Battlefield 6, Megabonk, Steam Next Fest

you Hey, hey gamers and non-gamers. Welcome back to the No Clip Crewcast. This is episode 249. We are almost a quarter of a way through a thousand. We've done so many podcasts, but you know who's not going to be here for episode 250 or this episode? Daniel Dwyer. He's not with us this week or next because he is in Australia. Is he coming back next week? I don't think so, right?

I think he's gone. I don't know what you guys are going to do, though, because I will be gone for the next few weeks. Jeremy's going to be gone, too. But he is with us this week. Jeremy, hello. Hello. How are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm exhausted. I couldn't sleep last night, but I'm... caffeinated i have two games i'm excited to talk about and i'm physically here he's caffed vaxxed and waxed jeremy jane joins us on the crew cast as per always and

The lovely Frank Howley is with us as well. Frank, when's the last time you got your flu shot? Oh, God. Before my, like, I don't know. Many years ago. I got to get it. I should get it. So my dad used to always bug me. Like, you should get your flu shot. I'm like, all right, I'll do it. And now he's gone. So there's no one asking. So Jesse, you have set the fire. No, I got to do it. Because I got super sick like two weeks ago.

My mom is super sick right now. And it's like, oh, man, it's the hard thing is picking a day because it's like it's got to do it. It's got to do it. I don't know. And you got to book the rest of the day out. You get your shot. It's like, well, I can't do anything. I got to order DoorDash. It's like. I got to pick like a Friday or Saturday. I have nothing going on.

Yeah, soon. So feel free to keep asking every week until it gets done and we can have like a bedding pool. I don't know. I don't know. But yeah, feel free to bug me about it because that's literally what my dad would do now that he's gone. It's like, well, I don't do that anymore. But no, I got it because my mom is elderly. I don't want her.

to get further sick you know yeah yeah yeah i get it it's important but it's just you know i the the the gamer procrastinates so if you asked when's the last time you got a trophy it would have been like oh four hours ago we need to so what if we give you achievements for it yes

When the lady at CVS gives you the jab, she needs to make the little like boop boop noise and give you a little pop up. They used to give stickers, didn't they? And candy. That was kind of like getting a trophy. That's true. They give you jack shit now. It's like the dentist. They need to bring back the dentist little balsa wood planes, little styrofoam planes.

Oh, you used to get those? Yeah. We've talked about, didn't we have those on the podcast? Maybe you were gone. Maybe I was gone. At the dentist when I was a kid, we get little airplanes made of styrofoam. But then in retrospect, it's a terrible idea because then it's flying styrofoam trash that children are throwing around.

It's okay. As long as they're happy, it's worth it. Go away because of nine 11. I feel like as a kid, and then now you just don't get, I think you would only be concerned about that. If you were also giving out two buildings with the plastic airplanes were no longer associated with whimsy.

Yeah, then it's like, uh-oh, we've got to make this serious. Okay, no more little paper airplanes. That's a great video essay, is the conspiracy theory that little balsam would play and spit away because of 9-11. See, and you could make that on no clip too. You could, yeah, you can make it happen. We can find some way to spin that into being a video game video. I'm sure if we try hard enough.

do some pilot wings put pilot wings in there oh yeah that's why that's why they won't make another pilot wings too it's because 9-11 because you know as soon as Nintendo announces pilot wings 747 which is what they'll call the game they'll do 9-11 too and that'll be it All right, this episode is getting deleted.

Nintendo's not working on it. Jesse is not a treehouse insider. That is just a coincidence. We do not know what Nintendo's developing next. Doug Bowser on his way out did not hand me a piece of paper telling me about Pilot Wing 747. It's fine. You know, if we end up making that video essay on NoteClip2, the only reason we can do it is because of the support of our great...

Patrons over at patreon.com slash noclip and patreon.com slash noclip2 who support all the work that we do, including documentaries, this podcast, loads of other stuff, including a bonus pod every month, which this month's is going to be our review of Final Fantasy.

Fantasy, Spirits Within, which should be out either when this episode is live or shortly after. You can listen to that again on the Patreon. If you're not already supporting, you can do that again at patreon.com slash noclip and join if you want the list of the battle pass.

holders, the tippy top supporters on that page, which includes if you've supported since the last podcast, I don't know if it's been updated, so we'll find out. Love Preet, Yut, Tiny Tal, Dwayne the Rock Lobster, Anthony Thomas. Nico Possiteri. It's a me, Ferrario. Senator Armstrong. Read Redge. Harry Flanagan, Joosh, Arno, Matt Pearson, James Brown, Mark Rojas, quote, Tucker Morgan, David McGarry, Goddison, Sven Hooster, Pez, John Akers, Uint Nate, Tim Robinson.

Forrest Pruitt. It's been a while since I've had to read this. Dark Insanities. Jonathan Kremen. Eric Hamilton Schneider. Christoph Fatouhi. Enox. Cameron Ladd. Whoa. It's weird to hear it normal, right? I don't like doing it normal. Let me do it again. Cameron Ladd. I like that one. Zachary Snader. Alex Goucher. George Zerkotis. Jacob Godserve. Entheogen. James Med. Tohir Tiliev.

And ricin. Thank you all so much for your support. That list has gotten really long. I should try to do that all in one breath next time I have to do it and see whether or not I asphyxiate. Hopefully not. Long list. We're going to talk about a lot of video games.

on this week's episode, but not too many. It's going to be a shorter one. You've had some, you've had long ones. All right, listener, you can enjoy a normal length podcast. How about that? Well, probably only an hour and a half, but we do have some cool games to talk about, including Battlefield 6, Mega Bonk.

Jeremy's going to be talking about Kari Mara, I believe is, maybe I got it. I feel like that sounds right. And I'm going to be talking about some NextFest demos as well. And Frank has one to cover.

And also mega, did I say mega bonk already? If I haven't said mega bonk, I love saying it. Mega bonk. We're going to be bonking mega time. It's going to be great. I can't wait to hear about it. In fact, you know what? Let's not jump into that one first. Frank, Battlefield 6 is here. You guys have been very excited for this one.

New first-person shooter from DICE. Gamers have been clamoring for a new Battlefield experience. You've played a couple hours of the, this is 1.0 or is this still beta? Tell us about Battlefield 6. They're not doing the skate thing. They're not calling a game early access and releasing it. Straight up, this is the full thing. The open beta was like a month or two ago.

Battlefield 6. Yeah, I've only had like a day or two to play because I was out of town this weekend. But yeah, I've bought every single Battlefield that launched since Battlefield 4. Like Battlefield 2, I got way late and I didn't play Battlefield 3. But like I'm always curious.

And I love Battlefield Hardline. Like, I like the weird, you know, I spent half a year grinding all the trophies in Star Wars Battlefront 2. And then I got to a point where I downloaded Battlefield 1 and I wanted to play it. So it's so weird to be playing a Battlefield 6 at launch. It's like, oh, there's other people playing it. Like, whoa. Yeah, so I'm playing Battlefield 6. Did like two levels of the campaign. It's like generic Xbox 360.

corridor whatever there's trophies associated with each level so it's fine but it's like you know i don't know if i'll finish it um it does do the thing that a lot of like call of duties have done recently where like when you're downloading the game it's like do you want to bother downloading the single player uh things like that so i

appreciate that but i'll keep it on there until i whatever um yeah so so i'm playing a little bit of battlefield 6 and uh it's so funny the way i've been describing it to friends is like oh it's like a really good call of duty they made a really good call of duty it's awesome like um

I will say I really like Battlefield V, the World War II one, because I played a medic. I didn't get too deep into Battlefield 1. This is so much of a smoother launch than Battlefield, is it 2042? What's the thing that came out a few years ago? Yeah, 2042. Sounds right.

Yeah, that that one was super rough. And like I bought it with a bunch of friends at launch. We were all excited. And oh, my God, Battlefield 24 to launch was like buggy. Couldn't cross. It was like just them kind of starting to do cross play stuff. So connecting the servers was glitchy. It was constant.

all this bad stuff. Battlefield 6, because maybe they had the open beta, because maybe they didn't want to completely screw it up. Like, oh, it works. Getting into servers are super easy, and playing it is very, very fun. I'm only doing a Medic, which I like, because I feel like most people...

do not either revive other teammates or be like, no, you can revive team. I don't know. It's insane. So it's like, if you just play the medic, you can spam revive constantly and get so many points. So when I'm playing battlefield, same thing I did in battlefield five, it feels like I'm playing Tony Hawk.

Because I am dashing back and forth on the front line and just looking to revive teammates. And so it's like I immediately get floated to the top of the leaderboard because I'm the only one reviving people. So for me, it's extremely fun. I haven't bothered playing other classes. I know sniping. looks cool. I think if you're...

The engineer, you can throw down ladders, so it's kind of like Death Stranding. People are just spamming ladders across the map because you get XP for putting down the ladder, and you get XP if people walk on the ladder. So it's like, oh, you're incentivized to try their classes because they're... are like dailies and weeklies and all this stuff but I like playing the medic and I will say

i don't know more so than others are if they've changed like the gun system or whatever but i'm finding it also very easy to get kills as a medic so it's i'm it's super engaging for me because i'll be reviving people constantly can shoot people get kills and it's like oh i'm constantly in a flow state when i'm playing it

I've only done the Conquest stuff, which is stuff with vehicles. There's a super long exhaustive mode. It's a breakthrough where the front line is just being pushed forward or back as opposed to having multiple domination points. Oh, okay.

basically have their own like call of duty playlist that's like close quarters combat which is like 12 player like team deathmatch king of the hill stuff so if i want like that so the the number one thing is like on the main menu when you're picking the different playlists it's like breakthrough it could be 20 to 40 minutes conquest back 20 minute max

um the close quarters stuff like 10 minute max so you can kind of gauge like how much time do you want to play I did one mission of the breakthrough which was like a the match was like 36 minutes and I was so exhausted I was like all right I'm good I'm good because like

Again, when I'm playing, I am sprinting across the entire map just reviving people. So I did one of that, and I was like, I'm done. And that's just constant, right? There's no, like, intervals. There's no two-minute break or anything. No, no, no, no. Yeah, there's no halftime. There's no, like, timeout or anything. Like real war.

Yeah, I will say, I was playing, again, I almost called it Call of Duty. I was playing Battlefield 6, and I was like, dude, why aren't other people reviving? Why is the team lagging? What's going on?

And in the middle of the mission, my friend texted me because he was at Tower Record Shinjuku buying starter merch. He was like, what do you need? So I put down my controller for five minutes and was texting my friend in the middle of this exchange. I was like, oh, this is probably what other people are doing, too. Everyone else is probably.

Probably talking to their friend in Tokyo trying to get them stardomers. That's why no one's playing the game. But it was so funny because I was being such an aggro gamer. Like, what's going on? Why isn't my teammate helping? And then I put down my controller for five minutes in the middle of a match. I was like, oh, you're not going to get in trouble. no commanding officer yelling at you like why aren't you whatever so

I don't know. So yeah, I'm having fun with it again. I'm not playing with any friends. I don't know anyone else who has this game, but I've got, I don't blame them. This game is 70 us dollars. Yes, that's right. Well, that's the price of war. You know, that's the price of freedom and I'm willing to pay that price.

Damn, what a patriot. I'll probably stand up. That's right. New head of Department of War, Frank Howley. Again, I'll do anything for achievements, and it's not always clean. My hands will get dirty. My hands will get bloody. I do not mind. gamer score uh less so for the freedom but just more so the gamer score um no but yeah a lot especially you have a very good point people are hesitant to get this because a maybe they played the early access and weren't blown away by it or b

2042 had such a terrible launch that everyone knows wait a wait a month they'll be on sale for Black Friday someone posted a thing of like the Steam sale thing where it's like you can chart every single like major EA release or like Battlefield release and like literally like

By eight weeks, the game is slashed to $40. So it's like, I just wait too much, you know, or whatever. But I will say, I really like it. As someone who's played a bunch of random Battlefield games this year just for trophies and achievements, I'm like, oh, this is fun.

I do wish there were Star Wars characters and music playing because I will say I think Star Wars Battlefront 2 is better. There's no third-person camera mode. There's no Ewoks. There's no Chewbacca. But, yeah, I'm having fun with it. But, yeah, like Jeremy talked.

about when we did the open beta where it's like to me this feels so much more like a um xbox 360 call of duty experience in the sense of like it's not hyper there's no wall sprinting sliding dashing it does feel way faster than the traditional battlefield experience which i like but i know that's different than like the old school uh vibe of the thing

So yeah, I like and I also think like, yeah, no one's going to care about Call of Duty 7 or whatever the new, whatever. But it has Mila Ventimiglia. What do you mean? Who is that? The guy from This Is Us? Right? Is that what it is? The show? The dad. I don't know the actor and I don't know the show. You're not This Is Us fans? I know the name. In the comments people are so...

Isn't that the movie where Michael Cera and James Franco and Seth Rogen, the post-apocalypse? Is that This Is The End? Yeah, yeah. What is This Is Us? The worst TV show you could ever watch. Oh, Milo Ventimigui. Yeah, yeah. He's also in Heroes. He was the main guy in season one and two. Oh, okay. Now you're talking by language. He's in Call of Duty? He's the Call of Duty. He's Mr. Duty.

Oh, yeah. We were playing a trivia game last night. It was Canadian Thanksgiving, and the old guy who knew nothing about video games had to come up with a video game name, and he chose... tour of duty tour of duty that's a great like ipad version of call of duty yeah you know like you could buy that on the playstation store right now for two dollars like i remember an old germa youtube video like pre-streaming career where he played grab

that auto. Um, and it was like a GTA ripoff. I feel like tour of duty is the grab that auto of call of duty. Grab that auto sounds like a Simpsons spinoff where you're trying to chase down the school bus driver. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Oh, yeah. Get a hold of him. Yeah. Put him in jail. That's a mod for the iPad version ripoff of GTA. Come on, dude. This game's rated M for mature. Okay. Battlefield 6. Frank, I have not played a Battlefield game ever. Really? I keep...

I keep outing myself as, as I'm not in, I don't enjoy culture. All right. If there were Digimon in battlefield, I would play Digi, I would play battlefield. No, I would just play Digimon and then think about battlefield instead. So, okay. If I wanted to experience, cause you've played from four on, I know four back.

is a sort of different play style. I've played everyone up to three. So we have the two covered. Perfect. If I want, and since you've played some of it, Jeremy, this is a good question. If somebody who's never played a battlefield game before, should they buy six or should they play? Bad Company 2, or should they play 4? Like, where do you think, Frank and Jeremy, what are your guys' thoughts? Where should they go to get the Battlefield experience?

The main thing is like just fighting the player base. So it's like, where is the active play? That's why it's like, it's fun playing these games at launch because people are here two months from now. Where will they flock to? Like, like what, what subreddit is going to explode of like, yeah, we need a new.

Battlefield 1. Who knows? But yeah, it's hard to say. It's also hard to push this for recommending buying it at full price. I did it just because I like all the Battlefield games. Also, I needed something to talk about this week. So I'm like, whatever. So you picked an 80...

dollar thing to talk about i'd rather do that than sit here and not have anything to talk about that's a very good point i'm like you know yeah so i don't know uh again unless we have any friends at ea's please hey i hey i love ea you know yeah It was electronic arts. I'm a fan of the electronic arts. You love them so much. Such a big fan. He couldn't remember what it stood for. Yay. He was so overcome with emotion. Electronic arts. I love it. Yeah.

I will say, it's kind of like the Borderlands 4 thing. I want to play Borderlands 4. I'm not buying that full price because I know exactly what it is. It'll be a fun game to listen to podcasts to while I loot and shoot. Battlefield 6. Hey, Mark Maron had Barack Obama on. on his podcast. That was the last episode, right? Yeah, yeah. So I was listening to Barack Obama while playing Battlefield 6. I was like, dude, this is good. Again, yeah, so...

It's hard to say if you're just... It's also weird to say because I feel like the prime Battlefield experience is you playing with a full squad of friends and messing around. Playing by yourself, I like, but it's like... I feel like I'm in such a weird, like... satellite of an experience but like yeah where are player people gaming on that that roblox battlefield game we played a few months ago like a year ago oh yeah so would that be your suggestion go to the roblox battle battle battle bit

Battle bit remastered, I think. Yeah, I know that player base fell off super hard. That's the tough thing about like, everyone's always like, why don't, why doesn't a team of like six devs just make the indie battlefield? And I think the hard thing is, is that like, it's incredibly expensive.

to engineer this fucking like super game that millions of people play but it's also just like if you lose that player base it's fucking over like yeah I don't know it's and people you can't like enjoy that's the thing Jesse you asked like should I go play Battlefield 2 or whatever

People still play those games, but the player base is so diminished that it's not like you can't have the experience of playing that game when it was an active game. It's like if you played Street Fighter Alpha three and like an online version on Steam or something, you're playing people who have played it for three million.

hours and that's who's left it's like you're not going to have the same experience as figuring out what the heavy punch button is on your controller yeah and they're you know i feel like when a game has a diminished community

the people that are left playing it definitely would be more receptive to if you were like I have no idea like I just started playing Battlefield 2 I feel like the 400 people left playing it would be like oh dude let me like teach you about commander mode you know but I I just feel like it would be

I don't know. It's like a ghost town. You know, it's like going west for the gold rush in like 1940. Yeah, I totally know what you mean. I wish there was some way, especially as somebody who missed out on a lot of those games because I just didn't grow up with a console.

I wish there was a way to bottle that experience because like bots, even if they're really good, it's not going to be the same experience as sitting down and playing with the actual community as time went on. And it sounds like six, it sounds like it's good, Frank. It sounds like you're having fun, but it's like, yeah. Sorry, go on. No, yeah, I really like it. But, like, the thing is, like, it's weird playing a multiplayer game with no friends. It's like, oh, my God. Like.

So but I do not blame like friends who are like, again, there's six billion games out right now. And it's like, yeah, you can. And again, you can totally wait in this game will a run better, have more content and like be so much cheaper when it's out later. But yeah, like on Steam, it has.

Very positive, 35,000 reviews. That's great. People are liking it. But yeah, again, to me, it kind of plays more like a Call of Duty. And again, because didn't Vince Zampello produce this or didn't his team oversee it to try to specifically get that Modern Warfare 2 feel?

Um, but I will say like, again, I like the revive, like the fact that you're reviving teammate people, it does kind of force. That's what I like more so than like, cause I like a month or two, I was playing black ops six for, for achievements and like,

That is such an isolated gaming experience. There's no teamwork. You're just load in, shoot, die, load in, shoot, die. Battlefield 6, at least there's a pinch of like, okay, you're moving with the squad. You're putting down blockades. You're reviving your teammates. It's like...

Oh, no, you are actually, like, working with other people to get the attack points. That is so much more of a, like, parallel play social feeling of combat as opposed to, like, how... like cracked out call of duty is um so yeah i do like it but yeah it is weird just like it's a different experience because like like what jeremy said is like yeah you respawn you're kind of immediately thrown into battle whereas like the traditional

like, slower-scale battlefield experience is you spawn all the way on, like, a naval ship, you get on a plane, you parachute down into a building, you're driving, you're walking up ten stories, then you get sniped, and then you respawn, you know, or whatever, but like...

It has these beats. It's like Tom Hanks sitting on the boat, shaking as he gets to the spot. But it's during those months, if you're playing with friends, you get on the helicopter, you mess around, you laugh. I mean, I remember like...

And maybe he's still in Battlefield 4, but just like flying helicopters in each other is like always so funny. So yeah, the quote unquote Battlefield moments. I think I've had like one of those experiences so far with like funny vehicle stuff. But again, I want to play more. I do like it again.

it's so fun to like play games at launch and just the the the vault the uh the the the player skill base is so all over the place i think there are a lot of people coming into this treating it like call of duty so i think that's why people like as soon as they die hit respawn it's like no no let me i get so angry as a medic

when I am rushing out to revive someone and they just ignore me. And I'm like, no, dude, trust me, I'm the one medic who's actually trying to revive people. I feel like that, it points to sort of like my critique of Battlefield 6, which is... Like like you said, Frank, having not like that lead up experience where you're like transporting there and then you're like deep behind enemy lines and you're like, all right, if we die, it's fucking, you know, 15 minutes on the bus to get back here.

I think that like the experience I haven't played, I haven't bought Battlefield 6 yet. I played quite a bit of probably like 10, 15 hours of the open beta. And I was hopeful about it, but like it felt so claustrophobic that. like everything was so close together that I would die. And I'd be like, all right, well, I can cross my fingers and hope that someone revives me, which is, you know, a coin flip.

Or I could just respawn like 15 seconds away is what it felt like most of the time. Whereas like most of my memories from Battlefield 2 are being a squad and like pushing up the side and then making sure that the squad leader stayed alive so you could squad spawn. making sure the medics stayed up making sure you had like two medics to revive each other um because then it was like

It was like this operation, this like ongoing operation, which feels like weird sort of like emergent quest design or something where it's like, all right, we're going to push up with, you know, everyone's fighting at B. We're going to swing behind and we're going to take C. That's really going to fuck them up. And it becomes this like. that's your mission for, you know, whatever, two thirds of the match. And I was not feeling that with Battlefield six, but.

I feel like it's a very well-made game. It felt good to play. It had the sound designs incredible. It looks good. So I'm hopeful that larger maps might solve some of my issues with it. Well, there you go. Battlefield 6.

Sounds like it's a game that we will hear more about in the future. Frank, I hope you continue playing and report back on the hopefully not dwindling player base. Hopefully people keep picking it up, especially when, like you said, it's $40 in a couple of weeks for Black Friday. Yeah, that's right. So check that out. PlayStation, Xbox, and PC. Battlefield 6. Buy it on Steam if you want. 70 US dollars.

Let's move on to Karimara. Jeremy, I shared a little fun fact with you. about this game and its developer and another game that they made that you also thought was really cool. So tell us about this creepy looking Halloween-y card game, Karimara. Yeah, so Karimara, this is a game by a developer named Bastard.

in this rex published by uh critical reflex uh it is a i don't even really know how to describe this game it is a it's not really a horror game but i think sort of first person narrative horror game is the best for understanding what this is. This is sort of like...

This is a very short game, but very like narratively, thematically and aesthetically rich. So I think it's a very worthwhile experience. If you're on the fence as well, like this game took me an hour to be not. There's more secret stuff. I think you could do all the secret stuff in about two hours.

but um but this game is like under five bucks uh and i i just i'm such a sucker for like a little bite-sized experience that just you have it it's done and you enjoy it um so karmar is a game where you play as a caramara which is like a little i think it's a is it a goblin or a troll i forget which term they use i think it's a goblin um but you're like a little fantasy creature being who shows up to the house of this old sort of like

like hag of the woods, like a Baba Yaga figure. Um, and she has a spirit in her house in the basement and you are there to purge the spirit from the basement. Now your character is mute and cannot speak, but your character has a magical ability where once they interact with something, they can conjure a card that has a picture and the name of the thing on it. So if you see the old lady, you get a card.

that says old lady and now anyone who in the world who is like interactable like if you can go up and talk to someone you can present them with the old lady card and get their thoughts on the old lady so as you explore you're gaining you're building a deck of conversation options which i think is a really cool uh mechanic um so

That that's kind of like the whole game is like that's the mechanic is just going around and looking at stuff, getting these cards to get more options to talk to people about more things. And the entire game takes place within this sort of like very small. almost diorama-like, you know, it's like this house in the surrounding area, is it? There's no, like, Morrowind world where you leave the house and walk to Saitanin. It's just, or I think Saitanin's where you start. Walk from Saitanin. I...

And it's kind of like, I don't know, I'm struggling with how much to say about this because it's such a short game. So I don't want to say too much about what the narrative thrust of it is. But basically...

Yeah, you're like a goblin exorcist who's building conversation options through this core mechanic. And I really like this. So you mentioned that this developer is working on another game that I thought was promising, which is Trip. I did not realize this was the same developer until you put...

pointed it out but uh i i played the demo for a trip you know some number of next fests ago um yeah it came out september 2024 the demo did for trip uh which is it's like a psychedelic weird colorful first person

also like mysterious sort of horror-ish game where you're on a train in like a weird sort of like loop every time you go through the train it loops back again but everything's different and I also highly recommend playing the trip demo I don't know when the full game is out for that I'll have to look that up I don't think they have a date yet. This seemed like sort of Karimaru was like a bridge game. They were just like, this is cool. Let me finish this and get this out.

Critical reflex gave him money. So why not? Right. Yeah. They have very similar vibes though. Like they're both sort of just about going around and observing, which I think is, is a really strong sort of like core.

design premise for these games is that instead of being like oh you gotta like go around and solve this thing but there's like the monsters chasing you don't get caught by the monster I think in in absence of that sort of like core negative pressure on the player it it frees you up to challenge as a designer to challenge the player in other ways because uh i found that karamara most of the obstacle was created by just like

me not being observant enough which i think is a cool like way to do a mystery it's like the way you should do a mystery game you know um like it's not like you talk to a guy and he's like ah did you go talk to that guy yet go to him and tell him this and then you go do that it's more just like Like you're collecting little bits of sort of passive storytelling and things that seem very sort of like innocuous and like little side details are actually.

core crucial details of understanding what's happening in this world. Yeah. It's like getting all of your money's worth out of a single set in a movie. Like if you make like a short film, that's just a small set.

very specific world building elements inside of it. It's like, you have to get the most that you can out of that where here it's like, I feel like I totally agree. I think a lot of smaller games that sell themselves on being a two hour, one hour long experience that are like five bucks end up almost trying to do too much.

or are way too linear. Like they are way too, here's where, go see the thing that I made. This is like, it sounds like you're just, you're forced to focus. You're forced to like look around, really appreciate everything that's there and like get the most out of it.

on a, on a narrative level and on like just your curiosity, you should feel curious in this little weirdo world. Yeah, for sure. And it, it definitely like, I, I feel like it respects the player's intelligence because I, I sort of like. built my own theory of what was i mean again this is like a one hour experience so this is all happening within the course of 60 minutes but i sort of built my own theory of what was happening in this game and then playing the game was essentially just like

disproving my own biases and understanding of the world and i thought that that was really interesting it wasn't like i immediately intuited what was happening here it was more like the game sort of leads you down a path and then it's like all right now like

You have this little pocket world and it's small enough that when you hit a roadblock, you can kind of just walk around the entire game looking at everything again, which I thought was interesting. It's sort of because it's one environment. It gives the developer a lot of. A lot of license to basically be like to roadblock you in ways that like if it forces you to to into a situation where you know that in order to progress, you're going to have to make some sort of intuitive leap.

And I think in like larger point and click adventures, that can be a frustrating wall to hit. Because if you play like fucking Monkey Island, it's like because it's a larger game, it's a larger amount of space to walk around and click on everything. Whereas because this is so small, they can just be like.

Like, I don't know. You better figure it out. And you're like, OK, I guess I'll just go like walk everywhere again. But because it's so small, it's interesting. And do they utilize the unintentionality? Like you're saying, I think that's a really good observation that like point and click games tend to have a lot of.

unnecessary information that they can do a lot with to build up the story. Does this do that at all? Like there's stuff that isn't necessary to progression that you can sort of... gain more insight on the world from or is it sort of very everything is very intentional it feels like everything in this game is intentional but not necessarily pointing you

towards solving the core mystery if that makes sense um in fact i think that that works to the advantage of the core sort of like mystery puzzle here because i think that giving you things that are building out your understanding of the world, but not...

getting you closer to solving the mystery is interesting because then it allows you to create red herrings for yourself where you're like, oh, I like noticed that thing over there. It implies this. And then you sort of like build this theory and then you have to like overcome that bias.

you've built early on by misunderstanding the way things are so again i'm being very vague because i don't want to solve the mystery in this one hour game for you but uh so how does it end is it let me tell you about the end the ending is great this is how it goes No, the ending is unironically actually really good. I found it very... It tells a very touching story in such a short amount of time. I was very pleasantly surprised. So yeah, go play Karamara. It's good.

You know, it's like, what are you going to do for an hour? You're going to go like fucking play a game on your phone or you want to have a meaningful. That's two breakthroughs, brother. I'm playing breakthrough in Battlefield six. And that's exhausting. That does sound fun too, actually. You could do both of those things if you just set aside two hours. And one-tenth of the money. Actually, less than one-tenth of the money. You'll need it like $75 to play both of these games.

It's not bad. That's a good average. 37 and a half. Yeah. BB in the middle. That's pretty good. Yeah. Caramara. Is that where we're going? Caramara. Sorry. Go ahead. No, I will say GameStop does things like that where they'll screw you, where it's like, they'll have a thing where it's like, buy two games, get one free. And it's like, oh, you bought the $70 game and a $7 game. The $7 game will make free. I'm like, come on. That's so, you know. That's brutal. Or like a $7.

I'm going to need a 50 and a 20, and then, like, the 20's free. And I'm like, look, I get it, but can't the 50 be free instead? Yeah, you got to be careful. But, yeah, if you split the median, that's pretty good. But, no, I didn't mean to step on your call. No, no, no. Some free airheads with your purchase of Battlefield 6. Yeah.

One free Funko Pop. They're just giving them away at this point. One free M16. Go for it. Hey, all right. That's an American GameStop. We have EB Games back, baby. We're free up here in Canada.

Yeah, there you go. Karamara Beneath the Forlorn Limbs is the full title on Steam. Pick it up. It's on 10% off. It'll still be on sale when this goes live. But once it's off sale, it's five bucks. One other thing to mention that I totally skipped over, which is the thing that got me in the door for this game, is that the...

is incredibly bizarre and cool. It's very limited color palette. It's sort of like a... uh not like ps1 aesthetic but it does have some of the vertex jitter of ps1 but um the limited color palette and the sort of like gothic cutesy horror it reminds me a little bit of tim burton um like good tim burton yeah uh

But yeah, I don't know. It's just kind of like this is like a little little living Tim Burton adjacent folk horror game. It's really good. Yeah, check it out. Look at the screenshots. See it for yourself. Buy it for five bucks and play. It sounds like it's an hour. You're going to have a good time. From the sounds of it, again, published by Critical Reflex, developed by Bassinus Rex. Critical Reflex on fire this year, except for Eclipsium, which Jeremy said was the worst game.

I did not say that. He said he liked it. I'm joking. A lot of people really liked it. I admired it.

It seems neat. I will have to check it. I also bought Karamara like a week ago and did not play it. So thank you for reminding me that it's in my Steam wishlist before it rots away. You have another game here that we could, I'd like to get through quickly because I think we have a bunch of NextFest demos and other.

stuff and then I have to run out the door. But Vampire's Best Friend. I want to hear a little bit about this because I've seen screenshots of it and I still don't know if that gets everything across. So what is this game? So Vampire's Best Friend, this is a game developed by Synx Adventure, who I'm going to click on to see what other games they made. Nothing I've heard of, but maybe I'm going to check them all out now. Vampire's Best Friend, this is a...

It's a platformer. Is this a UFO 50 game? Did you find a UFO 50 game? It's kind of a UFO 50 game. It looks like one. In the most complimentary way. In the nicest way possible. This is a game where you... The introductory cut scene shows a adorable little vampire girl and her bad best friend who sneak into the town and they drink all the tomato soup in the town and the townspeople. are furious about this so they hire vampire hunters to go you know I don't think they say the word kill but

to, to incapacitate the little adorable vampire girl. And so the vampire hunters spread garlic all throughout the, the castle vampire castle. All right. And, uh, This incapacitates the vampire girl. So you do not play as her. You play as the eponymous vampire's best friend, a little cute bat. Oh.

And you have to free your vampire friend by collecting all of the garlic, by purging all of the garlic from the castle. And you do so by it's it's an upside down platformer, I guess is how I would describe this. So. You're navigating this like trap laden.

castle full of like weird labyrinthine little corridors and traps and moving compartments and all sorts of bullshit um and you can only land on the ceiling because you're a bat so if if you you have this meter that goes down which is basically like a stamina meter.

um it's it's just a timer but that it doesn't it's not exhausted by like inputs it's just time-based uh and so before the timer hits zero you need to land in another position on the ceiling somewhere and if you do not you die quote unquote and are sort of teleported to the back to the last spot you landed on the ceiling so it's this bizarre so the way you move is you either tap left or right

If you tap either one, it moves you in that direction and slightly upward. So like a like a flappy bird. Yes. OK, it's like a flappy bat. So you. All right. This creates these weird situations where like. You know, say you need to get through something to the left, but it's below you. Then you need to like create enough momentum moving leftward, but then kill the sort of like kill the throttle enough to have the leftward momentum, but then drop early enough to get through. So.

like i kind of felt like i was driving like a boat upside down or something there's this very sort of bizarre like you have to get used to like drifting a bat through these openings and stuff and then the world has all these sort of like wrinkles on that there's like a There's like a gas trap that reverses the controls. So now not only are you playing sort of like.

something adjacent to flappy bird but also the controls are reversed and it's just like it builds really cleverly on this one core mechanic that the whole thing is based around but it's basically just like a a sort of like open world platformer i wouldn't

call this a metroidvania but it doesn't look like one no but but the fact that you were in a like vampire themed open 2d platformer world i kept being like this feels like a metro it's not a metro video is this a batroidvania i'm leaving hanging out the call um yeah no i uh I really like the design of this game as well because I kept hitting places where I was like, I feel like I don't...

quite have the skill level like I've played you know whatever 20 minutes of this game and I got to this one puzzle and I feel like I can't solve this yet I know this is here and I'm going to wait to come back to it but you can sort of teleport back to the starting point in the world and because the world

sort of like small and dense enough it's it's not that bad like it's not like punishing like when you die you don't get teleported back to the start but you can choose to do that and sort of like retake another route um and you're basically just exploring this whole castle as a little bat and it's uh This game is fucking hard, though. For all of its cutesy aesthetic, I found this game incredibly punishing. But I...

Yeah, I don't know. I feel like that's what makes it interesting. It has this sort of NES aesthetic, and I feel like it has this sort of NES platformer design ethos where it's like... You know, it's not like you're it's not like a token taker. Like it's not trying to eat your quarters, but it does feel a little bit reminiscent of that era of design where it's like this game. So fuck it. I'm on a home console. Why are you doing this to me, Nintendo?

I gave you all my quarters already. What more do you want? I paid for this game in quarters. I prepaid for the arcade experience. I was going to do laundry, but instead I bought Vampire's Best Friend. Yeah, exactly. I made that UFO 50 comparison, by the way, not just because. You know, it seems like a bite-sized arcade game, but also...

Because it looks it looks fantastic. It looks really, really good. It's got a very similar sort of like the earlier, you know, the early years of Moonsoft or whatever the team is in UFO 50. The first handful of games there, it has that same sort of like color palette and the pixel art's really nice.

And yeah, it just, it looks lovely. It sounds really good too. Just the music and sound effects in this trailer are really like just very Castlevania adjacent. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. No, it's a, it's sort of, I feel like it's sort of like. super positioned between NES and Super Nintendo in terms of like aesthetic and fidelity and design and stuff. But yeah, Vampire's Best Friend. I am definitely going to play more of this. It only has 29 reviews. That's fucking crazy. It's been a weird year, man.

Yeah, this game is fantastic. I hope I hope if you like hard platformers, you will love this game. And yeah, it's I also the last thing I'll say about it is that it's like. platformers are a genre that I often associate with incredibly precise controls, like things like Celeste and Meat Boy and stuff. The joy there is mastering these incredibly precise controls and precision platformers. This is sort of like an imprecision platformer.

or you need to be very precise with it. But because the controls are like, you know, the little sort of like upward sideways acceleration per input, it's very... It's finicky in a way that mastery of it feels satisfying because it is not intuitive. So you feel the skill curve cutting against you, and as you start to get a handle on it, you're like, oh, this is not as bad as I thought it was, or I'm pretty good at this.

after all um and it's a very satisfying thing to overcome so uh highly and sorry the flaps are consistent right so each time you press the button you always go the same height or sorry did you say it was different no it's consistent um you can also hold left or right so you can sort of like you know you don't have to like button mash or whatever um but yeah it's a fucking it's a hard-ass game but it's really good

It sounds like a fun challenge. Sounds like something I'd be into. I'm going to pick this up. I had seen pictures of it, but yeah, I hadn't seen anyone explain what it was. They were kind of like, this looks cool. Someone else play it and tell me if it is. And I'm that guy. Yeah, thank you for being that guy. You're always that guy. Thank you. That was Vampire's Best Friend. Pick it up on Steam. It's also on Itch. I feel like this would be a good itch.io game. I don't know. I can't find it.

I'll let you know later if it is. But you know what isn't on itch.io? Actually, it might be too. I didn't check. Megabonk! While we're talking about indie games, before we get on to the Steam Next Fest stuff real quick, Frank. I have seen so many clips of this mega bonk seems like some sort of vampire survivors, adjacent 3d game. Uh, how, how do you like the bonking? Are you enjoying doing a little bonk?

Yeah, so Megabonk is, yeah, essentially 3D vampire survivors. Like, this game blew up, like, over, like, the last two weeks. Like, Jeff Grossman recovered it, like, a week or two ago in his podcast. But the reason I got it is I had, like, I flew, I'm from California, I flew up to Oregon for a friend's wedding.

It's like, oh, I need to just burn a, I need a game to, like, burn a plane ride. And, like, I thought about bringing my Switch, playing Donkey Kong, or they just remastered Mario Galaxy 2. But it was like, oh, man, another Vampire Survivors type thing? Let me check it out. And, um, yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's, it's, I really liked it. It's one of the things, things as soon as I, as soon as I started playing, it was like, okay, yeah, there's so many.

like waves of progression and things to unlock so it's just constant like taking stuff but yeah the fact that they basically took Vampire Survivors, which is over the top 2D and essentially have made a game that kind of looks like N64 or like early World of Warcraft graphics. There's only two levels. I don't know if they're going to add more and there's like scaling difficulty.

So there's a forest biome and then like a desert biome. And yeah, it's just that like immediately start. There's so many characters. And I will say the game has like a more silly meme-ish like quality to it. Like it's very.

silly irreverent but like the guys on reddit and steam just like hey i just want to make a game i think is cool and fun and and so normally i'm like like kind of like the borderlands say i get annoyed when there's like that kind of that stuff but it's very genuine it's just like oh you mean like contemporary mean

memes sorry memes yeah like like i'm trying to think of one example it's like there's a power-up where you get a lot of money and i think it just says like stonks or whatever i'm like oh brother it's not there are a lot of jokes like that in this game it's just that but i'm like i'm not looking i'm not that's you know i don't

care about that but like i close my eyes i'm just doing i'm here for the bonking yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah um yeah exactly so no but play the game is fun it is kind of cool so there is a little bit of platforming stuff so like you could theoretically jump over enemies enemies will throw down

like AOE attacks. So there'll be like a red orb that expands and you have like a little bit of time to jump out of it. And yeah, there's so many weapons, so many power-ups. And so it's been funny looking at the reddits and people coming up with like, already there's a character that has broken the game. There's a character where it's like.

the more currency you have on you, and you can spend your currency on chests and power-ups in the middle of your run, the more currency you have, the more damage you do. And people realize, like, oh, you didn't cap that value. So, like... The current meta right now is this one character where if you just keep collecting coins, you do insane amount of damage output. But yeah, so I played it nonstop on my plane rides, nonstop going to sleep before going to bed.

I played the game so much, by the time I came back from the wedding trip, I had severe eye strain because I screwed up hard. So imagine, what, 6 a.m., flying out of Oregon. Even before I get on the plane, I'm in the terminal playing. Megabonk. Okay, here's a life hack. Maybe, whatever, I'll out myself and it's over. Here's the thing. When the plane, when the Delta United are like, hey, we're boarding group four. If you're group five, just get to like the.

You can still get in line and they're not going to say anything. So I cut. I'm kind of a gate cutter. Whatever. Boarding group cutter. I don't care. I need to sit down. I need that luggage space, that overhead bin space. That should be a game.

We're at an airport trying to get overhead bin space because that's like the craziest thing in the world. Whatever. So I sit down on the plane, pull out my Steam Deck. I start playing Mega Bonk. The plane takes off. I'm playing Mega Bonk. They turn off all the lights in the cabin. I'm playing Mega Bonk. Oh, no.

know i didn't adjust my brightness yeah so i'm sitting there on a dark plane at like 6 a.m staring at megabonks there's so many lights and flashes and things blasting my eyes uh and then i'm playing it the entire time during takeoff in the air during the landing sitting down still playing megabonk i get off the plane i get to the next connecting gate i sit down i start playing megabonk

And then I get hit with like the worst wave of like nausea. So I got legit motion sickness playing Megabonk for like hours upon hours. You're why those warning screens are on games at the start. Yeah, I always ignore. listen this time it's for weak-willed gamers you haven't seen my gamer school um and then i sat there in the turn like but i also was at a wedding so i probably also was hung over but so good combination so i was sitting there just like

Oh, I thought I was going to throw up. It was so bad. Just sitting in the, sitting in the terminal, just like sweating and like rubbing my eyes. And I felt like, it felt like I was experiencing an exorcist. I was so sick. And then I Googled on Steam, like, Mega Bonk Motion Sick, and there's been a handful of people being like, yeah, this game gave me motion sickness. So I, like, didn't play it for two days because I was like, oh, man, I like.

I need to know more about you being sick. What happened? Did you get on the plane and you were still nauseous? No, so it was like when I got off the plane, having played Megabonk for like two hours. But that was your connecting, I thought. Didn't you have another flight? No, so did I play? I did not play Megabonk on the second flight. Yeah, I bet. Yeah, instead I just sat there like with my head over my...

hands over my eyes just like that for like an hour and then I got home. You ate the free snacks that they brought around and you were like, give me a Sprite. I want a Sprite. But then last night before going to bed...

after some battlefield six i pulled up my steam deck and listened to mark maron and barack obama and i was like oh yeah but it's like dangerous i think i have to quit at cold turkey because it's one of those things maron yeah me too you know we always talk about like the dark patterns the rng the and it's like it's so good but

It's like, oh, no, I OD'd on Megabonk, and so this is me warning you. And I'm also hesitant because I'm like, yeah, it killed plane rides, but I almost died. I almost died from it. Not really, but you know what I mean? It messed me up. But I will say I really do like the game. If you do like trying all these, what do you call it? Jeff Gersman called them ass games, auto-assisted aimers, or whatever you call them.

I don't know. I've also heard the term mowers, which I like because that's a Japanese one, right? Yeah, it reminds me of like Dynasty Wars. And there is something so satisfying of like...

when you're peeling off this giant layer of things coming at you. But it also makes me excited for Dynasty Warriors 3 Remastered, which got announced for next year. But yeah, so I liked it. Again, it's like one of those novelty games. Like, oh, it's fun. You could theorize. It seems like the... average like to unlock everything plow through everything is maybe like 20 hours of just chipping every character doing all this stuff vampire survivors the og

I like because I didn't get motion sick, and that was a game I played, like, 50 to 60 hours. But, yeah, if you really do like those games, if you do want something to kill time or chill with, like, I will say it is fun. It ticks all those boxes. It was very satisfying. But, like...

it's so hard to put down the one more run at it. It's like, Oh God, it's so bad. So I literally had to stop playing because of motion sickness. Um, but again, that was me on a plane, maybe a little hungover. Yeah. So, um, I don't know, but I will say I liked it, but yeah, at this point it's got like 20,000.

reviews i feel like it's only 10 bucks so not super extreme but i had fun with it i do i kind of do like the art style it kind of does remind me of owen forest that first that first uh level but yeah i liked it i don't know if they're gonna keep updating stuff any more characters whatever but for ten dollars

I've had a good time with it and it's one of those things too where it's like it's like got a hundred achievements but it's got the it's like vampire survivors like upgrade this item to level 10 use this character on this map whatever so

All those little things. I have 51 of 102 achievements so far, but I also don't know if my Steam Deck's updated. I feel like I have more. But yeah, so I liked it, but it gave me super bad motion sickness playing it on a plane. Yeah, I wonder if that's going to be a thing for some people because the...

appeal of this genre seems to be that it's fairly straightforward and you can kind of just play it wherever in any circumstance and not, you know, a lot of big flashing lights. I wouldn't recommend playing vampire survivors if you have epilepsy, but, uh, it's still like an enjoyable time where this is like,

You also need to worry about 3D positioning. You got to jump. You got to the camera moves around in interesting ways. It's yeah, this seems like too much for me. I think I had my fill with vampire survivors personally, but I'm glad that you're having fun with it, man. It looks like. It looks really fun.

Like, it looks like it's just a good time. Big numbers popping up on the screen. I think somebody, you had mentioned you wanted to play this and somebody mentioned that you would enjoy Disgaea for the big numbers. Yeah, yeah. You need to report back from the Disgaea universe. I need to know how you feel about that. So here's the thing.

I'm looking for a copy. It was, it's like 50 bucks on the PlayStation store. Disgaea one complete. So their GameStop does have it for sale for 25 bucks, but you don't want to order it online because you might just get a disc with like.

like like a cardboard box as the case but um i do want to play this guy because yeah i've been playing so much more tactics and this guy feels like the parody version of that very anime but yeah but uh so i'm looking out for a ps4 copy of this guy won but yeah big numbers just games that kind of it's also kind of funny to play stuff that like mock

game stuff too, so it's very silly. But yeah, it's the kind of thing where I'm like, yeah, it's not changing the world. It's fun. It's like junk food, but sometimes it's fun to OD on a bag of Doritos too. No, I completely agree. Yeah, there's nothing better than just mowing down on a whole bag of Doritos.

one weekend. Although don't do that on a plane is the message I'm getting from you. Yeah. Megabonk. Check it out. Also, the developer has been posting a lot of clips on YouTube shorts and TikTok and stuff. I just happen to see them every once in a while. And I'm always like this.

Whoever this is, is like very excited to be working on this game. They think this is really fun. It's weirdly more fun to me than playing the game. I bet I would have like a good amount of fun with it, but watching them figure out how to fix things, how to make a bug into a feature and all.

that that's been like a weirdly enjoyable experience uh i really like it it turns out people who like talking about making video games like hearing people talk about making their video games who would have thought that's megabonk pick it up on steam it's only on steam

Vampire's best friend is on itch.io. Oh, nice. So you want to get it there as well. Yeah, buy that on itch if you... I mean, I'm not... I like stuff on my Steam library, so I'm not going to preach, but itch does give a bigger share to the peeps.

exactly give them the 10 old buckies straight to the dome let's talk about some next fest let's get in the next fest zone steam next fest time It's the October one. It's the last one of the year. It's Halloween season. So, you know, it's time for lots of spooky games. I've tried a couple of them haven't been great, but I do have a ton that I've enjoyed. I'm excited to share some of those.

here on the pod in a video that we're making over on Noclip2. And there's also a thread on Blue Sky. If you want to check that out, jessegrasher.com. It's my first and last name.com on Blue Sky. Follow me there. Keep up with all the cool stuff that I'm checking out. I think I've got like eight or nine in a thread as of record.

But by the time you check it out, if you're listening to this, it'll be 11 or 12. Who knows? It's been a weird next fest for demos. We'll talk about that in a second. But you guys mind if I just rattle off a couple here and Frank, you've got one as well. Yeah. I won't be too long on these, I promise. First one, Tears of Metal. This, so I think there was a trailer for this like a year, year and a half ago. It's a Musou. It's a Musou game, Frank, but it's Braveheart.

You play as a bunch of Scottish warriors trying to fight off the British who have invaded your homeland and you're trying to reconquer it back from them. It is straight up. So I have played maybe... I don't know, 20, 30 hours of, I just want to see Dynasty Warriors 2. That's my whole experience with the Musa genre. I'm like, I like it. Oh, and you know what? I played the Age of Calamity, the new Zelda one. That was a good time.

But that's it. That's like, I don't, I'm not a master at this genre or anything, but this feels like they've figured it out. They nailed it. It's you, you play as, you know, not Mel Gibson fighting off hordes of British people and beating the crap out of them with your sword.

doing third person melee combat. It feels good. You fight off the easy pawns and then you've got bigger captains that you can focus on and you have abilities that you can use. Either you can tell your spear men to use the spears or get the arrows, but then you also have like. team abilities where you can just be like, everyone shoot all your arrows at everybody and do a ton of damage. There's also like roguelike unlocks as well that build out the gameplay a little bit more.

So like you have combos that you can do, right? Your light combo at the end might do something. Your dodge might cause an explosion, stuff like that. It's fairly straightforward in terms of its presentation gameplay wise. You know what this is if you've seen this genre before.

But the setup is kind of neat. It's set up like a roguelike. You start from your sort of base screen. It's just a menu where you can like go to town and buy stuff or like upgrade your units or whatever. And then you go out and it's a bunch of different laid out.

Almost a bit like a map. Actually, it is literally a map, but laid out sort of like Binding of Isaac. Each of the areas has different rewards and you can see what they are in advance, that sort of thing. So maybe not like Binding of Isaac, maybe more like Slade the Spire.

And yeah, you go there, you fight them, there's bosses, you get to the end and you clear out the British and then you're like, yeah, we did it. And we go back. I wasn't able to finish it. I found it actually pretty challenging. The difficulty ramp is like, it's easy, easy. And then you fight one.

or two decent like enemies at the same time falls apart. It's like so much more challenging, which is cool. Like I do like that. I actually like the challenge of it. But no, it looks great. It has a really cool art style. I think the music's fantastic. It's like.

bagpipes and then also like hard metal rock it's great it's it's so much fun the sound effects are great the voice acting is obviously very scottish and they're like yelling like yeah for for liberty or what i don't know what they say but like there's just yelling and very excited it's a great game it's really really

cool. Check out the demo on Steam if you haven't already. It's a good time. Skate Story is another one developed by Sam Eng, I want to say is the name. Paper Cult were the developers of Tears of Metal. But yeah, Sam Eng on Skate Story. If you don't know what Skate Story is, you know...

Check it out. If you do know what it is, you're probably already excited for it. But yeah, Skate Story is a fantastic skateboarding game. I think this is a fantastic skateboarding game, but it's also like a fantastic adventure.

game. It's a lot more structured than I thought it would be. Like I had no idea going into it if it was going to be like a linear sort of like walking sim with some skateboarding gameplay, but no, like it actually has challenges and stuff that you can do in smaller maps. So It's structured almost like a poem of a video game. It's very weird. You play through a bunch of tutorial sections to open. It's a third-person skateboarding game where you are like a glass human. trying to swallow the moon.

And the universe is watching you and they don't want you to skateboard. It's like very clearly has commentary on like authoritarianism and what the state is allowed as allowing people to do or not do, which is kind of, you know, it leans back all the punk aspects of skateboarding and Tony Hawk.

the series and everything but more specifically just skateboard culture which i think is really cool sort of recontextualizes that and like it turns the skateboarder into into a myth almost i was gonna say i love when media does like Like a story about like a punk rock band in the future where punk rock is illegal. Like it's such a funny charged, like over the top comic book version of it. Exactly. It's so unnecessary because it's already fairly like punk culture is pretty.

Not, you know, you don't go to jail for being a punk rocker usually, but like they find ways to get you for doing some anarchist stuff. But no, Skate Story is like, it's really... The skateboarding feels fantastic. Like, it's not flick trick stuff, but it's a weird middle ground between Tony Hawk and the flick trick of skate. It's like you have this...

loop that shows up once you get into Ollie mode, but you can bend the loop with different buttons to do like a pop shove it or do like a kickflip. And there's obviously timing based stuff. So like if you're in the green window, you get a better jump and all that. They call them. the score damage, like you're dealing damage when you get a certain amount. There's like boss fights. I didn't know you could do boss fights in a skateboarding game. It works somehow. I really like it.

Yeah, I think you guys will enjoy this. I'm really curious what you think about it because you're really you're big into the Tony Hawk and skateboarding scene a lot more than I am anyway these days. But it's yeah, it's.

It's very poetic. It's a very poetic game. I love the prose. I love the writing. I think it's weird. It almost feels like if if Goichi Suda got really into skateboarding for like three weeks, this is the game he would make. It's it's incredibly bizarre. And that's the biggest compliment.

that I can give to any video game is that it reminds me of a suit of 51 piece. So, so this is awesome. Yeah. Skate story. Check it out. on Steam, part of X-Fest. And the last one I want to shout out, although there's a ton of really good stuff, is called Shadow of the Road. I had not heard of this one before. It's a CRPG strategy game.

Where you're playing as, well, you're basically controlling a team of people in, I don't remember exactly what the era is, but it's like end of, I don't know. I don't want to get it wrong, but whatever. It's like feudal Japan. Yeah, feudal Japan. Yeah. But I think they specifically say it's like the border between the end of that and the start of the next era or something. But whatever, whatever the point may be, it's just like.

There's something going on. It's a tumultuous time in Japan and you are playing as two different characters to start, a samurai and a, well, I guess a... former samurai you're working for the Shogun now. And, um, you're like magical companion who is also, uh, an archer and it's, it plays like, um, a bit like a me, me, me game.

like one of those, like a Desperados, something like that. Um, but it's, it's more like a, like a traditional CRPG. You have a hex positioning or XCOM is probably a better comparison point because it does have that like, um,

armor blocking cover thing. Whenever you hover over cover, it'll be like full shield, half shield, that sort of stuff. You can target enemies in different ways and you have different abilities. It's actually very complex. I think the demo does a good job of explaining everything. It's just long enough for you to understand it by the end.

Narratively, it's interesting. Like you have these conversations between the two characters and it's different set of characters as Ty goes on because it's like a CRPG. Your choices, you can see, influence the alignment of the characters. So it'll be like, hey, you didn't want to kill this group of people. Or you said, oh, we won't be mean to the shogun. So now I'm leaning more to the right. I mean, more towards.

Samurai. So like that sort of stuff, right? It's fairly straightforward. It's a little janky. It's a little weird. Like it feels... It feels like if this is the demo and it's out in two months, I would maybe wait a little while and like clean some stuff up. But it's almost a charming jank at the same time. Like there's stuff clipping through characters that like.

That seems like an accident, but it weirdly, I'm like, I don't really, it doesn't bug me that much because it doesn't seem like it's trying to be a hundred percent historically accurate, but also they did their research. It says in the start, I don't know. It might just be a me thing, but it doesn't bug me as much. I thought it was really fun. I really enjoyed my time doing the combat. It has turn order stuff you need to be cognizant of and items that you have to...

equipped to the characters in advance. So you need to think about combat engagements, not when you see them coming, because everything just sort of happens on the fly. You'll be in a story conversation and then like, oh, whoa. These bandits are now here. So you can't be like, oh, there's a bandit camp over there. Let's make sure we're ready in advance all the time. So you have to think about what might happen eventually.

It's neat. There's a lot of different characters. You meet like a big hulking guy who can ram into enemies and there's... an old guy who you meet is like daughter. She can use her hair to attack enemies. Like there's a little bit of mystical magic stuff going on, but it's fairly grounded. I think it's really interesting. I'm excited to see what the full game ends up being like. Cause yeah.

I had no idea what this was. It's my favorite part of Next Fest. You play a game you've never heard of before and you end up playing something really cool that you're excited for. I was going to say, I feel like this has a sort of like... uh wild wild west thing going on because there's in the screenshots there's like a giant mechanical scorpion shooting lightning out of its stinger yeah it doesn't you know what i was saying it's it's got a little bit of that

how historically accurate are we trying to be? Remind me again, which period in feudal Japan was it with the giant scorpion? Yeah, when did they have the mechanical scorpions? There's also a great screenshot where two characters are looking at a wagon full of machinery.

and one of the characters says wait isn't this gaijin technology that is the funniest part is there's a lot of words where it's like it kind of feels like uh i didn't see any of the mech stuff in the demo but there are narrative bits in this where

It seems almost like Forza Horizon, like four or five, especially five, I guess, where it's just like random Spanish in the middle of a sentence. You're like, OK, all right. But this game has a text highlight thing. So in the middle of a conversation, you could hover over the text. Yeah, it'll explain. what gaijin is bro i hate gaijin technology yeah you're like gaijin is a foreigner that's yeah yeah it's it's

Honestly, I really liked this. Again, it's a little janky. It probably needs a little bit more work, but I'm a big fan. I'm definitely looking forward to this one. No, this looks awesome. Another Angle Games. Yeah, I think so too. I'm wishlisting this. I'm going to pick this up.

Hell yeah. There you go. And then Frank, you've got one as well here. The union syndrome. Yeah, so this is Union Syndrome Rhythm Psychosis. This came on my raid, and I never mess with Steam Next Fest stuff, because I'm like, I'll just play, like, that's why I didn't mess with the Battlefield beta. It's like, I'll just play the game when it's out, because I hate being teased. But the timing...

this is incredible because i'm so obsessed in researching rhythm games and uh because this is published by the same like team that helped put out a needy streamer overload so it's got the same thing where it's like when you turn on the game it's stimulates like a windows XP thing. The premise of this game is it's about, uh, an otaku girl who's so it's a rhythm game about an otaku girl who's obsessed with rhythm games. And all she does is sit in her room and plays.

games and listens to dempa music which is that hyper like hyper hyper j-pop um she listens to it so much that she goes crazy and starts visualizing like rhythm game demons in her room that are telling her to keep playing to find the secret transmissions in the dempa songs and so it is an actual rhythm game but like dd streamer it's like pushing along a story and a narrative

And it's got so much going. And, like, the demo itself is maybe, like, I think I spent, like, a full hour. It gives you maybe, like, a dozen songs you can play through. You can even play through, like, the theme song of Needy Streamer Overload in it. It's also got, like, Toho songs. It's got original music. It's all great. The art's super cute. The writing's really funny.

once you finish like the first five set of songs you have to like look around your room and it's like it looks like my room it's like oh there's the hug pillow there's like the anime figures um there's like trash everywhere and then it's like oh you see a glint you see like a glint and it's like oh i found a Zempa CD under this pile of clothes. Let's put it in. Just like your room. Everything you want glints. Yeah, it's great. So it's so funny. There's a thing in the game where like...

If your mom comes home and comes to your room, you hit the tab button and it's called mommy mode. And it just like shifts to like, oh, I was just watching like a boat racing video. Or I was just watching like.

Cats on YouTube. So is it like a Five Nights at Freddy's thing? Like your mom just shows up and you got to like, oh, I'm just kidding. Yeah. So like not in the middle of the rhythm games. That's just part of the story thing. And I wonder like how the game, what character arc. Cause yeah, the girl, like the girl's the Hikikomori neat. Like she lives in her room. She's a.

afraid to leave the room she doesn't want to leave the room when her mom's home but like when the mom leaves she'll go out and she'll get like energy drinks to like and you get like more points but you're on energy drinks and things like that and it's just genuinely funny the music's good and then the rhythm game itself the core of the game I'm sure if you can rebind if you play with the controller, but you see the girl at her computer typing and like...

you know getting in sync with the music so the default is like your two left keys are sd and i think it's like kl or gh so so it's just this but it's so specific and hyper and you can calibrate the timing so it's just tapping the four keys in sync and getting

the all the rhythm patterns so it's very similar to playing like beat mania you're not spinning a dj thing on the left but very similar to beat mania the music's good and um yeah like playing beat mania or ddr it was fun for me to find my like oh what level am i comfortable with so there's like

and then like rhythm demon, whatever the super hard mode is. And it's like, I could do some songs on normal, some on super hard. And like, there's a difficulty scale of like one to 10 and you can find the sweet spot. I was able to full clear a song and things like that. But, yeah, it's really good. But it's just, same thing like Needy Streamer. It just hits, like, all the otaku stuff. Well, it's like, you know.

Japanese-made, so it's so authentic and great and funny and cute. The art's awesome. The music's great. The actual rhythm game part of it's good, so when this is out with achievements, like, oh, my God, I want to play all this. So, yeah, I rarely...

I rarely go touch Steam Next Fest stuff, but it's like, oh my God, this was made for me. So it's awesome. This is why I get mad at Next Fest. I would... pre-order I would like let me send the money in advance help you guys out like please like I legitimately want to like spend the money for it today so I can like I don't know what else so that's why I'm like oh my god the community service aspect please guys wish list like oh my god I need this game I need it I don't know if it's

2026. There's no release date. I'm like, Oh my God. Oh my God. Yeah. That is the main thing with next fest, man. It's a real challenge, but yeah, that's, that's union syndrome.

Rhythm psychosis. Jeremy, did you play any Nexus demos? I played a bunch, yeah. We're going to do a Nexus video, but there's one I would like to shout out. Yeah, please. Here on the podcast. Love Eternal. This is a... 2d platformer sort of like psychological horror precision platformer um i've seen this yeah i've really really enjoyed the demo for this uh it sort of starts in a very

like normal domestic setting of going out from your room to eat dinner with your family. And then it transitions into sort of like weird unsettling. like mega structures that you're platforming around. But the core mechanic of this is that you are running and jumping and flipping gravity.

and you can flip gravity once per jump while you're in the air you can flip gravity uh so there's sort of like momentum based like jump and then move and then at the right time flip gravity so you have this sort of like sine wave trajectory uh stuff like that And then there's crystals that you can catch in air that add another flip like the like Celeste sort of. And yeah, it's really good. I'm super enjoying it. All right.

There you go. Love Eternal. Yeah, that sounds awesome, man. I saw some screenshots of it. I think I have it on my list of 9 million things that I found that look interesting. And it was one that stood out of, yeah, I love the art style. I think it looks really cool. I think the best thing you can do in a NextFest...

Steam page or any Steam page really but especially when you're trying to hook people in or even with the trailer is like show normal shit and then one page where something really weird is happening and I'm like okay well now I need to see what that is.

Yeah, this looks really cool. Love Eternal. Check it out. Check out all those games. I'll have links to all of the ones that we've mentioned in the description. Again, Jeremy said we're going to have a NextFest video on Noclip 2. Check that out as well. And let us know what you've been playing. It's been a week of NextFest since...

or almost a week since you, well, since we recorded this and when you're listening to this. So let us know what you've enjoyed from Steam Next Fest. I'm always excited to see what demos people pull out, especially because this one has felt... particularly hard to find good demos in. I tend to scroll through as many as I can before the webpage crashes on me. And this one has been...

AI art out the ass. It's been bad video games. It's, Hey, you want to play beer pong? And I'm like, I wish, yeah, that actually would be fun. I wish there was a good version of that. And then you open it and it's like, but you spent a week on this. Some of the stuff I'm like, I just,

I would love to know what the logic is behind some of the, like, did you just have a hundred dollars you wanted to get rid of? Like, why did you put this on steam? I don't, I don't understand. Um, very weird. It's very weird, but, uh, Yeah, I don't know. This one, it happens every time, but this one in particular has been very hard to sift through and find the really great games because there are some that look okay because it's AI art that like...

is just, they obfuscate it enough or like it just sort of fits in well enough that you can't really tell or you don't know and then you open it up and it's like, oh, it's like AI voice acting and stuff. It's like, you know, sometimes I have a little leniency for that stuff. It is what it is. But there's just so much of it here. And for every game that looks interesting that I haven't even had a chance to play yet to know if it is, there's nine more where I'm like, I don't know.

Why? If Despolote can just get everyone that they know to do the voice acting, then anyone can do that. Exactly. It doesn't have to be good. I would rather listen to like mediocre, your friend doing voice acting that's like serviceable. I would rather listen to your like slightly charismatic friend, Jeff, just like fucking busting out a line.

That's why every PS1 game like Resident Evil or even Dynasty Warriors is so memorable because it's like, oh my god, this voice acting is... so authentic yeah i don't know what you want to say in a weird way like really good voice acting is memorable and then like below par voice acting is very memorable as well yeah exactly there's like a charm to it It's fun. But even then, it's like placeholder stuff, you know?

Like if this is your next best demo and you're just trying to get it out there in front of like a publisher or get enough wish lists or something to get a little bit more capital or whatever the case might be, this is partially an advertising event more than it is getting it in front of consumers.

placeholder stuff is like, it's okay if it's bad, but if it's AI, it's like, I'm not excited about it anymore. You know, now I'm like, I don't know why you did that. It's whatever. Everyone has their own, their own, uh, limit on that sort of thing. But. For me, I'm just, I'm pretty hard on it because there's only so many, you know, there's only so many games we can cover.

If I'm going to cover one that has AI stuff or one that doesn't, I'm going to pick the one that doesn't every time. Yeah, that was also my experience is that scrolling through NextFest was a absurd amount of AI generated thumbnails.

I don't know. I wonder if the logic is that because the little capsule image is so small on the page generally that they're like, no one will notice or I can get away with it. Or I wonder if it's just like people being like, I don't have money to hire an artist, so I'll do this. But, you know, I don't know.

I would, I would rather have like the illusion of polished art to me is less effective because it's sort of, I mean, this has been the thing I know air has come a long way, but like it still is this kind of thing where it's like.

oh, that looks kind of good. And then you look at it for a second. You're like, oh, no, that doesn't look good at all. Like it falls apart under the light of scrutiny. Whereas I feel like the meta is to do so. Like if you're not an artist and you can't hire an artist, just like.

draw something and if it's like if it's sufficiently janky i will notice it because i'll be like what what was this person thinking with this and like that's charming though like i don't know i feel i i mean i get it like There is this feeling...

As someone who has learned visual art skills to make games, I get that there is a feeling that you only want to put your best foot forward. You don't want to put out a piece of art that sucks, especially when it's the capsule art. It's the storefront for your game. the it's the window shopping experience where people are just like scrolling by and it has to catch their eye um but if that's the case it's like

You know, you're walking by two ice cream stores and one is like the sterile like pink berry that's like white tile inside. And one is like, you know, some some lady at like a lemonade stand. Like actually restaurants is probably the perfect comparison. Cause like, if I go to a shawarma place called to like, called like, you know, uh, uh, shawarma, but it's missing three vowels for some reason. Um, and the inside's really clean and the branding is like, it's got a sans serif font.

I'm not in there. I know what you did. I know where you got all that from. You made it on Canva. But if I see a restaurant where it's like someone's cousin made the branding and everything in the restaurant was repurposed from the previous pizza store it used to be, that's when you know you're eating at a good shawarma place. True. It's really steam.

Steam is just the swarm of places of gaming. Yeah. Looking for the good ones. Yeah. Restaurant is a good analogy or like a band. Like I, if, if a band sounds very sort of like. like overly familiar or polished like they're doing an imitation of a good band I feel like it's less appealing than if a band is like

you know, comes out and just starts like screaming into the microphone. You're like, these people are fucking nuts. But I respect their their commitment to this. I want your crust. Give me a little crust. Yeah, I need a little crust on my art. A little crust. That's like what makes it fucking human, you know? Yep.

Oh, real. We still like Steam Netflix, though. We like all the games that are on there. It's cool. Not all of them, but we like finding out cool, weird experiences. Again, share yours in the comments or check out that video on Netflix. We do have some emails as well from you lovely listeners. Frank, you want to get through? Maybe just two of these before we get out. Yeah, I know you have to bounce whenever. Feel free.

All right. Yeah. If you want to write to us, please send us an email, chat, internet, chat message, digital, whatever. Podcast at noclip.video. Send us your emails. Thank you so much. Podcast at noclip.video or in the Discord for patrons, podcast chat. Thank you so much. Our first comes from RetroRentsAl. With it being October and the month of all things spooky, do each of you have a favorite game? Classic or new? They love to take out this time of year and replay.

I used to try to tie my Quest for Glory series replaced that I'd hit the fourth game around this time. It's got dark Lovecraftian themes, fall pumpkins everywhere. Ooh, that's a good question. I think every year around October, I try to get through a new...

horror game series that I haven't played before. Last year, I played all of the classic Resident Evil games up until four. That was a fun experience. This year, I've been making my way through the Silent Hill games. I'm on three now. I just started it last night. Hey.

Those are really good games. If no one's ever told you before, the Silent Hill series, it's good for a reason. I think that's, is that kind of the end of them being great? And then it's sort of all over the place. Four has a lot of sort of like... not filler, but like a lot of low moments. But I think for some of the high moments of four, I think are some of like the heights of Silent Hill.

Oh, cool. Great. I think, yeah, I mean, as a latecomer, I have no nostalgia for the series at all. I started playing a few years ago for the first time from the first one. I think one is perfect. I think two is perfect. I think three is damn near.

I don't know about perfect, but it's fucking it's one of it's in the top three with one, two and three. But I think four is definitely worth playing. Yeah, I played two last year after I finished the Resident Evil games. And I mean, it was fantastic. I played the remake for this one and it was, you know. Yeah, it's exactly what a remake of Silent Hill 2 would look and feel and sound like. Maybe a little bit too much extra on some parts, like the combat feels good, which...

I didn't get from Silent Hill 2 original, but whatever. And Silent Hill 1 is still a great game, which they're also remaking. So I guess I'll have to play that one again in the future. How dare they? I know. No, ironically a little bit. How dare they? It's a little weird. It's a little weird. They probably shouldn't remake Resident Evil.

evil one again right they should just leave that alone they did it enough i i will say if they do a third person over the shoulder resident before resident evil one i that's my dream game it's really i i totally get it like i get the appeal of that idea but i'm like I'm fine, man. I've played two versions of one. I'm happy. If they do that, if they give the Resident Evil 4 treatment to Resident Evil 1, I think they will need to find ways to make the combat more frictional without just like...

In my mind, the easy route to take on that is is give like like sway or something or like make it harder to aim. But I think that's a that's a cop out solution because that's not fun and nobody likes that. Like it's a negative sort of like feedback mechanism where it's like.

Resident Evil 4, you're so precise that I think the sort of like finite combat in Resident Evil 1 would be trivialized by having that amount of control. So they would need to find a way to make it challenging and not just like... You know, I have seven bullets, but that's fine because these zombies each take like one tap in the head. Yeah. What what series do you guys like picking up for for October?

I genuinely like when MMOs are just like whatever you see, whatever, like not always online games, but to me, like traditionally MMOs, like World of Warcraft, their Halloween stuff is so fun because you could get masks. So like, especially back in the day, like now you can. what do you forget we call it transmog everything but like in vanilla wow you were just stuck with whatever gear you had but during halloween oh my god i put a mask on now i'm an ogre now i'm a pirate now i'm it's like

I love that. And you log on and now Ellen Forrest has, or Goldshire has pumpkins everywhere and witches' cauldrons and you get candy. So I remember playing Destiny 2 during a Halloween season. It was like, oh my God, it's so fun. So I love when games will just... decorate their spaces. So I currently have an active FOMC 14 subscription. I don't know if they do any Halloween stuff, but I like when like those, like I think even Call of Duty in years past have done.

I think they're actually doing a big Halloween thing. I think they're adding Jason Voorhees and Chucky, a bunch of cheesy stuff. My favorite combatants. Dude, yeah, if that's Warzone, I'll check it out. They put Jigsaw from Saw. So I like when multiplayer games or online games do seasonal stuff. There's not ones I, like, traditionally replay. I'm always hungry to replay, like, Resident Evil 4 and things like that. But, yeah, I don't...

I'm always so weird with like seasons. Again, my head right now, today's date is like August 8th, 1998. I track time based on where we're at in my WCW watch along. So I'm in August. We just had, you know, so we're leading up to... Fall Brawl, the Wolf Pack versus Hollywood NWO. So it's like, oh, the real world, it's October? Guys, I got to know what's going on with Sting. Is Ming joining? So my sense of time is so messed up.

But I do like online MMO games doing decorations. Yeah, those are great. It has nothing on the summer of 98. But it is cool when there's pumpkins in World of Warcraft. I agree. I love that stuff. It's like it makes it festive in the video game. Love it. Jeremy, what do you fatal frame?

I've never played Fatal Frame, actually. I will probably play it this year. Yeah, I like to play new... horror game not new like they just came out but horror games that are new to me um yeah i'm not a big not a big game you don't you're only replaying you know it makes me feel weird yeah i don't know yeah i feel like i'm like There's so many games that I want to play.

That it's like I don't even have time to replay stuff. So, yeah, I don't have like a comfort game unless it's like something I haven't played in a million years. That's what I was going to say is I need like I'm in the same boat where if I played something and I thought it was great, I will let it just be great in my head forever. But if I haven't played it in 10 years...

I kind of want to see if it was good or if I was just a stupid kid, you know? Yeah, for sure. Like, I really want to replay Jet Force Gemini at some point. Yeah. Because I don't know if it's good or not. Also, that was a game that I mostly watched my brother play. So it's fucking it's my turn, dude. Mom said it's my turn on the N64. Now that I'm in my 30s. You don't have to hold the unplugged Madcats controller anymore. Now you can hold the real grey N64. You're controlling the camera.

Yeah, I'll probably just play new games. Yeah, Fatal Frame is definitely on the list. I've also never played Siren. I would like to play Siren. Oh, yeah, okay. So those are probably my two. And I would like to play more of Clock Tower. I played... a little bit of it and enjoyed it um but i played the like the 2d one that i think

I don't know. I can't remember the order of release. Frank, didn't they make it like a 2D one and then the 3D one was like the first one released in the West or something? Or the first popular one? Yeah, I know. They just remastered the original Clock Tower, which is like 2D. And then I know Clock Tower 3 is the weird one that's like... directed by the guy who also did the film Battle Royale. So I've always wanted to play Clock Tower 3. Oh shit, really?

Yeah, there's something involved with that. Oh my god, dude. Yeah, it's Kinji Fukasaku, the guy who we just talked about because of Battles Without Honor and Humanity. That's fucking nutty. Now you gotta play that. Oh, shit. That's crazy. That guy invented Kiryu, kind of. Yeah. All right, cool. I'm putting that on the list. Also, the cover of it is very unnerving, the North American box art.

Yeah, I got you. Yeah, you would pay Fatal Frame rules. I don't think I actually beat one, but number two I did. And I feel like it's like, oh, that's the side of the hill too. Like where it's like, okay, they figured out it. And so I feel like one is good, but like, I don't know, two is. Badass. So it's like, what does it mean? Something butterfly. Crimson butterfly. It's so sick. Yeah. All right. We did a remake of that one as well.

For you to not play, Jeremy, but you can play the PS2 one. I will play the original. Also, recommending Kuon to people who have not played Kuon. From Soft's survival horror game takes place in also feudal Japan. Very cool. There you go. I should check that out. I was going to say adding on to the Halloween joy. AJP, similar question. What kind of Halloween scary horror games do you prefer? Unsolved mystery, existential dread, jump scares, and then what's your most memorable jump scare?

Get the jump scares out of my face, personally. I hate that shit. Boo! What did I just say? No, yeah, it's so weird. When I think of horror games, it really is my experience as a kid renting a game from Blockbuster. And then having to look at video game magazines and walkthroughs of how to beat it because I was too scared to discover on my own. So I do like survival horror. I am spoiled by like...

The post-Resident Evil 4, like, oh, my God, once they added, like, I could just shoot and kill this stuff so easy, the power fantasy. Like, I love Resident Evil 5, but that's not a horror game. That's an action, you know, and it literally is an action game. So it's like, to me, horror is... Yeah, resource management, like obstructed camera view, PS1 graphics. So, yeah, I do like traditional survival horror stuff. That's why it's like, oh, my God, I've never played Clock Tower 3. Clock Tower.

Clack Tower. Clack Tower. We got to get into Clack Tower. Yeah. So I do like that. Yeah, I don't. That's why Five Nights at Freddy's and like a lot of these like Twitch era horror games. I just don't. It just that's not that doesn't read to me.

Yeah, so I like the old school survival horror stuff. But not like too old school. I'm not going to play like a text adventure. Yeah, like that alien game that invented survival horror games where it's just like ASCII art. Whatever. Yeah, I'm kind of the same way. I like... I feel like...

survival horror around the ps1 era was very because of part of it is just like limitations of uh technology like because they were so limited in technology they had to rely a lot more on atmosphere and sort of like

psychological horror, I guess is what I enjoy. I like things that, um, that make me feel like a sense of dread and doom, not like something, not because I'm like, so there's going to pop out and scare me, but because I'm like genuinely afraid to venture deeper into this world and unfold. kind of like how fucked up it is that's that's why Silent Hill 2 the original works so well for me because it's like

You know, you you see these little glimpses of this horror. It's almost like David Lynch, where like David Lynch is so good at. And I mean, David Lynch was a huge influence on Silent Hill. So this makes sense. But Lynch does this thing where it's like, ah, here's like 1950s America. And then it's like, but if you.

zoom in it's all fucked up and it's like that's what fucks me up because it's like you you know that something is coming that is is going to fuck you up and you're slowly getting closer to it and it's the feeling of dread of like

understanding and comprehending why this world is fucked up. Not that like a guy is going to pop out, although Mulholland drive does have the best jump scare ever. So yeah, that is, I think the thing about horror that I tend to be drawn to the most myself as well as like,

If it's all horror all the time, that to me diminishes it. Everything stops being scary. I'm just on edge the whole time where if it's like sometimes it's scary or sometimes it's a joke, then you never know. Every buildup is like.

What do we get? What are we in for? What kind of world am I about to see? You know, is it going to be a scary monster? Is it going to be a funny moment? Is it going to be a weird character? That was what I liked about Alan Wake 2 was like, you never know what you're going to walk into. And sometimes it's just a musical performance. Sometimes it is a scary monster. Sometimes it's just a pretzel. Like, okay, what was scary about that? I don't know. It's weird. Video games are weird about that.

Yeah, I'm in the same boat, though. I don't like jump scares. Not because I don't like getting scared. I like getting scared, but like they don't scare me. I'm always just annoyed. I'm like, this is annoying. Yeah, it's not scary. It's more like it's like a somatic overload. Like I'm not afraid. I'm just like. It's like if someone like kicks me in the dick, I'm not like, whoa, dude, you're so scary. It's just like, don't do that. Yeah, it's it's never exciting.

You know, it's just like, whatever. It's always a company with a loud noise or like something. Like if you're hanging out with your friends on Halloween and going around to the campfire telling ghost stories and someone's like, all right, here's my story. And then they have a guy run up behind you and grab you and go like, ah.

You're not like, whoa, dude, that was like you're a master of the craft of telling scary stories. You're just like, why would you do that horrible thing to me? Objectively scary, but like. Not in a cool way, not where I'm like, dude, he was so good at scaring me. It's in like a, yeah, you attacked my basic.

physiological response system yeah you like bypassed my brain to like make me have a mammalian response of startling me it's not like three weeks from now we're not gonna be like dude could you do that again because that'll scare me again like it's you know it's whatever

It's not satisfying. Stupid. Yeah. That's why I like mouthwashing. It's like weird. Yeah. Scary. It's not scary because it's trying to scare me. It's scary because the world is fucked up and the people in it are monsters. And are we not? Who's the real monsters? It's man. It's man. Yeah, I think we'll have to leave it there this week. These other questions look really good and I'd like to get into it and not have them rushed out. So thank you for sending them in.

as Frank is always so diligent about finding all of them and bringing together the best ones. They're all good questions, though. So thank you for sending them in again to podcast at noclip.video. We got a lot of cool stuff coming up, perhaps way too much. So many documentaries. You can check out the patron. update on Patreon, the patron show. There's a lot of really cool stuff that Danny has included in that episode, including sneak peeks of...

upcoming documentaries that look really good. Again, on Noclip 2, we've got the Mugenics feature, or preview rather, which you should check out. I did watch all of it since we talked about Mugenics last week. Really... really cool looking game. Danny had me excited that preview put it over the moon. So this is, I think, a really good time. And again, the Final Fantasy Spirits Within.

Podcast will be up either again now or very soon from the release of this episode. So hopefully you enjoy us being really confused about a perfectly cromulent... sci-fi movie from the early 2000s. So check that out again. Patreon.com slash NoClip to get access to that. Become a supporter. Become a supporter on NoClip2 if you want as well. There may be some discount codes. I don't know. I don't run NoClip. I've just heard things.

From the grapevine, a little birdie told me. Did you say the grapevine? Because it's Halloween? Yeah, that's what I said. I didn't mean to say that, but it sounds way cooler if I did. uh i don't know whatever enjoy some some video games we'll catch you next week uh for episode 250 me and frank and

Someone else. I don't know. We'll have to figure that out. That'll be an interesting two-person episode. Maybe we'll come up with a fun game or something. Or find some guests. Maybe it'll be a surprise for episode 250. We'll check it in. Play some video games. Check out Clack Tower. Buy whatever makes you happy. And I hope you have a good weekend. We'll see you next time. Bye. Bye.