169: Know the Ledge

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everybody hi what's going on welcome to the program it's the jeff gerstman show it is september 2nd 2025 and here we are entering the thick of it Video games coming out when you said things months ago about things like, oh, the game's out in October. It might as well be October. We're practically there. I mean, if we make it. If we make it, right? But we are entering the season of big video games, whatever qualifies for big video games these days. It's...

But I don't know, whatever. We're, what, five weeks out from Battlefield? Borderlands is out real soon, right? It's out next week. Is that next week? It's out... September 11th. Can't believe I forgot that. But yeah, that's out next week. So, I don't know. That's a big deal.

I don't know. Shinobi just came out. Skate is out in a couple of weeks here. Which we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about Skate. Today is my son's first day of preschool. He was very excited. But he still wanted to play some We Love Katamari before breaking out for school. We're still figuring out the best way to get everybody up and ready and all that sort of stuff.

but he sat down and played a good eight, nine minutes of it. And then it's like, okay, time to go. He's actually gotten to the point where he knows how to turn the PlayStation five off, which is more than I can say for a lot of people. Never wonder why, you know, like.

They didn't even patch it in. They haven't even patched in the thing where you can hold down the PlayStation button and make it pop up the power off thing. Like not only did they not launch with that functionality, they have not added it in the years since. So clearly they think this is a better way. They're wrong, but clearly they think this is the superior way for them to go over there. I don't know. It's ridiculous. But yes, I don't know. We're still... It's...

It's a problem. It's still a problem, I guess. We'll see now that he started school. He'll have more stuff going on. I think his desire to play the game will be limited by just the amount of free time he has. That'll certainly be... a factor, but in the days running up to the start of school, it was like the first words out of his mouth every morning. Daddy, can I play this in Wheel of God? I'm like, dude, no. I just woke up, man. I don't want to do it.

But he's very excited and he knows all the names of all the cousins, which I think is crazy. I think that's crazy. It's awesome. But imagine knowing the names of all the dudes from Katamari. I never would. I mean, now I kind of do. Except that, you know, because he can't read. And my daughter can read well, but sometimes...

You know, we'll just kind of fast read a word and get it wrong and whatever else. I don't know. No, this didn't come wrong because he asked me. There's a character in Katamari. One of the characters, one of the unlockable characters is named Johnson. And Johnson seems like a perfectly cool dude. They're all cool. He has decided, as I've told him when we first unlocked him, his name is Johnson.

Like somehow in the day or two after that, he has reworked in his mind the name. And now he only refers to that character as Joshua. And I think Joshua is a great name. And I think that we should start naming people Joshua. It's a, it's a hell of, it's just a hell of a name. That and Miso. There's another character. There's a soup bowl for a head. Miso became something else. Masso. Masso. And I've corrected them multiple times and they say no.

No, it's not Masa. It's not Miso. It's Masa. Okay. Ultimately, you guys are right. You can never tell a player that their feelings are wrong. Right? The first rule of player feedback. You can never tell them that they're wrong. They're both getting really good at that game. It's kind of crazy to watch. My daughter asked for the Switch.

for the first time in a long time and you know because because he's commandeering the tv and so she took the switch light and was was back to playing super mario 3d world and and i was over here playing unnamed video game oh it was yeah it was there was some fucking hot gaming going on in this room yesterday it's just three people in the room not talking to each other playing video games like yeah parenting um so yeah that's that's been

Uh, that's been fun. We're going to talk about, uh, Shinobi. We're talking about a little skate and the news and stuff. Why don't we take a, uh, a quick ad break and we'll come back. We'll get into some video games. Seems like things are just getting busier and busier all the time, right? I mean, the only thing growing faster than your inbox is your to-do list. Well, now you have permission to ignore both for a little while anyway.

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Shinobi, man. Wow. Shinobi came out last week. There were so many other games coming out that I ended up not playing it until Wednesday of last week when there was a stream of some video up on YouTube. If you want to see some of Shinobi Art of Vengeance in action.

I am really enjoying Shinobi. I think they did a really good job of making a pretty good modern 2D ninja platformer kind of thing. I don't know that I would say that it necessarily feels... exactly like the old games you know like it it's and and that's that's probably for the best i don't know like i think some people have gone both ways on this i've seen people say like oh man i wish that this was more faithful to um shinobi two or three

On the Genesis. I don't think anyone is saying like. Man why isn't this more like Shinobi 1. Which there's nothing wrong. With the first Shinobi game. It's just very much an arcade game. And it's like Rolling Thunder with Ninja Stars. Instead of. A pistol. Ultimately. You know. There's nothing wrong with Shelby 1. But it's just not. Not the. Not the same thing. Two has always been my sweet spot. Three is a cool game as well. I'm also. Two and Shadow Dancer. Honestly.

I always thought Shadow Dancer was a cool game. You had a dog. And you could make the dog attack dudes. You hold down the button to charge up your dog. And then you inflict dog upon people. And it roots them. It's a status effect dog. This is not though. This is not that like I think that they do a decent job of kind of.

pulling from those older games um in terms of like oh you have some kind of more magical abilities at your disposal and shooting fire and do this and that you know like there's stuff there that they you know kind of pull from those games to a certain extent but ultimately this is this is sort of its own thing um but i do think it's like like the combat is really fun it's got a really interesting combo system where you can just kind of keep going

Um, you know, you, you can kind of mash out a basic four button combo and then do a roll and you can roll out of the combo or roll out of the roll into back into another combo. And so you're kind of like, roll, roll. And there's a good rhythm to that that is fun when the screen is full of enemies. And I think that that stuff works really well. I think it's got a really nice look to it.

I don't like the music very much. I think that's the, if I had to say one thing about the music in Shinobi, Art of Vengeance, is I think that the music is a little too much in spots. and uh doesn't really fit the action super well i just yeah and it didn't really do anything for me at all um but the The action itself is really nice you you kind of knock people into a state where they can be one hit killed and so if you can If you can line that up

to where you've got multiple enemies in that state you kind of just like will pop the buttons and you'll just get a and it'll kill everybody you'll get kind of more resources out of a string of kills like that if you can if you can line it up it's neat And it's kind of a search action game, but not. You know, there are reasons to revisit levels and go back. Like, it's not one big contiguous world. It is kind of shorter areas kind of strung together.

onto themselves and then you move on to the next area the next area the next area um but inside of that there are still kind of you know reasons to to revisit some of those spots to find more unlockables and Find more fights like you'll stumble onto like, oh, here's a harder fight and fight off this wave of enemies and it'll check it off the list and you can go find two more of those to get stuff. You're buying upgrades along the way.

And the upgrades are, you know, it's typical kind of upgrades for a melee combat game where you are buying crazier combos. You are buying more extensions to your combos of like, oh, now I can do this or. Uh, you're also getting things that take care of like, you know, you'll find armored enemies and like, Oh, this, this knee will bash and do damage to armor better than your default attacks will. And.

You can kind of pull that in as well and use that as you need to. It's a very effective and fun combat system. I think it's an unfortunate comparison because I don't think Ninja Gaiden Ragebound is necessarily a bad game. but because the two games are similar in concept and... and came out relatively close to one another. I think that it definitely invites a sort of inevitable comparison between the two games. I think Shinobi is by far a better game.

than Ragebound is. But I do think that there'll be some aspect of that of like, oh, well, you know, hey, there'll be... People that prefer Ragebound, I guess. But Ragebound is certainly not a bad game. The bouncing on... There's been just enough of these kind of 2D games of like, okay, now bounce on these objects and move around like that style of platforming.

you know, kind of bouncing on things in the environment or enemies or whatever to kind of get from place to place that I think I have maybe just done a little too much of it. And so seeing a game where. This tutorial is just full of that because they're like, you need to make sure you get this concept down. I'm like, oh, don't worry. I've got this concept down. Like, it's okay. It's certainly not a bad game, but I would take Shinobi.

In a heartbeat, I guess you could say that about the entirety of both franchises. If we're being real about it, I would probably take the Shinobi franchise over Ninja Gaiden. Well, you know, that depends on how you feel about the more modern Ninja Gaiden games. I think that PS2 Shinobi game was pretty fucking neat for what it was. But if we're taking the kind of classic side-scrolly 2D such and such...

Uh, and ignoring the more modern ones, I think it's, I would take Shinobi any day, any day. Um, it only gets more complicated if you actually like those Ninja Gaiden games, which I feel okay in saying like, Those games didn't really do it for me then. I always appreciated the Ninja Gaiden games from a distance. Watching... Itagaki be him and wear his leather jacket and talk about how good his games were was fun. But I never actually enjoyed those games all that much.

Like I said, just kind of respect them from a distance and it was fun to have that guy mouthing off all the time and just being a fucking lunatic. Especially in a case where he's mouthing off about how amazing his games are, and then as someone who never really thought those games were all that great. Like, oh yeah, yeah. Talk your talk, man. Speak your truth. But yeah, it's sort of a bygone era, I guess, these days.

But yeah, Shinobi's out now. It plays well. That's kind of the thing that really stuck out for me. Obviously, hey, this game plays pretty good. But the combo stuff is actually really fun. and uh it makes the combat work really well you have a it's bordering on giving you like too many options in in combat like as it starts to layer on more and more systems of like

Okay, now if you want to cast the big ninja magic, you pull both triggers. If you want to do your kind of little whatever ninja magic, you hit this button. This is also a stance change button with if you do this and this. It's just on the good side of systems. It's on the verge of spiraling out into just like, oh, you used too many buttons and you don't need to. It didn't need to be.

as complicated as this it could have been a little more straightforward but um sorry i just need to get the get some air moving in this room I'd record something before the show today, so I had like multiple PCs and TVs on. It is already probably, I mean, it's going to end up being probably about 100 degrees today.

But I think in this room right now, it is probably about 84, 85 degrees, which is uncool. This room sucks. Anyway, also in this room, I have been playing skate. Now, Skate is not technically out until the 16th. That is when it will enter early access on the PC. And consoles, consoles old and new. There's like a PS4 and Xbox One version of Skate.

I wrote up a long thing on skate that you can read on the Patreon. If you want to go to patreon.com slash Jeff Gerstmann, you can get an ad-free version of this very podcast. As well as, you know, read what I had to say about skate so far. And, you know, a bonus podcast every week, all this other stuff. So, you know, go do check that out if you want kind of the fuller take on skate. But the...

The skating in skate is good. The movement, the right stick, they have done a good job of duplicating the mechanics. of skate for the most part. I think just about everything else that they have done with this game Is. Bad. Now the version I'm playing is supposedly the version that will hit people's hands on the 16th. I don't know if they will patch it between now and then, but it's always possible that they will. So, you know, this version that I'm playing on PC is...

You know, like I said, they said that this would be the version that they are shipping out to everyone in a couple weeks here. And I think that they have forgotten the full scope. Of what made those. Or no not forgotten. But I think that they have. Ignored. The full scope. Of features and things. Inside of. Skate games. That made them good. This game feels like a game that got greenlit.

I mean, you know, because of a social, because people on social media, because people on Instagram could not stop commenting hashtag skate for on everything EA did. They finally bullied EA into making a skate game. However.

At the time when this started and for the years following, the only people you saw talking about and or playing skate were people that were making big crazy videos for social media of them flying off this high-speed pipe and fitting through this weird spot in a bridge and, you know, like crazy trick sequences.

And they were always fun to watch. It was fun to watch people doing weird things with Skate 3 and Skate 2, you know, like watching this stuff. This feels like a game that was made exclusively for people who make those videos.

This feels like a game made exclusively for people who want to go viral with some hot skate clips. The rest of the game, the progression... the things you might unlock over the course of playing it, the city itself, the challenges, the things you have to do in order to fill up the meters to proceed to all of that stuff. is extremely subpar. I think the city itself that you're skating in has some okay spots and I also think it is very small.

And there's not a lot, you know, there's not a ton of real estate to explore. The challenges are given to you by... Like the characters in the writing, like there were fun things that happened in the skate games because you ran into goofballs and you had Coach Frank and you had all these.

silly uh you know like the the silly fmv sequence at the start of the game with all these pro skaters doing you know silly ass skate video shit uh there was always a great time nothing like that Instead, a character named V, who is a camera, some kind of camera drone, who is presumably following you around like Lakitu in Mario 64. She talks to you most of the time. And the writing is terrible. The line delivery is so bad that you want to...

You wonder, did actual humans record this or did a computer generate this dialogue? What happened here? There's a couple of examples that I ran into along the way. Where like whoever was writing the script wanted to insert some hip-hop references. A couple of times that I've, that I've stumbled into. And so you have lines in the script that'll say like microphone check one, two, what is this? But like the line delivery.

is done in such a way that whoever was crafting, whoever was recording those lines again, whether it was a human or not, we'd have to stare at the credits and find out. didn't know that that was a reference to something. And so it becomes like microphone check, like you're doing some kind of quest that, you know, like some kind of challenge that involves music or a microphone or something, if I remember right.

And then at the end of it, as they're kind of congratulating you, it just says, microphone, check one, two. What is this? It's so crazy. And there's another part where just like they're talking about grinding ledges and then they insert a little like, no, the ledge. And it just like, again, just feels like whoever was directing the voice one way or the other. Didn't.

was not the writer of that dialogue and didn't have anything to really, just didn't really know what the fuck was going on. And it was just a really strange. It just comes off as really strange. A lot of it's really repetitive because a lot of the dialogue is not necessarily specific to a challenge or a quest. It's just like they're dropping things in. And so...

A couple of times I've had this robot come up and say, they're talking about like a local skate crew in the town. And like, did you know that they liked to mob their kickflips? Damn. Knowledge. And it just sounds so fucking phony.

You won't run into other characters, but you go on what they call tours. And tours are like series of challenges that are kind of tutorials. Like if you go look at, there's a list of all the tours in the game right now. And every single tour is like...

We're going to show you how to do better manuals. We're going to show you how the party system works. We're going to show you how to emote and how to grind and how to do that. It's really kind of tutorial in nature. But they kind of hand you off to another character for a while who... We'll then kind of say, go here and do this. Wow. You're really killing it. You know, like, like all of that kind of generic fake sounding stuff. Um,

And so much of that stuff is just so bad. It's, it's like mind blowing. You know, it feels like a total afterthought. Like all of the, all of the speech in this game feels like it just like, well, we got to have something in here. We got to figure out something to slide in here. And it's not even... I don't know what it was they were going for. And you've seen a lot...

Since the NDA has been lifted on all the years of playtesting that people have been doing, you're having people who have been spending a lot of time with the different builds of this game for a good long time kind of coming out of the woodwork. And a lot of them are complaining that the game doesn't really represent skateboarding culture in any kind of sense.

I think I agree with that, but also I'm going to try to also acknowledge that, like, I don't necessarily know what modern skateboarding culture looks like. I know what kind of, you know. 2000 2001 era skate culture looked like but i can't tell you that i have kept current enough to really have a good line on like what are the kids into with skateboarding you know how do they act how do they dress how do they do this

But I will say that like, you know, the game is a free to play game with a bunch of paid cosmetics. And so all of the things you're unlocking as you go are like this really. You're unlocking this constant string of generic stuff. Congratulations, you earned enough currency to open this blind box.

And there are like a series of like 12 blind boxes per quadrant of town. And you have to level up in each quadrant of town in order to unlock the different blind boxes. They all have like about 11 things in them. And you have to open them over and over again to get all 11 things. You'll get a random item every time you open it, but you won't get duplicates. You'll just get the next, you know, whatever thing. And like half of this stuff is just like, it's a gray sweatshirt.

Congratulations, you got a black shirt. And they'll even call it like it's art for your skateboard. But you're like, what's the art? Solid red. Now you can have a red skateboard. No designs, no nothing. You'll eventually unlock some stickers that you can put on the bottom of your skateboard if you so desire to give it some kind of flair or something.

Here is some camo pants. Like, the most exciting item I've found in the game so far has been a pair of camo pants. Otherwise, it's like, I don't know, black bucket hat. Some glasses. Do you want to give us $44.99 for the Deluxe Founders Pack? Because then you'll get t-shirts with the logos of the old skate games on them. And you'll get to play as a mocap guy in a mocap suit.

And you'll get other skateboard designs and other things that actually look like they might be real and or interesting. And it's like really nakedly fucked in that regard. Where like the divide between the things you can grind out for free are just straight up solid color items for the most part.

And then if you play in deep enough or give them real money maybe you'll get one or two things that look like legit. There are some brands in there. The game feels like someone wanted to build a mall and then none of the stores showed up. So it just has this like generic, it's a weird thing to say, but like in some ways this game needs more brands because that is that.

is recognizable as a part of kind of skateboarding culture is you want like authentic stuff. They've got some Dickies clothes in there. If you want to buy them, they've got a few other things. So like, you know, and if you, if you dig into the microtransactions, You can, in fact, buy some licensed clothing in here, but you have to pay real money for it. And that sucks, too. I don't know. It is the exact opposite of throwing you a bone.

You know what I mean? It is here. Have the most generic shit imaginable. And if you give us some money, we'll give you the license stuff. And they say, oh, we're going to add new brands, new licenses as time goes on. And the game is evolving and all, you know, and I'm sure that that's the case. Right. But it feels like the thing that they're launching with. The game they're launching with is also like really buggy. That's where I say, like, I'm not sure that.

I wonder how much they will fix between now and the actual early access launch. Hopefully it's something because like text will get stuck on screen. I had, you know, there's multiple camera angles and like control styles in the game. So if you want kind of a knocked down reduced version of the full feature set, you can set it so like the X button makes you jump.

which I think you could do in some of the older games. But you have some options as to how the controls work. It basically asks you up front, like, hey, have you played these games before or do you want the dumb version of the controls? You say, no, I do not want the dumb version of the controls.

But I found that like between like sometimes I would complete an objective and then come out and my camera angle would be set to something else. It would be all wrong. Like even the controls would sometimes be different. It would have like automatically changed to one of the different control schemes.

And so I have to go in the menu and even though my preferred scheme is selected, I have to select it again and hammer the X button a couple of times to get the camera to fix itself and get it to go back where it's supposed to go. Um, it doesn't have the thrasher hall of meat. I wonder if that license was just too expensive for them. So instead they have what they call stunt challenges, which are basically the same, but with none of like the bone breaking.

Like the slams, you hitting the ground doesn't have the same impact that it did before. They've just got some stunt missions around that are just like, jump off this thing 10 times in the next five minutes and make sure you hit nine speakers or four palm trees or... you know, land in this dumpster or, you know, like, like it's, it's really just, it, this word gets thrown around a lot.

And like games like this make you realize that maybe it gets thrown around a little too much. But I do think it applies here. This game feels utterly soulless. It feels like it has no creative core. It feels like that they, again, that they realize that people were making videos of skate games. And they wanted to make a thing that would let them continue to do that and hopefully allow EA to make money off of the people that are doing that and consuming that and whatever else, right?

They wanted to have a new product out so that people seeing those videos could go, oh shit, I should try that and have something new that they could try that they could maybe make a little money on along the way. The game is always connected online and so when you connect there's in theory a lot of other players around the map and when you pause the game

and look at the map, you will see the dots of individual players all over the place. But if you skate to those areas, those players are not actually there. I don't, like, that, it seems like a bug. But like players pop in and out of the world. I was trying to do one of the side tours you can do is tries to introduce you to the social controls. And some of the social stuff is like, oh, you can teleport to another player. And so they ask you, okay.

Go to the player menu, pick another random player, teleport to them, and then do see some emotes near them. And so I'm like, okay, that's easy enough. So I'm going to go here and I'm going to... teleport to this other player and then I'm going to wave. But you teleport to the other player. Like you can spectate them and see them skating around doing something or standing at the spawn point at the store and not moving.

And you're like, great, that player's not moving. I'm going to go there so that I can wave near them and check this off and go do something else. And then you teleport there. And the scene you just saw before where it looked like there were 10 human beings all in the same area. None of them are there. They're all gone. So I spent like I quit the game or relaunched the game like multiple times trying to go like, where the fuck are the people? What the fuck is going on? And try and.

I sat there long enough and then eventually two people popped in. Like, I don't know if it had to sink or what the hell was going on, but eventually I got to a point where I saw another human being in game. While I was trying to do this quest. Because before, I'd seen them here and there. And they're kind of few and far between. But occasionally you'll see a glut of dudes.

Like if you go over to a pool, like I went, I went to go skate in a pool. There was a quest near a pool. I go, there's a pool over here. And I got to the pool and there were like 30 dudes clipping through each other, all skating in this pool. And I'm like, well, this looks like shit too. But then when you try to find somebody, there's no one there. It's like bizarre, man. And so I sat there long enough and eventually another human being appeared and I was like, okay, great.

And so I did my emotes and then it was like the range you have to be near someone is actually way closer than it should be because these other players are skating around. And so you have to like skate after them and then stop, plant your feet and try golden in the menu and wave. And then it checks it off and you're like fucking fine. Jesus. What are we doing? So like that stuff is clearly like buggy and like that stuff that I have to imagine that they will make that stuff work better.

But for a game that has been in development for seemingly as long as this thing has, it feels like they've been working on Skate 4 for the last 30, 40 years now. For this to be the quality of the early access build that they're finally shipping is really... Kind of nuts. When you're doing these stunt challenges, it will draw a target on the ground where you will be landing.

So you can aim properly as you're kind of gliding through the air and I need to hit this palm tree. I need to do this. So put the target over the palm tree and then bam. I had cases where that UI got stuck on. So I was skating around with a giant target under me the entire time. I had to quit and relaunch the game to make that go away. Like there's just a lot of stuff that for even for something that is early access.

That has been in development for, again, what feels like a pretty long time, like the level of issues it has is kind of striking. I think the character creator, I think the characters in game don't look awesome. The hairstyles and facial stuff that you don't always see because you're not really seeing your character in a ton of cut scenes. But I don't feel like the character creator is especially interesting or good.

And again, all that dialogue. So the other thing is like, you know, the stuff you're doing, you're doing challenges like there'll be icons on the map where you are. You skate up to it. You hold down the button to trigger the challenge and then you do the thing.

And then for doing the thing, you get what are they called? The rip chips, which is the grind currency in this game, which you will then use to unlock your blind boxes. Which all of that stuff feels... like ancient it feel like games have gotten away from that stuff quite a bit as well um some of those challenges are there all the time some of them refresh on a timer

So like, they'll have like, you know, like every day you come back to the city and now there's all these different challenges here, but I don't know, like playing the game for a week or for four days or whatever it's been.

It feels like that there's maybe two or three sets of challenges that are live in the city at any given time, and it's just rotating through them. And if you complete... the challenge on like day one and then you come back the next time that challenge has spawned, you can just do it again and get the reward again.

So there are some cases where I've done the same challenge like three times and gotten credit for it each time because they rotate in and out of the city. And every time they rotate in, everything is fresh again. So it doesn't feel like that there's even like even even with the idea that the city is.

always changing and oh there's the these challenges are up now these challenges are up now like you still see the same ones come back again with like what is already kind of an alarming frequency And so between the tours, the things that you would think would be like a story mode or some kind of progression or something, with those things being more like a tutorial, with long breaks between them, because you'll finish one of them and it'll be like...

All right, you'll unlock the next tour by completing 155 challenges. You've only completed 70. I guess you better go do a bunch of these fucking daily things. And so they stretch it out that way. And then those things are basically just tutorials. So the idea that I have to go play a bunch of the game in order to unlock another tutorial is crazy. On top of that, like there's just kind of nothing in it. There is kind of nothing in this game.

And so it just feels like a husk that they have put the gameplay from skate into. So at the end of the day, if that is all you're looking for, that is what's here. And so there's a window through all of this stuff where you go, actually, this is pretty good. That's the craziest thing about it. Is that if you have a very narrow interest in a very narrow specific part of skate. It has that. And you can climb up buildings and you can.

you know, caveman off a fucking building into a big ramp in a pool on another building. Like you, if you've, if you've been looking at TikTok the way I have. then you've already seen people making the exact sorts of videos that they used to make with the old skate with the new skate. But I don't think the city's big enough for... there to be an abundance of those and I feel like I've already seen the same spots in multiple videos being kind of crushed the same way and

I just, I don't know how they're going to pull this one out, man. Like, it's really crazy.

I wonder what happened here if this was a situation where finally it was like, you guys have been making this for a long time. And I know that, you know, what we had to do to frostbite to get this up and running in the first place took a big chunk of time. in order to kind of pull this off to begin with. But yo, if we don't start making some money back on this thing, we're going to just kill it. It has the feel of a game that they're like, we are out of time.

We have to ship what we have. We have to just get it out there in early access and hope for the best. And so they started taking money a while ago. That's my understanding. And because when you launch the game now, it actually pops up a little pop-up every time you launch it, every time you launch it, that says, hey, we've refunded all the currency you bought.

because you spent it on cosmetics that might not be in the game anymore for launch or, you know, whatever it is. I don't know. But basically they refunded, like if you bought real money currency in the, in the beta, in the closed beta or whatever, they gave you all that money back so you can spend it again.

or like currency back plus like a 20% bonus or something for, for whatever. Unfortunately, if you want to buy the founders pack, which is where, what seems to be the only actually potentially interesting cosmetics that I've seen. You cannot spend the premium currency on that because those have dollar values next to them, not skate books or whatever the hell you're buying. The free-to-play nature of it and all that sort of stuff is really... I think it is poorly constructed in a handful of ways.

And for a game that is always online and connected multiplayer, it doesn't feel like there's much to do with other people. You can get together in a party and you can skate around and you can... Take on challenges as a group. But it doesn't feel like there's like I. There are these kind of areas around the map that are like bigger skate parks.

Where you'd think you'd see a lot of other players, but again, I feel like I barely see other humans right now all the time. I feel like a few days ago I was seeing more players in the world. Where, you know, where now when I look at the players list, there are still a lot of players connected to the game. And when I look at the map, there are a lot of dots of players that should be right around me somewhere. But they just don't appear for whatever reason.

And so there's these large skate parks, and one time I found a thing on the map that looked like it was... A multiplayer event that I could join some kind of multiplayer session that I could sign up for and we would be match made into some kind of competitive event is what it looked like. So I went there and I held down the triangle button to sign up for the event.

and then I fell through the world and couldn't every time I respawned I just fell through the world again and there was a timer running on this thing that looked like it was eventually going to tick down and spawn us into an event And then I don't know if the other player who was also waiting quit or if something else broke, but eventually the event just vanished and I was no longer in a matchmaking queue for whatever it was.

And I have not seen it again since. So I... The larger areas that have kind of skate park type things in them, you know, like, hey, here's a skate park. When you skate into them, a timer will appear on the screen as if there's some sort of event happening or about to happen. But every time I have gone into those areas, it'll have timers that are like...

A timer pops up on the screen, but it's a timer for 14 hours. And you're like, what am I looking at? What is this a timer for? What am I looking at? No indication in the game as to what the fuck that is. Is a giant fucking skate boss going to appear at the end of that timer? Is it the world boss type? I don't know. It's a mystery. Skate. And again, it would be. And maybe, you know, maybe you already have dismissed to this. Based on some of what I said here.

It would be very, very easy to dismiss this, except for the part where, yeah, I mean, you can skate. It plays like those games. I think the environments in some of the previous skate games were a little more entertaining and varied and fun and larger. But if you just want to hit rails and ledges and... Skate in a half pipe and do stuff. It has that. It's almost more frustrating that it does have that. Because...

There's a nugget there at the core of it that you're like, oh my God, I loved these games. Oh, these games were so good.

But all the stuff surrounding that here is currently kind of a bummer. And I don't know where it's going to go. They've talked about some of their plans for... every season we're going to add to the soundtrack and like half the soundtrack in the game is a bunch of like royalty free stuff and then you get like here's you know what Jake won and MF Doom and here's you know like there's there's stuff on the soundtrack um

But it doesn't always play it and there's a lot of royalty free stuff in there too. Which is kind of a weird mix. They do a thing where like a lot of the music is played out of speakers in the world. And they've built a thing where like if you're skating near a speaker, a little icon appears and you can hold it. It's basically like Shazam is what the in-world concept. is you know that they're kind of building a Shazam style app

And you, you know, will capture the music and then it will transfer from playing out of that speaker diegetically into playing like a game soundtrack. And it's kind of a neat little thing. Except for when you hear the very tail end of the MF Doom song that you would like to hear and then you capture it and then it plays that and then after that are three terrible songs. You're like, ugh.

just play that one again just play that one on loop until i say otherwise i don't know yeah um you can go look i i don't have the soundtrack in front of me you can go look it up um the the license stuff that is in the game currently but um but you can you can it has playlists it has stuff you can you don't have to engage with the music that way to experience it you can just put it on i think i think there's a whole setup for for building that stuff um

Yeah, I really want to like this. I really do. I really want to like skate because, again, the absolute core of it still kind of scratches that itch. But, man. everything around it is such a mess like even if we take out the monetization and just focus on like the quality of the dialogue or the the quality of the progression through the world

Or for a game that's supposed to be this online connected thing, just how disconnected you feel from other humans while you're playing it. Like there's just a lot of stuff like that, that just. It becomes a head scratcher of just like, I don't know, like the stuff they're saying are like core pillars of their experience, like are just largely not there or broken or both or just like these really weird things.

You just look at it and go like, this is a really crazy time for you. If this is where you're at with the build of the game, this is a really insane time for you to decide to invite more people in. Because I do not think it is a very good experience. I don't think it's a good representation. It is not the best version of what this game could be. Even.

Just in terms of technical issues and some of the bugs and things that abound in here. It is beyond early access. I think even on the screen, they refer to it as pre-alpha gameplay. You're launching a pre alpha and early access. What are you, what are you doing? It's really, it's interesting. I'll, I'll, I'll give it that. Like it's a, it's a, there's a.

There's probably a really weird story behind this. This all should be better. I feel like for it to even have the name Early Access on it, it... Even that you have a certain expectation as to like the level of quality and, and completeness of some of these features for a game that they are very happily accepting money for early access or otherwise they will, they will happily let you buy pants.

It's really messy. That's maybe the main thing about it. It's just really messy across the board. There are aspects you can look at and go, this is ill-conceived. I don't think that this is very good. And, you know, people will have different takes on those aspects. Maybe. It's hard to imagine anyone really liking the dialogue in the game, but okay. But there are the kind of technical issues and bugs and other network and whatever is going on with the multiplayer stuff, like all of that.

All of that stuff you just look at and go, even for a game you are calling early access, this is too messed up. And so the idea that they've just chosen to wrap it up, man, launch it, we get it out the door and we'll, we'll fix it as we go. Like it's really kind of crazy to me on that front, but you know,

It'll be out in a couple weeks here. It's the 16th. So that's, what is that? That's two weeks from today. That'll be out on PC and console. They originally announced this thing for phones as well. It's hard to imagine that version. Shipping. Is Tim Robinson in it? That's a good question. I don't think so. But I never thought that he would be. If that makes any sense. Like all of that stuff just seemed like stuff they did for trailers.

There's no story of an evil corporation. The most you get of world building is they make reference to some kind of high tech thing that prevents you from experiencing pain. And you've got that. And that's why you can jump off of all these things and jump off of tall buildings and get right back up. And they have some fake brand name that they've given to that, but there's no cut scene. There's no, there's no stuff.

In there. It is just these characters who build themselves. Like the way the city is set up. You know like in previous skate games like there were cops and it was bad and you're like man this is fucked. In this game it's like hey everybody we've built out our perfect skate city and I'm on the city council and I'm going to show you how to shred.

Let's get out there and rip it, rip it, man. Let's get gnarly. You know, like, like it's, it's just, it, it, it just feels like a, like a fucking shitty fucking empty mall. You know, like no edge to it whatsoever. It's just, just like, Hey buddies, let's get some skating going. Yay. Let's, uh, how do you say tear it up? Um,

And so in this world, like, you know, and there's always if they wanted to do seasonal events and the cops are back or, you know, like there's stuff they could do. And maybe they have some intention around that. But like they, it is really this like incredibly overly friendly, but not necessarily in an inviting way. It is friendly in a really phony way.

Whatever. I don't want to belabor the points here. I think you get the high level and maybe some of the low level issues that I've had with this game so far, hopefully by this point. We could talk in circles around it for another hour. Um, but like it's the whole thing just comes off as really bizarre to me. And, um, With what I have played so far, I am very disappointed with where that game is at.

As someone who has been waiting quite a long time for Skate to come back, was very excited at this announcement. The way they have brought it back, I find to be supremely disappointing. and I want to say here boy I hope they pull it out I hope that they turn it around. I hope they figure out. I hope they course correct on this. I hope they this. I hope they that. But, you know, we live in brutal times. Games don't get that second chance to come back.

games don't get that. Like, Oh, I hope they, you know, like if this is what they're putting out, if this is their best foot that they can put forward at this time, I don't have a lot of faith in where it goes from here. Very few games get the chance to rewrite that history and right those wrongs. Or games right those wrongs, but they do it so late that everyone has already moved on, right?

You can drop things in the world. One of the things you're unlocking is rails and fucking kickers and quarter pipes and ramps and different... objects and they have this whole system where you can drop items in world to you know use them to get to where you want to go and they have a whole tutorial around that as well I was doing the tutorial

for how to use quick drop, which is what they call the system. But when I was hitting the button to spawn the ramp, the ramp was not appearing in world. It was acting like there was a ramp there. But there was no ramp there. And so I was completely stuck and I had to quit the game and relaunch it and it was still broken and I had to quit the game and relaunch it.

And then eventually I got a ramp to spawn. And I was able to complete this quest and move forward. Also, it feels like you can maybe only spawn.

Sometimes you'll see other players spawned objects in the world, but they'll have like wavy lines through them because you just pass right through them because they don't want players to stack up a bunch of ramps and... fuck up the world or you know make it impassable for somebody so like you know you you don't you don't really see other players stuff um

But I think you can go into the mode like the item drop mode and you can turn on other players' items if they've left them there. But I think even... separately from that, I think you can only drop, like, five items in the world. Like, I hit a limit, like, after, like, four or five items. I was like, oh, I'll put some ramps down, I'm playing, maybe I'll put some rails over here, maybe I'll build, like, a little mini skate park. And after I dropped, like, five items, it was like...

Do you want to delete your most recent item? Because you have too many items out here. I'm like, oh. Well, I guess I'm not building shit, am I? And even still, I think if you quit the game, all that stuff would go away. That stuff doesn't persist across sessions, so I don't think that you can... It doesn't feel like... And maybe that's a direction they could go in.

Almost like player housing. Hey, we have this empty warehouse and you can put your stuff in it and it will stay that way. And you can invite people to your little warehouse or, you know, there's directions they could go with that sort of stuff, I guess. But as it stands right now, it's just like.

It's a series of bizarre decisions, or actually, more correctly, really bizarre implementations of systems that you go, oh yeah, I guess it makes sense that it has this system, but every way that system is designed is like... fucked in one way or another. It's like baffling over and over again. It's really something, man, to play the early parts of this and to see it unfold before you and just go like...

Oh, my God. What happened? It's bizarre. I really, again, you wonder, is this like the last ditch? Get this out the door or kill it. That's it. Those are the options. We've spent a lot of money for a lot of years on this. Let's see what we can do. I don't know. Is this team under the gun already weeks before release because this thing needs so much work? I don't know. I don't know what the answer is. But like I said, I am extremely disappointed with where this game is at right now. And...

They have basically said, you know, they've said that this is basically the game that they are going to be shipping in a couple of weeks here. I hope that's not true. I hope there's like, okay, time to flip the switch for the real launch.

And like, hey, here's an actual up-to-date build of the game that is not fucked. That's not going to fix the writing. That's not going to fix so much of this other stuff that is like... core to the experience but if you at least corrected all the technical issues then that'd be something just weird man let's take another break we'll come back we'll get into the news

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offer only valid for new factory customers with code and qualifying auto renewing subscription purchase they're making mortal kombat 2 The movie, but they're delaying it. Deadline is reporting that not to like this. This movie was originally supposed to be out October 24th, but Mortal Kombat to the film. has been delayed until May 15th, 2026. It sounds like that this is purely a move for like money reasons.

Deadline says, we understand research screenings have been strong for the sequel, which stars Carl Urban as Johnny Cage alongside Adeline Rudolph. But I don't know. I guess they're saying... Yeah, so the Simon McCoy directed deadline, there's something about movie writing out of these trade publications, the way they name drop, the way they insert names into sentences, the language they use, shingles and such.

is just unlike anything else. The sequel is bound to deliver tons more in mid-May than staying in the crowded late October time frame. Where the Bruce Springsteen movie was as well as the next Colleen Hoover feature take Paramount's regretting you exists.

Also, Halloween is the next weekend and that's a not so vibrant time at the box office. So it sounds like they're just like, oh, this is if we release it in May, it will make more money. So let's do that as opposed to anything like wrong with the movie itself.

Like sometimes you'll hear like, oh, this game got pushed back because we need to reshoot a bunch of it because it's terrible. Whoops. Whoops. We accidentally made a, we made a bad movie. We, we were going to put it out and now we're not, we're going to, we got to fix this thing. You know, whatever it is.

Um, but, uh, but yes, now that, that movie, I am, I am looking forward to that. Uh, the last Mortal Kombat film I thought was pretty good. The trailer, like Carl Urban is Johnny Cage. I think he. Like, that looks interesting. His take on the character, like, I think that stuff looks alright. So, I don't know, man. Like, I'm bummed that it's moved.

to may i mean again they were they've done a bunch of test screenings so i wonder if they will change anything about the movie or not whatever this is like a not an uncommon thing in the world of film where finished movies are just going to get tossed around one way or the other based on financial reasons we don't see that all that often in video games of course with the gigantic asterisks the the silk song just did it to everybody um

Or rather, a bunch of people reacted to the release date of Silksong. I don't think that's... It is not Silksong's fault that it is a game that people want to play. and that that is making other developers want to move their game out of the way. You can ship anything anytime. Look at EA, they're putting... but no yeah so you know and in grand theft auto of course was another one um

Where you had a lot of developers. That was less about developers moving their games. And more like because the date hadn't been announced. Everyone else was not announcing their dates. Because. they were worried, Oh God, what if we accidentally ship at the same time as GTA six, no one will care. Uh, and, and all of that. So, um,

So yeah. Mortal Kombat 2. The sequel to Mortal Kombat. I don't know. We're in an interesting spot. I wonder, you know, we talked about it before. I wonder what NetherRealm is going to get up to next. This is a weird... The release of the movie, I think, actually gave the franchise some good cover.

for kind of not having a game for a little bit and uh you know like oh what are they going to do next they don't have an announced project and you know you were going to have the movie hit probably around the The exact same time as mortal combat legacy collection. Um, I wonder if they're feeling it now. Cause they're like, oh man, we thought there was going to be this big groundswell in mortal combat.

like discourse and discussion on the heels of this movie and we were going to have our project out with all the you know retro kind of emulated stuff and now suddenly the movie has like you know Much like the green ninja reptile, it is turned invisible and will not be reappearing until Mitt. No. But.

But yeah, so now that collection will presumably be kind of out there on its own. Whatever, I am more interested in that collection than I am in the movie. So I wonder how many people would agree with that.

But yeah, that's where I'm at with it. We talked about this a little bit last week on the bonus podcast because it happened right around then. But Atari has purchased five games from Ubisoft and acquired the rights to the IPs and all of this stuff, and they have... goals to doing stuff with those games in the future. Video Games Chronicle.com is reporting this because it's true. That Atari has picked up the rights to Cold Fear.

Child of Eden, I am alive. Grow home and grow up. The release that Atari put out says that they are looking to re-release those games, potentially do new content with those games and what they refer to as extended distribution channels. It's crazy. This doesn't happen. Companies would rather just sit on an IP and do nothing with it rather than sell it to someone else who might find success with it. Because if Atari ends up hitting big with any of these games, Ubisoft will look like dopes!

And so that's why companies never sell anything. But, you know, the price was right. Whatever it was, they bought enough of them to make it worthwhile. I don't necessarily look at it as a situation where like, oh, Ubisoft's really hurting because the price that they would have gotten for these IPs does not change the fortune of Ubisoft as a publisher. They're dealing in much larger numbers than any of this. Any of this other stuff. Grow home and grow up were neat little games.

They were experimental at the time. Ubisoft even framed them as such. It was like, oh, you know, small team went and made this and made this. And those are both really, really neat games. So it's cool to... think that those games might find their way back onto uh you know digital platforms or you know more digital platforms i don't think ubisoft ever put those games on steam uh 2015 2016 maybe that was that came out at the time when they were still doing that but anyway

Those are both really neat games. Child of Eden is, of course, Tetsuya Mizuguchi's kind of, you know, you could call it a follow-up to Rez. It came out in 2011. It was a Kinect game. It had some good music in it. I don't think I like the gameplay of Child of Eden very much. Ultimately, I think that game kind of...

I played a chunk of it last year. I played the PlayStation version because I didn't want to use a Kinect and wanted to play it. I think when that game originally came out, I think I only really played it with a Kinect. I don't know if the 360 had controller support or not. I forget. But anyway. It was a Kinect game. Where you would aim with your fucking hand. And it just. That didn't work great.

It did not work great. With a controller, again, I'm playing with a controller last year. I don't think that that game is especially great either way, but it does have a lot of style. It does have some Genki Rockets in there. There's certainly value there. Cold Fear is like a survival horror game set on a boat. And I Am Alive, is I Am Alive the last game that Jade Raymond shipped? Or did she leave before that game shipped as well?

I don't have the answer to that question in front of me, but Jade Raymond was associated with I'm Alive at one point. And then what's she, I don't know. I don't know where she's at nowadays after, uh, after the, uh, the fair games thing, she's not there anymore. Um, But yes, they were, yeah. So Jade was still at Ubisoft. They were originally, this is like a rumor report from 2008.

Ubisoft and Jade Raymond may reveal I'm alive at E3. But yeah, she was somehow affiliated with that game at one point. Anyway. I forget what I am alive was. I remember it having, I remember I am alive having a lot of like oomph behind it. Like people were like excited to see it and they, they treated it like it was a big deal. And I seem to remember it coming out and people kind of going like, Oh, okay. And it not having any... Not doing what people thought it was going to do. So...

Again, you could see why Ubisoft would, you know, these are not the types of games that Ubisoft traffics in these days. They're never going to bring that stuff back. And, you know, it makes a lot of sense for them to. divest themselves of these properties it's not stuff that is anywhere near their wheelhouse at this point unlike something like Hayes I mean you know any day now they could green light a sequel to Hayes and it would just fit right into the portfolio

Right. I would love to see this be a trend. Obviously, you know, I think all of us have, you know, our own pet properties that have lied dormant long enough. And it would be great to see some of that stuff come back again. The grid. It'd be good to see a sequel to the grid or a reboot of the grid at some point. That would be interesting. Smash TV. You know. Killzone. The first party stuff I think is even trickier. Would Sony ever sell the Killzone IP to someone? No, they would not. So.

There, there's your answer. No, they, they would almost certainly not do that. But with some of these third parties sitting on tons and tons and tons of, of intellectual property that is unlikely to fit their portfolio anytime in the foreseeable future. I would love to see a situation where some of that stuff gets sold around a little bit.

Or even just greenlit for like, hey, an external developer came to us with a pitch, and it's not the biggest budget thing in the world, but we think that they're going to at least do right by the property, so we're going to partner with them to make it, and they're going to develop this thing, and here's how we got a new Ace Combat. Something like that. Like that would be cool. That would be cool. We talked about it a lot around.

Like the Crypt of the Necrodancer, like Zelda, some of the stuff that happened around then that like Nintendo seemed to be open to the idea of...

maybe taking some of their properties and having smaller developers have takes on them. And of course, Nintendo has partnered with Sega and Namco and some of these other publishers over the years to, you know, do... new f zeros and you know and whatever else so you know it's not out of the question but like you know what's it going to take to get a new star fox who would develop that game

Like if Nintendo said tomorrow, dude, we need to make a new star Fox. Would there be any internal team that you would go, okay, this, these are the people that, that are the right people to do that. Or would you go find. someone else to to do that would you yes would you resurrect factor five um but yeah you know what would you what would you do to get that game off the ground these days um

Yeah, Namco is doing air riders. I mean, yeah, they're still that partnership has been ongoing for a long time. I mean, you even have some of the, you know, the Capcom did those Game Boy Zelda games back in the day. Like there is kind of a grand tradition. of Nintendo partnering with some of these Japanese developers to, you know, do new versions of these franchises that they themselves are maybe not equipped or interested in tackling.

But there's a lot of smaller stuff as well. I guess Metroid Prime 4 is around the corner, so this may be a bad time to talk about this specifically. But I would love to see more new 2D Metroid games. from other studios. I think Metroid Dread was really cool. It would be great to see just kind of more stuff. Like that. Just conceptually. If not Metroid specifically. Where's our new. Doshin the Giant. Where's that? Name a Nintendo franchise that hasn't had a new game in a while. Doshin the Giant.

Dummy. But you know what I mean. There's people that are always like, I can't wait for there to be a new Kid Icarus. And you're like, yeah, keep waiting. Keep waiting, dude. Where's the new Wrecking Crew? Where, when are we going to get ice climber to where, when are we going to get, you know, where's the hot mock writer sequel that everyone has been waiting for? We deserve this.

But alas, they don't do it very often. But it's cool to see Atari pick this stuff up and we'll see what Atari does with it. Like I've been saying, I think Atari is at least... They are at least doing interesting things, you know, for a company that not that long ago was like you felt gross every time Atari came up because it meant you had another story where you were talking about how.

grifters were trying to leverage the Atari name for a bunch of crypto fucking garbage. And that was the only story happening around the Atari brand. It felt bad like to actually have some interesting projects. And Atari with some interesting pickups and buying some interesting studios and, and kind of getting back into the game in its own weird way and doing things that they, that no one else is really doing right now is just fucking fascinating.

Really fascinating. So yeah, we'll see what they end up doing with that. If they end up making a third game in the grow home, grow up.

They end up making that a trilogy? That would be crazy. That would be insane. Tim Sweeney, the head of Epic, got out there and... Was speaking in Korea at the latest Unreal Fest, according to VideoGamesChronicle.com. Your home for the news. But this was reported originally in the Korean press.

There's been, and I've heard this bubbling for a little bit, I guess. You're seeing more and more developers trying to kind of complain about Unreal Engine 5. And the... performance that they are getting out of UE5 or lack thereof um and you've started to see kind of an undercurrent of developers going like man fucking UE5 is killing us like these shaders like cook forever like every single load is you know hitchy and weird like there's just a lot of

specific things like that, but also in just a general sense, just kind of like, man, UE5 is not doing it for us the way UE4 did. Because, you know, yeah, whether it's Nanite or just like things end up having a performance cost that they are not used to dealing with and, you know, whatever the culprit is. Tim Sweeney would say that the culprit. is that developers are not optimizing their games properly. Touché! Touché, developers! It turns out it was your fault all along. Right? Huh?

I'm sure every developer read this that was having any kind of issue with UE5 just read this and went like, oh, it was us. Gosh. Thanks, Tim. So, uh, basically what he is saying is that some of the problem is that too many developers are targeting high end hardware and high end specs.

As opposed to developing for lower specs and scaling up. Which is some of what I was talking about when we were talking about the potential for developing third party games first on Switch 2. And then porting them up. to console and pc from there same basic idea uh the quote here this comes this is via some machine translation uh

But the quote here is the primary reason why Unreal Engine 5 based games don't run smoothly on certain PCs or GPUs is the development process. Many developers develop games for high end hardware and then perform optimization and testing on lower spec devices in the final stages of development.

Of course, optimization is by no means an easy task. It's a very challenging one. Ideally, optimization should be implemented early in development before full-scale content build begins. We are preparing two major solutions to address this issue. One is to strengthen Unreal Engine support. Optimization requires significant manual effort, so we plan to provide automated optimization features for various devices, making the process faster and easier for devs.

The other is to strengthen developer training in order to providing education on the overall testing and optimization process. It's crucial to raise awareness of the importance of early optimization. If necessary, our engineers can provide. Direct intervention to raise awareness of optimization techniques and provide technical assistance. And then it goes on to basically say, like, games are way more complicated now than they were.

And so developers, especially engine developers like us, have to collaborate in order to solve these issues. I'm paraphrasing at this point. We're actively incorporating the optimization technology and expertise we've accumulated while working on Fortnite into the engine. and they're working diligently to ensure the game runs smoothly, even on low spec PCs. So this is, um,

I have heard that this is kind of a problem. I heard relatively recently that this was kind of an ongoing thing that developers were starting to... really be bummed out by aspects of UE5 and the performance they were finding. And I don't know that all of these games are targeting super high-end hardware. It's sort of... His explanation doesn't necessarily line up with stuff that I've heard coming from the development community, I guess I would say. Like where they don't necessarily target.

super high-end hardware and then at the end go like oh it runs bad on on older stuff like they're not idiots they're not you know like they They've been making games for a long time. They have a basic idea about how to do that sort of stuff. So I don't know. This feels kind of... This doesn't really feel right. Also, I would say that I've encountered a handful of Unreal Engine 5 games that even on high-end personal computers that beat all of those specs.

Sometimes that stuff just doesn't run great. maybe that's my fault maybe that's maybe we can pass it along another layer there and be like well it's the players or players or just don't know how to configure the game you know or something to that effect but it's uh um Yeah, I don't know. Saying, hey, why don't you make games the way we make games we made Fortnite, I think is not an especially...

And again, this is through a layer of translation, so I'm not going to sit here and say he was being this way or this way because the translation can add or remove some connotations there. The thing I will say is I don't know that that's especially this doesn't seem like especially helpful advice. And I'm sure that there's plenty of like, yeah, like I'm sure some of that is accurate. But there's a lot happening here. Games, again, are very complicated. And UE5 is increasingly complicated.

And so there are still players out there who like used to play a lot of Fortnite and then Fortnite changed. When they inserted UE5, when they updated it to UE5 and they added all this stuff, and even though you can turn a lot of that off and nanite this and turn a lot of that off, they're finding that it still runs way worse than it used to.

So the idea that like, oh, well, we've been doing great with Fortnite. I don't know that I would say that they've been doing right by players on lower end specs with Fortnite this entire time. There's still quite a bit of... of, you know, not game breaking issues, but like the performance in that game seems to be worse than it was, which makes sense. You've added a bunch of new bells and whistles and when you turn that game all the way up, it looks better than it used to.

It was a neat overhaul when they rolled all that stuff out, but it was not an especially well optimized one either. Um, so yeah, I don't know. That's, you know, Hey, as if game development wasn't fraught enough. Here's another thing causing issues out here. The engine technology that everyone learned and depended on has maybe gone a little sideways on them.

Bloomberg is reporting that take two. Was in talks to pick up perfect dark. This story happened as we were recording here. So forgive me. I'm kind of looking at it for the first time. But, you know, Crystal Dynamics was working on this game in conjunction with a new studio that Microsoft had founded to make Perfect Dark, and it was a crazy mess. But those talks fell through.

And it sounds like that the layoffs at Crystal Dynamics that just kind of went around were in conjunction with those talks falling through. It was like, oh, well, if this is back on, then we need to keep all these people. Oh, wait, no. Remember, Crystal D is owned by Embracer. So, yeah. Yes, according to Bloomberg, Take-Two was looking to both fund and publish the game. but they could not agree over, I guess, IP ownership from the looks of it.

That perhaps take two wanted to own and control the franchise going forward. And Microsoft was like, no, we, again, again, no one wants to sell anything. That perhaps Microsoft wanted to retain too much of that IP for it to be worth Take-Two's time and effort and money to fund that game to completion.

That is probably that then for that game. There was maybe a moment there that that could have come back. Call of Duty is working on, Paramount is working on a Call of Duty movie and potentially a TV show. Again, according to videogameschronicle.com, your home for video game news. But this comes from Variety originally. Paramount has done a deal to make one Call of Duty movie.

And that there is potential for that to expand. There's a funny quote here from the CEO of Paramount, one David Ellison, who says, as a lifelong fan of Call of Duty, this is truly a dream come true. Whose life? How old is David Ellison? Is he 23? How? What is it? Do you mean the life of Call of Duty? Because that's a weird, lifelong is a weird way to say that.

These statements get vetted through so many different PR people and everything before they make their way out the door. I don't understand how you, is David Ellison one of the, is one of these like Larry, David Ellison's like a Larry. Yeah, of course. Son of Larry Ellison, naturally. Naturally.

From the first... There's the rest of the quote. From the first Allied campaigns in the original Call of Duty through Modern Warfare and Black Ops, I've spent countless hours playing this franchise that I absolutely love. Sorry, I meant to actually look up how old is David Ellison. 42. So older than Call of Duty.

Being entrusted by Activision and players worldwide to bring this extraordinary storytelling universe to the big screen is both an honor and a responsibility that we don't take lightly. You mean like a duty? It's like a duty. feeling some kind of call.

On the Activision side, they say, with Paramount, we have a fantastic partner who we will work with to take that visceral, breathtaking action to the big screen in a defining cinematic moment. The film will honor and expand upon what made this franchise great in the first place.

And we cannot wait to get started. So I gain experience points for watching it because that's what made the franchise great in the first place. Is it no Russian? Is it just an hour and a half? Is it just 90 minutes of civilians getting gunned down? Because that... That helped put it on the map for sure. What is it that made the franchise great in the first place? Speaking as someone who does not have a ton of reverence for the first three Call of Duty games, I know, you know, definitely.

There are people who loved 2 and 3. I don't know that I would put myself in that bucket per se. But those games were certainly well regarded upon their release. Now, look, I like Call of Duty. I actually like the different sub universes of Call of Duty as well. I think that, you know, the modern warfare characters and happenings of that series.

have been entertaining over the years. I think the Black Ops universe has also been very interesting as well. And I think that there have been fascinating stories told through the art and magic of video games. in both of those sub-franchises. What is a Call of Duty movie? When you think about that Call of Duty itself was more historically focused and was more or less the equivalent of a video game version of a fucking war movie in its original inception.

you know when we were looking at call of duty and medal of honor and all of this stuff and just saying like yeah man they sure did do normandy you know like like you know recreating these moments uh That we have seen, and mostly, like, even though they are based on real events, most people's memory of them is coming from films. Most people's memory of them is like, well, you remember Saving Private Ryan? You know. So what...

What even is, you know, with a franchise that I would say even through most of its run was a multiplayer first franchise? What characters do you latch onto here? What sort of story do you tell? Do you put a price in this game? Are you telling the story of price and soap? Like, are you, are you Gaz? Are you getting those, that gang together? And they're just out there doing, they're just out here doing war shit.

Like you could write any story you want. That's the beauty of call of duty. It is literally a blank slate every year. If they want it to be, it can be as tied into or not.

the previous games in the franchise from a storytelling perspective at any point they could say here's the new call of duty it's advanced warfare it's infinite warfare it's this it's that like there are plenty of opportunities for them to just fucking do whatever If anything, the Call of Duty campaigns over the years have had references, if not recreations, of events that you might remember from films.

So to wrap that back around on top of itself and say, now we're going to make a Call of Duty movie. There's just the IP, the Call of Duty IP is not necessarily best built for this. That's not to say you can't do it, and they will do it. And it's in some ways surprising that it has taken this long for it to happen in the first place. But...

Are you going to tell the black ops story? Is that a little too weird for something that you're trying to view as this big mainstream thing? If you tell the story of the numbers and Mason and the, you know, like is, are you, if you're making your Manchurian candidate, like you're weird.

Number station brainwash movie. I would happily watch that movie. I would like to see those concepts expanded upon in a purely narrative format. It doesn't need to be labeled Call of Duty. I just like movies and shit like that. I just like number stations. Make more movies about number stations, I say. You know, you could do that. And I'm sure that you could easily make it. Well, not easily, but you know, you could make a good movie based on those themes and concepts. It's not a problem.

You could also tell the modern story of the modern warfare reboot where you've got a multidisciplinary task force. That operates above the law, you know, above the, the command of these other units and they get the job done that no one else can. Like that's just movies, man. You just call of duty is just movies. The stuff they are doing, the teams they've created, it's just movies. It's just a slider. You've got a knob on like, do you want like.

Battlefield murdering dude shit, or do you want spy shit and covert ops? Like you're just turning the knob and deciding how much spy shit do you want versus how much we're brothers and we're in the shit. I'm covered in mud and we've got guns and we're in the shit, man. We're the shit, brother. We're a band of something, brother, something. We're in the shit. Most importantly, we are in the shit. And then over on the other end, you've got like.

Yeah, we're sneaking around the shit. The shit's happening over there. But we know that the real shit is over here and the shit, we're going to get in the shit over here. We're going to stay out of this shit. We're going to start our own shit over here. And then we're going to tell you the magic story about the Cold War. Here's what really happened. And that's the Cold War. Judy, Judy, Judy. Those all sound like movies I would watch. To be totally frank with you.

Those all said to be totally Frank Woods with you. See, he's a guy from the call of duty. I like to have fun around here. It's a fun podcast. I've been doing this for decades. So.

That's why I'm so good at it. I think Call of Duty, it's a silly thing, but all of it's silly, so why not? But I just, you know... You don't need a license to go make a bunch of movies about war stuff or spy stuff. There are so many of those.

You know, sure, slap the brand on it because I think that's sort of like, you know, like at least World of Warcraft has like a, like there's a, there's a universe, there's a narrative, there's Arthas, there's this, there's that, you know, the like things you can pull from.

But like ultimately when you look at the world of Warcraft and the story they could have told there, they could have told any number of stories there about like, I don't know, man, there's humans and then there's orcs and they fight. You could tell a zillion different stories there. And so much like that, I think with Call of Duty, it is just a wide open field. But that franchise has pulled from film so directly so many times over the years.

but it's just funny that they are going to go in and, and, and make a, and make a call of duty movie. I, you know, what's the ideal there? You know, again, I think it'd be a weird place to start if you want to make more of them. If you wanted to make a franchise of Call of Duty movies, but I, you know, if we're at a point here where the Mission Impossible franchise is truly...

over. If Tom Cruise is done making his own brand of fucking crazy spy shit movies, which everyone says they're done. They say that they're finished with those. Believe it when I see it. Or when I don't see it, I guess. There's room for that. Black Ops 6 did a really good job of, again, you know, I think a lot of people don't give these games any credit whatsoever narratively or anything. They just like assume it's all just no Russian over and over again or whatever.

But, like, Black Ops 6 is largely a fucking heist. Like, there's a whole heist in the middle of that game. You're sneaking around a casino. There's, like, you're doing, you're taking spy photos that, you know, you're compromising politicians. Like there's all sorts of stuff in that that belongs in a Mission Impossible movie. It really is like that level of hijinks that you're getting up to throughout Black Ops 6. And it's what makes it so good is that it's not just...

i'm in a trench brother we're in the press forward and shoot guys like you know it does have some of that as well like they managed to actually span quite a bit of they cover quite a lot of ground in that campaign It is one of their better campaigns just in terms of raw variety. It's really neat. And like the modern warfare, and they do it in kind of a classic.

You know, because that game set in the nineties, they kind of get to, you know, they get to nineties it up a little bit, but also the modern warfare games are not entirely dissimilar to that. It is just more about.

The war on terror. And we're a task force. And we're going to be the ones that stop this from happening. And he's got a nuke. It's a dirty bomb. And there's this. And we've got to run and do this. And we're running with guns. And we're standing on top of a car. And I've got a gun. And I've got to start shooting in the car.

You know, it's like that type of action. It's less, it is less covert and more overt, I suppose. As the name Black Ops might imply, it makes sense that Black Ops is the more covert of the two. but ultimately they're not that different. And they're both have casts of characters that are capable of like, if you wanted to have some fucking spy shit in modern warfare, they did in fact do some of that over the years.

So, you know, I don't know. Like, it's such an empty, you know, it's like, hey, man, we're making an Asteroids movie. Like, what? Like, in a weird way, Call of Duty is as open. As some of those ancient 80s franchises that get licensed for games, you could get away with damn near anything and put the Call of Duty logo on it, and it would ring true, I guess, because they've done so much over the years.

I think that's a credit to the variety of the call of duty franchise ultimately, but like it's a different conversation. Um, knowing that like, I feel like these people have zero imagination. I feel like that a Call of Duty movie is likely to be price and soap and gas in them because that is kind of that's a good classic starting point and

And you tell a story with those characters and they're fighting terror. Because that's the ultimate boogeyman. This guy's got a bomb. Why? He's angry. What's he angry about? Let's not get into that part. He's mad. What color is his skin? Look. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Yeah, I don't know. Another one of those, right? And we'll see how they do with it. I don't know. I think...

When I think about it in terms of like movies and then potentially TV, I think if you did Black Ops right, you could do it as a TV show. And then you're just, like I said, I think, you know, you could just make your own modern version of the Mission Impossible television show. Like that style of like, here's the thing we got to deal with this week. No one else can touch it.

And then you have some kind of through line thread of like, oh, there's this cluster of actually real bad guys who were funding all of these crazy operations. And at the end of the season. One of our guys is going to get killed by them and that'll tug at the heartstrings and then we won't renew it anyway. And then you'll never know who did what or whatever, because that's modern television, but whatever. Sure. Why not? Why not? That's it for the news.

Why don't we get into some podcast emails here? Podcast at guard.bike is the email address. You can email me. Me. Uh, Mason asks about the numbers and also says, how is that different than the Jack Ryan TV series? Yeah, man. Yeah. How is it different? It's not, but they don't make that anymore. Do they? So why not?

You could make, you could have two shows like that. Fuck it. They're going to make another season of Reacher too. Like Reacher is not entirely unlike, like Reacher can straddle those same lines, right? Reacher went to jail, didn't he? Wasn't there a whole arc where that dude's in prison punching guys? I mean, Reacher the television series, not Jack Reacher the films.

Or Tom Cruise talks to a lady in the back of an auto parts store. Ask me anything about Jack Reacher. Tom Cruise talks to a lady in the back of an auto parts store. He talks to some cops and says... That phone's going to ring and you're going to get arrested. And then it happens. It's always good when that happens. It's the same thing Tom Cruise did in that movie where he played like the Bill Clinton lackey that was smuggling stuff where he's like, I'm going to walk out of here.

I like that. I like a scene where a guy says, I'm going to walk out here like the Nicolas Cage arms dealer movie. Where he says like, well, here's what's going to happen. Someone's going to walk in here and he's going to say, you did a really good job arresting me and then they're going to let me go. Because I'd sell guns for your government, dumbass. Like that. All the hottest TikTok clips of films.

The trope I like best is dude who got arrested who is confident that he is about to be released. No movies that do that are bad. I'm convinced of it. Will I watch any of them? Probably not. I keep thinking about watching those Jack Reacher movies. They don't look good, but they look like my kind of bad. What are you going to do? Emails.

That's what we're going to do. Matt in Toronto writes in and asks a very timely question. Is Weezer the borderlands of bands? Good when they're good, annoyingly awful when they're bad. If not them, then who? I think you are under... Look, I don't even really like Weezer all that much anymore. In fact, I have a real disdain for Weezer in this day and age, but there's still so many. Those first couple of albums were good enough that I get mad when I read this.

The highs are higher. Good Weezer is like Hall of Fame level good. Good Borderlands is... Eh, this could be better. So I think that there's a pretty big... There's just a... It doesn't... I don't think your thing works out, but who is the borderlands of bands? I don't know, man.

Like what is Borderlands if we break it down? Not taking into account anything that they're about to release, but just, you know, Borderlands as we know it today. MXPX. That's a really fucked up thing to say about MXPX. I'm going to say. Imagine Dragons? No, because Imagine Dragons isn't Andrew WK. Okay. So, yeah. Andrew WK. I don't mean to be shit-talking Andrew WK per se here, but there is an over-the-topness in a way that you're like, what?

That I get where you're coming from. I don't think that's 100% right. Because I feel like it does a disservice to Andrew WK. But it's right there. Andrew WK, there's like a. What you need. What you need for to really be the borderlands of bands. I think is to be a certain, there's a lack of self-awareness that has to come out that where you're just like,

oh yeah, we're doing this because we think this stuff rules and we think this stuff is super fucking funny. We saw these jokes on the internet and we talk like that. And there's just like a lack of self-awareness. Green day. Yeah, okay. Methods of mayhem. Yeah, yes. Okay, methods of mayhem. I like methods of mayhem, but methods of mayhem kind of sucks.

Kind of. Actually really sucks. But there's a handful. The tracks with Crystal Method are good. But they're good because they're tracks with Crystal Method. But yeah, it's like Borderlands is this kind of like, we're all in on this style of humor and that's it, man. And we're not, this is not a joke.

Other than the part where we think it's all jokes, but we think it's all really good. And that can't be true, right? There had to be people that worked on Borderlands 3 that were just like, fuck. Fuck! What are we doing? Fuck! The Bloodhound Gang. Hmm. Is Bloodhound Gang the borderlands of bands? No, I think Jimmy Pop gets it. Jimmy Pop knows what he's doing. Like, he's too... Jimmy Pop is too fucking... He's too smart for... Is Jimmy Pop the Randy Pitchford?

Of jokey rap rock bands. No. Again, you're doing a disservice to Jimmy Pop here. You're doing Jimmy Pop dirty. And I refuse to allow it. Daddy long legs, however. There you go. Wolf pack. The spin-off, the guy who left Bloodhound Gang right before they broke big to start his other group, and then they were like, you know, ICP, Gathering of the Juggalos, stage three.

uh favorites or whatever daddy long legs and his group wolf pack where they're just like we are these fucking strippers we got all these fucking hard-edged songs where they're tough also Naked ladies. Wolfpack is the Borderlands of man. But Wolfpack's not popular enough. Borderlands is like very, very popular. Or has been over the years. Ween is not a good fit for this. Riff Raff. Riff Raff, like, I don't know, like, Riff Raff should be a character. I mean, the Torg guy.

The Torg guy in Borderlands just kind of looked like Riff Raff, but just talked tough. I don't know. We've stretched this beyond its limit. We can't have this conversation anymore. Oh, ween. I feel like it's Diplo. Pat says it's Diplo. Yeah. I don't believe in guilty pleasures, but if I had to say something that was a guilty pleasure, for me, it is probably Diplo.

There are some tracks that Diplo worked on and was responsible for that I actually think are quite good. And I find that frustrating for a couple of different reasons. But, ugh, goddammit. When Diplo first broke on the... Look. I can't. I can't. I cannot have a long conversation about Diplo right now. I just cannot. What about the album he did with Dirt Nasty? And Andy Milonakis and Riff Raff. He produced one of those tracks on that album.

Three Loco? Is that what they called themselves? Three Loco? Yes. Three Loco. Andy Milamakis, Dirt Nasty, and Riff Raff. And then Diplo put out that record. And then Diplo rapped on... the, on, on one of the tracks as well. It was not good. Um, it was not good, but that's not his forte. Anyway, a three local album is fun. I'm not going to sit here and tell you it's good, but it was a good time. I'm guessing it did not hold up very well at all.

Yeah, they had to change that farmer's track because they were using the thing from the farmer's insurance commercial. And they could not get away with it. I just like it when ladies put their legs on the wall and go upside down and make their butt shake all weird. Is that wrong? Diplo brought that to us in a mainstream way. Congratulations.

Tiflo is at least partially responsible for that. Anyway. Madden Bristol writes in and asks, which of the big three platform holders do you think has done right by their legacy catalog? Or come the closest to getting it right. Nintendo has virtual console. And their kind of subscription thing. Microsoft has backwards compatibility program. And now the weird retro classics thing. Sony has backwards compatibility. Through to the PS3.

or up to the PS3, and now has a very limited pool of classics on PlayStation Plus Premium. I think that Microsoft has done a good job of talking it up. And I think Microsoft has done. When it comes to navigating the realities of this space these days. I think Microsoft has done about as good a job as they could have done to do the backwards compatibility stuff.

Now, that said, everyone is going to have one to ten games that are not backwards compatible that they're going to get. God damn it. You know, like, why isn't this 360 game here? Why doesn't this work? You know, there's always going to be stuff like that. But I think that they have done right by that, by also by, you know, letting you kind of use your existing purchases in some cases, whether that's a disc in some cases or, you know, you digitally owned a thing already.

The PlayStation stuff is very... It's limited, and it is limited to a higher tier of a subscription service, much like Nintendo's full thing is. I think that stuff's really frustrating. Um, so I would say, I guess, I think that again, none of these are ideal or even close because the ideal is let me play these games done period. Make these games continue to work. Right. Let me put a disc in and run these games. That's the thing you're looking for. But that's just not...

that possible in this day and age, both from a business perspective and, and, you know, just the, the like, could Microsoft go and make their consoles existing, you know, like backwards compatible with every Xbox 360 disc that gets shoved in it? Probably. but it doesn't mean that they could allow new sales of those games and so like at some point you're you're you're doing that work for a very limited number of people that could actually take advantage of it and that gets weird um

But those are just excuses. I think, again, I think that Microsoft probably does the best of the three because I don't like the subscription service of like this stuff goes away. I more like the idea of this game you bought still works. I think that's a better thing. Especially when we're talking about disc-based games and all of that. It's a shame that, you know, the PlayStation 3 is obviously a unique... thing and not the easiest thing in the world to replicate.

But boy, you know, even as a middle ground, it sure would be cool if you could put PlayStation 1 and 2 discs in a PS5 and have those work because that stuff's relatively locked down. You're always going to have edge cases that won't work, but boy, that would be neat. Uh, that would be the ideal to me is a PlayStation that you can just put everything in and it goes, well, you know, within reason. Um, but that's, we're, that's, we're not going to, we're not going to see that.

Grant writes in and asks for some gaming zeitgeist examples that have changed over time. He says, I find it funny these days how things I remember have completely changed in the masses thanks to the internet. So things like, and he's got a few examples here. Halo 2 got so much hate for the campaign at the time, playing as the alien dude and just ending abruptly, but all of that isn't really remembered today.

MGS3, and I remember everyone hating the game when it launched because the camera was that bad, but now it's the most beloved one and people seem to only remember the re-released version that they did. And Batman Arkham City, how many people love it? But I very much remember people being lukewarm on it and not liking it as much as the first. Are there any examples that you have?

I don't remember Arkham city going down that way. I remember Arkham city and playing and going like, I feel like the opposite happened where Arkham city came out and people were extremely excited about it. And it wasn't until. Until the next couple of games, by the time they were done or wrapping up the Arkham thing completely, between Origins and Arkham Knight, I guess, somewhere around then, I think people started to re-appreciate Arkham Asylum.

for what it was and the size of it and the scope and all of that but at the time people were like this game is so much bigger it's so crazy it's this is it's it's everything you loved about arkham city and and it's so much bigger and but like i feel like that That's what changed. Over time, people went more negative on City and realized just how tight of a package Asylum was. But City's a fucking awesome game.

Like, whatever. The debate about if it's better or worse than Arkham Asylum, you can have that conversation. I think Asylum is a better game. Because it's tighter, because it invented so many of these things. Citi improves on it in a lot of meaningful ways, but Asylum, dude, it's so good.

Halo 2, it's funny. When they first announced that they were going to re-release the Halo campaigns, when they were doing... I guess it was when they announced the Master Chief collection. I was... in a room at I guess it would have been 343 at this point talking with Frank O'Connor and they were giving a presentation about What they were doing with Halo. And then Frank was taking questions to the room of assembled journalists.

And I remember asking about, you know, like, oh, the ending of Halo 2 was such a, like, you know, the ending of Halo 2 was so divisive. Do you think you will revisit these games and take this opportunity to make any changes to those? you know rework them and you know reworks and remasters and like they had done that sort of stuff I was like you know do you think you'll want to address that in any capacity

And his answer always stuck out in my memory as he just said, like, I mean, you can just, Halo 3 will be right there. Like, and it was like, oh, right. Like the big problem with Halo 2 is that it came out. And then you had to wait a very long time to see the results of that dumb cliffhanger. It is a dumb cliffhanger. It's not just a cliffhanger. It's not well done. It's a little ham-fisted. It ends abruptly.

But then you're like, okay, well, now let's play Halo 3 because that game has also been out for years and I can just play it now. And so that blunts almost all of that criticism completely. In terms of the way it was thought of originally, because so much of it was like, we waited years for this. It came out. It sucked. And then we had to wait years for them to continue the story.

And so it's a very, you know, the disappointment is at least partially, you know, you don't let it off the hook completely, but a lot of that disappointment is. wrapped up in the idea that you would not play Halo 3 for another handful of years and continue the story. And Halo 3 is so much better. Fuck, man.

And so it was an interesting, you know, I was like, oh, right. Yeah. You don't have to touch. You don't have to fix Halo 2 because you're putting out a collection that will have or you could put in Halo 3 and play it, you know. I thought that was an interesting answer, and it always stuck with me when it comes to having some perspective on this sort of thing, especially when it comes to Halo 2, but just kind of in general. MGS3, I'd...

I mean, you know, we talked about it last week that I've just never been an MGS3 fan, but I don't remember people hating that game when it launched. I remember people being excited about that game when it launched. And that, you know... Yeah, the camera stuff was what it was and subsistence. was a second crack at it and I think people also really enjoyed the way subsistence kind of fixed some of or changed some of those camera things but like the camera stuff

This was not the first camera in a metal gear game that people were had to fight to enjoy. Right. I mean, this is kind of been the, um, it kind of been the, the norm, I suppose for that franchise. So MGS3 was not a big outlier at the time. I'll put it this way. The things that made me not like MGS3, the camera was not really a part of it. Though it's nice to have, you know, kind of new angles on it. You know, subsistence. I remember subsistence there being a groundswell of people going like, oh.

Now I enjoy this game a lot more because of what they did with it here and this is really neat and all of that. So, you know, that subsistence did improve upon the game in a general sense, but I don't remember people going, fuck this game, the camera is this and that. The people I knew who liked Metal Gear still liked it. It was not a jumping off point for them.

Vincent wrote in to ask, what do you think happened with skate? We talked about this earlier. But Vincent from Vancouver says, I've been playing the skate play test for months now and I agree with your take on the current state of the game. It's lifeless flat and the type of soulless husk of a game that I can't really see early access updates and post-release content actually fixing. What do you think went wrong? Do you think EA leadership was so disinterested?

in making another skate game that they didn't really care as long as it had the controls and the free-to-play monetization. I don't think the dev team set out to make a game this flat, but something seems to have gone wrong during development, and I'd love to know your thoughts. Maybe just to spend another... A little bit of time on this. EA is a company. We've talked about this before.

And I think this is something that increasingly we see across the big studios that are left, the big publishers that made it this far without collapsing. Your Take-Two's, your EA's, Ubisoft. Warner will eventually probably be back in this boat in one way or another. But they're in kind of a weird place now. They would rather...

place really big bets on really big games than place a hundred smaller bets that, you know, they don't want you to go. They don't want a team to go spend $10 million to make $15 million. They can come back and say, hey, we had a 50% profit. We made $5 million. We made back all our money and then some. They're like, great. How much did you get? $5 million. Great.

The, the people running finance at EA, the people running budgets and figuring out, they're like, what are we gonna do with $5 million? Like if we have 5 million or don't have 5 million, it makes no difference in the overall health of this company, which is crazy. But again, the size of that company is such that it's just, you know, it don't matter. They want to instead spend $500 million.

Making the next biggest game ever made. Too big to fail. Look at this marketing. Look at this. They want to go make a game for $250, $300 million. They want to go spend a ton of money on a massive game. And if it hits big, it hits in a life-changing way for everyone in that company and changes the company's fortunes, changes this, changes that.

That's the stuff they want to do. They don't want to go make, you know, 10% profit, 50% profit on a bunch of smaller projects. There's no action there. And you know. It sucks, but that's the way it is. So Skate is not a big project. It's not a massive project. It had the feel of a Skunk Works project.

that they probably greenlit because there was enough social media fervor that they're just like, all right, you know. And much like when they did this with Mirror's Edge, you know, if we try to... and and i don't want to i don't want to i don't want to talk about doom you know this game's not out for a couple weeks so to talk about it like it is already done and dead feels bad but if you'll allow me that for a moment

You know, they greenlit Mirror's Edge because there was a lot of online fur where they're like, all right, we'll make another Mirror's Edge. And then it came out, it didn't sell really well. And then they came out and said like, yeah, I didn't really hit the numbers. Who could have guessed? The, the...

It turns out that there were only 20 people posting hashtag skate four on all these videos and all 20 of them played the game. What did that get us? You know, whatever it is, but it feels like a setup for that situation all over again. Where they're going to go like, oh, this is what we get for listening to the players, right? And when in reality, I think the issue is that that Mirror's Edge game was not great.

It did not fully capitalize on the things that people loved about the original Mirror's Edge. And I would say the same thing about Skate 4 here. Skate. That's not Skate 4. You know, they greenlit it based on probably the social media fervor around skate. And they kept getting asked about it enough that they're just like, all right. If nothing else.

If we do this project, it will be like a hearts and minds thing. It will be like, all right, we were, Hey guys, we're listening. But then the game still has to fit into EA's portfolio. And it still has to be put on a path to be profitable. And how do you do that with the amount of money it would take to make skate from the ground up?

And then, you know, if you just made a game that was like the old skate games, let's just, you know, as an example, like if you just, if you made Skate 4, and you made a sequel to Skate, That was another one of those. And you made another skate game after all of these years. And it played like those games and it had all the same stuff. And I coach Frank is back. And you had that.

People who liked those skate games would be stoked. But if there were enough people in that bucket, they would have kept making skate games all of those years. So the goal with making a new skate can't be to just... appeal to the existing audience of skate players because that's a dwindling audience every day. All of us are in our 50s tonight. People are dying every day. Skate fans are falling off the map every goddamn day.

So how do you make a modern game that maybe appeals to a modern audience? And you're like, well, for starters, we can't sell it for $70. We need to make it easy for players to get into this. And so it needs to be free to play. And then maybe you get some eyes lighting up around the rest of it going like, okay, well, if we can do a good cosmetics business, if we can do this, if we can do this, maybe we can build a platform here. Maybe we can find a way to.

you know, make this into something that financially makes sense that EA might be interested in. And so probably part of even pitching that project and getting it off the ground had to include that. Because if you showed up in an EA pitch meeting and said, we want to make Skate 4 and we want to sell it for full price, just like the old Skate games, they're going to go back and look at the historicals and go, how many copies did Skate 2 sell?

Like 4 million? It's good numbers for them. But if you're telling me you're reaching out to try to sell games to 4 million people who... that was 4 million people who bought that game over a decade ago. How many of them are left? How many of them are actively playing games? How many of them are doing that? It's not a winning proposition. And so you have to come up with something different and you have to roll the dice.

There is a scenario where you make that free-to-play skate game and it still has some soul to it and it still feels enough like the old thing that you're like, okay, well, there's something here. I don't think they threaded that needle very well. Maybe it'll still somehow attract a brand new audience of people who just have only seen the TikTok clips of Skate 3. And they'll be like, oh, that's that game. I'm going to try that.

And maybe that gets them off the ground. I have a hard time believing that, but that feels like that's the play, right? That feels like that's your audience. That's the audience you're going for is people who have interacted with that game somewhere on social media. And have seen clips of it and been intrigued. And maybe they want to try it for themselves. And then you have to go make that game. So.

I guess all of that, you know, taking all of that in consideration, it's hard to be surprised by what skate is. Because again, if they had sat down and said, we're going to make it just like we used to make it, that game doesn't get off the ground. That doesn't get green lit. That project doesn't happen.

No one actually wants that. Or not enough people want that for it to be a thing. Because if those games were selling well enough, Skate War 4 would have come out two years after Skate 3. And we would have had Skate 5 and Skate 6 and Skate 7. And Skate 8! Otherwise known as eight, you know, I just think that that's the reality of it. And I think people like to, you know, ignore.

this stuff and like it isn't a fucking soulless business like it isn't a fucking very much a balance sheet like look at this what do we do you know like Especially electronic arts. It's a business. It's a harsh business. It's an increasingly harsh business. They're not going to make the skate that you wanted.

If you were a person who was just like, dude, they should make more of those. There was never a world where they were going to make just straight up another one of those exactly like that. It just ain't happening. Because the needs of a company like EA are too great. You know, you look at the Battlefield 6 stuff and like they're enjoying unprecedented popularity for this Battlefield 6 beta and the excitement for Battlefield is...

is there in a way it has not been in a very long time. You know? So clearly if they do everything right and they put the right money behind it and they do this, they can at least set the table. the table is set for battlefield six will battlefield six get it done i don't know maybe that game comes out and it has a bad launch maybe the servers are fucked maybe the progression is too stiff

Maybe the types of classes that you can build and be effective with are not numerous enough. There are a million different ways that people could come unstuck from Battlefield 6, even if they are hyped about it right now. Right? So even when you've got everything kind of headed in your direction, you've got that momentum. There are a lot of cases where that stuff could go all wrong. So in a case like skate where they're trying to capitalize on a social media trend.

That is now like 10 years old. Like, that's crazy. The whole, the idea that there's another skate happening at all. And the way, the roundabout way in which it seemed to get over the line and out the door is just bizarre. I don't know. You look at EA and you go, do they need to change their ways? Are they happy with where Madden's at? I don't know. This year... Madden came out, by the way. I don't know if you know that.

It feels like, and maybe this is just, you know, I exist in a very different pocket now these days than I probably did 10 years ago. But Madden came out and you're like, oh. like I want to partially chalk it up to what we were talking about a couple of weeks ago of like hey it really feels like games enter and exit the conversation way way way faster than they used to And I'm not sure why, whether it's the splintering of social media across multiple platforms or, you know, whatever it is.

You know, like stuff just enters and exits, especially single player games that people finish them and they don't talk about them and then they move on, you know, and they go on to the next thing. And like, that's probably bad. That's probably not a good thing for video games. Uh, because video games need to sell a lot of copies these days in order to break even. And so if something like a death stranding two comes along and I don't know what their budget was.

But if something like Death Stranding 2 comes along and people talk about it for, let's call it about four days, really intensely, and then it tapers off.

That's probably bad for the long tail of sales on a game like that, right? That like, hey, this game just kind of went away and... you know i don't know that that necessarily i don't know that the the social discussion doesn't always translate one way or the other into sales you know because people are going to hear about it at different times ago oh they put out a death stranding too i'll check that or oh it's on sale i'll check this out you know there's going to be different

reasons that players enter that funnel over time but um but yeah people in chat are saying like oh Madden does numbers like Madden always does fine like yes but like remember That EA is a corporation. They don't want to do numbers. If everything about Madden was predictable and nothing changed about it ever...

All they'd be able to do is cut funding from it in order to squeeze more profit out of it, right? They don't want to make the same amount of money they made last year on Madden. They want to make more. They want to develop another game and make more. They want to have a larger profit margin. They want to make more money on this thing. If they're just turning a crank and X number of millions of dollars coughs out every year.

that's not what they're trying to do because they could maybe instead be placing those bets on other projects that might have potential for a much larger return. You know, they're not going to kick that Madden money out of bed. But they're not here to do the same amount they did last year. They're always here to do more. And yeah, college football is not, yeah, like people were excited about college football and it seems like that's not where it was.

Excitement-wise, sales-wise, whatever. But yeah, man. Like I said, it's a goddamn business.

All right, here's another one. Could Dreams have been what Roblox is today if Sony just released it on every platform? Such a cool tool that just died because it was released for the wrong audience. If it were on PC and tablets, it could have seen a much bigger take up. I'm going to say no, because Dreams is also complicated. Roblox can be insanely complicated, but at a low level...

You can still get some stuff going in Roblox dreams in the time I spent with dreams, which I'll admit is not all that much time. It was a higher bar to get something acceptable or interesting out of it. And Dreams is just kind of a little clunky here, a little messed up there. Like it's not, you know, like you just kind of need, you know, better, better tools for making simple things. Like people need to be able to kind of fart something out.

and make money on it and have ways to play it. And, you know, yeah. So if you put Dreams on multiple platforms, I think that would help it. I think that would have helped it reach more people. I think the tools would have been better suited for a PC audience in a lot of ways. The VR stuff was always very interesting and what have you, but like...

Ultimately, yeah, if you had kind of better access to easier tools, that would have certainly helped it. But I think that the success of Roblox is sort of a... uh a different thing um stuffy ass don't tools and things like that already exist on pc yes but then you have to plug them into an engine like the thing about something like roblox

or even something like dreams to an extent, is that it's a universe that kind of comes with a set of rules. And so if you want to put a guy on the ground and have him stand there and jump, you don't need to rewrite every single line of code to make that happen. And engines have a lot of that stuff as time has gone on. You know, yeah, it is easier to do that than it was. But, you know, the tools of like, OK, I'm going to get Blender and make some 3D models. I'm going to rig them.

Now, how do I get these into UE? I import them over here, and then I got to sit here and stare at all these blueprints for a while. It has this work. Like that sort of scripting and building those sorts of building blocks, I think, you know. Something like Roblox will have a much lower ceiling, obviously, than proper game development tools, but it also ends up coming with, it's easier to find that floor for more people.

And so, yeah, you end up with that. And, you know, you would normally say like, oh, well, if you know how to use those tools, you should just be out there making real games instead of stuff for Roblox or Dreams. But also Roblox is a platform with a gazillion users. And so your ability to put a game into a platform that already has that many eyeballs on it is probably.

better for you from a reach perspective than trying to just launch something brand new and dumping it on steam and going i don't know i hope this i wonder how many roblox projects have marketing budgets Like what's the upper echelon of Roblox projects and how do they advertise and how do they get in front of people? I have to imagine that Roblox has built in tools for that. You can probably pay them.

to feature your game right i imagine there's a way to get your game in front of more people and and give roblox money to surface a game um Instead of just like having streamers do it or whatever. Like there's probably a way to like, hey, how much does the front page Roblox cost for a day? You know, or whatever, right? I'm sure that they've got some kind of placements. It would be weird if they didn't.

Let's see. John in Melbourne claims Revenge of Shinobi and Super Hang-On are the peak of video game music. Alright, yeah. He elaborates, when I was five years old, my parents bought me a Mega Drive that came with a multi-cart that contained Streets of Rage columns, some soccer game, Golden Axe, Super Hang-On, and Revenge of Shinobi. In the many decades since, what I consider good video game music is still informed by Revenge of Shinobi and Super Hang On.

If you need a question, is there any bit of video game music that is better than outright a crisis or the first level of revenge of Shinobi? The answer is, of course, no. You're right. The answer is, of course, no. It is hard to get. I mean, Daddy Malk. It's maybe better than OutRide of Crisis, but it's damn close. It's right there, man. Streets of Rage 1 has some good stuff. Streets of Rage 2 is a game I would put in that conversation as well.

as a couple of tracks from Streets of Rage 3. But I think the old SST, the old Sega Sound Team, I think... Obviously Yuzo Koshiro, you know, just like with some of the audio coming out of Sega's games in general for a good chunk of time there was really mind-blowing. Obviously, you've got like Zuntada on the other side of the aisle fighting tooth and nail with video game music and Robocop and all this other fucking crazy shit. And then you've got the Brits.

With all of their arpeggiators arpeggiating their lives away. Yeah. Is there video game music that's better than outright a crisis or the first level of revenge of shinobi? I'm going to say not. It's hard to say anything is better than that stuff, but there are a handful of tracks that I would probably put on the same pedestal as those two. Outride of Crisis is... I don't even really like super hang on or hang on as games. They're fine. But man, outright a crisis is unbelievable.

And then half the soundtrack to Streets of Rage 2 and maybe a third of the soundtrack to Streets of Rage 3 I think probably ends up similarly on that. in that same sort of bucket. What else, man? I mean, Daddy Malk is right there. From Ninja Crusaders or whatever. Ninja Warriors. People in chat are right. Streets of Rage. Streets of Rage 3 is a weird soundtrack. It is definitely like there's some kind of crazy stuff on there. But like the stuff that goes hard goes unbelievably hard.

Again, Streets of Rage 3, not a game I would say that I care for, especially. I feel like Streets of Rage 2 is the sweet spot there in a lot of ways. 3 is... The fucking weird meter and the three, three is just a strange fucking game. Um, yes, poets one and two. I believe I like two more than one. It's been a while. I need to go back and listen to it. But the Poets 1 and 2 off of Streets of Rage 3 are... It fucking don't get much better than that, man.

But I feel like if we're talking about video game music, and we are, at some point we hit a weird line, right? Like there's, and maybe it shouldn't be thought of this way, but I think there is a pre and post compact disc technology. you know, there, there is sort of a line you hit that like once it's just CDs playing music that, that stuff, I think, you know, just becomes kind of a different, like the conversation changes.

And I was very quick to discount a lot of early CD music because it just sounds like music. And you're like, that's not as impressive or it doesn't, I don't know, it doesn't work for me in the same way. Like if I'm just listening to CDs, then, you know, we could be listening to Rob Bass and DJ Easy Rock. One of the first CDs I ever purchased, right? We could be listening to Eazy-E here, you know? And, uh...

But when I go back and you know, I was not, I didn't, you know, I could have been because of all the video games I played, but I just, my brain never made the connection.

My brain never connected video game music to quote unquote real music for a really long time. It was always like, ah, this is over here. This is a different thing. And I like it. It's great. But like, I don't, you know, like I don't, I don't really spend a lot of time thinking about it. I don't spend a lot of time taking it super seriously.

And now I do. But I take music from that era much more seriously. Like modern video game music, I think there's plenty of great music out there. But it's music. There's plenty of great music all around, right? And so it becomes more about how does this music fit into the game and how does it work within the confines of the game and whatever else. But then you get the stuff like Command and Conquer, you know? And some of the tracks in that game are so, so good.

But again, a lot of it is specific to like in the confines of that game. I would listen to that music separately, but it's only because I also really like the game, right? But I did not advance. I think a lot of people, this was their through line, right? And this kind of was a later connection for me that didn't happen until the PlayStation era when Wipeout XL came out.

but like the, the progression of the club inspired tracks of streets of rage to into electronic dance music, uh, the early days of techno. Acid House, you know, whatever else that those games were being informed by. Like there's a version of me that got way more into that stuff years earlier. But I just never took it all that seriously and never really connected the dots. I'll tell you this, and this is probably a part of my Nancy Reagan upbringing, the anti-drug.

propaganda of the time um kind of bleeding into some of that sort of stuff but like I was I would I would describe myself as lightly afraid of techno music Of dance music. In the early 90s. As the stuff that as it got darker. because a lot of that stuff got really poppy and you know like CNC Music Factory was on the radio and you go back and listen to those tracks now and you're like oh this is all right there with that stuff it's just a very sanitized

poppy version of you know what what the clubs were into and had been into and and all of that but like there was just something about there was just something about electronic music of that time that i just i found really um hard to hard to grasp onto it was really just like i don't i don't this is It was it was like there was maybe like a little bit of fear attached to it. And I had to go to a rave. When I was 19. The.

the Glenn and I talked about this on the relevant episode of game boys to men, uh, I believe, but like we, the company we worked for, the magazine we worked for, they held an event, uh, And they had another magazine that was for developers, software developers, like just developers in general. And they never quantified what they meant by developers. And it was called Morph's Outpost. And they had something called MorphCon. And it was a bunch of...

You know, they had a show floor and they had a bunch of talks and developers would come and be developers. And they had a rave as part of it. They're like, yeah, and there's going to be a rave. And this is like 1994. And I'm 19. Still living at home. Into what I'm into, which is to say G-Funk. That West Coast shit. And I had to go to this fucking rave. They made us go. They're like, no, you need to go. We're going now. We're going now.

This would happen a couple years later at GameSpot where they decided to have a party and they're like, yeah, we're having a rave. This would have been 96, 97. And I was again forced to go. Because like, no, you have to go to the party. The clients need to see the editors there and see that everyone's having a good time. Yeah, okay. It was like attached. It was like part of E3.

And I remember going and it's just like, here's this dark room and this music is just like, and I'm just, I'm not, I'm not really into the music part of it. And it's just like, this place just seems like it sucks. And everyone here seems like they really fucking suck. And I'm just, fuck this, man. And the Morphs Outpost one, they were way more, they were like that kind of 90s hippie. techno hippie like let's log on to the well and send some emails man it's all magic bro

Like they were the like older generation that was like lashing onto this technology as if it were mystical somehow. And it's like, no, you fucking moron. It's a goddamn computer. Um, and. The Well was an ISP based in San Francisco. If you don't. If you're not aware. But like. Doug Rush coughed up. Yeah, don't. I met Doug Rushkoff. At that time. Doug Rushkoff was probably at that rave. Because he had written some stuff. He was around. He was around.

And yeah, like that whole scene of just like technology, man. Whoa. Like it was just such a like, you know, as someone who was like significant, like, you know. 10 to 15 years younger than those people and had grown up with all of this technology. Whereas they just like stumbled into it and thought it was like discovering fire and treated it as such.

It was just an embarrassing, like it was just, you're watching these old men be old men and you're just like, Jesus Christ. Shut the fuck up. Anyway, it was like, it was just, I don't know. They were just very embarrassing people. I don't know. And, and I worked for them and we worked for some very embarrassing people. Yeah. The same way it's, it's, it's basically, it was the nineties equivalent of the tech bros, fucking micro dosing.

Like we're just taking a little bit of psilocybin to open my mind to new ideas about NFTs. You're like, you suck. It's the same exact thing, man. But like, ugh, these fucking people. Just the fucking worst.

Burning Man. Yes, Burning Man. Burning Man. Let's see here. Let's find some more emails here. Matthew writes in and says, what do you think feels like the more threatening harbinger of video game calamity? Your perspective around Myst's release or the current... anime block sections of events like opening night. Yeah. After Gamescom opening night live, we were kind of talking about, uh, you know, this like chunk of free to play anime games and how just it does not pretend.

You just look at it and go like, ah, jeez, guys. This doesn't feel good. I think that stuff is worse because I think that stuff has a lot more funding behind it. Mist at the time, the frustration around Mist... For me ended up being largely unfounded, right? My worry about mist was mist came out around the same time as doom. And you had all of these mainstream writers who had not played a lot of video games.

coming into the space and saying, Myst is revolutionary. Look at this amazing, the future of video games is right here. And as someone who had been playing video games for a good long time, it was very easy to look at it and go, You made a Laserdisc game. You made like a slightly different take on the Laserdisc game. Like you've made this FMV thing that is like...

It's just a puzzle game with some video in there. Like I played Dragon's Lair. I know that this stuff is a fucking scam. Like you can't fool me, man. Have you played fucking Doom? What is wrong with you? Why would you be in here telling me about how Myst is so revolutionary? Have you seen what the fuck they're doing down in Texas?

Did you see Wolfenstein? Well, now this is Doom. Did you see this? I have a beta build of Doom where when you shoot the BFG, the game almost crashes and in fact does crash sometimes because it's spitting out a zillion tiny balls before they decided to make it one big ball.

have you seen doom you should check out doom and you had all of these and it's you know it was all kind of around the same time that multimedia era where again a lot of people who didn't know jack shit about video games came into the space And thought that they saw the future and thought they saw God and the magic and the spirituality of the internet. Like all of the same bullshit. It's the same people that are losing their minds to chatbots now.

The same sad fucks. Over the years, my feelings on Myst have become insignificant. I don't really feel a type of way about Myst. At this point. And it was never about the game itself anyway. It was. The reaction to Myst. And the way. All of these people. Came into this space.

didn't know anything about it, and heralded Myst as the greatest thing the medium has ever seen, fucking sucked. And that whole era... of fmv the cdi the 3do the here's this super expensive compact disc thing that plays a bunch of shitty video and you know like it was

There was a lot of shit happening around that time that, you know, if you had a 16-bit, you know, and they tried, the problem is they all tried to treat it like it was like, oh, this is, video games are growing up. This Super Nintendo shit is for garbage kids. This stuff is bad over here. We're doing the, this is the, I'm going to intellectual put my, put my glasses on here and tell you why fucking Groyler's interactive encyclopedia on CDI is going to change the world. You know,

And Carta, that's where it's at. And so watching all of that stuff unfold, again, this is like if you wanted to find a fucking blueprint for shit. that I'm angry at and will always be angry at. And I've always been angry at it is this, right? It is this, it is people coming into video games. with no fucking knowledge of what any of this shit is none of the history none of anything like no no knowledge of what makes this space tick and try to tell you this is the future of it

Because they see an opportunity to fucking get paid. They see an opportunity to fucking move it in a direction. That made me angry in the 90s. It makes me angry now. it's just it's a different kind of thing now and the thing that's changed is I think you know you have a lot of people that have experience in the kind of more traditional video game industry who maybe have like hit a wall

in their current career who go like, oh, well, you know, I couldn't find anything. I couldn't cut it over here. And so now, now I'm just going to get over here and make Facebook games. That's what it was 15 years ago. And now it's phone games. And now it's free to play on PC and console and everywhere people are. Like the people that kind of are just... They're in the slot machine business. You know?

They're not in the same, like it's all become part of the same industry and it, it used to not be this way, right? Like the gambling games, the, the things that we're going to like fuck you over on a money front used to be off to the side and. you know, advertised as gambling. Instead, you know, all they had to do was take the winning part out of it. Like now you never win real money. Now you win anime horse lady and people are like, great video games are saved.

And here we are, you know, and I, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm into some of those games, right? Like it's not, it's not the end of the world. I think that, you know, that's, that's maybe the craziest part about it is that some of those games are. within the confines of their nightmarish monetization schemes, those games are becoming increasingly well-made. It's the thing that we said when Genshin Impact got big, is you're like, man, fuck.

Someone finally came along and made one of these and they made it good. That was all it took. They took all the traps they've learned making phone games and Facebook games and everything else for all these years. You ran out of energy. Would you like to buy an XP doubler? Would you like to do this? We can do this research. You can pay money right now to skip the research and do this.

And then someone just had to come along and say, oh, what if we merged all of those ideas with something that just looked like a fucking video game? And there you have it. You know? And so that's where we are today, right? Is, you know, you had something like, I would probably, you know, you could probably say that like, especially if we look, if we look to the East, if we look to Asia, I'm sure there are games that came before Genshin Impact.

But I think the impact of Genshin Impact can't really be undersold in this specific way, right? In the West, at least. And... Yeah, they, you know, developers chipped away at it and chipped away at it and figured it out and finally spent a bunch of money making a thing that looks really good and looks, it looks like a game that has a story and yeah, it has a story and has this and it's got all, you know, the graphics are really nice and we did this and...

And so they built a whole new formula for bringing the phone game style, mobile monetization, slot machine, pull five star fucking anime lady to all platforms. And every platform was ready to have it. They're like, yes, bring your gacha games to us. We would love, yes, yes, bring it all over here. We'll happily carve 30% off of your anime wife business and take it in perpetuity. Yes, let's do this, man.

And here we are. You can't necessarily blame the platform holders. You could probably extend this case out to say like, you know. Publishers used to have a much firmer hold on the games that appeared on their platform than they do now. The PlayStation 4 is largely thought of as an amazing video game machine. They had a lot of great games. It revolutionized indie publishing on console because they allowed for self-publishing. The problem with self-publishing

Is that if you let anyone publish anything on your platform within reason, you are letting anyone publish on your platform. As long as it meets your specific guidelines. And all of those guidelines are written around, oh, the game shouldn't crash. Oh, you should say press X to continue. All of their stuff is written around stuff like that.

I don't know. Did it get too easy to make games? It's a shitty road to go down because I think the other side of that coin... is we see amazing independently developed games from unique perspectives, from small teams, from the, you know, like there's so much that comes along with that, that is worth seeing.

And so how do you, you cannot separate those two things without Without a platform holder becoming unfair and picking and choosing and gatekeeping their platform, which maybe is not the worst idea in the world in some cases. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what the answer is there, you know, but there are so many games that come out on steam every day. And a lot of those games come on console as well. And, you know, we were at a point where the rapid.

knockoff of a popular game on another platform is like beating games to you know like before the original can come out on a platform And get ported to switch or whatever, you know, like three knockoffs have already made their way there. You know, like it's, it's filthy. Like there are aspects of all of this that are just like, that are really fucking grimy. Um, and.

I don't know what you do on that. I don't know. I don't know how you can't unring that bell. You know, you can't just say like, oh, we're only going to let traditional publishers publish because there are no traditional publishers left. What are you going to be like? Well, we're going to EA and Warner and Ubisoft and who else?

I guess Nexon and I guess NetEase and I guess this and then you're right back to where you were. MillerDuck says knockoffs of games like Schedule 1 are all over the Switch. Right. Exactly. That is... Literally the game I was thinking of when we were having this conversation. Yeah. Schedule one, very popular on Steam. So of course, crews got together and knocked off a clone of it.

and threw it up on switch i'm sure that there's probably some on playstation and xbox as well you know it's it's super But I don't know. I don't really have a great solution there. Captain Fram asks, do Steam curators get kickbacks from sales? No. As someone who has run a curator page for... Not that I keep it up to date per se, but no, unless there's some special deal out there for someone, you know, who has a more popular curator page. No, I don't believe that.

I do not believe that anyone is making any money off the Steam Curator stuff. I've never seen anything in any of the curator, like the backend pages for administrating a steam curator page. I've never seen anything in there that has anything to do with business or giving them a place to send money or anything like that. I don't think that steam has any sort of.

There used to, I want to say there used to be like, you know, you used to see links, um, like link tagged links to steam pages as people were doing some kind of affiliate type thing. but I don't know if steam has like an affiliate program of like, Oh, you clicked on this link and then bought the game. And so, you know, like something, something like that. But, um, Yeah, the Steam Curator stuff is not, it never felt like fully baked to me. But yeah, it's sort of a weird thing.

Let's see, maybe we can get one more question here before we got to go. Thomas writes in and says, I'm an enjoyer of your NES ranking and I respect the science that you do. I know that you've stated you will not be ranking any modern NES games that are being made today, but I was curious what your thought on the concept of developing for obsolete systems is.

Do you think that a larger modern audience could be made to actually care about these homebrew projects beyond the niche audience of retro enthusiasts that they serve? Lastly, are there any of these titles that you know about or have played at all? So I think it's really cool.

that people are still making brand new 8-bit Nintendo games, and you see like, you know, and that people make dev tools to make, like, you can go get like an SDK kind of for making Genesis games. It's fucking weird, but it's awesome.

that that stuff exists um and that the tools have gotten way better and and that you know some of that stuff is easier to use um i can't think of a single game that has been made in that that like that sticks out as like oh this was an amazing video game and oh it's so cool that this exists and i like i i'm not yeah i don't know like i i i do

look at some of that stuff here and there and there's you know there's a wide variety of things that um that have come to a lot of platforms i mean you know like you could say that um uh earthy on the so that just came out that that kind of fits into that bucket as like hey this is an actual genesis game and they ship it on steam but it's really is an emulator running a genesis game um

that stuff's neat. I think that there are ways to kind of go beyond and make something that is, you know, a very high quality and, and, and what have you, but like, I, Yeah, Xenocrisis is another one that kind of comes to mind. Like they made a lot of versions of that. There's like a Dreamcast and Neo Geo version or something of Xenocrisis. Xenocrisis is okay. But like, eh.

There are a lot of old games that I haven't played that I would be interested in playing before I go try to play a bunch of new old games. You know what I mean? So I think that stuff is interesting. I love that it exists. But it's not something I stay super closely attached to. It's not something I really keep up on. I mean, Crazy Bus already exists, right?

Once crazy bus shipped for the Genesis home brew is dead, man. It doesn't get any better than crazy bus. So, so fuck it. Am I right? That's going to do it for the show. Thanks everybody. for hanging out um it's been a crazy i i recorded something before the podcast this morning so i there's a whole separate video that i need to take care of and process and get ready for later in the week and

And I have not eaten anything. So I'm just like, I'm here at the end of the show going, uh, what are we doing? I'll be back tomorrow. We'll do something with some video games. And, uh, Yeah, we'll do something with some video games tomorrow. Again, like I said, we're entering that time of the year where I'm now playing a bunch of embargoed stuff.

So I have to, like, figure out what... I've got to stop playing that game. Maybe we'll play Skate. Maybe we'll take a look at Skate. Because that's available for that sort of content production. Uh, and then Friday we'll be back to rank some eight bit Nintendo games. So come on through and we'll make it happen. Have a good rest of your week. I will see you. Yes. This is the first descendant is always there for us. Yeah.

I have a lot of ladies to level up. I need to level up the rest of my ladies and I need to find more parts so that I can make more ladies. That game... Not to bog you down with a bunch of first descendant news, but that their new season rollout went so bad that they gave everybody like 33 levels on their battle pass. They're just like, oh, some stuff's broken.

and uh as an apology for everything here's a bunch of battle here's here's a ton of battle pass xp oh god um it feels like they're scrambling a little bit that thing All the new content they put out is bad. Even the wall crash. Right. There's your first ascended minute. I will see you next week. Have a good one. Bye.