Hello friends and welcome to episode 226 of the No Clear Podcast. It's a crewcast. The whole crew is here. Jesse managed to make it all the way to Amsterdam and back. He's here. We have a lot of fucking video games to talk about. demonetized on YouTube already for that F-bomb. Let's go. Probably because last week we didn't have a crew cast. Last week we just had a fun little interview about Atomfall, which is a fun-ass video game. It was a good interview.
Thank you, Jesse. You're welcome. Great job, Jesse. You guys are great. Jeremy's here. Frank's here. Frank's great, too. Shebang. Frank is shaking his head. He's like, you left your country and you didn't go to Japan. I'm sorry. I didn't even do one weed. I was there. I was in Amsterdam. I was 420. I didn't do one narcotic. I know what a loser.
It was great. Anything. Did you have sex with a prostitute at least? I was there with my wife. So, I mean, I'm going to say no. Did she have sex with a prostitute? What do you guys do? What happens in Amsterdam stays in Amsterdam. Let's go. The only thing I want to say that's very funny. 420. uh easter same day but also the day before i was like wow all these holidays all converging now we just need the pope to die and it'll be a crazy day here boom
Do you think it's because he smoked too much weight? I think it's because he was in the vicinity of J.D. Vance and just, like, he was done. He couldn't do anything. That's what it was? Yeah. I think he played Indica last year and he got the wrong message from him. He was like, you know what I need to do? Smoke some indica. Yeah, exactly. You know that popemobile? Sorry? It's just a drivable hotbox.
That's true. It's also a bulletproof hotbox. You were having a panic attack in there and you were like, smash the windows, I gotta get out of here. This is real. I thought this was like a joke in movies. No, that's real. They need to be able to see him. While he's not getting shot. Because Pope was shot. I forget which one. Or somebody tried to shoot John Paul or something like that. I don't know. Presumably because of his stance on marijuana.
Yeah, that's what it is. Imagine how you can drive around I guess you can't drive and smoke weed at the same time. It doesn't stop half of Oakland. That is very true. I actually have an interesting tidbit on this. When I had an RV, a recreational vehicle, there are certain laws that... pertain only to RVs and not cars.
So, for example, if I was driving in the front and I had a friend in the back in the house portion, like, you know, go on a road trip with friends, they could crack a beer and drink it in the back because it's like a limousine. Yeah, totally. Because it's not open container because they're in, like, the house portion. But you can technically walk from your... Wait, was yours a cab, a truck cab? Or could you walk from...
I forget, your RV, you had to get out of the front to get in the back, right? No, you could crawl through the back, but it was like, not while you're driving or you're dying. Like if you were like, hey man, give me one of those brews and fucking go off the road. You can't crawl into the back seat while you're driving.
Yeah, that's true. That's a good point. I'm not sure where we draw the line as a culture, but for whatever reason, yeah, someone could crack a beer. So I was always curious, like, if we got pulled over and my friend was blasting a joint in the back, you know, and all the windows are open. I don't know. I don't know where we draw the line. What do they do if they pull you over? and a friend was drinking a beer in the back. Or like smoking. Oh, I mean...
I wouldn't be smoking weed because I'm a law-abiding citizen. But my friend in the back, I would be like, you know, I can't control him. I'm up here. eyes on the road officer of keeping up with the flow of traffic and it's not my responsibility to What if you get a context high? What are you going to do? That's why I don't know how legal the weed thing is. We have to ask a limo driver this. Like a limo driver in Southern California where this probably comes up a lot.
What's a context high? I knew it. I saw it coming. That's a Family Guy joke where Stewie Griffin pretends to be high. He's like, I think I'm getting a context high. And now I say that. That's pretty good. Thank you. Instead of contact high, I just say context high. That's beautiful. Yeah, I wonder. I think limo drivers are probably more worried about getting like STIs or something like that.
than hotboxing it. But that's a good point. You could... The only thing that would get you done is if they weren't wearing a seatbelt, right? They have to have a seatbelt, don't they, in the back of your RV? I actually don't, in an RV, I don't think so. It's been a while. I don't know. None of this is professional or legal advice if you drive an RV around with your friends.
We have a trailer so it gets dragged behind the car. So it's not like an RV where you were driving the car. You have to do some sort of like speed. two or speed one sort of crawling out the back of a car you know it'd be quite difficult to get into the trailer while you're driving down the highway. But I'm pretty sure like whenever, because like we'll stick all of our camping shit in there. So like I'll put in my like daughter's bicycle and shit. Right. So there's just.
And then whenever we arrive, wherever we're at a campsite, I open up the door and it's like a fucking disaster has occurred. Like, you know, all like the Diet Cokes that I put on the bed are all over. So I always think like, It's probably really not a fun time to ride in the back of the trailer, but, you know.
One time I was moving and we didn't have enough space in the front of the truck. This is a joke if the police are listening. Me and my friend were in the back of the truck with all the furniture and everything trying to not get hurt. That was fun.
So I can tell you firsthand that I would not recommend being in a moving vehicle with a lot of loose items. Yeah, my dad bought me and my brother in the back of like a little, like a shitty little trailer, which I don't even know if he owned it or just... he found it or something but it was just like a a terrible one axle like i don't know six by six foot wooden trailer like it was just like a like
Absolutely, like a donkey should have been pulling it. And we were bringing stuff out to the dump in Waterford, my hometown, and he let me and my brother sit in the back. And he was driving like 40 down the road and we were just waving at people and shit. And it's like... That's awesome.
Little screws are going loose as you're bumping over. That sounds like the kind of thing where, like when you're a kid, your dad is like, if you guys aren't good, I'm going to take you to the dump and leave you there. And then my dump trailer, you're just like, oh no, he's doing, for real this time, he's taking us to the dump. When I played football as well, our manager had like a painter, like a contract painter guy. And oftentimes we wouldn't have enough people like parents.
to bring us to like an away game and like 30 miles away and out on the coast. So we just stick us all in the back of his paint fan. So there'd be like 10 of us in the back of this, like sitting on paint cans in the back of a, like a white van with no windows. And he'd bang, he'd bang if there was like police for some reason. I think there was windows in the back doors. So we want us to dock if we went past the stage. Were they taped over, perhaps?
I was going to say, this sounds like when you see footage of Nazis pulling up to a white supremacist rally, that's how they pull up. There's 15 of them in the back of a paint van with the windows taken over. Or they pull us over and think we're being human trafficked. this guy only stole children who were dressed in soccer gear, I guess. He stole an entire soccer team at once. Exactly. He was the greatest thief of all time. So what did you do in Amsterdam, if you weren't?
You know, doing weed or doing ladies. What else is there to do? I mean, it was my first time in Europe. It was my first time outside of North America. So I was, yeah, really, it was my first time. So it was nice to just. look around the rest of the country. We spent a lot of time obviously in Amsterdam. That's where our hotel was. We actually got a lot of really good advice from a patron.
super helpful. Let me get his name because he was just like, he gave us so many good restaurants. Atomic, apologies. I'm going to preface this by saying anything I say in Dutch I'm butchering it. It's not on purpose. Great language. Very funny. Very nice. Very helpful from the Discord. You have us a lot of really good places to go, including museums.
which were a lot of fun uh we had a lot of great food although uh i don't really get down with the dutch delicacies the pickled herring not for me But I like the dessert. The Dutch pancakes were really good. Had a lot of those. We went traveling, like I said, outside of Amsterdam, so like some of the neighboring cities. We went to Utrecht, which was really cool, and Zandvoort, Zandt and all that. Yeah, it was really nice.
Yeah, that was my first time going to an ocean too, the North Sea, which is wild because I'm surrounded by two oceans and I've never gone to either of them. Have you ever seen the ocean in your life? That was the first time I'd ever actually seen the ocean. I just got flown over. Sorry.
Yeah, did you look at it at play? Yes, in the corner's eyes the whole flight. He's like, I don't want to see it in person. That was the first time I was in front of. I smelt the salt coming off of it. It was beautiful. That's insane. You've been to Boston before. That's what I'm saying. I've been to Boston like three times.
Three times and I just never went east. You're going to be Boston in like two days. I know. We're going to go to Cape Cod. I promise. It'll be my second ocean in one year. It'll be great. I'll get it all out of the way. Then I'll go to the Pacific Ocean at some point.
Yeah, so that was just great going to all those little places. Zanfort was beautiful. It was like this sandy beach with all these different, like the architecture was really cool. It was just such a blast to be there in a place that felt so different and yet so... like at home uh the one big thing i want to mention that i thought was really really cool
without just going into every bit of my itinerary. We went to the Rijksmuseum, which they have Rembrandt's Nightwatches there, a lot of really great classic paintings. They had some Van Gogh. That was really nice to see. But there was one painting that I saw of St. Bavo Church. in Utrecht, or no sorry in Harlem where we also went.
and i saw the painting it was done in the 16th century it's by this guy like you know Here, when you go to a museum in Canada or America, the closest you're getting is some old building from the 1800s, at best, late 1800s, that you can still go to.
I went into the church. I saw a painting of a church from the 16th century and then I went into that church and stood where the guy did the painting. And they had like a printout of it at the church where you could stand where he did it and they had like outlines of the things that had been moved in the painting. It was just,
It was so, I felt like part of the world when that happened. I was like, oh my God, I'm in history. I'm living it. So that was just a really eye-opening experience for me of like how old the world is and the fact that we still live in it and shit. Because again, like. Hell yeah.
you see a building here, a painting here, and it's like, this was a fur trader in 1893. This used to be a McDonald's. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. This building is the same building it was. It was just slightly shorter. All right, cool. That's cool. That was a blast.
Yeah. What was any good food? We had some Iraqi food? Oh, my God. Forget about it. It was so good. I know. That's what I'm saying. I had never done that before, but it was really good. I don't remember the name of my dish. Again, I'm already butchering enough. Dutch, I don't need to ruin any other languages. Dutch Iraqi dish, that's a real fucking... Well, the cool thing was, like, they have, obviously, every culture in Europe, you know, is like, everybody's right there.
So I was more excited, if anything, to try different cuisines. We had some Italian food that was just awful. Like the worst Italian food I've ever had in my life. The pizza was... Not to say that the food there is bad necessarily from Italians. We just went to like... touristy spots on accident um we didn't know but across the street from there great new york bagel place so that was cool uh yeah the iraqi food was great lots of like sauce and meat and more i'm so good go to the hague
We didn't. I wanted to, but all the train tickets we went. So it was the end of tulip season, basically, when we went. So we went to Kuggenhof. That was great. That was like a monumental experience, like Disneyland for flowers. It was so good. But I wanted to go to The Hague. We wanted to go to Brussels. We wanted to go to, we always went to Rotterdam, but I decided we should go to Utrecht instead.
But yeah, we couldn't get train tickets anywhere because it was so busy. There were so many tourists. Like, I've never seen that many tourists in a place before in my life. Because the week that we left was, um... Conningstag.
Again, I'm sure they're supposed to have a funny accent when you say that. But it's King's Day, I think it's called, which is a huge celebration in Amsterdam. Everyone's getting drunk and high in the streets. I've seen some clips from it after we left and it looks like a blast, but I'm glad we weren't there because it was exhausting. on a regular day.
Yeah, didn't get to do any of that, but it was still really cool. We didn't go to the Anne Frank house, which was a bummer, but again, tickets were just out of the way. Everything we did, though, very happy to do it. Honestly, some of my favorite experiences were just going to the supermarkets and getting really good pastries. for really cheap. Like they had better croissants I've ever had. Yeah, dude, I can't.
We've had a loaf of Dempsters or whatever here. I'm like, I hate this. I need to make my own bread now. I have to be one of those guys. I got to get a stone flour mill in the backyard. I got to figure this out. It's a nightmare. Bread and soup, man. I just can't do it over here. Cassie had maybe the best chicken soup she's ever had in her life
At the Rijksmuseum. At their stupid little cafe. Like, oh my god. Again, I'm probably, that's not how you say it. It's probably Rooksmuseum or something. I don't speak Dutch. But yeah, no, just really, really, like everything was so good. Also the tap water, shout outs to the tap water, baby. They don't mess around. Cassie needs to drink water like all the time because she's a human being who exists.
And we would try to fill up our bottle whenever we could, but she's so against drinking tap water because here it's like, it's high quality. Don't get me wrong. you don't know what's in there. They're putting chemicals in the water. No, we have a lot of like, I don't know, the pipes in Hamilton specifically, I'm doxing myself, are like very old and falling apart. So you never know what's going to be in the water. But when we got to Amsterdam,
she still had that same feeling so we were spending like four dollars on bottles of water because they're like who why would you ever buy water the taps are so clean uh so we drank a lot of sparkling water for the first two days until that was like there's no way They have like these dunes. of sand that they bought that filter the water that we passed when we were going to xan for it i was like that's amazing that's their water filtration system that has to be better than ours we have like
big nets that catch shoes and tennis balls. Like, there's no way. There's no way no water, honey. Your syringe got through. That's the water. It's just like fentanyl. What's that about? Yeah, that's my report back from the trip. It was a lot of fun. I'm glad to be back, though, to talk about some video games. Yeah, glad to have you back, man. Glad it was a fun time. Where would the next spot be? Where would the next European...
Yeah, that's probably somewhere not so popular. Didn't have an issue with the amount of people. It was just like a little overwhelming if you wanted to do anything. It took a really long time, which, you know, that's what you get. I'm adding to the problem. I would probably go to either Greece or...
Spain, probably. You're on that old shit hit. Yeah. You want it like, how old can I get? Exactly. Yes. What's the oldest thing I can walk into? Where's the cave that Jesus woke up in? I want to walk into that. Come in. Let's go to Constantinople. Mesopotamia. Exactly. Keep going. Just keep going east. Fuck it. Go to Iran. Go to the cradle of civilization. Make it happen.
Glad to have you back. I'm going to talk about some video games this week. We've got a bunch to talk about this week. Expedition 33, our various expeditions in Oblivion. Some hot-ass indie games came out too. Despolata is out. Skin Deep is out. Jesse's going to give us a little bit of catch up on blueprints and we've got some good questions too and a lot to talk about.
just in the world of games coverage as well, with the just kind of, I don't know, wholesale shuttering or just I don't know what you call it, ransacking of Polygon and Giant Bomb sort of, Giant Bomb's straw that broke the camel's back for much of the community sort of moment that happened last week as well, with a bunch of folks being left off, let go there because of some... seemingly and allegedly incredibly myopic decisions from their C-suite people over there.
at fandom, but we will get around to all that sort of stuff. First of all, massive thanks to all of our supporters over at patreon.com slash noteclip. Thank you so much for helping us do what we do, both on the documentary side and here on the podcast. And as we'll talk about maybe a little bit later, increasingly in other places, maybe Noclip Crew will be getting a... a bit of a major rehaul. Maybe we're working on something over here. We are.
maybe. We'll talk about it a little bit. We're still figuring it out, but I'm definitely reacting to what's going on in games coverage with a sort of mixture of anger and frustration and fuck it, let's see if we can... Not fix this, but maybe carve a new way forward. But we'll get to that later. Massive thanks to all the folks, though, who let us do this stuff, including our Battle Pass holders and a new one. Welcome to Lovebreed.
Welcome to the crew. Alongside Utes, Dwayne the Rock Lobster, Anthony Thomas, Nico Passadetti, It's Amir Ferrario, Penelope Hayes, Senator Armstrong. Thank you for your service. Harry Flanagan. I don't know why I said that. That's not an army thing. I don't like him at all. I like that thing. Nanomachines, son. Hey, look. Everything he said came through. Joe Schroer. Arno. Jose R. Matt Pearson. James Brown. Mark Ross. Tucker Morgan. David McGarry. Sven Hooster. Pez.
John Akers, You Ain't Nate, Tim Robinson, Forrest Brouwer, Jonathan Kramen, Eric Hamilton-Schneider, Christophe Fatui, Kaverla! Thank you all so much. for slapping your names all over our podcast, you disgusting foul beasts. Let's talk about I'm trying to think because a lot of these are, some are new and small, some are big. I'm so surprised you want to hop into the games and not talk about the hottest news in gaming right now.
Should we? Should we talk about all that? No, we don't have to. I thought you would. That's all I'm saying. It's such a... Everyone's been talking... Oh, sorry. I'm running it back. I'm running it back. Now I know what you're talking about. Are you talking about the trailer that went live today? Yes. Okay, Grand Theft Auto Sex. Yeah. Okay, that was it. Okay. All right, moving on. A trailer came out. What do we think of the trailer? It looks like one of those.
They didn't show gameplay, man. Yeah, it looks pretty. If that's all in-engine, the jiggle physics are off the chart. They've outdone themselves on the... Butts and thighs have never looked as good. They're going all in. The sunsets have never looked as good. They have the shiniest crocodiles in the business.
Cyberpunk move over. We've got a new RTX 5090 testing suite. I can't wait for Digital Foundry to talk about that trailer for 300 hours. I want to hear them talk about how the volumetric weed smoke really work. There was a lens flare off of one of the police sirens, like the light, and I was like, oh, John's going to lose his mind. That just looks so cool. It's like the jizz in my...
pants, face. He just does. Oh, yeah, like that. Every time that happens. It's incredible. Yeah, they also put up rockstargames.com slash VI. We'll bring you to... Kind of a little splash page that they put together. Did you see this? has a bunch more information on it. It's like a good amount of chat about the... The two characters, Jason Duvalden and Lucia Caminos, the two main characters. One of the other characters, it appears, Cal Hampton in the trailer, and a bunch of other sort of...
bits and bobs, alluding to, I guess, what's going to be in it. Was there anything that stood out to you guys in terms of what you saw in there, or was it just a similar thing where technically this looks really good? That's it. Yeah, I mean, it's incredibly technically impressive. I'm waiting for, like, the moment that the story kind of grabs me, because these gates, like...
Grand Theft Auto 5 was so impressive, but I feel like I didn't get that hooked into the story, and I feel like I enjoyed it for a while, and then I kind of just petered off, and then my PlayStation 3 died, and I was like, there's no way I'm going to replay the first 25 hours of this game. Um, but, uh, yeah, I need, I need to be like hooked in emotionally, but I mean like, you know, technologically it's fucking, it's a powerhouse. I just, uh, I'm not.
These games aren't for me, let's be honest. I can't imagine a more anti-Jeremy Jane game. I'll play it and it'll probably be great, but I'm not the target audience. I'm just kind of like, oh wow, I liked Grand Theft Auto 3 when I was a kid. They detailed some of the areas as well. Vice City obviously is in it, but it's much bigger than that. It seems to be a significant portion of Florida. Leonida, Leonida Keys.
which is presumably based on the Florida Keys. Grass Rivers is an area that looks very much like the Everglades. Port Gellhorn looks like Port Everglades, perhaps. And there's an area called Ambrosia. which looks like some type of industrial area around Miami. But then they also have a mountain in there. Miami is famously one of the flattest states in the nation.
certainly for a coastal one. And they do have Mount Kalaga National Park. So folks are wondering if it's going to sort of stretch up into Appalachia maybe a little bit and sort of have some of the... southern south as it were stretching in there as well I assume just from a gameplay perspective they probably need to
not stick entirely to the geography of the area if they want to make it interesting. Which obviously they got for free in GTA 5 with all the Hollywood Hills and big mountains and stuff like that. But it has sort of Hawaiian-Polynesian vibes that area does a little bit. Who knows? Maybe they're doing something Caribbean with it. I don't know. That'd be cool. I'll have to see, but that looks pretty good. Obviously, the game has been delayed. It's coming out now in May of next year.
We gotta check that bingo card. I was gonna say, that was in the bingo. Definitely on the bingo card. 100%. Was that center square? It might have been. That was a real bold center square. I was looking for the bingo. I could not find the bingo thing. Can someone find the bingo card? I'll look for it. I'll hunt. Could you look for the bingo card? Because I feel like...
Between that and all the... You said something with Ubisoft also that was right. Yeah, right, yeah. There was a big structural change at Ubisoft we did. Which, you were right. 10 cent, bottom up. They sold like... Shed loads of money. All the brands anyone cares about. Brands. Trying to think what else. I got Bingo and Snapchat. I reposted it. You do? You're second Snapchat? Yeah. The Discord? Thank you. Jesse, do you want to go through it? Yeah, I'll see. See what we got.
Increased layoffs. We never really agreed on what that meant, but I feel like it keeps happening. No Death Stranding 2 delay yet. Go through them. Okay, so GTA 6 is delayed. A... That was one? Yep. Skate open beta technically has been announced, I think. Okay. Go through all of them, even the ones that aren't right, maybe. Oh, sure. Okay, all right. We got Yakuza, Kiwami 3 announced. It hasn't happened yet. Okay. I already said the increased game in history layoffs. Death Stranding 2 delayed.
who knows uh there are people there so it must be there must be something to see uh playstation franchise will release on xbox not yet But Gears of War is on PlayStation. Yeah, a lot the other way. Yeah, not yet. Horizon on Xbox. New big budget MMOs announced. GTA 6 gets delayed. Silksong release date we don't have unless you want to play it in a museum. We know that that's happening. Reveal trailer for a first...
for a first or third person thriller with Hans Zimmer or people playing game unconvincingly. Yeah, that happened. Switched to. Yeah. Switch to trailers. I'm checking these off so we have an update. New Resident Evil Code Veronica announced. Or Dino Crisis. Not yet. We're almost there, I believe. It's more of a dream. Yeah. Bloodborne Remake. I don't know if that's happening. They already did Dusk Bloods or whatever.
Hey, yeah, but does that count? No, it doesn't. I feel like if they're doing that, they don't give a shit. Big changes at Ubisoft. Done. We're almost all beat out here. It's not bad. EA Skate Open Beta. And then our center square is major studio gets caught using AI art.
Fill that out. That's done. Coss seems like it's the wrong word there. Yeah, Coss in the wrong hole. It just does it. Yeah, Phil Spencer leaves Xbox. Hasn't happened yet. Live service game gets announced. Released. Cancelled in 2025. I think that was me. I could see it happen. New Call of Duty game based on real war. Come on.
Almost. Kojima meets another Euphoria character. I don't think so. He met Margaret Qualley, maybe? I don't know. She's not on the show, though. She was in Death Stranding 1. Oh, she is, right. Yeah, my bad. derivative game imitates popular old game and takes its place
You can tell which ones are Jeremy because they're so like, because they're very specific. Insane. That one, I feel like there's been a lot of, that one's hard to pin down because there's been a lot of sort of like action RPGs that look like Diablo 4, but I don't know if that. because Path of Exile is trying to get in on that Diablo 2 excitement, which I think is more what I was getting at. So I'm not sure if that one's been checked.
Give it time. Rematch will take over FIFA, I'm sure. GTA 6, PS5 bundle. They're not bundling that shit. PS5 will cost $8,000. Yeah, that's true. GTA 6 will cost $8,000. Yeah, on its own, yeah. Netherrealm announces a new game. That'd be cool. Switch to release. Yeah, we got three of the bees. We can almost make a line here with the bees.
New Call of Duty game based on real world war. That's on there twice. Well, that means we're going to spunk out one of those bees into something we have. True. We got to make this happen. DMC remake. Timothee Chalamet as Link. I believe. I believe. An Ichiban or Majima in Tekken 8. Not Kiryu, because it doesn't hit women. That's on there. So, yeah, we got...
Three. Four. Something like that. In that line. Alright, we're working on it. We got some of the big ones. Some of them are more dreams, I feel like. Like Dino Crisis. We still got another half of a year. Give it time. We do. We got two thirds, hopefully, do we? May. Jesus. Sorry. Oh lord. Anyway, let's talk about some video games before the year is out. Let's talk about Expedition 3.
Or not the Expedition 3. 33. Hopefully there isn't an Expedition 3. Yeah, I mean, in the case of the story of that game, it better not happen. So I played a bunch of this. You played a bunch of this, Jesse. Yes. I'll let you take the lead on it. I do want to be a little bit... vague about the story stuff because I think the opening two hours of that game and what the lore is
If you don't know the opening of that game, I wish I could be the kind of person who gets to play Expedition 33 for the first time and doesn't know the setup. Did you know the setup? Yeah, I did. I knew nothing about the game. I was so excited for this game. I was watching constantly. that makes sense it was such a great reveal a whole world what yeah really terrific I was like man this game is a stupid name and then by the end the first 90 minutes I was like I get it I get it
Danny DeVito, just crying. I get it now. What is this game? Let's try to describe it. Clear Obscure Expedition 33, developed by Sandfall Interactive. New studio. It was made by 33 people. No, it was not. That's not how video games work. A bunch of ex-Ubisoft staff and then, you know, people from wherever and then contractors came together to make this really great... homage, I suppose, to JRPGs. This is a
Third-person turn-based RPG with timed button presses, so it's a bit like a Mario. And the setup is very French. It's got that Belle Epoque dystopian. Paris look to it. The costumes are really funny also. You'll see screenshots if you look up the game. But overall, the story of it... That's just French people, bro. That's just what they look like. Yeah, you're right. I'm sorry for being so anti-French. They all look like Robin Patterson.
Robert Pattinson. You play as a team of... expeditioneers on an expedition for some reason we're not gonna say what the story stuff is I suppose but you're leaving your home of Lumiere to travel the world on an expedition for some reason there's a paintress in the world who does something with her painting. Don't worry about it. It's like 33. I don't know what that's for. Somewhere in the distance.
you'll find out by playing uh but the gameplay is uh i think the combat for this by the way for a jrpg is really really strong like i think making turn-based gameplay and adding button prompts and dodges and stuff it almost It can be a little bit too much, I think, in some games. They tend to go a little overboard. Here it works really well, so the structure is like a turn-based JRPG where, you know, you have your team and enemies, and they all have different abilities, and there's a turn order.
but when you're performing certain actions, usually skills. You can hit a button and a time prompt like a QTE that pops up and you do a little bit more damage or you continue the attack and you do more steps to it.
And when enemies attack you you can dodge out of the way or you can parry the dodge window is a lot lighter So you have more opportunity to either just get out of the way or get a perfect Or you can parry and hit them back for a big damage. It's really fun. It has that like Sekiro or Dark Souls kind of pattern.
to it it's not like the mario party games have it too but it has more of a wind up than i think those games had some of the enemies in expedition 33 will spend like two minutes that's i'm exaggerating but like a very long time setting up their attack before you can parry
So that's really good. I think the characters also are all really diverse and interesting in their approaches to gameplay. It's so strategic, the options that you have. It almost at times feels like... playing a roguelike in the options that you have for each character you can build them out in different skills like it's not a roguelike and that you could die and come back and have oh i got four keys
I played Blueprints earlier. But you come back into it, you do the attacks, you have your special abilities, everyone's got their own thing. What's the main guy's name? I don't know, something French. Yeah, I think it's Gustave. Yeah, I was going to say Guillaume. Robert Pattinson, voiced by Charlie Cox. Daredevil, if you're playing in English. Oh, that's what it is. Okay. I thought it was Ben Starr. It's not.
um he has like a special thing where he gets overcharged and his special ability does more damage and there's other people who have like there's one I think her name's Mayel, whose abilities feel like the Watcher from Slay the Spire, where she has stances that can switch in the middle of combat based on the abilities that you use.
so there's so much like you're thinking two three turns ahead lining things up trying to get everybody to work together it's and i think that plays into the the theme of the story which i mean danny you you we're not going to talk about the story too much but like
Do you have any overarching thoughts on what's going on here? I just think, like, you know, I don't want to kind of just specifically... Yeah, because you'll be more... I don't know what counts as a spoiler, so I want to make sure that you're the one who... We just don't need to talk about the story at all. If there's no need to, you can talk about the quality of the game. I mean, don't need to. You don't want to continue? You don't want to?
I don't want to be spoiled as much as possible. I just want people to play it. I think the production on this thing is incredible. It looks wonderful. The art style, the art direction is incredibly strong.
It feels very... sure of itself I do not play these types of games like I have sort of on this podcast historically been sort of desperate to get into a JRPG like I tried to play the new Final Fantasy remix stuff obviously when we did the Final Fantasy 14 stuff I tried to play that I'm always trying to like dance in
genres i've historically not liked and for whatever reason i just bounce off those i think it's because well let me say the difference between this story and a lot of the jrpg stories is this one i immediately connected with the plight of the people. Yeah, I bet. It was like Really well acted. A really believable human story, even if it's in this ridiculous fantastical setup.
definitely fascinated by the world and the initial mystery of the world that's why I think it's important not to talk about it a bit because I think to me that was a real driving force and the game has continually for the opening hours revealed enough but also shown me new things to be fascinated about the combat I really like I again don't generally like turn based stuff and I think it's because
I feel like I don't have an agency that I like to. The one game that I've gotten into that is turn-based in recent years is the Like a Dragon series. And I think the reason I like that is because at least I'm able to move the characters around in between them and it gives me that sense of
presence or whatever it is. Similarly with the dodging and the parrying mechanic. That stuff feels great like i really like that it's kind of reminds you of like you know souls like games where you're basically watching the animation as trying to get used to the animation and Difficult enemies sort of do things out of rhythm and all that. They layer on enough mechanics. It hasn't gotten to the stage where I think there's too much going on now. So I hope it doesn't get to that stage.
For instance, there's like a shooting mechanic that you also have that like there are certain enemies that you can like just straight out pull out your gun and aim when you're in the turn-based thing at like a weak point and it'll take off a bunch of... Yeah, or like when you're in the overworld, if you get the jump on them first, like a lot of RPGs, right, you get your first shot in or if they get you. And it, yeah, it's just, there's, you know, it's also, I think,
More linear than I was expecting. Yeah. Are you finding yourself getting lost at all, though, in the areas? Once or twice. Okay. Yeah. But I was... I don't know. I associate JRPGs with more... like eventually you sort of get access to an overworld and I don't know if that happens in this much but like I've felt much more like this is pretty guided you know I'm still finding a lot of the people and doing stuff but you know my crew is getting built up and all that but like
I don't know. Does it open up more? Yeah, it gets a little bit bigger at a certain point. It does the sort of thing that I had no idea it was going to do. I mean, I did because I had seen footage, but I didn't know how they were going to do it and how they're going to set it up.
yeah yeah that's all I'm saying but it was really good it was just like I think the way that it expands the world in terms of its scale and also like you were saying like this is the only story thing I'll say it's not a narrative thing it's more of a general concept I think the way that Stop me when you think I'm swirling something. I think the way that Expedition 33 presents its story
is incredibly confident in this way that it accepts that the player wants to go on this journey with it. It's not spending an hour setting up like here's a you're going to the kingdom to save the princess who's been taken by the bad guy they're just like this is the world the character is limited you go on this journey with them and figure out what that means you can piece it together as you please um and it's just
it feels so much more worthwhile to become invested in the narrative than it does in almost any of these other games. It's fun to keep track of what's going on in Dragon Quest XI, or if you're playing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. I want to know all the minigames. But here, There's this... economy and their storytelling that's so impressive the things that they're able to pull off with the budget that they had i mean i just i assume they spent a lot of it on anti-circus and other
actors who are in the game. But just the way that they've, yeah, set it up, like you were saying, it sort of continues to roll out new information and build on this premise that is so unique and fun to learn about in this weird sort of morbid way like I want to know more about why it is structured in the way that it is and the rules and yeah it's very good it's very very strong
strong opening and I haven't really felt like the momentum has slowed down for me. I feel like I'm constantly interested in playing it. I'm finding myself Not being able to go to bed because I'm so excited to see what the next thing is whether that's combat
a new opportunity for something, a new Picto build where I go, oh, if I use these abilities in line, I'm not even talking about that. Yeah. There's like the theory crafting you can do for your characters is just off the charts. There's so many options. It's yeah, it's a very dense. game that does a lot with its very small spaces, small scale, to feel a lot bigger than it actually is, which is just so impressive. I haven't stopped enjoying it since I started playing.
Yeah, it does a great... Like you said, that's actually a really good point. I think, what game was I playing? I've played a couple of games that are under embargo this week as well. I can't. most of which I can't talk about. I am playing Doom the Dark Age as well at the moment, so we'll have
videos up for that on Noclip Crew next week whenever the embargo drops. I'm not sure when exactly. I think I know where it is, but I don't know if it's public. I think it's public. I don't know. Anyway, I'm not talking about that, but there are some other games I've been playing as well that are... where the intro you know i've been playing the start of a lot of games recently and the start of expedition 33 is so good ash that like you said it's not like
the land of Lumiere blah blah blah is ruled by and this happened then and this you're just like what the fuck's going on and they're using all of these like the gommages today and like all this stuff you're like what the fuck is the gommage you know she got her flowers you're like okay yeah and they're all other also great use of french curse words a lot of terrific a lot of doubt in here yeah Charlie Cox is doing a good French accent every time he needs to use one of those words.
Can you play this in French? Probably in French. I wanted to, but I was like, man, that's a good set of actors. I want to hear how they do their performances. We'll have to see. Can you play it in Japanese? No, I tried. No, it's only English and French. Wait, you're playing it too? You're playing it too? I started, yeah, but only the first, like, 90 minutes. It's all, like, stories set up, but I did get to try some of the combat, and the combat's really good.
Nice. That's good stuff. Yeah, it's a fair play to them. Sandfall Interactive, Expedition 33. They showed it to me last year at one stage. We talked about doing something, but we don't tend to do pre-release stuff on Noclip. It's kind of like, you know, maybe we'll talk after, you know, make sure you're recording.
Your dev stuff, yada, yada, yada. Yeah, so it's really cool. And you were alluding to, on social media, there was just some people saying that the game was made by... small number of people, which is not really, you know, I think
Yeah, I don't know. I think there are narratives that exist that people want to, especially when it's ex-Ubisoft people that they want to say like, oh, this is like five people or whatever. But also I think in general people tend to... over sensationalize when something is successful that they didn't see coming like oh blueprints is really good and it was made by one person blah blah blah it's like
Ballotro. Yeah, Ballotro. But this one in particular is a real... The game isn't just good because it's a well-made game with talented people who perhaps had to contract out to others or... do whatever it took to get it done. I mean, they had a ton of money behind them. Kepler Interactive, I think, are partially owned by Tencent, right? NetEase. NetEase, thank you. It's one of those two. If you pick a game company, they're partially owned by one of those two.
but like there's a ton of money behind this yeah like it's it's not some totally out of the blue thing just because you didn't hear about it and then again the narrative that shows up with that is like it's breaking all the rules and it's like it's it's being made against the culture of games it's like
I don't know, man. Maybe don't talk about games like that, man. Just talk about how art sets your soul on fire. It's weird to talk about it. I'm delighted that this team has done it. It seems to be the thing that we talk about nonstop on Noclip, which is if you get... people who are knowledgeable who have like grace institutional knowledge, if you can retain them, if you can train juniors up in that type of environment where they are developing faster over the course of a project, then
you get situations like this where you have like Hades being made by 25, you know, people. But also I think this show is like, a different type of, you know, Adam Fall was a similar thing, right? It's a smaller size team. It's closer to what we had with like, you know, 50 people making Oblivion, right? Things like that, where I think studios are picking their battles a bit more. Like this game is...
somewhat refined. It's not like a massive open world, you know, crazy scope game. I don't think. Do you know how long it is? I think it's like 30 hours if you don't do a bunch of the side stuff, something like that. So if a game is 60 or like a Final Fantasy is like 100, like, those hours don't come for free that's content that has to be made so i think like adam fall was a similar thing where i think it's like
you know back in the day when first person games were like 10 hours long like i don't know how long i played on fall for i don't think any longer than 15 i don't i don't think it was that crazy long but it also was a game that was making smart decisions design-wise, economically designed, I would say, right? They put the money in the right buckets. And then another thing we're seeing is outside of just outsourcing, stuff like rendering materials or making models or whatever.
More and more you're starting to see middleware companies or production houses that can do very specific things really well. You know, we were just, well, I can't say publicly, but like we were in Sweden talking to a studio about games they made and they worked with one company for... all of these games to do all the motion capture and stuff, because they were a company that did that. A lot of that stuff is in-house at some studios, and more and more, there's more of that stuff.
Kepler was founded by the Kovalunites folks. This is a funding, this is a... publishing company which is trying to make money in video games and it's trying to do it in a slightly different way than the traditional. ones have. It's not that dissimilar to a lot of the VC money that's come into games as well where they are investing in smaller teams that can use technology to
punch above their weight. And if you're sort of naive to this world you look at that and go you know the credits are this many people wow I can't believe they did that and it's like no this is this is just a new way of investing in games and working game making games and that shouldn't
Like, this is the problem we're going to run into over and over again is because people are like, this company bad, this company good, this form of funding bad, this form of fund, you know, this form of capitalism bad, this form of capitalism good. It's so hard to... pull the art from the funding if that's what the cross you're going to die on like it's at a certain point
It's hard to just like, what are we saying is good? What are we saying is bad? Is it good for companies to be big? Is it good for companies to, you know, Ubisoft For the longest time, it employed a lot of people, made a lot of games that people didn't like. There were people that worked for 20 years there. That's kind of good, right? Isn't it good? Actually, it's bad because they had to make Assassin's Creed games four times.
Especially as bad as the mission markers that were on the screen. Exactly. So all of this is like, I'm not trying to be like a fucking... contrarian here. But yeah, I think I found it particularly funny when people were saying that Sandfall was this like... I've talked to those people. They seem lovely. They've made a really terrific game they should be really proud of.
And I don't put any asterisks next to that at all. I don't care where you get your funding from as long as it's not from, you know, fucking pure evil or whatever, you know? But like, Is that the dog food company? For people on social media to be saying that this was like a real indie tour de force. Yeah, they did it. We need to kill the term indie game forever. It needs to die. It needs to be broken down. We need to balkanize the term indie into a thousand sub-labels.
right now it just means cost less than you'd think exactly yeah you go to a convention you see like this is the indie mega booth and it's like hey I'm funded by Devolver Digital it's like hey I mortgage my house again and I don't think I'm going to make my money back. That's the same thing? What are you talking about? A lot of things, like Devolver, I would have considered indie. Out of time. Bethesda. I would have considered indie at a time. You know what I mean? When wasn't it indie?
It's hard to tell when did ZeniMax I guess definitely when Microsoft bought them. Were they independent before that? I don't know. Or the way people talk about Arcane and Machine Game. You know, it's just so much of it is marketing and people don't realize yeah it is also specifically like number one it is marketing and number two it is odd that I feel like it's sort of a specific thing to games the way that people engage with the business side of it because like
I maybe never see people talk about the size of a film crew unless it's something like Tangerine that was shot on iPhones with a very small crew or something. It's only the extreme edge cases where... no one is like oh christopher nolan made inception with only like 123 people that's you know what i mean like i don't even know how i like people talk about budgets sometimes with movies but way less common but never fucking like team size or i don't know it seemed it seems like
talk about industry in games is both like more common and also often driven by sort of just like sticky narratives that don't really map onto the reality like when people talk about Yeah. It's a number you can point at and say, like, look, they did it with this many people. Why does it take 1,000 people here to make this game that sucked when you can make a good one with 33 people?
It's a quantifiable thing you can compare. People dissect the topology of AAA assets. They're like, what does this cape have? Like 4 billion polys. And it's like... I've, you know, Danny, you bring this up a lot, but it's sometimes people will assume like ignorance or foolishness on the part of these people who are like insanely talented, skilled technicians. And it's like,
It's usually like design goes through a process of iteration. It's usually not just like, Oh my God, dude, we left in the Cape that has like 4 billion polygons. What the fuck? I hope no one notices. There was that one time in Final Fantasy XIV, remember there was a barrel that was like 15,000 polygons or something and they couldn't, this part of the world wouldn't load forever and they realized they left in this like
Fucking super high texture. But yeah, I get that it's based on broad narratives about like, you know, fucking production line video game development. Like I get it, but it's just, I think, I think it's when, I think it's when it's people. Especially like Super naive.
like, I don't know, online content creators who are trying to talk game about game development and they really don't know what they're talking about and they're going around saying things like this or tweeting things like this and then it's kind of like, all right, well, you know, we're just going to spread lies, I guess, now, and this will be the new lie that, you know, people have to... be angry about for the next
or not I have to be angry about for the next 10 years because somebody said something stupid one time yeah it's just like it's just drama rage bait content, a lot of it is just like, I mean, there is a larger discussion about how algorithmic engagement and narratives that are sticky are things that get people
either elated or enraged and it doesn't even matter if they're true because that initial like engagement is what fuels further initial engagement so uh i just think you know if i would just was like Gabe Newell killed a man with his bare hands. It doesn't have to be... I feel like that would go viral if I just said that. Don't pull that quote. Take that back. That was a joke. It's not a soundbite. He would have used a knife. Come on.
Yeah. That's true. He's got so many knives. He escaped a shark. He might be unkillable. Exactly. Yeah, you're right. That's why the shark ran away. He was like, oh shit, it's that guy. The shark escaped him. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, look, it makes sense for those of us who are our team in the business of trying to demystify games development and show how complicated it is that superficial narratives like that are quite frustrating. But yeah, super cool game. As an outsider to this genre.
totally besotted with the world and the gameplay. I really think it's special. And yeah, fair play to everyone who worked on it. Both of them. Let's talk about another game that was made with a small team, at least initially. Oblivion. I know we talked about this a couple of weeks ago. I think I had 90 minutes or two hours in the game before we had to record it. I've played, I think, 25 hours of Oblivion over the past two weeks. Fuck, man. Oblivion is such a good time. I think Oblivion is just
It was my first Elder Scrolls game and I think it's just, it's peak open world fantasy for me. It's also very 2007 and lots of, Lots of silly ways. Frank, you've played a bunch as well, right? Yeah, I think I'm also maybe like 20 to 30 hours. And it's so funny going back to this because I barely remember it.
This is the first game I played on 360 where I got all 1,000 achievement points. I remember vague things. I remember going to Oblivion Gates. I remember doing Thieves Guild and stuff like that. but now i'm actually in the world it's like it almost feels like playing it for the first time because i don't remember any of the details even like progression and stuff at first was so confusing because it was like oh i really can just
You can just go any direction, any town, and just start to get, like... You can fast travel anywhere, even if you've not been there. Yeah. Which I totally forgot was a thing that they allowed then. That's...
that kind of like screwed me up because i was doing that a lot and then i was like all of a sudden like i was following the main quest and then i was getting killed i had really bad gear and i realized like oh wait no you're supposed to explore like go into random goblin caves and just get like
So once I started doing that, actually walking the world and killing things, and then all of a sudden I started getting way better loot and really enjoying the game. But it took me a while to remember how to play this game, because like... i was just not used just not used to it and uh it's uh yeah it's been really really fun to be back Yeah, I've had a blast with it. I've played a lot of Oblivion, but I'm surprised by how much I forgot, I guess. Like, you know, like the...
Dark Brotherhood stuff, I remember, and the arena and all that stuff. But I guess there was loads of side quests that I either... never did or they're just so quick that I forgot about them. Yeah, and also something about, I don't know what it is about this, the way that they've produced this thing. It's obviously an Unreal Engine. I think somebody somewhere...
I saw a post somewhere that it's like a rapper or something. Yeah, like it's Gambrio underneath, right? Okay, yeah, because I can't believe how... like much it feels like oblivion like all the same little weird ai things happen and just the feel of it, but for whatever reason, maybe it's because I played it on 360 on a pad before, but playing it on mouse and keyboard and it running this fast,
I just feel like so, I don't know, kind of powerful because I mean, I always played these games using bow and arrow as well. So I'm just like fucking nailing people from really far away. I'm jumping around a lot more. The inventory is so much easier to use with mouse and keyboard. So I'm just like, I'm eating up the content. I'm just burning through stuff. You know, I've like, I've collected like 70 Nirn wrote at this stage. Like I have.
I spent two hours one night just walking along the riverbank of every water source in the game collecting fucking... weird sounding weeds because I just wanted to complete that quest. And then the level scaling stuff I'd forgotten about. So, you know, I was getting into these. you know, little dungeons and collecting all those crystals. They're, what are they? Weyland stones. I always call them Weyland Yutani stones. Weyland stones, Wendel stones, I don't know what they're called.
and then like suddenly there's like minotaurs and shit in there because i've i've leveled up yeah it's crazy so um Yeah, man. They still have the persuasion wheel. Do you still have to play that weird minigame? Yeah, they kind of fixed the look of it a bit, so it's a little bit easier to...
I just bribe everyone. I can persuade them by giving them some money. I just like to hear them say all the classes, like, don't talk such rot. They just have such weird, uncanny lines. I just love hearing that. it again. Dude, every time someone says blessing of standar upon you, I'm just fucking yeah now give me akitosh i'm twisting of akitosh upon you oh and then every once in a while like they kept all the lines including that one lady who does a recut you know she's like
There's that famous oblivion line where she says the line and goes, oh, let me do it one more time. They kept that in, which is great. That's awesome. Is the character creator still butt ugly Martians? Are they still the grossest thing he's ever seen? Yeah, you can see. Somebody made the...
J.D. Vance face. Like the meme version where it's all blown up. Somebody made that pretty good. There's no Pope in Oblivion. I heard J.D. Vance met Uriel Septim. That's what Poor Patrick Stewart, who's alive, by the way. Yeah, he is.
no in the last episode no no no and when you guys were talking about oblivion i think danny said rested power uh about no i was saying about uriel no i know you mentioned about uriel septum but it sounded like you were saying patrick stewart that you knew something that we didn't know No, Sean Bean's in this too, which I forgot. Yeah, well, I mean, he's died in everything else so far. Yeah, I forgot Sean Bean was... Also hilarious that John Bean is playing the young person in this story.
Fucking great, man. Oblivion is a good time. You guys not going to jump in and play some Oblivion? I don't know. It looks amazing. I kind of... Oblivion is a very specific sort of like holistic experience for me. I mean, which is weird because it's not even fucking nostalgic because I played it for the first time like two years ago and talked about it on this podcast.
Uh, so I feel like it's both a little too soon for me and also, yeah, I don't know the, uh, the, the, the old timey aesthetic I feel like is part of the experience that I enjoyed. So, um, We talk about this all the time. Remakes are one of those specific things that you either like cilantro or you don't and taste like soap to you.
I think when I was growing up, Oblivion was kind of the first game that I really watched reviews for, and I remember when Knights of the Nine dropped, I think I watched I think I watched Greg Kasavin's review of Oblivion like 40 times. Nice. And then I watched someone's Knights of the Nine video like so many times. I was like, I can't wait to play this expansion to a game I haven't played yet.
but I eventually played it I think maybe six or seven years ago for the first time and I was like oh this is really great I love the speed tree stuff I love the weird like high-definition Ray stuff going on. Yeah, HDR stuff. Yeah, like it's a very... specific look to me. so when i watched the opening of oblivion the remaster
and I see you come out of the cave, and it doesn't look like that, I'm like, I don't really want to play that. To me, that's not Oblivion. Like, I get it. I can totally understand the appeal of it looking the way that it does. Like, it still looks great, don't get me wrong. But part of the charm of Oblivion to me is that...
that version of it in my head yeah that i like because i feel like most remasters the goal is to make it well i don't know necessarily how true that is but i feel like the goal is to make it look like how you remember it looking
Here, I remember it looking more fun than this. I'll be honest. I think I said the same thing two weeks ago when I was chatting about this, about how... You've gotten over it. Especially when you do a side-by-side. Yeah, but I got so over it so quickly because I was just like... man, let's fucking do this lockpicking minigame. Is there no, like, dissonance between the jank and the visuals? Like, that doesn't get in the way? Or does that make it funnier?
I think the problem is if you do side-by-sides of them, it's super obvious. If you're playing the game, it's not, except for that one spot. because everyone has that image of the green hills and everything, and it just does feel less saturated and less inviting. But I think... Here's the thing that I'm not sure. I probably need a side-by-side to do this.
The original Oblivion, when I played it back then, one of the things that I found sort of limiting about it is that I kind of largely felt like the world looked the same everywhere. I didn't really feel like there were many distinct biomes in it. And there are, but they are similar looking. In my mind's eye, they were. In this, they're not. In this, the lighting and the colors in the different parts of the world.
uh are are very different so it feels different like the areas and i remember in skyrim feeling that like oh solitude feels very different to like this other part of this part and i don't know if that's part of it like maybe Maybe that area doesn't feel that way because other places feel more lush. Frank, what do you think?
I don't know why my brain goes this way, but I always change the time of day to be like morning. So it is green and sunny. I hate like when it's night or there are parts where it's snowy. I don't know. I don't know. I get I'm fast traveling so much that it's like. I'm not seeing the evolution of like the biomes as they go by. But yeah, once I was playing it, it's like,
The way the game feels, it feels exactly. I remember it back in 2006 or 2007. The graphics are different, but I appreciate it being 60 frames and it not dropping like 20 frames on the 360. So I'm very happy with it. Any of my skepticism with the colors are washed away once you start playing it. Also, I feel like half the time you're in caves anyway. Dude, the dungeons look so good. The lighting in those spots is...
is really cool. And I've got, I'm playing around more. I think the first time I played it, And I played a lot of it, but I'm trying to think how many times I replayed it. I think I was always like fairly conservative at what I was doing. So I'm sort of like trying to fuck around more this time because I'm so familiar with the world and I'm trying different things and I'm not doing as much magic as I used to and I'm messing around with different like finding interesting You know.
necklaces and shit. My two favorite ones are I have the necklace of seawalking which lets me just straight across. Jesus, myself, across rivers and stuff. Wow, you got the Jesus Rosary? That's awesome. I found like four of them, and they were worth a fortune, so I've sold the other three.
worth like a thousand gold each or something. Sounds like a story out of the Bible. Yeah. Dude, it's so funny. Sold to this guy from Nazareth and he won't fucking cut it out. Not as four of them walking around out there. Yeah, all just like hanging out. Hey, what's up?
and you can like get caught you can fall through the water if you like try and grab something under the water and stuff but I use it to like I'll pull mobs and just run into the middle of a lake and they'll like chase after me and I'll just be like fucking arrowing them as I'm like standing above them and then I have the other one there
the the uh of sea breathing or whatever water breathing so i can just go underwater for as long as i want and for that one i've just been diving into massive like into lakes and stuff and just trying to find some shit, like find some chests and stuff. It's awesome.
The way you describe that sounds like a... like a like a logan paul youtube prank channel where you're like pranking people and then walking onto the water so they can't chase i don't know exactly that is how i picture that is like you hitting a goblet and then you're like what are you gonna do about it man i'm on a fucking plane
Fucking asshole one one hitting things in this game. Just like I'll just like aim at like a fucking wolf from across a valley and just be like and then you hear that and then they die you're like oh I saw speaking of the hit detection stuff I saw they changed whether or not this is bad up to the person I saw that they changed it so their reactions to the hits now
Like, is that real? Oh, did they not before? Oh, yeah, you'd hit somebody with a sword, and they were just like, ow, you jerk. But, like, their bodies didn't, like, flinch. Yeah. Just like, stop, Ethan. You violated the law. It's so funny. Eating sword slashes. Do you guys remember the YouTube video of the guy who did the perfect Oblivion Guard impression and him and his friend were up by the pool and he fell in the water? I have to...
Do you guys remember what that channel is called? Sorry, I'm sourcing old meme videos on the podcast. Smosh, no shot. They're not that funny. It's not Smosh. I'll find it, and I'll mention it by the end of the podcast. Such a good time. Yeah, got all oblivion. Never, never, never change. I wonder if they'll do a Skyrim one now. Probably. Yeah, probably.
It's LaFave Bros. L-A-F-A-V-E Bros. LaFave Bros. Oblivion 4 is the name of the video on YouTube and it has 11 million views. It's probably my favorite Oblivion video of all time. Stick it in the air. Stick it in the comments. I was making fun of the Consolvania review, which is a bunch of Scottish guys you probably don't know of that did one. That was pretty good.
Pretty good. Good stuff. Oblivion is still a threat. Do you want to take a quick break? This is probably going to be a long podcast, I feel like. Sure. Do you want to take a quick break? Sure. We'll do a pee-pee. Somebody needs to pee. I got to empty my nappy. Oh, man. All right. Everyone empty their nappies. We'll be back in a second.
Welcome back, folks. More video games to talk about. This is what happens when we have a week without a crew cast. We've got to plunge deep into the video game hole. Jeremy, what do you want to pull out of this hole? Pick one or two here. They're both bangers. Let's talk about Despolote. Despolote. Despolote. Check out my interview with the...
designer of Despolote over on Ludo Narcon's website. We'll have links to that and talk about that at the end of the show. I've been dying to watch it and I have not watched it yet because I played this whole game yesterday. So I was waiting to experience it. Despolote is a... First-person narrative game. It is about a young boy in Ecuador, and as Ecuador fights its way towards trying to enter the World Cup, soccer fever, football fever.
for the alliteration, seizes the nation of Ecuador. The game starts with this sort of parallel narrative about how an Ecuador, an athlete from Ecuador, won a gold medal, I think, for power walking in 96. And then everyone in Ecuador was like, we fucking power walk here. Now that's our thing. Showing that like, you know, when you're with someone from your sort of like,
out of the spotlight corner of the world raises to the national stage. It becomes this matter of immense national pride, but also it becomes part of this It becomes part of your identity. It's not that you're just like, we're the nation where that guy who power walks come from. It's not like we are a people who are proud of our power walking prowess.
And so similarly, you know, despite the fact that football, soccer obviously is a bigger part of the culture, you know, than power walking, presumably. Once Ecuador is fighting its way towards the World Cup, it becomes this fever that seizes the whole nation. You play a small boy in Ecuador around this time.
The game, or Desplodee is told across, like, five games on the road towards the World Cup, and it's sort of this, like, story of it's very slice of lifey is how i would describe it this is it's i thought it was gonna be way more about soccer and about the world cup that is sort of the like That is the water in which you swim. But the actual focus of the game is very much about the life of this young boy and sort of like his experiences within that backdrop. This reminded me a lot of...
Yasujiro Ozu movies, slice-of-life movies, or I just watched Where's the Friend's House? somewhat recently by Abbas Kiarostami, a very famous Iranian filmmaker. This reminded me so much of Kiarostami to the extent that I think there was a reference to Where is the Friend's House in this game. I need to ask the people who made this game if it was a reference.
but regardless just sort of like very slice of lifey quiet humble domestic portrait of life and so the game sort of has these open somewhat open little vignettes where uh you know someone will be like uh hey you gotta be back here at 10 30 don't be late and you can look down at your little watch and then just run around in the world and so uh
It's beautiful the way it just kind of lets you off the leash and lets you explore. And there's weird little pockets of interactivity. I kept thinking about... It was, I forget where I read it. It was by Melus Hantani, the guy who made Anodyne and a bunch of other games, was talking about how there's this philosophy about game design where a lot of Western developers will think that... Freedom for the player emerges from creating a huge number of systems and that like
Freedom for the player expression, as it were, is do I level up strength? Do I level up intelligence? Am I a bow guy? Am I a sword guy? But he was contending that sort of a form of freedom that we don't... or that we sort of underestimate is bespoke moments that are more curated by the developer, but because the player can't predict what's going to happen, it almost feels like infinite possibility.
So like if a game is, you know, your character is going towards this inevitable plot point that's about to happen, or there's like a set of a few limited interactions because each one of those is specially curated by the developer.
if you set it up right, the player can essentially feel like they're having this infinite possibility space because they're like oh wow like I'm a little kid who can go around and like kick a soccer ball anywhere and that's just it's just one interaction like it's just kicking a soccer ball it's not a huge systemic thing
But because there are just soccer balls laying around in this world, it feels like this much larger possibility space because you're, you know, like you come across some kids who are kicking a soccer ball around and I just like, like older kids.
and I just ran in and took their ball and started dribbling it around. And they're like, what the fuck? And just came and pushed me to the ground and took it back. And it's just this very small bespoke interaction. But it creates this feeling of a larger possibility space that I think...
I think Despolote does that a lot. I think it really creates this feeling of being a kid and wandering around and just being able to go up and if you hit space bar when there's not a specific interaction in front of you, you just wave and say like, hola!
And I was just going up to, like, this is just like I'm being a gregarious child simulator half the time. I was just going up to random people and being like, can I pet your dog? And they're like, oh, yeah, pet my dog. And I was like, this is fucking, this is so charming. And yeah, it's just this like...
beautiful sort of personal story about a real time in one of the developers' lives, but sort of semi-fictionalized in a lot of ways. And it sort of slowly breaks its frame and does interesting things I wouldn't have expected. It ended up... being pipped for the Seamus McNally and the Nuevo Award by Consume Me, which is another game coming out of NYU Game Center, as this one also did. Julian Cordero came out of there, and I believe Jenny from the consumer team did as well. But it did win the...
excellence in audio. And I want to ask you about that because one of the things that I asked Julian about was the The voice work in this game I thought was amazing. And also just the sounds. I apparently went back to this town. in Ecuador to record all of the sounds there. But also the voice work. I was thinking, I basically asked him, I was like, is this because it's not in English?
sort of prescribing some more authenticity to it maybe as somebody who doesn't understand what they're saying um or or is it is it not that and he he told me the process of recording the audio which was absolutely mad which is that like For instance, the parents in the game are his parents. I figured, yeah. His parents have since divorced. Oh my gosh. So he had them basically... in the same room together. Chatting?
Like, he never told anyone what to say. There was no, like, script for this stuff. He would basically just, like, give people, like, a situation. Like, you're in the car. We're driving to this wedding. What would you talk about? And they just riff. and like and he recorded loads of this stuff and then
sort of used it. And I think it totally works for the perspective of a child because you are such a passive you know you're like a passenger in other people's lives to a certain extent when you're a child
And, you know, they're not directly talking to the player character, aka the child, in those scenarios. You're just sort of overhearing adults talking about stuff a lot. And I think it's such a... a beautiful way of um of adding to the game especially with regard to how sort of stripped back the art style is like it gives so much
presence to every moment. And obviously it won an award for it. But yeah, Jeremy, what did you make of it? And Jesse as well, you played a bunch of this, right? You played the demo at least last year. No, I finished it last night, yeah, as well. It was, I think the music... the sound the way that it's recorded like you're saying that sounds really cool for the dialogue but even just
I think you make a really good point that sometimes it's easy to say oh the voice acting is really good because all you hear is the emotion and you can't really discern what's being said but I think just the way that the presentation is done from the perspective of yeah a child the way that characters talk like there are moments where you can play soccer in the game Like there's a soccer game within the game. And the characters will be talking overlapping that now
Of course, if you don't speak Spanish, you have to read the subtitles to keep track of what's going on. And in that moment, I was getting a little frustrated at first because I was like, fuck, I want to read this dialogue, but I want to score on Ecuador. Or I want to score on whatever. Uruguay, I think. Uruguay, yes, was the first one, yeah.
I was like, I really want to make this happen. But then I realized like, yeah, I'm ignoring the parents so I can play the video game. I'm experiencing. And in that moment, I was thinking about that Keita Takahashi interview that I brought up a couple of weeks ago about how he wants.
games to be capable of showing perspectives and and ways of life that aren't just shooting things and punching things it's like you can tell stories and games you can make games about childlike wonder and present it in this way that's not exclusively you know making cute colors flash on the screen to distract you for 45 minutes you can be
you can get down to the scale. Like, I've thought a lot about, um, the florida project while playing this not you know some aspects of that didn't overlap but the the scale at which it's told and the way that it centers itself around children um and then also uh nickel boys a movie i watched recently which is like a very dreamlike story about these kids who
lived through hardship who were taken to like a I think a reform school and are forced to live their lives there and just the way it's shot and edited with this sort of dreamlike quality to it where it sacrifices its ability to tell a totally linear narrative so that you can experience emotion more rawly and in this way that like is very honest and deep and i felt that while playing despolote as well like
It's not told fully linearly, like you go through these days where the football games are happening, but there's other stuff that happens between those that sacrifice that, and you see what they're able to do. by jumping around in time and like I don't know there's so many moments that there was one moment in particular I won't say but like um where i felt like it was a purely systems driven thing you had to go home to your mom that's it uh that happens a couple times like you guys said but
There was, like, stuff around that that scared the shit out of me for, like, no reason. And it just reminded me of being a kid and the way that, like, my brother, who's only, I think, 10 months younger than me, I think. I've only been alive for 29 years. and he would be out later than me and we would go looking for him and he was like fine but it just scared the crap out of me and I was thinking back to that while playing Despolote and a lot of stuff like it brought up a lot of really
sad and nice memories. And I think that's what draws me to this and what draws me to games in general is like their ability to put you in someone else's shoes and give you the chance to see what life is like from a perspective that you may never get to see in Latin America in the midst of soccer? Come on.
Like, what more exciting moment could you ask for when they're finally getting to the World Cup? Like, I've been hanging out around a lot of Chileans, and they're like, a basic soccer game here for a sports team no one cares about. They win, and they're like, it's time to party. Let's burn down the streets. It's awesome. Yeah, this is very much the experience of growing up in Ireland and the 1990 and 1994 World Cup as well, just complete.
complete fever for the exact same reason and that's why I liked having the interview with him was a lot of fun and we'll link it in the show notes because it's almost the exact same thing where it's a small country. I don't know what the population of Ecuador is. Is it about the same? Ireland's about 4 million when we were qualifying for those. Oh, I can ask way more. It's like 18 million. And it's weird. In a way, a lot of countries qualify from the World Cup in South America.
They got like 8 slots. but a ten or six maybe or seven but it tends to be the problem is you've got brazil argentina a bunch of other teams that historically have a lot of decent teams in them, and then you've got a lot of really small countries as well that tend not to make it. But Bolivia, I think...
or Ecuador, sorry, was probably punching below its weight for a long time there or didn't have enough players together. So, yeah, it was cool. I never knew that this was the fever that they had going into that. Cool little game. Any other final thoughts on Despolote? I want more games told from like the slice of life perspective that are about such a particular moment in time I think this is so interesting obviously like
Jeremy said there's some fictionalization going on here. I wouldn't call it a straight autobiography. No, but being able to capture a moment it's like there's uh what is it called black revolution 1979 or something like that um it's a game about the 1979 revolution black friday i played this like a decade ago no nine years ago when it launched in 2016 and it's about
Let me just double check and make sure I'm saying the right country here. But it was about a civil war, I think, in Iran. And it's just such an interesting video game. I think back to it a lot because it...
touches on subjects that you never really get to see. It's the fall of the Shah or something. I think something like that, yeah. So it was just very interesting. 9? It feels like it was earlier than that. I don't know. It might have been. But just, yeah, more games like that, please. Thank you. All talented people, make what I want and not what you want.
Yeah, my sort of bottom line on Despolote is that I watched a really good lecture that the NYU Game Center put on recently, given by Karina Pop, who is... I think a visiting arts professor. I forget what her title was, but in, I'm not going to paraphrase her ideas on it because it was way more academic and you should just go watch the talk if you want to see the real version of this. But one of the contentions she made is that
People often think that video games are games, and she made the contention that video games are a separate thing that are different than games, that video games are not games. And I thought this was a really interesting thing, and I started thinking a lot about it, that games are inherently these things that have, like...
rules usually like points some level of competition or a person trying to overcome an objective and stuff and video games are more like sometimes they have game like elements sometimes there are numbers that go up and points and stats and all these things but video games are more like interactive
spaces, possibility spaces. And sometimes they have characters, sometimes they have interactions, but it's more like, it's a totally different, separate thing. And I think Despolote is such a good illustration of this, that this is...
This is not a game where it feels like a weird open... Like, I felt like I was playing, like, um... I kept thinking when I was playing this that, like, Oblivion, in many ways, is, like, a walking simulator. Or that, like, when you play Morrowind, that, like, Morrowind isn't great because... The combat sucks in Morrowind. Morrowind is like a walking sim in a fantasy world. And I just kept thinking that an immersive first-person slice-of-life game, I think, is...
such a rich area to explore. I brought up earlier movies by people like Ozu and Kiara Stami. These are movies where, you know, often in an entire scenario, an entire scene will be crafted out of, like, kid sitting on a bench and like can't move until their mom gets back and they have to like watch people going by and stuff and I think when you bring those sorts of like domestic or pastoral quiet scenes
real-life slice-of-life scenes into the format of a video game and let the player choose what they're interacting with
And I think it could reach a lot more people because I think a lot of people see movies by people like Ozu and they're like, oh, that's that boring ass movie where like they drink tea for 25 minutes. Where's the colors? Boo, I'm not watching this. Yeah, well, yeah, I just think like, quiet humble explorations of everyday life in the form of a video game I think is a really powerful thing because I think video games by virtue of being interactive draw you in so hard that
I think you could tell stories like that in video games in a way that would reach people who might otherwise not be open to that kind of story. I think the thing that sometimes I'm a bit protective of is the idea that... we feel this way whenever somebody does it well. Like that there are people trying to do this stuff sometimes and they're just, they just don't work. Like they either, they don't hit the right tone or.
or technically and i think over the past few years like the past 15 20 years games game developers have gotten better at this like i think it sort of isn't surprising that this is coming out of a place like NYU Game Center where they're really attacking the skill and art of making video games from like multiple ways and there's probably a lot of stuff going on that like makes a Despolate work and makes another game not work. And like obviously the walking simulator genre is sort of like a...
you know, a relatively derogatory thing because you go back to games like Dear Esther and, like, they literally just are. You're walking, listening to someone talking. You know what I mean? Like, we've come a long way since then. So I hope that what you're saying is true. And I think that... Maybe it's just taken a long time for people to... Maybe it's two things. Maybe it takes a while for the market to be okay with it and maybe it takes longer for people to find
find a way to make these more interesting. Because Despolade doesn't feel boring or preachy or slow. It's like curious and fun and sweet, you know? It's different, and I don't have the brain to figure out why, but it is.
You know, and it works better. Yeah, I mean, games are, you know, relative to cinema, games are pretty, it's a young medium. And so, you know, you don't get like an Ozu or a Kiarostami until... whatever like the uh 50 well ozu was working earlier than that but like what we think of as ozu comes later and stuff but cinema's been around since the late 1800s
And like, you know, the earliest games that were made on like fucking oscilloscopes and NASA labs were like the sixties or whatever. So yeah, I don't know. I think that, uh, Maybe we're getting to a point where there's an artistic inflection that explores.
There are quieter, humbler slice-of-life games and stuff, but I do feel like this shows that I think there's a huge amount of potential untapped in that sort of area for everyday stories about real people's lives or based on real people's lives. Speaking of everyday stories based on real people's lives, skin deep is Ash. Jeremy, how much of this have you played as well? Yeah, sorry. Sorry, Jesse. Meow, Jeremy. Meow.
I have played a few hours of this. This is fantastic. This game is really, really good. This is a slapstick immersive sim, like a comedy immersive sim. from Blendo Games, who've made games such as, uh, 30 Flights of Loving, uh, they did Quadrilateral Cowboy 2, right? Yep, yep, great game. A bunch of great games. Check out every game by Blendo Games. Fantastic body of work, but, um, this is like,
This is such an interesting flavor of immersive sim. M-Sims are typically like... dark and oppressive and like the government's got like a mind virus or like this plague of rats taking over the city. Uh, And this is like... What if you're freeing cats as an insurance adjuster in space and you have a third lung and you can fly around in space?
Is that why she's able to fly around? All the insurance adjusters have a third lung that allows them to exist indefinitely in space as they're assured by their employer. But the assurances made it a way where it seems like they're not very sure of it themselves.
I don't know if you should push the limits too much. But yeah, this is sort of this mission-based but narrative-driven IMSIM where you're going into these ships that are taken over by pirates and they've taken the crew captive. The crew are always these...
polygonal box-headed cats, and you're essentially playing in this sandbox of just a ridiculous number of overlapping systems. You're usually severely underpowered relative to all these pirates, which I think is... I think that's such a great twist on Immersive Sims because a lot of times in M-Sims,
i i am not a stealth gamer i like i'll i'll get caught by the first guard in a dishonor game and i'll be like well i guess i have to murder everyone you know like it's not my fault that i'm fucking i'm going weapons loud you forced me to do this just because one guy's like what was that noise and i'm like i guess i have to murder you
So, yeah, having to throw pepper at dudes with guns and then jump on their backs and slam them into walls. And then they can revive themselves, so you have to pop their heads off. because they'll revive otherwise. You carry the heads around and the heads continue to talk so they're making noise and then you have to flush the heads down toilets or put them in garbage chutes
Or you can go out into space with them and just, like, pitch them into the void of space, which is very, very funny. So, yeah, it's just this bizarre little comedy Imsum. It's so fun. Yeah, Skin Deep is like the funniest game I've played this year. I would say almost hands down.
The way that it gives you opportunities to do funny stuff, not unintentionally, like it's not glitchy. I mean, there's a little stuff here and there, but sometimes you see a clip where it's like, the funniest thing has ever happened in Dishonored, and it's like someone's... skin is stretching across the whole map stuff that's here is like
You slipped on soap, and now you're rolling around on the ground like a sausage. Like, it's just so... quirky and not in a derogatory way like it's it's very funny and silly and i think more than other uh immersive sims to jeremy's point about like it's not oppressive it's
almost the tone of it being funny encourages you to do whatever like right in Dishonored it's I don't want to do any magic stabbery because then I'm not gonna get the ghost mode here he's just like you messed up that's fine whatever run away you'll you'll be in stealth mode again and that'll change how things play out and whatever. Have some fun with it. Throw a banana peel. See what happens.
There's so much to see and do and experiment with that I think it's just, even in the first handful of levels, um the stuff that was in the demo that i haven't been able to play past that but just the stuff that's in the demos is just like so good such a good introduction to the mechanics and then also
your ability to do stuff and try different things it reminds me of playing the opening of hitman the the ioi newer ones the 2016 or whatever um where it's like here's okay you did a level try it again and do this fun thing that's a little different here there's nobody saying to you I think there's a little like there's some objective things you can get that'll give you more points or whatever like you didn't find this thing figure out where that is
So there was a little bit of that there. But for the most part, I was playing through levels multiple times just to try a different way to get in there and to un... unpack whatever the puzzle is to like open the windows or disable this computer over here or like how do I get a hold of this key card so I can open and like So much stuff like that where I was just, I wanted to see how deep it went. And I was laughing the whole way through. I don't think.
I don't think there's more than 10 minutes I've played of this game in a row where I wasn't laughing my ass off. You're at least going to get one of those fucking cats. Absolutely. The funniest cats in gaming. it gets me every single fucking time the sense of humor in this game sometimes works for me and sometimes does not but the one bit that like always gets me is when you free one of the cats
it goes into a slow motion and they go meow and it says meow on the screen and they just like fly out of the box in slow mo. Jesse, can you stick a meow in here? Meow. I laugh every single time. It's like someone is hitting my knee and my leg is doing the involuntary motion. I just laugh at it every time.
It's so fucking funny. But yeah, Skin Deep is fantastic. I mean, if you like immersive sims, I think this is a great immersive sim. If you're not really into immersive sims, I feel like this might be a good... entry point because it's a it's less self-serious but it is still very uh systems rich it's not like a this is not like a tonka toy truck version of an msim where it's like easy or light on systems yeah
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's not the baby version either. Yeah, I'm excited there's some more. The demo they released was pretty generous, so I'm still in the same situation with Jesse where I'm kind of... Playing it differently as well, which is fun. I remember when I played the demo stuff, I was like, I'm excited to do this different next time, to mess around a bit. We will have a quick look of that and also of Expedition 33 up on Noclip Crew. We'll talk a little bit more about all that later on.
So if you're thinking about it, go check out the quick luck skin deep. Looks pretty cool. I think it's got 360 reviews on Steam, so it doesn't look like it's doing gangbusters 390. Man, Despolote also does not have nearly as many reviews on Steam as it should. Really, yeah.
This sucks, first off, that we're even talking about this. This shouldn't have to be a thing that we care about. This is why we have to do something, Jesse. Absolutely. But it sucks that this is the metric that Steam uses to be like, people like it. It's like, TV reviews are on average awful. Like, even good ones are pretty, you know, mediocre. Like, of these hundred reviews, I bet, like,
two of them are useful product reviews. Oh, you mean the actual reviews themselves? Yeah, like the content of them. The fact that you have to rely on people willing to write reviews on Steam to sell your video games sucks. I hate it. It is a little bit like if... It's a little bit like if the movies that showed in theaters were determined by letterboxed reviews.
is kind of how Steve feels sometimes you know what I mean if like meme reviews where someone's like you know I can't riff a meme review but you know the reviews on Letterboxd that are like people will write this big essay about like this has moved me to tears i can't believe such a depth of pathos as possible and then someone else is like Did that guy shit his pants in 35 minutes in? And then that's like the top.
Letterboxd review. As it should be. That's what all criticism's about. I'm not going on Letterboxd to read your essay that you wrote for four hours for free. Alright? I want to read a funny ha-ha and then close the app. That's it. That's the difference between Steam. At least in Steam, you have to have played the game. It's not like...
It's not like fucking, you know, it's Morban time or whatever. You leave a review on Conclave. You're like, wow, I hope they put the Pope in real life. Like, that's the review? Okay. That's it. I'd say. It's beautiful. I saw somebody, I saw somebody, there was a Twitter post for Morbius saying like, oh shit, we were busy that weekend. Re-release Morbius. Third time's the charm. We've got some other games here. We might want to have some Fafra next week. Some of these Have you played?
A lot of, or... Yeah, I mean, I've finished both of those, but we can totally save it. Really? Holy shit. Okay. I wasn't on for like a month. I know, it's a good point. We're going to talk about LabRot then, and initial thoughts on both LabRot and Blueprints, I guess, just for folks more. Blueprints is really good. I think it has problems that are... are a little too much for some people. I like the meta puzzle solving stuff. And, uh,
That's all I got. It's a very good game that structurally frustrates me at times. And Lab Rat is just a really good short Sokoban puzzle game with neat ideas about AI. Sokoban. Yes. Oh, hit my microphone. Sokoban. I want to make sure I get the dev name right, because they worked on something else. Chump Squad, who made Kine? which I think the lead developer was in one of Jason Schreier's books, was like sort of the focus point of one of the bits there. Good game, though. Really fun puzzle.
Published by Clay as well. Got to get to the publishing world. There you go. Libra. Alright, that was a bunch of games there we talked about. Exposition 33, Oblivion, Despellate, Skin Deep. And some brief mentions of Blueprints and Lab right there as well. Looks like we got some emails this week. Frank, shall we jump on in? Yeah, we got a lot of emails and Discord messages. If people do want to write to the show, email us.
podcasts at noclip.video are in our patron discord and the podcast chat channel. The first one's from Alex Sills. Sending this preemptively, assuming there will be Claire Obscure a talk next week, the game has been amazing so far and it made me think about the last couple years of AA or maybe just not quadruple A releases that seem to be knocking it out of the park.
Claire Obscure, Lies of Peace, Stellar Blade, probably more I'm not thinking of. This has been discussed before, but what are your thoughts on the apparent great success of non-massive studios coming out with bangers? That's nothing new.
uh i can't see where they're coming from i think i think the quality I think the quality of work, I think the one thing you'd say about games like Claire Obscura, Liza P and Stellar Blade is that they don't feel double A and I think that's one of the things that people are maybe feeling a bit different about these days is that like A lot of these games looked or felt or sounded not as glitzy as some of the AAA games.
there's been a bit of a slowing down of progress, like a, you know, I don't know. the bell curve is kind of, you know, diminishing returns maybe on AAA. I mean, we're looking at this GTA 6 thing. That looks fucking crazy, right? But, like, a lot of AAA games don't look...
insane when they come out anymore. So I think that has been helping a little bit. But also I think just it must be tools a more mature industry so like stuff like clear obscure where you just have like really strong leads really strong juniors that are learning really well.
smart development processes that you're able to get these games out and they're just more economic designs games that aren't trying to do too much you know which is the gloss that you get into like with a starfield for instance where there's just like
or Fallout 4, where you have these systems upon systems upon systems, and it just becomes a little bit too much, and then you lose a bit of something. I think there's a big... desire for games that are more economically, and I don't mean in terms of development costs, I mean in terms of the design, that they're more sort of
They're less broad, but they're really well produced. And I think all of these games sort of tick that box. And I think they just look closer to AAA than they ever have for... I think they've gotten better. It's gotten less expensive to make stuff that good, and also AAA's probably slowed down a little bit in that regard. Helps everything's on the same engine, too. Everyone's using Unreal in some way, so it's easier to make it look like an Unreal game if it's all in the same.
Default assets. Yeah, I think there's a lot of really good AA games that I've played over the years that, but you have a good point that, yeah, things have gotten, it's gotten easier to make a game that looks good, which I think has been a good and bad thing.
There are a lot of games that look good that are not fun. And there are a lot of games that don't look that good, but are really, really enjoyable. But we are hitting more of a middle point where it's, yeah, the quality is more visually obvious. And then I think also part of it is... The press consolidating the amount of people left to sort of highlight video games that aren't live service ones are looking for weirder more you know going against the grain games like
Or just the market. The market, too, yeah, for sure. Like, if people are getting bored of those games. There's no big... You don't want to play Assassin's Creed Shadows for 100 hours? You don't want to do that? Here you go. Yeah, then maybe these games are... I mean, they are more interesting. Absolutely. They don't have crafting systems tacked onto them, you know?
It might just be that to a certain extent. I mean, there is so much frustration with AAA and there kind of has been for a long time. And I get it. They're taking longer to make the games and then when they come out, maybe they...
are below expectation. And there's something cool about these games that people, a lot of the time, don't know much about them before they came out. Like, Atomfall really took me by surprise for whatever reason. It just was not on my radar. Clear Obscure was only announced like last year, right? Yeah, Summer Games Fest. Summer Games Fest, yeah. It's out less than 12 months later. So I think a lot of that stuff is helping too, you know. It's so much about expectation at that stage. Go for it.
All right, Ollie Cant wrote, what do you think constitutes as spoilers for a game? For me, spoilers is more about story and area discovery related things. Let me get out the stone tablets.
to count game mechanics as spoilers or new weapons or the answer to puzzles. That felt odd to me because I play for immersion and story mechanics to me are just a means to an end, so I have no shame in using a guide if I get stuck on something and want to move on, and then other people thought I was crazy for doing that. It's interesting, though, because it speaks to what I think what it is in games that we value, and I just wanted to hear your thoughts.
Your mileage may vary. It's different for everyone. There's no hard, fast answer. My personal philosophy is that some of my favorite experiences with games, movies, books, anything in life is... that if I want to know just enough to know that I'm interested in a thing and literally nothing fucking more, there are people who say like, spoilers aren't real, and that knowing a particular detail of a plot or a mechanic or whatever will not spoil the entire experience for you.
I think that is true in some regard, but I think that my personal ideal experience is knowing fucking nothing because then every little... oh my god, they have potions in this game? The littlest thing can become this moment of delight and surprise, and I think that the denser... a game or any experiences with wonder, with surprise, with mystery, with curiosity. The denser those things are, the more of them there are.
the better the experience for me. So, yeah, again, I've given this before, but there's a, I think it was a Terrence Malick movie I watched one time where I didn't even know what it was about and it's like i'm in a small town and then someone died and i was like this is a movie where people die like that's insane i i thought this was just gonna be like a quiet little dialogue movie um
And I talked to someone who is a cinephile and they were like, oh, that's wild. Cause that's like, everybody knows that about that movie. And I was like, I'm so fucking glad I didn't. Cause like, I'll never forget watching that movie that time. Yeah. Will I go first? I'm not.
I'm not as big of a stickler on spoilers as you guys are. That's all. Yeah, to me, Jeremy basically said the two points I'd say, which is that mileage may vary, mileage does vary, and you don't know what someone else's mileage is. So that's why I always think it's more important to... like say as much about the game to be as selfless as possible when you're talking about games in the context of a review or in the context of a podcast or whatever it is because
If you are selfish, then you can sort of like make any excuse for why it's important to talk about this aspect, right? Like, because it makes you feel a certain... you know you really want to make a point about this mechanic or you know there's an element of this story that really resonated with you and you want to put it across and that's all fine but you're making a decision there to value
your experience over someone else's and so that's why in my head whenever I'm talking about anything I'm always trying to I think part of it is because that's the media ecosystem I grew up in. I think part of it is because I have been playing or talking about writing reviews, reading reviews for so much of my life that
It's the same problem I have when people talk about movies. If somebody who doesn't know anything about movies or narrative or doesn't watch a lot of movies, what they think is a spoiler is not the same as somebody who... watches a lot of fucking movies because they can say something and it's not that they said that thing, it's that from that thing you can intuit about 30 other things.
and they might not because they don't think about movies that way or games that way, but my fucking stupid OCD brain will, and it will tell me. Like, you know, I have tried, there's this famous The famous, sorry, infamous moment of my life.
where I used to tell... Because I have, like, intrusive thoughts, and I have, like, voices in my head when I was a kid and stuff. So, like, I have, like... parts of my psyche that will fuck with me when it comes to spoilers so that's why I don't feed that guy anything because he'll let me know and I used to like tell that to my friends and my friend He spoiled the end of what happens in Terminator 2 for me by standing in front of me and saying,
a five-sentence phrase like a hundred times. So I couldn't get it out of my head. And now whenever I think about that movie, I think about that phrase. I'm not going to say it here. It's basically what happens to the antagonist in that movie. So I am super sensitive to spoilers. And mostly it's because I know that maybe 5% of our audience listening to this is. And I think about games like... The Outer Wilds, right? Sorry, my bad. Outer Wilds. I didn't know.
anything about that game. So within the first hour, my mind was blown over what you were essentially doing for the entirety of that game. I did not know that was going to happen. And that's like one of the best gaming experiences I've had of the past 10 years. It's hard, so I think it depends on...
the game, or the genre, FIFA, for driving games, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wait, what? Who's in FIFA? You know? Exactly. No. Whereas, like, Expedition 33, I enjoyed the start of that game so much because I knew nothing about it. that I wouldn't want to take that from somebody. You know what I mean? But yeah, but I get it. Some people don't give a shit. Whereas, you know...
I try to be careful about it on the pot. I try my best. There's a lot of stuff where I'm like, that's fine. It's in the first hour. I can weigh the value of it, I think is what I'm saying. with expedition 33 the opening that game very cool don't want to talk about it because i know that's that's a cool thing even if like i knew before going in and i still was shocked at how cool it was um so that was like that's one of those things but other stuff i'm like
I don't know, whatever, this actor's in the movie. He's not on the poster. He's in the first five minutes. It's funny, some people say that, or like, trailers used to be a thing, and a lot of people would say, like, oh, it's in the trailer. And it's like, something's in the trailer, like,
Something can be in the trailer, like the GTA trailer, where people are going to frame by frame that shit and basically pull every single thing. Or something can be, maybe you watch the trailer once. I don't even watch a movie trailer. Like, for that reason. When my wife, yeah, when we're, like, going to watch something, like, especially horror movies, because we always watch lucky horror movies. It's a lot of fun. Fucking all on that Blumhouse shit, right? Just, like, cheapo, whatever.
I'll walk out of the room. She goes look at the trailer. I'll walk out. You don't want to see Megan 2.0's trailer? You don't want to know what dance moves she does? I did watch the Megan 2.0 trailer. Oh, okay. Oh, so we make exceptions. No, I'm just kidding. No, because I wasn't sure if I'd want to watch it and I don't now after watching the trailer because they like...
AI in her face or something? Oh, that too, yeah. Is that what that... It looks gross. It looks shit. Yeah. It looks terrible. Like, the original one, it looked... It was the fucking robot, right? Mm-hmm. Or, like, they CG'd it or something, but it looked good. It looked like AI schlock. I was like, what the fuck is this? Is this the sequel? Whatever. Spoiler, Megan 2.0's face looks stupid.
My favorite story about spoilers is, I think this was an old Harm in Town episode where they were talking about this, but three people are on a couch watching a movie and one of them has to leave before the movie ends. So he's like, just tell me what happens. And one of the people on the couch says, I don't want to know though.
And so the third guy who has not spoken has seen the movie before. So the guy leaving is like, just whisper it in my ear. Does that guy die? And he whispers in his ear and the guy leaving says, oh good and he's like he's like i didn't say what it was and he's like yeah but you said you're not saying oh good he fucking died like it's just it's funny how like the absence of information can be just as big of a spoiler yes 100 percent yeah i think that happened with uh blueprints as well.
not not in the same way of like people sort of like alluded to something that ruined it now you're expecting something but the hype around that where it's like don't say anything don't know anything go into it totally blind
I think was a bad idea. I think a lot of people went into that game thinking it was going to be something different, including me, and walked away from it like this is not what I thought it was. You guys made it sound like it was going to be something different because you set up an expectation. without explaining what the game was. Right. That's funny. A little bit of that. Good question. Thank you, Ali Kant.
Mostafa writes in, Hey, Noclip crew, I recently played Wonderstop and loved it. A seven-day holiday had just started and I was really burned out and needed to relax. Then I played this game for the first two days. It felt like everything I learned about myself through therapy and life experiences and my relationships and my work in the past years.
was compiled into a single seven-hour game, and I loved it deeply. Getting to know that some other person on the other side of the world, 99% knows how you feel, is the most rich experience I've had in gaming. Have you guys ever played a game that you think you played in the best possible time of your life and felt like it was tailor-made for you? Oh, that's a good question. Man, I don't know if it resonated that strong in the moment, but I've definitely had games that were...
That I needed at that moment. I remember being in a really rough. It was like my last. No I guess the COVID stuff was tough. It was like a bad. Moment of depression, like a good four or five months that was particularly tough in Maryland. and Horizon Zero Dawn came out.
and it was so optimistic and outdoorsy and I was living in Maryland so the fucking outdoors was just like the trees were just skeletons it was awful and I remember like feeling like that game really dragged me out and like and it's all about like We'd moved to Maryland, right? I had basically hardly any social life in Maryland for the two years we were there, which was fine because our daughter was born and we were mostly being parents, but I think it was before she was born.
And that's a game about going out and journeying into the world and meeting people. It was just so positive. The whole thing was just so uplifting and positive that it made a massive difference for sure. I think for me, it was probably Disco Elysium. Disco Elysium speaks to a number of different facets of my life that were all sort of reflected there.
like, you know, substance abuse, depression, uh, regrets about the past. Um, just like a million different things that I was experiencing and seeing them reflected back in this, uh, sort of like. emotional play space was a good way to kind of have like independent therapy without a therapist or something to like work through these things and also
It's this sort of relentlessly optimistic game in the face of all this pessimism. It drags you through the fucking mud, but then there are these pockets of humanity and lightness and humor and connection. And yeah, it's like, it never shies away from beating you up emotionally, but as it does, so there's sort of like...
It's never like a cynical game in the way that it's depressing. It's always sort of like, yeah, this is the worst thing that's ever happened to you, but you're going to get through it and there's more to life than this. For me, I think it's got to be What Remains of Edith Finch. i was dealing with like just a lot of family loss people dying that i i didn't really know like their life story i didn't know much about them but i knew that they were important figures in the family um
And trying to learn more about them was so, like, they had impenetrable lives. It was like nothing was documented. No one wanted to talk about what anyone had done. You hear, like, whispers. And it's like, oh, yeah, this guy swallowed a key after the police showed up and they were inside of a stolen or abandoned building.
it's like cool stuff like that but you know you don't get the full picture of somebody and it's you don't have those opportunities so playing a game that's about exploring the ways that people die but also their own lives and like through their spaces and what's important to them and the shrines they make to their own lives it's like yeah it was very very cathartic uh but sad but nice but sad
Come on, Frank. Yeah, Persona 5. This was... God, okay, whatever. Yeah, after my first breakup, I started playing Persona 5, and the key thing of that game is like... Your friends, like, I guess Final Fantasy IX is the same theme, but, like, your friends lifting you up and carrying you through stuff. And so, like, that's so simple, but, like, I would play Persona 5 every Saturday morning.
And, like, it was, like, I just, because you have to dedicate time if you ever really want to be in a JRPG, because it takes, like, 120 hours. So it was like every Saturday morning, I'm just going to start playing this game. But like the, the game loop of every persona starts is like, you're in your room and you get text messages from friends. Like, Hey, you want to go out? Hey, let's go see a movie, whatever. And like, just by playing that every Saturday, I like.
it like became a habit but then while playing persona then i would start texting friends also and it kind of like helped me like go from like being in a relationship where i was just with one person all the time and like then all of a sudden having that void and then just remembering like oh i have all these friends around me
And then it's still, like, on my phone, it's still the Persona 5 text zone when you get messages from that game. So, like, yeah, Persona 5. And then it's so funny because, like... I was playing that game here in this room. Then I moved down to San Diego and was still playing it. And it did take me like, I don't know, like two years to beat it. And then I still haven't beaten Persona 4 or 3 because those games are so long.
the personify was the first one that clicked for me but just like the just texting your friends became like a game mechanic that like i had to remind myself to do in real life and i was like oh my god it's great and then the music and the aesthetic and yada yada so yeah personify as one example
Hell yeah. And Yakuza, of course. Yeah. Like a dragon. Yeah. During COVID, the Yakuza series is like, oh my God, yes. And then finally being able to go to Japan after playing all the games through quarantine. such an insane payoff.
Um, And then Catherine wrote in and said, I'd love to do some setup here, but as you're aware of the gutting of Polygon and other outlets in the last few days, you're a small operation that seems sustainable from the outside, but what's the future of games media and reporting in your opinion?
especially for those who aren't personalities already. As someone who wants to cover games, renbuttonline.com, the ongoing brain drain and loss of generational talent is immensely disheartening. It's great to see operations like Noclip and Aftermath help some of those already here carry on, but what comes next?
Yeah, I don't fucking know. Patreon.com slash noclip, baby. That's what comes next. Be sure to support us. You can get access to behind the scenes content. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. This is probably, yeah, exactly. It's nice that someone asked the question because I find it very difficult to talk about this stuff.
sometimes because it feels like you're dancing on someone else's grave because it always comes up when this type of shit happens. Yeah, there's two answers to this question. One is about writers and one's about video people, unfortunately. For writers, I don't know. Writing across the board has become... People always struggle to make money from writing writ large.
I read an article yesterday about... Oh, I thought it was dead. Exactly right. About just how little even... well-published authors make in 2025 in comparison just because of how Um... international markets are really good, but because the stakeholders involved in like distributing and publishing stuff weirdly and some markets are still owned by a very small amount of companies like we're running into that problem again with film you know like independent film is very tricky to get
It's not even a problem with making the money to make the movie, it's finding where it goes, where cinemas and streaming platforms and all that stuff are largely owned by a consolidated... a smaller amount of companies, corporations, and it's definitely the case in games writing, games publishing at the moment as well. And online is just, you know... It's really tricky and you do have the aftermath model, but that requires or sub-stack or whatever, but that stuff also requires people to be
well-known and have a following, but that kind of always was the case. It's not like there's a meritocracy in any art form. I think Rob Zachney and Patrick Klepek from Remap, name-dropping, talked about this. a little bit when they found out about Giant Bomb and Polygon and they were like, Rob made a really good point. You know Rob Sackney, right?
I talked to him about Formula One cars every day. I talked to him two hours earlier today. And I know Patrick as well. We were both at CBS at the same time and he was a giant bomb. I was at GameSpot. There can only be so many Patreons. How many of these are just small subset of like a thousand or so people who are paying every single patreon like five to seven bucks a month like this that's not a it's not an industry where do you grow from there you know what i mean yeah
100%. And that's another reason why I don't like Stacking My Head Out or why Noclip Crew has been a thing that we've been... flirting with for years and I've been the one selfishly not pulling the trigger on doing a crowdfunding thing for it because I don't want to double dip with the Noclip community or triple dip for those who follow me on Shift F1.
Rob's probably got the same thing with what they're working on, and he's on multiple ones as well, right? Like D&D ones and lots of other stuff. And yeah, like you said, compare notes. I'll look at the... patrons on Noclip and the patrons on Shift F1. It's a Mi Ferrario. There's a battle pass holder on this and a... I've had a livery sponsor on the other one. Thank you. Thank you so much. So yeah, that's a really good point. So if the question is like broadly what this means,
The enthusiast press is largely dead already. IGN does some reviews. Most of this stuff is done by freelancers. Same with GameSpot. Tomorrow's reviews editor. Most of their reviewers are contractors. when I was at Gamesbosh. it was probably what do you reckon jeremy's 70 30 maybe with uh with remote with contract workers like 70 in house 30 there
And they fired a bunch of them and then it was probably close to 60, 40 maybe. But like now it's, I don't know, is it 80, 20 contractors? How do you build a culture within a website? You know, but you can't pay for those people. It was, But then video people, like, things have been really good for video people, right? Because of YouTube and streaming and, you know. The pivot to video in general. Well, there's lots of, you know, you can do Netflix and all that sort of stuff.
I do think What we've done with secret tape has been really demonstrative of the secret sauce that video people have in so far that we have a marketable skill that pays well and writers don't. Writers can do contract work, but it doesn't really pay that well. Whereas if you're you know, aggressive and good at what you do on the video side. Or even if you just want to do whatever, you know what I mean? You can get really good. You can make a killing doing...
fucking little promos or wedding folks do really well. You have a marketable scale that is useful and Like what I found at least. Like... My dream for any publication is that you don't The desire to sell out will always be there because eventually someone will just turn up with a huge fucking pot of money, which just seems to be what happened with with Polygon and the numbers don't add up or you just want to
get an extension to your house and you just do it, you know? Or you get sick of doing it, you get tired, whatever it is, the owners do it. Whereas if you own the company, like I always looked at Red Bull and went, Red Bull's the perfect company. Red Bull sells fucking cans of drinks. and they use that money to do all of this crazy fun shit, which then gets to the stage where it makes its own money, but it needs that safety net to do it.
And adopting that model towards the work that we do here, I think has been really interesting. And I think you could do more of that. But it's hard. Yeah. It's, I don't know. How do you find that, how do you bridge that gap between what magazines used to be, which was basically just ads. Like, it's just ads. Yeah. Like, I go back and read old game pros, and I'm like,
Was any of this writing? Was it all just advertisements? Oh, you mean the actual writing themselves? Yeah, well, not specifically the writing, but just the content of the magazines. If you go back, it's a 120-page issue. It's like 75 of the pages are advertisements. But weirdly it didn't feel as intrusive as like... It didn't because it was advertisements for things that you wanted to know about anyway.
Well, that's very true. Yeah, that is true. Like, it was okay. It was like, oh, okay, they're advertising the new Diablo. I didn't know that was a thing. Cool. And it was like on a different page. yeah that's true I don't know why it wasn't covering the text and you had to like scroll past it it's just it's over here or it wasn't a
Five minutes into a YouTube video, we're going to talk about fucking Squarespace. Squarespace. Yeah. Fucking, you know, whatever. Go, go, yeah, go, go to the part of the tracker where you see the biggest peak and that's where the ad stopped. you know like it's that stuff feels way more intrusive you know do you just start a i mean i was i was i went for a drive last night because i was a lot of these questions were going through my head and i was like
You start a website, right? And then you have a show that's just called The Shill Zone. And it's just like, people pay you, and you play whatever fucking game, and everyone knows. Because it's 2025. And people aren't fucking stupid. They know when it's something that's paid for, so you just wrap your fucking arms around it and you make it. It's like the Devolver Digital thing, did you see that? Where they're purposefully going to launch a game the same day as GTA 6.
Just counter-program that shit. Put your Dave Oshree hat on. You know what I mean? Become the ultimate disruptor. And I don't know. People get really... I- Look, I'm- I'm- I don't want to rant. This is like the thing on Monday where we had that big conversation about this and I was like, it's just going to be me ranting for two hours if I fucking start on this. So I'll cut myself off in a second.
People, you know, when we did like secret type stuff, right? We did a bunch of work and we did, you know, you do work for companies that you like, you know, they pay well and maybe you don't. have the same value as your clients, that happens. I think mileage varies on that. I think if you had a publication where you were as transparent as you possibly could be about that,
It's difficult sometimes because you're negotiating with people behind closed doors for very good reasons. You can have a stronger business position or because they're working on something that they can't talk about publicly or whatever. But there is a world in which, like, People hold us to count about that already. By design, there were people in our community who didn't like that we were producing that. And I totally understand that. I also like taking money from people.
who aren't our patrons. The Robin Hood of gaming right here. If somebody wants to fucking pay and what I did with that and what I've done with all of our secret tapes of is I've put the number at the... This would be hard to walk away from number. You know what I mean? Like those series is like six videos. paid for one of our team for the year like that's not
And that wasn't that much work to put in. It was a decent amount for me, but it wasn't like insane amounts of work. I like taking money from people who have too much fucking money. I think it's great. I think those are the people you should fucking take money from. And I understand that people don't want independence means a certain thing, right? But if I have to take money from people who have You know, kids, you know, both of them go to work every day.
They fucking already have Netflix and all this sort of stuff. And then I'm asking them for 10 bucks a month. Or I can get like a fucking corporation. to give us like whatever fucking six figures to do a fucking weekly show for you know a year or fucking not not sorry that would be that would be like a monthly show sorry for that but like then I'll then fucking do it and like be transparent and and and everyone knows and they have the money to waste
Because these companies do have the fucking money to waste. Like, that is the thing that I have learned. A lot of the people we've worked with, a lot of the people that I have turned down projects for or couldn't meet my budget expectations or whatever, it's not because they don't have the money. Like, it's orders of magnitude more. And so, honestly, sometimes I look at video game coverage and I'm like, I don't know. Somebody hasn't cracked a nut somewhere because the money's there.
Maybe the audiences aren't big enough. I think that's a big part of it. I think a lot of these publications just simply did not have enough people watching their videos. And I think that's sad, and I wish more people did. You can look at YouTube numbers. You can look at streaming numbers. You can somewhat get an idea of page impressions or comment sections on websites or whatever it is.
and you can figure it out. And if you don't pass a threshold, nobody wants to work with you. And then it's not anyone else's fault. You know what I mean? That's also part of the fucking dance, unfortunately.
But I don't know. I don't know what it means for individual writers. I don't know what it means for the next generation coming through. Like, how can you... That's why everyone wanted to be YouTubers 10, 15 years ago. And they were right, you know? Why would you ever try and convince somebody to get into... games coverage at this stage as much as you know will many of us love it.
It's fucking, yeah, we don't have that paradigm breaking thing and I don't know where it's going to come from or if it's going to come from anywhere. Discovery is only becoming more difficult because the internet is getting sludgier and sludgier. Why would I read a review when I could watch 400 TikToks in an hour? Yeah. That's what it is. A lot of peers put out that video about funding in the games industry.
Man, the challenge isn't even video games or Netflix. It's fucking TikTok. Everyone with idle time is wasting it on that. It's like you're not going to read a review. That takes 10 minutes. You know how many funny dog videos I can watch in 10 minutes? Life is so much faster than it was 20 years ago. I get my magazine, PC Gamer. That's the only thing I had to read about video games for the month. Like a month, yeah. So I read every single... No wonder I loved all those.
There was TikTok before that. It was this mono game thing. It was Minecraft and Fortnite. We have a whole generation of kids who grew up who don't really... It was a bit of a bubble because they didn't really play games the way we play games. They were mostly using them as social ways to connect with their friends outside of school. And they still are. Yeah, it's also cool, but they're not... buying fucking blueprints. You know what I mean? Not yet. Not until they get Xbox Game Pass.
We've talked about this a little bit before, but it's hard to inspire people organically to conduct themselves in a way that is more conducive to creating a slower pace of consumption or a more diverse range of consumption. I feel like it takes This is a skill I've built over the last decade that as things have sped up, it's taken more and more effort.
on my own behalf for myself to just, like, make time to find an article I really want to read and just keep that tab open until my fucking computer crashes because I have 600 articles I want to read in my Firefox. And then I'm like, well, I guess I just have to read all these now or they'll be lost to the sands of time. Or just like, you know, just like forcing yourself to watch a good movie.
I'm a real fucking cinephile. I love good movies. I love weird movies. I love art movies. I love unwatchable, hard-to-watch shit sometimes. And even then, as someone who loves that, it is hard to force myself to sit down to play like an art game or watch like a really weird, challenging movie. I'm always glad I did it, but it is, it's sort of like exercise or something where it's like, You have to build a routine of doing it, even if you know it's rewarding, even if you know you enjoy it.
real concerted effort to maintain that relationship. And so how do you preach about that to people who don't? recognize that as anything other than preaching because it does sound like fucking you're being like preaching you know more pretentious you watch movies yeah exactly if you want to be as good as me you can watch all this art bullshit um but yeah i mean no it just depresses me so much when i see like
videos go viral where they're like can we all stop pretending that our favorite movie is like a movie where like a french guy eats a croissant those are the worst where they're like they're making a lot of directors doing their letterbox top four which already in itself is
But then they're like, oh, but my favorite movie is this French film. Of course their favorite movie is some weird esoteric thing you've never seen before because they watched it when it was important to them. I'm like, shut up. You don't like the cat in the hat?
sorry the hidden dimension of that is that i feel like the people i know who are the most like deeply into weird art movies and games and shit they talk about that weird obscure art in the same way that they talk about like pop culture art because there is not this artificial division of like oh I'm going into like art mode or I'm going into like Christopher Nolan mode or I'm going into like Marvel mode there are it's just a spectrum of of things of experiences you can have and so like
The people that I like when they talk about movies talk about Ozu the same way they talk about contemporary pop culture directors and stuff. They're not like... It's not a separate thing. And so, yeah, I don't know. It's breaking down that barrier, I think, is important and showing people that there is a different, like...
flavor of experience that these things hold. It's not superior, it's not better than, but it is an important thing to experience as a person and to force yourself into those other spaces sometimes. Yeah, and I think one of the things that I really value about doing this podcast especially is that I know on a personal level Jesse's just been I've had enough of this shit his camera's had enough of this shit they're like two hour podcast what are you doing Is that like...
I have connected with a bunch of games and stuff that I wouldn't have done through even just being on this podcast. And I know that a lot of folks in the... community feel the same way but I'll be honest I sort of like thought like oh that's cool like we're not really doing like a service or anything it's like people fucking you know they probably get more recommendations from social media or
steam fucking emailing them or putting it up on their thing or whatever it is right and and would they have lived a happier life if they hadn't played this game anyway maybe i don't know i'm always Sort of trying to be a morbid realist about a lot of this stuff. But something about last week scared the shit out of me, which is that like...
you know, Pottygon, Pottygon felt like it was safe. Like, Pottygon felt like it was making money and doing good work and had struck a balance between doing the sort of, like, You know, SEO, although SEO has fucked everyone, that's the big thing that actually has destroyed half of the fucking web publishing business. But, you know, that they were doing this sort of, I don't want to say clickbait, but like more shareable, let's say, stuff alongside.
really great reporting and some really interesting video stuff. They were doing a lot of interesting stuff. I think tonally a lot of that stuff wasn't for me, but over the years I have really enjoyed and appreciated a lot of the work that they did. But moreover, it seemed like it was... It was a business that was healthy and profitable. So that's the shock.
Stuff with the giant bomb situation or like GameSpot where me and Jeremy know a lot more about the sort of internal workings. Like GameSpot was in the red for years when I was working there, right? It was not making any fucking money. It only existed because of corporate ownership.
And I think, like, you know, Giant Bomb has only found it because of corporate ownership, because Shelby Bonnie wanted to make a bunch of websites again. And, you know, I don't know how much money that made before it got sold off into parts. Who knows? So, you know, the original sin of a lot of these places or the fact that they've survived as long as they have sometimes is because they did have big pockets or big wallets that they could put their hands into.
There's something about last week with the two of those. I'm worried about GameSpot as well, obviously. And E3's coming up. Summer Games Fest is coming up. And I'm like, who the fuck is covering this stuff? Is it like five companies now? Thank God Min Max is out there doing the good work. IGN's still around. They've largely are down in LA now because that's where all the video production shit is.
Mostly remote, seems like a lot of the fine O'Brien. O'Brien lives in town here, so he must be going to a studio in SF or somewhere. And yeah, I think Scoville's in the East Bay or something. It's going to dox everyone while I'm here. So they're local enough, but you can count the amount of like outlets on one hand almost. Like it's fucking, that's scary. That's scary. To me, I always just assumed
Someone will figure it out. They'll be like, churn. But I look at what's going on now and I'm like, maybe these people won't start their own Patreons. Maybe they'll just get a job in PR, marketing, in the way of stability. Where's the next generation? I don't know. Yeah, it's scary. I, um, yeah, and as, like,
I'm trying to make games right now and thinking about the future as someone who spends part of my time on games media side and part of the time making games. And it's like thinking about it from both angles is a little scary because it's like...
If the only people left to talk about these things are... streamers and YouTubers sort of like individual voices there is so much pressure on those people to talk about things that will get clicks that are like when you have the corporate backing and it's like ad driven and you do the spot for like the new Fire Emblem game and that funds like talking about stuff with a little less
pressure on views. It frees you up in a way that allows you to talk, to highlight games that are maybe not the new hotness or take risks. I mean, we did a quick look on Dredge. And we didn't do it because it was going to fucking blow up. And then it did blow up. Oh, yeah. I forgot. Yeah, yeah. That was one of our bigger videos. Probably the biggest quick look we did on crew. But you cannot cover... games in the same way if you're like
Is this preview going to blow up? Especially if it's a game that no one knows about yet. And so if you want to perform the service of calling attention to important new games that people don't know yet, which I think is a huge
I mean, there are a lot of people who do this more on social media, and I follow a lot of those people and value the work they do. But I think that it's a self-selecting audience of people who follow those things versus something like a brand name, like an IGN or a Polygon or whatever.
People who follow like an institution, I think, are doing it to be exposed to a range of perspectives, whereas like influencers and content creators sort of curate to what their audience wants or expects and more of, I don't know, yeah. Yeah, you need to fund it and spend money on... Sorry, Jesse, if I'm cutting over you, I can't see you anymore. No, you're good. I can't tell if you're getting ready to speak. No, I'm laughing at what you guys say.
I think when we worked at GameSpot, at an E3, for instance, everything got covered. We knew what the big games were going to be, presumably, and those were getting more promotion or maybe getting like... you know, the top billing and the carousel on the website and getting tweeted about and shit like that, but, like, everything got covered. Like, oh, the Wii version of some game that came out on PS3 ages ago.
We sent someone to fucking cover that. You know, the trailer for whatever, this, that, and the other. They all went up. and To pay for it, like to do that, you need to do the time. Like we have, we're lucky that you guys do a bunch of, you're playing a lot of different types of games. I'm not paying you for that time, by the way. It should also be mentioned. Do you know what I mean?
We do have budget for stuff when we're doing it, right? Patreon.com slash noclip, please everybody. Indie games are so expensive. You know what I mean? Or like Game of the Year, for instance, right? There is a budget that is allocated based on... Probably here's like, I don't know, what did we do last year? I forget. 20, 30 hours. What was it? 20 hours, something like that. It was 24. I don't know.
24 hours of, like, you'll probably play games for game of the year for this much. And then, you know, the games themselves, right? Obviously, no clip A for those as well. But, like, yeah, to do that work properly, like, if we're doing... which we're not going to do on a note clip. You know, Crew was set up to sort of do that type of thing to a certain extent.
Yeah, we had a big meeting on Monday and we're looking at all this and thinking, and again, I don't want to step on anyone else's toes. I don't know what's going to happen with X Polygon or Giant Bomb people. I don't know, but it's gotten so... I was talking to Ger about it this morning because I was like, I still don't want to like...
announce anything or I want to like, I want to slowly figure this out over the next, not slowly because you guys have been very fucking patient with me about this because I've been talking about this for about three or four years. I was like, I still don't want to step on anyone else's toes. And Drew laughed at me and he said, oh, because people are like scrambling to get into the profitable world of video games coverage. Like, what are you fucking talking about? Like nobody...
Nobody's getting into this for the clout or the money. You know what I mean? so so yeah that's where i'm at is i'm going to ask i wasn't going to go to summer games fest i am now frank is going so we're going to cover it for whatever
No clip crew. I don't know. We'll probably turn it into something else, but we're starting Quick Lux again this week. We haven't published anything on the channel in eight months. There wasn't a budget for it, quite frankly. You know, secret type stuff paid for a lot of it. And we're going to try and figure something out. I don't have the answer, Catherine, for...
what it means. Like, if you have enough money and you have enough of a pipeline, then you can start hiring writers to write cool stuff. You can start hiring reviewers to review games. You can do all that. I don't know if that's... you know that's that feels like if that is a possibility that's a long way down the road and i rather start walking and and figuring out but yeah i think
I said on the Patreon show, it's kind of shittering it off the pot time for me when it comes to this stuff, and I think in the next month or so we're going to be... We're going to be trying our best to get into this world. And I'm reaching out to people already about money, stuff that we can bring into this. I don't know what that looks like. I've already talked mad game about the type of money we can bring in and who's willing to pay for it and what they'd want for it and that type of thing.
You know, meet us in the shill zone. I don't know. I want to be in the shill zone. That sounds awesome. Sponsored by Walmart. I can't make that joke. There is an outlet sponsored by Walmart. I'm sorry. That'd be great. I'll do non-endemic till the fucking cows come.
non-endemic like endemic advertising is like within games right so like non-endemic is anything else i'll fucking i'll what was this who the fuck used to what was the candy airheads used to sponsor the fucking e3 stage do you remember yeah Disgusting. We'll call it the Skittle Zone if you want. We got sponsored by Samsung and I had to talk about the fucking Samsung Galaxy S on the E3 stage show. There is videos of me and Chris Waters.
Just self-awarely talking about our, they didn't call it a stylus. We weren't allowed to use the word stylus. We had to call it, shit you not, the S-pen. Jesse knows the S-pen. S-pen. Do you know what S-pen kind of sounds like if you shift the letters around? It sounds like penis. S-pen. I'm using my S pen. I like how hard my S pen. That's games journalism right there.
it's great though because it's like if the shill zone is us playing a game that we might otherwise play and then we do the shill zone episode on it then it's like what if we talk about that game on the podcast and then it's like well you guys are just talking about it because it's on the shill zone it's like well no we did the shill zone but the game rules but if it's like fucking i'll do a tier list of every sour patch kid and tell you which ones are the best for you know whatever money
We should get some big fucker publisher or fund. to pay for us to do a show about games that don't have PR people. It's just games that cannot afford to market themselves. And we go out and find them. And we call it... Big. Game Hunter. If only there was someone we knew with a podcast with a similar name. Also, I'm watching this Samsung clip where you're sponsored by Samsung. You're sucking down some Pabst Blue Ribbon with Mikey Neumann and others.
Man, this is funny as hell. Was this on Giant Bomb? No, no, someone put up a compilation 10 years ago, which was roughly when this happened, E3 2014. I think I might have brought the S-pen on the Giant Bomb catch. Was that with Mikey? You're doing a big panel. You've got two big tables, Jeff Gerstmann in the middle. It's kind of like The Last Supper, but for gaming. There's a Joe Biden cutout, I think.
Yeah, is that the Giant Bomb after Irish show or whatever? Possibly. Is Jeff in a chair on his own and the rest of us are on a couch? Jeff's in a chair with, sorry, two other people from Giant Bomb, I think, and then you guys are on not couches. Oh, it was that weird one. Okay, yeah. Yeah, I think that's The Giant Bomb Show.
Talk to tell. But there'll be no Giant Bomb show at E3 this year either. Oh man, don't say that. Maybe someone will do something. I don't know. AI generated Giant Bomb at night. We'll make it happen. Me and Jeff have been talking about doing an Amiga show for three years. He says he's up for doing it. I've never organized it. I want to call it the three Amigas, but I don't have a third person. I thought maybe the Amiga could be the third Amiga. I don't fucking know.
i don't know we got nine years worth of sock quality ideas like that just in the chamber waiting to blow them into your face I get more messages about Fat Session than documentaries I've done that have millions of views as well. I'm sorry about that. No, you don't have to apologize. We just have to bring it back at some point. People love those fat sessions. They do. They're great to sleep too.
they're beautiful yeah i love it because i feel like the deeper i get into one of your fat sessions i feel like there must be an attrition rate you know it's like it's like getting there mightn't be But just knowing how YouTube watch curves go, the further it goes, the more I feel like I'm sort of exploring unknown territory. It feels special.
It feels that way when I make them, too. Because when I'm six hours and two beers deep into Heroes of Might and Magic 3, I'm getting loose. I'm getting weird. So that's where the gold comes out. Because you're solo presenting that whole time. It's like a fucking...
Yeah, it's beautiful. I like that too. You're in the shit with you. It's like being in solitary or something. Totally. You're like locked up in my insane asylum. Yeah, I don't know. I love doing stuff with other people, but I've always felt like my comfort zone as a presenter is just like... being on my own too. So I feel like doing solo long form stuff is very appealing to me.
Does anyone else have anything else to say about this? Because I have a very funny transition if you don't. Fire away. Okay. Frank should we talk about our creators for a second? Yeah sure. Chao. We've not talked about this publicly. We don't talk about a lot of our secret tape stuff publicly. This is the shill zone. This is our video production stuff. We did our GTA. GTA? We did our, now people are going to think we're doing it on GTA. Spoilers. We did our Half-Life 1 and 2 documentaries.
We've done a bunch of stuff, Battle Aces, we've done other bits and bobs. We are working on a series For the folks at Embark Studios on Arc Raiders, we filmed it last year in Sweden. Frank, we had a good time in Sweden last year. I was checking in with them actually when I was just in Sweden recently as well. That's not why we were there, but I was...
Checked in with them that time as well. The Arc Raider tech test was just on TT2. Me and Frank played a shit ton of it because we were capturing gameplay for this documentary series we're working on. Which is also probably why we didn't bring it up today. Because it feels a bit like, you know, it's not something. I basically want to get out ahead of this and be like, If we're talking about our creators, know that we are working on this project and we've been embedded.
i've been embedded with this team for much longer actually just because i've known a bunch of people over there for a while and i've known what they've been working on and the tech they've been working on and there are a lot of questions about our creators because when i originally showed it it was a completely different game it was like a pve
like more co-op, more... i don't know what you'd call it like like you were a more powerful character in the world sort of dominating the robots say this trailer with robin music obviously the version that's coming now is this more sort of pv pve extraction shooter type thing, which it seems has gone down well. It was the fifth most streamed game on Twitch over the weekend and it seemed a lot of YouTubers were playing and it seems to have come down well at least.
I'm really into it. Frankie, are you less into it? What's your vibe with it? Did you play groups much at all or were you solo? I'm mostly playing solo. Yeah, for all the tech... test stuff i did group up with random people which is always a very funny experience like doing public lobbies and stuff but i'm just not a fan of like pvp stuff but i really like the pve stuff like hunting and shooting robots and looting is like so satisfying
um but every time you get killed by real people i want to track no i i hate pvp but The robot stuff is very cool. Shooting their parts off and seeing them freak out is very, very satisfying. And the aesthetic is incredible. But yeah, I'm just not a general fan of extraction stuff. Yeah. Me neither, actually. I'm more of... I enjoy PUBG and stuff because I can... solo stuff and hide from people. I found it more frustrating when I was playing with random groups.
Because I would feel the social pressure to do stuff with them. You know what I mean? And then also if you get caught with one of them, they generally know if there's another one of you around. Whereas solo, I was able to like hide in places and kind of keep away from the PVP. And I would, I was almost playing the game. Like I was like getting it, like kind of like the way you're supposed to feel about the arc robots, I guess, and machines is like going in.
Getting my shit and getting the fuck out of there as quickly as I can or like waiting really long in the map so that most people have extracted so that I can So the tension when I was trying to get out was really good. I'll say it's so much better than it was when we played it at the first tech test back in January. I think there were fundamental aspects of the...
the loot and the quests and stuff that work a lot better. So yeah, we'll see how it turns out. It's an interesting proposition that both that game and Marathon are in because they are both games that were previously free to play. Was Marathon going to be free to play and isn't now as well? Am I right?
I don't remember how they mentioned it. I have no idea. I don't know. I thought I saw a video. I thought I saw like a friends per second video or something about how it wasn't free to play or it wasn't going to be for, or it was, or it wasn't. Yeah, it's not free to play. It looks like. Initial price tag on AI. So this is on our games from three weeks ago. So maybe it wasn't ever free to play. I guess they only just announced it like months ago. So it couldn't have been.
But yeah, and the same thing was true of our creators, right? They were going to originally go free to play and then now aren't. So I'm wondering what that looks like as well. What does that mean? Because technologically, rendering the actual performance and look of the game is quite impressive, I think. But then I would say that because I'm in the plow shell. You're shelling? Brought to you by the shell zone. The shell zone.
Yeah, so anyway, I played a shitload of arc writers over the past week, but mostly I just wanted to Let people know that that's a project that we're working on. And I can't say when it's going to come out. See, those are the treats that you get if you stick around two hours and 32 minutes into a podcast. Yeah. You get to finally hear why I was in Sweden. Why myself and Frank were in... in Sweden that time. Or if you're a patron, you can find out why I was in Sweden.
Three weeks ago. Why I got that blood clush. What I was all in service of. It's still so scary. Hey, it's not like I just sat down for two and a half hours. Yeah, that's fine. I guess I got off and walked around a little bit in the middle. Yeah, you're okay. It's all good. A friend of mine wants to bring me to a racetrack to drive around cars on the weekends, and I was like, just don't crash. Cause like my blood is just top of the line right out of it. So crap.
My blood is so thin, it's just going to pour out. You think blood is viscous, usually. You just wait till I've got an arterial bleed with two months of blood pressure. Like a water balloon. Yeah, exactly. I'd be like that scene in Adam's family. You'd be like the blood elevator in The Shining. Yeah, exactly. Man, fun, fun, fun. All right. On that note, I guess we'll end the podcast.
Don't know how to end on the podcast. We just rambled. Or I rambled. We all rambled for a while. We will have some quick looks this week. We're going to have quick looks for Skin Deep, for Expedition 33, and Frank. He's going to do it. We're going to do WWE 2K25 because he's played about 16,000 hours of it since it came out.
We're also going to have some type of quick luck stuff for Doom the Dark Ages next week and a bunch of other things. We're getting into it. We're going to slow and steady. We're going to start putting stuff up on Noclip Crew. 99% chance going to rebrand that channel. We have a free Patreon for Noclip Crew that we set up originally just to track
interest, we are going to be using that as well and likely rebranding it. We will not be starting a 100% crowdfunded organization, I do not think, because I want to I want to fucking... I want to... blow past expectations for what we could do with this thing, but I want to do it slowly, slowly and steady. So this month is quick luck month.
for us at the moment over on Noclip Crew. We're going to just keep, you know, get a decent patter of these up. And then we're talking, you know, we've been talking a lot already this week. We're going to keep talking. I'm talking to people outside. and we're going to put something together, but we're going to do it on our own pace. The reason you might want to subscribe to that free Patreon is because I'm hoping, I'm planning to put together a sort of patron.
podcast feed that is sort of about putting this together where we elicit feedback and I bring on people from the industry who I want to talk to about this and sort of have chats about. some of the ideas that we have and ideas out there about what we need to do or what games journalism needs to look like in 2025.
And like I said, we'll be at Summer Games Fest. I'm also putting the flag down, we will be at PAX West as well. Or at least some of us will be, so no clip or whatever our fucking... other brand is going to be whatever it is um we'll we'll be there uh i'm committing to that as well also going to be a quake con as well if anyone's heading to that so that should be good fun
And we're going to see if we can try and figure out a way of adding to this. And I think number one is what we're best at here on the podcast, which is highlighting games. that you may not have heard of before most of the mainstream press tends to. You know, games like Expedition 33. Yeah, you know, special little game no one's ever heard of before. Exactly. We're a little bit slow off the mark at the moment just because we're, you know, because Jesse was away.
He's got to play all those Sokoban games, you know? as quickly as possible. Other stuff to talk about, we were media partners for Ludo and Arakan. If you head over to youtube.com slash at fellow traveler, fellow traveler is the indie label that... together ludo naricon so if you type fellow traveler into youtube you'll find their channel and uh i think i'm not sure if your demo stream has gone up jesse but my despelote interview is up
And I think my Rise of the Golden Idol one is also. Those are more interesting anyway. So you can go check those out. And hopefully Jesse's demo stream will be up soon enough as well. You can also go to ludonaricon.com. to check out those as well. Bonus pod last month was the Borderlands review. I fucking even forgot we did that. My brain has scrubbed.
Gosh. That was so fun. I'll see more of those. Dude, I'm always down to watch a good movie, but I'm also equally down to watch a completely dog shit movie. I think Final Fantasy The Spirits Within is ripe for the picking.
Yeah, we should do that. I like that movie. It's weird. Yeah, I haven't seen it since I saw it in theaters with my dad, and we left the theater, and he was like, what the fuck was that? That's like when I brought my dad to the fifth element. He was like, yeah, that was great. What happened? At least that's a good movie. French directors are weird. Yeah. Um,
What are you guys doing for the rest of the week? Frank, what's your week look like? Any wrestling shows? They had Golden Week in Japan, which is a week off. Everyone travels mainly to Tokyo and other parts. Every single day in Tokyo was a massive wrestling pay-per-view.
So I've been catching up on all of these wrestling shows. So I'm, you know, making my way through it. And I'm starting to get into like... luchador wrestling so there's even a legit lucha show happening at the end of the month in LA and it's like I finished Eddie Guerrero's book, so I'm learning more about, you know, the Rudos and the Technicas and the legacy of the mask. So it's, yeah, I'm all in. So lots of watching wrestling.
Hell yeah. Jesse, you're off to Boston? Yes, sir. I'm going to Boston. I'm going to PAX East. I would love to hang out with Jeremy if we could. We're going to try to make it happen. Yeah. Hell yeah. If not, though. At the very least, I get to see some cool video games. If you see me there... bother me. I would actually love to meet people at the event. It'd be nice.
Father, Jesse. Although he turned his camera off, so maybe he's trying to be incognito. Well, this is just in case Border and Customs checks and hears that said. It's not me saying it. It's my evil twin, Essage. You're like, oh, we saw you're in Zandvoort. Yeah. Last month, what were you buying there? What were you planning? Yeah, yeah. Exactly, yeah. Jeremy what about you? What's your week look like? Oh, about to do the first quick look in a while.
Break off the dust and the rust, which I'm very excited about. And I've been cooking on a little, been making a video game that I'm pretty excited about. So I've got a pretty... straight shot I'm hoping to get it into playtesting by this summer is my hope but what that means in video game terms is expected in you know 2035 or some shit
But no, no, I've been cooking on something that I think is actually real good, so I'm excited. You'll obviously hear me talk about it on here when I'm ready to share more. Wicked sick. Love to hear it. I got a pretty chill weekend. My parents are coming over next week. First time they visited California. Only second time they visited me in America. They came to Maryland like six years ago now. So very excited. It's a perfect time to start launching a new video game.
Get them on. Property. Get them on. Get my dad to talk about. He used to play... Solitaire on his little IBM ThinkPad thing. Okay, get him to play Ballotro. That would be amazing. Yeah, you're right. He used to do the thing where he'd invite us all in the room when he did the last one. So you could watch the dum-dum-dum-dum. That's great. Which, unfortunately, isn't framerate locked, so...
If you do it on modern machines, it just goes like that. All of them animate, really. It's like the Pac-Man problem of the ghosts move faster with the less there is to render. So lazy devs. Lazy fucking devs. Finally, someone said it, Jesse. We need a patch. I'm seeking truth to power, man. That's all I ever do. PatchSolitaire.com. That's the real patch. What is it? Change.org slash PatchSolitaire. Yeah. Let's get it fixed. And pinball. Let's get Windows pinball updated, too.
Yeah, you're right. Yeah, wind pin. Let's change it. Did you ever play the little pinball game that was in Microsoft Word? Did you ever do a little hack? Yeah, there's like a little hack you could do in like Word 98, I think. And also in Excel, you could get a flight simulator to appear.
Like using the Excel cells? Yeah, there was like a thing you did that like unlocked a hidden game. Cool. And there was a flight sim in Microsoft Excel and there was a pinball game. I got the pinball one to work in Word. I never got the flight sim to work.
I don't know if someone was fucking with me on that one. Yeah, you're getting pranked. I think I saw a video. Yeah, you could play a little pinball game. You see it? I see it. They're beautiful. Right? Yeah, a beautiful little hidden pinball game. In your Microsoft Word. I play a pinball game in Microsoft Word all the time. It's called adding a fucking image to a Word document. Everything goes all over the place. Aligning text. Yeah. Good shot. Hey, if you use Squarespace you can also have that.
problem. they haven't sold that one yet can we just get jerseys for noclip crew that say like the blue shoe on the chest and then we can just talk about whatever video. Like, there's gotta be someone who just... Well, we're like F1 uniforms with all the rainbow logos on them. I just want to be a NASCAR. I want to have it with Oreos on it. Well, now we're just talking about the fucking Battle Pass Hulk.
Like, we got to wear a shirt. Oh, yeah, put their names on clothes. I would do that. Yeah. Just a big Cameron lad written across the front of it. I think if you wear a t-shirt with the word ricin on it, though, you're going to get a visit from the FBI. Yeah, ricin is illegal in 15...
alright we're pushing three hours people have to fucking get on with their lives and this blood cut's starting to itch me so let's get out of here thank you all so much for listening to our podcast see you again next time bye Bye. you