What's good, internet? It is April 1st, 2025, but this is not an April Fool's joke. It's Side Story. a podcast about games and the stories we tell about them, presented by Friends at the Table and supported by our patrons, maybe you, at friendsofthetable.cash. I am joined today by Jack DeKeat and Janine Hawkins as we kick off this brand new show. How's it going? It's exciting. It is. Yeah. I think we've all been very excited about this. We've been planning this now for...
We've been, it's been a loose plan for six months, let's say, maybe a little longer than that. I think I said to both of you in the middle of our Palisade. finale era that i was like i really want to start talking about video games again i think motivating a video game podcast and then uh i well timed for for today is as the igf awards just uh were were announced last night uh i was an IGF juror last year, and I was like, damn.
I miss playing and thinking hard about video games. And so here we are, a new video game podcast for people who've never listened to us at all, ever. Welcome. For people who've listened to us on Friends of the Taste. Check it out. We're talking about video games right away, right in the front of us now instead of as a weird diversion. We will not stop doing weird diversions. There's a reason why this podcast is called Side Story. It's because we are fans of the diversion.
um and if you're if you happen to be someone who like listen to me at giant bomb or on the beast cast or at waypoint or guesting on remap or if you come from a more civilized age or shelved by genre welcome uh did you know i used to be
I mean, some of you obviously would, but I used to be a full-time video game critic and podcaster. And so I wanted to do it again. And I wanted to do it with some of my favorite people, the people I make friends at the table with. Again, friendsofthetable.cash. This is not going to have its... own special patreon we're not starting sidestory.patreon.net or whatever uh that's not how those URLs work um we're just doing the front of the table one you know I I will say outright that like
Friends of the Table has been the side project for my entire professional career going back to when I was in grad school. It's never gotten to be the thing I'm putting most of my attention onto. And it felt like if I was going to go back to talking about video games on. on the internet professionally, that I should give it a shot here, which is like,
my hometown, so to speak, with people who I think are brilliant and are smart and funny and talk and make video games well. And so I wanted to bring people from front of the table here, and I think it'll be a rotating cast to some degree. I want to make sure everybody on the front of the table can come talk about the stuff that we've been playing and thinking about and talking about. But today, we're kicking it off with Janine and Jack.
um for people who don't know y'all who've not heard your wonderful play in our actual play podcast friends at the table uh or who haven't happened to stumble onto something else that you've been on like jack you just did that fall in london actual play um What should people know about you?
I'm Jack. I am a writer and a composer. I work for Friends at the Table. I write all the music for the show, as well as the music that you will have heard opening side story. It's available at notquitereal.bandcamp.com. you can find me on blue sky at not quite real um i have done sort of like uh games criticism in the past as well as some games writing i've worked uh with uh fail better games on fallen london um some work back with crows crows crows years and years ago um
And then I had to immigrate to the United States and they said to me, you cannot do anything other than what you write in this document at the beginning of the year. And I said, oh, that makes freelancing very difficult. And they said, yes, it does. So I've recently been freed. freed from those awful restrictions and i'm getting back much like austin to you know thinking and talking about video games professionally which is really exciting yeah how about you janine
Uh, so I'm, uh, Janine Hawkins. I'm not really on, on a lot of social media anymore, but like, you know, in a, in a social pinch. Yeah. In a social pinch, I'm still bleating heart on X. and also on Blue Sky. I also, you know, did my time in press. Was a critic for a bit. Wrote reviews for some assorted sites. Always freelance because that was...
That was very much the period when the salaried positions were all becoming just freelance contract stuff, sadly, tragically, but also before guides had fully taken over. So I never had to do that. Thank God. Or before you were writing for, for instance, Screen Rant or one of the other places that recently, I think yesterday, there was a news article about how bad that freelance pay is, which is kind of the... Listen, it was pretty... bad I mean it was not
It was never good, but it has gotten, it has bottomed out. It has gotten so brutal as like part of a campaign of particular destruction, like on purpose. So, you know. Not great. Cool. Anyway, then I escaped. I patched together a hot air balloon out of slipcovers. And then crashed it directly into... And then I started writing for games instead of about games.
So I worked on Hitman 2 and 3. I worked on some unannounced stuff and some stuff that's still coming out. By unannounced stuff, I mean thing that's... I don't want to say it's dead because it's not like dead dead, but... i i don't it seems like it's not for the first team has been laid off phase but theoretically some people still are shopping stuff around maybe yeah yeah yeah ain't that the way yeah
working on other stuff that'll come out eventually yes yeah i think that that's that is uh part of the cycle that we live in uh i guess at this point uh shout outs also i guess The day that we are recording this is a couple of days after CWA announced an industry-wide union, which is...
a pretty big swing at trying to take this on in a different direction. There's been a lot of folks trying to build unions inside of their studios for the last decade or so, like a really concerted effort, I would say.
And now there is a, you know, on top of those efforts, there is now this industry-wide union via CWA. I'll put a... note in the episode notes i'll put a link in the episode notes to find out more about that it's not one of our big topics today otherwise i would have prepped for it and instead i'm just gonna say hey go read about this
I think probably worth saying up top, I don't want to get too deep in the weeds, but I do think it's fun to say that we tried out about a thousand different names for this podcast. Oh, yeah. And I want to give a special shout out to Janine. There was a period when the two of you were in my house and we had this conversation that was, we need to figure out what this thing is called. And over a few days, we sort of started...
batting the ball between us. And then we all went... We had one very doomed... You and I had a doomed drive. to two different grocery stores in search of the proper groceries for a board game night. And the whole time was just being like, is it this? Is it this? Is this the vibe? And then we came back fully in that conversation.
conversational mode uh that we were and that was it we were just in that mode then for the rest of that trip basically and then janine in the discord was taken by a fey mood yeah and by taken by a fey mood i mean persevered with a degree of effort and and like grit yeah to do maybe 500 name suggestions there was a point at the end when they just started getting really like loose and weird you know like when you zoom really
into like the quantum molecular structure of a thing and things start behaving differently. Once you sort of reached your deep limit, Janine, there were some really odd names in there. And then eventually you just said, I can't do this anymore. Remember, Janine, the thing that almost broke you? I don't. That's good evidence of how much it almost broke you. There was a point at which we wrapped back around to something we dismissed like four weeks earlier.
and we were like well what about this and you were like if we pick this after weeks of it was like you know it was like a thing i really liked at the time too and it had been it hadn't been like you know it's it's not it's not like a devastating takedown of things it's just like no that's not the right fit and then you move on but you did use the word fisticuffs
to describe what your reaction would be if we went with it because it was it was it was to begin with we were talking about one of our early thoughts was like oh well we have media club plus with people don't know the excellent uh media club plus also part of the front of the table
expanded universe. Nah, I don't like universe. Is network better than universe? No, network is also bad. Universe is also bad. We should do oeuvre, but we should say it like Alex Trebek, where he says oeuvre every time for some reason. The friends at the table oeuvre. has a podcast called Media Club Plus.
Jack, you are on the current season of that. You're talking about Hunter x Hunter right now, the incredible shounen anime. You're, in fact, at the height of that show right now. So people should go listen to Media Club Plus. And so we were like, well, is there like Game Club Plus, Game Sh-
show plus well we're not doing a game club we're not like playing a game a month or something and we're not doing a game it's a show about games but it is not a game show so we can't really every episode of a podcast one of us asks a family feud question that i mean you know sometimes you got to find the thing that makes it work hawkins come on down it's our price is right podcast um and then what animal might you find in your garbage can? Rat! Raccoon. See, this is now...
Well, this is a little preview for Perpetua because the game we just did is actually a very well-established thing over in Perpetua. People should go listen to that, which is out as this hits for sure. We're in Perpetua Prelude. We also do an actual play podcast where we play tabletop games. We are currently playing, I guess when this comes out, we'll probably be in the middle of wrapping up our prelude series to the upcoming Fabulous Ultima series we're going to do. Fabulous Ultima.
is kind of a JRPG-inspired tabletop RPG. So if that sounds interesting, you should go listen to that at friendsofthetable.net. In any case, we were like, what about Game Podcast Plus? And you were like, if we pick Plus after a month ago, me being like...
Like, it would be cool if we had Plus in the title again. The problem is that it might not be clear. It's that Media Club Plus has truly astonishing SEO. Right. And it's not like we were saying, well, we have to go for good SEO. But we wouldn't like bad SEO. That's right. Plus, it was interesting for a bit, and then we moved past it, and then it was very nearly fisticuffs time. But instead, we chose side story.
Yeah. And I'm really happy with this name. Me too. As is often the case of these things, the moment you decide on a name, it doesn't feel right. And then the longer you say it, the more and more right it feels. Yeah. And now we've been saying it for a couple of weeks. We then got into a whole second big thing.
which we'll talk about, I guess. Let's talk about it right now, where we basically redid the whole thing, except... me at my worst and and it's me and my worst is not that's not the right name me at my worst is that's not the game i want to play right now actually that's not the right fit for what i want to stream that's not i'll just get into these it's like the opposite of a
That's the Austin Walker fame mood, which is just like, I have a hundred things in front of me and they're all a little bit wrong. They're all a little bit wrong. Yeah. And I don't need to find the perfect one, but I do need to find the right one. And really the perfect one. It's either something I already played or watched or read and I don't want to actually replay it or rewatch it or whatever, or it simply doesn't exist. I'm imagining a thing that should exist that doesn't exist. Oh, well.
And the thing in this circumstance is a video game Let's Play, a game that's perfect for a Let's Play because... For $10 subscribers to our Patreon, friendsofthetable.cash, you will get access to an exclusive Let's Play of a video game. And we spent about a month.
Figuring out what game that was. Maybe not a month. Maybe it was like three weeks. No, it was like a couple weeks. Yeah. Yeah, well, it's one of those years. These weeks just keep getting longer. So for people who don't know, our Patreon has a bunch of stuff on it, including stuff that has nothing to do.
with tabletop actual play. So if that's not your thing, but you're like, I like these people. I like it when they talk about video games. I like it when they talk about anime. You can go to friendsofthetable.cash and for instance, go listen to the Media Club Plus crew listen and talk. about uh or talk about anime uh you've what have you covered at this point dragon ball z some jojo's bizarre adventure um yeah we're gonna do a bizarre non-canon hunter hunter movie that's true
I'm going to eventually make Keith J. Carberry watch Sailor Moon. Thank God. He needs it. I'm so excited. Yeah, we also have a thing called The Clapcast, which is a monthly kind of... You know, cutting room floor material podcast where we get distracted looking at yachts on the Internet and talking about them. Or I don't know. It was a recent.
Clapcast's conversation. I'm trying to remember what the most recent big one was. You made us do a Winnie the Pooh quiz. That's true. Children's reading comprehension Winnie the Pooh quiz. I did make you do that. That was different than the time I made you, Art and I made you try to guess every power set in DC Universe online without having ever played that game or really knowing too much about the DC Comics universe. We do do other things than quizzes. Prove it.
That was the time that Keith and Ali and I found that there are a bunch of places in the continental US called Peru and planned a road trip on maps between each of the various Perus. That sounds great.
It's a good time. Yeah. And there's also a newsletter that gives you the update on everything we have done in the last week that Janine puts together. That's very funny and good. And there is a bunch of other stuff there, too. We, in fact, do if you are a tabletop person, you know, we have a. campaign we're currently running realis which if you've heard me on next lander or if you've heard us on the main show um you know we we uh it's a game i made i made a game over the last year or two or four
It was four. It was four years of slow development on it. A tabletop game. And we have a currently running campaign of that on our Patreon. And then we also have, you know, we link, you know, when we've done. a stream, here's a VOD, or we announced that there's a stream coming up. And now for a $10 tier, the new added bonus is a, uh, a let's play. We are going to let's play the game outward, uh, which for people who don't know.
is jack how would you i would i would compare it to comparisons are tough because it's immediately going to put something in someone's brain right and they're gonna be like oh that's it that's the one thing it is It is a very odd, particular, very tactile fantasy RPG that is borrowing from things like...
It predates some of these games. That's right. It's not necessarily borrowing, but it's in line with. It's in conversation with Morrowind. It's in conversation with Death Stranding. It's in conversation with Kenshi. On the face of it, it is going to look a lot like an open world fantasy exploration game. It's going to look like Elden Ring, but with oblivion aesthetics.
Yeah, we're going to be schlepping gigantic backpacks around. There's a bit of pathologic in there as well. Pathologics like obscure architecture. And we're going to be dealing with weird factions, weird cities. It is going to be very odd. Here's the thing that I'll say about that game. I almost don't want to spoil it. So it's a fairly modern game. I think the Definitive Edition only came out a couple of years ago, which has all the DLC in it.
originally was 2018 or something like that. So it's a fairly recent game. We're not talking about, you know, make the Morrowind comparison in terms of style and vibes and, you know, you're in a strange place and you're learning all the factions and stuff. But, you know, there are things about it. that I do not want to spoil that I know about or that have happened to me. But I will simply say that the first time that I died in this game, which I died to like...
you know, a giant mantis shrimp or something. I was like, all right, time to load my game. And I did not load my game. Instead, my character woke up in a prison mine being run by a bunch of bandits. And all right, just keep playing the game from here. I thought you were going to say it was run by a bunch of shrimp. It was run by a bunch of mantis. I mean, listen, I've only been to one of the areas in the game. That'd be really cool.
Which is the other thing. We're actually going to start this Let's Play with a particular goal in mind. Because what if we hate it? There's always the chance that we're playing it. And it's just like, I've watched a lot of Let's Plays in my time. And one of the worst things that can happen is... People are playing a thing and they hate it and they feel obliged to keep doing it. And like, it's just not fun. It's not even funny bad. It's just like.
It's just not fun to watch. No one has the energy for it anymore. I don't expect that's going to happen with us. But just in case it does, I'm giving us a very particular goal, which is I want us to visit every major city in the game or do a little road trip through the game. and I don't think it's possible to like for two amateurs playing it because it's a co-op game it won't be we can't just speed run that I think we have to like
play the game to make that happen, you know? Yeah. So I'm excited to see how that treats us. Janine, you'll be there as our backseat guide, I think. So I'm very excited to start that up. The first episode of that should be available now. I think probably the first episode will be free. And then every couple of weeks, we'll put out a new one for patrons only.
Yeah, I'm so excited. And yeah, that's available right now. You can go and we haven't recorded it yet. God. No, I'm so excited. You want to make a prediction about something that's going to happen? Yeah. Death by Wolf. Death by Wolf is a great prediction. Death by Wolf is a really good prediction. That's the kind of prediction when you want to just win some money, but you don't care to win a lot of money because the odds aren't going to be pretty low. The odds are too good. Yeah.
I'm going to go in the opposite direction and go for a low odds thing and hope for a big payout. Mace that does weird magical damage. Interesting. I'm going to go for one...
That I have strong suspicions about. I bet one of our characters will get indigestion. Cool. Deal with that. You know? Speaking of... video games where you're like what do i even do here where am i going i i love how it feels but where am i going what am i doing and then later you're like ah well of course you simply do xyz i believe the three of us have all been playing soul frame
Yeah. The latest game. Oh, boy. Do I always get there? I always get the developer name. It's Digital Eclipse, or is that the other one? It's not. Fuck. It's Digital Extreme. I believe it is. Digital Eclipse does the ports, does the really great remastered ports, etc. Is that correct? Digital extremes, plural.
Plural. Plural. Apologies to Digital Extremes. Shout out to Digital Extremes for making Soul Frame, which I believe is currently in... What are they calling their... What are they calling their... Prelude. It's Prelude 8. Oh my god, we... We stole Prelude for Perpetua. No, no. It's a word that exists. Okay, okay, okay. But yeah, all three of us have been playing it. There is no NDA on the Prelude, which is sort of like an open alpha.
of the game i don't i don't think it's in beta yet uh no and they're kind of avoiding those terms so maybe i should avoid those terms to some degree it's so loosey-goosey what those things mean as soon as it's out of you know like we've all worked in games enough to know that like what you call an alpha internally and what you call an alpha externally is often pretty different um in that like oh there's textures oh there's uh lighting every you know that's that's yeah
So what it is, is for people who have no idea what Soulframe is, digital streams are the Warframe people, so you might know them from Warframe. Maybe like our very own Sylvie Bullet, you know them from Dark Sector. But it is a... an online... third person action game set in a fantasy world with some sci-fi elements. We're now talking about Soulframe, not Warframe, which is, of course, a third person sci-fi action game with some fantasy elements in it.
which you are playing in a sort of mystical ethereal that, you know, this game has a map, but it sometimes feels like even in the overworld, things just seem to like go, you know, you're just like always over another hill, always seeing another. little village um and then there are there on top of the kind of open area there are procedurally generated dungeons instance dungeons that you go into um the combat is similar in many ways to the sort of souls style um
which is to say that it's very precise. It's very animation. priority focused it's very much like it has things have weight and precision and um uh you are you know fighting people one on three one on two you're not really fighting you're not dynasty warriors and out there um warframing or warframing i guess no that's the thing i'm excited to talk about because i
i got into warframe after soul and i have thoughts i bet yeah um let's stay on soul frame now because like people probably played some warframe what do you what do you both think of of soul frame i guess i guess janine you and i first started playing around the same night and then i got busy or traveling or something and then i came back and you would figure it out which was interesting because i played like 30 hours or something um i had i had gone all in
Uh, yeah, because when we first started playing, the way that game unfolds itself to you is very weird. You get a very basic, um... I mean, you get the wildest intro in the world, right? It's the thing of, like, I almost don't want to spoil it. Yeah. You know, you're picking...
Some things very tangentially related to how your character is going to look. It's like if you were playing The Sims and instead of shopping for wallpaper for your house, you were just walking through a Home Depot and someone was like, What do you like? What type of paint do you like? Do you like furniture? What type of furniture do you like here at Ikea? What kind of wallpaper did your mother have? Right, exactly. What type of wallpaper did you grow up around? And then you get a character.
Um, I think you can, I think they added a, you can change it now after the, after the fact, but, uh. That's good because I don't like my hair. I want to change my hair. I wonder if, I wonder if there even are other hairs. Um, yeah, so. it gives you very little in the way of instruction of like how to do anything. I want to say it like tells you how to run and like light and heavy attack. And then like,
But you kind of wake up on a beach and there are some guys with silly helmets. Big knights with silly helmets. Big helmets. And it's kind of like, here's how you attack. Okay. Here's how you summon a bird. Those helmets, now that I've started playing Warframe, there's people in Warframe that have helmets that are very similar to that.
sitting here like hmm i i am so curious about this and i'm gonna watch the hell out of it yeah someone is gonna can make the the connections that i don't know enough about warframe to make you know um so it's interesting it's it's a heavier game um in terms of like how it feels to control and play uh it's very deliberate I am not a person who likes, I like the idea of souls likes and I've dabbled in souls likes, but I have a hard time sticking with them. Even the, you know, the core stuff.
I can't really pin down why. I've tried so many of them at this point. Even things like Lies of P and stuff like that. It just doesn't quite work for me. Something about Soulframe does work for me, and I think it is probably just that it is a bit less punishing when you die, but you are still really squishy at first.
you do still have the arc of you level your shit up and then you're super super powerful and then you have to swap something out for level one and then you know that's right right which is similar to the warframe mark right yeah yeah which is not like Elden Ring or Dark Souls. Those are games that...
If you want to change your first of all, it's hard to get really powerful in those games if you've never played one before. And the second that you've played enough of one to fully understand what the loop is, you're like, oh, yeah, I'm just going to do blah, blah, blah. And then that's like.
It's completely obscure if you don't have resources to learn that stuff. And I would say Soul Frames kind of... close to i've compared it to cube world in terms of its progression where sure you know for better for worse there's there's a
When you start out, it is really alienating and the world feels very strong and you feel very clumsy. And also like nothing, places don't have... legible names everything has these runes that you can't read and there's a system for slowly unlocking the runes for each location until you can know the name of them and then when you get them all you get a little stat bonus item that you can equip for instance um uh yeah the
And it's a deeply brave maneuver, I think, to be as obscure as it is. Very confident. And also all of the writing is very stylized in this kind of early modern English. um uh style uh prose wise and the delivery is very much in that space and sometimes people are rhyming you know um it's it's very much like working in the the language of like legend and fable kind of feeling thing
Yeah, speaking of fey moods, this is a fey mood-ass game. People are in... the fae you know uh pretty pretty closely at least um but it's also a game that sometimes a spaceship shows up and you're like what is happening yeah i was gonna say there's a bit of a distinction
I could understand people listening to us and thinking, also, I mean, something like Elden Ring is a game that is also very vague about its world and its story and kind of like lets you loose, gives you just a little bit of instruction. What's happening here in Soulframe is... much more like, you know, when you're playing like a...
like rogue or a dungeon crawler or something and you are like deep in procedural territory for most of your time i think about this with case of cud as well and then you suddenly start feeling like you're right on the edge of something authored um that That is the sensation that you get.
in soul frame you know you head out into the world and you're just like well i guess i'm just kind of gonna go over here i'm hitting the up button which summons a little bird and you follow the bird to a little thing yeah but they tell you right at the at the beginning like and i i wonder a lot of this i wonder like how
much of it is just prelude how much of it will actually carry through yeah this is something i'm curious about but when you when you first hop in they're kind of just like okay go go yep Go on. It's very much like a parent has put you on a bicycle for the first time. Right. And they have pushed you a little bit, but then they immediately let go. And it's like, you're riding it now. Do it. Really?
Good example of this for me, Jack, the thing you're talking about, about brushing up against authored content, is there's a quest sort of early on where you end up in a new type of zone that you've never been in before. All of the kind of enemy types start to shift.
and the sort of tiles, so to speak, that the game is made up of are fresh and new. It's a different type of weird forest. And then you go through some caves and you end up then, and all of that stuff is proc gen, right? They're pulling from a pool. of potential rooms and enemy encounters and stuff like that.
And you're fighting your way through that. Maybe even do some puzzles. There's some fun stuff in this game where you like throw your sword with a rope attached to it to like attach to something and pull yourself across a cliff or drop some barrels of water to like put out the fire so you can walk.
They're really quick and fun. Anyway, you end up emerging into like this new field you've never been in before. And a voice starts echoing in the clouds above. And it turns out that it is a sort of lightning knight who is going to come wreck you.
shit. And that whole little encounter is authored and is kind of the climax of this series of kind of procedural, you know... pathways that you're going down um and and the way that they drop that stuff in is so unexpected and then like the solution to that is really fun and really like um They swing big when they do the authored stuff. You end up changing the weather so that you can beat this lightning night in a way that's dramatic and bigger than everything you've been doing for the last...
90 minutes of play you know and that's the sort of structure they have there's no like well i'm just going to focus on the main quest tonight i'm going to advance the main story yeah that's not you don't you don't get to make that call oh it's all about the bird
You're either playing it or you're not playing it. It will give you... um it'll give you missions and stuff but often it's just like then go here and kill the guys or like you know and then eventually it'll be like oh go get the thing and then the thing will be this magical nonsense thing that you bring back and it's like it's like a involves some sort of like a like a rat lady who wants to dye your clothes and all kinds of shit um she does do that it's true she does i love her
you know, I have a task for you and I need you to go to the shop and pick up some bread. And, you know, five times you go to the shop. Oh, the green knight is the vibe also, by the way. Yes. It's kind of the Green Knight. It's really interesting. The tone is very much like every piece of European folklore firing at once.
Whereas I think that The Green Knight is sort of like a bunch of very specific pieces. The Green Knight is a lot... I don't like this one. The Green Knight is a lot earthier and a lot darker. You know, there's a lot... People are constantly nearly... Nearly drowning. Yeah loamy men briefly turn into skeletons and stuff and it's not that there's not really that in soul frame It's odd
The tone sometimes works really well for me, especially when it starts blending the weird sci-fi. Very early on, you encounter a sort of like a Huntswoman who has been sent from the evil faction, who it turns out... had had spent time in this sort of like magical world beforehand but her whole character design is this very odd blend of the sci-fi and fantasy and then you know you will have these just these great
old folkloric feelings of like Sleeping Kingdoms, things under the ground. And then sometimes they'll just be like, here is a weird little turtle man with a non-specifically regional accent. Yeah, that guy's a weirdo. You know, sometimes they... put their thumb on the scale and it starts feeling more like Fable 2 than it does, you know.
Like the Green Knight. Have you gotten to the whatever flagon yet? Oh my god, what is the name of the... That sounds like it's a place from Fable 2, doesn't it? It is the Drippin' Flagon, which is the tavern. and you can get it's like the first social zone you know yeah usually fantasy games that have characters speak in rhyme are just like deeply annoying
It's a different sort of rhyme in here, though, isn't it? Very often, the rhyme is working pretty well here. And part of that is that the meter is consistent, which is something that people just fall down on all the time for no goddamn reason at all. That's 100%. A lot of people fully...
a lot of people even writers don't realize meter is even a thing they need to worry about it's they're doing it like based on vibes and so much of it is like if you read it in your head one way you can't guarantee the actor's gonna read it in their head the same way um And also the actor is aware that they're rhyming. Whereas often the character who's rhyming, ideally, they're not supposed to be aware they're rhyming. It's just the way they are. It's just what they're doing.
And, like, I think where they succeed is that the performances are, you know, the little guy is a funny goof because he's a funny goof. But, like... When people rhyme, they're often rhyming. They're often rhyming like kind of tragically or like almost incidentally. Like it's, I don't know. It feels good in that way to me. There's a bit of that early modern stuff in there where like
The early modern playwrights understood that a shift in meter indicated something about a character. Something was happening, yeah. When you are speaking in blank verse, you are sort of saying something different about the world than when you are not. Exactly. There's a bit of that going on here that I like quite a lot. I also like that...
Very often, you have no goddamn idea what anybody is saying. There's like an inventive vocabulary going on at points that sometimes you're like, oh, well, clearly I understand what they're talking about. And then occasionally they'll throw in... in a line or two and you're like, I don't know what that means. You smell like the cleg that skinned my lovers, for instance. Yeah, you're like, damn. Wow.
um they do this in cud and you just sort of have to um the the writers on caves of cud talked about how they wanted it to feel like you were discovering an ancient text you know like like finding something in a in a in a temple from 2000 years ago or whatever and there's a little bit of that going on
here where the narrative joy comes from the sounds of the syllables less sort of a meaning that you can grasp but when it's the sounds of the syllables along with like a spaceship shaped like a trumpet descending through the clouds you're like god damn now we're now we're into it And then you also – there's two things here. One is like I think in line with that is –
Just push through that. If you end up coming to the preludes or if this drops somewhere playable for you this year and you're like, I don't understand what they're saying to me. My advice for you is the same as people who are reading Book of the New Sun, which is like, don't slow down and open the wiki and go read what it claims.
is um it's okay that you don't know what they skin know that they skin and that this person doesn't like you because you remind them of a clag a particular clag and like that's all you kind of need to know The experience of, you know, I said before that when you come to new places, you don't know the names of them originally. But over time, you unlock. It's like in a script. Yeah, it's in a weird runic script, which maybe you could learn theoretically.
you could you could you know over time actually internalize that i have not done that what you end up doing is finding these collectibles maybe it's like once a day you can go to the same place and they also don't like fully spell that out they do not yeah so i'm spelling out something the game doesn't extremely spell out i guess
But over time, you do learn the names of the places. And that's sort of the experience of learning what's up with the world and your ancestors and what the conflict that's being focused on is about. And I would love for them to retain some of that stuff. Yeah. My big fear is that it will get tutorial heavy and it will get less obscure in favor of a really strong on ramp, which I get why that would happen. But I think that it's really special in keeping where it's at now.
The second thing I was going to say is when the UFO descends from the heavens through the clouds and it's this beautiful thing and the lightning is striking and... It feels really cool to shoot an arrow of light at someone and have them explode into a sort of chromatic firework. It feels good. The particle effects in this game. Oh, they're so good. Like just in general, the magic.
shit that happens is so it's so like deliciously rule of cool like it's so they don't care about the fact that like okay this is your this is your second arm or whatever like maybe it shouldn't be super powerful arms are your warframes in this basically uh and you know maybe it should just be kind of basic or whatever no it it's like you have this ability and it's gonna look sick as hell and you just have it and it's like basically
game we just we realized that we won that the second arm that we had was the equivalent of a second character a second warframe and warframe parlance was already great and then we realized that the default like Special attack with it. The first one is this kind of bow that fires these light arrows The second one is just like an orb that hovers in front of your hand like you're the coolest wizard who's ever lived But it's like a techno orb and it summons like
electricity blasts that do chain lightning but in these like rapid um you know they're like tesla towers or something from command and conquer or like uh like if you ever see like if you ever go to a spencer gifts and see one of those things it's like
the lightning the plasma balls or a tesla thing uh tesla not the bad one um well even the old one was kind of the bad one in some ways but you know what i mean he got that fucking elephant yeah he did yeah he yeah well wait wasn't that edison wasn't edison the elephant was tesla the elephant who got the fucking i think edison did because edison was just evil like a cartoon guy yeah tesla was mostly a misogynist and like well women's brains don't work
You know, he's one of those guys, unfortunately. Anyway, the electricity. Anyway, the electricity was like pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. And it was like, oh, this game does that too. And I say all that because I think the three of us as game writers. probably spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a good game and what why does the writing work for us and all that I think all that's super important but also like if it hits right when you pull the bowstring back
you're going to buy yourself a little patience for me when you're doing something creative. When you get the ability to shoot an arrow that summons a flock of birds to just harry your opponent repeatedly, you're like, oh. okay, this game rules. They're taking swings. They're not just, it's not just a fire arrow, you know? I was playing with Janine the first time and I loaded into the game and I didn't know how to do shit. And Janine said,
I will teach you. And Janine arrived and looked a lot cooler than me straight away. and then we got into a fight and i was just like hitting guys around the head with a sword sort of enjoyably but fairly ineffectively and then like 70 blue deer came out of nowhere and like trampled this guy to death and i said was that you and janine was just standing over there with you know like uh the cheshire cat smile being like got him
That was like my second time using that arm too. They just let you do the thing. It's really good. Janine simply said, Twas the torment stag. And you went, I guess it was the torment stag. Okay. I guess it was the Torment Stack. There's a little bit in here as well. His name is Darren. Darren Rude. Right, Darren Rood, yeah, R-O-O-D. He's kind of scary. Yeah. There's a little bit in here as well of, like, early MMOs. I think about...
early Warcraft, I mean, Warcraft wasn't the only one that was doing it, but I think, you know, it's kind of fixed in a lot of people's minds, is that early Warcraft, you just went out and saw what happened. That wasn't really like a main story that you could go through. You'd just leave Orgrimmar.
and head out into the wastes and, you know, run into little bits and pieces or whatever. And there's a bit of that sensation in there, as much as I think there is the sort of, like, From Software, out you go into the world, my son.
which is really enjoyable. Well, like, you know, if you did want Elden Ring to be more like this, you could do it. You would have to get rid of the grace that leads you from bonfire to bonfire. You would have to, you know, maybe you... could have your your finger maiden um uh melina melina melina melina melina melina god i always get them all confused melina um but like she would be even more
abstract with her guidance than she already is. And you would need to also say, guess what? It's going to take you... um a lot of you're going you want to make uh some crafting you want to you want to craft some armor all right put in the order come back in eight hours to pick it up because that's the other thing that shapes this go ahead what were you going to say janine i was going to say you do kind of have
finger maidens this is true you do and they are very but they're all very specialized yes uh and the main one is an old man yeah davinci's here from you know with a baby on his shoulder assassin's creed 2 total recall uh leonardo da vinci you know that's the vibe i get from him um so yeah he is not going to tell you where to go he might tell you where you went
And listener, you might be thinking, didn't you say that the bird leads you to things? I need to reiterate, sometimes the bird just leads you towards... Just like, you know, four guys who you need to kill. Yeah, four guys in a campsite. Sometimes it leads you to four guys in a campsite and next to them is a giant mechanical head vomiting oil directly into the lake. You know? I think there's a... You know, we want to spend some time talking about Warframe as well. And I think the...
A way into that is that something that a lot of people say about Warframe, and I'm one of them, I haven't spent a ton of time with that game, is that, you know, when you start playing Warframe, nothing makes any sense. And you just sort of have to go with it, and it will start to become clearer.
And there's a bit of that going on, but I think that the difference between Cellframe and Warframe at this stage is that when people say you just sort of have to go with it, what they are talking about is the accretion of... 15 years, 10 years of various interlocking game systems, some of which have been deprecated, some of which have been partially deprecated. A story that you are playing through only vaguely in the order in which it was released um uh
like an interlocking web of systems that are so phenomenally complicated that you just sort of have to the only way you can enter them is like take a nice small manageable byte and then see where it goes. Solframe is so much simpler at this stage. And it really does feel like... And they like the sensation that players describe of, I feel overwhelmed and I want to start to explore this thing, you know, like at my own pace and on my own terms. But they have...
pared it back from 500 interlocking systems. If something that has always interested you about Warframe is the sense of a game whose outer limits you don't quite understand or a tool that you sort of want to... grow and learn with but warframe is proving too much i think soul frame might be a really interesting way into that sensation for you yeah i'm curious janine you know so i have played warframe on and off mostly off for since since
It came out, basically. I've been trying to become a Warframe guy. And every time I put about 12 hours into it or 10 hours into it and I go, I just don't think I can crack it. I don't think...
I'm not having, we'll talk about why I bounce off of it, maybe a little bit more, but part of it is what Jack just described, which is there's so much of it, I can't get my head around it. As you know, I am someone who likes to get my head around a game in the way that I feel like I'm making good decisions, famously.
one of the things that makes me bounce off of things like stardew valley is when i feel like i've wasted a day in a season and it's like i'm not gonna i can't i have to wait a whole year of gameplay to play spring again and i fucked this up and which is a stupid way to think this is not
I don't advise anyone have my brain. Please take it. Replace it with something slightly different. I would appreciate it. But Warframe, because of that complexity, it really got me. The last time I played, I played with Joel Fowler a little. bit uh formerly of waypoint our publisher at the time uh and and there was probably about a week or two of playing before he was like oh yeah we have a dojo set up which will help you
And I was of two minds. One was like, I don't want, I want to just play the game without needing to have been in a dojo. And the second thing was like, well, fuck, I wasted all this time without even being in the dojo. Well, I got to, I should probably just restart, which is not true. That's not how it works.
at all um but you seem like you've pushed through that because you've now been playing warframe like for real for real for dozens of hours i have 62 hours in there we go see damn um and this is after like i for years was saying oh i should try warfarin because i like aesthetically thought it looked really neat Right, for people who don't know Warframe, third-person action game, not run-based, but mission-based sci-fi with lots of shiny chrome, but not bad.
Lots of very unique shapes. Robot butterflies. Yeah, exactly. If you are a Friends at the Table listener, I think it's a very signet-coded game, personally. Yeah. So, yeah. um cygnet's uh divine bell guard was definitely sort of influenced by some things i had sort of passively absorbed from seeing warframe floating around for a while it was definitely not uh
Definitely, like, the idea of, like, a robot can be pretty in a certain way, but also kind of gross. That was very important for that season. So... Yeah, for a really long time, I had downloaded Warframe so many times, then uninstalled it and downloaded it again and uninstalled it. Without trying it?
Yes, because like every time they would show it at like the game awards or whatever, they're like, oh, that looks really cool. And then I just wouldn't commit to it. So playing Soul Frame finally pushed me over the edge because I played what feels like... most of what's available in Soulframe right now. And I was like, I really just, I want more. What if I try Warframe?
And at first it was a really jarring adjustment because the controls have a lot of overlap, but are different in a way that is very disorienting. If you're trying to just kind of... do the same things you do in one game in the other um the logic of the controls is is consistent but but it is a little bit is a little bit weird um but warframe's really interesting
So I booted up Soulframe today for the first time in a few weeks just to see how the feel is now that I've been playing a lot of Warframe. And it feels so slow and heavy. And Warframe is... Warframe is so much... And I can't speak to how it was at launch, but right now with all of the 12 years of content is just having their 12th anniversary right now with 12 years of content and shit like they want you to fire yourself like a bullet through each level, basically.
I would not be surprised if there was a whiteboard with that on the top of the whiteboard drawn in so long ago that it has solidified atomically with the board beneath, you know? It can't be fully erased. Whereas Soulframe feels like a sword being swung. which is still fast, but it is precise, and it is the word that you said 30 minutes ago. What have you said 30 minutes ago that I always forget when I'm trying to describe souls like...
combat starts with a D. I always forget what it is. It's driving me crazy. Deliberate? Deliberate. I always lose the word deliberate when I'm talking about Souls Likes. Think about Delibird the Pokemon. Oh, that'll do it for me. I'll just remember Delibird, the Pokemon. Yeah. Anyway. It's so deliberate, but it's deliberate in a way that still feels heavy and weighty, but not, it's not, it's not like Monster Hunter, Soul Frame, but it does feel like a sword. But compared to Warframe, I get it.
Warframe is so frenetic to me. Warframe really wants you to... It's so interesting because I feel like, again, I don't know how much of this is because...
You know, they want to get new players up to speed, obviously. Like, you get some of this in... older mmos in general where they sort of compress the early parts of the game and they can all kind of feel like a blur like if you're starting final fantasy 14 now you're going to have a very different experience than someone who started final fantasy 14 six years ago yeah um
And so there is this sense sometimes of like, I can't tell how compressed this is deliberately and how compressed this is just as an experience of being a late comer to it. But it's so, there's so much and it happens so fast and you really kind of... don't have time to take everything in and i can imagine if you were playing it from the beginning there's a lot of environments where like you're happy to shoot through them because you've seen it a million times sure but
It's so strange to play a game where they really don't care if you stop and look at this stage of it anyway. And I would say that Soulframe isn't that. They want you to be curious about the world in a way that in Warframe I... don't feel the same way i mean soul frame has a few mechanics that are really built around that not only the yeah throw your sword with the rope puzzles but like sometimes you'll hear a sound and it turns out if you go into your soul vision mode there's like
ghost of an ancient king who you can let possess you briefly for extra you know damage or whatever or there's an enemy type that requires you yeah there are little ocarina puzzles there's that one enemy type that when you beat them you have to go into that mode in order to like
truly beat them um and so there's there simply being a mode where you have to slow down and look around even if that just means for a second means that the moment to moment play always has these little pauses in it in a different way than the
bullet-through-the-air Warframe. And, you know, I've watched high-end Warframe. You're still... You are not moving slow through those spaces of anything. I think high-end play is, like, even faster from what I've seen, you know? It's a racing game. Yeah. Yeah, it's sort of... Yeah, it's sort of like Trackmania with swords. You know? You're just going. Yeah. It makes me feel nauseous. Me too. And this is why I've bounced off of it. How much time have you put into it? I believe you.
I just can't play that rhythm. Yeah, I think I don't know that I mean it makes me feel nauseous negatively. Okay, you mean like a roller coaster. Yeah. Sometimes it actually makes me feel like I'm playing music very quickly. And as is often the case when I'm playing music very quickly, I just lose it completely. And, you know, the rhythm falls apart and I get out of the flow.
at that point it's just it's the worst sensation you know and in warframe this is me doing this sort of like bizarre bullet jump that they let you do all the time straight into an like an overhang and smacking my head on it and then losing my momentum completely But when it's working, it feels tremendous. Do you want to talk about your Warframe, Janine? I would love to know how you move through the game. So my gateway Warframe.
So I did the thing of when you join up now, they offer you a discount on currency. And whenever I start playing a free game... Sorry, I hate to interrupt you. Could you briefly explain what a Warframe is for people who are unfamiliar with this? I'm not at the point in the story where I think I fully know. So to me, it's a robot body.
It is a robot body that comes with a set of abilities. It is, yeah, like in Soulframe you get arms that are bonded to gods, essentially, that give you abilities. And in Warframe it is a robot body that... has certain abilities in it they also have stats separate from those abilities is that true like speed they have stats yes and then you equip uh mods which are like cards into them to right right add other effects and
boost stats and things like that um yeah so you know when i start to when i start to play a free-to-play game i'll play a little bit and if i am having a good time i will do the thing of like How much would I pay for this game? And then I'll put that into the currency. And then I'll, you know, give myself some walking around money. Right. You put 62 hours into this thing. That's enough. That's a full game.
Yeah. So Warframe gives you a 50% off or whatever when you first join. So I got some currency. I grabbed a bunch of Warframes. I didn't look them up. I didn't, I like looked at them in the display thing and I was like, yes, this one seems cool. Um, so I got a few of them and the one that I ended up spending the most time with initially was your rally who is, um, She's a character that you sort of are exposed to early on as like she's in this comic.
these orphans on the working the like worker what planet is that is that mars where there's like indentured servitude uh venus yeah sorry it's venus um She's like in a comic in Venus that the kids who space skateboard really like. And she really is the one that... kind of hooked me because she has a built-in space skateboard.
um before i had unlocked it in anywhere in any other way so it was really fun she also just has an aura thing and like a power where she can just it's just like a ring of water yeah i showed austin the other night i'm just like it's just this ring of water that goes around her and just immediately bisects any enemy that comes within it um so you don't like i didn't even have to fight i just
put the ring on put her on her skateboard and then i would just run through a level and then i'm done yeah the first time you thought it was like i was watching it was like i was watching someone play soul frame and and as if there had been way too many enemies attacking like you just can't move that quickly
do you even deal with this with the character you have the weapons that you have and the second time was like oh i'm watching vampire survivors now like you were just running in circles crushing everybody or something and nix is is not as as uh massively destructive um or wasn't at that time right i'm sure now if you've leveled up your necks maybe it's it's a different situation better it's just you know it's a different it's a different thing um but this was a mastery test so it was like a
here's demonstrate your skill and then you get a little plaque and another little banner thing um so that was sort of the the gateway for me and i've sort of been working my way through a bunch of different frames um generally the ones that have like at least some kind of damage aura are my favorites or something that i can kind of plant in one spot that will do damage but also now i've got like pets and stuff so um
I have options where, like, I can kind of have fun with any of them. Even, like, weapons. I was using fist weapons for a bit, and I was like, I think I hate this. And then I put a bit more time into it. I was like... This is fine. This is totally fine. This is okay. So I've hit a point where I can kind of enjoy any frame that I'm playing around with, which is surprising to me.
I did not think that would happen. I'm curious about a thing which is because I think one of the things I'm so curious to see is how much this shakes out into.
soul frame and i already kind of gestured at it i mentioned waiting around for a blacksmith to finish making your armor in that game um my experience of warframe is not just uh that you have to put time into it playing in order to get through to the stuff that's really exciting though that's changed since the last time I played I think that you've gotten to stuff that I could not have gotten too quickly when I first played I was stuck in running missions on
kind of cookie cutter ships for like 10 hours when I first played, or not first played, when I most recently played. So I think that's changed. maybe quite a bit or you just did did it maybe you just pushed through i mean six or two hours you know yeah but i mean you were on venus pretty quick right you were like in an open world maybe you just put in the time i truly don't know um but the the of it the other thing that was like tough for me was like oh
I, if I want to make this sword good, or if I want to build a thing, I have to like get all these resources together and I have to like put them together and then wait it out. Um, and that's like one of the big structural things that makes that, that Warframe is, is, uh, makes Warframe distinct, let's say, from Genshin Impact or other sorts of hero-based free-to-play games where, like...
Genshin Impact is all about, I mean, there is some crafting in Genshin Impact, but I think if you, I played some Genshin Impact in my day and mostly I was crafting five gems a day or whatever in order to like get my daily, you crafted five things.
uh thing not to like make a new weapon that i actually used yeah exactly upgrade materials exactly whereas whereas with warframe and and with soulframe if you want to make the cool new arm in soulframe you have to like grind rep with the blacksmith, and then...
get all the materials, you'd get three pieces of the blueprint or whatever for the new sword, then, which are random drops in certain locations, grind out the materials you need, and then take them to the blacksmith. And the blacksmith will be like, you don't have a high enough rep with me yet.
Go make some other stuff to get your rep up. And by the way, Austin, don't go sell that stuff for money because if you do, you lose reputation with me, which I didn't know. And makes me feel so sad. It makes me feel so sad because the Blacks... has such low self-esteem and it's like she's getting sad because you sold you sold the sword she made you anyway uh then you give it to her and she's like all right cool
Come back in 12 hours or 24 hours or something for those arms. And at the time when I was playing Warframe, very much like... on a schedule where it was like, I'm trying to play enough of this to talk about it on a podcast in a week or in three days because Waypoint was twice a week. I was like, okay, well, I'm not going to advance at any sort of real rate here is what it felt like because I can't make it my everything game. I can't only...
play this and i'm curious if that stuff is where's that at in warframe today how often are you like i really want to use this sword but the only way i can actually use it now is if i pay them five bucks to speed build it over the next you know instead of waiting three days i'm waiting you know three hours or instead of waiting 30 hours i'm waiting 30 minutes or whatever so most of the stuff that um that i have access to right now is stuff that like takes a day to make and that's
I haven't really found it pressing because I have so much other stuff to play with. Right. Um, the thing that's more pressing is like, because there's so much in the game and so much of it is like, kind of. recursive and tangly, I have a lot of blueprints for materials that I don't even have access to the planet where the materials are from. And they're just going to sit there forever.
Or I have blueprints for things where it's like, okay, well, this requires mastery level 10 and I'm at like mastery level five or whatever. Right. And that's like my personal mastery. That's not like the crafting station's mastery or whatever. That's like I need to level up more weapons and level up more frames and like that stuff individually. I can do pretty quickly. But I think the thing that I keep encountering that's sort of the most running up against a wall is leveling up mods.
Because it costs so much money and so much endo. And that's the thing where it's like, well, that's where most of your power is actually coming from. the mods that you have slotted into stuff right i see and you have a lot of slots and there's a lot of mods every single thing you equip every frame every pet even the pets claws
have slots. So I think that the pet's claws, like C-L-A-U-S-E, like you've to sign the pet's claws to get a pet, you know. No, no, no. Like the pets have claw weapons and the pets have slots where you slot in cards and then their claws are also... you slot cards into their claws some warframes also have like specific um weapons to them like interesting i forget the name but there's one that's like glass and has like a glass whip
Um, Gaara? Or is Gaara the stabby one? I don't know. All of this is also a thing that I struggled with, which lines up with my bad brain around maximization, which is like... Which, again, I don't advise anybody else to. This is not me saying that's the right way to do it. But I would feel so overwhelmed by the amount of things I could do.
be focusing on that it felt like oh i played for six hours today and then i read on the form that i was not actually getting the thing i needed to get in order to advance the thing i thought i was trying to advance or like i'm trying to get this drop and then i don't realize
like oh yeah it'll drop at two percent on these maps but actually it'll drop at twenty percent once you get a little bit later on i just didn't know i was so overwhelmed which i think is a me thing to be clear i'm not saying that it's a failing but it's part of why i'm so excited about soul frame It's a clean slate that I will not feel that overwhelmed by, you know?
i'm you know i'll also say like there is an auto equip mods thing and i'm a person who i have no problem using that i don't even look at what it's equipping um i don't even think about oh i like it when i have ice on this gun but it put fire here don't care. I'm going to be in this mission for one minute.
You might as well be saying you're not even playing the game because for me, that is part of what I like. That is part of the play is being like, well, today I was playing Xenoblade Chronicles X today and my highlight of the day was realizing that the character who doesn't use...
who I didn't think had any beam type weaponry, could buy a beam type, you know, a sword that allowed her to get the boost from when I used the aura that increases beam type damage. And I went, ooh, a little synergy I have found. this video game that i've played before and i do find that fun but like it's
I haven't noticed in my particular case. Well, I mean, there are synergy things, but it's like when you're polarizing a slot and like, I'll do that stuff deliberately. That's when I do that. When I use the forma, you know, just jargon.
Put the thing in the other thing and then the thing changes. That stuff I will still do deliberately and be like, you know, which is the... thing i'm most excited about having here okay what polarity is that i'll put that slot there and then that makes it half price to use essentially um or like half a resource point right right right whatever sure um i'll still do that stuff But like just in terms of, especially because you level stuff up so fast, like I did...
I did one mission where I like stuck around for a few rounds instead of just bouncing after the first one. And like all my shit went from like rank 10 to rank 28. And when things are happening that fast, do I want to spend time between every single mission picking the perfect? No, I'm just going to go in. I'm going to hit right stick. I'm going to auto mod whatever. And then like... you know when i get something maxed out and i'm like really
into it and really committed to just sticking with that, sure, then I'll handpick. I'll be careful. I'll be deliberate. But like when I'm just leveling stuff up to get my mastery up and I'm not encountering, that's the other thing, I'm not encountering any resistance because Warframe... is to me like a like a musou game um at this point where it's just there is just a wave of guys and they are all turning into mush there's no point in waste in like spending time
maximum like i'm not at the point of the game where it has is has been hard i guess i'm sure that will come at some point um maybe maybe they've done a really nice rework of the on-ramp you know i don't know I I've done like, because there's that 12 year event going on right now, I've mostly, yeah, I mostly stick to things that are sort of.
at my level-ish those are the things that it surfaces for me fine but for some of the event stuff it is higher level and some of it um doesn't gate you out if even if you're a lower level so i did something that was like level 110 or something around when i was doing things that were level 10 right um
And it was fine. Like, it was a little bit tougher. I was a little bit squishier. I definitely had to stay close to the group. I couldn't just wander off on my own. But it was still doable. You know, it was still like... you know i didn't feel like i couldn't hang i did feel a little bit like kid sister syndrome but it was still fun and i got the reward i wanted and like and then i went back to the stuff that i that i do normally or that i that was at my level um
It feels very, I don't want to say seamless because there is still a lot of stuff that's just like, this is locked until you get your... robo hanger six and it's like i don't know what that is i don't know when i get that i could look it up i'm not going to uh i'm just going to keep doing my thing um So it's still a little bit like obscure and weird, but it is so much a game of just like...
the numbers go up you hit the buttons and the numbers go up and you get the rhythm it's like all you know the rhythm of the the rocket jumping whatever um where it's like alto's odyssey or whatever those iphone games are you just Tap and release, tap and release, tap and release. It's very soothing. It's a great bedtime game somehow.
That makes sense to me. I think that's part of the appeal, right? Is, you know, one of the things I know you compared it to in terms of setting certain sorts of goals for yourself was Infinite Nikki. where you're like, okay, I'm just going to spend a day. Infinity Nikki, thank you. What did I say? I wrote down intranet. Infinity Nikki. So the actual, the real thing with Infinity Nikki...
Because mostly because I have run out of stuff to do in that game. I've like run out of stuff to make and stuff to missions to do and whatever. I think the interesting parallel between Infinity Nikki and Warframe and Soulframe is there's outfits that give you abilities in Nikki, but Nikki is a gotcha game.
and you have to roll for the for those outfit pieces right warframe is not i guess there's someone listening right now who does not understand that that warframe and soulframe are not gotchas they are You put in real money if you want to buy a new Warframe, but you can also grind for things like Warframes. Yeah, it feels like pretty much everything you can acquire through other means. Right, right.
but not an infinity though right yeah yeah um the only kind thing i can say about nikki because i kind of from the start thought it was a little bit gross to have ability outfits, and then some of the outfits would only be in the gotcha. That's kind of the third rail of gotchas, isn't it? Or of free to play in some ways. They're not like...
you don't need those abilities to succeed. It's a little bit less mercenary than Genshin in that way, where originally in Genshin, there were some characters where you needed that character to do this world thing or whatever. It's not quite like that. Usually it is like a superficial ability or just like kind of a fun gimmicky thing or a twist on an existing ability. Yeah. There's...
an ability outfit you get in the story where you summon a flower and you glide with the flower. And there is a gotcha outfit from a few rounds ago where... It's that power, but instead of being in that dress and summoning that flower, you're in a different dress and you summon a bunch of balloons and you float on the balloons. Oh, right. So...
Those are different, and I don't want to downplay the difference there, especially in a game about... different outfits but it's not for example like you're unlocking an ability to like open locked doors that you just can't get yeah elsewhere right yeah it's definitely balloons are an alternative like a similar gameplay and there are some um You know, an example of something that you can't do without paying the money or winning it in the gotcha. But also it's not like a...
big thing. It's not game breaking. They had a bicycle that they were selling for like a dollar of real money. So then you could summon the bicycle wherever you wanted instead of having to go to a bicycle stand and rent the bicycle from them. And now the current event... Those bicycles are fun. The current gotcha banner has an outfit where the power associated...
that outfit is you summon a motorcycle and then you can ride the motorcycle. Holy shit. That seems useful. I wish I had that outfit. That's so funny because the opening to that game is like... cozy pastoralia and the idea being like four months later and nikki has a motorcycle is very in keeping with the tone of isn't isn't the previous nikki game filled with like war crimes all of the previous yeah then the one before that
I thought there was only... I didn't know that there were... I thought there was a second. There's three. I didn't know there were three. I think it's actually the fourth or fifth. Okay. The first one's really bad, though. It was barely... It was barely a game. The thing I was going to say, though, is like the kind thing that I can say... Nikki is that when you are pulling items from the gotcha, you don't get duplicates until you have the full set of that outfit.
You'll get duplicates of the garbage, but if you're pulling for a motorcycle outfit, you're not going to pull the hat and then pull the hat again and pull the hat again. You're going to pull each piece in sequence until you have the whole thing. Right. And then... and then start pulling the second set so that you can upgrade the first set after that and then etc well it and the upgrades are cosmetic it's a color palette upgrade okay that's not so bad yeah yeah so it's like
There is some kindness to it, but to the point where I can't decide... When I look at that versus Warframe, I can't decide which mode I prefer.
Because I think something about Warframe's model is definitely I'm more susceptible to spend money in it than I am a gotcha. And maybe that's just because I've... built up gotcha self-preservation muscles after years of being a mihoyo player yeah um it reminds me of being the person who swore off uh, uh, CCGs, uh, collectible card games, and then being like, oh,
But I can play Netrunner because Netrunner comes out as a specific set of cards once every three months, then another one every six months. And it's the whole set is in there. And I know exactly what I'm getting. And I can... preview all the cards ahead of time and now i can play this again because what i can't do is fall into the trap of wanting to just keep buying single booster packs so i can chase something that is like not a fun way for me to engage with with the ccg
i'd been playing at that point and and whatever dopamine hit i originally had was quickly replaced by frustration and then like you know, you end up at a certain point, if you get into the CCGs, you do end up going like, well, is there a secondary market where I can just go fucking spend the $7 on the card I actually want instead of spending $17 buying, you know, individual packs, hoping I get it.
And so much around in that space, and this is so true for gotcha games, is also about FOMO and also about the build of the moment. Not the gameplay build, but the build, the PR build of, ooh, a new character is about to drop.
banner is about to happen you're going to get excited about this character who you might not ever really play you're hoping that they're fun and good and i think that that probably also happens when warframe is getting ready to drop a new warframe i know while we were playing soulframe and we realized there's two new arms we could grind for. We got very excited because it's like, oh, new core abilities are about to drop. That's like...
a whole new way of engaging with this game we already like. But I do think that there's something really different between I'm going to give you 15 bucks for this thing. And I'm going to start at 15 bucks or I'm going to start at 99 cents or $3. And then from there.
maybe i'll spend a hundred dollars before i get this thing or maybe i'll spend you know four weeks trying to get it not get it through earning the in-game currency and then as it's about to cycle out which is something that happens in gacha games right like the window close on the thing that you want the windows don't seem to close on warframes right like you can just go get Nyx if that's if you've heard us or who's the one with the with the water ring you rally
urelly urelly is in the shop probably forever right they're not disney vaulting the war frames they do like sales with the like marked stuff down but it seems like i mean there is some stuff i think that's limited but it's usually like very very cosmetic it's like the shiny weird version of this guy or sure they're not like i want to push back a little about
There are dark patterns at work in Warframe. Oh, for sure. Sorry, I was not saying there were not dark patterns. I was saying this particular one that I can't fucking deal with anymore. Right, right, right.
But when we're talking about like FOMO and stuff like that, something Warframe will do is like when you log in, you will get like a random login bonus. And some of those login bonuses are things like you've got a 20% off coupon. Oh, that's a classic. That is going to expire. Oh, that's a classic dark path.
the first thing you see is do you want to spend something but it'll be a little bit cheaper but this is also why I say like I'm not sure which model I prefer as someone who's engaging with both of them like willingly and like I... You know, I'm fortunate in that, like, I have a good sense of, like, how much I'm willing to spend on entertainment and a free-to-play game. And, like, it's, you know, I'm on top of that and comfortable with it. And if someone isn't and is not comfortable with it...
do not engage with them. But for Warframe, I find I am a little more prone to impulse. of just like the idea that I can have the whole thing. Right now for this money is more alluring to me than the idea of, well, I can put some money in and then pull for this and I'll probably get most of it. But.
Maybe not. And like that stuff, I can I can wait for that. Like I can I know I will get X amount of premium currency a day just by doing my dailies and I'll plug away. And then maybe at the end I will have, you know, the night before I'll have a moment of like. Do I really want this? Yes or no. And then maybe I'll put some currency in and get those last few pieces, you know, versus.
The Warframe thing of like, I could have this whole thing right now. I could have this Warframe. I could have this gun. I could have this hat. I could have this weird dog if I just give them $30 right now. Yeah. Yeah, that's dangerous. That might get me too if I was in. Yeah.
it's tricky right again imagine imagine uh at the moment where playing soul frame i realized i'd lost enough reputation with the blacksmith that i i now can't craft the thing i thought i was going to be able to craft if at that moment they were like Five bucks, buy yourself a little reputation, put a little money, put a little money in Tolkien's pocket and she'll make you this cool new wolf arm that you want so bad that you might have fucking gotten me.
You know, so I, and of course none of that stuff is in there yet. Right. I'm always going to prefer like sticker price. Just, just. I just want to pay you for the game and be on my way. Yeah. I understand that's not always the model. I understand that, like, if that had been the case with Warframe, it probably wouldn't have stuck around for 12 years.
It probably would have had a shorter shelf life and they would have moved on to do other stuff. And, you know, to some extent, it's food in the trough for the animals to... who's the i've lost this what's the metaphor i don't know where that metaphor is going yeah i don't i think i mean like fuel for the engine or something not not not food for the animals
yeah I it's it's tough right it's it is it's a balancing act I will say I'm like more or less happy with with Warframe I'm not unhappy with nikki i just wish there was more content yeah sure there's it's early though right war favor nikki has not had the 12 years of of what warframe has had to make a bunch of stuff i've started a lot of gotcha games i've played a lot of fashion games i've played a lot of nikki games i have never run out of steam with run out of something to do as fast
as I have with that game. Fair enough. Really, if you play it a little bit every day, you really do just, it's all done. It's all, you've done everything. And there is nothing for you to do except for you to go to the machine and spend your energy points and level up stuff. I love to spend my energy points at the machine. Which I'm going to do right now. We're going to take a break while I spend my energy points at the machine. And then we'll come back and we'll talk about some more stuff.
All right, we are back. And we actually took a kind of a long break, long enough that there's been a Soulframe update. I don't know if you saw this. I haven't watched it. I didn't know how much was going to actually bear fruit immediately. Prelude 9 is out. It's just going to make me stressed. I went and played it. I went and played the game more today. They released it in the middle of our recording. Is it more different? Yeah, there's big differences.
They, like, they got rid of a thing that I think was, like, previously pretty, like, key. Because they've, you know, the idols, the super weapons, like the bow or the lightning blast. Those are have been removed because they're going to be like full weapons instead. And instead, they they did roll out a regular bow as a weapon and a new lightning like spell.
punch thing that is a whole new weapon type. That's very consistent with what I've seen from Warframe. How the weapons are in Warframe. They also rolled out a new thing where you pick your starting kind of your class, your frame, your, in this case, your pact. Um, outright at the very beginning between what was the magic bow one and the lightning, the kind of lightning fist or lightning ball one. Um, and now a third starting one also, which is like a stealth focused one. And that.
starts with a regular bow as a weapon the um the one that previously was i mean it still is the one that like does like the knockback attack and the um uh what's the other thing it does um
Gosh, I'm blanking. Actually, you know what? I think I didn't end up getting this one. There's one here now that's new. The Pact of Courage, Tethryn, is like a tank-focused... pact where you're you're getting one of your abilities is just like do more damage on consecutive attacks one of them is like a taunt that gives you increased damage and defense um and so that's like there was no taunting before and in that stream today they were talking about
They were talking about the idea of there being more role-based multiplayer stuff. There's factions now. You're getting faction rep now between three different factions. Again, very consistent with Warframe. If you look at the patch notes, you can see, if you scroll down enough, you can see what the new kind of like casting lightning attack basic weapon is. It's so sick. The Odiac, yes.
This reminds me a lot of, I've been playing with a weapon in Warframe that's a combination whip and taser. Sure, right. It's kind of a similar vibe. And all the map is covered with mist. You have to go find these trees to... recover your map which is very fun um otherwise you don't have map access anymore uh and then there was there was one other thing that i think was um you know there's a bunch of a bunch of little changes for balance which is tied to your faction and
like your faction rep and stuff like that. But like, I think they didn't add was like, a bunch of tutorial or something, you know. I will say I immediately had to solve a puzzle. I found the entrance to my faction area. There had previously been a sort of... tavern uh that was like a social hub that has now become one of three similar social hubs and there's there's each one is tied to a different faction i picked the faction unknowingly of the little avocado guy uh oh the fellow i don't like
That little, yeah, Avocat. And there was a little totem like shrine thing out front. And it said, beloved when lost, but loathed at home, I crave a jewel born not from stone. So a little riddle. I have to do a little riddle.
asked me which of the like gem drops that i had did i want to place in the altar kidney stone pearl close right in some ways right because yeah loads at home is a kidney stone for yeah exactly for an oyster so uh so yeah put that in there opened up new little social space which was cool um i didn't a ton of time in i tried out these new these new like lightning bolt
the odiac as you said the crackle of lightning bolt uh bottled up one sleeve um even just reading these notes i see there's also a new fucked up there's a new fucked up dog i misread this we didn't mention when we talked about this before
We didn't talk about how there were dogs and the dogs have helmets. And instead of killing the dogs, you knock the helmet off and they run away. I bet you kill this dog. This dog looks fucked up. No, because look at what it says. It says, seeks to free them from the Odin reign. Seek to free them from the Odin rain. I thought this said corrupt old dog. Not corrupt old dog. Corrupt old dog. You know, even just looking at these faction notes, or these patch notes, rather, are a great...
of like, hey, what do they mean when they say the writing is weird in some way? The writing is extremely built towards its own voice. And it's like, okay, let's take a look at something as simple as what are the three classes and one of them says um chief of the soulless warriors was she wreathed in flame and fury claim the pact of the fey champion tetheran raise your sword to sun how the felling song
Have courage, envoy, for a warrior's heart is both a weapon and armor and a human heart can crack. And it's like, yeah, okay, they're doing it. It's great. And then at the same time, you read stuff like Kith of King's Enclave, heralded... by his towering throne, haunted by his subject stone, the crumbling crypt of the fire king Fen Yotar, hidden away in an untouched pocket of his undercity does his body rest, dot dot dot, and his restless soul wander. That's just good fantasy writing, you know?
fantasy writing yeah a hundred percent when there's an undercity and like a tomb of stone i love i love to see that stuff new pact morris hand her ever flame will she impart to braving souls with burning hearts not life nor death will do you part take morris hand envoy make a pack with the red sun an honor once held only by the The first ability is Ignis Roth. You'll see why I'm reading on. Wake the old flame. Set the earth ablaze.
enemies in area of effect take fire damage it's so funny you know it's you know sometimes enemies in the area take fire damage it's just still the thing yeah these will return as mythic tier earnable weapons etc etc premium currency testing you know uh-huh yeah well there we go we'll be back
to that i am sure so we'll have to see how that how that uh shakes out i guess this is a precedent that we will not be continuing which is midway through every episode of side story they release a new patch that we don't know what if this does continue who could say you know
Maybe this is our weird special version of The Shining. You know, anything we talk about, if we happen to take a break in the middle of the episode, something will shift the world such, you know, that... I mean, we're set to record the next one of these shortly after... This is true, yeah. So who knows, right? Anything could happen. We'll take a break and then switch through. Exactly. We also played something else in between sessions.
which was Repo by Semiwork, a developer who I think previously put out a game called Voidigo or something like that, which is like an action roguelite. And this is not that. This is another game. Do we have a name for this? Is it like horror extraction comedy? I don't like that people...
They're getting called Lethal Company likes, which I don't think is fair because I don't think Lethal Company started this. I don't recall feeling like, wow, Lethal Company is doing something new. I remember thinking, oh, people are refining the phasmophobia. Which itself is in the line with their stuff. Which is, yeah, itself is, yeah. So I don't like they're being called lethal company likes, but also when you say that, people know what you mean. Jack, have you heard any other term?
I don't think so. They're horror comedy games, which is really... Phasmophobia is more explicitly a... Muppets in Peril. It's Muppets in Peril, for sure. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and you're right. Phasmophobia obviously had comedic moments, but... it's it's one unlike lethal company and unlike repo and unlike uh what's the content warning is that the other one yeah people played a lot last year um
and headliners so like i think headliners is different also in one way which is repo uh uh and the other two i just mentioned lethal company and content warning are do have the extraction element of like go in and get a particular get literal objects i guess The one you just said. What was the one? What's the one?
the one headliners you are trying to survive and escape with photos but you're not like go in to get stuff and leave the way that repo and co are doing that almost as if it's um tarkov or something except you're trying to find in the case of repo a big vase instead of like an ak-407 or whatever um yeah it's it's because it's it's got that like moving out yes it's moving out plus totally yeah so repo like you said uh first person multiplayer
I think it's up to six players by default. A game about going into creepy places with your friends, trying to extract a bunch of valuable things. Each new level is set up where you arrive in a big truck. And at the truck, there is an extraction point. And to start with, all you have to do is come back with a bunch of valuables, which you load in via a weird physics carrying system, also a hover cart. But as you play deeper into a run...
You unlock levels that need, consecutive levels end up having multiple extraction points that are placed deeper and deeper into the level design. And importantly, as the words already come up, you're playing a bunch of Muppets. You're playing a bunch of kind of cylindrical people. Trash can puppets. Yeah, there you go. It's a stroke of genius. These little guys are...
Okay, so Austin briefly mentioned that there's some sort of physics going on here, and physics is the backbone of this game. You know, if in Lethal Company you're kind of just picking things up and putting them down, in this game you are trying to wrestle like a grand piano through-
a door that you can't quite manage and every time you bonk it against the floor it loses you know 50 uh dollars of its value right because you're trying to extract a certain percentage of or a certain dollar amount of stuff from these places you know it's like you're ripping out the copper pipes from the walls, except the copper pipes are a big statue or someone's, you know, a vat of or a canister of liquid flame. And if you drop it wrong, it'll blow up.
up in front of you, you know? Or like a glass, a statue of a glass rhinoceros in a glass case. Oh, in the glass case. It's so funny. There's some real understanding. In the same way that... Or a doll that will kill you. The doll that attacks you. Yeah, like in the same way that the...
the understanding of the Victorian bedroom farce is like predicated on how it's extremely funny to run in and out of doors and slam doors open and closed. The understanding of repo is predicated on the fact that it's extremely funny to like... Pick up a cup, and then your friend turns around and bonks the cup with the thing that they are holding, and it just shatters immediately. I found a vase. I was climbing this unbelievably tall set of spiral stairs, and halfway up the spiral stairs...
There was like a ledge looking out over the gap with a huge, very valuable vase on it. And I picked the vase up and misclicked and immediately dropped it down five flights of stairs where it shattered. You know, it's... The physics in here is amazing and it is built into these like trash can Muppets who are moving with sort of like inverse kinematic stuff going on. They are affected by physics in the world.
world as well and they are looking uh that their eyes are um not controlled by the player their head motions are controlled by the player but their eyes are looking at whatever is making the most noise or what they consider to be
I value objects. And the physical comedy involved in watching your friends embody these guys is... exquisite they they can there was this great moment where I guess you know you can crouch down importantly you can take this little trash can and it will like person the design that they are they're almost like cylindrical trash cans and they can telescope down into
A tiny little, like a flat button almost. Not quite flat, but like just the cap of where their head is and then a little bit of leg underneath that and that's about it. And there was a moment where we had taken a little break or I'd stepped away or something and I came back and...
I remember who the two people – we streamed this, youtube.com slash friends on the table. The archive will go up at some point. You can probably go see the archive still on twitch.tv slash friends on the table. And it was you, Jack, I want to say, and maybe Sylvie. We're both in the cart in your little –
tiny hiding mode in your your crouched mode and you were both making perfect eye contact with me and i was like wait it's still me playing and just listening and like looking at me and you told me that the eyes like naturally follow sound. And so it's just, it's so expressive because of that. It's so filled with character whenever anyone yells or runs or gets thrown across the room or gets shot by Elmer.
Fudd, the guy with the gun who will... We'll talk about Alma Fudd. I mean, this is... I was saying, Janine, the other day to you that I think the thing that makes it stand out for me is... There are enemy types in those other games, right? Like there really truly are enemy types in Lethal Company and in Content Warning. And I know in my heart of hearts that repeated play would have led us to develop strategies with dealing with them, you know, outside of like...
I know how to deal with the blob in Lethal Company pretty easily, or I did at the time anyway, right? These are so legible. The enemies in this space or in this game, you very quickly go like, okay, I understand how it's patrolling this route. I understand the type of...
Not very quickly, not so quickly that it's nothing. But the first or second time it kills you, you know, I see what just happened there. Someone made noise and it caused this old guy to raise up a shotgun and shoot at us. And next time we got to be more careful with. noise but you don't know how careful you need to be necessarily and be yeah i was gonna say explain the frog chef to me that the frog chef is chasing you around the frog the frog chef just wants to just wants to get you you know
I didn't get, I never, the frog chef only killed me in the back because someone led, led the frog chef to me once. So I didn't get like a look at the frog chef. Whereas for instance, I know I should probably not mess with the big box. the car or the the wooden box that if you drop it begins to break open revealing a creature inside you know it's that i've learned my lesson
The creatures are tremendous, and they are subject to the same weird physics shit that you are. I've seen Elmer Fudd, who is a huntsman who is blind, but has really, really...
advanced hearing. I've seen him fall down the stairs on several occasions and then get up and shoot someone in the face who laughed as he fell. There is an alien who floats around menacingly and summons you into like a, oh, there's an- gnomes there's uh oh my that's a great example for me right is we were playing an early one of our early um
like missions or early runs uh there were these little gnomes that were like hopping around and killing the whole party um and on a whim i was like i i went to maybe i went to pick up something else but i grabbed one of the gnomes and then like had it and held it and whipped it against the wall and it like broke like a ceramic like a little ceramic gnome would break and then the next 30 seconds was me like destroying a half dozen little ceramic gnomes yes
And so that for me is one of those things where it's not just their cool monster designs, but they are interactable in really particular ways. The doll was similar where like there's a little doll that you can cash in as loot basically.
second you you pick it up it will start she will start like trying to stab you to death with a little knife or like reach out with her arms she's like flailing it's a nightmare it's a tornado of violence but i realize if i keep doing the thing where i'm holding her in this game when you pick stuff up you
kind of like a little gravity beam is how you're picking stuff up in the interface um and that you can you can pull stuff closer to you with that or push it further away and so i was just like push her further away push her further away and she's like trying to kill me and
I'm running to the drop-off point because I'm like, oh, as long as she's not near me, then I can keep her out of reach and then we can still cash her in and get the money we need so that we can leave this level. And that is just not the way I've interacted with any of these other games before.
Again, I'm willing to say that if I put 20 hours in to Lethal Company, maybe I would have that depth of interaction. But the core set of verbs in this game just are so much more expressive than what I've seen in those other ones. There's a really good... sense of like there's sort of two two like branches here that converge that i want to talk about where it's like they've won picked the most expressive kind of puppet to base their main character their main models on which is the sort of
Muppet where the mouth is made out of like a margarine lid you cut in half kind of thing. I don't know if anyone else is like a puppet kid, but you were just a puppet kid. You're not a puppet grown adult. I still appreciate puppets. Not as much. I watched a lot of puppet content as a kid, including shows involving making puppets. And...
So there's a kind of puppet that you see a lot in Sesame Street and Muppets and stuff. Like if you look at Elmo, Elmo's mouth is basically a big circle cut in half and folded. And basically anything where you're getting like this big wide circle shape where it is so obvious when it's open and then so minimal when it's closed.
is very expressive and people tend to respond very strongly to it. You get this a little bit with Kermit too, but Kermit's more of a soft mouth. Like he can twist his mouth around more and stuff like that. Fold it up like a little pizza, but upside down. Yes. Another thing you'll see a lot with really, really funny puppets is the eye. You'll often see like the eyeball will be like a little plastic black disc or the pupil will be a plastic black disc.
It's like attached to a pivot point. And the pivot point is not at the center. It'll usually be like near the top or something so that the people can like waggle. Yes. and and sort of move around uh so again you get this sense of animation that like even you know if you're using it correctly will feel directed and will feel like really expressive um so they've learned and i think you can say a lot of the same stuff about the enemies too right where they've clearly
got some opinions and done some looking at, you know, what is evocative? What, like, what do people really respond to on like a, like, like a primal brain level of like what, what gets us?
feeling things but also i think a thing that they've done that's really smart is they have kind of figured out some of the kinks in the format that they're looking at um in a way that reminds me of like when shooters figured out like what if you could just get back in a match real quick like what if what if once you're out you can just like keep you know um and So you have health. You can share health. Healing isn't a rare, strange thing. You're totally right.
You can give health to other people. You can survive taking a few hits, depending on the context. Usually like there is room for you to make mistakes. And that's good because mistakes are funny. But what's less funny is when you're immediately out of.
the action and you can't you can't there's no room to recover there's no room to to steal victory from the jaws of defeat there's even yeah i gotta tell you i don't know that i've ever been more clutch than in some of those rounds that we played people to go watch because i think the final version of this uh it's very mlg yeah yeah i was east i was esportsing for sure
Esports gnome killing. Esports gnome killing. Esports evading the guy with the gun. Lots of various... Esports learning how... Okay, well, I evaded... Esports getting other people killed because you were saying shit. about the guy with the gun. Sometimes being clutch is being the guy who's faster than the slowest person with the bear. And sometimes... The guy behind the human shield. Yeah, exactly. Sometimes you cover someone else with peanut butter and then you outrun them. Anyway...
That's eSports. You know, eSports isn't fair. eSports is like love and war, you know? Wow. uh sorry i was reminded i have our footage on and i was reminded of the duck which is a little duck you cannot interact with or else but it just like hangs out and quacks at you jumps up and down inquisitive he tries to break the shit you're
Yeah, it's like a little brother or something, like a little sibling who's like, oh, what are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing? And like a little sibling, I don't have any. My plan would be, I'm just going to ignore you. I'm just going to.
give you any attention and that seemed to work fine for me. I wonder what would happen if you put the feather drone on it. Well that's what I was going to say is my favorite clutch moment was spending an entire round being stupidly obsessed with a feather drone which is a thing that can
Make any object light enough to float or light enough for one person to lift is really what it is. You went through hell with the feather drone. I really did. I was like, oh, I got this feather drone. Okay, how do I make it work? And I made it work pretty quickly where it was lifting not me, but an object.
And then for the rest of that map, I kept making myself lighter, which lets you jump really high. Instead, at one point, I jumped out of what was like the primary area of the map and up to like some balconies looking down. I was like, I don't know how to get back. down without hurting myself feather drone helped with that it turned out yeah that's not that's not a game where jumping is a is a
Real strategy. I was jumping a lot. There's a lot of verticality in that game. I think the number one place for jumping is when gnomes are trying to bite your knees. And you're like, ah, get away from me. You know? So. Yeah. But that feather drone ended up helping me lift a big, heavy case with like a witch. It was either the, I said Grand Pan. It was a broom, right? It was the case with the broom in it, or was it just the raw broom? I don't remember. Case with a broom.
Yeah, and that was the last thing we needed to get out of the area. And to your point, Janine, things like the Feather Drone, other games have had... uh things that you can buy between rounds a hundred percent um sometimes those things are really funny or like multipliers content warning is big on like bring this new thing with you into the world so you can take better pictures or get better video that
will give you more points, but they don't lean as much into the way that this has both stat increases in terms of stamina, strength, being able to lift things more, and then like outright verbs.
like the feather drone. Obviously, there's like grenades and weapons and stuff, too. But there's a lot of things that are just like, oh, what if we use this thing? What if we brought the shock mine? What if we brought, you know, there's a recharge drone, recharge your other drones. And those things, I think...
There is a gun. There is a gun. But those things speak to the thing you're talking about, Janine, which is like there has been a focus on how do we change what the loops are in this game to go from you do a run. Most of your team might die or maybe you won't and you'll get out with the stuff and then you do it again. There's like both short term loops of, okay, I'm going to go in. I'm going to get hurt. My friends can heal me. I'm going to die. A number of times people would die together.
or near each other, or not even near each other. They'd both be dead in the voice comms for dead players. When you find someone's body or their head, just their head, you can bring it to an extraction point that you haven't used. yet and when you use that extraction point for the first time you can only use each one once it'll res that person and then the player will come back and be like i know where sylvie's body is i know where we can go save sylvie or
Jack said that they have no idea where they died, where their head is. We can't say that we have to go. And those little loops combined with the kind of larger progression schema really do the thing that you're talking about, Janine, which is like, oh. this is maybe what will a standardized version of what this might look like it feels like we're arriving at that a little bit more you know there's a more fully functional fully featured
look at these sorts of comedy extraction horror things that you could imagine breaking bigger because of that structure, you know? And all of this stuff compounds, um... to produce something that is just so funny um i can i can The horror comedy of this genre, you know, tends to balance the two fairly evenly. Phasmophobia is a funny game, although it's much more frightening. Lethal Company is about equally frightening and funny. This is just so deeply...
All of these mechanics have been tuned to producing moments that are not just moments that are exciting, but moments that are funny. And, you know, I feel like a lot of column inches have been spent talking about how and why games... struggle to be funny or succeed in being funny. And, you know, very often there is conversations about how, you know, successful funny games are funny because of what you do rather than because of what the game says, you know. It's quite difficult to...
write a comedy game, although it can be done, and it's much easier to, you know, it's extremely funny in a match of Warzone where something goes very, very badly wrong because of one player's inaction or something. And in Repo, you are just seeing mechanic after mechanic after mechanic like turned towards how can we make people laugh
To, you know, you describing earlier people coming back and saying, I think I know where Sylvie's head is. There was a version of this where we were talking in the voice comms and Austin, someone were trying to evade. Alma Fudd and we came back and you just said shut the fuck up everybody stop talking because they can't hear you in the voice comms but as soon as we were in the world and we were still just maintaining our conversations it might be because I had one HP which is not
thing you know you have health of those other games but it's not a big one on the screen on the top left which you'll carry for nine minutes as you're like I just need to get to the end of this level because if I do I'll get 25 more HP and I'll be at 26 for the beginning of next level and that'll be way better
you know yeah but yeah you're gonna say about about the character we call elmer fun who i think is actually called like the hunter or something yeah i think that's right To Janine's point about how you're given opportunities to make mistakes, I think central to the way the game is...
really aware of the mechanics of comedy, there are exceptions to that, and they are the exception rather than something that happens regularly, but you don't get an opportunity to make a mistake with Elmer Fudd, or you do if you're very, very lucky. Or if you're already in motion. Or if you're already in motion. Or if you're hiding on a table and Jack is actually closer or in the line of sight. Because I didn't get shot, certainly.
No, no, that's true. But there being a monster out there that will just get you makes the narrow escapes all the funnier. And it makes the moments when you encounter that fellow walking quietly down the hallway, genuinely terrifying and intense because you're like, all right well this is it now the rules are very clear to me in this moment i have to be silent we've learned uh that um
Oh, we need to talk about the text-to-speech. The game is mostly played over voice comms, and it has that really good... Not just... proximity stuff but also like processing done on the voice to um mimic the spaces that you're in phasmophobia was wonderful at this you know as you step into some gigantic uh school or asylum in phasmophobia and hear the the reverb in your voice
But it's slightly crunchy, it's slightly reverb-y, things get muffled through walls. Yeah, things I think get super muffled when you're one room away. Like I think that they made a very key important choice, which was even if you're fairly close on the map, being in a different, you know, room on the grid.
automatically makes someone more quiet than they might be in real life as a way of creating kind of information asymmetry. There are so many times when playing where, you know, a good example of this is like there's the... laughing child at me I never saw that thing in person I always heard it laugh and then heard someone scream and then someone would try to explain to me but from a room away and I never quite I still couldn't tell you what it actually looks like I have no idea so you know
I'd be screwed if it showed up near me outside of I'm going to get small and hide in a corner, you know. But that asymmetry, I think, really is important for selling that distance between you, you know. Yeah. But for players who don't have a microphone plugged in or who don't want to play with voice chat, there is text-to-speech. This is hilarious because the voice that they have chosen for the text-to-speech is the most garbled... uh like tone shifted
And it fits so well with these stupid little trash can Muppets. And it differs in tone and pitch based on whether or not you're crouching. If you're crouched, it appears as this awful hissed robot whistler. but sometimes they'll speak in a very deep, low voice for seemingly no reason at all. It's because you're looking down, Jack. It's so good. If you look down, it gets deeper. If you look up, it gets higher. Which again feels Muppety to me.
Yeah, they mispronounce things like a computer does. They have no real sense of like where stress falls in a word. Just standing around making these things talk to each other is great, because it is the ultimate transformation into a Muppet-like character. I think about the, um...
The Sesame Street aliens who don't know what a telephone is and are trying to talk... talk with each other about what they think a telephone does, the various little gangs of weirdies that the Muppets will just send into a scene to cause havoc or whatever, just using the text-to-speech transforms you perfectly into one of those.
It's great. And we learned to our cost that the enemies can hear text-to-speech as though they are being spoken to through a microphone. As if it's actually, yeah. Uh-huh. We learned this because in Warning Friends about Alma Fudd, I typed react to sound and was shot in the head so quickly that the word sound still appeared in text above my head. I mean, and the timing of that, you got shot and killed by this guy. You didn't get shot and then immediately blow up. There is a...
you know, a half second beat where your whole body turns red as if you've been supercharged and then you explode into pieces, which again is... Yeah, if anyone reads the newsletter, that... Sylvie took a screen cap of that moment and I put that at the top of this current. And that's the, and that's the, like there is in the same way that like,
playing Monster Hunter or playing a fighting game means that there's a little bit of hit-stop on certain attacks. That kind of hand-crafted animation timing for maximum effect can... Sometimes we in video games, yo, check out this dragon punch you just hit. In this case, it's like, it is the funniest thing in the world when somebody gets shot and explodes into little pieces. We have to emphasize that moment. We have to punctuate it, you know, with something that makes it stand out.
just any specific split second. And that's, you know, it's good. It's simply good. But one thing that I think is genuinely not good about this game is its logo. Oh my god! It's bizarre! Okay, so the logo is clearly pushing for some sort of virality, which I say not so much as a value judgment. My value judgment here is that I think that the logo is bad, not that they went for virality. It shows a...
Grinning, smiling, yellow smiley face with like rotten... teeth this does not represent the production design of the rest of the game in any way there are emojis in the game you're like your email communication thing in the truck uh only ever has emoji on the your respond button and i have to imagine that that's where it grew out of but it's not it's not these sorts of like rotten gross you know it's just regular ass emoji you know and the the
The Muppets are such a beautiful piece of art direction that it is clear that there is really skilled, thoughtful production design going on here, but not in the logo. It's fucked. It's a shame. It's the one thing that I would love for them to just change it and be like, we got a new logo. It's the Muppets. It's the Muppets. Yeah, they just put these little guys.
Bouncing around. I would die for the little guys. Oh, it's also worth saying that they're... Yeah, make it the duck. The Muppets are small. They are, I don't know if you've noticed this, they're about three feet tall. All the levels that you go into, the architecture is like slightly bigger than you. And this is presumably to allow for hiding under chairs, tables, couches, etc. But it further characterizes the repo crew as this...
Like this bizarre, like, rowdy gang of small mascot characters that rock up into a house to strip it for parts. It's worth saying that they are adding some stuff to the game that I'm really excited about in terms of new maps, new monsters, they're adding a bucket that you can put over the duck to stop it.
uh uh coming for you and they're also adding stuff that i am less interested in uh they are adding like expressions for the characters and one of the big things that they're adding with the expressions is eyelids And that sounds like not a major addition, but so much of the humor of the little trash can robots is their blank-faced, big-eyed stares. They have no expression in their face, and they communicate entirely.
Entirely through the posture of their head, the way they're moving, whether or not they have a tiny trash can. Sometimes they roll their eyes purely procedurally, like completely by accident.
And I think the idea of making them narrow their eyes or something is a really weird moment of something that seems like it would add more... expression to the characters but might end up robbing them of a particular kind of expressivity that is really funny now i wasn't on board until you said seeing them narrow their eyes because i am
I want to see it. I got to see it. I got to see it. I think I can send you a picture. Send me a picture. And then we can get a reaction. I mean, you know when Animal from the Muppets like lowers his eyebrows? Yeah. That's funny. But you kind of get that. or gonzo like gonzo i it's it's gonna be a question of like restraint right like if they do it all the time it's gonna suck but like gonzo has big huge eyes
And then every now and then those big eyelids do something funny. And it's funny. That's true. The other thing that they are interested in adding... is lore there was a question where they were like does the game have lore they're like yeah the game has a lot of lore and we're really excited to tell you about it that's and that's making a video game for this audience in 2025 right
This is, you gotta SCP backrooms it. You gotta skippity toilet it. You gotta skippity toilet it. These guys are funny to me. Going into the houses is funny to me because they are just these like... There's like a magic school, there's a weird old mansion, there's the base from The Thing. These are inherently weird, funny spaces, and they will not be made better to me by someone saying, you actually work for the Glaxaback Corporation.
And the Huntsman is actually a guy who has been... As long as that stuff is... You know, when I think about the way that that stuff gets delivered in these games, it's like...
so tangential to what playing it is like. You know, a lethal company has data disks you can find and load in to read the lore docs. I think that's fine. If we were finding every once in a while some sort of... you know not even an audio log but that sort of text log that you could then like in your side you know time or you know it goes back to like the halo 3 you can find lore dumps in that like that's fine it's okay i'm not gonna what i wouldn't like i'm not that player right
Right. What I wouldn't love is if there was like a big briefing about each location that before we went in that explained why there was a magic school and what the history of the magic school was. You know, I don't need that. Yeah. And I guess the other thing is, I like it when writers get paid, and so I'm happy that there is someone being paid to write lore for The Muppet. you know horror action comedy game yes uh even if it's not going to be to my particular taste you know
I gotta tell you, Jack, I kind of like this angry Muppet expression. No, I do not like these angry Muppets. Well, they're not gonna always be like that. It's gonna be a moment. The thing is, for me, it's like, I'm gonna trust them. to continue to understand what makes it work.
And like, they got here. They got here. Yeah, exactly. Maybe you're right though. It's not like I haven't played games before where I've been like, I really liked it early on. And then as stuff, as they added to it, they kind of diluted what was great. You know, that does happen. They're adding a museum. That's going to be extremely funny. Because... There's a lot to steal. There's a lot to steal. Well, and there's a lot to break.
Yeah, that is 100%. The funniest thing in this game is you pick up something that's worth $20,000. You only need $17,000 to clear this extraction, you know, and you immediately drop it and, you know, take $6,000. dollars off of the top of it you know it is simply innately funny what is your favorite object to find in a repo level oh great question oh I do really like the rhino. I really liked... I like the big dinosaur bones.
the like dinosaur bones are good dinosaur bones on a on a stand is really great um I like opening like an armoire or something and just finding a little pocket watch or a diamond or just like just something small out of the way just a quick 2k right in the bucket you know froggy purse which is a frog purse that croaks when you pick it up sorry it's the
doll i described before that's the because the line being blurred between monster and thing i want to trade in for nine thousand dollars you know um yes the experience i had of lifting that thing Getting mauled by it as its arms went. And then learning to keep it at a distance was just like, I like the reactive things. The gramophone that can make noise is very fun. Yeah. Flamethrower.
That if you pick it up by its handle, turns on a flamethrower from the thing and just sets you on fire. Okay, I've picked that up before. I never picked it up by the handle. That's very funny. Can you use it against the... You can, but it's really, really hard to use. Yeah, perfect. It's great.
I like that big painting when you grab like a giant painting with somebody. That's the other thing. It's like we haven't been super explicit about this, but things have weight and you often need a second person to pick it up. And so there's a lot of comedy of like, all right, now let's quick. We've got to rotate this.
this way and then you hear the sound of like the state the stay puffed marshmallow man walking down the hallway like ah shit okay everybody hide put the painting down put it down soft put it down soft we don't want to break it Great game. Really, really thrilled with it. Great game. If you want to play it before they add the eyelids, you should go play it now, you know?
Now is the moment. They'll look back on that like the beautiful day before they added the eyelids. I think the eyelids will be fine. Yeah, but I get what you're saying. I mean, again, like... If the eyelids suck, there'll be a no eyelids mod. There will be a no eyelids mod. And that'll fix it. You're right. You're right.
You know, I get this, Jack, because I am the person who really misses launch No Man's Sky. I'm that person. I was just talking to a friend about this the other day. Oh, side story, update report, they added bones to No Man's Sky. Yeah, they did. They did do that. They did, yeah. one of the dinosaur stands the dinosaur displays that are in uh repo in you then have to carry away yeah um yeah i you know and i'm always because of stuff like
And you know, what they've done to No Man's Sky is really cool. I think both Austin and I are talking about primarily from a preference sense rather than from like a value sense. But like... Whenever a game hits massive success and their designers carrying forward that massive success are like, here's all the stuff that we are adding. I feel like a tingle of fear creep down my spine, you know?
um but also i mean because there's a sense of like because this is a game that it is that is following a sort of sequence of games that have sort of come and gone When this game was originally conceived of, what was the list that they had on their whiteboard? Right. And how much of that was cut for, you know, scope reasons because they didn't know, am I going to make any money? Are we going to have time to do this? How much of that was cut?
was cut and like it ended up being a lucky and good thing that it was cut right but then when they do have the time the budget etc to return to it they maybe are still of the impression like well this is the thing we should include this is a thing yeah um these kinds of games have whatever and there's you know
You have to trust. You definitely have to trust that it's their game. They have a vision for it. Their vision so far has been represented in a way that has resonated. Yeah. Cool. Hopefully that remains true. Hopefully they changed their logo, though, actually. It was never originally intended to be a lethal company type thing. It sort of became that.
The developers say that it was originally a single-player cleaning game where you tried to clean a mansion while remaining hidden from Headman. Very funny. Which is one of the monsters in the final game. That's very funny.
Like that Goblin Maid game? What's that game called? I don't remember. I know the one you're talking about. Goblin Maid game? Yeah, the game where you're a Goblin Maid. It's a game where you're a Goblin Maid and you're cleaning out the dungeon, but the traps are still active and stuff. Goblin Cleanup? That's really funny. You know what it was called?
It's a good pitch. Maybe? I don't know. There's actually like multiple games where you're a goblin who's cleaning things or repairing things. I can think of three off the top of my head right now. There's a dragon in this now. So yeah, this is... it's not out yet it's one of the seven basic plots that's right that's right you're a goblin you're a goblin the dragon is here now yeah yes and also man against god um goblin what's it called goblin it's just called goblin goblin clean clean up
clean up oh this is great and of course this is you know There's a lineage here with Power Wash Simulator, but way before that, there's Viscera Cleanup Detail, like way back when. This is like a kind of expression in games that has been percolating for a decade. I would say even longer than that, because like, if I look back at when I first played Harvest Moon.
super nintendo like the very first harvest moon the best part of that game and all subsequent games to me was cleaning the field when you first get the farm oh it's so good to tidy up chopping the wood hammering all the stones getting a nice clean And then, you know, when the summer storms come or whatever, like repairing your fences and picking up the...
crap that this that the windstorm leaves like so i feel like i feel like there's been a thread of it around for a while but it did take a while for people to like just be like this could be a thing on its own yeah why not Sorry, I've just been notified by Steam that there is actually another repo change that has arrived or is arriving. Oh, yes. It's explosions. Yeah, it's explosions. Do you see what this is?
I didn't understand what I was looking at. Jack, guess what the title of this video is, Introducing an Explosive New Mechanic. Let me see how much of this I can read without it. This week we're showing off a new mechanic and some progress on matchmaking. The image is everyone blowing up around the huntman, the huntsman. What do you think the explosive new mechanic is? I'll even say it is. explosions. They've added explosions in a particular way. Is it farting?
no i see where you see this this would be the bad version of this i think you know i think that if the first thing they added was farting if the first thing they added maybe that's maybe that's someone else's 30th or 40th um is it Is it the players willingly exploding? Not willingly, but that's not a bad guess. Like a weird, like you can have a timer put on you. In a sense. do something, you'll explode. That's actually the other way. It's if you keep doing something. So...
When you are lifting an enemy, let's say you get enough strength upgrades that you can lift one of the enemies up, it creates a new meter in the top left next to your health and your... Next to your health and your stamina. There's stamina in this game. It's a soul's life now. Here, I've time stamped this for you.
If you're holding, say, the Huntsman up in the air and bashing him against the walls, which you can do with a high enough strength upgrade, or even just holding something in place so that your friend with low health can get away, it will start ticking up this... And if it hits 100, you blow up.
Oh, that's really interesting. And if more of you are holding it, it speeds up or it goes up slower. So if multiple people are trying to hold back the creature so that the weak person can get away, that is acceptable. It's always acceptable. It's about gaming this. I don't think this is for items or anything like that. It's just for monsters. It's like overheat. I mean, that is exactly what it is. It's like overheating. Yeah. Great. Overcharge only affects enemies. This I like quite a bit.
of the museum, which they're greyboxing towards the end of this video as well. And you can just see like weird statues of the robots. Oh my God. There's a load of bowling pins like balanced on top of each other to make a pyramid with a bowling ball on the top. Hell yeah. We didn't even get to do the thing in our run because our run was so successful of what happens when you lose. Jack, did you get to do this in a different game? Yeah, I've done it a few times through failure.
We don't lose, so, you know, we're just never going to see it in our group game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You play an extremely small, extremely stupid, last man standing, king of the hill game. with a combination of weapons and also just stuff where the last remaining sort of surviving player gets to claim a crown that they wear in the next level. This mechanic is exactly as, like... This joke would not be funny at all if it was three minutes long. It is...
It is 90 seconds long and it is just an immediate free-for-all. We've been talking for longer than most of those rounds go, you know? Yeah, you fall and you pick up like a massive hammer and you just hit your friend with it completely off the... platform that they're on, or then you stumble backwards and fall into the thing. It's great. It's just such a fun little...
I think the way to think of it is like it's like you are suddenly dropped into a Mario Party minigame. Oh yeah. That is the vibe. Shoutouts to Repo. Shout out to Repo. That's probably the last thing we'll talk about today. We've already gone at this point for a reasonable time, and I know I'm well known for five-star run times, but I'm trying not to make this default to a... three-hour monster podcast every week so that when that does happen it's special um
Is there anyone we want to shout out that we didn't I guess important one before we wrap up we did not talk about our cover art at all Jack you really took the lead on that Do you want to talk a little bit about our incredible cover art and what kind of what makes it so special visually? Our cover art is by A. Liang Chan, or Four Myths. That's F-O-R-M-Y-T-H-S. This is a...
piece of cover art that is so beautiful. I am in love with this art. It is risoprinted, which is a style of printing that produces these really great tactile images and something I knew that I wanted in getting art for this. podcast was something that felt really warm and felt really tactile. And I am so excited that we were able to work with Eliang Chan on getting this art that has such a cool feel.
to it. I love it so much. I will say a really fun thing in it is, without giving it away, one of the things on the cover art was an alternate name for this podcast. It was a name I really wanted. Multiple things. Oh, sorry. At least one of them was one we explicitly did not ask for. And they just kind of put it in there, and that felt good. That felt like a little bit of kismet, you know?
yeah sign um so yeah shout outs to to a chance to four myths um really incredible uh really beautiful um uh i think we'll probably end up having some cool digital assets around it for our for like if we ever do special streams maybe i'll use some of those in our outward uh let's play oh yeah you know put some frames up
Available now. Available now. Patreon.com slash friends at the table. Friends at the table. Cash. You can watch our repo stream. Again, twitch.tv slash friends at the table. We're on YouTube. YouTube.com slash friends at the table. I don't think the repo stream. is up quite yet because Keith got a huge amount of different perspectives and is doing his best to actually put them all together, which is going to be incredible. It's going to be the best way to watch that.
good way to watch it the second time you know i believe all of us were we're recording even though only one or two of us were streaming i think that's right yeah yeah so so yeah that'll be a good one We have a lot going on right now. We are very close to... Perpetua starting in proper mode very soon. We are deeper into our Dreamcast stream series. Jack, you have now played two of the eight.
seven Dreamcast games that have been prepared for you on a beautiful slideshow introducing you to the world of the Dreamcast. You've now done two. You've done... What was the first one? Evolution, the RPG. And now you've been, I was going to say indoctrinated. Maybe that's too strong. Inducted is better. Introduced is too light, though. I think it is more than just...
introduction into the world of Shenmue. Shenmue is astonishing. I think everyone who has played it either says this thing is garbage or I love it deeply so much. Yes. I got to experience it for the first time. I love it deeply so much. It feels not just like a game that was made for me, but also like a weird jewel. I don't know how or frankly why it got made.
But it's excellent. There's some stuff in Shenmue that is... it is gorgeous today like you know the way that game looks and the way that it moves and it's also it's bizarre sort of like singular spirit really really special i had a great time playing with keith we're definitely going to go back to it i accidentally left my dream
running while I went to do something else midway through a cutscene to I was in a cutscene and the cutscene reached a point where I could talk to this guy and offer a response and I was like okay I'm gonna go and make lunch and then come back because I'll still be in the middle of the cutscene
save the game. Instead, of course, 11pm happened and I was immediately teleported back to my house. So I don't know what the status of that cutscene is anymore. Whether I can go back and learn a move from that weird old man. I bet you can. That's very funny. Well, good news. We know some people who've...
yeah a lot of people you can go done some things with this game run button has an entire let's play of it um i think the first few episodes are very easy to find at the very least uh and the there there is a patreon for run button you can go our good friends Keith and Kyle and go watch them play through the whole thing if that's what you want to do or like Jack you could go down this this route and become inducted into the Shenmue fandom it is a valuable journey I think
You learn a lot about yourself and video games by doing it. Jack, have you decided what the third of the Dreamcast games is you're going to play yet? No, we haven't decided yet. I'm really excited. Twitch.tv slash friends on the table. And I guess that's going to do it for us this first week. Thank you so much for giving us a shot. If you enjoyed this, feel free to let us know. We are over on blue sky at trends.
Hyphen table. I think that's our primary social space at this point. I would love to hear your feedback. We'd love to hear what you think. Obviously, the best thing you could do for us right now is to share this, to let other people know about it. We don't have any advertisements.
for the show outside of us shouting about it on our own shows and our friend shows and stuff like that um so please let people know uh we have already decided a little bit what we're going to talk about next time which is exciting so uh look forward to us
back in two weeks we're gonna do an every other week structure right now um you know obviously we can uh we can revisit that if this is some sort of giant smash success and everyone is like no you have to do it every week for a million dollars like okay Maybe we'll do it then. I'll do lots of stuff for a million dollars. So we'll see. If you all could get a million dollars together every week...
I promise you we will do this show weekly. And maybe even for less than that. But, you know, we got to like start somewhere. Start with a strong first offer. You know what I mean? Million dollars a week. I'll do face cam. I'll do video. Okay. Look at that. That's the only way. See?
This is, yeah, we're taking a Germa stance to face Cam. It's a little reward, you know? You gotta earn it, you know? All right, that's gonna do it for us. Thank you so much for hanging out with us. Any final thoughts from either of you? Oh, I'm having a great time. I'm really excited to do more of this. I'm having a great time. It's going to haunt me until we have a good sign out. These are two test sign outs right now. I'm having a good time and I'm haunted right now.
Stay haunted. Is it too corny if we're like to be continued? Oh, because it's stories. It feels corny. It's pretty corny, but maybe we should bring corny back a little bit. You know, we're like trying to be a little less irony poison. You know, the thing is the world is bad. And so it's kind of hard to be genuine and sincere because if you open that door, it's like.
just burning in there and you just have to like let that out. The corn subsidies are getting scrapped. We got to pick up the slack. I see. I see what you're saying. Right. It's a fake it till you make it type thing. All right, we'll just try it. We'll say, I'll say it here. To be continued.
Is that to be continued or is it to be continued? I don't know. You have to say it the way that you like it. The way I like it. Because if I dictate, if I dictate how you say it, you're going to try and follow that and it's going to defy whatever feels natural to you. I do the voice-up thing. I do to be... What do I do? What do I do with this? I'm feeling a little haunted right now. To be continued.
I could also imagine you going like, to be continued. To be. To be continued. No, that's too long. I take it back. It was bad. To be continued.