Elden Ring Nightreign, Pre-SGF, Star Wars Battlefront II (2017)

you Hey, what's going on gamers and non-gamers? Welcome back to the No Clip Crew cast. This is episode 230 and there's only three of us here because Danny, he's stuck on the beach, the beach that makes you old. No, he's stuck on Kojima's beach. He's playing Death Stranding 2 right now. That's why he can't be with us. He's too busy hunting down ghosts. I haven't played the first one yet. I really want to. Building ladders, I think. Yeah, connecting with America or combining our hearts to...

defeat the kingdom or something like that, right? It's Kingdom Hearts basically, right? It's a sad state of affairs that logistics in America are so bad in public transit that there's an entire power fantasy game about just having logistics in America. How cool it would be if we could like build another lane. Just one more lane, dude. Build the highway. Just one more lane. Oh, man. I wish I could just like climb a mountain.

Yeah, just one time without getting like sued or pulled over. Let me just let me let me build some infrastructure, you know, finally. And all it took was a Japanese dev to put it together. And one of the most prolific. I'm excited to see what the reviews are for Death Stranding 2. And I'm sure we'll hear more about it from Danny and every. single other person in the slowly dwindling games press in the next couple weeks. We're also joined of course by the lovely Frank Howley. Frank, how goes?

Pretty good. Like I said, I've been like happy and calm the last, I don't know, few weeks. I don't know. I don't know what happened. Again, it was that Zen Buddhist book. I actually like over the weekend finally went through more of my dad's tapes, like home videos, which took me.

like a year and a half to like build the courage to like look at and I don't know that made me really happy I have footage of me at my first time at Disneyland in like 1992 and every kid has like a mullet and like it's awesome I don't know so I'm in a good mood I feel happy and content So I hope you guys are feeling that joy and peace as well.

I wish. You know, I've never been to Disneyland or any of the Disneys, for that matter. I mean, they're all in America. So, I mean, what am I going to do? They can't do Disneyland up here. The better ones are in Japan. There's Tokyo, DisneySea. You know, I follow all the wrestlers and everyone goes to DisneySea every time.

Every single day. So I see Disney see more than any other. Every day. Don't you get tired of going. I don't know. They probably have season passes when they finish at the dojo. They hop. Oh, I don't know. But sure. But like, what do you do? You go on everyone. Disney exists solely to take Instagram pictures.

I'm not kidding. I went to, like, the fantasy land there, and it's just 10,000 people, like, taking selfies in front of, like, a tree made of Elsa. I don't know. Made of Elsa? They just, like... No, they have, like, a water... waterfall and like the rocks and plants are all formed as Disney characters I don't know but it's yeah you would like Disney see it's cool but yeah when I when I was moving a couple months ago I found a bunch of old photos and one of them was me

at like six years old or five years old at disney world hugging a guy in a poo bear suit and uh i the poo bear suit is so like like it looks like i'm at some sort of like off-brand like weird rural like fake disney world

because the suit is so shitty. And I was like, is that why things are so expensive now? Is that like... the back in the day the internet didn't exist or was shitty and people were like i mean yeah it's like that's the best you could hope for i've never seen like i've only seen grainy polaroids of disney world so it must just be like this and now they've never seen full-size winnie the pooh yeah yeah exactly i just didn't

better. So I was like, I have to hug that giant bear. I wonder how far we are from the next step where it's not people in costumes. It's like horrible creatures that they've created in some lab. Like they have a lab underneath Disneyland and they're just creating Winnie the Pooh. They hug you and they just whisper into the kids' ear. They're like, kill me. Just do it. Just end my life. How does he sound?

What a shmackerel. Free me. Just put some arsenic in my honey. Where's Piglet? Put me down. This is getting way too sad. Let him get out. Well, if they build monstrosities, I'll be back in. I would never go to Disney World probably, but if they had weird mutants, I might go.

True. That wouldn't be Disneyland anymore. That would just be, I don't know, name of an American city you don't like. Yeah, Universal Studios. There you go. All right. Knocked it out of the park. That was great. Yeah. You know who else would not want to go to Universal Studios? Our battle pass holders who support this show on Noclip on Patreon.

Patreon.com slash NoClip. They support all of our work, our documentaries, this podcast, all of the stuff we do on whatever the new channel is going to be called. Not NoClip Crew. Something else, eventually. You'll find out. And so will we. And also you get access to our discord where you can talk about new video games and old ones too.

Whatever you want, really. You can talk about dogs. We have people who just talk about the animals they see outside. It's awesome. It's like so wholesome. But yeah, if you want to support us at the tippy top level with all of the other Battle Pass holders, you can do that at patreon.com slash noclip and join the list, including...

Love Preet. Yut. Yut. Did we decide on this one? I have no idea. I'm going to go Yut. Dwayne the Rock Lobster. It's good every time. Anthony Thomas. Nico Passateri. It's a me Ferrario. Penelope Hayes, Senator Armstrong, Redredge, I think is how we nailed it last time. So I think that's it. Harry Flanagan, Joosh, Arno, Matt Pearson, James Brown, Mark Rojas, Tucker Morgan, David McGarry.

Goddison, Sven Hooster, Pez, John Akers, Uint Nate, Tim Robinson, Forrest Pruitt, Jonathan Kremen, Eric Hamilton Snyder, Christophe Fatui, Cameron Lenn, Zachary Snyder, Alex Couchet. Thank you all so much for your support, for being with us for so long.

I feel bad that Cameron Ladd can never leave because if he does, he ruins the flow of the list and we'll never forgive him. But I'm kidding. I'm kidding. You can do whatever you want. Someone else will have to inherit the inflection of Cameron Ladd. The very energetic way of saying the name. I'm going to go Alex Couchet.

I like that. I'm spitballing. I like it. It's been a long day, man. I did not have a good start to this one. But it's okay. We're here. It's going to get better because I'm hanging out with my boys and we're going to talk about video games for two hours. Or less.

We'll see. Exactly. I'm literally so locked in. I can't do anything else. Actually, that's not true. I wish I could lock in. My body hurts. We're going to talk about some video games this week, including hot new games like Star Wars Battlefront 2, which is popping off with the children.

They're very excited for Star Wars Battlefront 2. NBA 2K15, which released in 2014. I love video games. Elden Ring Night Reign. Sol Sesto, I think is how you say it. And maybe something, some other stuff. We'll see. We'll see what happens. I don't want to put...

I don't put anyone on the spot, but there's other games that we could talk about. We won't be talking about Death Stranding 2, like I said. And we won't be talking about Summer Games Fest because that's not happening right now. You'll be listening to this while it's happening, but we're recording this on Tuesday. So it hasn't quite started yet. But Frank...

since you're going to be there with Danny, how is it? Are you having fun? I can imagine myself in line at YouTube theater, gawking at all the celebrities and influencers and gamers. Everyone's here. At the biggest summer celebration fest in video game history, who will arrive on the stage? Hideo Kojima is here. Will we have AAA Hollywood celebrities like Sean Penn or Kirk Douglas? Who knows who's walking? What are they wearing? newest threads by Gucci and more. I don't know. I'm excited.

Also, the biggest crazy thing is how many people in line will be holding their new Switch 2s? How many people are anxious because they're going to be in LA while Target is shipping their Switch 2 unprotected to their home? I don't know. Let me just pick up the Switch 2 from Target. I'm so upset. Target is shipping the Switch 2s while everyone's at Game... Yeah, you can't... Oh, that's brutal. I got my Switch 2 pre-order. I shouldn't complain. I got my Switch 2 pre-order, but...

Target doesn't let you do in-store pickup. They're just shipping them out. And it's like, let me just go to the store. You're adding such an unfortunate chaos element. Do they not just leave it at like a USPS or something if you don't go to pick it up? I don't know.

It's going to be interesting to see Twitter and stuff and just see everyone's stories of like, oh my God, my Switch 2. How many Switch 2? I don't know. Every games journalist is on this long list. And if you get their address, just go there. Free Nintendo Switch on the porch, guys. You know what to do.

I don't know. It's going to be crazy. I don't know. I'm excited, though. But for me, it's easy because it's just like, oh, it's just LA. It's close to me, so it's not that different. Sorry, guys. I got to go. I've got to go get my Switch 2. Yeah, yeah. I feel like people would understand, actually, if you said that at Summer Games Fest. Yeah, absolutely. Jeff Keighley would be like, you know what? Take my car. Here's the keys. Go get it.

Oh, man. Frank, when you were doing your beautiful Hollywood intro to, you know, frolicking among the stars at Summer Games Fest, I was imagining that the best piece of content I could imagine you making is doing, like, standing by whatever the red... carpet equivalent is just the entrance to the theater and be like who are you wearing what are you wearing today and just like like people wearing like a fucking 2004 jinx t-shirt oh yes yeah

You could be gaming's Joan Rivers. I believe in you. How do you do Joan? She's like, you look terrible, darling. I mean, she just smoked a pack of Marlboros every single day for like 70 years. I haven't heard her voice in what feels like 20 years. I'm so happy to see everyone. You're all here. All the celebrities are here, my best friends. You could be the Joan Rivers of gaming. You really could be, Frank. I believe in you. If there's anyone that I believe in to pull that off, it's you.

But yeah, Summer Games Fest is coming up. It's going to be lots of announcements, stuff that we definitely don't know about. That's going to be cool or bad. Who knows? I'm looking forward to all the coverage and hours and hours of new video games.

woohoo I don't know it's weird because like the Switch 2 is this week like you said sorry I have a hard time getting I'm like legitimately excited about this stuff because I love video games and I do like seeing all the new stuff but there's part of me where I'm like There's too much now?

Can I explain the tone of what you just said? This is like you were held at gunpoint and you had to feign excitement for an event, but you were so tired of it that you were like, just shoot me already. Just get it over with. But you weren't just going to say, you're just like, woohoo. Like, what do you fucking want from me? It was incredible.

give me all your money i'm like oh no oh no i'm gonna die like i have like i have so much to live for yeah oh man oh and i have an appointment at 11 30 for a game i don't know anything about um yeah no i here's the thing i love the events i love watching E3 I used to love watching E3 rest in peace 3E obviously now it's like it's three months long it never ends there's an event every other day it's like 40 new indie games and it's like yeah you don't have to watch all of it I know

But I can't help myself. I gorge on the video game news and it hurts. It hurts my body. But that's neither here nor there. It doesn't really matter. Is there anything that you guys are looking forward to? Any big surprises that you're hoping to see? Are you excited for Silk Song to shadow drop on the 6th at Summer Games Fest play days or whatever the hell? I'm always curious because Xbox has their showcase and I think they've openly said they're going to have outer worlds.

to their other Gears of War. I don't care about Gears of War, but the best part is I feel like Xbox always announces remasters and it's available today on Game Pass. Although we might get Ninja Gaiden 4 stuff. I don't know. The big thing is Jeff Keighley's thing, and then Xbox is like, we have a thing too. The thing I don't know, I think they host an event in LA. How do you get into that? I got tickets for summer games, so I want to go to the Xbox thing. You have to have a Zune.

I mean, I know the theater that it's hosted at. You could just show. I mean, they won't let you in if you don't have a ticket. But how do I get a ticket to the Microsoft Theater? Dude, just say you know Noclip and they'll let you in. That is true. You're also the guy who mentions Xbox the most on Noclip. Just give them one of these and they'll know. It's crazy. I want to go to the Xbox room and screen.

I think Xbox was the... It was either Xbox's or Bethesda's, but there was one year, or maybe it's every year. But they have all the developers there for the thing, and so every time a game gets announced, people are screaming, and so you'll just hear separate cheers of screams and yays for whatever team's...

But I want to be the cheerleader for every project that gets announced. I want to bring that enthusiasm. Everyone's so tired from working on these games. I did love hearing you scream at the top of your lungs in your vlog. I did not get front row this year, unfortunately. Yeah, I bet. I bet. Jeff was like... the hell was screaming that loud for gears of war e-day i remember last year because like

I was able to get a front row ticket for Summer Games Fest. As soon as the thing starts, I scream. When I watch the thing, you can hear the audio mix. They immediately pull down the slider in my section. Like, oh, I don't know what this is. It was, ah! It was that. It was like they immediately pulled it down. That's fantastic. So I don't know. But I don't know. Again, like.

I think that's the energy I bring is like, you can get excited about anything. And I think like wherever there's a lack of enthusiasm, that's where I want to be. I'm like, yes, let's go. Like, I don't know. It's 10 billion people in the world are excited for Switch 2, Mario Kart. Cool. But who's excited for? I don't know. Xbox showcase, you know, it's just, it's that easy. The PlayStation state of play. They're announcing a new ghost of Yote.

Woo! You know how they have like seat fillers? Frank is like the lull filler. Like, when they have empty seats, they need people to sit in there. But when they have like a... When they just bring an SM58 over, they're like, just scream into this, please. We need it so bad. Everyone needs encouragement. Just be that little voice like, yeah, keep going, you know? Totally.

someone worked hard on the like chibi Marcus Phoenix that you can use as your avatar now you know what I mean like someone needs to cheer for that do you remember when they did you just reminded me they did a Funko Pop Gears of War game oh man you remember that Gears of War game with Funko Pop yeah Gears of War pop or something like that? I think I had like one or two people play it and like it was like notoriously like...

like broken at launch to get crash systems and stuff. I don't think they ever patched it, but maybe we'll get like the, the apology patch and be like, I, it finally worked. I don't know. We're finally bringing it to Xbox series X, the game. Everyone's been waiting for gears of war pop. Why did they make this? I've never heard of this. Yeah, I don't know. Microsoft's random with its brands. It'll be like, let's do Gears of War.

Tactics, which was pretty good. Well, if they made a Funko Pop game, then GameStop would sell it. Like, that's the only thing. Yeah, that's a really good point. It's like, shit, how do we get our games to GameStop? Did they make a Funko Pop straight up game? Sorry, I'm totally derailing us. Pop Fusion? Is that what I'm thinking of? Is that right?

Funko Pop game. We should do a Funko Pop documentary, and when we interview them, we're like, how do you feel about the fact that in 100 years, every landfill will be 90% Funko Pops? It'll be like the Nuka-Cola caps. It'll be currency. Can I pay you with my Aloy Funko Pop? I have 100 of them. That's the thing that's also heartbreaking. Now every mall is being filled with anime stores, which is awesome.

For a while, we're finally getting out of it. You'd go to a mall and be like, oh, there's a comic store. You walk in and it's just Funko Pops. Or a game store and it's Funko Pops. You're tricked. Every time you walk in, it's just Funko Pops. And the thing I don't understand about the Funko Pops being so...

ubiquitous is that I swear this is a gaming podcast is that they're like $30 sometimes they're almost dude some of them are really expensive I don't know if it's a reseller thing I'm sure it's not MSRP but like they're almost as much as the books or games like what It's also like the comic book variants where it's like there's this Funko Pop, but this is like the gold foiled edition and random stuff like that. I don't know. This one was made in a sweatshop in Malaysia. Oh. Nice. Okay.

do rarity you know how like in like diablo you get like purples and stuff they should do that with funko pops where you open them and you're like this is like an uncommon marcus phoenix

Don't actually delete that from the podcast. Why did you say that? Someone's going to make that. He just invented the worst thing I could imagine. I just augmented the torment nexus. Wait a minute, Funko Pops are back. Oh, my God. We turn them into gotcha machines. That's what we do. Mr. Funko is out there listening, and he's like, oh.

Dude, you know what? The thing that makes me most mad about Funko Pops is that there used to be a game store called Funkoland and it was my childhood. And now they've besmirched the name of something beautiful. You know what I mean? Monsters. It's like if they opened a store called like David Lynch and it sold.

I don't know, like something terrible. I was going to say cigarettes, but he would have loved that. He would have been like, great. Well, I mean, I guess they killed him too, but he loved them. He had a complicated relationship to cigarettes. It's the thing that kills you that brings you joy, isn't it? I think so. Is that a saying you're coining right now? We're always saying that. No, we've been saying that for years. Yeah, that's true. Like gaming will kill me.

Like I'll die holding a controller or a mouse. Exactly. Deep, deep vein thrombosis. I can't joke about that. That's someone's worst nightmare. Yeah. His name's Daniel Dwyer. How can you joke at a time like this? I'm so sorry. I want an insensitive thing for me to say. I apologize. That's right.

I hope everyone who has to deal with blood clots is okay. Everyone stretch right now. Not us if you're listening to this. Do a little yoga. Hit your downward facing dog or I don't know. I know no other yoga poses. Okay, can we talk about a video game now? Yeah. Can we talk about some brand synergy? Yeah, which one? Perhaps. I would love to talk about what all the kids are excited for the sequel to. Every child that I'm aware of, which is all zero of them, is so looking forward.

to Star Wars Battlefront 3. But that's not out yet. Instead, our good reporter... Frank Alley has been playing Star Wars Battlefront. It's so hard for me to say for some reason. Star Wars Battlefront 2 from 2017. I can't believe it's that old. Why? And also, is it still good?

Oh, my God. This game is amazing. So the whole thing with Star Wars Battlefront 2, I forget how it came. It was like one of my friends was like, dude, have you seen this? Everyone's playing Battlefront 2. And I was like, huh? And so...

Okay, it's May. Well, now it's June, but this started a month ago. May the 5th be with you or whatever it's called. Yeah, right? Oh, yeah, May the 4th. Oh, you got it. I like yours better. That's good. You were late. You showed up late to the event. It's not May 5th. It's not May the 5th be with you. No, because it's May the 4th, baby. It's like if you have a lisp and you go to say May the 4th be with you.

Whatever. May the 5th be with you. Okay, so I made the prequel day. May the 4th be with you. All right, so Star Wars Celebration, they put Episode 3 back in theaters, 20-year anniversary. Fortnite did a Star Wars season. They had AI Darth Vader. Oh, God, that's right. ride that AI...

James Earl Jones. Andor season two, which I hear is good. I've never seen Andor, but people are saying it's good. Andor season two happens. So Star Wars mania is buzzing. George Lucas still building his museum of narrative art, which actually sounds great in like San Francisco. Oh, I want to go.

So, Star Wars is huge, and, uh, I don't know, there was a thing posted on, like, the Star Wars Battlefront Reddit that was like, Star Wars Resurgence Day! On this day, all Star Wars gamers and soldiers will unite on Battlefront 2 to show EA we want Battlefront 3!

And if they don't listen to us, the resistance, I don't know. And so it was like a genuine movement. We're going to send the space Gestapo to their house. They'll never see it coming. It was a genuine movement. Like, hey, guys, let's all get on Starz Battlefront 2. Let's show EA we want Battlefront 3. Whatever. So everyone started playing Battlefront.

front 2 and everyone's like oh my god this game's really good so what happened when battlefront 2 came out 2017 i i wasn't a part of this wave but apparently it was like the most evil game in terms of like loot crates Star Wars boasts, like, you can play as all your heroes, Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, but you had to, like, grind hundreds of dollars worth of loot crates to unlock cards, to unlock those characters, and even, like, the progression system.

is when you're playing as an Indian class, you equip different cards, like better grenades, longer scopes, or whatever, but you had to unlock those ability cards in loot crates. So it was just such a scattershot thing, but if you wanted to pay to win, spend money on loot crates, and now you have the best card. and you can dominate a lobby. So no one was happy with Battlefront 2 when it launched. And so EA spent, I think, two years patching the game, completely changing the system.

Fix it. Then they released it in 2019 or 2020 as the Star Wars Celebration Edition. I think that's when it was on PlayStation Plus because I had dipped into the game back in 2020 for one round, forgot about it. Now cut to 2025 and it hit a...

new all-time like steam player record it hit like 18 000 concurrent players like just last week oh my god and uh on playstation it's part of like the playstation plus i think xbox game passes all the ea games and game pass so it's free to play on everything oh

if you're part of the services on steam it was deeply discounted for like the star wars celebration stuff playstation even featured it on their playstation store it was like hey you should get this like i think it was like five dollars if you didn't already own it

So they made it accessible. A lot of people are playing it. They've patched it. Yeah, so I started playing it, and I really like it because, like, I do like Battlefield games, but they can be really complicated, and there's a high skill ceiling, especially if you're coming to it years later. But because Battlefront 2 with this new, like...

resurgence day campaign you're getting a lot of fresh players so people who aren't like obsessed with it know everything so it was an even playing ground so yeah I'm playing Battlefront 2 and I'm genuinely loving it again like

There's all these different classes, sniper classes. There's, I don't know, turret guns, kind of like Team Fortress 2. There's officers. You can heal your teammates, things like that. You can play as Yoda. You can play as BB-8, the little ball, whatever. What do you do? You just like walk into people as BB-8s? I haven't actually played it, but it's so tiny. But I'm assuming like.

A lot of special characters and classes have things where you can like ping enemies on the radar. You can throw grenades. Things like you can go up and like cut people's ankles if you're BB-8. Jesus. I don't remember that from the movie. I don't know. There's BB-8 and there's an evil one. Yeah, I don't know. But the game is extremely fun. It's not cross-play, but I've been playing on PS4 and just enjoying getting trophies. You can play the game in Japanese. There you go. Oh, shit. We're so back.

You have droids speaking in Japanese, and it's like, oh, this is so cool. I always like playing old games because they get cheaper, and all the trophy and achievement guide, all the walkthroughs are out. the best strategy so it's just like satisfying just grinding trophies on stuff and like you're saying usually it's so late in the game that they can get rid of all the microtransaction nonsense like so is it easier now to get a hold can you play as

I don't fucking know. Mace Windu now without spending $400? I don't know if Sam Jackson didn't want to lease his life. Sam Jackson's not in it, but everyone else is. Harrison Ford is in there. Mark Hamill, Princess Leia, Carrie Fisher. Donald Glover is in this.

So Lando Calrissian, you can unlock the Donald Glover costume or whatever. They really gave him the perfect name. They saw that shit coming from the mile away. Lando Calriss. And they got Donald Glover. Dude, it's like they saw the future.

Anyway, sorry, go on. Yeah, so it's really cool, and I don't know how long this buzz will last. I also think, too, the way I am is like, yeah, once... I mean, I'm not going to go crazy on Switch, too, but it's like there's going to be so many new games announced next week that I was like, I'm just going to play old games for a bit. not worry. Um, but, um, yeah, it's been fun. I've been playing with friends and it's just, it's just real. It's just, it's just fun. I think what it is too is like,

I've been playing, like, team multiplayer games, like, even, like, Halo 2 since, like, 2004 and even older. So it's, like, I feel like I'm pretty confident and good at, like, these kinds of online shooters. I'm also playing at third person. You can play first person. If you press, you know, down the D-pad, you're playing in third person. so I'm just running around and just like killing I don't know if it's kids or whoever just random people and I'm like this game is awesome I'm like

near the top of the leaderboards all the time. And so, yeah, I don't know. I really like Star Wars Battlefront too. So I recommend checking it out if you just want something to play. I'm hooked on it. I genuinely was like... I was so tired, but I wanted to play. I tried to wake up earlier before the podcast so I can play more, but I will keep playing after. It's just a good time. So, again, it's a great case of...

uh online community rallying behind so then to get back in people get generally getting hooked people also saying like oh no this really is the best star wars multiplayer they tried having the fortnite star wars stuff all this other crap we just want battlefront 2 whatever i don't if battlefront 3 never i don't even think ea has the rights to like make future Star Wars games. I don't know. But...

Battlefront 2 is awesome. It's cool to finally play it. And yeah, they finally patched it. They added all these levels and things years ago. And to me, it's a brand new game. Everything's available to play as from the start. So I got to avoid the loot crate controversies. So yeah, Star Wars Battlefront 2. You probably already have access to it on Game Pass, PlayStation Plus. You probably accidentally own it on Steam. You don't even remember yet. It just showed up.

It's like that U2 album on your iPhone. It just was there. Yeah, yeah. I really like it. It's a great game. The fact that you play in Japanese is also very fun. And then, yeah, the airplane fights are sick. I don't know. It's a great – there's also a single-player game. So if you don't want to do multiplayer stuff, if you just want to play very highly detailed Star Wars levels, check it out. It's good. The reception to this, you're saying people just randomly were like, hey.

It's, you know, May the 5th be with you. Can we, let's start playing Battlefront 2 again. Is this like a Morbius situation where everyone's like, this is so dumb, let's make it happen? Or is this genuine and EA should feed into it?

I feel like that's where I jumped in. My friends are like, everyone's playing this. Let's play. Oh, this is awesome. Yeah. Like, I don't think, I don't, I don't think campaigns like this work. I don't think EA is going to be like, oh man, we got 10,000 players. Yeah. People are excited about Battlefront too. Let's run it back. I don't know. I don't know, but I'm not trying to be like.

cynical against it, but it's just like, dude, also it takes so many years to make a game. It's like, because 10,000 people played a game this month, let's spend five years working on this. I don't know. I don't know. Please make Battlefront 3, whatever. You don't need Battlefront 3. Battlefield 2 is it. For me, it's a new game. I don't know. This is sick. I don't know. It's also funny because it's like playing Battlefront...

too is nice because I've never been a hardcore Star Wars fan, but it's just such a huge part of American pop culture that it's like, I think Jeremy and I have talked about this. For me, one of my first games was N64's Shadow of the Empire. So to me, that's what Star Wars is.

janky n64 it's not the movies it's the janky n64 graphics um or even like rogue squad squadron so to me it's like oh my god they made like a first a first person shooter of all those like n64 games this is crazy they should have dash rendar as well

of the heroes from Shadows of the Empire. They made a movie based on Taras Kasai? I can't believe they made a movie version of Rogue Squadron, dude. That's crazy. I also think Battlefront as like an antithesis to like a pushback to Fortnite is interesting because one of the things that I find kind of

repulsive about fortnight is that it's this like it it represents to me this new sort of like normalization of cultural mishmash where it's like you got like fucking goku and like ai darth vader and like all these things coming together in a way that is just sort of about like Like...

pop culture maximalism if you just stuff all this shit in then everyone has their favorite flavor it's the restaurant that's like uh oh like jeff loves paking ravioli and like stacy wants pizza let's go to the place that serves fucking everything cheesecake factory let's go

Exactly. It's like Omega Pop Culture Cheesecake Factory. It's funny. I don't disagree with what you're saying, sir. I'm thinking about how when I was growing up, I was playing Mugen, or Mugen, however you say it, where you could just install whatever characters you want. And that...

doesn't have that same gross feeling of the corporate because I'm doing it but I'm the one saying I want this shit in here yeah exactly no no I'm pretty sure it was because anyone could make a character and include it I feel like it's it to me, it's like if someone mods TF2 to have Darth Vader in it, that's funny. But if a company is like we put like if Gabe Newell comes out on stage, he's like, it's starting now. Darth Vader is available in Team Fortress 2. I'd be like, boo, fuck this.

It becomes cringe when you go to download it and there's a TM after Darth Vader. Yeah. Or like from Star Wars TM registered trademark. As soon as that's there, I'm like, I don't know, man. It's like how every meme dies when when corporations start posting the joke. You know what I mean? But Battlefront 2 as like an antithesis.

to to fortnight has like it has like world building it's like because because star it's a it's almost like a bad thing in many cases that star wars media is so beholden to the legacy of star wars that it's like you can't change the battle of hoth it's like the battle of fucking hoth you know

Empire Strikes Back is like this. It's like might as well be the Bible. You can't fucking rewrite the Bible. But because of that, it has. Yes, you can. They did. That's true. They've done it a bunch of times. We need a New Testament version of the battle. I can't rewrite.

the bible and be like oh yeah jesus he had a brother named mark oh well i there's a mark whatever it doesn't matter you fucking it's a metaphor um but sorry they like that they're beholden to this sort of like cohesive world building of characters that like if Goku was in Star Wars Battlefront everyone would be like this is fucking stupid and I think that's cool like I think that like

I don't know. I think it's it's cool to have media that is has some sort of like cohesion and adherence to a sense of world building. Not that it takes itself hyper seriously, that it's like it's not like a serious game. It's like a fun arcade shooter or whatever, but it takes it's it's.

world seriously enough that it's like it's fun to immerse in these battles because it feels there's a sense of place, I guess is what I'm saying. I think it's so weird. I don't disagree with you, but I do really like cameos. Some of them. Like Mario and Luigi. I'm just trying to find what the line is for me. Like Mario and Luigi in NBA Street V3. Hilarious.

That makes no sense. They're dunking on Mario every time. That man is two feet tall. Like, he's eating basketball, no question. But then, and sorry, Link in Soul Calibur, was it four, right? Two had Link on GameCube, Heihachi, and PS2 spawned on Xbox. Right, and those are fun for some reason.

But yeah, I do have that same limit of like, when does this turn? I think Fortnite's problem is it has turned into the Funko Pop wall of video games. I walk in and I'm like, oh shit, when did they add the Big Burger guy? When did they do that in Fortnite? I didn't know about that. You go to the store.

page you're like oh Peter Griffin's in here I why are we doing that I I feel like the difference in my mind is that I just looked up a video of NBA Street and the Mario shit is ridiculous but I think that the the difference is is that NBA Street first of all it's like

It's an over-the-top game. It's like NBA Street. It's not like NBA 2K15 has Mario, which it might with the character creator. But regardless, it has this, like, foundation of cohesion. And then on top of that, like, GoldenEye has big head.

mode or whatever right right and it's but it's it's it is understood as this sort of like ancillary side thing that it's like i played a thousand hours of golden eye now let's get fucking weird with it and silly whereas fortnight is like the their cohesive vision is the is the big head mode it's all it's a hundred percent big head mode yeah like there's no there's nothing that it feels like it's rubbing up against is what you're saying like there's no when you see you know big head mode and and

Goldeneye, you're like, oh, that's funny because Goldeneye is not like that. Where here in Fortnite, it's like, oh, this is the game where Goku rides on a Nimbus cloud and then he's shot out of the sky by Ariana Grande. This is that game. So it's not exciting when they add whoever at this point. You know, like Tony Soprano in Fortnite? Okay.

Like, what are they subverting is like, you know, like you look at Fortnite in the absence of this pop culture maximalism and you have like default guy and like default woman. Number two, you know, it's just it doesn't have like an identity of its own. That is the foundation. It's just like the most. that it does

They do those like season trailers and they're like, hey, look, it's the white guy with the hair. You remember the white guy with the hair. And like John Wick shows up. You're like, remember him? He's like part of the game now. I mean, it's baked into Fortnite's DNA. I remember when Fortnite was like, we're building like it's a base builder zombie game or whatever.

And even then it was like, that was the identity. It wasn't like these characters or anything. It was like the game mechanics for the identity. And then they pivoted the entire game mechanics to something completely different, which obviously was a, you know, a good move. you know, in terms of like business and making it a successful game or whatever. But it's like, it's never been like, like Fortnite's identity is just a, it's a container for pop culture. Right. It's not quite as.

Perhaps cohesive as Star Wars Battlefront 2, which you can get on. It sounds like everything. Like Frank said, you could buy it now. Play the hottest new game from 2017. Yeah. I mean, I played a little bit of it and it sounds just as good as I remember it being. Maybe I should play more and hop on the train before all the kids move on to. I don't know. I don't know what weird thing they'll want to revive in the future. Billy Hatcher. All the kids will be like, hop on Billy Hatcher.

We're all playing the GameCube PS2 game from 20 years ago. OK, we mentioned it briefly. Basketball. I was looking for a segue and I found it. I'm sticking with Frank because I want to stay on the brand train. All right. Why? I think you explained it to me off the pod, but why in God's name are you playing NBA 2K15? Guys, NBA 2K15. Let me pause, drink water. Yeah, do your thing.

Kevin Durant is on the cover also. He's parched, of course. Frank is parched from balling too hard. Yeah. I've been playing Battlefront too with friends and screaming for all the fun we're having. So it's like, oh my God. But. Guys, I'm all about that hoop life. NBA 2K15. So...

Hey, I am like, as of this recording, I'm about 400 achievement points away from cracking the world record. The first person to get 100,000 gamers score. It's never been a comp. I'm so close to 100,000 gamers score. So what's the easiest way to get achievements? old sports games, but that's not the reason I picked this up. My friend linked me. There's a compilation of NBA 2K15 voice acting, like the cut scenes in the story mode.

It has like the, you know, I don't want to be mean to these professional basketball players because they are very talented on the court. But in the voiceover booth, they are reading. So they have like NBA. I almost call them actors, NBA, whatever, basketball players. Oh, they're actors. They follow a script.

There's an in-game story mode. It's like a cinematic thing. You make your rookie, and you get drafted and all that stuff. And whatever team you're on, you're paired with a veteran, and they're giving you advice. And the way these cuts... scenes are done is it has like gta 5 like presentation like they the graphics look good the the animations are good but then the voice acting is so bad so it's like you'll have someone like hey that was a good game you gotta remember that today we were

And nobody else can be. Wow. Thanks, Anthony Davis. It's crazy. It is like people are mumbling lines and it sounds like everything's recorded in a bathroom. Are they are they recorded lines like into their iPhone, like on a plane? Like there's a different.

difference in quality of everything and it's like so you don't know what you're gonna get with these cutscenes so it's just like people mumbling lines off a piece of paper there's sometimes where you can hear like them like breathing in or like smacking their lips between voices it's like the worst voice acting everything about the game's presentation is good so like i'm playing it and then like pausing and like enjoying the cut scenes

of how bad they are, but I inadvertently got sucked into the game. It's the same way WWE does this. Wait, did you get sucked into the game like Space Jam? Yeah, I touched the ball and now I've got to defend the Monstars versus the Looney Tunes.

which wouldn't be bad, but all these games now, these sports games, the way they have their story mode, it's like an RPG. So you create your character in NBA, and then you have to try out for different basketball teams, and the coach ranks you, and it's generally like...

like what I like is I like immediate feedback I'm a you know I need dopamine I need the likes all that stuff when you're playing NBA and I'm sure it's the same as 10 years later maybe they change it I think NBA 2K25 is like this month's PlayStation Plus game so I could try the newest one but What I like about NBA 2K is you pick one character, and in that story mode, you're just playing that character. So like...

What I like is, like, on the top right of the game, you constantly have a grade, and you're always getting feedback. Whether, like, you're in your position at the right time, you have to guard that specific player, whether or not you made a good pass, good shot, things like that. And when you make your – again, I've just never –

played any of these two gay basketball games this might be the most basic thing for anyone else but to me this is brand new this is exciting um when you try to make your basket it's like hot shots golf the little radial dial goes up and you have to hit it at the right time so it turns into like a rhythm game and who talked about Zen Buddhism rhythm Phil Jackson of the Los Angeles Lakers Chicago Bulls so it's like oh my god there really is a rhythm to it and Phil Jackson would like

train his players with jazz and like the one, two, three, one, two, three. And I know that's a different tempo, but like, so it's, it's interesting just like playing, I don't know, just reflecting on basketball. I'm all about the ball life now, but it's, it's a, it's a really good game. And some people have been saying 2K.

15 is actually where they kind of peaked, and it took them a few years to get back to where they were back then. I just got the game because the voice acting sucks, and that's funny to me. But it's $3. I'm getting achievements. I'm really into it. What I like about it, too, is every time you finish a match or a basketball game,

I don't know the term. When you do a game, I don't know. Game. Whatever. After every game, depending on what your grade is, how good you get, you get points and you level up your attribute points. When I first started playing, I couldn't do anything. I couldn't get a rebound. I couldn't make a shot. I couldn't do a dunk.

Couldn't do a layup. My stamina sucked. Little by little, I've been spending my upgrade points, and now I'm crushing. I'm like, oh, my God. So I'm feeling the progression. I'm genuinely invested in this story. I don't know. I really like it. Maybe. I think I'm going to keep going.

I don't know how many years my character is going to go. I'm all about it, but maybe eventually I'll try NBA 2K25. Maybe one day I'll go to a basketball game. Who knows? I don't know. Who do you have for the championship? Who do you think is going to win? So right now, it's the Pacers versus the Nugget. OKC. OKC. Well, is Kevin Durant still in OKC or no?

Uh, no. Oh, dude. I mean, Kobe Bryant is in this game, too. That's why it's crazy. It's like, oh, my God. Bryant passed away 2019, 2020? Something like that. I don't know. That sounds right. Yeah. Durant on the Suns?

Yeah, he's in Phoenix. I don't watch fucking Phoenix basketball. How often do people get traded? I don't know anything about sports. Oh, really often. It's random. I remember there was a big controversy about... What's his name? Oh, my God. He's like my favorite basketball player. I can't remember his name. It's pissing me off. Luka Doncic from the...

Denver Nuggets. He got traded out. Or no, Dallas Mavericks. He got traded out and it didn't go well for him. And he went to LA and people were like, why the fuck did you trade him? He was the best player. Have you gone to Raptors games or anything like that? I have, yeah. I've been to a couple of Raptors games. It's the Toronto Raptors.

They're not great, but it's fun to watch. When I was a kid playing like NBA Jam and NBA Hangtime, I liked the Toronto Raptors because dinosaurs were so cool in the 90s. And back then they had the cooler logo where it was like purple with a real dinosaur on it. Now it's just a basketball. like claw marks on it. Like where's the dinosaur? He left the dinosaur. I said, yeah, that's, I'm always saying this. No, that's yeah. It's great that you're playing this. Cause I feel like you, you've.

given more of a chance to the 2K sports games than anyone else, which I really appreciate. Everyone is so negative about all this stuff. It's like, ah, it's sports games. Yeah, you can even hold the controller. It's like, dude, shut up. These are sick games. I don't know. It's the same developer team as WWE 2K, Visual Concepts. And I don't know. $3? That's such a good deal. That's a steal. Shit, games are $80 now? Oh, my God. You could buy, like, I don't know. You could buy, like, $20.

You can buy 25 copies of Mario Kart World for that. Dude, it's so sick. Or the other way around. I don't know. I'm giving sports games a shot. What's your favorite sports game? What else should I try? NBA Street. That series is great. The Madden.

the NFL street, all the, I'm not big on like technical legit sports. Cause like I can see the value in it, but I'm also like, I would much rather just watch professionals play this than me. Like for me, sports games that are very serious and like they do perfect rendering of here's, you know. Steph Curry, you can see every bone in his wrist bending as he goes for a three-pointer. To me, that's not exciting. It's like the video game version.

What? What? The sports video game version specifically of Super Smash Bros where people go, oh, dude, Mario could beat the shit out of Sonic the Hedgehog. The sports games are like, oh, dude, Larry Bird would have totally got his ass beat by Michael Jordan. It's just like.

what are you talking about? And I'll say, whatever. I just would rather watch basketball. Although basketball is getting a little hard to watch because they keep doing the sports betting ads every five seconds. It's a little exhausting. I don't really like watching sports live because of that. But yeah, that's it. I would recommend.

silly sports games over serious ones every time yeah I'm the same way but that's obvious because I don't really follow sports um anymore i haven't followed sports since being like a red sox fan when i was 16 years old uh but like yeah like mario strikers like all the fucking weird like non-official sports games are the ones i like and uh uh megaman soccer uh that's probably my favorite sports game of all time yeah that's yeah mario stark strikers charged right is that

That sounds right. I don't know. It's been a while for me. Mega Man Soccer is the only one I really care about. I think everyone should go play Mega Man Soccer.

I think we should do a quick look on Mega Man soccer. It's not new enough. It's the hot new game. Wait, wait. They'll do the Mega Man Volume 3 collection. It'll be in there, and then we can cover it. Oh, yeah, yeah. Or it'll be in the new Yakuza game. Wait, no, that's not the same company. It's fine. They'll find a way. Capcom and Sega team up to bring...

Mega Man soccer to the masses. Let's make it happen. I'm really curious because the way we're talking about WWE 2K25. Yes. Sounded like it had this reverence for the past. Like it really. was being very conscious about the history of wrestling. I would really like a basketball game like that. That's not an RPG. That's more like a documentary almost. I feel like that would be...

way more interesting. I'm curious if they do that with like the showcase. I'm curious how they do their like story mode or showcase mode stuff now because like Spike Lee did one like the year after. What? Yeah, Spike Lee directed a story mode in NBA 2K. That's crazy. I don't know if it's like he just wrote it so the Knicks wins all the time. Spike Lee had an Instagram post that was incredible. When the new pope got elected or however it was, it was like, oh, my God.

is a divine sign. The Pope here went to the same university as three of our players for the Knicks. It's divine intervention. This year, the Knicks are going to win, and that's the truth. Although, as it is now, they did not. Yeah, the Spike Lee in 2K16 did NBA 2K16, a Spike Lee joint, and the story mode is that. There's a Reddit thread about it, and people are just shitting up the Spike Lee story, which honestly, this doesn't...

this doesn't temper my like excitement at all. I would love to see this, but the funniest thing is someone said the story felt completely disconnected from the player, especially if you play as a white player, which I've never, I've never been more interested in the spike. Like I'm just imagining there.

writing like you know a canon like it's a canonically black character they're just like oh yeah we'll just like throw a white guy in there though and it'll be fine yeah i wonder if this is spike lee getting that bag like is this spike lee old boy or is this spike lee you know

The five bloods. Do the right thing. I hope it's do the right thing. That'd be funny. Spike Lee makes his own white men can't jump. He finally did it. And this time it's a video game. Your white player comes out. He's like, we got to end all the racism I've been experiencing. Black Klansman, but it's an NBA. White Klansman. They did it. White Klansman.

Oh, God. Oh, you got to take the hat off. Jonathan, you got to take the hat off. You can't wear that. It's pointy. You can't wear it inside. It's bad manners. Can't do that. Also, go OKC. I'm backing them every time for the championship. I know. I know that the Indiana Pacers are trying their best. And if Tyrese Halliburton's ankle breaks at some point, I'll be happy. If Pascal Siakam falls off a cliff and doesn't die, that'd be awesome. I just really want them to win because the MVP in the NBA.

Shea Gilgis Alexander is from the city I live in. He went to high school not too far from me. We're almost the same age. I'm not 30. Don't look it up. It's just exciting to have the best NBA player at the moment be. from here. We need to make a statue for him so I can take a picture next to it and pretend that we're friends. That's all I want.

Can I share one more update from the Spike Lee story? I'm sorry. Please. I'm so intrigued by this. I love Spike Lee. We need to do a long play of this entire story because it's like four hours. I want to. A three hour long react to all the cut scenes would be so much fun.

This guy is a post from over 10 years ago on Reddit. I like the idea, but the execution was flawed to say the least. And then he lists a bunch of bullet points. But one of them is I'm white. Please make my family white or at least say I'm adopted. No, my twin and mom and dad are not all black. Oh, my God. That's awesome. Just like unexplained white child of this black family. And I mean, he could be adopted, but they do say he has a twin brother. That's like Steve Martin's the jerk, right?

That's the premise of the movie. I have not seen The Jerk, but I honestly now I'm intrigued. I mean, there's some gags that I really like. It's a comedy from the 70s. Oh, I'm sure it's all above board. Nothing. culturally inappropriate is said at any point yeah oh the white adopted son of black sharecroppers in Mississippi grows to adulthood naively unaware of these circumstances oh yeah oh yeah they say some words they say some words you can't say anymore in that movie

They wouldn't let you make the jerk anymore because of woke. They would not let you do that. That's for damn sure. Damn, this Reddit thread is all just people being like, Spike Lee is an anti-white racist. Bro, did you guys not watch any of his movies? I have to play this game so much. There is absolutely a truth to that.

Someone's first exposure to Spike Lee is NBA 2K16. That's actually fucking amazing. If they're like sports gamers, then yeah, probably. So again, that's why the 2K series, that's why I got to play 2K16 at some point. I don't know, man. They always do something weird with every game. All of these. There was one NFL game. What was it? I think it was like...

NFL 2K, didn't they have like the first person quarterback mode on like game? Oh my God. It was like a PS2 era. I think they had first person quarterback mode. They always like add features and take it away. I don't, yeah, I haven't played a football. Football I feel like is not as fun to play.

Sims stuff. But basketball is really fun. I really like it. Oh my god, yeah, I'm watching this first person. Put this in VR. This is a great way to puke. Wow, you can get a concussion in real time. This is awesome. So stupid. I love sports. I love how silly sports are as well. I think in the same way that WWE and wrestling in general is funny to watch because it's like the storylines and watching them play out is great. That I think once you get into sports enough, that becomes.

The thing about it, that's interesting. It's not necessarily watching the games play out, although those are also fun. But the aftermath and the, you know, watching them go up and do the press conference and just talk shit the whole time. Watching Ernie Johnson call Shaq names on TNT is...

Rest in peace, by the way. I can't believe that show is over. It's so sad. Although I think it's coming back on a different network. Yeah, we should totally watch this. I would love to do a live react to this stupid Spike Lee thing.

Before we move on, I have to share one more Reddit comment and I'm closing this thread, actually, so I'm not more distracted. These are just like, this is the most like Redditor from 11 years ago comment. But again, someone complaining about the race dynamics of the Spike Lee story. It's like if I created a character in a...

golf video game and even though my character was black there was a backstory of some white family working so they could pay for my character to go play golf all day wouldn't happen and hasn't happened what are you just what are you fucking talking about i have no idea i'm just like These Redditors are losing their shit over the Spike Lee story and it's killing me. Isn't this person getting mad about someone who they're saying doesn't exist, but it's just...

Tiger Woods. It's fucking insane. I don't know. I just like Redditors are always fucking a source of endless amusement. Yeah. The most know nothing but talking all the time motherfuckers. Okay. Well, that's all the video games. No, it's all the important video games. I actually don't know anything about Tiger Hood's familial history, by the way. I don't know if he's...

secretly. Did you just say Tiger Woods? I meant to say Tiger Woods. Because that's racist. Yeah, my bad. I'm taking that one back. I'm reclaiming that. Sorry about that, folks. That was my heritage slipping out. I'm sorry. That would be a fucking cool alien.

though tiger hoods would be a fun video game though i bet yeah all right cool we can move on from that i just thought that was awesome no thanks for walking me on the plank and then pushing me right off brother i appreciate it i'm sorry i'm gonna listen back and i never said tiger hoods and we're gonna go through all this for nothing There's Cyber Tiger 64. There's so many Tiger Woods games. Oh, of course there is. Bring back golf games.

Okay, let's talk about anything else. Let's talk about Elden Ring Night Reign, the game that all the gamers are so excited to be talking about, especially one Jeremy Jane, who I hear is cracked and quite good at this game, or not. Tell us more. What is Elden Ring Night Reign and why is the night raining? Yeah, so it's a FromSoft game directed by Spike Lee.

I would love that though. Sorry, I'm fucking, I'm never going to get over the last 20 minutes. You're so stuck on it, yeah. I wish I was still reading that Reddit thread, but I had to close it to be professional. Yeah, Elden Ring Night Reign. This is a... This is a hybridization of the FromSoft Souls formula. I would essentially say this is like a professional official mod for Elden Ring is what it feels like. For people who have not seen the gameplay of this, it is...

Essentially, if you took Elden Ring and you made a mod for it that was like part Battle Royale, part roguelike, and part Souls game. So what happens is... You queue up with two of your friends. It's a three-person team where you get match made with people. You go from a hub world that's sort of like an alt version of the roundtable hold in Elden Ring, and you get dropped into a big sort of, it's called Limveld. It's like an alternate version of...

Limgrave and hybridize with some of the other zones in Elden Ring. And much like a Battle Royale or, you know, any sort of like hybrid genre of that, the circle slowly closes. The rains come for you that kill you. And so what happens is... There are all these sort of PO like points of interest scattered throughout the map. And each one of them has, you know, some of them have like bosses and items and all these things. And essentially what you're doing is it's like an hour long run. And at the.

end of it is a boss that you pre-select when you do the run um and you're running from poi to poi to poi trying to not get killed by the circle in order to get a bunch of upgrades and level up and do all these things to to get a good build like any good roguelike so that you can kill the last boss. Now, on paper...

I was not interested by this game at all because I'm like a I'm like the I'm a FromSoft like paleo conservative. I'm like, we need to go back. We need to adhere to tradition. This is a libertarian FromSoft fan. This is a. uh from soft game we've strayed from god's light where's king's field bring it back etc we need to go back farther than souls um but uh but i've been playing this game and it's a lot of fun it's really fun wow

It's kind of like a friend of mine who's never played a Souls game was like, should I get this? And I felt very conflicted about it because I think that it would be a really weird introduction to Souls games. I mean, the combat is so fun. Like, it's just, you know, it's just Souls combat. Like, it's fucking, you could create any game with it.

this and i'd be like wow the combat is amazing in this because it is in a vacuum it's amazing like just fighting like a fucking training dummy with it is amazing uh but it's kind of like i feel like this is like brain rot elden ring a little bit All right. Because it's like you do a run and then you're like, I got to change. I got to queue up again. I'm in the fucking slot machine machine zone for this. But it's it's just like.

It's kind of just fun. Like, it's just kind of like it's like your favorite gourmet restaurant that you go to for like a nice steak is like, what if we made funnel cake? And you're like, I kind of want to see what the master chef does with like junk food, you know? Yeah. How do they elevate this?

Yeah, exactly. So how do you get onto the map? You're saying you're you're dropped in, but like you drop in on like spectral eagles that you jump and they grab you by the arm and you fly in and they drop you. Can you thank the eagle on the way down?

You cannot thank the eagle. Then what's the fucking point? I was very upset, but they are like weird ghost eagles. So maybe they don't have like, they may just be like animate glint stone energy or some shit. I don't really know. Um, it'd be like, it'd be like thanking like, uh,

the wind well no that'd be cool and spiritual yeah what did you you just said like the deepest thing possible and would that be stupid yeah i mean if you had like a spiritual relationship to nature that'd be fucking stupid uh anyway that would be cool to thank the eagle but you cannot

But anyway, it's like, yeah, you're just like, you know, it's a fucking like a Souls roguelike. It's cool. Is it more roguelike or is it more Fortnite like? It is. So there are no other people on the map. So despite the only sort of like. BR adjacent thing is the circle closing in.

and each each run has like three phases essentially there's day one so what happens is the the ring closes and then it closes again and then it closes to a final circle you fight a boss and that's day one and then when you beat the first boss the circle expands all the way out again, and that's day two. And you can run around the map again and try to get more upgrades and flasks and weapons and whatever.

And then when that circle closes all the way, you fight a second boss. When you defeat the second boss, it transports you to just like a upgrade zone before you fight the third boss. So you get two full circle closing down, and then a boss cycles on the map, and then...

the third day is just fighting the end boss, which is preselected at the hub before. Okay. And then the game has, it has one boss that you start on. And when you, when you complete your first run, when you beat that last boss, which is actually, like I say, this is a fucking FromSoft veteran.

And the bosses are really hard. This is a hard game, which is kind of I was worried that, you know, there's a temptation to think like, oh, did they like make casual souls? Is this like the you know what I mean? Like, is this like the the the.

roman holiday just like let let the hoi polloi enjoy souls for once just make it easy it's fucking it's a hard game these bosses are actually really hard especially when you are dependent on random matchmaking, which I think is sort of one of the interesting dimensions of this game, is that balancing a game where there's no voice...

There's no in-game voice chat. There's no in-game text chat. Do you use a soapstone to write messages on the ground? You can't even do that. All you can do, you can buy the prattling paint, like, hello thing from Dark Souls. That's great. Okay.

which is, you know, funny, but kind of useless. And you can ping on the map, but that's it. So there are situations where like you're totally, I mean, if you play this game with a three stack with friends, I think it's much better because you can hop on and be like, all right, I'm going in, go at me.

me in the tunnel i'm going down there you can coordinate really tightly coordinate really tightly but uh I played this with Chelsea and it was just me her and a rando and sometimes the rando would be great and they would follow us or they would take the lead and I would just like follow them to make sure we stay stuck together but sometimes you would just get some fucking doofus who just run it off on their own and it's like

There are situations where you get to know the layout of the POIs. For example, the harder one on the map is there's a castle with a trench next to it. The way you get to the boss is there's a tunnel under the castle in the trench.

and so if you didn't know that was there i feel like someone walking up and seeing that you were there on the map wouldn't be able to find you and so suddenly you know you're fighting the hardest boss on the map like alone or man down or whatever um and you it's just like i just want to scream

to the microphone like fucking just walk in the trench and look for the red glowing door um so it i think i i saw this reflected in some of the reviews for this game as well um this game reviewed kind of just okay it got like like sevens and eights it seemed like Which I feel like is honestly kind of fair, but this game definitely suffers from being very dependent on either having friends to play it with or getting lucky with matchmaking.

So, but you know, that's like, that's part of the, that is a true reflection of the experience of playing, you know, like BRs or like, you know, you play apex long enough and it's like, you have squads where people cohere really well and you have squads where. Pathfinder is just on the other side of the map and.

Yeah, or their mom is yelling in the background to come to dinner, and they're like, I gotta go, guys, in the middle of a match. But that's the best version of any multiplayer game. As soon as you have a child getting berated by their parents for not finishing their homework, that's when you know you're true.

playing it's true i have had that exact thing happen before that someone was arguing with their mom about not doing their homework on mike while i was playing apex and i was like this is like bro you gotta mute your mic this is like humiliating for all this is debasing for all of us wait until he finds out

a youtuber and i recorded it it's going on no clip crew um but anyway yeah so do you guys have any like questions about this i really like this game yeah i'm curious about the build variety stuff like how many options do you have

when you get onto the map? Is it you're sort of scrounging for the worst weapon in the game or do you actually have decent options once you get down there? So when you... so there are like chests and stuff littered about and sometimes those will have good drops but the best drops are from when you kill a boss they spawn this like weird like black orb thing

And when you interact with that, it gives you a few choices of like, you know, it'll be like a perk and two weapons or two perks and a weapon that you can select from after killing each boss. Some of them are really good. And all of the weapons or most of the weapons rather have like little side perks.

It'll be like regain health when you kill an enemy or something. Right. If you don't equip that weapon, if you just have it in your inventory, you still like partake of the bonus perks. So you can see a weapon that's not like you could see a bow that says.

gain hp for each enemy defeated and you're not a bow user and you can just tuck it in your inventory and still get that perk that's smart which i think it's really really smart design because there are classes in this game so you you pre-select a class before you go in um so

Like, for example, the guy I like to play is the default big sword guy. And so if I find a bow, it's totally useless to me, especially if we don't have an archer or if our archer has a better bow or whatever. But having the perk be there, it's like everything is potentially for everyone. So I think that was a really, really smart little tweak.

And also the archers, like archers have, I mean, maybe there are people out there who crushes an archer in Souls games. I've never found them to be a viable build. The archer is really good in this game, which is kind of, you know, it's fun to see like a, you know, a ranged build. get get their flowers in a fromsoft game sweet but yeah it's really good i'm i'm enjoying it a lot i've played

Probably like 10 hours of it or something like that. I've cleared the first boss and I've been doing some of the other ones. Have you felt any... So you beat the first final boss you're saying or just the first? Yeah, yeah. The first like final boss, which that's how you you access the like the other options for other bosses open up basically once you beat that first boss. Are you feeling any pull to go back to it? Like, is it just sort of one of those things where, OK, I beat the final boss?

Now I know sort of the loop of the game. Maybe I'll play more or is there a reason to keep coming back? It definitely like.

So the end of day one, end of day two bosses are linked to which final boss you've chosen. So when you get to the day one or day two boss, there's a small... pool of like i think it's like two or three bosses that it can select from uh so there is like a unique flavor to each of the runs based on the boss you've selected where it's like you know you're gonna get like margit and then you know like a throwback boss from dark souls one that's like oh that's

a nice surprise they have like yeah yeah really there is some tie-in from other souls games which is like i know i just shit on dude it's like oh they do cameos in these games and they fucking ruin them all the time at least from soft games yeah But yeah, that's why I said it's like brain rot Elden Ring. It's like your chain queue in with the boys being like, oh, I recognize that. It's fucking they TikTokified Elden Ring. But yeah, I mean, I saw.

I saw if you don't want to hear one boss get spoiled, that's a throwback. Close yours for 10 seconds. They have gaping dragon from Dark Souls one. And I saw that and it was like, Oh, that's fucking cool. Like I love Dark Souls one. I love that boss. So, uh, yeah. I wonder why they did that. why they brought those bosses. Is there like a narrative conceit to it or is you just kind of like we have the assets might as well try and out.

I feel like if you're like a Vaati watcher, you could probably find some explanation for why. I play these games in the strange... I'm probably the biggest FromSoft fanboy of anyone I know. And I don't give a shit about the story in any of these games. I don't know why. I just don't care at all. So...

You're asking the wrong guy. All right, sure. Can you read the item descriptions to figure it out, please? I'm sure it'll tell you. Maybe. Yeah. Do the hard work. Gwyn is like royalty in the lands between. I don't know, man. Melenia just spawns them from her hair or something. Yeah, her ex-boyfriend is Gwyn, Lord of Cinders. Yeah, she hasn't talked in years. He keeps sitting on that throne, he won't get his ass up. Yeah.

But anyway, it's a it is a really fun game. Highly recommend it. But if you have never played a Souls game before, I think you should go play a traditional Souls game. This is kind of the last thing I'll say about it is that like the souls experience for me is you get to a boss and you're like, it's about this, this.

incredibly tight loop of self mastery where you die to the boss. You're like, I can do this, but it's going to be hard. And then you spawn a short walk or right outside of the fog door. You do it again. You get your ass beat worse. And then it's like about this self mastery of going in there.

getting your ass beat 50 times and then finally you get it down to half health and like what seemed impossible now seems feasible if like still difficult um and i think that having night rain have an hour long run for you to get back to that boss or like 50 minutes of an hour long run to get back to that final boss it dilutes

that experience a little bit because you're not getting that like... like super meat boy or like tony hawk instant kind of likes like oh i fucked up let me like you know how on tony hawk sometimes you hit retry goal by accident because you're so like in the loop of just like i gotta do this again

um like you just fuck up one kickflip and do it instantly i i like that about souls games that it's sometimes i'm just like all right just kill me i like fucked the first dodge roll just kill me i want to start this over um i like that really tight loop of self-mastery and this loses that a little bit but what it

is its own sort of like different flavor that i think is uh i think it's a little inferior to the souls experience but i think it is an experience worth having does this have you excited at all for the duskbloods the switch to exclusive or I don't even know. I...

There's no way I'm going to buy a Switch 2 for Duskbloods. You sing that now, but when it gets 99 on Metacritic, you'll be singing a different tune, I bet. Yeah, maybe I need to go be a porch pirate on release day, whatever. June 6th, man, they're busy. You know where they live.

Yeah, tell Danny I can't work that day. I got plans. I've been driving around in my blacked out van with the windows tinted. But yeah, I don't know. This game retains that like... single player us against these monsters feeling even if it does it in a different format having other players in the world and having it be a pvp thing i've never really enjoyed the pvp of souls games i know people get really really into it and i like i respect that community and i think

it's really cool um it's just never been for me it's not what I enjoy about these games so uh I will be I'll be shocked if it appeals to me but i am curious to see what they do with it i just hope that the thing that they do after deskbloods is a more traditional like pve you know like a souls game right yeah i agree i think uh It's either that or Armored Core 7, right? Maybe they'll bring back Kingsfield.

as a multiplayer exclusive battle royale style combat game dude they should bring back kingsfield but they should do it like an elder scrolls game but you still move like fucking like incredibly slowly so it just takes you forever to get anywhere your sword swings are still like a week Just the animations are so slow. I would love that. Kingsfield is great. They should do more of those. Frank, do you have any interest in Night Rain or are you signing off?

No, I was hanging out with a friend over the weekend and he was getting it on PC and he's going to rebuy it on PS5 because I like playing all my games on PS5. There's no crossplay, but I know a lot of people have it on PS5, so I want to get it. It's just that thing where it's like...

I don't think it's going to dip in price anytime soon. So I'll probably get it whenever like my two friends are ready to carry me. But they were talking about like, because of like the roguelike nature, it's not a thing where they can just like max level and get me. I have to. pull my share too but they can care i don't know i'm interested it sounds fun it sounds chaotic it's been a while since i played

Like, I didn't touch the Elden Ring expansion, so I haven't touched, like, a Souls game in a while. And I really do like the games. So, yeah. But, yeah, I just didn't know exactly what this was when this was announced or even it was just... But now it sounds really fun. We were even talking before. I like the chaos factor of just grouping up with randoms. Are they going to be amazing? I've always had success in Monster Hunter.

especially when you get teamed up with like Japanese players, then they're like max rank and going crazy. And it's like, Oh, this is, yeah, this is good. This is awesome. And so, yeah, I want to play this just, you know, the avalanche of games, but yeah, it's too many. I'll try to catch it at some point.

Monster Hunter is actually an interesting comparison because those games have always intrigued me, but it never seemed like my cup of tea. I've just sort of appreciated them from afar. This does feel a little bit like they made... like a monster hunter game for souls freaks like me because you are like picking a hunt like a monster to hunt down and then going in with people and doing this run um so yeah i think if i think if you like monster hunter and souls games this might be a good fit

Nice. There you go. Grab it now on all platforms. Elden Ring Night Reign. It's $53.49 Canadian. How much is American? $39.99. $39.99 in a real country with good currency. I can't make that joke. Things are going hot. Less true every day. Less true every day, baby. Who cares about the Constitution? Sorry, Frank.

You have some comment to make about Donald Trump? No, I was like, if I go to Japan, I could buy a Japanese copy of Elden Ring and it's probably like 30 bucks Americans. There you go. That's the loophole. Yeah. Is the yen still in the dumpster? Let me double check. Let's do currency quarters. I'm about to buy a ton of wrestling tickets, so I hope it's in our favor. Let's see. Let's see.

You know what? Right now, it's like $1.143 yen. I feel like when I've gone the past, $1.156 yen. Oh, all right. Japan's on the upswing. Yeah, Japan is... It's nuts. It's so funny seeing a lot of the wrestlers complain that they didn't get their Switch 2 pre-orders locked in. Yeah, that's funny.

They deserve it. Come on. I'll buy extra Switch and give it to whoever needs it. If you're a Japanese wrestler. Yeah, I don't know. The one crazy thing, too, is if you're in Japan, all the Switches are Japan region locked because they don't want...

Americans buying cheap Switch 2s and then coming back and playing them. But that means I can still buy Japanese Switch games and play them here. So if they make weird exclusives, oh, I'm ready for it. I wonder how much of that move is geopolitical and how much of that was like Nintendo was like Like we did this before and it didn't seem worth it. You know, are they like the tariffs, man?

Trump, what a bitch. I don't want his son Barron to have a Switch 2 for cheap in Japan. I guess I'll just have to move to Japan. I mean, the Switch 2 is out. I guess I'll just have to move there. Oh, man. I don't have a choice. I hear they're paying Americans to move there. I saw a post on Instagram, so it must be true. There you go. Eldering Night Reign. Or Switch 2. Whatever works for you. Whatever you like.

I'm going to briefly talk about an indie game. You mentioned Elden Ring Night Reign had the potential to feel like a machine zone game. which I think we've talked about here before, games like Bolotro and Nubby's Number Factory, that are all about making numbers go, making values happen. It's like, what if a slot machine was a video game, but like, you know, you don't put in a quarter and lose your entire...

house to the casino. Just lose your entire day. Yeah, your entire day, your whole bank account. You get to hold on to some of that when you play these games instead of going to the casino. Sol Sesto.

I think is how I want to say it. I'm going to keep saying it like that, and if it's wrong, I apologize. This is a... It's such a weird game, but I think it is such a good... distillation of the roguelike concept so basically this is a dungeon crawler that's presented to you in a grid a four by four grid where you as the player are

trying to kill enough enemies or perform enough actions on the floor to advance to the next floor and keep going deeper and deeper until you get to the end. And the way that you attack is you click on a row, any of the four rows. And your character will randomly warp to wherever that is based on a percentage chance of it happening. Now, that sounds to me.

Like on the surface, the idea of a game where you have no control over anything and you're just hoping things go your way sounds brutal. And yet it works so well. So this game, Sol Sesto. I think it's just one developer. It might be two. Regardless, very small team. It's like $10 Canadian on Steam. So it might be, it's on sale right now, 30% off. And it will be by the time this episode goes out, which is great. Actually, it's...

Three people, it looks like from Steam. The art style for it is like, I don't really have a touch point for it other than it kind of looks like... The opening to Monty Python's The Holy Grail, like almost like 25% of the way there. That's the closest comparison I could make. It's like scratchy and it's got like limited animation. But basically, yeah, it's a roguelike where, again, you're descending through this dungeon.

items that give you different resources um the way that you get like passive abilities are there's teeth in statues that you find all the way down and they go into your mouth on the HUD of the screen and give you different abilities and stuff. So there's like synergies you can have that work together on this grid.

And some of them are enemies that deal strength damage and some of them are enemies that deal magic damage. And then some of the blocks will be like a chest or a trap or a strawberry, which is your health. for some reason and you're just clicking through it and you have a series of characters that have different abilities and you're the goal of the game and the reason I think it's a good distillation of a roguelike is like roguelikes

like Ball Latrobe or like Enter the Gungeon or Binding of Isaac or whatever, are basically you looking for stuff to stack the deck in your favor. You're looking for items to cheat the random number generator so that it goes in your favor and you have a better chance of winning. Some of them require, you know, more... dexterous abilities you need to be able to dodge out of the way or aim. This one removes all of that. Same with Bollatro.

Like literally Bolotro's joy is stacking the deck, right? Really, the real joy is watching the numbers go up, but the mechanical fun of it is stacking the deck in your favor. And here... In Solcesto, the way that you click on things is like when you hover over the row, it shows you the percentage chance of each thing happening. So those teeth that I mentioned that you get from the statues, some of them will be like plus 15% attraction to chest.

which is a very funny line of text. And then the negative part of that will be like minus 20% chance of hitting a strength enemy. And you can build strategies around maximizing the chance of hitting things that will help you.

And avoiding things that you don't have a good amount of damage to hurt. Like the more strength you have, the better you are fighting strength enemies. Same with magic to magic enemies. And it's just, yeah, it's like a. It's like if you boiled down those games to purely numbers and then gave them this really cool art style and re-represented that, I think they've done a really good job of paring that down and making something that's a surprisingly...

fun sort of like, I want to keep coming back to this ass roguelike. It's not particularly deep. Like I don't find myself. feeling like I want to play for hours on end, but I do want to do a run or two, which are maybe like five to 10 minutes long. It's a good little steam deck game or like something you want to fire up when you're on your lunch break or whatever. I honestly, I kind of can't recommend it enough because it's yeah, it's not overbearing and it doesn't make you.

want to play it forever. But when you play it, you're like, yeah, I'm having a good time. And then you're done. You're like, OK, that was enough of that. Also, there are passive upgrades that you can get. You select like a series of characters on the main screen, one of them being the peasant that you start out as who doesn't have good stats and you get a soldier and other people who have different special abilities.

You get the special abilities by killing a certain number of enemies. And then you can like the first one, I think the soldier, instead of clicking on a row, you can click on a column and move along that with a percentage chance. So like there's a little bit of strategy there and what you leave remaining in a column before you.

get the ability and all that but it's all again it's super simple and the way that you get passive upgrades is every couple floors there's like random uh rooms that you can find like an upgrade room that gives you more strength or magic or a different room that gives you more um

like there's a pool that has items in it that'll give you different passive upgrades. But then the way that you upgrade stuff externally is there's a well with a pot that you can put gold into because you get gold from the chests that are on the screen. You can upgrade stuff that way. It's like, it's very straightforward. If you've played one of these games, you will not feel out of place playing Solzesto, but like...

it's one of those where you got to look at it. You got to see, you got to play it a little bit. I don't know if there's a demo. I don't think there is. It's an early access. So they're, they're definitely still adding stuff to it, but I played the demo for this at the last next fest, which is starting soon. Next fest for.

June of this year starts on the 9th. So get excited for that. Lots of really good demos that I've seen so far. But yeah, this was one of them from the last one and I'm glad that it's out now. I'm excited to play more of it and see how they change things up. I think this is a really good idea.

that's being executed really well. And I love how it looks. I really do like the art style. So I just wanted to shout that game out. I think it's awesome. And I think this team has done really well. It's got 774 reviews. So far, overwhelmingly positive. So good for them. And I hope they continue to see success. And we see more cool stuff coming to whatever this ends up looking like at 1.0. Probably the same, but with more stuff. Yeah, this game is gorgeous. It kind of reminds me of like...

It's got like a little bit of like Mobius in there, like a little bit of Monty Python and the big chunky UI, a little bit of like Pendleton Ward's kind of Adventure Time style a little bit. It doesn't remind me of any of those things totally, but I feel like it has little glimpses of each of them. Sorry. I was just going to say I like the presentation of it because it's like...

I kind of couldn't tell what kind of game this was until you explained it, which is I think that's a cool feeling is sometimes you look at a game and it's like you have one of the genre recognition. Yeah, I could pick a game that will.

build a picture in your head and just say it. And you'll be like, oh, it's this. But yeah, I was honestly a little weary talking about this because I'm like, I don't know how the fuck you explain this. It's kind of one of those games that I knew what it was before I played it. And then I was playing it and I was like, what the hell is going on? Like I click on a row and the character warped wherever. And I was like, no, I clicked on this one. Go there. And then I realized, oh, it's.

percentage chance and it just kind of goes wherever it feels like going you're trying to minimize the chances of losing but yeah the visuals um I think the Monty Python thing I'm drawn to as a comparison, not just because the looks are like sort of there, like the muted colors and some of the effects, but there's moments where like big enemies will show up. Like there's a boss that you do at the end of the first set of dungeons. And it like takes over the screen and like.

It starts hovering over the UI and sort of covers your health. So you don't know how many resources you have left and all that sort of stuff. So it's very interactive and it feels almost like when the foot comes down at the end of that opening, it's like it's like all the bosses, some of the.

shop characters that show up sort of have that same feeling. So it's a lot more impressive than I thought it would be in terms of its visuals and the places that it goes with them. So yeah, again, I just think it's a cool little game and it should be on more people's radars, but it looks like it's already doing really well.

Good for them. I think that's all the games that we had this week. Unless, Jeremy, this is up to you. I'm letting you take the lead on this one. Do you want to do it? Or we can move on. We got some good emails.

uh yeah we could quickly touch upon i also played pipistrello and the cursed yo-yo which is a a very cool game this is sort of like a puzzle puzzle-y action rpg like top-down metroidvania a little bit uh kind of a hybridization of a bunch of different genres but this is a um yeah it's like a top-down adventure game uh where you play as the uh sort of like spoiled

nephew i think of of like a an energy magnate essentially like um someone who runs like a factory that powers the whole city in this weird sort of like fantasy urban environment um And a bunch of people break in and sort of like try to steal the energy back and turn your aunt into a bat. that also merges with your yo-yo it's a weird intro um but it's kind of like cursed yeah it definitely is cursed in many ways uh but this is yeah it's like a it's like a

It reminds me a little bit of like Link to the Past or sort of like the Game Boy Advance slash Super Nintendo era of action RPGs. And... Yeah, it's cute. I haven't played a ton of it. I played the first couple hours, and I thought it was worth highlighting just because it's gorgeous, it's interesting, it plays really well, and it has a very unique set of skills like Liam Neeson.

Can you kill people in this? Yeah, you can. Don't Google Liam Neeson black people. Don't do it. Let's not go backwards to the fucking... The race discussion. Spike Lee's Liam Neeson. uh you like learn yo-yo tricks and so you know they're like when you hear top-down adventure 2d action rpg you're like oh surely you're swinging a sword and killing guys who walk towards you um and i think the yo-yo being introduced adds like a really interesting ripple onto this where you can throw your yo

and then you only have the string which can't damage people but it can stun them and you have to go pick up the yo-yo. You can like do like a walk the dog charge attack where your yo-yo is just like hanging out there and stuff. And all of these attacks double as puzzle solving mechanics.

So if there are like 45 degree angle corners, you can throw the yo-yo and it kind of like bounces around and does all these little moves and stuff. So the thing that impressed me the most about this game was the aesthetic. The pixel art is absolutely gorgeous and the animation is like... crazy everything is like bouncing and breathing and moving um

And the way that all of the mechanics double as both combat mechanics and puzzle solving mechanics was very impressive to me. There will be situations where like your charge attack is introduced as an attack, but then you're thrust into a puzzle.

room shortly thereafter and it never says this will be to attack and to solve puzzles but it lets you fill that gap and be like oh I bet I could use this attack to solve puzzles or something you learn to solve a puzzle you're later like oh I bet I could use that as an attack in this weird situation

So, yeah, it's just it's doing a lot of sort of like multifaceted introduction of mechanics and letting you apply them to different situations. And I think it's it's worth shouting out. It's if you like good sprite art, if you like action RPGs, if you like. quirky little indie games. Check it out. Yeah. I played this at PAX East last year and had a chance to talk to the developers. Very nice people out of Brazil. I can't remember which city. Might be Sao Paulo.

And they were just, yeah, very nice people. Their previous game, Dodgeball Academia, I'm one of like four people, I think, who played that. Actually, I think that did pretty well. It did okay. But it was a really good game. I really enjoyed it. It's like a dodgeball. strategy RPG kind of thing. It's really fun. But this was a totally...

huge departure. They're obviously big fans of Game Boy Advance, both games and the culture around it. I think when you leave the controller alone, it like spawns a Game Boy on the screen, like a 3D render of a... legally distinct Game Boy and the game screen is inside of the Game Boy thing. It's like cute. But yeah, overall, when I played the demo at PAX, I was like, this is really good. I like these yo-yo mechanics a lot. And I think like what you said, Jeremy, about the way that they...

intertwine it with puzzle solutions. Like it's useful for combat and there's things you can do, but then outside of combat, you're like, Oh, I could do. This interacts with the world in a lot of cool ways. The demo ended before the overworld section. I bought the game. I'm going to play it eventually because I was looking forward to it. But there's an overworld section that's like a city, right? What's the deal with that? Are you maneuvering through it to get...

to quests or is it sort of a hub area what's the deal there yeah so the overworld has like uh enemies and threats there's cars driving around that can hit you and so it's it's not like a you know it's not like a passive sort of like hub world

it is like its own environment um but basically you do the intro and then the game is like we have to hunt down these like four dudes who were in the intro as like the villains uh and it gives you i believe two of them as options and it says i don't care what order you do them in just like get it done

Um, so I thought that was cool that the, you know, it's, it's hard, especially in a game that is sort of like a Metroidvania adjacent where it's like, you need this mechanic to solve this puzzle to get past this puzzle. Um, I. it's a bold design decision to give you that level of openness because I was like wow it's impressive that they designed these two dungeons in a way that they can be done in either sequence because in each of them you get like puzzle solving mechanics so yeah it's a

it's basically just sort of like a mini open world that lets you access these other dungeons and stuff but the dungeons themselves are integrated into the city so like one of them is um There's like a excavation site where they're building a skyscraper. And so you go over to the excavation site and have to get an ID to kind of like infiltrate as like a member of the construction crew to get into it. So yeah, it's cool. I like the way that they took.

sort of like fantasy i like anything that takes fantasy or rb rpg tropes and transposes them into a different setting so having urban especially it's like earthbound they did it yeah

Totally. Yeah. Having like a, it's like a dungeon, but it's like an unfinished skyscraper where you're jumping between the beams that are hanging off. It's like, I don't know, something kind of like Buster Keaton. Yeah. Or it captures that like childhood, like in the same way that maybe this is a little depressing. I don't know.

But in the same way that, who's one of the most prolific game developers of all time? Shigeru Miyamoto, like traveling through the woods, and that's how he came up with Zelda. For our generation, it's like, yeah, I went to an abandoned building and got, you know, I needed to get a tetanus shot after, and then I came up with this new game. Yeah, very true.

Yeah. Yeah. I think imbuing the ordinary world with a sense of wonder like that is a is a cool aesthetic decision here. So having like a fantastical world about like, you know. the power company like it's it's silly but they do it in a way where it's like uh over the top and interesting but um yeah it's it's a really cool game i think it's uh it's beautiful it plays really well and it's fun and interesting

Nice. There you go. Pipistrello and the Cursed Yo-Yo developed by Pocket Trap. Pipistrel, by the way, is a kind of bat. which is what you're playing as. Oh, shit. Okay. Playing as a bet. You can buy it now on, I think, every major console and Steam.

major consoles, including, of course, the Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch. You can't buy it for the Ouya. Sorry, Ouya fans. I know there's three of you out there somewhere, I'm sure. Whole YouTube channel dedicated to playing all the games on the...

Still working. Wait, the pipistrella is so cute. I just Googled it. Yeah, right? It's adorable. It's so fucking cute. I want to feed it a guava. It looks like it would really like guava. It has tiny little eyes. It's so sweet. Yeah, kind of looks like me. This is your bat soda. Yeah. I can echolocate. I can do it.

Okay. I think those are all the games this week. Unless anyone has some secret pocket games they want to pull out. No? All right. Then we have some emails to answer. Frank, you've done the good work of collating some great ones here, it looks like. Yeah, thank you for sending us emails and chat messages and instant messages and all the using your soapstone to write threats on the ground. Hitting us up on AIM.

Be sure to send us emails, podcasts at noclip.video or in the Discord for our patrons in the podcast chat channel. We have two questions. One is from Kyle, wrote to us about weird gaming habits. This past Saturday, my family visited my wife's friend and I found out he's a real sicko.

His late night, relaxed and unwind video game is StarCraft, but he plays it on N64. What? I exclaimed, oh God, selecting multiple units must be a nightmare. He replied, it's all right, you just sold Z. Do you know anyone? with bizarre or horrifying video game tastes or habits.

such as obscure favorite games, weird controller grips, et cetera. I know this guy named Frank Howley who really likes playing bad sports. No, I'm kidding. No, I have a friend who, I said that begrudgingly because I couldn't remember if we're still friends, who really... liked playing Overwatch and most, I don't know if this is common, most first person shooters with a controller in one hand and a mouse in the other hand.

Is that common? Is that like a normal thing people do? I don't think so. Like the left hand was instead of like WASDE, it was the left hand's a controller. I think because you get the analog movement and then the right hand is the mouse. That's a power move. I want to try that. That's actually sick. I like that.

it's like piloting a plane it's like crazy yeah it's like a mech almost uh if you if you had like a switch switch weeboat whatever the fuck you call it that little tiny thing in your hand then i could see it then you're yeah i like that

that's cool that's how like if you were playing a pc game like on an airplane or something i feel like that'd be a good way to do it because you would well i guess you'd still need room for a mouse okay this is what you do you have a first class first class ten thousand dollar flight to japan uh tomorrow i'm flying out expensive of course yeah um left hand switch we boat it's not called a we mo but i don't know what it's called right hand

trackball mouse with the ball on top. Then you can just put the screen on the tray table in front of you. The way that you're cooking is you're inventing what they've already invented with the Nintendo Switch 2. The Joy-Con, whatever they're called now. have their little, their mice now.

I avoided everything about the Switch 2 because I don't have any money for it. So I was like, why would I even... If it's cool, I'm going to be pissed. Yeah, exactly. I didn't want to know if it was cool. I just wanted to... I was like, yeah, that probably sucks. I won't look into it to disprove that.

Frank, you got any? I know you have a buddy who owns one million copies of Sneak King. Oh, yeah. Leroy owns all the Sneak Kings. I don't know. I was trying to think. Like, my own thing is if a game has the option, I'll play it in Japanese. But, like, I have friends who are, like, platinum.

that weird japanese people do that too no i know i know but it's like i'll go out of my way to make yeah yeah i don't know like i have a lot of friends who are achievement hunters like my friend dr ryan will like I feel like this ruins the game, but like, we'll like look at it. And I kind of do it too, but for every game, look at a complete like achievement walkthrough and specifically play the game in that way. And I feel like that takes away the like.

discovery and joy I like having a few achievement goals in mind but to like like if you're playing persona like you have to do this thing on this day otherwise you're gonna mess up your platinum it's like that sucks like that's not fun that's miserable i don't know but some people like it so i you know um i don't know i i yeah

I had a friend in high school who did every quest in World of Warcraft. There was an achievement. It's called the Loremaster. I think it took him years, but he did every single quest. That sucks. That's tedious. That's brutal. That actually sucks. Speaking of trackball mouses, I used to play everything with a trackball mouse. I got a ton of shit for it at the GameSpot office because we would play Counter-Strike after work or sometimes during work.

I brought my trackball mouse to work to play with it because I could only play FPS with it. I have been on a normal. Can you turn that thing down, man? Jesus. I've been on a normal mouse for many years now. Although I think I feel like there were pros. who played FPS with a trackball mouse at some point and it like came back into fashion. And so all of you who laughed at me, fuck you. I was right.

Go to hell. Go to hell. I was ahead of the curve. And I'll see you there with my trackball mouse. They'll never take it away from me. Yeah. The only other one I can think of is my buddy growing up. He was really into Age of Empires 2. We would have... parties all the time it was a blast i was very bad at it but the way that he would play and this pissed me off every time is he would silo himself into his own room and play with the speakers at max volume he would be like

Separate, but like full volume. This is a game he's played for thousands of hours. And he's like, you know what I need? I need the Wololo to be incredibly loud. I need it to thump into my chest or I'm not playing it properly. It was so bizarre. Every time he did it.

I think it was a distraction tactic. I think he was trying to distract us with the loud music so we couldn't pay attention to him building a bunch of elephants to somp our asses. But you could hear the elephant noises like through the fucking wall. You're right. We were too drunk to figure. I mean, no, it was in high school. We were too Coca-Cola drunk to figure that out. Sugar high. Yeah. Yeah, that's a pretty weird one. Like full volume, like in his own room. Whatever.

I don't know. Sorry, Danny. Not O'Dwyer. The other Danny. There's more than one. Anyway, sorry. Next email, Frank? T Sandwich writes in and says, A noclip gang. I liked what Jeremy said about being a tourist in games, trying stuff outside his usual taste just to experience it. I also dipped my toes into tons of different games. I had a stretch where I got into Phantasy Star Online and Ultimate Online Outlands. Loved both, even though I'm pretty bad at... MMOs.

Lately, thanks to Nakey Jakey, I've been hooked on CS2, which always felt way too intimidating as a noob. I never thought I'd actually play it, but there's something fun about diving into games way outside my comfort zone and trying to figure them out, even if I suck. Any games you guys tried out of pure curiosity that you ended up getting... a lot out of hmm it's a good question I feel like most of the stuff I play out of curiosity but I don't tend to get a lot out of them yeah I

I don't know. I feel like I was pretty anti-MOBA for a while. And then I played like a thousand hours of Dota 2. So I feel like that became my wheelhouse. But now I'm like... You know, Dota is like cigarettes to me. It's like part of a past life that I'll never revisit now, you know? Right. I guess for me in the same vein, Street Fighter 6, I never really played fighting games. I couldn't understand what about that was fun.

Like you're going to learn the six frame animation. You need to press this button to counter for every character. I'm good. And then I did it. And yeah, I don't. I understand it now. I see Evo clips and I'm like, I get why that's hype. I'm here for it. So that's definitely one for me. Frank, you have any deep... Cuts. I remember being extremely dismissive and skeptical of World of Warcraft back in 2004 or 2005 because I think the only PC game I played was Counter-Strike.

my pc just wasn't good enough to run it but everyone in my high school was playing it like even like for whatever reason it was like the water polo team all like the swimmer all those guys also i don't know if weed was a factor but everyone's like yeah man after school we just play wow um but I was like, okay. So I got it for Christmas.

And then 10 years went by and I played a lot. I don't know, but it was that. It eventually became the giant, I mean, I feel like especially in Orange County where Blizzard is, but it was such a cultural phenomenon. But like, yeah, the early days of WoW, playing like this.

is some nerd crap i don't care about like lord of the rings and i just did not it was like before i even played oblivion like yeah it was like december 2004 but uh it got me so so hard and then uh god that's all i did like in 10th and 11th grade anyways yeah and then um

I feel like even during COVID, like trying Fortnite before it became the Funko Pop chaos. Like to us, it was like a dumb kids game. And then we played it being like, oh, this is a dumb kids game. You got to try it. Like it was like, this is so stupid. It's awesome. And then like.

And then I grew out of it. I just played so much of it that I was like, I can't play this anymore. Everyone keeps saying it's even better and better and gunplay is better and better. Once they switched Unreal engines, it looked way prettier and they added every anime character. But I just spent like...

Way too many hours during COVID. I can't touch it. But, yeah, I'm always – I mean, even, like, with NBA or, like, literally both games battle for – I'm always eager to try stuff because it's just, like, what is going to – get me in that flow state. I don't care. I'll do anything in life to get me in a flow state. You never know what your favorite game is going to be until you play it, right? So how many people are not playing 4X games without realizing that, oh, I would actually love to play...

Crusader Kings 3 and I don't know, like my good friend T-Pain and have a good time. Yeah, I think the appeal of... trying out the like tourism mentality for playing games is that it's like it's really just like a Trojan horse to be like oh I can try

a game even if I don't think I'm gonna like it and then if I bounce off it it's like cool I had like a little tourism experience and that's like the contextual like cognitive wrapper for trying it out that makes it positive but then you know ideally it's like

Maybe you like buy a ticket to Indonesia and it's like your new favorite place. You know what I mean? Like you just like went there because you're like, I want to experience the world. Maybe like Phantasy Star Online is like your favorite game of all time. So, yeah, I mean, I have found many games just with the tourist mentality.

and then been like oh this is actually sick or you know maybe it's just like a cool experience you had I played Ultima Online a little bit very recently like a few months ago for a project and I was like, I don't think I'm going to go on the fan servers and become a huge fan of it. But it was interesting to me.

as someone who got into MMOs very, very young to see sort of the era that like just preceded my era. Cause I played like a few, you know, like Star Wars Galaxies and Anarchy Online and some of the pre-wow stuff, Dark Age of Camelot. in EverQuest, but I never played Ultima Online. Are there any gaps in your MMO knowledge, either of you guys, that you want to... If you could find a thousand hours, if you could just scrounge that up from the couch somewhere in the...

metaphorical time couch with all the change stuck in there. What would you want to go back and dump a lot of time into? MMO specifically? Yeah. If there's any one that you've always thought this would be interesting, but I don't have the time. for me it's eve i always wanted to yeah eve would be cool i've never had time for it but i i would love to be part of like a weird corporation in space um

I never played City of Heroes. I mean, it's like dead now for a long time, but I saw it in magazines a lot when I was a kid and I thought it looked cool. I wish I put more time into Dark Age of Camelot. I was like 10 years old when I was playing it, so I kind of didn't really understand anything. It was really cool.

They had like the realm versus realm where there was like the three sort of like realms that were like Horde and Alliance, but there was three of them. And they would do like huge PVP battles against each other for control points in the world. And I always thought that was really cool. That's really cool.

Yeah, I think the Dark Age of Camelot guy, like one of the main dudes is trying to do another MMO, but I think it has languished in development hell for a while now. One day. We'll bring it back. Yeah, maybe. We'll see.

yeah i don't i can't eve i think eve is a really good answer i wish i played everquest more seriously i played it uh i had a friend whose dad was into pc games when i was a kid and i think i played everquest on his account for like 20 minutes when i was nine years old um and he was like standing behind me like an adult man like you know like oh what are you doing you can't do that like i was like too intimidated to like because everquest if you fuck up it's like so brutal and punishing

so I don't know if he was like letting me play on his character or something and I don't remember now but I just remember being like oh this is like serious business I really like the idea of dads playing MMOs but like back then Now I kind of get it because you would have probably grown up with it. But back then it was like you were on the cutting edge if you were a dad playing an MMO. No, totally. Yeah.

He was plugged in. If you're playing EverQuest in 99, you were fucking, that's OG status. Exactly. What's he doing now? Still playing EverQuest. I don't know. Kevin, if you're out there, I won't say your last name, but send us an email. I actually, I've, I just moved back to these guys. I was thinking about, that's. My buddy who I played all my MMOs with as a kid, I have no way to reach him, which is shocking in the age of social media and stuff. I was like...

I'm going to have to send a letter to his parents and be like, hey, remember me? Can you forward this to your son? I don't know how to reach people. How do you do that? That's a good point. I don't know. What's like the what's like the etiquette for that? Because like.

I think you send them a handwritten letter to the previous address. That's what I think I'm going to do. I'm going to be like, hey, remember me? We had some nice times. Can you put me in touch with your son? I don't know. It's a weird thing to fucking do. That's not weird. People do that on Facebook.

And they'll like message you. Hey, I knew your son 14 years ago. Can you send me his number? That's someone messaged me being like, hey, I haven't talked to your brother in 14 years. Can I talk to him? Like he also has a Facebook. Yeah, that's weird.

i facebook to me when you hit someone up on facebook after like 12 years it's like i just got divorced to it i hang out yeah every time and they're like yeah man i've just been having a hard time and you're like ah here we go free therapy session let's go get some drinks yeah exactly uh

But yeah, no, I feel like Facebook is for hitting people up after a long time. They need, you know how they have like a pre-made like greeting card for like, oh, I'm sorry that your like great aunt passed away. And it's like hyper specific. They need one that's like.

Hey, I was childhood friends with your son and I don't know how to reach him. Can you like a, you know what I mean? Like a Maxine cartoon. That sounds like a Facebook, you know, they have those AI, or not AI generated, but like automatically generated t-shirts that are like 47 year old.

uncle who's really good at guitar and yes my son bought me this shirt they should you should make a shirt that says that on it and send that to his parents that's a great idea Jeremy they're gonna be like this guy is insane let's talk to Kevin let's get him let's pretend honey pretend we

moved if he comes by and knocks on the door don't answer keep bringing more shirts like hey guys hey i sent you yeah you get a second t-shirt that says hey i sent you a t-shirt like a month ago and you never got back to me i just wanted to follow up Sorry for the spam. Yeah. Just spending thousands of dollars on t-shirts. Oh, man. Well, there you go. Facebook brings us all together, like all good social media. That's it for emails.

And that's it for, I think, the pod. We're coming up at the end of it here. It's another... Another hour 40, give or take, episode. Sorry they're shorter. We're not playing all the hot new games. But like I said, we'll have some fun reporting coming up soon from the beach that Danny's on and other cool stuff. Frank, you're getting a Switch too, right?

You said, assuming no one robs it. No, I don't think it's going to be stolen. I just don't. The other thing, too, with Target shipping, it says expected delivery Tuesday. That's like four days later. The Switch will be so old by then. No one's going to care. You know what? Just send it to me. Just forget about it. What's the point? yeah like by the time we record the next podcast I still won't have it but it's I mean I don't you know

I just want to have it so I can get rid of the old Switch. Yeah. It's like, all right, let's just make sure I'm current. Yeah, yeah. Well, if you decide you don't want it, just let me know and I'll come steal it off your port and then you can get a refund. Be there early. So yeah, we'll have lots of new stuff to cover. Sorry, Frank, go ahead. I was going to say I'll set Home Alone traps. Do a Joe Pesci accent as I get hit by a big Ewok log that comes down and hits me in the face. A paint bucket.

It really sounds like it's like the, like the, the day after tomorrow, like the scientists being like, wait a minute, the guy, like everyone's going to be out at 10, not everyone, but it's like they're switched to is on route, but summer. I don't know. This feels like culture jamming by Nintendo. It's like, ah, don't go to get my games to stay home. Watch it. Stay home. Do some Switch chat with your camera. You got the camera, right? This is Joe Pesci at Nintendo. Oh, yeah.

This is also the first time I've done, I have not bought any accessories or like, I got the Mario Kart bundle, but it's like, I'm just going to get the thing and figure out crap later. I don't care. I don't know. Well, we'll have reporting on the Switch 2 and stuff that we saw from maybe Switch 2 and stuff that they saw at Summer Games Fest. Danny and Frank, they're going there and checking out cool games. Stuff's under embargo, but I think people have said, who's going to be there?

So you can probably guess what they're going to go see and guess what they're not going to go see. It's going to be a fun time, though, and I'm looking forward to seeing all the cool stuff that you guys check out, including the Sonic the Hedgehog popsicle, which I hope they bring back because that was really funny. The like melted face one. Yeah, they got to do that again. In the meantime, we have some stuff going up on crew in the.

soonish future when you're listening to this some of it might be up uh more quick looks uh i've got a highlight video coming out of like some cool indie games you should check out that have less than 100 reviews on steam as of writing um and also a suggestion in that video

to do that yourself and write some reviews for games that you like. So I hope you'll check that out on YouTube of the channel formerly known as NoClipCrew. It's just a weird symbol now that nobody prints just like Prince. Ooh, prints like Prince. I'm a poet and I didn't even know it. We have other stuff coming to the main Noclip channel at some point. Danny has been very busy with life and family and work and et cetera, et cetera. He's a one man.

army of hard work. So hopefully soon you'll be able to see some of the stuff we've been cooking in the background. But yeah, that's been the podcast. Thank you so much for listening. You can support us on patreon.com slash noclip. Send us some cash. Send us your pocket change that you've got and throw it at us.

especially the hard coins. We like those. They hurt us and the pelting feels nice. You could get access to the discord, support all of our cool work, pay for us to go to fun events and for Frank to make vlogs that I'm sure everyone will die to watch, including me, maybe, or maybe not.

i don't know no pressure uh yeah that's that's the pod for this week and uh we'll catch you on the next one but in the meantime guys what are you doing this week what's uh you guys have any fun plans other than game fest I went kayaking over the weekend and it was awesome. Yeah, it was my buddy's birthday. So I just took him kayaking. Where'd you go? We went out on...

There's like a river that intersects with a bunch of salt marshes out here near the coast. And so I took him out there and we... paddled around it started pouring rain we almost canceled and we were like fuck it and then uh as soon as we started we were as we were starting there was a guy coming in on like who had been like

doing i don't know if he was like commercially fishing but had like all camo and like six rods and like a camo boat and stuff like super legit and as we were leaving he was like you guys are going out now so i was like oh if that dude is skeptical we're fucked um and i started pouring

rain but uh but it ended up being a really good time so i might do some more kayaking this week it was uh hell yeah it's been it's been a it's been years since i last went and it was it was so fun that's awesome kayaking is so much fun same i love canoeing although it's you know a bigger task you gotta have two people core

that's hard enough kayaking yeah seems seems like the better move you go fishing on the kayak at all uh i have never fished off a kayak but uh i yeah i've been fishing since i was a kid i'd love to go fishing yeah that'd be fun we should do that

Yeah, come on down. I'll take you out on the salt marsh. I'll be there again. I love Boston. Yeah, next time you come, let's go kayaking for real. That'd be fun. Yeah. Just hope we don't end up somehow not making it happen again because life is so busy. Yeah, yeah. Can't coordinate anything. Frank, are you getting back on the bike? Yeah, the weather has been better, so I've been riding the bicycle. I've been doing walks late at night because it's like 65 degrees, so I can like...

Before, I'd have to bundle up, and I don't want to do that, and it's just not fun. But, yeah, so. I don't know. Again, I'm still planning potentially going to Tokyo in August. That's where my brain is at. It's just like, all right, I don't know. I don't feel detached, but I'm just like, I found the thing I like to do and I'm trying to do as much as I can before I die. So it's like, that sounds like a good life purpose.

That Zen book is really putting some good ideas in your brain. It really is. It's just, I don't know, man. Again, also revisiting my dad's stuff has been really healthy. Yeah, I don't know. I just feel lucky to be alive. That really is it. God, I don't know. That's why I'm saying don't get mad at announcements or like Spike Lee's story in video games. Just find the thing you like and enjoy it. Amen, dude. Yeah. Put that on the t-shirt.

Frank I don't know if this calls to you but if you when you're in Japan there are a lot of temples that are open to people just like coming in and visiting and sitting in like ceremonies and stuff it's really really cool Danny and I did it when we were in Tokyo and it was awesome so if you are If you have the opportunity, I highly recommend it. Thank you. I'm interested. Yeah, it's cool. You'll be back soon. You'll have the opportunity. You should totally do it.

Anyway, we'll see you next week with more gaming news and also hopefully fun things that we're doing on the side. See you then for episode 231. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thank you for being here. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.