DOOM: The Dark Ages, Capcom Fighting Collection 2, PAX East

Hello friends and welcome to episode 227. It's a crew cast. The whole crew is here. We've got a lot of stuff to talk about. Why don't you grab a beer? We're going to be talking about a bunch of games here. We've got Labyrinth of the Demon King. Doom the Dark Ages, Capcom Fighting Collection 2, and Jesse's back. from PAX, Boston. The mass hole is back. Or maybe Jeremy's the mass hole. Jeremy, have you ever been called a mass hole in your life? Oh yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, I mean, mostly jokingly. I've never cut someone off in traffic. Although the biggest asshole I've ever had as a neighbor in California turned out to be from Massachusetts, so it was right. I got away from Massachusetts and I was like, you know, I really miss it. The one person from Boston was like, I'm going to call the cops on you for watching a movie a little too loud at 7pm. Terrific. Jessica, it wasn't the town. That was the problem.

You weren't watching The Town. If it was The Town, you would have been okay. Or Good Will Hunting. Good Will Hunting. My boy's wicked smart. Jesse, what was the most Boston thing you did at PAX? This past week. We visited the cop slide at City Hall. You are kidding me. That's where that is? Yeah, I was so shocked to learn that that's where the big slide is. That the cop falls down and like breaks his neck. Beeps it.

We had to go. It was like visiting the Statue of Liberty, but for more important things, obviously. Did you go down the slide? I personally didn't, because I don't have health care in America, and I don't want to have to pay for that. So my buddy went down and it's not that crazy. The cop perhaps was playing it up. Why would a cop ever do that? And like...

It was a good time, though. They had smaller slides for children, and I loved going on those ones, but that was it. Yeah, yeah. But it was so cool to see. I saluted it and everything. Wow. It was awesome. I had a great time. It's an important thing. You went to the little coin machine and got your coin bent. the picture of the slide on. No, but we did go through Fanuel Hall. I hadn't done that yet. What's Fanuel Hall? No, Fanuel. Sorry. Oh, what's that? It's, I don't know, an old market.

some sort of building. Jeremy, help me out. The old city hall, is that what it is? Uh, I got it. You know when you're from a place and you never do any of the touristy shit? I don't know any of the history of annual hall. Yeah, I mean, it's currently like a bunch of overpriced shops and kind of touristy stuff. But if you go in the basement, you can learn about slavery and how that was a thing. Yeah.

It was very interesting. We did it in Boston, but also we were super against it. We were chill. We didn't really like it at all. Yeah, exactly. We had a lot of middle-aged women who, I think their children had just left them there. sitting there on the bench. They watched it play on loop twice. It was awesome. I felt so bad for them. I hope not. I hope they rename it FanDuel Hall in the future. Oh, God. Yeah, give them three weeks. And they sort of, yeah, they take over.

That'd be pretty good. Frank, what's the best-named place you've seen wrestling in? And you can't say the Ukrainian Cultural Center, because that's obviously... No, I always say Corican Hall, but there's one place I haven't been to yet that I want to go to called Ryo Goku Kokigikagen. Whoa. Yeah.

It's a giant, like, sumo hall tournament. And, like, a bit is, it's like, if a wrestler can pronounce it properly or not, like, there's a famous promo video of Mayu Iwatani, like... stumbling through it and everyone else is like cracking up but it's like Is that what Ryu does in Street Fighter? So in like 1994, they had the Street Fighter 2 tournament at Ryogoku Kikikagen.

So, like, it's a legit famous place, but they had a giant Street Fighter tournament, like, back in 1994, so it's a famous, like... sumo hall but i have i've yet to like actually go there but i've i think i've hit every other uh wrestling venue and you've got to go there and flex on them and just say the name three times yeah pretend you can't find it and like ask some locals you know You can be like that guy. You can be like that guy. What's his name? Xauma, the guy who does the...

speaks like 10,000 languages. Do you ever see that fucking thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the guy who learns like a little bit of every fucking language so that he can go to like Swahili district in whatever part of New York and speak perfect Swahili. And they're like, holy shit. I can't tell if he's a really good linguist or if he's a really good scam artist.

spending two days of learning six particular phrases so we could run out and chat. He seems pretty good. Although, the one time I got the insight into if he's actually good is when he did...

And it was, like, kind of funky. Like, I think the people listening to him were like, Being generous like you know, I mean like trying to like interpret what he was saying because his pronunciation was like all over the place It's like when you go to Japan and people are like, oh, Nihongo Jozu, and they're saying your Japanese is excellent or skillful, but what they're actually saying is like, oh god, he's trying so hard and it's terrible.

Exactly, Neo Go Coco Kiki Kagan. Yeah, Rio Go Coco. Rio, oh shit, okay, I fucked up at the start. Not good. You know what? I won't fuck up. Our battle pass holders who are here to sponsor our work. to give us money for art. It's called patronage. Maybe you've heard it. You can go to patronage.net slash note clip.

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Tokir Tilyev and Rycin and all the thousands of other incredible patrons who support us over on that web zone I talked about. We got a lot to talk about. First of all, a correction. Unfortunately, I did not do my research. How dare you. How long we did. Hey, look, we talked about it. Giant Bomb ending. It turns out I was wrong. Giant Bomb is not ending, and I just want to personally apologize to all of the Giant Bomb tutors for putting that out.

in the world. Jesse, I assume you were asked the announcement at PAX? Do you know me? I definitely wasn't. I saw it. I saw Dan and Jan. on their way in, not to the panel, but I saw them while I was going towards PAX, and I was like, Something good's gonna happen. They look happier than people who just got fired should be. So that was a good sign. But after that, I was with my wife, and I was with my friend, and my wife brought her friend.

We were getting dinner, and I was like, I'm not skipping dinner to go to this, because I know what it is. I know it's going to be good, so it's okay. It's live-streamed, so. I'm sorry. I didn't get to be there for the moment, but it was cool. And everyone was very excited on Sunday to know that Giant Bomb was back, baby. Yeah. The news was the Giant Bomb was basically, I mean, Giant Bomb had never been closed, but.

Jeff Garvin, Mike Mignotti sort of getting kicked out, and who knows who else got kicked out. I kind of, yeah. The way this went down, I'm assuming... If they sold it to Bacalar and to Grubb, that maybe both of them were out. Dan, I know. was I don't know if he was let go, but he kind of looked like he was trying to get let go online for a few days there. It was all very strange, but obviously, you know.

A Giant Bomb, as much work as Janet Choa does over at GiantBomb.com, an entire website cannot be run by one person. And what it sounds like is, and I've heard this as well from folks, I've been talking to is that the, and I'm really surprised by this, but that the reaction from this Giant Bomb fan base and sort of the industry writ large. was so toxically negative to the fandom brand and that perhaps whatever plans they had for Giant Bomb which has always been this sort of

Also, like a sort of a freebie you get at the till when you buy something. You know what I mean? Like it's the buy one, get one free of acquisitions. You know, GameSpot was when Red Ventures got bought by CNET. It was sort of like... It was in the same vertical at CBS Interactive when I worked there, so it kind of got sold along with it. And Giant Bombs was sort of the add-on on the add-on. And then when Fandom bought GameSpot and all that stuff, Giant Bomb again.

It's just weird to have two gaming websites in your portfolio anyway, and Giant Bomb was sort of the... I don't know, yeah, the add-on to that particular deal as well. Yeah, I'm assuming the numbers didn't add up on fandom side anyway, and they just wanted to cut their losses. But it was crazy to hear that. Essentially, what we have heard has happened is that, according to those folks, fandom have...

I assume none of this is done yet because you just don't get an acquisition signed off in four days. There's so much legal stuff you have to do. Usually you get lawyers go through like...

20 years of paperwork to make sure there's no like liability exposure and you know fucking god knows what there's all these other contracts to be signed over like it usually takes a you know particularly long period of time I know people who were sort of in charge of the previous two acquisitions, the M&A procedure for those. merger and acquisition stuff and I know that it takes a long time but apparently it was sold to Bacalar and Grubb and then they have

either are planning to or have already essentially created a corporate structure in which it has also been split between Mike Mignotti, Dan Reichert, and Janet Cho. So the five of them are equal stakes holders. in whatever this new, you know, duders.llc is. I was confused by your point about them being able to afford this, but I'm even more confused that they sold it to Jeff Grubb. He doesn't have money. I was laughing on Twitter saying like, how much did fandom sell this thing that like...

five games journalists were able to buy. I mean, I'm genuinely fascinated by all this. None of this will ever come out, right? You can already tell that non-disparagement contracts have been signed because the tone in regards to fandom, has done a complete 180. I don't blame those guys. They have to do the dance, but there's a lot of positive stuff about fandom coming out when last week it was all, fuck fandom.

So, you know, those contracts have clearly been signed. But yeah, I don't know. Like, what's your gut feeling? No idea. There has to be some sort of outside investor, right? This is a ton of money. Or maybe there's sponsorships that they just pre-locked and they were able to get credit on it or something. They probably have.

good enough connections to get something people saw giant bomb closing or people with money rather to be more specific saw giant bomb closing and went hey you know if we can work something out we can cut a deal with you for a good amount of money. I don't know, that's speculation. I could see it making sense, though, if they needed capital, which, yeah, they probably need a little bit of capital. Like, yeah, just a little bit. Yeah, that's, I think at the start, I definitely thought, like,

Oh, there's, presumably this is more money than people had lying around in their, their bank. Cause you're, again, you're talking about the speed of this. Like, it's like, you know, the fastest thing you'll ever pay for is like a mortgage, right? Which is.

still an incredible amount of paperwork, an incredible amount of legal stuff. It's crazy how fast it is for something in the last 30 years of your life. Yeah, yeah. But that still takes like fucking you know you sign off on a thing but it still takes like at least two weeks you know like california is crazy fast right but like other places it's

It's nowhere near that. Like in Ireland, it's a process that takes like six weeks to do all that stuff just because of how that works over there. So at the start, I was like, Yeah, they must have gotten somebody or, again, You're not transferring. It's not like you're buying a fucking popsicle. You know what I mean? The money stuff can happen later. The stuff can be signed now. Maybe there's an agreement in principle that's been established.

Maybe they need to find the money. Maybe, you know, I don't think anyone right now wants to remortgage their house if they had a mortgage before all of this.

interest rate stuff happened pre-covid like i don't know what maybe it's just a brand acquisition too like maybe there's sounds like they're getting everything like the website really and all the content and everything too i hate using that word but which honestly might be the biggest issue I'm fascinated and maybe I shouldn't be talking about this. as openly considering how close I am to

Some of these folks, but in many ways, I'm not actually that close to the guys who are running it now. I've worked with a bunch of them in the past. Dan, obviously, is somebody I've been friends with for a long time. I texted him over the weekend. I was chatting to... I send a message to Grub to say congratulations and Bacalar, who I've talked to a bunch over the years as well, and was there when I was doing Giant Bomb stuff a couple of years ago. But Mike, I've never talked to.

In many ways, I'm really, really happy that this happened, and I'm really, really happy that these guys did it. But as an OG Giant Bomb fan, I'm somewhat bittersweet that none of the original... GB people are involved. I immediately felt kind of mournful that Gursman and Vinny and obviously Ryan Davis. didn't get to enjoy this, and obviously Brad and Alex as well. That's just me. You know what I mean? Like, I just think about...

when you found something and you build something, you know what I mean? Like, to me, everyone should end up in other hands. It is. And I think it's, it's ended up in really good hands and I'm really happy for those guys, but there's definitely, you know, a sort of a tinge of sadness in my heart that it's, and hopefully maybe those folks will, you know, maybe there'll be some collaborations and things like that. I think that would be kind of cool.

But yeah, on the money side, the website is the big question mark for me because you would think that hosting websites doesn't cost that much. But I think hosting that website does cost a lot. It costs a lot if people go to the website. Well, that's the thing. The other issue with Giant Bomb is that it's been a repository of video game data and information. That's why it was built.

So there's an API where people pull information from that wiki. There's also just a lot of links to images that you can directly link to Giant Bomb's servers. So you can just... use those images. So that server is getting pinged by people who have links to content that is stored on that server, like images and things like that. Obviously the video stuff is largely propagated to YouTube, but there's definitely like a decade and a half sort of...

of internet activity that is sort of baked into the cost of running that website. So that's the thing. If they... And I think that's going to be a tricky one. Like in my head, that's the thing that I'm most fascinated about is like, how do you. How do you pay for that, especially when it's something that's going to cost a lot of money that maybe you're not getting much from anymore? That's a good point. And how do you sort of, like, what are the optics around that? Like, how do you...

How do you make Giant Bomb independent? one of the first things that has to happen is the website disappears. Like that's, that's in my head. Like I'm, I'm, you know, I love running properties like this and I like planning stuff and you know, the money side of it I'm interested in.

all that stuff and operating. And so those are the things that immediately come to mind for me. Like, I think there's going to be an amazing amount of support for them, especially from the sort of established Giant Bomb fan group. I think like a lot of established... like you know and I consider myself in this as well, like sort of now, sort of older games journo people, building new audience is always the problem. And you see on the graph treons and you see it on...

YouTube video views for a lot of people who've been around a long time that, you know, graph goes down, goes down slowly, but it goes down and it's hard to get that thing to go back up again. you need to, you know what I mean? So that's going to be a challenge for sure. But yeah, I'm super happy for those guys. I think they're in the same boat as the rest of us now. You know what I mean? And I'm really glad for them, and they'll be so happy to do it. But this side of the...

This side of the wall is fucking hard, you know, and it's harder the bigger the team you have. And you see how hard people like Kind of Funny have to fucking hustle. You know, like Greg and those guys are just in terms of... being able to keep a lot of people employed full-time, you know what I mean? Like, I'm the only full-time employee on Noclip, I think. Jeremy, last year, you were pretty close, I guess, to that in some respects, but you're not a full-time.

Ben over at MinMax is the only full-time employee over there, right? The way these operations are able to sort of survive. and not be in the red is because it's contract work. You know what I mean? I think through Second Wind, I'm guessing the founders are full-time at least over there. I mean, they're earning loads over there. Their Patreon's really impressive. Although they're still in the red, right? They're quarterlies.

Their quarterly report they put out, they're still... Don't look awesome. No, it doesn't. And that's just the... That's how hard it is to do this. I think they still have their own Patreons and things going on. And I suspect that they will be not pulling a load of money out of this thing right away. They've got families. Many of them have families. It's a lot of responsibility.

Yeah, it's tough. And the more... i don't know it's like we tried this with crew and stuff or kind of a lot of stuff last year where it's like the more work that you make does it bring in more people i'm like and i feel like second when they're in that position too because they're like producing more new shows um And it's like, sometimes the more work you do doesn't actually help. Like, I mean, what was the year, Jeremy? I think it was like 2020.

maybe we put out more docs than ever it was an insane year like we put out so many documentaries And like our Patreon numbers didn't really, like the curve was the exact same look. And you're like, Fuck. It's not like

a job where the more hours you work, the more you earn. You know what I mean? Yeah, they're not like apples on a shelf and people are buying the apples and there's like a direct linear increase. It's more like you do the work and you hope that the holistic perception of it is that you're doing a good job.

navigating it and then if there are people who are able to pledge to the patreon it's almost like it's more about their life circumstances and then when when the stars align and they're like oh i got like 10 bucks a month i could throw like who's doing good work and it's like you just better hope you're doing good work at the time when those individuals are like ready to, you know what I mean? It's, it's totally decoupled from just like,

the work you do. You've got to get off Grafton.com. You've got to start looking at the stock market. That's what you need to start playing, baby. Watch where people's income... Watch the S&P 500. Once it reaches a certain number, then do a call-out for patrons, alright? I think we should just start throwing, like, bones and, like, reading tea leaves and shit. That might be more effective than any other tactic. That's what I've been doing. I think that's on cryptocurrency.

basically. You know what you should do? I feel like every gaming outlet path to success is Quit all at once. every six months and open a new thing? And that seems to work.

for whatever reason okay we have to invent a fictional overlord who we all work under at now his name is like john money smith dr money smith and he uh and we all hate him and every six months we go he's just like riding our asses we gotta quit and start a new thing and we give it a new name but it's just no clue we'll call it god mode or something just keep coming up with new cheap names I consider god mode so many times but

I was worried I'd end up like God is a Geek where everyone thinks we're a Christian website. Yeah, I mean, that's true. God Mode would be such a funny name for a Christian game site. I mean, there is money to be made there. Like, that's a huge market. Yeah. Oh, you think we should just lean into it? Let's pivot. If you were wondering what the new name for Noclip Crew was, well... Yeah, we're going full Christian. Apologies to all of our LGBTQ+, and trans fans. We are really...

sold you down the fucking river. We're going to ask everyone to, yeah, Jesse, you're going to have to move to Iowa or somewhere. I don't know. Where's the most Christian nationalist place in America? The White House on my right. Mar-a-Lago. You said quitting is the way to do that. You actually get a multiplier if you're fired.

I've heard that's not true. All right, hurry up. Send me the pink slip. Let's get it over. Or you quit and you pretend you got fired. You go on like Joe Rogan and kind of just say like, oh, I actually, I got fired. I got fired. They made me quit. They fired me because of woke. Because of their woke. There's so many strategies to getting sympathy money from people. There's a whole range of ways to do it.

my duder friends you know when it's like your little brother you know when you're like you feel like so close to a thing and it's been part of your life the whole time that you can just kind of like you know poke fun and razz at it a little bit yeah but only you can if anyone else does you'll beat their ass Anyone else, exactly. I am the biggest challenge. That's why I have now, I live in Petaluma, because I have my... My sort of...

Caterpillar to butterfly-like transition into Jeff Gerstmann continues. Just move to Bethlehem and we're like, I'll grow my hair out. I'm like, I was a little bit embarrassed about it. I was talking to Jeff a few days ago and I was like, I'd like seen his mom earlier that day because we needed new tires and like the tire store that she runs is like down there.

So to somebody who is a genuine Giant Bomb fanboy, sometimes it's kind of embarrassing that like things, like I could go to another tire shop. but I know her, and it's the closest. It's like a two-minute drive from my house, so I don't want to not go there because I'm self-conscious about being a fucking fanboy.

Well, you shouldn't have moved so close to the tire shop on purpose. I know. You're like, oh, Jeff's mom lives there. I should move nearby. That's it. That's what I did. That's what I did. That's also why I named my daughter Lucha Deer. I've never said her name. on any of our podcasts. I want to reveal the fucking... It's out. It's out there. Really cool to see. I know I'm the big Giant Bomb fan here on the crew.

I suspect we will not see something like that from the Polygon folks. Have you guys seen any? I know some people have launched sub stacks and things like that. I think Aftermath picked up one or two people. You know, to do contract work, stuff like that. Have you seen anything else? I've seen some articles dropping. I think Nicole Carpenter did something on sex scenes in video games. Yeah, I think that was on Aftermath, was it? Was it? Yeah, something like that. Or was it...

No. Yeah, it was. Whatever it was, it was good. It was a good article. Yes. Yeah, there was a great line about one of the... Baldur's Gate guy was brought in just to do sex scene noises, which I thought was right for just, uh, uh, just got good grunts. I should have just hired you, man. You're so good at it. yeah and you do it for free on the pod they don't even have to pay it that'd be a fun job but you know like

Even if you're good at your job, you get imposter syndrome. I feel like doing that job, it's like... i don't know where the line is on mastery so i'd feel like i was in the booth like and then after like an hour of that they're like all right we're rapping and i would come out and be like was that like was that good was that anything it's like i could do this all day but i don't know if i'm fucking cooking or not You know, and you're like improv-ing, but you kind of run out of lines. You just...

you know, it kind of gets a bit weird. Like, what if you start getting, like, real fucking, like, yeah, take it, you know, like, saying some shit that you're like, hey, yeah, if you could just, like, tone it down a little bit. Yeah, call me, call me, call me daddy. So we can make a great soundboard out of it. Yeah, just like really leaning into it. Frank, what would you say if you were recording Sexy? I'm not a

up for a performance, but I could rehearse if you'd like. Is John Mulaney in here? Just the neurotic sex scene audio. Woody Allen sex scene, sex game we're playing. This is alright. No, actually, you know what? I don't want to play the Woody Allen sex game. Don't Google Woody Allen controversy. Don't do it. Exactly. Oh, I don't know. Should I take you to school or bring you home? I don't know. Oh, no. Alright, let's fucking move on. Move on into weird waters here.

Speaking of sex scenes, hand check everyone at PAX. Jesse Karasha, how was your time at PAX East? What did you do? What did you... Was it... Paint a picture. Were you there kind of hanging out, seeing some panels? Were you just spending all your time in the indie game? mega booth or what was the plan? I'm a show floor guy. I like going to PAX. It's my second time now and I will probably continue to go because I like Boston and I like PAX.

I'm a big proponent of going out and playing the games myself. I got some emails in advance that were like, come check this out. And I was like, yeah, yeah, there's a couple that I signed up for. I got appointments, which was really cool. I got to talk to a lot of devs, which was really nice.

It was like a good opportunity, I think, to get the word out about stuff that we're doing in the near-ish future, which was cool. There's a lot of excitement and a lot of trust in the brand. We have a safe brand that people believe in. Well, we're changing that brand, so... Right, so they better get over that. That's going to be moving. But yeah, so I saw a lot of cool games. I went to the DreadXP booth and played a game called White Knuckles.

which was very very good um talked to the dev there and they were like Every time, and Danny, you said this happened at GDC, every time I was, I would just have a casual conversation with a, you know. there's a really cool game when you start making it and then at the end i'm like oh i didn't introduce myself sorry hi i'm jesse from no clip and they're like no clip and i'm like man i didn't want that i just wanted to have a nice conversation

But they're so happy to talk to anyone from there. And they're like, wow, they care about our games. And I'm like, yeah, we care about video games. So that was cool. Thanks for being part of our propaganda wing. Yeah, I'm happy to go around and persuade everyone to be excited. Like one of those army recruiters outside of a high school. No. I live in a country that's not scary. No, that's not true. We do that too, actually, when I think about it.

Anyway, yeah, White Knuckle, very good. It's like a climbing game. White Knuckle's awesome. yeah you're oh dude you played it oh my god it's so much fun like i was playing it at the booth it's this first person um climbing game where each of your hands is a mouse button so your left hand is the left mouse button right hand is the right mouse button obviously

and you climb up these surfaces independently, so you can use your left hand and hold onto something, look around, and then grab with your right hand. But there's also tools that you can use in each independent hand so you can like put a pitton in the wall and hammer it but your hands have

uh stamina so you run out of stamina and you can fall off the wall and it's like very stressed i was just playing the tutorial and i went up alone it was just me that's what alone means and i was like playing the tutorial And I realized there were people behind me after I did like a cool thing. You get these rebar poles that you can just like throw at the wall and they turn into climbable.

uh surfaces oh that's cool and the guy behind me was like is he gonna do that and i was like huh i turned around there's like eight people behind me watching me play the tutorial they're like this is the sickest game ever i'm like yeah this is like the best thing i played at the show I love the art style. It's like Quake and Solid Fingers or something. It's super dark looking. Yeah, it's not quite as gross as Solid Fingers, but it's up there.

It's really good. Yeah, that was awesome. And the dev, I forget her name. Very, very nice that was there. That was the lead. They've only worked on it for like a year, which was wild. Yeah, it's still in early access now.

seems like it's not too far out so i think the demo on steam is the one that was at pack so if you want to check that out uh split gate 2 i also took a look at that shit man that'd be good yeah i'd love to do a quick look on white knuckle for sure um yeah split gate 2 it's split gate again but it feels so much better like i feel like if you played the first one and you were like this is all right it's good

Halo with portals. This is legit. Like... i was i was hip firing i was aiming down sights the portals so much faster because like in the first one uh you had to do one or the other here both portals are one button so you just hit the button And like, it's just quicker to be strategic. You don't like fumble the controls while you're learning it. So is it in like order? Like first?

Yeah, first portal is the one you put, and then the second portal you go through. But then if you hit it again, the first portal goes away. Okay, okay. Yeah. so it's just like there are not a lot of opportunities where you want to keep the first one anyway so it just made sense from the design perspective and yeah I talked to the lead on that one and he was really candid about a lot of stuff too considering that the first game didn't do

super well long-term, so he was talking about all that, which was cool. Yeah, but what was the situation there? So they released Slipgate, it came out. Splitgate, sorry. It says 2019 here, but it blew up during COVID. Am I remembering that right? Yeah, which wasn't long after that. No, but it was a small team. I think they're based around Lake Tahoe. And then they had an office down somewhere in Silicon Valley or around that area.

Yeah, it was a very small team. It was like 15 people or something, I think he was saying. Like, a super small team. And they couldn't. It did well, but yeah, exactly. As soon as it popped off, they couldn't keep up with the demand. People wanted more content, they wanted more maps. They were like, by the time we have this stuff done, people are going to stop playing the game. So instead of bothering to do that,

just let's just go make split gate 2 do the same thing again but make it better uh and then when we launch have a ton of content to go and he was like we have content he's like we have so much stuff people are going to get tired of playing it and i was like that sounds like a different problem

But alright. So it sounds exciting. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, I wonder, was there an investment or something? Like, did they get seed money? You know what I mean? Because it was around that time that Yeah, I'm seeing it here. There's a Venture Beat article here, how 1047 games put its VC money into good use on Splitgate 2. So I'm guessing that's what happened, is that like...

They had this game pop off during COVID. They went and got some money for the sequel as well. But yeah, like you said, I think it was a smart call to be like... We're going to be playing catch-up on this thing for years. We're going to be way behind what our user base wants, so let's just get out ahead of them and make this other thing.

it's cool to hear it's uh it plays well yeah yeah it plays really really well i'm excited to uh to play the full thing because i was just like i did one match and i was like that's it that's when you know you've played a good demo you do like one round of it you're like I don't need to play it again. Uninstall. I'm not playing that anymore. Is it free to play? I don't.

remember actually uh probably because it's gonna have so much like battle pass stuff but he was like if you get the bat he was very very clear about this if you get the battle pass you will get enough currency to get the next battle pass and i was like thank you So much for being rational. Everyone stop doing that. I wonder in a world where both Marathon and Ark Raiders have opted to not be free to play, if that also...

like a lower price point entry thing or something. Maybe that helps with reviews as well. I wonder if that's part of it, part of the calculus. If you're a free-to-play game, your chances of getting a review bombed are maybe higher.

maybe maybe it's not maybe who knows there are tons of paid games that still get review bombed somehow it's very true buy them and forget to review and then something bad happens and then suddenly it gets a ton of reviews so it's all nebulous and we shouldn't do anything based off reviews but we do The third game I want to mention, I saw a ton of really cool stuff. I played a game called Fretless, which was really fun.

lots of weird little indie stuff. Devolver had a good booth. Monster Train 2 was there. They had a new game called Mycopunk, which is like a multiplayer mushroom shooter, which looked really fun. Batsu. Mushroom shooter.

I didn't play a genre so long. It's a frog game. Are you playing any frog games, Danny? We have documentaries on two frog games. That's right. Good point. We're the leading... source of fraud game news um but the other game that i play those are the weirdest experience that i've ever had going to anything maybe ever

Crimson Desert, the new game from Pearl Abyss, right? Yes, the Black Desert Online team. Black Desert Online team, yeah. I was very excited for this game because it looks off the walls. It's like there's so much stuff going on. Every trailer is like 900 features. But the experience of playing this game. So you wait in line for like 10 minutes, it felt. Which isn't that bad at PAX. I went on Sunday, so it was pretty dead. But when you get in, it's a 30-minute experience.

but the first 12 minutes is you watching a tutorial video in like classroom assembly style with a bunch of strangers all very smelly and on the floor and four days tired from being at pack The loudest speaker I've ever heard in my life with a subwoofer that you can feel in your chest.

And it was just this British guy being like, and here's how you play Black Desert. Sorry, not Black Desert. I know exactly who you're talking about. It's the community manager for Black Desert Online. Oh, he has a great voice. He hosts the Heidel Ball, the annual Black Desert. thing they do. Oh, that's so cool. He's got a great English voice. He does. It's so good. He's like, here's all the buttons you can press. Welcome to Point Hospital.

So yeah, we spent 12 minutes learning the controls and then they're like, now you're going to go fight a boss. And they're like, yeah, this boss should only take a little bit of your time. Everyone at the booth took the entire time to beat that one boss. It's like, imagine if you were doing a demo for a game that you've never played before and you fought. like the second or third boss.

Okay. And that was all you had time for. No tutorial. No, like, lead up. It sounds like a 12 minute long tutorial, Jesse. Were you not listening to the... Right. They gave us the explanation of the world and stuff. They were like, here's what you'll be doing in the world of Crimson Desert. There are sexy looking characters with amazing clothes.

Have you played Black Desert? Weirdly, they don't use the character creator. You just play as one character, and you don't get to, like, make your own beautiful creature. You would have fucking spent the 30 minutes. That's the problem. That's fine. Black Desert Online has the most attractive characters in the world. I'm sorry, Khajiits from Oblivion Remastered. How dare you say that? There's a little Irish girl. There's like an Irish paladin in Black Desert Online.

It's good stuff. Wait, you don't make your character in Black Desert. I thought you do. No, you do. That's the whole thing. You make one, yeah. You pick a class. Yeah, something like that. You give a class. Yeah, once I got into it, it seemed okay. It's, you know, one of those. It's a Souls-like kind of combat game, third-person action. You swing the sword, there's special abilities. It looked really cool, but again, because we didn't have time to learn how to actually play it.

everyone was kind of doing the same combos but in the very cool tutorial, there was like You can grab a guy's neck and fucking DDT him and do all these cool wrestling moves. And I was like, yeah, let me do that. And then we get in there and they have the little card telling you what the controls are. And none of them are, here's how you do the one cool thing you saw in the video. All of them are like, here's how you attack.

so that was a bit of a shame i think that was probably the worst way to show off that game because it looks so wild there's so much to do and they're like Here, do combat you've done in the last 100,000 games in this genre. Like, it's not different. It's right bumper for light.

right trigger for strong, you know, all that kind of stuff. It's very straightforward. So that was a shame. I was hoping to see more of that garden demo. Yeah. Black desert is like such a, I mean, you know, that's an MMO that's been running. know 20 years or something and it's like the amount of stuff that you can do in that you can just like be a farmer you know i mean they have a life skills stuff so it's it's kind of like

It's kind of weird. It's not a sandbox MMO, but it's kind of more of one of those than like, you know, Guild Wars or WoW or any of that stuff. So I was wondering... How much Crimson Desert was going to lean into that? Or was it going to be like Black Desert where like, oh no, we'll just do an update every week for the next two decades and then slowly it'll turn into this. thing but you know it's a single player game you know with a story i'm guessing I don't know how much of that.

Who knows? Maybe it'll go forever. It'll be one of those single-player MMOs. I guess Assassin's Creed kind of turned into that for a little bit there with Valhalla. Yeah. Who knows? Maybe they'll have a multiplayer mode. Give them a chance. One other thing I wanted to mention. I went to the Critical Reflex booth. They had all of the coolest games at the show. Like if you were going to go to one spot for long enough,

That was the place to be. They had a buckshot roulette table that was a real-life buckshot roulette. It wasn't like... multiplayer in the game they had a gun on the table and like buttons that did stuff on the table and you like place them the RFID on stuff and it would like take people's stuff away yeah it was very very cool that was a apparently it was very expensive that's all I know

And then the games that they had there were great, too. Yeah, they had Militioner or Milizione. I don't know how you read words. The Big Cop game. Like, Big Cop stares at you from high up. That was cool. I didn't play it myself. My buddy was running through that one and I watched him play a little bit of it. It was very good. It looks like not exactly what I thought it was going to be. It's a first person walking around talking kind of thing.

It's, yeah. But the cop is watching you, like they always are. That was good. I played some of No, I'm Not a Human, which... Freaky. Once you see the pictures on Steam, I'll put a link in the description. It's a scary looking game. This game is awesome.

It's exactly what you think it is. Was it a demo or was it an earlier version of this? I've played a version of this a while ago. It's really, really cool. The writing is so cool. To me, this is the sort of stuff we need to be covering on the new thing. For sure. the new no-clip crew stuff, because, like, I mean, especially when it's set, because, like, we've, like, all the games that have ended up in our game of the years are big conversations, mouth-washing thresholds, art.

Buckshot Roulette, obviously. And there's so many interesting other games here that are probably... are they are they they're like a collect they're a publisher right so they're pulling in Yeah. I met some people that work at Critical Reflex who were like, love Noclip again. I mean, everyone basically.

had something similar to say uh but they were very very nice and they were like we'd love to you know figure something out so hey i'm not but if you want to they it's you know there's a possibility for relationship there um i couldn't remember the name of the game threshold god the whole time i was like you guys published this game with a train and meat falls and the guy's like i don't know what you're talking about i was like i swear to god um

But anyway, yeah, the other game that I checked out there that was really cool was Tanuki Pawns Summer. Which is being developed by Liam Edwards. Our boy. Hey. Awesome. I finally got to meet Liam in person, which was very nice. Oh, he was there. Great. Yeah. He is like the kindest, sweetest person that I've had a chance to talk to at the whole show. Just like X GameSpot UK intern, baby. Yeah, he had nothing but nice things to say about you, Danny.

No, it was great. It was a ton of fun getting to talk to him. He explained the whole game. It's like, you play as a tanuki whose job is to deliver mail in this small Japanese city. and you would do all these little side quests and minigames with the people who live there.

and it was just it was so adorable but then he took the controller and was like here's how you really play the game and was like doing bmx tricks and it's like tony hawk level dude you can like grind and ollie and like there's there's you got a balance on the on the little wheel thing like Really, really impressive. Coolest thing, by the way. There's a...

What do you call it? A bar in the game that's based on the bar where he lives in Japan and goes all the time. I think it's called Bridge. And yeah, it's modeled after that place. And he showed it. to the owners of the of the bar and they were like wow like that's you've really made that like that's yeah so i thought that was a little we're gonna sue you yeah how fucking dare you um

Yeah, so overall, I had a fun time at PAX. It was a weirdly chill version of PAX, it felt like, compared to last year, which I hear every year is the case. Oh, you mean like fewer people? Fewer people, but also like, yeah, no big hitters. Like there was no switch to, there was no, like Elden Ring was there, Night Reign, but it wasn't playable.

like some people it was a ticket system and some people got a ticket to play it but most were just watching the gameplay and then like this big dome theater So outside of the indie games, there wasn't really anything to really draw in big crowds, which I thought was a shame. It's almost like indie games are kind of where it's at, and then maybe we need to put more time and energy into... looking into what are the cool indie games before they clash.

Similarly, me and Frank have been planning our Summer Games Fest stuff, and there's some interesting stuff that's there for sure that I'm... You know, Frank has gotten us a couple of appointments that I'm pretty interested in. I'm not sure if we can say any of them, Frank, so let's keep it on the deal for the moment. But there's definitely...

Yeah, unless the stuff's getting announced, and I don't know if that's what happens at SGF, really. I'm sure some stuff will, but I don't think any massive games. Who knows? Yeah, it doesn't seem like it's going to be bananas there either. That's kind of the way the industry has been going, right? You got to take the swings, exactly. You kind of got to look at something and go, that seems interesting, let me give it a shot, and then it turns out to be really good, or...

You know, you spend 30 minutes playing a game that's not very good. I'm not going to name names. I'm not going to say what it is. Okay. Or you spend ten minutes. Ten minutes, yeah. You're like, ah, you put it down. But you have the media badge on, and you're like, ah, if I do that, they'll feel bad, or whatever, you know, like, ah. How'd you like it? It's really good. It's really good. It's really good. It's really good.

Hey, you guys kill it. Best of luck with launch. Okay, that was PAX East. You talked about cop games. That game, The Precinct, came out as well today. I haven't had a chance to play it. It's got 124 reviews on Steam. Very positive. So people love being a cop. You can be a cop in the precinct. I talked about it on this podcast, the demo I played. Or was it on the... No, was it on the... You did it on both, I think. Yeah, I think it was.

Double dipped. I'm interested to see that. You can also buy it alongside Police Similar. simulator patrol officers. This is a sub-genre. And there is also a deliver-at-all-cost bundle, which I find hilarious because these two games have a very similar look to each other. That game is not out for another. Is it out? It's on there for another... Nine days, it looks like. That game's still not out? It's still not out. Haven't you, like, finished it? Let me, let me...

Talk among yourselves for two seconds. I'm just going to check something. There's also a third bundle featuring Shadows of Doubt, which is pretty funny. That's a good combo. That's a good fit. You can do all the things. Yeah. Um... Control F embargo. Yes. What are you talking about? I don't know. Nothing. I don't know if I'm allowed to say if I am already playing a game whose embargo dropped. By the time the next podcast comes out. Okay. I will talk to the good people at...

video game company to see if that's the case. But I, for one, am excited. Maybe I'm excited to talk to you about a game in the future that looks a little bit like the present. Enough to be in a bundle. We'll see you later. A game that I have been playing that was under embargo that I can't talk about now is Doom the Dark. The trilogy. The Doom trilogy has now been closed. The contemporary Doom trilogy, as it were. From id Software, Doom the Dark Ages, it is a prequel of sorts. A prequel.

You play as the Doomslayer during a war between the demons and the Sentinels, and the Makers are involved as well, and it's all very ridiculous. We have a quick look up on Noclip Crew. You should go check that out if you want to see some gameplay of it. Myself and Frank enjoyed our time playing that. What questions do you guys have about Doom the Dark Ages? What are the hot things you're interested in when it comes to this latest id software?

so i know the big thing is like the shield i think even while playing it it shows like you can also like there's like buzz saws in the shield but what's the whole deal with the shield that's the new gimmick Yeah, the shield, so the Doom 2016 felt, I don't know, it was like Doom scale. It was a corridor crawler in many ways. Then you had these battle arenas and the combat chess and glory kills and all that.

Doom Eternal was a bit more like Soulsborne-y. Like it was about sort of like windows and, you know, what weapons to use and what order you should take on the baddies and these sort of like one-on-one fights. The Dark Ages, and I understand that I'm parroting what they were saying in their pre-release stuff, but it very much is accurate that...

In this one, the Doom Slayer feels like a tank. Like you are a heavy, brutish, like you're not wall running or double jumping all over the place. You are a tank with a bunch of weapons, and you are killing. So many more demons.

Like in the first game, you walk into a room and there's like five imps, right? And you like take out the imps one by one, you shoot them, you get undercover. In this one, you walk in a room and there's like 10 guys and you just like shield bash one of them so hard that all 10 explode. It's just...

completely ridiculous. The shield is essentially the parrying So this game has a parry system where whenever a enemy, usually the bigger enemies, either do a melee attack on you, like they're swinging a sword or they're stomping you with their foot. Or they are a projectile enemy and they are like shooting out projectiles, red projectiles.

Whenever any of them are green, you can parry them. So if they're shooting at fireballs and then one of them comes out that's green, you can go up and hit it with the shield. You put the shield up right beforehand and it'll directly go back to them. It'll zoom in on them, home in on them. same thing if somebody hits you with a melee strike you parry them and then it creates sometimes you have to parry them like three times in a row and then it creates a window where they are they will take extra

So you are constantly using the shield to do that. You can use the shield for other stuff. You can throw it. It has these blades on the sides. So there are certain enemies where throwing the shield is the advantageous. sort of thing you should do. There's also a brief sort of, you know, there's so many systems in this thing where you can use the shield to cross.

chasms by throwing it in something and then jumping and catching it so it pulls you over stuff like that but they're in specific places but essentially that's what like sort of the shield is for and that's that is also demonstrative of the overall combat in this game which is a very rock paper scissors with all of the different guns with all of the different demons and while that was also the case in the previous two games it is like turned up to 11.

one like you are fucking using melee on this guy you're punching him to get ammo you're kind of glory killing this the glory kills are not really glory kills on this they're just it's just kind of like used all the time you can right click and hit space bar and you will

run across and smash somebody with your shield you can get health if you kill the mobs with that there are some ones who have like plasma shields you have to kill in one way there are other ones who have metal shields you have to shoot a bunch so they get hot and then when they get hot you throw your shield at them You know, it's just every enemy has like a, it's a puzzle. And then what the game does is it sticks 10 of those puzzles in the room with you and goes, good luck.

And it's awesome. I'll be honest, the first few levels, it took me a while to get into it. I was like, I don't know if I like this. You are teaching me a lot of stuff. It slowly does it. And I think the level that we show off in the quick look is the first one I did where it all snapped. where you are literally flying a dragon around a map.

that has four of these big battle cruisers in it that you use your dragon to take out all the turrets on it and then you land the dragon on the ship jump off the dragon first person shooter destroy this whole ship Get to like the core of the ship. and you smash it with your shield the screen goes white because of the explosion and then suddenly you are the doom slayer falling from like 2 000 feet and down into the city landing on your dragon and then going off to kill the next

one of these spaceships. It's epic. It's really crazy. Do you think if you went back in time and told 13-year-old Danny, 14-year-old Danny, of playing doom for the first time that that was what doom was gonna be It's weird, because it doesn't feel doomy. Like, it feels... We all said it looked a little quakey. Quake 1-y, I guess. And it really doesn't either. It's this weird cyber future past Viking world. It's very...

It's unique. The world design is incredible. You know these guys. The work that they did and the first two games to build those worlds. The architecture in this game looks fucking incredible. The enemy design and the animation is terrific. It's still like it feels more mature and short of itself. The levels are all over. You have your sort of normal-ish uh, Carter Crawley style one that's very reminiscent of the previous two games.

And in those, you know, there are lots of puzzles and stuff and hidden bobbleheads and all that lark, right? That's all in there as well. And all these different systems and upgrading your guns and, you know, just like you can climb up these certain walls and all this sort of stuff. Then there are the levels that are a bit more mech-y, like you can get in one of these huge mechs, and then you are playing at a huge scale, and it's kind of like a melee.

demon punching game. It's like a And Hugo Martin, of course, works on concept art for the Jaegers for Pacific Rim, so it feels very sort of... in his wheelhouse there. And then there is the, whatever, somebody said Panzer Drag Doom in the comments of our quick look.

You're flying around on your big dragon thing. What's that about? Can you summon that whenever, or is that a specific story? I think it's in specific levels, and you can only land in specific spots. There are spots that you clear them out, and then there are... press control. Is there exploration you can do with that? Is it like a rail shooter when you're on the dragon or is it kind of just a separate open world section? It's

In that initial level, at least, you'll see a lot of footage of it looking quite rail-shooter-y because they're sort of teaching you the ropes. And there are these tunnel sequences where you're sometimes chasing somebody.

uh it's open it's open but it's not like you could like go anywhere anywhere and maybe there are later levels where you can do a bit more than this but like for instance in that initial level we show in the quick look where you can land on the four battle cruisers there are also other places you can land

um again they're preset you know one of them is there's a big demon on top of we actually do it in the video there's a big demon on top of one of the towers and if you kill that one Which I'll say the actual combat of killing the large demons and the battlecruisers is fairly structured. You know, you right-click, there are three different turrets that you're taking out on this battlecruiser. You go up to one of them and you right-click and you basically lock, right? You're locked on.

And at that stage, your movement is cardinal. It's up, down, left, right. And they shoot things at you. And if they're green, and you dodge them in the right direction, you get a window to shoot them back. And then you do that enough, and then you get swapped over to the next one on the cruiser. So it's not like... It's not fucking Elite Dangerous, you know what I mean? Like, it's not Drakkan Order of the Flame to talk about everyone's favorite dragon game. It's more, um...

prescribed in that way. But I think the game does such a good job of making sure that all of these things that you do are just short enough that you don't get bored.

you know what i mean like you're doing that and then you're doing this and then you're killing that one and you're doing this and then okay we're going to give you a new gun and then oh we're going to introduce this weird new enemy and then we're going to have you fight in this new weird place look at the architecture here and if the whole experience feels like It feels expensive like it kind of feels like the way first-person shooters I feel like used to feel back in the

aughts where you were like man they ran a lot of track here like they made a lot of game and there's a lot of systems in here and obviously there's no multiplayer or any of that stuff they've put all their eggs in the basket here and there's like cut scenes and voice acting and gross demon fucking baddies that look like a cross between a xenobite and that one george michael music video where he wore a red spandex

What? Yeah, I don't know what that guy's called, but he's fucking terrifying looking. Yeah, there's just a lot of game in here. And the more I've played it, the more I've enjoyed it. I haven't completed it yet. I'm over halfway. I think there's like 19 levels in total or something. It seems like it's beef. Yeah. How does the pacing feel? Because I watched a bit of the quick look, and just from your description of it, I feel like there's so much going on in this game. Do you feel like it?

takes time to like sync it because you're like going from first person mode to like flying to fucking the dragon to a cutscene to this like does it feel like it sinks into each one of those individual things and kind of like does you know commits to it for a while and lets you get a flavor for it yeah i'd say that it's it's the pacing like i think the reason i picked that level for the quick look was because it's so fucking

It is frenetic is an understatement. And the stuff you're doing is also like, you know, you come up to our first demon and I'm like dodging it in a way and then You know, the kill shot on it is that your dragon grabs its mouth. like rips its neck open and like fires down its mouth like Godzilla style. Like it's, it's just ridiculous. Yeah. The opening levels are.

have moments where it's crazy and then slower moments where you're sort of exploring and stuff like that. But I don't know, actually. Because even the level before that one, I think, is the first mech one. And that's just insane. I feel like this game is doing so much that it's like, I guess I'm just wondering, do you feel like...

Is the first person combat sort of like the bread and butter and you're spending most of the time doing that? Or is it sort of like giving sufficiently even chunks to all of these different mechanics? Or are they sort of like side dishes? No, it's mostly the first person stuff. I hear what you're saying because in this one...

Yeah, the first-person combat parts are sort of these, like, small nuggets in a more crazy flying around. Yeah, no, in those levels, that's the case. But, you know, then you'll get, like, two or three levels of more. standard first-person fare, let's say, you know, and then the mech ones as well. So, no, I think

You know, it's predominantly the first-person stuff. And the combat's really good. Like I was saying to Frank, We didn't get to one in this one because I didn't want to show off too much, but there are levels that you walk out in, like you walk into a room or like an area. and there are, like, they all turn to look at you, it feels like. And there's like a hundred fuckers. Like spiders and, you know, fellas riding beasts and big demons and just like 30 random mobs.

And I just go, how the fuck am I going to win this? Like this is, there's no way they expect me to get off. And then you do it first time. And it's insane. And it feels like you've been on low health the whole time. Like, I don't know what they're doing behind the scenes.

make make you feel that threatened and you're parrying like we did one boss fight in the quick look where the i'm on two health and i parry that guy like 20 times in a row to kill And like those moments just feel amazing where you're like, and then he's like, and every time you're like, the party windows are like,

You know, you can mess with them as well if you want, but it feels like, holy shit, like, how am I doing this? I'm blocking that shot. You know, I'm fucking, and they're all frantically trying to murder you. And because there's so many of them doing it,

it really feels epic. Like, even more so than the previous two games. It feels like you are just... It's the most, like... powerful i think i've felt in a game before while also not feeling like i am like god mode right that i am impervious to everything Should we call this in God Mode? You're sticking to the name. Check out our new website, God Mode, for a little description and a little bit of game coverage. Doom has jumped the shark. It's time to walk it back.

We need to go back to boots on the ground, Doom. Alright? Get us back in the spaceship. We're going to shoot normal stuff with regular guns. I just want to find the blue key, man. That's all I want. Bring the flashlight back, you know? Bring the flashlight back. Sorry, how does the fall of the Roman Empire connect to Doom the Dark Ages? What the fuck? Is that included at all?

When did Charlemagne come up? Yeah, Frank was also kind of like, wow, I thought this is set during the Dark Ages. And I'm like, this is not set during our Dark Ages. This is set during some fucking pre-earth. race of humans as dark ages where they have significantly cooler and more

Cthulhu-like looking technology that we do not have access to. The fucking, my favorite one is the makers. The makers are like the creepy alien race who, at the start of this game, the Doom Slayer is essentially a... captured weapon that in moments of crisis, when they're incredibly futuristic, insane weapons don't work against the hordes of demons.

They just shoot him down like that fucking Red Bull guy in that balloon. They just launch him from a plane floating above the... the earth in like a pod he's like the rip he's like the tear in case of emergency doom slayer like it's so good like the stuff it's it's less like on the nose comedic than It's taking its own lore seriously. All the chats between the Sentinel people are very straight. And also the threat is taken really seriously and the demon guy who's in charge.

Super, you know straightforward, but there's some stuff around the edges Yeah, the makers I love because they just look like a mix between the... the Harkonnens and like the Odos, who aren't in, I don't think they're in the Dune movies, but like the other family from Dune, like sort of a future, future techie. Yeah, I'm into it. I'm into the look of it. It's very silly.

It's a good game. It'll be out by the time you listen to this. It's actually out in... They have their early access window thing for this, so if you spend an extra... extra lot of money. Recurring theme there at Microsoft. You gotta pay extra. You wanna play early? You gotta pay extra. We want $100. Oh my Christ. Did they resurrect?

David Lynch and hire him at Microsoft? Can you believe it? Doom the Dark Ages is out! And if you have Game Pass for $30 more, you can get the Premium Edition! Golly! Oh no! If you don't, you'll get it Friday. It's another Friday. Doom the Dark Ages. They've added Laura Dern. She's in Doom. She's in Doom. So mine is more of a, again, I've gone Woody Allen. It's right cusp between the two. Keep going and you'll hit Bob Dylan. Somewhere in the spectrum.

We're here playing video games. Now we're the Beatles. I told the whole story about Bob Dylan and my uncle. Oh, yeah. That was actually Bruce Springsteen. It's okay, he's part of the movie, music man, cinematic universe, so it's alright to make that mistake. Yeah, I was thinking about it about a week later, and I was like, oh, whoops, I was the boss. My bad. Whoops. Close enough. Yeah, so it's 70 bucks for the regular game, and 99.99.

for premium edition. Are video games too expensive? Advanced access. I mean... They cost $60 like 30 years ago, so I don't know. I don't know. If you use the inflation calculator on this website, then really they're cheaper now. and what's yeah yeah we have more money now than i had when i was you know what i mean like arden's economy was fucking not sure the number not awesome yeah um Houses probably were proportionally cheaper. That's very fair. That's where it's at, right? It's like it's a...

My parents bought their house for 40,000 pounds. in 19... Yeah, everything used to cost like a blueberry. You know, it was different. I also just pulled up a 1996 Toys R Us advertisement in which Doom 64 is $74.99 in 1996 dollars. So, you know, just food and love. And after you've spent that money, the game you're playing is Doom 64. You get home and you have Doom 64 to thank you. We have Doom at home. Yeah, Doom the Dark Ages. Check it out. Bethesda also sent me a special edition one.

Should I do an unboxing? Is that a thing people give a flying chuggins about these days? Look at this expensive thing. Why not? Look at this. He's talking about games not being expensive. You know what I mean? Here's a, here's a, I don't even, is it a statue of the Doom Slayer? Well, you'll find out in the unboxing. Collectors. That's why, exactly, that's why I need to do it. There's no game in there, right? There's a code. No. I already have it. Because they gave me one for the review.

this thing it comes with a big doom is this the one they sent actually i have to open it so i have no fucking idea it looks like it has a big doom slayer statue on it that sounds right on a red key which might I wonder what it opens. Thanks, Frank. That was such a polite laugh. Let's pivot over to you. You have played another indie banger. Maybe another quick look we should do while we talk about something.

So this game came out mere hours ago. I woke up today and was waiting for the drop of it so I could download it and play it and report before the podcast. This is Labyrinth of the Demon King. Sounds like a Jeremy game. It is. Jeremy game. I have become a stereotype. This is... How do I even explain this? It's a survival horror game. By all accounts, this is a classic throwback.

You know, like PS1 era, crunchy, gritty, dithery-looking-ass survival horror game. But it plays more like King's Field, the old FromSoft first-person dungeon crawler. Oh, cool. So it is a first-person melee combat survival horror game. I kind of looked up nothing about it because I saw...

you know, a little, a few screenshots and I love the art style and I loved the horror, like Japanese horror thing that was going on there. So I kind of went in blind on this and I thought it was going to be way more of a dungeon crawler.

but it literally is like a first person melee survival horror game so this is the story set up for this that happens at the beginning is that in this sort of old timey Japanese like jidaigeki setting of you know samurais and lords uh your your lord leads you and all of your guys into battle and everyone dies except for you and your lord sacrifices himself

save you. And so this is you going to get revenge on the demon lord to avenge your fallen lord which is like fucking awesome i mean you know i look how doomed the dark ages this is a pretty fucking metal pitch um yeah i love it you so you being the only survivor and then immediately doing the most dangerous thing Yeah, exactly.

So the feeling of this is very... I sometimes feel like I'm playing an old sort of... It reminds me a lot of Kuon, another FromSoft game, survival horror game, old-timey Japanese setting as well.

but sometimes it feels like it has like that weird sort of dark souls feeling of when it was it's so empty and creepy and the like everything is like grimy and dirty and the world is so empty that when i came across the first npc i was like it was like scary because there's so little going on that i just saw this

you know this woman standing in a field i was like oh this is either like this is either where i learned how to save the game or it's the first like boss fight that you're supposed to lose um But uh... But yeah, so it's this very sort of like gamey setup of go defeat the four lords and the four towers and then you can face the Demon King.

and pretty straightforward it reminds me a lot in its setup of Dark Souls 1 where you have to like ring the bells to proceed it gives you this sort of like overarching grand thing and it's just like alright well like good luck Um,

What are the enemies like? Are you fighting a lot of yokai and oni and stuff like that? Yeah, they're like little goblin-ass yokai-looking creatures with kind of mangled weird... featureless faces like um like they've been like burned or mangled or something um but the uh sort of the the most striking thing about this game to me was it has this like The first cutscene came on, and it was so fucking compressed that at first I was like,

i was like oh no is this like a like is this a technical error was this like This is a first-time developer as well. I wasn't even considering that when I was playing it, but I found that out after, and if I had known that, I'd be like, oh, no, that's so sad. this guy like fucked up the compression rate on these cutscenes but

It's so perfect in this way that you start to discover as you see more of the cutscenes. And there are quite a few of them. There's also sort of the little transition cutscenes like old Resident Evil where you go to a door and it cuts to the black void with just the door opening. Like, that shit is all over this. But, uh...

But the cutscenes are so... compressed and artifact-y that uh when it shows like you know it's like a slow push in on a monster like eating another monster or something and it's so fucked up and compressed that you're like you can't really tell what you're looking at for part of it and it reminds and that feeling is like That's what playing horror games as a kid was like. Where you're like...

it's this feeling of seeing something you're not supposed to. It's like you found a channel between two channels and there's like a scrambled signal coming through. And yeah, it gives it this really like...

uncanny horror, low fidelity horror that isn't just, you know, usually when I think low fidelity, it's like low poly or compressed textures. This is like, my like tv is fucking up and i'm like i'm like squinting at the monitor and i'm like oh no i'm gonna have to fight whatever that is so i want to see what it is but um but yeah just like

gross wet sounds and horrifying ambience and like really like low visibility all kind of culminated into this very sort of uh murky foggy sludgy samurai horror thing That's cool. Do you think it'd be a good case for a quick look? I need to play a little bit more of it. It starts very slowly, which I think is good for...

the game tone setting. But I think if we did a quick look from the beginning, it'd be like, alright, this is the part where you walk down a very long cave. There's a lot of cave here, as you can see. A lot of real estate. Yeah, I'll play a little bit more, and I'll report back on it. Yeah, maybe we could start at the first dungeon, though, once I complete. I'll reserve a save on the side of the dungeon, and...

and we'll see. But yeah, so far, really, really enjoying it. Highly recommend it if you like Kingsfield or Kuan, or if the combination of those two appeals to you. developed by J.R. Hudpole, I think is the name, and published by Top Hat Studios, who I've talked to in the past. I think it's an individual. a publisher, published a bunch of predominantly unknown indie people. So that's really cool, actually, to see them.

Yeah, the only other thing about it that I think is worth mentioning is, I mean, there's a million things that are cool about it, but the last thing I'll say is that, like, First-person dungeon crawlers, I think for me, there has to be...

Like, I don't find first-person melee combat particularly engaging, usually. It's a very hard sell for me. And... when I go back and play games like Morrowind or Oblivion it's not that I'm like wow the combat is so sick it's that the larger framing is interesting enough to me that like it contextualizes the combat that like if I played a prototype for Morrowind they're like this is this is the game and it was just like a gray box where I did that combat

I'd be like, I don't know about this Morrowind thing, guys. You might want to go back to the drawing board. And I think that the narrative and horror aspects of this game create such a compelling atmosphere. cognitive framing for this that uh that it it like Yeah, it sucked me in enough. I think some people will find the combat a little janky, but it has this like...

push-pull, parry, stamina management thing going on from Softie where you're watching enemies, you're getting ready to parry your block, do a kick and interrupt and things like that. So I think it has enough sort of like... rock, paper, scissors complexity to it that I'll be curious to see how deep it goes. But I think this is more about like

I mean, again, like Kuon. Go play Kuon. It's one of my favorite survival horror games. The combat is kind of ass. Go play it. Look, I've put 25 hours into oblivion recently. Yeah. Nobody's going back to that game as bad as Morrowind is in some of that respect. oblivion is not that much better there's a reason why i only ever do arrows

in that game. Yeah, that's very fair. Yeah, it's like, I mean, Silent Hill 1 through 4 is one of my favorite games of all time, but again, if someone was like, yeah, I'm working on this game, it's called Silent Hill, and it was just a gray box with a combat, I'd be like, I don't know, man, this is like, this kind of sucks.

Yeah, it's like people keep going back and being inspired by Kingsfield, but that game was not particularly well-received, right? Like, it didn't do well. I'd never heard of it. Kingsfield won. to be honest. It's really, really fun. I mean, Dark Souls 1 was my first FromSoft game, so it's not like I was playing King's Field as a kid, but I've gone back and it's very similarly sort of weird.

like vacant liminal vibes to it where it's like i don't know yeah kingsville is very cool it's been cool to see games like um like lunacid and fly knight and now this Kind of going back to that slow, sludgy, first-person dungeon crawler and kind of bringing it back. Totally, yeah. And it's a retroactive, it feels like, nostalgia. Like, I don't think... I mean, maybe, don't get me wrong, but I don't feel like most people were, like, clamoring for Kingsfield games. I feel like the From Software is

Later releases did really well, and then they were like, what else did they make? Oh, this is cool. And then now it's like, huh, what if we like recombine this and made it better? But they're all pulling from that same sort of place of like the thing that's cool about this.

is the environment is really eerie. And it's like, how do we build our own version of that? And like Dread Delusion in the same sort of way, although I think that might be a little more Morrowind inspired, are doing that same sort of thing of like going, that's what was cool about this. Like to your point, Jeremy, like the combat. It's okay if it kind of sucks if I get to go to a cool place that you can't see anywhere else.

so yeah agreed I will say though that I'm glad that they tried something I think this game could have gotten away with just being really narrative and atmosphere driven and just having it be like click to swing and then you're like backing up and you're clicking a swing and moving forward. I actually do think that, like, parry system and dodging stuff, it adds enough of sort of, like, a, you know, a gaminess to it. The other thing is you can...

if you hit space, you can dodge, like, left to right, and there's a short window in which a dodge does not cost stamina, but if you do a second dodge, it does cost stamina. So it constantly feels like you're trying to stay close to enemies and land parries and dodges and stuff, as opposed to just, like...

yeah again like when i played oblivion it was like hit the guy and then just like run backwards for five seconds and be like all right now wait till he does this little animation i'll come back i'll be interested to hear what you say about this stuff having played a bit more as well because like a lot of this stuff is going to feel different how much that stuff sort of keeps pulling you, because then that'll be even stronger. Yeah, for sure.

And there's a good lineage here. I've not played Kingsville, but like... you know, Amiga and PC and Atari, well, not Atari, but like Commodore stuff. There's like a good lineage of first-person dungeon crawlers. They weren't like FPS-like. doom, but they were like sort of screen by screen kind of stuff. But yeah, that central mystery of kind of going deeper into the dungeon, deeper into the dark land, I think. A cruel appeal.

even games like Dark Souls and Silent Hill. They're games where you are descending into the scary world. The further you go, the weirder it gets. the further you go, the more the game can fuck with you and be even more crazy because you've spent time. So yeah, I'd be interested to see kind of how crazy it does get for you, Jeremy. Yeah, I'm definitely going to keep playing it. I'm still in the first dungeon, but loving it so well.

Nice one. It's Labyrinth of the Demon King. Frank Howley, you've also played a new game. It's almost like... we decided to start reaching out to people about games that we can talk about. Can you talk about this yet? Is the embargo... Yeah, it'll be out Friday when the podcast is out. Sick. Let's talk about Capcom Fighting Collection 2.

This is great. So, I'm a big fan of, like, just Capcom as a whole. Like, I have the sticker on my phone. Like, I love Capcom. One of the best game libraries of all time, publishes everything. So, anytime there's any, like, re-release, remake, remaster, I'm stoked.

This is Capcom Final Collection 2. In the past few years, they've done collections with the Darkstalkers, other Street Fighter alphas, Marvel vs. Capcom was its own collection. This collection I like because it's like their deeper, weirder games. This is basically all their like... like, like, B-tier. Like, I love a lot of the games in this collection, but these are, like, the, like, secondary, like, Dreamcast wave of Capcom games.

so uh there's in order of like a release date the the first game in here is plasma sword which a game i had never played before this is all these games are like on a 2d plane but It's a 3D graphic game. It's kind of like a sci-fi soul caliber. So you're in space, you got like lightsabers, and all the character designs are so funky and weird. So Plasma Store is really cool. We need to say the full name for Plasma Store. Okay. Yeah, Plasma Sword Nightmare of Bilstein. Thank you.

So check it out. I think it's Hugh. Nightmare of Bill Steen. Not Bill Steen. Yeah, poor Bill Steen and his nightmare. That's my accountant's name. Yeah, win Bill Steen's money. The really, really cool thing in here is Power Stone finally is on a modern console. They've only ever re-released it on PSP. So there's Power Stone 1 and Power Stone 2. I never played Power Stone 1 before, but I did do a run through that. But Power Stone 2 is like...

One of, is like Capcom's like Smash Brothers. It is like a 3D game. It's like, I have no reason. Because you said this is a 3D. Power Stone's 3D, right? Yeah, Power Stone's is 3D. This is basically, I always refer to it as their Smash Brothers. I have memories as a kid going to sleepovers. We'd all place Power Stone 2 on Friends Dreamcast.

This is like a four-player fighting game where it's like you're picking up weapons, you're smashing people with hammers. If you collect the power stones, you evolve into like a super version. It's like equivalent of like getting the ultimate smash in Smash Brothers. So it's a very, very fun game. This collection does have online. I wasn't able to play with any of my friends because it wasn't out.

the time playing in advance, but I do want to do multiplayer stuff with this, so Power Stone 2 is awesome. It's so goofy, but it holds up. There's, like, giant boss battles. It's just, I don't know, it's a really fun game, so I'm eager to play that online.

And then we have the Capcom vs. SNK games. So Capcom vs. SNK 2 is like one of my all-time favorite games. That was the game that kind of introduced me to the SNK world of fighting game characters. I never owned King of Fighters or Fatal Fury, but... Capcom vs SNK 2 on Dreamcast was like how I learned all the SNK characters. But even before that, there's original Capcom vs SNK Millennium Fight 2000 Pro, which is their first one, which I had also never played before.

And I loved it because it was like unearthing all this incredible like Y2K pixel art and like 3D graphics and soundtrack and like. Every time you start these games, it's like... I love the announcers in this. I can't remember the voice lines, but it's like, get ready for the fight of the millennium. What groove are you? That's really good. It's so, it's like, the aesthetic of the Capcom versus SNK games are so cool. The music.

Because it's incredible, gorgeous pixel art, but they're starting to do 3D graphics with the Dreamcast, so it's just like... I don't know, I always, like, have this- image in my head of like what a dreamcast aesthetic is and like this is the most dreamcast game this whole era of stuff that you're talking about is like because we all there's so many like street fighter 2 moral combat you know one to four all of these games and then we have the sort of like

The enshittening, I think, of the fighting game genre in the early aughts where it was like we all went 3D and it kind of went a bit funky. There is that middle ground where they were doing... like, I don't know, post-processing and all these effects, but they were still using, like, Street Fighter 3 is really in the nexus of this. And I think, like, a lot of these games, I never played a lot of these spin-offs.

Like you mentioned, Millennium Fight 2000 Pro, which might be the funniest subtitle I've ever heard. uh yeah but they all look amazing so they look good on when you're playing them do they look are they uprised are they it's so funny i immediately will turn it off by default they have like a soft crt thing which like i just turn off just because it's like i i just i i don't mind if you can see like

I don't know. I don't like the fake processing stuff. You can, for the 3D games, like, it's the same thing as, like, an emulator. You can, like, boost the internal resolution. So I think I always set it to, like, times two, and I turn off the filter. But you can, like, tweak the effects to get it to how you want to look. And then they do present the game in like the 4x3.

You can stretch it out if you don't, but I kind of like playing it originally and you can change the wallpaper on the sides. When you say stretch it out, do they just pull it out? I think so, yeah. Everyone's just lied.

Yeah, so you're screwing the art. Like, that's the big thing with, like, I feel like the 3D games, maybe not so much, but the pixel art in these games, especially, like, that was a thing that, like, I mean, like, Capcom's Third Strike or Street Fighter Third Strike hit their peak.

SNK kind of pushed the envelope with their pixel art. Like, you look at original Metal Slug stuff, nothing is as beautiful as that. So, like... I think that's why when I played Capcom vs SNK, it was like... my god the character everything looks so good and so specifically what i like about like millennium fight 2000 the first one i'd never played but you're like there's a level that just takes place in an arcade there's a level that takes place on like a like a japan freeway so it's like

Just seeing Y2K Japan reflected in these games is like, oh, this is so cool. I want to be in that arcade. So it's awesome. Soundtrack's great. In between all that is Project Justice, which is a rival schools game. It's 3D. This might be like my favorite, like...

hidden, like, I don't know, game I'd never played before. I'd never, same thing, like, I'd emulated these games in the past, and even back in the day, trying to get Dreamcast, I guess you could burn a CD. The easiest way to emulate a Dreamcast game is burn a CD, but... trying to get rival schools to work on pc is always such a hassle so the fact that there's like an official rival schools port out there is amazing so project justice is really cool it is a 3d game

but on a 2D plane. All the characters are so goofy. You're either playing as high school kids, and each one's on a different sport. There's a tennis girl, a baseball guy. oh there's a violinist and then you can also just play as teachers and like principals and everyone's fighting to defend their high school and it's like There's goofy manga cutscenes and stuff, and it's like...

Oh, it's so cool. So I like this, because here's a Capcom game with like 30 characters I've never played or seen before. Sorry, my chronology might be a little bit off here. Was Project Justice, was this literally...

Rival Schools 2, they just called it a different game. Yeah, yeah. And I think Rival Schools 1, I think, was on PlayStation. But yeah, it's just one of those series I had never played. It was kind of outside. I've never played them either. I've just seen videos and people talk about it.

Yeah, so Rival Schools 1 was on, yeah, PlayStation, so I never played it. And that had, like, kind of chunky, bad 3D art. Like, the PS1 era of stuff, like Street Fighter EX, like, the art doesn't look good. It's a little charming now, but it doesn't help. But the Dreamcast... uh the graphics look great so project justice i like when you do super moves the camera will move and pan

super silly sound effects. Like, it's a silly game. It doesn't take itself too seriously. So I'm, like, very excited with that, and I do want to play more of that. and then i'm trying to think if there was an oh yeah and then also in the collection street fighter alpha 3 which again is a great game and has like 30 plus characters soundtrack pixel art everything is great it is all of these are like the arcade versions of this so

Street Fighter 3 had a world tour mode on like the Dreamcast and port and that's not on here which is a bummer because that is like its own giant like single player RPG like pick a level like it's crazy but you can do survival mode and other stuff but And then the last thing on here... This is upper, technically, isn't it? Yeah, Street Fighter Alpha 3 upper. Which is also known as Street Fighter Zero.

So this is the arcade version. Fighting games, you should just have names all over the place. In Japan, it was Street Fighter Zero. In America, they released it as Street Fighter Alpha because they didn't want America...

Their perspective was like, if they call the game Zero, they're going to think it's worse than Street Fighter 2. Americans are too dumb. We're moving backwards. So they call it Street Fighter Zero in Japan, Street Fighter Alpha in America. I don't know. I think Alpha sounds cool, but whatever. Yeah, Street Fighter. That's what they were thinking, too. The Americans are going to think Alpha's cooler. There was such a lack of faith in American audiences for Japanese games in this era.

They're like, we talked about this before, the Dragon Quest art, where they're like, ah, Kira Toriyama, everyone's gonna think this is for babies, because the art is too good. Let's make the art way shittier, and then they'll know it's for adults. Yeah, turning Kirby's, like, smiling face into a frown. Yeah, making Kirby, like, have so much tough, like, attitude instead of being a cute little fucking... I mean, he's still a pink ball. He just has angry eyebrows.

and then the last game of this collection which like i don't know it's sure uh capcom fighting evolution so like this is a game i had never played and i don't think anyone's ever buzzed about this before It's basically like Capcom vs. SNK without SNK. Yes, exactly. It's just like... Darkstalkers and Street Fighter. But like, the pixel art disparity is so shitty. Like, it's nuts. It's straight, like, here's some alpha art. It's like...

It's such an ugly, like, I even, like, I, like, I boot it up for, like, I think I did beat it just to get the achievement, but I was like, man, I don't think I'm ever, like, I don't know. It's just, I don't know why this game exists, what happened with it. I think they were going to make SNK 3 and nothing. I don't know. It's like half of a game in here.

But you do get to play the characters from their terrible fantasy arcade game, Red Earth. Yeah, yeah. Bowser! God, I don't know. It's a weird, goofy game. That's what I like about these collections. It gives you a reason to play a game you never otherwise would have, so they threw it in there. Capcom Fighting Evolution, also known as Capcom Fighting Jam in Japan. Evolution was kind of rival schools. like the way It was set up. It was last street.

Yeah. I don't know. Was it an arcade board porting situation or something? Well, yeah. Yeah, and everyone, they have their own factions. There's the Street Fighter 2 team, the Darkstalkers team, the Alpha team, Red Heart, so whatever. It's just, more Street Fighter is never a bad thing. And then talking about the collection as a whole. It's very much similar to the Marvelous Capcom collection or the previous.

Capcom finding collection where there's an achievement for playing each game and achievement for beating each game An insane achievement, which is beat each game with every single character so you can take the rest of your life. And then there is online stuff, which I have not personally tried yet because it wasn't out publicly, but I do want to play this with friends.

My experience with the previous collections, the online works great. But yeah, as a whole, I love Capcom vs. SNK 2. That's one of my all-time favorite fighting games. So I love that that's on here. Power Stone 2 is such a fun game. Even if you want to do local co-op or online, it should be a blast. And then the Project Justice was a true like, oh, this is awesome. I want to learn all these characters. And then, um, Capcom vs SNK1, which I never played.

uh it's kind of good because i played so much of snk 2 that it's like whatever so it's like it's two is in here as well right yeah so two is in here um i just like playing capcom versus k1 more because i just never seen those stages so it's like It's like getting a new Capcom versus SNK. So, yeah, this is awesome. Capcom Final Collection 2. It's out on all the, you know, PC, Xbox. That's so funny. At first, they didn't announce it for Xbox, and then people, like...

I don't know. It is now out on Xbox, aren't they? They didn't advertise it. I forgot what the full story is there. What were you playing on? So I played it on PS5 with my fight stick. It's $40 on everything. I do not know if there's crossplay. I can't remember how they handled that. I don't think so, because I remember Justin Wong made a big deal of like... He was like when Marvelous Capcom 2 came out in the previous collection.

he bought it for every console so that he could be number one on every leaderboard. And so, like, when he bought the Switch version, it's like, I'm here now. And everyone's like, no, those poor kids. Please. Leave the Switch alone. So I don't know if it's cross-play, but yeah. So if you're a Capcom fan, it is worth it, even if this was just Capcom vs. SNK 1 and 2. Power Stone Collection.

Rival School is $40. There's so many cool games in here. So if you're a Capcom fan, if you're a Final Game fan, I feel like you're already going to buy this no matter what. But yeah, no complaints. Other than Capcom Evolution is such a weird game. But that's, you know, hell yeah. All right. Check it out. Capcom Fighting Collection 2 gets the thumbs up from Frank anyway. 40 bucks as you said.

And those games, again, included Capcom vs. SNK Millennium Fight 2000 Pro, Capcom vs. SNK 2, Mark of the Millennium 2001, Capcom Fighting Evolution. Street Fighters, Alpha 3, Upper, Power Stone 1 and 2, Project Justice, and Plasma Sword, Nightmare of Bilstein. Nice that they include all the bad ones. Capcom Finding Evolution. I'll be honest. There's something... I know this might sound contrarian.

There's a version in which this collection is three good games. I prefer them doing eight games and some of them are real mid. Yeah, we're a Starclad creator. As someone who's not really into fighting games at a really dedicated level, I've never committed to learning fighting games in the proper way, but they're very fun to just

fire up and emulate random ones. Yeah. One of the most fun fighting games I've ever played in my life was Ergie's. Ergie's God Bless the Ring. It's a 1998 fire with like... Sephiroth and Cloud and Tifa. I never thought about this in fucking forever. It looks like a Yeah, core memory there or something. It also has, if I recall correctly, it has a side mode in it that I thought was going to be like the story mode, but it's actually like a mystery dungeon game that's totally separate from it.

So, yeah, Eric, he's just fucking weird. Man, they used to let you do whatever, right? They used to be able to just fuck around and do whatever. Maybe we should call the new channel God Bless the... God bless the ranks. No, that sounds like what Frank should call his wrestling podcast. That's awesome. His Christian wrestling podcast. Exactly. God bless the...

Should we do a wrestling podcast? God bless the ring. Yeah. And we can just play any, have retro quick looks. I can play any wrestling game. That's a full hour. Call it God bless the ring. Just do that. Yes, yes, yes. We should mention it only because I talked about it so much three weeks ago.

it is a bummer but sabu did pass away oh you're kidding me yeah like over the weekend it was announced yeah and all of wrestling everyone is freaking out because like yeah everyone just saw him at wrestlecon and and GCW, and yeah, so... And all my friends are like, we just saw Sabu.

Yeah, so that's what? Do they know how? Had it anything to do with? Nothing's come out yet. So, yeah. So, people are already, like, pointing fingers and stuff. And, I don't know, Sabu, yeah, it was incredible. And the fact that we got to see him wrestle one more match was nuts. And yeah, so Sabu did pass away at the age of 60. Wow, that is absolutely crazy. What a time to do that event. That is nuts. Yeah, rest in power, Sabu. Holy shit, what did you say, 60? Yeah, 60.

Yeah, un-fucking-hell. All right, there you go. I'm shocked. Yeah, yeah, you were just saying. That's bananas. 60 in, like, it's weird. He's from a generation of wrestlers where 60 is probably better innings than a lot of those guys got, but hopefully. The industry has changed a decent amount, or at least we hope it has. That won't be the case, but man, wrestle to the end, eh? All right, that is all the game.

we have to talk about. They were Doom the Dark Ages, Capcom Fighting Collection 2, Labyrinth of the Demon King, and then all the stuff Jesse saw. Klax East, White Knuckle, Splick A2, and the Crimson Desert. Crimson Desert. Frank, would you take us to email? yes welcome to email land i will take your tickets please you can make a reservation podcast at noclip.video or in the discord channel podcast chat our first email is from eric

I was wondering, do you think you could see Noclip ever publishing another studio's game? I know you're giving development a crack, but publishing might be more up your alley. Is that something you'd be interested in? If yes, what are the barriers you see in that way? Anyone else want to answer this one? Seems hard, expensive, and not necessarily worth doing. There's a lot of resources that publishers offer to developers that aren't just money.

Publishers do translation services. They'll do porting services, right? They won't do it in-house necessarily, but like there's a lot of coordination and logistics there. It's not just as easy as like Danny O'Dwyer gives, you know, animal well to one million dollars and then he makes one million dollars back right it's it's there's a lot of effort that goes into that that requires a ton of overhead in terms of like spendings, resources you have to have already, like,

It does depend. It doesn't necessarily. I'm just picking names out of a hat. There are versions of it. There are publishers out there who do just do money. And that's fine, maybe. But, you know, I feel like if being so public and open the way that Noclip is about development, if you started doing publishing and you were like, yeah, I don't know, we give them really terrible deals and some cash, like, that would just burn your reputation, right?

I mean, it's a whole business. I think, you know, Dunkey's interest in it has been, was interesting to me because like Jesse said there as well. it takes a lot. experience to do this sort of stuff and contacts like a lot of design publishers are doing stuff it's a lot of admin and a lot of communication that developers are maybe historically not very good at like the dwarf fortress stuff is a good example of kit fox basically being the go between them and steam

helping to do the contracts for artists to add stuff to the game. The donkey animal well situation to me looked mostly like it was a marketing thing, like he was getting points on that. promoting the game, and maybe there was some feedback, and I know they obviously did a bunch of booths as well and stuff like that, and it clearly helped. It clearly was a good strategic partnership, but I think the game was large.

of not done but like even when i played it he was it was very very very far along and he'd worked on it for a long amount of time so it wasn't like there was much to could change Yeah, I don't know. The answer is no. I mean, ethically, I think it would be weird if we started selling games. I mean, Stunt Derby in a way is kind of that already, but at least that's something that...

you know, we've put effort into, you know what I mean? It's, it's not a, it's not just a social experiment. That's not necessarily a video. It will be coming out. We're going to get it finished. I was, I had lunch with Alex last week, actually, when he was coming through town and we were chatting about it.

We're not going to say it's going to be the best game ever, but it'll be a game you can play with your mates, and it'll be sold at a cool price, and we're going to capture the last run to the end. But yeah, I don't know. No, it seems like the type of thing you do if you have a lot of money, you can throw around. And if you don't have a million documentaries to edit, slash starting new channels. Yeah, and I'm ethically...

Yeah, you feel gross about, like, selling video games. I mean, it's okay. Just don't ever do a documentary on those games. You know, there's all that stuff. Yeah. And I mean, everything's weird now, you know. Who knows, you know, people are, we're out here talking about our creators. You know, we didn't, well, I guess we didn't talk about our creator. We didn't talk about our time in TechDest too. And we're out because, you know, our white label stuff is producing AI.

so we're back in the shill zone we're here we're back in the shill zone we're in the email land shill zone it also gets weird with like I feel like the the sort of like part of the reason that the donkey animal well thing works so well is like reflected in the reviews of animal well on steam where you go and they're like it's probably like 65% people doing like references to Dunkey's videos or be like, Dunkey sent me or things like that. And it's like,

I mean, I haven't checked in a while. It may have changed the balance now. I know you checked every single one. I mean, I showed my work on this. I just saw a lot of feedback in the reviews when I checked. And this was a long time ago now. people doing references to donkey in it and it's like i think that's fine like i'm not saying that's like an ethical thing but it is an odd thing where like

Because, Danny, if we were to publish, a huge part of it would be that people recognize you in your work and games and stuff. And I think it is almost the most effective way to leverage that. as a person who has a reputation like that is to pull attention away from the person who made the game. Yeah, it's kind of impossible to... You know?

I'm sure Donkey doesn't like when people think he made the game. I don't think that's his intention at all. But it's sort of unavoidable with a certain percentage of people, I guess. They'll just see two things together and assume... It's like if Tom Cruise started publishing video games. I don't care who made that. Every headline is going to be Tom Cruise publishes this game. It's just, I guess what I'm saying is it is...

I mean, it happens with Devolver 2, which is a brand, not a person. People will be like, that's a Devolver game. But I feel like it gets into weirder territory when the brand is more closely associated with an individual, because then it's like... oh that's that like Danny O'Dwyer game and you'd be like well I just like

published it and i i don't know there's a weird way in which the water has to be murky in order to effectively market it as someone who has that kind of pull as an individual maybe yeah i've just never felt comfortable about selling my reputation to people, I'll sell my reputation to companies all fucking day long. Like I'm like, that's, that's the, that's, you know, that's quality work, you know, is worth a certain amount.

how a lot of that stuff works and I'm okay with that. That's transactional, but I always feel weird. There's a delta between who I am and the version of me that exists online, and I am mostly responsible for crafting that. You know, like the version of me that exists online is what I put out there and what I decide not to put out there. Like I don't talk about my family.

stuff you know i talk about my family stuff i don't mention their names i don't put them in videos right uh like i'm mostly here talking about games from some sort of position of authority but in in my day-to-day life there's lots of stuff that i'm very vulnerable out and things that scare me that don't come up in this and like I'm part of crafting that and ultimately that's the reputation that you're selling and so if I'm crafting this reputation

I'm mostly doing it as a sort of a, I guess, in one way, I'm just trying to focus on the work and talk about things that are relevant. And in another way, I'm protecting myself, my either ego or my sensitivities or whatever it is.

goes out into the world as a version that i'm crafting i'm i edit every video i'm in pretty much right i i'm i'm able to to have control over that if i then use that version of myself to sell Like that to me makes me feel uncomfortable because now what I'm doing is creating a facsimile of who I am and immediately to then sell that. to people. And that makes me feel like a con artist. Whereas And this is maybe a big reason behind the fact why I never called the Patreon Danny O'Dwyer.

I didn't put myself in all these videos because I feel uncomfortable about that parasocial thing and about people giving me money because they like me. I wanted to... I wanted to help, like, produce things that have intrinsic worth outside of me. And that's why NoClub has a mission and an ideology, and it's why... when we spin at this new thing, it will also have a mission and an ideology, and it won't just be us.

putting our hands out on the side of the street asking for money so we can do our dream job. You know what I mean? So similarly with publishing, I think that would just make me feel super uncomfortable. because I would be checking in my online cred, which is not as much as lots of other people, but it's still more than most, to... trick people into buying video games. Why is marketing?

We're tricking people to buy things. But Noclip is like, if you're able to silo, and this is not me being like, you know, how dare you not want to publish video games, you hardworking person. But like, if you're willing to silo off Noclip and not view it as you using your brand to get people to give money to make documentaries how are you not like are you not able to just do the same thing with a publisher be like this is

noclip games i am danny o'dwyer this is the thing we publish the cool games like is that not something you're able to square in the same way because it's a commercial transactional thing of like give me money for product I guess in the same way, that's an interesting concern of that. I think in the same way I feel weird about cashing in my...

whatever online cred in terms of a YouTube channel, in terms of Noclip, I would feel weird about cashing Noclip's cred in. You know what I mean? Probably even more so because that's not just me. But also me. I think then that's like... Like if you were to tell me if I had to start a publishing company and I could either call it like Danny O'Dwyer Publishing, Noclip Publishing, or a new name, I would... I don't want to do it, but I would do the new name. Because at least then...

You have to be honest right from the start and it has to build its own reputation. I just don't like the idea of... translating because the reason people like me or like the work that I do is because they value the work and if I transfer that to like selling games I'm basically doing a currency exchange. I don't know how to sell games, but people will trust me, maybe, like I would trust somebody to sell a game because I sort of inherently trust them. But to me, that's like...

converting, like, I don't know, it's just, I mean, there's a reason why people say selling out. Like, that's what you're, you're, you know, and we've gotten... the world changes and you know we all have fucking five jobs now and all this shit right but like you know I still feel like you need to be super respectful of people like that

and that's probably why I had the reaction with the donkey stuff because it is something and I'm not you know I'm not saying boo about what they did over there and I think they did a great job with Animal Well and all that but like I just know the internal turmoil that I would have And I wonder, and the same lots of humans do when they see people doing something that they wouldn't necessarily do. Sometimes you fear the worst version of that.

Yeah, so I don't know. It seems like a lot of fucking work as well. It's really difficult. It's a lot of work. A lot of fucking emails. Even a female, so you don't want to do that. Do you want to be head of comms for Noclip Publishing, Jesse? Oh, no, I'm good. You get bitched 100 times. Oh, another Metroidvania. Sorry, Metroidvania developers. Delete.

We have enough. Unless you're Ubisoft and you make a good one. Okay, okay, you got me. Okay, I'm sorry. It's good. The only Metroidvanias Jesse likes are the ones made by Massive. That's right. The only indie games I want to play are the ones made by people with millions of dollars. Only fake indies only. That's the name of our publisher. That's the name of our publisher. Fake indies only. I did want to add, in Japan, instead of Metroidvanias, they call them search actors.

I think my search action is so much better. So I feel like we gotta stop using the term Metroidvania and then use the term search. i feel like that's what happens there though is like if any genre has a shit name that's basically just like something like they just go something action like instead of it being a dmc like it's just a character action It's, you know, search action.

Should we call the channel Search Action? Search Action. Search Action. And it's just playing Metroidvanias. And it becomes dead in three months. And only Japanese people will recognize that it's a reference. That's fine. That might be worth it. I've always preferred Castle Royd anyway. Castle Royd. Hell yeah. Oh, these are both good names to the champ. That sounds like something Cinemassacre would sell when they make their full right wing swing. Oh my god.

Get your castle roids. Castle roids. ABGN just going, fuck, fuck, shit. Man, you can get 50% off dude wipes if you buy these castle roids. You're going to need them for the constipation. Frank, we got an email? Yeah, I'm hooked on search actions. that's a search action game okay um Catherine Roden, writing in as I wanted to know what your thoughts were on the BDS boycott against Xbox.

The aim of it is to target the consumer arm of a major military contractor like Microsoft, both to reduce its income and to stand in solidarity with those impacted. Microsoft isn't new to the military by any means, but BDS felt it was a good way to support Palestine now. I have known some people who have canceled their subscriptions.

even sold their consoles in some cases to take part in this. However, media coverage has been pretty sparse outside of places like Aftermath, with many outlets continuing to cover Xbox without even a nod to this. I understand still covering the company myself, but pause when I see side coverage like streams and deep dives that promote the games more. In short, what do you think is the role and responsibility of games media when it comes to a boycott of this scale?

I'm guessing we're all going to have probably... Mileage is going to vary on... How about the role of personal protest and things like this, or boycott? Yeah, so I don't want to have a no-clip answer to this, although in some ways I guess there is a no-clip answer to this, because we've, I don't know, we have not covered it.

Yeah, we just did a quick look on Doom, right? I mean, we talked about it on this pod, so... Yeah, we talked about Oblivion. Yeah, Oblivion, yeah. Which are both games owned by... a company recently acquired Microsoft. Right. Yeah, that's the thing. Microsoft is so fucking big that I think when it comes to boycott, I It would be very easy for me to say that I hadn't bought Oblivion or Doom on principle. I just don't want either of them. Right. But I mean...

sure makes it easier to not buy that. That's the online crowd, man. You just left that fucking change on the table. It'd be so easy to cash in on that, but I would be dishonest. But like, yeah, I mean, I think it is good to, you know. call attention to these things and I think to advocate for not supporting companies that are boycotted by BDS. For people who don't know, basically the short version is that Microsoft provides.

software and sort of like intelligence logistics to the IDF. I believe it's like It's kind of fuzzy what it is, but it's like Battlefield Logistics and Intelligence Services through Azure, I think. I think it's that they use Azure. I don't know if Microsoft are giving them Intel. I think it's that they use Azure. No, no, that's not what I mean. I mean that their technology is deployed for Intelligence Services and Battlefield Logistics. Yeah.

Not that Microsoft is like, yeah, they're over there calling it in. It's popping open Microsoft Flight Simulator. It's right there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, this is the other thing that is the reason people are talking about this more so is that it became like a BDS has like priority targets for their boycott where they sort of are like, here's like a million companies that are bad, but these are the ones that would be like really meaningful to boycott.

And Microsoft became one of those priority targets, which is why it's being called attention to. Yeah, I mean, I think it's good to not support companies that are boycotted by BDS whenever possible. I make exceptions for myself, so I'm not acting like I'm ideologically pure. Windows as an operating system for a million reasons, for compatibility with collaboration with other people, because it's what I'm familiar with, because there's a time cost to learning Linux and et cetera, et cetera.

I've been vocally pro-Palestine for my entire adult life. I have family who were involved as peacekeepers in the region. I have friends who have been involved in flotillas.

Sadly, not anything new to me, what's been going on over there. And obviously the recent past two years have been incredibly difficult. I think most of us assumed who are sort of especially... know back home this is a pretty um well educated subject and uh when when all the stuff happened when the attack happened in israel terrible and then also you kind of knew if you were watching this that the response was going to be insane.

horrific as it's been. I think one of the things that I feel in particular about boycotts is that the left is really good at eating its own food. And I think one of the biggest problems that sort of left-wing alliances run into, which you do not see in right-wing alliances because people are happy being hypocritical, is the sort of... splintering of the inside by being sort of overly critical of people's autonomous decisions.

I think boycotts are powerful. They are not powerful on their own as part of a wider strategic sort of... stand or alliance they can be especially targeted boycotts can be really powerful i support the boycott I think this stuff varies. I guess I don't criticize people who don't follow the boycott. And I think whenever I see people, it's a difficult thing because you want people to join a boycott.

Sometimes you can be overly aggressive in trying to order people to join a boycott when mileage varies in this. This is the fucking Xbox. This is the least popular console in the world right now. It is very easy for some people to not buy their Xbox. Do not buy an Xbox Series X. You got it, pal. Exactly. Are we telling people to uninstall Windows? Right.

We're not. Why are we not doing it? Because to do that would be ridiculous because nobody would join the fucking boycott if we forced everyone onto Linux, right?

And there might be people out there who are doing that, and that's fantastic, and I support them. But you have to understand that we're stronger when we try and put pressure on the companies when you start to... be sort of overly dogmatic and spending all your energy there, then you maybe have to take a look and see like, is this really helping? why am I having this response? Because it's a very personal thing, so it is tied to your ego and your sense of self.

and your sense of justice in the world and all these things. And people are angry. A lot of people are fucking angry. You know, I'm fucking angry. I've been angry about this for a long fucking time, and I'm really angry about it for the past. two fucking years, especially now that I have a child and I'm seeing all these images coming out. My brother is fucking apoplectic about this. I can fucking barely talk to him about anything else. It's horrific. It's absolutely, absolutely awful.

I guess there's another element to this as somebody who grew up in a country that has a fairly... robust democracy maybe I mean it's a bit different since I've left but like one of the things I have learned in America is that protesting through boycotts is something that is so much more common here. And I think the reason is because people have such little political power.

and they have little political autonomy, and they don't feel like they can make a change. And unfortunately, in the sort of hyper-capitalist world of America,

the seemingly most empowering thing you can do is not buy something. And I think that's, like, that's fucked. Like, that's really sad. And so part of me has a repulsion to boycotts because I feel like they... are sort of representative of this like it's not it's not that people boycott and they're not Getting involved in politics, but there's a certain thing where I think boycotts feel more powerful than they are or or that they're like

the rich people can weather this shit. You know what I mean? Like that's, that's soft power. That's not hard power. And I think like boycotts are important and important as part of a wider political movement. But I stop short of getting that angry when people don't boycott things because I just think it has limited power in some capacity.

Not what's working. Like, what would have worked is if we had put somebody in the White House who didn't, who lied about putting pressure on Israel for the past two years before he was so fucking brain dead they had to swap. That's what we should be angry about, probably. The thing that makes me angry is last year, the tax bill between Patreon and all the white label work we did was hundreds of thousands of dollars.

How much of that money went to fucking giving Israel weapons? You know what I mean? That pisses me off. I'll play Oblivion remastered because it's fucking, what the fuck is, that's like 15 steps removed and I'll sleep well at night. The thing that makes me fucking sad and makes me feel angry and bitter. is that I live in a country, I have, all the work we have done has directly gone into taxes that have supported this fucking regime who is committing genocide in Gaza.

But this is me. I'm not saying... Anyone on this call should feel that way. I'm not saying anyone who's listening should feel that way. Mileage varies. We all come from different political realities and we all feel different about stuff. And I'm really happy people are doing this and I'm really happy that people in...

For the longest time, my perception was, and I think a lot of people in Europe's perception was, that America didn't give a shit about this particular issue. And that has, I'm incredibly shocked. have been really sort of buoyed by that, seeing how active people are about this. But also it's hard to feel good about anything when you see the picture. So I fully support people. But like, you know, I'm not going to jump down anyone's neck.

for playing Doom, you know what I mean? No, but I mean, if the, you know, I think just for me personally, again, I'm not trying to be like, Danny, how dare you? But like, you know, if the BDS group is like saying this is what we'd like you to do is just like not buy Doom the Dark Ages.

fine sure like yeah you know that's that's the easiest thing i can do and like absolutely what is the impact of it who's to say but if that's what this group is asking for and they're the group that you know doesn't necessarily represent every fucking palestinian person but like they you know

that's what they're arguing for it's a palestinian coalition like that's it's that's what they want then that's the easiest thing i can do to help them then yeah absolutely in the same way that donating should be done you should pressure your politicians it's like you said Boycotts are not a singular solution to the problem. It needs to be one part of many things that you do.

to help the situation whatever way that you can, whether that's not making a purchase, canceling a subscription service, emailing a politician again making donations doing whatever support that you can for refugees who may be in your own country like there's loads of things you can do and if this is one step then

It's not that hard to take it, at least for me. Yeah, I agree. And I also think if you're the biggest Doom fan in the world and you're like, holy shit, I just can't not have the new Doom, but I feel bad about it, then like... the boycott is good and I think it should be part of a larger body of political action but it is a sort of like it's an as a political action it's a negation of a potential purchase I think that like if you feel bad about not engaging in that then do something that is like

an active act of like, like Jesse said, like donate to, you know, relief funds, talk to people, have like frank conversations with the people about. about this stuff, you know, put pressure on politicians, be politically active. And, you know, I think above all else, like, educating yourself is not inherently a political action that will change things, but it creates a,

strong foundation for all other action that you can take. If you can speak confidently about things and be educated in them, I think that the conversations you have that might otherwise be contentious with people have a higher likelihood of being like, exchanges of information rather than being like aren't you as outraged as I am and if that person maybe is on a different level or has a different understanding of it or has been exposed to like

propaganda that has convinced them a certain way then um yeah you being an educated person can have a more profound impact on people in your life who otherwise might you know might not listen to like a journalist or a content creator or an influencer or a pundit but like if you're there

daughter, son, cousin, father, whatever your relationship. Having frank conversations from a place of speaking truth to power can be... you know one form of political action like boycott can and then i think from the games media perspective based on what catherine was saying of like what the role is in that it's weird because like on the one hand

Games media isn't supposed to be advertising. Like, covering a game, talking about the people who've made it, isn't necessarily advertising the product, especially, I think, like if we do a documentary on something that's not saying go buy Disco Elysium, it's like, or whatever, whatever, then that's not, you know. Especially not now, because none of those motherfuckers are going to need the money. Yeah, exactly. So, like, you know, it's not a scenario where we're

doing advertising for the company. It may result in sales for it, who knows, right, or excitement around it. I know Dwarf Fortress, there are a lot of people who checked it out because of the documentary, which is cool, but that's not the goal of it, right? So the goal of games journalism is supposed to not be to sell a product. So it's like...

There's that weird middle ground of it, but also if that is the end result and you can avoid doing the coverage you know if there's only so much coverage dollars remaining from the you know five cents everyone's handing around to each other like we might as well use that to highlight projects that are not on this list that may result in sales for something that could benefit from it and doesn't go against this boycott if it's something that you want to support as an outlet.

Yeah, and I think, again, mileage varies right now. If you're somebody who doesn't care about the games that are coming out, or as Jeremy said, if you're a big Doom fan, Aftermath is probably one of the most... Politically, this is funny because the word I'm trying to think of is the word for being good at saying words. So this perfectly surmises the situation.

You don't come here. Maybe you are aligned with our politics in some respect or like our proclivities here at Noclip Crew or the way we think about games, probably the way, artistically, how we enjoy it. Whereas Aftermath, I think, is more of a politically forward, you know, they're really educated about this stuff, like they're smart people. but they're also very left-leaning. So it sort of works. That's a smart thing for them to do, right?

But it might not be the case for another group of people or for another publication or for an editor to make a call for an entire political... you know people who write for another site might not agree or might not care and that sucks But, you know what I mean? It's stuff is more complicated. It's like the thing about Noclip is like...

You can very easily think about an organization or a group of people or something and really reduce them down to this sort of groupthink thing. Our brains are fucking literally designed to do this. We can't get away from it. We think about companies as people. It's the way we view the world largely in our fucking lizard brains. Again, I'm not a scientist. I think all this would have been... But I think...

Things are really complicated. And if you think about a place you worked in and when you really felt passionate about something and other people did. that causes friction and stuff. And then if there's legal things involved, it makes it even more so. So you have to be really careful about things like that when you're working with a group of people.

And if it's a small group or relatively politically aligned, you can do something like that. But we shouldn't jump down the throats of other people who aren't in a position to do that or who don't want to because they... Somebody feels something on the staff and they don't want to say that publicly because that person might get targeted. Yeah, shit's complicated.

I fully support that stuff. And if people want to give me shit for talking about Doom, I didn't pay for it technically. We got a code, right? So we got to send the fucking... Collectors Edition. Absolved. Absolved, exactly right. I have committed no capitalist sin today. Do I feel a little bit bad? Probably I feel a little bit bad, yeah.

for doing that stuff. I've donated thousands to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund. Should I feel good about that? I don't feel particularly good about it, to be honest. I wish I didn't have to give that money. I wish it wasn't needed. You know, do I feel I could do more? Do I feel shitty about the tax situation? Am I pissed off at the political situation now that I live in this country way more than even when I did live in this country? Abso-fucking-lutely.

So just empathy is important when you're thinking about people in different parts of the world who are in terrible situations in you. It's also important when building a coalition, and I just think, like, I really respect people for doing this stuff, but I also think... remember who the enemy is a little bit with this stuff. So I'm not going to jump down anyone's throat for covering that stuff.

I think the only thing to do is if you do the unboxing of the Doom Slayer statue that you should put a little Palestinian flag in his hand and then reseal the box and pretend it came like that. I did do something. I wrote something. What was I on? It was around the stars. I put a sign up behind myself. I forgot. But I couldn't do the fly because my daughter didn't have the right colored pencils. And it looked shit on camera. Yeah, exactly. Do something like that.

do a donation i don't know yeah maybe that's maybe that maybe that's a good idea maybe every time you cover something that's microsoft you have a little lower third every time that says, fuck it. you know, donate to this fund or calls out Microsoft for... what they do. I don't know. Is that what Aftermath are doing as well? Are they just fully boycotting stuff?

Probably. I know Fanbyte did something similar, rest in peace, where they were boycotting another thing. I think it was a Harry Potter game. And they were like, we're just not going to do any coverage on that. And that was the last sort of big gaming... boycott sort of thing that happened yeah yeah i get and that's another great example of like

somebody like that game is really good right people it reviewed really well i've settled down i don't know about well i don't know i don't know it seemed to be it was the most it was the highest selling game last year that doesn't mean anything that just means a lot of people want it in something it wasn't a cash crap right it seemed like people put together a game that they really cared about you know fuck JK Rowling and you know all solidarity with all of our trans friends

You know, and I think it was really important that all that shit got put out there. It's also like, I don't know, I feel, maybe I'm just super cynical. And I think like, none of these people give a fuck if nobody... like the amount of change you have to do to make that shit people still play Michael Jackson on the fucking radio like it's really hard to

enforce this type of thing. Like the smaller, the more individualized the person and the less of a sort of a framework of other people getting paid is connected to them in the case of both Microsoft and JK Rowling stuff. the easier it is to do it. And I'm not saying you shouldn't fight against that stuff, but it's easier to like...

go after one person, right? Or one local coffee shop that puts a swastika and the fucking cream on the top. I don't know. I'm going to pay $8 somewhere else now for my latte. It just makes me feel sad. It just makes me feel that we spend a lot of time fighting the losing battles. You know what I mean? And not strategically getting... doing the more important oh yeah we waste a ton of time not you know making any collective action that we could

purposefully do and like but also it's the same thing you're saying of like you know oh uh if an outlet chooses to not cover doom that may impact their income and then you have layoffs and it's a similar problem in a different direction it's like

Why don't we have people all taking time off their job and go do a general strike? We're not at that point yet. That's the thing about protest. I feel like there's a direct correlation between how much it costs you to take an act of protest, a political action, and sort of like...

how effective it might be whereas like yeah a general strike would be like insanely effective but in order to do that everyone involved would be potentially like fired from their jobs or alienate their workplace or maybe like Maybe they support a family and stuff. Yeah, mileage varies again, right? It's easy for some people to do that. People who are working week to week, that's way harder an ask to do for them. Yeah, for sure.

I am making a comparison that's a bit like, yeah, the mom who works at the grocery store. She should not buy her child Doom. Why are you taking time off of work to go strike? You could be at home playing Obscure Expedition 33 on your Xbox Game Pass. Stream it to your phone. I think these are good conversations to have because unfortunately, this is the big fucking problem that all of... stuck at

is that there's like five companies now. So it's hard to fucking miss this stuff. You know what I mean? It's hard. It's hard to be a responsible consumer in the year of our Lord's 2025.

fucking disney's got some got some you know history and fascist ideology as well yeah like for sure you know imagine like here here's an interesting hypothetical for instance actually no i won't say i'll keep it for a different time but i've gone i've gone too much yeah no just to extend on what you were saying it's like when you start to exit it's very easy to for someone to call attention to something and be like this is a thing that is like

tied to injustice and you're like oh shit i shouldn't have that but if you then take that and think critically about like If I look at my computer and just take apart every component or iPhones or anything that contains rare earth minerals, those metals are probably not sourced from people who are like... and I got the 401k and like the Foxconn factories you know what I mean yeah yeah totally yeah your MacBook is made in horrible fucking conditions by people who like don't have

And yet you post about hating Jeff Bezos. How ironic. You participate in society. Exactly. You run into the participate in society problem and the also... you know, also this, also that kind of thing. You can just point at another bad thing.

You don't care about whales, though? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I get what you were saying at the start of, like, there's such a hyper, like, eating yourself that's why there's like nine parties in the UK that are all left leaning and like what two right wing parties it's like first pass the post kills it that's a great example it's the same thing up here we have like you know the

four or five leftist parties and then it's all the liberals or that's about it. And then the conservatives win when it splits on some political or social or economic thing that the three parties agree on.

it's a constant problem of like everyone is so passionate about the things that they care about that unfortunately causes that splintering fortunately it causes that splintering also because it creates silos where people can like learn more about what the thing is that they have a strong feeling about and if they rally enough support then they create their own thing and it overwhelms the one and everyone comes together eventually but

Do they? Yeah, eventually. Eventually they do. It happened in the past. You know, the left kind of... Name a left-wing coalition that's lasted more than five years anywhere in the world. Hey, right-wing coalitions only last so long because they're all willing to be hypocrites. We've all been living in right-wing coalitions our entire lives. Exactly. Exactly. In case you haven't. Oh, wait, Nathaniel.

Name them all. Go ahead. Say them all once. So I think, like, yeah, like, what does a hypothetical, you know, machine games releases a new Wolfenstein? They've been bringing out anti-fascist games their entire life and then do they get boycotted? because of all this as well, I guess.

That's the weird thing. It's like the paradox that, I mean, people say that this led to sort of like Kurt Cobain's existential crisis is that like he was this this representative of like fuck the man fuck the system the music industry is evil like fuck your parents like fuck all this and then

labels were like oh shit that's like that sells and they're like putting it on t-shirts and shit and it's like I It's so weird how you could make the most anti-Nazi game, and it could be published by the most fascistic publisher, and it would be... They'd be like, yeah, fucking everyone hates us and we're making loads of money. It's very weird how easily messages can be co-opted. So, yeah, to your point, it is like, you know, it is weird how... You could see a game like that that signals very...

sort of, like, progressive ideas or ideology, and then still, like, supported by, like, Fourth Reich Games. And it's just odd how, like, you know, on some level, like, a game could... perform good ideas and it could be an aesthetic dimension that still supports evil shit. I'm not saying, I'm not saying machine games is an example.

It's sort of a separate thing. Yeah, but here we are. And that's why I think some of this stuff is a bit more easy to stomach than others for people. If people were saying, stop playing your PC. Stop buying games on Steam because that's a PC platform. The boycott doesn't move. You know what I mean? There's a reason why it attacks the weakest points.

People will do political action as long as it is, you know, the convenience factor of political action is unfortunately part of what... politics work and not work in some respect uh so yeah but yeah great conversation to have and i think yeah thanks thanks to you guys as well Yes, and thanks to Catherine for a great question as well.

I think that's a... On that cheery note, we end. We leave email and... And come back to the land of Noclip Crew for now. We are going to... There will be a video up, actually, by the time this podcast is up, sort of.

Broadly explaining, it's me sort of broadly explaining what the plans are for the channel and kind of why we're... why we're going to do something and the position we feel like we're in and the position that sort of games coverage is in and why, you know, certainly why I think at this moment, my own sort of personal feeling. It's a moment to sort of shit or get off the pot, as it were. So that'll be up. There's also quick looks at the moment up for...

Doom of the Dark Ages. What was the first one that went up? Expedition 33. Clear Obscule. Fantastic work, Jesse Grosh. We also have the game I keep calling Skill Up, Jeremy. Skin Deep? Skin Deep. We have a Skin Deep one recorded. And we have a bunch more getting done as well in the next couple of days, especially on some games that we think deserve some eyeballs. which I think is a big part of this, is creating a place where, you know, no clip.

has tried to highlight interesting stories regardless of if those games are popular or not they've all kind of always been relatively well regarded i guess like we sometimes do stuff that's a bit more

Indie, especially in the GDC sessions when we did those, you know, docs on games like Frog Fractions and Genital Jousting and stuff like that. And I think... there's a big space for an outlet that really takes highlighting games seriously, not just the big games or the indie games from studios you know about, sort of established indies, but also putting in the hard work to highlight the work of great games that maybe you don't know about.

just so many more games coming out and the algorithm has ruined the fucking internet and I think people need to hit the ground and do the work of finding that stuff for you and I can think of no better people than the folks right now. So we're going to start getting into this stuff. Myself and Frank also heading into Summer Games Fest. I've also been talking to a lot of folks I used to work with in the path about doing some fun sort of video shows.

weird shows with them and so they're getting down for that so that sounds pretty cool. The bonus pod last month was the Borderlands review. Dear God, listen to it at your own peril. And we're working away on Disco Elysium at the moment and the Everbloom stuff. My parents are coming to town tomorrow. They've never visited California. They're coming for three weeks.

So I'll be on the podcast all the time. We'll be doing our quick looks. I will mostly be in an editing hall when I am not showing them the wonders of California. So I'm excited. But yeah, this is a particularly silly time to start doing all of this, I think, when they're coming over. So if I'm slow on emails, that's why. That's what I'll say. And the patron messages. I'll try and keep on all that sort of stuff. I mightn't be in the Discord as much.

Frank, what are you up to for the rest of your week? I'm trying to think. This is like the first weekend where I don't have it. I've been really peaceful. I meant to reach out to Jeremy about this, but I finished reading a book about Japanese Buddhism because I was so disturbed and plagued with my dad and dreams. yeah i'm so curious what book it is it's gonna be like big as dusty no it's it's my uh jikasai manami it's called it's okay not to look for the meaning of life

And it's a Zen monk's guide to living stress-free one day at a time. But I read this, and then the next morning I woke up so peaceful. The last 30 pages is all about life.

death and grief and I was like shaking crying because like I went to Vegas and I had a good time and then two weeks later I had like extreme vivid dreams of my dad being in Vegas because he would take me all the time and it like threw me I like I had to like reset the entire grief process it was miserable and so yeah so like but then i finished that book and i've been very peaceful and i've been

Personal like off from everything. I've been playing persona 3 again just like and it's like the best game It's still the best game ever. But, uh, I don't know. No hard plans. Are you on a vibe rollercoaster? What's going on? You're like, oh, I'll read this book about getting over it, and then I'll play a game about how sad losing people is. It's just, like, kids shooting themselves in the head. I don't know. Just light reading.

don't do any of the social links they're all sad don't do it no i don't know it's all cool it's just it's just hyper i don't know anything That's cool. I'll definitely check that book out. Yeah, I... Danny and I talked about this when we traveled to Japan a lot, but my link to Japanese culture, it's funny because When I tell people I want to go back to Japan, they're like, oh, you must be really into anime, or is it a video game thing? And it's like, I want to go to a bunch of fucking temples.

like my uh my like lineage and learning about buddhism was in the greater boston area going to college there and a lot of my sort of like Spiritual mentors there are directly linked to sort of like the first transmission of Zen teachings came through Boston, basically. And the Cambridge Zen Society sort of like hosted DT Suzuki and a lot of those early Zen thinkers.

specifically like zed and like japanese schools of buddhism are kind of like the the lineage that speaks the most to me so uh that's cool that makes me really happy that you were checking that out i'll read that book Awesome work. Should we do a Capcom fighting?

Sorry, a little bit of a pivot there. It's Japanese. It'd be easy to, because it's like each game is, I mean, I don't have to show every game, but I could show it like a few rounds of each. I'm happy to if that's an assignment. We have a WWE 2K25 one as well, which will be coming out probably. We feel like a backlog of them now as well, so we should probably... Jeremy, what are you up to? You look like you're in the no-clip room from that video game that people always email me support questions.

yep still in the back rooms um yeah i'm gonna do a quick look this week uh we've been working been like cooking so fucking when i never when on social media i don't post anything about game dev it either means that i'm like so morbidly depressed that I can't get out of bed or that I'm cooking harder than anyone you've ever seen in your life. I hope it's the latter. It's currently the latter. I've been making some crazy shit the last couple of weeks.

So yeah, I'm really excited about it. I'm excited to talk about it, but I'm reserving all of the, you know, the toy, fill up the toy chest before you show it to people. You know what I mean? I need a publisher. I got a place you can talk about your game. I can sell my cachet for sales. Just call it Danny O'Dwyer's Jeremy Janes. End of the title.

Jeremy Jaynes. There's already that Jaynes series of fighting sims, right? Flight sim games. Jaynes, right? Isn't that like a... What? I don't know about this. Yeah, isn't Jaynes? J-A-N-E-S. Maybe Jaynes is like... A wider... Are you thinking of the Jane brand? Oh, Jane's combat simulations? Yeah, Jane strips. Yeah. Did you ever play the fucking Jane's games? They were like, yay, man. Oh no, named after editor and publisher of military reference book, uh, Fred T. Jane. Fred, not Freddy.

Fred T. John Frederick Thomas Jane. Not spelled like my last name. He's the plain Jane. You put a Y in the middle. Plain Jane. God. Plain Jane. That'd be a good name for a game. Because of airplanes. Plain Jane. Holy shit. That could be his YouTube channel name. Plain Jane. Yeah, play some fucking Jane. Yeah, I'm jaining. I'm jaining right now. Oh, yeah, that does sound bad. I'm going to play this.

I just call it Jane's. Jane, publisher of Jane's Defense Weekly. Dude, I'm going to fucking, I'm just going to do everything he ever did. I'll just put a Y in the middle. Yeah, this is like the opposite of you, actually. Combat simulations. Yeah. You're like, he's right. No, Jeremy would make a game called Longbow 2. He'll do it.

Yeah, I mean, you know, every religion in history has been co-opted to do war at some point, so I'm sure there's a, you know, I could say it's what Buddha wanted, that I had to fly this F-18. That's where, yeah, I couldn't find, what are all Buddhists trying to find? Enlightenment. Enlightenment, I couldn't find enlightenment. Всем гармония.

of searching the world for enlightenment. Nothing. I would like to do nothing for a little bit. I went to Europe and then America. Very scary. No, same amount of scary, actually. No, I just want to sit down, do the lawn, walk my dog. My buddy got me a paper Picross book, so I'm going to do that on Saturday. I'm going to have a coffee in the morning on the porch and do some Picross with a pen and paper. That sounds great. That's beautiful.

thing you know it's also beautiful our listeners thank you so much for listening folks you're beautiful hope you have a wonderful time out there we will see you next week on the crew you