Arc Raiders, Mortal Kombat History, Ben's Leave

Hello, everybody, and welcome to a new episode of The MinMac Show, a place about games, friends, getting better. Thank you for being here. I'm Ben Hanson. Honored to have you. I am joined by Hayley McClain. My life is like a video game. Remember that? Yep. Leo Vader, take it away. Yep. I don't know that song. Can I do a different one? Yeah, absolutely, man. Yeah, yeah. Hey, now. And Jeffem, popcorn to you.

How can you follow that up? I got nothing. You hack. Kelsey Lewin's here too. Was it Hey Now, You're an All-Star? Or Hey Now, Hey Now? And then Jacob Gellar takes it home with... This is a podcast about video games. The story of a couple boys. Welcome, everybody. We're going to be talking about... And a couple girls too. They matter just as much. One of us won an award. More. Exactly.

Oh, lordy. We got a lot to talk about on this episode. We're talking about Ark Raiders. We have a full crew. Everybody wanted to talk about Ark Raiders, and we can't say no to these people. Then we're going to talk about Fortnite. In the year 2025. What a hoot. We're talking about the Simpsons as well. Number one victory. Royale.

None of us did that one. It's a cool episode. And then some people are dropping out because we're going to get nerdy and good and geeky because we're going to unpack the Mortal Kombat Legacy Collection. So button up. and buckle up people uh then button up button up folks we're talking about mortal combat

Then we're talking about evil egg. I want to talk about that. No, I'm not a human. Stray children. And then back after the show, some wonderful questions submitted over there on Patreon. Thanks, everybody, for being here. This is going to be my last.

regular episode of the mid-max show this year um the episodes will still be coming out weekly Unless something explodes while I'm gone, but I can't imagine what that would be. But I'm going to be on paternity leave for the rest of the year with a couple of exceptions, obnoxious exceptions.

The plan is I'll be coming back for the Game of the Year debates, which are happening in mid-December. Couldn't miss those. So we're going to try and squeeze those in. And then also for the Thanksgiving joke-a-thon that will be happening. presumably in the studio. Jeff, are you writing jokes? Are you getting ready for that big event coming up? Oh, yeah. I've been... Getting ready all year for that. Okay, good. I felt so obnoxious that I wrote a joke last week and...

I am losing sleep about telling this joke. I am so excited to get to the stupid joke-a-thought. I have a child presumably being born in the next three to four days. That's number one excitement. Number two excitement of my life is to deliver this joke. But we randomize it. so I won't even get to. By that I mean we're randomizing who's raising my baby girl. Best of luck to all y'all. No, so I'm going to be out on the opportunity to leave, but I wanted to...

Just send out a big thank you, obviously, to the little support that we've gotten on Patreon. You know, kind messages are lovely, but also just the... People jumping in even at that $2 tier, $5 tier have allowed me to be able to step out for paternity leave. We have people like – well, everyone is stepping up in their own beautiful way. But particularly like Leo and Jeff and Janet are stepping up and tackling more duties.

We're bringing in a couple more people to help with the workload and stuff. And all of that's only possible because of that support on Patreon. So thank you for not making me work through my paternity leave, everybody. And the people that we have stepping in, first of all... For some video editing help here and there, we have the great Jason A. Strikers going to be jumping in.

formerly of Giant Bomb and Game Informer. It's fun to have him back in the mix. So the plan right now, unless something comes up, I don't think he's going to be on content regularly or anything. He's just going to be helping out with the editing with Leo and stuff like that. But it's just fun to get to see.

From the distance, Leo coordinate with Jason Aestreicher, two people who never worked together, but he's a big fan of Giant Bomb, Leo is, and so it's got to be fun to coordinate with that dude over the next month and a half. Totally. And of course, he built the Game Informer studio where I spent so much time. That's right. That's right. It's like, you know, meeting my ancestors. Yeah, in some beautiful way. And then the host of this podcast for the next month and a half.

Drum roll, everybody. I hope you're not expecting a bigger surprise. Kyle Bosman from Delayed Input Fame. What? He's coming back. Hot off the presses. Who could have seen? That's right. Former guest cohort here. He's going to come back and guest host the podcast just like he did last time around as well. So it'll be fun to have him back in that mix. But.

Can we talk about some freaking games already, you guys? Spamming hearts in the chat right now. Let's do more song parodies. Oh, okay. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, I was delighted that...

Something has grabbed the universe and is dragging everybody towards – What's that? Was it ghoulies? It was largely ghoulies. They're grabbed by the ghoulies reference in my immediate circle in one week. What's going on? You haven't heard, Leo? It's hot. Yeah, it's trending. Come on, man. I guess everyone's talking about him. But no, we tell them that we're recording like five hours later. But have you guys noticed this? It's just as you know, I'm getting texts from Haley.

Last night of like, hey, Kelsey and I are playing arc writers, jump on. Or Jeff being like, hey, I'm jumping on arc writers. Like this momentum of people eager to play together. It's just, there is a gravitational pull. from the new game Arc Raiders that seems to be grabbing everybody. And, like, I'm having a tough time thinking of a game that has grabbed almost the entire min-max crew and has, like, encouraged this much...

or have you guys just been playing a bunch of games without me and I'm out of the loop and everything else? Then we all play with each other because we're friends and you're the only one that wants to not be a part of it. We have a group chat without you, queen. No! No, no, no. Or I'm excluded from it. I've been playing this. I played this with Jacob.

Uh, and I played Fortnite with Jacob and I've done so many other things with Jacob and it was too late for me last night, but I was eager. If it would have lined up, I was like, it was just that moment of like, Oh my God, I get to play this multiple game with like Kelsey. Like I never played hell divers with you. I've turned my back on you so many times. Uh, but this.

It's just you've always been invited. I don't know if that's true. I will check my text. I don't think you've ever sent me a text and said, let's play this thing this night. And I said, no. Okay, that's fair. I've not been trying to set dates. Are you making the argument that Kelsey wouldn't play a game with you and that's why you haven't played with her? The argument I'm trying to set up is that this seems to be a popular game that a lot of people are excited about is this here, Ark Raiders.

It's the dumbest thing he's said the whole time. Damn it! Dreams are made of... Okay, so Leo, tell me your journey with Ark Raiders, because you're a big fan of the finals from the same developer... Embark Studios and you were like cautious going into this thing and then we streamed it for max settings and was that like the click of like now you're in it yes big time

Embark done did it again. It's got all the smoothness and polish of the finals on day one, which is so crazy and so feels unprecedented how smooth this has been since the moment it launched. And it is just... The hooks are there and the proximity chat encounters that can go so differently. Everything, every encounter is rich because you know how differently it can go. You know that whoever you're making friends with might betray you like people have before. It's like every single...

Sometimes you have like a couple dud runs, but the vast majority, it's been like hit after hit after hit of that was a great story that just played out with me and my friends or me by myself. Yeah. And so this is, yeah, just for zooming out a little bit. This is the extraction. shooter that was originally just like a PVE thing and then they rebooted it a while ago at Embark and they're like, I don't know, let's make it an extraction shooter.

And it seemed like an arrow and everyone's like, extraction shooters. All right, we get it. Tarkov is big, but no one else is going to catch that lightning in a bottle. Oh, Bungie, don't even try. And then Ark Raiders comes out and everyone's like, yep, this rules. We like this. Thank you very much. Give us more. It's just amazing to see the big pivot. Haley, are you maybe the second most tickled? Tickled pick for this.

It's so fun. I don't know. It's been a long time since a game so quickly was like, oh, hell yeah. Like the first session I did was with Jacob and friend of the show, Joe Buckles. And I like... Three games in, I was like, yep, I know I'm going to play this for a lot of hours. It has that secret sauce. I think it's what Leo's saying. It was me and Joe, actually, none taken. What'd I say?

You said Joe and Jacob. You said Jacob. I wish it was Jacob. Are we playing with Joe? I don't even know him that well. Another secret group chat. Wait a second. Have I been mixing you two up this whole time? I never realized. Sorry about that, Leo. You were there too. That's okay. It's an anecdote machine is kind of what I feel like.

If I go and play with other people, when I meet back up with my other crew that I play with, I tell them like five stories. Like, you know, one time I killed a leaper. with one of my crews, and I was so excited to tell my other crew that I played with, oh, if we killed a Leaper one time, it was sick, you gotta throw a blaze grenade right at its eyeball, and then it's ten times easier, we figured that out. And... It sort of feels like you're in a human experiment of like, are humans good or not?

counter another person i'm of the opinion i turn on proximity chat and always go hello hi and then if they shoot me i'm like i have no moral culpability to kill you now like that's kind of how i play the game but it's so fun when you just meet other like-minded people And you do little missions with them and you bond with them and then they die some comedical way. You're like, I guess I'm leaving your corpse because I have no way to res you. So, okay, bye. Just walk away.

Great. It's so fun. Yeah, I've been trying to generate more wacky scenarios. I'm just like, all right, I'll just walk through these abandoned city streets, you know, push to talk down, just going like, hello, just making like wacky sounds with my voice.

Just to try and lure in some people to have conversations with because it's definitely the thrill. But, like, here's my question. Can the robots, like the ARCs, can they hear your voice chat? Will they be attracted to you if you're using your mic, Mannheim style? I actually don't know, though.

Do you know it? I don't think so. Okay, okay. So I shouldn't be scared of that. It feels like they would have thought of that. It's the kind of game that feels like they thought of that, but I don't know whether that's true or not. Right, right, right. And so it's just consumed your life now, Haley? This is your obsession? Yeah, we recorded PP Bang last night until like...

12 30 my time and then i was like i think kelsey was gonna play this tonight so i was like kelsey can we play and she's like yeah and so i played till 2 30 in the morning even though i worked today like i just can't not play it and then i dreamed about it two nights in a row when i'm not playing it i think about it

I think about strategies. It's got a really high thinking about it when you're not playing it factor of like planning for what you're going to do when you get back to it or thinking about how crazy moments were. Yeah. I see little videos. I send them to.

To Jacob and Joe, not Leo. And I say, this is what we can do next time. You guys, when we group up. It's like fun. I'm going to play with who I really want to play with. I really want to play with Jacob and Joe, not Leo Vader. Yeah. Kelsey, as a big Helldivers fan, is that why you were... open to it uh i mean i was mostly just excited that everyone else was playing it and uh my partner's playing it too and i was like will i like this and he was like i think because you like

playing with your friends i think you will like this and i was like great good enough for me um and yeah yeah so far uh so good i have i all i've really done so far is just play with hayley last night a little bit with my partner but um so i'm still Still learning the ropes, but Haley's been a great guide, and I'm definitely excited to play more. And already, like, yeah, just the second you jump in, anytime you encounter another person.

you you get something out of it might be terrible but you get something out of it i get a little anxiety in your belly it's fun like when i kill someone and caught i'm like i killed another man and for this i'm like

Who's that over there? You're like excited to see how it'll play out. It's different every time. There's plenty of games that you clutch in. Like, oh, I'm the last one left on my team. Oh, and I won this. You know, that happens to all of us all the time in all the games we play. Yeah, yeah. But it's such a new thing in this game to be like...

getting revenge like this person in my party is gone for good but now i killed the person who did it and they're down and i can talk trash to them and be like make sure they regret like really drill in that they made a bad decision by attacking us

There's something about that that just tickles me. Tell the time that Jacob got killed and then we... roasting them and we leo and i doubt both of them after they killed jacob and they angered us first we were very cute and very fun we're like we want to shoot you we promise and then they killed jacob in cold blood

And we downed them, and you kind of can do an animation to fully knock them out or, like, shoot them more. Kind of like Fortnite, how you have a second, you can crawl around. And we were like, yeah, yeah, probably should have rethought that, huh, huh? And then an arc started shooting us, so we had to stop.

chirping them and like literally i got hit by a drone that knocked me out of the punch animation like i didn't try to stop it just pushed me away and then we killed the drone and we had to like resume the trash talk like this is still cool that doesn't doesn't change anything

I also won over. I was excited about this game, excited about the studio, but then it was like watching that max settings and just seeing the silliness and the fact that... people were just being really friendly as strangers like oh i am so into this like being able to talk and reason with people and have that be such a challenge is so compelling and i've been amazed that like i think one guy one time in a group just took like

you know, an ax to the back of my friend Grant's head when you're trying to get on a subway. Other than that, I feel like everyone that I've seen so far has been friendly. which is surprising. There's like a post on the Reddit where it's like, is everyone a little too nice in this game? Like, what is happening? I want more PvP stuff.

It's funny, there are people on that subreddit talking about how, like, I've been down this road before, Division Dark Zone, when it first came out, everybody was being super nice. Oh, interesting. Over time, it just gets more and more violent, which is a funny type of doomsaying. I'm curious to see if it goes that way.

but plenty of people you know you do definitely get a lot of fights you get you get shot from random people who just see you and decide to kill you pretty frequently in my experience and it's not just a matter of like because you know clocks ticking down it's like there are more and more escape routes that are kind of cut off over time so in theory as you get closer to the end of

The time play or the game session here, it's going to be funneled and everyone's going to get more and more intense. Is that typically where the big fights are happening? It's just like if things are getting dire for you only got so much time to get out of here?

it definitely encourages things that way because like over time the loot is less on the map and more on people's bodies so it's like oh i spawned in late my best chance to get loot is to kill people but also i think there are people who just that's their play style like they just go in to kill they take

The free loadout, which is like, you know, extraction shooters, your loot is kind of permanent. You bring a gun back, you bring it with you, you die with it, it's gone. Or you bring it for five runs if you never die and you get to keep using the great gun. But you can take a free load out. There's a lot of ways that this is like a more casual of an extraction shooter, a little more player friendly. Yeah. And you can bring things that basically.

You get free stuff that you won't lose, so it's consequenceless, and you can go in just to have fights. Whether that's just a practice or just because you have a bloodlust. And the game needs players like that. It makes it more exciting to be friends with somebody. You know, when it feels like not everybody is going to be your friend. Yeah.

i do feel like it's worth talking about like what you do in the game which we haven't really touched on yet and and ben playing with you i felt you you were like It felt like you were kind of looking for something that wasn't there or maybe I still don't fully understand it. But like what it seems like to me, if you take the if you take the you're having random conversations with people.

out of the game this is a game where you like load into a map you go and search objects for scraps and then you leave And like, that's what the game is. And there are there are enemies and there are like more involved places that you can search that will be more dangerous with like the arcs, which are the robots around. But Ben, you kept being like.

now are you doing the same quest as me or like are we doing are we like working towards something and i was like the quest is to kill three robots like the quests are only to get you moving in the direction of looking through desks to find you know, a broken cord that you need to upgrade your workbench. And it is like, it is weird that the, and impressive that the game is so interesting in its moment to moment mechanics that it can support a structure.

That kind of has no like it's not pushing you to do anything. You know, it's just kind of like you're just building up your desks and gear and whatever, because that is. you're able to do that and build more gear but it's not like oh to get to the next big story moment or even you know to like to unlock the newest gun uh it's just kind of like go and find stuff and gradually you'll build up your ability to

build things at your base and there's enough stuff to do that somebody says does it does anybody need to do anything on this map and somebody can go oh there's five things i could look for i know where they'll be let's check out i need to go this type of building you just like have enough to to

decide where to go and kind of have a goal. And then that just like guides you to some encounter that you didn't expect to happen. It just keeps things moving. Jacob, that is the thing that I have been grappling with as I've been playing this. And it's...

Like, I've really been enjoying it and I have been thinking about it constantly and I can't wait to go play more tonight. But it's one of those paradoxical games where, like, if it wasn't for the loot, I don't think I would... keep playing it but also the loot only exists to get you more stuff to make you do more runs it's it's like this oros boros that it's just like and and the and the like the actual crafting better loot

is something that I don't care about and I haven't really been doing. I've mostly just been doing the free loadouts because of loss aversion where it's like, okay, if I go in with free stuff... And I make it out. Not only do I get all the stuff that I looted, but I also get to keep the free stuff that I started with, which is great. That's like two great things. And if I die, then I didn't lose anything.

To begin with, versus like if I take stuff in and I die, then I feel like I'm losing stuff. And it's just like that's my own stupid brain. But but like but also I don't I don't really care about. You know, the loot that I'm going in with to begin, like I've had great experiences regardless, even though I'm just starting with like the normal stuff. And so I don't know why I'm enjoying it as much as I.

I am just, just because like, it's really, it's really exciting and intense while I'm doing it. But, and, but every time I'm like, oh man, I got a lot, a lot of good loot that time. And like I don't know what I'm going to do with it. That is the thing that – it's like – talk about – OK. There's a lot to unpack here. I think, Jacob, when – to go back to your point of me being confused, like is this it? Is this it? I think part of that is –

I was bracing for a wall of intimidation to hit me, right? Of like, okay, extraction shooters, they're pretty intense. Look out. Tarkov's going to eat your children. Look out. And then I jump into this and it's like, this all seems pretty.

above the board, except for the only thing is just like, there's a lot of items is the one thing that's like, okay, it is kind of an overwhelming amount of fiddly little bits. But other than that, it's like, oh, this is friendly. I understand this is a slightly watered down Tarkov, but yeah. No, and that is, it's like, I'm having a blast with this more so than I possibly expected from this genre. But my biggest complaint about the game is that...

Every piece of loot that you pick up is like broken power cord, but they're actually... 27 different variations of broken power cord and you need one to uh you know upgrade your bench and not the other kind and you can You know, you can highlight them to say that's what I'm looking for, but actually it won't tell you if you have enough. It'll still be highlighted. It's like, I really do think that...

for all of the, you know, like all of the streamlining that it's done of the genre. Well, there is still this problem of like, And maybe it's just like built into the game of like the entire game is loot. The entire game is finding loot. It's just going through desk drawers and finding little pieces. But the.

Pieces themselves are so not memorable, but they're also the whole game. And I kind of don't know how you fix that of just being like, oh, I didn't need this kind of broken engine. I needed another broken engine. Two of the main enemies, two of like the enemies I fought the most are named Wasp and Hornet.

And it's like, oh, you need the Hornet engine. And I keep picking up a Wasp engine because it just is in my brain is B engine. And both of those are bad. And they look pretty much identical. Yes, they do. And the fireballs and something else are both just balls that roll at you. These are great points. Yes. I had to feed three of them. Or get the pieces from three of them. I was like, all right, I finally did that. And it's like, no, wrong ball, I guess. Time to go back in and get more balls.

I'm currently just assuming that if I just keep playing, it will get absorbed into me at some point. So I'm not sweating it yet, but... I feel like if I actually look and read the names of everything, I will be so overwhelmed that I will... I'll start thinking about it too hard to enjoy it. So I'm just like...

I think eventually these things are just going to become part of my knowledge bank if I just keep playing rounds for a little while, but maybe not. Well, you experts out there, I mean, how much should I be? selling or recycling that stuff is my question. That's what's really hard to know. That's a big, big fat question. And I don't know the full answer, but I think the more you play, the more you just naturally learn. Oh, yeah.

I don't even know what they're called, but like one looks like a Frisbee. And I didn't learn till late that those are really good at building modifications for my weapons. And I was recycling them and I shouldn't have been. And yeah, I lost a few of them doing that early, but like you find them again pretty quick. So it doesn't ding you too much.

And then I think the really insane stuff is, is pink. So you're natural. And it goes, when you like open something that has it in there and you're, you just kind of know, Oh, I should not recycle this. Because it's a rare drop. Even though it is also called, like, Little Jumble of Microchips, like everything else. It's pink. It is pink. I mean, it does feel a little, again...

maybe less so than other in the genre, but like it was a game where I was just looking up spreadsheets online. You know, I found, I found a pink snow globe today and I was like, wow, what's this? And I was like, well, you just sell that.

You know, that's that's for selling and you get a lot of money for selling it. But then I found something called like comfortable pillow. And they were like, well, actually, after you upgrade the rooster three times to upgrade it the fourth time, you're going to need five comfortable. I shouldn't have been selling my. pillows, Jacob? I sold like three of those. I would never sell a comfortable pillow. Wrong with you guys. They're worth a lot of money though, Kelsey.

Well, I foolishly thought that because they have the diamond icon and the only description is you can sell this for money, that it would be safe to sell. But apparently...

Apparently not. You're a fool. Yeah, don't sell anything ever. The rooster idea is very smart, though, by the way. Just to have like a little flash of personality and just like, all right, this rooster is going to be grabbing crap for you at all times. It's always going to be a rewarding little thing. It's perfect because if you have a bad run... just got so much basic it's like the

basic level stuff like you know you can get metal components and then once you upgrade your refinery you can make advanced metal components that are way better but like scrappy's just always getting you those while you're out so there's a big incentive to like upgrade that's why you need lemons and like olives and prickly pears and stuff and literally there's wars at the two places in the maps where you can find lemons because everyone's just like I didn't like

it's for scrappy and there's like 50 dead bodies it's hilarious we won a team fight we won a team fight and i found eight lemons on a dude's body and it was more exciting than any purple piece of loot i've gotten yeah it was such a huge moment i was like this is gonna Level up my rooster and my friends rooster. And that's important.

And then you can have like a secret pocket to bring stuff back. So whenever you have something that's like, oh my God, I need this home. Like blueprints are also the other thing. It's kind of like one of the only perma unlocks. If you find a blueprint, you bring it home and you can actually learn how to craft a specific item.

you found out in the wild and it's usually really good things that are hard to find and guns and stuff like that so every time i find this if you come out with a free loot loadout you don't have a secret pocket and My heart is in my chest if I find a really good blueprint. I just, I look for the closest way out of there and I'm hiding in a bush the whole way there and I'm so nervous because if I die, I just lose that. It's like...

I don't know, another 20 hours until I find that again? Who knows? It's like this is the most stressful thing ever. It is. There's also we were talking about I was talking about with Leo, the the stash, which is like where you keep all your stuff when you return from the map is pretty space limited. Like you'll you'll fill it up.

pretty quickly and you can pay to get more slots in it and and you will but i was thinking about like why why do that at all why make the stash space limited why not just like bring everything and i think the motivation is actually to get you to spend your stuff you know because it's like the free loadout is so tempting and it's like hey you could just take that every time but it's like at some point

You're going to have enough basic parts in there, and I think the game is trying to kind of push you to be like, you have enough stuff to make a better shield and a better augment and take out a gun that's maybe kind of good.

And go out there and try a little harder. And so it is, like, it's the hardest thing in the world to, like, get the player in the RPG to drink their health potions, you know, to actually use the stuff that you're collecting. And I think the game is trying really hard to be, like... Use it. Go and use it. But it fights against that core gamer instinct of like, I can't use anything good because what if I need it later? Totally.

I'm not using the free loadouts nearly as much as I expected. I barely ever do. It's one of those things that's like, oh, it makes it easier to try this because it seems like more. I know Tarkov had free loadouts, but still managed to not be approachable at all.

to me, but this game was like, okay, it's comforting to know, like, I can do this free loadout thing, that's a great feature to have me not be too worried about the extraction thing, because that scared me off, and I've since, like, this has made me fall in love with the genre. And I think part of it, and this wraps into the loot conversation, is like Jacob's saying, you are incentivized to use everything. You have plenty of everything, way more than you expect.

Except it might not be the exact thing you want, but you're kind of pushed into using what you happen to have because you may as well empty your stash a little bit if it's overflowing and you have to be selling stuff anyway. And also in that spirit, not worrying too much about... what will be i'll need for an upgrade five upgrades from now like just sell it and get something you can use right now and then because it is

only an incentive for you to go explore a particular place it's like okay later on i just have i will have that mission to go get that thing rather than thank god i had this keep take up space in my stash for 10 hours while i didn't use it you know It's made me see the extraction shooter a lot more holistically and kind of feel how everything has its place in it. Because it is one of those genres that came out of nowhere and captured so many people's hearts and minds.

And I was looking at it from an outsider, and now it's like I do see what is core to this that is unique among other genres that there's a trillion of versus relatively few extraction shooters.

Yeah. So what do your runs look like these days? Because Jacob Geller was just telling us fantastical tales of like Leo's just like building zip lines everywhere. He's like on another level. He got the zip lines out, Leo. Yeah. Come on, man. It's very impressive. No, he just got them from a crate once and we had. One amazing run where he's building them all over the place. It was cool. There's a grapple hook. I have that. Do you swing around on stuff?

I'm saving it to fly on an ark with you guys. I was saving it so that we can use it to fly on an ark. Because you can fly on an ark! I saw someone on YouTube do it. Yeah, there's a special animation. The guy's like...

surfing on it and you can tell it where to go and shoot people from above it's insane and apparently using i got that gold thing in a crate and i stuffed it up my butt cheek secret pocket and i ran my little butt home and i've been saving it for a run with the boys because like i'm not just gonna use that bum

myself solo I need to do it with my friends yeah I was amazed by like how relatively small the maps were I think I was imagining like a PUBG size map or something but it's cool that there's multiple of them but it definitely was a feeling of like Oh, I'm not zooming out. Like, this is the whole map. Okay. But you guys are still feeling good about the variety and everything in there at this point?

there's little puzzles which is fun like kind of like call of duty zombie puzzle you know i mean like come and press the switch over here and then move a battery over there not to that great extent but you know there's one puzzle in like a hospital building where you you like go up to a monitor turn it on it changes color and then there's lines on the ground that are different colors and then if it changes that color you follow the line to the door and get the really good loot on that

door and it's like I never knew that and now of course you know someone talks about it online and then the next time you go to see it there's everyone's trying to do the same puzzle at the same time so probably things just have to calm out a bit and everyone tries a puzzle once before they're not too

crazy busy but it's fun that they put that in there because that's much more enjoyable from like a solo experience if you don't have people to talk to it's like oh i'm gonna go try to do that puzzle in this run and see if i get any good loot in that little hidden hospital room and every map has at least two or three of those in it I mean, and the density is just bananas. Like, it's, like, yes, it's, like, square footage-wise a smaller map than what we're used to, but, like...

When a hospital building has six floors and all of those floors have, you know, drawers to go through, it's like suddenly you're spending a lot more time there than you would if it was just kind of a gray box building that you couldn't enter. I have entire runs where I don't even go to one of the designated loot areas. I'll hit up three random buildings that aren't even labeled on the map.

and be like, well, okay, my inventory is full of crafting stuff, so I guess I'm just going to go home at this point. Exploring is really fun, and that's been what has continued. driving me so far. I also wanted to say, like, the first time that we streamed it, Jacob, you said that this was a game that you think you'd never want to play solo?

And I had no choice last night because you guys all teamed up and had a full team. And Hanson told me to get bent. It was so fun. And then immediately went to bed like 20 minutes later. Play with Hayley and I. Jeff doesn't say I play. I would have loved to, but I didn't. One in the morning. I added Hanson, and then he left.

And he didn't, I guess he didn't bother to tell anyone that I had told him, hey, just let me know if a spot opens up. So anyway, I played solo all night and it was actually...

it was actually like surprisingly fun. And it ended up like, I think, I think the genius thing that they're doing, or at least I'm assuming that they're doing is if you play solo, they just put you on a map with a bunch of other people playing solo. And like, 90% of those people must just be people who just want to be left alone and like don't because like almost every interaction I've had has just been people most of them aren't on mic.

And they'll just use, like, the emotes that say, you know, don't shoot or whatever as you're doing it. And, like, everybody's just been very cordial, and I've just run around and done a bunch of looting by myself. Occasionally, you end up waiting at the subway and someone else shows up and you have a moment where you both stare at each other and it's like, okay, I guess we'll just both get on the train right now and we're good.

like thank you for not killing me um and it's it has just perpetuated that like sense of before that i was like i kind of i kind of wish this was just pve and i don't know how much i'm getting out of The fact that like when someone does kill me, I feel like I lose faith in humanity and that's a weird thing to sign up for. And like to be a core message of your game of like, you never know which way it's going to go.

The guy could just be terrible and shoot you when you're begging for your life. But like, that's fun, I guess. That's life, baby. But like, it has just become less consequential and just like doesn't come up as much if you're...

out there running around playing solo and so i don't mind it as much and i feel like it it like naturally being more present when you're playing with a team it's like well okay then i have my friends there and i'm not going to care as much if we roll into you know a crowd of bad people who

We're still going to shoot you in your back, but at least you got allies then anyway. The energy is definitely different from... from solos versus squads like solos it is friendlier and squads people are looking to fight a little more and it's weird how there's a feel for that and between the different maps like the the base of starter map people tend to be more friendly versus the second the buried city map

feels like a pvp map it's like constantly shooting on site you're constantly hearing other team fights and having to work around them yeah and and also in that subway like jeff was talking about the subway exits on that map are so cool because you go press the button you have to wait 90 seconds two minutes whatever it is

uh and and you can't shoot the other side of the subway it's bulletproof glass but if somebody else is also waiting for the extract on the other side you have that 90 seconds to make a deal with them or decide how it's gonna go like there's there's these little specific things on the map the damn head these bridges that you can raise and lower it's almost like little set pieces for a scene to play out and stuff like that makes it feel like these maps could go so many millions of different ways

Like all my favorite shooters. The amount of maps doesn't matter because the density and the variety keeps paying out. Yeah. The audio in this game is so insane too. It's kind of funny. We were playing like RV.

there yet or whatever game we were playing that just had the worst proximity chat to the point that we turned it off compared to this proximity chat like when you hear somebody in the next room it sounds different if they're in a wooden house or a metal building because the refurb off the walls just sounds different it's crazy what was that and like everybody's footsteps oh you were activated joe and i were playing i was impersonating leo's activation

We're on the roof of a building and we hear talking, but even we stop and listen and it is like muffled from being inside a building, but very clear. One's on this side of the building, one's on the other side. Oh, wow. And one guy goes, you come into my house, this is what you get. And the other guy's like, we need to get the hell out of here. The other guy's like, chill out, dude. Like, just getting a glimpse at this.

interaction they're having that we never saw them at all oh we hung around and then we left but they were just you know blood-borne inside the building muffled shouts coming outside oh that's amazing i mean i think the big reason for that is I mean, the co-founder of Embark is Stefan Stromberg, who was the lead audio designer at DICE for kind of peak Battlefield audio era. So good. Yeah, he was one of the most impressive developers I've ever met. We did an interview with him back.

when visited for the battlefield three cover story with game informer and like his grasp on like making the sound design of. battlefield 3 or bad company 2 like really pop it's like awe-inspiring and so mainly because of that interview and the fact there's so many former dice developers moving on to embark now it is like i feel like i've been rooting for this team for so long it's so cool that this is

taking off in such a huge way finally they can leave that dopey the finals behind leo can you imagine yeah finally god i'm happy for them getting the attention they deserve no matter where no matter in what game it happens to be And it's just so weird too. This is a small. Please go ahead. I was just going to say, if you slide down the stairs, you can hear your butt slapping each stair as you go down.

That's cool. I just like that. Yeah, but what about the game? There's a note on the skill tree for your hearing comes back sooner after explosions. Which has to be the first in gaming history. Oh, weird. Yeah, I guess that's a good call, yeah. I will say, that skill tree, that's built for you to be playing the game for like...

hundreds of hours. And then you prestige it. Oh my god, why? You do, yeah. For what purpose? That's something, I haven't gotten to that point in my extraction shooter journey, but Tarkov has... wipes for everybody every three months. It's like everybody's loot goes back to zero, which to me has made that completely uninteresting. Like, why would I ever invest in that? And this game is trying to not have to do that by having you voluntarily wipe yourself. Like, say, you might, you know.

A bathroom situation. Is the benefit cosmetic only or something? Or what's the incentive to do? It increases your stash size and you get faster XP boosts and stuff. I have kind of a vague understanding, but it's like, it's so... Core to this design that eventually people get too powerful where it's unapproachable for new players unless you have wipes happening. So this is their attempt to not have to...

wipe everything for everybody. And they've said like, we're going to try this. And if it doesn't work, maybe we'll have to switch up. That's really just like the top 10% or something they could wipe. Like that feels fair. Let me stay down here in the bottom five. It's like you're like a boxer and you're trying to be like, let me get let me be 89 percent. Please don't. But there's like on the skill tree, there's a.

The one that's most visible, a lot of them are just more stamina. Your footsteps are quieter. But there's one that's like, you can't open this type of... crate or this type of thing unless you have the skill and you see those and you're like okay well I want to prioritize that skill you have to invest like 45 points in

Just one side of the skill tree to even get to that skill. And I've played for, I don't know, like eight hours or whatever. And I'm level and I've played for 10 hours. I'm level like 10. You know, so it's just like thinking about like how much I would have to play to get there and how much I would have to like ignore. It is it's doing a really good job at like appealing to, you know, Tarkov for people with jobs kind of thing. But like.

You can see the pieces of it that are like, these are for the, you know, the 500 hours-ers. Yeah. And by all accounts, that's worth it. The loot that's in those boxes is crazy. It makes me want to grind for it and be the guy in my friend group who has that skill and can open it for everybody. Everyone wants to be that guy. The security breach guy. He'd be the most popular guy. Can you imagine being a popular guy?

So there's kind of the weird bigger picture thing with Ark Raiders happening where with the finals, Embark got into a little social no-no territory of like there's AI for voices and there's –

AI for the voices again in Ark Raiders. And then also they incorporated AI into the development of the game for like animations in particular, it seems like. And not generative AI. Is there... line in the sand um but you know in interviews they've talked a lot about like you know we had a relatively smaller team for something this ambitious we need to come up with shortcuts and that was one of them that we took

And so there is a part of me that wonders if this is kind of like the harbinger of letting AI loose in game development at this point. Like once people see how successful this game is, it's always going to be like, well, Arc Raiders used AI, so game on for the entire industry, you know? I mean, they can try that. Yeah. I don't think anyone needs the license. I think that we all get mad at generative AI when it's very obvious and finished assets and whatever.

I would assume that almost every game has some level of AI being used to code it behind the scenes. As a tool. We're just not privy to that because that's a part of development we don't see. So, you know, I don't know. When I draft contractor agreement templates for indie devs, the line in the sand is generational AI. It's like because they have so many AI tools built into the systems they use. Like, you know.

Things that don't generate content, but they will fix behind the scenes things that otherwise would just take more time for the dev to do. The dev is using it as a tool to make their job easier. It's not replacing the dev's job is kind of the distinction there, right? If it's creating art assets, you don't want it. If it's creating animations, they don't want it. But if it's helping somebody figure out how to do their job quicker.

they're fine with that and of course it gets kind of muddy and we we include at the end the very like such determination by company its sole and absolute discretion so that they can be like oh no that one's actually not allowed but Yeah, I don't know. It's an interesting thing to sort of leak into the market because people who just want to make generative AI slop and sell it on the marketplace will try to use this as the reasoning why that's okay.

Whereas the way that they're using it might be legitimately just as a tool to speed up development time. But that is that is weird, right? That it's like you using it to generate art. No, but like using it to write code. Yes. You know, like that seems that seems like a blurry line, because I would imagine that Cougar thinks of themselves as like a talented artist in what they're doing. And theoretically, they could be replaced if the AI gets good enough at like.

Make the gun shoot good. So, yeah, I don't know what's going to happen in the years to come. It's blurry for sure. It's also like the Ubisofts and the EAs don't need permission.

from embark to like try and cram as much of this into their games and they're going to do it in the shittiest way and fire as many people as they can and that's when they're going to catch a bunch of health from the people who are playing the games and with something like this i Could imagine the community might have a little more leeway because they don't see as cutthroat and greedy business practices driving it.

as much when you have a smaller studio and you're trying to do it hopefully a little more responsibly than that. Set the temperature. Tell us what temperature is on the thermostat. Is this like a... no way in hell arc raiders is not going to be on the two tens upper 10 material how much is the group loving it here it's in my top 10 somewhere i haven't thought about it that distinctly but it's like i'm surprised by how quickly it's just like

encapsulated me and and you know i guess that's why it's kind of nice that we have a month like maybe i'm in the honeymoon phase and i just have never played an extraction shooter and it's tickling my brain in a weird way yeah But as of right now, I really think I'm going to keep loving this for a long time. So I'm excited to see if that's true or if my brain is just being tricked.

I like it significantly more than Night Rain, just to compare it to another multiplayer game from this year, which is very different. But it's like, you know, multiplayer games, I feel like do have kind of an uphill battle when it comes to. game of the year lists just because the the experiences can be so so variable and dependent on the community yeah it's an interesting thing to come out sandwiched between battlefield and the new cod

It's because it is so different. It's a shooter, but it's so different. I was liking Battlefield, and this just took its place in my life overnight. Me too. I just don't boot up Battlefield anymore. Yeah, I was quite delighted in the Game Business podcast, which is quite good. That's where that interview with Patrick Soderlund, who used to be at Dice for a long time, I know.

uh he's at embark but it was so refreshing where they asked him about that about like you know why did you release right now between the two big shooters especially battlefield when you're formerly of dice and he's just like i don't know like we had to we thought a lot about it we had to start somewhere and like it's gonna be a long road so might as well just do it right

now right here but it's so refreshing to hear him when they're asked like oh you know what do you think of battlefield 6 and he's like oh i've been enjoying it i'm playing the hell out of it like i feel like every other Head of a studio would be like, oh, well, we wish him the best. But to have somebody be like, oh, I was super curious. I dove in day one, like devoting his whole life to it than just being still that eager to play it. It's a refreshing tone from a higher up.

But speaking of smart business practices, the Simpsons have come to Fortnite, everybody. They finally did it. I am trying to get a sense of this as a very, very casual Fortnite-er.

Of just like trying to build the tier list of like the IP that has gotten the most respect and effort from Epic with Fortnite throughout the years. And like Star Wars is a biggie. They've done a lot of Star Wars. And is Simpsons number two now or Simpsons now the number one because they've overhauled. They rebuilt the entire map to be a Simpsons map. Like that is just the Battle Royale map is just Springfield and beyond. And it's awesome.

And all there's so many little Easter egg things that are fun. Like if you go in Mr. Burns office, you can release the hounds and then like a bunch of NPCs will fight for you. If somebody steps on that area, you can knock the head off of. the founder of springfield statue and it grants you one free headshot invincibility yeah the next time someone tries to headshot it doesn't count there's so much stuff like that i mean and it's like there are didn't have

I feel like the other stuff that they've done have mostly been Easter eggs exclusively. You know, like, oh, you can find Thor's hammer, or you can get a lightsaber, or maybe they put a TIE fighter in the game. And, like, that's cool. But it's like... For a total art style conversion, you have every location on the map be based around one IP. is something I've never seen them do before. And is, you know, I do think is... I don't know, like...

If they thought The Simpsons was bigger or they wanted to try something more ambitious or they were just allowed to in a way that they weren't with the other properties, because it's like... Why not do this with Marvel or Star Wars or like Dragon Ball Z? And is it just, you know... It is just like, man, you got one shot with The Simpsons. Go all in. Yeah, I mean, once you sign the paperwork and start talking to Disney here for Fox and The Simpsons, it's a matter of just like...

Yeah, wouldn't it be cool though? I mean we could make basically our own Simpsons hit and run inside of Fortnite with the cars and the scale of the city. Like it's just – that must be so fun and tempting for the developers. Like, yeah. to just pay off so many little nods and Easter eggs. It's so detailed. Yeah, it's ridiculous.

I optimistically it's like there's enough fans of the Simpsons in positions of power where it's like this would be so fun to do this. Yes. But also it's like a lot of Disney collaborations down the pipe where they're trusted and it's a franchise that unlike Marvel they probably aren't double.

triple quadruple checking every single little detail and making sure it's okay and part of the concept book they have for each character like it's just something that is a little less art and lisa are in like robo suits so they can be six foot I was yelling about this to Ben when we were playing. Every time there's a short character and they put it in Fortnite, they're like, what do we do? Put him in a robot suit. Get more creative.

Put fart on Melhouse's shoulders. I don't want to see character robot suits. Give him the pinstripe suit. And the platform shoes. He could comb his hair. Have like adult President Lisa when we play his hair. Those two ideas are so good. Can you imagine how good that would be if it was the platform shoes look but it was just like ridiculous.

ridiculously tall it's working yeah but it was it was super cool jumping in you know you know like hayley mentioned all the little easter eggs and silly stuff but it's like you know

My friend Grant has never really gotten into Fortnite, but he's a big Simpsons fan, so we were playing with Jacob and stuff. He was texting me after. He just kept running around and exploring things. He's like, dude, you can lower the flag in Camp Krusty and raise a Camp Bart flag. All these other things. Being able to sit on...

the couch we just have four random stupid fortnite characters sitting on the couch together where it's just you know a xenomorph next to bob's burgers whatever nonsense crammed in together it is super fun to jump in when you land to it like plays the intro to an episode yes music like as soon as you land it's like

Like, does, like, the episode start? Like, little stuff like that's everywhere. I just get excited thinking about that. Like, thinking about just those meetings that they must have had about, like, oh, my God, we start in the sky for every match of Fortnite. What if we start with just the opening of The Simpsons every time, which is in the clouds? Like, it's just super fun for a combo. That's cool. And you tell me, Fortnite people, what? In a couple months, this is just going to be gone forever?

You must make this a side thing that you can still explore. And like, no, that feels crazy. Yeah, I don't know how to create, like, there are lots of custom modes in Fortnite and I've never played any of them. So I assume... those assets maybe stick around. I think it's, they, they currently have the battle pass that you can get and it's all Simpsons characters. Homer is at the very end.

Like if you want to play, you get Marge pretty quick. If you want to play as Homer, you got to either like play a lot of Fortnite or spend an additional like $30 kind of fake leveling up your battle pass. Yeah. All the marches have been rocking me too. I was playing with my sister right before this.

And we were just texting because she plays on her Switch. So we don't talk on the phone, but we just text about what's happening. She's like, damn it, Marge, again? We got rocked by three Marges in a row. It's just such a weird thing to happen in a video game.

It is. I know we need to get over it, but it's so weird just to see Marge with a gun. It's like, okay, I guess that's just the power of Fortnite is everyone has to be like, well, I don't love this. It doesn't really fit the character. But what are we going to do? Say no? Like, of course. Of course, Marge has a gun. Sure. Why not? Let her go now.

I was asking, I was talking to Emma, my sister about this. Who do you think paid for this? Do you think Fortnite paid them for the rights or do you think that they paid to be in Fortnite? Haley, you're going to hate this. I've had that question for years and somebody gave me the answer recently and I forgot what it was. No!

who gave me the answer probably someone who works there yeah there's some developer yeah that knew yeah but wasn't wasn't it just like sometimes it's one way and sometimes it's the other and sometimes it's a handshake like is it is it a concrete deal for every No, I'm sure they change it for each brand. But it's just the fact how huge this is. Is it bigger than Fortnite? This is messed up, and I hate saying this, but I do feel like The Simpsons benefits more from this than Fortnite.

does it's like there are a lot of you know it's like me and some older friends are like really into simpsons and so going into fortnight but like i think a lot of i mean most fortnight players were born 10 years after the simpsons you know cultural hegemony and so it's like for them being like wow i guess this is big enough that it gets to take over the whole map yeah maybe gets people to go to the theaters and

two years when the new Simpsons movie comes out yeah I do think it's going to have an impact it's wild to see and also just fun to see like come out the same week as Ark Raiders where it's like okay If you track it all back, starting with kind of Eastern European military shooters with ARMA that eventually led to PUBG, it's like you can chart that family tree and be like, oh, the Simpsons Battle Royale is on the same family tree as Ark Raider.

in some way, right? So here we are. Fun industry to track. Jeff, you know what else is fun to track? How much you...

eat from factor meals how did you know exactly that's exactly what i was going to talk about yeah your intestinal tract jeff um and watching that sweet factor meal slide right down it because yeah don't go no hayley that's not what we say during the ad read we say yum Yum. Yum. Yum. Industrial. I can't speak. I say the wrong words. It's so late for Haley. It's so late.

She was hopefully playing Ark Raiders. What is she doing? And I'm probably going to play some after this because I know I'm leaving early to go night-night, but I'm going to play some more. Well, why don't you just, instead of playing Ark Raiders, why don't you spend two minutes in the kitchen heating up a delicious factory meal like smoky cheese?

Chicken and stewed black beans. Just tell a woman to get in the kitchen? For two minutes? I think every woman can tolerate it. You're ruining the ad, handsome. To not cook. To not cook. To not cook. Not cook. That's right. To just eat and get energy, you need to conquer the world. Smash that glass ceiling. Haley. I feel empowered. Thank you for your meals.

That's right. They have jalapeno, lime, and cheddar chicken, everybody. Their chef-prepared delicious approved meals make it easy to stay on track and enjoy something comforting and delicious no matter how hectic the season gets here. Two-minute meals. They really are fantastic. We got a shipment.

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Follow Factor. They really are great. We want to keep them around. So if you're interested in having ready-to-go meals, two minutes in the microwave, follow that link and keep them around as a sponsor. All right. We've had some fun. We've paid our dues. And now it's time for this podcast to get deadly. deadly serious uh so let's see jacob and leo no sorry leo you can stay hayley you and jacob can go yes You want to play some Ark Raiders? Yeah, Loki, you want to play right now?

Will you guys put your IDs in the Slack so that I have people to play with that won't tell me the event when I ask? Please do that too. Yeah, I'll do that. I'll drop it. Okay, bye guys. Bye! Jeff Marcufaba, you remember Mortal Kombat, right? Mortal Kombat! Mortal Kombat!

Running out of the streets yelling for it. The new Digital Eclipse joint is out. This is Mortal Kombat Legacy Collection. It's a collection of a bunch of the early games up through Mortal Kombat 4. And then... Who can say if it's more or less important? There's also a bunch of making of stuff packed in here, like Area 5, the old one-up show crew. They produced another huge documentary series for this. You can work through the entire timeline of Mortal Kombat with a bunch of documents and stuff.

Kelsey, I am still confused. I've had it explained to me, but this is not technically a Gold Master Series edition from Digital Eclipse because this is...

Still the same format, still the same timeline aspect, everything you'd expect, but it's not Gold Master. My understanding is, and maybe this is wrong, is it that it has to center on a single... person if it's gold master or is that just a coincidence oh interesting that could be that i think because there's the jeff mentor one and there was the um the karateka one the jordan mech

mechner one right i think their logic is that if it's like you're selling it based on the games first versus the documentary stuff first

And if it's documentary stuff first and interactive history timeline, then that's the gold master. So this is one where they're like, no, no, no, not just the weirdos are going to like this. You'll like it too because it's Mortal Kombat. Right. If you want to play Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. online the WaveNet version now sickos come on in also there's some documentary stuff we hope you stick around you know but like I think a bulk of the sales that they're trying to get

is from people just being like, yeah, here's just like a huge collection of ridiculous amount of Mortal Kombat games, including the first one I went to was like, yeah, I want to play Mortal Kombat 1 on the Game Gear. I want to see these freaky handheld games, you know?

And that the Game Gear one is rough. And then I went to the Game Boy one and I just about puked from that port. It is so bad. I love that that's where you immediately jump to. You're like, what is the worst version of these games? That's what I want. Yeah. That's how you know you're in the opposite camp. You're in, you're in the freak camp. Yeah. Yeah. Guilty as charged. What'd you go to Jeff? Um, uh, I started with the documentary stuff. Yeah. And watch some of that.

which you know is great as always and also like Ed Boon is just such a charming person that I love seeing him still somehow be enthusiastic about Mortal Kombat and the history after all these years. And he's just always delightful to see him in an interview. It is the part that will really freak you out.

through this is like you know ed boone co-creator here talking all about mortal combat and so much of it is just like especially going through the ancillary making of stuff you realize like how old all this is you see like oh the 90s you remember the 90s oh what a wacky time let's try Come up with a lore for Mortal Kombat. Wacky, wacky, wacky. Oh, what a fun throwback. And then you just try and put yourself in that space mentally of like, Ed Boon has not left this world.

of Mortal Kombat. He has been thinking about and iterating about this on this like the entire time. Like, you know, Leo, you know, like you watch, you tend to like a live stream like the Giant Bombathon or Min Max, Give to the Max charity stream and stuff like that, right? And there's people that like are tuning in and then they come back later and they're like, I can't believe you guys are still alive. I can't believe you're still going. That's what I feel like everyone's career is life.

his career is like is people checking in and be like i can't believe you're still thinking about moves for scorpion it's 2025 dude don't you want to do something else right right and he desperately does but it's so funny too because in that uh making of Learn that like the game that him and John Tobias, the creators wanted to make after Mortal Kombat one, not the new Mortal Kombat one, the original Mortal Kombat one, of course, is they wanted to make a Star Wars game.

And like, yeah, let's reach out and start working on a Star Wars game. And then I guess the entire company and everybody's like, out of your mind, this is the part where you do Mortal Kombat 2. And they're like, oh, yeah, I guess we could do that. And it's just locking in for Ed Moon, at least, and a lot of the other team, you know, the audio designer and a bunch of other folks. That's just their career forever now.

They've had that conversation every time. No, this is when you do Mortal Kombat 11. Right, right. It's like, okay, we'll give you Injustice. We'll give you the grid. We'll give you a couple chances to break out. But by and large, you're sticking with it. But Kelsey has a... Video game history, nut. This was the fun thing for me. I love Robotron 2084, one of my favorite arcade games from Midway there.

And I appreciate the original Mortal Kombat. I got much into the later Mortal Kombat. You know, I dabbled with Mortal Kombat, of course, as a kid in the 90s. You can't dodge it. But it wasn't until, like, Mortal Kombat... 9, 10, 11. It was like, oh, wait, this rules. I'm playing through the story mode in all of these. I think they're really fun. So to get that insight into the original run is really helpful. But for me in particular...

What was really insightful is just seeing the clear thread at Midway from Robotron and Eugene Jarvis then to Mortal Kombat. Like everything in between there was a bit hazy for me, but just learning like the impact of... no pun intended, of like high-impact football, where it's like, oh, they made a football game, whatever, I never really wanted to check it out. And then going through this documentary series, I'm like, oh my god, the animation's in there.

are so fun and so Mortal Kombat, or even like Smash TV, which is a game I also really love, learning like, oh, that was the first game that John Tobias made art for. And you can feel that Mortal Kombat energy coming through there. And so there's just so many of those games that I'm writing down like, okay, I need to fill more of my arcade history knowledge. And that's the amazing depth that you can only get from this type of legacy collection is to connect those dots.

And one of the nice things about Midway, and I mean, just most of the stuff that Digital Eclipse has done to this point, but like, this is a company that was in... chicago and chicago is a place where like people have houses and basements and like they just And they don't move as much. So you end up with like a much richer look at the history because people aren't like, you know, all these companies that are.

on the west coast especially in places like san francisco and seattle like we're all living in shoe boxes we're throwing things away you don't like get as much of this nice context saved whereas here i mean i i still have not spent time with this yet i'm looking forward to it but um you know just from my time doing stuff with the video game history foundation my experience was just like

Yeah, I mean, it's been sitting in a box in my garage or in my attic for 20 years, but it's still there. I've never taken it out and had to move and make more room. So you end up with a lot more... A lot more rich context, I think, to pull from. Yeah, yeah. And the fact that so many people are still at NetherRealm now as well, it just feels like they're...

They have the people there to still be able to get together and tell the story. And there's just like some good dorky stuff because it's like the little documentary chunks, which are great. But then just a fun batch of just, you know.

Okay, Lieberman proposed that bill that created the ESRB because of game violence from Mortal Kombat, right? And it's like, hey, why don't we just put that bill in here? And you can just look through the wording of it. It's like, yeah, at no other point would I be...

you know, presented with that as an option, but it's so sweet to see, or just really dorky stuff. Like this is the collection for you. If you like to geek out about stuff like, you know, yeah, we found in the code, actually they have, um, you know, the finish him font. That pops up iconic, right? Like actually they made every letter. It's a full font, but it's never been seen before. They've only used the letters for finish him.

Until now. And you can, like, look through the entire font alphabet for the finishing font. It's like, yes. Type whatever you want. Yeah. Thank God we have this to really dive into. Yeah. I liked a lot of...

A lot of, like, they have a bunch of notes of, like, what the character archetypes were supposed to be for some of the, you know, like, original characters. Some stuff of, like, oh, like, they designed this character from three, like... in the first batch and they just never got around to putting that one in yeah they took striker yeah yeah but then one of the things that um i loved was they had videos of the of them recording um

You know, like the first actors, like doing the moves for Mortal Kombat 1, because it was all, they just recorded it all on VHS, and then they had to figure out like... how to cut them all out and use those frames and stuff. But they have those actual, like, the original recordings, and they have a specific clip about how...

Ed Boon just came up on the fly with them saying, hey, you know what would be a sweet ass move is if Scorpion just like threw the dagger and it went into him and then you pulled him. And then they were like, okay, I guess we'll try that. And they just like fully did that. He came up with the idea of like for Sub-Zero and Scorpion, like they should just have like different idol.

idle stances because if you're fighting one against the other it's going to be really obvious that they're just palette swaps so just do them and they they show the the video of the guy trying to figure out like okay, well, like, what should the move be? And they just have the two idle animations of both characters on either side as he's, like, trying to figure them out, and then eventually he gets there, and it's like...

oh yeah, like that is it, one for one. Like that is the move that he did for that little moment. And it's just like super fun little snippets of history like that that go beyond just like a bunch of old guys reminiscing about.

about those moments like you actually get to see it and that's what makes this so cool too is like the fact that it was digitizing this live action footage it automatically means they have so much more raw recordings saved than most games do that you get to hear yeah ed boone literally say you know it'd be a cool ass move

It's like in what other world do we have like a raw videotape of one of the most iconic moves in video games being created? Because it's all because of this dopey process. And I didn't know this, that like the reason that tech existed at Midway to digitize the video and actually. make them look live action in the game is because of the designer of Q-Bert.

that he went to work at Midway and he was the one that was working on that tech for NARC, their game. And then that was the tech that they're like, oh, then we just used that for Mortal Kombat, piece of cake. You know, it's like, it's just actually being able to set the... The table for here's the people who contributed in a huge way and then they picked up the ball and ran with it and then Mortal Kombat just became the complete juggernaut. It's so cool.

And then it's like, hey, then you can also jump into these games and play them online and everything there. And that is really the fascinating thing is seeing like Digital Eclipse's obsession with history and preservation. It is now colliding with...

fighting game fandom in a really interesting way, where the fighting game fans, like the hardcore fans are like, this sucks. This collection is no good. The input lag is unacceptable. Online's not great. And so they just have a ton of... complaints and bugs that are hopefully being ironed out but like seeing those worlds collide

It's really interesting because I'm coming from it like perfect experience. The documentary was good. Yeah, this is meticulously, yeah, recreated. You can read it all. Yeah, exactly, exactly. I guess there's some bloody games there if you want to play WaveNet Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, but for the fighting, like fighting.

game aficionados. Dude, Freudian, you hate them. The farting game community. No, come on, guys. They're not the farting game community. I didn't mean that. I didn't mean that. Dude. Yeah, some other really cool things. I like that for the arcade versions of... of all the main installments they have specifically like a fatality thing where you can you choose the character and you can just do the fatalities for each one

And they, like, teach you, like, they show you where you have to stand, and then they'll give you the moves list, and you can just do those parts. And then also, like all of these Digital Eclipse games, they have... like automatic rewind feature so that you can do it. And I didn't realize or didn't remember how.

ridiculous the AI is in the original Mortal Kombat I played through that whole thing and even with the rewind there were matches that I had to rewind like 50 times and basically like be Neil from the matrix and just like have try and try and get every single move. Perfect. And the AI is so freaking cheap in that game and just like instantly reacts to whatever you're doing. It is the most frustrating crap.

that I have ever played but I'm glad it was there and I got to relive that and I didn't remember that when I was a kid but that was super cheap I do think it's really interesting that this, even more so than the Tetris one, is like the first of these collections where a collection of just the Mortal Kombat games alone would sell and make sense as a product and people would be really excited about it.

And it's a really cool idea to merge that with the history element. It's a shame if it's not a perfect celebration of... the way it's intended to be. You know, it's got a hit for fighting game fans there who've made Mortal Kombat what it is today. Yeah. Well, also, I think, you know, certainly they have their place in the series, but I think for most...

Fans of Mortal Kombat, I don't think you're going to notice it and maybe they can patch it and fix it. But it's interesting just diving into like the Reddit in particular where so many people are like – This is always a problem with digital eclipse. All of their collections have input lag. I don't know what's going on over there. I don't know what's happening, but I watched like, you know, Maximilian dude's video and he's like four frames.

Six frames. Can you, like, call out and feel, like, in the menus even? Okay. I did not notice that when I hit play on the video. But glad to know that... They are very aware of these little issues that hopefully can be ironed out over time. But I was I was really tickled by this just to get the full saga. And there's so much fun stuff like.

John Tobias, they talked about – a little bit about crunch just and how self-imposed crunch was brutal. But they were so excited about this in the early days that John Tobias said that he was talking to his dad and he said he did the math and he ended up – when working on like Mortal Kombat 1 or 2, he's like, yeah, ultimately I was making like two bucks an hour technically, but I did not care. Like I would take that deal anyway because I was so excited about getting this stuff.

Out into the world. Yeah, it was really cool. Like I have seen Ed Boone talk a million times and, you know, already had a sense of his personality and stuff. But this was like the first. real information i got about uh john tobias and just like you know like for him to go from Like the guy whose face would pop up, you know, or like Noob Saibot was like named after him. And to like actually finally get a personality and like see all of his art.

and see basically like him grow up working on this series is super cool. Yeah, it's awesome. And they have, you know, in the videos as well, they have like Mike Drucker jumping in, comedian. Friend of the show, Midmax here. Jeff Gerstman's in there, friend of the show. Andrew Rene, so it's fun to see them try and add some context around everything as well.

And not just be like, Mortal Kombat's great. Moving on. Like they talk about Mortal Kombat 4 was a rough launch, which I had no memory of Mortal Kombat 4 when that launched. So it was really interesting just to hear like, oh, apparently people hated the shift to 3D. That was not an aspect that I picked. up on at the time yeah it like i i went through all four of them last night and when i got to three it was like oh yeah like this cast was just

For me, it really peaked, and I was the right age at Mortal Kombat 2. Probably too young, truthfully. But like... But then you get into the characters and some of the characters in Mortal Kombat 3 and then Mortal Kombat 4, I was like, oh my God, what is even happening anymore? But then you go to Sub-Zero Mythologies and you're like, finally, I feel like I'm at home. Made all up for it.

Yeah, it's smart they got that in there and special forces and stuff just to have some sillier options. Special farts you said? I did not say special farts! Dude. What is wrong with you? Yeah, so Ed Poop and John Tobias, you've got to check out their excellent work. So I had a great time with the Legacy Collection. It was a blast to go through absolutely everything in the making of stuff.

I did have a moment of looking it up online and being like, wait, it was 50 bucks? That's pretty steep. In the past, these have been like 20 to 30, but you know what? Mortal Kombat fans, there's a lot in there. You can really dive in in a big way. How many Mortal Kombat does it go up to? Four. Oh, yeah. But it has like – it's like how much are you willing to pay to have the Genesis and the Super Nintendo version of all of these games? Any price.

Right, that's the problem. A wire transfer. Right, so that's the thing. It's cool to have them all in there, but is it really adding that much when we just stack on more and more versions? I'm like, okay. Yeah, it's 50 bucks, but you also have the 32X version of Mortal Kombat 3. Yeah, I mean, I just want to play the best one. It's better than, like, having the first three is better than having 10 versions of Tetris.

that we didn't really need in one pack. It is probably the best value proposition in terms of a collection of games, but it's a pretty steep... Price take for that. But you can't put a price on learning about things like Mortal Kombat, the animated video, which I had never seen before, but it's just like the roughest.

earliest 3D animation crap I've ever seen in my life. And it's just a VHS that they sold. And it is, you should look up the animation for this because they try and mix in some 2D animation as well. But in the realm of like a Donkey Kong animated show where it's like, oh no. Computers were not ready to do this at this point. And then they also have a whole section about Mortal Kombat Live.

where it was like a stage show that toured the country. And then like a lot of the actors that were actually captured for Mortal Kombat 3 that went around the country and just performed this absurd, basically Mortal Kombat on ice equivalent. And the actor for Sonya is... freaking awesome she's such a good interview and she talks about like tearing her acl during that tour and she's like taped it up and kept going and all the tough guys were like

You got balls of steel, Sonya. You're doing it. But she was just in agony with her knee shattered during this experience. But it's a good bit of insight there for Mortal Kombat, the Legacy Collection. which reminded me of a game called Robotron, Jeff. Um, uh, which, you know, you can play and it's fun to play in the arcade. I know Leo got into it back in the day and all that fun stuff.

But there is this new game that I have been looking forward to for quite a while. I played the demo when that came out. And it launched on Steam and I had to do a double take because this game called Evil Egg, which is very, very Robotron inspired, launched. And then it was just free. I don't know. I don't know how or why this decision was made.

But it's a small little arcade-y game from Ivy Sly, the developer, and they just ended up launching the entire thing for free. So now you have no reason if you, like... fast twin stick arcadey stuff not to jump in and check out evil egg um specifically uh the part that really sells it is like i just feel like this is forever going to be a lock on my steam deck like why would i ever uninstall

Evil Egg. It's just like this tiny little game that was just like the quickest, cleanest, nastiest pick up and play twin stick experience. But Jeff, did you jump in and check out Evil Egg as well? I did. How'd it go? It was okay. Okay! Yeah. It's fine. It's very visually... It's very visually busy. And like...

That's exciting. There's lots of flashing stuff and things exploding. There's just a lot of the characters that you defeat kind of leave remnants on the board. Yeah, it's like a good smear. It's very visually... It was very visually cluttered for me, and I was having trouble telling what the hell was going on sometimes. I think that's kind of the charm. If you want to fire a huge plasma cannon that just smears...

Like this entire section of the board or just to have like this like nasty invading viruses come around. It is just like a nasty take on modern Robotron. But I love it. That egg is evil. It's really evil. That's true. They have the whole opening where you are coming out of the egg and you're taking on the – what are they called? The greenoids that just – basically instead of saving humans like in Robotron, now you're just collecting –

greenoids that add to your multiplayer, but I'm having a blast with this little thing. It's funny to see the genres label it on Steam as like, oh, it's like an action roguelike game. It's like, yeah.

I mean, it's also just like an arcade experience of just like, yeah, you start over, I guess, and you die. All games back then were action roguelikes. Right, right. Like numbers that you're achieving. Right, that's kind of the deal. I mean, you are like getting weapons and stuff as you're going through this run and stuff like that.

for additional, you know, tweaks to the gameplay and you're like choosing which path you want to go on as well. But I'm having a blast with Evil Egg and, you know, like so many other...

Kind of modern arcadey throwbacks. I just keep thinking, like, oh, it would be cool to get this in an arcade cabinet and play it there. Because, like, playing the Steam Deck is a good time. But, like, if you actually had this up just in an old main cabinet or something. That would be cool. You'd be blowing your damn mind, Jeff. If someone had one.

one of those if somebody had one of those yeah in theory yeah but evil egg it's free if you like arcadey stuff come on what's wrong with you check it out what are you waiting for what are you waiting for you want to pay you to play evil egg come on i refuse

All right, Jeff was falling asleep. All right, here we go. Let's get the show on the road. Jeff, you want to bow out of here, dude? Yeah, I'm going to go play either Evil Egg or Ark Raiders, and I'll leave it to the community to figure out which one I'm going to go to. Okay, cool. Bye, Jeff. Clap out. I pressed the button. It didn't... Leo, what is no, I'm not a human?

It's a game where you are in your house and the world is ending. The sun is burning way too hot to even go outside in the daytime. And at night, different types of freaks are coming trying to get in your house. But some of them are from the core of the earth.

And are there to kill you and you have to figure out who's who. Okay. The core of the earth. Because just that premise alone. You want to talk more? Yeah, I think I do a little bit. Because the idea of neighbors are trying to get in your house. Good. horror concept. Do we need a race of mole people also trying to get in there?

Well, it's like they're called visitors and they look like humans, but they act a little strange and there's ways to identify them. And so the gameplay, which is very light, is like checking their teeth or their eyes to see if they line up with... what you expect a visitor to look like and making a decision that is...

Kind of based on the signs, but kind of based on just your gut. You just you can shoot them or leave them in your house. But like people will keep you let a bunch of people in your house and people one person dies each night. And you're like, I know I got somebody in here as a visitor and I got to figure out who it is. Oh, my God. So what is that? It's mostly.

fives like the gameplay is light it's just like an eerie energy that's fun to be in and the gameplay is a little twist on it and decisions that you feel good or bad about and that the atmosphere is just so cool and it's one of those great like favorite thing about

checking out indie showcases and watching those those presentations is like a new game comes along and you're like that is a new art style for a video game to have that i've never seen before and this is totally one of those it's like a 3d house but when you peek into your rooms It's like a 2D warped photograph with some really hideous kind of figures. Even the nice people are just like twisted and morphed in a way that is unsettling to look at with this creepy, twisted soundtrack. It's...

It's just really cool. Oh, God. I mean, this and Silent Hill F, are you just on a kick of like, feed me all the horror stuff this holiday season? Feed me! Yeah, for sure. Is it scary? I like horror stuff in the fall. It's... moody there's there's like you know what's what's scarier than a scary a new scary face in a horror thing where you're walking around your house you can picture that person's

Scary face that you saw in that movie around the corner. You go, God, I don't want that scary face to be there that I remember so well. Burned into my mind. Together, great scary face. This game got a great scary face. Okay. There's kind of a main scary guy. It's a good scary face. Sweet. Is it good? Or just cool art style, weird novelty?

yes weird novelty cool well written very like you know it's it's a bummer it's about death it's really sad but but beautiful and scary and short to do one run of and then there's not that much variance between the runs besides some of who comes to your door but it's a lot of the same people from what i've noticed in just one and a half runs so it's not a must play but it's it's a standout

Very cool, very unique thing to spend one evening in if it looks up your alley. Yeah, that's sweet. No, I'm Not a Human is the name of that game there from the developer Trio Skaz. Speaking of well-written.

Kelsey, I am so curious how much time you spent with Stray Children so far. Not enough yet, but I am thinking about it every second. I'm not playing it. Okay. Okay. Fantastic. So this is from... Onion Games, which is... Is it fair to say one of your favorite developers or just a developer you have a very soft spot for because of its history to your favorite game of all time, which is Moon? It is one of my favorite games of all time. And it's weird because...

Onion Games has not made a ton of games, and also the developer that they spun out of, which is Love Delic, or Love Delic, however you pronounce that, also didn't create... a ton of games um but everything they create is just really interesting and cool and you know like you know that quote i forget who said this but like oh nobody listened to the velvet underground but everyone who did

made a band or whatever. This is that studio. This is your favorite game designer's favorite game designer studio. And... I mean, do you like Undertale? Yes. That's where this was. Like, that's where this came from, you know? So straight children is really interesting because it is almost like a full circle.

back to that um toby fox has talked you know several times about how much he was inspired by moon um which is if you haven't heard of moon it's a weird like take on an adventure game you'll look at it and you'll be like oh yeah that's kind of like undertale like what if instead of fighting things you were actually like not fighting things and um in the case of moon you know actually cleaning up the destruction of someone who was

the RPG main character going around and killing all of the random monsters and everything. This is a lot more like Undertale. Stray Children is kind of like, what if... What if Onion Games was inspired back by Undertale after it had inspired Undertale in the first place? Does that make sense? I think so. Yeah. So it's like they see the creator Yoshiro Kimura. I'm sure I'm butchering that. I apologize.

But like you see it as kind of like the spiritual sequel to Moon. And he's talked in interviews about like talking with Toby Fox about this game. And they're kind of bouncing ideas off each other for the development of... Delta Rune and Straight Children. And so it is fascinating to see like the combat in this game. It is just kind of Undertale combat where it's just going to be bullet hell.

attacks you have to dodge but it's still going to be turn-based and you can talk to all the enemies as well and there is a pacifist run and there is i mean it's really very um At the very least, with the combat and everything, I would say follows Undertale pretty squarely. But as usual, just...

Super interesting, gorgeous art style that you don't see in any other game. Super interesting audio design. My favorite, like, I don't particularly pay super close attention to audio design in games, and this is... It stands out because of the weird sampling voices that they do and the weird moody atmospheric noises. It's so good at creating a weird environment.

So, I mean, the premise of this game, and there are some, like, I wanted to boot up Moon before this podcast because there's a lot of things where I'm like, that's just from Moon, right? Like, this was the location of this. in the main town of moon and this was the location like i think it just kind of is moon in a way or at least it's the beginning of the game kind of starts there um

But you are a boy whose father created an old video game that they say was never released, but then it also sort of was. It's confusing. And you end up getting sucked into this game. But because it was never released, the game is falling apart on the inside. So you are like the hero never came to.

do the story that is within this game because it's an unreleased game and the world kind of starts to crumble around you and then you have to deal with all of the consequences of trying to get back to Find your father and figure out how to make the game world whole again. Yeah, it's a really cool premise because it starts down. It's like, OK, it's basically just Tron got it. But then the world is so twisted that you go to it first and everything's just.

So really, you know, there's a king and he's like, I don't know. I guess I could grant this hero some XP, but it doesn't really matter because this world is doomed because. No one is actually going to ever play it. There's a bar in the little village area and the lady running it is just completely drunk off her ass. She's like, there's no hero to play the game, whatever. And it kind of has...

a Link's Awakening vibe in some ways too, where the characters in that starting area are like, you know, this is going to disappear and we're going to disappear along with it. We're all going to die when this game dies.

And then the game just keeps going layers deeper in some really cool ways. And they describe it as like a fairytale RPG, which I think comes through with just the surreal environments and kind of the inspirations they're pulling from eventually. But it has such a... you said it looks cool kelsey i really want to beat that drum more like this vibe just makes me so happy it just looks like a lost 90s rpg and just the aesthetic is so soothing to my soul to play through and they do such cool

loose things like yeah it's it's meta textual in all these different ways but just weird stuff like you're going screen to screen different environments and you just go to a different environment and suddenly it'll go from like day to night and in this area that you go to it's just nighttime and it's raining and it's never really explained but there's like several different pockets of that well it just completely changed the tone of the game

just to make a more interesting environment for the sake of it. And I think with this type of loose meta approach to an RPG, they can get away with so much that just makes it awesome to go through. Yeah. I also think the... puzzles in this game are really interesting i've seen some complaints online about it being kind of obtuse yes and i think you just kind of have to put yourself i think look up one is what i'll say and then i think you will get

the rest of them or like kind of the the mindset you have to put your brain into um i don't i don't know if i want to necessarily spoil one but to like to talk To talk to each different enemy type is its own unique dialogue puzzle. And you get a hint for this dialogue puzzle out in the world. You'll find an empty husk of each enemy type.

Sounds, the hint is extremely obtuse, I think, until you figure one out. And then since then, I feel like I've had a better grasp of like, okay, the types of puzzles this could be. Like, maybe you need to... spell something out with the words that you are saying or maybe you know like it can be like little uh word like play on words and letter play and stuff and not like a literal um Here's the conversation you should be having.

Right. Okay. Because I am curious about that because starting this game, I was like blown away of like, oh my God, this is so awesome. I love this. I love this. And then I was looking up some Steam reviews and so many people were like, yeah, look, this is a 10 out of 10 until the combat starts.

And now I've gotten into the combat stuff, and I'm like, I think this combat's cool. I don't know, but I guess it just becomes more and more specific with the puzzles to defeat these different enemies, and that's the part that people are just hitting a brick wall with. To be clear... You could totally just fight the enemies, too. Just like in Undertale. You do not have to, like, do the pacifist route. And I have no idea, actually, because I didn't...

I honestly didn't look up a ton about this game until after I had started playing it because I just, again, I love the studio so much. So I was like, I'm just going to try to go in as blind as possible. So I didn't realize that...

you know, I mean, the talk option made me think, yes, there's probably a way to not kill this, but I had to like, I had to feel that out. And so I don't know if... killing one enemy in the very beginning is going to make me not have a pacifist run and i also don't know if i'm going to get so frustrated halfway through the game that it stops being a pacifist run anyway because i get annoyed but uh i am excited to

Delve deeper into this thing. Yeah, it seems awesome. It seems tailor-made for people who maybe are waiting for Deltarune to finish. And they want to have an Undertale, Delta Runish experience that is... You will roll credits and see the full story here, you know? And so to go back to the creator... of moon which was so inspirational for undertale i think it's a cool spot for it and so i hope people check out stray children yeah it's on like switch and steam at this point

And at the bottom of the Steam page, it says, we have one final request for anyone and everyone who finishes the game. Please keep the ending a secret. I dare them to stamp us. I am intrigued. That's a good little pitch. And it seems like it's like 20 hours or so is how long the beat has it at. But it's still super early because I don't think a lot of people are jumping in and playing this thing yet.

It is also pretty linear, which I think, as far as I can tell so far, it seems like it's quite linear, and I think that is a good thing, because the... biggest issue with moon is that i mean i had to look up several things with moon because there is backtracking and it is fairly obtuse in some of those later puzzles so um

To not have to think about whether you just missed an item in the very beginning or something and have to backtrack is a very welcome change. Yeah, that's sweet. But you're going to stick with Stray Children, you think? Oh, yeah. Okay. I'm seeing this thing through and then going to spoil the ending with my spoiler hat on. I can't wait. That's going to be so sweet. I'm very excited, though. Cool. Leo, you know what I'm excited about, man? Huh.

Patreon.com. If you want to help support this whole independent operation. Otherwise, I'm excited, of course, to go to Iam8bit.com. Don't get me started on Iam8bit. I don't know where to stop. They have their big Black Friday deal coming up here. Check out their wonderful online store. You'll find a ton of amazing things available for you, including CDs. You remember those? iMateBit does. You can check out...

Their full CD collection here, they have Steven Universe CDs, Sea of Stars CDs, Cuphead CDs, Ultra Kill soundtracks, Bee and Puppycat CDs, Joystick Jazz, which is an awesome medley of video game music. You can get a ton of CDs for your favorite video games. games and beyond at im8bits wonderful online store and you can use the promo code throughout all of november turducken turducken everybody for 10 off of everything under 100

Check that out. And please support IM8Bit because they support the MinMax community in a big bad way by shipping out a prize each and every week to whoever has the best questions submitted on Patreon for the community questions. We choose our number one favorite, and I make it ships out a prize. This week, of course, it's Bear and Breakfast, the vinyl soundtrack to Bear and Breakfast. We need to remember, of course, who has the best questions submitted. Are you two ready for this?

I have my 10 p.m. community emails beer ready to be cracked open. That's what I'm talking about. Okay. Tokyo Game Life writes in. They say, hey, MinMax, people on the other end of the podcast, rank. All of the number 20 games from the history of the 210s. What is this? A perfect question? Right out of the gate?

I love this. I'm excited. Okay, 2019. I did not look any of these up. Oh, perfect. All right, some of these we probably haven't played, so we'll just have to work with that, I guess. 2019, Bloodstained Ritual of the Night was number 20. Perfect 20. 2020, it was Paper Mario, the Origami King was number 20. Number 20, 2021, it was Bravely Default 2. I thought that at 19. Damn, we do have to talk about that one. Oh, we gotta talk about it indeed. 2022...

a game called rumble verse. I remember that being number one based on Leo's passion. I can't believe that's a sit at number 20 for that year. Number 20, so glad that's immortalized. Somehow I feel like this is more damning that we put this at number 20 instead of leaving off the list entirely. But 2023, we put Super Mario Brothers Wonder at the number 20 slot. Yeah.

In hindsight, I regret that one a little bit. I still like that game, but that definitely felt like we put it on there because it's Mario a little bit. Having another 20 Mario... a couple of years earlier, it does make it feel like a pity spot. It does. Yep. Absolutely. And it's going to be an awesome spot for Donkey Kong this year. I can't wait to see it. 2024 star struck the hands of time. All right. Now if we have to rank all of these.

Star Struck Rocks. Star Struck Rocks. Star Struck Rocks. Has some real Onion Games vibes to it. All right. I would, based on this list and based on the three of us, which is all that matters, of course, in this beautiful world. Rumbleverse feels like number one to me, right? Because Leo loves that game. I'm still in the subreddit. I still read the new post. People are going, does anyone else?

Miss this game more than life itself and nothing has ever scratched an itch the same way. People make that post every two days. I love it. I love those subreddits where just the same beats get hit by a different person over and over and over again. Yep, it's that and do you think it could get brought back? I mean, what else is there to say?

Okay, so here's what I'm trying to gauge. Ghost Town. Just based on our collective passion, is Starstruck number two then? A game that I think all of us liked? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Sweet. So another question is... Bloodstained, Paper Mario the Origami King, Bravely Default 2, Super Mario Bros. Wonder. How do we rank these GMs? I haven't played any of them. Okay. Which hurts me a little. I've only played some of them.

I did not play very much Bravely Default 2, but I did like the first one. Does that mean anything? No, for some reason I'm going to say that dings it just for the sake of dragging that game to hell. Yeah, it's weird. I mean, I liked Wonder. Okay. I did, like, enjoy that game. That means something, right? Kelsey, thank you for defending.

the king because i also think it's funny to dunk on wonder the situation but if a stranger accosted me on the street i would frantically answer like i liked playing that game I just think the hype for it was absurd based on my experience rolling credits. I think that what pushed it over from just a game that I thought was decent for me was it had some really weirdo, silly moments.

And that stuck out to me and that made it a little bit unique among Mario games. And so that's why I liked it. I thought it was a goofy little guy in addition to being a Mario game. It was the most modern goofy guy Mario game. The question is... How do you rank this with Bloodstained, which is a game that a lot of people love. They say it's one of their favorite Metroidvanias, but I probably played 20 minutes of Bloodstained. Yes? I hate Metroidvanias.

Yeah. I'm sure it's wonderful. All right, dragging it down. Okay, great. So... Because you're asking how we would rank it. Yeah, you're right. This isn't objective. Objectively is the correct order, right? Hey, look, if people got a problem with it, they should have hung out on this podcast instead of dropping to go play our craters right now. That's what I got to say.

I can see them playing our creators right now. This fucking sucks. Yeah, and I've never had Steam. It says in parentheses, and they're having fun. That's so cruel. Why would it say that? Their avatars on Steam are hugging. Oh, my God. Did you play Origami King at all? I watched my partner play Origami King. Okay. I...

I like everything about Paper Mario the Origami King except for the combat. I think it's a silly system that they make you do again and again and again. But like the tone of any Paper Mario, I'm always going to be on board for. Even if I have my... quibbles with the most recent ones you know it's like is the tone of paper mario going to lift it up on this list here's what i here's what i'm asking is this list

Number one, Rumbleverse. Number two, Starstruck, The Hands of Time. Number three, Super Mario Bros. Wonder. Number four, Paper Mario, The Origami King. Number five, Bloodstained. Number six, Brody Default 2. I was going to say, you know, I'm not sure. It seems like we're doing it based on quality of the games, but also it's interesting to do it based on like as a pick for number 20. And I do think Bravely Default 2 is on the bottom either way. Right, right.

I think you're right. So I'm satisfied with that. Okay, Kelsey, how you feeling? I'm fine with this list. I do think that we're probably objectively wrong about Bloodstained, but... Correct. Whatever. Yeah, that's all right. Leif Dion. So thank you, Tokyo Game Life. There's a list. Leif Dion writes it. What if we did a year where the two tenths, you could only really vote on something or move it around if you hadn't played it?

You, like, had to be unbiased. That sounds like great New Show Plus material, I think. I've just completely bastardized the list after the fact. The new tense. That's right. Leaf Dion writes in and says, has anybody listened to the Game Maker's Notebook interview with John and Brenda?

romero uh i have not listened to that one yet but i listen to a lot of that podcast um they say it's really good and personal um also here's my thing with game makers notebook which is a podcast i like but they have multiple different interviewers and so

They're all equally great. But there are some when I see it, I'm like, I kind of wish this other person was doing the interview. And so I'll have to go back and listen to this one. But they say, hey, side question. What's everyone's favorite interview of all time? I thumbs up this one because I knew you'd have an answer. What? You can't do that. Sorry. I thumbs up this just because I also wanted to hear Ben's answer, but I also I like too many.

interviews like i'm i need to come up with an actual answer to this i'm gonna say um i really love a good oral history um Some of my favorites are Matt Leone's for Polygon. He's done some really incredible ones on like Street Fighter and a bunch of other stuff. Yeah. I always like a good...

If this counts as an interview. I really like a good oral history where you're blending a bunch of interviews together a little bit. It's just a way to do it. And even like, you know, like the Mortal Kombat Legacy Collection. It is just so fun to have it in that format.

of where things can collide and contradict each other. Like there's this whole section where they talk about like who came up with the K in the Mortal Kombat name and two people are like, that was me. And just seeing those interviews, if you just put them right next to each other. But then you also add, like, Ed Boon and John Tobias being like...

Actually, it was this guy. I remember him coming up with a K. Then suddenly I think you get the full picture of the office dynamics and you see a little bit more. They're like, okay, so now I have to choose to believe this person over this person based on memories that are 30 years old. And I think oral history really brings it.

all to light of just more of the interpersonal dynamics you know yeah and just like that memory is not perfect so the more people you add to that mix the better your odds are that you're gonna like get the truth out of it and When you interview exactly one person, they may subconsciously try to come up with an answer for something they're not 100% sure on, and then that's just...

that's just history now, you know, that's just repeated as history. So I really like a, I really like a good multi-part interview like that with many people too.

to kind of sand off some of those edges yeah and shout out to uh matt leon's new site design room which is in the ball of heroes now uh for it's all about oral histories and he said shadow the colossus and res infinite just went up this week as well um but Kit and Krista, that podcast, they were teasing that Matt Leone was teasing to them that he has some Nintendo oral histories coming up on that site, which I'm very excited to see which angle that's going to take.

I actually do have an answer to this. Please. I'm trying desperately to find it. It's an interview for the Matt Johnson movie, The Dirties. Yeah. That is, it is, I... He is so great in interviews. He has so much to say and it is about his heart making these things and the specific details of the process. So, so, so interesting to listen to him speak. I'm really trying to find it. It was like...

After the dirty screening, which was like this indie movie from 10 years ago, in a hotel room, sitting around a table with him and a bunch of other people, the other main star and a couple of people who worked on it, other core members of the team. And it was like people they knew doing the interview, like friends who were running a movie channel. And it is so just people hanging out in a... Maybe it's more of a roundtable. I don't know if we maybe don't call it an interview, but...

The vibe is so just completely raw. Friends hanging out in the middle of this weekend showing their movie they've been working on forever. Oh, that's sweet. Incredible vibe. I would love to find that. Have you watched Operation Avalanche?

yeah okay how is it i that's one i haven't seen it's good it's i like the dirties more but it is uh fascinating as well you know those are the movies shot for people who don't know like in the real world blending reality and bring in people who don't know they're acting in a movie as as people who they're bouncing off of and performing improvising with yeah and it's really impressive that they did a period piece with that with operation avalanche and there's a climax like action scene

That hits really hard in that format and style. It is a very unique movie. Oh, my God. So my answer is outside of the realm of games, I think. I was thinking about this recently of just like, is this the first podcast that I consumed in my life technically, even if it's not technically a podcast, which is Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth? That aired on PBS a long time ago. It was like a six hour long episode series. And it was all just Joseph Campbell talking about mythology.

and being interviewed by Bill Moyers. And I just remember watching this as a kid being mesmerized, like put in the next tape. I want to watch this full VHS of them just talking about mythology. And it was like an easy sell because they filmed it at Skywalker Ranch. And they talk about the impact of Joseph Campbell on.

Star Wars, like, all right, I'm on board for that. But it was so soothing and it is just such a weird piece of history just to have like a six VHS chunk interview that people would buy. And then just sit down and watch this whole thing. Remember, like my aunt and uncle had it and it was I was so into it that I bought a bunch of like Bill Moyers books and stuff like some really dorky nonsense. But if you're a fan of mythology.

And Joseph Campbell in general. You should assume it's on YouTube at this point for the full series. So I'll go with that one. Luis writes in and says, what movie theater experience completely blew you away? Recently, I got to see Galaxy Quest back in theaters. No way! Which gave me a new appreciation for seeing old movies in theaters and rerunning. It's like...

It hits in such a specific way where you know everybody in the theater has seen it before and these are their favorite jokes and they're so excited to be re-experiencing them. You can just like... feel that and that's a magical thing in a movie like that which is a five star movie my god galaxy quest of course so perfect uh yeah electric a new a new way to experience that movie which maybe i saw in theaters as a tiny little kid barely remember it

But it was like, this is worth making it out to for sure. This is a whole new way to love this movie. What do you think was the best joke? What got the biggest laugh from the audience? It's obviously going to be by Graptar's hammer. What a savings. Yeah. But in the theater, you really feel how long the pause is. By Graptar's hammer. And then he's just...

Trying to make his mouth form the words. What a saving. Can you see his lip like quivering on the big screen? Different people laughing at different... But, oh my god. Crying at that part. Oh, that's sweet. You know, David Mamet said it's a perfect story, perfect film. So you got to trust him. I agree.

For me, it's equally as classy, but seeing Jackass 3D in theaters, like I don't – wearing 3D glasses, that is honestly tough to beat for just having a theater that's immersed in just the dumbest thing possible. a new sensation back then when 3d was exciting jackass was firing at all cylinders. Like what, what a time to be in the theater, you know? Yeah. And no judgment. No one's here. He's going off. Jackass is stupid. Yeah.

Right. Everybody there is going to be pumped. No one thinks that. Yeah. For those 90 minutes, no one thinks that. That's right. And that's beautiful. I remember for a long time... Back when like Midnight started and I was like, oh, I guess I should do video essays. Is that how these things work? And I'm so glad I didn't go further down that road. I dabbled a couple of times and I hate the tone of them for me. But I was like, I always thought it'd be fun to like.

Compare the 3D experiences of Jackass 3D versus Super Mario 3D Land. Just like very serious pros and cons of the use of 3D in both. I think it would be really fun. That's the difference between me and Jacob. I would love to. Go write a video about that. Hey, you know what, Leo? That one's yours, dude. You can have it. Thanks, man. Slycut writes in. They say, hey, everybody, how about that World Series? Not sure the Dodgers deserve that win last night.

or last game, but luck was on their side for sure. It was one of the craziest, I think it maybe is the craziest World Series of my lifetime. Like, in terms of just moments of like...

You think it is about to be over and then it's not. I stood up and sat down and said things out loud, I think, more than I have said in... I mean, this is a game where I don't... particularly i was rooting for toronto but i don't like have a a dog in this race a horse in this fight whatever um and just the it was crazy i mean you had one game that went

18 innings which is tied for the longest a game has ever gone and then that last game in the World Series at least and that last game just had so many crazy moments where the game should have been over There were like just... Someone sliding with their feet instead of their hands. And it was the difference of one inch or Andy Paz in the outfield, like completely mowing down Quique Hernandez in order to make the game saving catch, like just knocking him.

three feet out of the way. I mean, things that just should not have happened. It was really, really wild. That's weird. And so it's not like the... the fact of the Dodgers winning is the wild thing. It's just like the gameplay itself was just out of this world. There were just so many crazy moments in it. And yes, the Blue Jays played better nearly the entire series, but there were just...

Every time it was about to be over, the Dodgers would find some crazy way to hang on. Or the Blue Jays would find some crazy way to do something one inch wrong. Right. Weird.

Are the Blue Jays typically good? I feel like I never hear about them as someone who doesn't pay attention to baseball. Things just change in baseball fairly quickly. So, I mean, they've been good for... They've had some very good people on their team for... several years now they've been seriously contentious for a few okay hey that's cool yeah but it's tough they're in a tough division they've got the yankees in their division uh that's what it is okay gotcha uh chris fantrey

says hey cohorts rematch and rocket league are the only recent arcade style sports games that broke out into the mainstream in a major way when do we see a non-soccer game do this and what sport will it be I was thinking a baseball XCOM could work. Yeah. So about statistics, like percentage chances. Yeah. Right. So like the command. Yeah. Strategy.

Moneyball. You could also do a deck building roguelike for baseball, I think. Yes. That would really hit. I played a bit of basketball roguelike this year called Clutch Time. Clutch time. Basketball deck builder. It was pretty fun. It makes sense. Here's the problem. Building decks, I'm checking here.

Yeah, it says it's some dorky ass crap. We're talking about breaking out into the mainstream is the question. We're talking Rocket League level success. You think your cute little cards are getting you there? I don't think so. That's the problem is you can play basketball in Rocket League 2, so that's out. Yeah, I guess that's kind of it. Basketball and soccer are kind of the same sport at the end of the day.

It's like you need something that's simple and clean and clear for like, just get the ball over here, everybody. Let it go through this. I don't think it can be baseball. I think it has to be something like if you're talking arcadey and super mainstream, it's like. tennis you know like just something very very simple well here's you can't have all these rules and and waiting yeah okay what about this you guys sitting down

Hey, Leo, put this in your pipe and smoke it. Do you think this already happened a long time ago and we just don't think about it, but aren't fighting games kind of an adaptation of boxing? Sure, man. And target shooting from the Olympics is like Overwatch. Yeah, now you're catching on. Channing Potato writes in and say, a few years ago I dressed up as Santa for Halloween.

Nobody laughed and my wife still brings it up as one of the least funny things I've ever done. So I just want to say thank you, Leo, for confirming that it is funny to dress up as Santa for Halloween. Oh, no, no. It was funny when Leo did it. Oh, OK. But Channing Potato was embarrassing, I think. Important distinction. Yeah, I got it. That makes sense.

Fancy Graham writes in, I was at a music educators conference last weekend. I thought our keynote speaker was fantastic. One of the points he brought up in his presentation was instead of thinking of having to do something. We get to do it. Within reason, of course. It wasn't a speech about toxic positivity. Is there anything that you have to do in your professional life where you can adjust your thinking in a way that it's something that you get to do?

I'm certainly in our careers. There's a lot. I think it's easy to be like, I have a million things to do. And, and, you know, I, I, I find we all just want to feel in control of our lives. And when it's like,

I've overcommitted and now I have a million things to do. Even if they're all fun, it's like I'm trapped in this thing and now all I want to do is the things I have not signed up to do. Right. That gets tough mentally. So yeah, spacing things out and taking the time to like... orient yourself and think about how fun it is that you get to do this stuff that what i'm that what the many complicated things i'm juggling are also cool and meaningful to me yeah

Yeah, I think I'm bad at specifically that part, but also if you ask me if I like what I do, I would say hell yeah. So, you know, I think like day to day I am stressed and there are moments where I'm like... I mean, just yesterday I was like scrambling to prepare for Pew Pew Bang recording, which is like some of the most fun I have in a day is recording that podcast.

But I was still stressed out because I was kind of scrambling to like, you know, I hadn't like really written out the ad reads yet and like figured out where I was going to slot them in. And like, it's just these little things where they're where I'm stressed and I feel like I'm running out of time.

But again, if you ask me if I like what I do, yes, I love what I do every day. But everything you love still comes with moments of stress. Definitely. And I think when there's a tight deadline is when it is. Most unpleasant. Like in a non-work thing, I've been packing to move recently and we've been so ahead on it.

Versus like, oh, scrambling to pack last minute. Oh gosh, I didn't take enough time off. It's like, oh, I have it spaced out. This day is this portion of this room. This day is these shelving units. And...

Taking the time, putting on some freaking Sopranos and just going through stuff slowly and discovering old things. It's like it gets to it is fun to be packing in a way I didn't think was possible because it's not something I'm behind on. It's like, oh, this is something I. am doing with the luxury of time and I don't have to get a certain amount done it's like having having extra time not feeling cramped in doing it is is totally outlook changing yeah

And sometimes it's not an option, of course. Yeah. But it's interesting, yeah, just having that little, like, mental twist. Like, you know, my wife is good at reminding us of this little... phrase of like you know if you're dealing with a really stressful period with a kid like the kid is just losing his mind he doesn't want to eat his uh tortilla that you made for him because he begged for it anyway you know that type of just basic frustration thing uh

And it's always worth just remembering like if 20 years from now, I would give anything in the world to time travel back to this moment. and deal with the kid at this age. It's like there's that little rephrasing and reframing in your mind that can help out a lot. I think I think about my wife dying the perfect amount. To be grateful every day that her and I are together at this time in our lives. Yeah. You know, you don't want to be like obsessed with it and fixated on it.

But it pops into my head as a real possibility that when she gets home, oh, I'm so happy to see her, you know? Yeah, yeah. And what is the right level? You think that's like twice a week to have that morbid thought? Yeah, two, three times a week. Yeah, I think that's good for everybody. Get it in your system, everybody.

Felix Davin wrote in. Think about my wife dying. Hello, good people. Question for Kelsey. What is currently the most commonly sold item at Pink Gorilla Games in Seattle? Do you guys want to guess? Yeah. We're not... Pokemon booster pack? I was going to say video games. Yeah.

Oh, do you want to know the most common video game? Okay, yeah, because it's a boring answer. It's a Pokemon card. Okay, that's a good guess. Way to go, Leo. But yeah, what is the most common game? I'm going to say... Is there an answer for that over time? Versus just recently? Yeah, it's tough because we have to have it in stock, you know? Like, I think if we had infinite copies of, like, Pokemon Emerald, it would be that.

But we don't have infinite copies of Pokemon Emerald, you know, like just in terms of what people ask for every day. It's probably Wii Sports. What? On disc? No Wii? Well, you said video game. That's weird. But they buy it with the Wii, typically. Yeah, or they already have a Wii. They've bought a Wii. They've found their Wii. Sure.

but they didn't find the disc or whatever. So yeah, there's some things I wish I had our point of sales, not like amazing about this, but you can do some fun stats. If you look. It doesn't show for all of the stores combined, but if I look up Wii Sports real quick, I can tell you, if it loads, how many copies we have sold in this last year. Would you like to take a guess? This is just at one store. One store. That's helpful. Yeah, I've got my number. You got yours, Leo?

Yeah. And this is not year to date. This is one full year. Obviously, Kelsey, it's not our first rodeo. OK, we got it. OK, sorry. OK, let's hear the guesses. Three, two, one. Thirty seven. Twenty five. 84. Whoa. Wow. You retire off that, girl. I was rolling around a number like that, and I said, that's crazy. That's like once every week.

That's like twice every week. Weird. And that's it. One store we sell a couple every week. Yeah. That's awesome. Wow. Business is booming. I love digging into the weird stats of that. of what we've sold a lot of and stuff. The item we have literally sold the most of is just we have one item for keychain.

So the answer is Keychain because it just encompasses like a million things, but that's not exciting. Yeah, that's exciting. I was really interested to hear on PewPewBang that you like... fell in love with owning a business and that's why you got into that this is like running that it's like from an outsider it kind of feels like

somebody would be in your position because they love video games and want to do like something related to video games. And this is a way to be in that space and be interacting with people who are also into it and stuff. It's, it's really interesting.

component of your personality that it's like the the business management aspects of it are what you enjoy about it and why you're still doing it yeah well i mean obviously i love being in video games in general too but yeah i do think i have kind of a weird uh trajectory here whereas most people i think

wake up and they're like i'm gonna be a business owner and i want to do like this is my passion and this is what i want to do and i was like i want to be around games and oh this is fun and i'm enjoying all these other like oh i like stock management and i like uh you know

forecasting different like trends and stuff like that and i'm just enjoying the whole package of this i like being in games and i like doing the business stuff too i don't like pink bills though yeah well no sure you can iron that out So you think like you could shift that passion over? Not that you need to, right? But if it was like, hey, you now just run a small little gift store with no video games involved, do you think you'd be almost as excited? I think I'd still enjoy it.

That's cool. No, I'm not almost as excited because I really do. I mean, I also just have so many years of experience in video games at this point that it comes easy and I'd have to relearn that in another industry and that would be tough. um just to start from so far down like if you threw me in a bookstore or something like i i don't know i don't know what people are reading i don't know what's popular like this would definitely take me a while to get me

my feet under me, but, um, but yeah, I still enjoy the work. Atlas shrugged. I think Michael Nickley writes in Heyman Maxers. If you could assign one better quest goal to the entire cohort. Oh, they're using the word cohort correctly. I'm not used to that. And everybody would magically be totally here for it and wouldn't resent you. What would it be? Wait, hang on. It's not cohorts?

In the way that the word is defined, I think people... It sounds more fancy and correct. So we're like a cohort of... In the same way you're like a flock of... birds or whatever? I think that's how it should be. But we're cohorts, plural, and we're the bastardization of it, I think, is the idea. Okay, okay. But yeah, what would the one better quest goal be? And everyone would be...

Totally on board and go for it. Um, journaling every day is my answer. Ooh, that's good. Oh, that's a good one. I was going to swing for the fences and I was going to say we should do like. we should put on a play or something like that. Put on a musical. And you know what that should be? And perform it. We should finally carry through on the New Show Plus poll. Yep.

borderlands 3 reveal i was literally i was thinking about that today because i was thinking about like bonus pod where we talk a lot about the future mid-max and stuff like what's a big swing we could take and i was like you know i still want to do that i still want to do the theatrical touring production of the reveal of Borderlands 3 on stage.

Can that be a triple charge shot or something? Yeah, the full year, and then we just pull on the full play. Yeah, there's no new show plus for like two months while we get this together. Please understand. But journaling, Leo, that's yours. Yeah, I have always I've liked writing my little notebooks. I've liked journaling over the past few years. And then just a few months ago, I started really putting on the to do list first thing in the morning that I do for when I'm ready to start doing stuff.

journal every single day and it's been really transformative just for like going into the day with a better like understanding of everything i have ahead of me When the breaks are going to be and, you know, being grateful for what I'm getting to do and what's fun about it. It's like it just puts my head on straight versus.

Being everything, everything in your life contributing to a nebulous cloud of anxiety in your head. It's just like it just gets it all out. And I then I reread it and it all just feels manageable. It's such a useful tool. And since I've really started doing it every single day, I've really noticed an improvement in my productivity and life satisfaction. I'd be very curious for how everybody experiences it.

Yeah, this is making me want to take it seriously again, because I always also feel like I benefit from it. And I even recently I'm just not very consistent. But like the other night, I have a problem on. weekends where no matter what i do i feel like i didn't do anything and then i have anxiety about it um and so and like the

I'm not even expecting myself to work or anything. It's just like I want to not laze about and do nothing and scroll on my phone or whatever. So... on sunday i was like okay i'm like writing out everything i did this weekend so that i can look back at this and be like oh no like you you hung art in the bathroom and you like you know took donations to goodwill and just things like that like okay i

I did do things. I remember being lazy on the couch, but I also did all of these things. So now I'm not just remembering the parts that I regret. And it's just that feeling of like on Monday waking up and just being like, oh my God, I threw. I threw my time away. I did nothing. I was on my phone. It's like on Sunday, even I start feeling like, what have I even done with this time? Was I recharging? Was I doing something? You know, did I get chores done? I don't know.

There's something about the weekend that just kind of like, my brain becomes a little more void-y. Yeah. I always have looked forward to the weekend so much and then I'm in it and I'm like... Why do I feel bad? What is this? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's exactly. I've really started responding to that with, with journaling and going like, it's just a moment to like, stop letting anything else in except your own thoughts. And I go like.

What do I actually want to do right now? Am I being drawn to a podcast and a nothing game? Like, is that what my brain really craves right now? Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's like, I want to watch like a movie I haven't seen. I want to, I want to try a new game. I want to get some friends together for multiplayer. Like helps me find. the goal and then go do it versus I could just scroll for two hours before randomly doing something. Yeah.

And then you go back and look at your journal from six months ago where you were also saying, I really want to do this. And it's like, okay, if I was thinking about it back then, I haven't done it yet. Like that's an extra motivator. Like I think that'd be the fun part is just going through the history too much.

That is really interesting. I regret not dating my journals more throughout my life. Ooh, yeah, you gotta date them. Yeah, come on, man. That's important. But it's fun to try and piece it together, too. What project I'm nervous about at the time. Yeah. I wasn't thinking about this for the better question, but I guess it could work, but I'm amazed more people aren't dorks for stuff. I just have a note in my phone and I recommend everybody do it. That just says life notes.

And every time you hear something that's like, oh, that's good. That's smart. It could be something profound. Just something where it's like, I don't want to forget that. That's a good reminder for life in general. why doesn't everybody else have one? It is so helpful just to have a constant thing of like, all right, this is, this is the wisest stuff I have learned on earth and I'm going to forget it. Do you go back to it? Yeah. Yeah. I go back through it a decent amount. Yeah.

It's nice. And some of them, I'm like, that wasn't that profound, you idiot. But still, by and large, oh, yeah, that is good. I'm glad I wrote that down. That's relevant in some way, I think. If this isn't too vulnerable, can you give us one example? I was just thinking about one today, and it's very dopey.

But Pete Holmes, the comedian, has a podcast. And he has some really good guests. And a lot of it is kind of some pseudo-spiritual stuff that comes from his side. It's like, oh, that's just a good way of looking at life. OK, got it, got it, got it. But he had one recently where I think it was his idea where he just thought out there. He's like, why don't people use the most valuable phrase you can use in English, which is, hey, that hurt my feelings. Would you mind rephrasing that?

It's like no one ever uses that, but it's like all you need in so many instances. It's like, all right, I'm going to write down that phrase. I might come in handy at some point in my life, you know? No. I need to retreat into myself and wonder if it's valid to have not liked it. Right, right. For three hours. Yeah, yeah. There's always a chance. Moments passed way too much to ever go back to it. That's it. You get it.

I have that too. My journal is in my Trello board, and I have different categories for different areas of my life, and I have one called Things to Never Ever Forget, even if you get comfortable thinking you've solved everything. Ooh.

Is it huge stuff or is it like remember to eat well and you'll feel better, you idiot? Yeah, it's a lot of like the day to day of like I know I'm in a great period right now. So let me write down why I'm in a great period where I'm feeling so good. So that when I'm in a down period, I like.

know the pieces that are missing. I need to break this out because I have those things like in journal entries where it's just like, hey, I like... ate clean today and got enough sleep and drank enough water and like i feel great and this is a possible state of being that we can do if we just you know Trying to take care of ourselves. Right, right. Sometimes I bold stuff like that, yeah. Yeah, you just need those reminders for sure. So everyone, write that down.

And I recommend typing your journal because it can be really more stream of consciousness. You can get it down so fast and it just feels like your thoughts getting transferred into a place that's not so anxious. Yeah. I found I was getting anxious when I was typing my journal out because it was in the Mortal Kombat to Fidelity Fund. All right. Halloween's still going. That's right. What do you all like for question of the week here? I like that one. That was good. I do.

stop myself from talking about how much journaling has done for me a lot. And it was good to have that opportunity. That felt nice. Well, there we go. Michael Nickley. Congratulations. Oh, yes. Well, sorry. I was going to ask Leo if he. could remember to ask me in a week if i've been journaling you don't have to but if i like have a small amount of pressure that like leo's gonna ask me about this i think i'll be consistent

And you know I've got my Trello board open right now. The reminder's already been set. It's also the goal of the BetterQuest channel in the Discord, Kelsey. If you just jump in, they'll hold you accountable. You'll have an extra. So I'm going to get like a hundred pings. Like Kelsey. Failure, failure, failure, failure. That don't feel great.

uh now it's time for something of course that's called get a load of this new show plus could have had us hear this forever we could have been able to hear the song we let people vote

If the people recording the podcast could hear that, I could make it happen. But people voted no. And there's going to be a sweet choreographed sequence with it every time. And $10 supporters said nay. So we got to go with it. I don't know. Do you guys just want to do the YMCA or something? No, you can't give them anything. They didn't vote for it, Kelsey. You can't reward that type of lack of voting. Right, and on today of all days? Yeah, today of all days, Kelsey. So, get a load of this.

Lex Friedman. You heard of this fella? Podcaster. But he had an interview that I saw one news story pop up from it. It was one of those like, wait. Who interviewed Dan Houser from Rockstar? How did they do this? And it's Lex Friedman talked to Dan Houser from GTA fame. He has since left, you know, but he talked to him for three hours.

And it's like, oh, my God, I barely heard Dan Hauser speak. So to have three hours of him unpacking his history at Rockstar, it was very interesting to jump in and listen to. If you're a fan of Lex Freeman in particular, he's got a unique interviewing style. But he talked about a ton of interesting stuff. People are making headlines about it. But he talked about how they were developing or starting to kick around ideas for a mythological game.

with like Knights of the Round and stuff. It was going to be a Rockstar game at some point that was scrapped. He talked about how originally in Red Dead Redemption 2, Arthur had his... kid die is unclear if it's like a stillbirth or something there's some baby that died right at the beginning of red dead redemption 2 and arthur was just mean as hell to the baby's mother

because you're like wouldn't that be interesting if it starts and you hate arthur because of this and the way he treats this woman after their baby died and then it gets to the point where you love arthur And they said that it was just all the testing were like, F this guy, Arthur sucks. It's like, all right, this is maybe a little bit too much. We can get that other angle of Arthur's history in here without having such a bombastic thing.

People are too used to stopping playing video games. Right. Yeah, exactly. But also to hear him talk about he's like GTA 4 had a really dark tone. It was really a cynical, dark game because of hot coffee in San Andreas.

He's like, it was such a tough time for the team. It almost tore us all apart. And it really rocked us so much personally. And I just moved to New York and I was really in a dark spot for a lot of reasons. And one of them was because of the hot coffee scandal. And that's why GTA 4 story was so dark. That's his take.

I wouldn't have connected that. I think for us, it's always like, hot coffee, haha, what a weird anomaly in the game industry. That was such a weird scandal. It's just nice to hear. And wasn't it great that GTA 4 was so dark? Right, right. Just to hear that bit of insight, like, I've never heard him explain. oh, that was brutal to go through. It's like, oh yeah, that's right. These are people on the side of that. Okay, got it. So link below if you want to check that out. Get a load of this.

I always like, I know this is stupid, but I always like dictionary.com's crowning a word of the year. It's always very silly. This year they have chosen pick seven. And they attempt to define it by basically saying it means nothing. It means everything and nothing and get over it, Grandpa. The world is moving on. And... I just I think it's really fascinating that like the last couple of years of this have just been things that are popularized on TikTok and stuff and don't even necessarily like.

mean much of anything. They're the last ones. So last year was demure, which was because of that. I don't even. everything moves so fast it was the exact same thing though it was just like people were saying it on on tiktok and things she's so demure um and uh Yeah, but before that, I mean, it was kind of just like normal what people were talking about a lot, but without it being so meme-y. And so I just think it's interesting that the last couple of years, they've just been like, I mean...

Guys, this is what people are Googling and what they're talking about. And everyone is looking up what does 6-7 mean. So that's our word of the year. And I hate to do it. But it is that weird concept of like, well, that's the way the history of language is, is it's kind of just Mimi. Yeah. Right. And like wind bubbles form and trends form. There you go. And it's like social media is the main reason that we're having these things.

trends bubble up it's like what is dictionary.com going to do what are they to do but to put six seven as the word of the year of course right it's weird yeah I can tell I'm getting older because more of these things I'm like, I'm going to not learn what it is and just wait it out. It'll pass like everything else does. And so seeing this get crowned word of the year, I was a little like, oh, now it's around forever. Now it's locked in as part of history, huh?

I'm just glad it wasn't K-pop Demon Hunters. All of these like... kind of are you know like there's gonna be people in 20 years still saying that even if they're saying it in the same way that our parents would like jokingly say the wrong slang that they're too old for you know Oh, language. And of course, kids, you know, learning their numbers in school. I mean, they're going to be keeping this going forever. Yeah. Stupid memes, sequential numbers.

Don't do no alphabet memes next. Get a load of this. This is just a simple anecdote from the ArcGrader subreddit. A little story about this person who joined a random team, three-person teams, two randos. They were speaking Spanish, which this person doesn't understand, but he gradually, continuously picked up that they were being really mean, and they were stealing all his loot, and they were calling him cuss words that he could recognize in Spanish.

And so he ran away from them and found another team and said, help, help. And said, I have a truly evil proposition for you. My teammates absolutely suck. If you will come with me, I'll take you right to them and you guys can take all their loot. And so he brought this team back and they killed his two teammates. Wow. Which is just that good arc. stuff we love. We love it, folks.

Hey, get a load of this from the community Discord where they post interesting factoids each and every week. I'd say all day, every day. There's a whole channel dedicated to people sharing fun, interesting things. Steveolution posts the... Brendan Fraser has signed on with Rachel Wise to make a new Mummy movie. Everybody. It's happening! From the Ready or Not filmmakers that have made the last couple Scream movies, apparently.

Leo, predict that mummy movie tomato meter, please. 72. 72! Screen movies are pretty good. Is that right? Okay. I can never keep track of where the horror films are at. So, hey, if you're feeling good about it, then I can't wait to see the new Mummy movie. I'm feeling awesome about it. The Mummy one I like in concept, but it was, I don't know. It's kind of boring.

It was kind of a two-star movie when I watched it, the original Mummy. Really? I mean, not the original Mummy, the Brendan Fraser Mummy. As much as I love Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. You are going to get lit up. It had a couple moments. You are going to get lit up. But that Tom Cruise mummy one's a lot stupider and more fun to watch. Okay. All right. All right.

You know what the best mummy is? We can all agree. It's the ride at Universal Studios. Yeah. Yes. It's excellent. Don't worry about the movies. That's all you need. That's good. Well, hey, that's it for this episode of The Mid-Mag Show. Thanks, everybody, for watching, listening, sharing all that fun stuff. There's a big thing happening soon, Kelsey, to remind folks about Totally Rad Weekend. Is that the name of it?

Really rad weekend. Really rad weekend. Forgive me, please. It's also totally rad, but that's not what we call it. I see. And what is it like? What is this? It's so great. So if you don't want to be in the... gray dark wherever you are right now like i am um it is in uh florida fort walton beach and the whole like it is a video game convention slash event in a way

But it's actually just kind of an excuse to be at a resort in Florida that's got a swim up bar and a bunch of pools and a bunch of delicious food and stuff while there's like video game stuff happening around you. So it's just a really great excuse to like... have a little vacation, do a little bit of video game shop and maybe see a couple of panels and stuff. But I am really just looking forward to hanging out by the pool and by the beach. And Leo, do you want to look at crabs at night? Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Can I go look at some crabs on the beach at night? Yeah. So I scream when they run towards me, but I still enjoy it. That sounds amazing. So it's something that people can go to and meet you guys. Okay. Yeah, the whole thing. Yeah, the whole all of us are going to be there. All the folks are going to be there, including Leo. And it's going to be really great.

There's a swimsuit contest, I've been told. A swimsuit cosplay contest. Swimsuit cosplay contest? We got a shot at it, I'll just say that. Yeah, I think so too. My suit came in, it's crazy. Are you guys doing clear-obscure? Maybe. Okay. All right. Cool. Interesting. All right. Awesome. There's a link in the description if you want to learn more about it and attend that. If you're in the Florida area, everybody. Does that answer your question? Oh, I believe it does, Leo. I believe it does.

New episode of PB Bang dropping on Monday. Kelsey, what is the theme for this episode? Oh. Wouldn't you like to know? Men. We're talking about games that ruined our lives, and it gets... I almost brought this for making a load of this, but it kind of spoils... the pewpewbank podcast um janet's really into uno you'll learn yeah and you'll it's a really it's a very interesting and surprising conversation i think okay

Perfect. All right. Check it out. In a way that it can only happen on PPBank. There we go. Check it out, everybody. Let's see. New Show Plus this week. It's playing the RV game, Leo. Is this some friend slop? Good time? Yeah, that's exactly what it is. It's called RV there yet. It's like peak style, but you're using an RV and you're using a winch to pull yourself between.

trees like pull yourself up to a tree or suspend yourself between two trees by tightening the winch all the way it's like physics based goof them up stuff Oh, fun. That sounds great. Check it out on MinMax's YouTube channel. We also have BonusPod. If you're a MinMax supporter at the $5 tier on Patreon, you unlock the bonus podcast feed where you have early ad-free access to the MinMax show. All of our interviews, all of our deepest dives, all that stuff.

And BonusPod, which is a show Haley hosts every single Monday. And this week, it was a business blast where I took questions about past, present, future of MinMax. If you want to know what it's like to try and run an independent games media outlet, I... Hope the conversation is interesting for you. I certainly would be interested in these types of conversations where it's diving into the numbers, you know, highlights, lowlights. Specifically, maybe the juiciest part is...

You know, last year we did a couple of min-max spotlights where we visited a studio, profiled a studio, and we certainly wanted to do more this year, but... They just kept falling through. We never got one lined up for 2025, which was a bit of a heartbreaker. And so then for this bonus pod, it was like, well, let's just run through every one.

That was planned and how it fell apart and what happened. Like, why not be open with it? I'm like, oh, we're going to go to the studio and then we didn't. And so it is just a Gatling gun of like, here's. everything that did not happen but was somewhat close to happening. Some of them really shattered my heart, but that's all right. And so we'll come back swinging next year for that.

I always listen to those business blasts. I'm in the damn company and I learn a lot of new stuff. Yeah. What stood out to you this time? It was interesting getting the exact like wall of heroes numbers. Yeah. That conversation about its place and the, yeah. The business card thing. Honestly, the biggest takeaway was the, your friend survey. Oh, that was wild.

Okay, check out BonusPod for some good, fun stories in there. But that is it for this episode of the Midmax Show. The greatest plug of all is I'm astral projecting into your kitchen. And I'm going into your cupboards. And I'm seeing that you have some food in your cupboards. The Arc Raiders Max Settings is in there? Yeah. That's really weird.

That's like a three hour fun gameplay stream. Oh, Jacob and Jeff and me in the cupboard. Right, right, right. And you should definitely watch that. This is really clear. Okay. And now I'm continuing to astral project. What's next? Flying through. There's just a bunch of food, a bunch of canned food that has probably been sitting there for a couple of months. Yeah, that makes more sense overall.

Just a reminder, you should donate some food that you have, perhaps lying around. Perhaps you should just donate some money to your local food shelf. They could really use some support, and this time more than ever. On top of, you know, everyone's got some soup, everyone's got some beans, the old basics, right? But on top of that, like, you can donate spices.

They're always short on spices. Cooking oil. You can donate stuff that people need as well. Stuff like tampons, diapers. You know, there's a ton of things you can jump in there and donate as the government is shut down. a dire situation for a lot of folks out there. So it's a time to go ahead, look through some cupboards and unload some stuff. Absolutely. I thought I was interrupting a factor read. The same way.

And also check with your company to see if they donation match and stuff too. A lot of them do. So you can probably make your dollars go even further. Sweet. And your cans go even further. There it is. You got it. That's right. Like Mr. Fantastic. Sweet. All right. Thanks so much, everybody. Greatly appreciate it. You all have fun while I'm gone. I'll be back for the game of the year stuff. But you be nice to Kyle Bossman, you hear?

We're going to let him talk about Bonanza every week. That's true. He's going to come and sing for Bonanza in a fun way. It's going to be great. Yeah, I'll miss you all. I'll still bug you in Slack, hopefully the right amount this time around. But I'm really looking forward to unplugging for a bit and having some focus.

hectic but focused fun family time so I appreciate everybody supporting on Patreon to make this whole thing possible but I'll be back as a double dad at some point in the future alright you all be good have fun let's go