transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] K-Pop Demon Hunter's Saja Boys Breakfast Meal and Huntrix Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.

Speaker 2:
[00:14] It is an honor to share.

Speaker 1:
[00:16] No, it's our honor. It is our larger honor. No, really, stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side.

Speaker 2:
[00:28] I participate in McDonald's While Supplies Last. If you've got spring fever, Lowe's has the cure. During Spring Fest, make your landscape stand out with three free bags of Miracle-Gro 3.25 cubic foot garden soil when you buy three. Plus, get up to 40% off select major appliances to keep clothes, food and dishes fresh all season long. Our best lineup is here at Lowe's. Battle it through 422, While Supplies Last. Selection varies by location. See lowes.com for details. Soil offer excludes Alaska and Hawaii. I'm Logan. NVC starts now.

Speaker 3:
[01:16] You've switched to Nintendo Voice Chat for the week of April 16th, 2026. Thanks so much to my lookalike for that intro, but don't you know, you're not supposed to eat on a podcast. I'm Logan Plant, joined this week by Brian Altano, who's already living in Tomodachi Life.

Speaker 4:
[01:29] I'm already there, how's it going?

Speaker 3:
[01:31] It's going great, Seth Macy's here.

Speaker 5:
[01:33] Wow, so great to see you, Logan.

Speaker 3:
[01:36] That's pretty close to what you sound like on my island. And Miranda Sanchez is here, hey Miranda.

Speaker 6:
[01:40] Hi, I forgot to send you my lookalike to your island. I'll have to do that later.

Speaker 3:
[01:45] Yeah, I want to add everybody from IGN. I already have a few folks, but I want to get even more. Well, this week it's all about Tomodachi Life, Living the Dream, which is out now on Nintendo Switch. My review is up on IGN, I give it a 7. I think this is such a good game. I love it so much. We're going to talk about everything. Miranda is working on it for guides at IGN, so she's played like 40 hours of it. I'm around the same amount, so let's get into it. Miranda, just first impressions, what do you think of this one?

Speaker 6:
[02:09] I generally like it a lot, though. I think I like the original better, or the last one that we had better. This one, it's hard, right? It's really pretty. I think they made a lot of really cool changes to improve the overall look and just kind of playability, some new items, and you definitely get into this in your review. The custom features, so there's a lot of things about building an island, but the building tools are very simple and you can't really share me's, you can't share the creations you do. There's this whole new place called the Palette House Workshop, and that's where you make new treasures, you make new clothes, you can do a bunch of custom things, which is cool. So if you want to make a me really close to something, that's a neat place. But at the same time, when you're making me's, there's limited skin tones, they've never heard of cool and warm skin tones before. And so in that sense too, it's really hard to get certain people with melanin, like the right skin tone. And that's really frustrating when there's just so much there. It's like, but you can make their outfit perfectly, or you can draw face paint, but it's just a lot of weird little mismatches here and there. That's all to say, those are the things I dislike. It's still super funny, it's charming, it's fun to be in and see how people interact. I will say, though, you put it perfectly in your review that it's a great 20-minute game. If you stay too long, you will see the same scenes over and over and over. And I'm like, all right, can I get a different dream? And then suddenly you see a bunch of new stuff, and in some way it feels like the tracking internally in this game needs to be shaken up. I just need to, I keep pulling the same cards, but I know the deck didn't shuffle well enough or something, and I'm trying to pull from the bottom, but it's not showing me the bottom yet. So that's kind of how I feel. And I don't feel like I had that fatigue in the same way with Tomodachi Life, the original, but at least the one that we got. That being said, I also didn't play it like crazy like I am right now.

Speaker 3:
[04:18] Yeah, right. Yeah, it's an interesting one for a review period. Now granted, we got this one pretty early. We've had this game longer than we usually get Nintendo games, which is great because I binged it a lot the first couple of weeks and then I started kind of settling into I'm going to log in for 30 minutes every day, which is what I plan to continue doing now that it's out. And yeah, I think I've just gotten luckier than Miranda. And I don't feel like I've seen nearly as many repeats. Like I'm seeing different dreams. I'm still seeing different conversations at the restaurant that I haven't seen in my first 35 hours. Like it was me and Seth and somebody else were dressed up as robots and just talking like beep, beep, beep. And then like random phrases would be inserted. And it was great. I hadn't seen that before. And still seeing new daily newscasts. And so I still feel like I'm seeing lots of new things. But yes, there's some repeats. I call this out in my review. I'm already skipping the scenes when people are making new friends because it's, do you feel like talking about? Insert whatever you said here. Oh yes, I love talking about whatever you just said. And that's repetitive. But I still think there's still lots of variety. And I just love the humor. Like this dry, quirky, weird humor is still so up my alley. Like there's one scene that I lead off my video review with where Jada Griffin has an enormous crush on Reggie Fils-Aimé. She just head over heels for him and he couldn't care less about her. And there's this cut scene that started where Reggie is like walking, he's on the beach and he's walking towards this puddle and he's going to step in this puddle and Jada freaks out. She's like, no, and she lays down this towel in the puddle and Reggie stops and he's like, oh, that's all right. And then he just walks around the puddle and Jada's just laying, here it is right now. She's just devastated and Reggie's dressed up like a baseball catcher and it's just, it's great. Like it's still got that heart and that charm that I just adore so much from the original. I love the Me News broadcast so much. I still, yeah, I think it has that same heart and charm from the first one that makes it, I identify with this more than something like the Animal Crossing or Pokopia in some ways. Just cause it's so personal and so funny and the characters aren't these kind of blank slates they are in those games. Like they have their own lives, they do their own things. And we're just watching my video review laughing as we're sitting here cause there's some random crap is happening.

Speaker 5:
[06:34] You can be talking like serious about something and I'm just laughing cause like I see Brian Altano in a cow suit eating a cookie or something.

Speaker 3:
[06:42] Yeah, pretty much, right?

Speaker 6:
[06:43] That's the thing, right? Like you can just really make this so much your own. And that's the same with the first one, right? You can just, I right now I'm making all of the gears of WarCast and so like Marcus Phoenix and Dom got in like a huge fight at first. I was like, what do you mean? I was like, well, actually that's kind of spot on. But then like Dom fell in love with me at first sight and I was like, wow, thanks. It's kind of funny just seeing like who connects with who I think right now. I'm about to have, so I got like, it's like a weird place for fan fiction, right? Like I got to get the nanas from the anime and manga Nana together and they're married. And I'm like, this is the ideal situation. I mean, try sorry to spoil things, but this is how I would like, it's not even technically over, it's never finished. Ideal situation for me. Or right now I have Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks is in a long-term relationship with Hatsune Miku. Things just happen, you know?

Speaker 4:
[07:41] What a sentence.

Speaker 6:
[07:42] Yeah. And it's just such a fun thing that you can sort of put together. That being said, I feel bad for just harping on stuff. I'm really sad there isn't a compatibility tester.

Speaker 5:
[07:55] Oh, yeah.

Speaker 6:
[07:57] It sort of just feels like you're kind of going and just hoping everything plays out, but if you force them together enough, because you can drag me's together, the more you do that, the more likely they'll just get together or be friends if they're compatible, at least friends, and then it may take a longer time, but romance is almost guaranteed if you keep forcing them together in like ideal situations. So in a way, I wonder if that's because they wanted that to be a bit more flexible for people to get like the outcomes they wanted in like this sort of fan fiction world of Tomodachi Life. But at the same time, I kind of like reduces some of the chaos in a way, because it's like...

Speaker 3:
[08:39] I agree.

Speaker 6:
[08:40] There's like less firm ground.

Speaker 3:
[08:43] It's like how I just feel all these games, like New Horizons, I felt the same way about like, they just totally wanted to be up to you and what you want. And so you can really, really manipulate it more. But not always. Still a lot of the time. But like something that just was hilarious, that caught me off guard was, usually I found that if a me asked me for their, my take on something, they would do whatever I said. And so Zelda and Jeff Probst, host of Survivor, were kind of had this on again, off again thing for the whole time I've been playing this game. And Zelda came to me and she's like, hey, I think I'm done with this guy. Like, what do you think? And I'm like, no, I want this to happen. I think you should give it another chance. And she said, okay, okay, that's an interesting thought, but here's my counterpoint, no. And then it pops up on the screen and it says, ex-friends, they're done. And so she went against what I said, which I thought was really, really fun. That has only happened a couple of times, but they do still live lives of their own. Or you will log off for the night and come back the next day and they'll be, these will be fighting. That you didn't see the fight happen. Yeah, who, did anyone fight? You said the Gears of War characters. Did you have any other big blowups on your island?

Speaker 6:
[09:48] Oh, yeah. I remember just, there were a few, like there were some Genshin characters who were really mad at, I think some, I forget which other character was, I have screenshots of everything. But they were just so angry. No, it was Nana and Shen He from Genshin. So they were really mad at each other. And it's like, should they make up? But Nana is like the popular, everyone loves her. Like everyone's just because she's like this cool, like rocker girl and she's just very appealing to people, I guess. I was like, how is this happening? That's also totally accurate. Everyone should be in love with her. But when they fought, they couldn't make up. And so they just were not friends. But then eventually they came back around to being like, actually, I really miss Nana. And it's like, yeah, go talk to her. And then they are like friends again. So you can see things kind of recover from that too, which I liked. I liked that a lot. But sorry to bring up another frustration. It's so funny because of how different, again, like we play the same amount of time, how different our times were. I had the hardest time getting anyone married. Like just nobody wanted, everyone wanted to get married, but nobody would pop the question. I'm like, hello?

Speaker 5:
[11:04] What is happening?

Speaker 6:
[11:05] I tried every trick in the book until like, it just finally happened. And then I had like three marriages in a row and I'm like, what is going on?

Speaker 3:
[11:12] Yeah. Yeah. It took me a while too. I wanted to propose to my real life fiance for several days before I finally did it. And yeah, that was my first marriage. And then a couple of Survivor contestants got married. I'm putting in the entire cast from Survivor 50, which is going on right now, which has been a lot of fun. A lot of people noticed that in my review. But my, I already mentioned Reggie with Jada. Reggie has just been the biggest piece of drama on my entire island because I logged on one day and Samus and Reggie had just gotten into this enormous fight. And something I really liked that's a nice touch is when these fight, these kind of angry, aggressive drum beats invade the otherwise really chill music. It's like when you zoom in on the me, you hear like they're stomping around and that is lining up with the music. And it's a, it's really nice touch. And they fought over who knew more about Survivor. That's the most popular show on my island. And there's this clip of Reggie going, I won't forgive you. And then there, and Samus is depressed. So I go to her house and I give her a chicken suit and I remodel her house to look like a hamster cage. And she's like, I feel so much better. Thank you for doing that. And then seconds later, she's like, what do you eat when you're feeling sick? I'm like, I don't know, like saltine crackers. And now everyone's just talking about saltine crackers on my island. And so then I go to Reggie, who just broke up with his best friend and Reggie doesn't care. He doesn't give a rat that they just had fought. He's like, I want to talk to Shigeru Miyamoto. What should we talk about? I'm like, oh, you should talk about Wii Sports being a pack-in game on Nintendo Wii. And he goes to Miyamoto, which was a real fight that those two had in real life, of course, if you remember about the Wii. And so Reggie goes to Miyamoto and he's like, have you ever heard of a pack-in game? And Miyamoto's like, no, I haven't. Tell me all about this pack-in game. And he's like, I'd love to. Let's hang out sometimes and discuss the pack-in game. Like, that happened in real life. I'm recreating Nintendo history here. Later, Reggie apologized and Samus and him are friends again. But it's just, yeah, these are just great scenarios that I just love watching play out.

Speaker 6:
[13:02] So speaking about talking about pack-in games, I do love that you can type in anything, but you can type in anything, which is probably-

Speaker 3:
[13:10] There's no filter.

Speaker 6:
[13:10] Yeah, there's no filter. So it's like I can have Marcus say like, shit, yeah, and stuff. Sorry, sorry, sorry, we're going to have to delete that, but you know, like just like really canonical things. So they just go on about like whatever saying, I think we have like a damn fine cup of coffee is very popular on my island as well from Twin Peaks. And like there's just a lot of cool little moments. I guess going back to like how you're saying that when memes get upset, one thing I found that's really sweet is if you have a me who has an established like best friend or something or really high up on their friends list, and you bring them to them when they're sad, they'll make them like instantly happy. And it's just kind of sweet to see those sorts of relationship moments play out. I also like that they allow me to be gross. Like eventually you can unlock certain like identity traits for the means that you can give them as they level up. And one of them is that they fart a lot. And so my partner is really into Always Sunny. So I was like, hey, can you help make some Always Sunny characters? And so we just make them like the most vile means as possible. And it's just so funny. It's like Frank just keeps farting and just like looks around and stuff. It's really funny.

Speaker 4:
[14:23] That's incredible. Very on brand.

Speaker 3:
[14:25] Customization is just amazing. And it leads to this really great loop that I've gotten a lot out of where you level up your means by solving their problems that they bring to you, feeding them dinner, giving them gifts. And that can be clothes, treasures, pets. Like I drew this horrifying Kirby in the palette house where you can draw whatever you want. And I gave it to Tim Robinson and he loved it. Tim Robinson is like my favorite me I've ever made. I love him. And I've introduced him to zero people. He has no friends. So he's just this creep walking around the island who knows nobody. And he's like eavesdropping on conversations and he's very awkward and it's great. But you level these means up and then when you level them up, you can give them quirks, which is what Miranda's talking about. Like you can make, I made Samus like walk like she's in low gravity. So it looks like she's on a planet from Metroid. Or you can give people catch phrases like Reggie says, my body is ready. Brian begs for a Bloodborne remake when he's standing at the scene. He screens out into the abyss wearing his dog suit, asking for a Bloodborne remake.

Speaker 4:
[15:17] I'm getting an animated movie. It's a start.

Speaker 5:
[15:19] Yeah, it's only going to be 30 FPS, unfortunately.

Speaker 3:
[15:24] But it'll never be get a Blu-ray release. It'll be on DVD forever. But I think it's just great that you want to take care of your me's just because it's fun to do and see how they react. But then you're rewarded by leveling them up and then getting to make them more like themselves in real life or different than themselves if you want. And it's just it's just a really great like I want to keep going. It doesn't take that long to level anyone up ever. I just think that they really nailed that that really short, repeatable thing to do.

Speaker 6:
[15:50] Yep. I also quite like the palette house and they have predicted people like me who don't want to make things. I kind of said that before. It's like, I don't really want to make custom pets or books or food. And they're like, you should go do this. And I'm like, I don't really want to. But they have a really simple system where they have like base items you can draw on. So like they'll have just like a blank plate and they have a bunch of stamps. So if you just want to quickly recolor something at, like I made milk steak from Always Sunny. And so I had just like a steak and I just put like a grayish filter with like little ripples of the milk and sprinkles on top. And like the sprinkles are a stamp. And like, it was just so easy to do that. And I appreciate they kind of thought ahead and be like, all right, listen, not everyone's going to want to do this, but we still want to have this be part of it to like make it just that much more interactive. And it is like fun and quick. And now it's just funny to see people talking about milk steak and dreaming about it. And I'm like, guys, not the milk steak.

Speaker 3:
[16:48] Yeah, I like that, too. You can like, there's just this egg template. So you just saw this Yoshi egg that I made from that and it took, I don't know, less than two minutes because it's super easy or you can draw whatever you want, which is really nice. Seth, I want to hear from you. What do you think of all this?

Speaker 5:
[17:01] The thing that I love, I played the original a lot, obviously, because I did the guide for it, which I've mentioned a thousand times. But one of the things that I find the most interesting and endearing about Tomodachi Life is that everything that you're saying right now, we're laughing, it's so fun, everything you and Miranda are discussing. If you came to me and said, oh man, I had the weirdest dream last night, Miyamoto and Reggie, I would zone right out. I would be like, I don't want to listen to you. But when you say it in this context of this game, it's so fun and hilarious. I am so excited to play this game. I'm bummed out there's no compatibility tester, because that was one of my favorite things about the original was-

Speaker 6:
[17:41] That and the concert hall are not in it, which sucks, yeah.

Speaker 5:
[17:42] Well, yeah, the concert hall.

Speaker 6:
[17:44] Which sucks, yeah.

Speaker 5:
[17:45] On the original, when it would show their compatibility, it would be like the me's head on a stock footage from an HR training video of a person in a white shirt, and I just love that absurdity. I love the absurdity of this all. I'm really very excited. How does it rate on the absurdity level versus the- I'm sure it's probably one to one.

Speaker 6:
[18:10] I would say it's a little more on you to create those moments just because it does lean so heavily into- You should drag people together. Like Logan was saying, you can have someone who's never met anybody. So it is really on you to have those friendships and get people to say weird things. But at the same time, there are dreams and other little things. You'll just see me's fall over, and they'll be like, help me. And then you can either help them by poking them, or they're like, I'm frozen, I can't do anything. Or you can just noodle them around. It's just really funny. So even with that, there's still a lot of light interactions. I guess that kind of brought me to another idea. It's a little bit off of what you're saying, but as far as absurdity, sometimes they'll ask for items to be placed in a very specific spot. They're like, I want this bench right here on the beach looking out at the ocean. But it's face backwards. And I'm like, guys, come on, what are you doing?

Speaker 3:
[19:08] Why do you want that? Yeah, what are you doing?

Speaker 6:
[19:10] And they say, I really want this, can you help me out? And I can just say no, but it's like funny how those little things happen. And there's all of that without you having to do too much input. But of course, they'll ask you for your thoughts, as Logan was saying, on like, what is your deepest secret or what was something your number one enemy would say to you? And so they'll still prompt you to kind of make these goofy scenes happen too.

Speaker 3:
[19:35] Yeah, no, it's a lot more almost casual observation than like crazy bonkers sketches in this one, and that's because they are roaming around this island where your island on 3DS was a menu to take you to the apartments, to the homes, to the concert hall, wherever. But now it is this living space and it is just entertaining to see where do they like to hang out and what are they doing? And they're sitting around this pet shark and they're talking about how they're secretly really scared of this pet and wish I hadn't given it to them. And like just little tiny things that are cute to watch play out. And it's more almost like parody of real life rather than, wow, look at this crazy concert these me's are putting on. And I find that very charming and I really like that, especially since you can make your island look like whatever you want. Like half of my houses are on this baseball field I built. And people are going to do crazy stuff with this island builder that I will never even be able to touch. But I think that it's going to be really fun to see what people do.

Speaker 5:
[20:27] I can't wait to see what they do when they share them, right?

Speaker 3:
[20:31] Oh, we're going to talk about that. We are going to talk about that plenty.

Speaker 6:
[20:35] One really quick absurd thing, sorry, I know we're like all over the map. That's Tomodachi Life.

Speaker 3:
[20:39] It's just everywhere.

Speaker 6:
[20:40] It's just a mess. It's like the puzzle pieces are hidden around the apartment and you have to find them in order to solve the puzzle. But there are also three different puzzles and you didn't know it. That's Tomodachi Life. It's just like, wait, what's happening? One thing that's really fun is if you have a lot of me's and there's just like a bunch of different relationships and friendships, sometimes you'll see them all meeting. I saw like eight me's together just in a group and one person was giving like a monologue talking about like the value of like a seashell or something. And it was like this grayed out area and they're all really intensely watching. And it's just funny to see that. And that's of course quite different from the original where you could only have like one-to-one interactions really. And this one, it can bring so many together. And when you hover over them, you see all these like crisscross arrows of the relationships and who likes who, who isn't friends, who doesn't know each other. And I think that is also just such a fun thing to, as Logan was saying, just to watch and see what happens.

Speaker 4:
[21:37] It sounds like a mutiny or a rebellion that you watched. Like these people, they're organizing. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[21:43] They gossip about you a lot, Brian. They're like, they're talking about what they all call me, Skipper. Like they're talking about like if Skipper is really a person or not. And they're talking about Skipper's true person. Wait a minute. What he does when he's not looking at us. That's what I told you. Yeah, but Brian, I know you're a huge fan of the original.

Speaker 4:
[21:59] Yeah. So I mentioned it a bunch on the show, but I pulled my 3DS out of a desk drawer like a year ago. And my daughter and I just completely reconnected with it. And she's seven. And this became, Tomodachi Life became far on her way. Her favorite video game in the last year. And that's like, we got to switch to, we get, you know, I try to get all the new games for her to play. I've got every console and she's like, nope, I want to play Tomodachi Life on 3DS. Cause she's running in the other room and she's like laughing about all the relationship things. But yeah, one of the big things that she really loved about that game was the ability to... She took the 3DS camera and took pictures of the K-Pop Demon Hunter poster in her room and put Rumi, Zoe and Mira into the game as Miis. And we pulled up these ancient websites with old QR codes and it's like, okay, we've got Zelda in there now. We've got Peach. She's like, I want more. There's too many boys on the island. We need more girls on the island. So she was like, let's get Rosalina. And we went through every old video game character we could. And they're all really weird and charming, right? Because it's like the Miis were originally designed to create people. And over the years, people were like, what if I made Pac-Man? And it's like psychotic, right? And I'm going to make a cartoon Peter Griffin or Scooby-Doo. And you know, I love all that stuff. And you throw all those ingredients in a pod together in that game. And they mix up really well and really interesting and sometimes really bizarre in very funny combinations. And this feels sort of like a slightly more polished version of that, or a lot more polished version of that. And I think with that becomes a lot more options. And also it loses a bit of that charm that you get just sort of inherently with playing. In the same way we talked about like Animal Crossing 3DS versus the Switch one, right? Where I think there's just like a kind of there's a weird sort of jagged weirdness that comes with the 3DS version that sort of gets lost in like the HD super cleaned up version of it, right? In the same way when you watch like a 4K remaster of Star Wars and you can see that that's a painting behind them and not an actual lived in place space and so there's beauty and limitations yeah exactly exactly and so I think like the like on the 3DS version right with that we just saw a shot of it earlier like there's a news there's like something a news report where they're looking at this like really blurry picture of San Francisco that somebody clearly took with like an iPhone 5 or something right and it's like they're just not going to throw that in the new game in the same way but I appreciate that the new game still has a lot of weird stuff I am apprehensive about like the lack of sharing and I do and I know we're going to talk about that but I find it first of all I find it stunning that Nintendo was like no filters, no words. Look at that young Bill Trinen. No, no, you can say anything you want in this game. That feels so removed from their entire sort of design philosophy for forever, right?

Speaker 3:
[24:48] It's shocked.

Speaker 4:
[24:48] Yeah, and at the same time, they saw such success during the pandemic with the connectivity and Animal Crossing and people finding these ways to join each other's islands and share creations and stuff like that. And so I find it kind of odd that that's difficult now. Like Logan, I have a bunch of me's on my 3DS that I really want to bring to this game. And the idea of having to go through this very cumbersome path to do that is, I think, just enough friction that the average player who's kind of like a hardcore old school Nintendo fan like me and all of us here that have those old games and those old me's, I don't know if they're going to go through that, right? And so that's that's that's the sort of like push and pull that I'm expecting when I finally sit down to play it. I'm super excited for it. And I know my daughter and I are going to play it a ton. I'm a little worried about that that element of it.

Speaker 3:
[25:38] Yeah. And you're hitting on I mean, I really love this game. You are starting to hit on the biggest reason that it got a seven instead of an eight or a nine. And that is these these communication limitations, because to me, it is just it's mind boggling to me that you cannot share me as you cannot share creations and you cannot easily pull screenshots from your device. And there's so many reasons that you could say it's legal reasons. It's copyright reasons. They want to protect younger players. And these could all be legitimate. And obviously, protecting kids is super important. And it should be. But I think that there's a lot of things they could have done to keep this game a safe experience for younger players. I mean, there's parental controls, there's opt ins. There's so many things they could have done that they didn't. And instead, it just feels like, oh, well, it's uncensored. You can do whatever you want. And that one kid in the back corner of the class did something bad, and now the whole class misses recess. And it just feels terrible to me.

Speaker 6:
[26:31] Yeah. I'd way rather have, like, censored words and phrases and things and imagery for this, rather than not being able to share things at all. Because ultimately, I really want to cool Zelda. I want to cool Link. But do I want to make them again? I'd rather just download them. Or I want to share, like, my Dale Cooper. I want to share some cool of my Genshin characters together. Like, there's a lot, but I wish I could also put out there that I think are, like, charming or interesting. And I know, again, as Logan was saying, that people are out there going to make, like, some really cool stuff. And I will never be able to recreate that. Because I have to go in pixel by pixel. I need to go find a stylist to use for my DS and hope that my limited art skills could recreate what they make in Pallet House, which is, it's just not going to happen. So it's just, that is such a bummer. Because just knowing how many cool things are out there for Animal Crossing and how much I used all those codes to download to make cool paths and other things, like having that gone makes me want to interact with some of those systems a lot less.

Speaker 4:
[27:41] Yeah, and I think that's completely spot on. And I think what's interesting now is that, with the 3DS and pretty much every hand held system Nintendo ever made, your only option to share those things was there was a screenshot button that you had to put on an SD card and stuff like that. Or you could take your phone and film it, but capture cards are ubiquitous now, Twitch streaming is ubiquitous now, Discord. There's all these ways you can hook your Switch up to pretty much any technology you have and record all this stuff anyway. So it's sort of like the worst of both worlds, we lose the ability to share, but their genie is still going to get out of the bottle, right? And so people are going to- It already happens. It already is. The game's out.

Speaker 6:
[28:23] And that's the whole thing. As Logan, you put it perfectly, this is such a shareable game. Why wouldn't I want to share this really funny thing? Well, I don't want. Of course, I want to tell people Dale Cooper is getting married to Hatsune Miku. That's so weird and funny and the reactions they have and the phrases we've made. And it's not like you can't get the screenshots off your Switch. It's still possible. It's just they removed the easiest option to make it just a little bit harder. So it's just such a strange way for them to go about this whole thing.

Speaker 5:
[28:55] It's such a bummer too because that's free marketing for this game. Is everybody sharing and becoming a viral thing for three months if everyone just share the most ridiculous stuff. Now, we can't. I don't know. I have to wonder if maybe they will allow it in the future with an update. But even then, I think it'll probably be too little too late.

Speaker 4:
[29:17] Yeah. I was thinking about that too because we've been playing a lot of Super Mario Wonder at home which has fixed all of my problems with the base game three years ago. I was talking about this with a pair the other day about how all of our biggest complaints about that game are now fixed. It's a completely different game. I love it so much. I love that I can say Super Mario Wonder and it just appears on screen. Amazing. Thanks, Tao. You're a wizard. But that took three years. I feel like the life cycle on a game like Tomodachi Life, they'll add content, they'll add stuff to it. But I want that stuff right now. Obviously, there's a technical limitation. The Switch 2 doesn't have a camera on it. You can plug a camera into it and you could theoretically scan it.

Speaker 3:
[30:03] It's all bought and has been used for nothing. It would have been perfect for it. I know.

Speaker 4:
[30:08] It's so like, I don't know. There's got to be a way to share me. People are making really cool stuff. Logan, I'm looking at your game and I'm like, I want some of these people in my world. There's no real way to do that. You asked me to get my... I made my character in the demo version and then I took pictures of it and then sent it to you and you were able to put it in your game. And that works if you have some of these number or maybe you find something on a Reddit. That's sort of a make good. It's a half measure, but again, on the 3DS version which is over a decade old, you hold up the thing, you scan a QR code on a website that's still around and all of a sudden Pac-Man and Scooby-Doo and everybody else is in your game. And yeah, they need something like that here because otherwise it's such a bummer.

Speaker 3:
[31:01] We are going to keep talking about this, but sadly, we have to say goodbye to Miranda. For now, she's got an appointment to run off to. So Miranda, thanks so much for coming on.

Speaker 6:
[31:08] Thank you. If you guys need help getting started in this game or learning about progression, I have unlocked basically everything I think you can. It goes really, really fast. But if you need a little extra help, I'll have a beginner's guide and tips later today on IGN for a guide. But otherwise, it was a pleasure to talk. And I'm sorry for being so negative. I think I just have very high expectations and some of it was a bit of a bummer. But overall, I'm enjoying it. And I'm really excited to share these very weird screenshots that I have.

Speaker 3:
[31:35] Thanks so much, Miranda. Come back anytime. NVC will be right back.

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Speaker 3:
[34:44] We're back on Nintendo Voice Chat, Logan Plant with Brian Altano and Seth Macy. And we're talking about Tomodachi Life and just the friction of this communication and the lack of sharing. And it just is so frustrating because this is otherwise, I think, a very frictionless game. Like something that I really love about it is like if you're building something and you run out of street lamps, you can jump straight to the shop and buy a street lamp from that menu without having to back out of the builder. Like it's just seamless. And if it had sharing, this entire game would be seamless. And just to really set up for people who maybe weren't around in the first one came out on 3DS 12 years ago. Brian already talked about it a little bit, but there are these QR codes that you could export a me to share online and using the 3DS camera, anybody could scan that QR code and instantly get that me to their game. It was incredible. I have so many people in my island, like official Nintendo made me's that I dragged over from my 3DS island using an amiibo. It's this convoluted transfer system where you copy the me to the amiibo, scan the amiibo into your Switch, and then copy the me into your Tomodachi Life. It's a pain. You have to do it one by one. But it's really the only way to pull in me's from elsewhere besides local communication. If we're in the same room and I can send you my me. And I just think it is such a failure because for so many people, I don't think this game is about making me's. It is about the funny interactions of celebrities and fictional characters. And it used to be so easy to pull them. And for reasons that I think are very weak and not very well explained by Nintendo, it's just entirely gone.

Speaker 4:
[36:13] Yeah, I think that's well said. I think that you nailed it, that most people probably don't want to spend time making me's. I think people make themselves, maybe they make a family member or a friend, and then after a little while, they tap out. This is not, first of all, I'll say it's awesome to see me's back in 2026. That makes me really happy as somebody who's always loved them and also reading your review. When I was playing the demo, I didn't put together that they never had ears, and then you pointed that out, and I'm like, yeah, that's right. They have ears now. That's so cool. So I do think the way you're describing it, it makes it seem like you could theoretically take me and turn it into a QR code, like if Nintendo was to do an update, and then you scan that QR code with your phone, it goes into the Nintendo app, it's stored, and then you send it to your island. Like that seems like the easy path of least resistance sort of make good on this. Like in lieu of being able to literally do it in game with the camera and having them just like pop up on your island, that feels like a good way to do it. And I just don't understand why they're not interested in that this time around. It seems odd to me to bring back me's, add all these new customization options, make them 4K and give them all these cool new costumes and all that and then just sort of landlock them to this very specific corner in a situation that's otherwise meant to be shared and celebrated. This is like basically roughly the six year anniversary of all sitting around during the pandemic and sharing everything on Animal Crossing. And that, like you said earlier, Seth, before the break, that sells the game to people. That is free marketing, right? Like that is a valuable selling point to see people having a good time from the outside looking in. And I truly believe that that is one of the reasons why the Switch was so successful the first time around. Because anecdotally, I knew a ton of people that saw that stuff said, what's this game? What's this system? And they went out and they bought a Switch and they bought a Switch Lite and maybe they only bought two games for it. But still, like that, you know, that that made that a massive success for them. And I don't see that happening on the same level here because of that. I think building concrete walls around everybody's worlds is not necessarily helpful in the broader experience.

Speaker 3:
[38:43] Yeah, it's just extremely disappointing, especially like you mentioned, it's the comeback of Me's and sharing has always been integral to what these are. Even back on Wee, you had the Me Parade channel where you could upload your Me. And that is how we all got Barack Obama on our Wees back in the day, was by doing that. And then the QR code system on 3DS, Me Topia, which is a Switch game, it was 3DS first, it came to Switch. It had the most robust Me Maker we'd seen so far and it had this online marketplace where anyone could upload their Me and anybody could download them. And so this is really the first time in these characters' history that they have just gated that. And with how customizable this game is and how much funnier it is, the more people you have on it that you like, it just feels like they handed you to the keys to this just incredible paradise and then locked you inside. And it's just so frustrating how isolating it is and how backwards that is from what this should be. And I've seen a lot of comments this week that are like, have you seen what people are posting from the demo? Of course they had to block sharing. Do you see how backwards that is? People are still posting this stuff, even with all these restrictions in place. So all they have done is make it more difficult for just normal players to share stuff and impossible in some cases. And by this overreaction, which they've been unable to control the damage they wanted to, they've made their game worse. So it's just worked for nobody. And yeah, they got to fix it.

Speaker 4:
[40:07] No, that's exactly it. If all of that stuff is still getting out anyway, then everyone loses, right? And I've seen like the pro censorship crowd being like, well, it's a win that you can say anything you want in this game. And OK, it's like being able to say anything you want in your house. Like, no one's stopping you. But because you want to say the F word in Tomodachi Life, I can't download Zelda for my game. Like, I understand the need for the artistic purity and for the average conversation around localization. And like, we lost this and we lost that. And like, this is the creators in Original Vision. It censored it. All of those are very nuanced conversations. This is not one of those to me. Like, this is one of those, like, we are basically taking away all the freedom of sharing and trading it for the ability to do whatever you want by yourself. And that's no one ever censored you by yourself.

Speaker 3:
[41:07] Right?

Speaker 4:
[41:09] That's on you to do yourself if you want to do that. But I just I feel like it's a miss. And I hope they patch it. I hope they update it. And like you said, like if all that stuff is getting out already and people are already making stuff like the game is out, it's it came out, you know, it's been out for several hours as of the time of this recording. We're just going to see that stuff anyway. And like if they're worried about that mainstream news, you know, the same people who are like, you can you can kill a sex worker and GTA, you know, those people that check in on video games like once every 15 years. And they're like, you know, it's not it's not Pac-Man and Tetris anymore, games have guns now. Like those those guys are going to write those news reports no matter what. And stuff is going to get out no matter what. And so in lieu of that, just let us share with each other, you know, like let us let us let us take our creations. Like I'm seeing stuff that you made, Logan, I'm seeing like textures and stuff like that and like items and stuff. I'm like, those are really cool. Like you should be able to just put those up somewhere and let people grab them. That's like, I played a lot of Forza, right? Forza Horizon. And a big part of that game is that you can download the mystery machine from Scooby-Doo or you can get a car that's wrapped in like hentai stickers. And that's on me to decide what I want to download and what I don't. And I look at a lot of that stuff and I'm like, yeesh, I don't want that on my car.

Speaker 3:
[42:29] And I think it's on you to help figure out what your kid can and can't download. I completely agree with that.

Speaker 4:
[42:34] I completely agree. And that's a big part of it too. You don't have to be a helicopter parent, but I don't know, keep an eye on what your child is consuming. That's one of the core tenets of parenting, I think. And I don't know, I think because people aren't doing that, then again, the rest of us suffer. So I don't know. I'm gonna scold you for that, parents. You're not even paying attention to this, so it doesn't matter.

Speaker 5:
[42:57] No, they're not. Their kid's on fire right now.

Speaker 4:
[43:00] Your kid's watching this video, he's got a cigarette in his mouth.

Speaker 5:
[43:04] Preach, brother. Yeah, I think by locking it up and making it seem like they are trying to prevent this bad stuff from getting out, of course, the worst people are going to make an extra effort to put the worst stuff out. It's like when you're in like second grade, there's that one kid in your class, and whenever the teacher was like, don't do this, they would immediately do that, because that's just what these awful contrarian people are. Whereas if it were very, if we could just share, it'd be like, hey, look, I'd be sharing, Brian would be sharing, Logan, you'd be all, everyone would be sharing their fun, wonderful stuff, and it would drown out all the idiots who are doing horrible things, and instead now it's just all the horrible things being shown to everybody.

Speaker 4:
[43:48] Have you ever played Mad Libs by yourself?

Speaker 3:
[43:51] No, exactly. Yeah, I know, that's perfect. That's what this is.

Speaker 4:
[43:54] That's what this is. You ask everybody in the room, and they give you a different verb or adverb, and invariably every type of liquid is always PP or whatever. You say all these dumb things, you put them in and you read it back, and everyone in the room is cracking up, because everybody contributed to something that collectively made something funnier or weirder. But if you're just doing it by yourself, there's no surprise element there. There's no reveal. There's just, I got to say PP alone in my house.

Speaker 5:
[44:20] I'm going to Photoshop the case. Have you ever played Mad Libs by yourself? I just played Altano. It's the box quote.

Speaker 3:
[44:29] No, and it's exactly that. And I feel for the people out there who aren't as artistically creative in that way and just want to play this game for the comedy and interactions. Because I've seen so many people say, well, the game is making me's. And I just so disagree with that. I so think it's about some of Nintendo's funniest writing ever is in this game. But you got to put in a little bit of work to get there. And in the 3DS one, you didn't. You didn't have to put in work. You could play how you wanted to. Here's QR codes that when I was listening to NVC 12 years ago, I put in Brian and Jose and Pear into my island because you could do that. And now I'm going to share my me with you guys. I think we have a screenshot of this. There's me making a pair right now. But I have a screenshot. Brian alluded to this earlier. This is all of us, which is fantastic. This is Seth and Brian.

Speaker 5:
[45:14] Look at that shirt. That is crazy.

Speaker 4:
[45:16] Seth, you look like Bill Burr.

Speaker 3:
[45:17] And Brian has that dog suit.

Speaker 5:
[45:20] I couldn't not make myself look... I wanted to...

Speaker 4:
[45:22] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[45:23] It's Bill Burr. It's hilarious. I think the me's are so great. These are so good. I love that pair of 8-bit glasses. And then, Taiyo, the other screenshot that I have here. This is how you have to share me's in this game. You have to take a screenshot of this screen that shows all the elements that you used of your me. And then, in the case of you guys, you took a crappy picture of it on your phone and texted it to me. That's the only way to do it. And that's, please, add me to your island. I would love to. I wish I could give you a QR code to make it easier because instead you have to rebuild me from scratch.

Speaker 4:
[45:55] So, just here, yeah, you take every single one of these elements and you put them all in manually, right? But that does-

Speaker 3:
[46:01] Yes, manually.

Speaker 4:
[46:01] And then there's a second screen that has like your height and personality or voice?

Speaker 3:
[46:05] Yes.

Speaker 4:
[46:06] Okay.

Speaker 3:
[46:06] It's like me telephone. And it's not gonna look exactly the same by the time it gets to the end of the line. It's gonna look a little different. And yeah, it's, remember, I don't know if anyone out here remembers Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS? Yeah. They don't let you upload levels online. Yeah. It was terrible.

Speaker 4:
[46:21] That's exactly what this feels like.

Speaker 3:
[46:24] It's a return to that. And I just look at, this is nothing new for Nintendo. There is Mario Maker, there's Miitopia, there's the Splatoon art where you can draw and say whatever you want and it's posted in the plaza for everybody. Pokopia came out one month ago and this is just, they have turned the clock back over 20 years with this sharing. And yeah, I agree with you on the censorship too, Brian. It's like, I would trade, I would take a filter if it meant that I could share anything seven days of the week. Because saying the F word is funny once or twice when a me does it, but being able to grab creations from around the globe for this game's entire lifespan is way more fulfilling than that.

Speaker 4:
[47:00] Yeah, yeah. I mean, I love the idea of them kind of pulling the walls down a little bit and like opening up a share store in the game or whatever, right? And I can go and I can see all these creations that you've uploaded. And obviously, there's going to need to be a moderator there, right? Like there's going to be needs to be some sort of content.

Speaker 3:
[47:17] Like Kurt Baer writers took down the Kawasaki Bikini stars that people were making last year.

Speaker 4:
[47:22] Yeah. I mean, that happened really quickly. And it's like, you're going to need a human element. And that's for any sort of sharing of anything we do for the rest of our lives, right? Any system where a bunch of people get together, people are invariably going to draw, they're going to make World 1, World 1-1 for Mario, or they're going to make a thing I won't say on this show. And that's the first thing. You give a kid a marker, and that's what he's going to draw on a billboard or something, right? Like, it's just that happens all the time. And so you need that human element that will look over that and make sure, because ultimately this is aimed at all audiences, right? This is not an M rated game. That's the other thing that you obviously have to take into account for. And so, yeah, I hope they see this and I hope they figure out a way to kind of loosen the grip a little bit. I can't believe those old QR codes are still there. That's amazing.

Speaker 3:
[48:14] Yeah, it's on a wiki page. Yeah. Yeah. So otherwise, I love this game. I adore this game so much. And if you don't care about sharing, if you love making me's, if it's one of your favorite parts to spend hours in this creator, wholeheartedly recommend this 100 percent. I think this game is fantastic. But if you're somebody who is going to get sick of it after making five me's, I kind of am, and it becomes... I procrastinate on expanding my island population because I just don't want to do it. Maybe think twice about this one, which is a shame because I wish I could just give it my full send recommendation because I adore this series. I'm thrilled it came back. But it's a dark cloud over my island, is how I described it in the review. And I can't talk about this game without talking about that restriction.

Speaker 4:
[48:58] Logan, do we have plans to put up a guide on how to get your me's from 3DS? To switch?

Speaker 3:
[49:07] Yes, I think we do.

Speaker 4:
[49:08] Okay. Can you refresh me on that real quick? Just go through the...

Speaker 3:
[49:11] Yeah, you have to open up your 3DS. And if you have an original 3DS, you have to have the hockey puck adapter, the IR sensor, because there isn't one on your old 3DS's. If you have a new 3DS, new 3DS XL, or new 2DS XL, you can just scan it to the bottom screen. So you go in, you go to Amiibo Settings, on the top left from the home menu, I think, and you register an owner to that Amiibo, and you pick a me to represent that owner. It will copy that me to that Amiibo. You then go to your Switch, you go to your Settings, there's a spot for me, you say copy from Amiibo, you scan it in, it's in, then you go to Tomodachi Life, and then you can, when you're creating a me, you can create me based on this system, and it will be there. Each Amiibo can hold one me at a time. That's why they're called Amiibo, not Amimibo. And so it takes for freaking ever to get these people over. Just, I mean, I have my shelf behind me, you've all seen it, if you watch the video version, and I was just up there like going one at a time, copying, move over, copy, and so I had like 15 in a row lined up, ready to go. It's a pain, but it's worth it, because I got Reggie and Miyamoto and a bunch of old, I got, the one I made of myself when I was like 13 is on my island, I named him Young Logan, I gave him the deepest voice you could, he just walks, he's the shortest you can be, he just walks around.

Speaker 4:
[50:29] It's me Logan.

Speaker 3:
[50:29] Yeah. It's great. Ladies. So anything else on Tomodachi Life, or should we move on?

Speaker 4:
[50:35] I'm excited to play. Let's, I'm, despite all of the, you know, couching all of our optimism and criticism today, I'm incredibly excited to play this game.

Speaker 3:
[50:43] Yeah. Now I'm going to keep playing it too, because I put in the legwork, I have this island, I love it. I just wanted to say, Seth, you said one of my favorite lines in the whole game, Jeremy told me out of the blue, it's so awkward when strangers are walking the exact same speed as me, do I speed up or slow down? That was just nothing, completely out of context, he just told me that one day, and I thought that was great.

Speaker 4:
[51:08] We have a running joke about that in my family where it's like, if I'm grocery shopping and someone's doing that next to me, I'm like, oh, are you my store friend? And another time, we were on vacation and somebody was walking just along us, and I was just so tired after a long day. I was like, hey, are you going to join our family and help raise our kids and stuff like that, or can we get a little space? And this guy was just like, geez, man, all right, sorry.

Speaker 3:
[51:37] Brian, you're one of my favorite me's. You are hilarious because you wear that dog suit. I gave you all, like, every black t-shirt I could find because that's all I've ever seen you wear in my life. You hated every single one, and so I gave you a dog suit and you loved it, and you are best friends with Yoshi, and you were the one that started that friendship. You were like, Brian's really interested in Yoshi, and I was like, go for it, and you sprinted over to him and you're like, hey, Yoshi. So just like real life. And then Pair's favorite thing to do is writing guides, which is just so funny every time he says it.

Speaker 4:
[52:06] My beautiful, beautiful.

Speaker 3:
[52:07] Green screen Yoshi.

Speaker 4:
[52:08] Green screen Yoshi.

Speaker 3:
[52:09] That looks so good.

Speaker 4:
[52:11] It's so terrifying. Yeah, there's his tail. Who was that blue guy that you had in there?

Speaker 3:
[52:16] That's just a character I made because I was just seeing what I could make.

Speaker 4:
[52:19] So you just wanted to make up a psychopath, monster man?

Speaker 3:
[52:21] Yeah, pretty much.

Speaker 4:
[52:23] I like him.

Speaker 3:
[52:24] Yeah, he's 150 years old. You're really good friends.

Speaker 4:
[52:29] My best friend's like a punk rock demon that haunts your island. I'm into that.

Speaker 3:
[52:33] Yes, exactly. Well, can't wait to see what you all make in Tomodachi Life, Living the Dream. And we're gonna find a way to share our me's with you. Maybe we'll put up an article or something with these guides to make us in your islands. All right, let's move on. We're gonna talk about what we're playing, but first I gotta tell you that it's time for a brand new month of gaming. Jump into the Humble April Choice Bundle and score an amazing lineup of titles. Right now you can grab Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Daemon X Machina, Titanic Scion, Lord of the Rings Return to Moria. Until then, Planet of Lana, Artisan TD and Buddy Simulator 1984. This all supports Reverb, a nonprofit harnessing the cultural power of music to drive real world change by greening concerts, eliminating single use plastics and bringing large scale clean energy solutions to live music. Head to humblebundle.com through May 5th to start playing today.

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Speaker 3:
[54:04] Let's talk about what we're playing on Switch. Seth, tell me about Graveyard Keeper.

Speaker 5:
[54:08] Graveyard Keeper is a video game created by Lazy Bear Games and published by TinyBuild. It is something that I had bought on Steam when it first came out and put about an hour into it and just didn't feel it. And then I started playing it again and it's all I want to do now with my life. It is consuming me. I can't stop playing it. Sometimes I'm not even actually having fun, but I know that if I just do this one task, it'll open up the next part of my tech tree that'll make me have fun. Or, oh yeah, you know what, I'm going to fix this graveyard right here so that the deacon of the religion in this game smiles on me and gives me, you know, like whatever, the ability to cook new types of cakes and pies. Yeah, this is a, I guess you'd call it a cozy game, but it's a little bit irreverent on that because you're, you wake up in, I guess, the afterlife and you're in charge of a grave. You're like, you have to take care of a graveyard and it's wonderful. And I love it. And everyone should go out and get it. It's like $20 on Switch. It was free on Steam, PlayStation and Xbox to celebrate their announcement of Graveyard Keeper 2. And then I saw, I can't remember who it was, like somebody from TinyBuild on online was saying like they made so much money giving this game away for free because everyone then just went and bought the DLC. And so I'm hoping that they make it free on Switch as well for a weekend, because I think it's not just free to play, it's free to own. So like, yeah, if you haven't checked this one out, it is really fun and kind of weird. And there's a lot you can do. I still have a lot to do. Like I just unlocked the blue tech tree. So there you go. Blue tech tree. I don't know if either one of you have played this game, but it is awesome.

Speaker 3:
[56:10] No, I don't know what that means at all.

Speaker 4:
[56:13] I know of this game, but I didn't play it. It's basically like kind of like morbid Stardew Valley, right?

Speaker 5:
[56:20] Yeah, it's Stardew Valley with like corpses that you have to do autopsies on. And you get better at the autopsies and then you can keep other parts of their body to like their brains. And then you can start doing alchemy and make, you know, magical stuff.

Speaker 4:
[56:37] But why is he fishing?

Speaker 5:
[56:40] Well, because it's a cozy sim game.

Speaker 4:
[56:42] He's fishing for corpses.

Speaker 5:
[56:44] That's true. They're dead fish. People that you meet sometimes would be like, boy, I sure would like to give you the pass to this next area, but I sure have a hankering for four fish filets. And so then you have to go, you know, it's that kind of game.

Speaker 3:
[57:00] So, yeah. Cool. Wasn't there a sequel just announced or something?

Speaker 5:
[57:05] The sequel, yeah, that's why they gave it, they were giving it away for free because they did just announce the sequel to Graveyard Keeper. I don't know any other details other than that, but very fun game. And I believe, and there's actually a physical version, if you're one of those people like me who likes to buy physical games. And this seems like one of those ones that in, you know, 10 years on a physical Switch cart, people will be like, no, I will spend $100 on that.

Speaker 3:
[57:33] Yeah, that's neat. That looks fun. I've never heard of this game before. Sounds cool.

Speaker 5:
[57:37] What?

Speaker 3:
[57:38] Yeah, I haven't. I've not heard of it until right now. I did not know there was a Stardew autopsy sim. Yeah. That's really interesting. There's a Stardew for everything. Brian, you are playing Dead Zone Rogue on Switch 2?

Speaker 4:
[57:49] Yeah. So I forget how I heard about this game, but Dead Zone Rogue is a kind of game that if you had just told me about it in passing, I would have been like, oh, okay, cool. I'm not really interested. I'm kind of over sort of like generic first-person shooter stuff and rogue lights are sort of a dime a dozen. And so by no means should all of this kind of coalesce into being something I'm totally hooked on, but it did. Somebody said really nice things about this game and I looked on the eShop, it was 20 bucks and I grabbed it. Dead Zone Rogue is a rogue light first-person shooter. I'm going to be as gentle about this as possible and couch all of my optimism and kind words here with the fact that this, I think that this game is dumb as rocks. I think it is hitting the same part of the back of my head as like when my wife watches the real Housewives reruns or something, right? I think this is Housewives for dudes. Like not to say that the Housewives aren't for dudes, but this is Housewives for gamers. This is a like the protagonist of this game talks like, yo, okay, so what the heck happened? It's time to get out there and kick some butt. All the enemies you fight are like robot spiders and like, you know, it's a flying skull. Like it's it's it is it is just like it feels like a long lost era of old nonsense video games, but it's awesome. Mechanically, this game feels so good. You go on these 20 minute runs. There are tons of different levels every single time you go through a room. There's like a wave of enemies that you fight. You kill them all. You get this orb that pops up that gives you a little buff or a bonus or a new weapon. And those buffs and bonuses and weapons start to stack and you start getting incredible things like, you know, a sniper rifle that occasionally shoots double grenades that freeze things. Right. Or you get, you know, like you basically get faster and faster and faster each round. You get, you know, a shotgun that every time you kill someone, it automatically reloads. And so you end up in this cool loop where some of these builds are just straight up broken. And then sometimes you'll kind of you'll die and reroll and play again. And you'll get something that's really difficult and really interesting and really challenging. And I just this has been my like wake up, make coffee, sit down, play this game for 10, 15, 20 minutes and then start my day. And it's been it's been awesome. Like it is, Seth, I really want to recommend this game to you because I feel like you'll really appreciate the level of like kind of stupidity and humor in it.

Speaker 5:
[60:28] I'm so into this.

Speaker 4:
[60:30] It's absolutely rooted in, you know, like silly 80s sci fi action movies. It's got just enough like, you know, horror in it, but without being like really bloody or grotesque or anything like that. It just feels very arcadey. And I think that the rogue light thing is great because every time you finish a run, you get to add new upgrades to your character or, you know, increase little nodes and meters and all sorts of things that make you a little bit stronger, a little bit tougher and a little crazier on your next run. There's all these different weapons. And I think one of my favorite things about this game is that there's a, they just put like a house plant in your spaceship. And after every run, you check in with him and you have a single line of dialogue. And he's just like, good to see you're still here, Planty. You're like, why? Why is this here? I don't know. It's again, it's silly, it's dumb, but mechanically it is rock solid and it feels really good to play. The challenge is awesome. When you lose, you feel like, I know exactly what I did wrong there. It never feels cheap. And so, yeah, 20 bucks. And I've probably put 20 something hours into this game already. Cannot recommend it enough for people who want something, you know, that looks good, runs well and feels great on Switch 2. Oh yeah.

Speaker 3:
[61:44] Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I have a few friends that have played this and they've all said the same stuff. So, high recommendations. I've been playing Tomodachi Life, but I am about to jump back into Ufo 50 on Switch because Fangamer just released the physical edition. Oh yeah. Ufo 50, here it is. I have it here on camera.

Speaker 5:
[62:01] Oh damn.

Speaker 3:
[62:01] And it is fantastic. It comes with the big box and the game, physical on Switch 1, it's not a Switch 2 game. But the coolest part of this, this is incredible. I think you guys are both going to go nuts for this, is the Ufo Companion, which is, it's incredible. It's one of the coolest things that I've ever seen come in a special edition. If you don't know, Ufo 50 is, it is this, it's a compilation of 50 retro games that were all made by a fictional publisher that was a competitor with Nintendo in the 80s and 90s called Ufo Soft. And so there are, you see the first games they ever made that are intentionally super rudimentary and difficult, and then they iterate them on sequels, and there is lore to these games. This one came out in 1987, and the sequel came out in 1990, and it's way better. The third one people didn't like so much, and there's little developers, and it's directed by this fictional person, and then that fictional person left the company, and then the producer took over as director on the next one. And there's all this stuff, and this book, which I'm going to show a few pages of now on the video, just doubles down on all of that. So each game, well, there's comics for some of the games, like fully illustrated comics, which are just amazing. And then each game has like, it's basically an instruction manual for all 50 of them. And they have like what you're supposed to do in the game, and the objective of the game, and like background lore for the game that's not in these 8-bit games that never told their stories when the stories were always in the manuals. And it's just incredible. And it goes through all 50, and then the back even has like a note section, like instruction manuals used to always have. Like it's just an awesome companion. And so many of these games in UFO 50 are really difficult, and obtuse, and it's like you want a guide to play them, and now that guide exists. And it just is, it enhances this experience. Like it feels almost essential to me for how freaking cool it is. And it adds to already one of my favorite indie games of the decade easily.

Speaker 4:
[63:56] Dude, I'm so sold. So I loved UFO 50. You touched on it like, yeah, it is a sort of alternate reality, make believe game jam style assignment where they basically got a bunch of modern indie devs to create NES games that never actually came out. I mean, knew about the companion book coming out. I didn't know they were also selling it standalone. And I just looked and it's 24 bucks on Fandamer. So I'm buying that. You just sold me on that. I love this game so much. And I think what was really cool was going through one by one and it felt like being like, I had a friend from Pakistan growing up. He's one of my closest friends and his parents came back from a trip to Pakistan with one of those bootleg NES carts that had like 80 games in one. And I remember sitting down and it blowing my mind as an American kid living in New Jersey, cause like games were one game per cart. And I was like, wait, you can fit 80 games on a cart? Why isn't Nintendo doing this? And it's like, cool, cause they want to make money, you idiot. And so yeah, I remember there were like so many weird games there and like alternate versions of other things I'd played already and this totally scratched that itch. I love the creativity in this. I love the different genres in Ufo 50. I really, really loved this game. When they put it on Switch, I totally reconnected with it and played a ton. And like seeing a player's guide for it, that also doubles as like an alternate dimension Nintendo Power with comics and everything.

Speaker 3:
[65:21] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[65:21] The best. That makes me so happy. And there's stickers.

Speaker 3:
[65:25] Yes, there's stickers. Sweet. I think I have those. I can show the rest of what came with the full physical edition. There's a bunch of stickers that come with it here. And then there's, this part's cool. It's like a kid's hand-drawn map of one of the games. That's awesome. And they have little notes that they took. And it's just a really cute piece of art. So yeah, super recommended. The UFO companion. I'm not sure if the book comes with the stickers. Maybe you're seeing that, Brian, because I just got the whole thing. I have the whole physical edition here. But really awesome. Can't recommend that enough. If you like UFO 50, this is an awesome companion. Speaking of hand-drawn maps though, let's move to the question block because Dave emailed NVC at ign.com and sent in an awesome picture. Dave says, After clearing out my old bedroom at my parents' house, I found a map and notes I made for the Legend of Zelda, The Wind Waker. This must be over 20 years old and I'll be sure to use it when I replay the game on Switch 2. Feel free to pass it on to the Wiki team. So this is a map of every grid in Wind Waker and there's little notes underneath. I know it's really small here on the screen, but it says like, oh, there's the three pirate ships here that you need to shoot down with your bomb cannon. This is a really awesome note.

Speaker 4:
[66:35] This is so good. So this reminds me, when I played Spirit Tracks the first time, I played that game before it came out. It was like one of the first games I got early when I worked at GameSpy. And I did this exact same thing. I remember making a grid and drawing the islands and writing notes about what was where. This is so cool to see. Look at that.

Speaker 3:
[66:58] Yeah, it's amazing.

Speaker 4:
[67:00] Yeah, no, I talked about this a few weeks ago, like going to the Nintendo Museum in Kyoto and seeing the original hand-drawn maps for Zelda. It reminds me of this and it also makes me happy that, like them, you held on to this. That's so cool. Don't throw your stuff away.

Speaker 3:
[67:14] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[67:14] Well, I mean, throw some of it away.

Speaker 3:
[67:16] But not some of it. Yeah. Dave follows up with a question which Brian kind of just answered. He says, my question to all of you is, what is your favorite game that's made you take notes as you progress? This could be pen and paper on your phone, a spreadsheet, etc. Mine would have to be Return of the Obra Dinn. Brian, is that your answer or do you have a different one?

Speaker 4:
[67:33] That one and then the other one would be Metroid and Kid Icarus for the NES, where I was both writing down notes and had meticulous binders full of passwords. Because every single time you play those games, they didn't have battery saves in them, and so you had to write down this incredibly long cumbersome password. If you missed one digit and you went to input it to pick up the game again, you were screwed. This especially because Kid Icarus was hard, man. This was a really, really difficult game. Side note, I feel bad that Reb texted me the other day, and she was like, hey, so I'm playing Zelda 2. And I'm like, I'm so sorry. I left that as your parting gift.

Speaker 3:
[68:14] She texted me and said she likes Zelda 2.

Speaker 4:
[68:16] Oh, great. OK, I didn't get that side of the story. Thank you, Reb.

Speaker 3:
[68:20] Yeah, she likes it and Metroid Prime so far.

Speaker 4:
[68:23] That's my answer.

Speaker 5:
[68:25] She texted me the opening quote for Metroid Prime, and I was like, yes, welcome.

Speaker 3:
[68:33] Seth, what's your pick that you, a game you took notes for?

Speaker 5:
[68:38] I have two, and it's weird because I didn't, I don't remember doing this as a kid. Like, I don't remember taking notes on games, which is exactly when you 100% needed to. But I just thought, ah, you know what, I'll just figure it out. And I never figured it out, like, yeah. But as an adult, I definitely took notes for Fez, and I think everybody was taking notes for Fez when that came out, like, try to kind of figure out the language that was there and like what things meant. I over thought a lot of things, and I spent a lot of time kind of bumping into walls with Fez, but oh my God, I love this game so much. This might be like one of my all time favorite games. It's so good. Oh, I might have to replay this one again. That's like the most, just I did that for myself, but because I did the Guide for Tomodachi Life for 3DS, which I may have mentioned in the past, I took meticulous notes and again, over thought it, like I was trying to figure out the compatibility system, and I had like drawn tables of like all these things, like, oh, it's their sign versus like what they like. And then I wrote a program in Pearl, which nobody even writes anymore, to like try to pick out any real patterns there to see. It was so much more complicated than the real thing. I don't actually remember what it ended up being. But yeah, I took a lot of notes trying to figure out every little bit of what made, what made Tomodachi Life, like what the systems were underneath that made everybody like each other. So that's the most I ever did. And yes, sure, granted, it was because I was getting paid to do it, freelance, by the way. But yeah, that's the one that I really had the most fun, actually kind of diving into those super deep systems and trying to figure them out. And I did eventually.

Speaker 4:
[70:38] I realized that a modern version of that is taking off-screen photos of your TV with your phone and going back and looking at them later. Like I've done that a lot where there's like a puzzle or there's like a thing. There'll be like a clue on the wall in a game and I don't like screenshot it. I'll just because I'm like, I don't even want to get out of the game and go to hit home and go to the screenshots. I'll just take a picture on my phone and then I'll be looking through my phone through like old memories and they'll just be like a wall in Resident Evil 4. Why is this here? Yeah, I do a lot of that.

Speaker 3:
[71:10] Yeah. I thought you were making a Tomodachi Life joke at first about taking pictures on your phone since that's all you can do.

Speaker 4:
[71:17] That too.

Speaker 3:
[71:18] My answer is probably gotta be when I got into Monster Hunter for the first time. Those games are insanely detailed and in depth and there's so many systems that are meaningless to you until you learn what they are and their onboarding is like terrible and it's kind of part of the fun is to learn and be guided along. And so I remember the summer I got into Monster Hunter, I was taking my grandma to a bunch of appointments that she had like an hour away. And these appointments like lasted two hours. So I would sit in the lobby and watch Monster Hunter YouTube on my phone. And while I was waiting and just take these crazy notes of like, this is what this means, this is what this means. These buttons do this combo that the game doesn't tell you at all. These do this. And then I would get home later that night and call my friends who I play Monster Hunter with and be like, here's everything that I learned today. I still have that notebook. It's like, I think I have like 20 or 30 pages of this stuff. And now I've played Monster Hunter for like, I don't know, well over 1500 hours in my life. And so that was kind of the onboarding to get in. And now it's like a language to me that I just know. But when you don't know it, it's super like overbearing and intimidating. And that was a really fun one. And I remember when I was a kid, we played a lot of Harvest Moon, A Wonderful Life on GameCube. And there were like recipes in this. And a family friend like printed out this recipe book that she like stapled together and it was like on this really nice paper and it had like every food item you could make in the game was in this recipe book. And she put it in a Shrek 2 Happy Meal Toy Diary. And then she plastered over the Shrek 2 Harvest Moon in the same type of paper. And so we still have it, I think, at my parents' house. It's this Harvest Moon recipe book that is, I mean, it has like little Shrek Ogre ears on the side of the key or something. It's still very obviously a Shrek toy, but it has all the Harvest Moon recipes in it.

Speaker 5:
[73:06] That's so cool. When you said combos, you unlocked the memory. When Street Fighter 2 was coming out, I was, for Super Nintendo, I was so hyped. Like I, that's maybe the most hyped I've ever been for a fighting game. And it was, of course, like the first one. I had the copy of EGM, Electronic Gaming Monthly, that had all the combos, but I still wrote them down on a piece of paper in a way that I like found visually pleasing to me. And then I would just sit there with my NES Advantage. This was, I did not have the game by the way. And I would look at the paper and I go, ah, and I would try to figure out the combos. Without having ever played this game, like not even in the arcade, it's a bit of a wake up call when you actually play it. You're like, oh, that's what the down arrow, that arrow and that arrow mean. It means you take a little half moon or a quarter moon. But yeah, that was a completely unnecessary way to spend my time.

Speaker 3:
[74:04] Sometimes that's what you do when you just don't have a game, but you just like, I remember Nintendo Power, you don't have the cover story game and you just read it forever and over and over and over until you get the game or it comes out or whatever.

Speaker 4:
[74:15] I remember, yeah, I remember doing that. And like you would get a game like at night or something, or maybe you'd get a game on the morning on your birthday and you'd take the manual out and you'd just read it on the school bus. I did that all day. No, so my final answer to that, and I've definitely told this story in the show before, but like I got in trouble in third grade because me and a couple friends got together and we made our own video game magazine. We drew our own maps and all that stuff. And we went into the school library and we printed it on, like made a bunch of copies on the school printer and handed them out to people. And I think we tried selling it at first and they shut that down fast. And I forget what it was called. It was like, it's funny because it's got my Patreon subscriber to Nintendo Force, which is like the sort of spiritual successor to Nintendo Power, done by Lucas Thomas, who used to work with me at IGN. And I love it when every time it shows up every single month, like it's always funny. It's got to pull out poster and all that stuff. And yeah, so go check them out. They're doing the legitimate real actual version of what me and my buddies tried doing. But we had a very similar name where it was just like Nintendo Thunder or something, right? Because we were eight. And yeah, they shut that down fast, man. That was not, they were not having it.

Speaker 5:
[75:33] And yet IGN-do Power still lives on somewhere.

Speaker 4:
[75:36] That's when we did too. Yeah, we did a thing called IGN-do Power, which was a bootleg Nintendo Power magazine. And we did the UFO 50 thing where we were like, it's a long lost issue. And we made scans of it. We Photoshopped this entire fake old IGN Nintendo Power magazine. And me and my buddy Scott Bromley spent a very long time on that. And we had all sorts of help around around the office. And yeah, so go Google that. That's that exists somewhere.

Speaker 5:
[76:03] It's still I've I don't know. It's probably been like eight years since I actually looked at it. But it's still it's still somewhere on the site right now. It is still unbelievable how perfectly it captures the tone of those like the weird just art. But then it's like it's like you interview a horse or something like.

Speaker 4:
[76:23] Well, because Nintendo Power always had like an interview with like a celebrity at the back. And it would just be a guy who was like, you know, I never I don't really play video games, but sometimes in, you know, in the trailer on on the set of Cool Runnings or whatever. They're like, you know, me and the cast of California Dreamin just love to blow off steam and play, you know, Domino's 2 for the NES. And you're like, what is this interview? Like, it's so weird. That was like you'd get to the very end of Nintendo Power every month. And you'd be like, all right. So you guys, you know, you ran out of steam a little bit. And then you turn the page and there'd be like a drawing of a Triforce and be like, next month, a new Zelda awaits. And you're like, oh, my God, I'm back. I'm so back.

Speaker 3:
[77:05] Yeah, I miss I miss Nintendo Power.

Speaker 4:
[77:07] I do, too.

Speaker 3:
[77:08] I wouldn't be in this job if not for Nintendo Power. No way.

Speaker 5:
[77:11] It's the same. Yeah, that's that's crazy that across all like the generations, because I'm so super old and you're just a young fella.

Speaker 3:
[77:21] I remember I got when I was devastated when I got the last issue of Nintendo Power and how sad that was when when that era came to an end. Yeah. All right. Let's go to our next question from Dan, who says, I'm an avid gamer and parent of two kids aged 12 and nine, both of whom play video games on Switch, Xbox and iPad. However, my kids seem to have limited interest in what I would consider to be classic franchises like Zelda, Mario, Metroid, Donkey Kong, etc. They instead prefer multiplayer free to play games which leverage in-game currencies like Fortnite and Roblox that they play with their friends. I'm wondering if this is due to some extent to the increased development times compared with when I was a kid. NES was my first system and we had four Super Mario games within six years. Compare that to now where my son had played Mario Odyssey when he was five, he is 12 and has not seen a follow up game in the last seven years. He said virtually none of his friends or anyone he knows plays Mario or Zelda, etc. My question is, will classic Nintendo franchises continue to remain relevant to and grab the next generation of gamers if, as in some cases, there hasn't been a sequel within their lifetime? Wasn't this in the news for like Final Fantasy within the last couple of weeks where someone at Square Enix was saying like it's too long between sequels?

Speaker 5:
[78:35] Yeah, I know that the Final Fantasy VII remake sales weren't initially close to what they were expecting because they started to realize like the young audience just doesn't care. It's kind of only people who remember the original Final Fantasy VII.

Speaker 4:
[78:51] I think that issue was sort of twofold and I think it was, Final Fantasy is predominantly a franchise that is enjoyed by people over 35, 40 at this point. It is just the way it is. On the flip side, they made a remake of like a decades old game and they split it into three parts and they took those three parts and spaced them out by half a decade each. And like that is just, I get it, but that's not the soundest business plan. I think it's a really interesting question, Logan, and I think that the, I don't necessarily believe, I'll put it this way, I don't think it's helping anyone that it takes nine years to get between Zelda, 3D Zelda games or nine years between 3D Mario games. I don't think that's helping anything. I think it's fascinating that Nintendo has a Super Mario movie in theaters right now that is crushing at the box office. People love it. They've gone back and seen it two or three times. It's going to make probably as much, if not more than the first movie. And their newest Switch 2 bundle, Bundles Galaxy 1 and 2, which are Nintendo Wii games from ages ago. And it's cool that they can just reach into the back pocket and be like, we have those and we're going to do something with them. But it's also, I think it's an issue that they don't have a new Mario all the time. That said, I don't think that that's the reason people are gravitating towards Roblox and Fortnite and stuff like that. I think it's the free to play thing that is making those things successful. I think the fact that any single person with no money who is a kid is jumping in on something that is ubiquitous and all of their friends are into it and it's a big toy box of licenses and all this other stuff. So I think that that's like, I was talking about this with a friend the other day. I bought a Biggie Smalls song in Fortnite where he says, Super Nintendo Sega Genesis. When I was dead broke, I couldn't picture this. And it plays that when I'm flying onto the island to shoot people in Fortnite as Kill Bill or whatever I want to play as. And I think that might be the only Nintendo reference in that game. Like, that's weird. That's weird. They sat that out entirely. They're like, buzz light years in that game. So Disney was historically one of the most guarded companies ever, was like, we will throw down. Okay, we'll give you some characters. There was rumors of them buying it a couple of weeks ago. Nintendo hasn't touched Fortnite. They want nothing to do with it. They're nowhere near it. The optics of like a weird adult lanky Mario running around with a machine gun is probably not good. They don't want like Zelda with a flame thrower. There's all this stuff that they're just not interested in doing. Disney is, every other company is, Nintendo doesn't want to be there. And so that's one way to sort of like raise awareness for their characters. I also don't blame them for sitting this out. You know, like they want to keep their experiences premium. They want people coming to their consoles. That seems to be working pretty well. Their games are still selling well. I do think that even if we got a new Mario game every two years, people are going to gravitate towards free to play stuff first because of the economy, because what it's like to be 10 years old. And like, you know, all of your friends are doing this one thing. Like, so, yeah, they are competing with the space that these people are playing in. But I don't think that's the reason that said selfishly. Yeah, man, I want to I want a new 3D Mario game. I don't want to have to wait nine years for them. That's ridiculous. Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[82:21] What? How old did he say his kids are?

Speaker 3:
[82:24] 12, 12 and nine. His son is 12, played Odyssey when he was five.

Speaker 5:
[82:30] Okay, I'm going to say that they are going to outgrow this and then they're going to like good games. The only people who play Fortnite are kids between the ages of nine and 13 and men above the age of like 35. That's it. My kids, they went through an insane Fortnite like mania because when they were this age, because like Brian, like you're saying, like all their friends played it. It's like you go to school and you talk about playing Fortnite. Oh yeah, I got the dub last night. Whatever. I think Fortnite is for babies. I don't like that game. But so I don't know anything about it. But yeah, they'll outgrow it. And then like my kids, I mean, like, look, it's a little different because like just look behind me, but they have like such a healthy respect for old game. Just for old games in general. But also the fact that like my kids primarily play, I say kids, but they are adults. They play primarily on PC. So they play games that are maybe 15 years old at this point. Like Parker's favorite PC game is XCOM. He's a high school senior. His favorite game of all time is Borderlands 2. But like he'll see me playing something old, like something on whatever, on NSO, and he'll be like, oh, he'll just like recognize it. He'll know what that game is because he's interested in video games. He got over his sort of singular Fortnite obsession when he was a kid. And now he's like, oh, there's more to video games. So I think the classic games are going to stick around. I think your kids are just stuck in that era right now where they just want to be playing this free game that has all like Kratos fighting Sabrina Carpenter. And that's all it is. So now I don't think games are in trouble.

Speaker 4:
[84:18] I mentioned it before, but I'm pretty conscious of what I allow my daughter to play and watch and stuff like that. I mean, I showed her Predator the other day. So we watch Die Hard every Christmas. So I'm not a total cop about it. But I don't let her play Roblox. And if I did, I would be watching to make sure that what she's playing is not, she's not just downloading something horrible. She's seen me play Fortnite. And I handed her the controller a couple of times, but she doesn't wake up every morning and play Fortnite. But I'm growing her up with a lot of, like a wide sort of palette of games. And most of those are Nintendo. She has my Switch One. She has access to my whole library. We do that digital sharing trading thing all the time. We watch the Mario movie, the new one. And I was talking to her about the Bowser Jr. part where he's like, it's time to meet your maker and how that's a direct Mario Maker reference. And she started playing Mario Maker 2 on Switch. And we started doing the thing where she'll make a really evil level and she'll hand it to me and I'll be like, what is wrong with you? And then I'll do the same in reverse, which is what I was doing with Jose Otero, you know, 10 years ago or whatever. I showed her that video, we're cracking up. So we're really conscious of that. And it's funny because it's like, I don't think a lot of her friends at school, I mean, I know a lot of her friends at school don't have Mario Maker 2, cause that is like, it's a very old game at this point. But a lot of them have Switches and they, I picked her up from school yesterday and she said, we played Mario Galaxy on the playground today. And I was like, what do you mean? And she goes, oh, well, me and like six of my friends who all saw the movie, we all picked different characters to be. And she's like, I was Rosalina and my friend, Eloise was Bowser Jr. And like they ran around the playground. She was like, one of my friends was all the Lumas. And I'm like, I was like, I don't even know how that works, but that's exactly the kind of stuff I did in second grade, right? When you go see a big movie and you and your friends acted on the playground, you don't know what you're doing. And I don't know how much that directly feeds back into them being like, I'm now a hardcore lifer, a Nintendo fan. It's too early to tell, right? I know with my daughter, that's just gonna be the way it is. Like Seth, she's surrounded by, there's a bald guy that lives in the house that collects garbage, basically. And so, I don't know, to me, that it made me kind of tear up a little bit because I was like, it's really cool to see, this is not me being like, you gotta love what I love. This is her and her friends on their own terms on the playgrounds coming out with a game. And a couple months ago, they were probably doing that with K-Pop Demon Hunters. And in a couple months, they'll do it with something else. But it's really cool to see that, and Nintendo's mentioned this multiple times. Miyamoto told me this to his face. They make these movies so they could bring in new audiences and that's working. And yeah, long story short, I think that there's a way to do it. And I also want another Mario game soon.

Speaker 3:
[87:14] Yep. Yeah, I was gonna bring that exact thing up, Brian, that it's all about what on-ramps can Nintendo create to reach new people. And for some people it's built in, like the kids of you guys who just know Nintendo and always will because of who they were raised by. Like if I have kids, obviously they will be surrounded by Nintendo stuff because I mean look behind me. But I think that when you're talking about reaching outside audiences, the movies are huge for that. Like that's a big deal. A theme park is a big deal. And also, I just disagree with the premise that there's been no Mario since Odyssey. Because it's just not true. If you're seven years old and you played Odyssey, then four years later, 3D World plus Bowser's Fury was a new game to you. That is a brand new 3D Mario game. Yeah, it was a port of a Wii U game, but what? When that game came out, your kid was a newborn? That's a new game to them. There's Mario Wonder, there's Mario Tennis, there's Mario Kart, there's Mario Party, there's Luigi's Mansion, there's all the spinoffs. The Mario universe has been very well served. I think to put it in a box and say, there's been no 3D Mario, so my kids won't be Nintendo fans or Mario fans. I think the Mario brand is so much bigger than that and that there's been so many games. We get a Mario game every single year, basically. We got the Galaxy ports. Yeah, not new to us, but new to your kids. And so I think that's the way I look at it, is that Nintendo sees lots of value in their old games. We see them bring them back all the time and they know they can bring in new audiences with those old games while also getting $64 from us when we buy them for the third time. It's all dual purpose. I think that their franchise care is very, very strong. Mario is not the one I would point to.

Speaker 4:
[88:54] I also think that all the games you just listed are a lot more accessible to a younger audience than a 3D platformer is, especially one where you can go upside down and cappy and all the weird, deep stuff that you can do in Odyssey. When you watch people speed run that game and play it, my daughter will play Odyssey, but she will play it casually where she'll just sandbox around a level a little bit. Whereas when you play the other games like Mario Party, she's playing those games to win, Mario Kart, she's playing those games to win, even the side-scrolling ones. You play them with a very specific intention. I think that the 3D ones just inherently connect with slightly older audiences. Kids definitely play them. Logan, I'm sure you're younger than us and by the time you're old enough to start playing Nintendo games, there was a couple 3D ones out.

Speaker 3:
[89:45] I ran around Delfino Plaza as a kid all the time.

Speaker 4:
[89:47] Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3:
[89:48] I didn't ever beat it as a kid. No way. That game was hard as hell, but I played the heck out of it.

Speaker 4:
[89:52] Spot on. That's exactly what I'm talking about. So I think kids are playing Mario Party, they're playing Mario Kart, they're playing Mario Golf and Tennis and all the other games you listed. The 3D Mario is the kind of thing I want because I love 3D Marios. They're some of the best games in the world, but you're right. It's not like we've gone nine years without a Mario game and there's been no presence for that character whatsoever. He's everywhere. He's arguably in more places than he ever was in history. You go to the toy store, there's an entire section of...

Speaker 3:
[90:20] The Lego store.

Speaker 4:
[90:21] Yeah, the Lego store. There's Mario stuff. It's everywhere now. I think they're doing a really good job with that character. I was dropping my kid off this morning and somebody had the backpack clip that they're giving away at McDonald's right now. It's everywhere. Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[90:36] I just wanted to say one more thing. If your son played Mario Odyssey when he was five and he's 12 now, in his mind, Mario is for babies and Fortnite is for big boys. That is a big part of it. Probably in the next couple of years, he'll stop playing Fortnite because that'll be considered a baby game, which I saw. I talked to a group of seventh graders a few years ago and they were kind of snickering because one kid was wearing a Fortnite shirt. I felt bad for him. The seventh graders considered that a baby game. That might also be part of it. He wants to play a cool game with guns, not a game where a shirtless Italian man runs around the beach.

Speaker 3:
[91:15] Yeah, and I think it is so much about just what's popular, like you're kind of saying too. And that ebbs and flows over time. And so I think there's a ton of ality to Dan's concern that Nintendo, I think the biggest challenge for Nintendo as I look ahead over the next 10, 20 plus years is making sure that Nintendo doesn't just become a like vintage brand, like Mickey Mouse. Kids do not care about Mickey Mouse. I could see in 10 years kids do not care about Mario. So I don't, this is why I don't care when Nintendo games are super easy and like for kids, like Bonanza is really easy. I think it's freaking incredible because I think a four year old could pick it up and smash around with a big one and have the best time. I think Nintendo games should always be first and foremost for kids and people like us that still love them will still enjoy them. I never want to see them cater to the 35 year old lifelong Nintendo fan. I just, that's not what I like Nintendo for. Like that's what Star Wars did. Don't go down that path. Like you can't, you got to keep cultivating your audience and just trust that the lifers will stick around. And I think that's what they do. I think they're very good at that. I just think that it's more challenging than ever with Roblox and free to play and things outside of games, social media, like there's more attacking your time than ever before. And that's a big challenge for anybody to figure out how do we carve out our space of time for that person. And I think Nintendo is doing a great job with all the different initiatives they have.

Speaker 4:
[92:39] And there's like, you know, I'm replaying Wonder. There's a bunch of really hard levels in that game. They're mostly optional, right? But for the most part, like you can engage with that on any level you choose. And we talked about that forever on this show about how Nintendo is really good at making games that a little kid can play and an adult can 100%. And as long as they keep doing that, they'll always service the needs of people like us who grew up with them. And, you know, people like a young kid who are just like starting to play games for the first time. Cause if there's too much friction and too much pushback, it's why we bounced off of Wonder to begin with. Cause my daughter was four at the time and they, they kept making her in, in the lead of the entire experience. And it was like, this functionally does not work for us. And they patched it and it's great now. And we're playing it again. And it's a brand new game for my family. All of a sudden, right? And that's what they need to do. And they've been great about that. They will always be great about that.

Speaker 3:
[93:33] Yeah. Cool. Well, I think we should call it there. That was a great conversation. Thanks so much for the question. Email your questions for Question Block to nbc at ign.com and we'll try to get to them on the quieter weeks. But that is another episode of Nintendo Voice Chat. In the books, we're here every Friday with audio on your favorite podcast app and a video on Spotify or the IGN Games channel on YouTube. Next week, we're gonna have a really fun show. We're gonna celebrate 15 years of Nintendo 3DS. It's like one of my favorite platforms of all time. So I can't wait to talk about that. And Seth, are you shocked that it's 15? Is that what that reaction is?

Speaker 5:
[94:06] Yeah, that seems insane to me.

Speaker 3:
[94:08] 2011. Yeah, so we're gonna talk about that and hear about your guys' time with Tomodachi Life, Living the Dream. Thank you so much, Brian and Seth and Miranda earlier and Tayo for working behind the scenes and thank you so much for listening. But for now, that's all the time I've got. I got to get back to playing Animal Crossing New Leaf on my Nintendo 3DS. Have a great week. We'll be back next time with more NVC, the only place you can.

Speaker 4:
[94:27] Get the thing.

Speaker 5:
[94:28] Get the thing!