked stuff? I haven't no chance. It's all right. I still kind of prefer the main

Turf four mode. This one is kind of his own thing to where it's like there will be one or every ranked match just this, or is it kind of just when I played, I just sat down and played a few ranked ones in a row. Okay, I didn't play a lot. I went right back to Turf four soon after that, because I think that main mode is my favorite for sure. But yeah, they introduced the new map

some new weapons. I don't think i've seen the map yet. I tested out a couple of weapons and they weren't really for me, but it's cool that they're adding new stuff. I had a bunch of people give me shit last week for saying that, what is it the splatter help me out here? The main weapon splatter shot splatter Shot Junior was like a totally good, viable weapon when I said better, I guess like that style. There are ye you immediately get like a normal splatter shot that has more range on it,

but otherwise seems like the same guns. So I don't know why you wouldn't just use that, but whatever. I have not spent enough time in Splatoon to like theory, craft, the weapon lineup. Yeah, probably on six or seven hours of the game total. Now, actually probably more than that, but yeah, it's fine. Ranked is fun, and at least

at least ranked is a different mode. Like when I saw that there was a ranked category coming, I was like, because you know, usually ranks just means like the same thing you've been doing, but with some kind of leaderboard. Right, So hearing that that's actually different mode is really good because that game needed some more stuff. Yeah, yeah, so that's pretty cool. Also, did you Must Build a Boat? I've been playing a lot of that, which we I switched over. Yeah, we talked about last

week. I ended up switching. So the PC version doesn't have steam Cloud support, so in preparation for the quick Look, I ended up playing through the early parts of that game about four different times. So I said fuck this and bought the phone version where I can have my progress with me wherever I go. And uh, yeah, so I've been playing into that too. It's a good phone game. Yeah, it's a really good game.

Really good. Is it kind of more of the same, Yeah, it's a little I think it's I think it's a little more focused on the quests in terms of just like you know, the things you have to do to proceed are sometimes difficult, and it seems like there's way more to do as far as what you spend your currencies on, Like as the boat gets built bigger, there's just all these different rooms and different people that you can do.

Like, I it's been so long since I played ten million, I don't really remember what the leveling up was like, but I seem to remember a pretty basic like here's where you do your swords, here's where you do your shields. Four, here's where you do yeah, yeah, it's there's Yeah, basically four did things. Eventually you unlock like Halo skulls, like the rough equote of that you can kind of right right, some things that make it way harder or and modify kind of what you're going to get out

of it resource wise. Yeah, and this you're like recruiting people, you're selling junk and loot to this ORB thing. Like there's all these different rooms that seem to do different things. You're upgrading individual spells things like that. See, I I'm loving it. I love ten million. This seems to be right on that same level outside of what you're buying and unlocking and like

putting currency into and stuff. Is it's just a match three games. It's more it's more complicated in terms of like what you want to match and when because it's but I mean, like matching things is the core of the games. But timing at a right time, so like a sword trap will be flying at you, and oh shit, I gotta find some swords or this this monster is immune to magic damage or whatever. So you may recall when I bought ten million in the middle of last week's podcast, I have not

yet played ten million? Good plan? Should I have just waited for this ten millions? Great? I mean I think you could. You certainly play both. M okay, So like I'm not gonna totally burn out on this if I play this and then well, I'd say play this and maybe don't immediately go okay, you must build a boat. But they're not. They're not one hundred percent the same game or something. No, they're not okay, all right. Also played some Super Mario Kart Super Nintendo on the back

of a lift seat I ordered. Me and the lady were going to a concert on Wednesday, and I ordered the lift. A van pulls up in front of my place. It's just got like Warrio and Donkey Kong and all sorts of crap panted all over the side. And I just looked at my girlfriend. I was like, I don't know what the hell we just ordered here. We get in. Both of our seats are in front of us,

the driver's seat in the passenger seat. Yeah, and the backhead rest has a Super Mario Kart loaded up and you can play two player with two Supernintendo controllers. He's running it all through a Raspberry Pie up or him. So this was like a homebrew job. Yeah, so he said all this up. He said, he also has like you know, length of the pass and a bunch of stuff. They're not they're not selling vans equipped with no no it says Video Lift. Like they do themed lifts now, he

said, like one lady in San Francisco. It does all Hello Kiddy stuff. But it's like it's not like they It's like these people are just doing it on their own. Well, I guess Lift is pushing for themed Okay, they're trying to differentiate from from Uber, I'm sure. Yeah. And his was video games and so like I started to asking questions about it and stuff and he's like, oh, take a look at this, and he

projected Street Fighter two on the ceiling of the van. It's like, oh, I guess we could grab this control play Street Fighter on the ceiling. Cool. This whole thing sounds like a nightmare. Sounds kind of cool. He started doing video game trivia with me and I won some Starbucks gift cards. Wait, like cash cat. I was about to say, at that point, you're like waiting for him and tell you you're on TV. Yeah, like that is correct. Yeah, yeah, my girlfriend I kept looking

at each other like what the fuck is this? And then yeah, you went to Starbucks for the first time in my life, and you started a really good way to fuck with drunk people, like to have a themed lift. Yeah. He was saying something about like he picks up drunk people and like playing a racing game in a car while you're drunk. Yeah, that's the best kind of rough. So yeah, we were talking to him about like putting oculuses in there or whatever. So yeah, okay, so yeah

that was that was a super rand thing. That no indication that you had done this until it showed up. I pressed the normal ass lift button and all of a sudden, the video game van pulls up in front of my place and we're doing trivia and Mario Kart and all sorts of stuff. Wow, Yeah, that wasn't We were talking about the trivia on like last week and it was like one of his questions was wrong. Yeah, so he asked me. The first one was what year the NASS game out? I

got that. The second one was how many Wizards and Warriors games on the NASS? I got that three? And then yeah. And then the third one was he said there was a Wizards and Warriors TV show who played the lead and like, I was like, I have no fucking idea here. It was Jeff Conway from like Greece and the drug stuff. And then you told me that that actually had nothing. We looked it up. That Wizards and Warriors show was like from eighty three, like well before there was a

Wizards and Wars to the game. It's like yeah, yeah, so I don't know, I mean technically you know TV trivia. Yeah. He also was playing the Princess Bride and the van so was van was there. It looked like a soccer mom minivan thing and just completely I I think he might have said he had sixty four hooked up as well. He had some other system I didn't PS one or something, but he had a lot of stuff going on there, and it was kind of I'll running through the Raspberry Pie.

We'll run a lot of stuff. Yeah, it was it just like hanging out the side. Did you see it there, the Raspberry Pie. It was between it was like by the center console or whatever man up front. Yeah, I thought that was a cool idea. It's a neat idea, but it's not like when you request an uber or a lift, you have any real choice over who picks you up. So it's like, I think part of the joy was like the surprise though. Well yeah, if he just like if he just gets a kick out of seeing people enjoying it,

I mean you probably rated him high, yeah exactly. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, we give him big tip and stuff, and so like it's, uh, you know, if it was press this button to pay five dollars more to order the video game lift, I don't know if I do that, but it was a nice surprise, you know. Yeah, so yeah, that was pretty cool. I kept thinking about switching the lift because the world is strange. It is. Yeah, it's we live in a disruptive age. Well we also live in the city for it. Well

have totally dune bullshit. Yeah, that's not happening. They invent all the dumb bullshit. I kept I kept thinking about switching the lift because Stuberd keeps being a reprehensible company and and yes, stopping because of the weird expectation that you sit in the front and a lift that I never I never said, is that Is that not the case anymore? I never want you anymore?

Okay, like when whenever somebody told me, like, yeah, you're supposed to sit in the front with the driver and talk to the driver and a lift like they want to be your friend or whatever. No, no, I don't know. I cat is the exact opposite of what I want from a like car service, taxi cab, anything like that. Totally all right, that's good to hear. Maybe all right, I will I will look back into Johnny cab, Johnny Cab. I'll fist pump Johnny Cab. It's

your prerogative. Played a little bit of nominom Galaxy for making a super factory and space by the pixel Dunk guys. I thought it was pretty cool. I thought it's not a Pixel Dunk game at all, right, doesn't have that it's branding on it. I think I think it was originally called like Pixel Junk Galaxy. Really, wasn't it because Sony owns the Pixel Junk game, right or do they? Maybe I don't know. But then again, some of those games have coming on steams. They have, yes, I'm

not sure, maybe they don't. I thought I saw that logo in there. Yeah, it's kind of cool. We did. We did a quick look of it, and near the end of it, I turned on, like, hey, turn this level into a multiplayer level in case somebody wants to join, and no one did, and so I paused at the end of the quick look. I think you guys came in to do some other quick look and so I came back like forty minutes later, just to finish

that level and save my progress. And my factory that I had built was just like way bigger, and it was just like super well built to all these conveyor belts and everything was automated. And I'm staring at this and I had no idea why my factory like I recognized what I built, but then it expanded just tenfold turns out, while you guys were doing a quick look, some guy had jumped into the PS four session and had just been in

there by himself, just like building this awesome factory for me. So I just hopped back in and he's like, oh, hey, I see you're here. He can come help me out and fight these monsters off or whatever. So crazy, it's great, still have progress. I saved the level we won. Yeah, yeah, it's cool. It looks kind of like Terraria, uh as far as looks goes. Yeah, like breaking through you

know different terms. Yeah, you're breaking the breaking around stuff kind of building some stuff, right, but yeah, you know, I haven't played enough Ferraria to really know. Yeah, I mean you're getting materials, and yeah, you're mainly getting materials to make soup, not necessarily to build the base. The stuff, the base elements are just off a couple of basic currencies.

There's matter, which you get by kind of drilling through any kind of environment, and then you get gold by selling soup, and so that will build kind of any part of your base. But you need to go gather ingredients and plant stuff and do all that to make your soup to make money. Also place where super we're talking. It's all sorts of crazy space vegetables

mixing together. You can make all sorts of combinations. Like each soup machine you put in two ingredients and it does a mixture, and each one has a unique name and everything and break different money. Where can I get a soup machine? I don't know. I am the soup machine. Okay, do you make me any soup I desire? I mean, no, your crummy soup machine. Yeah, man, it's pretty fun, all right. Cool game, cool video games. They're real, I think, Yeah,

I'd find out in a week. Yeah, fall Out four. For a second there, I thought you were going to talk about that band, and I was like, that's why. Yep, but they saw a band. I feel like I haven't heard about them for like six or something. I'm pretty sure they just put something out. I just heard them on the radio this morning. Popular Also there they're in the Nu Guitar Hero, Yes they

are. Yeah, that was one of the three fake videos or like you know, we saw the video of fake Fallout Boy right playing a real Fallout Boy song. Yes, there was a song on the radio this morning. It was by them. That just made me angry that sounds about right. Yeah, does fall Out four make you angry? No, Okay, that's a good start, because we're gonna talk about it. How fucking like. It was the craziest thing in the world to see people like like, oh

my god, fun four is happening. Yeah, it's like no ship. You know. Honestly, I was actually old surprised that the announcement was as straightforward as it is, even when they put up that countdown clock things.

By the time that showed up, I was like, all right, well it's definitely fall Out because I mean, you know, you've been hearing variations on Fallout four years coming out of that place, right, just like yeah, like if you if you are like three degrees separated from anybody who works on video games, I feel like at some point you've heard somebody say, yeah, they're making new fall Out. Yeah exactly, but it's been so long that at a certain point, like you started to doubt it. You

know, it's like, well, maybe they are doing something new. Yeah, it was at it was at a point where like everything I had heard about Fallout four was now three maybe even four years or exactly, like and so like, uh, I mean maybe they changed course. Like who knows, Like is that info even good anymore? Yeah, And then even on top of that, like a week or two ago, I heard that it

might not be called fall Out four but like fall Out something else. But here we are, it's fall Out four and it looks like Fallout three great, Like I mean it's teaser trailer. I don't know, but I mean, like, you know, stylistically, it's very m and there's old timey radio clearly, boy, there's vaults. You know, it's very clearly descended from the stuff that they did with with fall Out three. But but there's a dog. There was a dog, totally dog before after this long,

I'm just ready to go back to that. Like I'm fine with it being more Fallout three. I think it looks great, like I'm not. I don't mean to be dismissive of it, like I think I think it looks

like. There was actually like a weird minor outcry about it not looking good enough, to which I'd say, I mean, yeah, like, I mean, well, you know, that's that can go both ways, because like parts of Bethesda's history, they I feel like they have like set graphical standards, you know, like moral wind and Oblivion when they came out, We're like fucking mind blowing looking. But but I feel like they've fallen off of that. Yeah, totally. Yeah, Like I feel like they've just

had different goals. Yeah, yes, absolutely, Like fall Out three and Skyrim like are fine. You know, they look fine for what they are, but like it's like the it's like the breadth and the scope of the worlds that you're showing up for right, Like it's the I mean there were certainly, yeah, they're parts of Skyrim. They look really great for sure, sure, but you know, like the you know, the animation. Character animation is always pretty robotic looking and like facial stuff not so great,

you know, like individual like texts. You know, they're not like a tech powerhouse necessarily. Yeah, it's like the size and the intricacy of the worlds. That's the impressive feet there. I mean, as far as it just being more Fallout wasn't Skyrim to a degree, just more Oblivion, uh, I mean it didn't like completely like the shouts and everything of the Dragon

the Older. The thing about the Older Scrolls games is every one of them takes place in a different part of the world and time period in Boston. So yeah, I know, I'm not saying that Skyram was set in Boston. Yeah, yeah, totally. I would play Skyrise in Boston. The Boston Vikings or nine dollars I will sell you my mod renames the whole area to just Boston. I mean, that was one of Ben Franklin. Yeah. One of the things I liked about Skyrim was that they picked like a

sort of a climate and like a region and stuck with it. You know. It's like they didn't feel the need to like, oh, here's your desert area, here's your deciduous forest, here is the frozen tundra. It's just like, yeah, kind of uh, it was just like well, so, I mean actually was kind of impressed at the variety of places at the showed in that trailer, Like it felt a lot more varied than what

I remember a Fallout three. It's certainly more color. Yeah, like Fallout three I remember as being a very brown and gray and green game, and that was kind of it. And there's a lot of there's a lot of areas of this, you know, like they showed some of the little more urban looking stuff at night with a lot of kind of contrasty lighting. Yeah, stuff like that, Like there was kind of a seaside area, which you know, if it's in Boston would make sense. Yeah. Yeah.

I watching that trailer kind of made me think, like about, like they should make a Fallout game that is set well after all of the other Fallout games that it is depicting civilization coming back together in ways that are not super waste landy. They're actually establishing some kind of I mean there are governments and

factions and stuff like that in the world of fall Out. I mean there is an order, yeah, but trying to actually make that order into something I think of as modern civilization or something you know, a little less cutthroat. Yeah, instead of just having little pockets of that. They're always like gone horribly wrong in the most wild westy kind of weird ways, uh, like something like resembling order, Like like what order comes out of that situation?

I guess. So it always strikes me about that world, at least from what I remember Fallout three, that like everybody is too busy scrabbling for resources to actually like erec a hierarchy, you know, I'm sure, yeah, but you know, like water was like a coveted thing in Fallout three. So it's just like, you know, who's gonna who's gonna take the

time to put like a government together. That's why you would have to flash forward, Yeah, pretty far because you know you think about it like that's you know, Caveman did that, and you know you can have that sort of situation. I guess I don't know, Yeah, it's I don't know. It's it seems like a lot of speculation around what the deal is here based on the trailer. Our our intrepid news guy Austin uh did kind of a deep dive in this news story. I don't know if you guys read

it. Yeah, about the the the sy quest, the replicated man from Fallout three. Oh yeah stuff. Yeah, there was like an android who was like basically running away from his creators, which is kind of a group called the Institute. Yeah. Uh, And you know, I won't go into exhaustive detail here, but like Austin's kind of postulating that so like that stuff was set around Boston in the Choosts area according to this android. Yes, so he's postulating that a lot of this stuff is that stuff is going

to come into a lot more focus in this game. I think there's there's been a lot of talk in the lead up or not even in the lead up to this, but a lot of prior talk about AI and the role of AI and things, so that that fits into a lot of the leaked

stuff. Yeah. So it's weird. There's that Reddit post from like a year ago floating around, and at a certain point it's hard for me to like separate in my mind, like, all right, what have they talked about and what was in that post that may or may not actually be true? Yeah, well they have talked about next to nothing. Yeah, you know, it's stuff that has come out of little bits and pieces here and there, which I yeah, we've heard some of the some of the stuff

directly about some of the some of this AI stuff. But again that was years ago, right, so know what what is it now? Yeah? And then you know, there's whatever you can surmise from the trailer, which is probably not a lot of actual detail. There's a little bits and pieces, but yeah, you know it's Yeah, did you know the trailer doesn't say like, here's what we're doing to vats, Like you know, it

doesn't actually tell you anything they're doing something. Yeah, I don't want to play another get fall Out that's just VAT sing everything, Like I would play another Fallout that, well, there was a better looking like you know it needs because it's been a while, but I would like to see I mean, if you think about the change from Oblivion to Skyrim, you know, in terms of systems, in terms of like that sort of stuff, like I would like it to evolve. I would like to fall Out four to

evolve more than New Vegas. Well, sure, but that's just needs an overhaul. Like I'm not saying that it needs to go away. I just didn't the way it was originally, I would not want to keep playing. Sure you expect all that to be covered on Sunday. I don't know, no, Like this is well, they're not gonna go like here's what you know, like you let's look at the U. I well, they're not gonna sit there and talk about vats. But I might totally see there be

like a fairly extended gameplay. Yeah, yeah, sure, because yeah, I guess a gameplay demo that would certainly answer some questions. Because it seems crazy to me now that they went and rented out a whole theater and they're doing this Galla thing the night before all the other press conferences. If they've already announced their biggest game and they've already shown like gameplay footage in that trailer, I mean, so what do they show with this thing? Like they

can't just run that trailer again. I probably show a good check of a quest or something. Yeah, like I would I would expect more of a live gameplay demo or something like, you know, walking around like the equivalent of Mega Ton or something like that and talking to different people. Also, it's been now if I kill this guy, his quest won't be available. Whoa real consequences? Oh you know, it's been almost four years. Like they've got to be pretty deep into this thing, right, Like it's got

to be in a fairly fairly playable state. No, yeah, I dode, I totally think. So it's coming out this year, Coburn, I remember this year? I disagree? All right, you disagreement has been registered. Yeah, bet a sandwich on it. No, okay, I think it has to be this year. I think it would be great if it came out this year. I think it would be great if everything came out this year, If everything was done came out, that'd be really cool. But I don't know. I think the timing lines up. I think it

makes sense they should box heart. Oh yeah, I'll eat a hat if it doesn't come out this year. Careful, you've said that before and it's gone. I'm not gonna let you bet on anything, not all the hats at once, and then in any of our stuff. It's just I just want to reiterate for the record that eating a hat is a figurative. I was gonna find a way to make an edible hat. I actually looked up and actually a hat safely. I know. Well, if it's actual food

stuffs making the hat, this is more in my own retroactive defense. Uh, you can make it like one of those paper in and out hats, but out of rice paper. Yeah, that that satisfies. Make make a spring roll out of it or something. She's burger on your head that goes on your head. Put burger on head. That definitely works. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know what else to say about Falling four other than I want to play it. Like I thought that trailer looked really good.

Like it, you know, it looked like a Bethesza game. It didn't look amazing lead. Yeah, I mean from there, it just looked nice. It looked like what I would expect to a new next gin. BETHESA have a ton of questions about what faugh for is, you know, in terms of just like are they overhauling you know, is it the same engine is? Are they overhauling this? Are they doing? What does that even mean at this point because they said Skyrim was on any brand new engine?

Yeah, and come on right, yeah, like what does that mean? Will you that a new engine? Will it be jankie in the same way all of their games are JANKI yes, that that at some point becomes a deal breaker. I would. I mean it might be better, like they they can't fucking well whatever, every fucking game's broken now, so obviously yeah, they could ship something totally fucked. But like that's the you know, like polish. Yeah, you know, games that work. It needs

to get better. You're not wrong about the way their games work. And I think there's stuff with like animation and presentation of you know, of dialogue and stuff like that. I just I still don't see anybody out there creating these like massive clockwork simulations. That stuff's awesome, Like it's great, but I to do that I think you're the dog has to turn, it has to pivot on a point. Like that's just how that might be the case.

Like I see a lot of people out there going like like oh, like oh the Witch or three has completely like remade expectations for what open worlds can be, Like Bethesna needs to step it up. But like that is crazy talk, because like every NPC in the Witcher has one place to be for the entire game, and every time you walk through one of those towns they say, they go through the same dialogue routines over and over. Have you ever played a game called Majora's Mask, No, whatever to that's but

they're still all scripted to be in a pet looked at that game. Yes, But like like the npcas and bethesta game like roam around and do weird shit constantly. Yeah, like most games are not attempting this level of like autonomy in the agents that are moving around in the world. But like at some points forgive part of it. But yeah, but at some point they need to tighten that shit. Yeah yeah, yeah, you're right. It would be nice if that stuff works more consistently. I'm excited because this would

be my first Bethesza game on PC. I've always done it on you know, Xbox. Oh, how is their track records great? Now that I have a good well, I mean, you know, they're like some people had complaints about the UI for Mounsing Keyboard and Skyrine. I'd be playing the controller, but like, you know, they run great, Like okay, alright, Like it almost doesn't matter how good the ports are at this point because buying large the hardware is so much better. At this point, you

don't have to care. When those games had games from Windows Live, you could pull down the console and unlock all the achievements right there. That's how good the PC versions were. I might have done that on fallow I gave myself fifteen hundred points and Fallout three in about two minutes. I got banned from checking games out of the game and Former Vault because I did that on it and follow Out three. What why? Because I was using the vault to like it's like, oh my god, every games here, I'm just

gonna achieve farm all the time. And everyone knew I just love getting achievements checking out college basketball games? The fuck did they care? Though? It was? It wasn't like a serious punishment or anything. But they stuck to it for a month. They couldn't check anything out because I cheated to get it that they catch up or something whatever. It's not cheating. It's right there in the game. Yeah, I know I contacted. They never patched

it out. Yeah, I contacted bethsa Pr at the time. You can go on our site and look for that news story, and I'm pretty sure I think I ended up posting it because I mean, they gave me a very noncommittal quote, but it was clear they did not give a shit. It was like, because like you guys wear this is this intended and there's like a lot of things are possible possible through the console in our games. There's the magic of video games. Uh, we don't give a fuck about

Microsoft's dumb achievement system. Fuck you, Like it was basically what their answer was. Yeah, well maybe not the fuck you part. Yeah, you know, I mean, obviously they're held back by console hardware to an extent, but like these machines have so much more rams and whatnot than the last ones did. Like maybe they finally just got the resources to brute force pass some of the jink that they've had in the past. Yeah, maybe, I don't know, but i'd like I think that their ambition has grown as

well, to the point where they might still be jacking. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, a lot of things remain to be seen. Like I'm really one curious why all those assets for like pre war America or in that trailer, right, like all those shots of like here's what it looked like before. That's probably that's probably

just their fancy trailer treatment. And I don't I don't know, necessarily like a lot of stall like art to put in the game just for a trailer, Like, I know, that's a lot of assets though, that they may have built for inside a vault. Oh yeah, Fallow three had that one VR mission where you went back to like the fifties or whatever. Right, maybe they have like a playable prologue thing or that's that's possible. You

know. I saw some speculation from some people that your character is from the pre war era and has been in like cry Oh for two hundred years or something like that. That would probably be easier to make a voiced character. Yeah, if he has a sort of different perspective, I don't. We don't know for a fact that they're doing that. That was part of the league. Yeah, and you know, the character the what is clearly the main character has a line, like a recorded line, which some people were

saying it is Troy Baker in the trailer. I wouldn't sounds started like Troy Bakery. I went back and listened after after people said that, I can see that. I don't know for a fact that there there will be actual voice acting for the character throughout that. It's key for Sutherland. I'm proud to announce city about five lines of dialogue and yeah, yeah, okay, uh if if that stuff is true, I hope it's not the case as the leak implies that you can only play the the one voice, you know,

right here's here's like the one male voice the character. My version of the boss is, you know, talks like this way, and then your version of the Boss does the cockney accent because you picked mail two. And then yeah, no, if any likes the cockney, okay, yeah, yeah, four, Yeah, it's happened. Four, it's happened. They

should make that game. That'd bed be a really good idea. They've got good news for you, I think they are Okay, great order now and it will be out in November. Yeah no, yeah, no, I'm on bradside here. March coming out this year, Summer coming out this year. That's not gonna come out this year. They've gotten a new habit of November releases, so it seems like they stick to that. Man, that's a real bummer then, because we're gonna have to wait until all the way

it's next November. Then if they're sticking to that, and hopefully they're not, hopefully they'll release it in the spring of next year. It's just five short months away. I'm feeling pretty good about twenty fifteen. Twenty fifteen has not disappointed me so far. It's been a really good year for video game releases. I say we keep this train going. Okay, Beth has to put your game out this year, that would be cool. I don't think it works that way, you know. I don't think they get to to

do that. You know, we'll see. Uh. Steam News they valve valve wheeled out on another policy, you kind of out of nowhere. Yeah, on Steam you can get refunds now. Seems to be something that a lot of people have been clamoring for for a very long time. Yeah. Uh yes, they yeah, or like Origin had their kind of like guarantee policy that was like, what is it if within seven days or something like

this, or twenty four hours of launching the game. Yeah, I think it was seven days of purchase or which whichever comes first or whatever, Yeah, something like that, and then this is what was it? Two hours of play? Yeah, so if you have less than two hours play time on the game. Uh. And what was the other stipulation, I'm sorry it was some it was a date from purchase thing. Yeah, it's uh,

I'm trying to find it in the new story here. Uh, less than two hours of playtime and within fourteen days of purchase, so within two weeks. Yeah. It sounds like the wording from their announcement sounds like they'll just give it to you. Yeah, but it's they also are saying that,

like they'll they'll stop people that are abusing it from abusing. So it sounds like it's it's not as as simple as like, well, I could play any game for two hours now, Like it sounds like they will eventually go like nah, yeah, I mean yeah, from the sound of it, if you had like, you know, refund after refund on your account,

they might stop, right. So I think that was the fear or hope, depending on which you know, whether you were developing games or buy them, sure was that they would just let you play anything for two hours, which for people that were developing games that were not two hours long probably got him a bummer. Yeah. I can understand that perspective, but like, I don't know what else you do, Like, you've got to have a cut off, Like you can't just give people carte blanche to just demand

a refund whenever. So you've got to be able to say, like, well, you can't have played it more than X. I could see actually them, you know, if they really wanted to get into it and do this stuff, they could tie it to Steam achievements and just say like, hey, if you've unlocked this Steam achievement, we will not give you a refund under unless you have a larger like technical issue with the game, like if you get sorry, I mean like if you've completed a game within the

two hours, then sorry, Oh it's just like yeah, you finished the game, right. No. I imagine that there's so many games coming out on Steam. I don't know how they could keep up with that on a per game basis though, I think it's like developers have to submit. If I just started dating what their end game achievement was, like mandating an achievement

be in there, then this troublesome. Either way, there's gotta be there's gotta be a grace period though, you know, you can't just say like, oh, like you can't get a refund if you've launched the game already or whatever, because like at a certain points, like just like you need some time for like technical issues to raise their heads. And so they had been you know, like they had never really made a big deal about it.

But like if you wrote to them and said, hey, I need a refund and you had a good case, a really good reason for it, they would occasionally give you one. Yes. But I looked that up and it was it was a one per lifetime account like they would say in the email like this is a once this is a once per account like they Basically the wording was basically, we were doing you a favor, yeah, like don't ask to do this again, right, like, we will not

do it again. Yeah. So so it was not something you could repeat, which now it sounds like you can do and you know, within reason, but like anecdotally, there's already stories out there about like from developers saying like, oh, we're seeing a bunch of refunds on games that we're sold at prices we haven't offered in weeks or months, right Phil talking about Dad? Yeah, yeah, so I saw some stuff with Octor, Dad and

two or three other games that I don't remember of off the head. But yeah, and and you have to you know, no one has a history of returning stuff, so everyone is new to the whatever Steam system, so you know that they said they would be willing to hear cases out if they were outside of this window. So maybe it'll be people that just were running into there saying they were running into technical issues. Yeah, who knows.

Yeah, I don't know. That's uh, it's hard to say. I think, you know, like refunds for games like that's something that needs to happen, especially in an era where so many games are are having technical issues and stuff like that. They're they're just game breaking problems for players, Like they need to be able to find relief, even if it is like get this game out of my life and give my money back like I can. I'm not going to wait for a patch either. Do you know they do

obviously need to be some fairly strict safeguards. Yeah, total, totally, But also like like the consumers need to wield some kind of power in this relationship that they haven't had for a long time. And as a result, you know, like more and more games ship with serious issues, you know, so so it's something where they can say like, actually, no, maybe I'll rebuy it when I hear that you've fixed this stuff, but you're not going to just like get my money and then I'm just out of luck

until a patch comes. You know, I'm really curious to see the first situation of like a big, like major publisher developed game but that has I was like, you know, like indie games or one thing, but like if the next you know, like fall Out or whatever comes out. Yeah, like if Unity X, yeah yeah would have been with its launch issues like that would have been well within the two hour window for people have just like this doesn't work, yeah, giving my money back? Yeah, Like

just imagine the number of returns. Yeah, Like that game did not launch the night of release. You know, It's like they're like, how many people would have just given a lot of people yeah exactly, or they would have been like, well whatever, like maybe I'll rebuy it, maybe I won't, you know, like but until I hear otherwise, Like I'm not

getting stuck with this. That's the thing is they will have launched the game, seen that it does not launch, and then go like, well, the clock's ticking, I need to file this refund right now, right, so like that's yeah, but that stuff there needs to be stuff like that, And I think, yeah, ye, I wonder if this pushes the console makers to start thinking about a similar solution on their digital stores, not

feel like those stores lag behind. Steams are so like you know, like those stores are just as problematic as they were last generation, and everyone talked about it. I was going to be different this time. They're gonna take it to Steam. Like you see, they've improved. Yeah, I would say the one place I've really see some improvement is in the occasional sales like

yeah, like their weekend flash sale. You'll see some some discounts on the Microsoft side of things typically, right, you know, they do their games with gold stuff, Like they're nowhere near the bargain basement of the Steam sale, right, but but it's you know, it's some progress there, yeah, but like it's still it's still the case where you see plenty of retailers that have to clear shelf space and they've lowered the price of a game to

a point that is not reflected on the online store. Right, Like my example was called of Duty Ghosts, Like on the PS four, the if you want the game plus season Pass edition of that game, it's still one hundred dollars for fucking Call of Duty Ghosts. That's about to be two generations old of Call of Duty game rights, and you can go get that stuff. I mean, the season past will probably still be the season Pass prize because that's a digital thing. But I bet if you could find that hardened

addition locally, you're probably gonna pay sixty for it. If that if you want the regular edition of the game, it's probably more like thirty because it me retailers you have to get rid of it. And then that doesn't even take into account used games. Like if you're willing to buy use copies of games, then the digital stores are fucking nightmare. Yeah, Like they don't

compete, and that's that's a bummer. It's the digital stores only exist for people that want to play games on day one, you know, and then right, yes, or the type of consumer that like really cares about playing something as soon as it's out. And for everyone else, they're smarter than the rest of us because they are waiting a little while. They're probably finding it for at a discount, and which is gonna be so great, you guys, And yeah, it'll be it'll be patched up, you know,

like there's there's won't cost me sixty bucks. Yeah, there are plenty of great reasons not to buy games a latch now, and unless you're just dead set on being part of the kind of the zeitgeist, like being able to talk to people. Rush, the rush of publishers to get games out in unfinished state, you know, like is only making that more obvious. Yeah, that's that's a real problem. Yeah, probably no refunds anytime soon on consoles. If I had to guess, we'll see hey, threes around the

corner. And you know, some stunts always make people smile. Sure, yeah, this this you know, this is it is a good thing. This happened. Obviously, there's a lot of particulars that still need to be hammered out on this and like potential abuses, Yeah, addressed, But it's a good thing to have step in the right direction. Let's say, remember like two weeks ago, maybe it was when we talked about maybe it was three weeks ago that Capcom was going to be doing a lot more HD remasters.

Yeah, what if I could tell you? What if I told you that you could play the first six Mega Man games in CRISP ten ADP. Wow, I'll do that. I'll play them all again t ADP. Yeah, they're pitching for this Mega Man, I mean legacy collection there emulating the nes Mega Man games. It's just not just not redrawing the graphics thet's nearest neighbor the image up to ten adp. Yeah. So this is coming out of Digital Eclips. Yeah, that's the weird story is that there's the Digital

Eclipse. I think the Mega Man, Uh, the MegaMan Legacy collection is kind of a bummer, but the fact that Digital eclips is back is kind of cool. Yeah. Uh. And they say they're going all the way with you know, kind of supplemental museum style material to go around the games. Yeah. This says they're taking the emulation seriously. You know, it's like Digital Digital e Clips did a lot of emulation projects back in the day, but some of those were fucked up, and so if they're really going

to take the stuff Xbox Live, it was a wild list. Yeah, really, it really was. Did you did you do it the wildest of wild West? In full disclosure? Did you do any d E work? No? So that was a as far as I know, it was just sort of I mean, Mike mikel would be the one to talk about this, but like, as far as I know, it was sort of just a brand within Backbone. Okay. Uh so were they not necessarily even doing that work in the same building as you? They were, but they were

the same people. I suspect that this is now a brand inside of Other Oceans, Okay, I'm not I'm not positive about that. That's the press release they put out saying Digital Eclipses back is a little strange. So it just it's Mike, Mike and Franks Fall. It's just Other Ocean doing it, right. I Mean they're like Mike, Mike is the head of Digital Eclipse the studio and all the is like the head of restoration for digital cribs,

right, so I don't. I don't know. I don't think they had to like pack up a desk and move somewhere else to do that. I don't know for sure. I don't know. I haven't. I don't know, but I mean, like, it's not like before where there were all these different companies under this one foundation, Foundation nine being like in it his backbone, it was other ocean like whoever else was in there. Yeah, I don't know. The lineage there is strange, but I don't.

I think it's I didn't even understand it and I worked for him. Yes, uh, they they threw around the Criterion Collection as a reference point for this thing. Hey man, Mica loves No. No. I will never dispute the fact that those people were probably some of the best people to restore a bunch of old games. Those two are probably the exact right duo you would be because like you know, like the imagine, like you go to

Capcom and say, like we're making Mega Man one through six. They're gonna have some stuff, Yeah, but they're not gonna have all of them. Oh No, you need to go to the source for that stuff. You would, like his basement, like you know, like that stuff's in there somewhere already, and he's like, no, I got all that shit here, yeah, you know, yeah, uh yeah. They're they're kind of talking up like this idea of sustainability with uh these emulation. Emulated versions of

these games will not go yeah locally. Yeah, but it's the idea that they're like they're building an engine that will run these games, and the engine will be portable in a way that you know, it could be released on multiple platform and at least then the next generation comes along, it could be released again. I think it's sort of weird because at some point, like Capcom has to give the green light on that. It's not like they signed a deal to like, yeah, you guys just put this out on whatever

forever. You know, at some point Capcom has to care enough to go like, yes, do the work to put it onto the PlayStation five. But like, you can't just and then we'll sell it all over again again. You know, that's the main thing. You can't just buy it once and then have your ownership follow you from play So like the pitch, the pitch on that from Digital Clips is a little strange, but I get what they're trying to say. I think that sounds very noble. Yeah, totally.

I wouldn't have necessarily picked Mega Man one through six. Yeah, but at some point you gotta do what you gotta do one through three or great. Yeah, yeah, I'll still play through four or five. Eight is underrated. Eight is pretty good. The PlayStation which one was eighty like a clown man in it? Did it look like the NES games or do they? They must have dressed it up. They dressed it up. And that's that was not an X game. That was just straight up Mega Man.

It was called MegaMan eight. It was on PlayStation yeah, and Saturn. Let say it's like ninety six ninety seven something like that, and then seven was for the SNSs. Yes, okay, but yeah, I mean it's like people are going like, why doesn't this have all the Mega Man games. I'm not buying this, Like it's specifically because it's an emulation project that is going to be running any S games, so they're putting those out when they get to the nest, then they can put out Mega Man Soccer Sweet

and none of the X games because they're all terrible. What and what? Leave it at that? It's just like pay fifteen dollars from Mega Man Soccer and we're done. Do you really not like the X games? Yeah, they're dumb. I've never heard anyone say that. Yeah, they're they're they're so good for again, it's like the first three specifically, but yeah, yeah, and then five because of the guns and roses bosses, but yeah, yeah was that really five? Yeah? Never really like it just felt

like this weird bastardization of Mega Man. I had already gone off the rails for me after three, so like, at some point after three, I was like, I don't even really care about Mega Man anymore, so bring it back. Mega Man X maganam Edgy is just dumb. I'd say one, two, and three on the NAS for my favorites, But the first few X games are right at there I totally understand. Was really fun to watch, Yeah, which one? Travis Pastrana, Yeah, it was really

good those first couple of X games. Then he kind of sold out. I don't know, but also nine and ten are pretty good. There's new ones they put out on Xbox Live, Arcade and we and everything, but they were good. They felt like old MegaMan games. Yeah, I don't know, I guess they did. They not lean into the like ridiculous Challenge Angle a little too hard though. They were hard games, but I don't

think they were like crazy harder than the originals. I mean, they made it super faithful, even had that go where you could turn on the slowdown. The way they were hyping up how hard they were going to be before they came out and made modes. Oh, you guys are going overboard. I think there was modes like after you beat it. I think there were like extra hard modes. I think by default that game was difficulty. They

were they were difficult games. But yeah, I don't know. Uh. I think it's cool that they are setting out to kind of produce these sorts of projects, and I hope that they get a lot of work. I think that I hope they do right by those games. The digital eclipsed half of the story is cool. Yeah, like that sounds like a neat initiative

and yeah, like there's some language around this. It's like in an offer a new set of challenges and museum content, you know, like and then if you if you go to their website to kind of like look read like what they're you know, building is like their mission statement about how they're kind of approaching this stuff like it is noble, you know, like that the idea of like, Okay, we're gonna try to take this stuff really seriously

and make sure that it's actually right because a lot of future proof it sounds like yeah, yeah, which I imagined at that point. It's like, you know, there are a lot of emulators that are highly portable these days in terms of just like appearing on multiple platforms and open source all this other stuff. So I would assume that like their portable as in able to be porteous, yeah, not as in life it in your pocket. Yeah. At the same time, looking at this as further indication of the state of

Capcom, Oh sure, yeah, this is kind of depressed. What is you know, like Sony's helping them make the one game that they're making that matters, right, and then they have a bunch of Monster Hunter stuff that, you know, even to someone who's not a big Monster hunder fan, I hope they don't just drive that into the ground because nothing else is hitting right, because there are a lot of people that like those games and be

a shame if they burned it out. I don't get the sense that they're doing that but it seems like there's more of that stuff, a little faster than I would have thought. But then for them to have recently said like, yeah, we're gonna keep doing you know, remasters of our old games, and then here's zero and then here's Mega Man one through six, right,

like weird mishmash of Yeah. I don't know, still mad about the GameCube Anniversary collection of MegaMan because everything was great as far as I had, like, you know, the first eight games or whatever they're you know, some bonus features and stuff. You can even switch between the powers on the trigger, the triggers, which was a huge you know, pause every time, but the fucking B and A, the jump and shoot, you know, the thing you're doing the entire time you're playing MegaMan. Yeah, you

couldn't swap it. And it was the wrong way cool. It was the opposite of the way it was on the nes right. So yeah, yeah, that was insane. Everything else about it was great. It's disgusting, it's filthy, unacceptable, what a nightmare. I don't see any information about when that's coming out anyway. Mega Man, when that's Beyond Good and Evil HD remake came out, you could swap either you could invert either the camera X or the camera why I could never get it the way I want?

All right, last story, dual headlines that don't sound that exciting on their own, but stick with me here. New versions of both consoles have been leaked, all right, like very slightly new. Yeah. Amazon added a one terabyte skew for the Xbox One. It's gonna have that new controller in it, the existence of which leaked a week or two ago. That's you know, the controller's got an actual headphone jack in it. Is this the id at Xbox Bundle or is that only for Australia. I believe this.

I could click through here. The wording of this story makes it sound like it's just straight up you know, here's an Xbox, a new Xbox one with a one terabyte hard driving Christmas and that new Yes, happy Easter. Here's your new controller. Plug your headphones in, Yeah, says usure. So there's that, and then, uh, there's an FCC filing that outed the existence of a one terabyte PlayStation four. And then that one's got some slight changes to it. You know, it's a little bit lighter, it

uses a little bit less power, which like optimizations and stuff. That's one that would be my assumption. Like some people on forums have kind of like looked at like, oh, the weight and power reduction are exactly consistent with what a blue ray drive would use. So maybe this one doesn't have a Blue ray drive, which sounds insane. That would be the worst given what we just said about the PSN store. Yeah, that would be the worst

deal in video games if that comes to past. Don't buy that. But but it sounds like the dimensions of that PS four are the same, Like it looks the same. You know, these are basically more or less identical consoles with more storage in them. Yeah, drives get cheaper, Yeah sure.

And I mean, you know, like these stories are not all that interesting or surprising on their own, but I kind of wanted to use this as a jumping off point to see what you guys think it will happen around those platforms at E three, like price wise, like do you think these are just new skews with higher price tags? Do you think the original skew drops like fifty bucks and these slide in at the original price, like my

bed? Where do you think that goes? I think that they probably just put these on shelves alongside the other ones, don't actually make a price change and just hopefully blow out the or put them put them in. Well, I got man, that would mean, yeah, you'd have to change one price at the other. Right, it would be horrible if you inadvertently bought

the small Maybe they never move it. Maybe they Yeah, maybe they wait to get these one terabytes out there until the existing supply has become well so, so this Amazon listing says the new the terabyte Xbox is launching on June fifteen, okay, which is the week of the three. But also it doesn't come with any games right. Uh again, I just link does not work in the document. I've got the probably pulled it down or something. But I could see the existing ones going down thirty or fifty and then the

new ones coming in at the current price point. Yeah, I would think you'd have to. I think Microsoft maybe makes that move. I feel like they've been a lobody doesn't necessarily. Yeah, Microsoft has been so aggressive on price already to try to make up their deficit. Yeah, but it's not always working, so you wonder, you know, I think if if Sony could afford it, I think you're putting the screws to Microsoft and coming down

like three nine for the model would would be probably pretty big. Yeah, but then they have to not really, I mean if they're introducing a new model that they want to protect price on, then yeah, they kind of do have to. But you know, you know, we don't know how many weeks, how many weeks of supply are sitting in like warehouses already for the older ones, Like how how many do they have to get through before they only have these new models left? Right? I don't know. This

sounds weird to me. I mean it's it's interesting from the perspective of like, oh, what are the potential gains and market share and stuff. But the storage is so expandable in both of these consoles at this point that right, Yeah, I mean it's nice for people who wait for one is like well, yeah, yeah, if it's the same price for more space than great, yeah. But although I would say, like a terabyte is even maybe not what you want, yeah, I mean maybe not. Maybe you

want to go to two. Yeah, maybe you want two terabytes. I'm pretty happy with that, Brad, Thank you for filling me that. Think about it. I have one terabyte in mine. What have you had too? Yeah? What if I had too? You have a lot more space. I've never run out of space in my PS four. It'll happen, and yeah, totally, but I actually, well now I'm actually coming. I've started deleting a lot of stuff the Xbox One. Actually I've I've been

closed to out of space. Yeah I have one on a space on that one, but that's on a five right, Yeah, yeah, so you know, obviously a terabytes nice and their external options sound all right, except a little hesitant to have anything that's got its own fan on it underneath my TV, like another hard drive, oh, because it's already loud under there with everything else that's under there. Most small USB drives don't have fans these days. I thought you would want like to get I don't know speed,

wouldn't I want something that was not bus power. It's gonna sound like a damn hard drive. Maybe you're right external and I don't know the the last time I saw I think it was a Digital Foundry did a test of USB three drives on Xbox one, and they're faster than the internal drive, even the bus powered ones. Because it's a shitty fifty four rpm. Right, Yeah, Cheapo laptop drive in that system, so you're kind of already coming out ahead there, man, makes sense anyway, Yeah, I don't know.

I'm curious to see what happens with these platforms, just business wise. Yeah, next week hopefully something anything, anything, we're raising the price. Yeah, I don't care. There's wants something to happen. Happened. I'm happy regardless. How about the we you? I think we'll change there? What is the current? Yeah? What is it like? I think it's swear it's still I'm gonna look it up. Yeah, fact check that price. I'm gonna I'm gonna price check, get price price check on wi you

I got a price jack on out three? Uh we you hard work? Click on that. What do we got here? Two ninety nine for Mario three D World on a thirty two gig console. Okay with with three D World, that's not a bad. Yeah. I didn't realize that we're still packing in the game three ninety nine for oh that's a bundle that comes with Smash Brothers as well or something. Okay, that's just weird game stop ship? Do they still sell the eight gig skew here? Only is refurbished.

I know they phase it out in Japan. I'm not seeing any new eight gigs here. Yeah, yeah, two ninety nine with the games not terrible. No, it's not unless you unless you consider the possibility that that thing is rapidly approaching end of life. I'm left good on it now. Yeah. Sure, there are some fantastic games, and there will be some more. They could sweeten the pot on the price, to be sure, you know, but how much would that really move things? For people? Like

fifty bucks on it? It's still, you know, multiple hundreds of dollars for a thing that you're buying specifically to play Nintendo's games, like half a dozen games. Ever, Yeah, and well, and like either you care about that or you don't. And at some point the price doesn't matter that much, right, you want that smash, You're gonna get that smash m Any chance they would do like a slimmer like game pad version with the more storage space two hundred and fifty gigs, you know, redesign of the system

Slammer games seem like Nancino style. Really they did that weird Canadian wi or right at this point, they've they've already kind of tipped their hand about a next generation device. So I feel like even though that's only like on the horizon and not like a factor right now, Yeah, you got to think like at some point it doesn't make sense for them to iterate on the WU when they could spend all that R and D time and money on the next

platform. I just wonder what they're big headlines are going to be when they're not talking about the NX and they're not talking about Zelda this year, Like, what is going to be the big thing for Nintendo? I mean I think I don't. They'll have star Fucks, They'll love you know, Mario Maker. Yeah, a lot of stuff, but it's not going to be

huge, right yoh Yoshi right now. Maybe they'll have fire emblem. Yeah, I mean they left games that, you know, like for the people that are checking for Nintendo in an E three setting, They're going to have plenty of games for that audience. But in terms of like big headline grab moments and all that other stuff, like maybe they'll have some big new announcement that'll psyche people out, but yeah, you know they I mean I don't think they I don't think they have to have that. Yeah, it's why

they have a direct instead of a press conference. They're wisely going, like, you know, we we speak directly to our fans and and they like us, and it's going fine on that level. Like they they've you know, they frequently run a direct where there was like one game announcement or something. You like Major's Mask three three DS was like that was the sole big

news that came out of that particular direct. Like even I think I feel like even last year's E three direct was not like choc a block with huge new things. Right, well, there were stuff, I mean, you know the rest you had Mario Maker, you have things in there, But in a lot of cases, it's just like, you know, here's some new footage from something we already announced. It's not necessarily like, right,

here's three new Mario games coming out this fight. I think, you know, like you have to applaud Nintendo for like lifting themselves out of the fucking rat race in a way that doesn't actually make them look weak like they're they're just they're talking to their people. Yeah, they are preaching to the choir. They are selling fine to those people, yeah, and biding their time

for whatever they're going to do next. On a next console Nintendo always like just when you want to write them off, they come back and surprise you somehow. Yeah, I mean, but you know they're they're doing it on their own terms. Yeah, like you know, not you don't have to like, you know, no one mentions them in the in this competition anyway. No, but they don't have to play in this whole like compare ourselves

to Microsoft and Sony. Again, they've created their own thing. Well, you know, like last year, like on top of the direct like the absurd runaway success of that Treehouse stream that ran the whole length of the show was like like if you'd ask me, NINTONA would have been the last company to break ground on something like that. You know, But like here they come surprising you again. You know. Yeah, yeah for sure. So don't count them out yet. I wonder how much they're saving by not running

out the Kodak Theater, Club Nokia or whatever. Well last year there, I mean, they're so they're still doing the Nintendo World Championships. They're still running out big spaces for that. They had a thing for investors at that theater last year, even though they didn't have a regular press conference. Yeah, so so like they're still they're still they're spending money. But yeah, three three catch it. Yeah, we'll be there. We will next week.

M not here. There'll still be a podcast. Yes, all right, it's all the news I got. Okay, let's take one more breather and then come back from some email. I got a teaser here for you on the on the other side of this break. Huh, we're gonna talk about metal Gear Solid five of the Fantom Pain. We are, yes, sound really confident about Okay, Fine, we'll take this break and I'll find out and we're back and you're gonna tell me about Medicure. I played it,

Solid five, the Fantom Pain. That's the one you played. That's the one I played. H yeah, I got to start at the beginning of the game. They kind of just talked about the game a little bit and then set lose it. Yes, go on, it's cool, okay, in the same way the ground Zeros was cool. Yeah, And that they've made this stealth sandbox thing where you're tagging enemies. You know, it's

like Far Cry, but with metal Gear mechanics or something. Right, Like you're looking at an installation, you're tagging enemies and then going like heroes, how I'm going to fuck these guys up. It's like far Cary, but you can attach a balloon to a tank then fly it away. Yeah, so I wasn't able to do that when at the start of the game you actually don't have your Fulton system balloon stuff. Yeah so so so it sounds like what you played is the same thing that I saw played in front of

me at E three last year. But then they must have had like cheats on because they were just running around ballooning everything. Right, So you have to upgrade your faulton stuff. So at the start of the game you can only really fault in troops, and then you have to upgrade everything. You have to you spend upgrade points to get a cardboard box. You have to research the cardboard box. Yes, they unlocked the cardboard caboard boxes right now, not in the way that makes it easy for you to get in and

out of though. Down could you have a pretty lady on the side that's advanced technology? Doesn't doesn't this one have like like you can pop up a cardboard sandy of snake? I mean I didn't see that there are multiple levels of cardboard box for you, and and and some of them are different camo patterns. Yes, bred I think you're thinking about the inflatable snake. Like there's a guard next to a cliff and you throw it out and like inflates

and knocks the guard off the cliff. We can also confuse them and make them things, maybe, Yeah, but it's a balloon. So all the research stuff going on back at your base, yeah, like it ties into like the stuff you send back there and the money you earn and all that stuff is what you cash in on research, right, Yeah? Is that how that stuff works? And like you you, it expends time, like

as you research, like there's a yes, there will be time. I don't want to say there's all that free play style mechanic on it, but there is straight up like or something, you know, like it takes time for you to to unlock stuff in here. But it's like some sort of

repeatable stuff, right. It feels it seems like kind of building up your mercenary force like it actually, so I got the impression there would be side missions and stuff like that that there would always kind of be there to a certain extent where you could, you know, kind of just get out there and run missions over and over again. Or I think you can just fly out there and just fucking take guys if you want. You know, you kind of pick where you want the helicopter to drop you off and just go.

But you probab might have to take a side mission on there. Some of the structural stuff, you know, was unclear because it is it is pretty different in a sense. That's kind of the thing like the you know, the previous MGS games are so linear and narrative driven. Yeah, the idea, the idea to me that this is like there's a lot more peace

Walker in this than I was expecting is kind of crazy. And that's my problem with the game is that it's when I when I think about why I come to metal Gear and what makes metal Gear matter for me, it is this big narrative thing. It is the story of Snake, It is the story of these other characters, and and there's like Snake almost seems like a silent protagonist for all for all the time they spent getting and you know, hey, I haven't seen the full game, who knows where it ends up.

But in terms of like you know, there are cut scenes where there are people very emphatically talking at Snake. I guess big I guess Big Boss at this point, right whatever, and in a way that deserves and would elicit a response, but instead it's just stoic Snake staring backs. Like it was like like it was like he was link, you know, not like he's like being quiet on purpose, because that's a cool way to be saying Snake is the hero of time. Yeah, exactly, Like it seems totally

out of place to me. Those like what I saw when they show it to D three last year. It was the opening cut scene of him. He was on a horse with somebody else. Yeah, young young Ausselet. It was like one new rap name watching watching that whole thing the whole time, like he's basically just monologue La Saska in the house. Yeah, it was. It was a very one sided thing of just like I'm going to dump this info on you and you don't respond at all, and then you

go off and do a mission. Yeah uh yeah, and you know the after you finished that, that's like a prologue mission. You're kind of do you do that? Then you go back to base, learn about how mother bass works and how all the fultoning and all this other stuff. Then it's like, here's what the game really is. And you're like, okay,

all right, now it makes sense. But like that, that's there's a whole helicopter sequence where you're just getting yelled at and Snake's just like staring, and it just again like it just doesn't fit, you know, the the

character doesn't fit the tone. It's just it's it seems really weird. It doesn't fit with the notion that they went out and got a named actor to do this stuff, other than maybe the sessions went poorly or they didn't have him for enough days, because like I mean, it's it's not like, oh his vocal cords got burned out and you can't speak, because like when you're riding around on a horse and you stop, you you definitely hear the guy from fucking Lost Boys or whatever go whoa, whoa, Yeah, you

know, just stop the horse, Jack Bauer. Yeah sure, And and and it's just it's super out of character for Snake too, like he's just chatty motherfucker. More so he was a little more silly. Yeah, I guess, so, I guess there's something a little more task turn about Big Boss. And also a big boss has seen some shit at this point, so maybe he's just he's fuck that's alright, alright, rational rationalize it whatever

you want, yea. And he has weird metal in his face. I mean, yes, you know, maybe gets on top of him from time character motivations, you could, but and and maybe that'll pay off in a way that makes sense by the end of the game. But for me, like playing the early parts of that game, it just seemed off. It seemed like not what I come to metal Gear for. Maybe, and it seemed fun on its own. And if if they had said, like, hey, this is peace Walker two, I would have been like, fucking

ay, absolutely, let's go. Uh this this is super fun. Uh. And and it doesn't necessarily need to have a story because it's not metal Gear Solid five, But by calling it metal Gear Solid five, Uh,

it just seems really strange to man. I mean, considering how cinematic those trailers are, Like, I mean, I think it's safe to say there's going to be a big story with this, how much like hearing from people who have played deeper into the game than I have, like, there are certainly story moments, but it's a lot of this really like, are you saying it just straight up doesn't have as much storytelling you? I don't know,

because games I haven't talked to anyone who is finished. Well, no, but you know, you play enough hours of it you can or you get deep enough in you can get some. I feel I'm left with. I'm left with the impression that you know, there's there's more story to be had, but not in the quantity that you necessarily you're necessarily explaining out of

a Metal Gear game. Arguably those old games were like primarily story well four especially, so I'm going from like the most exactly, and I really enjoyed for for it's for being over the top in that way and being totally out of its own fucking mind, and it was glorious. That game is is nothing short of glass. I will say this, I don't know that you

can out crazy Metal Solid four. Maybe they understand, maybe maybe like in this like this radical bout of self awareness, could you even realize that he had reached his limitations and he had to do something different. Yeah, and it's just like it did. Four is fucking wild. Yeah, all that TV shit they shot for no apparent reason. Yeah, what an awesome fucking game. It's a weird thing. Let's just watch Solid Snakes smoke fucking cigarettes

for like an hour. So did they ever pat did they patch that out? Did they make it the whole game? And you don't see that stuff anymod do that? That's almost unfortunate in general's warnings flashing Yeah, uh oh, oh my god, that game, I can I can understand your complaint, but like it's if it's not if it's not as metal gear as it used to be, but it's still a fun game. I'm fine. It

definitely was, Like I definitely was. I love the way the Ground zero is played, just like then then you will like this because it is it is that. Yeah, Like that game is the Grand Tourismo prologue to this being grant to reason, I tell that from the E three demo last year.

But yeah, like I'm all in. Like if it's just you know, if it's twenty more hours of ground zeros with a lot more land mass and more things to fulton, and like I can set up more weird roadside bombs and launch jeeps into wash towers like you see the YouTube videos of them stuff. I'm pretty sure that you can absolutely do all that stuff. I'm okay with that. Like at the beginning of the game, you can't even like you do the thing where you grab the guys and and try to interrogate

them, but you don't speak Russian? Did they have you played the thing like were you going in to save Master Miller? Because that's that's so yeah, and so like every time you try to get them to talk, like awesol Lot just comes on and goes like, yeah, we really need to find somebody that speaks Russian, because uh, I can speak it. He actually goes into extreme depth about, hey, look I can speak Russian, but look like translating at the same time, that's a totally different skill and

I can't really do that reliably. Like there's a lot of nuance like, look, we're gonna need to find somebody that's a translating of course. And then like early on, like on one of the side missions is like, go fucking folding the translator. That's pretty good. It's pretty good. That sounds like a different but equally viable vehicle for craziness. Yeah, maybe maybe like that that's right up there with like having to research cardboard boxes in the

sense that like, okay, maybe the production values aren't insane. Maybe there aren't two hour cutscenes anymore, but like you can still get really ridiculous in like mechanical ways. Yeah, like having Big Boss make a horse poop on the road to make a jeep spin out and attaching a balloon to the jeep to get so I didn't I couldn't do that. There didn't see any I didn't see any horse poop options. I didn't ride a horse, but research

your horse. But the horse is a buddy. You can pick a buddy when you go into a mission if you want the horse or like quiet, Oh did you see quiet? So when you first are like going on to your first full mission, it's like, here's how the buddy system works. You can take somebody you like one lady or this horse. So so like, how did she act as like sniper support or something that's I think that's the idea she will. So I didn't have her and my thing or anything,

so I couldn't do that. But it's like it showed her and I think the implication was that she can ark targets for you as well as do some shooting, and she gets around super fast and everything. But yeah, you you know, I took the horse because that's what I had. Yeah, and you can totally fall off the side or you know, lean off

the side of that horse for stealth Horse stealth. So yeah, you know, it's it's super cool and it's a weird sandbox thing like but it's it's like a bigger ground Zeros, you know, and if you like that gameplay, I suspect that you will probably enjoy this a great time. I play through Ground zero is like, yeah, six or seven times, because it's that with a bunch of like like base building shit too, you know of like you know, bringing troops to your thing and researching stuff and and all

that. Again, I don't think they could top four, So I'm almost more excited about a Metal Gear solid that I've been like excited to play. It's yeah, it's it's it's a weird turnaround of like, you know, you might be actually be excited to play this game instead of like watch the cut scenes and suffer through like like trigger shit better about that stuff. But you know, it was it's never been the greatest playing series. It never like by the time they were done with four, it didn't need to be.

I know, I know, I know, but like the idea that it could actually be a fun video game. Now I manished the buttons to crawl through that tunnel. Yeah, no, I remember, I think we know into most experience in all the video games right there. Yeah, I think when Metal Gear two came out, I think it was a very very good playing game. I remember getting that demo is out of the enders. Like the amount of ship control. It's hard to go back to now.

At the time I found out, you're right. At the time I thought something about strut F I thought you're right, You're right. I thought it was a fantastic game. Yeah, all the first person shooting and all that stuff, the stuff you could do to the guards, but the control scheme is very difficult to revisit going back to. Yes, but in two thousand and one it was fucking awesome. Yes, all right, Well, let's good to have heard your thoughts on this. Yeah, it's it definitely.

It left me disappointed in some ways but excited in others. Like I came away with it with very mixed reactions. I was just just a lot a lot of like, this is not the like, this is not what I want out of a Metal Gear game. But it's a really neat uh and you know, I mean maybe part of that's just again because they put a five on it instead of kind of saying, like, here's a weird open world side game we're making. Middle Gear Solid five is just gonna be a

forty two episode Ova. Okay, I got five on it. I can I can live with that. Yeah, I think, yeah, maybe this is a maybe this is the game that finally broke his relationship with the management. Yeah, maybe maybe his plans were so well, I mean, the

tim timing in the case that has to have been the case. Yeah, I mean, well, you know, there's a lot of what I mean is like, you know, maybe they didn't get as much keep for Sutherland and whatever else they wanted in there because things were starting to fall apart. Who knows. That might be a completely naive theory, but yeah, I don't know, it's there was. There was a lot of Cogima Productions logos in that game. We'll see, Yes, we will see a lot of

things before then. Let's take a few emails. Yeah those oh BombCast at johnbomb dot com. We'll read a few here as we are running out of time. Let's see this one comes in from McConnell in Scotland. I was wondering about your opinion on the recent spate of games being announced or at least

teased before E three. It seems weird to me that for an industry event that big, that games would rather trick out a trickle out news of titles beforehand rather than have that big wow factor when games are announced at the conference, potentially making themselves the winner of E three as it were. Of course, I'm an outsider looking in rather than looking at it from the inside. Don't get me wrong. I understand the reasons as to why publishers may want

to do this an entire news cycle that gets taken up by them. They're not competing for coverage and having a short time in spotlight, but it feels kind of weird to risk cutting yourself off if you're doing your own conference with less surprises. I think he's mainly talking about fallout here. There's no such

thing as winning E three. That's, you know, like it's it's all about the only winning coming out of E three is how many pre orders did your game get sure, you know, or other metrics like that, you know, and if they can get out there with something like Fallout and dominate a day and and point people to that stuff, then that's going to be just as big as whatever. I think Fallouts a case, it would have been big at E three also, but it may still be like they could

just two bumps here, depending on depending on what they show. Sure, but like Fallout is the weird outlier for me because like let's say if it had been dishonor two that they announced like that totally seems like a you know, a week and a half before E three, let's blow it out for

a day. The Fallout, especially when you've got your own stage, like you went to the trouble of reserving your own stage, but when they've got when they've got so much stuff leaking out, Like I'm actually surprised that they put a trailer out as that has as much as they did instead of just like a press releases, Hey we're making fall Out four and you can see

it at our thing. I figured that this would be a very brief tease that said like be sure to come back for our thing on Sundays, Like maybe they were maybe they weren't seeing the uptick in like people thinking that they were gonna watch this as the press conference, they need to get the word out about that a little bit bigger. Well, you know, that's exactly did this. That's exactly what they did with Doom, Right, It's like that weird five second clip of footage, yeah, saying hey come back at

E three, So exactly. So I figured this was going to be more along the lines of that. Total this turned into something a little bit bigger than maybe, you know, I didn't even thought of that. Maybe it was a game time decision to just run the whole trailer because like you said, things were leaking, damn, and like you know, it seemed maybe they were just like, all right, let's just go with this. Let's just go with this and just control what we can of it from here.

And yeah, but yeah, I think that, you know that it's one of those things where like the concept of a winner of E three is something that only people on message boards. So yeah, I can't really care about I think it's not it's not real. There's something. There is something to the rush at the press conference, as though just one big thing after another.

And if you can come out of E three being like this is the game that was tweeted about the most like some kind of actual metric then you can feel good about, like, well, the team can feel good about we're on the right track and we're doing this thing. Hey we won these awards, Like there's certainly value in that, but E three is not what

it used to be. Yeah, as a consumer, I think that these early reveals are like you know, peeking out your peeking at your presence before Christmas, because like I kind of like E three being this special week every year where it's like, oh my god, this game and then this game and then this game. Like I kind of like not knowing, like I wish I would have found out about Fallout for while I was watching it, Like you're kind of riding like a weeklong high of excitement, right because but

just the news just doesn't stop. The thing is is also like you know, taking you as like in the consumer of saying you weren't doing this and that that's how you want and weren't doing this for a living, rather and saying that that's how you want that information delivered, Like you're in a subset of the overall player base that will consume this information regardless of what time of the year it's released. A good point, and you don't like, you

don't matter, Like you're you're the choir. You're going to find out about this ship one way or the message I'm gonna take, regardless of when they announce it, it doesn't matter. So they're playing for the larger audience. They have to try to drag in the mainstream people and get them interested and excited in these games they may not have heard about. And so the vast

majority of marketing and stuff like that seems to geared to reach them. That makes sense because like, the people that live and breathe this shit every day are going to know it one way or the other. It's why exclusives don't happen the same way anymore. Like you know, like publishers buying ads on big game websites, It's like, look, anyone still visiting a big game website in this day and age is going to know about our fucking game.

And I think that's the mentality shift that has finally kind of happened. So, you know, these other outlets, these other places to spend your money, you know, if you're advertising games, like you know, it's just buy a bunch of ads on Facebook that say come watch our press conference, you know, try to get these people that might not know about it otherwise in because like the people that know what E three is, yeah, they already know all this you were as something I want to know all this shit.

Yeah, so they don't. They don't actually matter the same way that that people might think they matter, just not in an early advertising sense exactly. Like the awareness there, Yeah, the awareness is already there. Whereas a casual person who's not going to these websites but loads up YouTube videos every day might see the Fallout trailer before YouTube and then they're like, oh shit, this new fall Out, I need to go pre order that right now.

My favorite retailer. It is. It is really easy if you're if you're in this line of work, if you like inhabit video game message boards every day, it's really easy to forget that. Like there are people out there that buy consoles and buy like two games a year and like live their

lives and don't consume video game information every single day. And it's like, you know, it might be a month or two prior to fall Out for is released before a lot of those people realize that even exists, you know, but but they they know the name enough to say like, yeah, I'll get the new Fallout game. Yeah, I've known plenty people that will have like PlayStation and Xbox, but like you said, you know, won't know what E three is, right, So yeah, they shouldn't have to.

Yeah. Yeah, that's why I like you know that. That's why like game box art still matters from a gross marketing perspective, because you know, in a lot of cases they're trying to sell games to people who have barely or never heard of them. You know. Yeah, like the remember Ken Lavine talking about that with the BioShock Infinite cover or just Dude with the Gun. Well you know what, it says that it's gonna sell more if it's dude with the gun, So we have to kind of do that.

Yeah yeah, all right. Nick from Minneapolis. Is there some reason or history why you record the podcast on Monday but act like it's Tuesday. We're all adults here, we can handle the truth. I don't know what you're talking about, trying to be good weather out here on Tuesday. Who's hot on Monday? How's you were all last night? Jeff? Yeah? Great, what a great show. I love I love Tuesdays. It's my favorite day of the week. I had tacos at lunch today. Wow, yeah,

it's the day for it. It is, It's my favorite day for tacos. I got a great deal, all right? Moving on? Uh. Next email comes from Woody and Sydney, Australia. What a case you're wondering right something about paid fall Out format. With the announcement of fall Out four and the recent failure of the Steam paid mods system, will Valvin Bethesda

use this opportunity to try and successfully implement the paid mods system again. One of the issues cited in the implementation of the sky Room debacle was the introduction of paid mods in an already existing community. Seeing how fall Out four is sort of a fresh start, do you think this might be the chance where paid mods will be accepted? If not, when do you think is the ideal opportunity? Oh? Maybe, I don't know. I could see it, yeah, coming back, I think it's it's you know, like,

I just don't know. Is that a different community and it's a different game obviously, but like the people that mod Bethesda's games, is it kind of the same crowd? Sure, some of the same problems. There's totally people moving from game to game. I think you know, the key is just setting the expectations out of the gate, right Sure. Yeah, I guess like if you kind of lay the ground work from day one, ye'll see. I don't know. That doesn't mean there aren't still a lot of people

who won't like it. Sure, but if you if you're gonna do it and you're gonna stick to your guns, it makes it makes a lot more sense to do it fresh with a new game like that, Yeah, because then you don't want to have mods that are like freely available in some stage of development, and then you're like, well, everything after this update is now paid for like that. That's kind of a weird one. Yes.

Alex in Brighton England writes in about that Mario puzz and Drag ooh Yo puzzle fans, what do you think of the insane difficulty curves in the three DS Puzzle and Dragon games. I understand the logic and throwing walls into the players progression and they free to play pay to win business model, since that's how you ring the dollars out of people. But it seems like this same exact curve has been lifted and dumped into the three DS version resulting in some very

jarring difficulty spikes. How are you getting past these? Or are my puzzle skills just weak? Yeah? That's Jeff, How far are you getting that? Not much further? Okay, right now I'm on like World five or six, I want to say, And yeah, I think it's like near the end of like World two. I think might be the Castle of World two where it spikes hard and it's they have continues in there. You can

get those green one up mushrooms. But I kind of feel like I failed if I use one of those, so like I do not use any of those ever. So yeah, I'll have to like play a dungeon or like a castle or a world or something eight nine times and fiddle with different teams and helpers and level them up before I even have a chance. Yeah. Yeah, And sometimes it does kind of come down to a luck of the

draw thing. So it's like I'll decide, like, well, my team of all dark dudes didn't get the job done, so let me go with my big you know, wood team or whatever, and then just kind of hope that you get a bunch of wood icons. Would team would tea Yeah, so it spikes real hard. I have not gotten tired of playing it, though, Does it does it feel like a free to play game to

you? Though? Like, does it feel like they just couldn't stop making games in that mold so they just threw that kind of I don't have enough patience for free to play games that do those crazy difficulty spikes in an effort to get money out of you, So I guess I haven't played enough of

those to kind of know what that feels like. Who wasn't I can't remember somebody telling me this recently where I read it somewhere that there's like apparently a point in Candy Crush where you just cannot continue if you don't spend money, Like it's like effectively impossible to keep progressing because of the difficulty or something like that. I wish I had a source for that. I swear that I

read that recently. I thought it was something that's like it's definitely a spike, like there's a way through it, but or even even if it's not literally impossible, like to make it so unpleasant, like I've certainly played for to play games like that where it's just like, well, yeah, it's you know, I could keep going, but I could grind out all this current or I've even I've even bought games, you know. I granted it was like a ninety nine cent game or whatever, so it's not like there's

a huge barrier to entry. But like, uh, like Field Runners two stands out in my mind as like, oh, I bought that game and it was cool, but like four missions into it, it was so hard. I felt like I had to start buying yeah, yeah, items to help myself, you know, And it's at that point I'm just like, Nope. Hearing people describe that with like candy crush and everything, I don't think Marin puzzling Dragons is that extreme. I mean you'll you'll definitely feel it,

but it's not like insurmountable. All Right, that's good to hear. I keep thinking about trying that. It's great. It's really good. Maybe no, I mean it's really good. No, I mean maybe I will Okay, I mean maybe you know what you're talking about up. Nope, no guarantees there. Next email comes comes in from d MS way into people just signing their initials to their emails. Hello bombcasters go on, Remember how Super Mario Sunshine was basically an anti graffiti game. Did Miyamoto take up bombing

as a hobby or what the heck happened between then and Splatoon? Yes, Miamoto and Mark Echo got together. They've been getting up. Yeah, they've been getting up. One color throw ups, two color throw ups, wheat pasting. What could be a prequel roll ups? Could it? It could all be Delfino Island. Yeah, sure, Delfina Island skate Park. Yeah, sure about that. That would be the most disappointing reveal ever if they

pulled back and went like a, here's just said. In the world of Super Mario Sunshine, you hit level thirty and Bowser Junior comes out, Yeah, and just fucking Mario just shows up and stomps all these squids into submission. It's like, oh, right, can you go to thirty? I don't know, Max, I seen his twenty. Yeah, I thought twenty was the gap. Did you guys play any more of the single player not?

I haven't done a lot. I know we discussed it briefly last week, but like again, I thought that first mission was super boring and I didn't go back to the campaign stuff. But people keep saying like, oh, the last two missions are elections? Are really good. Some of the boss fights are incredible. That's the main thing I want to see as the boss fights is Yeah, because the standard missions didn't do much for me, I'll wind up playing through it all right, all right, I will be

curious to hear what you say. Greg from Toronto. Dan and Sushi m listening to last week's bomb cast talking about restaurants in LA and Dan is raving about sushi places. Let me get this straight. Dan won't eat figs because they might have microscopic dissolved insects. He won't eat mayo, the whitest and blandest condiment known to man. But he will eat goddamn sushi, raw fish, crazy foreign sauces. Not a barbecue in sight. This is what gets

in under Dan's radar. Who is this man and what lunatic sylum did you bring him from? You're supposed to eat fish, Okay, meat, all right? Bugs ain't meat. Bugs literally are meat, I know, but no one called you wouldn't find a grasshopper and that got me. Not yet technically, but eventually, eventually we'll be getting like grasshopper, just patties and that'll be in the meat section when they sell Its gross you can order protein bars that are just bug protein. Yep, that's a weird thing, but

the rawness doesn't weird you out. Like when I when I say I have sushi, it usually is of the like I'll go across the street and get the California Rolls or whatever, where it's like avocado and cream cheese, and I don't know if there's any actual like imitation crab or we're not getting. That's almost scarier if you're getting like you don't even it's not even real fish, Like what are you even getting? Like what is that? I need to be fair, not all sushi has raw raw stuff in it, right,

But I've had you know, real raw sushi plenty of times. I remember, like when I went to Japan for the first time, I told myself that, like, okay, this is a big, crazy trip. I'm not going to recognize what any of this food is. Nothing is gonna like like here, I have context for stuff. I know that, Like

I don't want to try Manna's. I don't tric hour cream. I've seen that stuff before I knew in Japan, like I would have no way of even learning what the hell these things were or if they even had these flavors in the States. So I told myself, I'm just going to eat everything in Japan and not ask questions. This is the one time I can just put away all my stupid food stuff and just do it. And I remember I got on this boat. It was a super ill fated Vita boat.

The Vita boat. Yeah, listening to the bottom of it was a nightmare. Oh my god. That was the worst, the absolute worst. Like like a bunch of overseas journalists out there on the middle of the water to see the Vita. What they have, like two Vidas, and so you get on a bus, you get We got on two buses, a bunch of journalists, and the buses it took like an hour plus or something to get out there, and they got lost to one point, and so we

were lost and everything. We finally get out to these boats and the whole point is to play the Vita and they're gonna have exclusive stuff there or we played it and then wrote about it or whatever. And yeah, so we've

got forty or fifty US journalists out there and like three Vitas. Like the whole time, it's like this whole you're trapped on a boat dropped on a boat for a long ass time, and then the long trip back on the buses and everything, and this whole thing they probably spanned like four or five maybe more hours at night, or it could have been getting a lot of work done. I think I watched someone over their shoulder play sound shapes for like fifteen minutes, and that's all I could get out of it. Man

cool. I think I might have touched a vita at one point. But it was the absolute most disaster media event I've ever seen in six seven years, and doing what did you eat on the boat? That was the thing is they started before they brought the vitas out with like, okay, do this thing where you sit down, like you have to sit underneath this table thing, and we're just gonna bring out this crazy shit constantly. And it was really weird looking sushi and I ate all of it, and a lot

of it did seem really gross, you know. Some of it had like what looked like full you know, fish in it and stuff like with their beads and eyes and all that crap. And yeah, I would take like a bite, just said I did it. I didn't necessarily like it, but but I tried it all. So that was such an outlier from my normal experience. That's genuinely impressive. You know, I can step outside of that thing. All right. Here's the new thing that I'm kind of bummed

out about myself. I went to Taco Bell this weekend and I ordered a cheese Gordia crunch, something I've ordered a billion times before, and I love this thing. And I always ask them because I forget the ingredients. I say what comes on this? And they say something about some crazy sauce. I say that sounds weird. I don't want that. I thought I had sour cream in it or something. They take the sour cream off. I've

eaten like hundreds of them this way. I think I found out that it might be the same sauce that's on the chicken case Idia, which is my favorite like menu item ever. So if I've been turning down that delicious sauce on the hundreds of cheese Gordia crunches I've eaten, I'm gonna be really sad if I find that out. Yeah, I think that's that's a likelihood. The Taco Bell probably the case I could have had it all. It's like a nice, spicy cheese sauce could have been a contender. Well, now

I'm just gonna eat a billion cheese Cordia crunches with that sauce. Now what if that sauce mayonnaise based. Uh, I'm actually afraid of that, and that's why I have specifically because it's got a weird taste that I've never tasted before. On the chicken case, Idia and mayonnaise can lurk where you least

expect. I am worried that there is either sour cream or mayonnaise lurking in those case did is which I eat all the time, And I don't want to know, And I know people are gonna write in and tweet to me, so I'm probably gonna find out and then I'll never get to eat a case of the Aggain and I'm gonna be sad. Will though I think sour cream is gross because I've tried it and I think it's disgusting. I assume it's disgusting. You're right, Yeah, you're right. A little bit of

sour kaream can go a long way. You would not eat something because of what's in it, not because it like, regardless of if it tasted good or not. Yeah. I think I might have told you this when my mom made all that macaroni and cheese and it was fucking awesome. And she made me like this huge freezer batch macaroni and cheese, like he's got values to uphold here, Yeah, And so I had like twelve There's a principle to this. This isn't it's called taste. Does it taste good? This

isn't about This isn't about good. My mom is about dumb trying to live a good and noble life here and that does not include eating mayonnaise or something has to have a code. She made me like twelve bags to put in the freezer of this macaroni and cheese macaron and cheese, like my favorite thing ever. I ate like two. We were three of them, and they were fucking awesome. And I remember calling my mom and being like, Mom, this is the best macaroni ever, Thank you so much. And then

she said, oh, well, guess what I put in him. That's what she goes. I put Sarah cram in those, and so I got rid of the rest of the bags. I would not touch it after that. Moving After having that knowledge, I could not continue to eat it. Next em even though it is the best macaroni cheese I've ever eaten. Next email, I have no words, please Brad. Next email comes in from Drew Los Angeles. True, very different. Yes he wears a hat. Yep, oh that's the difference. Hey, guys, just wanted to say

thanks for telling everyone that LA sucks as a Los Angelino. We've been pushing that for years now and it's working. People are moving away. If you read this, please tell people that Hollywood is wretched and depressing. The East Side is just endless conversations about coconut oil and Santa Monica is a boring mall for rich people. Living here is like being in a lawnmower because of the helicopters all the time everywhere. What's the with us traffic squares, the squares

with my experience of LA. Yeah, no, I was just I was just in Santa Monica and it looked like a boring mall for rich people. Yeah, Los Angeles is a hell on Earth? Wait is he telling he is he telling us to evangelize that viewpoint so that people move out. Yes, and he's trying to further, He's trying to expedite them and thus more La for him. I think that's the case because if you think about it, if there were fewer people on the road in La, La would not

be half as bad. So he likes La, yes, okay. Or he has to work there or something. You know, some people are stuck in places. Yes, he is in La whether by choice or not. Okay, But it sounds like he would prefer it if fewer people were. I can't wait to go there. Yeah, it's a big fun It's gonna be great. It's gonna be great. Del tacos faro. I could see that that grinder, there's that weird stand with the hot dogs. Yes, so that's that's sushi place I mentioned last week, sushi knows all what it

closed down like. I had heard that his son had opened up a restaurant called Sugarfish, like a couple of three years ago. Yeah. Check today. They now have nine locations down there, So sushi for everybody. I'm excited. It's a good name a man, sugarfish, Sugarfish. It's kind of just makes you want to eat fish. Sounds tasting. Brock from Melbourne, also in Australia, says a high bomb cast every second or third episode we hear comments along the lines of, I don't even know what a particular

game or expo looks like these days, quote unquote. I understand why you say these things, but I'm curious. What will gaming conventions look like in twenty twenty five. Can we say that the PlayStation five and Xbox X will be the current generation of consoles, Will VR slash R be a common standard? Will Half Life three be confirmed yet? Can conventions survive for another ten

plus years? Yeah? Absolutely, But like in terms of like what who they're trying to appeal to and why they exist, I think that's overdue for a shake up. I don't know, like you really think the value of getting everybody together in one place is even going to persist that long, Like I feel like it's all it's becoming so diffuse already through because social media. Games are still an interactive medium and so you want to get your hands on

them before they're out. In terms of getting people together for like business reasons for a trade show, no, I think that that, you know, that is more and more distributed every day, and and E three is not, you know, in just terms of like raw percentages of games coming out with the sheer number of them coming out, Like you know, E three is not the place for most of them, and like retail buyers don't need E three to see the games they might purchase, right, but it orders

more and more and more publishers are, you know, visiting those retailers directly, so you know they're having their own trade shags things. Yeah, so you know, those those relationships have changed, and you know, plenty of games that are digital only have no reason to go there in terms of like finding retail support and stuff like that. So like that's an entirely different class of game that doesn't necessarily get the full benefit of something like E three.

If they did decide to go there and show there, then you small developers straight up can't forty three. It's a super fucking expensive thing to exhibit at. I mean, it's you know, it's one of the nice things I guess that's happened as a result of Sony forgetting how to make first party games is they have a lot of room in their booth to bring in a lot of kiosks for a lot of small games. They have had tons of indie

games last year. Yeah, so you know, like that stuff is getting displayed on that level when they're making the deals to come out on consoles. Some of those games are getting invited in and there are events kind of around the show that are indie focused and stuff like that as well. But yeah, I don't know, you know, kind of its kind of like as as goes the industry, so goes E three, right, Like I feel like I feel like by twenty twenty five, they're going to be crazier trends

and play than what's happening. I mean, are the questions about like E three specifically or about all trade shows, all all conventions? Yeah, because I think there you'll see more stuff like packs, yeah, springing up in more locations that aren't being served by packs. Sure not about those? Are you know? Those are more kind of consumer fan events and yeah not, but they are are conventions. Yeah, yeah, that's true cons if you will. I mean, the bigger question for me is like, is there

a PlayStation five at all? Sure? Stuff like that? No? Absolutely, that's that's Those are the questions that need to be answered before you can say what happens to you? Three? Largely should we make this the last email? But yes, Half Live two will be out by then. Three Yeah, Half Life two has been out, I said, I said for ages. Yes, Half Live two will be out by twenty five. Finally, fucking finally, Uh, we can get two more emails in your queen.

Now, let's make this last email. Let's play it safe. Uh. Jason from Scotts Bluff, Nebraska. Okay, right, then about a good night's rest. It's been a long time since we had a giant bomb mattress update. And he right. He included literally eight to ten exclamation marks after this, so he's very excited about the mattress update. We have no idea what the mattress sich of Drew, Dan or Jason is whatsoever? And this must be corrected. Brad, do you still have a spring poking out

of yours? Jeff, you said you got rid of your performance sheets, But how did you throw them out? As someone picked through your garbage and is now in possession of all the of all the sweat they wiked away, not to mention all the body hairt ripped out. We demand answers. Yeah, we threw away the performance just straight in the trash. I kept the pillowcases because they stay cool, Okay, in a way that I appreciate.

Yeah, uh, from my part, I think over two years ago now we finally went out and like made an all day excursion out of bed shopping, got a pretty fucking nice set. That is my favorite object in the world. Now nice we put we put a mattress pad like a topper on our mattress. Which is it turns out? I think I think that's the type of bed I like, is a firm mattress with a bit of foam on that. It's the way to go Japanese. Is that what that is? Is it? Don't they sleep on like boards with some foam. I

don't know. Maybe last time I was theress. Yes, that's how I rolled, some kind of good firm back support, but with a little bit of cushion on top of Yeah, exactly what I'm looking for. Drew, What is your bed situation? It's a mattress, just a mattress. Yeah, I'm the ground. No, it's up off the ground box springs, I guess, I don't know. It it's soft. How many coils are we talking? Well, you know if you had a box spring or not.

It's like another mattress size object directly under the mattress. But it's a lot more rigid or do you just have a mattress sitting on a frame? Is the mattress just directly on a frame? I think it. I think it's just on the frame. Okay, we're talking like a high like a waste high frame, or like a load of the ground. I always thought it would be cool to have one of those frames where you're like six inches off the ground. Yeah, like, what was it? Was it the

standard in New York? M m is it? Even me Brad who went there for crisis or something and they had like the mattresses like six inches off the grao. Oh really there? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, weird low mattresses that when you wake up and you're still drunk, it's like a bad fucking yeah, because you're you're way closer to the ground you think you are okay. You go to stand up like you're in a regular ass bed and

go fuck and then almost fall over. It's like when you're going down the stairs and you think there's another stair and you step into the floor like an idiot. Yeah it sucks. Yeah, Dan, I got a big ass, king size bed. King Yeah, it's great. I got all the space in the world. It's incredible to buy it new when you came out here. No, I was in Minnesota and I lived in an apartment complex, and some dude got a job in Hawaii, like two weeks after he

bought this brand new, awesome king size bed. So I saw a post in the laundering room saying, like, king size bed two weeks old, two hundred bucks. Wow. Yeah, so I have a bad ass bed for two hundred butts that would be hard to turn down. Yeah, I don't. I'm on a California king Man, you know what. I also think I'm rocking a queen buck wheat pillow. What okay? Alright, gurm as hell gluten free? I don't know even can you get gluten anllergies from

a pillow? Probably if there was wheat in him? Huh okay, maybe I don't know buckweeds, it's it's super duper firm. Yeah, I don't like super soft. I've got I've got a buckwheat airline like an airplane pillow, and I was talking about Yeah they're great. Uh yeah, I went queens who and I think would kind of regret it occasionally, but it's time. It seemed like so much space king best. I don't know about the cal King though, cal King you can sleep three comfortably if you had to

wait, it's cal King, the bigger one. Yeah. Yeah, actually that is what I got because I just had to buy some fitted sheets and my mom said to order California King. I didn't know what the difference was, so I did do have wider, shorter, but shorter. I can't get around the Yeah, I can't get around that. It's weird, Like I feel like I'd barely have enough feet room as it is. That's in California. Watch it in short, I don't want your feet hanging off the

edge of your bed. That's no fun. Yeah. Yeah, mine used to. And I resituated my pillows in such a way that it is no longer a problem. Good enough. Yeah, all right, John Bond Mattress update for twenty fifteen. Catch it. I think we'll get Jason chime him sometimes in your future a mattress. Yep, I'm gonna have a baby. He's gotta get a tiny mattress. That's true. I'll take all those cribs. Yeah, I don't think. Well, I think there's a mattress in

the crib. Okay, you could have a you could have a crib without a mattress to be a fucked up cribs. Criptech is advancing. Yeah, okay, Criptech they make the mattress. Maybe your baby needs like an extreme lumbar support or something though, Yeah, you never know, sleep on bear wood. I'm gonna look into the memory foam thing though, the thin layer of foam. Yeah, it's nice. Do you got a brandy like? Uh? No, I just put the Amazon got something? Does it stay

or does it slide around? You put onto the fitted sheet? Yeah? Yeah, it's tight. Just send me a link. I'll see if I can find you. Go through order history and Amazon. Yeah, yeah it sounds good. Beds, bed chat, bed talk all right, that's gonna do it for emails podcast at giant bomb dot com. I like you went all the way down that road and didn't come to pillow talk, man, Yeah, I got so much in me yep. End of the podcast show. It happens. Ye, you either go all the way or not at

all? All right? Uh? This is it is our last regular BombCast before we go to LA. Yeah. Well, well we're recording one more this week that is kind of just the last bits of stuff from Judges Week one. It'll go up on Tuesday, and the annual Sealed Envelope podcast. Yeah, that'll go up as soon as the show floor opens on Tuesday next and next Tuesday at noon, yeah, I think so noon Pacific. Yeah,

well, that'll have what's left of our predictions. We've already booked all the appointments, so I think we have some good indications about some of the stuff we're going to see. Yes, and we could be pretty candid about it, since by the time people hear it, all the announcements will have been made, but we won't have seen it, so you can see how wrong we are some of these appointments we booked, but as a week prior, this is what we think. Yeah, that'll be fun. Yeah,

so stay tuned for that. Probably of fairly light week around the site as we pack everything up, put it on trucks. Yeah, some quick looks heading hitting the site from US and from the East coast. But yeah, we're loading up. Truck comes on Thursday. Yeah, all right, we're gonna try. I don't want to commit to anything, we're gonna try. I will commit to trying to do a live stream all right, if yeah, we can't, if we can't run it, out of our gear.

Then one of us will grab our phone and we'll periscope or you can always just you can always just play room it. Right, Yes, we'll set up PS four and we'll be real big on you stream. Set up two PS four's one will be play a room one will be the game we're playing. Okay, I think we simultaneously all periscope it. You know what, we could probably embed both of those in our chat. That is the thing. We could do that, all right, Right, well, we've got

options. Obviously, we'll see what we can do basically on what equipment is left. Yes, clearly ideas are percolating. But yes, so yeah, stay tuned for all that stuff. And uh yeah, other than that, we'll see you in Los Angeles. So well, actually we will. We should plug the fact that we're gonna have live streams of all the press conferences talk over them, yes, because that will those will happen before our next

PODA and those and those will go up. Those will not say, well we're doing nighttime shows during the three those will go up into this podcast feed. Okay, so you'll the audio versions of those, Yeah, and I have the press conference out of press conferences we'll be talking over the press conferences. Those will go up in video after the fact. But yes, we're gonna we're gonna talk over all those E three press conferences asda Ubi Softya,

Microsoft, Sony, Sega, Sega, an EC. Wow. Finally, all these graphics, these hardware manufacturer press conferences, turbographics one hundred and twenty eight coming out. You're very excited. Yep, it'll be fun. All right, We'll see everybody in Los Angeles. Stay tuned next week, same time for another edition of the Giant Bomb Cast. Bye.