2025's Best Game And Biggest Game (So Far)

Hello everybody and welcome to a new episode of the MinMac show, a place about games, friends, getting better. I'm Ben Hanson in the MinMac studio and thankfully I'm not alone because- Well, technically you're always in the MinMac studio, aren't you? Well, I'm in the upstairs MinMac studio normally. Oh, the other studio.

Yeah, we have a studio and kind of like a mini studio in the mansion that is the handsome place. And some living space. Yeah, I mean, kind of funny who, am I right? Like, this studio has a house with it. And the crazy thing is the rooms shift around every day. This guy still got it. You said he was all washed up, Leo, but look at Jeff. I take it back mostly. Of course, we're joined by Sarah Podzorski. Hello. We're joined by Leo Vader.

I'm a hungry, wongy gamer. Check on the show plus for context. Joined by Jeff Marquiafava. It's me. Welcome in studio recording. It's. It's rare. You know, it's kind of tough to line up that idea of like, okay, we have nine people at min-max. Everybody's played these different games. And then on the horizon, you see like, wait a minute. Enjoy blueprints. Is it gravitating towards a Minneapolis possible crew? And the answer was, yes, if we...

kick out Janet. Everybody else is super excited to talk about these games. I know, it feels bad limiting it, but it's like, what's the value of in-person versus limiting it? They can talk about it. any other week just like the sims chat we can have it to schedule it at any time why even bother putting it on the main podcast that's what bonus pods for absolutely can people hear our chairs like

squeaking together, do you think? Just back off from me. I'm not going to have a problem with the chair squeaking. On this episode of the podcast, we're talking about some darn good games. We're talking about Blue Prince. Apparently one of the greatest games of the year. Let's unpack it. We're talking about South of Midnight is out, everybody. Unpacking that one in a big way. Schedule one.

Don't call the cops. We're talking drugs on this episode. We're going to be talking about Inzoy, which is that Sims, to say clone is offensive. What's a better way to put it? I don't know. Sims inspired. Reincarnation. Reincarnation. Big old fat wannabe. Nubby's Number Factory is a game that Jeffem did not make up. We're going to be talking about Promise Mascot Agency, Leo. Yes, please. And then we're going to return to Atomfall. And at that point...

It will be nightfall. It's going to be a long, big episode. Hey, thanks, man. Thanks, Leo. Yes. We got great questions as well from the community. So look alive for that. If you're wondering why we're not covering anything that was announced during the triple I showcase. The answer is check our YouTube channel because we're streaming our reactions to that there. But we're not going to be covering that because we have not experienced it yet because we're recording this technically on Wednesday.

A Wednesday. And you know what happens in just a couple weeks, Jeffem? What? We're kicking off the next deepest dive. Oh my goodness. From Onimusha to what could we possibly tackle next with the deepest dive. We've locked it in. Ladies and gentlemen, if you're ready, and by the way, if you're new, thank you for being here. The Deepest Dive is the best most of our discussion about games on the internet. It's a multi-part game club discussion.

where people who support us on Patreon can submit comments and unlock the podcast version of these discussions which are otherwise public on YouTube. Next deepest dive is going to be the one, the only, Plock. No, it's going to be Claire Obscure Expedition 33. Nice. Thank you. The Xbox. promoted game the big french rpg very inspired by a lot of japanese rpgs so we're going to be tackling that it's coming out april 24th it's going to be a big one

I don't think the game is going to be like, you know, Atlas level length, but it's going to be on the bigger side of a deepest dive. So there'll be multiple discussions we're covering. uh in the first discussion which will be airing the week after the game comes out we're covering everything in the game up until you get the fourth character

which I love that as a stopping point. Very clear. When you get the fourth character, that is the stopping point. And we love doing new games for the deepest dive. Typically we've been like, well, Zelda, that's going to be good. We should tackle that for the deepest. I've got a Ragnarok. We're feeling good about that, but it's tough. When you don't know how the game is to lock in a deepest dive. Right.

Wink, wink. We're feeling good about tackling Claire Obscure Expedition 33, that RPG. So if you're craving another RPG Deepest Dive, you can support us on Patreon. Join along for the journey. Submit your thoughts on the game as we unpack this game in a huge way. Just like we're going to unpack a game called Blueprints right here, right now. This game, this is Blueprints as in King's Son.

Is that just a play on blueprints? Is it really right here right now? This is why I'm so bad at this game. And it's actually, it's not just that. There's a play on play on play. In this game, there are puzzles and puzzles in puzzles. Wow. Okay, this is a conversation that's going to be delicate and tricky. We can all navigate in our own way. We're not going to spoil anything. It's a game that has...

You know, the easy comparison, maybe a lot of people are comparing it to Outer Wilds. Immediately stop. In terms of if you go in blind, you're going to have a much better time unraveling the mysteries of what's actually happening in this game. Okay. As somebody who loves Outer Wilds, my big sticking point with the Outer Wilds comparison is...

When you finish, you unlock the big puzzle of Outer Wilds with knowledge. Once you have the knowledge, you can get through Outer Wilds no matter what. Even if you start the game, end the game, whatever. Blueprints. because it is that sort of like roguelike game, you can have the knowledge and RNG can just say like, no, right. You can have the knowledge and the run can just suck.

So I would never compare this game to Outer Wilds. Like I, I went in being like, people said this was like Outer Wilds. And then I played it and I was like, this is not like Outer Wilds at all. Why would they lie to me? However, you're loving it. I do. I do really, really like it. OK, OK, so we're going to unpack this thing. So what I was trying to get to is just.

Spoiler free discussion. Yeah. It's an interesting thing to talk about. Like I was watching interviews with the developer whose dog you bomb is the name of the developer technically. And then Tonda Ross is the creator here. for this new game, which is out on PS Plus Premium Extra Extreme.

extra spicy cheetah whatever the hell they call that thing at this point the highest version of ps plus but um even interviews with them they were bleeping out words in the interview so they weren't spoiling things And the words they were bleeping out, I'm like, how could that possibly be a spoiler? Like the things they're describing, there's no way. So basic premise.

First-person puzzle game. You know, the developer is a huge fan of Myst. Riven is his favorite game of all time. But it has a funky structure where you're entering this mansion that you've inherited. But you can only inherit the mansion if you can find the 46th room. And then the roguelite element that Sarah mentions is At the end of every run, every day, every time you run out of steps that you can take or rooms you can enter,

then everything resets and you're building up the mansion again. And it's like, It's like Hypercube. Everything's just rearranging in the mansion as you go in again and uncover these different things. It's Hypercube. We all know Hypercube. It's kind of like a Hypercube-like, more than a, you know, Outer Wilds-like. But is that the basic premise? That's the starting line for talking blueprints?

Yeah, it feels like Betrayal or any other board game like that where you're laying out the tiles and matching the doors together. There's that basic level of good feeling. from from laying out a house like that and being just you know separate from all the mysteries and everything it's just like really satisfying to end your day with damn i filled this house i could get everywhere and i had these places that link together like there's that that level of laying it out is just satisfying

Yeah, it is funny. To start it out, I was like, oh, I was not expecting it to feel just like Betrayal. And Dan Reichert's been over the moon about this game, and he's never played Betrayal. So I was like, oh, it's kind of a nice indicator. I was like, okay, you're going to like it because it'll remind you a little bit of blueprints of just getting to choose. which room as you're slowly building out this mansion. Okay.

I'm like two hours in. I'm a little baby stupid boy. Jeff, where are you at? You're in that ballpark too. I'm like twice that amount. I'm pretty good. Big boy on campus. Leo? Okay, Sarah? I'm 30 hours. 30 hours deep. This is the part that when I'm only two hours in, I'm trying to fathom because I think the game is cool so far. But the way people are talking about it is like, oh, that's cute.

That's cute that you're going through the rooms and sometimes there's a room tile that you lay down. It's like, oh, there's a little puzzle in here. They laugh in my face just like you're doing.

I am happy about that and I'm happy to be talking to you two guys because that's where I am at this point and it's just like everybody's talking about this is a great puzzle game and I've seen like two or three puzzles and i don't you know what's amazing though is you have seen a hundred puzzles and not realized it yes no leo is so so so true like i 30 hours i've walked through these rooms over and over again and i'll walk through a room

And then I'll just stop and I'll be like, wait a minute. And I'll just turn and I'll be like... puzzle puzzle so it's so fun because like it's fun to go into this game and it it very much prepares you for there's a little note you can find that's like hey

keep a notebook and you know it's bad when the game's like you're gonna want to write this down i know but it also it makes me more excited like to have a game where it's like if you aren't focusing 100 you're such an idiot so as i'm going through i'm just writing down everything of like

okay, there's a playing card in this room, and then this room, there's this thing that is on the wall, and it kind of looks this way, and then there's this over here. Like, is that the level of note I should be taking if I want to make the most out of this game? There's... more notes that you should be taking but that is also where i started i started in a very similar spot i would say my

suggestions for like if you're picking this game up for the first time is whenever you have a room option always pick the new room because there's always something new in it like very important the point of the game is like you're on this sort of like playing board and there's like the antechamber at the far far north and it's eight squares or nine squares away it's like it's far away and you have to the game's like you have to get there Right. And I was hyper fixating on.

trying to build my way there as quickly as possible yeah but It's actually better to prioritize the new rooms that will actually have puzzles and pieces of information that you can unlock to make things easier for yourself. Like there's other puzzles to solve. There's like things you need when you get to the room. So it's like I would always prioritize.

a new room okay over like because i'm just trying to get there the stupid main path is the idea of like okay how do i not just cut off every route possible to me which room is going to leave okay this hallway is going to extend up here so then i can technically get in through this way just

Don't make myself hit a dead end here. Or can I afford a dead end that'll give me some resources because I have these other possible routes to go? But sometimes you'll then get a draft where you get your three rooms to choose from and all of them are dead ends or none of them help you. And then I cry. And then you cry. And then you just cry and start over. And there's like ways you can make...

I think you know a lot of people see a game like this and they're like am I gonna be too dumb for this everybody seems really hot on it but they're taking a ton of notes and they seem really smart

And that doesn't seem like me. That is also not me. Like I fell off Lorelai really quickly in a lot of games like this, but this game has a really smooth onboarding where it's like you detect certain mysteries and you get pulled in one by one until you're seeing all these threads. It's like really gradual and feels really personal. Like it's this.

adventure you're going on or whatever but the luck is going to be more frustrating for people i think when they have a run and out of nowhere thinking they have all these chances like oh this is helpful if i can take if i can get this other room this one room becomes really useful to me and that just not happening will feel bad but there are ways to mitigate that risk there are ways to get resources that let you re-roll rooms and frankly I had a run and heartbreaking. Such a huge...

and I had like one specific goal that was not going to be that hard to get to, but I just ran out of like gems. You need gems to... Gems and keys and specific keys to unlock specific doors and... I think what I had to learn the hard way with this is you have to be flexible. You do. You have to be flexible. So you have to like, you can't go in and being like, I'm going to do.

I'm going to get this room and this room. And when I get these two rooms, some rooms, you need to have rooms attached to them. Yeah. So it's like, you're very much like depending on RNG, right? And you're like, I'm going to go in and get this room, this room, but you can't, you have to see like, what does the game give you?

And then explore that. Like I have like two or three puzzles that I'm working on at a time. And I'm just like, okay, like, let's see what happens if I like try this or I go this way. But I have been playing for 30 hours.

And I am pulling rooms that I have never seen before. And that's like... New clues in it. Okay, so the frustration is you might... get screwed over by the rng every once in a while but then the benefit is i mean people are playing this game for 100 hours and still discovering new stuff so just have that level of like freshness with the rng in a puzzle game is the part that feels wildly unique yeah wildly unique right but you have to have to bring like

patience to it and openness. And like Sarah's saying, I was too zeroed in on that run. And at the end of it, I'm walking back through the house I created with tons of extra steps. Oh, I had so many steps. That wasn't a problem. But I'm looking around and I'm trying to figure out like...

Is there anything else I can take notes on here? Anything else useful about the way I laid this out? And I go into this one room and it is like my world opens up. I'm like, oh my God, I never noticed this super basic thing about this room. And now this whole other thing. Like this run just became useful because I noticed this. And what is unique about this game for me?

note-taking wise lots of games you got to take notes yeah a lot of puzzle games you're kind of just taking notes of like keys to solve code to solve codes with you know like deciphering things And there's not that much of that in this game. What I take more notes on is simply like goals, keeping track of things I want to do, like finding. This room has a secret entrance. I need to find that. I'm seeing these things. Where are they appearing? Can I make a note of which room has which thing?

There's this one thing that seems locked. I unlock that just like remembering what these open threads I have. It's like my own little mission diary here that has like 20 items in it. And that one thing I found ended up being like, yes, I can check this off now. I've achieved this goal because I figured this out. Yeah, there are literally notes that I took within the first five hours of the game that I didn't use until like hour.

And I'm like, you walk in here, you can look at my notes. Tell me if it... How many spoilers are in here? I don't think... The thing is, is this looks like the Zodiac Killer wrote these notes. Yeah. These are just drawings of Sonic's feet. So it's like, I don't think if you gave someone else your notebook, they would... be able to decipher it similarly i think i saw leo's i can help you with something in there if you want but like nice

This is psychotic. And that's the thing is, again, you don't know where these puzzles are. And so what a lot of people are doing, I'm curious what people at this table are doing, is not just notes, but screenshots of every document. photos on my phone there's no more progress on my phone it's just me taking a photo of my computer screen perfect yeah i i have my i just have like shift tap to steam to go to the screenshots folder constantly because you know you get this document

You don't know if it's useful. You have to get lucky and get this room to even see it again. So you take these screenshots. And there are times where I'm like, does this connect to this? And I have to go back 100 screenshots ago. And I'm like, there is some code hidden in here that I had no idea. And now I have access to that. So that's really unique to it.

screenshots and everything and some people might find that annoying but it's cool to be building this library to me yeah and jeff and you're going with like temporary tattoos on your body or how's your yeah i can read them backwards when i look in the mirror yeah no like

This makes me want to pick it up again and play more because I've only done like a couple of runs. I got to the antechamber, but you can't get into it. And I was like, well, I don't even know what to do next. And it's... so it's it's good to hear that there's how naive apparently all this other stuff that i have been missing but now i'm gonna have to get myself a cool little notebook and start taking notes

And you the rule is you're given as you start the game is kind of like the house will reset at the end of every day and you can't take anything out of it. So it feels pretty hard roguelike that way. And just like you're going to be gathering information, but but resetting everything. But I hope it's not too much of a spoiler to say there are permanent upgrades and things. There's other, there's ways that you...

change things outside of the specific rules you're given that make it really satisfying and not like you're hitting a bunch of dead ends. It feels like you're working towards something. It's just so weird to have a structure of a game like this. I feel like most puzzle games...

But most puzzle games like, all right, solve this puzzle. OK, Hotshot, solve this puzzle. OK, Hotshot, solve this puzzle. You know, so it's so cool to like empower the player in this way to give you some semblance of choice of which direction at least you're laying out the house and some semblance of.

making it feel a little bit like a strategy game in some ways for like how you're building this thing over and over again. The idea of any two people going through this game the same way is completely unfathomable and trying to talk about it with.

other press people who are playing it, which this is a game that you want to talk about when you're playing it. You want to compare notes and go like, what did you think of this? Has anybody solved this? But don't give it away. Just give me a hint. It's really fun to have those kinds of conversations. It's so hard to vibe check people. You're like, so!

Did you get to the... And then you just kind of look at them and you're like, and have you unlocked the... And what would I do if I wanted to... And that's how, like, you're trying to... I think the big thing for me is I've... because it's a big puzzle game and it hasn't it's launching tomorrow right so there's not a lot of people who played it

It's literally just you and your own mind. And I think that's like what's been bothering me the most. Like even if I had questions, I can't. What am I going to Google? Like there's nothing. There's very little online about it. So I'm just kind of like, OK, well.

I guess we'll just keep, we'll go in the other direction for a little bit. Like the thing about this game is like, I finished a puzzle and I'm like, there, I did it. Like, I just, I just know this is a big thing and I've solved it. And now this is going to make my life so much easier. It's another puzzle.

The reward for solving the puzzle was another puzzle. And it'll never end, apparently. And it will never end. And I love it. I'm uncovering, like, there's like so many layers to this, right? There's like the main level, but there definitely is things that I think.

I don't think you need to solve every puzzle to finish the game. Yeah, you can roll credits. Yeah, you can roll credits and not have seen, I think, you haven't even, like... gotten down to like the deeper part of the iceberg and you could already roll credits on it okay yeah uh something also unique to my notes in this game is a lot of questions where i go does this mean this or if i do this does this happen reliably there's so much of like

is this how this works that you're just figuring out the logic of the house? That's really cool. And so many of them are, does this work this way? No. No, not at all. You go down these completely wrong. Like I have so much.

so many notes like yes this and this and this and this and none of it ended up mattering but you just like find your own threads and that means you invent them sometimes but when you are like in sync and you tap into something that's really going on it's a really really cool feeling yeah and i'm like deep deep in the Coming to this house, your uncle has passed away and he was a baron. So it's like, you're going to inherit it.

I'm stuck in like the family drama aspect of it too. It's deep. There's deep. Big year for wills between red trees and blue brands. Honestly, yes. Yeah, I read one review when I was trying to figure out what the hell to make of this game because I wasn't getting anywhere. And they were like, oh, there's so much about the family tree and all this strange stuff. And I'm like...

I've seen like one picture of a person. I have no idea. That's the weird thing too. It's like jumping into this game. I was like, all right, digging through everything. Let's crack open some drawers. And you realize like, well, there's much.

less interactable objects in each room than you expect for this type of game. You think it'd be like a VR game or some immersive sim where you're like scurrying through everything, lifting up the bedsheets. It was like, no, no, it's like occasionally there's something sitting there you can grab. But most rooms just kind of...

seem like what they are it just seems like an empty room and you hear how big this game is and you get into it and pretty soon you're like i feel like i've seen most of the rooms right and they can't be laid out in that many different ways but then you it's like It's really incredible how small it seems at the top and then how much it.

just branches out as you as you learn more and more yeah it does have that like it's deceptively small feeling which i think is why people have had a really easy time getting into it even if they aren't necessarily big puzzle people yes is it

It's approachable at the top level. And then it just gradually, wherever it feels natural for you to get into it deeper, that's how you get into it. Weird. I mean, how hot are you on this thing? Because Haley's already like, it's game of the year. Locked down. Top 10 easily. Okay. Of all time. I feel like we're on the lower end for the way people are talking about this. Right now on the Metacritic, it's right below Split Fiction and Monster Hunter Wild.

Yeah. Or it's up there with it. Yeah, I think those are the top three. Top 10 for me this year, I think. It'd be really crazy if it got knocked off at all. And the first game I played this year, I was like, I could see this being min-maxed game of the year. Whoa. Okay. Yeah, what's crazy is, like, people will play it for, like, an hour or two hours, and they'll be like, game of the year, and I'm, like, at hour 30.

And I'm like, I do I do believe it's like a really, really good game. And I'm like, you haven't even. You've only been like two hours. You just like being like bathroom here. But I think it just proves like there's really nothing like this game. Like I find it hard to compare it to other games. I saw like people were joking about calling it like a Metroid brainia.

and people were saying that we're not allowed to call it that but like there's really nothing like it and if you like you'll like this game i feel like after i play this game i don't want to solve another puzzle in a video game ever again okay like none of these like zelda puzzles like i just feel like this

completing this game i should get a phd yeah and the ability to never have to play a video game puzzle ever again yeah i agree that'd be nice yeah and i i don't consider myself a puzzle game person either but but it is it's still drawn me in because of like the roguelike stuff because there is still that satisfying resource management and like learning that system almost is what brought me in and then it's just the rest of it is

too exciting to be like invested in all these different threads that I have to figure out to like stop like yeah the development's a weird situation too where the lead developer here he created it eight years ago And he said he made it in about six months.

of like okay here's the build with like you know unity assets thrown in there and stuff and figuring out okay the the secret to the 46th room that was done And then it's just been iterating, iterating art director music, obviously, but just like.

from that but i love that idea that like the the core concept has been around for eight years and you've just been play testing it and adding more layers than apparently we could possibly imagine it does feel on that spelunky level of like this this first game That is the only thing that's like itself right now. And it just comes out perfect. Yeah, there you go. Blueprints. There we go. This is like, can you imagine being the publisher of Raw Fury? Talk about the dream get.

we've got a puzzle game okay there's a lot of those these days let's see how this is going and now it's like all right everyone's screaming game of the year game of the year blueprints the answer was blueprints that's what the industry needed that's right There we go. Blueprints. Again, it's on PS Plus, but also it's everywhere except for Switch, I believe, for that thing. It's on Game Pass as well, right? Ooh, is it? Yeah. One of those rare double entities? Yeah.

Fun. Sea of Stars, I think, was maybe the last one that was the exact same bucket. Jeff, just because it feels maybe a little bit related. What's with you and Inscription? Why are you in love with Inscription in 2025? Oh, yeah. I tried to play Stalker 2. Because I liked Adam fall so much, which we'll get back to. Yeah. And it was on game pass and I put it on.

my series x and it ran so bad that it instantly gave me a headache and so i was like well what other games are on game pass and inscription was there and i was like I remember everybody yelling at us that this. This should be our game of the year. I was yelling that. Were you? Yes. He hears you as multiple voices. We need to listen to Sarah more often. That's what I'm saying.

It did fine on our list. Are you literally looking it up right now? No, I'm just checking my email. No, it was number 28, someone told me in our chat. Really? I literally, I loved inscriptions. And it turns out Sarah was right all along. It's crazy. It's super good. I was a fool because I looked at screenshots when it came out and was like,

I don't want to play a deck builder where the cards look like that. Mr. Deck Builder? Mr. Bad Looking Card Game Lover? Well, this was back in 2021, so I wasn't as into him at that point. Brad, your previous life. But, yeah, it turns out...

The production value is... just off the chart and and i didn't like the the kind of aesthetic of like kind of old grungy you know older era graphics like i didn't appreciate it and i didn't i didn't appreciate until i started playing it that like I've never actually played a deck builder that exists in 3D space where it's like...

But like you're so you're battling another person on the other side and you have to do, you know, so many points of damage. But the way they visualize that is just the scale that's sitting on the side of the table. And every time you score points against them.

like golden teeth drop on their side of the scale and it ticks over towards their side of it and it's like and it's it's a tug of war back and forth like so if they score against you all of a sudden you have to score more points to get back and it's just like Like, that's a fun mechanism. It's not that different from other deck builders. But I've never seen it visualized in such, like, a tactile, satisfying way. Queen's blood says hello.

No. Are you serious? Did you really bring Queen's Blood to the instruction table right now? You're not even going to say hello back? Yeah, but so I streamed some of it and then I kept on playing. I immediately bought it on...

Steam Deck so that I could play it on my Steam Deck. It seems a great one to go back to. But now I'm like split between two... like both places on xbox and steam deck i made a lot more progress on the xbox version but i will totally happily go back and play it on steam deck now but i got to like

I got out of act one and that's when everything changes. And I feel bad because, because this is what everyone said. And what Sarah said to us, like, it gets crazy. And it's like, okay, well that sounds cool that it gets crazy. But it really does get crazy and once you see how like like trying to avoid spoilers for people I think does a disservice to the game because like

It changes into a completely different game and like completely blows wide open in terms of what you're doing and the deck building aspects of it and just becomes this whole other thing. And I'm sure there's even more. I'm sure. Sarah sitting there thinking you're a fool and you haven't even seen what comes next. Um,

She wrote it in her notebook over and over again. Yeah, she did. I'm surrounded by fools. But yeah, turns out it was really good all along. Dang it. Dang it. I'm curious to see, because the best thing I ever heard about that game was something that happens later, and I'm curious how it works on a Steam Deck.

Please report back with full spoilers for inscription once you figure out how that all works. Yeah, to have a man vouching for it is great. That actually would really help it. 2021 was a hard goatee year for me, if I remember correctly. I disagree. Chicory got number one, right?

Yeah, but there was still a rough year. Therefore, no one can complain. That was the chickery year. But it could have been the inscription year. Leo, how many times have you seen the Minecraft movie at this point? Hmm. Um... It's high triple digits. High triple. Yeah, I get that. Hooten, hollering. Did you know that before Minecraft was a hit box office smash film from Hollywood?

From the director of Napoleon Dynamite. Polly weird, but go on. It used to be a video game. Whoa! Created by a man named Notch. If you remember the legend of one Marcus person in Notch. I'm trying not to. Well, this is the thing. What if... There's a podcast from BBC, everybody. This is an ad. There's a podcast from BBC called The Good Bad Billionaire.

And so they go through and kind of give the journey of a bunch of different billionaires figuring out how do they get their money? What is their life like these days? And so I subscribe to it. If we're going to be promoting on the podcast, I want to check it out. I'm a bit of a podcast junkie. And I was like, oh.

Notch? I want to hear that story just to remind myself. Like, you think you know the story of Notch and Minecraft, but going back and listening to it, it's like there was so much in there that I did not know. There was so much interesting along the way. Like, I forgot that the company that Notch used to work at in Sweden, uh... eventually became King, the creators of Candy Crush. And like he tried making a game.

like leading his own game that then was absorbed and like launched as a king game well before it was called king but you know what i mean And I guess it just completely bombed. I didn't know that. That's so weird. Like he had like a pet project that he gave to them and then that didn't work out that well. And he's like, well, I'm going to go to take source and actually develop this game called Minecraft on my own.

And then it explodes. But there's so many twists and turns of that saga that you forget. Like, remember he was making that game called... c to the power of 10 after minecraft for a while and he's like the space one yeah the weird space cube thing for a while um and also a lot of you know tragic stuff in his life you probably forget about but then it's like you know

not she eventually went off the rails and that's what the podcast dives into in a lot of ways you know not uh overlooking how much you went off the rails but it's fascinating to hear You rarely hear billionaires be that transparent about how miserable they are. And this is what I think is fascinating about the story of Notch that this podcast called Good Bad Billionaire really gets to. Like having him write in his blog.

about like, yeah, you know, I got billions of dollars and I'm having a bunch of parties at my house. Like I invited Jay-Z and Beyonce and Tony Hawk and we're all partying at my house and I've never felt more alone. Like this feels... terrible and it's just so crazy to have somebody openly talk about the way we all assume every billionaire feels right yeah um anyways so uh there we go to hear more about marcus person

Listen to Good Bad Billionaire, the podcast from the BBC on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, the BBC app, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's not just a Notch podcast, by the way. That's just one episode. There's a whole bunch of other ones. Taylor Swift and... drug dealers, some real bad, scary people. Taylor Swift was dealing drugs? They get into it. She actually made Schedule 1. That's right. Should we dive into Schedule 1 here?

What a game. What a moment for what a game. What a moment for what a game. I feel like this came across all of our desks the same way. We're games media. We have this list of games that are going to come out and games that we're going to cover. And then all of a sudden... Like, out of nowhere, it's like, oh, everyone, every Twitch streamer I'm watching is playing Schedule 1. It has, like, millions and millions of downloads. It's got millions of players. Like Steam puts it as like the banner.

Which, you know how hard it is to get the front page banner on Steam? Is that money? It's hard. Or momentum? It could be. The thing is, it's a... momentum mostly it can be money or momentum okay and it's hard to get momentum that reminds me of a good bad billionaire no it's funny like seeing screenshots there I was like this looks like a steam of the cream game this game has a real cream vibe to it

This is how we had to cancel it. Oh, no. It's a bit on its grave. The game felt creamy. Yes. No, it totally did. And I mean, we all played it. And I was like. ready to be wowed i was like what is what are the secrets this game is hiding and i i've come to the conclusion that it's good but like

anything... It's not hiding anything special. It's a first person... open world drug creating and selling simulator the easy pitch is imagine first person gta but through the lens of drug wars on the calculator is that what we're working with

Sure, yeah. Chinatown more specifically. Yeah, more systemic. More, you know, getting drug dealers and giving them your drugs and them selling them and reporting back to you and stuff. Yeah, but before Leo gets critical, just like lay the land here. I mean, Sarah talked about it tearing up the charts. I mean, right now it is...

There are more people playing this than Monster Hunter Wild on Steam. It is the biggest game of the year that's new. It looks better. Yeah, what do you think about this? What do you think about this? I enjoy it. I mean, it's really smooth and...

You play it and you're like, I would like this just as much if it was like, you know, a game about making crafts and selling, making a little craft selling business just happens to be about drugs. And you're doing that. That happens to be the satisfying things you're doing of like snipping the buds off the plants and mixing them with. donuts to make new flavors. I do like getting my Sudafed for my meth.

And then putting in a little chemistry container and then like stirring it all together. And then I like to break the meth with my little hammer. The thing about this game is like it has a lot of really satisfying mechanics and it's just really solid.

yeah it's solid simple good mechanics the tactility of it that you don't get in most games even even like bigger game like if you think of like uh grand theft auto san andreas where it was like that that was like the closest that like had actual systems for you know like

taking over gangs and you were and you were actually doing like illicit things in it but it was like But you're not like snipping the top off of like a soil bag and then tipping it sideways and or like, you know, like actually, you know, like using your little watering can and like aiming at like.

It's it just has a layer of like you're actually doing these very specific things. You're going to you're going to plant a seed for your marijuana and you like pop the top off of it and then you turn it and the little. seed like actually rolls out and falls where you've where you've aimed it like

And then just like walking around, it's like, I got to get to the hardware store. Like it's going to close in a minute. Like I can probably run over there and get back before curfew goes into effect. But like. But I'm carrying all the cash that I made and I have to get to an ATM first to deposit it because they only take credit cards. Oh, I should remember to pick up a garbage bag because the garbage is full and I have to...

Like all of this weird, like the minutia of it is what makes it a sim game, I guess. And what and what is more interesting to me than just like, hey, click on this guy and you'll get 500 bucks because you. in a in a like a more generalized look at it that you usually would get yeah but as a drug dealing game it like gets far enough where you eventually outsource all that like i i watched my friend play it who is playing it till 6 a.m every night for weeks

And his operation is unbelievable. Him and his friends talk about getting, like, tricked into playing Factorio because those systems gradually come in until you have, like... 30 employees easily and you have all these things mapped of like this storage goes to here and this goes to this delivery thing and these deliveries come to the loading zone and people unpack them. Do you have to worry about the cop? Crashing in on that like I saw in a video review

There's a really fun mechanic of like you can get like searched by the cops and you have to move the drugs in your inventory pocket. You can only move one thing so you can like move them around where they're not searching you. It's like that is such a good idea. the gamifying that is cute but the like actually raiding your business is not in the game yet it's early access and that is coming but as of now there's no threats like that but you can like get a gun and uh shoot cops yeah oh yeah

Like I was getting searched by the cops and like my friends just came up and started pummeling the cops. And then we threw their body into a trash can. No harm done? No harm done. She had the trash bags for it. But it's cool because people text you and they're like, meet me here for the drop and you have to go to the drop to get seeds and then you can do your own drug.

And the drugs have pretty like interesting effects. Like one lit my hair on fire and then it was like anti-gravity. So I was jumping onto the tops of buildings. Like you can, you can like when you mix the drugs, you can like, you know, do your own supply and stuff. And the effects are pretty funny, but. Yeah, it's just really solid. And I feel like at a time when a lot of games releasing are not solid, I think people are really enjoying this. Yeah.

It is funny to see it just blowing up in such a huge way. It's very flattering and very sweet, but it's funny because it's one of the most played games in the world at this point. So I reached out for some codes from the developer. The developer's studio name is TVGS. And the email they sent back is like, well, I can't believe MinMax wants to cover my game.

Do you know who's streaming your game? Check your sales list. Yeah, exactly. He's too high. He doesn't really understand what's happening. Okay, take back saying it's a good game. It's a great game. Oh, wow. Interesting.

So co-op, is that a big component? I think it adds a lot to it, but a lot of people do solo runs, and I think you just progress a little bit slower, and you have to rely more on your dealers and your employees, whereas when you play with a group of people, you all usually just assign your own tasks. like I tend the marijuana buds you know that's my job I make sure that the marijuana is growing well and then we have like the dealer and then we have the person who's like

You progress through owning different buildings. Like you go from the motel to the room above the Chinese food to like your own home to like a warehouse. So it's like you kind of got to complete more main story objectives. But I would say it's better as a... People play it alone, but I'm like, I just don't feel like it. Yeah, I've been enjoying it alone. It's like a podcast game for sure, doing the simple, satisfying stuff.

mostly outsourcing it to dealers you can just choose what products you have for sale or not and you can just have nothing be for sale if you don't want to be like catching up with all these orders but it also is fun to go like

Somebody wants a certain thing you can negotiate. Actually, I'll give you five of these things for more money. And they're like, OK, fine, I guess. And you say and it'll be in the morning and then you make it overnight and you have the deal set up in the morning. That little. The systems there are enough to be satisfying and fun. And they'll show up on your doorstep, too, if, like...

Like I've had people show up and I'm like, get out of here. Like the cops are going to come. There has to be. It's hard being a drug dealer. It's so hard. It's so hard. Our heart goes out. But like there's got to be thousands of. drug sims on steam so it's so funny to see one just

All right, this is the one. This has the quality that we need, and you're roping in the nostalgia for drug wars. Everybody really wants GTA 6 to come out. Honestly, I wonder if there's any ounce of backlash for GTA 6 if at the end of the year people would be like, you know, what was my GTA 6? And I'm Pretty Smart was Schedule 1 on Steam. It does feel like the way GTA could have gone. Yeah. For sure. Right.

piss poor graphics and just focus on being edgy. That's part of the charm. I find the graphics be part of the charm. Yeah. And Grand Theft Auto Online is like almost in that direction where you own a bunch of different businesses but it still is just stuck in the Grand Theft Auto engine where all you can do is shoot people and fly around and do some menu management but it's like if it went more into your building a business from scratch

uh illicitly yeah i don't know it's it's cool to have that that version of that open world yeah for sure uh this ain't open world at all unless you count the south as one big open world jeff on which i know you've gotten on a platform and Declared several times. The point is the game is called South of Midnight, everybody. South of Midnight is out from Compulsion Games. This is a Microsoft game from the studio that made We Happy Few.

Which I had to look up. That went 1.0 back in 2018. It has been a long time since the last Compulsion Games joined, but then contrast before that. This is the game that... A love letter to the south, some would say. A gothic folk tales from the south. And then the gameplay itself is, Jeff, how would you describe Southern Midnight? You asked the wrong person. Uncharted-esque, but not nearly as good at doing anything. How we're describing it is that it's very nostalgic of the Xbox 360.

era is how i think that's a good way to put it okay it's melee only yeah picture uncharted yes right right i was thinking traversal my yeah yeah i i'm liking the game but i realized that i don't like any

what I'm doing. It's like the sum of the parts is better. The thing that I do really like is I really like the setting. I like the characters. I like the story. I love the idea of like Southern folklore as a thing that you're pulling from so that's the stuff that's really keeping me going in terms of like The actual gameplay, the exploration, you know, like the traversal is what I really meant when I compared it to Uncharted. Like that third person, I'm going to climb around on stuff.

nothing really feels good about it feels pretty janky it feels like i'm always trying to jump on something and then i float there for a second or like i'm i'm not getting up ledges like That kind of stuff is just doing nothing for me. I don't particularly like the combat. I think the combat... is more fleshed out and a bigger part of the game than I was expecting. But I just don't like games where... go into this area we're gonna lock you in

we're going to spawn a couple waves of enemies. The DMC kind of arenas. It is funny because I'm really, I beat the game. I enjoyed it a lot. But still, every time you got into a combat arena, I was like, you guys, you don't have to do this. We don't need this much combat in the game fighting the same enemies again and again. Big kudos to them. They are another one of these games that I will...

bless up and down every time they do it they give you a ton of like difficulty sliders that you can affect so i like turn down all the combat i've been enjoying the combat more because it's because i don't have to just like constantly dodge and get in one little hit

when i want to like like i can breeze through it pretty easily and get back to the story parts that i'm actually liking and so it's it's just it has been a weird game where it's like 90% of the time, if you ask me if I'm enjoying what I'm doing right now, the answer is probably no, but it's like...

But the larger part of it, I'm still being drawn back to. And it's like, and the rest, I think I hear in a lot of that, I think the rest is just so smooth and simple for like, you're not going to get lost in this game. You hit R3 Dead Space style and they go, Hazel, come this way. That is a great effect. Like the presentation, including stuff like that is really, really cool. Yeah. And so everything there just makes it so smooth to keep rolling through.

Sorry, did you guys know that Ben has like... He takes like a lot of notes for the podcast. I never do that before. But I'm sitting next to him and he has like pages and pages of notes. Yeah. And I've never taken notes for the podcast before. It's because you're a professional. I'm a rookie. But you've got a book there at least. Yeah. Come on. My 13 blueprints notes. Shall we go through them?

But that's the thing is like, it'll keep you moving forward and that setting and the story and the characters and the presentation, which is all kind of a stop motion animation look like that is, it feels so unique that like, that is what's propelling me through the game. Even if. The classic example is like, without spoiling it, even like the final boss, I was like, please don't let this be the final boss. This is such a disappointment. Like, okay, I still really like the game, even if...

you can see kind of the production limits here and there. Like I hit several bugs. I got stuck in geometry a couple of times. There's a lot of kind of like those pops like jumping between cut scenes to gameplay and stuff like that, that I think maybe with patches will be smooth that I was playing pre-release technically. Which, and also like coming from compulsion, I'm so happy that they have been tackling bigger and bigger projects. Like I played contrast way back in the day. It's like.

You've come so far and that's really cool to see. Yeah. It's, it's just. I like the story stuff more than like, I have done this kind of traversal and combat before in many different games. And this isn't. This isn't adding anything new for me, which sounds like a really shitty criticism. Like, very jaded criticism, I understand. You're definitely out of line, but are you guys digging it? Yeah, I mean, I have only played, I think, like three hours of it.

But I've been so impressed with the music in particular in this game. The opening song, when you're running through, it opens in a storm and you're running through the storm, right? the opening song when they bring out the trombone i was like this is what video game music is missing yes trombone like you really feel like they set that like deep south kind of like rolling feeling with the music and then they have

individual songs for specific parts of the game with lyrics that match the individual parts of the game. I'm like, what's happening? It's so smart to make you care about... premise of the game is you're trying to find your mom who is swept away in a big storm. The house was swept away. And then chapter by chapter, you're kind of just uncovering different... Southern folklore characters.

trying to wrap your head around their trauma basically it it feels a lot like psychonauts in a way narratively of you're kind of like jumping from mind to mind not literally the mind but just trying to wrap your mind around what did this person go through how can we help fix this along the way while doing some simple DMC style combat there. But it's so smart.

As you're going through these areas, when those songs start to play, feeling and connection with this larger character that's usually going to end in like a big boss fight against this big creature but just to be like to have a song narratively drive home like there's a big alligator it's going to destroy like it connects you more and it makes you more invested every step of the way it's a cool way to kind of spread the thrill of the big folklore character throughout the entire chapter.

Sure. Yeah. I'm feeling about the same as everybody else here for sure. Like the presentation is unbelievable. And just the design, like that claymation type look, the figures or whatever, it's more accurately liked. Yeah, just like seeing a new character's face. You're like, I love that they made this character's face look this weird. This blatantly stylized. Like, I'd love to see that so much more in games like this. Yeah, sir and I went to a GDC talk along with Hayley about the animation.

uh, in the game. And yeah, it was really interesting to hear them try and just analyze a lot of Coraline references. And, you know, you talked about it on bonus bod with Haley, but that was interesting just how much they were trying to mirror the kind of what hiccups and pops, what they call those, the kind of just like. weird jittering that stop motion has like how can we put that in a game without it being too distracting but like it it does look

So good. And I'm totally with you. Like the characters are great. And also like the voice acting for so many of the characters like, God, I am. I am so into the voice acting for this character. And it turns out it's voiced by the guy who did the mocap and voice for Jar Jar Binks. And he was the most up director for all of this game. And it's like, oh, he's my favorite character in the game. That's incredible. Yeah, just knocking it out of the park.

But on the music front too, like, yeah, the big themes are great, but then also just the small... details of like getting into combat for most of the combat how it's just like pretty simple raw drums as you're playing why does this feel so rare in a game just to have this level of kind of I don't know, tactile nature to the soundtrack even. I don't know, Leo. As a drummer, was that saying that to you? Sure, yeah. I mean, like, it's totally...

Every time a game has needle drops like this where the music matches and fits and is like such a part of the experience. uh everybody is like i want more of this you know we all love it and games don't do it that much for some reason it's weird that we still

I don't know. Probably we all do this. Not just me. Think of the Saints Row the Third moment with the Kanye West song. Of course. When we think about good needle drops in games, even though that was 15 years ago, that's still like... one of the most relevant examples of it because it's so underdone but it is really really cool to see them lean into that so hard with especially with like a new genre you don't see really focused on right right yeah the um the animation is awesome specifically

My favorite animation of the year so far is it's like when you respawn, I think when dying in combat only, there's this. The whole thing is about weaving. She's a weaver. It's very kind of thread-based. They could have called it Eternal Strands, really, and nobody would have blinked an eye. Although I will say, Sotheby's Night, the more I think about it, that is a great name for a game. Yeah. It's cool, mysterious.

But the animation when she respawns and she comes in on that string. Yeah, like a spider web. It looks so damn cool. Are you into, um, do you have Crouton yet? The little buddy character? No, not yet. Okay. Yeah. Curious how you react to him because it's like a little buddy that you can control and...

To your point of gameplay not ever being really revolutionary, it's like, it's a little buddy you can control. Isn't it fun? He can kind of crawl into small holes and uncover secrets. Press a button on there when you get to... Yeah, exactly. It's like, okay, it's not that interesting. But...

also in combat you throw him and then he takes control of an enemy and fights for you it's like all right this little crouton freak went from a zero to ten to a ten out of ten if he's helping me in combat in this huge way and it's so fun just to like toss him and take control okay that health war is blue let's focus on this now

It's fun just tossing him out of everything, honestly. It's like, I'll be like walking past some shack or something. It's like, can he go up there? And you just like whip him against the wall. And he like goes, like, I'm just constantly chucking him at stuff. Is it like a spider? scary stuffed animal. Think of like a Voodoo Vince type situation. Midnight. Let's see. You're going to love the way he looks. I guarantee it.

oh yeah yeah he was in the opening claymation and like they had like a whole bespoke opening claymation which was crazy yes which was bold to be like let's show you what we're going for with the gameplay Which doesn't live up to it. It doesn't live up to it. It was so cool though. This game has so much.

in the vibes camp going for it like yeah the branding i call branding but just like the way they brought all these things together with the art and the music and the characters and like the folklore and the accuracy but you're like and then i'm just Why did you put combat in it? I'm with you guys 100%. I'm like, okay, I'm playing it.

what was the reason this could we have maybe changed this to be i don't know something else but i mean more narrative based i guess but like it feels it feels fine even if it's not revolutionary and you know as you're going through the gameplay

Yeah. You know, you're going to be doing some wall running, which might be the most exciting. I like the float. But other than the float, like wall running might be the most exciting thing you're doing as you're navigating the space. But at least the settings are nice. Like I was flying through the bayou and I'm like, well, I mean. At least it's a nice setting to run through. It could be worse. Has wall running jumped the shark?

Are we at a point now where like split fiction, plenty of wall running, Mario Kart is wall running. I feel like a long time ago. Yeah. I feel like Jedi, the second Jedi Knight or whatever was when I was like, I don't ever have to do this again. Wow. But, I mean, no offense to Leo, like, it's different in multiplayer games. I could see how that would be, like, your standout of, like...

i'm sure that i'm sure it's very satisfying then in game in like single player games where it's just like you're following these linear paths and it's like oh This time you're going to run on the wall, though, to get to that side. It's like... I don't care anymore. Saying stuff like this in an in-person setting when I can do physical violence at any time? Really bold, man. You're still very much into wall running, you know? That's your big...

That's what I hang my hat on, yeah. It's like, what? You're just not going to complain about running on the floor. You're just going to run on the floor like everybody else. I'll be happy with it forever. Ceiling running. that's the future baby yeah i think you did that in spot friction though yeah you actually do a lot of that which by the way I beat

just a couple days ago here. We got the full playthrough up on YouTube. Ending was hyped up and still was like, yep, that got me. It gave me goosebumps. Did you cry? No, not that level. I did. Back to South at Midnight, though. There was like, it was like, okay, I appreciate the story. Appreciate the story. And then there's like one line read. I was like, like, okay, now I'm more emotional than I ever could have expected. Like after a little hug, there's just a moment that like fricking got me.

nice it'll sneak up on you the writing is good surprisingly good yeah and I love that there's like a bunch of time spent at the start introducing you to the characters in your neighborhood that's like cute funny little scenes and then they introduce you to weaving and the magic and stuff and it is

five seconds i love the pacing can i say i love the pacing of this game i feel like most games they drag it on a little bit for too long this game you're like i love that we're just we're moving we're grooving like we're getting our weave we're talking okay we're out you don't need to over justify why the magic is real or whatever we can just get it and then play and it's funny I'm curious to see like you know

how much feedback they got from playtests and stuff because they have like kind of a glossary in the game like an index you can go through a codex for mass effect of like if you want to see exactly who these mythological creatures are all the characters stuff like that But then on top of that, in between chapters, they do like a recap kind of like storybook thing. Like, here's everything that just happened.

And here's a reminder of where you're going next. I wonder if they got the feedback. I'm like, I'm confused. They do that a lot in game as well. Like the number of times she was like, oh, well, stigma must be when, you know. someone experiences trauma and then it turns into a knot and it's like, yeah, I've, I've read that at this point. I've seen it in cut scenes. You've sung to me about it. Like I'm, I'm good. I understand.

Themes. Jasmine Roy was the game director for this. She was the designer on Deus Ex. Human Revolution and then Watch Dogs 1 and 2 apparently I'm really fascinated by David Sears who's the creative director who Leo Might have a connection to one of your favorite games of all time where he was the creative director for Rainbow Six Patriots before it was rebooted and turned into Rainbow Six Siege.

And he's a really interesting guy. Like he goes back and he was a designer on I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, which is the adventure game based on that Harlan Ellison book, which just got re-released now. So it's like a weird time for David Sears here. Yeah, he's really, he's talking to me as a very bold guy. Hey, Sarah, do you want a Game Informer cover story, trip story?

Yeah. All right, Sarah, coming right up. No, I remember when he was talking about Rainbow Six Patriots during the interviews, he was like, hey, do you guys know who the biggest funder of terrorism in the world is. I'm like, uh, no, I guess who is it? He's like, the United States military. PR, like I've never seen them spring into action. We cannot say that. And he's like.

technically that's the whole point of like our elite forces is they are terrorists just extremely well funded and there's like Ubisoft is like melting down Raven Six Patriots interesting game and then they cancelled the game and then the game imploded and there's a lot of but the game from our cover story still exists still exists and now you can read it probably well the archive on game informer's site it only goes back i think

10 years? I don't think it has that. It's got to be in the Video Game History Foundation. Yeah, it's got to be. Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. It'd be in that one. Anyway, South of Midnight. Congratulations, Compulsion Games. This is...

I was bouncing back and forth like, is this fair? But it's like, no, I think I think it is. Sarah, will you stop? I'm just making sure that you talked about all your talking points that you wrote down. OK, I don't want you to leave anything on the table. The green highlighted ones are ones that I really want to make sure I don't miss. What, the alligator on the chain leash? If you like big stop motion alligators on a chain leash, you'll like this game. That sounds great. That was my point.

No, but just that idea of as I was playing it, I thought a lot of Psychonauts. I thought of Hi-Fi Rush. for kind of simplicity and level design sure And then thinking about Hi-Fi Rush made me bummed out. Where at the same time, I'm very happy that Microsoft is funding a game like South of Midnight for years and years. I think it's a really cool game in their library at this point. God, are they going to get shut down now? Can you imagine a universe where South of Midnight's like...

the sales so many people got game pass because it's south and i'm not trying to be doom and gloom out of the gate but it's just like i feel like this game lives and dies by is it winning awards and if it's not winning awards what is the point of Microsoft's library at this point, which is so brutal, but I think that's where they're at. And it's like, and even then it's eight months until award season. Right. Yes. Yeah.

Not fair, except it is fair because Microsoft shut down the entire studio that made one of the greatest games the last couple of years with Hi-Fi Rush. So it's like, that's on them. And so we can't feel good about any of these kind of more... artsy projects, if you want to be generic that way, you know? But if you get Game Pass, you can play South of Midnight and Blueprints. Consider that.

And they can't shut blueprints down. They can't shut blueprints down. It's not the Midnight's the name of that game. What's next? What's next, Sarah? What's next on this deck? HelloFresh. That's right, Sarah. Oh my god. And because it's physical, we can... Do we get to eat your dinner? Well, you got to make it first. But the good news is...

HelloFresh has meals that can be ready in 15 minutes. What do you see, Leo? I'll pass these out. Which one do I get? Look at all these recipes. Which one do I get, Leo? You don't get to eat. I got San Antonio beef balls. Can I unpack, unbox this? Yeah, sure. I almost said unpack. Should this be in your fridge?

Oh yeah, we should probably get in the fridge after this. With HelloFresh, you get farm-fresh pre-portioned ingredients and seasonal recipes delivered right to your doorstep. Skip trips to the grocery store and count on HelloFresh to make home cooking easy, fun, and affordable. That's why it's America's number one meal kit. Look at this.

They send you the HelloFresh stuff in the little box. You don't need to organize it and get it all lost in the fridge. Where's that seasoning packet? It's all ready to go right here. This one's the San Antonio beef bowls. Can you tell us about it, Sarah? Please? Um, let's see. Does it have a lovely blurb? Okay, so step one, you wash and dry your produce. Finely dice the tomato. Half peel and thinly slice onion. Finely chop a few slices until you have two tablespoons.

And then you zest and quarter a lime. Right. Half. and de-seed and finely chop the jalapeno. People need to get HelloFresh to get these recipes. You can't give it all away for free. Leave seed in for more spice.

Good tip. Good tip. Making the salsa from scratch on that one. Hanson, mine has chicken cutlets in it. That should definitely be in the fridge. I'm not interested in doing it correctly. There's a big ice pack in here that keeps it cold. That's right. No, generally HelloFresh the other day, it saved...

It saved the day where we had company coming over to watch Survivor because we're a cool household, you know? And it was like my wife's like, I don't want to think about dinner. I don't want anything. And I'm like, hey, I'm not a good cook, but... Hello fresh arriving at the doorstep. I got it covered and I made some beautiful chicken tacos some spicy seasoning on top of that Jeff my friend that came over for survivor

He said, this is so good. Ben, you made this? And I had to sincerely say... You survived on the island. That's right. Thanks to HelloFresh, even a Dumbo like me can make this possible. HelloFresh, everybody. Get up to 10 free meals and free... high protein item for life at hellofresh.com slash min max 10 fm one item per box with active subscription free meals applied as discount on first box new subscribers only varies by plan that's up to 10 free

HelloFresh meals. Just go to hellofresh.com slash minmax10fm. Jeff, will you get this HelloFresh out of here and up to my French for Christ's sake? Please. Um, can I take it home? I don't think so. Give it here! You'll have the Huel and you'll like the Huel! That was like banter. Hey, Sarah, um, Enzoi. Oh, okay. Post-ad read? That never happens. This is the game that is like The Sims, but it looks damn fine. Yes, this is a very good-looking game. It's out in early access.

A lot of people have been playing it for a little bit. It's got the uncanny valley. You can make what they call zoys look very, very, very human. With a straight face, they call them zoys. They call them zoys. Okay. And you can do face tracking. so like you can track your face you have an iphone so i couldn't do it but you can track your face and it puts it on the zoe and it's actually very very like you can like your cheeks puff out like your tongue can poke like it's it's

I'm like, why did they do this? Which is a lot of what I ask myself when I play Enzoi. You can also even make emotes out of videos. You can upload like dance videos and it'll make it so your Zoe does the dance. Which is insane. I made one of Elon Musk doing the jumping X. And it's really weird because the video is from an angle of like up in the corner. And when my favorite Zoe does it.

They just, like, teleport to 45 degrees at an angle halfway through the floor and they do it. But it's, like, a perfect recreation of the animation. It's just that the video's wrong. Also, before we see, like, YouTube comments, like, they have had some weird AI controversy noted. They've said that they've been training their AI on their internal stuff, but how much do you believe that? They have a whole option where you can drag in 3D objects and the game will make a really...

bad version of the object in game. The part that freaked me out the most is I watched like IGN's early access review and it was like at the very end, they're like, oh, by the way, the NPCs in the world talk about the power of AI and NFTs a lot. They also talk about stock. And honestly, some of the translation, it's giving like... Not like AI translation, but it's giving machine translated in some locations. They say some really weird stuff. Like the Zoys will like text you.

And they'll be like, I've been tracing your face every night. And I'm like, you're doing what to my face? And the thing is, it has all the pieces of a Sims game. It's got... the zoys it's got jobs it's got a place that you can live and decorate it's got other places you can go but the when you put the pieces together it just doesn't quite fit and the game i just feel like it is early access

And it's got like really, you know, it's I like it because it's open world. So you can leave your apartment, walk down your street, walk to your job. You go to your job and you have to do things at the job itself. Isn't it like Sims 3, which is your favorite? So it's like I like that aspect, but also there's just no.

substance to it like i talked to this guy for like 20 minutes and then we were like we could get married and i'm like this relationship is moving really fast like it's like you progress the relationships too easily um I stole a baby at one point. I just picked up a baby off someone's floor and brought it home with me and like... nothing happened and then I stole every baby in the neighborhood and put them in my house and they didn't leave until they aged up as

Kids have been walked out the front door. Thanks, mama. Is there like a karma system? There's a karma system. And that gives you positive karma? I don't quite get it because it's there like, oh, like warning, like basically zoom out. The whole thing is like you're working in a company and you're God and you're building these neighborhoods, basically, and you're managing the lives of all these Zoys. And I appreciate how easily it is to switch between households.

You can just see another toy and say, I want to play that one. And you will instantly switch perspectives, which I think is awesome. And the Sims should steal it, which is how I feel about a lot of the ideas in this game. You can do like bad things and get negative karma. And then I like stole money. And then the cop showed up to my house.

and they threw me in jail, and my Zoe was just stuck in jail for a day, and the days are really long. Yeah, especially in jail. The days are super long, and I was just stuck in a jail. And I'm like, I'm literally just, this is just, I guess I'll just go play somebody else for a little bit. Everything is like, you can tell it's Korean because they only have like Korean products.

Like you can buy a car and I'm like, oh my God, the Hyundai Ioniq 5. I've always wanted to drive one of those. And then you can actually drive it like with like, it doesn't just like teleport you places. You can actually drive it and then hit others always. And they had to patch out hitting children?

because people were doing that so the kids just kind of like phase like the ghost no they go red doll oh well now well now now you hit the kids and it's just like a solid object which i don't think is you know i think the car stops yeah the car stops the car

Okay. But thanks to the Honda collision, the airbags go off. Yeah, thanks to the Honda Ionic 5. And everything's like LG, too. Like an LG screen. And you're like, oh, okay. Cool. So it feels like as if The Sims... was heartless and I'm not saying this game is made by AI but it feels like as if The Sims was made in a heartless way by AI and it's technically impressive It's like they had all the pieces and they just missed like they missed

some like how they work together like they just did the algorithm wrong that's interesting i've only played a few hours and i definitely wanted to talk to somebody who likes the sims a lot to see if what i'm missing is just like me not having much experience with that genre because it is a lot of like You have people and you have their general wants and you kind of like let stuff happen and see how things progress, but it doesn't seem like.

that many interesting stories are coming out of it for me i tried to make an evil child and i was and the character creator was a blast and i made a great looking evil child but Very limited in the ways I can be evil. I kind of bully one kid at school. Yeah.

extent of it. Not great relationship with my parents. I threw a party like a rager overnight while they were asleep but there weren't really any consequences for that. When you were in elementary school you could do that? That's hilarious. Yeah.

yeah it's just like it's got like the pieces and some of the pieces are really really good yeah and then they just kind of they don't like you know the relationships are kind of weak they don't really mesh well but it's like i feel like this is almost any make your own fun it's more of I didn't really enjoy playing as a family basically I liked the single player baby kidnapping arc that I was going through yeah that sounds pretty good

It's like it's early access. Can they add that kind of flow to make everything feel better as it moves along and stuff? Weird release within Zoe. It's like, oh, this was the segue I was missing. It's Crafton who's publishing this thing who ended up buying Hi-Fi Rush, which South of Midnight reminded us of. So how about that? There you go. Wow. Yeah. Full circle. See, I wrote that down. Did you see this, Sarah? What is this about? There's footage that leaked of the new Sims game.

That's like a mobile game? That was by Project Renee. Okay, so what is this? I don't know. Is this a new article? Yes. Yeah. They're like, we're developing the next Sims game. And everybody was like, oh, my God, The Sims 5. And they were like, oh, who's going to tell them it's a mobile game? OK. And then they kind of like kicked it.

out of frame so you couldn't see it and didn't talk about it for a little bit and then they came out with all the stuff that they were like We don't want to make The Sims 5 because you guys like The Sims 4 so much! hate to have you start from scratch on The Sims 5 when you built up so much in The Sims 4 and it's like meanwhile it's like being held together with duct tapes and toothpicks

And every time I add an expansion, it breaks a little bit more. But you're like, that's right. I never wanted The Sims 5. Who am I kidding? So I don't really know what's going on with this mobile version. Is it like in that weird phase? I think of EA's confusing rollout of pop caps.

plans versus zombies 3 remember they keep rolling out a version of that mobile game in new zealand they'd be like never mind and then they revamp like this is the new plans versus zombies 3 never mind this is a new plans for zombies spinoff it just feels like ea in that mobile space is just

soft launching things on a continual basis and that's what this sims project it's giving like when the sims came out with that facebook game when i was in high school in like 2010 or something and you could play your sim on through facebook and like talk to other people's sims Was it good? No. I mean, they canned the entire thing within a couple of years. Oh, God. Is Farmville still doing well? Jephem? Jephem. What's that?

Zynga? Zynga. Zynga died a long time ago, didn't they? No, they released Star Wars Hunters last year, but they just shut that down, which actually was not bad. It's a little Switch mobile Star Wars shooter thing, I think. Did you know that I tried to make a Facebook game, Jeff? No. When I was in college. Wow. Yeah. And I still think this is a good idea.

All right, here was the pitch. Okay. Because like the way back then with Facebook when it was all the rage and we're all obsessed with it in college, like I remember like my girlfriend at the time, she's like... I'm friends with our friend Carrie. You know, she just joined Facebook and added her. And then I was like, oh, please, I added Carrie last week. And then I had the epiphany of like, oh.

facebook is turning people into pokemon so that should totally be the idea wow so the idea was like taking the profile picture and then turning them into cards. And it was like a card battling game. Where it's like, OK, I collected this and then this I'm leveling up this friend in my Facebook deck and they're going to battle this friend in your Facebook deck and you can trade them along the way and stuff like that. When you when you say you almost made. Yeah.

Did you have the thought? Was that just the idea that you had? You tell me how far I went. By me telling you how far I went. No, but I worked at a place and my boss was a programmer. I pitched him on this and he's like, that's really good. I'm going to develop that.

And so we actually like got a prototype working of like the battle system, which is like a rock, paper, scissors thing. It was like a big pie chart for you could change the levels of the odds of the rock, paper, scissors, yada, yada. So we had the prototype that would actually pull in the Facebook profile picture into that. test thing and I wanted to call it FaceDeck.

And then it was rejected. This is not a good one. It was rejected because you can't have the word face in a Facebook game, apparently, because it seems like it'll be the official terminology. And so then you guys just deleted it? And I was like, I can't come up with anything as good as FaceDeck, so I guess we'll delete it now. I still think that's a good idea. I think so too. I think it would work better with like a Snapchat.

Not Facebook anymore. Yeah, I suppose so. Hey, Jeff, if... This is too forced. If that game did well, we'd have to create a factory for it. Just like Nubby's Number Factory. Ooh, I mentioned PopCap. Developers of Peggle. Now, Jeff, talk about Nubby's Number Factory. I could give him a noogie. Yeah. Has anybody else played this game, by the way? Yeah. Okay. Awesome.

It is, what are the recent Peggle likes that you all have been Gaga over? There was one last year, right? There was Peglin. Yes, that was it. It's the only one that's really, truly Peggle-like. I'm afraid to say. Because that's the one where you actually have boards. you're hitting the pegs and they're disappearing in like different patterns and things like that. Like true Peggle stuff. There was Ballionaire last year, which is more Plinko Pachinko kind of offshoot, which is where I also put.

Nubby's number factor. And Ballionaire was interesting because you would get, like, the roguelike part of it was you would get different pegs. And the pegs would all have different abilities. And that's what you would put out and kind of create an engine around that. In Nubby's Number Factory... The pegs are just numbers that will continue...

Getting stronger as you go through different levels. Okay, we've got a crisis here. Sarah won't stop reading my notes. It's invasive and feels gross. Don't write so many personal things in there in the first place. I have a lot of thoughts on how you look, Jeffo. Me undies, yeah. We know all of them. So...

In Nubby's Number Factory. God damn it, Sarah. Listen about Nubby's. It's all mine. Sarah just wants to hold her breath until this conversation is over. I understand. In Nubby's Number Factory. Each peg is a number. The numbers get higher. The balls are just nubbies. Really, the only engine building that you're doing is you get like seven items, basically.

that are like Jokers and Bellatro, where it's like, that's what's going to affect how you score differently. And then you can get some other passive books that will do things. And you're trying to build an engine out of that. And the game is demented. Demented. It's gross and nasty. There's a Steam review that sounded up well that made me laugh where they said, I scored a multiplier so high on round 103 that the game described it as, quote, you broke the game.

and then later on round 247, I scored so high that it did actually break the game and the application crashed. tremendous game yeah that sums it up it's people were crashing it a lot I think they put out some updates I haven't I haven't managed to crash the game yet. But it looks kind of like Windows 3.1. It looks nasty. It looks delightfully nasty. It's cold looking. It's creamy as well. I saw a couple articles about it before you had brought it up and I was like,

I love these types of games. I don't think I need to play this one because this one just looks like it's going to be gross. And then you brought it up and it was like, everybody's talking about Nubby. Do you want to check out Nubby? And I did. And it is actually good. And the aesthetics actually did grow on me. I'm not of an age where I have any sort of nostalgia for that look. Yeah. Really?

It came too late. I'm too old for that. You're old for kid pics? Yes. But if you see hieroglyphics, you're like, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, there you go. I can't even think of one Egyptian thing. You can go take a break, man. You can lay down the rest if you need to. But so that grew on me. The actual game, like the first time I played it, I was very confused about it because it felt very random. And then I...

Scored like 650 million in one game and I really loved it. And then it's been a roller coaster of do I actually like this? Is this balanced at all? Which doesn't... seem to be very much... But when you see balls fly down and hit the numbers and go over the place... The numbers go up.

the numbers go up but yeah a lot of it's early access and a lot of the you know scrolling through the news posts whatever here's my plans for the game roadmap it's like I do want this to feel better and be more balanced at some point you know things that are not promising for like getting really into it right now he had one he had one post where he was just flabbergasted because he's like everybody's complaining that the physics suck now

And like all I did was when a, when a ball hits a peg, it could go between either negative two degrees, negative one, zero, one, or two. And I just changed that to negative one, zero, or one degree off. And like now everybody thinks the physics are broken. And I honestly can't tell the difference is what he said. But I will figure out a compromise. I don't know what it's going to be, but I'll figure out how to make everybody happy about it. So it's it is very much a work.

In progress. Yeah. You're not playing it on Steam Deck, are you? I am. You are. Yeah. Works great. Really? I don't know what your problem is. Did you see the mouse controls? Okay. Maybe I was just way off. I don't know what was going on. Steam Deck emulates mouse controls really well. Okay. It does.

All right. I'll give another go there. That part's fine. The main complaint that I think I've come to with Nubby is that... unlike every other game like this where each level you just have a score that you have to hit um which which i really like i like that they've distilled it down to basically you have a score that you have to hit you have to hit it with just one ball and if you don't do it

Like you, you lose a life and you try again, but you start at zero again. So you just have to get that one thing. Most levels you will play once you'll shoot, you'll shoot it. numbers will explode you will go on to the next one so yeah it's very distilled in that sense but the thing that that i do i've come to the conclusion that i don't like is that the the level that you have to get on each one scales with you as you progress and so like every time you restock the board which is basically

Once you beat a level, how many times, how many multiples you've beat it by, like if the score is 100, if you get 500, that's five restocks and the numbers, you know, the numbers of the pegs will go up. But that also affects what your next. requirement is on the next one. And that scales.

Super weird. And I've definitely had runs where I have failed out because I did so well early on that like the numbers just got too big and I couldn't keep up with it. And so like, I think the compromise that they've added is there's a button that you can press.

once the ball has started going and the numbers are going up, where you can just end that run immediately, and you can press that, and that will keep the multiplayer down, and that will make the next level... I didn't realize that's why you do that. I think that's why it is. But the problem with that is it's just not fucking fun. Like I'm playing this whole game to see numbers go up and to explode and to get billions of points. And it's like the smart play is to just.

Cut it off as fast as you can so that you're not, you know, inflating the next requirement. I don't I. I don't envy having to try and figure out how to balance a game where your end score might be 200,000 or it may be 600 billion points or whatever. Figuring out what those levels should be and having that static would be hard.

But like the solution of, well, I want to do just good enough to pass this, but then please don't score any more points. Just feels antithetical to why I play these games in the first place. You digging it though, Leo?

I've played a couple hours and I feel good on it for now. I totally like the style a ton. Like, it's cool to see something like this have its own personality that is... cool and not just like a basic version of what it could be you know it's like really got its own spin on the way it feels yeah nubbies number factory on steam A game where we're going to talk about in the future, then Leo said, no, it's really good. We got to talk about it now. Sorry, everybody. Promise Mascot.

agency it's another top 10 lock for leo this year i'm so sorry dude i know it's like are people even gonna literally my only reason to not talk about it or not that's gonna be my top 10 is like are people gonna believe me right because there's been so many good games lately yeah This one's really good too.

This is okay. It was at GDC. Sarah walked by the station and said, I will play that. Is it because it has some connection to Yakuza? It kind of seems Yakuza adjacent. It's like the actor that plays Kiryu. plays a big role in this as well so i think it's like roping in the yakuza fans also a lot of Japan love thrown in there. So fans of Yakuza will find a lot to love here. What should I say? Japanophiles, I guess is what I'm trying to say. Okay.

I mean, it's very Yakuza and like the personality, the humor and the heart. And you're playing as a stoic virgin who is helping people. And they're going, why are you really going to help me? Why? And you go, because it's the right thing to do. Thank you. Like all Yakuza. Yeah. Just like Yakuza Kirib. Right. That's very much the...

The heart of it, the drive of it. And that's very enjoyable and fun because it is in a more surreal way. Like it's not a rip off of that or anything. It is in its own weird ass world where these mascots that you're managing, they are biological creatures. organisms uh that you know you are running an agency where you are having them sent out to uh

do kids' birthday parties and book signings or whatever, but not all of them get into that business. Some of them get into organized crime or whatever. There's just these giant weirdos around in this world, and they're very funny and strange. One of the first ones you get.

new the open world is this city that is like in total disrepair and people are wondering why you're even there and why you're trying to get a mascot thing going because they have all the worst mascots any mascot who's worth anything has moved away and so the first one you get is this giant block of tofu that is

perpetually crying and you have these interactions where as you send them out on missions they are getting these little bits of trouble like You'll get a little cutscene of the crying tofu at the event. And they'll be coming out to greet everybody and they'll get stuck in the door and it'll say.

tofu versus normal-sized door, and then you do this little card battle against the door to assist the tofu. Card battle? Yeah. It's not even worth explaining the mechanics of it, but the card stuff is really simple and... satisfying. So is it business sim then? It is an open world collect-a-thon. Oh, like I don't I don't see it called that on the Steam page or anything.

But that is really what it feels like. You're driving this little car around for 90% of the gameplay. Little truck. Little K truck. Yes. That is so cute. And you're upgrading it and you are just... You can jump and you can boost and you can eventually get to do other things with it too. And you're just going around.

essentially hitting a on all these different things in the world that all feed into this incremental passive progression, which I feel like we were just talking about recently. Like why don't more open world games lean into passive income and things like that? And I think the answer is because then it's all you'll want to do and you'll focus on all those things first and ignore everything else in the game.

And this solves that by having pretty much every single thing you do feed into your passive income streams. And that's your mascots doing their jobs, getting you more and more money or straight up side businesses that every night give you a certain amount of money or you collect

merch from a crane game and set them to your different stores that'll sell them overnight it's like constant passive income while doing satisfying open world collecting where it's really fun to be driving this truck around and hopping over fences and like It's it's really it's the driving the truck around isn't complicated, but it's completely satisfying. I blew through it like 12 hours. I'm almost done.

In just the last few days, I've been so obsessed with it. And it is still so fun to putter around in that little truck and just collect things like I love the genre of collectathon. Just that that works for me. And this one. Makes it really exciting to collect everything. Like a lot of the things you're collecting feed into the card battles where you get better and better cards.

percentage boosts to this one income stream it's like everything is making that kind of incremental game you're playing be more rewarding huh so it's listed also as like visual novel yeah that freaked me out How much of that is in there? A good amount, but it's all good writing. And again, it's funny and it's weird. And I never feel like I'm skipping through it to get back to the other stuff. It's like nice little breaks. And yeah, I don't know. It's like all these mechanics would be.

fun and it's almost I don't know I have this thing where when a game is making me have fun I like I'm suspicious of that. I'm like, are you just doing these tricks to make me have fun? Because my brain does never want to be. Life is miserable. Yeah, right. Exactly. Exactly. He's like the tofu. I was crying. Yeah, yeah. But you also get the visual novel stuff that actually hits and actually has so much personality. Speaking of personality, Jeff, I need detention. He spilled his drink.

And that's like, now I'd be using these cards to help them out. Yes, I'm the one who needs the attention. Yeah, but it's like it also has so much heart and so much going for it where it is. Exciting that all this fun, you know, monkey brain.

idol game stuff you're doing feeds into this story where you actually care about the characters and are actually interested in what's going on. Like that is the secret sauce that makes it truly special and unforgettable. Okay. I mean, rank the games we've talked about so far. Is this by far your favorite? Do you like it more than blueprints? Where are we at? I don't know.

He has a whole notebook for blueprints. Yeah. It might be a little less than blueprints, but more than Atomfall, which we're going to talk about. And I also love a lot. But yeah, it is like Atomfall in that it is maybe not for everybody, but... what it is appeals so specifically to me that I'm so glad it exists and I would play 10 games exactly like it a year just blasting through this like super satisfying collect-a-thon which again I like the genre but not all of them hit

yeah but that idea of collecting things we're collecting each thing actually feels really good and you're actually really excited about every little dot on the map yeah that uh i love games like that promise mascot agency all right i gotta check it out it's on steam it's on xbox on playstation um and like 15 hours to 100 a satisfying collect-a-thon like that's perfect i love that perfect um

It's somewhere around the arena of Atomfall. A game that we talked about a couple years ago. And then you guys said, remind us, we gotta check back in once we actually beat this thing. Because this is a game we talked about that is... The easy comparison, you look at screenshots and be like, oh, it's a little bit like a Fallout game developed from the creators of Sniper Elite. But then the takeaway is no, it's more survival focused and more unique than you would think just from.

sci-fi apocalyptic adjacent world um finishing it i'm amazed both you guys finished it like how long was the game 15, 20? I think I was around 30. Okay. Yeah, I beat it in 20. Nice. And conclusion was? I still really liked it. I still really liked it. Yeah. It stayed at that same level. It dipped a little towards the end. Which, you know, no spoilers. But the thing that I was talking about that I really liked in the first episode when we were talking about was...

Like the discoverability of the objectives that you that you're like just kind of stumbling upon and learning about yourself. And your your whole goal is to just escape the entire game. Honestly, these kids. They're looking at their notes about blueprints. I know. But so like trying to figure out how to escape was interesting to me. Yes. And there were and there were all these like leads that you would come on. And my my first takeaway from that was like.

Well, some of these just have to be false, like like they're not going to go anywhere or something's going to go wrong while you're doing them or something because they can't all lead out. And there were there were a few like that. But mostly you get towards the end and you realize that there are actually six different endings. And most of the leads that you had will lead you there. And so, like, this is totally a me problem. But once I got to that point, it was like.

well what's the best ending gonna be like like like now now i've gone from discovering these things, being intrigued by them. Trying to trying to guess where they're going to go to just like, well, I want the best ending. So who's going to give me the best ending? And I was kind of like inching up each objective in parallel to one another because I didn't want to close myself out of anything. And so at that point, it's like. It became more familiar and more like other games that I've played.

And and it's like the lead up to each one, like you have to do a good amount of work for each person. And it's all kind of very similar. And it's like now now at this point, I'm just kind of wasting my time and I should just pick one. And so it was a little bit of a dip towards the end for me, but I, but I really do like like the conclusion and the final kind of stuff that you have to do.

and learning about the mystery and all that because it seemed like a mystery was a big a big tugger for you to trying to bring you through the game big time tugger and i think you know the final area like the thing you're building towards is a really cool place to explore like for exploration game it kind of culminates in a cool way

that way. But yeah, I ended up... going from the second highest difficulty to the highest like halfway through my playthrough because i really love the scarcity of the resources and i had too much of everything and i was like let's let's try it where it's as scarce as possible and it gets real scarce which i like because truly The weird magic of this game for me...

As I got better and better at it and went to beat it was it's like a packing game. It's that's how the survival mechanics, which are so smoothed out and so I think unoppressive. They don't get in your way. It's like what it leaves is like planning for each encounter. Having the right resources for getting through specific.

events and kind of mitigating the different threats of like do i bring this like poison resistance thing or an extra med kit because the poison resistance if i take it smartly like it'll

reduce more damage than the med kit would heal you know and you have like a home base with like your inventory that you're like swapping out on to go on missions is that there's pneumatic tubes in set locations that make sense you're like i bet this will be the nearest one in this bunker or whatever and you're right which I think is a fun system for it because, you know, pneumatic tubes like transferring all your goods between all these bunkers or whatever. It's...

Yeah, it's just satisfying to have a game like that where you get a skill tree and... I wanted every damn thing on there. I was not bored looking at it going, why do I bother? Or going, this is bad until I get this thing in the skill tree. It's just like every time you get enough skill points to get something, you are going, do I take this huge benefit or this huge benefit?

And I really, I really enjoy that. And yeah, again, just the packing, the like planning for each thing, being, being more what the game is about than the actual fights is having the right guns, having the right. ammo i still love bartering like oh i i am giving you this extra plan i found because i want this resource from you and there's a little i'm it's still in my favor a little bit

So I'm just going to add however many bullets until it becomes as even as possible. What else can I squeak out of you? Yeah. So I'm not losing anything. I'm not wasting any value in this trade. Which again, having it on the most scarce resource setting, it's like every bullet really...

really matters and when you can get through without using bullets you know doing melee or whatever which is way more dangerous might have to do more health items it's satisfying to be saving your resources like that it all just Matters. There's something magical about when a game as you're going around, you're constantly on edge because like any little scrap I get into is going to have an impact on me and my resources.

it makes a game where there's no like driving or fun way of getting around it still makes it where every time every bit of moving around i do has a little story to it has a little excitement to it because it matters and it's it's crazy that Like there's no fast travel in this game at all. And you are you like.

Just stop banging on the table. Oh, sorry. I thought that was more. Sorry. Like, you end up learning all of the different zones and how they connect to each other because, like, there's multiple layers and they did an amazing job of, like, Figuring out how to connect all of these disparate places in enough places that you don't actually need fast travel. Yeah. But it does lead to situations where it's like.

Okay, well, I got to go out there. What do I need to pack with me? What do I want to bring? Like, what's the fastest way to get there? Okay, I want to actually go drop off. I got this new gun that I haven't seen anything like this. So like I should go drop that off first. And there was just like.

a layer of planning and then a layer of familiarity and then it's like you're you're following up on all these leads that are in all these different zones that you're going to all these different places and it's like i ended up knowing that place so well so much more than most open world games where you just like never think about that or you just end up fat you go you go to a place once and then you just fast travel

back and forth from that place like yeah and something else about the highest difficulty is there it takes the compass away and so you literally have to like pick landmarks like the big power plant that it's all kind of revolving around you go like okay in this zone that

to the east and what i can look at the big plume of smoke and kind of orient myself based on that so i have to check in on the map less like jeff i'm saying yeah it's a better relationship with the world than you usually get yeah and like all the all the like essentially dungeons like all the bunkers and caves you go in like there's no map at all and you just have to like figure out where you're going and figure out it's like okay oh i did actually come through this way and it's like

The level of just like be in this world and discover stuff and actually explore stuff and putting in real emphasis on that is off the charts compared to a lot of games. Yeah. I mean, where is this one ending up for you guys? Like funky? worth checking out or like one of my favorites of the year. I'm just trying to get a sense of conclusions now.

Jeff, if you were reviewing this on Game Informer's patented review scale, what number would you give it? I don't know. Is this a Jeffem 775 that you like? No, it would probably be, I guess, like an 8. Like, we'll see if it... We'll see if it ends up on the top 10.

For me at the end of the year. Okay. A bubbler. A personal bubbler. A bubbler. Yes. That's how I feel too. It's easily top 10 right now. More likely to get knocked off by other stuff than some of the other heavy hitters. Once Welcome Tour comes out for the Switch too. Right. What are we doing here?

for sure which they charge that so that it's eligible for game of the year it's very clear their strategy gross smart nasty but so smart but so smart so smart Sarah, what do you use to browse the internet? well i don't know what i use but i would definitely think that someone who uses opera gx is really cool

That's right, sir. Thanks to Opera GX for sponsoring this episode. You probably use a browser that wasn't designed by gamers for gamers, and then you jump into Opera GX, and it's like, oh, this is what a browsing experience is like. if it's one designed by gamers and for gamers. Opera GX, everybody. Oh, Jeffum's cleaning up his gross spills. This is what you get for making us be in person, honestly. Making us. Use your tongue like a gentleman to clean up your spills, Jeffum. Come on.

No need for spills with this browser, Opera GX, everybody. It won't be spilling your data, is it? Does it protect your data? It does protect your data. Nice. Also, a VPN built into the gosh darn thing. It has mods there so you can install a bunch of mods like you can put a little background on there to like have like an 8-bit style game playing every time you open a tab. There's so much customizability. You can also have it so it doesn't just

drain all of the limits and boundaries of your computer as you're trying to do gaming. You can actually set levels of like, okay, don't surpass this level of CPU usage. While I'm using my browser and so you can actually control a little bit more instead of just being a big computer drain like chrome and other uh browsers that are out there um it's

Quick and easy to import from other browsers if you want to check out Opera GX there. Is there anything else that jumps to mind when you think about the cool things about Opera GX? No, that's a lot of notes though. Yeah. Force dark mode. I love dark mode. Well, now you can force it. with Opera GX, everybody. You can use the link in the show notes to download Opera GX today. And how much is it going to cost me?

Free as welcome tour should be, everybody. Wow. Check out the link to download Opera GX today if you want to check it out. If something's free, you're the product except for this. Hey, that reminds me. Thanks to iM8Bit, speaking of products, some of the best around. They've been supporters of ours for oh so long. They have a wonderful online store in that store.

You can go to it in your Opera GX browser. At iMatePitsWonderful online store, you can get the vinyl soundtrack to Ori and the Blind Forest. They're reissuing that 2020 soundtrack and then also the soundtrack to Ori and the Will of the Wisps. that sweet vinyl soundtrack check it out but they don't just have vinyl soundtracks that i made but it's wonderful online store they have

physical editions of games. I'm 8-Bit exclusive physical editions for a ton. They're kind of stories over there. They truly are choosing great games to make awesome physical editions for, like Sea of Stars, stuff like that, right?

And help support IMAPIT because I support the MinMax community in a big, bad way. By every single week, shipping out a prize to whoever has the best questions submitted on Patreon. If you support us at any tier on Patreon, you can submit a question. We choose our favorite IMAPIT. This week, they're shipping out Bomb Rush Cyber Funk, the Nintendo Switch exclusive edition thanks to iMateBit. So if you answer...

You submit a question for us over on Patreon. We deem it as our favorite. Suddenly you're going to check your mail and get a physical Switch game. A physical bomb. Well, you'll be rushing to install it to your Switch. Um, also you can use the promo code. Happy birthday, Mr. Resetti. Happy birthday, Mr. Resetti for 10% off of everything. And I made bits, wonderful online store under $100.

I just want to say a really cool thing about blueprints. Sarah just pointed at a question in my notebook that I didn't know if there was an answer to and then pointed at something unrelated I'm taking notes on as if that's the answer, and it's very exciting. I did a wink-wink. Nice. Yeah, what did you think about his notes? How's he doing?

It's really cool because they look very similar to my notes, but I can... easily pick out the parts that like I can tell where he is in the game based on what his notes are and I can tell what he has and hasn't done yet. And yeah, like looking like he wrote a bunch of questions down and I can see like the puzzles he's trying to solve. And I'm like, if you want the answer for this faster.

Focus on this. There is a Discord channel, by the way, for blueprints in the Discord. Yeah, it seems like a great one to kind of hive mind with people. I like slowed down how much I was playing because I was like, it's going to be so much more fun when everybody has their hands on it. And it's got a channel in the MinMax Discord for sure.

Other thing I wanted to circle back to, Promise Mascot Agency is on every platform, including Switch, and it's really fun with the PS5 haptic triggers for driving around. The chunky little truck feels great on those triggers. Good triggers. So, shout out. Chandler writes in to say, hey, Sarah. It's out today. Yeah, we got that. Say, Sarah, Leo, Ben, and Jeff, Chandler says. Simple question. If pixel art wasn't associated with old games, do you think that would make it more cool or less cool?

If it was just its own art style, is that cooler or less cool? How important is that connection to this is the way some good games that some... old people used to like look. I feel like I've seen younger generation lean away from pixel art more and more than what I'm used to. Some people just think it's like, if a game's in pixel art, they just straight up won't play it.

But that's how I feel about, like, the 3D textureless kind of games. I don't like... those as much because to me it's like I grew up with pixel art so I don't know how to put myself in the the position of someone who's like never seen it before but to me I will always pick pixel art like I just think it's so beautiful and it like the constraints is what makes it so cool I mean Fields of Mystery is obviously the big

behemoth in the room we're not speaking about the game that you work on but did you get to get a lot of that where people did Tardew Valley just blow the doors open oh I don't want to play Fields of Mission because I don't like pixel art and I'm like what what an opinion and then you go to their you know profile and it's like

I love high school! And you're like, oh, okay. I love PE! And you're like, oh, okay. It's more of like a generational thing. Sure. Are there any farming games out there that are going for kind of the back to nature vibe from Harvest Moon, though? Of that kind of early... Not intentionally, right? Because they showed that New Harvest, or sorry, oh my god, Story of Seasons Bazaar, I think is what it's called. Grand Bazaar? The Grand Bazaar one, and I don't like it.

like, smooth, 3D, bubbly, chibi-like to just be a little soulless in some ass. aspects i don't like it i saw that cow and i'm like that cow just screams like an og harvest moon cow and they've made that cow in pixels before yeah you like the picture i just yeah i don't like

It's like it just feels so plastic to me. I need some textures. Interesting. I do think that for the coolness, though, of pixel art, I think it is because of the nostalgia, like what coolness it has. It's like because it's loaded with all those. The memories and history of it. You know, I can't picture it being cooler without with less context. But I think it's like the fun.

kind of leapfrogging that's happening, I think, where people are going for pixel art because it's in theory easier, in theory cheaper, asterisk asterisk for all that stuff. What's cheaper? Pixel art? Yeah. No, it's more expensive. well that's pixel art is more expensive but it's easier on like game file sizes right because it's just 2d um and then 3d is a little bit harder on games but it's definitely i feel like cheaper because pixel art you need an artist

You need an artist and you need to make every single thing. Same for 3D, but it's just like... pixel art like the rules of pixel art they're like oh my god you can't put that pixel next to that pixel like oh like you can't put that pixel next to that pixel they gotta look like they can't touch like that and it's like do you like a black border it's like it's very unnecessarily complicated oh god definitely more of a labor of love pixel art games right right

But it's just weird to think of like, you know, the people who are making a game inspired by the games on Super Nintendo, Genesis, wherever they used to love. And now those games have become so old. Like what's the Terraria is like.

that's probably an antiquated game now to kids and maybe they could even get nostalgic about terraria so it's like the second wave of nostalgia for the games that were inspired by so we're gonna go from like the inspired like the ps1 like we're gonna make games that look like ps1 and now we're gonna go back to pixel art again is that what you're saying yeah eventually right i think so it's like okay we're kind of veering into

ps2 dreamcast era of kind of indie likes now and then eventually i feel like it's already happening of being nostalgic for pixel throwback games already Right? Or did it just never go away completely? I don't know that it ever stopped. I guess not. I think it's just like the accessible game dev tools now more often allow for 3D.

as easily as it used to be 2D. Yeah, I think I'm like, you know, kind of the game maker stuff, you know, people just jump in, which I guess feels a mystery is that I'm not saying that that's easy. But if I was making a game, it would be some pixel art game. I'd have to imagine because in my mind, that seems easier to cobble together.

like cobble. Patrick writes in, usually I watch the likes of Nintendo directs and game awards and whatnot by myself and I enjoy them. The switch to direct was the first time I watched with others. And I hated the experience. Sure. Wow. My focus and interest was distracted by live reactions, commentary, et cetera. Stupid Shuhei wouldn't shut up. We were trying to shoo him out. He wouldn't go.

They say, I had to go back and rewatch the majority of it. The group experience took a lot of the hype and joy out of the event. Am I the only one who prefers to engage with these types of things by myself? Comma, LOL. You should check out our comment section on all our reactions. We find a lot of new friends. You're actually not alone. Yeah. I don't know. I don't mind watching with other people.

But like, I do feel like, you know, you miss a little bit when you're talking to other people. Yeah, it's probably valid. I'm just like not a baby. So like, it doesn't really bother me that much when people like dog on things in front of me. What if you were taking notes for a podcast, though, and people were like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Why would I take notes for a podcast? Yeah, that seems pretty egregious. That's so stupid. The dorkiest thing I could possibly imagine. Yeah, I get it. Yeah, well, if I were excited for more things, maybe I would feel differently. But where I feel right now is I feel at the end of every reaction stream, which... i pretty much only watch them if we're doing a reaction stream on them and i end up being on a lot of them i i i'm like i can't give a score

We all are giving score ratings. I can't give the same one that the chat can because I have such a more fun experience with. my friends talking over it than i would just watching it by myself right it feels like i i have fun with those no matter what because we have a great time streaming them and that would not be the case if i was just sitting there watching them

And once in a while, there is something I really care about. And even then, it's like, it's fun to share that experience with others. And you can go quiet. I want to pay attention to this. Right. That's allowed no matter what group you're in. I guess if I was in like a big group. and mid-max didn't exist anymore and we're watching the game wars and people are talking throughout the entire thing i think there'll be a part of me that's like but you gotta you gotta just pair with it

If you can politely tell your friends to candid at times, that seems like a best case scenario. Right. Or just deafen yourself. Are sure I do that like in discord or whatever. It's like, I'm just going to.

leave discord for this moment right you imagine poking stuff in your ears when he said deaf in yourself yeah i'm not familiar with this other technology i don't know i like i like the feedback from other people right because i like ask questions and like people know more about other games than i do and i like being like wait so like Did you like that? Is that working for you? Is that doing it for you? I love the feedback I get from other people. Like when I started to make fun of

Harrison Ford at the Game Awards and then Ben was really excited about it and I said, I don't need to make fun of this. I'm letting him be excited. How stupid I have to look at this famous actor. Boy. Boy. Yeah. Can we do one commentary track for a reaction stream where you're not just going doy doy doy show me something cool. For what? I can't even doy I'm so impressed. WeGoGiant says question for Sarah Podzorski.

Do you ever say when people ask about your middle name? I hate when you start with people in the discord for anything, Ben, like you do it a lot. Like at the meeting on Monday, it was always like the discord is saying, and then I have to like brace myself. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. The streets are talking. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, do you want to read the question, what it says?

No, I don't have my glasses on. It says people in the Discord. I'm not saying that. I'm reading the person's question. Don't attack them. He's never said that. Anyways, people in the Discord, Sarah, they tell me that among the cohorts, you're probably the biggest fan of Kirby Air Ride.

That game has a cult following of people who sing its praises, so I'm curious about the announcement of the sequel, Kirby Air Riders. What makes the original so special, and what are you most looking forward to for the sequel? It's just so crazy that we got a sequel. So weird. I don't even think I had it.

in like my greatest dreams like i used to ask for a curvy air ride you know remake or like a two or something and everyone would just shoot me down and they'd be like why would they do that yeah it's a bad game and i'm like you don't know you don't

No. Was it like an Extra Life that we streamed it from the studio? Like at some point we did that weird confusing mode and I remember being overwhelmed by the complexity. The city one? Yeah, the weird city mode. Well, it's like, it was just like a fun...

game it had like the basic like race mode it had like a top down race mode it had the city mode where then it would like it was like a kind of like a battle royale like baby's first battle royale you go around you collect all the power-ups and then you don't know what kind of battle you're being thrown into

It was just enjoyable for when you wanted something different, I guess. Like, it really stood out to me that it was different from Mario Kart. And it was just something you could play for, like... You know, like five or 10 minutes, 20 minutes. And like all the cars were really cool. Like the cars were very unique. The boxy truck, the wheel, like the Batwing one. And they all had different like fly. Like it was literally Mario Kart.

infinity is literally mario kart 8 before mario kart 8 because like some would glide better some would be like have better speed some would have better acceleration and handling and like it had all of that in it and it was just like so adorable and it had the power-ups it had like

the enemies kirby's could suck in and it was like really into the drifting right like it did a little bit of yeah it did a lot of like drifting depending on like what kind of car you had um the music was good the spaces were good and it was just like For a kid, like the perfect amount of different things to do to keep you interested over like a period of time. It's so fun to think of.

sakurai and like all right i'll make one more game and of course it's going to be kirby air riders the aliens-esque sequel like of all the things i still can't wrap my mind around that idea and i'm curious to see like Are people going to flock to it this time? Is it do you think it's like a weird validation thing for him where like he knows how good that game was? And I was listening to. Well, like, the Kirby Air Ride, like, ultimate vehicle is, like, in Smash.

Right? You collect all the pieces and then you blow everybody up. Oh, that's what that is? That's from Kirby Air Ride. I had no idea what that thing was.

oh all right yeah like he literally has a lot of kirby air ride in spoken and his youtube channel like he uses that footage from kirby's air ride so much that that entire youtube channel that he built out and it's funny to be like okay i'm going to tell you guys one more time that i was right back in the day but I was listening to the Aether podcast, and they're talking about...

How reviews for Kirby's Air Ride back in the day were not glowing. It did not score well. I mean, it was a GameCube game, right? Like, I feel like everything back in my day, nobody liked any, nobody liked Wind Waker, nobody liked Curry Air Ride. I think, you look up reviews for Wind Waker, and there were some idiots that were like, oh, it's bad. But other than that, like, it still scored unbelievably well, I have to imagine, but.

They just wanted to use the subhead Kirby's Air Ride ERR. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So they just retroactively. And that was every review written back in the day. Yeah.

I'm looking forward to your redemption tour, Sarah, where we all say, you know what? Baby Sarah was right about Trek 2. She was right about Kirby's air ride. She's right about everything she's ever talked about. It's crazy that like everyone was dogging on Kirby air riders and then they saw Sakurai's name on it and they just, everyone just like.

completely change their attitude. I was like, that's right. That's what I want to see. I'm curious to see why it needs to be him. Yeah. What is interesting and new and cool about it. Right. Because it feels like. Anybody could have cashed in on that. But it's also weird to think of him like... being hands-off with the kirby franchise i've never heard this story maybe it's happening like is he a creative consultant for any of the other kirbys i don't think so but just the idea of him being like

Yeah, Kirby franchise, I'm fine with you being a separate thing, but if Kirby gets in a car, that's me. Out of all the Kirby games that I've played, Kirby Air Ride is still my top Kirby game. I refuse all mainline Kirby games. Wow, wow, wow. Boba Fett writes in, in honor, they write into our podcast, they say, what's the cohort's reaction to Doug Bowser, the president of Nintendo America, saying...

You need to just learn that now, right? You knew that, right? Blueprints! I can't tell this is a bit. It's like I'm learning it every time. So what's the reaction of Doug Bowser saying in the interview with the Washington Post that Nintendo is going to use... quote, variable pricing for title.

reacting to the idea of 80 bucks for Mario Kart versus 70 bucks for Donkey Kong. We're going to milk as much money out of you on a per title basis. That's right. Swat down in Moo Moo Meadows. You're ours now. Give us your milky money. That is the thing. Jeff, you have hot thoughts on this. No, that's it. They want money?

yeah it is funny like you know their wording is so it's so interesting there's a really great episode of the Kit and Krista podcast it's like it's in their podcast feed but also on YouTube which is Oh, it's I was hooting and hollering and listening to this because they. Used to work on the communications team with Nintendo, right?

And so they read all of the interviews that the higher ups Nintendo did about the switch to, and like analyzed it line by line. Like this is a great pivot from Nate to transition the topic back to this. They're just having like that pro level insight to this was fascinating. And so it was interesting just to hear all of the wording of how they're trying to phrase like, well, it needs to be $80 for Mario Kart World because...

It's the biggest, most expansive Mario Kart yet. And the scope of it is going to blow your mind. You have like all these things that clearly just they're talking themselves. uh for out of this whole thing for no reason like the answer is because they can because the last game sold 67 million copies people are not going to blink that much of an eye at spending 80 bucks so like yes this justification of like well once you see that

The quality of this Mario Kart. It's going to be good. There's no doubt in my mind it's going to be good. It's to honor the design. It's so insane. Just doing stupid math. I don't think this new game is going to sell. 67 million copies. It'll be the highest selling game on the Switch 2 for sure. But isn't it $50 if you get it with the Switch 2? Yes. So...

It's going to sell that many copies. It's just going to blow the... blow the roof off and then they can look at it and they probably won't differentiate between who paid 50 and who paid 80 and they'll say well okay Looks like people are willing to pay 80. Yep. Yep. I think you're right. And I think the other thing about the variable pricing is that also gives them. like a way to retreat if it was disastrous for them. And then they can be like,

We've estimated the new one, and this is more like a $60 game, actually. Yeah, but there's no universe where it's like, we only sold 40 million copies, therefore it's a disaster. This will sell gangbusters. They could charge $100 for it, and I think it would still crack. 30 million. And 80 will make 70 feel more normal. Right. Yeah. I did the math. So it's like charging 80 bucks for Mario Kart. If it sold as many as Mario Kart 8 Deluxe did, which was, yeah, 67 million copies. So that game...

you know, back of the napkin math. Dumb. You know, incredibly stupid math. Just over $4 billion. For the $60 Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, right? If they charged 80 bucks, they would have made $5.36 billion. You know, just that little difference. huge difference from the outside uh but it's like they can just make so much money and they're gonna do it why not why not try and take that gamble i don't think it's great that we're spending more

But I think this is going to be game on. I think it's going to be Naughty Dog. I think GTA 6. I think a lot of those kind of top of the tier sales games are going to be $80. Yeah. No way out. Yeah. Nintendo paves the way again. I guess so. Yeah. Our bad world. Victor Famritsen, with the increased prices of games and hardware, are people going to be priced out of the hobby of gaming? Yes. Of course! What do you think?

Maybe new gaming, but in a world where you can get a PS4 and Fortnite for probably 70 bucks. We don't talk about how $80 games are going to motivate people to start their small businesses. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you can always just wait for sales and like... Go play PC games. People that like...

This just feels like it's going to continue fueling the next Bellatros and like those kind of all the indie games that come out for reasonable prices. Like that's what people are going to be playing. Yes. Yeah. Playing older stuff. It might. It'll it'll further. You know, it's something like.

four percent of gamers buy a new game every month um and like that number could drop two three or two like who the hell knows but there's so many great games in the past and free to play games like it's just going to grow that pool even more right yeah and i think what The gaming market for Gits is like they're not just competing against others.

Right. It's not like PlayStation versus Nintendo. You are also competing with people's attention. So you're competing against TikTok. You're competing against YouTube. You're competing against all these things that are already free for most people. And now you're going to slap $80 on like X hours of a game when I could just spend X hours scrolling on TikTok for free and get equal amounts of like, oh, hee hee. Like, it's just like an insane thing to ask of people. Yes.

The whole idea, like if you take it at face value that like, well, these games cost so much and we have to make them the way that we make them. So like this is the only – this is the only – like we're going to dig our way out of this hole by charging more money to the people who are already on the fence or just not buying enough copies to break us even. Like that's not going to work. Percentage chance that –

They've probably heard people being outraged about this. Oh, I'm sure. They've noticed. I'm sure they've noticed. Those live streams, the Treehouse live streams, I'm just saying drop the price. That is. That's my nightmare. As like a marketer and PR person, the Nintendo switch to into the Donald Trump Liberation Day tariffs would have ended me as a marketer and PR person. I wanted to crawl into a hole and die for them.

And then into the live streams and on the second day of the live streams, they announced during the live stream that they're taking the price down, taking pre-orders down because of terror.

I would shoot myself in the head. I would shoot myself. Like, I would Persona 3 myself to get out of that situation. It is... It was... It's like you can't... script something that could go that awful for a launch for like an announcement it is xbox one it is in that arena of just like oh my god what a disaster

timing and just messaging wise i think just that welcome to her the fact that charging 10 bucks for that like 10 bucks and that just has like further soured everything i'm just like okay you're being as greedy as possible as point number one, this pack-in game that clearly should be a pack-in game. It's going to be charging $10 for it. What do you think the odds are that because of this outcry...

They packed it in for free. They're like, okay, all right. We're not going to drop the price. We'll give you the $10 one. We'll give you welcome to her. We'll give you the $10 manual. Right, right. I don't think they will because I wouldn't want to set that precedent. That we can get bullied into making games free. I wouldn't. Especially with the $80 games. Yeah. I wouldn't. Yeah.

Yeah, it's hard to picture. Nintendo less than any other company would do that, I think. Will Nintendo do the thing that people are asking them to do? I mean, I think of... Operation Rainfall they brought Xenoblade over after that fan outcry like it's not it's not outrageous they dropped the price to the 3DS you know that was also based on sales that's an interesting like comparison yeah

But that was probably they saw the sales numbers were lower. It's not like they're seeing like, we're not hitting the welcome tour numbers we expected to hit. We're hinging everything on this. Yeah. But it is. Yeah, I get it. It is just the most fascinating. situation to think of Nintendo marketing for the follow-up to their biggest system ever. colliding with the ego of donald trump so bad right there i could not it was like a trick a train on train crash collision and i could not look away

Kevin Cooper writes in it with a similar thing. They say, hey, Sarah, everyone on Discord is talking. Pancakes, waffles, or French toast? Let's settle this once and for all. Waffles. French toast. French toast is... objectively the best. Yeah. It's unfair how much better it is. I wish we each had a slice of French toast on our hand as we did this. Wouldn't that be better? I find French toast, I think the thing about waffles is like it can maintain its crispiness.

And then I appreciate which French toast can get really squishy. Yeah. So it's like, it's, you know, French toast can be good, but it can also be bad. And I find that waffles maintain a baseline. For my expectations. That is true. But you think of like waffles. Out of a toaster. Extra hard waffle bad. See, I knew you were thinking Lego my Eggo.

I'm not with them. I'm just saying, imagine the worst waffle ever, and then you guys stand by it. You guys are the freaks. That's your favorite? Yum, yum, eat them up, you say, on a daily basis? You guys are weird. I make French toast all the time. I love it. You guys want to get some French toast after this? Yeah. Yeah. uh pelican man hey pelican man they say what's one thing that game developers clearly assume you'll find exciting but you don't enjoy

Mine is buildings or other structures collapsing around you. I'm over it! I've been playing Stellar Blade and they have this happen every two minutes. Like as a set piece. I think so, yeah. Yeah, shooting drones. Out of the sky? Yeah. Like in your backyard?

Like in Ubisoft games or whatever. Shooting drones, shooting robots. Ubisoft does love that. Yeah. They do love their drones. I'm tired of climbing towers to reveal maps. Yeah. I think if we could just put up... know more on that that would be great just climbing in general of like when it's like there's that ledge and then you jump to that ledge and then you shimmy this way south of midnight right now but i would like you to stop okay but then sometimes it breaks

breaks a little. And you're like, whoa! I almost fell off, but I didn't. Okay, that's my idea. As we established on the United Jones Rapid Fire. Which, by the way, I was just thinking about that. I don't know if that happens once in the game of, like, hanging on to a legend that crumbles.

Yeah, there's like a pipe that like swivels. There's some similar type stuff, but it's not this straight up. Yeah. So I think that joke. They took it out. They took it out. Yeah. When you said that. Interesting. I think the joke still points at something real. Yeah. It's about the larger truth underneath.

Yeah, I think South of Midnight is a game that definitely is a series of those things of like, am I supposed to be having an emotion or thought as I'm going through this gameplay? Yet still, I like the game. It's that classic conundrum. Climbing in a straight line. Yeah. I'm pretty Breath of the Wild climbing or bust at this point. They just came out with a bunch of games that it's just about climbing in a straight line, but with various mechanics and shaky legs.

Which I think makes this an even better answer to this question. Yeah. Hey, Dusty B-Man writes in and say, on the 100 things to be thankful for, for 2021. Leo Vader said, I'm thankful that Lucas Games ended its exclusivity contract with EA and it's not letting Ubisoft create an open world Star Wars game. I can't wait to learn more about that in three years when it's canceled.

That's what you said, Leo. Wow. And then Dusty Beeman says, should credit be given for being right about the three years timeline for Ubisoft's open world Star Wars game? Or should shame be given for being wrong by saying it would be canceled? Well, it was canceled because of, you know, offensiveness. So I'm still right. Oh, interesting. Yeah, because the whole W-O-M-A-N protagonist. Right. Right. Right. Alex the Snood writes in, says, Minimaxes!

Do you think more people have played the first Super Mario Brothers or Minecraft? Follow-up question. Do you think more people have beaten the first Mario or Minecraft? Here's my thing. You only put half the question in the Slack channel for us to thumbs up. Yeah. And then you saved the entire question.

for yourself. Sarah, do you know how many hours of my life every week are going through this? I was actually looking at what you send in the podcast of each individual line so we can individually react to each question summed up into one line. I was like, bye. so much work that he does that.

Tell her! No, I know it's a lot of work. I put the most interesting one in there. There's withholding happening. Yeah, because I want you to be a little bit surprised, and I put the most interesting option in there. Like, you know, dialogue in games, where it's like, choose this emotion, and then you're surprised by the answer? You know, that's the... fun of it. It's called fun. More people have played Minecraft. More people have beaten Super Mario. See, yeah. So beating Minecraft means.

Is BD Minecraft the Ender Dragon now? I think probably so. Have the kids changed it if they move the goalpost? I thought he was seeing credits in the movie. You're doing so good, man. Stop high-fiving over my head. It's disrespectful. It's all about the French toast thing. I can't stop thinking about it. You're lying. Oh my gosh.

I think that's right. I think, especially what, you can skip a bunch of worlds in Mario 1. But I haven't even beaten Mario 1. I haven't beaten Mario 1. No. Have you, Jeffo? I was trying to think this when I was looking at that question and I can't remember if I have or not. You're Mr. NES. I've seen your username. sucks it's hard and it sucks it sucks like the level eight i think it's the level eight dungeon you just have to know the route through otherwise it just repeats endlessly

Oh, boy. For anybody watching, I'm listening to something else on my headphones. Yeah, and it's actually really good. Came up with that idea. Yeah, so I don't want to listen to this podcast either, that type of commentary. Mina Farag writes, it says, Hi, Midmaxers! during your GDC episode, you discussed the exciting new game called Blueprints that everyone was raving about.

I wanted to look this game up afterwards because it sounded up my alley, but I couldn't find anything called blueprints. Turns out I was looking up blueprints instead of blueprints. Ugh. the name was a very effective pun my question is what is your favorite show slash feature that you've ever named i love this question yeah you really do Wait, because at least you and I have named so many shows over the years. With New Show Plus?

Yeah. I guess so. And it is always a meeting or, you know, a conversation. And it's hard. It's always a conversation. And you're choosing through a ton of totally workable, serviceable options. You want to get it right? Do you have a favorite? I'm proud of new gameplay today. I also wrote down new gameplay today. This is a Game Informer thing, believe it or not, Sarah. And shall be again. Oh, that's right. I hope so.

But that idea of, okay, I want to do something. Test Chamber is what the show was called before. I think that was a Ben Reeves suggestion of like, let's show off the game a little bit. But what is the most SEO friendly way we can show off a game name?

Which from analytics, from our most popular videos, it's like, OK, the word gameplay has to be in there. That was kind of like the starting point. That's right. Yeah. And then I remembered, well, Don Draper and Mad Men said the word new is the best word in advertising. And he's never been wrong about anything. And then I still have the thread. I save the Slack thread. It's on my computer, Game Informer backup stuff of Leo and I spending, I don't know, like half an hour or whatever.

spitballing names for a show and then it was like okay new gameplay today and i believe it was you i came up with it and then the real sign of quality was the view started pouring in. And GameStop said, my God, GameInformer is saved forever. But I do remember it was then like eight months later, Andy McNamara had some line where he's like,

you know, do more new games than it is. It's a good name. It's a good show. One of those things like, oh, we at least got Andy's attention for saying, hey, that's actually a good name for this show. And a lot of them did really well. That's true. Yeah, there are plenty of breakouts from that. But yeah, I don't know. I've named so many shows over the years and it's fun to think about that specifically.

We did a show at Games are Dumb and for Kids, which is also, I think, a good name. I like that name. This is Leo's old YouTube channel. Look it up if you want to larf. We did a review show called My Cody Report. Yes. Which was about us working for this child YouTuber named Cody and doing his game reviews. And we were talking around the water cooler about the game we were playing for his upcoming video. And it was a play on minority report, of course.

My Cody report. I never connected that. I never. You can't. I don't blame you at all. It makes no sense. But we might have had the name Cody first and then somebody said my Cody report. And yeah, there's certain levels of nonsense you're really open to at certain ages. And we were happy to move forward with that. And that's definitely the worst name for a show I've been a part of. I'm trying to remember. I'm defeating my argument by having to Google it. But for new show plus.

i remember being like i want to call it the uprights what's it called when like you pitch a show to a studio Is it upright? It's something like that. And I remember being like, that's a perfect name because it's like pitching a show. This is exactly what it should be called. And then we did like a backstage pass vote and it was kind of like one vote compared to then you were pushing for it to be called new show show.

Right. And that was the debate. It was New Show Show versus New Show Plus. Upfronts. Thank you, chat. You got it. Yeah. Now, don't you think New Show Plus would have taken off even more if it was called The Upfronts? Yeah, of course. It's a universal thing that everybody knows.

Everyone's so stupid in retrospect. Yucky. What other shows have we named? I don't want to move on yet. Oh, okay. Deepest Dive is a great name. Oh, thanks. Yeah, I'm happy with that. And we actually have the pitch session for that one. If you're at the $5 tier on Patreon, you can hear our first. meetings for forming mid-max and i pitched deepest and we were like

It's like the term deep dive, but it's the deepest. Right, right. How do you make it a little more compelling? Because we used to call them just game clubs back at Game Informer. Yeah. Sarah, by the way, I hope you're not taking shots every time we mention Game Informer on this episode. Under the desk, I actually have tallies that I've scratched into this table. Oh, no. Sorry. Great goatee hunt. I think your heart was in the right place on that. Yeah, it never worked.

To try? It did. I think our Luigi's Mansion 3 episode got like 80,000 views or something. Because everyone was searching Godi, Luigi's Mansion, Godi, Godi, Godi. And we made the whole intro for it and everything. Yeah, fun intro. Yeah, it was a fun intro. I was like, ah, never mind. Could have been a great goatee hunt. Trivia Tower, I think, works well. That was a John Carson joint. He came up with that one. Oh, nice. Which is very helpful.

What was the people in the chat are mentioning cream of the steam as a great name, but you hated that. What was the original name? I came up with it. Ben hated it. It wasn't the name of the show. So what's the story there if you didn't hate it? It was backstage pass vote and Cream of the Steam got annihilated. Oh, it was Steam Secret Stash. Steam Secret Stash ended up winning. Right. Yeah, which I think both are good. But Kareem, this team...

Thank God you guys championed it and made it more fun because it's a weird thing to... to push through. It should be cold cream in this team. There's a certain level of goofiness that you want where it's like this is clearly unique from afar while also still knowing what it is. I think we can get a little too utilitarian with our name sometimes I definitely lean that direction

Hence Bonus Pod. Yeah, we can tell that you didn't name Pee Pee Bang. Yeah. Because it would be called Women Talk About Video Games? Right. Question mark? Subscribe now in a standalone podcast feed. And there's totally an argument for like...

it being more helpful and i think a lot of people do prefer it and stuff but it is interesting finding that sweet spot where it is it's definable own thing like we're talking about with deepest dive versus game club which a bunch of places have a game club right right But this is the best game club in theory. PB Bang is the perfect name. I think you guys completely knocked out of the park. Haley talked about it more kind of the formation of that name on the latest episode of bonus pod.

Yeah, you get to min snacks, min facts. all of that everyone suggested so many like minnesota based puns you know minception all these things and it's like i'm glad we got out of that phase like within the first six months of min max and now we can just go on to

good clean good names but now you have to worry about like future proofing things right because now you just have house hunter rise forever even though we're in several several monster hunter games deep at this point but it's still house hunters rise yeah it's gotta be yeah that one man you know i'd like a do-over probably for that one

Retro Game Treasures, which we only did the one episode of, of Kelsey, you know, walking around Pinkorolla with developers. We would like to do more, it's just a matter of scheduling and timing, and there's a lot on all of our plates at the moment. But I was saying, like, that name ain't working. Like, it's not getting the point across.

We've had a really hard time naming that. Yeah, because it's like... shopping with devs is my instinct but that's again so robotic but like how do you get that across it's cool because developers are talking about their own games and their inspirations and it's a really cool collection of games like it's a lot of weird stuff in there so it's not like just

shopping it in the target game section or something like how do we sell that yeah it's impossible it's impossible always in you know 12 letters or less and stuff yeah tricky I love having backstage pass vote. I feel like that helps.

for headlines and stuff there's interesting stuff i know it's like with um scripted podcasts like you've just been like not having the name of the show in new show plus you're like let's just try and make it clear what this is right yeah i thought that was interesting yeah i

it's like I want to get across that we not only write the script but we perform it because they're both the fun part and then once you do that it's like you're out of room in the headline once you communicate that it's pretty much

I didn't make those decisions. Yeah, Crossfade's a better name than Mintrax, Crowley points out, for the music podcast that Helgeson hosted. Oh, Crossfade is such a better name. And the original idea, the reason we went with Crossfade... is we were going to do cross cut and it was going to be a movie spinoff of crossfade was the original idea but then

you know, life pops up and schedules pop up and it's like, I don't know. I don't know if people are dying for movie content from Inmax necessarily. So I think we're okay without that. But hey, maybe that's a new show plus. Put Crosscut in there. Great. It can live. um collector's corner is pretty good yeah collector corner is great yeah yeah that's great um tom rickard

Hey, guys, it is also funny because we we name shows every week when we're doing our weekly meeting for our new show plus ideas like we come up with a name for that show, whether it gets picked up or not. So it's like we kind of end up having a lot of.

of coming up with names that are allowed to be really, really stupid because it might not even become one episode, let alone multiple. 50% are good names. 50% are just like, here's a stupid pun. Just get it out the door. Yeah. Get them out of them. I am really happy with them. I do think that's a funny name for a show. What was the great pun one we had recently?

I tweeted about it. I said, it's the greatest pun you've ever heard. And it was your idea and I want to shout it out. Yeah. Because you're just, again, you're just killing it today. Like French toast level destroying. Remember the Alarmo?

It was probably remember the Alarmo, yeah. I feel like some of the ideas are like great names, but like weak ideas. Yeah. It happens all the time. Are you saying the show where we ate beans and played Orcs Must Die and it was called Orcs and Beans is not a great... It's lost repeatedly.

What was the one that Leo brought up you had on the new show Plus list like five times and it lost? Oh, we played No Man's Sky. Just played No Man's Sky. We didn't have a good name for it. That's the problem. Exactly. Which was, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I could have sold it. Tom Rickert says, hey, everybody, quick question. When is the last time a game has had a definitive and groundbreaking weapon? I love this question. The last game to be like this is a definitive and groundbreaking weapon.

Probably Donkey Kong's fist, right? About to be, yeah. About to be, yeah. Wow. Nice answer. Gravity gun. That's the last time? 2004? Tell me I'm wrong. Maybe something from Prey had interesting things, but... The glue gun. I would go... I think the Leviathan accident got a war. was good enough to be at that level feeling so good about like coming back like the vibration of the controller is so fantastic yeah that's a good feels good yeah yeah i don't i guess

Groundbreaking is the word I'm getting on. I'm getting stuck up on the definitive groundbreaking because one of my favorite weapons that I've never seen come back again was the Twilight Princess Beyblade.

that Link would stand on and you would like twerk on it to get it to move faster and it would like you could like move cogs and gears with it and you could fly up walls with it and like that still I think is one of the coolest hyper specific boss battles I've ever done jumping between the tracks and like knocking the skeleton head off like I just think that's so cool and it's never coming back that's weird

Yeah, interesting. There's got to be some Bloodborne stuff, right? Some switchy bladey thing that everyone... Sorry, this is the wrong table for Bloodborne Deep Cut. Yeah, whatever it is, I'm sure it sucks. Honestly, like the tone of the spell book in Avowed, like the way that works with its own loadout of spells and it having its own kind of...

Yeah, I don't know. The way you play around it, it's definitely an overstatement to say definitive and groundbreaking, but that's the most recent one that comes to mind. This feels new and cool. Like the ice power in Eternal Strands felt different at least because it was like you were actually making... Those are powers, not a weapon.

I kind of wish you'd stop talking. The Kirkhammer, by the way, is a Bloodborne thing I was trying to think of that chat came up with immediately. God, his ass bad night. Waffles take a ding. Submit your comment below. Waffles, is this your man? Ricky Winterborn says, what posters did you have on your wall as a kid? Another question I loved. Yeah. When do we ever talk about this? And yet we all have an answer, don't we? The Kirk Hammer.

For me, it was that Lord of the Rings Fellowship of the Ring poster. Legolas. Smeagol. Oh, you seem Smeagol-y. One eye in the darkness. terrifying at night. Very memorable. Oh, that's good. Why'd you do that to yourself? My sister's poster. Oh, yeah. Oh, that's tough. And it was on the door, too. So when the door is closed at night, that's when you see it. Yeah. Only when it's most scary.

I had the opposite. I was trying to think of the dumbest thing. I remember my sister's got Seventeen magazine. And there was this one cover with Jessica Alba on it. And I was like, that's supposed to attract a human being. So I cut off the cover for 17 and that was pinned up. In my room, it's just Jessica Alba. tiny magazine cover poster. But Sarah, if you saw this poster, you'd become a cartoon wolf. You'd hear him out. What a horn dog.

I also we had a movie rental place a few blocks from our house where they'd be getting rid of posters sometimes and you get the ratty torn up ones that they couldn't sell. So I had one that was George Lopez in Mr. Troop Mom for a while. You can quiz 100 people on the sidewalk. No one would remember that movie. I'm so confident. We had a full – a full door length poster of,

uh, Michael Jordan dunking on some white guy. Oh, that's good. Classic shot. Wow. Cool. And that radicalized you. It did. Yeah. Um, yeah, I think of, uh, I don't know. It's adjacent enough, I guess, but like, I remember at a game stop. uh, when age of mythology came out, 2003, 2002, um, they had a huge standee and they were throwing it away. I was like, can I have that? Like, yeah, totally. Like that was in my room for so long. Just have a huge age mythology standee. Do you know where it went?

We had it in our garage for a long time, then eventually we threw it away. Like, it got destroyed and all color distorted. But I remember, like, Zeus had, like, a physical plastic lightning bolt, like a real lightning bolt. Whoa. And I was like, I should just hang on to this so I have this remnant. But that is...

I think the saddest nostalgia play I've ever had is looking online for like, could I get like one of those standees anywhere on eBay? But also I had Revenge of the Sith when that came out, that fine picture. The movie theater is throwing away a big cardboard. standy thing of yoda flying in his little senate pod or whatever um and so i got that and that's still hanging up in my childhood room is the weird yoda for revenge of the sith that's cool it it's no doubt really cool

That's like a cool weird one. Yeah. You have anything, Sarah? Honestly, I didn't put up a lot of posters. My sister had a Taylor Lautner poster going through her Twilight phase. Yeah. Somebody gifted me for Christmas a Legolas poster from Lord of the Rings, and I was too embarrassed to put it up. I had such a big crush on him.

When I was younger. I get another crush on a guy that just looks like you. No, he does not! I couldn't pick you guys out of the lineup, to be honest. But yeah, I didn't, like, put up a lot of posters. I think it was hard to find posters for, like, my... interest at the time like i i would love like a sailor moon poster they didn't have those back then now they're everywhere did you decorate another way

Yeah, I would like print things off the internet and just stick them to my door. I would literally just go to the family printer and like run through the color and I would print Sailor Moon and I would slap it to my door. Nice. We had the best system at Ronnie's.

Uh, you know, that Ronnie guy, I played through split fiction with him, but, um, you know, back in like seventh grade or whatever, we just got reams and reams of like printer paper. And then we would just like draw pictures that made us laugh. for days and days and days and it became like a weird like cartoon contest between all of us and we'd be staying up all night just like drawing pictures and seeing if this one would get a laugh and then we would just put them up in Ronnie's bedroom

So like at the end of like a year, his entire room was just lined with like inside jokes and stuff. Isn't that just like the early version of like, what's that game that you guys like that I have to play on my phone every extra life? Drawful? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why is everything torture for you, Sarah? What an existence you've got. Mike Chase writes in, what is your most thought about game of all time?

Not your favorite game of all time, not the best game of all time, but the game that you think about so often that it creeps into your mind seemingly at random. Yeah, like full life. If you're adding up hours of thinking about games, is that more interesting than just more most recently?

If it's that, then it's definitely Siege for me, and I don't think anything will ever... changed that wow i had so many years where i put so many hours into that with friends it was just like the main way we hung out was playing siege and i would be watching videos when i wasn't playing it at game informer and stuff watching videos over lunch throughout the day and and truly

Having a great session, five hours playing with friends at night, go lay in bed and be replaying my favorite rounds. I'm going, oh, remember that round where this happened? Did you ever like, I got to a point with Overwatch where I would like. we'd stay up until five in the morning playing and then i would go to sleep and i would just dream i was playing overwatch for sure yes a lot of siege dreams

Tetris. Because every time I'm like packing something, I can't not think Tetris because I do it so efficiently. There's no doubt about it. Very good. Yeah. It's got to be Pokemon, like Pokemon Red and Blue. Like if you're fracturing, like reading the strategy guide and like the little books and stuff, like endlessly thinking about that game. I think that's got to be number one.

That's tough because it's biased toward games you played when you were younger, right? Because then it would be like, oh, Pokemon Sapphire. I spent a lot of time with that game. But I feel like the game that I've been thinking about most now is just like the ending of Outer Wilds. Like I find myself just pausing every day and being like, yes, soon this will all be over. Hey, how was that Sailor Moon concert, by the way? So good. Oh my gosh.

So I guess like to preface this, I went to what is it called? Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, the super live. Pretty Guardian. Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon is her full name. Get it right. But basically to give you some. So Japan really likes to make musicals out of everything and anything. A lot of animes have musicals. Sailor Moon has a musical. Prince of Tennis has a musical. Ace of Journey has a musical, right?

And they do it often in Japan. And when I was growing up, I would spend hours in the summer watching these Sailor Moon musicals in like the lowest quality possible. No subtitles on early, early YouTube. And I would just watch them and I'd be like, one day.

i will i want to see a sailor moon musical live like i want to go and i want to be in the audience and then recently it popped up that they're touring the u.s wow and like not just hitting up like la new york like they are going that's how serious the sailor moon tour is so i bought tickets it was on sunday and we went and like

people were losing their minds. Singing the songs? So it's in Japanese. Oh, cool. And they have subtitles on a back monitor in almost kind of like a music video type way. And it's a sort of like... Some speaking, some singing, you know, very like Broadway-esque. But like the production value really, really high. The actors were great. And I was like, oh, my God, like I kept having to stop and be like.

in minnesota and like everything was packed and there was like little girls with their sailor moon buns And then people like me, old and washed up with our Sailor Moon outfits on. And we're like, oh my God, Sailor Moon. And like a character would come out. And it'd be like, I'm Sailor Venus. And people would be like, literally every time a character would show up, people would be like, people were losing their minds. And then they did like a greatest hit.

thing at the end where they sang some of the songs from like the past popular musicals like tokyo girls and like all that kind of stuff oh fun and you went with kyle yeah kyle me kyle and his wife went It turns out they were sitting next to you. They were like a little bit...

I did balcony seats and they were kind of on the other side of the balcony. Yeah. And Kyle was like shouting over all the little girls. You could just hear his pitch coming through. Oh my God. It's Toshito Mask. That's cool. John Chizunas. Sarah. Yes. Okay. Hey, CLCs. If you woke up one morning. All right. Imagine this. Close your eyes, everybody. If you woke up one morning and your handedness had changed.

How long do you think it would take for you to figure out exactly what was going on? I feel like immediately because I'd go to set up my computer desk.

And I feel wrong. Do left-handed people have the mouse on the left? I guess I don't know. Well, I touch it and I would just be like... what the heck but wouldn't it feel weird if you didn't know like i would think i was having a stroke or something i think like something was wrong with my body if just like brush your teeth and you're like wait a second i think honestly i'd be googling like

Something's wrong with my body.com. I'd be like brain damage side. Yeah. Brain cancer question mark. Yeah, totally. So are we assuming that if you woke up. instinctively, when you went to brush your teeth, you would grab it with the other hand now? Yeah, because it would have switched, right? So wouldn't your muscle memory switch?

I imagine that you wouldn't. You'd use your right hand. I hate even the thought of it. The thought of my left hand doing anything disgusts me. I haven't used it for 15 years. I am left-handed, so I use it every day for everything. What's the weirdest thing about being left-handed? Did you hear like they have a higher death rate than people? Because things aren't made for you? Yeah, because of conversations like this, Sarah. You feel alienated. Do they really have a higher death rate?

That's just some dumb thing that goes around the internet from every so often. Oh, because you have to drive on the opposite side. It was very dangerous getting here today. That's why I don't like doing in-person podcasts. Not to turn this into dumb dad hour.

But it is fascinating to, like, study. To study closely, it can be like... Try to figure it out. Yep, and they're like, he threw that with his left hand. Okay, now back to the right. Like, you're just trying to... Look, I don't want to put my finger on the scales here. It's just fun to try and figure out, like... But obviously, it'd be cooler to have a left-handed cat. Undoubtedly. They're more creative. Right. Exceptions.

What do y'all like for a question of the week here? I like the naming. Yeah, obviously I like that one. I like the poster one. Poster. The handedness. Sarah, what do you think? The naming one. The naming one. Jeff, you concur? Yeah. All right, that is Mina Farag. Speaking of good names, congratulations. You just won the prize from IM8Bit, the bomb rush cyberpunk. Also, Ray Loaza, very... important to cite this correctly, that it was somebody in the discord.

Specifically, Leafeon suggested the name Remember the Alamo. So I cannot take credit for that pun. So please forgive us. Oh, yes. I butchered it, but you get the idea. Now it's time for something that we love to call Get a Load of This.

Originally called Juicy Nugget, by the way. Speaking of bad names versus good names. Was that seriously something you... I pitched it to you guys and you said no. But it never got to... It never got to air, I suppose. Juicy Nugget. All right, what do you guys got? Juicy nugget coming up. Okay. Yeah. Sorry. So open wide for a juicy nugget. Is that what you don't like? Yes. Well, it's okay. I don't know. Open wide for a juicy nugget. Trans people are in a lot of danger right now.

There's a lot of legislation that is making things really scary. And I just want to shout out this blue sky profile, Trans Safe Harbor Network, where they are working on this thread basically of every like.

country that people talk about potentially being good to relocate to or potentially not being good and it is really pared down data on like The in-demand jobs there, of course, whether it's safe or not and whether, yeah, what kind of limitations there are on surgery, cost of living, just like useful at a glance information to have.

handy if that's something that you need to be aware of, need to have a plan for, or whatever. So I just want to shout that out. Transafe Harbor Network. And this link is to that thread with that information, but they're a good profile to follow in general. So that's a juicy nugget for you. Right on. Links below. Uh, for all these, uh, Hey, uh, Choke down this juicy nugget, everybody.

Do you all know the ice cream flavor called Superman? That's my favorite flavor. You seem like a Superman type. Shut up. You know, kind of like three different colors. And it's really not a... And it makes your mouth horribly blue. Right, right, right. It always just looks like, I like sweet things, but when I'm in the mood for ice cream, that looks still like too much. You know, I was buying some recently or talking to somebody working at an ice cream store. And you're like, what sicko?

Well, I asked the standard question of what's popular? What's the most popular ice cream people go for? And they're like, oh, it's Superman. And then they said, fun fact. Superman the Ice Cream predates the character Superman. I find that hard to believe. There's no universe where that can be true. Turns out it is true.

But it had a different name back in the 20s when it was invented. And then the colors match Superman. So when Superman came out, they changed the name of the flavor of the trifecta thing to Superman, even though it's not actually licensed in any way. And it's just like this. I feel like it's just kind of like an underground, like we're going to call it Superman in DC. You're going to be cool about it. But it is weird that like this.

Ice cream flavor, which I think is predominantly in the Midwest, just has this character name and has never been legal action. I'm more confused that I don't know what the flavor is. I just know that I like it. Right, right. It tastes like Superman. Flies. Anyways, that's my juicy nugget. Juicy nugget. I'm dripping. Choke on this juicy nugget. This is actually an old juicy nugget. It's new to me. Okay. It's actually like 10 years old. Still good. Heat it up. Yeah. Apparently 10 in 2016.

Someone named Billy Dominu? released a fan-written Seinfeld episode called The Twin Towers. Sorry. And it's an episode written about 9-11 that's just... written like an actual Seinfeld episode um and it's It perfectly nails Seinfeld. If you read it, it just seems you'll read it and be like, yep, that was written by Larry David. And they're joking about 9-11? No, it kind of takes place around 9-11. It's as if those two would actually sit down and write something, like what happens to the cast.

in the immediate aftermath. Oh, everything's closed. It's such a pain in the butt. Jerry is freaked out because there's dust everywhere. Right. This is dark. George Costanza is like jealous of the firefighters and police officers, but then he gets mistaken as like having saved people and he just goes along with it. Like all that kind of stuff. Script online. Love it. Wow. Haunting. Okay. This is my juicy nugget.

This is my juicy nugget. There is a Magic the Gathering website called Mythic Spoiler that was made, I believe, about 12 years ago and they would post sort of like... images of what Magic the Gathering cards would look like, right? So they'd kind of be like a way that if you want to see what all the new cards are, you would go to this website. The creator of that website is also the creator of Blueprint.

And this is what they say. They say, I created Mythic Spoiler 12 years ago as a way to allow players to view card sets in a visually pleasing way. This website has always been a passion project of mine, but I never expected it would allow me to pursue my dreams of making a game. Wow. For the past eight years, all of the ad revenue from this website has gone into making Blueprint.

And then, like, it even has, like, a thing on their website, too. Like, there's, like, about blueprints in the upper corner of the website. That's wild. Huh. Yeah, in interviews, he was talking about being inspired by so many card games like Dominion and stuff like that, like tabletop stuff. I was like, okay, that makes sense. Totally. That's cool. Super cool. Hey, get a load of this. Michael Berry.

Oh, hang on. Was this the one I wanted to use? I think it was. Michael Berry in the Discord, they share fun tidbits each and every day. Michael Berry posted this YouTube channel, which is about Lost Mega Man Legends game has been found and translated. I believe it's a phone game.

It's been translated into English now. So you can check that out if you want great adventure on five islands. I am very curious to dive into this weird thing. So thanks to, of course, Michael Berry for sharing that fun stuff in there. Also, bonus Juicy Nugget is Charles Hart. There's going to be a link below for this, of course.

He's back to creating his lunch songs. Now he's back at Game Informer and he made one in honor of the GDC travelogue from Min Max where it's a parody of My Brother from Mufasa the Lion King, the greatest film of 2024.

That is unbelievably good, as all of his songs are. It's amazing. You listen and learn in disbelief, yeah. Yes, absolutely. And believe it or not, he really enjoyed the music for South of Midnight. His review was like, this music rules over and over again, but musical knowledge for sure. All right, that is it for this episode of the MinMax Show podcast. Thank you all for being here.

Keep the feedback rolling. We can clap all we want in person. It has no magic ability. It has no effects. And Discord can't drown it out. You can't hide our pride! Coming up in the next year, we have, again, the deepest dive on Claribs. Obscure Expedition 33. The previews have been red hot on this upcoming RPG, so if you want a great place to talk about it, you can support MinMax on Patreon at any tier.

and join the discord where there's gonna be a great discussion about it and then submit comments for us to read during our discussion or join at the five dollar tier to unlock the podcast version of all that yeah again we weren't sure whether to do it until we found out whether it was really good or not and it seems like it's really good

What person at Mimac said it was really good that changed Ben's mind on doing a deep dive on it? Interesting. Because he didn't want to do it originally. It's a gamble. It's a gamble. It is a gamble, but... You know, people take that into consideration. If you're unsure about it, it might be fun. There we go. Also, yeah, up on MinMax's YouTube channel, we have the biggest Let's Play we've ever done, technically, where it's an 11-hour stream of Ronnie and I finishing.

split fiction in co-op in the studio together so if you want more gameplay streams more in studio stuff you can check out that incredibly long let's play for split fiction which was fun and rambly at times and silly and yeah i'm glad we did it all in person i made that happen over a bunch of different recordings there

hayley mcclain's bonus pod if you're at the five dollar cheer you unlock that bonus show each and every week so it's called bonus pod because you know exactly what it is leo stop licking the gosh darn table Ew. Haley took great calls. I don't think Ben cleans this. I've never cleaned that table. Do you know how much Ronnie sweat is on that table after 11 hours? You can taste it.

But, bonus pod Haley's show, she talks more about her thoughts on blueprints, spoiler free, but then also takes a bunch of fun calls from the community, from people at that $20 tier, which we're very thankful for everybody at that New Max Council tier. um new show plus this week scripted podcast continues yeah this week it was kelsey and janet and hayley writing a deepest dive for jacob and leo and i to do on the game clock for super nintendo which

They knocked it out of the park. It was very, very impressive. And it's getting scary how well everybody knows mannerisms. I went back and watched that today, by the way. janet is uncanny she is for being like okay jacob does this thing where he tilts his head 45 degrees and then he says this phrase before he goes into this phrase like whoa i made a clip about that with clips of jacob doing that and it is really something that's fun

Pew Pew Bang! There's a new episode coming up on Monday. What do you talk about, Sarah? Game Merc. Game merch. Game merch. Interesting. So subscribe to PP Bang in a standalone podcast feed. Leave a review. Help spread the word. It's also on our YouTube channel if you want to watch or share the video version there. Also, shout out to everybody in the Discord. We posted something we'll be talking more about.

Like a cool new, hopefully initiative here at MinMax would be the right way to phrase that of just saying like, hey, would anybody that... community be up for doing this thing and god bless the people in the discord for for going out on a limb and be like yeah i'm totally up for that that sounds great and so look forward to something unique coming up in early may something i've wanted to do for years and hopefully hopefully it goes well and we can keep doing more of it and

We can make the world a slightly better place thanks to this whole Mad Max thing, kind of leaning into that getting better thing in a way that we haven't as much since the show BetterQuest went down. So look forward to that in the future. But that is it. Sarah, do you like podcasting in person? This is like the second time we've ever podcasted with the Min Max show in person. Yeah, this is my first time podcasting in the studio.

Yeah. That isn't just like, yeah, like a game of the year awards or extra or give to the max. Yeah. Whatever the hell it is. Yeah. What do you think? Pros and cons? It's nice. Okay. It's nice. The podcasting in person, pros and cons? Pros and cons. You get to watch Leo lick things off the table. Yeah. But also there's like nothing to look at.

when i need to look at something don't you wish it was like a that 70s show style setup where we could have more eye contact because it kind of does feel weird sometimes i'm just like looking in this space and i'm like do i look at if i look at leo then Right. I barely looked at Jeff on this whole time. I know. I hope he's still there. He left a couple of minutes ago. You should have just looked at Leo and never broke eye contact just so you weren't looking at my notes the whole time.

Jeff, thank you for coming out. Greatly appreciate it. Leo, thank you. Sarah, thank you. You should get one of those screen protectors that's where you can only see us. That would kill me because literally, if people haven't noticed, I always end up sitting next to Ben at these things and all I do is read chat.

Yeah, like during like the Game of the Year stuff or like Extra Life. Like I literally just read channels. It's like a Twitch training. Like you need that Twitch training. I sometimes do too and I have the same problem. So I can't not look. I need to look. Yeah, I get it.

All right. Well, there we go, everybody. Keep the feedback rolling. We appreciate it. You can support us at Patreon if you appreciate this type of content and more content in the future, including the deepest dive. We're doing it, everybody. One blueprints clue for you to send you a home on. Okay. Um... Ballroom sets gems to two. Does that mean something? I'll be honest, Leo. I don't think it does. Thanks so much, everybody. Be good. Have fun. Let's go.