07: The Judgmental Gamer

What's good, internet? It is June 24th, 2025. And this is not... I didn't write one of these for this one. Give me one second. I'm going to come up with one on the fly. This is a new one. Actually, I could use the same one as last time because we didn't get to Night Raid last time. This is not a magical island where time works in strange ways.

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 at friendsofthetable.cash. I'm joined today for the third time by Keith Carberry. Fourth in a row. Third time in a row by... by Keith Carberry, and for the first time, our very own Dre, Andrew Lee Swan. Hey, hello. Hi. Welcome to Science Story. Thanks. I'm excited to be here. I was thinking...

Gosh, a few weeks ago when I was scheduled to be on the first one of these. that got cursed and rescheduled. And then there was another one that got cursed and rescheduled. But I was, I was thinking very wistfully about like, wow, I have probably been excited about the idea of talking about video games on a podcast.

With Austin and Keith and, you know, all the other friends at the table people for like 10 years. And it's finally happening. We're here, baby. I guess since we first started streaming video games together, huh? Uh-huh. Yeah.

That's wild. It's a natural extension of what we've done. It is. And, like, we also have been talking about video games together in things like the clap casts, which, for people who don't know, if you only listen to a side story or if you fell off of Friends at the Table or whatever else, there's a...

do a patreon friends of the table dot cash and for one dollar you get access to the clap cast which is like conversations we have around uh the the podcast like before we actually start recording the kind of cutting room floor type but less so these days like while in the middle of of like an episode of something much more like no not everybody's here yet let's all talk about

the news or yachts or a video game that we've all been playing. And so we've been doing some video game talk over there for years, but nothing quite like this, I guess. Yeah. Nothing focused and structured. Oh, yeah. Obviously, yeah. During streams and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dre, you, me, and Art just recently streamed some NBA 2K. We got to get back to that. We do. I've got to figure out how to use Cheat Engine so that...

that we don't have to like grind the whole time for the player to not suck anymore. But yeah, once I figure that out, we got to get back in there. Cause I got to see how Spike Lee's Magnum Opus ends. I got to learn more about frequency vibrations. A name that I obviously love greatly as a fucked up name lover. The main character of the NBA 2K16?

Is that right? Yeah. 2K16. Story mode? Okay. Yep. I'm talking about Freak. I'm talking about Freak. In case it was unclear, we're talking about Freak. Not the game. Not the game. Other stuff, Dre, I guess I guess we don't know you're over on Media Club Plus. Also, y'all are closing on the end of Hunter. Gosh. Yeah, we are recording our second till last recording. Yeah. Yeah. Tomorrow. Yeah, that's wild.

But yeah, you can hear me over on Media Club Plus. Since you are listing this as a Patreon subscriber, you probably also have access to the Media Club Plus bonus stuff. Oh, I forgot it's not. This is just out there. This is just out there. It's just so good, I forget that we give it away for free. You know what I'm saying? There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good recovery on that one.

Well, if you do support us over at friendsatthetable.cash, there's a couple of Media Club Plus bonus episodes for a bunch of different stuff. Specifically, the ones that I brought to share were about a little show called Dragon...

Dragon Ball Z, if you've heard of it. Reading the name off a card. It's called right here. Dragon Ball Z, it says. Dragon Ball Z. Dragon Ball Z. I have two things here. The first is, Keith, can you hit us with the Dragon Ball Z? dub announcer because I heard you do that at Media Club Plus recently and it killed me. Dragon Ball Z. Any sound. Any sound. Any sound. It's unbelievable, this guy. The second thing is I recently fell into a nightmare.

Crap, I had a tooth procedure, as I am wont to do, apparently, last week. It fucked me up. You want to do these. Yeah, I want to. I love it. It's so good. I want, as I am a want to do, I suppose. That's what you said. You said that. I want to make sure I didn't fuck it up. Okay.

You know when you're sick and you're home from school when you're a child, which I'm not anymore? But you're like, I know. I'll watch Wings on the USA Network or whatever, right? Or I'll watch The Price is Right. This is how I watched half of MASH. Right.

the thing you end up getting into like oh there's a show that's just on tv there's or or even you know when i was like in college or when i was in grad school especially it was like oh like there's a show i've been meaning to watch that i like i don't want to i'm not going to find time in my life for it it's long but i'll put it on while i'm sick

This sounds like what I'm going to say is I rewatched Dragon Ball Z or I watched Super Finally. No, I rewatched a ton of Dragon Ball FighterZ because I have a fucking, there's a clip in my head of a con. doing a sort of butchered version of what Goku Black Rose says. And I was like, I have to find him. I have an earworm in my head of a guy being like, you know, I don't remember. Dre, you watch Super. You both watch Super? Yeah.

Yeah, I've seen all of super and he's like it's like it's it's like it's until like a rose or something like that about his called the Goku black Yeah, who how do you explain Goku black in another dimension? There's a guy who's obsessed with Goku it's a god who's obsessed with goku after goku fights him and beats him then he's like this is impossible he can't beat me i'm a god and so his answer

is to he goes into another universe separate universe we're now on third universe finds a goku kills him takes his body it's not but isn't it not a different guy it's the same guy it's it's not sorry is there never a point where zamazu zamazu zamazu And Goku Black are... I've seen them fuse. Yes, they are separate. I think he like... splits his spirit or something like that i see i see okay anyway he like gets his special pink haired super saiyan mode and he calls it super saiyan rose which is

Incredible. I love it. It's incredible. Yeah, no, it's sick. It's so much better than Super Saiyan Blue. Oh, it's so much better than Super Saiyan Blue. How do you think it stacks up to Ultra Instinct? I don't like Ultra Instinct. I don't know. All I know is what I've seen in third-party materials. I'm ambivalent about Ultra Instinct. I like the idea. And I like the Toriyama thing of making the strong... version of Goku closer to what Goku just looks like normally, which is why I liked...

Like the Goku Red before Super Saiyan Blue that they immediately get rid of after that first movie. I forgot about that. What is that? That's not Super Saiyan God. It's Super Saiyan God. It is Super Saiyan God. Super Saiyan Blue is going Super Saiyan as a Super Saiyan God. I said red because he glows red like in Kaoken, which I also impartial to Kaoken. Yeah, of course. But there then is a red-haired version that is not what I'm talking about. He does bring Kaoken back.

and super yeah he does what i think fans have been saying since like yes freeze like post frieza which is like why doesn't he go keo ken and super saiyan at the same time yeah And then he doesn't. And that doesn't work. It probably works for exactly long enough for it to be like. Yeah. And then he loses. Yeah. Figure out how to get Super Saiyan. Or he passes out. You know. Yeah.

He says, he says he, in the show, Super Saiyan, in the show, Goku Black, Goku from a different universe, who's been taken over by an evil god, says something like, you know, My power is like a rose or something like that. I guess I'll call it Super Saiyan Rosé. What do you think of it? Quite the color, huh? In keeping with how you like to label your power levels, the name of this one is... Rosé. That's right. I have now reached Super Saiyan Rosé. Hold on, Super Saiyan... Rosé? Ha ha ha ha!

or something but there's like yipes or some other fgc commentator had a version of that that feels like it was a fan sub read of it that he read and like got in his head and he said it a bunch whenever goku black would come on screen And so I was like, well, I have to go watch every match with Goku Black in it from 2017 through 2019. I know it was pre-COVID. I'm pretty sure it was pre-COVID.

And I didn't find it, which makes me think it was one tournament where a different guy said it a bunch and it wasn't like a recurring bit. But I'll tell you what.

Fucking Dragon Ball FighterZ kicks ass, man. Yeah, that's a really cool game. That game was so good. I wish I had the fighter game thing so that I could have played it more. I honestly think if you just go back, I'll link you to some good... matches um there's a there's a there's a sequence between goichi and leffen that is like an all-time like it's the thing about that game that was so powerful to me was how much it captured

dragon ball z oh yeah it literalized a lot of the and it leveraged a lot of the rhythms of shonen anime in a fight so that like the crowd was just so into it even if they couldn't even if they didn't know what spending a meter would mean in a particular fighting game. You know, they were spending a resource or whatever. The feel of...

two characters clashing, of a character getting all of the Dragon Balls and making a wish to bring someone back. All this was in that game in a way that, like, ugh, it was good. Yeah. Yep. Anyway. Sorry, okay. No, we shouldn't talk about Dragon Ball Z. Why not? Why shouldn't we? Did we all play Sparking Zero? No, I have not played it. That's the one that came out last year. That's the new Budokai, right? It's the new Budokai, yeah. How was it?

It was not good. I was very surprised because the chorus about that game when it came out was like, oh my god, they finally made a good Dragon Ball Z game again, which I really think is nostalgia for those old Budokai games.

Unequivocally, Sparking Zero is worse than every single one of the Budokai and Budokai 10KG games. Damn. It is so weird. It's very hard, but it's not hard in a fun, challenging way. It's just like... doesn't nothing really feels right they went so they went perfect on the visuals of like this is like exactly how this stuff should look in a game but then everything you're doing

I think feels terrible. I did not understand the love around that game. It's an arena fighter in the way that the Budokai games... It is, yeah. It's like third person-ish fighting. Okay. And that's what I was thinking about. FighterZ reminded me of it because when Sparky Zero came out, I was like, I don't even like the sort of side-on Street Fighter-style fighting game. FighterZ was...

leagues more fun to play and do than Sparking Zero, which is the kind of game I am interested in playing. Right, right, right, right. Yeah, I played all those Budokai games when they were coming out, or at least, you know, I played one and three and Tenkaichi or whatever. There was a bunch of them. There was a bunch of them.

But at some point I stopped playing the bad DBZ games. I started playing the bad Gundam games. Because that's the arc. I was no longer a child. So I put away childish things. Childish things. That's right. Little Austin very seriously moving a Goku figurine aside. It's time for the robot. Yeah, I put my Gundam wing model up on the shelf. It was up there next to my Goku and my Piccolo and everything else.

as like a 13-year-old for sure. So definitely it took until I was like 19 when I was like, ah, yes. Mobile Suit Gundam Federation vs. Xeon for the PS2. It really captures the kind of monotony and rhythm of a war. And it's just an arena fighter. It's just an arena fighter with a mission mode.

That's all it is. But, you know, always been, you know, I was who I was before I got here, as they say. Ah, yes, Dynasty Warriors Gundam. It really speaks to the heart. I didn't like Dynasty, now, now, see? To be clear, I don't like Dynasty Warriors Gundam. For two important reasons. One, that's not what I go to Gundam for. It's why I'm not a big wing guy. I don't go to Gundam for one mech killing thousands of mechs. It's not what I go to mechs for. I go to mechs for, like, a pilot has a rival.

I want 1v4 to feel kind of scary, not 1v400 to feel kind of nothing. But you take the skin off of it. I know you like Dynasty Warriors. I love Dynasty Warriors. Yeah. 100%. Because I go to Romance of the Three Kingdoms because Lu Bu is a badass. Because Guan Yu is a badass. And they are the kind of personification of this larger. And it's just a different genre space.

It's just 1500 year old Gundam Wing. But I don't like Gundam. Exactly. And the difference is Guan Yu kicks ass and it turns out that Wu Fei sucks shit. Yeah, yeah. I really wish I could add a perspective here on Dynasty Warriors Gundam, but I'm realizing, full disclosure, I don't think I can because I won a copy of that game for free from a...

log that probably hasn't existed for 20 years oh yeah okay i see thank you for thank you for just closing your yeah i want to be ethical here so thank you yeah it's very it's important to be very upfront about the ethics in the situation you know i didn't buy the game so i could have i could have been swayed

We're about to talk about a game where we got code. So we got to clear all our bases up top. Delete that. Delete that. Delete it. I'll definitely have deleted it. Definitely didn't leave it in. Just really quick. reason I'm not a big Dynasty Warriors Gundam person is in the US those games or at least the first the first one maybe the third one didn't get licensed for the Gundam music

And it's such an important part of Gundam to me. If you're going to have Amuro Ray out there, you have to have the funkiest beats you've ever heard. Because that's what... OG Gun is what First Gundam has, you know? Although this has happened before, but it worked out really well, which is the Digimon movie, which had a whole new soundtrack and also was awesome. Interesting.

For some reason, they could. They're both good. One of them has aged really poorly because of the dub of the Digimon movie is like the earliest 2000s shit you can imagine. And the sub doesn't feel dated to me in that way. Maybe it might if you're from Japan. but it's a ton of fun this soundtrack is crazy keith are you looking at the soundtrack yeah assuming google's not lying to me hold on let me click on a link just to make sure that google is not lying to me okay google says uh yeah

up what's in it. There's less than Jake in here. Wow. Smash Mouth. The impression that I get is just in here. Yeah, it seems like they got every song by, like, if you named a band and said, hey, name that song you know by them. That's most of the songs that are on here, I think. That is an all-star. Yeah, it is. Wow. This is wild. Well... It's very funny. This is very 2000 to me. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

This would never have happened after 9-11. It's true. We never would have gotten... No one is letting them put Kids in America by Len in a kids movie in November 2021. When did the Men in Black movie come out? Was that 97? I just remember that as peak movie soundtrack. All the Pokemon movies had...

like, big song tie-ins for the first couple, right? I think so. That sounds right. Yes. Yeah, totally. They all had, like, Disney Channel pop stars on them. That's what I thought. Those are also 99, 2000, huh? 2000... Pokemon 4 ever, the one with Celebi? Is that the name of the Pokemon? The little green guy? Yeah, yeah, the little green guy. Celebi. That's the first one that comes out in 2001.

Actually, that's still pre-9-11. Pokemon Heroes, the first post-9-11 Pokemon movie. In this essay, I will argue... By the way, I remembered that the movie Jimmy Neutron had Kids in America, but crucially, it wasn't Kids in America by Len. It was Kids in America by No Secrets. So I'm still right. Yeah. Okay. Good. Good. That was 2002. So, yeah.

The code that we were sent was for Elden Ring Night Reign. We played a bunch of that. We streamed some of it. I played a bunch of it with y'all. I guess Keith, you and I have played a little bit more of it than Dre. You and me have played.

But I've also played with some other folks. It is for people who have don't follow. The Elden Ring. I actually think, truly, if you don't follow this type of game, the FromSoft games, the Soulsborne games, and all you caught was early chatter and marketing, you might think this is a different thing than it is. And if you don't listen to other games podcasts, I think at this point, because Keith, you thought it was something different than it was even, right?

Right. I very much thought it was going to be like Fortnite or Call of Duty Warzone. Where it had like an Elden Ring. yeah yeah and there you know part of that is it's called night rain r-e-i-g-n but there is rain r-a-i-n in it uh that closes in magical kill you, Rain, will close in like a circle around you. You and up to two friends as you do a sort of run across this sort of mishmash version of...

one of the first zones of Elden Ring that's been kind of reworked and turned into a different map. You kind of have two runs on this map that is kind of... scattered over with special locations like fortresses and base camps and churches, all of which have... gear and loot and bosses and opportunities to level up. It's run based the way a roguelike might be. And there's some degree of either procedural generation or a pool of these kind of map variants. And you're going around to level up.

up so that you can at the end of when the circle closes and all the way the first time you fight a boss then it opens back up if you beat the boss uh like the the boss of the first night then you do it all again and you fight the boss of the second night And hopefully you're strong enough at that point, because then you go to a special arena to fight the Night Lord, which is one of these kind of eight special bosses that are brand new, newly designed bosses, specifically with some.

mechanics built towards multiplayer in mind uh most obviously in the very first of the bosses when you have to beat to open up the big boss menu um because you pick which boss you want to go after after this the first one is like a big dog

a three-headed dog that can split into three heads or into three bodies? Like, what if Cerberus could pull itself... apart into three different bodies that could fuck you up um and so obviously in a three-person game there's a lot of like okay let's just run from these guys right now or like let's just try to like i'll try to tank two of them while you go heal or whatever um and so yeah it's a game

some ways it feels more like a game like risk of rain um uh than a game like fortnight or tarkov it reminds me a little bit of a deck builder in the sort of like you're putting together your your your character build over the course of

30 minutes and you're like all right i guess i or reminds me like ftl ftl was very much like this too where it's like okay i gotta put this fucking spaceship together and i better it better be good enough to be the final boss you know um except that game had one final boss that always kind of needed the same type of

basically um but yeah that's the gist and then the other bosses that you fight along the way whether the ones that are spread throughout the map or the ones that show up at the end of the first and second knights are previous uh elden ring bosses and a handful of previous souls bosses

That's like the very short one, short description of it. What are your first impressions of it? Like, Dre, you, me, and Keith played once, and it seemed like you had a pretty good time. I did. Holy shit, that game is fast. That is the first thing that stood out to me is just how much faster everything is compared to any other Souls game I have ever played. Even just your base move speed is so, so quick. It doesn't cost you anything.

stamina to sprint you have like a super duper sprint you got a super duper sprint you do gosh and now importantly i gotta say it does no fall damage there's no fall damage there's no fall damage there's big jump pads like air boost pads that will leap you or like jump you up hundreds and hundreds of feet there are birds you can hold on to spirit birds that will

ferry you across the map. I don't remember if we did one of those or not. We did, yeah. We used the Fortnite bounce pad to pop our glider. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. Fuck, it is Fortnite. Damn it. But the, you know, the... I will say that feeling of speed, it's something they've played with before. You know, Sekiro can feel fast in moments. Bloodborne, obviously, was notable because it felt like a game about...

getting you out from behind your shield and forcing you to engage differently. But it's different. It's fast in a different, it's fast in a more zoomed out way, not in the independent mechanics of movement and attacking, which are basically more or less.

not exactly the same as Elden Ring. I guess the big difference is there, there are not, it's not blank site characters or characters who have built in abilities. And they also have kind of like passive buffs that you can equip before you go into it. run um but uh this is the the speed is is at the meta level of traversal and exploration you know i think these games for me

I don't know, Keith, I know you're a Sekiro guy. Dre, I don't know what your relationship is with these games. I have actually, I have not played Sekiro or Bloodborne. I think those are the only Souls games that I haven't at least played some of. Then you know that, like, for, you know, I think for most people, the way you...

move through those games is like even if you're playing a pretty active uh build that's about parries and about um you know fast attacks a high dex build or something you're still moving around the space carefully and trying to like learn what's where and what pathways to take and is it safe around this corner andrea when you say this game is fast it's fast in in those spaces where it's like all right let's just fucking go to the church we'll get an extra flask then we'll

We'll run to the mine. We'll drop down through the mine. Ignore all those randoms. We're not going to fight all these random guys who are just mining. We're going to go fight the big giant boss. It's actually a mistake to fight those guys. That's right. Yeah. This is exactly what I was going to say. It's so urgent. It's not just that...

Like, it's not careful like the other games. There's, like, you have to go. We have to hurry. Yeah. And the, like, same thing happens with your build and your stats and what weapons you use. At least for me, who was, like, new to all that stuff and, like, didn't know, like, okay, what stat should I be...

prioritizing is the big bird guy and so like it all just felt so fast it was just like there was a time where i dropped what was a pretty good weapon and i think you ended up picking it up austin and i knew that but i was like by the time it would

take me to explain to Austin what happened and to get him to drop that weapon back to me, we would have like already missed what we were trying to do. So fuck it. Let's just, let's just go, go, go, go, go, go. Yeah. Fuck it. And then you ended up with the best weapon that I've ever seen. Yes. What did you end up with? run i forget i forget what it was called but it was the it was the jiran doll like the planet in partisan oh yeah that's right it had the black flame cyclone skill which just like

destroyed everything up until like the second to last boss. Yeah. I mean, I think that's part of the thing that's so interesting to me about this is, you know, you recognize that skill from your time with Elden Ring as being like a badass skill, right? Mm-hmm. And so it's not like it isn't rewarding.

play player knowledge uh or care it's just that for for people who've already played elden ring that care all came already from a year or two ago when they played elden ring or three you know when they played elden ring we're like oh yeah black flame

you know whirlwind tornado whatever that shit is sick cool and now you can see it and go okay yes uh i'm actually kind of curious about that for you keith as someone who has not played a lot of elden ring you played some of it when it launched but like yeah Do you feel like overrushed in terms of making gear decisions and stuff like that? I definitely did like for the first few hours of playing where I was like.

It tells you damage, but it doesn't tell you damage per second. I can't tell by looking at the picture if it's going to be a huge weapon or a small weapon. There's no, like, real indication. Like, is this a great sword or just a regular sword? You should put a quarter next to the sword so you know if it's big or not. Or like a low-level enemy. You know what I mean? Put it next to a guy. I was playing...

The last couple rounds that I played, I was playing with Wilder, who is like the first character that they make you play as in the tutorial. and I had a skill that gave me a special bonus for using great swords, and I spent two full rounds being like... what is a great sword? Which ones of these are great swords? And that is the most recent stuff. So it still is happening that I'm like, I don't, I'm not sure about some of these stats. Like, I don't know.

You know, the weapons that give you bonuses for things like Dre was talking about being worried about stats and the game is not worried about stats at all because you level up. It just levels everything up for you. But there are like sub stats on weapons that are useful and kind of interpreting like, is this useful for me? Is this like am I playing as a character that needs five poise?

um right yeah yeah and i gotta tell you especially especially when it's like when you beat a boss and it's like the drop is you pick between a weapon or like a boon

Which I think was at least some of the ones that I saw. Yeah, definitely. You'll get something that's like, you know, bonus health. Or, you know, a classic one. You beat one of the... um the there are these things called ever jails where you can find keys to open them up they are kind of these platforms on the ground or these kind of like um almost like a small like um indented

not a crater but like uh something like a bowl it's kind of like a cement bowl um and you go in there and you summon a boss to fight yeah in there a very shallow bowl it's not like a very deep bowl you know what i mean um and you when you beat them a class Classic option you'll get is like, oh yeah, a bonus stamina recovery or 10,000 runes. Runes are like the currency that level up in Elden Ring. And it's like, okay, well, like, do I, am I a character who needs that stamina?

boost or is the 10 000 runes enough for me to level up is that is it more important for me to just get another level or to get a stamina recovery or to get this whip or whatever it says it's a good damage whip are whips any good you know um i do think

That can be tough. And there are stats in this game. They're just kind of obscure. Sorry, yeah, that's what I mean. You just hit A to level up. That's right. It's not like Eldenorm where you have to pick, like, do I need strength or intelligence? Is it clear to you that different characters... have different stats yes okay yeah because like for instance I would say it is not clear as in like

I can see it happening. It's clear mentally as in I just knew that that would be true, that the tank guy will have a different distribution than the Bose guy. The Bose guy, right, yeah. Exactly, yeah, that makes sense. And that is... And there is like, it's tough because it's like to some degree, so much of what has made those games work so well for years is a community forming around the gaps in knowledge, right? Where it's like, oh.

People want to know how does magic scale. Magic scales differently than physical attacks. And, you know, oh, there's different soft caps. And, like, people doing that work is part of the engine that has made that series and from soft games. like be so popular is that people get to like go on Reddit and argue about stat scaling. And so I get that there, that that's there for, for a good reason. But I also do, I've definitely seen people be like,

Wait, why the fuck does magic scale differently than swords? Why wouldn't you just make that be the same? And it's not necessarily super clear that that's even the case in the game. There are some resources in the game to be like, if you want to go find out what all the... great swords are you can go to the sparring zone and just pull up all of them but then like you gotta flash card them like what are you gonna do yeah right and it's not like in in

uh any of the other souls games where you can kill everybody in an area and stand still and go online and look it up that's right because you have the fire that is moving towards you and will kill you in one second which is part of the joy at the same time because it like right it breaks

I've seen it break people out of the sort of paralysis, the decision paralysis that they would normally get hit by. It all works towards the end of what I think the game is really asking of you, which is to just be good at the fighting. like to be physically like mechanically competent at like hitting the boss and not being hit by the boss yeah just be good enough at the the guts of it that the build can push can push you across the finish line, but it can't drag you across the finish line.

from a mile out you know you got to get close and then you have to have a gold weapon that like does something special every time you like hit isn't going to stop uh the fire dog from like burning you into a crisp in one hit i've been trying to tell people this about american politics for a long time and they keep trying to get the golden weapons and i'm like it's not gonna help you that's not the way to do it

Cursed. I mean, we ended up having a really good run the first time the three of us played together. I think, Keith, at that point, you and I had played and bounced off of the first boss, the three-headed dog. two or three times we had like a couple of good runs at it right yeah i think that we fought at least four times that dog that makes sense and we brought dre on and this is no shade to our other uh uh player who did a great job

But Dre came on and we had the magic run. We had the perfect feeling of like... I think we're doing a pretty good... Actually, we played twice. In the first run, we felt like perfect, right? And the second one was a worse... It was like kind of scuffed and we still pulled it out. Is that right? Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It feels even better. It feels even better than, oh, we all have...

great gear to be like fuck like we died we lost some levels we got our shit back but like we're kind of in a in a rut right now can we pull this out and then you pull it out it feels incredible yeah that's where i think a lot of people stumble in games like that where you're You have that feeling of, wow, this is such a good run.

And it doesn't stop the game from being a game where when you lose, you have to start over. And that hurts. That can hurt people enough to where they say, I hate roguelikes. Yeah, totally. I've been thinking about this a lot because like... I come at this as someone who's been playing roguelikes for 20-something years, right? Longer than that, maybe? I don't know. I played...

Some early roguelikes on PC on a laptop when I was in high school, you know, and then I got really into them, I would say, in 2006. 2007 2008 um starting with sheer and the wanderer on ds and then i played a bunch of eng band and i played a bunch i played a bunch of like like classic old school ascii ass

roguelikes on PC. And so I have become very annoyed to the feeling of loss in the way that like, you know, back in the day, Dwarf Fortress. I have become annoyed to the feeling of loss. Yeah. Stamp that on friends at the table. Fucking hell. But like, you know, the losing is fun mentality that that door fortress, you know, has been has been yelling about for decades now. I took, you know, a lot. I just found myself liking that.

So I know that I'm coming into this with a lot of bias. But the thing that I keep thinking about when it's like, when people feel like, oh, I've wasted my time playing this run of Night Reign because I didn't win. It's like, don't you, like, you play Fortnite. You don't win at Fortnite every game. And my point there is actually not, you're such a hypocrite. It's okay.

Something interesting is happening that someone who doesn't mind losing at Fortnite or Warzone or any of these other games does feel bad losing at the multiplayer or the single-player cooperative or multiplayer cooperative game. There's something happening that's different there, and I'm trying to untangle what that is besides the presence of other players. I mean, I think that, like, maybe this is not a totally unique situation.

I feel powerfully about a less generous read where I feel fine calling those people hypocrites. Well, that's you. Yeah. And maybe they don't. Enjoy playing fortnight, but they just keep doing it But but they okay, but but then what we're getting at is a difference in terminology Where in which when I say enjoy, I don't necessarily mean a person has to write down on a piece of paper that they enjoy it. I mean that they that they for some reason are repeatedly continuing in action.

Right. And some people will stop repeatedly playing a game like Night Rain and give as the reason or feel as the reason and then report potentially honestly. I feel bad when I lose in this. But they don't report that feeling, even though they're getting washed by 16-year-olds in no-build mode. Especially in build mode. Especially this season.

Is that you, Dre? Are you getting washed by 16-year-olds in Fortnite? It's me and all of my old Fortnite friends. We're all like, why are we getting... We are getting nothing but the sweatiest drops this season. I think they have, like... I think they have dropped the number of bots that they are putting in lobbies. I see. And so you're getting more lobbies that are mostly, if not all, players. Yeah, I'm getting pure Fortnite. You're the uncut Fortnite. I can't keep up with that shit anymore.

Yeah. If I ever could. I think it has to do, Austin, we talked about maybe on the last episode or something about the Fortnite has like a social gravity to it. Yes. that Elden Ring, or not Elden Ring, Night Reign could have, but because Elden Ring... sort of feels more like a roguelike. And because other games that are roguelikes tell you that they're roguelikes, you get to identify all of those things.

from the marketing, from the jump before you've played it, you've already like sort of presupposed like, oh, this is a game where I'm going to be like dying and having to start over without connecting it to my favorite game is Fortnite, the game where you die and have to start over. Yeah. Right. The vibes are just so different too, though. Like, just like you look at a screenshot of Fortnite and a screenshot of Night Rain. Like, I think there is something too...

It reminds me of Viva Pinata. Viva Pinata was a game I remember being like incredibly deep if you like were that kind of person yeah and i think it ensnared a lot of people into becoming that kind of person because oh man look at these cute i mean pokemon right now dre so it is like that is also the pokemon thing

you know like yeah you start getting into evs and ivs and i i don't mean the pokemon you don't even mean weird stats huh yeah which we can't go down the pokemon road today we have too much else to talk about but i do want I do want to come back to Pokemon at some point because I'm finally playing Scarlet and Violet. I'm playing Violet, I guess. That is what I thought we were talking about today. Well. I did see at 7.30 when you sent the thing that we were talking about.

Right. Rune Factory, Guardians of Azuma next. Only because I know Dre's been playing it, and I don't know when we'll next line up a chance to see Dre. Yeah, totally. Whereas, Keith, I know you and me have a very similar schedule, and so I don't think it's going to be hard to get you and me in a room to talk about Pokemon.

I think we're going to be able to do that whenever the fuck we want. I'll talk about Pokemon with anyone anywhere. So I've seen. So I know. People should go watch you and Allie play the Pokey MMO. The Pokey MMO. Yeah. Which is a fan-made... game combining all of the Pokemon games. You can play every Pokemon game at the same time surrounded by other people also doing that. If that sounds good to you. Or you can just watch Keith and Allie do it, which is what I did and felt pretty good about it.

Anyway, but yeah, Dre, I do think that you're right about that. And I've all, you know, I have not been a Fortnite guy except for that one week where we played Fortnite every day. on or whatever it wasn't a week obviously it was a fortnight of fortnight fortnight for waypoint um uh but i've always been like oh yeah they crushed the

the aesthetic here. They understood the assignment. They made a game that is radically appealing to the widest possible margin of players. That does not mean that I happen to like it particularly well in terms of aesthetic. It's funny that crushed the aesthetic is the word that you use because they did crush the aesthetic. They have taken many aesthetics and crushed it into sort of like a car being pulverized at a junkyard into cubes.

Yeah, or if you cannot tell that one of these was a Corolla and one of these was an Audi. Or if, you know, for instance, you once had these beautiful lumbering beasts walking the planet called dinosaurs, and then they died. And then... Millions of years later, you scooped up their remains and you called it oil and you crushed it down until it was plastic. And then you put the things you made in 99 cent stores and called them toys. That's Fortnite to me. I'm filling my car up with...

Master Chief. Oh, God. Yeah, that's what the MPG is, Master Chiefs per gallon. Anyway, yes. So, you know, I do think, though, I have seen some people, I have seen Night Rain slowly become more like the Fortnite. of like uh of let's just hang out and do a couple runs you know you get over the hump of what is it you learn that wilder and he you know has a build with great swords where he can do a cool fire attack which is super useful because it means he always has the ability to set

things on fire and do fire damage to things that are weak to fire uh and then you know what all the great swords are or you know you know enough to make a guess and then you could just kind of hang out there yeah um and i kind of which i love

I mean, I love games like that. I remember playing Guild Wars years ago, just like jumping around, chatting on voice in Guild Wars. What you're describing sounds a lot to me like Prime Destiny 1. gameplay for me well and that's the thing that i'm like i think one of the most interesting conversations before this game came out was like hey are they selling out like are they are they making a game

In the last episode, we talked a lot about the Summer Games Fest and a lot about Gooner Games and the feeling of, like, trying to just, like... chase a demographic, you know, and your heart not really being in it in that way. You're not being gross and legit enough.

Right, yeah. You're not really about that life. Yeah, exactly. To be clear, there are some people who are really about that life. There are some people who are really about that life. But there are a lot of people who it feels like they're tracking a box. try to get people to pay attention to their to their third person sci-fi action adventure game uh and the tna is there to like get your attention in the sex sells way and like not even in the i like it way In any case, I think that...

Even if they do like it, it doesn't feel like it's in the game because they like it. And there are people that it feels like it's in the game because they like it. And I feel like I can tell the difference in those things. And that is my right as a consumer to make that judgment. to sense when I think it's off. Austin Consumer Rights Walker. That's me. You know that about me. So can we expect your top 10 list of Gooner games that go for it in the real way to be on a Patreon soon?

Sorry, sorry, sorry. To be clear, if you're going for it, you are not a Gooner game. I see. Do you see what I mean? You're just a perverts game, like Death Stranding 2 out this week, right? Sure. Which I've not played, but I'm sure that's a perverts game.

And in this case, in the hierarchy, perverts game is more in it for the love of the game. I'm not setting up. You know that I'm not really about hierarchy. That's true. Yes, the definition is right, Dre. I do think it's in it for the love. I think. Hideo Kojima's brain is just like that. Oh, yeah. 100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Intentionally saying it oozes out of everything that he makes. And I don't like it all the time.

No, but I don't think you have to like that to move product. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so we're back. We're back on old shit. The point is the same way that you can take. the TNA out of the game to market it better, you can put it back in to market it better. That's right. And either way, it's for the market.

it's for the market that's right and i don't where the okay then the point is i think that there were some folks who there was a there was a lot of conversation when night rain was first announced and then especially after dusk bloods their switch exclusive two exclusive games coming out uh i think next year um the the next from soft multiplayer thing i think there was some people were

Again, talking shit about it. I was like, this looks pretty good. Try to get to. Part of what they're saying, part of what I've seen is people saying, this feels like chasing a trend. This feels like a publisher saying, hey, you should make.

a game that is fortnight adjacent because that's where the money is you should reuse your assets so that you can cash in and do xyz and i'm not gonna say the budget of reusing assets the budget choice is not uh uh you know probably part of the decision making process that goes into green lighting a game like this is you get to say to your publisher we can do this without spending a fortune on new assets is a hundred percent part of

how firm stuff has always worked they've always reused old animation rigs old animations etc like you know even even some some models directly so i'm not i'm not saying that's not part of some sort of calculus but i actually think That if they wanted to do the, the sellout cash in Elden Ring thing, they would have just made a fucking destiny out of all the shit they already had to go back to your point of like, they would have just put full co-op. They would have re-released the game for.

40 bucks and said this is the co-op version of it and there's dailies And there's, you know, we'll put these types of bosses just in the world. I think there's a much more cynical version of the game that is built around that sort of thing. We'll have cycling seasonal events that are just the... same 12 bosses with like inflated stats that rotate every two weeks or whatever. How long did you play Destiny 4, Trey?

I don't remember. Not crazy long, actually. Okay, okay. But yeah, that to me feels like there are other versions of the cash in here. And instead, I think they made something kind of experimental and weird. off-putting to certain folks which i think is a sign of life from the studio um so yeah i'm personally pretty happy with it

Yeah, it very much feels like a game that is like doing something and has a purpose and has a vision that they are like executing on. 100%. I had this great version, this great run of it. about a week and a half ago where I'd been playing with some folks who had beaten the first boss but not beaten anybody else yet.

Um, and, uh, had not really dug into, uh, and I don't know if either of you have seen this, the shifting earth stuff in this game. No, I have not yet. Okay. So, so, um, there are five versions of the map. There's like the regular version that everyone's used to. There's way more than that because things like churches and castles and stuff can move around. But there are these other versions that will have a major different feature on them.

map like a snowy mountain or a a uh a city you know one of the um like a take on one of the underground cities from the base game um one of the nox types cities and then there's there's one that's called the crater which is a um a deep hole in the ground that goes down to like a lava pit floor um and around the edges of it is a slowly descending kind of ramp slash

a temple type thing that you can kind of delve down into. These things are kind of structured like the dungeons from Elden Ring proper or like the level design in something like Dark Souls. And you can run through them like a regular ass level. You know, there's bosses along the way. They are huge. Like the crater takes up basically the whole northern half of the map, like the north center of the map. And if you can complete one of these.

these shifting earth kind of dungeons, you get something special. So at the very bottom of the crater is a forge. And if you get to the forge, it summons a big boss, a big magma boss. You beat the boss and you can go up to the forge and turn any of your weapons into a golden tier four weapon, which is incredible. But then you're at the bottom of.

a magma pit and so you have to like get to one of those spirit birds to let you out and inevitably like this is a thing you cannot do on day one you have to do it on day two i mean i couldn't do it on day one i bet some pros could do it on day one but i am not like them

And then you have to like get the fuck out before the rain closes on you because like inevitably it takes you the whole second day or a lot of the second day to do it. And that feeling is just incredible. Being able to like, I like led people through there who had not gotten to.

too deep into it before and had the great moment of being like, no, I haven't actually succeeded at this before, but I do know where I'm going. Like, follow me, we'll get to where the loot is. We'll have to get out. We'll have to figure out how to get out. I've never actually pulled this one off.

just like an all-time gaming experience that unfortunately did end in we did escape we did get to the final boss we fought a big ice dragon which is like truly one of the most majestic fights I've ever seen in one of their games and then we had a player get disconnected uh unfortunately their their computer was like um her computer was was overheating uh unfortunately in the summer heat and uh we did we could not 2v1 that dragon unfortunately

But it's just like when it clicks, it's so, so special. And I'm like you, Keith. Duskblood looks good to me. It looks good to me. I couldn't really even wrap my head around what people were trying to say about it. Not that I, mostly because I didn't dig into it. I just saw people kind of talking shit and went on about my day. I think people are just skeptical of the multiplayer stuff, you know? Yeah, it does sort of feel like, though, there's...

This like it's easy to be judgmental about the sort of the the presentation of like feature sets. But if you look at Nightmare and you think about it for a second, it's like. Where's the money hook? Fortnite is shitty because it's a live service game that sort of hooks you into playing it, hooks you into buying V-Bucks, buying costumes, doing dances, a bunch of silly stuff that...

a bunch of people spent a bunch of money on. None of that's in Night Rain. Night Rain is just a multiplayer game. It's a multiplayer game. It's a third-person action game from the people who brought you a bunch of third-person action games. It is like, you know, a series about sort of tense and thrilling fights that is presenting tense and thrilling fights in a...

slightly skewed way. Same as my favorite by far game that they've made, Sekiro, which is like the same kind of idea, but from a slightly different angle. And it just feels like... All of it is that to me. It, um, you know, you saying that reminds me, I once saw someone make the case that Bellatro deployed all of the same dark patterns as like free to play gotcha games. And it's like, I don't think that that's first of all.

That's not true. The gotcha technology is evil in ways that if you're not engaged in it, you don't know. You don't see how fucking devious that shit is. But also, you... You can't give Bellatro more money. You can't do it. That's what makes those games bad.

And I think that's probably worth being critical of how those systems are being deployed in general. I'm not opposed to that, generally speaking. But I think that you can't say that they're the same. I think the second that you say they're the same, you've maybe lost me. One of them has all of this.

stuff where you're seeing every time you log on what all of your friends are spending their money on and you are going but i want i but i want to be able to where's that i don't think i've seen that that's that's that's any of these that's anything with a social component you know anytime i mean that's you know you and i have both played some of that pokemon uh tcg oh yeah totally yeah you know oh yeah it's so sick that i get to see when you pull a cool card

a one in five chance, theoretically, that I could take one of your cards or get a copy of one of your cards. But really, what it is, is a preview of what is in these decks that I haven't drawn yet. I get to see that you got that god pool. And I get to go, fuck, if Keith got the god pack, maybe I could get the god pack with five special rare cards. I have decided that that is a Halo 2 style special armor.

a flaming helmet armor like a game virus thing where you can only have it if you played a game with someone who has it. This is... A conspiracy theory that I'm inventing. Okay, this is nothing. You're inventing something. You're lying. Here's what happened. My sister started playing Pokemon TCG and was talking to me about it on the phone.

and uh she was like oh and i got a god pack and i was like what the fuck you just started playing this game and you got one like in a week and she added me as a friend and within 24 hours i had pulled The God Pack. Wow. Maybe it's the phone is listening. You just go like, God Pack. God Pack. And then Isaac got one. God Pack. Wow. Within another 20 hours. He also hadn't had one. Again, within like 24, 48 hours had gotten one.

For people who don't know, a god pack in Pokemon, the trading card game, the trading card game Pocket included, is when you get a pack that has, like, nothing but special holographic rare cards. Instead of, like...

you know, like legendary and like ultra legendary cards. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you, oh, holy shit. I mean, they, in the real world, they will weigh packs to see if they are like... you know, tiny, minuscule amounts of weight different to be able to confidently guess if it's a god pack or not.

Wow. Because the art does take more ink, you know, or whatever. That's crazy. They are heavier cards. That makes perfect sense. I've never heard of that. Yeah. Yeah. YouTube has shuffled me into Pokemon TCG. That's so funny. A little while ago, unfortunately to me. I hate all the gotcha stuff. I do end up buying something in every game that sells something that I play.

I feel comfortable with the amount of money that I spend on these things because I only ever play one at a time and it's like every few months I'll be like, ah, let me buy something. I still hate it. I fucking hate it. I grew up around casinos, man. Like, it's... It is... And I... somehow believe that people like i'm not mad at anybody i've played many gotchas i don't feel like i did a bad thing by playing them i'm not

in a deep judgment of the folks playing. I am in a deep judgment of the people building the systems that are explicitly built to exploit addictive personalities and addictive behavior. Because the thing that triggers the feeling of I should spend a little bit of money, it's never fun. It's not a fun component. It's not additive to the enjoyment of the game. You get something out of winning.

But the thing itself about spinning the wheel, that's not... At least you get to play poker. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dre, I'm sure you've a bunch of, as someone who does therapy, you have a lot of, does therapy in the therapist sense, not someone's in therapy. Hey, hey, hey. You know, I'm not trying to, that's what I'm saying, I'm not trying to. No, no, no.

No, both. Damn right. Well, so one, I'm not a behavioral psychologist, which I think is kind of more in the lines of this. But I. Yeah, no, it's bad, dude. It's it's bad. It is. I mean. Everything you're saying to me also applies to, like, sports betting and stuff. Oh, the sports betting has just gotten wild. It's horrific. Oh, it's a nightmare. Yeah. And, like...

I feel that like sports betting should be legal. I think it's probably worse for it to be illegal than legal. But also, if we're going to do that, then we shouldn't. Like, it shouldn't be legal for there to be nothing but gambling ads everywhere at all times 24-7. You're saying safe, legal, and rare.

The moment I found out that ESPN has its own sportsbook, its own sports betting app, I was like, what are we doing? When I was growing up, it was like... verboten you know like you would never talk about the betting on the coverage and now charles barkley will tell you his bets you know yeah there was like a whole things of like

Bill Simmons and like Scott Van Pelt, too big ESPN. Well, in Bill Simmons case, former ESPN people like talking about like getting in trouble for trying to even acknowledge like.

odd lines like 10 years ago and yeah like you said now espn has its own sports book and if you watch anything on espn every 10 minutes they say hey you should go on our sports book and make this bet that stephen a smith has endorsed with the lines going down down you gotta juice it somewhere it's so bad you know what wherever steven a smith tells you to juice it don't juice it there

Stephen Smith. Is there a... Oh, fuck. I almost called it... the laugher curve but that's something totally different kramer what's the kramer who uh jim kramer he has the jim kramer the mad money guy there's like a thing that will like automatically like do your stocks against whatever Jim Cramer says that performs. Oh yeah, I've seen that. It performs like on par with, uh, with like Nancy Pelosi stock portfolio.

It's so good to do the opposite of what he says that you might as well be insider trading. I watched a YouTube video about that Kramer guy, and I feel like I remember hearing that someone like... had a beef with him and specifically like made that software to like rub that.

Kramer's nose in it about how shitty of an animal is. Well, of course, of course he's terrible. He's on TV telling retail investors where to invest. The best thing for people who actually trade in any real volume is for all the retail investors to be terrible at it. That's how they make money. You got to juice it somewhere. I just want to give you a quick update here. It says here. This is from a little while ago. It's from February. So these numbers are not.

Not up to date, but from as of noon on February, the week of February 22nd, a hundred dollar bet on Stephen A. Smith would win you twelve hundred forty one dollars if Smith becomes the Democratic Party's nominee for president in twenty.

that's not enough that should be way it should be way higher that's the wrong party that's a fake they're doing fake uh doing fake math in the casino yeah this is not this is not Vegas shit this is fake yeah I mean it is it is fake like it's fake but it's also this is a thing that Stephen A. Smith has like

started to talk about it more often than he should. That's why I looked it up. I didn't know that. Stephen Smith talking about how much he loves politics and wants to talk about politics and weigh in is... Yeah. I understand. He, like, did a show with Bill O'Reilly, I think. He did a show with, like, some, like, shitty, like, Xbox news guy. He should take to what he's good at, which is being a soap opera star. That's true. Yeah, I've...

I've seen cumulatively in my life maybe 25 minutes of ESPN content. Like, I could not have less experience with it. All 25 of those minutes are Stephen A. Smith clips. that just are going around. And I understand that he's like a joke and that he sucks shit, but everything I've ever seen of him is very funny.

yeah i mean that's the problem is that he does suck shit and like we know that and that's why we think steven a smith is funny steven a smith does not know he sucks shit and neither do a lot of the way he delivers it though

It sounds like he knows. I think of him as like a wrestling heel who's also an asshole. Do you know what I mean? He's channeling his natural... shittiness into a bit he's dicing like Andrew Dice Clay yeah my second favorite three named Andrew next to andrew lee swan who's much higher but there's only there's only yeah so uh

Sorry, I had to send you this link because I think maybe you didn't know this about Stephen A. Smith. Keith, Dre, you obviously do. Oh, yeah. Which is that Stephen A. Smith sometimes guests on General Hospital. I have heard this before. That's really funny. Steve D. Smith foils assassination attempt. General Hospital over on the awful announcing YouTube channel. Oh, and he's like doing real plot shit. Oh, yeah. He's doing real assassination attempts. You know what's really funny? That's right.

Now that I know that he's on General Hospital, it's funny to me. This is how my mom would know Stephen A. Smith. Because she's been watching General Hospital for 40 years or something. Yeah. He's been on it apparently since 2016. I think he is on it because he's a huge fan. He's a huge fan. He's a huge fan. I think his mom was a huge fan. My mom was a huge fan. Oh, my God. She was going to kill Sonny? That's what I'm saying. He saved Sonny? He saved Sonny. Oh, my God.

You gotta call your mom. He shot him to death. Tell me about when Stephen A. Smith saved Sonny. Sorry, his name is Brick. His character name is Brick. God, of fucking course it is. Uh-huh. Oh my god. I'm so glad that this is the only guy's name that I know on General Hospital so that I could do that.

According to, I'm going to read you his stat sheet from the General Hospital fan wiki here, portrayed by Stephen A. Smith, recurring 2016 to present. Strength 16. Jump ahead a little bit. Ethnicity, African-American, gender, male. And there's a few things here. Security consultant. Sure. Surveillance slash tech expert for the Corinthos mob family. Formerly worked as security for a quote three letter agency.

Former spy and veteran. He wrote this. I don't think he wrote this. He wrote this 100%. He said, here's who I want to be. That's right. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. He has two romances listed. Carly Spencer, Crush and Flirtation, and Jordan Ashford, Flirtation, 2024 to present. I can't believe Stephen A. Smith has a... Gun on TV. That's right. Yeah. With a silencer on it. Yeah. It's a suppressed pistol. It is funny to me that they zoom in.

To, like, him pulling the trigger. Yeah. But, like, you can't see him, so I almost wonder if he was like, I need a body double. I can't do this. The way he pulls the gun out, though, is so funny. Like, he doesn't even care. It's so funny. I mean, isn't this the great tragedy of our times? There are a bunch of people who would be incredible if all they did was be funny on film, but they all decided to try to, like...

Throw their hat in the rings for leading the world. Yeah. Nightmare. Terrible society. Get Chuck Schumer on General Hospital. I would love for Steve D. Smith to shoot Chuck Schumer on General Hospital. Or whatever. In Minecraft. Or whatever, yeah. Uh-huh. Uh, yeah. Uh-huh. Can you imagine what the news would be like?

There's that great episode of Idle Thumbs from forever ago about Max Payne and how there's an episode where there's a part of Max Payne 3 where Max like complains that the news is... covering him and his vengeance-filled murder spree through Rio. And I don't remember if it's Sean or Chris or Jake, but someone is like, that would be the only thing the news talks about all year. If Stephen A. Smith killed Chuck Schumer, it would be the only thing any of us talked about.

For at least two years. That's all I'm saying. We should take a break. On that note, any final thoughts on whatever we're here talking about? Night Rain. Night Rain. Uh, I really, I think it's really fun. I love that I don't have to fucking, I could just run past everything. It's like starting Elden Ring at a level that I never got to in Elden Ring or any other Souls games where it's just like, these guys are nothing to me. I don't even have to, I don't have to worry if they hit me.

two times, I'm fine. I'm not going to die. And the boss fights is always the, that's where the juice has been in those games for me anyway. So it's great to just have a run to the boss game. Yeah. Yeah. The game is really good. I definitely want to play it a lot more. My lack of playing it is not from my thoughts on the game. That game is great. I'm really impressed.

As someone who was really cold on this game before it came out and did not expect to like it at all. I'm really happy with that game. Yeah. We streamed a bunch of it. We're seeing like four hours of it or something like that a couple weeks ago. So that's up on the Twitch, twitch.tv slash friends at the table. It'll eventually go up on the YouTube. Yeah, it'll be up probably next week. Slash at friends at the table, I think. We'll take a break. We'll come back. We'll talk about farming.

Again, great. We're back. And I want to talk to you about the most annoying dragon.

Who's ever been born? Damn! Is that not true? Is that not true? You've played a lot of this now. I think the more you play the... it's still not good but it's so we're talking we're talking about Wolby we're talking about Wolby we're talking about Wolby we're talking about Wolby

Not the game. Not the game. We're talking about Wolby. In this case, truly, because I used to like Rune Factory Guardians of Azuma, the most recent Rune Factory game quite a bit. I even like Wolby just fine, but, you know. I can't think of a more annoying dragon off the top of my head. Yeah, the more chances you see of him, you get some of the good stuff to balance out the annoying stuff. I feel like he is especially annoying at the beginning, though.

The dragon from Rune Factory 4, which is the Rune Factory that I've played a lot of, isn't not annoying. Let me look this guy up. Rune Factory 4. Ventuswil? Ventuswil? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Ventus Will. Oh, Ventus Will. Okay, yeah, I forgot about that. I did play Woundtack 3 or 4. I like her. It is funny to have kind of a spacey dragon.

who, like, keeps getting things wrong. Yeah. But it's, like, likable, but pretty annoying. Different vibe here, I'll say. Okay. Yeah. What is Rune Factory Guardians of Azuma? drey yeah yeah so it is i mean it is a gosh what do we call these now what are we calling them farming cozy farming game kind of what are we calling these farm pg yeah that's fair especially this style of them right yeah for sure um

So, yeah, Rune Factory Guardians of Azuma is from the long running Rune Factory series, which is I can never remember. Is it that Rune Factory is made by the people who originally made Harvest? Yes. That is correct, I believe. I believe that it is literally, it was originally a spinoff of Harvest Moon, which is now Story of Seasons. Yeah, yeah. But now it's not like...

It's not hard. The first one was Rune Factory, a fantasy harvest moon, and it is now just Rune Factory. Yeah. I think the only one of these that I've played extensively is four. Same. So I don't know how much of this is in all the rune factories, but I know in 4 and in this game, you play a character who's called an Earthmate, which is basically a person that has magical powers that allow you to, like, commune with nature and the gods.

uh in in special anime ways yeah i would say there's the particular so i played the first three Maybe I played one, two, and four. I bounced off of five for sure. I would say that they don't all have the particular... Myth mythology. Like terminology of Earthmate. And similar stuff. Okay. They do certainly all have. The kind of broader thing. Which is like.

These are games like Harvest Moon where you're doing some farming, but then magic happens either via goddesses or dragons or there are different magical areas that have different seasons.

permanently imposed on them um you know for instance uh i want to say in room factory one there were caves that had like oh this cave is permanently spring zone you know uh or whatever um whereas this one is like there are different towns all of which are permanently locked in one of the seasons um yeah but but that that gist of it of like oh it's a it's a harvest moon style game or a Stardew Valley style game except filled with RPG style characters and plot lines and shit has always been there

yeah and they i all the rune factor games have also all have they all had combat in them yes that has been yeah exactly right yeah that that was like the the thing that in the first one really separated it from harvest moon was like oh This is one where you get a sword. And so you're fighting monsters or you're, you know, recruiting monsters or whatever throughout the various editions. In fact, I think in three, you might be a monster who has like... Oh. You are, in fact, a wooly who, like...

gets reformed into a person or something like that. I can't quite remember the specifics, but it is something like that as well. And that is, like, a major theme of the Rune Factory games is that, like... all of your pretend or not all but a chunk of your potential love interest which of course is a big part of the game are the monster bosses from the different areas that you have to turn back into humans that is that is i think

As of right now, as I'm playing this, I think that is one of the things that I think is different about this one, but it is historically true in past rooms, has been true in past rooms. Am I wrong that they're not? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I fought a bunch of bosses. I haven't dated one of them yet. Uh, well... And none of them turned back into humans after you beat them? So... You tell me. Well...

No, because I'm doing the autism thing where I'm like, what's the true, what's the right answer here? Let me think about this in way too much granular detail. All I know is I fought a big evil tree. I fought like a weird spirit knight. or some shit at one point. Those bosses, at least, seem like they're just bosses. The bosses do not turn back into the gods, but after you beat the boss, they're like...

the thing that they were trapped in turns into a person. That is true. You're right. That is how... Yeah, so there are four, I guess off the jump, Rune Factory Guardians of Azuma is explicitly a very kind of like Eastern mythology, you know. um kind of setting in comparison or in contrast to previous rune factory games very japanese in its aesthetic um uh but also lots of you know touches of of kind of chinese mythology the dragons of the seasons uh

There are, you know, spirits and everything, all of that stuff. And then just like visually, it is Japanese fantasy, you know, samurai ass traveling person comes to town, you know, and. And it tries to help villagers who are farming in the little Japanese village. That is the aesthetic set for this, which has not been the case with previous rune factories, for sure.

Yeah. Do you want to talk about the other aesthetic that is so essential to this game? Anime? Genshin Impact. Oh, it's interesting that you say that. I had very similar... I have Genshin Impact... feeling more than I have Genshin Impact aesthetic, but I think that's because I think so poorly of the contemporary, this is going to sound like a wild thing to say, the contemporary Genshin Impact aesthetic. Where are we in Genshin Impact now?

I haven't played since the green plays. You haven't played since Fantasy India. Yeah, correct. I haven't played since France. They did Fantasy France. Right. Right. And now they've done... now they've done fantasy mesoamerica slash i don't know there's still no brown people in this fucking game man yeah

Yeah. Yeah. I hear they've done a really good job of doing cultures of black and brown people without actually having any black or brown people. You know what? You're right. I shouldn't have even just said Mesoamerica, right? Because it's like the one that it's at now. is like a weird amalgam of... In the same way that Sumeru was both India and a little Egypt, I think this current one is both South Central America and also...

like Africa in places. It's called Natlin, N-A-T-L-A-N. My actual beef with contemporary Genshin character design is that it all looks like VTubers. They all look... Everything's flowy. It's just like a thousand ribbons. I think it's too busy. Yeah, I kind of feel the same way about some of the character design in this game. Say more. Well, just specifically, maybe even less Genshin, but more VTuber. Like, some of the... I think especially some of the characters you meet early on.

give me huge vtuber like design energy like uh hina yeah and the first two gods you meet ulalaka yeah and uh matsuri they they both And kind of in personality, Matsuri very much feels like a VTuber. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. 100% Matsuri does. Yeah. The thing that they remind me of, or a lot of these character designs remind me of, is... Uh, what do you call it? A demon slayer.

Oh, yeah, for sure. Especially the women in this game. Yeah. Huge Demon Slayer vibes to me, which is not. It looks literally like a character. I'm looking at the character. Yeah. Literally one of the characters from Demon Slayer for sure.

100%. And these are, we're being very broad in our, and there are lots of people I know who are listening who are like, don't follow any of this stuff. So I will say, try to be a little bit more descriptive. This is a character design style that i think is defined by a few things and i'm not an artist so like please stick with me as i try to like muddle through this um one uh Very busy visual design. You take a simple silhouette and then you cover it up.

by bolting on a bunch of things. That can be things like, in the case of someone like Hina, fluffy ears, a big hat, horns, hair that is... kind of two or three different types of haircut in one big flowy hair, but also big kind of like a column of hair that kind of like goes down like this. No, I don't have a camera on, but you know, it goes down like this and it has a little like tie ribbon ties around the.

edges of it and then the costuming has like a bunch of extra detailing. Bells, tassels, double skirt like it's a skirt and like half a skirt on top of it.

you know, three, four, like bags on top of the screen. Yes. Yes. And that's also the same for the dudes like Morrow, who is, uh, Hina's kind of like buddy where they're kind of tied to the same sort of exploration, uh, uh, archaeology group quote-unquote uh also has like layer after layer lots of of flair but also goggles and a hat on top of that you know the goggles on top of the hat and a big brooch and like all sorts of just

like it's just a lot and then the other half of it is I think very a use of color that is like big singular bright colored eyes that punch through the design in order to try to have like a sense of focus uh that tries to like bring together the busyness around like

Big green eyes or, you know, really, you know, sparkling silver eyes that bring the whole thing together. I think there are some characters here who are less in this design aesthetic, but there's a fucking lot of it for sure, especially out the game. I think that some of them do hit that more the early Genshin anime style that is like, oh, this is what if there was a maid?

This is, what if there was a samurai with a big armor pauldron? And that's kind of his whole thing, you know? But I'm with you that they are pretty busy. It's funny, if you scroll, I'm on the Wikipedia for this, the Rune Factory wiki. And there's like the bachelorettes, the bachelors, and then other characters. Other characters are so much more tame and much less...

I would call this design aesthetic kind of annoying to me. As always, I was such a I wish you could date the characters you cannot date in this game. Brother. It's brutal. They made it better and still awful. Who is it that you're wanting to date? How long you got, buddy? How many names you want? Give them all. Yeah, it gets three. Three each. Do you want three? Okay. Takumi, the himbo carpenter. Great. Love that fucking guy. I'm with you.

um subame the uh the lady from the second village the summer village uh who is like the merchant uh she's great cool design yeah great design You probably haven't made it to the Winter Village yet. I've only made it to the third village. The third village is the Autumn Village. Yeah, Yachio from that village, also great. Oh, yeah. Wow, that's a great design. Yeah, what's wrong with Yachio? Okay, Yachio is like a cat girl. I don't know what her...

role is, but I'm looking at this character's design. She runs a restaurant. Okay, I was going to say an inn, but okay, a restaurant. That makes perfect sense. But very simple design. Elegant. The one piece of like unique breakthrough visual design. She's got two tails. That's cool. Simple. Yeah. Yep. And then just like a normal robe like someone might wear.

yeah totally uh last one is zaza who you haven't met yet zaza zaza is a great name shout out to zaza she's a she's a dwarf who runs a blacksmith corey is a blacksmith i should say yeah she's really cool Um, I think interestingly, the game design is where I felt that there was some of that sort of like third person.

uh action adventure exploration stuff that that genshin was was you know so became so popular with uh it's not as open as genshin or obviously like breath of the wild which genshin took so much influence from But in contrast to the Rune Factories that I've played, which are kind of traditionally isometric in the way that something like Harvest Moon or... Stardew, you know, are or top down. It's a third person game. There's different weapon types that have different weapon.

animations so like you have your big great swords you have your kind of traditional katana you have a bow you have magical talismans that you can kind of fling around um you have enemies with elemental weaknesses you have allies uh who you can raise your affinity rank with, who will support you, and they have different roles like tank and healer. You have boss fights that sometimes require you to shoot a special spot.

or use a special type of attack to create openings where they're vulnerable. You kind of like stack a stun meter on them. And all of that stuff is like... I think that that stuff is passable at best, but it's like pretty good if what you're looking at in contrast is other farming games with RPG action in them, you know? Yeah.

I would much rather play this than I would play the fighting in Stardew or something like that. It's clearly just a more central... you know part of what the game is uh and i i find myself pretty interested in like going down the skill tree and thinking about what weapons i want to upgrade and all of that um where it works for me and i'm curious if it's working for you is in the

Farming is like the wrong word because it's so much more than farming. Yeah, it's village management. Yeah, it's village management. You get villages in this game.

Yeah, so you get, as far as I know, plural. At this point, I have four villages. I have one for every season. And yeah, a big part of the villages is farming, not only just because of like... farming because like that's a core tenant of the gameplay loop here but they also work it into as the village chief you have to be aware of the finances of all the villages

And like all the finances of all the villages like pool back into your account, basically. So like if you don't want to be losing money every day, you have to have people farming and running other businesses. and stuff in the villages um so that you can like make a net profit yeah you are you don't have to farm at all actually you just let the villagers do it the whole time totally can yeah you could let you have to lay out the farm

You have to build where the farms are. You have to make sure that they have seeds available to plant. Um, but, but you're instead of doing, um, the, and you can go through and there's even some value in going through yourself. You know, if you have a, you can use the fire sword relic to like, uh, collect extra seeds, for instance, in a way that they can't.

Use the drum to make things grow faster. That's right. Yeah. But so much of what you're doing is more like, I'm laying out a really... pretty looking farm that has the right set of decor in it to give a certain type of bonus to give the like, you know, rural, you know, rustic beauty, you know, bonus or whatever the fuck that helps produce production. Or I'm making sure that my the workers who have the blacksmithing or like the the.

doesn't get tired skill or whatever, you know, are in the appropriate place in the village. I'm making sure all of my shops have someone working there. But it's a little more hands-off in a way that's kind of... interesting and does feel novel for for the maybe not the entire genre but certainly for Rune Factory

It's interesting because it's it is more hands off, but it also the deeper you get into it, the more fiddly it can become because you get like a big series of list of basically like, hey, do you want to increase your village level? Do all. this stuff. It's like a hundred things. It's a huge list.

It's a huge list and, you know, it updates as you level up. So it's like, you know, when you're level one, the goal is like purify 50% of the land and then you get to level two and it's like, all right, well now do 60% then 70 and blah, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, it's... Some of that stuff is like, hey, place 30 decorations. Hey, make sure your decorations are boosting your strength by X amount. Yeah. So sometimes also I clear a space and then I'm like, well.

This is where I put 20 of these stone pillars so that I can get plus 20 HP, baby. It's my stone pillar for us. It's very avant-garde. And then I get to the end of the day and Wooly, this little sheep dragon mascot character, is like, you know...

You don't have enough houses. Your people aren't happy because you fucking built about 30 stone pillars instead of a house. And I'm like, ah, shit. Right. I'll get to it tomorrow. Don't worry. And I will not get to it tomorrow. I will forget. I will go build a cafe. instead. Where do they get off calling this guy a dragon? He turns into a big dragon. He turns into a big dragon. Yeah, I guess a little setup here that we didn't really go over is just like...

You are an Earthmate. You have nature magic. You are an agent of slash... someone in communication with the gods. The gods speak to you in your dreams, and the game opens with a sort of conflict between you and the other player characters. So if you pick the dude... you're fighting the lady. If you pick the lady, presumably you're fighting the dude and you land, the fight goes bad. You land semi amnesia in a semi amnesiac state. I think fully amnesiac to start, but.

You know, they get the ball rolling pretty quick and it all comes back. Yeah, it's quick before you're like, oh yeah, that's my dragon. I'm flying my dragon around in pseudo... you know i wouldn't say it's this i wouldn't go so far as um what was the zelda with the sky stuff not the most yeah Skyward Sword. Not quite Skyward Sword exploration, but like, you know, there's little sky islands you can fly your dragon around to, basically.

And yeah, you're like trying to revive these four villages, which have been kind of beset by a decay over the last... question mark question mark question mark time uh the villages you know used to be the example i go to a lot when i think about this is like one of the villages used to have hot springs because it had an active volcano nearby and so the the kind of geothermals were running and

And now it doesn't. And the volcano has become dormant. And what it really needs is that volcano to be active again. Yep. Yep. So you got to go make sure that's happening. You know, normal stuff like that. And I don't know. Like, Dre, you played previous Rune Factory. You played... at least one previous rune factory is this hitting for you are you feeling and I know that you had strong feelings about fantasy life farming so I'm curious if coming from that has you feeling a certain way here um

I am liking this game a lot, but I wonder how the legs are going to be on it. Because I... I don't know how far I'll care about going with like the village stuff and things like that. Like I am not a person who is driven to like max out everything about a game if I don't enjoy playing it.

or doing it and so i'm sure at some point like i'll hit a wall here in the post game the way i did with fantasy life as well right um but so far i'm like 15 hours in i have story-wise i've like done the first four villages I definitely don't feel like I'm anywhere close to, like, the in-game. It feels like I've gotten to the point where it's like, okay, we're done giving you, like, a new tutorial on every new island you go to now. You need to, like, just play the game. Play the game, yeah.

You know, I'm very curious because these games may be more than Harvest Moon or... um stardew for me are those games are about the characters i don't want to say they're not about the characters sure but there is something about rune factory i think maybe this one especially because you're you're just always with these characters

They, you know, you bring three characters with you when you go out to fight and stuff. It really like lives and dies on do I want to see more of the character story stuff. I think especially with this one where they've shifted. I'm not going around my field every morning and watering my carrots, you know? And so instead, a big part of what you do is you go and talk to a character. And in this version, when you go talk to a character, it pops up a set of four.

options for you to like what do you want to do with them do you want to like go hang out with them at the tea house do you want to go to the waterfall do you want to talk about like combat techniques do you want to you know show them a nap you take a nap with them you want to go hang out and take a nap

with them do you have a high enough you know relationship with them to take a nap um have you have you asked someone to do something oh and then turn you down yes i have oh so it's so brutal it's so brutal dude what do they like they fucking like yell at you What do they do? Well, so the way it works is that some activities are like a certain rank level.

And if your bond isn't a high enough rank level, the activity is you run the risk of them like turning you down. So like the first time I went to go hang out with Yachio, the cat lady who runs the restaurant, I didn't, I wasn't even.

been thinking about it and one of the options was like oh do you want to go get dinner and that's a level three thing i was like oh no it's fine everyone that i've ever asked to like go get food at the tea place has been like yeah let's do it that sounds awesome you're already tight with them you just met this lady Well, okay. But yeah, and you know what she told me? She said, please respect my boundaries. Damn. Come on, it's just dinner.

I'm just saying, let's go to the tea shop. Let's hang out. Listen, she said no. You're not even a romance character. She didn't say no. She said, please respect my boundaries. I didn't know your boundaries.

food was your boundary it's cool we're we're bond rank three now we've moved past dinner everything's chill when i asked um the what's uh is it aroha the the tea house uh lady when i asked her to take a nap and she said yes what she said was you must be a mind reader how else could you know that i wanted to do this and she looked very embarrassed

So, you know, you've got to build your rapport with people. You've got to see those numbers go up, and then once they go up enough, you can go take naps with people and go get dinner. You can take naps with people that aren't the romanceable characters?

No, this is a romance. But the TV, the cat lady. But also, yes, you can. Oh, can you take it? Okay, yeah. Well, listen. Bro, I took a nap with the homie Sakaki. This is what I'm saying. Just like an hour ago, I'm pretty sure. Kiss your homies goodnight and then take a nap. Yeah. this is it's brand new it's brand new development oh no i'm sorry it was it was with takumi not with okay okay okay even better because it was with takumi takumi's great

Wait, am I thinking of the right person? Wait, wait, wait. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, okay. Yes, yes, yes. Yes, yes. Takumi's great. Takumi is the homie. Takumi is like a big buff guy who builds all the buildings for you and has a heart of gold. And it's like, why is he not a datum? guy. Why is Morrow a dateable guy? I know why Morrow's a dateable guy.

It's the same thing as Mysteria. It is, 100%. I forget what that guy's name is, but the guy that everybody loves. The nice brother. You can date the shitty brother, but not the nice brother. I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to date the shitty brother. I'm pro dating the shitty brother. But they already did half the brothers. Why not just check off both brothers?

yeah that's right check them off god i i just looked at the full art of hina again i'd forgotten that she also has a huge like foxtail busiest character design i've ever seen in my life Now, we said all of that about the character designs. I do love this goofy fisherman, Watarase. With his stupid hat and his big mask and his dinosaur tooth necklace and his... Hey, what do you think his voice sounds like?

Like, if you had to guess, like, an archetypical character voice, what do you think? Sensitive soft? That's where I was going, too. I was going, the fish aren't biting today. The fish... The fish aren't out there today. I sure hope the fish come today. Nah, man. Wait, is he Southern? Yeah, he's Southern. He's a Southern fisherman. Damn, fish ain't biting a day. Yes, 100%. That rules. It's so good. Let me date this guy. Why can't I date this guy?

Take his mask off. I bet he has real kissable lips. Another mask underneath the mask. Oh, that's right. So the fish can't see. Yeah, I'm curious about its staying power too. This has been a year filled with games like this already, especially coming so... coming so quick after Fantasy Life, which I played the shit out of. And then I even kept playing it after we podcasted about it, which is very rare for me. Except...

Then I didn't go back. I stopped to play Rune Factory in between, and then, like, I went back to Fantasy Life, and now I'm like, I don't... Did it not? I thought it had its hooks in me deep. I thought Rune Factory had me, and I got distracted. And so I'm not sure. Well, you did play like 50 hours of Fantasy Life or more, right? I played 90 hours of fantasy life. That's about how much I played too.

No, no, no. I'm saying Rune... I thought Rune Factory had gotten its hooks into me. Oh, I understand. And in fact, I had not escaped the hooks of Fantasy Life. Even though I actually think I like Rune Factory moment to moment. Not moment to moment. I like...

fantasy life moment to moment more in a way that i don't like you know we were talking earlier about like do you enjoy it or do you just do it are you compelled to do it yeah fantasy life is like a compulsion engine for me like it is 100 Whereas I like...

Rune Factory, and I want to play more Rune Factory, but I'm finding it easier to put down. Maybe partly because it's not compulsive. Isn't that just life in the 21st century? Isn't that exactly what 2025 is like? I have all these things I like, but instead I'm doing these things that I'm compelled to do. do that I actually don't really like. I have 15 TV series I could be watching right now. But I'm scrolling, motherfucker. This is why I feel forced to take the ungenerous view on Fortnite.

My view isn't ungenerous. It's just... No, no, but your view is generous. My view is ungenerous. Sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I actually don't think my view is generous. I don't think I'm being kind to people. I think that I can say that they are not, to me, hypocrites. crit is not the worst thing you can be no you will you are refraining from judgment replacing judgment with curiosity that is i'm happy to be curious and to judge if i let the mask fall it would be done

For me and the world. Do you know what I mean? Uh-huh. I used to be that guy. Yeah. And I can't be that guy anymore. Sure. I'm trying to take it back. I'm glad you can be. I'm happy to follow you on this journey from a distance. I'm happy to watch you with my binoculars as you become the judgmental gamer. Your new YouTube channel. Yeah, that's it. I can't wait for your cool theme song.

Oh, my God. How's that go, Keith? That was your Judgmental Gamer theme song? Judgmental Gamer, he will judge the things you do. Judgmental Gamer, he will hate the things you do. That's, you know, okay. Yeah. That's pretty good. Yeah, pretty good. That's pretty good. You gotta keep the beat with just a gavel that you're banging on something in the background. The judge, right? Like a judge. All hail judge gamer. Yeah, at the very end of the theme song, it goes overruled.

You would fucking kill in 2006. But I have nothing in common with those people. This is a whole new strain. I'm judgmental against them. That's the thing. This is versus. I'm judgmental versus them. that's the name of your series where you you like take emails and like yell at people it's called like versus mode or something right yeah uh i do have a quick judgmental gamer thing which is someone wrote in uh nelson from seattle wrote in and said hi side dishes.

which is a hell of a hell of a way thing to call us side dishes i've heard austin bring up his preference for the original no man's sky over the current iteration but i've never heard why can we hear the full rundown uh or lowdown is it because you could now

befriend animals does austin hate animals please respond to these animal hating allegations thanks again for the show nelson from seattle i don't hate animals in fact i think you could feed them back then you just couldn't recruit them uh during launch number You couldn't, like, have them as pets in the same way. It's actually the same conversation we just had about Rune Factory character design. Launcher in a Land Sky is less like...

Hina and Matsuri and more like Takumi and Tsubame and Yachiyo. There is a simplicity and straightforwardness to its design. I am not saying it was not without problems, but when like you took it on face value is what it was. I mean, the thing that drove me crazy at the time was people saying they didn't know what that game was. was going to be yeah when i like very clearly sketched out what it would be on an episode of the beast cast like

six months before it came out or something. And it was that thing. Now, do I also think that part of their marketing strategy was about leaving very clear blank spaces if you didn't like go to their website and read their write-up of what the game was? Absolutely.

But I did that because I was curious about the game. And on that page, they said what the game was. So I knew what I was getting into when I played it. I knew that it wasn't going to be everything for everyone. I knew that it wasn't going to be a game with like a deep story. or interfactional politics or anything like that. So I knew what it was going to be.

And the vibes of not just launch No Man's Sky. This is where I'm like a real asshole. My favorite version of No Man's Sky was the pre-1.0 patch version that I was able to play.

i got a copy before street date because i got an early copy from the from the street not a not a copy they sent me i went to a location in new york and got a copy and that version which was even rougher even less focused on funneling the player through the sort of, even at that point, very slim narrative, you know, funnel.

I had a much I had. That's the best time I had with that game, which was like fully focused on the pleasure of exploring new places, the pleasure of looking at different aesthetic combinations of what its procedural system could put together.

finding a new ship, all of that. And those parts of the upgraded, the current version of the game, I still like quite a bit. It's the stuff that's like, I don't want to be on a big space station with 30 other people in No Man's Sky. The original No Man's Sky is... It's the opposite of Pokemon Snap where they put you in a cart and they drag you down. They put you in a cart, they drag you on the rails, and they put all of the interesting stuff in the world in front of you to take a picture of.

No Man's Sky's original thing was you can go anywhere and do anything. And the interesting stuff is spread around. And you've just got to go find it and look at it. And then when you get there, you've looked at it. yeah and then you like record 30 seconds of it and you put a song from you put a frank ocean song behind it and you put it on twitter and you go damn the vibes are fucking good tonight and that's it that's all the game needed to be to me

And it was that. And now it's like, I like base building. We were just talking about the village building and Rune Factory. But I don't like it as much as I liked finding a planet with like purple green grass as the sunset. And the ruins in the distance or whatever. That, to me, was the version of the game that made me just want to be in it the most. And the reality of base building is never as good as the promise of base building.

Yeah, no, that's very true. Yeah, I just don't think my brain is right. But I think No Man's Sky base building is also... It's not good. It's not a good system. You've got to learn a lot of weird glitches and stuff to do good stuff. They did such a great job of convincing everybody that No Man's Sky... is now what they promised it would be. People are so high on that game and the way that it has changed. I'm not saying I dislike any of it.

And I'm excited for their new thing. I really am excited for them to take a fresh swing at something. It's sort of like medieval fantasy. It's like a fantasy thing. Yeah, light no fire. I'm very curious. I'm also very... I like that they keep putting the tech that they're building for that game back into No Man's Sky, where they're like, yeah, we made the water better because we made good water for Light No Fire.

What are we going to do? Not put it in No Man's Sky? Which is the answer to that historically for game studios is yes. You would never. Why would you do that? But they're doing it. So you can ride a dragon. Okay. I'm in. Yeah. You're in.

watching the trailer for light no fire is that what you're doing yeah i had not heard of this there's like weird bird people and shit you know and i hope that they take as long as they need for it and i hope they don't feel like it has to be everything to everyone I think the more that they lean into that sort of messaging, the more likely they are going to be to disappoint people again, which again is on them to some degree.

And on whoever was doing the publishing and Sony was doing the publishing for the first one. But the marketing stuff. But yeah, I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. But yeah, that's right. I like the simplicity of it. I like the focus on exploration and the lack of overwhelming options. I think that it was a cleaner, smoother game. Every once in a while, there's like a wild flashpoint.

In games and people's reaction to games like Mass Effect 3 coming out was one. No Man's Sky coming out was one. It is very weird how... That stuff shakes out every time. In retrospect, it always feels like it was the wrong way to go, to freak the fuck out over something like that. Yeah. It does. It sure does.

You know, take it a day at a time. Be confident in your vision, you know? You can ride a Kingfisher! You can ride a Kingfisher in Light and Fire. That's fucking sick. See? They got your ass. But I know it'll be in there. I saw it. You did see it. You did.

And I'm not saying that all of those trailers had stuff that was, there were definitely some creatures in those early No Man's Sky trailers that did not make it in. I'm not saying that that's not the case. I just also don't trust any trailer I see ever. So, you know. Anyway. that's my defense thanks for your email major nelson

I don't think it was Major Nelson. I think it's a different guy. It does say from Seattle. Is he still doing, is he still the guy? I don't think he is. I don't think he's still doing Xbox stuff. What's he do now? I don't know. Let's find out. What was his name? Larry? Herb. Herb. He works for Unity. He's in Unity's community department. That's rough. Does he have a cool Unity podcast? Probably.

I don't know. Are you going to tell me what Xbox Live arcade games are coming out on Unity this week? I don't think he's going to do that. I can imagine, honestly, a worse job than being the community department for Unity since 2024. I can think of a worse job, but I wouldn't want to do this one either. I was being hyperbolic, but yes. You were. You were. You were. Anyway, I think that's going to do it for us. Any final thoughts from folks?

on anything we talked about today? I'm always looking for the... All I want is a perfect farming game for me, and it doesn't exist, and I'm still waiting for it. Maybe Rune Factory. Azuma, is that what it's called? Guardians of Azuma. I guess I'll also say right now as of this recording, and I think by the time this episode comes out, yeah, Harvestella is 60% off on Steam. I think Harvestella is really good. I think it leans even more towards RPG than farming, but it is more hands-on farming.

than guardians of azuma is um i think that game is underrated frankly it has some wild turns in it and uh i think that the combat and class design is really cool and i think the character design is Like, really restrained and, like, simple in a really minimalist way. In Harvestella. A really strong way. In Harvestella, yeah. Shout-outs to Harvestella. Yeah. I really liked Rune Factory 4. I think I will try Guardians of Azuma.

But I don't know. One day there will be something that takes farming and fishing very seriously and has good combat and has a bunch of characters that I like. one day how many hours in fantasy life do you have uh 30 35 yeah it's so close to that and yet i just don't think it's there i just don't

I really like it. I left the last podcast we did. Me too. I left the last podcast being like, me and Keith just shit-talked that game for 30 minutes. But I have 90 hours in that game. I really like that game. I want to play more of it. And also...

There are just some things that just didn't hit for me. I don't think we should talk to that bad. I hope not. I don't think it came across that way. I always feel like I should say I'm about to... shit talk this thing about this game that doesn't mean that I don't like the game yeah it is an expression of what I do like about the game how much I want this thing to be different yeah I agree

All right. As always, you can support everything we do here. Friends at the table dot cash. You can go watch our streams at YouTube dot com slash friends at the table or twitch.tv slash friends at the table. Please go listen to Media Club Plus, which is nearing the end of its Hunter x Hunter run. Very excited for what comes next there, so stay tuned about that. And go listen to, if you want to play some tabletop games inspired by JRPGs.

You can listen to our main season of Friends at the Table right now called Perpetua, where we're playing Fabula Ultima, a game that takes a lot of inspiration from JRPGs. As always, you can please leave us some reviews on whatever your podcatcher of choice is. I don't have any...

reviews up right this second but i'll try to get some for the next next time i read a really funny one last time so i'm on the lookout i'm on the lookout for funny ones please go review the podcast and let people know i think you know dre at the beginning of the episode you made a joke You made a statement thinking that the show was Patreon only. I don't think you're the only one who thinks that. I've seen people on social media saying, oh, wait, I thought this was a Patreon thing.

It is not. If you're listening to this, you should know that it's not. Please tell people about it. It's still a pretty new podcast, and it is a very busy, competitive space. So please let people know that we're talking about video games over here these days. And we'd love to have more listeners. So thank you so much for listening. Dre, where can people find you since it's the first time here on the show? Yeah, you can find me on...

Blue Sky. I'm on over there at swandre3000.bluesky.social. There it is. All right. Until next time. To be continued.