The Precinct, Deliver at All Costs, Formless Star

Hello folks and welcome to episode 228 of the Noclip Podcast. It's a crew cast the whole... The whole sausage factory is here, in effect. Jesse Groscia, how do you like your sausages? How do you like them? Oh, sauerkraut. Bastard. Mmm, yeah. Some jalapenos, if they have it, on a nice sesame seed bun. Wow, amazing. The hamburger hot dog bun. You're like the why not both little girl. Exactly. Taco Bell fame? No. Have you had Taco Bell chicken nuggets yet, Frank?

No, but I'd be down to try them. Old El Paso, sorry. Old El Paso, beautiful, yes. That's the only tacos I had in Ireland for the first time. you know, 10, 20 years of my life for Old El Paso. Hard shell tacos, just like the Mexicans wanted. Jeremy, what's your favorite Mexican food? My favorite Mexican food is probably... Sophie's Choice.

probably an enchilada, maybe a chimichanga. Although I do, I am also a fan of the El Paso marketing technique where they just say the bright yellow box of old El Paso as if to say... This is what it looks like when you go to the grocery store. It's fucking, you can't miss it. It's like a traffic cone. Except yellow.

What's a chimichanga again? I always forget what that one is. Isn't it chimichanga? I haven't had this since I was a child. It's like an enchilada that is deep fried. A deep fried burrito common in Tex-Mex and other Southwestern U.S. cuisine. Oh, man, I got to get a Chichichanga. Got to get me one of those. I got Chichichanga. Chichichanga because it looks like a big blonde smoke. Because it's what you would eat after you smoked enough that Chichichanga smoked.

Probably. When I lost my class president election in fifth grade, I was so sad that my parents took me out for Mexican food and I got a big chimichanga. And then the girl who beat me and became the class president came to the same restaurant to celebrate. side the next table over. Oh, man. This is awful. Oh, my God. That is terrible. Was she like the preppy, popular girl? I mean, you were like the vote for Pedro. Yeah, kind of. Yeah, that's accurate enough.

Except you didn't win. You needed to tell them that if they voted for you all of their wildest dreams would come true. That's true. I think I said, I took a picture and my uncle in upstate New York was fixing up like an old Cadillac. So I took a picture in like an old 1967 gold Cadillac DeVille. and was like, vote for me! And I didn't really have a platform. I was in a nice car.

Yeah, let's vote for this guy. He's got a sick car. That is a nice car. That's what you need, I guess. Man, I'm sorry to hear that. We had an unelected student council that was done by the school for some reason. I think they had elections and it was just... started fights and stuff so they just pick some lads to do it. And I was one of the lads. And then all the older boys aged out and I managed to politic my way into being the unelected student council. Oh my God.

which I wielded my power. You house of cards drew way into that. You were the Kevin Spacey of your school. Before all the other stuff. Sorry. Exactly. I got my buffalo wings in the morning and plotted how to take them. The whole school system with my southern accent. You can do it. I believe you can do it. Exactly. Thankfully my career has gone a little bit better.

Kevin Spacey. We're here to talk about video games, folks. That's the job at hand. That's all of our careers here at Noclip for now. I'm not saying that because Noclip's shutting down. Noclip's doing great. I'm just saying that. Our second channel is currently called Noclip Crew in brackets for now, which is making a lot of people titillating. Yeah, it is a bit ominous, isn't it?

But yeah, we're stepping into the game. But here on the crew cast, it's the same as usual. We're here to tell you about a bunch of goddamn video guys. Probably a bunch of you. have played and many you haven't. I would say this week might be one of the most you've probably not played these games. We've had a hot minute. We're going to talk about Deliver at All Costs and The Precinct. The sort of doubleheader of your isometric car game, I guess.

Kind of indie, not indie, double A. I don't know what we call these games without being derogatory. You know what I mean? Like, you know, whatever. Those types of games. We're going to talk about some indies. Formless Star, the Twitty demo is up. The new Kato Takahashi game is coming out next week. I will not be able to talk to you about that, Jesse, because I'm currently playing something that is embargoed for that exact day.

Riff Driff, we're going to be chatting about as well. Jeremy has played Outer Wild's Echoes of the Eye, which I'm very excited to talk to him about. We'll give you a big spoiler section for that one, folks, so you can tune out. We'll probably do that last here. and a bunch of other... Stuff to talk about as well. How was everyone weekend? Did you guys get off too much? My parents are in town, so we kind of just, you know, did some Petaluma stuff, went to Oakland, enjoyed the sun. It's hot.

If it was like the traditional, like, this is their first time in California, right? So what'd you do to be like, here it is? You know what I mean? Chimichangas, man. That's what we did. That actually would be a pretty good move. You're right. We haven't had Mexican food yet.

My wife made some last night, but we haven't gone out for it yet. What do we do? We went to Oakland on Friday because my in-laws are... you know, we'll try not to read into this too much, but they decided to go on vacation when my parents were in town. I don't think there's bad blood there, but who knows. So we went to visit them in Oakland. We went to Children's Fairyland.

in Oakland. Jeremy, you've never been in there, right? You need a kid to go in. No, I begged at the gates, and I said, listen, man, it's getting weird. Exactly. Here's a child who tried to walk in with some other parent. Your child was screaming. I was like, just shut up. We'll go on the rides. I'm going to fucking pay for it. Call me uncle. oh yeah it's like apparently that and Tivoli which is the the place in Copenhagen that we did not go to Jeremy but it was like a

It was not to be confused with the Rivoli, in case you're getting your Nirvana, the band, the show ears are picking up. At Tivoli, is that like Garden in Copenhagen? We didn't actually go to it, but we passed it a bunch of times when we filmed the... IO Interactive stuff. The two of those were the inspiration for Disneyland. Walt Disney, so Children's Fairlands is a... It's an old ass place. We went there and it was fun.

We went to get some food, showed my parents all the places I lived in Oakland, all that stuff, because they'd never been over here. And then, yeah, we've done a lot of drinking, actually. There keeps being parties.

in people's houses and like events and it keeps being like oh or once again like there was a thing for the school on Saturday night and we had like a you know they were just giving out free champagne and shit and my parents were like oh wow you guys drink a lot here in wine country I'm like apparently so So yeah, a lot of chilling out. A lot of watching sports at weird times from my dad. That's been fun. We watched the hurling, the Irish sport. We watched that at like...

Stupid o'clock in the morning. With a stiff drink. You want a mimosa? We invented the mimosa so we could drink on a weekend in the morning and it'd be publicly acceptable. You could totally do it until you throw up. It's great. You go to brunch and there's like a table of six women just knocking back mimosas and then throwing up the pizza that they had at 10 in the morning. Acceptable. Acceptable. It's so okay. I'm not an alcoholic. I just love brunch.

I fucking love orange juice man so much. I just can't get enough of it. Put some bubbly in there. Why not? Let's get going. So yeah, it was good stuff. We've chilled out now because my dad's in his late 70s. He's like, Jesus Christ, can we just slow it down a bit? So yesterday we just hung out here. I think we're going to go out to the coast later today after the podcast. I had to kick my mom out of this room to record Shift F1 at 7 this morning, so I felt bad about that.

Yeah. What are you going to do? Exactly. She's sleeping in the office. All right? You got to get out. She's sleeping in the office. Yeah. Yeah. She's just, you know, she just loves being around video game paraphernalia. That's why you're like that. Yeah, exactly. To fall asleep. She's just like, oh, you know, Prey had some really good concept art. If only Gordon Freeman was here to watch over me. There he is. There he is. Wow! Perfect.

What did you guys get off to the weekend? Well, it's funny. We call it May 2-4 weekend, but that's not what it is. It was Victoria Day for Clean Victoria. It's like our little national holiday on Monday, so it was a nice big weekend. We had fun with the family. We had a barbecue at a family friend's house. That was fun. It was too cold for the pool, but the pool was warmed. I love rich people. They have so much fun. Wow.

Heated pool. I know. It was great. And the barbecue, they had this big black top. grill in the backyard. It was so sick. I felt like a father watching him cook I was standing there like yeah yeah you're gonna press down on that patty you're gonna get that those are almost done you gotta watch those you should flip that over put the cheese on now so that it's melted before we put it on the buns is putting it on medium right now.

Just giving unsolicited advice on the easiest shit to cook. It's like, those hot dogs are pre-cooked, but you don't want to overcook them. You don't want to do it too much. And then we watched the Leafs game, which was a horrendous experience. I was not expecting them to win. It's the Toronto Maple Leafs. They have not gotten to round three of the Stanley Cup finals ever, I think, or in the last 21, 22 years. Something like that might be more than that. Correct me, Canadian hockey fans.

But we were watching it. We thought maybe they'll pull back game seven. And then the Panthers scored. And then the Panthers scored again in two minutes. And then they scored again in three minutes. And it ended at 6-1 Panthers. No, really? Yes. They got smoked. It was disgusting.

Sorry. That's a rough time. Apologies for you. We had fun, though. That's probably how the Israelis felt when they watched the Eurovision. Did you guys watch the Eurovision at all this weekend? No. What happened? Did they come in, like, second or something? I feel like I... They came...

They came in second and I'm not, look, I've just realized I've got goat dirt on my shirt here. I'm not going to, I'm not going to want, I'm not going to wander into conspiracy theories here because that is some fucking thin ice. But it was a very interesting situation where I think they were like 15th out of 20 or something. And then there's a public vote that comes in. So all the countries do their like...

you know, the country, they go through all the countries and they score every other country. It takes fucking forever. I used to do this thing. Half the show is singing and half of it is mad. It's just like math and geography, and you're trying to figure out who's voting for who. It's all like all the Eastern Bloc countries vote for each other. The fucking Swedes vote for the Finns and the Estonians vote for that. You know, it's like it's all...

So it's fun. It's fun to watch it because you're like, nobody votes for the fucking English. So literally, it was hilarious. When they came around to the public votes, England got zero. Some of the countries were getting like 180. points from the public pool. To be fair, they've signed out. They don't want to be in Europe, so you're not winning Eurovision, fuckers. Exactly. Here I am complaining that they've left Israel into the Eurovision.

I'm not even making that a political statement. I'm just saying geographic. Geographic doesn't make any sense. Controversial. Geographical level. And I would lay the same sort of problem at the feet of Australia, which I also... Australia's part of Eurovision? So I think this is just like, if you wanted to make an argument about... Europe being a white supremacist continent. Yeah, they're picking favorites.

They're just inviting the other white countries that are outside of Europe. It's representation for the white diaspora, you know what I mean? Exactly. Finally, somebody does it. You know, I am a little offended that Canada's not part of it, you know? I mean, at this stage, what you just need to do is start inviting most of South America then. You know what I mean? Like, why aren't the Spaniards saying, hey, look, the Italians and the Portuguese are just like...

fuck it, let's get Brazil in here. You know, if they got Latin America, they know they get smoked. That's why. That's true. Is Russia in Eurovision? No, because they're most of Asia. They're conducting a war, Jeremy, unlike every other country. That's so true, dude. Only peaceful countries allow. So Israel, as I was saying, the nation of Israel, as I was saying, were in like 15th or something. And then they got like... 280 votes. which put them in fart.

which was sort of like 15th to 1st. It's not like, kind of like, you can hear the murmurs in the room because it's like, oh fuck, are we supposed to feel about this? Is this a sympathy vote thing for the October 7th stuff? Ukraine didn't get that many. The phone-in thing this year, you can phone in from any country in the world. Are Americans voting on this heavily? It was just a lot of uncomfortable.

trying to figure out what's going on like you know how should I feel about I don't know like song was fine it was not like the song from like there were songs that were higher than the Israel song that were including the winner maybe that were not particularly good songs So it was all just very... And then literally the last one they went to was Austria and they got...

They needed 100 community points, you know, international points to win it, and they got like 180 or so. So it ended up being a blowout, but like... and Israel came second, but it almost kind of like, yeah, it made it very dramatic at the end. Yeah, just another... Just not a weird... The AirVision, it's just a weird night. It's kind of in keeping with it.

I like that it has like, uh, cause you know, shows like whatever, like, uh, the, the voice or like American Idol, they don't have like a geopolitical dimension to them. It's like, it's really interesting that it's like, you need like a risk board out while you're watching eurovision we got votes coming in from who's annexing this one we gotta take their votes they only cost half we gotta trace the call that are coming it's coming from el salvador

Yeah, you have to balkanize the world in terms of geopolitics to understand that. Yeah, totally. Yeah, like the year after the Russian invasion of the Donbass, there was like... or I guess the more recent one, that there was loads of every other country, Poland, and everyone voting for Ukraine to do really well.

I don't know how Austria snuck in. Does anyone really give a shit about Austria? Don't be saying that. Last time we said that shit didn't go well, all right? Oh, you're right. We love Austria. Good point. Good point. Yeah, there you go. There's a geopolitical. to that. So anyway, fair play to everyone who watched the, I think it's on Peacock. You can watch it if you want to watch.

Bunch of bats. Oh, the NBC streaming service. Is that what it's called, really? Peacock, yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, it's got the cock in the name. That's good. And pee. And pee. Say peacock and everyone, no one bats an eye. Say poopcock and everyone goes crazy. Poopcock. Or peepee. Peepee. Or cockcock. Is that the new name for the cruise channel? Cockcock.

They're renaming HBO Max back to HBO Max. You mean they're renaming Max back to HBO Max, which was previously HBO Max, which was previously HBO Go. What was this? Yeah, on HBO Now. Like Pokemon Go? Yeah. God, that channel's had more names than Noclip Crew. Noclip Crew! Boom, baby! We're still back. We've only had one name, technically. That's too many. Well, that was one and a half, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, good point.

Holy shit. I was about to say they should fire that executor for changing the name back, but I'm putting myself on there. Pointing the gun at myself. Get his ass. You know who's pointing the gun at me right now? Our battle pass holders. Love Priest. Yut. Dwayne the Lock Rob... Dwayne the Lock Robster. Wow. Dwayne the Rock Lobster and... His cousin Dwayne the Rock.

Lops away. I said it the same way twice. Okay, God. I'm having a stroke. It's all good. Oh, Lord. Don't joke by Thomas. Nico Passatieri. It's a me, Ferrario. Penelope Higgs. Senator Armstrong. Harry Flanagan. Jewish. Arno, Matt Pearson, James Brown, Mark Rojas, Tucker Morgan, David McGarry, Goddison. Sven Huster. Pez. John Akers. Ewing's Nate. Tim Robinson. Farvest Pruitt. Jonathan Kramen. Eric Hamilton Schneider. Christoph Fatui. Cameron Laird.

Zachary Snader, Alex Gachet, George Sikotis, Jacob Godserve, Entheogen, James Med, Tokir Tilyev, and Ryzen. Thank you all so much for your incredible support over patreon.com slash nuclear. We're not here to talk about Eurovision anymore. We're going to talk about video games. Let's start with Frank. Let's go first with you. You have played The Precinct, which is a game that I talked about on here, I think. Or maybe, was it an XFest video, Jesse? Yeah, XFest, yes. And on here.

This is a isometric. It's a game where you get to be a cop. You get to do police person things and stuff like that. We're all fans of cops here. Back the blue. Jesse's nodding. No, we're not. What do you make of the precinct? This is one of two isometric... car games we're going to talk about today. Let's see which one wins. The Precinct you played the first couple of hours, what do you make of it?

Yeah, I was, like, really curious about this game. Like, yeah, the look of it was isometric. I'm always interested in, like, cop simulator games, like, even, like, Battlefield Hardline, because I'm so curious of the tone. Like, are they aware of, like, how shitty it can be and all that stuff? And like Battlefield Hardline completely is like so tone deaf.

this game i feel like is a little cheeky this feels almost a little bit like the wire like even when you're going through like the opening missions the cops are all kind of grumbling about like desk work and budget and things like that and it's like okay like it's a little bit of the same wire tone of like shit rolls downhill

And like, you're a rookie cop, but your dad was a famous cop who got killed. And this is all like the opening stuff. And they're like, ah, we don't know who did it. Don't worry about it, kid. Keep your nose down and hand out tickets. So it's like, okay, there's corruption. so i think the game was produced in the uk but this game everyone has such a thick like new york accent it's like very it's like

It's not as cheeky as Rockstar stuff, but I think it's in the spirit of, like, the OG Rockstar stuff. So, like, I was playing the first hours, just sussing it out. It's like, oh, no, this is funny. Like, in, like, police pursuits, you can run over civilians and there's no penalty. And it's like, oh, okay, great, like...

That's something our two games share, apparently. Yeah, so as soon as I was playing the game, I was just testing it. What happens if you're handing out parking tickets, if you shoot a civilian on the street, it fails the mission and you restart, but the checkpoints are generous?

Unrealistic. Yeah, no, I was trying to see how far can you go with police brutality and things like that. When you arrest people, you can't hit someone one or two times with a nightclub before you get like... uh we failed the mission for excessive force so you can be a little rough but not too rough so the yeah the premise of the precinct is you're a cop i'm still like the opening stuff which i think is still hand holding a lot of like here's a high speed chase handing out tickets

shooting cops whatever or not shooting cops shooting bad guys um So, I like this game. Yeah, it is isometric. When you're doing combat, you can get into cover, and it almost looks like XCOM or one of those type games. It's not tactic. It's not turn-based or anything. No, no, but it's the same viewpoint. People are taking cover and like...

Is the opening mission still like a bank job where you murder a bunch of people? For a game that was like, we're going to give you parking tickets and stopping drug dealers for a chunk of it. The opening of the game has a lot of like... you killing people and then like being a helicopter pilot. Have you done that part? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the opening is like an extreme mission. And then the second mission is you giving out parking tickets. And then I think the third is like a drug.

and then and then i don't know if the game has like open patrol mode that's what i'm hoping to get to um but uh yeah so so i do like this game um yeah even the parts for giving out parking tickets it's giving me asking you very specific questions like Is it because they're close to a fire hydrant? Have they not refilled the meter? Are they parked in opposite ways? So the game is very guided.

uh in terms of like it always says where the objective is la noir i like the like world of it but like i feel like this game already is so much like easier and more fun to play than la noir I was not a strong state. You're not a big idea. You know, I'm fine. No, I'm not like, I don't want to do puzzles. I don't want to solve riddles. I just want to like run around and decipher faces where people are like, I'm not lying.

Yeah, yeah. You are early, so you might still be in tutorial land. That's the thing. You'll have to report back once you've gotten out into the... sort of wider world and that's what i'm eager to do but like this i feel like this game the the vibe of it does feel like early gta like the old school ones which is like okay this is kind of silly and chaotic and uh the game is like kind of self-aware

Yeah, everyone has, like, the very thick New York accents. Like, hey, welcome to the department, sweetie. And it's very, like, oh, okay. So they're having fun with it. Like, the cut scenes are this very, like, visual novel. Like, it's just, like, the portrait and the dialogue. And you can't skip through it. But the voice acting is actually pretty good.

Um, so, um, so yeah, but again, I'm pretty early, but it passed, like, my test of, like, okay, it's funny, it's chaotic, it's not, like, punishing if you're being crazy, so, uh, and I actually really like the controls. I was really skeptical with, like... playing an isometric game on controller, but it feels good. The shooting stuff is actually pretty fun, getting the cover and all that. Getting headshots is so satisfying.

You're not supposed to aim for that if you're caught, but it's cool. That's what they always say, aim for the hedge. What are you playing it on? I'm playing it on PS5. Oh, cool. Excellent. I think it's on all the modern platforms, Xbox, PS5, Steam. Excellent. Let me just talk about deliver all costs then because it's kind of weirdly in a similar kind of... I think reviews started coming out for today.

I was thinking about doing a quick look for it, but I think talking about it here probably will be enough. So Delivered All Costs is a game where you are delivering stuff. I would describe it as a physics arcade racer. Or not racer, driving game, I guess. So you are, the story is pretty hands-on, and I'm not sure if I'm in love with the story.

Maybe it goes somewhere. There seems to be some subtext to it, but basically you're a guy who arrives in this town and he needs a job and gets a job as a delivery driver at this thing. There's definitely something going on under, you know, similar to Frank's one. There's an early mystery that I'm assuming that... the story is going to move towards. But you get a car and you are basically using this car to deliver stuff. So it's less...

like crazy taxi where you are doing quick job, quick job, quick job. Each day has like... I don't know, two or three different set missions that you do. It is set in an open world. It's sort of like six different biomes connected by tunnels that you sort of, you know, you drive off screen, it loads to another neighborhood and you go into that area.

So there are the set missions you do but then you can do free roam stuff like there are some side quests that exist in the world and for those you get blueprints that you can update your car. There is lots of these yellow, they seem to have self-awarely done the yellow paint thing because there is yellow paint when you can climb up walls.

but there's like a bucket of yellow paint and like a paintbrush left beside them in a lot of places. So I think that they're like, self-awarely doing the climb here yellow paint thing and there's also a bunch of crates with yellow x's on them and those have like 10 bucks in them which adds to your your allowance and you can use that to buy stuff for the car or buy parts for the upgrade.

There's sort of an upgrade tree that goes along with that, and that can be anything from a silly-sounding horn to the ability for you to press a button, and it just opens up the doors and the hood of your car, which you can use to fucking yeet people into the next... rode over. It's pretty fun. So that's what you're doing is you're mostly doing these set missions unless you're exploring the world and stuff like that. Everything is fucking destructive.

So this is kind of what I was talking about when I was saying about how Stunt Derby, it was cool that we put the boxes on the road because games like Rackfest put all the interesting destructible shit off. tracking your... sort of disincentivized to touch it in this everything you crash into fucking falls apart you can smash into people

They might get hurt. You never get in trouble with the police or anything. They might chase after you though and start like chainsawing the back of your car or like try and give you kick your wheels. So you get a puncture and you have to like run outside and press a button to make the wheel go back up.

everything falls apart. Like you can drive through brick walls. You can drive through houses and the houses fall apart. There's a pier. You can knock out the feet. There's a Ferris wheel. If you crash into the support structures, the Ferris wheel will fucking roll. Collapse. Everything is made to be destroyed, and if you come back later, it's back, right? This game does not care about realism. It is having fun with its sort of ridiculous physics sandbox.

The actual missions themselves are also very physics-y. So one of them earlier, I think the first one you do is like... oh, you're transporting a bunch of fireworks, and then the fireworks start going off, and when they go off, they move your car a little bit, but also some of them land in the middle of the road, and you have to avoid those because they'll blow off your wheels.

There's one where you have a massive 30-foot Marlin that you have in the back of your flatbed truck, who is like, it's still alive, and its back flipper is flicking all the other cars and making you move. as you're going and You have to do a bunch of ridiculous things, like this guy wants to present this Marlin, so you're like, oh, it looks too dirty, we have to paint it, so you have to bring it to a paint shop and use your winch to put it up on.

paint thing and then bring it back but the marlin gets angry because it's hungry so you have to drive through like pots of rotting fish that are off the side of the road to like to make the marlin happy so it doesn't jump off the back of your truck it's just like It's slapstick nonsense, but the actual aesthetic of the game and the world is like this 1950s kind of noir-ish. vibe to it. Which...

I'm not sure if it feels at odds with it. I'm not sure why. I guess it grounds it. It gives it a sense of place and stuff that I think is interesting. Maybe it's that I'm not a big... fan of that aesthetic necessarily. I don't dislike it, but it's not like... It's not particularly interesting to me.

It's a lot of people dressed up in that thing. I don't know if I associate it with slapstick or physics. You know what I mean? It's not necessarily that. It definitely gives it a unique feel, which I think is important and cool. But yeah, it's not necessarily tied to the games, the themes. I guess it would be before they had had like...

stronger regulations on driving and vehicles. Nobody wore seatbelts back then, so it was okay if people careened out of a vehicle in a 1950s year. That's true. I haven't had that happen yet, although there is an upgrade for airbags, so I'm not sure what that does necessarily. You really have to fuck your car up.

to break like driving off there's a volcano in the middle of the level in the middle of the island it all takes place on an island and there's like a volcano in the middle at one stage you have to like there's a i got a side quest that was like a haunted car that basically was just like, you know, its doors were opening, it was like flipping around, it was trying to get me to crash it.

And the only way you could win is by driving it into the volcano and double tapping Y so you jumped out as it fell into the volcano. That's awesome. It's silly stuff like that. So the missions are pretty cool. The story, I'm not... necessarily massively into I'm finding myself sort of not skipping cutscenes but like topping the analog stick to kind of get through them.

But yeah, I find it to be fun, and it is a very good Steam Deck game. I like it on the Steam Deck. The whole thing of it actually reminds me a little bit of that one you recommended me, Jesse. What was that really cartoony one where you are, the guy who gets the car, he says he's going to get the car to be an Uber driver, but then he just drives around his town.

Oh, Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip. Yes. It is not massively dissimilar from that in terms of structure. There's a bunch of biomes. You can get out of the car and explore. You have a job. There are missions.

stuff like that it's it's not not this similar the only difference with this one is that the the missions are split up into days and sometimes it fast forward a few weeks or months or whatever and it has like a narrative to it and obviously tiny terry's Yeah, so that's kind of the 101 on it I'm about.

I don't know. It says I'm like 30% complete. So I don't know if that means I'm halfway through the story and I've done a bunch of the side quests and pickups. I'm not quite sure. I would say I'm probably a third of the way through this. Some of the reviews suggested that maybe it falls off a little bit. I'm not sure. go do your own research on that and your own due diligence. But yeah, it's good fun. I'm enjoying it. I'm going to keep playing it. I think it's... 30 bucks.

Am I right? It is. It's $30. There's a demo out currently, and it's actually got 10% off on Steam if you're at all interested. And you can get it in a bundle with the precinct, can't you? You're kidding. I thought we talked about that. The Delivering Justice Bundle. Yes, you're right. That's a great name. 5% off the two of them together. If you just want to support Back the Blue. Neither of these games are doing contemporary cop stuff, you can tell, for very good reasons, probably.

I will say as well, this game, while the art style... or the setting is not necessarily something that I'm like a super fan of. I'm not a fan of it, but it's not like something that like, you know, I'm like an aesthetic that I warm to. I love this game. Like the isometric angle is super slick. The modeling and the light, the way they do all that stuff is brilliant. It looks gorgeous on Steam Deck. It looks great on full screen too.

Yeah, the effects are great. The physics are great. It really feels like a lot of shit is breaking apart in really satisfying ways. It doesn't feel like, you know, you hit the Ferris wheel and it rolls away like it's one. physics object or whatever. So, yeah, it's really fun to destroy and drive and poke at it and have fun with it. When you climb a big building to get something, I just toss my guy off the top and he goes, and he dies on the ground.

And then, like, it waits a beat and he gets back up. You know what I mean? It's, like, silly shit like that. You know, you can punch people. You can push. You can push and kick. uh other civilians so like that there's like a big bridge in in in the world uh on the way through the mainland like golden gate bridge ass looking suspension bridge and you can climb up to the top and then when you get to the top there's like

A guy standing by the edge of a thing, drinking a cup of coffee, right? And you're like, well, here we go. You just push him off the edge for fun like it's... It's, yeah, it looks really, I think the aesthetic almost on its own, if you see a screenshot of this thing and you go, man, that game looks cool, that even on its own is really good. I think it plays as good as those screenshots make it look like it plays. And the last thing I'll say is if you hit the right stick.

It's not full 360 cam, but if you hit the right stick to the side, it'll basically give you a 90 degree pivot, which is also kind of cool because sometimes boxes are hidden behind stuff. So it's used as like a, oh, I can't see anything because I'm stuck behind this. This wall, but it'll give you an alternative look so you can kind of see it. And then you can go back to the other one if you want. Yeah, so if you're setting up big jumps and stuff, it's handy for that.

They should make a CRPG with this exact aesthetic and everything about this look screams a contemporary version of Fallout 1 and 2 to me. Doesn't it? Yeah. It's very era too. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's like a... If it was painterly, it would look like Disco Elysium. It's got a very similar kind of... Almost there. It's got that texturized look on everything. There's scratches and little splotches of paint. Very artistic, but yeah, not quite like...

Like 10% of the way, it needs to go a little bit further to get to that look for sure. Yeah, I'm glad to hear you guys like it as well because I think... that's a lot of the yeah it's just the graphics and the physics are enough for me and the missions are funny and they set up the thing really funny one of them was like a It was like a seismograph that I had to bring to the guys on top of the volcano. I spent a lot of time around a volcano. I can tell.

And it would, this one was not one that would like affect the car, but it was a seismograph that would beep whenever there was earthquakes about to happen. So you'd be driving down this road and it would just like beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. And then a bunch of like ridiculous physics boulders would come down the hill and like...

fucking hit your car off the edge and all that stuff and your little buddy in the car who's with you sometimes is like oh you're a good driver you know it's kind of silly silly little comments here and there Yeah, sounds good. Sounds like the sort of thing you would rent from Blockbuster for like, you know, a weekend and just crush on your Xbox. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. The camera angle is also an interesting choice.

for a game design reason, which is that because everything is destructible, I feel like if you had fuller visibility of everything, it would be easier to dodge a wall that you're driving straight at but you can't see because you're staring almost orthogonally straight down at the car. Um, but it also does like, you know how when you see tilt shift photographs of like a real city, it looks like a toy city.

I always feel like isometric and orthogonal cameras, like, they give that sort of toy box effect to it. And I feel like because the destructive physics of the world in this game is sort of like... one of the main features. They're giving it this very, like, it's not zooming in and focusing on the car like a GTA does or something. It's zooming way out and being like, the world is kind of the focus, not just the car.

Yeah, and I'd love to talk to the designers about that because that's a great point and it reminds me of two things. which is that one, when you crash into stuff in this game, it doesn't slow you down all that much. So you really feel like...

you don't feel like you're constantly trying to avoid things. I also think the road design is probably doing a lot of work here, because you know when you're playing Sonic, and Sonic is really fast, but you really can't tell what's coming next. That game has a real problem with... oh shit, like I'm about to hit a wall or like an enemy or something and I saw it too late.

You're like flying in this car sometimes and it's in the middle of the road and the camera is zoomed out a bit but because it's orthogonal you're not seeing down the road so you really don't know what's coming next. And I think the traffic and the turns that are in this game are long and consistent. So you can kind of tell, okay, I'm turning this way and I'm going to keep turning this way and then it'll straighten out.

The roads are on a grid, sometimes they're diagonal at 45, sometimes they're closer to a 90, but they're also fairly consistent. The game also has this system when you're doing the missions where it has

like little yellow arrows will appear on the road to kind of nudge you and go, okay, you're going that way. You're going that way. So you're not looking at your mini-map the whole time. You're not trying to glance up at a mini-map or anything like that. And then it does a very smart thing where sometimes the arrow will be like... kind of red and white.

And that means, I'm guessing, I intuitively sort of understood probably what it means, and I think this is what it means, that like, oh, this is another way to go, but it's actually a little bit dangerous. Like, it might have a jump, it might have some dodgy roads, and you might have to smash through something.

So that's really good. It kind of nudges you. It kind of goes, okay, go here, go here, go here. And up until this point, I know there are some missions that have like timers in them and stuff, but up to this point, most of the missions I've done have been very... like you would die in them, but the game has such a light punishment. for death it just kind of respawns you and the car is fully healed again and that none of them have been like

They've been tricky to do without dying, and the game does kind of rate you on how you did, but not so hard that it's really annoying and you're having to do them over and over again. So hopefully that's the case as I continue. Yeah, it's good stuff so far. Nice. Deliver at all costs. Like you said, Jesse, it's not like it's not going to, I don't think it's going to be, you know, in my game of the year discussions or anything, kind of like Tiny Tim, do you know? Tiny Tim.

Tim, no! Who did not die. Yeah, Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip. Yeah, Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip was one of my favorite games that I enjoyed playing. I think it was last year, but I wouldn't have necessarily put it in Game of the Year. You know what I mean? For sure. Yeah, I wouldn't like it.

it's not touching me in that way. You know what I mean? Similarly, I think this is a really well put together game with a lot of interesting ideas and the core thing that it's trying to do, it does very well. And graphically, it just looks beautiful. Sometimes that's all you need. It's just a fun video game that just executes its... Goal. Very well, and it's not setting the world on fire, but it is absolutely a good time, and that sounds like what you're getting here with Deliver at All Costs.

Yeah, deliver at all costs. Go check out a demo if you want yourself. It is coming out the day this podcast goes live, I believe, or came out the day before on the 22nd. Moving right along. Jeremy, you're going to do a quick look for this one. But please tell us a little bit about Formless Star. It is an itch game, right? Yes. This is a game that's taking itch by storm.

This is a game by developer Splendidland, whose name is Samanthauelle Louise Gilson, who also made a fantastic game a few years ago named Franken that you should also check out. I'm not going to be describing two games at once, but also go play Franken. So Forlostar is a...

I guess you'd call it like an RPG. I think it's one of those games where giving it like a genre designation kind of is limiting on what it actually is. But for all intents and purposes, it presents as like a pixel art kind of like retro looking RPG. But this is a game where you work for a company and you land in a little interstellar pod on a distant planet and you just like catalog all the weird creatures that live there.

and it is this is like this game is so fucking charming i like i was trying to think of like what it is about this game that made me love it so much and it's like it's a million different things but i think the primary thing is that it's like

It's very tender. It's a very rare sort of emotion in games, and I think people really value it, but it's not a term I hear very often. I think like... the yakuza games for example i think a lot of people are like wow the storytelling is so great the characters are so great but i think that the thing that connects with people so much is that behind the sort of like

the facade of, like, tough Yakuza guys, like, fighting and beating each other up. There's, like, a real tenderness, like, a really sincere sort of, like, connection between characters they act in a way that like with vulnerability and compassion and uh and i think that's a it's a it's a difficult thing to capture and i think that um splendid lands games have

like, a real sincere sense of tenderness that reminds me of, uh, like, Lovadelic, the developer who did Moon RPG, um, and then kind of, like, splintered and did a bunch of other stuff, I believe, like... I think like Chulip is one of the spinoff like studios and maybe like Chibi Robo I think oh cool but anyway just these kind of like very sincere like love filled games but anyway so

Formless star, you land on this planet with your crew, and you go around, and it is a procedurally generated landscape, hence the name Formless Star. It's like this, it doesn't have a discrete... definite form. Every time you step off the ship, it procedurally generates all the tiles and all the biomes and this whole landscape. And the landscape is filled with all of these weird little animals. And so you go around cataloging them. And as you find each one...

They, it plays like a little unique noise. It gives you a little sort of like Pokedex description of that creature and like their background, which are all, they're all like, the writing in these games are so, it's, Franken is one of the funniest games I've ever played. This one feels like it's trying to be a little less like...

you know, wink and a nudge, like, I'm doing jokes here, but it is still incredibly funny. But all these creatures have, like, little weird descriptions. And then they all do... like a bizarre little animation like one of them likes to dance and it does like this little dance One of them is a giant mechanical cannon.

And it says that it has like the, I think it's like the millennium ending cannon is like its special move or something. Oh my God. And then you interact with it and it's like, it like goes like, it deploys and it's like millennium cannon activated. And it starts this like, 60 second long animation and it's just like it's so fucking funny like you're just It's doing bits, and it's being weird and sincere. I see one here, and it's like a fridge that's shooting out.

Blocks of ice cream or something. Yeah, and some of them are weird contrasts where there's one that's only found in the hot biome, but it's like an ice guy who's really uncomfortable but refuses to leave. So, yeah, you're kind of just, like, going around and finding little guys. It's mean dudes. Yeah.

And, like, sometimes that's enough, is just, like, just experiencing this world. You also have, like, cohorts, like companions that work with you who are... also on the planet you can see out and about um and you can go back to the ship and there's like a android that cleans up the ship named fandroid and you can just like kind of do whatever you can call back to base and you have this very like neurotic boss who uh

constantly forgets who you are and you call him and you're like hey i'm just like updating you and he's like oh are you like my uber driver are you outside oh it's you never mind um So it's just this very sort of, like, funny, sincere little game about exploring a planet, and, uh... And if you play this game, it is about two hours long to get the true ending. I highly recommend you find every single animal in the world because the true ending of this game is...

Probably my favorite narrative thematic moment in a game this year so far. I think it's one of the most beautiful, sincere endings to a game I've ever seen in my life. Formula Star. You're going to do a quick look as well. It's not a long game, right? Yeah, I was going to do it.

Yeah, I think we'll probably play a quarter of it in 30 minutes. I think it's a difficult game to describe because it's very much just about the sense of place and atmosphere playing this game. So I think the quick look will do a better... illustration of why it's great. But highly recommend this game. It is on Itch by Splendidland. The name is Formless Star. Terrific.

name around price over there, I'm guessing. Yeah, but throw some money. What do they say in The Witcher? I've never played The Witcher. Throw some coins at The Witcher. That's the show, I think, right? That's not... I don't think that's a bad one. I've never seen the show either. Throw some bills at your dev. How about it? I think in Deliverar Cost, he says dollar bills sometimes when you pick up the dollars.

not error-appropriate, if I'm honest, but, you know, whatever. The phrase dollar bills is not error-appropriate? From the 50s? Yeah. I don't know. Dollar bills, y'all, is kind of where I go with the way he says it. It feels a bit more contemporary. Oh, okay. Maybe not. Who am I to say I'm no American? You were here in the 50s. That's fine. Technically American or somebody who was in the 50s. Exactly. Jesse. Jesse. Oh, that was good.

You've got two games to talk about here, probably briefly, I'm guessing, with the games here. Yeah, fairly quickly. The one is pretty straightforward, and the one is just a demo for a game that's, you said, out next week. next week so I'll talk about Rift Riff first which I'm going to mess up the name of because it's so close Rift Riff. I feel like a dog every time I say it. New game from Adrian DeYoung. Very, very good. Fun, silly little game. It's a tower defense.

style game um but it's a lot more strategic than most of those so uh this is like a top-down sort of isometric angle uh tower defense game but it's not like a grid tower defense like balloons or like you're not placing your little monkeys on a grid this is more strategic and thoughtful, I think, in the way that you set up your units. Because typically in tower defense games, I don't get down with them too much because like,

It turns into eventually just like maximizing numbers. There's not a whole lot of thought to it. It's just like, just put this here, find the curve, place them in the, make your dead zone. Yeah, there's not much artistry in them. Yes, exactly. It's very, yeah, logic. min-maxing your stuff. Yeah, which, you know, I can find some joy in once or twice, but eventually you're like, okay, I've played one of these, I've played a million of them. There's like 17 Bloons Tower Defense games.

But this one, I actually have had a lot of fun playing, and in the least mean way possible, I've been playing it while watching Next Level Chef, because it's the perfect... second screen game. Again, not an insult. You can totally focus very distinctly on this. It sounds like Next Level Chef is the second screen. That's true. Good point. Yes. I do just look up and watch

Gordon Ramsay yell at people, which is quite fun. That show is awful. It's so much fun, but it's terrible. But anyway, this game, on the other hand, quite good. So yeah, like I was saying, it is a tower defense game, but not in a grid. So basically, you're in these individual worlds. You start in this sort of overworld area that's very green and black. It looks very computer-y, and you get your upgrades there. And you go into these portals that warp you, rifts, perhaps.

that warp you to these areas. That'll have really good pixel art there. They're all designed really well. The colors are very nice. the whole thing is very juicy um the sound effects are great like all the animations there's so much little uh detail and like every single thing on the screen yeah how would you describe this because I think pixel art mice

sort of conjure up something close to what Jeremy was talking about. That's a good point. I mean, to me, it looks a lot like a game that I've just realized is in a bundle with this. which is Thronefall that I talked about at the end of last year. Yeah. It's kind of... Thronefall is more 3D though, right?

Maybe. I mean, it's still... Lay, you're right. Thrawnfall has more 3D look. Yeah, no, you're right. Rift Rift is more... It's, like, scratchier. It's more just art that's, like, low-fi. Like, it's very... Yeah, it is hard to describe.

It's scratchier. It's somewhere between sword and sword. No, that's not true. No, it's not as like structured as regular pixel art is. Like you couldn't put it on a grid and say like, this is the straight line and you got to do 90 degree angles. It's a lot more free form.

and it's Arco kind of a little bit Arco a little bit Pepper Grinder from last year it kind of reminded me of that sort of scratchier pixel art it all looks really good and it's very distinct and it works I think for the design of it as well so like I was saying it's not a grid based tower defense game there's specific points that you place them on and all of the towers do very specific things it's not like this one shoots and then this one shoots a lot or faster but does less damage

These are more like you have a turret and then you have a unit that slows down enemies as they walk through it. And all the enemies have different abilities.

like some of them will uh come in packs or like you know it's a tower defense game it's all pretty straightforward but they go on the strategy level like on a whole different uh wavelength because again it's not there's no grid so like sometimes they'll have uh obvious straights that you can see or like the way that the the level is designed as you can see there's like uh a point in the middle and then a bunch of places where you can

put your units because like you can only place them in very specific points they're like little black dots on the map you control a character that walks up to them and then you pick where you want the unit to go you build it

It's all pretty straightforward. You have like limited resources that come back over time throughout the level. They're all produced by your tower that you're trying to defend. And you can only pick like five tower or five units to build on the map at a time or well it starts with three and then it goes up more and more as you play more of the game um

and yeah you can just like you'll see that point in the middle you'll see like oh there's a ring around it where the enemies are definitely going to go because they have to go that way so you pick the tower that covers that ring but maybe you don't want to do that you got there's like a ton of different strategies you can make of like combining different towers to perform different actions

So it's a lot more strategic. You don't have to use every dot. That was something I was concerned about at the start was like, really all you're going to do is maximize your units, but no. here you can just be like i have one multiple of them where i just go here i'm gonna build this

little pocket and this is going to be the dead zone this is where everyone's going to go to die uh because you can build units to like that are called it's like a spot called fertile ground if you place something there enemies will attack it if they have the trait where they attack fertile ground so there's a lot of thought to it

The thing is, it's not overly challenging. That was something that I really appreciated by the end of my playtime. I'm not quite done with it yet. I think I'm about a third of the way through in terms of the levels that are available. But I never really found myself...

struggling too much or feeling hampered by it like i never felt like i was like oh i picked the wrong units and now i gotta restart it was like you have opportunities to to restart a wave or restart the whole thing if you want to um and try different strategies which is fun

But if you find your way fighting through it and you only have so many resources, you can go back and rebuild a building, but then it only has half health and it's on the fly. It's very frantic, but again, not overly challenging. You can do kind of whatever you want. Go big on units.

Hence the second screen experience. Exactly, yeah. You can play on Steam Deck then. Or whatever Gordon Ramsay show you want. Yeah, I'm playing it on Steam Deck. It runs perfectly fine. It runs with controls. The controller's perfectly fine. You don't have to use the touchpads or anything.

Yeah, it's very slick and like I was saying, juicy. The UI, the colors, everything's so good. When you like click on one of the squares to place a unit, it does this little UI pop-up over your character to show you all the things you can place. And just like... Switching between them like it just

There's something about it. It's so satisfying. Go check out some screenshots and videos. I think it probably sells in a decent amount that we can't on a podcast as well. It looks really slick. I really enjoyed Thronefall last year a lot. So, yeah, I think this is... probably give this a whirl as well. Riff. And like you said, I don't know what position I'm in here when it comes to Tua T. So this is Keira Takahashi's new game.

independent now, and a team, I assume, probably somewhat remote and somewhat in the East Bay here, in the Bay Area, working on this. Of course, Keita Takahashi, known for games like Wattam and Katamari and Nobby Nobby Boy. To a T, it's out next week. I'll be talking about it next week. What is the demo? Is it the start of the game, do you think?

It seems like it, because you make a character, or you name your character and design how they look. Brush your teeth and stuff. Brush your teeth, yeah, exactly. Yeah, so definitely the start of the game. But yeah, yeah, this is to a T, a new game, like Danny said, from Kid Takahashi's studio, Uvula. which I think is a different one from the one that made Watam. It is, yes, very much so. Yeah, something happened, I feel like. Yeah.

But regardless, I played Kanemari Damacy for the first time this year, so I really got into reading what Keita Takahashi has to say about game design and the sort of joyful experience that he has, both making games and watching people play games.

designing things that are fun and charming. And to a T, right off the bat, feels exactly like what I was expecting. It's like a low-level experience where you're controlling one character in this town. It almost feels like you're in a town from Katamari Damacy. and your character, who again, you can name whatever you want, I named him Tony, is T-Posed, and that's how they live their life.

Which means that just in case people don't know, it's like their hands are constantly stuck ash to the sides. Yes. All the 12-year-olds know what T-posing is. It's fine. It's all the 12-year-olds who listen to this podcast.

The kid that you're controlling... lives their life like that and the interesting thing i think is that the story is about sort of like living with that as a disability like how do you navigate the world with that um that you know stuck in that position how do you brush your teeth how do you eat food right and it finds this way to bring out this again like keita takahashi's games in general find this way to bring out this childlike wonder and joy and the simple things like brushing your teeth

Or washing your face. How do you do that with that limitation on your body? How do you control in that way? And then also, narratively, it kind of dives a little deeper on that, I think, than I was expecting it to. Again, the games are very heartfelt and joyful. So to play this, I was like...

we're so back baby we're gonna do funny things and then no it's like that's hard isn't it it's very sad to live your life like that and the way that society treats you and that sort of thing which I thought was

Yeah, presented very well. I'm not super far into the demo. I don't think there's much more than what I played of it. Yeah, probably not. Yeah, you start out pretty quick. You get dressed, you pick your outfit, and you have to go to school, and you meet a giraffe who makes you a sandwich. Like, if you describe what happens in this game, you're like, yeah, yeah, okay, that sounds like...

That sounds like a kid of Takahashi. The first thing you do is take a shit and it's like this destructive force that just shakes the whole house and rattles the whole thing. Yeah, it's great. If you've played any of Keita's games, you're going to feel right at home here, I think. So I'm interested to talk about that next week because I think I've grown up playing Keita Takahashi's games.

I played every one of them new. You know what I mean? Like this is like, he's been like a singular voice in this world. I think the first one I got into was one of the Katamaris and then there was obviously Nobby Nobby by Watson. I'm definitely missing something. Maybe. But those games are very sandboxy. from what I am seeing from this demo you're talking about.

It sounds like this is a lot more narrative and structured, and it sounds like that is quite interesting. How have you found that? Because obviously, Calamari games...

have levels, I guess, but they're almost like Tony Hawk levels. You've got a time limit, you've got to do the fucking thing. Wattam and, I mean, Nobby Nobby Boy especially, it's just like fucking, like, that game basically has no... mission like watch them to a certain extent kind of does I guess it's a bit more goal orientated but still so sandboxy what have you found of this so far I know it's obviously the start so maybe it's a bit more short

Were you surprised at all by how, I guess you're going to mention how sort of smaller in scope it is, I guess?

Yeah, you know, I really appreciate that, though, because I feel like being able to pull everything out of those linear scripted moments is the part of it that's so joyful. Like, it's not as open as katamari like you said you can't just roll around and pick up all the items or whatever or do anything or go anywhere you have like an objective you can still go wherever at a point they're like go to school you're gonna be late

And then I was running to school and I was like, no, no, no, this isn't one of those games. You don't have to do that. So I was like, I'll go pick up these coins that are just around the world. Why not? I'm having fun. I'm running around with my arms out. I'm feeling the world out. But then even on the smaller moments, there's like a bit where you eat cereal. And...

You dunk the, I was like, I'll do milk first. And then I was like, what am I, sociopath? So I put the milk down and picked up the cereal and did it the right way. And then like you eat the cereal and you watch all the little physics objects bounce around in the bowl and like your characters munching on the cereal. I'm like, this is.

this is what I want. This is beautiful. This is, it's charming. It's childlike. It's so cool. And then, yeah, like the way that it presents, I was crying at a certain point because like, there's the moment where the character turns on the faucet. And Tony, my boy, is like...

I can wash my face with this. Isn't it cool? My mom made it for me. And I was like, oh my god. Oh, that's so sad and beautiful. Because, like, I'm, you know, not taking it too personal. Like, my biggest concern I have at this, like, subconscious level is... living with a disability and like the way that society is not built for that because I live in a city where so many people use wheelchairs and like mobility devices in general and how hard it is for them and like I'm always

Like that's one of my biggest fears is that sort of thing. And I'm like, and the reason is just that. So seeing this and being like, no, this can be joyful. Like you can still have fun. and find joy in this life when you live with the limitations that society puts on you because of the way that you are.

The song that plays at the beginning is like, you know, I can't find my place, which is also very funny. Like, I'm making it sound like it's very serious. This is a very funny video game that just touched a bone. But yeah, yeah, no, you're right. It can play both instruments, which I think is very interesting. And it has that chorus, which is great. Who's got the cooler spoon? You know, regular person or T-pose person. Right, exactly. Very long spoon.

It's my favorite. Also, I wanted to mention this game made in collaboration with AbleGamers. which I imagine is part of what makes that story come to life. I'm not sure in what capacity, maybe just on the Sultan level or whatever. But, you know, able gamers controversy at the moment. In the news recently. Yeah. I don't know too, too much about this. It sounds like it's another one of these.

This boss was a jerk situations, which, you know, mileage may vary. I think it's hard to know. It was an IGN report that came out. And then the CEO, Mark Barlett, did a big response. And I think AbleGamers has made a post on LinkedIn about it now. Barlett's thing is like super long. There's tons here. I'm just scrolling through it. So there's lots to that. I think regardless of that situation.

The people who work at AbleGamers have done a lot of great work over the last 20 years, right? Something like that. Yeah. So it doesn't minimize that. I think if they've had any hand in this, it seems great. The hard work that they've done for so long shouldn't be minimized. Yeah, well, this is the problem with charity stuff is that you get a lot of this stuff. This stuff can happen in charities just by virtue of the fact that... It's a company. It's a structure.

So the reason why I would say it is this. unlike traditional companies, charities are usually led by individuals who have like a very particular reason why they are running that charity. And then sort of because of that, it's often difficult to put a more formalized structure on top of it. And also it's a lot of people who are doing it for a reason X, which might be because they're trying to...

you know, they have a mission that they want to do, having to also become chair people and that type of stuff. So you end up in situations where either people aren't capable or where people are manipulative. sort of, you know, the charity is just by the way they're structured, you know, they're...

the books are a certain way and you're asking people for money a lot and how much should you get paid if you work at a charity? There's all of these like very, you know, you can run into a situation where everyone's scratching their own back.

So this is always hard to parse because you can also be... there could be like genuine financial mismanagement going on or it could be that somebody's shit at running a business and if you're on the floor and you're having all these ideas and you think that management's doing a bad job and they're wasting funds or misappropriating funds or doing this and this.

Maybe you're bitter. So I always find it hard to, like I read the initial IGN stuff and it was definitely some like troubling stuff. And I was like, yeah, it sounds like this guy probably wasn't very good. at doing a lot of bunch of this stuff and was probably a shit communicator and overly controlling and stuff like that. I haven't read his Medium post. It looks like it's pretty long. I didn't know about it until... But it's, you know.

The worst thing, not the worst thing, one of the sad things about this is why you were saying, Jesse, which is that, and I think... From what I read in the other thing, the only person I really know from AbleGamers, we recorded some interviews with them right before I moved back to Maryland. And I interviewed, did I? I can't remember if either I interviewed Mark and I wasn't. He wasn't getting to the stuff I wanted to talk about.

I think that's what happened. It's been five years, so I can't remember. But we needed to do more interviews with him. And then I had trouble getting him for a while. And I didn't read too much into it. And I don't necessarily read into it with this stuff because I haven't gone back and watched those interviews in a while. And then COVID. So at a certain point, I was like, oh, we've interviewed Stephen a bunch of times, and I know Stephen relatively well over the years.

a great advocate for disabled gamers as one himself and you know he's a super lovely guy. very out there publicly as well, which is pretty awesome. I think there was one quote in here where somebody said this, and I don't want to misconstrue it, but it's something essentially to the... to the effect of he didn't want this stuff coming out because it will affect

The charity? Stephen, you're sorry, said that. Stephen, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which you could interpret as him closing ranks with Mark, or you could interpret it as the very pragmatic... thing of yeah you probably don't want this coming out about your charity because charities are entirely based around reputation

So like you said, I do feel bad for AbleGamers on this one. And then who I feel bad for probably goes up and down a lot based on how much of this stuff I'll read. But yeah, I think that's a good point you made. There's stuff... You know, they've done, I've been on the ground. I've been in those hospitals with those kids playing those games. You know what I mean? And they've obviously done a lot of advocacy work within the industry. They've helped.

with multiple controller designs. Yeah, the Xbox. Yeah, harder manufacturers. It's not like this. One thing I think that's really worth mentioning when it comes to AbleGamers is there are other charities in the world who do this type of work. When Steven was young... I think his picture was used. or something. Or maybe he just didn't like being weaponized as a child. So one of the things that AbleGamers has done over the years is in all of their work, in all of their promotional work.

They've never had, from what I know, I've talked to Stephen about this, and I'm sure it's probably been the same, they've never used images of children in their promotional work. And that came from... Stephen being very sort of adamant that this was not appropriate and manipulating people and the children to try and get funding. And I know other large organizations in this space.

will do a lot of that. And I've worked with, I know people who've worked in asylum charities and stuff in the UK, for instance, and they have certain policies around this stuff as well. To me, there's no doubt that AbleGamers have done great work and have put their hearts in the right place because I've seen those volunteers in those hospitals helping those kids. I was there.

interviewed many of them and yeah, so it was sad to see all that. I'm not massively surprised having sort of worked adjacent to charity a lot when I was in Ireland and the UK. I had clients who were charities when I worked as a web developer in the UK as well. And this wasn't massively surprising. It happens in a lot of this type of stuff. It happens in schools a lot as well.

with organizations that are, you know, they're not entirely profit driven. You just run into these weird power dynamics. So, yeah. Sorry to rant, but yeah, it was, you know, we'll put the links into the IGN article. to the statement from Mark in the Medium post. And did you say there was something else? There was another? Yeah, AbleGamers, whoever, made a post on LinkedIn just clarifying some stuff. Talking about it. Sucks to see all that. Hopefully the people who spoke up feel like it'll...

you know, mean better, more, you know, change that was required. Absolutely. And hopefully Amers can continue to do the work that's out there. That matters to so many folks. It's time to go into the spoiler zone, folks. if that's all right. Outer Wilds. First of all, fucking go play Adderwaz. What are you doing? quit your job stop mining your chick heads like Stop taking those medicines you need. Just go play Outer Walls. It's the best thing ever. Then go play. Go watch the documentary.

If you have played Outer Wilds and you haven't played Echoes of the Eye, the same thing applies. You need to play Echoes of the Eye. There will be, because Jesse is a legend, there will be time codes for this stuff. on YouTube and on the descriptor on the podcast app. I'm guessing probably 10 minutes, 15 minutes maybe ahead of time on this one. But I am fascinated to hear. Jeremy's thoughts on this. Before we do it who here has played Echoes of the Eye between the rest of you guys?

uh yeah i also played it yeah we did a podcast i have not completed it i just want to disclaim that i have played probably i mean it's it's hard to say because they kind of it's non-linear in some sense and also because i have no indicator of when it ends but like

I would say I'm probably about halfway. Okay, okay. So I can, when we start the spoiler zone, I can sort of describe where I'm at, and then we can, you know what I mean, work backwards from there in the discussion. Frank, you've not played it? No, yeah, I've just played the base game, but not-

And do you not want to, or are you... I just never got around to. Do you want to do it? Do you want to bounce out for 20 minutes? I want to know. Now, like, this will convince me to play it. I'm interested. It probably will, because I could not...

spoil the narrative aspect of it for you. So I think all I'm going to do is like a few reveals i will hint at why they're cool without necessarily because like i'm not gonna be like all right if you go left when you go here you gotta go left and like it's not gonna be like that so i think you could still play it All right, Jeremy, take it away, buddy. How have you been enjoying Echoes of the Eye?

It's so good. It's really, really good. I, you know, famously a DLC hater. Even Elden Ring, one of my favorite games of all time, I played the DLC, and I was like, I gotta, I gotta... I don't know if I needed to play that. I kind of wish I didn't play it, but I'm glad I did on some level. This is the opposite. This is just more fucking Outer Wilds. They did it. It's amazing.

And it's very funny because when we filmed the documentary at Mobius, they had on the whiteboard the design for one specific thing. Danny, do you remember what was on the whiteboard? I actually don't. It was the... Okay, so... In the new area for the DLC, there's a huge wooden dam. And about halfway through the loop, the dam breaks and the world floods. It was a design for the giant dam breaking and flooding the world. It was like a sketch out of the dam. Is it in our B-roll?

No, because we only, I think it was like, we filmed two days there, right? Was it one day? I think I was... One, maybe. Okay. I think it was the end of the day we filmed there. We were chilling in a meeting room and it was on the whiteboard, but I had not noticed it prior. So I feel like it was maybe something that they had sketched up that day. Oh, that's funny.

but I remember seeing it and being like I have no idea what that's about but anyway so Echoes of the Eye is a DLC that in proper Outer Wilds fashion is just like hidden in the world, embedded into the base game's world in a way where it has plausible deniability that it was there the entire time, which is mind-shreddingly brilliant. The way you find it is sort of that there's like a new exhibit at the museum and they're like, oh, it's like the first photos of this solar system that we got here.

And in one of the photos from a very particular angle from this deep space satellite, They're just like, that's impossible, and they don't really explain it beyond that. But if you count the planets that are in the photograph, there's a planet there that is not accounted for, because you can count all the planets, and then there's one passing in front of the sun, like eclipsing.

And so you go out to this deep space satellite, you wait for the requisite angle to happen, and all of a sudden this thing passes in front of the sun and is not one of the planets that you have on your map that, I mean...

Which is, it's such a remarkable feeling playing a game for, you know, 20-ish hours and being like, I know every, you know, I know this solar system like the back of my hand. And then it's like, what if hiding in plain sight was this like... huge body that you just never noticed it's like the magic which is kind of what a lot of Outer Wilds was first time around.

was being in space and seeing like learning like which portals went where and what you know thing was hidden in this thing you know like like in the bramble and all that sort of stuff So it fits really well, but like you said... has that plausible deniability makes it feel even more special. It doesn't feel like...

Oh, like you said, when you come out of the fucking cave in Oblivion, right? And you're like, oh, I got a letter from my cousin in Morrowind about this thing. Did you hear about this? Or your radio in fucking Fallout 3 with DLC. Yeah, I think that's the thing that's so special about the puzzle-slash-mystery design that they do in Outer Wilds and in the DLC as well, is that it feels like...

It is very organic. You are discovering it and you are internalizing the knowledge. And when you go back to your ship, there is like the mind map where it lays out things for you. So if you ever get lost, there is a way to get yourself back on track. but it doesn't feel like you find the thing and then it's like quest complete and you get like the little World of Warcraft level up noise. It just feels like you're, yeah, you don't get the ding. You're just organically discovering information.

fueled by your own curiosity and that's like that to me is like peak game design because I think that all of those things are like artifice to get you back on track. I think that it is very difficult to design a game that gets you from A to B. in the right way and to the right place.

without giving you those training wheels or those rails or those bumpers. But they just do it time after time. And the more remarkable thing in my mind is that they consistently pull this sleight-of-hand magic trick where the secrets are right in front of you. like the card was in your back pocket the whole time and it's like you know what I mean like it's fucking it's mind blowing and they do it time after like

I feel like I'm getting flexed on by David Blaine. Do you always have this handkerchief in your back pocket? I don't know. Why does it have my mother's maiden name written on it? How'd you do that, David Blaine?

So what did you think when you entered the spaceship and then you saw... yeah so you go into a so you as you well first of all as you see this thing pass in front of the sun and then you draw you beeline straight at it and by the time you get to it it's past past the sun and you can't target it so then i couldn't find it so it's like how the fuck do i get to this The trick is that you can only see it when it is between you and the sun.

So you have to sort of like circumnavigate as you approach it to approach it with the sun behind it so you can see where it is. Once you've been there, you can set it on your targeting computer and fly straight to it. But that first time was like, I was like, oh my God. So you approach it and it's sort of like, it sucks you into like an instance zone, but in a way that feels very seamless.

and you approach this sort of like docking bay. And the whole base game, you're exploring like the ruins of the Nomai and stuff. So I was like, oh, is this like a hidden Nomai ship?

But, uh, as you approach the landing bay, you see a bunch of technology and ships that are not know my technology. They're like a totally different aesthetic and like lineage of technology. So that's like the first hint that this is like, and it's, it's like vaguely kind of scary too. It's kind of, It's like HR gear is how I would describe the tech in that.

Um, not, like, with the weird, like, veins and penises and shit, just very, like, dark and metal-y and scary. Um, but then you emerge into this world, you go into an airlock that's, like, light-activated and it opens, and you're in, like... like a halo ring world that is also like a national park. That's a great way up front of you. It is this beautiful whitewater rafting...

Kangen that wraps around a ring world. And so as you look up, you see directly above you is the polar opposite side of the map. And you're circumnavigating the inside of this ring world, this massive ring world. It's like what I wanted Halo to be. Yeah, I mean, when you saw that ring world, you're like, wow, it's going to be amazing to explore that world and look up and see the other side and da-da-da-da-da. And in this one, you're like...

That's literally it. I remember the reveal because you're in a dark room and you press a button and it just drops you into the river. And you're like, what the fuck? First of all, why the fuck am I in a river? I mean, like a spaceship. And then I think... I think there's like immediately one of the things, because you're in this old boat, right? It's like a thing you can nudge it left or right with your controls. But then every once in a while there are these docks.

And so the intro to that, I think we covered this on the podcast because we do have an Echoes of the Eye podcast, as Jesse was saying, with the developers where we interviewed them about it. It's on the feed. It's from about four years ago, I think. you get to one of those docks and it picks up your boat and then it forces you to like look off.

And then you're like, oh, and you sit like it's that whole 20 seconds is so well designed because it's like, yo, motherfucker, you're in the water and you're like, what the fuck? I'm in a boat in the water. This isn't in this game. And then you're like, oh, I'm also in Halo. And also, like you said, it's like this like weird. beautiful Californian redwoods.

like aesthetic to the whole thing you know yeah yeah it's again it's just the way that they direct your attention uh so like seamlessly it's not like the yellow paint approach where it's like hey i know we're being kind of on the nose about it but like look over here because it's important it's very organically because like i i saw the ring world and i like looked up you know 45 degrees and was like that's crazy but then there was a moment later on

where I just looked straight up and I saw an area that I hadn't been able to get to yet. and that's how i discovered like that's how i saw for the puzzles was just looking straight up and was like wait a minute there's like another area over in that area um And so it's just like, yeah, just constant, like things are pulling your attention upward as if to say like, it may be important for you to not just like.

gaze in in awe at this place but also to like explore it sort of uh like laterally to be like on the opposite side looking on the opposite side um But yeah, so there's like this river canyon, and there's these sort of like... four discrete little village areas that are scattered throughout it.

And you're just kind of like going and exploring and there's like a new alien race and you cannot read their language, which I think is a really nice touch for, you know, like the Nomai were like aliens 200,000 years ago, but you can translate their language. So it feels like a little more, it's still like.

spooky you know and like feels cool and alien but like coming into this place and seeing new ships that you've never seen and like feeling like you're in the thick of the mystery again and then you pull out your translator and it's like unknown language like it feels

distinctly more alien than the Nomai. There's definitely more of a horror vibe to this one, because there's a lot of, like, you have a tool that's like a lantern that helps you. It also, like, there's... isn't there like you can zoom to a different spot as well using it but you're walking around a lot of dark places that's the part i just got to basically okay um yeah so this will be sort of the the deepest like spoiler in terms of like the story is that up

You're finding these lanterns, and you kind of don't know what to do with them. They call it an artifact, but it's like a focusing lantern. It has an opening mechanism. And you eventually, like, unravel enough of the secret to realize that there are these, like, sort of church buildings throughout the land. And they have this, like, I don't know, what do you call it, triptych? But there's five of them. Like a five-piece, you know, like...

Eisenheim altar fucking art piece and then you find all these sort of little hints and eventually you realize that the beings in this world had a ritual where they would pull out the lanterns from one of them and it would recess back into the wall and reveal a hidden compartment. So you're like, all right, well, let me go try that. And you go.

and in the picture they're all marching down there with the lanterns too so you're like okay i'm finally gonna learn how to light the lantern and you go down there and there's a bunch of like dead fucking aliens down there holding lanterns

And so that's like the first sort of like horror moment is you're like, holy shit. Um, but still, you know, I hold up the lantern to them. I hold up their, all their lanterns are lit. However many years later I'm like doing everything I can, cannot get the lantern lit. So, uh,

eventually you find this laboratory that has the icon of the land room, but you cannot get into it no matter what you do. There's just a window you look in, door sealed, cannot get in. Eventually you find a hint that is like, it shows something exploding on a big wheel and I'm like alright this is clearly crucial information where have I seen a big wheel and this is like one of those moments where it's hidden in plain sight it is the

intro area where you first enter this new dlc zone there's like a big spinning wheel that the docking bay is but it's super super dark and the doggy bay is the only thing lit up so it's again it's it is slight of handing you it's saying like this is just decoration ignore like the man behind the fucking curtain and just go land there and you realize that the entry point, that this exploding thing is on the wheel in the intro area. It's just like...

a secret entrance you've been passing by this whole time. And it's like, it simultaneously makes you feel like a genius for solving it and a fool for missing it. And that's like, that's like the Outer Wilds experience in a nutshell.

so you emerge into it and finally you're in the lantern laboratory you've been trying to find this whole time and it teaches you the ritual to light the lantern which then you light it for the first time and it just teleports you to like a fucking different realm um a dark world that is a direct like mirror version of the ring world as if to suggest that this ring world was created as a sort of like simulacra like a facsimile of their like home world or whatever

And then sort of this is the point where I've gotten to and have explained no further is I got into the dark world, did a bunch of exploring. And then I saw, you know, after like six hours in this game, seeing nobody, I see someone carrying a lantern in the distance. And I was shitting bricks. Yes. Jesse, do you remember the first time you saw...

I think it would have been in a darker area. See, I'm so weary to say anything because I don't want to accidentally reveal anything. But yeah, there were a lot of moments. I think that's probably my favorite part of The Outer Wilds and the fact that the DLC works so well is like... You go into it and there's so many ways to discover different sets of information. Like sometimes it'll be explicit.

but also you could sort of infer things and then have it confirmed by that information or you can like stumble upon something and sort of draw your own conclusion and yeah it's it's just a big part of what i think makes that game so great in general and uh and yeah seeing Seeing the characters for the first time in that DLC was such a... It was a scary moment because it is a horror DLC to some extent, but also it was like...

That's the first time I think you walk through an area in that game in general and see it's alive still. Yeah, yeah. Like it's, you know, everything up to that point, the Nomai is sort of your... going through their remnants but here it's literally their bones and discovering everything that's left but here you're showing up in a place and it's like oh shit I'm

I'm here right now, and so are they, and I'm piecing together their world in the midst of it. That was really cool to see. It's like if you're in a haunted house at the start, it's scary, but after about four or five hours... you're like, oh, it's fine. I'm just walking around this empty house. And then you see someone. You know what I mean? It's like, it's so... I'm really excited for you, Jeremy, because honestly, you've seen some of the really interesting reveals.

kind of think what the thing i love about that dlc the most is that like the rest of it is just crazy like they're the The solutions that you have to pull off in this one are so smart. I would say crazier to be fair. Yeah, maybe. There's some marks where it's like... It's so well put together, yeah. yeah real like holy shit voila kind of moment

Sort of the last thing I did was, and this was like, this was one of the most mind-blowing. It happened by accident. And again, it's sort of like fucking a fool and a genius. There was, in this area, there's again the four discrete areas, and between them there are these tunnels that you go through. and it's sort of like a ghost arc, and then you emerge. It's like a fucking Pirates of the Caribbean Disney World ride.

and I had fucked up something in that loop, so I was like, oh, I'm just gonna, like, jump off because when the lantern goes out, you wake up in the normal world. So, in the dark, just coincidentally, I was, I was like going between the worlds and I was like, I'll just fucking like jump off and kill myself. And then I jumped off and it took damage and emerged into a new area.

And I was losing my fucking mind because I was like, the reason I lost my mind is because like, i i never in a million fucking years would have done that intentionally unless maybe somewhere i'll find a thing that like shows one of the aliens doing that and i'd be like oh that's how you do it but i just did it by fucking accident And I was like losing my fucking mind. Cause like, yeah.

That's great. Yeah. Jesse's eyes lit up the minute you started saying that. We were both like, there's eight different things you could have just said and they all would have been equally as cool so whatever if you think you just did something that

that was that fucked up that was like there's no way a video game would do that yeah you're gonna do that a couple more times you should listen to the part after this because we we definitely talked to him about that one in particular because it is something that's like a small percentage of people find that the way you did. And I think one of us was too. I wasn't. I think you might have. Did you? I don't think it was that. I think it was something else that I don't want to...

Yeah, I found that, the one Jeremy talked about, I stumbled upon that area through... Through the diving bell? Answer that. That's right. Yeah. The way I found a point of reference that I had seen from the outside.

through that area but I never it was like oh I gotta go do that at some point I'll do that later I gotta replay this thing it's so good it's so good man it's like I got really emotional with the paintings and of all the like stuff that happened to this crowd it's very cool fucking Whatever they are. I like how it's incorporated into the story also. Like the main...

Outer Wilds plot it's still like this isn't just some offshoot thing like Jeremy Stanley this is included in the story of the game and I think there is a different time back to yeah in the ending so you can complete the game after you've completed this part yeah in a run And then it gives you a different... Fascinating. Yeah, it's the whole story conceit of the base game and this that it's theoretically completable in 22 minutes or whatever, but it's this whole...

You know, it's like this knowledge-gated world puzzle. It's just like, the feeling of freedom that gives you is so... ambitious from a design perspective and I think that it's like it's not just this dry like academic like oh wow that's they really pulled it off that's so cool and I admire that the feeling it gives you as a player is really like something special it is like

Yeah, I don't know. It's like being... let off the leash that much in a video game it feels like you have this sort of like authorial role in the world where hypothetically you could just go do anything you could solve it instantly you could beat the game instantly but it's like you you know i mean this is what everyone says without our wiles but you as the player are you as a human being are like

you're not like earning points you're not like completing quests you're just like learning the rules of the world that have always been there in front of you yeah it's a real it's like growing up if I knew then what I know now kind of thing this little... How do you punch that down into four hours? Exactly, yeah. We haven't touched upon this yet. I'm guessing you've seen this because it's so central, but there is a timed event in that.

rim ring world the flood thing yeah yeah what did you think the first time you saw that the first time i saw that i was like because i saw the wave come one time but the first time i saw The instant the thing you saw on the whiteboard happened in real life, I was like, no fucking way. Yeah, it's crazy. The first time it happened, I heard a really loud noise.

and I was like oh fucking what the fuck is that because like that's the thing everyone said about this DLC is they're like oh man it's like a horror DLC so I kept kind of like expecting the other foot to fall And all of a sudden, I hear this loud fucking crack noise. And I was like, this is it. The monster's coming. And then I was just like, all right, I guess nothing happened. I guess I don't know what that was. Maybe I'll figure it out later.

And then all of a sudden I hear like rushing water and the building of it just like instantly floods. It's like, what the fuck is happening? So I kind of didn't even know what happened until I went outside for the first time and saw the world was flooded and there was debris everywhere. And I was like, I guess like... Something fucking happened. And then eventually, you know, circumnavigate the whole world and found... The first time I saw the dam, it was already broken because I got there late.

So I kind of didn't even like, cause you start right next to it, but I didn't really like look back at it and register that it was a dam. I just thought it was like a wall. Um, but yeah, I mean, again, like outer wilds does this amazing, another, another one of its magic tricks is having, um,

time-gated, world-transforming events like that happen. So it is endlessly impressive to me how many like the ash twin doing like the fucking sand thing the like um i got i forgot all the original planets names but the uh the one that falls apart is that dark bramble um

No, the one, yeah, the one that falls apart. I forgot what, yeah, I forgot the name of it. Whatever they are, yeah. But just having these, like, world-transforming events that happen over time is, like, coming up with that many of them that are that interesting is so cool. Man. Hourglass, Timberhearth, Brittle Hollow. Brittle Hollow. Giant Steve. The Adderlock. Man. Yeah, it's a good game. Just make another one.

Yeah, what the fuck are they working on? They must be working on something, right? Maybe? They have to be regardless. How do you pull this off again? How do you do this shit? Just make more of these. They're fucking so good. Like, no one else can... too. There's tons of games, not like The Outer Wilds exactly, but this is definitely a trend for puzzle games now of making this sort of

structured, memory-focused thing, you know, the Metroid-brainia name. Whether or not that sticks are as good is up to you. But it is this design ethos of, like, creating something where the player is learning the experience rather than waiting for the upgrade or finding the key. It's like, no, this is a world with rules and structures and you are a stranger here. You need to learn how to be here before you can advance. If you like that structure, leap year.

on steam platformer version of that sort of thing it is like If you wanted to show someone what it was like to play Outer Wilds without... forcing them to play a game that may or may not make them throw up just give them that and it will like completely explain what makes it so cool it is such such a good game of like learning the rules of its world i love that stuff so much Hell yeah.

bunch of great games this week frank did you want an opportunity to talk about one of these ones and i played a bunch of stuff If you could pick one of these, maybe, which one would it be? Robot Alchemic Drive, a.k.a. Rad. That was what you were going to say. Oh, my God.

Some rad on PS2. Oh, my God. Has anyone heard of this game? I'm looking and seeing the box. I remember the box. Oh, my God. I've never played it. Okay, I feel like this is now going to... This is, like, the next, like... i don't know like deadly premonition i don't know this is like the next big cult game so like um another friend on twitch linked to the paps uh

They've been streaming this game. They're a great streamer. They're incredible. My friend Dr. Ryan was watching his stream and then came and was like, Frank, you have to play this game. Check this out. I looked it up. So Robot Alchemic Drive is a 2002 game.

It was published in America and the reason it's so novel is it has like the worst slash best anime voice acting ever. The premise of this game is it's very much inspired by like Evangelion or any mech anime. It's a world where like kaiju exists and... uh there's like a secret society that have robots ready to defend the earth at any given time but what makes this game unique is you're not piloting the mech

You're controlling like the kid controlling the mech. So this like scientist who has a very thick suspicious German accent. He gives you a controller and he's like, use the L3 button to move the left arm and use the R3 button to move the right arm. You try it. And so it's like, you are a kid, and you are... Is he Russian or German? It's like German. Every accent in this game is weird.

And so you're a kid, and you're looking up at this giant robot, and you have to pilot it, like, one leg at a time, and it's almost like... co-op but with robots or it's like ea's fight night like those boxing games where the left analog stick is your left arm the right is it's your your boxing kaiju in mech from the perspective of a kid but like if the robot falls back and like hits the building you're on it explodes and you fall down and you have to like

switch back you have to like constantly switch between like the kid so you can get away from the fight so you can see the fight going on and then control the robot it is like the most confused the most like deranged way of playing a game. It's not the robot, you're the kid.

but you have to be able to see the robot so sometimes buildings are obstructing you but you're equipped with like an anti you can like hover around and jump on a building you can even jump on the robot but what makes the game is so funny is like So is it tight controls? Yeah, it's kind of, yeah. It's very goofy, but also what makes the game great is, like,

It has, like, a very, like, anime plot. Like, it's, like, episode one, episode two, episode three. And so, like, there's three different characters. I picked a girl, and you and your friend are going out, and, like, you're gonna go shopping. So you go to the train station, and then a giant kaiju shows up. And, like, the Voice Act, and there's even, like, breaking news reports. Like, it's, like, BNN, I think Broadcast News Network, whatever.

But the voice acting is so, like, flat and bad. It's like, oh, no. A giant robot has appeared in Rome. Why would this happen? Like, that's how everything is delivered. And so it's like, it's really great, bad voice acting. And then like a really, I don't know, just confusing way of piloting the game. It's just very sweet, and it's the same way I love, like, Deadly Premonition or even, like, Disaster Report. All these weird, like, almost, yeah, very Lynchian, like, it's, like, like...

Everything is so off about this game. That's what makes it so enchanting and magical. And so I want to keep playing it. Yeah, Robot Alchemic Drive. It is so bizarre. It's a game that should get a remaster. It's a game that deserves its flowers. It is so... weird and beautiful and I'm very obsessed with playing more of it. I don't know, it's really good and really weird, but yeah, I like that.

It's a mech game where you're not the mech, you're the kid controlling the mech, and you have to, like, navigate and jump around the city so you can see your mech to fight. And it's, like, off-brand Godzilla's off-brand Gigan. It's so cool. 2002. I feel like it's just getting discovered now. 2002. Published by Enix and developed by the folks at Sandlot who are predominantly known for, do you know, Frank?

no what oh did they no what oh okay that makes sense that makes sense oh okay it's very same tone same tone yeah yeah same scale maybe to a certain extent humans big enemies, that type of stuff. That's crazy. I have only seen the box of this just because it's called Rad. It popped up every once in a while. Known as Gigantic Drive in Japan.

I did not know that. Cool. Thanks for telling us about the wonderful world of Rad. We'll have to figure out some sort of format to have a look at old games on the new channel. I think we... Frank's Hall of Fame or some nonsense like that. Thanks for telling us about that one. That was all the games we had this week. We had the Precinct deliver at all costs.

Robot Alchemic Drive, Formless Star, The Outer Wilds, Echoes of the iDLC, Rift Riff, and the demo of To a T. I'll be talking about next week once it's out. Okay, that's all the games. We have an email, it looks like, here, a couple? Yeah, we have several emails and messages. There's two ways to send us questions for the show. One is podcast. noclip.video or in our patreon exclusive discord in the podcast chat channel you can throw in a question

Our first question comes from Mark L. In our Discord they wrote, What is your completely unearned, self-defined, arrogant skill in a game? Mine is, I have no doubt I could beat you at Uncle Launcher or Uncle Bean on Bishy Bashy Special on the PS1. No question.

There you go. Any Bishy Boshy players here? Never heard of that one. I've played it like a few. I feel like I think I've played it in the arcade, but it's one of those games kind of like, I don't know, like Point Blank or WarioWare where it's an arcade machine with like three buttons. room for two players and it's just like mini games like 30 second mini games and I think one of them is like I think there's a lot of like extreme tapping and things like that but I can't I don't know

Oh, I want to play as Uncle Bean, I'll tell you that much. Yeah, extreme topping the bean, you know what I mean? Oh, whoa, hey now, wrong game. Bishibashi the bean, baby. Oh, man. Let's get it done. Mine is probably sensible soccer. I'm trained as a young... a karate child. You know, I was taught in the arts of sensible soccer from a young age. I went to the sensible soccer, the launch of the book about it.

John Hare was there, the creator of Sensible Soccer, and I fucking trounced him. I felt kind of bad about it. I had to hold off. So yeah, I don't know. There's definitely some better SWAS players out there, but I'm pretty... Does this have to be, because this unearned, self-defined arrogance skill makes me think it's like, I'm pretty good at neon white. I had pretty high scores on the leaderboard. I could call for that. But that sounds like not what we're looking for here.

yeah this is like what you think you're good at more i think so like i'm the best villager player in super smash bros don't at me yeah I think I'm better at Quake 3 than I actually am. I think I'm fucking awesome at Quake 3 and then we go to QuakeCon and we play Quake 3 and I'm like... Okay. I was these shirtless sickos at 18. I think mine would be, in my mind, I am the best person who has ever lived at light gun games in the arcade. Nice.

I don't think I actually am, but in my mind, I could like player one, player two, hold both guns and just clear house of the dead without dying once. You're doing, like, no scope on SilentScope. Yeah, I'm, like, fucking ordering a pizza while I'm, like, shooting no luck. Just smoking Terminator, just, like... Yeah. Double pepperoni? Yeah, I'm just fucking being a boss without luck.

Yeah, exactly. Is Frank's Tony Hawk? Mine's like legit. It's like, oh yeah, I know I'm very good at Tony Hawk. That's like the only competitive game where I'm like, oh no, I'm good at that. The other lane of it is the unearned self-define. I'm trying to think. I don't know how to quantify this, but in the days of Xbox Live and Call of Duty lobbies, the things that we would do is like...

I don't know, I guess it's like improv, but I would be so good at just like, hey guys, has anyone seen Breaking Bad on AMC? It's the brand new show. Hey, yo, shut up. Hey, no, you told me to shut up. You gotta make sure you don't say that to Walter White.

this was like when season one was just starting so like we went my friends and i would just go in the lobby people are doing whatever and like we'll still like every time you're just talking bullshit so your arrogant gamer skill is improv yeah I guess so I think so like it's the opposite of like it's not like trash talking it's like since it's like

i don't know it's like by the end they like you yeah yeah and then they'll send friend requests but it's like i'm i'm just doing it to like be annoying i think that's what because like my teenage years was like i was like the best at griefing and world of warcraft that's like that's not a it's horrible but like that was the thing we had fun to but being cheeky in call of duty lobby

That's pretty good. That's great. Another email. Different tone. Laith wrote in. I'm a recent patron and wondered if you had any specific games that you associate with or help you with grief. Back in 2013, my grandfather passed away, and after taking a break from video games, I found myself wanting to play through an entire game in one sitting. I heard good things about Journey, and that was relatively short, which was perfect for me.

Playing through Journey at that specific time in my life was one of the most cathartic and meaningful experiences I ever had. The art direction, music, multiplayer, simplicity, and story all meshed together to encourage me to meaningfully reflect on my loss, something I really needed to do at the time but couldn't.

For me, Journey is a game that I very personally associate with the grieving process. It's a game that I've revisited several times since 2013 whenever I've needed to and have recommended to friends and family in similar situations. Are there any games or entertainment media that helped you with it? Well, I probably can't chip in on this one too much because I have not had any significant familial death.

and stuff and I had a lot of friends of mine died when I was a teenager but I don't think games helped me with much of that stuff I did want to say that a journey to me is a game and death like that's that's that's i remember yeah right i remember especially yeah that ending is very sort of on the nose when when when they said

late the emailer said that that was the game I was like oof that is a real hard one to play right after it is I bet it was hard to play for me and I had nothing like that going on in my life so fair play I bet that was a lot Yeah.

Sorry, go ahead, Frank. No, yeah, I guess for my, like, very recent experience was, like, yeah, like, I tried a bunch of stuff, like, when my dad passed. It was so stressful. And, like, the biggest thing that really helped was, like, Twitch streaming. I would just be on, friends would come in. We'd watch, like, ninja movies, Godzilla movies, like, stuff that...

so outside like nonsense i needed nonsense but then the thing that actually like i sunk into randomly was fallout 4 just in the sense of like that was a game i never played it's a game i know was a time sink i was so numb that like let's just start playing this and then like every night would play i was so sad but it was like okay i'm like collect loot shoot robots what like was fun but then the extra like

nugget and maybe the subconscious thing was like that game took place in boston where my dad was from and like you would see like um i mean we just mentioned nathaniel hall but what's it like the liberty steps what's it called jeremy like the trail

like the freedom trail freedom trail like there would be like a mission where i follow the freedom trail it's like oh my god i remember my dad taking me at like six years old on these exact steps or whatever and it was like oh so it was this weird way of like I don't know, it was like, okay, my dad, like, it was like the thing that started to crack, of like, oh yeah, Boston, oh yeah, you know, happy memories, and then...

Uh, and then, like, I'm back to it again, but, like, Persona 3, another one of these, like, long games, but it's like, oh, no, I can, let me just sit here and the music, the grind. Just long games that I could grind, but were also pleasurable to play. But yeah, not from like a thematic thing, but it was just like, it was the game that like caught, the games that caught me and kind of like cradled me as a kind. But those are the chat.

I played Final Fantasy VII when I was very, very young, and it was one of my favorite games of all time. And then one of my best friends passed away when I was young, but like... a few years later that I played Final Fantasy 7 when I was probably like 8 years old and this happened when I was like I think I was 12 and he was 13. And I revisited Final Fantasy VII, a game that famously is about losing someone and then unexpectedly and then continuing to sort of like...

fight the good fight in the wake of an unexpected loss that leaves a real and lasting impression on these characters. And I think it sort of defined... what I it helped me like

project unexplored feel because when you're young it's like very tough to talk about that stuff you don't really have the language to articulate it so even like i have such a strong supporting family like support network of friends and family and stuff but it was like even if you have people to talk about those things with

It's hard to be like, I'm feeling these big feelings, and I don't even know how to explain them or describe them at that age. And so having video games as sort of like a... non linguistic, non-verbal outlet for that. To see it reflected back at me of other people dealing with the loss of a friend and companion was very powerful for me. Especially because that game was so formative for me.

as a kid, at such a young age, that it felt like losing a really good friend and having, in the form of a video game, another friend to reflect that experience back to me. Damn. Oh, I'm sorry. I think I talked about it before. What Remains of Edith Finch game for me. That really... Yeah, it was like a good reflection of a lot of struggles I had in my life because I lost my father when I was really young. I didn't know him. So learning about that part of his life was...

Yeah, something hard. And that game sort of is an exploration of that, of like learning about these people who were important in your life that you may not have known anything about and sort of parsing who they were from... small windows into their lives, whether it's their room or their stuff or a story about them, whether or not it's true, you learn something about them and the family that surrounds them. Yeah. Yeah. good question very good question

And then our next question, Rinbutt Online wrote in the YouTube comments, favorite video game dog? Hard swing. Perfect. What the fucking question? Yeah. Well done, Frank. Good placement on that one. You know what my favorite video game dog is? In the Call of Duty Ghosts behind the scene trailer, there's a moment where the dog...

Its mouth quickly opens. It's like one second. That's the best video game, dog, is when that moment happens. Of all of them. Does it bite? No, it's just so out of place and funny. It's like, I think, whenever I think of video game, dog, I think of that particular moment. That game sucks. and I'm sure the dogs in it aren't very good, I can't remember, but man, that one moment, that's gaming to me, and that's gaming dogs to me.

I'm playing with a knife this whole podcast. Sorry. It's merch for Skater XL. They sent me a knife. Yeah, they sent me a knife. Like years ago. there you go it works they got a shout out in the thing um what's a good i like them i like the dogs from dogs with a z

Oh. Remember that shit? Dogs with a Z. Yeah, baby. Show your rage, motherfucker. Do you have a pet? How about a pet that lives next to your recycling bin and shits all over my computer? Oh, this was like a mobile game and a PC game. It was a fucking... desktop games. There's also a DS and Game Boy version. Oh, yeah. It was selling so well. Dogs, what a Z was. Cats, what a Z was. Pets.

Guess what the last letter in that was? Was it a Z? It sure was. Yes. Z or a Z, whatever you want. Sorry, I live in a fake country. Yeah, they made a sequel called Pets Dogs 2. Yeah. Why? Who cares? Naming conventions are out the window and you're using Zed's instead of S's. True. There's also a game called Babies with a Z. Oh, great. It's on the Pets 3 game engine. That's too far. How do they spell it? Is it B-A-B-Y-Z?

It's B-A-B-Y-Z. Oh my god. That's disgusting. That's actually pronounced Babiz. Is there an apostrophe at the end of the S? No. You think they're fucking around with apostrophes, bro? Settle down. There's a Z in here. They pluralize it. Oh, dude, they made Bratz super babies also. Bratz has a Z. Yes, it does. That makes no sense. Oh, you're right.

My favorite video game dog is in Harvest Moon 64. You have a dog, and when I was a child, I carried it to one of the neighbors' house to show them how cute my dog was. And as I put the dog down, it clipped into the corner of a barn and got stuck there forever. So every day I would have to go visit my dog outside. And when it was raining, it would be sad out in the rain and I just couldn't get it out.

And then like a month later, I somehow managed to get it out. I un-glitched the dog and it was the most relief I've ever felt in my life. Oh, that's amazing. You ever think about how many Nintendogs are just waiting for their owners to come back? Oh, God. I try not to. At least the Tamagotchis died. They deserve it, those little freaks. Death's sweet release. Those fucking Nden dogs are going to be... Those DS batteries do eventually die, so I wonder if that's when they...

It's okay, the data's on the cartridge. Oh, it is. It'll last forever. One of our video games dogs we got. There's K.K. Slider from Animal Crossing. That is a good dog. He also plays guitar, and he talks funny. Is Parappa a dog? Yeah, Parappa. Okay. Ooh, the dog from Silent Hill 2, the funny ending you can get. Oh, that's a good one. That's a good one. Yeah. Oh, Shiba, you know. How about a Tokyo Jungle? The Pomeranian. Yeah, that's Pomeranian gaming. Yes. Dog meat. I was more of a...

I prefer Rex. Do you remember Rex in Fallout 3 or New Vegas? It was the one with the brain. It had like a glass brain. Was it a robot with a brain? Maybe. Yeah, that's the one that you get from... No, isn't that New Vegas? I think it is New Vegas. Yeah, because you get that from Elvis. Not Elvis, whatever his name is. Yeah. I already called The Watch.

God, the Freda Steyer company. What are they called? The fucking... Somebody like up the Elvis clan. Vegas, Elvis, clan. The kings. Actually, the best dog in gaming is 3Dog. Oh, that's a good one. That's dog enough. The dog in Toby Fox's game, that's like his avatar. In Deltarune, there's a long hallway you can go down that promises something cool. And if you go down it...

that little dog comes down in a toy car and hits you a thousand times and does like a billion damage. And then you wake up in a dumpster. Did they ever make a dog, the bounty hunter video game? Oh, I bet if they didn't, we could probably buy the rights. Yeah, Jeremy. Disney Prison is not the fucking arc.

He got like bountied and like somebody caught him in Mexico for some shit. That's so ironic. I mean, that's the fucking video game right there. You hunt people and then you go on the run and get hunted. Yeah, you get hunted. The hunter becomes the hunted. i don't know what he did so if he did anything particularly heinous and i'm making light of it i assume it was like an excessive force thing but maybe he like troll assault uh yep all right and i'm gonna get out of here okay Maybe.

Alright, I think that's all the dogs we got, Frank. Alright, cool. And then last... That's a good list. Please, in the comments, let us know your favorite video game dogs. Who did we forget? Chop from GTA 5. True. One of the best missions in the whole game. Yeah, that was pretty good. And then he's gone, basically, for the rest of the game. Matt wrote in and said, hey guys, my four-year-old has started to show an interest in video games.

They play on this Steam Deck, and they've had a lot of fun playing games with their kids. They both share the controls, and they started with hidden object games, which using Steam Deck touchscreen were great, but there's not a huge amount of games like that they can find on Steam. But if anyone's interested, Under Leaves was the best. Okay, Under Leaves.

I was racking my brain trying to find the next game to play. It's best if it has no fail state, no complicated menus, no violence, and something that's a good game. That's when in episode 222, Jesse reminded me of Katamari Damacy. It's perfect, cool music, you can't die, funny characters, and with the simple controls, turn on my kid, can push one stick while I push the other. We're having a blast. My question is... What can we play next, considering the constraints?

My suggestion for this is the only game that my daughter has completed. is very similar to Katamari Damacy. It's Donut County. That's a good one. Because all you're doing is moving the whole. There's no fail state. And it's fairly linear, like it's logic. There's no way she could accidentally find an alternative strategy that will mess her up. It's very like you kind of get these ones in a row, and if it's not big enough, you get some of the small ones. So there's no like...

She's not going to learn the wrong lesson as well as not learning the lesson. And yeah, I just skipped through the story stuff with her. Although now she might read it because her reading is getting pretty good. But she's six. She doesn't play many video games. She sits with me and watches games every now and again. But I'm worried about raising a child who's...

sicko like me. Although, hey, look, be good for the family business or whatever. Yeah, I don't expose it to too many games. But yeah, I don't account... Get her on Noclip Crew. For now. Katamari, I'm going to try that with her. That's a good shout. I hadn't even thought about that. Hidden Folks, if your kid likes hidden object games, that's a really good one. Also made, I had no idea, I looked it up.

made by Adrian DeYoung, who made Rift Rift. What are the chances? We've gone in a circle. That's crazy. Yeah. But no, it's a really good one, Hidden Object. I think you could play it probably with the touchscreen as well because it's mostly just mouse controls. So that's really cool on the Steam Deck. Yeah, it's fun. It's a nice little, it's like Where's Waldo? But, you know, obviously.

You can't get the brand. That's a good one. Do you guys call it Waldo in Canada as well? Oh, what do you call it in Ireland, the UK? It's Wally. Oh. Where's Wally? How informal. You guys know him on a personal level. Yeah, you guys are friends. do. It's been a lot of books. I've found them a lot of times. Europa Universalis 4 is also a really good book. Yeah, I was just going to say Hearts of Iron. Eve Online. Yeah, yeah.

Postal 2, I think. Yeah, yeah. You can probably love the cat gun. Whatever is really violent and maybe uses a VR headset probably is the move. Yeah, that's a good pick, yeah. Yes, send in some. If anyone has any in their list and they've had like toddlers or young kids like that. playing some games. give us a heads up or stick them in the YouTube comments. Maybe something we could get back around to.

I was going to say, like, down the line, there's a lot of platforming, so it might be a little complicated, but, like, Little Kitty Big City is also kind of in that realm of, like, Katamari, but that could also be a game if you're playing and then they're watching. That's what I did with my kid, yeah. thematically it's really good but unfortunately it has the cardinal sin of the dual analog stick

thing, where if you have to control the camera and the character, it's like, yeah, yeah. Look, there are definitely six-year-olds and seven-year-olds out there that can do that shit, but I think you probably need to expose your kids to a level of video games I'm... personally uncomfortable with maybe to get them to that point. But it just shows you the same problem we have with games.

She got, you know, kids got to learn how to do this shit. They play some toppy games. My kid plays some games. She has like a PBS, like educational game and a Crayola educational game on a tablet. And she plays those. And that's obviously super intuitive. Touchscreen, you have to teach some shit, you know what I mean?

my fucking cats can play a game on the touchscreen. They make games with like bugs running across the cats play on. But obviously, do a lot of luck stick because they rub your belly and pat your head. game controlling. Great question. That's all. That's it. It's a podcast. Thanks for being here. Check out our quick look. of WWE. 2K, what do they name it?

I named it something stupid. WWE 2K25, the wrestling game of 2025. No, that's it. WWE 2K25, the wrestling game 2025 edition. Check it out now on Noclip Crew, myself and Frank Howley. Use all the latest superstars, including Frank Howley himself. The Technician, Wildcat Willie, King Lord Brian, Starlight Kid. Can we download Frank Howley?

That's right. Yeah, my friend PestTV, he's made so many characters. If you type in just big dogs, like one word, they come up. He just made, we've been watching the Godzilla movies, so he made Manila, which is the son of Godzilla. Wow. You can get that in there too. Sick. We made the city. Oh, yeah, yeah. We also went to the island. I remember we talked about the island, the PlayStation Home. Did you get some Nikes? I went to the Jordan store, yeah. The loading screens in the island.

It has not been optimized for hanging out in the island. But yeah, it was a good time. We had a good time fighting Violent J. It was a good time. Go check out that quick. We got some other quick looks coming up. You guys are going to do one on. Form a Star? Absolutely. We might have some other ones. Jesse's getting back in the editing videos about games you've not heard.

About like kind of like our steam next best stuff. We're gonna do our first of those out next week i'm so excited i think this is going to be a really good thing for for crew and in general i think if we have more opportunities to do sort of what we do here on the podcast or on the crewcast uh talking about cool new video games if we can like do that more often for more developers That's cool for me.

Big time. Thanks to everyone who's been reaching out. We have had loads of emails from people within the industry, from indie developers. There is a bunch to be done. There's going to be a new Discord for this thing that'll probably be public. have areas in it for Patreon folks whenever we do that stuff we're talking about.

partnerships and sponsors with various folks in the industry. So that's to come. We are going to have, I was working on last night, a sort of formal... page on a new website that people can use to submit their or other people's games for coverage just as a way to formalize that process to make it easier for people to pitch stuff and also make it easier for us to go through them because this is going to be...

a legitimate logistical problem that we're going to have. So setting it up where there is a place where everyone can get access to it and jump in. And if people have Steam pages, they can link them on the form. Or if they have codes they want to send, they can put them in the form. We're going to be doing all that sort of stuff as well. And yeah, and then hopefully over the next... few months it'll become apparent kind of what we're doing. A lot of the what we do comes down to

the launch trajectory of this, like how much sponsorship stuff we figure out, how much crowdfunding stuff comes in, all that sort of stuff. There will be different, you know. plans based on that, of course. But like we've been saying, all of this... All of this money is going to be going into production immediately. And one of the great things about our team here is that we're all video producers. So we are all people who...

not only can make our own things, but also make other stuff, make stuff for each other that some person puts together and another person edits or whatever. And also it means that we are in an amazing position to work. with the people in the industry who are friends of ours or ex-colleagues or developers or whatever it is.

We are a team of one-man bands, as it were, who are able to put this stuff together, which means that as long as we have There is no bottleneck here as long as we have the funds and the passion behind it and people telling us as well what they're interested in. We are in a fantastic place to be able to go out and actually get that shit made and done.

That's all we do. That's all we do here. Also, just on another level, for the past week I've been chipping away, or for the past couple of weeks I've been chipping away at this whole thing for... whatever Noclip Crew turns into, and Over the weekend, I was just daydreaming and getting my note clip ducks in a row because I've been editing a couple of things, finishing up some stuff Jeremy was working on.

working on the Disco Elysium edit and stuff like that. And I was looking ahead because we have like a bunch of projects the patrons know up until like basically September we're done for editing. We have three major. the documentaries on big games and then a series. And then Jeremy's also produced something as well that's going to go in between us. We have loads at the moment. And one of the things that came to mind was like,

Oh, this like also frees NoteClip up to kind of do core NoteClip stuff because we've been swimming around with NoteClip for the past couple of years and it's been great because we've learned lots of stuff and we've, you know, crew came out of that, the form of this podcast came out of that. But also I was kind of like, oh, you know, we can sort of focus no clip a bit now as well. We can like work on stuff that does feel very, you know, historical and preservationist and, you know, let's...

let's focus on some stuff that we've missed over the years because we've been playing around with the format or doing this and the other. So I'm also... I've been really excited the past three days, kind of thinking like, oh, cool, the stuff we have filmed right now, the slate is really strong. And then also just looking forward to the back half of this year and next year, like, oh, yeah, we can like...

Let's tackle the big ones and let's tackle some weird ones and, you know, just do something fun. So I'm excited. Proof will be in the pudding once we get some of this stuff out and keep your eyes and ears crossed. Go over to... For all right now, it's youtube.com slash at noclipcrew. That might change. Will change, hopefully, sooner rather than later. We just broached 50,000 subscribers over there as well, which is pretty cool considering it's been our sort of...

random side project we do on weekends and evenings or whatever over there. So that's been really cool to see. So we're going to push towards 100,000, get that fucking plaque. Stick that plaque up, baby. Get that big old plaque. Hey, Noclip might get the plaque soon for a million. Who knows? We're up to 870,000 over there, I think, at the moment. Damn.

Like a big necklace. Put it on a big chain on a Cuban link. Big clock. Yeah, put a spinner on it. Exactly. No clip crew! Beautiful. Love it. Thanks, Jesse. You can get away with it. I'm not going there. I should watch Flavor of Love. It's been a couple of years. No. Actually, you know what? I might put that on when I'm done Next Level Chef. That's a great call. Bad Girls Club. Have you watched Drewski's one?

Drewski has a TV show? No, it's like a YouTube show, but it's basically, it's Could Have Been Love, I think it's called. Oh. If you want, if you want. And it's basically him doing Could Have Been Records, but for... but for ladies. Oh my goodness. Wow. It's like a real, yeah, hour long experience. Reality TV.

thing yeah yeah is it just a bunch of commercials for steak gambling that's a joke i don't know who this guy is i just know that he's a very strong no a lot of like yeah let's wait a second i'll tell you about fucking Yeah. Creptower. Best friends with Drake, if that gives you any idea of how much advertising. Best friends may be a stretch.

I just don't know anything about the guy, so I don't want to fucking clown on him at a joke and have people be like, he's actually like a really good guy. He serves soup at the Salvation Army every weekend. How dare you say that? He's sending me photographs of him helping the elderly. Oh my lord. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. Go check that out next. Yeah. This is us just promoting.

Bye. Bye. could have been records going to release and going to sign hundreds of artists at this stage so surely there'll be some music coming out at some stage you better be careful we gotta get some sponsors on this thing man they might have all the money That's a good point, yeah. And if you're looking to bet on the next big sporting event, boy, am I got the service for you.

Yeah, no FanDuel happening. No betting stuff happening on. No Club Crew. Unfortunately, we can't get that John Boy Media money because we're not able to go in the world of maybe Counter-Strike skins. We can do some...

I can't remember this. No, no, no. Have any of you guys watched the Nakey Jakey one, by the way? I saw the first, like, second of it, and I was like, oh, this is a movie. I gotta fucking put this aside for later. Yeah, production baby. Yeah. He still got the fucking bouncy ball, but he's, like, shot it all nicely. Go check that out. Yeah, just listen to our podcast. We can tell you about other YouTube channels. It's good shit out there.

Thanks for hanging out. The video's coming out soon over on Noclip, and we'll have updates on the other channel as well, ongoing for the next couple of weeks. And quick looks. See you next time. you