Welcome everybody to the Game Informer Show, a weekly podcast covering the video game industry. Join us every week for discussion about the latest gaming news, reviews, and exclusive reveals, alongside Game Informer staff and special guests from around the industry. I'm one of your hosts today, Alex Van Aiken, and I am joined by Marcus Stewart. Hey, Neil, Marcus, Hi.
What's up. It's a reference to our Resident Evil Outbreak super replay. Shout out to George, one of our hapless companions. He does that a lot. He just goes hi, and then he gets like, staff.
I saw that. Y'all are what seven episodes into that? How's that going?
It's going great. We're stuck in scenario three. We're like in the middle. We have a key that we don't know the bad luck goes to. Yet that's our occurrent sort of hurdle camming. Over All of our companions are idiots. Cindy died because she carried three red herbs that are useless. But yeah, it's going it's going good.
It's it's been like, yeah, listeners of your Curious Resident Evil Outbreak is the what spiritual prequel to Resident Evil Requiem there's some characters introduced in that.
There's one one, Alyssa Ashcroft, who was who we're playing ass.
He is the only she's the mom of the protagonist.
Yes, and.
Then also dies in requiem like they just showed that.
Okay, great, yeah, sure that's sign Thanks Capcom. We're also joined by Eric Van Allen.
How you doing, Eric? I'm doing good. I don't have anything to reference.
I could.
I could be like a Pokemon and just say Eric, Eric, that's my name.
Eric. We're gonna be talking about that later on in the show. And we're joined by a special guest, Bill Fairchild. You might know him from the nerd nest On YouTube or Patreon. Bill. How you do?
Hey, how's it going everybody? I'm happy to be here. I didn't know i'd have to have a reference ready, so you normally don't.
It's you know, they're feeling really, they're feeling extra wild today.
You could reference something that just happened on this show.
Yeah, just hi, yuh, there you go. Oh wow, it's a residentieval outbreak.
What a callback?
Wow? Bill, thank you for joining us. You and I met back at Paseas through a mutual friend Bob Wolf and Hit it off, and yeah, I wanted to have you come on the show. Your expertise is on PC handhelds, right.
Well, I wouldn't say that I have any expertise in any area in particular, but I do use a lot of PC handhelds.
Yeah.
Yeah, And of course the Xbox rock Ally and la X are out. Now you've spent about a week with them, if I'm not mistaken.
And yeah, I'm going to pick your brain. Yeah, they're sitting here at my desk. I've been using them a bunch, putting them through their I think Microsoft has done some pretty cool stuff, but maybe it's not quite far enough.
We'll have to talk about it.
Yeah, we'll talk about it in just a second. But I did want to give you a chance to let our listeners and our viewers know what nerd nest is all about and kind of what you get up to over there.
So nerdnest is my YouTube channel, which is also where I have my podcast, and basically I do gaming news stuff, mostly focusing on PC gaming that kind of thing, but I also will talk about what's happening in the rest of the industry, hardware reviews, things like that, and then every week I also have a podcast where it's myself, the Fox Retro gamecre and Fan the Deck and we sit down and we look at what's going on in the industry and just kind of talk about it, and
then in the second half of the show, we usually talk about the games we've been playing.
Awesome. Well, that seems like a natural recommendation for folks who listen to this podcast, so make sure to go and check that out. Nerd Nest is and that's the name of the podcast as well.
Right, Yeah, everything's nerd Nest which is actually the name of this room because when we built this room, my wife was telling one of her friends about it. Yeah, like that we that I had like this studio and she said, well we her her friend called it the man Cave, and my wife goes, well, he doesn't do anything manly in there, so they called it the nerd Nest.
And I don't. I mean, she's right, I don't do anything.
Likewise.
You like curling a controller, that's probably manly. Yeah, it's pretty light though. You got to get a lot of reps in order to get in a good workout.
Yeah, yeah, more about tone than than muscle. Yeah. Uh well, Bill, thanks for joining us. Let's not waste any more time. Let's jump into the Xbox rock Ally. Of course, listeners, if you need a primer, this is the new Xbox partner with asis Zeus. Who are They've previously made the rog Ally, which was a very well regarded PC handheld. You could still buy it today. It's probably what I would consider to be the main competitor of the steam Deck.
It is more expensive than the seam Deck but has been known to get better performance and that kind of thing. And Xbox this new Xbox rog Ally and Ally X, which are the two different skews. The x is the more powerful version. These are kind of the the successor to that first rog Ally, And a lot being talked about this week about these handhelds and in their performance and the new sort of Xbox you know, dashboard of
sorts that that it's got on there. But Bill, I'll kind of toss it over to you to kind of continue and expand on that primer and kind of kick us off with the kind of your thoughts on these devices so far.
Yeah, So just to give everybody background on it. There's there's two versions. There's the white one and the black one. The white one has the a M D rise in Z two A chip set, which is very similar to the Vangu chipset which is in the Steam Deck, which they're they're like these these very low power chips that can't really do too much to push games, but if you keep the resolution low enough and you turn off some settings, you can play a lot of different games
on them. The other one is the Xbox ally X and this one has the Z two Extreme chip set, which has a lot more power than the Z two A chip set. Uh, this one will give you a more power. It also has a bigger battery. It has the Xbox I forget what they're called, but the Xbox
triggers that have Liketic feedback. Yeah, it has those in it, but they and then they have seven inch screens, one hundred and twenty hurts with VRR which will smooth out that gameplay if you are running into hitches because these are low power devices. The white one six hundred dollars and the black one is one thousand dollars, which is pretty expensive. Yeah, large pill to swallow, it is, and I think that I think that this would have been
the for the audio listeners. Sorry, I'm holding up The white one would have been better off at five hundred dollars and the black one probably would have been better off at eight hundred dollars, but according to Microsoft, market conditions forced them to raise those prices. So, yeah, things are pretty expensive right now. I mean everything's expensive right now.
Yeah, of course, yeah, it's no strain. I mean everything's getting all prices are getting raised lately. It's a shame. But you know, what do you think about the devices? Like, how are you enjoying them? What's kind of your use case looking like the past week with these things?
So I think that.
When you're trying to like when people ask that question, usually they're trying to decide do I want this or do I want that? Like which device do I want? And I think that for the most part, when when people kind of get stuck in a console war mentality that this is better than that, it isn't really like that because all of these play essentially the same games. You want to buy a Steam Deck, then the Steam Deck is going to play the same games that these are going to play, and so they're just PCs.
Now.
The fact that they have an Xbox logo on these new ones that introduces like this expectation that I think that people have that oh, okay, well it's going to be like an Xbox, and they're not like xboxes. They're more like Xboxes than any previous Windows PC handheld that I've seen. But still I think that Microsoft has further to go in order to get the UI really where it needs to be, to where you never really realize
that you're just running Windows. Of course, the advantages that these play Steam games, they play Epic games, they play Goog games. You can play whatever the hell you want on this Really you can play everything, and that's one of the really great things about devices like this. If you're trying to decide between, say a Steam Deck and one of these things, it really depends on what kind of games that you're going to be playing and how
important Windows is to you. Because with Windows it plays everything. On the Steam Deck, you lose the ability to play games that are like that use anti cheat or DRM, or.
A lot of multiplayer games are.
Exactly Or if you really are into game pass, even though it's now thirty dollars a month, then these are the devices that you would want to get over a Steam deck, because you can't do game pass games on steam Deck for the most part.
Yeah, there are some you know, some workarounds, but I think that the average user is not going to go through the trouble of doing what you need to do to get other launches to run on the steam Deck.
I remember when I first unboxed my It was the first it was the LCD Steam Deck had just come out, and I went to the trouble of installing battle Neet and I was playing Ward of Warcraft with like this controller mod and it was it was very cool for like, oh this thing can do this, but it was a massive pain in the ass anytime I wanted to actually go and play it or like have a smooth experience. And there's a lot of that kind of stuff with the steam Deck where if you put in the effort,
yeah you can, you can. You can get stuff to work, you know, you can get emulation to run and all that sort of stuff. But having a Windows handheld, you know, just opens the door to so much more you know, native support. And I think particularly games like like a Marvel Rivals, for instance, I would love to play that on this device, or a Fortnite right something that previously, you know, I haven't been able to play really because of anti cheat yeh, but but yeah it.
So is it fair to say as someone like me who is like, I have a gaming PC, but I am a console person. I just like the convenience of console. Is the rock ally better? For like, if I don't want to fiddle with anything and I just want the closest thing to just like, I just want to install the games and they're most likely just play. Is this a better option than the Steam Deck?
I wouldn't.
I would say that it's pretty similar. It also does depend on what games you're gonna play, Like, if you're just playing like a bunch of indie games or mostly single player stuff that you never have to like go online, then when you like, the Steam Deck will play of the vast majority of my library, it won't play anything that's on the Epic Games Store because the Epic Game Store doesn't support Well, that's not necessarily true, because you
couldn't do the things that Alex was talking about before.
Not out of the box.
Yeah, not out of the box. You will have to jump through hoops. Honestly, if you are a console player, my recommendation if you want something to play portably is to just get a switch to, not because I think that the switch to is necessarily better, but it doesn't require any thinking on the part of the end user. You'd never have to sit down to play a game and be like, how the hell does this work?
Again?
Oh I remember now, or I have to go look something up. There's just a lot less friction that way, if that makes sense. But that also closes off a lot of games to you if you're playing only on the switch too.
Yeah.
Right.
Something that I've been really curious about is this has evolved, this entire market that kind of just sprung out of Valve deciding to do Steam decks and and try to make these at home PCs. Is that even going back before steam Deck to things like it was the Steam machines and things like that, you know, it always ended up being kind of almost a pro sumer product because you needed to be somebody who was willing to tinker.
You needed to be willing to Even if you play on Steam Deck and you boot up something like say Trails in the Sky, you might need to go into settings, you might need to tinker to get the experience that you want that you you kind of hope for. Whereas, like you said, switch to you boot it up and what you get is what you get, and to some degree that that can be good or bad. I mean, on end of switch one life cycle, we kind of saw how that got a little tired after a while.
But the flip side is that you aren't going to have to deal with those menus and stuff like that. So do you feel like it being a Windows platform does at least smooth out a little bit more of that for steam Deck and for the Linux side of things where people might not be as familiar or even like ready to do that kind of stuff. Or are you still kind of having to go into menus to optimize to kind of deal with the things that come with kind of a PC environment.
Yeah, So I guess the way that I would put that is, like, let's say you're playing a game on the Nintendo Switch too, you don't have to worry well, okay, you don't have to worry on these new devices either, but you might want to. You don't have to worry on a switch to how much power the device needs in order to run the game that you want to play. So if I'm playing a game like let's say I'm playing Animal, well, I don't need twenty five watts of
power to run Animal Well. I can run Animal Well at six wants of power and still get like sixty frames per second, no problem. On a device like these, you in order to get the best battery life, you would want to open up the menus, which admittedly Microsoft's new full screen experience, which is launching with these devices,
is a lot easier to manage those power settings. Basically, you hit the Xbox button, you push left, and it brings up Armory crake, and then you have these little buttons there that say six watts, thirteen watts, twenty watts, and you say, all right, well, I'm playing a simple game, so I'll set it at six watts, and now the
battery isn't going to run through nearly as much. When some a developer submits a game to Nintendo, Nintendo figures all that stuff out for you, so then you say, I'm going to launch this game, and you never have to think about that. So, even though I do think that there are a few less hoops to jump through when you are talking about a Windows style device over a Steam deck, I still think that these are things
that you definitely want to keep in mind. And I would say, though, the thing that you have to think about less is which Proton version you're using for a particular game. And for the listeners who aren't aware of that, Valves tried to get developers to make games for Linux, and developers said god no. So then Valves said, fine, we'll do it ourselves, and they translated all of the
Windows APIs over to Linux. So then when you go to run a game that's made for Windows, you can run it on Linux and it just says, hey, I need that API, and then Proton says, oh, here's the API. Don't pay attention too much that it doesn't look like what you're expecting and then it runs. So sometimes you play a game and the game won't start and you'd be like, oh, I'm going to switch to a different
version of Proton, and then it starts. So there's usually solutions, but you do have to jump through a few more hoops. But I don't do that very often, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, I did a lot of that more when I first got my Steam deck. I think that was you know, that's as time goes on, you know, the you just kind of want to sit down and play a game and I'm like, I'll sacrifice a few frames here and there if it means I'll just you know, launch the game and and and have it do my settings default. That kind of thing. Most with most games, I would say, outside of modern Triple A games, that usually works all
right with the steam Deck. Now, I'm currently playing a game that we can't talk about yet for review, and you know, it's a bigger game, and I've recently kind of been on its steam Deck kick again. I kind of go back and forth between my switch to and my steam deck. I've been playing Silk Song for a while on my switch and I kind of am and done with that. I'm like, okay, back to steam Deck.
And you know, it's it's a real bummer when you when you open up one of those games and you're getting you know, sub thirty frame rate and you can't even hit like thirty frames on the low. And that's kind of like where my steam deck has started to
let me down a bit. And that's natural, right, It's not meant to run these games, especially you know, Unreal Engine five has had you know, a lot of those games don't work on the steam Deck or run very poorly, which is another point I want to ask about in a second. But yeah, if you're just looking to play, like Bill said, Animal Well or ball x Pit, which is what we're playing we're going to be talking about
later today on this episode. I've been playing the hell out of that put, you know, fifteen twenty hours into
it on steam Deck and it runs perfectly. And I know, like when the steam Deck first came out, people were you know, we had like God of War on there and you know, Death Stranding and you can hit thirty fps with those, but you know, those games are what you know, six seven years old now, depending and you know, if you want to play games that came out last year or even earlier this year, like clar Obscure is one that I would have loved to play on my
steam Deck, but it's just it runs at an unacceptable frame rate, Like it just it's not really playable. And you know, we still see developers release updates here and there. Baldersgate three just recently got an official patch for steam Deck that we've talked about on on Gamemanformer dot com a bit. But yeah, it's I'm kind of at that point Bill where I am like, Okay, I think I
want to upgrade to something a little beefier. I'm kind of stuck between the Ally and the ally X. So that's why I'm kind of really especially curious about your experience kind of running these modern, more modern games on those devices. Are you getting better performance or is it kind of on par with what you'd expect from from something like an Ally the first generation Ally? Curious to your thoughts on that.
So when you say the first generation Ally are you are you talking about the Xbox ones? Are you talking about the original white rog.
Alli, original white rog Ally?
Okay, that one got That one one runs the Z one Extra Stream chipset, which is not as powerful as the Z two Extreme chipsets that are in here, but a little more powerful than what's in the Steam.
Deck, which is the van Go chipset.
And I feel like what I would say about those in particular is will you get a performance boost? Yes you will, but it's not really going to be all that noticeable. And then when you look at the rog Lix, not the new ones from Xbox, but the one that came out last year or the year before, I can't remember. Yes, this one that's black and it doesn't have it doesn't have the extra handles on it. This also has the
Z one Extreme chipset. So the big difference between this one and the white one is the form factors a little bit better, the curves are a little bit better, It's easier to hold, it feels nicer in the hands. It has a giant eighty hour battery in it. The original one I believe had a forty hour.
Oh wow.
So when you compare the steam Deck to the rog ally the not the Xbox Ones. Basically the Z one Extreme chip set is very is more powerful than the van Go chip set, but it does not sip the battery. It chugs the battery, so it just like burns through your battery really really fast. And they could not compete on efficiency with Valve. So what they did instead is they just said, well, I'm just gonna brute force it and throw a giant battery in there that'll just last
way longer. And that solved the problem for them. And this is a really really great device. I don't know how much it costs right now, though.
That's fair. Yeah, I think I was looking. I think it's in the five to six hundred range on i've seen it. There's been some sales that kind of thing, and.
If you walk into a best Buy you can usually find one used.
Oh cool, I didn't realize that.
Yeah, because the best Buy carries these devices, and so usually people will buy them. They'll think that it's going to be a console like experience and they'll have to jump through hoops and they'll be like, man, I'm not doing all this, and they'll take it back to the store. There's nothing wrong with it, you just have to If you're a PC gamer, you're going to be fine on these kind of devices. But if you're a console gamer, you will hit a wall where you're going to be annoyed at some point.
Yeah, fair, fair, But yeah, what kind of games are you playing on it? I know you've only had it for a week. Are you kind of just jumping around for testing purposes? Have you? Kind of?
Yeah, that's all I was doing, was just testing and testing and testing. So, like I put on Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven on the new white one. That's this one is about the same power envelope as the Steam deck. This one on Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven, I was getting, Oh, the best would be thirty.
Three frames per second.
Okay, And then with the steam Deck on that particular on Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven, I was getting about thirty five frames per second. So the steam Deck actually beat that one in Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven. That's not a huge surprise though, because Windows is it's very I'm going to use the word bloated. My friend Carrie is going to yell at me because I use the word bloated, because the point that I'm trying to make is it doesn't deal with the hardware very well, and Linux is
just so much more efficient. So Linux it every time you install like Linux on one of these devices, they just run better the games. You get slightly better performance, and that's why the steam decks beating that one. I played Borderlands three on the Oh I forgot to tell you the Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven that I got sixty two frames per second on the Black one.
Oh wow, that's this one. That's the thousand dollars one. Yeah, yeah, that's the that's I mean double the nearly double the frame rate.
Yes, but it's also one thousand dollars.
Yes, yes, very true, very true.
And then the same similar examples with games like Borderlands, Three Shadows of the Tomb Raider, Assassin's Creed, Valhalla. I was getting very similar results between those three things when I tested it in my video.
Did you have a chance to check out the Oblivion remake? I'm curious, so.
I okay, I have not installed Oblivion Remake on these sure, but I did make a video where at the when Oblivion Remake came out, I installed it on all of the devices that I had and tried it, and I don't remember what the results were, but it's not good. But it's an unreal five game. It really like these devices struggle with Unreal five games usually.
Yeah, yeah, that's totally fair man. Any any other take aways in general that you think, like the general you know, our audiences. Honestly, we have a lot of console players in our audience, but I think there's a growing contingent of people who have like picked up a Steam deck and really enjoy it or or are on the fence about that or a steam deck. But any any kind of takeaways that might general folks, might people who aren't necessarily like really into this more niche section of the hobby.
You know, they're not watching you know, nerd nests. They're not watching wolfed In or the Fox, you know that kind of thing.
I think that what there's there's a couple of different ways to look at it. These devices do have those speed bumps in the friction that I talked about before. But at the same time, when you're playing on PC, you have those Steam sales and there's like one hundred thousand games on Steam. Yeah, so like everything is pretty much on PC with the exception of and like PlayStation in Nintendo exclusives. Eventually it's going to come to Steam and eventually it's going to be on sale. And so
I think these devices are for the patient gamer. And if you're a patient gamer, if you're willing to wait for sales, if you're willing to wait for a game to come out and you know, work on your backlog instead of buying the new hotness, well then you might have a really good time with devices like the Steam Deck or the Xbox Ally or the ally X, or the Lenovo Legion Go two, which just came out, which is eye watering thirteen hundred and fifty dollars. Oh my god,
but that screen is insanely beautiful. From what everybody told me. I haven't got hands on with that one yet.
Man, Yeah, I totally agree with that. I mean, Steam is such a great ecosystem to get into, and even if you're if you're looking at getting one of these newer devices, maybe you haven't started building a PC library. Stuff like Goog and that sort of thing. Are epic games excellent platform to kind of get those games.
And one of the things about these new devices over the Steam Deck is when you press that Xbox button, it brings up a little menu and it has the launchers that you have installed on the device right down below the last couple of games that you played. And so you can press that button, drop down, open Steam, drop down open I don't know, Epic Game Store if you want, which like gog or any of the other ones.
Like on the Steam Deck, you have to jump through hoops to install other launchers, which isn't a big deal because you only have to do it once, but it is something that you do have to do, so that's another advantage that a device like this might have.
I do also think it's interesting when we talk about these devices. I feel like the rise of a lot of tangential devices when it comes to retro gaming and things like that have also seen an uptick in the
years since the Steam Deck started to take off. Things like Ambernick and Me You and all that have also been booting up in popularity over the last five six years, And I think it maybe shows just a general inclination that people, especially as they get older and want to play some of their older games, They're a little bit more willing to tinker.
They're a little bit.
More willing to say, I I'll deal with an ecosystem that is not just plug and play, but if you smooth it out a little bit, having that device that can play a lot of stuff theoretically across the entire board really does appeal. I mean that's the Steam Deck kind of opened my eyes in that regard to saying like, oh, I have this handheld that is just a PC can do PC things and not just you know, game boy things, switch things, you know, like I was used to with
a handheld. So I think in some respects it can be a device that can be as difficult or as intricate as you want it to be. If you want to just open it up and play Steam games, it'll do that. But if you want to like tinker with it. It's open to tinkering too, and especially with the Windows environment, it might be a little bit more comfortable for people to tinker with than say a Linux environment that they might not be familiar with.
Yeah, I never used Linux before the steam Deck. It's it's actually pretty similar. Like the number of times that I've needed to go into like the command line is only because I'm doing crazy nonsense so that I can make a tutorial or something like that. It's actually fairly simple, and if you buy the steam Deck you'd never have to go into desktop mode.
Now you want to, Yeah, it sounds scary and it is, realistically, and I've done some of that stuff and it always you read the documentation, you're like, I don't know about this, and then you actually do it and you're like, oh, that wasn't bad after all.
Yeah, I think that if you guys have these things, the little little retro guys instead, I've got.
In my closet. I think we've kind of got a smattering of like the annber Nicks and that sort of thing.
I remember an sp here nice. I also recently, I don't play with it enough, but I've got the MEU like six button one as well.
Oh cool.
I remember when we met at when we met at PAX to your friend the fox is his kind of screen name is YouTube channel. He had a DS like computer. I don't remember what it.
Was called, I think, but the GPD GPD something I don't know.
Yeah, that thing blew my mind. I was like, this is and he's like, yeah, that was like at least it was like something like a thousand dollars or twelve hundred or something. It's something ridiculous. And I was like, this is so cool though, like it was the clamshell. Look, it's super cool. But yeah, I mess I mod game Boys. Actually have a mod that I'm waiting to do when I get some free time this weekend. But I typically try to I play a lot, like a pocket that
kind of thing. Okay, usually on my desk. But yeah, I don't know. I know a lot of people love using their Steam deck for emulation and stuff. I haven't personally, uh done that with my steam deck yet, just because I have I do that on other things other devices. But yeah, I think, like this conversation is super interesting. I think I'm one of the things I've been thinking about actually the last couple of days as I've been kind of pondering my Steam Deck and if I want
to upgrade it or not. Is I really just want to rig one of my extra PCs that's laying around to just boot into Steam os Steam Big Picture Mode, Yeah, and just set that up in my living room. I think that I think that might be a weekend project coming up, because you know, it's just having your PC library in like a place that's not my work desk, which is where I do all of my PC gaming. I'm like, whether it's the Steam Deck or you know,
one of these new devices or rigging a PC. Like I said, I'm really kind of looking to, you know, put a little work in and then have a smoother experience of a more console like experience with my PC library because that's where I get all my games.
But I've got a Steam Link that I picked up like back when they were doing the going away sale for that, and I'm still I'm mad I never got a PlayStation TV, and I'm glad that I thought to pick up a Steam Link before those kind of went the way of the DODO because it's like the coolest little device that I had it set up in my old place. I haven't set it up at the new place yet, but it's really something else to be able
to just connect like that and move things through. And the steam deck is actually like kind of decent at that. I haven't done it in a hot minute, but there was It might've been Balder's Gate or something that I did a little bit of streaming to my steam deck and something where I didn't necessarily need the super high latency, but I wanted to just be able to I don't want to sit at my desk right now, I want to sit on the couch and play this.
And it.
Yeah, it worked, it functions.
Yeah, thank you for reminding me that I have a steam Link too that I forgot that I owned until this very second.
But it all looks under their chair right now, they'll see they all have a steam Link.
I think I also bought it when it was like three dollars and when they were just like please, we're trying to get rid of these, and I was like, yeah, I guess so. And I wasn't even PC gaming really at all, but I was like, well, it's like so cheap, I should probably just get it, because.
Yeah, I missed it. I missed it unfortunately. But you know, Steam has its own you know, streaming between computers that I use on occasion, and that works fine.
Yeah, and they have like they're just like steam Link is now just an app on most set top boxes.
I didn't realize that that's great.
That's the crazy part is we're getting to the point now where I don't use the set top box on my TV anymore because it has the built in streaming apps. And I was having that thought. I was like, we're probably not too far removed from the day when you're gonna be able to not have you know, a gaming PC's horsepower inside a TV. But if you've got a gaming PC that you can just stream it to your smart TV and you don't have to worry about all
the connections and the hoops and stuff like that. You can just run it right through an Ethernet cable and be set.
So damn, I just realized. So, my my wife and I we recently got I we have been using like the first Gin Chrome cast for like the last decade and finally gave out. So we recently, within like the last couple of weeks, bought like a whatever, the new Apple TVs are, and that just reminds me I should go, I bet it's got a steam a steam on it. Yeah that I could. I'm that it does, but I'm yeah, yeah that that sounds like a plan. Yeah, I just
checked it does. Yeah, so that's awesome. But even though, so the.
New the Xbox Allies, I assume can also do the sort of like docking situation where you can hook it up to a TV and run things off of it and things like that too.
Right, Yeah, Actually, there's one advantage that these have over the steam deck. The steam deck has only one USB port. Yeah, okay, so when you are docking something like the rog ally I'm sorry, the Xbox Ally it has two USB ports, so that means you can plug it into the wall and then have the other plug go into the TV so that then it's docked to the TV.
With a steam deck, there's only one port, so that means you have to buy a dock.
Yeah, but they're like, if you turn the wrong way, you're going to trip over eighty three of them. Like, there's so many steam deck docks out there that are incredibly cheap. I would I would not recommend buying the Valve one because it's eighty.
Dollars, yeah, which is expensive, but.
It also comes with an extra power brick so you never have to unplug that. So like, there's that one advantage that it has. Plus it gets firmware updates from Valve and stuff like that. The Xbox ally Ax the black one also has two ports, but one of them is a thunderbolt think four. Don't quote me on that, I can't remember, but that means you can also buy a very expensive external GPU for a device like this and then dock it, which I've never tried, so I
can't say how well it works. But you can buy an external GPU and then because these things aren't CPU bound, they're GPU bound, like they just don't have the GPU to deal with stuff, you can go buy an external GPU and then you have the same games that you're playing playing on your TV, and it's a much you know, higher resolution, higher frame rates and that kind of thing.
Huh, you just sent Eric down a down a rabbit hole. He's going to start.
You could build some to the prices, though, Eric, I'm too I'm too busy. I'm in the realm of I'm going to build my own like media server and stuff like that. That's where my next tech hole is going to be, is falling down the media server pipeline. But I do find that stuff fascinating as somebody who travels, because you know, I kind of stopped traveling with my steam deck because of how bulky it is and then having to throw a dock in with it and the cables in with it. I was like, the switch is
so much smaller, it's so much easier to pack. Or even these retro consoles are you put them in your pocket. You put them in a pocket in like your backpack or whatever. It just fits right in. And so I'd been going that direction for a while, but I'm kind of waiting for the point where we get to where stuff is going to be a little bit more portable. And it seems like even just knocking off the need for a dock on some of this stuff is going
to help with that. Because you get to a hotel room, you want to set it up, you want to be able to play on the TV in the hotel or whatever. You have to then have a dock. You have to plug it in. You have to find how to plug into the TV in a hotel room. I'm sure all of us have done that at some point is where where the HDMI ports on the Hodesel TV. So yeah, any anything that can make that process less painful helps.
Yeah.
Little pro tip if you're bringing your switch or switch to with you someplace, bring a deck of cards. Put it inside the dock. That way, nothing can make the dock break.
Ah. Oh, that's very smart. Yeah, that's smart. I usually just travel without a dock, but it's been a few times where I'm like, especially like the recent release of like Lego Party, Like, oh, I think I'm gonna put that on my switch and like bring that places. So that's a very good tip.
Live out that switch commercial Roof of the Park.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm trying, man, I'm really trying. Well, Bill, before you get out here, any any other games you've been enjoying lately that you want to shout out or talk about real quick? I know I didn't.
I know, it's kind of putting you on the spot. That's okay, anything you've been enjoying. Yeah, Well, before I answered that question, I have a question for Marcus. Marcus asked me the question earlier. Should a console gamer pick up one of these things? After everything that I said, how do you feel about steam Deck versus the Xbox ally stuff. Are you interested in picking one up or do you still think that's not for me?
I would So I've yet to buy a steam Deck or any handheld PC, like I've really like I want one just because you know, the idea of being able to play my very large PC libror anywhere is fantastic,
especially for work purposes too. But a lot of it has been the price of them and some of the like jumping through hoops that I you know what you guys have talked about the wrong ally like that price is it's very oppressive because I I'm the sicko where it's like, if you give me two versions, I'm gonna want the best version because if I get the like you know, like I have a series x Xbox and not the s because like, well, I want the one that's always gonna run the things well and I have
to worry about it. So I'm gonna want the thousand dollars one. And it's but I it's like, what would you since you guys are sort of like you know more about this idea, if you were to recommend which one you think I should get between like a let's see, like a Steam deck o led, which is the one I've been eyeing of, like, oh maybe if I get one, I guess it'll be this one or like the wrong Alley.
What kind of games do you play?
I mean, I have mostly my Steam library. It is probably like I played my game's there more, even though I have a very large Epic library and then.
You know my it's a it's a mixture for work at least.
Oh, I play like I mean for work, but I even personally I play like pretty much a bit of everything. I don't know if there's like is there.
Type stuff for like more pixel arty type stuff like fidelity? Why is because that's kind of that that's going to swing it the most one way or another. I think if you want to silent hell f that's going to need a little bit more horsepower than say Animal Well or Stardew Valley or something like that.
I think being a switch person has sort of conditioned me to play lower end stuff on a handheld, just because I just I just expect that to run without issue and not want to roll the dice on bigger triple A stuff. Even so, Yeah, I guess if I had probably like mid tier smaller things most.
Of Yeah, Yeah, are you playing a lot of online games where you're playing against other people where you might have to worry about Marcus hates multiplayer.
He won't admit it.
He won't he won't admit it.
I don't hate it, but yes, I'm a I'm a single player minded person pretty much ninety percent of the time.
Then, I think for the most part, not one hundred percent, but for the most part. Steam Deck o led the one that you're thinking of, probably the mid tier one, not the most expensive one, because you can easily upgrade that. The thing that you get when you get the more expensive one is you get an anti glare coating on the screen, which makes the oleed a little less punchy, which you kind of don't want that, but at the same time also less reflections, So there's that. But then
you also get a you know, more storage. But swapping out the storage on the steam Deck in any of these devices pretty much is dead simple. It's literally a couple of screws, take it out, put it in, screw it back together, and you're fine. Yeah, So I would say probably the five hundred and fifty dollars Steam deck OLAD is going to be the one that would probably work best for somebody who plays games like you.
Okay, that's half of a raw Yx too, Yeah yeah, yeah.
For like context, Like I have started to pick my steam Deck back up, and it's mostly been for things like Persona three, Reload Trails in the Sky first chapter, Digimon's Story, like turn based RPGs that just feel cozy to kind of sit on the couch and play while you have a second screen going because I am a child of my generation and I need the subway surfers on top of the video. But it's really effective for
that kind of stuff. If you want to get into like clear Opscure, then that's going to need the horse power. But I've found that a lot of what you would say a kind of mid range RPGs over the last few years in terms of what they need from performance and horsepower, do really well on the steam Deck.
Okay, one day, I'm not planned when I'm gonna make the plunge either way, I just kind of look at them from a far and go, hmm, wait for like.
May maybe when I put on my clown makeup and pay a thousand dollars for the ally, you can buy my old lead. I think I've got the mid to old d one.
I like the the clown makeup is a I like that that's a pre's part of the buying.
Yeah, yeah, especially because I posted already online that there's no way on God's Green Earth that I'm gonna pay a thousand dollars for a handheld. There's a there's a very real chance I will be paying a thousand dollars, which.
Absolutely I've said before that I would never become the type of person who would spend a lot of money on cardboard, And then I started playing Magic the Gathering, so like, there's a room for all of us to change for the better and for the worse.
You know, well, Bill, before you get out of here, you've been playing anything you want to shout out or talk about real quick.
So I've been playing a lot of which is I have tons, so many games to play, and I can't stop playing two games. The first one is Cloverpit. Have you guys been playing Cloverpit?
I haven't played Overpit's sick.
It's so fun for the people who were watching or listening. You think, Billatro, which everybody knows about because of the Game Awards, last year, but instead it's a slot machine and when you lose, you get killed, and that's the whole game, and it's it's super fun. The other one that I've been playing is MEGABONK. Have you guys been playing?
No, that's another one I need to play. Happen Hearing a lot.
It's on I think it's on a couple of our lists to touch before the end of the year. I'm very familiar. It's it's it's a rogue light right, like sort of like Vampire Survivors Risk of Rain a little bit.
Right, yeah, very much like Risk of Rain, like, yeah, because you just can't you get these swarms coming after you, and you can just do some crazy things. I was playing yesterday as Calcium, who is a skeleton that rides a skateboard, and longer he goes without getting hit, the faster he goes. And then I ended up picking up a power up that may that tied my damage multiplier
to my speed. Oh man, So I was doing tons of damage, just throwing bones at people or at these goblins or whatever, and it like it's got this ridiculous ps one esthetic. It's so ugly that it's charming. Yet the same time, and I've been playing the hell out of that game. I think I got it two weeks ago, and it's like, it's the kind of game that you pick up and you play for ten minutes and then you're done. I've got seven and a half hours in
this game already. Yeah, and it's it's that it's not the kind of game that you spend that much time in, but you can't stop playing.
I know I don't need We're gonna talk about balls Pit later, but I don't need another one of those when I have so many other big games to get through, but also can't wait to hear about that super good as someone that spent way too much time with Vampire Spers.
Yeah, clover Pit is one that's been on the top of my wish list for a while. I think Eric was showing I was over at his place recently, and I think Northern Lion's been streaming it, and that thing looks can't put me on blast like this. We can't let the people know that you come over. I just show you Northern Line videos. That's that's what it is. I recently saw a post that was like, dudes love
showing you YouTube videos. It's like part of their culture was like that describes Eric to a t. And they're always Northern Line clips. But that's okay, I love Northern Line. But yeah, clover Pit has been on my list since seeing that. It definitely has that inscription look to it, right, like the really yeah you know like.
Buckshot Yeah yeah, yeah, Like all the textures are wobbly, like they kind of just shake like you guys probably aren't old enough to remember this.
Do you guys remember Doctor Katz? Yeah, comedy.
I love Doctor Katz.
Okay, Doctor Katz had this squigglevis and that's what.
Cloverpit reminds me of.
It's Squigglevision, the Doctor Katz and video games. They call it.
Finally Yeah, we finally made one.
Yeah, well, Bill, thank you again for joining us today on the show. Before we take a quick break, will you just go ahead and plug where folks can find you online? Social media, Patreon, that kind of stuff.
Yeah, you can find everything that I do over at YouTube dot com, slash, nerd Nest or nerdnest dot tv, and I mean you can find me on Blue Sky, but I think it's nerdnest dot tv on Blue Sky, which is how Alex and I have been talking. Yeah, I don't really post to any of the other platforms all that much, and honestly, I don't really post a Blue Sky all that much, but you know, every pretty much everything is on YouTube, YouTube, dot Com, slash nerd, Nest.
Awesome. Well Bill, thanks for joining us, and hopefully we'll have you back on soon.
Thanks so much. It was really fun talking to you guys and meet you guys.
Yeah, by welcome back everyone to the Game Informer show. We've got still a packed episode. We're gonna be getting into our Ball x Pit review impressions in just a second, as well as Vampire the Masquerade, Bloodlines two, Battlefield six by Sweet Carol at the very end, well, we'll we'll talk a little little bit about legends, which I think we've got like a collective hour in our first impressions, Pokemon legends.
Yes, we're just talking about legends, Yes, various myths.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the legend I am Legend. I am legend. Yes, that's what we're to get into our exclusive review of I Am Legend. Guys, let's get into Ball x Pit. This is uh from I believe. I know it's being published obviously by Devolver Digital, but It's being developed by a fellow named Kenny Sun, the Legend. The Legend Kenny Sun previously worked on mister Sun's hat Box. That's where I know that name, from which I believe, Marcus you
were a fan of if I if I remember correctly. Oh, I've never played it, but maybe it was Alex Stadnick.
Do you think I would like it?
I think so, yeah. But ballocks Pit is is Kinney's latest game, again being published by Devolver. Is a brick breaker ball fusing rogue light that's describes itself on the Steam listing, and I think that's pretty dang close to to what what the real experience is like. There's also a sort of base building harvesting system that you know,
you continually expand. But the whole premise of the game is at the very start, giant sort of meteor hits this big city called ball Balon, which is this great city looks sort of like Menace tier at from one of the rings a little bit, and it creates this huge pit and pretty much all of humanity is much wiped out save for some you know, loan survivors, and you're slowly building up a settlement by diving deeper into the pit to find resources and uncover new townsfolk to
come back to your settlement and kind of help build things up. But the main sort of mode that you're engaging with most of the time is this brick breaker style game where you're playing a character. At the bottom
of the screen. There's a vertical scrolling battlefield with legions of enemies coming down, and you are playing a brick baker game where you're throwing special balls that do special effects, as well as what they call baby balls, which are just sort of like normal balls that bounce around, they bounce off balls, they bounce off enemies, and you're slowly kind of taking out these hordes of batties while slowly upgrading your character from the sort of XP gym that
you get from defeating those enemies. And there are mid bosses, there are are big bosses, and there are you know, you have to do runs multiple times to kind of unlock, you know, the next area. I'm having a lot of
fun with it. It's been really my main driver on my Steam deck, and I think I probably put probably fifteen hours into it at this point, and it's one of those games that reminds me of loop Heiro and the way that when I first looked at Loopierro on Steam, I was like, I heard it's cool, but it's not really a looker, and I don't know if it's for me. And then I played Loopierro and I was like, oh
my god, this thing is great. You know, I have hav any very similar experience with ball x Pit, where it's kind of my radar wasn't sure if I was interested, and you know, it was pleasantly surprised. But I'm curious Eric and Marcus where you guys are at with the game and how you're enjoying it or if you're not enjoying it.
I put it pretty decent amount of time into it so far. I I don't know that I would call it so it's weird. I don't know that I would say I'm like a roguelike guy, But then I play basically every roguelike that comes out and have an opinion on it, so I guess maybe I.
Am like a roguelike guy. I just look.
I got into FTL and Binding of Isaac when they were both like coming out, and I think it just like it hooked and and I bring that up because I do think Ballpit. Well, first of all, I'll call it Ballpit. Much like Hunter Hunter I believe, I believe the ex is silent.
But in the review and the review, I did ball x pit and then I recorded some alternate takes with just ballpick ball, cross.
Pit yeah, all times pit yeah pit. Yeah. So with Ballpit, it's been really interesting. I do think it's a really cool game. Like, like to be clear, I am, I'm very warm on it. I do kind of wish some of the base building stuff was a little bit not the way it was, just because there's I think as that starts to grow, it's it's novel at first, but then kind of started to degrade on me over time.
But I only bring that up because I think it's a really clever idea, and that idea plays out very well when you're actually in the pit and climbing through stuff. Because you brought up that it's brick Breaker, it's a little bit of Pinball, it's a little bit of Vampire Survivors. I think there's a lot of touchstones that if you've played any sort of run based game in the last five to ten years, you're going to see that here.
But what it's the reminded me the most of just in terms of general concept and idea, has been stuff like Galaga, where you're kind of managing this ever approaching wall of enemies, and yeah, there's kind of just always constant pressure on you, the player and the There's an interesting push and pull between how much you are willing to see ground or try to push forward and play the way that you want to play to then risk it them eventually getting to the bottom and starting to
hit you, because once they get to the bottom of the screen, or once they get close enough because you can't actually walk forward on the screen, and then enemies if they're in melee range, will start to actually attack you. Because of it, you can kind of play around with that. You can play around that space. And there's a lot of balls that I think do more interesting things than
I thought there would be. I kind of went in expecting like, Okay, you're going to have chain lightning ball, You're going to have some sort of damage over time ball, You're going to have a ball that turns into more balls, because that all seems natural, and those are all there.
I think the more interesting parts of this game to me are the ones that say, Okay, this ball will have higher krit chance if you hit it hit something from the right hand side, or this ball will do more damage, but once it hits the back of the screen and starts bouncing back down, now it's going to do less damage. Or conversely, this ball does less damage until it hits a wall and then it starts picking
up damage the more it bounces. And you can combine that with things like the wind ball, which kind of pass It moves slower, but it passes through enemies instead of bouncing.
Off of them.
You can do really cool interesting things with that. I think the physics of this game, the actual feeling of balls ricocheting around and how you can manipulate that to do really cool things, is one of the more interesting and novel parts of Ballpit that have really like resonated with me. I think it would have been very easy for this game to just be You're playing brick breaker and you get like cooler ways to break the bricks,
but it's kind of just that. And I think the ways in which the developers have thought to expand the playspase of brick breaking Galaga style like very retro feeling concepts and infuse so much new novel into it really really works for me, and I find that really really compelling.
Yeah, you know, Marcus, I'm curious. I'm curious to your thoughts before I dive into a rabbit hole that I was about to go.
And No, it's a lot of it's a lot of fun, I said earlier. I it's got a lot of the same hooks that Vampire Survivors had in me of just this kind of like endlessly replayable, but very easy to play because it's an auto shooter, like you're just shooting the balls, like so literally all you have to do is just move the character.
So uh oh, I you're not wrong, However, it is shooting. Auto shooting is something you toggle. And I will say something that did impress me was it starts you off, not letting you auto shoot, and then you turn it on and I'm like, well, why would I ever turn this off? And then you start to get some balls that make you go like maybe I don't just want to auto shoot? Yeah, I think that's pretty interesting.
Okay, Yeah i'ven't. I don't think I've encountered balls that would have made me question that. So okay, that's interesting.
Yeah, there are some balls that deal damage to you when you shoot them.
Oh okay, gotcha?
Huh yeah. And so if you have auto shoot on, you're just like slowly you.
Know, yeah, because I turned it off. Yeah, I turned on auto immediately because I was like, I'm playing a controller and I was like, oh, I don't want to hold down to the trigger the whole time. It's like, I'm just gonna play it like it's Vampire Survivors and just have it, you know, I just want to focus.
Most builds you can get away with auto.
I think that I would then draw comparisons to things like Binding of Isaac, where the first time I played Binding of Isaac, I was like, why would I not just walk around with the fire button held down all the time? Why would I ever use my bombs to not just blow things up?
Why would I? You know?
And then suddenly you start to understand that the play space is a lot deeper than you think it's going to be, but also that they're doing more things with those verbs than you normally expect a video game to do. I think a lot of video games, broadly speaking, love the idea of you do thing and then you do
more of thing. But I think What often sets a really good run based game apart for me is where it makes you have those moments of careful consideration where you say, I need to play differently than I do for every other run, where I need to like consider my playset and my play style a little bit differently, because now I'm playing something that is going to both encourage me to play differently and reward me for playing differently. And I do think Ballpit nails that.
Yeah, It's there's a primal satisfaction that I have and probably all of us do to some degree of just watching balls bounce around and break up, just like I've always really loved the Arcanoid and this is just like this is basically like fancy, more involved Arcanoid to me. Yeah, with a little bit of Tetris, because I think of Tetris when I see the kind of like enemy scrolling closer and closer and how but instead of like reaching the top is bad, reaching the bottom is bad, it's
like reverse Tetris. This game is so weird in terms of the different sort of like things it takes. It's like the watch a McCall a bar of video games.
Just like it's got a little bit of everything, and it manages to blend together in a way that is it's amazing how kind of like quickly you kind of pick up what it's putting down for how sort of like for how many different things it sort of mashes together that you won't think on paper it wouldn't work, But then you only need to play like around and you start to go like, oh, oh, okay, I think I get what this is cause and I think when you just watch a trailer it's even hard to sort
of kind of like understand completely what you're kind of getting into. I think once you get in there, And I think it's one of the reason why I Steam Demo did so well when it was available on Next Fest, Like I played the crap out of that, and thankfully your progress carries over from the Steam Demo, which is greats Like I just fired up the full game and it's just like, hey, we saw you played demo. Here you are just start off where you were. But yeah,
it's uh, it's fun. Like it's it's one of those games you get I get so lost in, like you get that zen state when you're like on a really good run and you're watching all of your balls kind of like do what you want them to do. And I also get really excited with like it does the
Vampires of Ivors like weapon fusion stuff. So every time you pick one of those up, I'm just like, oh man, I'm gonna like I would just combine things together just to see what happens, not even like I don't know if this has any strategic advantage, like for this current situation, but I just want to see what it does because
I haven't mixed these two things yet. And then even when it's something that's like Okay, I don't know if that did exactly wanted to do, it's still like a it's fun to just experiment.
Yeah, it's like a discovery element exactly. Yes, that that piece reminds me of Alchemy, the old mobile game that people would play where you would have different elements and you would just like combine them to unlock another element. And I think in that game they were like over
three hundred of them. In this game, there are significantly less, which is kind of a bummer because I think that is my favorite piece of this game, is the fusion system, and I think like as as you go, it kind of slows down quite a bit.
I do think one thing that I kind of have with this game in regards to that is that you have two different kinds of so for the people at home, you have a ball, so you pick up the chain lightning ball or the frost ball, the one that freezes random pieces, which I think is probably one of my favorite ones, just because the ability to stop the line from advancing is very helpful. You level it up three times and then it has hit basically it's max level.
But once it's at that max level, you can either I forget which one is, which there's one that is combining it with another max level ball to kind of just stick the two things that those balls do together to make them do the same thing together. And I think that one once you do that, it is kind of completed. It is finished, or you can fuse them into something completely brand new that will kind of have elements of both, but maybe do something that is kind
of brand new. I think one of the ones that I remember getting that I really thought was interesting was it gave the ball an AoE around it that was kind of burning the whole time, and it did some really cool stuff with that.
That one.
You can then level up and I think eventually fuse with other things as well, And I ended up getting just a little annoyed by that, because then if you're trying to min max, if you're trying to say, I'm making the most use of every single one of my limited slots, because you have a limited number of slots for how many balls you can have and how many
passives you can have. So if you're really trying to max that stuff out, suddenly one is technically a better and slot option than the other one because it can get stronger, it can continue to grow over the course of the game, whereas other ones kind of the evolutionary path stops, and that in the same way the Vampire Survivor is. The one thing that annoys me in that game is when you have to pick up something that isn't going to then play into an evolution of a
weapon somewhere down the line. I go like, I'm not playing optimally. I don't have the best possible build in this moment. Is this run just crap now? And it's it's good to force yourself to not play that way every single time, And in other games, I think they give you ways of forcing you to not play optimally.
Every single time. But I think when it dangles it over your head like that, it does like annoy me just a little bit where I'm like, ah, just just let me fuse them and make something new and then keep growing that that way instead of having the path
cut off suddenly. It doesn't It doesn't feel great when I'm like I had to settle for this because I just needed an extra slot, I needed more firepower, and then like, oh, I'm just have a suboptimal build now and I hope I can kind of squeak out something with this.
Yeah. I guess that's a consequence of just the rang with the power ups, like you don't know what you're gonna get until you get it, just like, oh, well this is the one I yeah needed, but I gotta roll with it.
I do think their way of doing rerolls in the game is really interesting because it's the currency that you want to bring back to the base to spend on certain buildings and stuff like that. So the fact that you're kind of gambling with it in that way where you say, Okay, I don't want any of these available balls, but it's going to cost me a decent chunk of change to reroll. Do I want to bring that money back or do I want to spend it for the chance to stay down here longer and get more cash.
I do think that's kind of compelling. I think that's interesting.
When you I haven't done a thing where you retry a run. I usually just go back to the base, Like what is that?
Do you just you start over again?
You just do a new run?
Oh okay. I didn't know if it's like like with like risking anything by not just taking whatever I got back back to base. I probably I'm surprised I haven't reatryause I'm kind of with you, Eric, were like the base building stuff, It's like it's like fine, it's like novel, but it's definitely like I don't necessarily look forward to
going back there. I just kind of keep doing ball runs and then I just kind of ye, I kind of like treat the the base building stuff as sort of like a means to an end of like, well, I guess I need this to to upgrade.
Get that progression.
Yeah. And I think Eric, you're talking specifically about the reroll the items that you're getting in.
The world, and talk about rerrolling the items that you get, which that that is for gold, which is one of the resources you can get in the pit, that you then bring back to your base to spend on, say
building a new building where a character might live. And then you have to you basically have workers who are ex balls that you fire off, and you play a little pinball game where you, like dark Cloud build out a town and then kind of bounce your workers off different resources and buildings to either construct the buildings or harvest the resources that then turn into more things that you invest into that. I do think that's an interesting inner loop of the game. I just don't know that
I particularly love. It starts to feel samey after a while. You just kind of get into a monotonous loop of it where you're going, Okay, well let me arrange everything that I have that needs to be built.
I'm constantly rearranging things.
Yeah, and not in a way that feels very exciting. I didn't feel like it's.
Yeah, kind of like this was already like I need to expand this land because I probably should have the money. Yeah, do you guys have a guess have a favorite character? Like I just unlocked a third character. I haven't used them yet, but the second the guys.
I like the twins a lot, the ones that both shoot a ball and basically invert the shot depending on where you're aiming. They're they're pretty fun.
I think I've got like eight characters unlocked, and there's a ton to unlock. I have a guy who he's a shield bearer, and his shield is like the classic brick breaker platform that you would typically like scroll back and forth to hit a ball. It's yeah, like yes, sort of yeah, yeah, like a pong paddle. Yeah, like in the game Pong, and like the platforms that you move around the game the game the video game Pong, not like ping pong paddles, but yeah, like a pong paddle,
legally distinct Pong. Yeah. And so he his bonus is essentially if you bounce balls that bounce off his shield gain extra damage, and so you're kind of like moving your baby balls around and like pushing kind of you're almost like shoveling enemies back. Because there's also like a little bit of melee damage. I think that he can do or you can modify it eventually to do damage when you're in melee range. And so that's an interesting build. I do, like I was talking to Leo Vader about this,
and it's funny. Leo told me he was like, and I'm curious, I need to listen to Two Men Max to see if his house opinions ended up shaping. But it was like the first day or two we had copy of the game, and I was like, we went on a we had like a double date plane and was like, hey, have you had a chance to play Ballpit And he was like, yeah, I don't know if the game is fun or if it's just hard to
put down. And he was like, I don't know if I mean too cerebral, but he was telling me and we kind of were talking about there's a character un Locke, who just auto picks all of your upgrades, and so it's the most turn off your brain. You don't even pick your upgrades or evolutions. You literally just like aim and moves.
Kind of fun actually, just kind of having to roll with whatever happens and just make the most of it.
Yeah. Yeah.
I remember when when Auto Chess started and people were like, why would you ever play that game? You don't even control your units. You just put him down and watch him fight, And I'm like, dude, there's nothing better than just you put thing down and get immediate feedback and then slightly tinker with it and then put thing down and get immediate feedback.
Yeah.
I'm a Final Fantasy twelve defender because I love the Gambit system so much and I felt like when I got to the point where the party just took care of everything with minimal input for me, I was like, this is gaming right here.
Yeah, that's really the manager.
Yeah, you're like, I've set this up so well, this.
Is my reward. Yeah yeah, yeah.
Some of the best gaming is just middle management.
Yeah. Oh yeah, I need that. I need that bad. I need to check out that grocery store simulator because that's probably real good.
No, that's that's You're not middle manager in that because you're doing all the stuff.
Is that not the final boss? Like you find the middle.
Management, you need the one you need like factorio where you're you're putting down the stuff that does the stuff, and ya the one that make sure that everybody's doing the stuff right. You know, you gotta get back into satisfactory. Oh man, there's okay, so this is kind of a crazy pivot, but I think someone told me that there's you know, arc Knights or R Knights the anime one of the mini anime games out there, and specifically anime
gotcha style games. I think there's a new one coming out that has like Factorio elements in it, and I was like, that's messed up. That's why would you put Genschen in Factorio? That's that's too much scratching my brain all at the same time.
That's dibolical. Well, Eric, I'm gonna kind of put you on the spot and I want I want you to talk aboutause I didn't do that to myself. Yeah, Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines too transition to that game, you are
a massive Bloodlines one fan. Uh and and though you weren't quite working here when we went on the cover story for that game, you were kind of finishing up interview phase, we did reach out to you as like a behind the scenes hey, we got some questions for you, Charles and I did as we were kind of prepping for that story, and so shout out to you for helping prepping us with that cover story, working for free for like twenty minutes on a Discord call. But you're
kind of our resident Bloodlines expert. I would say out of anybody out of anybody else on staff, and so I kind of hold your opinion. I hold your opinion highly. So I want to know what you think about this game.
Yeah, before you say what you're gonna say, can we acknowledge that it's kind of wild this game is actually coming out this week.
Yes, that That's where I was going to start, is like, we need to talk about the path that Vampire Bloodlines two took here, because that is an important part of the story. Vampire blood Lines two was originally set up to be the you never thought it would happen seql to a game that was kind of a cult classic of its time that got overshadowed by many other games
that came out around it's whendow. I believe Half Life two came out around the same time that Bloodlines one did, and Bloodlines one, even though it was made by a very legendary studio, kind of was a bit of a buggy mess at launch, had very notorious technical problems, and despite being this incredible story, an incredible world, incredible atmosphere, just was kind of against all odds and led to the closure of that entire venture and was just an infamous,
like almost made to be a cult classic type story. You know how you hear about the production of something and you're like, oh, okay, that's the story around. It was too good for it not to become this, this gem, this thing that people would appreciate later. And it almost makes sense in hindsight. But so Bloodlines, two potential sequel, people coming back from the original team to work on a follow up seemed like, oh my god. We never thought this would happen. We never thought this was possible.
Over the years, development troubles ensued. There was a demo of the game that was playable at some point that you can still go find the footage on YouTube of it. But eventually the studio behind it was taken off the project. The project was put in limbo, and finally it was given to the Chinese Room, which is the studio that worked on a number of horror games. Still Wakes the Deep and things like that that you might know of not really done what I would say are RPG's action RPGs in the past.
Not In fact, you might say they've done the hard opposite of that, dear Esther and was that everybody's gone to the rapture.
Definitely have narrative chops not quite as experienced, at least in their published work when it comes to more action of all stuff. And I mean, I'll be the first one to tell you that the worst part of Bloodlines one was the combat. It's bad not what you show up to that game for. It's a means to an end in that game. And with Bloodlines too, my feeling has largely been that is that I think the story
is interesting. I don't know that it has hooked me the way that Bloodlines one hooked me at this point, I will say, at this time of playing, we will have a review up. By the time that this review is out. Charles is writing that review and has put
more full, complete thoughts. I've put about probably somewhere in the vicinity of seven hours or so into the game at this point personally, and I think the thing that has struck me the most is just that it's definitely doing vampire things, and it knows what the vampire appeal is in this specific mythology, in the ways it talks about how the vampire society works, in the ways that it leans into a lot of the stuff that I think even broadly of vampire you know, just fiction will enjoy.
You know, Vampire the Masquerade is all about the masquerade. It's about the idea of what does it mean for vampires to live amongst people? And they have to maintain the masquerade yea. And so in this game, the first section you're in, you're an elder vampire that's awaking from torpoor, which is kind of a long sleep, and you break the masquerade because you are basically blood starved and there's a bunch of cops that are all kind of flooding into this building and you just kind of gotta go
nuts on all of them. And so that is considered a break of the masquerade because pretty soon, you know, work gets out, newspapers get onto they're like.
Oh this supernatural killing.
People were torn apart.
In this building.
It's like that's a break of the maskerade. People are going to get suspicious, and so you kind of get locked into all this while you also have what I'm going to call is basically a Johnny Silverhands in your head.
Yeah.
The Yeah, you have a the disembodied voice of a Malcavean vampire in your head kind of talking to you throughout the game. And the way that if you played cyberpunk, you had Johnny Silverhand, or you played Batman Arkham. Was it night where Joker was following you everywhere?
Yeah?
Yeah, it's the same thing.
And so your your vampire fire is an elder vampire and you're kind of trying to figure out what's going on while you're also trying to figure out why there's this dude embedded in your brain. And they use that, and especially the Malcavian aspect. Malcavian vampires have kind of weird, surreal but like ability to tell the future and see through truth and kind of do that, but they're also kind of spacey and weird and say weird things all the time. They play with that a lot to do
some really cool storytelling things. And the vampire politics are pretty good too. I like vampire politics. I think it's really fun when you get into the stuff of there's the kind of hierarchy of vampire rulers, the camarilla who enforce the Masquerade, who are kind of the established power, the old money of the vampire world. And then you have the anarchs, who are kind of the new bloods who want to support thin bloods who are kind of
weaker vampires. Of a newer generation that aren't considered as strong as older vampires are, even older vampires like you are as an elder, and it's a lot of really interesting parallels to class, to society, to all that kind of stuff that vampire can really dig into and have some fun with. I think when this game is doing that,
it's doing really cool stuff with it. My problem is just not doing enough of it, and a lot of it gets bogged down in kind of you need to go here because that's where the combat set pieces, and that's where the cool thing is, and you have this big, open world, but it's not fun to move around in, especially because they give you a lot of movement tools, but a lot of the movement tools you can't use because if people see you flying and leaping up buildings,
that's a break of the masquerade, and so you have to be a little bit sneaky about it. But even the ways that you kind of would lure somebody over to feed on them, to refill your blood gage, to use more of your meters and more of your abilities, and things like that aren't very well explained to you and aren't really intuitive in the ways that you would
use them. And so what it ends up feeling is like I'm going from combat arena to combat arena in this open world city and then occasionally getting cut scenes where.
I'm making.
Somewhat interesting narrative choices. I know that one thing that Charles said to me was he did not feel like it was immediately clear that he was making a lot of choices that actually had an impact on the story. He and I are playing two very different characters. He's going more of the I don't care an arc route. I've been playing more of the Camarilla route, and I will say I've had the exact same experience. So take
with that what you will. But uh, I've I think there is there's enough here that it does scratch a certain itch for me in terms of just enjoying the vampire world. But I also think it is abundantly clear that this is a game that was made from the bones of other games, that was made from the attempts to It's very clear in the same way that when I played Vailguard, I was like, you can tell in some ways that this game's been in development for a
very long time. There's just kind of lingering aspects of it that feel like, this doesn't make total sense for what they're doing right now, but it would have made sense that the game was slightly different. There's kind of that here where you have this really big open world and all this cool stuff, but for a large portion of the early section, the open world is just there for you to run between waypoints in. There's not really
anything interesting happening in it. You can find occasionally some people that you can feed on that will give you bonus blood points that kind of go towards learning other resonance skills.
Yeah.
Yeah, is it.
Closer to something like Mafia's open world where it's like their open worlds have never been interesting that Yeah, it's been about like no, just just get to the next mission. It's just background dressing.
Really.
I would absolutely draw comparisons to Mafay the Old Country, which I played some of earlier this year and felt the same way, where there's an open world here, but I don't necessarily know that it adds anything to the
experience right exact. Yeah, it suddenly makes me question like, is would this just function better as a linear game, as a more directed game, or even just not bothering with throwing me out into the open world and then putting me back in, and a lot of the open world stuff ends up being So you choose a clan, which also feels weird because they kind of acknowledge that you're an elder vampire and that means that you have
a lot of different powers. Usually your clan would determine what kind of powers you have the same way that a class would determine them in a D and D campaign or something like that. Here you choose kind of what clan you've been sired into, but also you can kind of just learn the other ones as you absorb blood resonance from feeding on the right people and then spending them on that stuff, more or less.
Just choosing your starter clan, but you're the other stuff anyway.
Yeah, and I think some of the abilities are kind of novel I chose. I wanted to pick something that I don't normally do when I played Bloodlines. One my favorite class to play is the tor Door because that's just like your charisma class. That's your smooth talking narrative class that loves to kind of talk their way out of things. But you have a lot of other interesting
options there. If you do a no sfaratu, which is literally your You look like the old movie monster vampires, and so if you get seen by a normal person, that's a break of the massquarade can't be seen. And there are no Sparatu in Blood Lines two, but you
can't play as a no Saratu. There are Malcavian characters, and one of the things in Blood Lines one was you could play as a Malcavian and you would get hallucinations, and you would hear voices and you get weird dialogue choices that would kind of hint an almost fourth wall break at various times. There are Malcavian characters in Blood Lines two. You play as a Malcavian character in very specific story segments, but you can't be a Malcavian in
that moment. All of the choices that you make around your clans seem like they just funnel you into what kind of combat you want to play. And I think that's the biggest miss for me, is that the appeal of Blood Lines one was, Yes, you can choose to be a Bruha and you can play through that game as just a ripper of just like tearing people apart with your claws and.
Things like that.
Yeah, or you can choose to be you know, a Malcavian and like a very different narrative experience and then have like difficulty added because now you're going to have less combat tools, fewer combat tools to work with. Everything in this game feels very based around the combat and you are going to fight and you're going to have to.
It reminds me almost of when dis X Human Revolution came out and a lot of people had critiques around you know, you could do cool stuff with a lot of the narrative in that game, but ultimately you're going to get siloed into fighting in certain areas no matter what. Right, same thing here, only you're not really getting any of the narrative anyways, because outside of a few times when the game kind of acknowledged that, oh you're you're a Tremere.
I played a Tremare in Bloodlines Too, which is like a blood sorcerer kind of. There's one character who's like, oh, that's why you're stinky, because like the stereotype around the Tremare is that they just love to be around blood and they read their books all the time. They don't really care for themselves hygienically, and that was about it. It's about all I've had so far in terms of recognition of my clan in the first seven hours or so. Yeah, yeah, I got called stinky, But.
Yeah, yeah.
It just it bums me out because I think when I think back to Bloodlines one again, one of the big things in that game is is it gives you a lot of almost imsign type elements. I think, as much as it is a CRPG, it also has a lot to share in common with games like dis X, where you have multiple ways of kind of approaching different encounters, of handling them in different ways of stealthing or talking or doing combat. And here the play space feels much
more narrow, much more head towards the combat. I don't think the combats all that interesting either. I think the perry system doesn't feel great. I think a lot of the combat abilities don't feel great for some reason. You don't you don't pick up guns, so you don't have weapons.
At all that you'll have the franchise.
In Vampire blood Lines one, you could absolutely pick up weapons and you know, keep a keep a few things on you for for when things got messy, and usually in that case you would also use your clause because a vampire's claws are usually going to be more powerful than most other stuff you have in that game. Sure, but it is still acknowledged. And even in Bloodlines too, they acknowledge. You know, there's a section where Fire wakes up and is talking to some vampires, is like, hey, like,
what's different in this time right now? And one of the characters says, guns are pretty powerful right now, like you, they've they've gotten a lot stronger in the hundred years that you've been asleep. You know, they're not muskets anymore. You might want to be afraid of them a little bit because one of the ways to actually kill a vampire in the Vampire series is to take their head off, And boy, howdy are there shotguns and things like that in this game that can absolutely do that, and so
so it's weird to acknowledge that. But then what Fire has is basically a telekinesis that lets you grab something and it's kind of your way of picking things up, so you can throw bottles and bricks to distract people, instell sections, or you can just hit them with it, or you can like telekinesis a gun, and then Fire will like point it and shoot it with his telekinesis like, what if Jean Gray fired a pistol by just thinking about doing it right, like that.
Sort of thing.
Yeah, and that feels like a very strange decision in this moment, And I guess the idea was that they want you to be kind of in the moment and finding characters and not relying on just oh, I'm playing a shooter. But guns still end up being a very crucial part of big combat arenas where you're dealing with a lot of enemies that are all swarming you at the same time. You might not be a combat class.
It's built for that, so you might need to be knocking people's weapons out of their hands, picking them up and firing them back at them and stuff like that. As a tremeer, I was having to do that a lot because my other move was just curse somebody with
a blood curse. That makes it so once they you have to like kind of concentrate and kind of your casting magic on them, and then once it's casted, the next thing they get hit by will just kind of make them explode in a blood explosion and deal damage to everybody else around them. So I would kind of curse somebody from the stealth from the Shadows and throw a brick at them, and then they blow up and kill a bunch of people, and then I'd go in
and sweep up and take out everybody left. But a lot of times that meant I needed guns, I needed pipes, I needed weapons that I could use to kind of fight people, and it never really felt that great to do. So yeah, Bloodlines too. I think it's another case of this game was about as good as it could have wound up being. And I have a lot of sympathy for the people who worked on it for years and
got laid off. I have a lot of people a lot sympathy for the people who had to pick up a project that had been in development for so long and see it across the finish line. But I think it wears a lot of its long development on its sleeve in that way, and I'm hopeful that it picks up a little bit more steam. I do think the way in which you could salvage itself for me would be if the story gets more interesting, if the characters
get more I do find the characters very interesting. I think their vision of Seattle as a vampire town is very compelling. I think a lot of the characters that they've installed, there's a new princes, there's a fight for power, a clear divide between what the thin Bloods wants and them wanting to see Seattle as kind of a refuge city for thin bloods, where other cities will not acknowledge thin bloods or will oftentimes hunt them down and kill them because they see them as weaker vampires. And I
find that tension very interesting. I find the politics of this game very interesting. But I think that's kind of going to have to be the saving grace because I don't know that the combat or anything like that is really going to do anything for me in this game.
Mhmm, damn, that's a bummer.
Yeah, you think else like what it see it through the credits.
But I probably will. I probably will. I've seen a lot of Vampire games through just because I do like this world so much. I think if you're listening to this and any of that sounded appealing, maybe worth checking out. I mean, I will tell you that Vampire the Mass Grade, but Lens one is still one of my favorite games of all time. I was actually replaying it ahead of this game coming out. And it it stands the test
of time. It's very, very good. And there was the I think fairly underrated Vampire the Mass Grade Swan Song that came out a while ago.
Yeah or something.
Yea Ryan really liked that one.
He reviewed that it's a very I don't know that. I think it also has its own problems, but I think it was a very interesting take on the vampire world and did some really cool things in that realm, especially if you have often missed the sort of telltale style of games or that sort of adventure game set up. It does some really cool things in that respect. So, yeah, I've been sitting on that game. I have it on thick Steam or the Epic store.
Cool. Yeah, that's a bummer. I was looking forward to playing as to someone that like, this is gonna be sort of like my gateway into Vampire to Mask Greade. Like I've never played the tabletop game or the original game. There was a point where and it might still happen. We even thought about playing the first game as like
a super replay, which could still happen. It's eric gets you to do that, who knows, But yeah, I just I like the the things that people complain about with this game in terms of the action, it was like for me, as someone that I had no attachment to it, I was like, oh, it kind of looks like a little bit like dishonor. That's that seems cool. I like Dishonored.
I don't know, that does sound like it's exactly accurate, especially like immersive SIMP stuff like I'm sure it's not that, but just like it tickled that part of my brain of like, maybe this will be for me as someone that is not precious to this, to this series, but here in the combat is not great. It's actually that's a really big bummer.
Yeah, yeah, I think this is not This is not a Dishonored Tier M sim. This is not a like you know, I'm trying to be vague here, But other stuff I have played so far this year has done more for me in sort of the realm of narrative choices and narrative decision making and character crafting that I think, I just don't know. It's it's it's kind of a bummer, but it is what is.
Yeah, Well, taking a wild turn here from from bloodlines to different kind of blood line. The front Line Battlefield six, which I've been playing.
Quite everyone related on the front line.
Yeah. Yeah, it's like the family civil war situation. A lot of a lot of unbred stuff happening, you know, a lot of a lot of family family ties on the on the battlefield, you know, fighting your brother in arms. Yeah, you know, it goes, you know, it goes. I've been playing Battlefield six and really really enjoying it. If you're looking for single player impressions, I have none. Okay, you can skip this part of the video.
That's like the main thing in this game, isn't that what the series is all about? Yeah?
Yeah, everyone loves Battlefield. It's known for its single player campaigns. Nobody pays an interest to the multiplayer, so uh no. But if you're looking for single player impressions, go read our review written by Jake we saw. He did a great job talking about it. It sounded like it was kind of like, eh, yeah, not much stake in what's happening in that single player. But no, I've been playing
the multiplayer. Uh and you know, I've kind of been been on the Battlefield beat a bit in the lead up in terms of you know, we went to several preview events that kind of thing, and you know, had a good look at what that what was on offer, you know, at launch ahead of time, and going into it. Really enjoyed what I saw on the preview builds and all that kind of stuff, and that that enjoyment has
continued into the final release. I've really really enjoyed getting back into just the the loop of you know, grinding out levels on my character and getting new attachments on my weapons and really kind of customizing that getting into the settings. And I've been finding a lot of guides on TikTok of all places for like, I play a lot of sniper. I play sniper a lot in battlefield
games specifically. I think it's called recon in this one, but typically with snipers and battlefield you really have to like, you know, take into account your bullet drop and all that kind of stuff and your fire rate, and that can be a challenge for some players. It's always a challenge. I've really liked figuring out in a battlefield game, you know, getting to know your scope and like the range on it and worry how far up you need to kind
of like aim to hit your shots right. To think about bullet This.
Is his way of saying that he misses a lot of his shots.
Now this is my way of saying I broke the system. Well somebody else did h and I am Now I follow this TikTok guide where essentially, if you attach a range finder onto your sniper rifle, you can then go into your key bindings. And I was showing this eric this earlier, and you can set essentially you can set it number one. So when you press right click on your mouse, which is look down sites right looking into your scope, you can also have that be steady aim
like hold your breath. And so by default, now when I click the right the right mouse button, not only am I zooming in, but my characters automatically holding his breath. So I've got the study is shot possible, which it's not a big deal. Normally you can just hit shift and you know you can do it yourself, but it's nice to kind of have it right when you ain't
down your sites, it's ready. In the same way I have bound the rangefinder the zeroing like zero in your scope and your sniper, which essentially I've bound that to the left click. So the order of operations is when you right click you scope in, you're holding your breath, you left click. The order of operations is that it zero's your sniper first and then you shoot the bullet.
And so I'm expecting this to be taken out of the game very soon because as it stands right now, you can pretty much be at any range and if you have your key mindset like this, if you have your weapon the radical pointed on a person, no matter how far away they are in the game, you will hit them. And boy is it fun. Just like real life. Oh yeah, just like real life.
You know remember when.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's.
I think the Geneva devs worked on that one a little bit, you know.
Yeah, getting triple quadruple kills with a sniper in your hand feels amazing. Uh and and and it feels like everybody has the tech to do it. It's not like a exploit, like anybody can go and do this. So it's fun. That makes it okay. It's definitely not going to stay in the game. I can almost assure you they're going.
It wasnt you just called it out for everyone.
Well I got it from a youth, Yeah that's me.
But in general, going to catch the heat for it, not not the TikTok creators. Yeah, learn this lesson the hard way.
It is what it is, you know. But I man, I'm really enjoying Battlefield. It's it's taken me back to battle Bit when Eric and I played that, when that just came out. Yeah, and battle Bit was just, you know, it was came out in a time where the Battlefield series was hurting, and you know, it just there's such a fun, sticky, unique feeling to Battlefield that other series just don't can't replicate or haven't, and battle Bit was the closest thing, and battle Bit did a great job.
But to have the real thing with all the features and the polish and the backing of like seven studios behind it and a one Mega studio, which is problematic in other ways, but for the sake of getting a good Battlefield game, I think I think it has paid
off for them. I'm really enjoying the maps. There are some levels I don't love, like I kind of prefer the bigger ones where you have all the vehicles in play, but there's a fair amount of modes that you can choose from, and each of them are, you know, pretty fun. I think the Escalation is the new mode where Jay called it out in our reviews and I think I
might have talked about it in this show previously. But sort of like you know, you start with five or six points and you're slowly the map is slowly kind of closing out as like as the longer you hold like a zone, eventually it just becomes your territory, and so the amount of points on the map you're fighting over gets shorter and shorter and thus get more intense. Every area gets more intense because it's getting more focus.
And that's a really fun way to play. But I mean, just getting in there and playing Breakthrough is really my preferred way to play, like attack and defend, and yeah, I'm you know, that's what I want to play tonight. I just want to get out of battlefield after work and grind some grind some attachments on my weapons, and you know, have fun with friends, get on some voice chat, and just get up to shenanigans.
The shenanigans happen pretty fun. As someone who has been on that voice chat, I mean when we were playing the other day during our Cuff Bust stream, yeah it was I was reminded of what one of the greatest joys in gaming is which is the first time you boot up a battlefield, and it doesn't have to be your first time play battlefield just has to have been
a while. But the first time you get in a helicopter and you have to attempt to fly the helicopter, I don't think I've laughed that hard in a long time.
Our good friend Jesse Vittelli was flying the helicopter and I was on one of the side gunner positions, and at multiple points we were on solid ninety degree angles, wedged between buildings and flinging around and just all the alarms going off and then being like, don't worry, we're fine, we're fine, and the rotors chopped through fuselage and things like that. I love Battlefield when it's doing that. I think it's one of the funniest games that is not supposed to be funny out there.
Yeah, yeah, it.
I think those games are incredible at player interaction when you get down to that, in the ways that silly player interactions can play out, and if anything, I wish they leaned into that more. I'm somebody who really loved I would play a battlefield too a lot. In Battlefield nineteen forty two, back when that came out, and I loved those games because they would often have those kind
of strategic emplacements. But I would sneak to the back of the enemy lines and plant C four on their jets, and then I would wait, and then somebody would hop in the jet and start to take off, and I'd wait for them to just get off the runway like wheels, just starting the lift into the air, and then boop and watch it explode and be like got em. And then I'd wait for the next jet to respawn. I'd
do it all over again. It was good stuff. I haven't really found ways to do that kind of chaos in Battlefield six yet, but it does just have some good chaos. I wish the maps were a little bit more. I don't know, individual that makes sense.
Yeah, a lot of.
The maps outside of the New York map, even the New York map at times feels a little samy because of the level destruction. At some point, all the buildings just start falling to pieces, and they kind of just maps start to feel very samey as they all turn to rubble, and I wish they had a little bit more personality to some of the points that you're holding. They tend to fall within kind of the usual suspects of what you would expect from that sort of stuff.
I wish there was a little bit more dynamism in that regard. I think that's my only major critique of the multiplayer so far.
Yeah, I would agree with you. I think that's my major critique as well, But it's not really necessarily hindering my enjoyment most of the time. It's it's something I would like to see them addressed in future map updates, like as they bring out new seasons and that kind of thing. With this game, I'd like to see some more personality in those maps for sure. If Wake Island ain't in that game right now, you know Wake Island
is going to be in that game itself. Oh, there's there's no way they're not going to put a Wake Island in there. So yeah, but they need they would need boats.
They do need boats boats.
There are no boats in the game right now. Yeah, there are no boats, but I must Wake Yeah exactly, I need them to add that for sure. But I really want to see Yeah, you can absolutely nobody's ever crashed the boat boat.
A boat has never crashed before. Yeah, there's no icebergs in this game, so we're fine.
Yeah, I do. Oh, you had said something that triggered something in my brain.
It's about boatsm Titanic.
No, No, it was about battlefield. But that's okay.
I don't know Wake Island boats. I have no boats, but I must Wake. Yeah, that was all good stuff. I don't know where I like that the Wake Island had. I think it was the nineteen forty two one had the aircraft carriers. So you did the aircraft carrier take off because people, yeah, so bad at aircraft carrier takeoffs, and it's it's hard, that's a short runway, and if you've got to refuel that thing, good luck. Like, honestly, you're just crashing the plane and respawning it at that.
Oh yeah, I don't know anybody. I've never seen somebody actually the plane. Yeah.
Yeah, I think in modern battlefields you don't have any sort of need to refuel or restock or anything like that. I was driving one of the anti air tanks because I'm a nerd that likes to operate the anti air vehicles, the big radar dishes and stuff, and I was noticing. I was like, oh, normally I would be like I need to be an engineer so I can repair and restock and things like that, And I was like, Oh, I don't need to. It just kind of like auto restocks.
There is a pass Yeah, there's a passive for engineers that if you're in vehicles automatically yeah. Yeah, but you don't have to worry about refueling. Yeah, which i'd like to see, you know them kind of tinker with that kind of McCain.
Supply lines in battlefield, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, I do like running some tank shells to the front line to restock the abrams and all that kind of stuff.
That'd be kind of fun. That sounds like the kind of shenanigans you get up to. And what is that game? Oh god, I played it for a little I played it for very little. Hell what loose? Oh yeah yeah, yeah, they've got some of that kind of stuff in there a little bit.
That's that's because it was old timey war. Now we've invented ways of not having.
To do that.
Yeah.
It's like when mass effect Mass Effect one came out and they're like, we just don't have clips anymore because we invented guns with infinite bullets.
Yeah, exactly what we needed.
Yeah, that's we all needed that.
Finally we wiped out bullet scarcity.
But yeah, that's about all I got to say about Battlefield. I just want to be playing it. You know. It's it's it's scratching the itch. It's not doing anything wild. It's very straight forward, but it's it's hitting the spot.
Seems like it's like a good back to basics almost from what I like.
Yeah, I would say sat Battlefield kind of yeah, yeah, it kind of needed to be. H it feels it feels like a foundation for something bigger. Oh, I remember what I was gonna say. Uh, I'm very curious to see how Portal evolves, which is their UGC platform for people making maps and modes and yeah, that kind of thing.
I would like to see what emerges from that. I've thought about tinkering that with my tinkering with that myself, because I messed with it in twenty forty two a bit, and I know they've kind of upgraded what you can do with it a fair amount. So I want to get in there and tinker with that and see what see what's what.
I don't know that I would think of Battlefield as the kind of space that you would have incredible room for for verbiage to evolve in a in a UGC environment, Because when I think of UGC within a game like this, I think of Halo and how you really cool stuff came out of people being given the tools to just make whatever they wanted to in Halo. But I don't know that all of the mechanics of Battlefield would lend themselves well to that. But also, like I don't know,
prove me wrong. I like, go out there and do something cool with it, even if it's just we made only up but you're playing as a bunch of random Army soldier.
Yeah. I mean, honestly, I would like to see just like maps, you know, user creative maps, see what comes out of that. But yeah, and I think right now it's mostly I've just seen modes. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if there's an actual level editor. I think there is, you have to. I don't know how they've got it all working. It's kind of separate in a weird way, like you can log into the browser. Yeah, I know, it's edible maps, not edible maps, editable maps.
I loved one custom logic, and like you can mess with the AI stuff too, So I want to dive in because I used to be big into Forge and I like at least dabbling with these things when they come out. But but yeah, I'm gonna toss it over to you, Marcus. You've been playing a game called by Sweet Carol? Is that right?
Yep?
I don't know anything about this game, so please enlighten me.
Yeah, this game caught my eye God, probably like a year ago with a trailer. To thing about this game if you've never heard of it is the art direction, which it's very evocative of classic Disney's or specifically like maybe like old animated movies, but like I think Disney is probably where your mind's gonna go, especially in particular like the work of Don Bluth, like his era of Disney and his films. It's not like a one to one,
but it's like the closest comparison. And it's also like like, despite looking like a whimsical Disney movie, it's a bit of a horror game where you control a sort of almost like prototypical Disney princess esque character who is an orphan at this sort of like all Girls' School it's set in England in the early nineteen hundreds, and it's the school's called Bunny Hall, and it's this girl that's
kind of like looking for her friend Carol. Like the girl's name is Lana, and her friend Carol has gone missing.
She doesn't know why. They're like best friends, and everyone at the school is pretty horrible to Lana, Like there's like sort of like the mean girl group there that kind of bullies her all the time, and then her like I don't know if she's like the head mistress or one of her teachers is kind of mean to her too, and everyone's just kind of like out against her just for being like different and weird and not
like a proper lady. So the game itself, it's it's basically an old school point and click adventure combined with like a little bit of a platformer, but it's got the like it's got the point and clicks kind of vibes, Like you're exploring these environments, you're picking up items you got like an inventory, and you're just trying to pretty much complete like a complicated order of operations to get out of like a of a room or to escape something.
So there's there's like stealth involved. There's a bit of like hide and seek stuff where you're like hiding from characters and you have like like you can hold your breath kind of like an amnesia thing to make sure that uh, creatures don't find you. Like it's it's like a mix of a of a couple of different genres. And I think so far, like I'm on the fourth
chapter right now, so like a few hours in. I'm enjoying it just because I love the presentation and I just like the like it's got like a soundtrack that's evocative of old Disney movies, like kind of like swelling, and it's like inspiring. But then you kind of get to the kind of more subversive stuff of like, oh, there's like a creepy owl here with like glowing red eyes, and oh, I'm being chased by like a a weird bunny creature that looks like it used to be a teacher.
But it's like now this like horrifying rabbit that's chasing me with a giant like meat tender rising mallet, and I have to hide from it as I'm trying to solve a bunch of puzzles around this thing like it's it's pretty it's been pretty enjoyable, if not just a little like you know, like kind of buy the numbers like adventure game stuff. You know, you read like a diary. It's like, oh, okay, you need to find a key.
Oh there's a lot dealer here, or here, I need to divert electricity to activate this machine to grind up some meat to then do this. Like it's like a lot of like you know, kind of seeing the solution and and working backwards in the way that a lot of adventure games are. I think my biggest problem with the game so far is that it's a bit janky, at least on PS five, which is where I'm playing it. It's on I think, like mostly everything I know. It's
on BC and Xbox. It might be on Switch, I'm not sure, but there's a bit of a there's a hitchiness to some of the animations because you can like do some like light like I say, a lot of light platforming and jumping around and like climbing stuff, and there's a I don't know if it's something maybe with the animation or if it's like I don't know, but there's like a little bit of like a almost like a tech demo feel to some of the interactions, or it's like, ooh, it feels like this could have been
a little bit more polished to make this a little
less like a little less rough. Yeah, like and even some of the like voice acting and like the like the lip sync is is pretty off with certain characters like I. The other big thing that I unlocked recently is that you get the ability pretty early on to turn into a rabbit, so you could transform into a rabbit at will, and that opens up new gameplay where you're kind of the rabbits faster and you can kind of like crawl into areas that Lana has a grown
or I guess like a regular sized person can't access. It could be good for running away from things. The rabbit smaller, but the rabbit's also more vulnerable can't take as many hits as as Lana. I also interacted with another character that you kind of switch between, who is
a guy. He's like a weird looking like he's the way he's drawn, he almost looks like he comes from a different game because he has a little bit more of the like kind of like early kind of like tube animation look to him, like if you like think of Cuphead a little bit as a modern example, Like he's like the only thing in the game that kind of looks like him, and I'm wondering what that's all about.
But there's like a segment where you're switching roll between Lana and this guy who you're controlling his head and nothing else because it's been separated from his body. This game's weird, guys. I don't know if that was evident. There's a lot of weird stuff in this game. But yeah, so far it's been it's been fine, Like it hasn't like blown me away once you kind of settle into
sort of like the novelty of the presentation. But there is a story that is The story being told so far is interesting, Like it seems like there's like a bit of a like Lana brushing up against this alternate sort of like reality that has all these fantastical creatures are kind of bleeding into the sort of like mundane world that she occupies, and that she seems like there's season like she might have a bigger destiny than she's aware of, and she's trying to, like I said, just
find her friend Carol. But it seems to be a conspiracy around her, like maybe some maybe the school staff maybe knows more than they're letting on. And there's and there's a lot of like the sort of like the rabbit motif that keeps appearing between like the bunny monster and the name of the school and Lana turning into a rabbit. It seems like there's something like a larger lore with like rabbits that they like where I stop, they kind of like open the door a little bit
more on that. I'm kind of interesting to see where it goes.
Cool. It certainly grabs me, like visually it's but I don't know, like the horror side of it seems.
I will say the horror is okay. I say this as like I love horror. Somebody tolerance for horror is pretty high, Like I can, I can endure a lot of really scary stuff. This has been very mild, like very very mild. Like it's been more like ooh, like almost like Halloween spooky.
This is a whimsical horror.
Yeah, yeah, you're like, oh, that owl looks a little creepy.
What little I've seen of it kind of reminds me of clock Tower in that way. Like it gives me some clock Tower vibe, maybe not wholly in gameplay, but just in the sort of esthetic and vibe it's going for somewhere in the realm of like clock Tower meets Alice in Wonderland type vibes.
Yeah, like I could see that. Like it's there's like a few like mild jump scares here, and Narrator's only been one like jump scared that like really got me because it was so unexpected. But I think if you're like if you're in this game because you think it looks cool in the art direction and you like sort of like classic adventure styles, but the horror is the barrier.
So far, at least from what I've played, I think it's been more than manageable, and I think sort of like there's like plenty of levity between the sort of like more overtly scary stuff that kind of bounces it out gives you a nice break from it. So yeah, I again, I can't speak for the rest of the game. Maybe it goes off the rails and becomes like terrifying
later on, but I've actually been sort of surprised. I felt like a lot of the trailers were leading into the sort of the the thing of like, oh, it's like a Disney movie, but it's terrifying, and it's like it's not really so far.
Yeah that's fair. Yeah, well cool. That was by Sweet Carol in case you missed it. And to round out the show, I'm gonna toss it over to Eric. I want to hear your your very very early impressions of Pokemon Legends Z to A. I've got my copy right here, which okay, I want to I'm gonna say something real quick. Number one, Nintendo, what are we doing with this box?
Number paragraph? They did? They put it back on the front.
There.
Yes, there's a back of the box quote that says includes the Nintendo Switch game and Nintendo Switch To Edition Upgrade Upgrade Pack. Upgrade Pack also available separately. For details visit and then it's other languages, and then the support page. There's a QR code. Please the love of God. Just like you've already got so much text on the back, just add some more texts. Okay, Alex, the thing I'm curious about, can you turn it back around to the front.
I'm not sure how I'm supposed to know that this is the Nintendo Switch To version of the video game, right what the red bar and the text underneath the logo and then the giant block of text at the bottom of of Oh don't worry, Oh okay, thank god.
It Also, it's gonna be found the switch to section of whatever story you get it from.
I'm only being a little facetious because I know that there's still going to be people that are like I accidentally bought the Nintendo Switch one version of those games.
They get what they deserve.
Yeah, but also I don't know, like Nintendo, you can leave the dumb people behind a little bit, okay.
Like has never done that. They are like have you seen their games?
Yeah, listen, let's let's raise the bar a little bit, Nintendo. You know, let's expect a little more from our players. And also, why is Pokemon the Pokemon Legends logo is blurry if you get close. That is not my camera. That is like there is just an inherent blur. It's a little like not It's way easier to see in person when you hold it up, like, you know, five six inches from your face. It looks like they took the logo and like upscaled it in photoshop. It doesn't it looks like a rastered image.
It's a artistic choice. It's the blur for how fast you're going to be open to camera.
Showed it off.
You can tell even here that it's like not quite as sharp as you would expect that.
Yeah, what's going on? Man? It feels like I'm curious, we're gonna find it.
I hope that's not I hope that's not an omen for like the graphical fidelity.
Hold on, let me see, is there like a clean version on the back.
Ax, he's taking the oh Alex for audio listeners. Alex just took the box art out of the box, and I guess the inner art is a math. That's cool.
Well, I was hoping the switch to cartridge. Yeah, I was hoping there was like a clean version of this without all the dumb text on the front cover.
Yeah, that's what it was.
E ten plus. Does the the fantasy violence really put it over?
Oh?
Someone dies this?
Yeah?
They gave they gave Pikachu a gun. It's crazy. Isn't shoot it? But he does wield it?
Agree? I mean the end of Scarby is kind of dark, you know, like, yeah, maybe they're maybe they're ratching it up in this one, But yeah, I'm just kind of disappointed and in the production quality of the physical version of this thing.
This is probably like the thing that I say that gets me the most heat, So I'll just say it. I've been a digital buyer of games for a while now, and so that doesn't really bother me because I just know I did this thing last night at like eleven and it was golden.
Yeah, that's fair. I go back and forth for the Pokemon games. I like to get them physical, and I only do it for Nintendo. I don't all everything else is digital, Yeah, but I try to get their first. Yeah.
A lot of the Switch games I have are the ones that were like very low print, so like I have like House and Fota Morgana and things like that, like very date, they weren't going to have a big run anyways, Pokemon Legends.
Tell me, tell me what this game is like that I haven't played yet.
So we we will have coverage coming of this in a more robust format.
Brian.
She is currently locked in the review chamber with with no sunlight or no very.
We said we're not letting him out until he catches.
Them all exactly exactly. He's he's going to catch them all or he's going to stay in there trying.
No.
So he's working on that for us. I did boot this up last night and play about say, like an hour hour and a half of zaw my early takeaways. I feel like I got a sense of this when I was you know, we did the NGT a while ago, and then we also there have been previews and stuff
like that. It is really interesting the way that they have kind of reinvented Pokemon combat in this game, because I think I had noticed before that it seemed a little bit different than what you would normally expect from Pokemon, while still maintaining a lot of the core tenants of what Pokemon combat is. But then when I was actually playing it, I thought it was a little bit interesting
the way it played out. Basically, you are running around on the map and I'm not outside of what looks like the mega fights where you're dodge rolling around big attacks and things like that. I'm not really sure what the idea is behind letting you just do the Dark Souls dodge roll all the time, but you can. But the more interesting thing is that you kind of issue these commands to your Pokemon to use different moves, and those moves have individual cool downtimers that were I mean
a lot of Zeno blade uh. And so there is I what I what I think I like about it is that encourages you to use those status moves a little bit more because it means that you're kind of getting this interesting DPS rotation in that feels almost mmoi compared to say Pokemon, where you're kind of going my turn,
your turn, my turn, your turn. Now there's a little bit more incentive to say, well, I'm going to use tail or a leer and then I'm going to follow it up with some attacks and and I'm kind of doing things on cool downs, and it incentivizes that play style a little bit more. Also makes battles a little bit faster, I feel, because you do, I mean, things died faster. You know, Pokemon are kind of out in
the open world. It's a little bit easier to just kind of like beef with them real quick and then and yeah, settle it.
I'm curious on that on that front. And Scarby, there was that ability where you kind of throw your Pokemon out they would just go fight stuff. The fast battle.
Yeah, is that in this game no, well kind if so. The way it works now is you basically just have a Pokemon out like you.
Have your your Did you play Arsius at all? Yeah? Is it similar to that?
It's pretty similar to Arsius in that way. There's also kind of the free range Pokemon catching where you throw the ball and you can kind of aim it and things like that and sneak up on them with crouch attacks to get you know, stealth captures and things like that. A lot of that has returned from Arsius. I think that has really surprised me. I do think the world of Lumios is delightful.
I love it.
I was actually it's really embarrassing of me. I was taking a lot of screenshots of the hotel that you go to stay in, because you go into this hotel and there's just all these different chairs laid out with a rug and some coffee tables and stuff like that. I've been kind of in that zone because I've been I just moved to a new apartment and I've been
kind of decorating and things like that. But I was really kind of taken aback by how the Pokemon Company and game free game Freaks specifically are really good at just creating these lived in environments that feel like they're natural, like people exist there.
You know. You go into the.
Hotel room and there's a little station where the cookies and the water are that you kind of get whenever you go to a hotel, and there's there's a night stand that has a lamp and a phone next to it, and a little outlet for people to plug in their charging stuff, and there's kind of the little luggage racks set out for you that your character puts their travel bag on. And I know it's a really weird thing
to hone in on, but it played out. The more I played this game, the more I was like, there's a lot of just little touches throughout each area in Lumios that makes it feel very you know, vibrant. As as a landscape, I was worried that going to a city would make every block kind of feel the same. Yah you just have building by building by building, and instead there's definitely a lot of storefronts and buildings that just kind of exists as blocked in resting when you're
in the wild areas and things like that. But even within there, you'll go buy a stall and somebody selling some goods or something, and they'll kind of have it laid out and it'll look like somebody actually like went to a city and set up their stall, just like you would see if you were in name a major metropolitan area.
So it's.
I find that really surprisingly appealing out of all this. The fashion, from what I've seen, is very very good for people who like character customization. I think Pokemon when they do that, they do that very well, and that's
really fun to see. And so far, Like I mean, I'm not even close to being able to comment on a story or anything like that, but I do like the general setup of Lumios is kind of having these nightly battle royales where people are competing in the streets for points to become the best trainer in the city and stuff like that. I said this on Blue Sky, but I was like, you know, maybe having a walkable city where everybody at night challenges each other and my latest hyperfixation would fix me.
I at that moment.
Where I was like, it'd be pretty sick if I lived in it. I live in a fairly walkable city now, but like, if I lived in a walkable city and then at night everybody just went out into the streets and started, you know, doing magic the gathering Commander duels.
That'd be kind of sick. I'd be pretty into that. You should play the Pokemon Trading card game on game Boy Color.
It's hey, look, that's that's an all time goat right there.
That's that's the best. I think that's like the most slept on Pokemon game in my opinion. Absolutely.
I know the Legends series is different than like the I guess, the mainline Pokemon games, But are are you still picking like a starter, like who is your first Pokemon?
I went with Tepig. My my options were Tepeig, todad Isle, and Chickorita. I don't particularly love any of those options, if I'm being honest with you.
It's way Why are two of them from the same Jen and then tepegs from like the later Jens.
That's weird, I think, if I remember right, the Fire Pokemon of that one was that's the last and Sinda Quill was in RCS as the fire option, So oh.
Yeah, yeah. I will say Tota Dial is one of my favorite characters in Pokemon, and so I will be picking him. But I do want to say people hate on Tepig and like his evolution line like m bore and all that. I I'm a Tepic defender.
I just want to say I think he's cute. I don't know, I've never played his games, but he's like a cool fire pig.
Right, Yeah, I didn't.
I didn't play his original gen, but I picked Tepig just because I was like, I don't really love Tota Dial, I don't love Chickorita. So because I went with Sindquill in that gen.
So did I.
It's like I'll just I'll just It's like I'll just go fire on this one. I tend to like the fire starters a fair bit and Tepig. You want another thing that this game nails is the animations, just little little animation. So you picked Tepig and you have your first battle on then Tepics like yeah and walks up to you and you put your fist out to fist bump it and it does like a little hop and spin and like slaps your fist with its tail, and then it's like ha ha, and I'm like yeah.
Man, right or die?
And so yeah, I think they nail that. One thing that I will just say almost immediately apparent, and probably what the largest complaint of this game is going to end up being no voice acting is that the game voice acting. No, but it's it's really become a problem at this point, Like I can't sugarcoat it anymore. There are entire cut scenes where people are talking, having conversations
like we are right now, and they're just mouthing. They're just like pantomiming to like their subtitles at the bottom.
Okay, so I do like the like, oh, okay.
This is this is going to be bad audio for people listening on the podcast. But they're basically like yeah, it talking with their hands. It's yeah, and talking with their hands. I'm exaggerating that, Like they're kind of just saying things and then like like mouth movements and then there's subtitles at the bottom.
I'm why. The first thing that came to mind was the NP season Sonic six talking with the.
Yeah yeah, and it really there are a lot of big not even big story moments, but like things happening and characters getting involved where I even had moments where it felt unclear who was talking in a cutscene because of the fact that there was no voice acting.
Because I imagine it came like it does.
But in one specific cut scene, very the first one that you see, there's kind of three characters in a group, and it feels undetermined which one is specifically talking at which time, And I was kind of going, like, I know, I'm not supposed to be following everything that's happening right now, but this feels like intentionally unintentionally ambiguous, and that's I don't know, that's it just feels like my thought on it is, if you're not going to have voice acting,
then don't do the cut scenes. Just have it all be text boxes that you thumb through, because then at least it's like, okay, well you still have textboxes that have characters' names on them and you can kind of follow, like who is talking, right, But if you're gonna have cut scenes, I mean, the most annoying one, the one that always gets brought up, is in Sword Shield, there was a fight that happens in kind of a rock venue where someone is literally playing music and singing a
song and is just headbanging and singing into a mic. But there's no noise whatsoever. It's just like the same background music is playing. It has not changed whatsoever. It's and it's not like reflecting. There's not somebody singing. It's just someone pantomiming, and it's like very strange.
Yeah, it kind of feels like like there's plenty of games where there's no dialogue and it's supposed to be text, but I feel like they're, like I said, they're shot in a way where you're like, oh, I'm not supposed to hear this, but like what you're describing sounds like it almost feels like, oh, there was going to be voice acting, but we ran at a time, so we just there.
There's plenty of RPGs that straddle the line of they say like, okay, well Final Fantasy fourteen, does this, Trails in the Sky it just came out this year. Does this where there's not going to be text. There's going to be text in a lot of scenes, but it's not always going to be voiced. It's only going to be voiced for the big kick scenes, for the big moments, right,
that would work fine. It's really weird that Pokemon is doing even more of these cut scenes and even more of these big moments it is not voice acting them.
It's weird. It's just weird, and.
I think that is annoyingly one of the biggest knocks already of this game against it, and I think will continue to be as I get deeper into the game. But otherwise, like I a while back, I might have talked about this on the podcast, actually, but Pokemon Legends, Arsius is the reason that I care about Pokemon again. It's straight up like I had fallen completely off the
Pokemon train. Wasn't really into Sword Shield. Like I thought it was fun, but I didn't think it was amazing and it didn't reignite my love that I had when I was in Red, Blue and Gold Silver Days. But Arcius was like the breath of fresh air that I wanted from that series, and za z through a feels like it is doing the same thing where I'm just like, this feels fun, this feels new, this feels interesting. This is a side of Pokemon that I've always wanted them
to explore. I love the concept of what is a city like when Pokemon live in it, when they're part of that world, and what are the tensions that arise from it? Like Detective Pikachu kind of touches on this too, But the idea of a different angle of Pokemon life
and the sort of battle royale thing. God, I love a tournament arc like it's it's hitting a lot of big buttons for me in terms of this is the sort of story that it feels like refreshing and new and different and intriguing and fun and and so in that way, it's like cool game freak still has the sauce, still has the juice when they need it, but there's still a few things that feel like they're holding Pokemon back from hitting those like Breath of the Wild, notes
of like this is becoming this giant, like defining piece of this series. Instead, it's like, we got a really good Pokemon entry, and I'm happy to have a really good Pokemon in tree that can be excited about because I liked a lot of aspects of Scarva, but it had a lot of hang ups. It had a lot of problems with it too, and I like that I'm I get to be a little bit less hung up on the problems here. But there are still a few like asterisks with zaw So. But that being said, I'm
really enjoying my time with it. I can already tell like this is the game that I've wanted on my switch to for a while, Bonanza didn't hit as hard as I wanted it to. Mario Kart World is Mario Kart World, you know. I was never going to sit there and play like sixty hours of Mario Kart World. I was just going to raise friends that be that. But this is the game that I think I've been waiting for on my switch too, much like Arcius was that game for me on the Switch one, and I'm
very excited to play more of it. When van Aken is out there in the battlefields of real war doing crazy stuff with his whole breath, drop shot crap, I'm going to be out in the streets of Lumios beating up kids pidgies for points.
Maybe I'll maybe I'll join you. Yeah, I know.
There's multiplayer. Okay, so the multiplayer is kind of crazy. I was joking, jokingly calling it Pokemon does Commander because it's essentially four players in a battle arena, all bring their Pokemon out and ring their teams with them and then fight for knockout points and take down points and things like that. So you can do kind of a weird like it's for player, free for all, so you can build alliances and then break them and stuff like that,
and you're doing kind of fun stuff with that. I have not played it yet myself, but I'm very excited to do that because I think that's a really fun, interesting way to reimagine the Pokemon multiplayer space. I think in that way, they announced Pokemon Champions a while back as kind of the this is our competitive thing. If you want to do turn based competitive Pokemon, go play Pokemon Champions. I like that this might free them up to do some weirder things with Pokemon multiplayer moving.
Forward, call the last I guess big thing is this game running all right on switch too?
Yes?
Yeah, I was playing it handheld last night kick stand it out because I just didn't want to hook up my dock to anything, and it ran super well. Maybe like a few random moments of like oh, going into a new area and it was like oh, okay, okay, we're good, and that was it. Otherwise it ran really really well. I was really happy with it. I haven't tried doc yet, so we'll see how that pans out.
But definitely, I think the biggest thing I remember from games even like Arcus, where you would see a Pokemon off in the distance and it would kind of look like a slideshow. I have not had any of those moments yet in in z through Ray, and that's been very reaffirming. This is also on normal switch right, No, I'm playing on switch to. To clarify, I am playing on switch to.
Yeah, I was like, I don't know if we heard anything yet about how to switch one version.
Go via condos on that one go with us, my friend. I mean, I've been.
Very curious about just the I'm not like into Pokemon.
Can you can you pull out the box again and check to make sure that there is a Nintendo switch to version. I wasn't clear on the box.
Also, while I was looking, I also realized the top it's one screenshot, but like different cremes, it's all the same. They're they're like trying to show an animation playout.
I think they tried to put a gift on the back of the box.
They could they could have had five different photos off the game.
No, no, no, no, we got a gift. We also let's cover up the entire Oh my god. Yeah, this is bad product design. I'm just gonna we should.
Start reviewing box arts. We just started like accounting that into our review scores is how good the box art is.
I still don't understand the giant red bar across the top of the box art that just says didn't to know switch to. That's I think maybe the most danding thing for me that I because because for a while I thought that was part of the actual box and it was just built into it. But no, that's just something they're putting on all the box arts for switch to.
Yeah, yeah, gotta let them know it's easy.
Yeah, they're really concerned about people buying the wrong edition.
I guess. I guess. So well, that's gonna be it for the show this week, everybody. Thank you for tuning in. Of course, head over to Gaminformer dot com slash subscribe to pick up a physical magazine subscription or a digital one and get get new issues of Game and Former delivered to your door or your inbox ten times a year. We got some good stuff coming up on that front.
Don't forget to check out our Outer Worlds two coverage over at Gaminformer dot com slash outer Worlds two, and stay tuned for next week on the Game Informer Show. I've been Alex, that's been Eric and Marcus be sure to follow them. You can follow Eric at C Mousey se a m O O S. I follow Marcus Stewart at Marcus Stewart seven, so that's a right, Marcus cool. And you can follow me at its Van Aiken. That'll do it for the show this week. Thanks everybody, goodbye,