transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:21] Hey, what's happening, everybody? It's me, it's hello, this card with this thing will last a minute, and then it'll go away.

Speaker 2:
[00:28] Hi. Hello. Hello.

Speaker 1:
[00:30] It's The Jeff Gerstmann Show. I'm here, it's Jeff Gerstmann. I'm joined by Austin Walker. Austin, how's it going?

Speaker 2:
[00:35] Dude, it's going.

Speaker 1:
[00:36] It's cold, it's cold.

Speaker 2:
[00:39] It was so warm here for a week out on the East Coast, and now it's back to like, it was freezing last night. It's bullshit, I'm sick of it. I'm sick, I like the cold generally. Yes, but it's been bitter, like bitter emotionally bitter. It's been like the winter was hard here, and then it got good. I went to the park, I went to the garden, I saw the cherry blossom trees, it was beautiful, and it's cold, I'm sick of it.

Speaker 1:
[01:05] That sounds great.

Speaker 2:
[01:07] Yeah. I mean, I'm more comfortable in the cold, and this is the fucked up thing. I'm a big dude, I like it when it's cold.

Speaker 1:
[01:15] No one said when you move to Southern California, hey, by the way, when they talk about that, it never rains in Southern California part, it's because it's like fucking 85 degrees all the time.

Speaker 2:
[01:25] It's wild out there, man.

Speaker 1:
[01:27] Yeah, it was literally 83 degrees two days ago, and now today it is raining, and this is like the only the third day of rain I think we've gotten all season.

Speaker 2:
[01:37] Well, you were just telling me that no one has gutters out there, no one knows how to build a world for the rain, so I hope that that's true.

Speaker 1:
[01:43] Now I want it to rain. Now that I've done all the work to prevent the house from flooding, I am desperate for rain. I'm like, yes, I spent all this money, I want to watch the water go down the drain. Let me see, I need this.

Speaker 2:
[01:53] Watch the investment will pay off.

Speaker 1:
[01:54] I want to watch this water drain out.

Speaker 2:
[01:58] Have you considered getting involved in the new Infowars? I think they should give you a slot.

Speaker 1:
[02:04] I literally this morning I was watching Ben Collins be interviewed and listening to him talk about how the process went of like, okay, and then we got Tim Heidecker involved and other stuff and I said, you know, I did spend a lot of like, the jokes aren't as funny anymore. Like at some point, at some point, I stopped because I just they got too real. But there was a time there where it was really fun to talk about chemtrails and harp and all of the insane conspiracy shit. I was like, I bet I could do a lot of really fucked up video game coverage for Infowars.

Speaker 2:
[02:47] It breaks my heart that the world turned out the way it did over the last 15 years, because there was a sweet spot where making fun of that shit was so fun. It was so fun. It turned out that our interest was like the canary in the coal mine of people who were going to become interested in a different way. We knew there was something compelling there. We knew that the voice and the delivery and the idea is all the same.

Speaker 1:
[03:13] Getting drawn into these lunatics is great. Yeah, this is great.

Speaker 2:
[03:17] Oh, well.

Speaker 1:
[03:18] The lady pointing at the sprinkler and seeing a rainbow and just going, that's not normal. It's just like, this is great. I love this.

Speaker 2:
[03:25] Yeah. At least we have Connor Romali's Pipe Rock Theory, which to me feels like the apotheosis, the grand finale of everything.

Speaker 1:
[03:33] So it's that. And then for me on a personal level, it's the Giant Bomb Game of the Year sitcom stuff, where there was one day where we did the Patrick on Wheelies, and I'm just running into shots and going, chemtrails. That to me is the last time.

Speaker 2:
[03:52] It was actually fun.

Speaker 1:
[03:53] Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[03:54] Well, now those people are in office and running the world.

Speaker 1:
[03:59] Right. Maybe the Earth really is flat. Maybe AJ Styles was right all this time.

Speaker 2:
[04:09] We can't open the door to wrestling. We can't. Coming off of WrestleMania weekend.

Speaker 1:
[04:13] Oh, what a big weekend it was. Did you catch any WrestleMania?

Speaker 2:
[04:17] I didn't watch any of it, but I watched the reaction and I watched clips. I'm not paying money for the Fed in 2026, man. no. If it was still on Peacock, I probably would have just been like, I fucking for some reason still subscribe to Peacock. I'll put it on in the background. I'm not going to subscribe to a new level of ESPN in 2026 to watch the wrestling.

Speaker 1:
[04:38] No, definitely not. I'm clean now. I think the last time I watched any WWE stuff was their first week on Netflix. Sure.

Speaker 2:
[04:47] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[04:48] I watched that show and maybe the Royal Rumble that year and I was like, this is all garbage. Also, this company is fucking garbage. It always has been, but Jesus.

Speaker 2:
[04:59] They were doing We Love Vince Chantz at the Hall of Fame this week.

Speaker 1:
[05:03] They're selling shirts that say, Thank you, Brock. That's that company, man.

Speaker 2:
[05:10] That's that company. It is what it is. It is what it is.

Speaker 1:
[05:12] And so it's like, you know, not that every single person in AEW is all clean and good and everything. They have their own issues for sure. But they came along at a really great time.

Speaker 2:
[05:26] They really did. I was thinking about this the other day of just like, even if you are a WWE guy at this point, you better thank your stars that AEW came around and upped your check. You know what I mean? Because you're one of these guys who's wrestling for the Fed. You would be being paid peanuts. You would have worse health care. All that shit would still be terrible if Tony Khan hadn't come around and said, what if we try to build another thing with all this money I got?

Speaker 1:
[05:52] It is the interesting thing about knowing people who worked for WWE at a certain point. And getting to know some of the folks who work in the ring and stuff like that is hearing very directly like, oh yeah, when our contract came up, this is like years ago, it was 2019, whatever it was, our contract came up and they bumped it up immediately. And then we went like this a little bit and they raised it some more. It's definitely, that shit is real. Like even like a guy like Randy Orton, I think supposedly got like a fucking major bump. I believe it. Because all he had to do was go, I don't know, I might go explore my office. And they're like, here, here, here, here, here.

Speaker 2:
[06:32] Stay, stay, stay, stay, stay. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, man. It's such a funny place at this point. Like I catch a lot of that stuff on YouTube shorts or on, you know what I mean? Like I see like the fallout of stuff.

Speaker 1:
[06:44] I think that's more or less how I see any of this at this point as well.

Speaker 2:
[06:48] And it's a little like watching a train wreck, but like they know that too. All the build for this year from what I saw was like all the McAfee stuff and all of the, even the punk pipe bomb 2.0, which I get me, don't get me started. You know, all of that stuff that was still built around like, yeah, we all know the product is shit right now.

Speaker 1:
[07:10] Yeah. It's like always a great proposition. Yeah. To be starting at that.

Speaker 2:
[07:14] And yeah.

Speaker 1:
[07:16] And then like halfway trying to blame parent company for some of it because the word of that leaked out that they meddled in it and, you know, and trying to use that, but they can only use it so far. So it just became like a bunch of people going on podcasts and going like, I don't think Pat McAfee should be involved. It's like, okay, yeah, I don't know. You can't say that on television. I get it. But like, yeah, what the fuck are we doing?

Speaker 2:
[07:37] What are we doing? So yeah, again, glad to be glad to not be watching the product and feeling invested and feeling like I need to. But I'm glad of my hope is never I hope this is a good show anymore.

Speaker 1:
[07:49] I went to WrestleMania when it was here, like three, four, whatever number of years ago was the first year.

Speaker 2:
[07:55] Cody win year or is that the Cody lose year?

Speaker 1:
[07:57] Cody lost lose year.

Speaker 2:
[07:58] Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1:
[07:59] And I was never super invested in the Cody stuff. But like at some point you want to see something happen. And sitting through two days of that show and getting to the end of it. And then, hey, by the way, yeah, we're going to have Roman Reigns win it. It was just like, oh, dude, I got to stop watching this. That was the first big moment of like, I got to not watch this anymore. And then like talk was like, oh, by the way, Vince is here and like calling shots low key. And like suddenly we're not allowed to say hospital anymore. Like it was a real, like again, knowing a handful of people, you start hearing stories about like, oh yeah, we were backstage doing pre tapes and couldn't say these words anymore. Like I don't know what's going on, but someone is back.

Speaker 2:
[08:45] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[08:46] It was real.

Speaker 2:
[08:47] Realizing that Cody stuff at the time, what it felt like at the time was that they'd realized, oh, people are really into this build. What if we did the year of this build? And it's like, oh, ah, ah. That's like, again, on top of all of the deeply evil, dehumanizing, you know, it's, also the product wasn't good. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, it's not even like you were grinding up the bones of innocent people in order to produce something.

Speaker 1:
[09:16] There's just bad, you know, very easy to walk away from it.

Speaker 2:
[09:20] Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1:
[09:21] I found in that Netflix show, that very first one when they got out and they played a video that basically said, this whole thing's fake and we tell stories and isn't that fucking rad? And then The Rock came out and said, Ted Sarandos, that's my dog right there. He was like, that's it.

Speaker 2:
[09:36] I'm done. Yeah, I'm done.

Speaker 1:
[09:38] Yeah, it was enough.

Speaker 2:
[09:42] Anyway, anyway, video games, video games.

Speaker 1:
[09:46] They're pretty good.

Speaker 2:
[09:47] Video games are pretty good.

Speaker 1:
[09:49] Some of them, at least I've I we talk. I talked a little bit about Pragmata last week. Have you seen much of this?

Speaker 2:
[09:55] I've watched some Pragmata. I need to play Pragmata. I think I I like it when you make a game that has levels, that has interesting action combat, and that is like a new story, a new place, new characters. And I don't know that they'll make a Pragmata too necessarily. And that's even cool to me too.

Speaker 1:
[10:17] Yes. Yeah. I think that if they did, it would, without saying too much here, it would be a fundamentally different thing if they did. Okay. And maybe, well, I don't know, maybe fundamentally different is giving it a bit much credit. Like, you remember how Lost Planet 1 was like this and Lost Planet 2 was like this?

Speaker 2:
[10:37] I do.

Speaker 1:
[10:37] Yeah. I do. And if they made another one of these, it would have to be something that drastic.

Speaker 2:
[10:41] Interesting.

Speaker 1:
[10:42] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[10:42] You're having a good time with it, though?

Speaker 1:
[10:44] Yeah, I finished it. Cool. Finished it over the weekend. And it left me like, man, you know, when a game starts out and goes like, hey, man, look at this little girl, like, you know, eventually they're going to put, like, they have to put these characters in peril.

Speaker 2:
[10:58] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[10:59] And I think there are good ways to do that and bad ways to do that. And there are very cheap narrative ways to do that kind of stuff. And I think they avoid the trap of it pretty well. You think you know where that game is going to go. And then it ends up kind of going around a different way. I mean, I still had figured it out sometime in the last two hours of it. Like, oh, OK, this is exactly how this is going to go.

Speaker 2:
[11:25] How long is like a dozen hours?

Speaker 1:
[11:27] Yeah, eight or nine.

Speaker 2:
[11:27] OK, not bad. OK.

Speaker 1:
[11:29] You know? And yeah, but I guess like so that's been a big part of the conversation has been like, oh, this game is too short. And you know, like that value proposition rears its ugly head.

Speaker 2:
[11:40] Which I don't get code anymore. So like to me, I'm like, yeah, I don't know if I'm spending, is it 70 or is it 60?

Speaker 1:
[11:45] It is 60 on PC. Yeah, it is 60. It's not 70.

Speaker 2:
[11:50] Even there, I'm like, I got to wait for one of these Capcom sales to hit in six months. They're always 40, you know.

Speaker 1:
[11:56] They're always doing it. Yeah. The thing I'll say though is when you finish the game, it does like dump like a whole new mode on you and a new game plus. And like there are multiple reasons to kind of go back into it. If you want to experience more of that combat. I think for my taste though, like by the time I got to the end of it, I was like, yes, I have seen the vast majority of the options, like the gameplay styles and things that they want to lay on you as far as like loadout stuff is concerned. And I came away from it going like, that was a good time. I'm not going to fuck it up by playing any more of this. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[12:31] You're not going to like grind yourself into paste by trying to do achievement chasing or play through the boss rush mode or whatever it is that gets added. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[12:39] Yeah. And so I kind of walked away from it there, but it was a, you know, I don't like falling into this trap because I like to think of myself as a hard motherfucker, but man, there's a thing that happens when you have kids where it just fucks you up, man.

Speaker 2:
[12:54] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[12:54] You know, in a lot of different ways. And so there's like the writing for Diana, I think is really awesome. Like they, again, like there are so many traps. She seems like a kid.

Speaker 2:
[13:04] She seems like a kid for real.

Speaker 1:
[13:06] She's like a very, you know, other than her speech being a lot clearer than the average, like six, you know, like she's supposed to be seven, I believe. And, you know, other than her speech being absolutely perfect and crisp, which makes sense because she's a robot, you know, that she's inquisitive. She like looks around with wonder, like all the mocap or like all of the animation for her and all of the other stuff. Like she sees a cat and tries to chase it. Like all of it feels so fucking good and so right.

Speaker 2:
[13:38] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[13:39] And I think that's the part that is really stand out about this, is I think they write the kid without falling into all of the dumb traps you can fall into when writing children. And Hugh, the guy that you play as, like there's not a lot going on with it. It's not so much that this game has like a deep narrative. Like it is really just like it's two people hanging out.

Speaker 2:
[14:05] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[14:05] They have respect for one another. It is not like, it is not weird. The only weird thing I think is that when you run into her, like this is you're on a space station that is supposed to be populated full of people and there aren't any people around. And at no point does Hugh, like at no point in the first 10 minutes of meeting her, does he go, hey, what the fuck happened? Are you, what's going on?

Speaker 2:
[14:28] You're not sent there because there's nobody there anymore.

Speaker 1:
[14:31] You don't know what you're going to see. And like the thing that happens in the first five minutes is you land as a party of four and the three guys with you are smoked. And so you're just like, okay, I'm alone here. What is going, like, and the amount of narrative, like the amount of time, the amount of, the number of cut scenes between you meeting her and him finally going, so what the fuck is going? Like, and she doesn't know, but like at the end of the day, like she, you know, he does finally ask, but that would have been the first thing out anyone's mouth.

Speaker 2:
[15:00] Hey man, what happened here?

Speaker 1:
[15:02] Tell me everything you know about this place, because there's all these robots are trying to kill us, and I don't like, who are you also? And you eventually find all that stuff out, but it is kind of one of the minor knocks against it. I think from a story perspective is just like, there's some stuff early on that you're like, this should have been handled a little more sensibly. But the nice thing is they actually handle it during gameplay. Like there's a lot of, it's a game about downtime. It's very much like you walk into a room and you walk around and go, there's a bunch of guns on the floor here. Oh, right. I'm fighting like nine things here.

Speaker 2:
[15:37] Right.

Speaker 1:
[15:37] And then, then there's a lot of time to talk afterwards. And so you get a lot of good moments with the two characters where she's asking questions about Earth and what's this like. And I think that stuff is so, so, so well done that it really drove me through the entire story. I mean, the gameplay, I think it is also like really, really neat. You know, it is, and anytime you aim it, for people that haven't seen it, we did talk about it last week, but like anytime you aim down sites, a grid appears and your face buttons move a cursor around that grid. And that is Diana hacking the robots as you are shooting them.

Speaker 2:
[16:17] Right.

Speaker 1:
[16:18] And so there is this interplay between you having to focus on that grid, which gets only more and more complicated as you get to further boss fights and characters and everything else, as well as like multiple enemies lumbering in your direction. And so the tent and also a thing this game does is almost all of the combat scenarios are in really small fucking rooms. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[16:42] I've seen a lot of tight arenas without a lot of cover, a lot of just like you have to learn how to be very mobile in order to keep from getting your head busted in by these big robots.

Speaker 1:
[16:53] Yeah. And you don't have melee, so it's not like you can't really push them off or do any kind of thing to delay it. Initially, other than shooting them with weapons designed to do that, and so it just becomes like, okay, I need to hack them because if I hack them, they will stagger and also that will open them up to further damage.

Speaker 2:
[17:11] Right. And that never gets too fiddly. Or more fiddly. It's supposed to be a little fiddly, that's the point.

Speaker 1:
[17:17] It's supposed to be, yeah, exactly. There is supposed to be friction there. Yeah. And I think the ways in which it is fiddly are really cool. And some of the stuff they do, even all the way up to the final boss fight, where they are introducing new things on that grid, where they can kind of like, oh, this maps back to a thing that when you look at the character, you go like, oh, it makes sense that the hacking would be fucked up in this way because look at this thing.

Speaker 2:
[17:41] Cool.

Speaker 1:
[17:42] And I think they they just do a really good job with that in the story and the setting of like you are you're on the moon and they're just 3D printing everything out of magic moon filament.

Speaker 2:
[17:57] That's why we're up there probably.

Speaker 1:
[17:58] Yeah, it is a corporation that is literally and like there's a personal story along the way of the people who were there and you know, although the audio logs and everything, if you if you want to dig into that, I think there's a lot of neat stuff.

Speaker 2:
[18:12] Where does it stack up in your mind versus other eight to 12 hour long action games like Vanquish and Metal Gear Rising and the unfortunately never localized EX Troopers, which I think one of the directors of this game directed actually that this is a lot slower than those games.

Speaker 1:
[18:32] And you know, when you think about Vanquish, you think about hiding behind cover. And this is a game where even if there was cover, it wouldn't make sense.

Speaker 2:
[18:37] Yeah. I think I'm going to cover and then launching a cigarette is actually what I do. That's what I think about first. Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[18:43] I mean, if Diana was there and she had like, and like she find you find gear in the world and some of it is just like, it needs to be hacked by a robot instead of you bolting it to your stuff.

Speaker 2:
[18:54] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[18:55] And so you find these cartridges that look like big SD cards with a glowing end on it. And I don't know if the GIF is going around, but she literally puts it in her mouth and vapes the shit out of that.

Speaker 2:
[19:03] Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[19:04] And her eyes go crazy.

Speaker 2:
[19:05] It's not good for you.

Speaker 1:
[19:06] No, it's not.

Speaker 2:
[19:07] But you keep doing that because we got to get through this level.

Speaker 1:
[19:10] When you do this, we'll be able to hold one more healing pack. So smoke that shit. And then the loop of it, the structure of it is not entirely unlike a Dark Souls. It's very much like, get to a spot. You will find a ladder that takes you back to the central hub. You'll get your bonfire equivalent. When you go back there, you can spend your upgrade points. It refills your healing items. It refills your ammo, everything else. And when you go back, all the enemies will have respawned.

Speaker 2:
[19:40] So you're like, okay, can I get through this next loop to get to the next bonfire equivalent and move forward? Yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker 1:
[19:48] And then that's an interesting structure for what is otherwise, I think, a fairly straightforward action game. If you broke it down into levels, biomes, whatever you want to say, you look at it and you go like, oh, this sounds like a four-level game. Like, what the hell is going on? But the way they break it up, and again, the story affords them certain amount of, like it's been in the trailers that like a Manhattan, a 3D printed Manhattan is on the moon, and you get to run around that for a little bit, and you're like, this is stupid. Who would do this? People on the moon who are lonely, it turns out, would do this.

Speaker 2:
[20:22] Yeah, if you're stuck on the moon, yeah, can we Times Square, I guess? Are you sure? That place sucks. Yeah, but what if we were in a place that sucks instead of a place that's gray? That's still an improvement.

Speaker 1:
[20:31] Basically, yeah. It's a really neat game.

Speaker 2:
[20:37] I'm curious if the sense of feeling like a hit internally at Capcom because the sentiment is high. I think I've seen a lot of people saying positive things about it.

Speaker 1:
[20:45] I think I said they sold a million.

Speaker 2:
[20:46] Yeah. Awesome. Is that a lot these days?

Speaker 1:
[20:49] I don't know. Maybe for Capcom, that's-

Speaker 2:
[20:54] I hope so because I would love for them to continue making single-player action games because it's one of the reasons I like Capcom so much.

Speaker 1:
[21:02] There are a few companies left doing it at this scale, certainly.

Speaker 2:
[21:08] It seems like they're out there beating their chest a little bit about it and getting people excited for Onimusha and I want them to beat their chest. If they own it as a win, then they have to own it as a win. You know what I mean? I think that that's what I want them to do as a Dragon's Dogma fan. They were so proud about how well Dragon's Dogma 2 sold, and then they just kind of pretended it didn't exist for the last few years. Now they're teasing, maybe there's going to be DLC. If you look at the Steam Workshop or the Steam Database, you can see that there's been changes on the depot, and maybe they're really good. There's a 12 gigabyte difference between the size of the most recent depot and the original size of the game, and maybe they're finally going to release some DLC for the game that I like and only I like. I don't know, but that's just me. That's just my bias in this situation.

Speaker 1:
[21:49] It started to sound like the people that thought Conquered was going to come back, because there were updates to the Steam depot. This is the big trick. They're going to re-release it.

Speaker 2:
[21:59] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[22:00] I like Dragon's Dogma 2. Me too.

Speaker 2:
[22:03] It was some stuff, but I thought that game was very weird in a cool way that made it still feel like Dragon's Dogma.

Speaker 1:
[22:11] Yes. That is something that I came too late, because when Dragon's Dogma 1 came out, like most sane people, I was like, what the fuck are you people doing?

Speaker 2:
[22:23] That's fair. That game has some of the best action combat in the world. It's entirely slept on because of how its interested narrative is passing. That's not true. The ending of that game and the lore that holds it all together is really intense. I know you've talked to Patrick back in the day about that. I have a fondness for the almost trite and cliché Japanese take on Western fantasy, the record of Lodoss War style of like, have you heard of the elves? And like, yeah dude, I have. Tell me more.

Speaker 1:
[23:02] Go on.

Speaker 2:
[23:03] They're mystical.

Speaker 1:
[23:03] They live with their wits.

Speaker 2:
[23:05] Exactly. Really? We'll see if that update is real or if the people like me who are watching the SteamDB updates have lost their minds. But yeah, Capcom, keep doing it. I'm happy to see them, you know, Resident Evil, they're putting out single-player games.

Speaker 1:
[23:23] Exactly.

Speaker 2:
[23:23] They're investing in it.

Speaker 1:
[23:24] Yeah. Like Onomushiro looks neat. They did, I can't even remember the name of it now, but they did, I would say, Kunitsugami or something, but that's clearly not the name.

Speaker 2:
[23:34] Yeah, yeah, but that's something like that, right? Last year.

Speaker 1:
[23:36] Yes. Yeah, and then they brought it out on Switch 2 at launch.

Speaker 2:
[23:41] Kunitsugami. Kunitsugami, yeah, you nailed it. awesome.

Speaker 1:
[23:45] Man, my brain. Still here. That game is neat. It's very much like wave-based and you have to stop and prepare, and it is a little tower defense-ish in a couple of ways. And so it is, but in that setting, and with that idea, it ended up being a really neat game. And so it's cool to see them also kind of taking some chances, because I think there's a world where Pragmata doesn't work at all because some people, like they go too far one way or the other on the hacking stuff, and it becomes too much for people. And I think they're riding a very fine line. And the thing they do, like midway through the game, you do get the ability, and it doesn't work all the time, but you do get the ability to complete the hacking automatically. It takes meter, but you can kind of click a stick, and it'll just go brrrr. And that's useful in some of the tighter situations when you want to pull that out. And then they've got a lower difficulty setting, which is, I tried a little bit of it, and it is significantly easier. And so I think between that, they managed to sort of address the potential issues people might just have with just like, hey, I can't do these two things at the same time. And then they unlock harder difficulty settings if you want to be a real maniac about it.

Speaker 2:
[25:03] Is there like DMC style scoring for the fights, or is it just, I can complete this boss on a harder mode?

Speaker 1:
[25:10] You're not going to like, just range fights? I didn't play a ton of the, I can't, like the new game plus, I would not be shocked if they introduced something like that in some of the stuff that unlocks, but I haven't spent enough time with it to know for sure. They do have like training scenarios that you unlock, like very short kind of one or two minute things that actually get you like pretty good resources for finishing a lot of the upgrades. And if you really want to milk everything out of that game, you will do all of those training things and get three stars on all of them to get the coins you need to fill out the bingo grids so that you can get the red key cards to go to the difficult areas. And once you do that, it unlocks different bingo cards.

Speaker 2:
[25:49] I do like to get a red key card, you know, for my sense.

Speaker 1:
[25:52] They're nice red key cards. They open up big red shielded doors and that's where the harder challenges are. And it's, they're optional, but like, I'm gonna do them.

Speaker 2:
[26:01] I'm gonna do them. You know, that's who I am. I play video games. I'm gonna open the red door and do the challenge, you know.

Speaker 1:
[26:06] Exactly. You play video games like Jay & Silent Bob's Chronic Blunt Punch. That's a video game that came out yesterday for 420.

Speaker 2:
[26:15] Oh, I see.

Speaker 1:
[26:17] This game was on Fig in 2016.

Speaker 2:
[26:24] No, it wasn't.

Speaker 1:
[26:25] Yes. What? 10 years ago, back when Fig was king. Fig was never king.

Speaker 2:
[26:31] Fig was never king, but you know.

Speaker 1:
[26:34] They named it after the Figueroa Hotel because it's near E3, and that's where all the deals went down. No, they didn't. The deals did not go down at the Fig. I don't know what people are thinking.

Speaker 2:
[26:43] Was that real? Do people really believe that about Fig?

Speaker 1:
[26:47] I think when they launched Fig, I think that's why they named it Fig. I do believe that is why they named it Fig. But I feel like the quality of deals that were happening at the Fig are not...

Speaker 2:
[26:58] Right.

Speaker 1:
[26:59] Maybe it's the quality of deals that would result in the Jay & Silent Bob Chronic Blunt Punch.

Speaker 2:
[27:03] Which has no online co-op, I saw. Which I don't understand how you release a beat-em-up in 2026 that doesn't have online co-op.

Speaker 1:
[27:13] Sure, yeah. I mean, if you want to...

Speaker 2:
[27:16] Treat this like a real Fig?

Speaker 1:
[27:18] Yeah, if you want to treat this like it's a real video game, then yeah, I guess that's a problem.

Speaker 2:
[27:22] This should mean something to me, Jeff.

Speaker 1:
[27:24] But maybe it's the part where most of the dialogue is not voiced. Why? Like, you have some...

Speaker 2:
[27:32] I have to read Jay & Silent Bob dialogue?

Speaker 1:
[27:35] Yes, you have to read Jay... Yeah, yeah. And Dante, like there are assist characters, and so you get Dante and then you get Randall, and it goes from there. Those are not the real voice actors?

Speaker 2:
[27:48] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[27:50] And so...

Speaker 2:
[27:51] Do they look like they're their clerks' cartoon models? Or do they look different?

Speaker 1:
[27:57] They look different. That would be way better.

Speaker 2:
[28:00] That'd be better.

Speaker 1:
[28:01] But they're older and they're dressed up in, you know, kind of clerks too, you know, like the the US universe has really gone... I punched out sometime after Jay & Silent Bob strike back, and like, I appreciate that they made a clerks too.

Speaker 2:
[28:15] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[28:15] I would go see them all rats too, if that ever happened.

Speaker 2:
[28:18] Yeah, sure. I mean, all rats is an all-timer, you know.

Speaker 1:
[28:22] But, but Jesus. At some point, just for my own sanity, I had to stop watching those movies. And so after Jay & Silent Bob strike back, which I liked at the time, I don't think I've seen all of clerks too. I saw enough of clerks too to know I did not want to sit down and watch all of clerks too.

Speaker 2:
[28:36] Yeah, I think you're okay. I really do. I haven't seen this since it came out, but I did not have a good time with it.

Speaker 1:
[28:41] Yeah. You played this?

Speaker 2:
[28:43] Are you...

Speaker 1:
[28:43] Yes, yes. You beat it? No. I got about a level and a half into it and was disturbed by it on a lot of levels. And then when I saw, oh right, they announced this game in 2016. Some things fall into place, but not others. It is incredibly basic from a gameplay perspective. The brawler, the beat-em-up, the belt-scroller, that stuff has come a long way. The Streets of Rage 4, you see what developers are doing to try to modernize that concept and make it work. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[29:18] What's the rogue-like one that I really liked from like five months ago? I'm forgetting the name of.

Speaker 1:
[29:24] The one that started with an A.

Speaker 2:
[29:25] It did start with an A.

Speaker 1:
[29:26] A board with a... Absalom. Absalom. Absalom. I just uninstalled that.

Speaker 2:
[29:31] That game is great.

Speaker 1:
[29:32] Yeah, it's cool. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[29:34] But in terms of like mechanics, there's a lot of stuff going on. You know, the side-scroller has come a long way. There's lots of fighting game-inspired mechanics in most of them now. There are lots of progression, unique progression mechanics in most of them now. This doesn't have that? This isn't really...

Speaker 1:
[29:52] So you do occasionally level up. I don't know where your XP is shown or anything like that, but a message... For starters, when you play it alone, it's a tag game. You could hit a button and change between Jay and Silent Bob. The differences are not necessarily hugely meaningful, but you can do that. They have separate life bars if you so desire. You eventually get assist characters. So when a meter fills up, which takes quite a long time to fill, you can have Dante drag a body bag with Dante in it across the screen. Okay. I forget what Randall does. But it seems like there's a number of assist characters that I don't know who they are, and I'm fine. And then you level up a super meter, and they've done some video game reference type stuff here. So like when... You know, remember at one point, Jay said somewhere along the way in one of those movies that he liked Wolverine or was like Wolverine?

Speaker 2:
[30:54] Sure.

Speaker 1:
[30:54] So sometimes when your super meter is full, he does Berserker Barrage, Wolverine's move from the Marvel games.

Speaker 2:
[31:03] Yeah, that's a cool move. I like when he says Berserker Barrage.

Speaker 1:
[31:06] And do you like it when Jay of Jay & Silent Bob fame says it? Because he does. They go there.

Speaker 2:
[31:15] I would like it if he said it in a movie, but I don't know if I like it if he says it in a game.

Speaker 1:
[31:21] Does that make sense? Yes, exactly. When it is happening inside of a game, like the references, the context for the references are different. And it becomes uncool. If he's doing video game shit in a film, you're like, oh, that's from that. Yeah, that's fucking neat.

Speaker 2:
[31:35] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[31:35] But you're right.

Speaker 2:
[31:37] But I'm already playing a video. I could go play the Wolverine one. I mean, not Wolverine. That's not out yet. But you know what I mean. I could go play a Marvel versus Capcom and have him do that.

Speaker 1:
[31:46] This is you're summing up my problem with the Scott Pilgrim game that was just a ripoff of River City Ransom.

Speaker 2:
[31:51] You know what game is good? River City Ransom. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[31:54] So I mean, just go play that.

Speaker 2:
[31:56] That game's cool.

Speaker 1:
[31:57] Great game.

Speaker 2:
[31:57] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[31:59] And so like the combat is very basic. You can block, like, you know, like there's some stuff that like maybe the the the brawlers of the 90s didn't have these abilities. And so they went a little bit of the way, but not enough to, like, feel like a fully complete combat system. And like you're beating up kids who are like walking around and looking at their phones and then they attack you. Like that's one of the main enemies early on. And so like the things it's trying to say is like all these TikTok zombies, not like Jay and Silent Bob. They're cool. It's like, like, there's just stuff there that's like fucking weird, but like, yeah. And so they recorded a little bit of dialogue, like a combat dialogue. And so if you, if you want to hear Jay say, Hadouken while he smashes a big bong on the ground or does a hurricane kick, which is not a Hadouken, or a dragon punch, which is also not a Hadouken. He said it is one of the five things he says. And so like while you're mashing on the buttons and mashing out combos, which again, I think you're right, in a movie, if he said that shit while he was hitting somebody, you'd be like.

Speaker 2:
[33:12] Yeah. If he was the dragon puncher that had hadouken in a movie, it would make me laugh. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[33:16] Here you're just like, that's wrong. You fucked it up. Like you fucked up the thing. Like you should have recorded him saying the other thing.

Speaker 2:
[33:23] Yeah. Or if he said, if he said a thousand different things, if they recorded him saying 500 things when he does an uppercut or does a hurricane kick, and once in a while hadouken happened to pop up, that would be funny still. But it's a different format. You can't just do the one joke. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[33:39] And so like I think on the personality side, which is really the only thing this game would be able to stand on, I think they really fucked up. Like it's really-

Speaker 2:
[33:49] Is it Jason Muse as Jay at least?

Speaker 1:
[33:51] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[33:52] Well, okay.

Speaker 1:
[33:53] I remember they brought him into the GameSpot office sometime in the late 2010s for an interview, and I believe it was for this game.

Speaker 2:
[34:03] Which is finally released.

Speaker 1:
[34:05] Which would have only been five years in development at that point.

Speaker 2:
[34:10] What happened? Why did it take this long? Does everybody know?

Speaker 1:
[34:12] I don't know, like a bunch- like now Atari and Digital Eclipse are involved. Like I imagine that at some point, maybe the developers of it got in over their head, and the only way for it to happen was for someone else to come in and push it the rest of the way. Money ran out or something? I don't know. Yeah. But, oh, the other thing, all of the audio, all of the voice audio is mixed really low.

Speaker 2:
[34:35] Weird.

Speaker 1:
[34:35] So like the thing you would want to hear because it's the one piece of personality the game has, like at one point, I thought because the audio was mixed low enough, I thought that they had Jay record him saying an F slur, and I was like, oh no, that's not what it was. It's just I couldn't make out what he was. Like, wow, really?

Speaker 2:
[34:56] Well, you understand, this is this is fun. I'm thinking 2015. Things are different, different times.

Speaker 1:
[35:02] Like, wow, they really, really. But it was just it was really strange. But it's a you know, this is the most anyone should ever talk about it. And no one like it's just like it's the most forgettable thing. Someone cleared it off their books and good on them.

Speaker 2:
[35:19] Sure, yeah, this could have just died, right? This could have just been one of those projects that gets lost, which is a shame because of course, all of the Fig investors would not have gotten their cut.

Speaker 1:
[35:30] Exactly. And I'm sure the lucrative shares of development that they acquired 10 years ago, I'm sure are probably going to pay them.

Speaker 2:
[35:39] Is Fig still running?

Speaker 1:
[35:41] I don't think so.

Speaker 2:
[35:44] I did search for Fig, of course, it took me to the fruit.

Speaker 1:
[35:49] That's a good sign, I feel like.

Speaker 2:
[35:51] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[35:52] When you search Pitbull, he comes up before the dog.

Speaker 2:
[35:55] That's the thing, right? Yeah. Fig was a crowdfunding platform.

Speaker 1:
[35:59] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[35:59] There we go. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[36:01] Remember they were going to do Rock Band for PC and it didn't clear Fig?

Speaker 2:
[36:06] I do. Outer Wilds was a Fig game, so I think that game did pretty well. I like that game quite a bit. Psychonauts was a Fig game. Psychonauts 2, rather, was a Fig game.

Speaker 1:
[36:16] All right.

Speaker 2:
[36:18] I'm looking at the rest of the things here. Wasteland 3, that released.

Speaker 1:
[36:22] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[36:23] Right. There's some other stuff here that did release. Pillage of Eternity 2 was one of these. But mostly it's stuff that didn't like. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It was a fun experiment. I'm happy that someone tried to figure out what if you could do this style of investment. I also have skipped obviously the most important one of these, which is the Intellivision Amico.

Speaker 1:
[36:46] Right. Much like Jay & Silent Bob, Chronic Blunt Punch, I'm sure we'll make its way to shelves sooner or later.

Speaker 2:
[36:56] Can't wait.

Speaker 1:
[36:57] Yeah. Let's take a quick break. We'll come back. We'll talk about some more video games after this. Keep a track of your money, it's important, especially around tax time, you got money going out, hopefully some money coming in if you got your refund or something like that. It's good to just keep track of that stuff, and it's not always easy, I don't know. If you got your finances spread out across a couple of credit cards, or you got your PayPal expenses or whatever, other savings, all that stuff, it can be hard to just get your mind around what all is happening with your money. Rocket Money provides a great dashboard. You hook up all your different accounts, all of that stuff, and it just lets you know, hey, here's where you're spending your money, here's the money coming in, you can set budgets, you can decide how you want to save your money, it'll help you save and get ahead of all of this stuff. While also letting you know, hey, these subscriptions that you've got, you might be paying for two of these by mistake somehow. Or hey, what you're paying for your phone bill, kind of pricey. We think maybe we can negotiate a better rate for you, and you can go and fill out some stuff, and Rocket Money will go off as part of its premium package, and they will go off and negotiate on your behalf, and they've saved me a couple of hundred dollars a year, since I started using it, and that's been pretty awesome, because some of these rates for some of these services, your satellite radio, it just creeps up on you. Everything creeps up on you these days. I don't know. It's bad. Rocket Money helps you stay ahead of it. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so that you can grow your savings. Let Rocket Money help you reach your financial goals faster. Join at rocketmoney.com/jeffg. That's rocketmoney.com/jeffg, rocketmoney.com/jeffg. We're back. How much marathon have you played?

Speaker 2:
[39:15] Oh, do you want to give me the actual number? Let's see. I got it right here. 70 hours, 69 hours.

Speaker 1:
[39:21] I'm jealous.

Speaker 2:
[39:22] Dude, I am playing marathon.

Speaker 1:
[39:26] I am. It's the downside of these other games. All these other video games are getting in the way of marathon. Like the mid-season update came out and they rolled out the carry package.

Speaker 2:
[39:36] And they sure did.

Speaker 1:
[39:37] All of the other stuff. And like as someone who's been playing mostly solo, like all the additions they're making to kind of boost that progression seem like very sensible and necessary. Because the progression when you only have one contract to complete instead of three is...

Speaker 2:
[39:53] It takes a long time, man. It really does. You just aren't earning the... You aren't earning the rep with the different factions, which unlocks some key upgrades. Like I cannot advise enough if you don't have the knife upgrade, if you don't have the... The one that really changed my life, probably, I don't know, 15 hours ago, was I finally got the Sekiguchi upgrade that lets you get your tactical, your like Q ability. Like a little quicker and just like having it in 20 seconds instead of 40 seconds. I don't know if it's ever won me a fight, but it makes me feel more confident in the field. You know what I mean? I'm ready to go, man. I can be invisible anytime I need to be. I can throw these drones out to heal me, whatever.

Speaker 1:
[40:37] I am playing Miracod. As soon as I bought the knife upgrade, it felt like something tilted and they've nerfed it. Like you can't one shot basic robots with the first level of knife upgrade anymore.

Speaker 2:
[40:47] Yeah, totally. You need the second one and you need the heavy hit also.

Speaker 1:
[40:50] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[40:51] And they changed the lunge on it. It's not as far of a lunge anymore, which makes sense.

Speaker 1:
[40:56] Yeah. I mean, it was never like full on Halo energy sword, but it was enough of that. It was.

Speaker 2:
[41:02] Yeah, it felt a little bit like that.

Speaker 1:
[41:04] On a and really stick them. And yeah, that game is.

Speaker 2:
[41:10] I think they did it, man.

Speaker 1:
[41:11] They nailed it. I can't believe it.

Speaker 2:
[41:14] I was so, maybe I wasn't skeptical, but I finished up the Destiny 2 stuff. You were a Destiny person more or less over the years, right? I think maybe like you, I was someone who like played all the content drops, all the new expansions for Destiny content drops. Jesus Christ. And I didn't actually play all the content drops. That's like not true. I played all the expansions for Destiny. I did all the launch, every time an expansion came out, I played through it and then I would check in or stay in for a season after that and I'd play the first season in between big expansions and then I would naturally fall off or I'd come back for the raid. I would get Kato Chia from Remap for the waypoint that like guide me through a raid and be like, oh wow, this stuff is all really cool. And then I thought that they ended Destiny 2's big story beat, you know, Beyond, what was the actual name of the final?

Speaker 1:
[42:08] Is it Beyond Light?

Speaker 2:
[42:10] Was it Beyond Light? Whatever that was, I thought was fantastic. Thought that they did a great job there, but I still left it being like, man, are they going to figure out the extraction shooter? Because I don't know, had you played other extraction shooters before playing Marathon?

Speaker 1:
[42:25] I played a bunch of, not a bunch, but I played enough Arc Raiders to know that I did not like Arc Raiders. So that was maybe five, seven hours.

Speaker 2:
[42:34] Had you been in the dark zone back 10 years ago or whatever? Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[42:38] I actually just reinstalled Division 2 recently, and it's a very confusing game now. I can't believe it. All these years later with characters that are midway through and stuff, it's the Destiny problem of like, I have not played Destiny in a year and a half or eight months or whatever, and something new is out that looks neat. Then I load it up and like, okay. The last time when they rolled out the Star Wars stuff, I launched Destiny, it throws you right into the intro mission of it. I got to what seemed like the end of it. It's like, okay, here's a no respawn zone, and here's a bunch of big robots. I felt like I was underleveled or under-equipped for that. Right. Because I was alone and normally they would match make you into those things. Maybe with this one they don't, I don't know. But I was alone and undergunned and died like six times in a row. We're like, okay, fuck this. I'm done and walked away from it. So I feel like with me, Destiny was like every major expansion or every time like something seemed cool, I would go back in and take a look, get lost, not really know where to go. Even when they redesigned the HUD to try to help that situation, it felt like it really didn't. And I would play four or five missions of sometimes it was the current thing, sometimes it was last year's thing that I didn't touch, and then just kind of bounce off it and go and do something else with my time. And so, yeah, Destiny, I'm not going to say it's like dead to me or whatever, but like the last year or so has been like me just being like, I think I'm just completely done with this game now. And so that's fine. I got so many hours out of Destiny 2 and played, I think, two of the raids, the relatively early ones, I guess in the grand scheme.

Speaker 2:
[44:21] Realis one and one of the other. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I like those games. There's something, there's something about Marathon that feels like they're getting one over on Sony. I want to be clear, I think the Halo games are good video games. When I think about their arc of who they were when they were making the original Marathon games, when they were making games like Myth, and then where Halo shows up, and this is going to be like real, this is going to feel like real Austin Walker as shit, but like Halo feels like America in the 2000s. Halo, there's the Master Chief.

Speaker 1:
[44:58] It's not that it feels like Halo is literally America in the 2000s.

Speaker 2:
[45:03] Yeah, dude, you know.

Speaker 1:
[45:04] Halo, fucking the end, the tail end of CKY, like the rise of Jackass, like Mountain Dew, like Mountain Dew was king.

Speaker 2:
[45:14] Mountain Dew was king, and support the troops, Mission Accomplished.

Speaker 1:
[45:17] We were on top, baby, America.

Speaker 2:
[45:19] That's right. You had your little blue girlfriend, and you had your cigar chomping marine buddy. You got in the damn jeep and you did that.

Speaker 1:
[45:27] I want to fuck that blue girl, but I don't think I can even touch her. I think my hand goes through her.

Speaker 2:
[45:30] What the? That makes me want to fuck her more.

Speaker 1:
[45:32] Exactly. You know?

Speaker 2:
[45:33] And so that's like 2003 America, America. And they captured that moment in that game. But it's not a game for sickos, you know? And then Destiny has a bunch of cool, weird corners in it. I think the Destiny lore, you know, I'm like that motherfucker. I think that stuff is cool. But the game is them chasing the business model, right? Like, it's them being like, how do we crack wow, but for the first person shooter? In some cases, very literally. And down to them trying to like talk to Blizzard and get tips. Like, how did you figure out Diablo? How did you get it?

Speaker 1:
[46:07] It's really insane when you think about that aspect of this, because you would never suspect, like when they started talking about Destiny and what it is and what they're going to do, like it was very easy to map what you think that game is. And then when you get to that raid for the first time and you see that like, oh, these motherfuckers, oh, Luke Smith really did like World of Warcraft.

Speaker 2:
[46:24] He really liked, he really was the scorpion, the Scarab Lord or whatever the that title was.

Speaker 1:
[46:29] And you're just like, oh shit, like they, wow, that's fucking crazy. Yeah, it's a-

Speaker 2:
[46:34] And I'm not, I mean, I guess I should say that is for a certain type of sicko too. I'm not, I don't want to dismiss the deep Destiny person who's like maxing their stats on the guns and rerolling for the best possible version of the purple guns, whatever. Like I get it.

Speaker 1:
[46:48] We must get our god rolls.

Speaker 2:
[46:49] Oh, your god rolls, thank you. But there's something about Marathon that feels like they pulled the wool over Sony's eyes about who this was for. And because the Destiny promise was this is for everybody. This is going to be the game that you're going to, you're going to see this gun and you're going to go, you want to know how I got this gun? Which I actually do for Marathon, by the way. When something comes out like a twin tap, which isn't even a gold gun, it's just a kind of rare PR. I'm like, whoa, where did you get that?

Speaker 1:
[47:18] Where did you find a twin tap? Who's carrying these these days? Where's the loot pool gone?

Speaker 2:
[47:23] And so I think that Marathon is like, it's a harsh game, it's a mean game. It's a game that unlike the, let's say Halo, which is like, you're the hero. Marathon is like, you are nothing. You are the gum on the bottom of the boot or thing that isn't even a human.

Speaker 1:
[47:40] Now go break 12 windows.

Speaker 2:
[47:42] Now go break 12 windows. Have you gotten to the second Gucci contracts where you're like, go get eaten by the ticks?

Speaker 1:
[47:49] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[47:49] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[47:50] Yeah. Go take some tick damage and jump off a thing, take some fall damage. It's like early Call of Duty had those like challenges. You'd get to like level eight and would unlock them like, get blown up by a car, fall to your death. And you would fall to your death and go, ja, ja, ja, ja, ja, ja, yes. Yes.

Speaker 2:
[48:07] And here you do that. And then you got to get out of here too. You have to survive. You have to extract.

Speaker 1:
[48:12] Right.

Speaker 2:
[48:12] I think this is a game for sickos. This feels like the company that made myth. This feels like the company that made the original Marathon games. I think that was a huge surprise for me. I was so sure that whatever this was would be sanded down. It would feel like a hero shooter. Not that there aren't heroes in class or classes or however you want to think about the shells. But I thought it would be sanded down. I thought it would not be... I thought they were like, we're going to crack how to make the progression shooter for a wide audience by taking the stuff that's in Tarkov and Ark Raiders and all this and making it appealing for the mass audience palette. I don't think that's what they did. They made something that like... They made it for me and you.

Speaker 1:
[48:50] Yeah. This game is disgusting in a lot of ways. And I love every bit about that in ways that I never would have expected. Because when it comes to multiplayer shooters, I haven't in months now, but I was a real big Call of Duty. I hit even on this year's game, which I don't think is very good, I hit Prestige 6. And because it's a very easy game to sit down and just go like, that is my cozy game. I sit down, I shoot some fools in the head, and I go to bed. It's like, look at this. Yeah, whatever, man. Cool. And it was very low key and whatever. Marathon, it is not a fucking cozy game. It's like I moved back to mouse and keyboard for Marathon. Like I have a, I'm going to unplug, it's going to make a noise here. I'll show it to you. I think other people have seen it. I bought a, it's a half a keyboard. It's just the left half of a keyboard.

Speaker 2:
[49:44] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[49:46] Just for playing games on. And it has hall effect switches on it. And I can do all the stuff that gets you banned from Counter-Strike servers, where if you hold it, hold down A and then tap D, the input will change. So you can kind of skitter a little bit.

Speaker 2:
[49:59] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[50:00] It's fucked, man. It's great.

Speaker 2:
[50:04] This is the best Cyberpunk game that's ever come out. And that's why you are getting an implant that you can side shuffle a little bit so that you can left peak or whatever the fuck, right?

Speaker 1:
[50:15] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[50:16] It's I, you know, the other day, here's here's my marathon story that I was like, oh, they made it good. I was playing on. Have you got an outpost to the bit like the third big map?

Speaker 1:
[50:25] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[50:26] Sorry. I don't know. How much how many hours do you have in it?

Speaker 1:
[50:28] Like four forty five or something like that.

Speaker 2:
[50:32] That's there.

Speaker 1:
[50:32] Yeah, I have not done cryo and you know, it's going to be a while before I do.

Speaker 2:
[50:36] Yeah, we should run cryo sometime. I have not extracted from cryo yet. I'm not that good, but I've run it a bunch and fed.

Speaker 1:
[50:43] I just want to get back into playing with Cruz. Like that's that's kind of the thing is I feel like most of the people like a server, a Discord server started up with some folks who wanted to play together and then all of them also are reviewing other games.

Speaker 2:
[50:57] And so like everyone kind of started being out of the biz in this way means I can just. Yeah, I do. I do a games podcast now, so I do have to force myself to play other things. But even there I was playing I was playing Road to Vostok so that I can secretly just talk about more Marathon because that's also an extraction shooter. Anyway, the other day I was playing on Outpost with a couple of friends. And this is after this most, not the most recent update, but the update that added the carry stuff, which is like it encourages collaboration and it gives Rooks, which are for people who don't know there's a class that you can kind of like drop into the middle of a match as a thing called Rook, which is like a hacked version of one of the UESC robots. And you can now, they start with a Mercy Kit, which is like a revive for another player. It's like you can rez as someone you've already downed. And I don't-

Speaker 1:
[51:48] Specifically someone who's not part of your team. That's right, specifically. You can always rez someone who's on your team, but this was for players who maybe you shot.

Speaker 2:
[51:54] Yes, exactly. So I think that the way that they frame it in the patch notes were like, we get it. Sometimes de-escalation happens after the firefight. You know, you go, you down someone and you go, are you cool? Instead of going, are you cool? Before pulling the trigger. So we're in outposts or like, in one of these kind of peripheral areas, we're like, okay, we're doing one of the contracts where you have to go into one of the wings and da-da-da-da. And we run into a rook. We hear a rook coming who's like talking and is like, are you guys cool? Are you guys cool? And we're like, yeah. Because sometimes you get a rook on your crew and you're like, cool, like there's four people to the crew now, we're good. Comes in the room and he's like, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. And like drops his gun on the ground to be like, you could take the gun, just don't kill me. I have to go into the pinwheel, which is like the center of Outpost. It's kind of like a hub and spoke situation. He's like, I'm going to go into the center. I'm trying to do some stuff. I don't even need my gun. You go ahead, you take it. And we're like, dude, you're fine. Go, just go. We're going the other way. It's not a big deal. Let him go. And then about, I don't know, seven or eight seconds later, he goes, you guys are going to wish you killed me. And we go, uh-oh, like, what do you mean? And then we could hear him, like, talking to himself and being like, yeah, they're going this way. They're going this way. And someone's like, yeah, I'm going to get him because he's not talking to himself. He's talking to four other rooks. They descended on us like velociraptors. They came from everywhere. They had set up a trap ahead of us and had set us up. They sent this guy in to see like, are you punks basically? Are we going to be able to jump these guys? And the answer was, yes, they could. And they just completely devoured us. And they were cackling the whole time. And you have to remember, they didn't know each other before this.

Speaker 1:
[53:34] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[53:35] This was organic. They decided to become a gang of killers together when they loaded into the match. They are not on a crew.

Speaker 1:
[53:43] No.

Speaker 2:
[53:43] So that was produced. And that was the out, to me, that feels like an outgrowth of the stuff that's supposed to bring you closer together. In fact, just turned them into a different roving band of lunatics.

Speaker 1:
[53:55] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[53:56] Game of the Year for me right now.

Speaker 1:
[53:58] So good. It's good to see like because early marathon, I feel like the hump I got over was I was playing it like Arc Raiders.

Speaker 2:
[54:06] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[54:06] I was like I was hesitating every time I saw another player and I was getting killed every time.

Speaker 2:
[54:11] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[54:11] And so that bred the bitch out of me. And so I was like, OK, all right, fine. It's fucking on now. Like anytime I see anybody is fucking on and just started shooting, just start shooting. I don't care the range, the distance. Like if there's enough range, I'll try to creep up. But like I've just started encounters from ridiculous ranges and just be like, I'm going to get some shots on this fucker because healing takes so long that by the time I get there, I'm going to finish that. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[54:34] I think the time to kill is so short that there's benefits in getting in any damn and the time to heal is so long, especially when you don't have good healing, that it's beneficial to just shoot first so often. And, you know, I actually think in some way we might get to the point where collaboration grows out of that somehow. I was watching one of these like, you know, all the time streamers go into cryo for the first time when that first dropped and he was getting his ass kicked. His crew was getting their asses whooped. They were burning through all their stuff. And at one point there was a match where they got into a firefight with somebody and you know, it tells you who downs you when you get killed. And they were like, oh shit, I recognize that person's name. And they said to their chat or to someone else on the crew, they were like, Discord message that guy, tell him it's us and let's see if we can run this thing as a six man instead of a three man. And I was like, all right, that's kind of sick. Soon enough, what I want is like, you have a three man crew and then you have an operator. I want the operator to be able to do all your comms.

Speaker 1:
[55:34] So they added the ability to latch prox chat.

Speaker 2:
[55:37] Oh, did they?

Speaker 1:
[55:38] So yeah, so normally that was like you had to push for proximity chat, but I think they made it so you can just default it open all the time, which specifically I think helps your Band of Rooks situation, helps them communicate because I think that was like they were, they were missing a dimension of what this genre I think was original. The thing you hear about when people talk about why this genre is interesting is some of that social aspect. So Marathon was I think skewing so far in the, it's not worth it to talk. I didn't even have my mic in front of me most of the time playing the game, unless I was playing with other people, because I don't have anything to say to these people other than bullets. That's right. So I like the idea of the Mercy Kit. They're creating situations that will I think, make that a little muddy and make you maybe want to get back on a microphone or, and some of the other systems that it seems like they're teasing or talking about, it seems like they're trying to solve that problem. Because I do think that's something that maybe they didn't anticipate was like, oh, we're going to make an extraction shooter so naturally people will sometimes talk, sometimes not. And then they realize like, oh, we made a kill box. What do we put in this game to A, like make it less of one for like just the narrative purposes or just the purpose of the game we want it to be. But also is there a way to get back to your point about like them pulling one over on Sony? I do think there's going to be some kind of push to like, hey, can we find a way to make this game a little friendlier? Is there a way to make the early game something like we need to get people into this game hooked because like, this game is for a very specific type of fucking lunatic right now. And they are going to like, they're going to talk it up. But like, is there a way for us to maybe not?

Speaker 2:
[57:24] Can we get some Destiny numbers? Can we get some? Can we ever get close to Halo numbers again?

Speaker 1:
[57:29] Right. And then I don't know about what to Halo numbers.

Speaker 2:
[57:33] Yeah, like no one, no one, no one. Roblox, you know, and they're not making that. I mean, what they're kind of making is like an adult Roblox simulator, like you're there. Roblox is a mega corporation could exist in the marathon world. You know?

Speaker 1:
[57:50] Yeah, sure. The UESC is just is actually just the outgrowth of of Roblox.

Speaker 2:
[57:57] Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1:
[57:58] That's like a very Saints Row kind of story at that point.

Speaker 2:
[58:01] That's right. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[58:01] Well, Ultor was actually originally just they sold books.

Speaker 2:
[58:04] And then this is the stuff that I want them to continue leaning into. It's like every time I learn something new about this space colony or about one of the companies, it's just so messed up. It's so it's so juicy, especially the liquid cheeseburgers. Those are the juiciest things. I'm very happy with the drinkable cheeseburgers.

Speaker 1:
[58:22] Weird thing. So I've played whatever it is, 40 hour, you know, of the final version of that game. I saw like three drinkable cheeseburgers during that open beta, that final weekend they have.

Speaker 2:
[58:32] Server slam. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[58:34] It's the server slam. I have not seen a drink. I've not seen, let alone extracted with it. Wow. Sense. Rarity on the drinkable cheeseburgers is strange.

Speaker 2:
[58:46] Maybe people are getting out there and getting the burgers before you. They're leaving everything else. But damn it, they're getting the burgers. They want to drink them. Yeah, I think that the core of it is like, it's not even like I don't want it to be a kill box. I like that it's a kill box. I even find camaraderie in the kill box nature of it. I say GG more in this game than I do in a regular shooter. Because I'm like, yeah, bro, we're both out here working. You know what I mean? Yeah. I hope that Gucci doesn't screw you. I hope USC doesn't fall on your head.

Speaker 1:
[59:15] It's just a fucking planet full of gig workers. We just got to get from one thing to the next, man. I don't know. This guy said he was going to give me four bucks if I got jacked in the box to his house in nine minutes.

Speaker 2:
[59:24] I mean, that's the dream. I was talking to a friend of mine and he was like, I think you should be able to order healing supplies and should load someone into your game, deliver you healing supplies in the middle of it. And they might just jack you when they show up instead of taking the pay. But I want that. I want Marathon Eve Online. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[59:42] No, that's... Fuck, that would be great. It would be good. It's an outgrowth of the Rook system of just like, you know, they already have a method to get people in mid game.

Speaker 2:
[59:51] Yeah. Call them doves or something or like, like some sort of other sort of bird, right? And like you see they fly in and they they drop off whatever the thing is you ordered and they get paid or they jump you, you know?

Speaker 1:
[60:03] Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[60:04] Yeah. It's like it's like straight up gig economy shit. Because it already is.

Speaker 1:
[60:07] Yeah, it already is.

Speaker 2:
[60:08] The other thing I want is I want a corporation that is like the entertainment corporation that's telling me to do cool tricks, like streamer clip shit, like get three headshots, you know?

Speaker 1:
[60:18] Yeah. Yeah. That should just be like the the anarchy group should just morph into that over time.

Speaker 2:
[60:23] Just like by the I can't wait for that to be revealed to be solved. I mean, speaking of the WWE, the CM punk fake anarchy shit, I can't wait for the reveal that that might or whatever.

Speaker 1:
[60:37] Are they called Mida?

Speaker 2:
[60:38] They're called Mida, are just CIA plants or whatever.

Speaker 1:
[60:42] Right. It's actually the UESC.

Speaker 2:
[60:44] Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[60:45] We want you to break windows early on, but now if you could just knock off any windows.

Speaker 2:
[60:49] Yeah. Exactly. You broke them so that you've justified our police presence because of the broken windows.

Speaker 1:
[60:54] Yeah. You're keeping the rent down. Nice. Nice work. We're going to come in and move in some high-rise condos. There's so much. I think that's the exciting thing about where this game is. It's something that I don't feel about a lot of the other shooters or the extraction shooters is I feel like from a lore perspective and just like everything they've done, there's so much possibility to do things that I think would be narratively fit and would be super exciting. And I just love the visual style, like it was something that like, it rubbed me the wrong way a little bit at first and like I remember talking to some friends about it and we were all like, this is kind of like, this feels like four-year-old net art, like it just feels like they're coming to it late because game companies always come to everything late. But as I played more and more of it, I was like, you know what? There's enough fucking Evangelion rips and everything else. All of the stuff comes together in a way that I think really works.

Speaker 2:
[61:51] I think there's something really special about the level design and the environmental art because it isn't just the loading screens. It isn't just the corporate AI, high-res NFT art, which is what they all look like to me.

Speaker 1:
[62:08] Sure.

Speaker 2:
[62:09] It's positive, actually, in a weird way, right?

Speaker 1:
[62:11] Right.

Speaker 2:
[62:12] It is that you are also in a marsh that is foggy and dense and scary, and you're hearing weird things, and then you turn the corner and you see someone's Lego kit building come up over the horizon. It's the mix of all of that that I think actually elevates the whole thing because you're not just getting the five-year-old net art, you're also getting super high-res, incredibly immersive quote-unquote environments. And that mixed together is actually just deeply, it's just really sweet, it's really cool.

Speaker 1:
[62:44] It's crazy they pulled it off. I remember that the very first beta they ran when it was just trios and there was no proximity chat. And just like I think that was, like just fundamentally I was like, this game is not for me. I came away from that weekend or whatever it was, just thinking like this is, they're doomed man, this thing is DO fucking A. And then when they did, after the art thing happened, and they had to contend with that and they delayed the game and everything, they ran like a closed NDA beta and I got into that and played some of that. And we're like, I came away from that going like, actually, wait a minute, huh. Interesting. This is still really dicey, I don't know man. Like it, you know, they might make a cool thing that I don't like, but there's at least like, you see something here and then for it to come out and be like, oh, actually, I am so fucking in love with this game, I think about it all the time and I can't stop thinking about it. And the universe and world and people have Etsy projects before all the corporations and like the, and just like seeing cosplay like 48 hours after the release, people going like, okay, well, here's my vandal. It's like, I kind of threw it together, but hey, look, like it was really crazy.

Speaker 2:
[63:54] Especially in an era where the dead game accusations come out before any game is out. And anything with anything that looks like a hero is, let alone, you know, anything characterful in that way is just immediately like in the, the target, you know, in the, in the reticle for, for folks. It kind of shocking that they made a set of weirdo characters to play as who I am actually weirdly fond of, even though they're not characters. And maybe it's because they're not really characters that I get to be fond of them. I don't know.

Speaker 1:
[64:25] It's weird that they have voices. Sometimes that rubs me the wrong way. You know, it's like they have voices and they have dialogue that it's like, well, wait, isn't this me in this shell? Yeah. How much of that is me? How much of that is the shell? How much like, I think there's lore they could, I'm sure.

Speaker 2:
[64:38] Yeah, I'm sure there is. They want to, but my dream would be that each shell, my dream would be that I had a runner voice or like a runner dialogue set, and then a shell voice. And they did, I could pick triage's lines, but have them delivered by the Vandal voice actor. And like, when I'm playing as Vandal, and when I'm playing as Assassin, it's the Assassin voice. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1:
[65:01] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[65:01] But I'm sure there's some lore drop somewhere that is like, oh, well, they're biokinetics, and whatever their neural pathways are, I mean that they say this when you mean this.

Speaker 1:
[65:10] Yeah. And then some of the stuff they produced for, that they ended up using for advertising, and some of the trailers and stuff, like kind of get into the shells having personalities. A little bit.

Speaker 2:
[65:21] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[65:21] And you're like, okay, what is that? Okay.

Speaker 2:
[65:23] What's that mean? Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[65:25] Yeah. Have they imprinted a personality? Yeah. Someone in January in the chat says, the shells allegedly have imprinted light personalities. Sure. I guess that, yeah. There you go. Yeah. That makes some amount of sense. Let's take another break, and then we'll chat some more. After this, he said as he clicked over here, there we go. There it is. That's what I need. I'm at a point in my life where I like clothing, but I do not like shopping for clothes. So I find myself really focusing on things that last. A nice piece, a nice pair of pants that you know is going to be with you for years to come. Especially a nice pair of jeans. You know, I think there are, I have over the years, you know, and I've gotten pickier and pickier with jeans, you know, over the years for sure. But there was a real long time there. You just get like the radiest worst jeans and it's like, ah, this button fly, the buttons are, you know, ripping out and popping off. This is just like the legs are all wrong. The length feels uneven. You know, you just end up with a lot of bad pairs of pants. Rag and Bone, they've got infused denim that looks great and they're built to last. This denim stretches where it counts. It's got structure where it matters. You know, it kind of will feel like it sort of moves with you a little bit. I don't know, you know, you get like a stiff pair of jeans and it's just unpleasant to deal with. Rag and Bone makes jeans that are built to last. And they've spent 20 years obsessed with this, making jeans that get better over time. So that infused denim will last season after season. And you know, hey, get more comfortable the more you wear them. I've got a pair, you know, it's been hot lately. So you know, I haven't had a lot of great opportunities to wear long pants. But trying them out and taking them on the road a little bit, it's been a great fitting pair of jeans. And sometimes you just need that. These are built with premium materials and craftsmanship. They're made to last not just for a season, but again, for years. You're not just upgrading your look today, you're leveling up your entire wardrobe for the long haul. Dragon Bones Infused Collection overdoes it by design. They use a meticulous eight step process to create rich multi-dimensional washes, from indigo and black washes for like, you know, work or evening wear to like a lighter vintage inspired blue for casual weekends. Rag and Bone, your go-to denim for every occasion. And they don't just make denim, they got jackets, they got shirts, they got knits, all sorts of stuff for men, women, and children, all of it. It's time to upgrade your denim with Rag and Bone for a limited time. You can get 20% off your entire order with the code Jeff at ragbone.com. That's 20% off at ragbone.com with the promo code Jeff. When they ask, hey, where'd you hear about us? Support the show, let them know, it was us, it was us. All right, we're back, Austin Walker. You, I feel like it's been, I can't tell you how many years it's been since I have, like we've exchanged some text messages here and there, but I feel like it's been a long time. You've been through the wringer in the video game world.

Speaker 2:
[68:58] Yeah, dude, yeah, it's been a bit, it's been a bit. The last time we saw each other would have been, last, they'll finally three?

Speaker 1:
[69:06] Finally three, probably, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[69:08] It seems right, right?

Speaker 1:
[69:08] Like in person in person, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[69:10] Yeah. That's a nightmare.

Speaker 1:
[69:13] To go to go make video games, you want to go live the dream.

Speaker 2:
[69:15] I did. I want to go live the dream. You know, I'd already taken like a half step back. I'd already like stopped being the EIC at Waypoint. I was just doing the podcast. I was like, let me just let me just do the podcast. Let me get one of these talent contracts that gets me health care, but also lets me do some side side job writing.

Speaker 1:
[69:33] See, that's the good, the tally contract I had was like, give your likeness rights to CBS and it didn't go back.

Speaker 2:
[69:39] Yeah, I had to do that stuff too. Yeah, that part sucks. That part was not fun. They didn't use it for anything. It just meant that I didn't necessarily get paid when I would be like a talking head on various, you know, video stuff on the device network or vice channel or whatever it was called. Vice TV, probably. I don't remember what it was called. It's been so long. In any case, I then did step all the way away from Waypoint to go do game development at Possibility Space, one of many studios run by the Pritania Media Group. I think it was called the Pritania Media Group. I think we didn't really know when those of us who started early on at that company started on, we knew there was a sister studio. We didn't know that there would be new studios announced every six months or so for years to come. I can't get too deep into the particulars of what we were making or what went down from the inside out. Though actually maybe I can because they never paid us severance. It's like we were signed in NDA being like, wow, you'll pay us severance if blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We signed something that was like, hey, we will clear the computers you gave us off of all the stuff and we'll get to keep the computers because otherwise, you're going to have to deal with us sending you all these computers and you're not going to want to deal with those. But yeah, I was in Dev for three plus years, full-time, console game, console and PC, big name publisher, meeting with the head of game development for a platform holder, like that style of role. Really fun, really, really rewarding time. I don't regret it despite it all blowing up in my face. I got to meet some of the coolest people in the industry and working on stuff that was really cool and weird and really fun to be on the other side of it, even though it was stressful at points.

Speaker 1:
[71:42] Of course, and now, so this is Realis.

Speaker 2:
[71:47] Realis.

Speaker 1:
[71:47] Is what you're working on. I am. I mean, of course.

Speaker 2:
[71:50] Yeah, I mean, I'm still in the podcast circuit, as you will. And for now, the game project I've been working on is a tabletop role-playing game called Realis, R-E-A-L-I-S. It is currently being crowdfunded on Kickstarter. It is being published by Possible World Games, different than Possibility Space, similar in ways.

Speaker 1:
[72:15] I did read the Kickstarter page and have a moment where I was like, is that the-

Speaker 2:
[72:18] Can you fucking imagine if I had gotten myself scammed by going back to those people somehow? And then like-

Speaker 1:
[72:25] Like, hey, I know it seemed like a real bad thing that happened over here, but what do you say we do some more business to get-

Speaker 2:
[72:33] I have had nightmares of going back to work for those people, believe it or not.

Speaker 1:
[72:37] I have similar- I have similar- Yes.

Speaker 2:
[72:42] I had a dream about three months ago where I went to get a job with the former one of the co-owners of Possibility Space, but what he had done is bought acres and acres of land outside of Pittsburgh and built a weird marathon-esque complex. And I went to wait for him to leave the gym so that I could beg him for a job. It was the most degrading, terrible thing I could ever have dreamt. And I woke up being like, okay, well, I'm not that guy. That's good. I'm not that motherfucker. I got my own shit going on. But yeah, so it's a table hop role-playing game. It is a science fantasy role-playing game. I think there's a bunch of different stuff to flavor in it in terms of what the influences and shit are. I think mechanically and tone-wise, stuff like Berserk is a huge influence on it, even though that's not a science fantasy. It's like a dark fantasy. It draws a lot on weird fiction and weird science fiction. There's a series called Book of the New Son that came out in the 80s and the 70s. When did I should know this? I should not be just talking shit. I did a whole podcast series about Book of the New Son. So I should just know this. He had the early 80s, which is like the sort of thing where that's a book series about a guy who's part of a torturer's guild and he doesn't know it, but the guild hall is the body of a rocket ship because it's like an ancient rocket ship that has fallen into rust and ruin. So he had no idea.

Speaker 1:
[74:14] And it lies on acres of land in Pittsburgh.

Speaker 2:
[74:16] That he'd be exactly, yeah. I mean, there was a little of that. He's looking at a painting early on. He's like, what's up with this thing? It's a painting, it looks so realistic. But there's just a guy on gray land. It's like the moon landing. And he doesn't know what that is, right? So weird science fiction, science fantasy setting, living spaceships, guys with huge swords, ancient living computers, that type of thing. And I'd say the thing that's probably most interesting about it in terms of compared to other tabletop role playing games, one, instead of like stats or skills or moves, you have sentences, your character starts with four sentences that summarize sort of like what it is they're good at. So the Berserker has the following four sentences. I'll just read these. I think this is like a good way of introducing the game. I always kill my foe. I always carry an unstoppable weapon. I always learn through violence and I always hurt those close to me. Every class has a four sentence that's kind of like bad. It's kind of like this could be trouble in some way.

Speaker 1:
[75:24] Much like most people.

Speaker 2:
[75:25] Much like most people. Right. And the way the game works is that over time, those sentences all level up. They start off as plus zero sentences. This is a game where you can get a plus three sentence. That was kind of in some ways.

Speaker 1:
[75:38] You add more verbs to it. It's like I always kill or fuck.

Speaker 2:
[75:42] The other way, this is the thing that's actually good about the game, I think. I always kill my foe at night. I always kill my foe at night when they're part of the Imperial Empest, this kind of like bug empire. I always kill my foe at night when they're part of the Imperial Empest and they're threatening someone I care about. So they get stronger, but they get more limited. They tighten in. Right. I always, you know, there's a doctor type class called the Alchemist who's like, I always cure my patient. I always cure my patient. And as you level up, they get stronger. It gets to be a plus one, a plus two, a plus three. But maybe it's, I always cure my patient when I'm in my operating room or when I have all the right tools or when I have a second pair of hands or et cetera. Right. And so that stuff gets more constricted as it gets stronger. Because the other thing about Realis is there's no dice in it.

Speaker 1:
[76:31] This was the thing that like I'm look, I joined the Chessin Games Club when I was 15, and we played D&D a handful of times. And that was enough to make me off of it. Like I spent like a good long time, because I bought all the books. Yep. And I read the Dungeon Master's Guide and the Player's Handbook over and over again. I would just look at the tables and charts. If I get to level 20, then I'm like the title for the class or whatever and and look at all. Okay, so it's three copper pieces for this type of source. Like I was obsessed with all of them. Yeah. And like all of the systems. But like then when it came time to actually play it, I was like, I don't like doing this at all because these people are fucking dorks. I guess whatever it was. Yeah. Like fair enough. The group that we were in, there was a girl, her name was Melina and she showed up with a full loaf of bread and just ate it. She was playing out of the bag as we played. And I'm sitting here going like, I had my mom drive me to this person's house on a Saturday to do this. And this is like energy to get.

Speaker 2:
[77:38] It's like carbo loading. You know, you got to be ready to totally.

Speaker 1:
[77:44] But like it left me with a very specific feeling that was just like, I don't think I want to do this.

Speaker 2:
[77:48] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[77:49] And but it was also like the particulars of all of it. The game itself and 20-sided dice were so just the coolest fucking shit in the world when I was that age.

Speaker 2:
[78:02] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[78:04] And so to me, and then I played a bunch of car wars with some friends and we started reading Gerps books and then I got a driver's license and started doing that instead.

Speaker 2:
[78:19] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[78:19] Started crashing cars and for real, popping pills, whatever. And so that's where a lot of my knowledge falls off of it. So the idea of it being diceless, does it just come down to is the person running the game, say, here's the scenario, which of your sentences do you want to try to apply to this? Like how does that?

Speaker 2:
[78:42] That's like the very broadest version of thinking about it, right? So it's like the way the game, the way all these games work. And there's been like a lot of, I say, there's been like a lot of developments in the theory.

Speaker 1:
[78:51] I was going to say, yeah, a couple of long ways since Gerps.

Speaker 2:
[78:54] We have, and then actually in a way we've gone back, like there's a whole thing of the last 15 years called the Old School Renaissance or the Old School Revival, the OSR, which is people who are like, you know what was fucking cool was Gerps or was really, it's like, was AD&D. How do we get back to that? Because there's something about that that I really liked and that contemporary D&D and similar games.

Speaker 1:
[79:12] Is it just people that liked that there was a book called Oriental Adventures? Is it, I mean, be honest with me, because when you talk about like we need to go back, like the thing I always hear is someone going like, games were better before.

Speaker 2:
[79:22] There was a little bit of that. Those people suck and they are around. But there's a lot of people who are making stuff in this space. Because you know the other half of this though, right? It's like it's just like Mill Sims or any of this shit, right? Which is like half of it is reactionary assholes who miss when you could be racist and sexist. And the other half is like extremely cool trans people who are pushing the cutting edge on whatever the old shit is. Because they understand like the mechanics in a way that I just don't understand. I don't get it. So like that's how this space, what 100% is, right? You're going to find a game that is, you know, I would just, one of these games is called something like Lamentations of the Flame Princess. And that guy sucks, right? But then there's stuff that's like made by the coolest people you know that are, that's about like a game called Fist, which is, which is about like a soldier of fortune style mercenaries kicking down doors and killing people with AD&D style rules, you know, for everything. It's like, oh yeah, that's, that's cool as shit. You know what I mean? And it's made by cool people, right? So that divide is everywhere. But there's a lot of stuff that has gotten away from the sort of, the way I would describe it is like for a while there are tabletop games, especially games like this, where like we're trying to simulate reality. We're trying to like, you know, car wars is a great example where like you're going to roll a bunch of dice based on however many bullets you're going to fire or however many, you know what I mean? You're like trying to simulate it. The old Cyberpunk 2020 game was a lot like that. And then somewhere along the line, it started to be, instead of trying to simulate the reality of the world, you're trying to simulate genre. You're trying to figure out a way to like, you're simulating the way stories get told instead. And so a good example for this for me is there are games where instead of having like, you have 15 bullets, you have three ammo. And when you get a bad roll, but not a too bad roll, you might get your shot in, but you might lose one of that ammo. And that's like the idea of the camera shows that you're running out of bullets, you're running out of arrows or whatever. And eventually you're going to run out. So it's sort of like simulating the rules of storytelling more than the rules of reality. Realis kind of is in that space, but it is borrowing a little bit from that OSR kind of stuff, because I wanted there to be a thing where you had plus two sentences. Like that's stupid. It's really good in a really fun way. So the way that this game works is like you, a lot of the stuff, part of the big theory around games is like, we all kind of agreed 10, 15 years ago that like, oh, when you're playing a game, you're having a conversation. That's what these tabletop games are. You're having a conversation. And then sometimes something you don't know, I don't know how it's going to go, pick up some dice. We're going to roll some dice to figure out if you can do the thing. But otherwise, I'm not going to ask you if you can open the door, if you're not going to roll dice to open the door, you can open the door. You're a fully functioning person. You know how to move through the world. And so Realis is a game where it says, when you would normally pick up the dice, when something's uncertain or when it's opposed, when someone's trying to stop you from doing a thing, you have to say how you're doing it. What's your means? What's your way of doing it? And generally, it's going to be one of these sentences, like I always kill my foe, right? And when that happens, if someone opposes you, you compare the rank of the two sentences. Which one is more real? Which one is plus zero versus which one is plus one? Ties go to the defender effectively, the passive person. The person who's letting things, or really the person who's trying to keep things the way they are. So if you're like, I always want to kill my foe, I want to kill that motherfucker, and someone else trying to stop you from doing it and maintain this sort of status quo, and they have an equal sentence, they're going to win. So if you have, I always kill my foe, and they have, I always won on a one-on-one fight, which is one of the duelist's sentences, the duelist will win that because they're countering you and trying to keep the status quo protected. To win it then, you have to do something special. One, you have to maybe use a token that you can use to boost your sentences temporarily. You need to have a sentence ready to, what the game calls, realize, which is like level up. After you failed three times with the sentence, you mark it each time you fail with it, and then it realizes it becomes, I always want to fight at night. I always want to fight when I'm wielding my special sword, when I'm in my armor, when I'm in a big war versus a skirmish or something. Over time, you end up getting higher level sentences. The other thing you start doing is being like, well, wait a second, that only has, I win a fight, I always win a one-on-one fight. Let's jump him. He can't use that sentence then.

Speaker 1:
[83:41] Right?

Speaker 2:
[83:42] You learn, oh, the general has, I'm always surrounded by guards when I'm in my tent or whatever. We'll get him out of the tent. And so it ends up being a game about narratively maneuvering around the strengths of your opponents and the strengths of the world. And then this is also a weird game where like the moon, there's a thousand moons in this game.

Speaker 1:
[84:02] Of course.

Speaker 2:
[84:03] There's only 20 of them in the book. You could write the other 980 if you want at home. But those have sentences and you can use those sentences, so can the GM. The factions have sentences, the NPCs have sentences. There are special objects called ephemera, which are like anything from like a magic sword you found to an alliance you made. And those you can use as means in this way, like three times, but then you can't use them. You can, you will still have the magic sword, but the story doesn't care that you still have the magic sword. You already used it three times in a cool way. The story has moved on, you know? So there's all sorts of things like that, but that's the gist of it. It's a game about these different, you know, it's the, I am an unstoppable force, you're an immovable object, who wins, you know? And then it's also a game about like, words are weird, you know? You've been writing for your whole life, I know you know that words are weird. And sometimes you're like, ooh, I didn't even mean to say it like that, but I said it in kind of a cool way, or there's a meaning here I hadn't considered, or can I use this word this way? And it's a game that people are constantly, when you're playing it, you're stumbling into something that you didn't know you could do. I read an example from someone on Reddit recently who was playing the game, and they set up their GMing, and their crew, their players were trying to protect like a prince. And so what they did is they had someone at a ball get poisoned in a hallway halfway across the castle, which drew the alchemist out of the party to go help the person who was poisoned or was hurt. And then they poisoned the prince. And then does anybody have a sentence that can counter? I always use a killer poison. And the only people who were left were like the duelist and the mage, and neither of them had a sentence at first that could stop that. And then duelist was like, well, I always carry a unique weapon. Could I bleed out the blood from the prince? And you're like, shit, no one can stop you from doing it? Yeah, that counters, let's go with that. And that's the stuff that is the juice of the game for me. It's like someone looks down at their sheet and they go, oh, shit, I never thought I could use that sentence that way, you know?

Speaker 1:
[86:10] So is that, so how much, so you said like the, you know, the different character classes come with their sentences.

Speaker 2:
[86:16] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[86:17] Is there room, and I guess the room is like anyone could do anything they want because it's a free country, still somehow. But is it a situation where there are four sentences or are you providing like, hey, there's 12 here and you should pick four when you pick this class, you need to pick three positive, one negative.

Speaker 2:
[86:34] It is, each of the 55 classes, I would say probably 50 of them, 51 of them start with the four sentences. Like that's it, those are your four sentences. You also can write your own kind of character bonds between you and other people in your band, your crew, and you have a dream. And a dream is a sentence that always wins, but you only get one of them. And once you use it in the campaign, it is gone. You cross it off your sheet. You've used your dream to do whatever. It didn't even have to be the thing you were dreaming about. As you and I both know, sometimes you have a dream and you spend it. Which is the other thing. You, when you use a sentence enough that it levels up after its third time. So after it's failed nine times, I guess, right? And you ranked it up. You don't have to rank it up after it's failed the third time. You can keep it ready to level up, but not actually pull the trigger on it if you want. But after it would have leveled up the fourth time, it retires. And so it becomes once I always killed my foe, right? And you can still use it. It's a plus zero sentence.

Speaker 1:
[87:32] Right.

Speaker 2:
[87:32] But you don't always kill your foe anymore. It's just not who you are anymore. It's kind of a game about getting older.

Speaker 1:
[87:39] And can you level up that version of it?

Speaker 2:
[87:42] I don't think so. I think the way the rules are written are it's locked at plus zero forever. I'm pretty sure. Because once you get to plus zero on all of them, you retire the character, right? There are like five classes that do have, you should pick some of these sentences. There's one that's like a wizard who has like, when I have cut grass, I always move the winds. And that class has like 12 things to pick from that are kind of like your wizard components.

Speaker 1:
[88:08] You know?

Speaker 2:
[88:09] And anytime you would rest effectively, anytime you have like downtime, you can swap what components you have, but you keep whatever the condition is. So on a good night of sleep, I always, whatever, and the good night of sleep has to stay even if you change your components out. There's a mech class that has a similar thing where you're loading components into the mech.

Speaker 1:
[88:29] Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[88:30] And then there's like a werewolf or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde class where you have two character sheets that have different sentences and those both, you're pulling for both the werewolf and the non-werewolf from the same set of sentences because I looked at those types of characters. I was like, actually, it's not clear sometimes who is the sneaky one and who is the violent one. Sometimes the non-werewolf is the asshole. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1:
[88:55] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[88:56] Yeah. So there are some instances there, but fundamentally it's the thing you just said, which is like, it's a free country. The book is filled with lines that are like, hey, this is your game. You're finishing the game when you play it. You make the decisions. If you want to hack it, if you want to change it, do that. That's when it becomes real. So yeah, if you're like, I want to take three of these sentences and write a fourth one that's my own, or if you want to mix and match them, I think the game still works just fine. In a lot of ways, it's about giving people illustrations of what I think works well and has worked well in play tests, and being like, yeah, go for it.

Speaker 1:
[89:33] And giving some guidance around like, hey, there are probably ways to write some sentences that are a little too powerful, so you should consider these modifiers as they level up.

Speaker 2:
[89:42] Exactly. And the modifiers have to make it falsifiable in some way. I had someone write in who was like, could I make it like, I always kill my foe when I really need to kill my foe? And he was like, I know what you mean, but in play, would you ever say, no, I actually shouldn't use this? Because if you can't imagine yourself saying, no, I shouldn't be able to use this now, then that's not a good level up. You got to actually give it something harder than that.

Speaker 1:
[90:10] Right. And I guess that's like someone running the game is going to be the check and balance here as they always are.

Speaker 2:
[90:17] Exactly. Exactly. And if you want to run like that, then cool. If you want to have fun with it, go for it. You know, I'm not-

Speaker 1:
[90:24] We all have invincible sentences, let's just have fun and romp around.

Speaker 2:
[90:27] Oh, did it not work? Yeah, weird. Weird. You didn't have a good time after you changed all the rules. Okay, cool. There's some optional rules in there too now. There's like, that was the big thing. I released a version of this last January that was like 60 pages or something. Maybe it was more than that. But it wasn't, this thing is like 400 pages long. It's like, 55 classes, 125, 150 NPC classes and types and shit. Many of the factions have art, all of the classes have art. We hired 17 artists. We spent all the money we made on the preview version on the art. And so I think it's a cool thing. I think it's a cool object. It's like, you can, it's going to be a book. You put it on the shelf, you know? Someone, as you know, I've worked in digital media most of my life. We don't get to make stuff very often.

Speaker 1:
[91:19] Yeah. It's a lot of that stuff kind of goes away. Like, there's some stuff I wish would, honestly. But the Internet is the Internet, man. But yeah, no.

Speaker 2:
[91:30] It's never the stuff you want to go away that goes away, is it? It's always the stuff you wish stuck around, that gets zapped somehow. And then you're like, no one believes me that there was this really funny video, or I wrote this thing and it just vanished, even though the rest of it's all still up.

Speaker 1:
[91:44] Right. Like here's half of a broken GameSpot page that was written in 2005. That is, you know, like, it's kind of still there, but like the dumb images we made for it are long gone.

Speaker 2:
[91:55] Oh, yeah. Or like you can get to it if you have the URL, but it's impossible to find it anywhere, especially now that search engines suck again, you know?

Speaker 1:
[92:05] One of the most frustrating things, well, no, a frustrating thing about going back to the company that owned GameSpot was they gave me access to the CDN. And they said, go ahead and log in and see what you can find. And it was all like a lot of it was still there. It was all broken live. But it's like, here's like, there's like decades of video reviews or like a decade, I guess I should say, of video reviews that are like mostly broken and gone. And like, I had the ability to hook them back up and make them work. No one else gave a shit.

Speaker 2:
[92:38] Right.

Speaker 1:
[92:39] So it wasn't like I could go to an engineer and say, hey, could you automate this? Because they're like, no.

Speaker 2:
[92:43] You had to do it by hand.

Speaker 1:
[92:44] So I could sneak into the GameSpot CMS and fix video reviews. And so I did for like 20 or 30 of them. And then I was like, what the fuck am I doing?

Speaker 2:
[92:52] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[92:53] This is insane. Like, this is stupid.

Speaker 2:
[92:55] Did you give up all at once or did you still pick a few more?

Speaker 1:
[92:59] I still picked a few. I still did a few more after that. But like the thing, GameSpot had the ability for users to upload video for a brief period of time.

Speaker 2:
[93:09] It's wild to think about.

Speaker 1:
[93:12] Yeah. Right. Different time. That stuff got completely blown away.

Speaker 2:
[93:17] Right.

Speaker 1:
[93:18] When they ended the feature, when they changed the user page, profile pages or whatever, like all of those videos got zapped and we were using them. Like there's a bunch of videos. Like I think there was a video of like the day they announced that Nintendo was naming it The We.

Speaker 2:
[93:31] Right.

Speaker 1:
[93:31] Where Cary Guskos, who worked on Marathon and then got laid off before Chipped, was filming people as they were coming into the office saying, what do you think about The We? The name. What do you think about the name? And getting all of those reactions. Like that's just gone. I'm like, I wish that was still, I wish that some of that stuff was still around. Like we did a bunch of dumb shit. And at a time when not enough people, like we were finding our footing with dumb shit in a way that I think would become useful in the years ahead.

Speaker 2:
[94:00] And cool to see, I'm sure, as a student of the game being like, hey, how did they find their footing here? Gone.

Speaker 1:
[94:09] Or like, or how did we sneak this shit into a website that actively didn't want it?

Speaker 2:
[94:15] Right, because you had to use the user video upload feature to do this, presumably because you didn't have...

Speaker 1:
[94:21] There was no real out, like I couldn't just record a video of me talking shit about something and publish it to the site without someone going, what are you doing?

Speaker 2:
[94:27] Right.

Speaker 1:
[94:28] Like that was at a time when I was on a podcast disagreeing with a review and that got me a bit of a talking to.

Speaker 2:
[94:35] Oh, interesting.

Speaker 1:
[94:36] Because we wanted to present a unified, you know, you can't...

Speaker 2:
[94:41] It's like publication. It's the publication's review.

Speaker 1:
[94:44] Exactly. We got so much shit from people all the time, for reviews all the time that it was like the call doesn't need to be coming from inside the house. Just don't do it. And I was like, I get it. But also like this is a losing like this is this fight is already lost. It is now 2004.

Speaker 2:
[94:58] There is no way this is the way this is all going.

Speaker 1:
[95:01] Yeah, it is.

Speaker 2:
[95:02] Actually, like this, this is going to all be disagreeing about stuff all the time. And that's actually going to be the draw. That's, yeah, that's what the whole media ecosystem is going to be eventually.

Speaker 1:
[95:12] Yeah, but yeah, I don't know. Like I like that. That's the stuff that I look at and I miss. And all that's left is like there's like we put it. It's old DVDs like when I think about like physical objects of like stuff we did, like we did E3 documentaries that were like us being dumb shit at E3 and what it was like to like record a press conference and then have to drive that tape back to the booth so that we could broadcast it. I've seen some of this stuff at the venue and like some just that that era of shit. It was it was nice to have some of that stuff, but so much of it is just long gone now.

Speaker 2:
[95:45] But so, yeah, like in that reality. I feel good about making a book that's a physical book that's going to get printed and shipped and I think we actually just found out that we're definitely going to get to have cheaper shipping to like Canada and Europe, which is really cool given because we were like, okay, well, are we going to get screwed on tariffs and on shipping costs or everything else? But we hit the number that makes it viable to ship a bunch of them to a distribution center and da da da da da. But yeah, so that part feels good. And I'll be honest, like, you know, the way that shit went down at Possibility Space, I'm joking about it, but like it me up, man. You know, I felt really bad for years after that, right? It's only been a couple of years, but it's felt bad for those years. We worked really hard on something that was really cool and weird. And that was, it was, you know, there was a mass audience element to it. It was going to be a big commercial live service console game that did some stuff that I think probably would have worked better just if we had been just a PC game. But, and we were at the stage where our publisher was doing play tests with us, not there at all. None of the people on the team were there. And we were coming back with like 4.7, 4.8, fun out of five, fun scores. And, you know, there was like graphic scores, 1.8, because it was all super placeholder, gray box, you know, designer art type shit, because our main art team was like working on production quality stuff. And it had some real challenges. It was something that was going to be like really open ended. And so it needed a graphical style that could be like flexible and not really not Baldur's Gate 3 quality art, for instance, to do like a little, to do a little peek behind the curtain. Could you believe Austin Walker was working on an RPG?

Speaker 1:
[97:34] Like what?

Speaker 2:
[97:35] Yeah, I know. It's wild. And so like, we couldn't do that. We had to do something else. And so what, you know, the long and short of it is like, we had a bunch of the game written, we had a bunch of the game designed, we had all sorts of cool stuff that no one is ever going to get to see, you know? I think one of the things we ended up, you know, requesting and arguing for was that, you know, some of that stuff gets to be in artist portfolios, so that when they're interviewing for other jobs, they can point at the work that they had done. And so I was like, some of that stuff from the design, the game design stuff I did, but not much of the writing, because the writing is like owned by our various investors and shit at this point. And so I can't put that stuff anywhere. And so there was something really hard about closing that door and being like, well, there go those three years. Again, coming from online media, digital media, if you have an idea for a thing you want to write or record, you just do it, that's the beauty of the thing. And one of the first things you taught me when I first came to Giant Bomb a decade ago, or longer, 11 years ago, which is crazy, you were like, Austin, it's about batting average, it's not about home runs, it's about getting out decent stuff every day, every couple of days. Don't worry about each one being a huge hit, just try to get on base.

Speaker 1:
[98:57] Yeah. I mean, it's showing up and publishing.

Speaker 2:
[99:03] Publishing. Yeah. Hit the button. Put something in the CMS, hit the button. Get in front of the microphone, hit the button. And making a video game is not like that.

Speaker 1:
[99:13] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[99:13] It is internally a little bit where you're like, I want to file this new thing. But man.

Speaker 1:
[99:17] Like discipline wise, I think that's a big part of why I've never had a huge desire. It's brutal. For that side of it is because I think I would lose my fucking mind. Yeah. Having to be like, okay, nine people know about this and that's the way it's going to stay for the next two years. And I don't know that I could do it. It's hard.

Speaker 2:
[99:38] It's the number one thing I tell journalists and critics who want to get into game dev, especially this type of game dev. If what you want to do is make weird fucked up shit that you ship every three months, go for it. You know what I mean? If you want that style of indie or even smaller than indie, awesome. If you want to treat it as your art practice and you're just jamming out shit, cool. But if you're trying to make a triple A or double A video game that's going to take years to release and no one may ever, ever, ever see it, especially the way that the industry works these days, you have to be the type of person where you're cool with that. And there are lots of people who are fine with that. They just don't have this thing that we have because we came up in this space where we're like, no, I have an idea. I did the idea. What do you mean no one can look at it? It's hard. And so I think Realis in some ways is like exercising the demons of that. Because I started working on Realis before I took that job. Realis is older than that whole arc of my life. It was a side project during some of that stuff. It was like, to go back to the Marathon is a sicko's game. Like, Realis was a sicko's game that I was doing by myself after work hours because my day job was, how do I make an RPG that could go on a platform for the biggest, widest audience possible, right? And so there is something really like emotionally, there's a relief of like, okay, I'm finally going to put this thing out in the world. Finally putting something out in the world again. And it's making me feel like maybe I could get one of those jobs again. But we'll see. We'll see how the next few weeks and months go in my life.

Speaker 1:
[101:03] Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And I mean, and the video game industry. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[101:09] How are you feeling about how things are going in the games industry? Do you want to talk about some new stuff? Do you want to take another break and talk about some new stuff? Because some of the new stuff we have is industry.

Speaker 1:
[101:19] I'll answer your question on the other side of the break and we'll talk about news stories because I think all of it is sort of tied together. Here's a fun trick that's going to happen. I have to go to the bathroom. This ad might cover it, it might not.

Speaker 2:
[101:33] I'll be ready.

Speaker 1:
[101:33] I'm warning you. If it ends, it will come back to just you and you will be live.

Speaker 2:
[101:38] Okay. Or with a camera.

Speaker 1:
[101:41] With a camera.

Speaker 2:
[101:41] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[101:42] Yes. I can cut that out of the aftermath, but if you want to talk to people, feel free.

Speaker 2:
[101:47] No, hang out.

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
[103:32] Oh, sorry. I was just playing some fantasy star online. Is that cool?

Speaker 1:
[103:38] Yeah, no, that's fine.

Speaker 2:
[103:38] Okay, I'll just turn that other way.

Speaker 1:
[103:41] What do you got? What are you playing it on?

Speaker 2:
[103:42] I'm playing on one of these stores. I got one of these stores.

Speaker 1:
[103:45] You like it? I almost bought one and then realized I have like a raw ally X in the Steam Deck and like nine other things.

Speaker 2:
[103:52] Yeah, it's the first one I've really liked. It's the first one I've gotten a bunch of these over the years. These types of things. It is the first one that I've been like, Oh yeah, I like playing games on it.

Speaker 1:
[104:03] God damn it.

Speaker 2:
[104:03] I'm sorry.

Speaker 1:
[104:04] I'm sorry.

Speaker 2:
[104:05] I like a Steam Deck, but it's hmm. There's games I don't want to play on it. I don't want to play everything on it.

Speaker 1:
[104:11] The D-pad is not great for the D-pad is not great.

Speaker 2:
[104:13] The D-pad is not great.

Speaker 1:
[104:15] I want to play old games on a thing, and none of these things have very good D-pads.

Speaker 2:
[104:18] Yep. The controls on this are really cool. The buttons feel pretty good. The screens are really nice. Everything I've played on it has run pretty well.

Speaker 1:
[104:29] Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Speaker 2:
[104:31] I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's like 500 bucks. Maybe I'm not.

Speaker 1:
[104:34] It's like 500 bucks.

Speaker 2:
[104:35] It's like 500 bucks. It's like 500 bucks.

Speaker 1:
[104:37] I gotta get it before they raise the prices again.

Speaker 2:
[104:39] You have to. And also before we have entered, I don't know if you've seen someone who I know in the games industry. I don't know that he's using his real name on this account, but he described the coming years as the years of gaming sorrow. And he was like, you should get one of these devices for our coming years of gaming sorrow.

Speaker 1:
[104:57] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[104:58] How are you feeling about the industry?

Speaker 1:
[105:01] So I went to DICE this year. And DICE, for people that don't know, it's an industry event. It is, in a lot of ways, a little more business focused than something like GDC. And it is people at risk of sounding like an absolute fucking piece of shit. It's thought leaders or something. Like it is that type of pitch. This is an event that has a golf tournament built into it, if that tells you anything about DICE.

Speaker 2:
[105:30] I see. I did not know that about DICE. That's very funny.

Speaker 1:
[105:33] And also a Magic the Gathering tournament and also a poker tournament because it's in Vegas. And a go kart event. Somewhere in the middle of that is a bunch of networking events. And I did not do that. Because people stay out too late because it's Las Vegas. And so the idea of waking up at 9 a.m. to make it to the go kart tournament seems a little farfetched.

Speaker 2:
[105:54] Fair.

Speaker 1:
[105:55] And it was great. It was, you know, I caught up with a lot of people that I hadn't seen in a long time. It was the first event that I had really been to in a long time. And DICE is always a really interesting time because you get the chance to talk to a lot of people that I just don't run into any other way. And so it's not something that I come back with like, I've got all these stories to write or there's going to be an hour of podcast chatter about it. Like I interviewed some folks at the DICE Awards. I interviewed Greg Kasavin, got him on there, Shazigram among other people. Yeah. And but the real value of it was just like, I need to kind of get a lay of the land. Like what is going on in with video games? How do people feel about it? Because I know how a lot of developers feel about it because I'm in more frequent contact with people who are, you know, like actively working on games day to day and all this other stuff. So to get a chance to talk to like, you know, people that have been like, this is like Mark Cerny's walking around and like there's like a lot of, you know, people higher up. I did not speak with Mark, but I did see him there. Um, and I came out of DICE feeling pretty good about the industry in general. It was a feeling of like, hey, this sucks and it's going to still suck. But like we're figuring out like there's a smaller industry on the other side of this, but there is an exciting smaller industry on the other side of this. There are deals to be signed. Like there's still like there's money in this space. We just need to figure out. Like, you know, like someone I was with was like, I had a big meeting with a bunch of bankers and then like walking them through like, here's what video games are now and here's why you should continue to invent, you know, like trying to convince money people that they should continue to invest in the space. And a lot of stuff like that. I came away from it going like, yeah, it's been it's been brutal for years. It's probably not going to change anytime soon. And like the high guard stuff happened in the middle of that man. And so I played a bunch of high guard.

Speaker 2:
[107:54] I liked high guard. I just want to say that out loud somewhere once and then we can move on.

Speaker 1:
[107:58] Okay. I did not. That's fine.

Speaker 2:
[108:00] That's fine.

Speaker 1:
[108:00] I use my guard. I was like, no, no, no.

Speaker 2:
[108:02] You probably just didn't learn all the lore. Like some of us. It's fine.

Speaker 1:
[108:05] Yeah. If only I had read the battle pass to its completion, I guess maybe I would. But that, that happened in the middle of this event. And so I was hanging out with people that had worked at Respawn and knew a lot of them like, oh my God, it was like this brutal thing in the middle of it. And it was just this reminder of just like where video games are at. But in a general sense, I came away from it feeling positive about the, if not the short term, then the medium term and long term. Like this will get figured out.

Speaker 2:
[108:38] You know, we've had a very strange few years built on the back of a lot of free money and a lot of bad investment and a lot of irresponsible studio leadership that did not think about the human cost of those things and only saw, hey, we can get more money for now and assumed that that was because of the quality of their studio or their leadership.

Speaker 1:
[109:02] Right.

Speaker 2:
[109:03] And then, you know, the people who are paying for that are the people who like they are employing. And so, yeah, I don't, I don't, it would be great if the thing could grow forever and everything and da, da, da, da, da. But what's more important is definitely that we get people investing in games and studios who understand what this is and the people in leadership run those studios in ways that are sustainable long term for their people. So that, yeah, maybe it won't be as big as it was in the last decade. But those studios don't vanish every three years before they even ship something or they ship something and then they're gone 12 days later.

Speaker 1:
[109:38] Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Figuring out what does sustainability look like in the new order or whatever, I think is definitely a big part of that. I think it was definitely like the free money and the over-expansion. I think you could look at the conditions that led to that and also the way companies will write in like, hey, as the head of this company, your fiduciary duty is to raise, you need to raise this money and hire these people or you're not doing your job. So even at an executive level, I think people that may have seen this coming and said, hey, this thing can last forever were in a position where they still had to go and raise the money anyway because there was money to raise.

Speaker 2:
[110:19] Right. Right.

Speaker 1:
[110:20] And not to, you know, like, oh, the poor ex- but like, but at the end of the day, I think like a lot of bullshit happened at every single level. And, and it's bad. That's my, it is, it is, it's on it, I guess.

Speaker 2:
[110:34] But the thing that the other half of this is just like, we're going to keep seeing the, we're going to keep seeing some of those projects limp to a conclusion and get shipped. Like just for instance, Jay & Silent Bob's Chronic Blunt Punch probably was impacted by the state of the games industry in the last five years, but they did it. They got to the thing and then they shipped and then that's that. Right? My hope is that we're going to start seeing projects that are built for this new era after that come out, come out with goals and budgets and timelines that are built for some, for a world that isn't free money, which I don't know that, do people know what we mean when we say free money?

Speaker 1:
[111:13] I think we talked about it enough, but I... Generally, it's just interest rates were at a point where it was very easy to borrow money for a good long time and then all of that changed. Obviously, the economy is in a very different place now and the physical goods are like anything with plastic in it, anything with silicon in it, anything made from oil.

Speaker 2:
[111:35] Do we do that? Is that our stuff? Our stuff is all it's plastics and silicon? Uh-oh.

Speaker 1:
[111:41] But it was, you know, like it was interesting sitting at Dice and like sitting with people who work at platform holders and just being like and you know, like I didn't like I wasn't like pumping them for information, but it was just like, yeah, I don't know when you guys raise your prices, we'll see how it goes. And then just getting the like eye roll and shrug. It was like, ugh, it's a bunch of people who were in it, you know, and they've been in it for a long time. And it's been fucked for a while.

Speaker 2:
[112:04] I'll say that was the vibe of GDC also this year, which I didn't know I was going to go to or not, but I ended up going and had a pretty good time despite it being a kind of really quiet, small floor, you know, pretty evenly split between AI middleware and, I mean, evenly split. The other big one was like monetization services. Like, hey, you have a live service game. How are you going to, you know, take people's money in Dubai, you know, whatever. We'll be that service for you. There's a lot of that. And also, except it's like it doesn't say gambling, but, you know. But beyond that, the show was basically me talking to developers who similarly felt like we're past the worst of the axe falling. We're past the worst of it. The question is what comes next. And I think I would say in general, you know, and I should say, you know, this was a GDC where there were not a lot of non-American developers there for good reason in general. And even I knew a lot of American devs who were like, I can't afford to fly out to GDC for a week to do what? You know what I mean? But people were taking meetings. People were showing games off. People were taking interviews for new roles. That stuff was happening. And it didn't feel like we were there at the bloodbath. Do you know what I mean? It did feel like the gears were moving. People were getting excited about projects again. The IGF was a blast. What happened to the IGF Awards? They split that off from the GDC Awards. They had its own night and that was great. And I think the attitude was in the right place for me to be like, okay, well, the next few years might be kind of tough in many ways still. But people are making the moves for sure.

Speaker 1:
[113:48] So, yeah, yeah, that was definitely like the, yeah, that was absolutely the vibe coming out of DICE was like there's, you know, people are, they maybe haven't figured out all of it, but they've been through a lot and they kind of have at least a direction in mind. And then, you know, like tariffs come in and smack the shit out of all of that. And then this change, you know, like, like, obviously, it's a very fluid environment. But I think everyone has internalized that. And they've been like, we can only make the moves we can make. And if all of this shit turns around on us the next day because of some bullshit out of the White House or, you know, like whatever, then, you know, we'll have to just figure that out then and see how it all goes. It was interesting, you know, like I found myself talking about AI a lot.

Speaker 2:
[114:33] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[114:35] And it was interesting talking to people who are not necessarily like hands on on a project, like, like head down on an actual specific game, people that were like, maybe managing a portfolio or, you know, at a platform and talking to them about kind of their feelings on it. And it was that idea of just like, yeah, this isn't really, like, maybe it will end up being useful for a small handful of things. But it was this general feeling of like, you know, for all the tech bro people out there who keep saying it's inevitable and game development is, of course, it's going to be AI driven. Like these were people that were like, you know, relatively high up at a lot of large organizations being like, eh, you know, like, maybe, maybe it plays a role here, here and here in a small, very controlled way. But it's not something that's going to come in and design games for us. It's not going to find the find the find the fun in a game was a thing that came up.

Speaker 2:
[115:26] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[115:26] Like, you know, and the thing I always came away from that was like, you know, when an AI can figure out how to make a double jump feel exactly right, the perfect level of sweet, like, oh my God, this is the best double jump I've ever felt like then.

Speaker 2:
[115:39] And then you can talk from the other good double.

Speaker 1:
[115:41] Exactly.

Speaker 2:
[115:42] Where you're not just copying the Titanfall double jump or the one that you know what I mean? Like, yeah, it feels like your double jump. Good, good luck, man.

Speaker 1:
[115:49] Yeah, I, it's like that was sort of the vibe coming out of there. It was just like, it's never going to be able to, you know, like, like that shit's just not gonna happen. And and so that was interesting because, you know, I think that's the other thing that I think surrounds the game industry, right, is just like there's this feeling of even though I think the people who know know that it's not really going to work out, there is still this talk of like, oh, well, the CEOs are going to push AI on everybody. And, you know, there was, I think there was just a story yesterday that like some of Ubisoft's job listings are saying, like, we expect you to be like, at least aware of these technologies to some degree, which Ubisoft, if there was a company that I would feel like would really try to go for it, they're the one.

Speaker 2:
[116:30] I, well, they, they have even said as much, right? Like, didn't they say that they were doing it for, like, crowd barks and crowd, you know, dialogue in big open-world games? And it's like, I know-

Speaker 1:
[116:43] Much like they had their big NFT experiment, right?

Speaker 2:
[116:45] You're right, yes, of course, of course. Same as like, I know writers who write that sort of dialogue and who actually enjoy it and make it good. You know, I think about the type of work that shows up in those Spider-Man games have some really good crowd dialogue that does not feel like just boilerplate whatever. This is Friends of the Table co-star, Jeanine Hawkins works for IO. So this is a little, I have to be very clear, full disclosure, I co-own a business with one of the IOI writers who's written some great Hitman and PC dialogue. Until you can get the double jump of dialogue, which is Hitman dialogue, as far as I'm concerned, good luck. It's not going to write the stuff that people actually like, you know?

Speaker 1:
[117:28] Yeah. And at some point, you're like, well, whatever. I think people get it. But also at the same time, I think there's, it's like people don't think that players know or notice. Yeah. And I think that's maybe the worst thing. And I think that's something I've experienced working in editorial gigs with business people above me, where it's been like, they don't understand that there's a level of quality that people will notice if it's gone.

Speaker 2:
[117:58] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[117:59] And there's that business drive to really just not give a shit about any of it. And I think that's the worst.

Speaker 2:
[118:07] Have you played any of that Crimson Desert thing?

Speaker 1:
[118:11] A little bit. As someone who didn't like Red Dead or The Witcher for control latency issues, Crimson Desert is like that times a hundred in some ways.

Speaker 2:
[118:23] And then it pivots the second combat happens and it's trying to do like DMC. It's a very weird mix. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[118:29] Yeah. And I just, I did not like the feel of it at all. And the look of it is so crazy. I bounced off it super fast. So, you know, like, it's one of those games that people are saying like, oh, well, 20 hours in, it's from hour 21 to hour 300.

Speaker 2:
[118:47] I think it's a fascinating thing. I, we're not covering it over on Side Story, the video game podcast I do, because we have a pretty firm, there's a lot of stuff to play. Let's play stuff and talk about stuff that doesn't have AI. It launches AI art. They've since I think patched that out, which good on them. I keep hitting things in that game where I kept, I haven't played it. I haven't since Marathon got me. I haven't really played it. But I kept hitting things that felt AI written in a way that speaks to what you're talking about, which is like people know. There's all this writing in the game where you will read a recipe. That's a game filled with assets, right? I think it may have been willpower during the promo cycle for it was like, this is a content game. It was a game filled with content, right? Yeah. And there's content all over the place. And so, for instance, every location has a little write-up. And one of them was like, I have it in front of me, Dragonstone Chamber. Ruins found halfway up the cliffs on the Hernand Highlands. A statue of a roaring dragon clings to the front wall with an overwhelming presence. Faded murals flanking the statue act as guardians, depicting a grand epic of desperate combat against the dragon and the ultimate win achieved at its end. Grand epic, desperate combat, ultimate win. And here's the thing, the dragon is not on the wall. It's on the front wall. It's on an interior wall. There are murals, but they are not depicting a battle. They're like geometric shapes or like abstract symbols. I think that game is filled with AI writing and it like feels like it. And I think we're gonna see a lot of that throughout the next few years as people, as studios say, hey, we have to use these tools or hey, can we fill in a bunch of writing for this stuff? No one writes like that. And I think you're right, the taste is off. It's like someone handing you a drink and being like, hey, wait, is this sugar or is this aspartame? You're like, I can taste it. It tastes like a diet coke, doesn't taste like a coke.

Speaker 1:
[120:47] I literally this morning went through a drive-thru. Someone gave me regular coke and said it's diet coke. I was pissed.

Speaker 2:
[120:52] You know the difference. You know the difference.

Speaker 1:
[120:54] So drinking it, but I'm pissed.

Speaker 2:
[120:55] Yeah, I think that there is a real and I think it's fair to say that like you're talking about, there are people at every level who are different relationships with it, including at the high level. When I was working on the project with Possibility Space, we were working with someone who was really invested in AI quote unquote big time and there are people there who are like, could you use this to do da da da da da? And there are people there who were like, we don't think it's a great fit for you actually. We think that your project would do worse if you tried to shoehorn this in. And so my hope is right now we're in the process of those people looking smarter and smarter and getting into positions where they can make sure that projects that will would be really poorly served by shoehorning it in. Don't have it shoehorned in, but we'll see, right?

Speaker 1:
[121:44] Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Speaker 2:
[121:45] What I found at GDC from talking to people was artists, writers, designers don't like it. Developers, coders, really, programmers, it's part of the workflow for a lot of them. And the divide there that I kind of found were between people who were like, it's great, I can make new ideas really quick. And people who are like, it's really good for prototyping, but we would never let it be in real shippable code. We would never put it in production. And my very easy to have personal position is like, I'm just not going to touch it, I don't need it, I don't need it. But again, I don't have someone breathing down my neck saying, we're paying for this subscription, you better use it or else you get fired.

Speaker 1:
[122:34] So yeah, it's like, or at least like eval it and make sure, you know, you can speak to it in meetings and make sure that you say here's why it doesn't work or like a waste a bunch of time.

Speaker 2:
[122:45] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[122:46] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[122:46] I mean, in Arc Raiders that drives me crazy, right? It's like, yeah, they don't need that stuff for the voices. No, it sounds bad. It doesn't sound good.

Speaker 1:
[122:55] As someone who liked sports talk football for the Genesis. Yes. I mean, I can at least appreciate the idea of, hey, man, we want to have voice be able to uniquely and specifically address every single moment of this game. And it's unrealistic to pay voice actors to do this. Like on some level, I'm like, yeah, if you're making a deep enough game, then maybe I could, but like they're not. Like they didn't.

Speaker 2:
[123:20] That's not what that game is.

Speaker 1:
[123:21] Yeah. They started replacing AI voice with recorded voice and admitted like, oh yeah, this is better.

Speaker 2:
[123:27] It's better. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[123:28] Of course it is.

Speaker 2:
[123:29] I was like, Tomodachi Life has the most robotic Microsoft SamS voices ever, and it's great. It's great.

Speaker 1:
[123:36] So have you been just ingesting that via social media or playing it?

Speaker 2:
[123:42] I've been watching them all play it. I think I'm on a couple of islands. I think a couple of friends have made me for their islands.

Speaker 1:
[123:47] Nice.

Speaker 2:
[123:48] A very iconic individual. I'm happy to join any of your Tomodachi Life islands.

Speaker 1:
[123:53] My kids have been playing it. Yeah. I have not had time to... It's twofold. One, I haven't had time to get going on one. Also, I am incredibly bad at character creators.

Speaker 2:
[124:05] I see. That's something that needs you to be pretty good at it.

Speaker 1:
[124:08] Especially Mii's and I'm terrible at making Mii's.

Speaker 2:
[124:12] You can't share them. There's no share codes on Mii's.

Speaker 1:
[124:15] What an amazing opportunity. Because it's a Switch 1 game, people have hacked the shit out of it, and you can download mods for... Hell yeah. People have basically found a way to import pings into it, which I think defeats the purpose because you want to draw fucked up looking stuff when you're making objects. But instead, it's like a zillion TikToks of the baby being born cut scene, which an item gets held up at the end of that cut scene, and it's always someone holding up a pack of Newports. It is great. You go like, yeah, awesome.

Speaker 2:
[124:49] They could put Newports in marathons.

Speaker 1:
[124:52] Smokable cheeseburgers.

Speaker 2:
[124:54] Smokable cheeseburgers.

Speaker 1:
[124:56] Now you're talking.

Speaker 2:
[124:57] The Newport colors away.

Speaker 1:
[125:01] Just like the Outrunners. Yeah. And so like I've been my daughter reads really well and she's having a really good time with it. My son really wants to play it.

Speaker 2:
[125:13] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[125:13] But he does not read very well. And so he's they when they get along, playing it is the best because he will come up with the ideas. She will implement them. And they've created the whole family and and they've, you know, like the interactions like they they but like they mess up on some of the ages or like the relationships between characters. So it's inevitable that like a father and daughter are eventually going to end up married somehow in that game. Like something fucked up is going to happen because they've not set it up right.

Speaker 2:
[125:48] Yeah, of course.

Speaker 1:
[125:48] Yeah. And the and they've made male characters that are not like the pronouns are all over the place. They've they've done all kinds of ill shit in that game that is going to come home to roost in a way that only I will truly appreciate.

Speaker 2:
[126:02] No, that's very, that's real funny, sweetie.

Speaker 1:
[126:04] Yeah. And there are going to be conversations that, you know, like I'm going to have to delicately have around like the nature of that game.

Speaker 2:
[126:10] I just need to make sure those conversation you need to make sure that there's not a lot of Tomodachi life conversation at school where, well, daddy married, you know.

Speaker 1:
[126:22] Yes, exactly. Dude, the school, like having someone who was playing video games and going to school and talking to kids about video games is a really is a fucking trip.

Speaker 2:
[126:33] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[126:34] Because you like, my daughter has come home and asked me about Fortnite. Before that was Minecraft and I was like, okay, let's play some, let's play some Minecraft. And it's like, it's too much for you right now.

Speaker 2:
[126:44] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[126:45] But she's chipping away at it and she's crafting stuff and like she's, she's playing it a little bit, a little bit. And Fortnite I have not, no, not, not even the chance.

Speaker 2:
[126:57] The newly made free save the world?

Speaker 1:
[127:00] No. As someone who paid for that, I'm very disgusted.

Speaker 2:
[127:02] I'm so mad about it. I didn't know that it wasn't free for eight years. I assume they made it free at some point.

Speaker 1:
[127:09] Did you see that there's a new map for their reload mode and it has like very outpost-y looking buildings on it with color schemes on it and like design. It's not marathon, but it's also not not marathon. And you look at it and go like, I did not see this.

Speaker 2:
[127:23] I'm so out of the Fortnite loop. It's the most thing I think I feel old about is that I never really had a Fortnite phase. You know?

Speaker 1:
[127:33] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[127:34] All of my friends had some phase where they're like, oh, yeah, they had no build and I got into it and I just never did. I just never did.

Speaker 1:
[127:40] When when no build came out, I downloaded it again. Like that's my my thing. Every year and a half, I download Fortnite and I play it twice and go. Yep. I still hate everything about the way these guns shoot.

Speaker 2:
[127:51] I don't like how they feel, man. I don't like how they feel.

Speaker 1:
[127:53] It feels super bad. Like if I wanted to do this, I would still be playing PUBG. Like, what the fuck am I doing?

Speaker 2:
[127:58] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[127:59] And that's that. And and I just. Last time I played it, I went and played the like UEFN, like user generated, all the shitty obstacle courses that everyone makes in Roblox and everything. I have been playing a lot of Roblox lately. So she has not come home and said anything about Roblox yet, but I am anticipating that that is going to be a problem someday soon.

Speaker 2:
[128:19] Probably right.

Speaker 1:
[128:20] Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[128:21] She's in school school. She's not in.

Speaker 1:
[128:22] Oh, yeah. She's in first grade. Like she's, you know, like, and like very few. There's like one other kid in her school that I think that plays not to be a dick about it, but quote unquote, real video games.

Speaker 2:
[128:35] Real games. Yeah, I see.

Speaker 1:
[128:36] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and like there's a little bit of care about Mario, but a lot of it comes from the movie and less so the games.

Speaker 2:
[128:45] Right.

Speaker 1:
[128:45] And so it's this weird it like every time I hear anything about her discussions about video games at school is it's always like a fucking trip. I don't know how it's going to go because like it like they don't realize what they've got here in this house.

Speaker 2:
[129:02] I see.

Speaker 1:
[129:03] Like where like it's not like this everywhere else. Where like, you know, she's asking me questions like, are you going to get Yoshi in the Cursed Book or whatever the upcoming Yoshi game is? And I'm like, yeah, they'll yes, they will they they will send. Yes, yes, we will have we will have the Yoshi game. Like it's not a quest. Like it's yes, they will send it. And I tell her that I was like, yes, they when on release day comes because I want her to go brag to her friends that she has all the video games in the world because she at least deserves that.

Speaker 2:
[129:31] Yeah, that's her competitive edge.

Speaker 1:
[129:34] Exactly. But it's like it's giving them exposure to all like my son is a massive Katamari fan. Wow. And so he was going to like it got him to figure out how dual six worked and it makes like all of this stuff. And so he's four. He's in a preschool program and like talking to everyone about it and no one knows what the fuck it is. Finally, a girl joined the preschool program and she knew what Katamari was. And he was like, he could not have been happier. He cannot stop talking about her. I'm convinced they will be married.

Speaker 2:
[130:08] That's the other the life has been laid out.

Speaker 1:
[130:12] Yeah. And so like I just realizing that they have a really corrupt. My son played through NAC recently because he finished Astro Bot and finished all the Katamari games.

Speaker 2:
[130:22] NAC 1 or NAC 2?

Speaker 1:
[130:24] One. She was too much for him.

Speaker 2:
[130:26] That's interesting.

Speaker 1:
[130:27] Yeah. He played through NAC 1. I would help out here and there with boss fights and stuff. But he was able to play NAC 1 mostly by himself. NAC 2 adds a lot of concepts around like you can get big or small at any time.

Speaker 2:
[130:40] Right.

Speaker 1:
[130:41] So there's like puzzle solving around that that he is not figuring out. And so he dropped NAC 2 after a few hours.

Speaker 2:
[130:49] This is the friend, the girl, does she know NAC?

Speaker 1:
[130:52] No.

Speaker 2:
[130:52] She just knows Katamari.

Speaker 1:
[130:54] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[130:54] That sounds like a household that's being run clean. Jeff, you got to see if those parents are cool. Yeah, I know.

Speaker 1:
[131:00] Right. And then Goat Simulator. They both, my son more than my daughter, but like he loves Goat Simulator because he just run around and fuck shit up.

Speaker 2:
[131:07] Yeah. I mean, I would have loved Goat Simulator. Are you kidding me? Like that's all the stuff that we were doing in games that, I mean, this is part of why GTA was so good. Right.

Speaker 1:
[131:17] Exactly.

Speaker 2:
[131:17] Oh, wow. They let us like have a sandbox that we can play in, in this way. That was part of the appeal. I wish I had more of that younger, you know?

Speaker 1:
[131:24] Yeah. Yeah. So he's been big into that. And yeah, it's very interesting because I think, I've now played enough Roblox. Like I read all of Patrick's stuff because he's running cross-play. He's in the pocket when it comes to all of the child safety stuff on account level and the sexual predation and some of the things that definitely happens on that platform. That should be reason enough to not want to touch it.

Speaker 2:
[131:53] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[131:54] I have approached it from the other end of like looking at the design of these games and the way these games monetize. And it's a whole different. I don't want to say one is worse than the other.

Speaker 2:
[132:04] But like the way that like everybody gets the design predation.

Speaker 1:
[132:09] Yes, too.

Speaker 2:
[132:10] Like it's not like even if you've avoided the really horrible.

Speaker 1:
[132:15] Yeah. Every time I join this experience, it has three pop ups that try to get me to follow the creator, add it to my favorites list and say, if you follow the thing and then you'll get a bonus, like they give bonus items for if you follow the game. And so you're incentivized to do that. They do things where like, hey, if you go join the discord and then come back here and enter your discord name into this box will give you a free thing. And then also every time you join it, like there are games with like where you have a base and there are a bunch of buttons on the base where you collect money because all of these brain rots are generating money for you, of course.

Speaker 2:
[132:47] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[132:48] Yep. And then there's a button right outside the base that is for like, if you want double money for an hour. And if you're running in a line all the way along the buttons, you always step on that button and it always throws a pop up that says, do you want to spend five bucks right now? Click this button if you do. And the number of times that sort of stuff happens and you see how broken these games are, and a lot of them will go like, do you want admin rights to this game? Then give us this amount of money. And they've built a separate fake set of tools. You can use to troll players and kick them off servers and like, and they're selling that too in some of these things. And so there's like every single best practice that mobile games have like learned over the last 10 years. Roblox said, no, son, I'll call that like just pop it up over and over.

Speaker 2:
[133:33] It's really this is Andrew Ryan's Rapture, but ain't that little kid like it's like, you know what I mean? It's like no, no guardrails. No, no, no. Only dark patterns, the darkest of dark. Yes.

Speaker 1:
[133:45] Yeah, it is all it is one big dark. It's really, it's really scary. And so like I like that's going to be the fight. I think eventually is she's going to go. I want to play this thing with my friends.

Speaker 2:
[133:55] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[133:55] And I've kept her off any online anything so far.

Speaker 2:
[133:59] Because you've you've opened the world in so many other ways. In terms of other games that are all fine.

Speaker 1:
[134:06] Right.

Speaker 2:
[134:06] And I'm sure you were doing the dance of like, I think you're old enough to do this, to play this, even though it's a teen game. I actually don't know that you're actually doing that.

Speaker 1:
[134:13] But I'm sure you're making judgment calls about what you think she's going to say that I've performed fatalities in front of a five year old girl.

Speaker 2:
[134:20] But but fatalities may have been performed.

Speaker 1:
[134:25] Yes, you didn't think I'm in the game like it like Mortal Combat Legacy Collection came out. I mean, it was MK1. It wasn't like it was modern MK.

Speaker 2:
[134:33] I mean, that's a cartoon.

Speaker 1:
[134:34] Exactly. It's goofy at that point. And look, look at the video game. Look, daddy's talking about the video game and the video game, which was she was not impressed by. No, I don't think it sunk in what that meant. Right.

Speaker 2:
[134:45] I see. I see. But you could get some good, important anatomy lessons through MK1. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[134:51] See all these ribcages? Most people only have one.

Speaker 2:
[134:54] Not these guys.

Speaker 1:
[134:55] Kabal has four.

Speaker 2:
[134:56] Yeah, that's why he's special.

Speaker 1:
[134:58] Yeah, there's been some news.

Speaker 2:
[135:01] Yeah, let's talk about some news.

Speaker 1:
[135:04] This morning, this morning, I woke up to a message that said, hey, they're pulling Call of Duty out of Game Pass in a few hours. And I was like, oh shit. And sure enough, at 9 a.m. this morning.

Speaker 2:
[135:16] You say it like they loaded them on to helicopters and Fortunate Son was playing. And they left Hanoi, you know?

Speaker 1:
[135:22] They're pulling them out. The last chopper out, man. Black Ops 7 is just waving, going like. Just staring longingly out the window, going like, I'll never be the same. A very short statement out of Microsoft this morning, starting today, Game Pass Ultimate, and they're dropping the price. And this is the, of course, the framing for it is to talk about how the price is being updated. Yeah. Game Pass Ultimate drops from $29.99 a month to $22.99 a month. PC Game Pass will go from $16.49 to $13.99. Beginning this year, future Call of Duty titles won't join Game Pass Ultimate or PC Game Pass at launch. New Call of Duty games will be added the following holiday season, about a year later, while existing Call of Duty games will continue to be available.

Speaker 2:
[136:13] So, yeah, I, you know, they're just saying the plan all the way out, right? Because that does suggest that they know how this will be received, right?

Speaker 1:
[136:21] Yeah, they don't really get into like trying to justify. They don't they don't try to like throw you a bone and say like, here's why it's I mean, the price is lower, right? That's the good part about it, right? But they don't they don't spend a long time trying to explain this or trying to like navigate any sort of landscape of like, here's how the rules work and here's why it makes sense. And like, they don't frame it up beyond that. They just kind of say, hey, Game Pass is still good. There's a whole paragraph about there's hundreds of games in Game Pass. And then the one little bit of just our players cover a wide breadth of geographies, preferences and tastes. So while there isn't a single model that's best for everyone, this change responds to a lot of feedback we've gotten so far will continue to listen and learn man.

Speaker 2:
[137:13] First of all, one of the things I was most wrong about was my early enthusiasm for Game Pass. But say that with the bracket of at this point between the BDS call, No Games for Genocide, all the other Microsoft shit around AI, blah, blah, blah, blah, lots of reasons at this point to not be supporting the company or trying to find alternatives.

Speaker 1:
[137:36] Basis come a long way. You just can't play marathon on it. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[137:40] Uh-huh. Yeah. Uh-huh. That's the damn problem right now. But maybe not for long. You know, I got to hope. But I do. I really do think about that when it rolled out. Maybe I was not. Maybe I'm being harsh to myself. Maybe I don't think that I was ever like, Ra-Ra Game Pass. But the deal seems so clear for the consumer, for the player, for me who was not getting everything. I was getting code for everything, everything. We were getting code, but then Patrick needed the code. So it was nice if something also came out on Game Pass, because then we could both play it, and then da-da-da-da. But like many subscription services, maybe this is one of the big stories of, again, digital media in the last 15 years. It's like the move to subscription services was always built on a lives of subsidy. We're going to subsidize this. We're going to give you, it's going to be a loss leader. We're going to get you into the system, and then the prices are going to go up. We're going to demolish competition, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think the thing that's so funny is like, that didn't really happen. Netflix and Game Pass are not the same. Netflix can continue to jack up prices somehow on people because people are locked in. People are not locked in to Game Pass.

Speaker 1:
[138:48] No, they're not. And I think that's, you know, like, Netflix is ubiquitous in terms of platform, and Xbox is not.

Speaker 2:
[138:56] Right.

Speaker 1:
[138:56] It's still, you know, like, despite being able, oh, well, you can stream it from a phone. Like, you know, at the end of the day, you need to buy an Xbox to really experience this, or have a PC if you want PC Game Pass, but PC Game Pass is not nearly as robust of a service.

Speaker 2:
[139:09] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[139:10] And so I think that, yeah, I think that that's where a lot of that stuff starts to fall apart, though there was, you know, I canceled Netflix. I was in a hotel at PAX and I was, I was having some just trouble. Like I was, I was like, I need to spend the entire day in this hotel room to just like, I can't, I can't be out today. And I needed to see The Fast and the Furious, Tokyo Drift.

Speaker 2:
[139:32] You needed to, I understand.

Speaker 1:
[139:33] Which was consistently on Netflix. And I loaded up Netflix and it was no longer there. And I canceled it right then and there and I've never come back.

Speaker 2:
[139:41] I don't blame you. Yeah, you know, I said the people are locked in. I don't actually mean locked in. They have a user base that has supported that strategy of constant, you know, tuning up what the price is. And it has sustained that somehow, even as people leave or do the dance of having it for the show and then canceling it and da, da, da, da, da, enough of there's enough of a mass where that number keeps going up, you know, not sustainably, but for them, that's a sustainable strategy. They're getting it to a point where they're going to make money, blah, blah, blah. That's the theory anyway. It doesn't feel like that ever happened with Game Pass. For Game Pass, I felt like we spent six years being like, hey, is this enough money for access to all of these games? Are developers getting paid? And the answer was like, well, yeah, if you look at the deals, they're able to make these games based on these deals that they're signing, whether they're getting the money up front or they're getting enough support based on playtime or da-da-da-da, where it seems like it's working. And then I think many of us said like, okay, but what's that look like eight years from now? And we didn't have answers, but we are here now. And I actually still don't necessarily know what it looks like for the developer.

Speaker 1:
[140:45] I think the answer is that it's just, it's super different for every deal and for every developer. Like I've definitely seen a lot of developers even recently say, hey, Game Pass actually is like the upcoming 17-bit game, I think is like fully funded by Microsoft. They cover the entire cost of development. And so it's like, that's cool. That's an X number of years where you're just like, okay, at least we're covered. After that, we'll figure it out. But hey, and so there's stories like that or stories where like, hey, the deal was really good and then on the other end of it, we did really well. And then you hear from developers that are like, hey, we launched multi-platform and we saw so many Steam refunds on Week 1 because everyone realized it was on Game Pass, but the Game Pass uptake was shitty too because everyone just dipped in for a minute and had no loyalty to it. So they just bounced. And so I think the answer is like, if you do well on Game Pass, you love it. As dumb as that is, but some people are doing just fine there and it's definitely not everyone, though.

Speaker 2:
[141:50] It's one of these things that feels... Sometimes something gets built because it can get built. The tech gets there and it's like, we can build Game Pass now. Very few people are buying physical copies compared to what it used to be. We distribute all this stuff digitally. All you got to do is flip a switch and then you own the game and you can download it. Let's say nothing about game streaming because I don't know anybody who's actually, I know a few people who are using it, but they're like sickos and positive. You know what I mean? And what they're streaming is something from their own setup to a device somewhere. They're not, I don't know anybody who's like using any of the official services on a day-to-day basis. But as that stuff gets there and as even just like digital distribution got there, it was like, oh yeah, well why couldn't we do Netflix but for games? Let's try it. But yeah, I don't know. I don't know that it will be, we've seen other people try to do it. We've seen, we just saw this indie game pass.

Speaker 1:
[142:49] Right, yes, this indie thing launched.

Speaker 2:
[142:50] Yeah. And it's like, there is a part of me that really likes just giving someone $12 or $20 or $70 for the thing and then I have it. It's reliable, it's simple.

Speaker 1:
[143:04] I agree with you but then it gets into, well I gave them $70 for a game and now it's like another $20 here or another $20 here for season 2 of this and the update for this. That starts to fall apart.

Speaker 2:
[143:19] But does that just reflect the sort of broader problem with the medium which is like, Pragmata is an 8 hour game or whatever, maybe 16 if you do all the extra stuff and it has to sell for the same price that Crimson Desert which is a 400 hour game. Actually, maybe I should use one that's like a game I like that's 400 hours long, but you know what I mean, right?

Speaker 1:
[143:40] We've decided- Dragon's Dogma 2.

Speaker 2:
[143:42] Dragon's Dogma 2, which is a very long game and maybe the final third isn't as good as the middle of it is, but that's because of the difficulty balance wasn't right. But anyway, it's a bigger thing and in your mind you go like, but when paying $70 for both of these or paying $60 for both of these, we've made a one size fits all price point because that's like easy for us.

Speaker 1:
[144:04] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[144:05] I don't know. I don't know what the solution to this is. Because I wouldn't want to have paid a hundred. People talk about this with GTA 6 coming out, right? This was like last year. All these people are like, how much would you pay for GTA 6, would you pay $100 for it? I don't know. I probably wouldn't.

Speaker 1:
[144:20] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[144:20] But also why shouldn't I if it is this thing that is so much bigger and so much more work went into it. I think it's like a naughty situation. It's like a weird psychological consumer psychology problem that is really hard to unknot.

Speaker 1:
[144:35] Yeah, definitely. I think this goes back generations. If you look at it, I paid $80 for Strider for the Genesis. It was the arcade version of Strider. It was like a two-hour game.

Speaker 2:
[144:45] Yeah, dude.

Speaker 1:
[144:49] As someone who saved up money for months and months and months and spent it on that and then later that day said, fuck, I got to get another video game.

Speaker 2:
[144:56] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[144:57] Like I'm digging in the couch cushions. Yep. I was like, I thought I bought a jumbo. This is not this is not working, man. And then it's like that stuff.

Speaker 2:
[145:06] Yeah. You could have gotten Phantasy Star 2.

Speaker 1:
[145:08] I actually truly is where I think I did.

Speaker 2:
[145:11] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[145:12] Like by that point. But yeah, it's I think the value. The value conversation is something that I think a lot of critics and reviewers don't like to talk about because it is such a weird problem and everyone's going to be in a different position with how much money they have to spend on games and disposable income and everything. So it's a really hard thing to work in in a review context. But I think it is absolutely especially these days as the economy worsens and money is harder to come by. And I think that that is an incredibly useful metric for people who just can't afford to buy a lot of games. And so Game Pass ends up on that list of like, well, you know, $30 a month is still too much money to pay for Game Pass, but if you are looking to just play a lot of video games, which as a kid, that's where I was absolutely right. I was trying to play everything I could get my hands on. Like, I think there's still value in that service and, you know, them knocking Call of Duty out of it and lowering the price, I think makes sense. They should go further. They should knock because right now with that ultimate subscription, you get a subscription to Fortnite Crew. They're like, you know, stipend of V-Bucks and Battle Passes or whatever. And you also get every character in the Riot Games. So like every League of Legend guy, every Valorant lady.

Speaker 2:
[146:35] I see.

Speaker 1:
[146:36] And I don't want any of that shit.

Speaker 2:
[146:38] Yeah. And so if they're doing that, having those those there, presumably, is part of why are those are they paying for? They must be paying for that, huh?

Speaker 1:
[146:49] I would assume, you know, like, that's not a Riot gift.

Speaker 2:
[146:52] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[146:52] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[146:52] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[146:52] They don't own Riot. So, you know, like, it's, and so I imagine that they do have to pay some kind of per subscription thing. But at some point, it's the cable issue of just like, I don't watch any of these channels, why the fuck do I have to pay for them? But then the answer is a la carte, these channels are way more expensive.

Speaker 2:
[147:09] Right. Right.

Speaker 1:
[147:10] And I don't have a good answer to that, other than I think that it's crazy that they're doing this when they're going to have to completely rebuild Game Pass and all of their services as soon as they put out hardware that is also a PC.

Speaker 2:
[147:26] Which is where it feels like the wind is blowing.

Speaker 1:
[147:28] Definitely. Yeah. And so the idea that they're doing, I mean, they're doing this now so that they can do it for Call of Duty this year and not take that same hit last year.

Speaker 2:
[147:36] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[147:37] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[147:37] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[147:37] But then next year, they'll have to go, oh, well, okay. They're going to have to answer really tough questions internally first about like, hey, we used to charge people to play games online. We technically still kind of do, but also we're making a PC. How the?

Speaker 2:
[147:54] Yeah. Yeah. How are we going to convince anybody to pay us money to play games online? Yeah. On the type of box where online is, you already pay someone for online. I got, that's it. That's all you're supposed to play.

Speaker 1:
[148:07] Exactly. And if I install Steam on this device, I will also not pay for online.

Speaker 2:
[148:14] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[148:14] And so unless they get real crazy with it and start trying to, I think it would be a bridge too far even for Microsoft. But they're going to have to answer those sorts of questions and they like the money that came in for Xbox Live Gold for all those years. I don't think they want to just walk away from it, especially like they carved out free to play and said, you can play Fortnite and that sort of stuff without paying for gold. And now they don't even sell gold because it's all kind of like it's the Game Pass essential tier or whatever. Like there's still a low end tier. They all combine those things. But Sony is not going to sell a PC.

Speaker 2:
[148:52] Right.

Speaker 1:
[148:53] And so they'll be able to just go like, well, this is how it's always been for us.

Speaker 2:
[148:56] Right.

Speaker 1:
[148:56] For decades. So we're not going to change.

Speaker 2:
[148:59] And plus does have now their Game Pass equivalent, right? With a hundred games or whatever on it.

Speaker 1:
[149:06] It does not have their day one releases.

Speaker 2:
[149:08] It's probably a smart plan.

Speaker 1:
[149:10] Ultimately, yeah. When we see Microsoft doing this, you kind of have to look at it and go like, I guess so.

Speaker 2:
[149:14] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[149:15] But it's also kind of annoying for them to do this. Right around the time they're starting to ship games again, like there was a good trench there that Microsoft just didn't have a lot of stuff coming out. And now it's like, well, Indiana Jones came out here, we got another Forza coming, and Fable is theoretically right around the corner, and they're starting to have gears is not too far off. They'll have big first-party games that ostensibly some people will want to play. But I could see, it's very easy to see a world where people go like, I would definitely check out the new Gears of War. I am not going to give you $70 for the new Gears of War. It's 2026.

Speaker 2:
[149:54] That's the difference between what the two value propositions were, right? It was like, when it was all new releases, the part of what the decision you were making was, oh yeah, they put out stuff. I want to see that stuff. Maybe I'm not going to stick with all of it, but yeah, I'll pay them $30 a month so that I can play the new release. Yeah, a completely different potential consumer is the person who says, you said before, a kid who's like, I want to play video games. Oh wow, there's 200 video games on this thing. Cool. That is a different use case. It's a different value proposition. You're getting a different type of consumer for that. Previously, you were getting both of those. But if that's of goes, then that model really just shifts to that ladder. I actually don't know if you get enough of those people to support it at that point, because you need a lot of them because it's an economy of scale thing.

Speaker 1:
[150:45] Especially, you need to be going out for all these third-party games, you need to do deals to get those games into your ecosystem, whether that's day one or that's after release or whatever. You still have to reinvest a significant chunk of that money back into Game Pass to make sure that it is fresh. It's a very tough thing to serve. That's what they're admitting. They're saying, like, hey, there's a wide breadth of players and there's no one size fits all. They're not done. They'll have to rework this thing on a more massive scale. For now, Call of Duty is no longer going to be in Game Pass. And I don't know. I think there's a I guess like maybe that's the right move. They could have complicated it even further by saying, like, we're introducing a new tier that is somehow even more expensive. And it'll have Call of Duty. And also you'll get a bunch of like the same way they do with Fortnite, like you get some V bucks or whatever. Right. Like they could have brought back a subscription service around a Call of Duty.

Speaker 2:
[151:42] You need to launch a Call of Duty pass just for Call of Duty and it's cross platform.

Speaker 1:
[151:47] Call of Duty Elite, man.

Speaker 2:
[151:48] Right.

Speaker 1:
[151:49] Bring it back. They had that subscription service, but it was just for stats back then. It was just like for people who wanted more stats as if that's a number. Like it was just like, it was ridiculous.

Speaker 2:
[151:58] You'll find it was for the elite who wanted more stats, Jeff, not people who wanted more stats. Please.

Speaker 1:
[152:03] As someone who was an elite subscriber, let me tell you.

Speaker 2:
[152:07] Jeff Gerstmann is all elite? That's weird.

Speaker 1:
[152:09] That's right. They issued the graphic and everything. I was there and then I got into a fight and then I did a guy, and then I can't even help my dog and it's a whole thing. Okay. It's been some new, Shuhei Yoshida was at Sony for a good long time, and was head of studios over there. Then one day just got pushed into a role where he was heading up an indie games initiative. He appeared on a podcast and confirmed that this was not a podcast. He was at Alt Games in Australia.

Speaker 2:
[152:47] The festival?

Speaker 1:
[152:49] Yes. He basically said, in 2019 after 11 years leading first party development, I was fired from the role. Jim Ryan wanted to remove me from first party because I didn't listen to him. He asked me to do some ridiculous things and I said no.

Speaker 2:
[153:04] God damn.

Speaker 1:
[153:06] I remember this because for a number of reasons. When it happened, I remember hearing from people who were responsible for indie games on PlayStation saying things like, what? We already do that. They just gave him a job. Does he work in our group?

Speaker 2:
[153:25] Is he my boss? Am I his boss? That'd be weird.

Speaker 1:
[153:28] Yeah. It was this very sudden seeming thing internally. I think everyone knew that this is the way it went, but I believe this is the first time he ever came out and said, yeah, Jim Ryan sucks. Basically, without saying Jim Ryan sucks. I found that kind of interesting.

Speaker 2:
[153:53] What's happening over there, man?

Speaker 1:
[153:56] I think they're as weird of a company as Microsoft is, if not weirder, and I think they're in a more interesting spot now post-Jim Ryan. Yeah. Because the Jim Ryan kind of Herman Holst sort of situation was, I think, what led to the like, hey, we're making 12 live service games. Just the strategic desire to get into that space without truly understanding what it took to be in that space for one game, let alone 12, the acquisition of Bungee, the idea that Naughty Dog was going to make a Last of Us multiplayer game that was apparently quite good but would have taken up most of the studio to work on that game, preventing them from making anything else, so they killed it.

Speaker 2:
[154:42] Bluepoints, multiplayer, God of War, that thing tears me up, man. I am one of those weirdos who is like, I didn't love the Bluepoint Demon Soul, I didn't love some of their aesthetic choices, I think it's a really well-made game, they have a different aesthetic vision than what Trump's original game was, I'm weird about that stuff but I think it was a really well-made game and it was like essential at the PS5 launch in terms of like there being a thing to fucking play with that huge, expensive box I bought and I was happy to play it, right? The idea that you read whatever the big piece was that came out around all of that and the fact that there's a moment in that story which I think was Shrier at Bloomberg but maybe I'm wrong, where they talk about that Blue Points leadership went to pitch what if we do Shadow of the Colossus again and when I saw that I was like what the fuck is happening at Sony? You have to understand that before it could get to them pitching it, it had to already have been pitched internally to whoever their point person was. The fact that no one ever pulled their leadership into a room and said, hey, no, no, you did that one. You can't, that can't be your next big idea. We're going to end up saddling you with something you don't want to do. There's a real disconnect somewhere happening there. And so I just like, I feel despite whatever my feelings are about the Demon's Souls remake, I don't know how you then end up pushing that team to go do a multiplayer live service game, a thing that they've never built before, and then sending them out to die. Like I, for me, that's like a real...

Speaker 1:
[156:21] I mean, the thought was that that was their pitch because they had been a support studio on God of War already. And so they're like, hey, let us stick on this and try to keep going. Which like, you know, how much of that pitch is like pure passion versus, hey, this is a thing we think will get green lit.

Speaker 2:
[156:36] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[156:37] And that's always, I mean...

Speaker 2:
[156:39] It has been a lot of years since I have been a reporter, Jeff.

Speaker 1:
[156:42] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[156:42] And so I will be careful with the words that I say, but my understanding is that it is not that simple.

Speaker 1:
[156:47] No, it never is.

Speaker 2:
[156:48] It never is. It never is as simple as they had the passion in their hearts to make a God of War multiplayer live service game.

Speaker 1:
[156:55] Right.

Speaker 2:
[156:55] Maybe they were working on other things, and eventually what they found the passion for was a God of War live service game.

Speaker 1:
[157:03] This is like when the Dead Space team suddenly was making Battlefield hard line. I was in the room when they tried to pitch reporters on why that was such a good idea for them and a great fit, and they were really, it turns out, were really passionate about making this cop Battlefield game.

Speaker 2:
[157:18] That's so wild.

Speaker 1:
[157:19] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[157:20] And you know what? Part of the job is finding the passion. It is, and finding what's cool about a project. Games are not made by one person who has a vision normally. And even when they are, your job is often to pursue a vision that isn't your own, and to find the parts that are cool as shit. And it's one of the things that makes it really hard. So I have no doubt that the people on that Bluepoint team were trying to find something really, really cool there. But man, yeah. So I don't know. I'm with you. I think Sony is in a very strange place, largely around them pursuing live service stuff over and over and over again.

Speaker 1:
[157:54] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[157:54] Of course, Marathon.

Speaker 1:
[157:57] Marathon, though.

Speaker 2:
[157:58] Marathon.

Speaker 1:
[157:59] That's a goddamn video. You can get 12 more of those. No, I don't want 12 more of those.

Speaker 2:
[158:03] No.

Speaker 1:
[158:03] I want one more. So like the reporting now is saying that like Fair Games, which is one of the other live service games that they had in development, that was the game that Jade Raymond was on for a bit there, that that is now apparently an extraction shooter. And so what the fuck are you doing? You got the one. You got the one you need. Like get behind that one. Just really get behind that one and don't do this.

Speaker 2:
[158:30] I don't know.

Speaker 1:
[158:30] Like Sony is, I think Sony will find its way the same way everyone will. But they sure they experienced the pandemic in a different way than Microsoft did. And I think it's visible in different ways.

Speaker 2:
[158:41] That's interesting.

Speaker 1:
[158:43] And obviously the leadership change has been, I think the leadership change will be good for them long term, but they have to spend a lot of time unfucking this live service game thing. And I think they've done a lot of that. But they also lost a lot of studios in the process, Japan Studio and everything else they've shut down.

Speaker 2:
[159:01] Right.

Speaker 1:
[159:02] My, this is not necessarily like just a shot in the dark thing, but this is very far from me having like firsthand knowledge of it. But I think the thing I increasingly think they're going to do is that they're going to go to external studios through like X Dev or through something like that and say, hey, why don't you make us a new Twisted Metal? Why don't you make us a new Wipeout? I've been kind of saying this for a few weeks now, but I do think that there is, when people talk about Japan Studio being gone and the legacy of these IPs and all this other stuff, I think that they're solve for that and whether it works or not, I think very much remains to be seen. I do think that they will attempt to pursue some of those older games through having smaller studios develop it externally and bringing them in. Yeah, okay, here's the new Wipeout, here's the new Twisted Metal, here's Ape Escape, here's like whatever.

Speaker 2:
[159:54] It's funny because that's Konami is in the middle of doing that. Who was developing those? What's the project? What's the Sega? They're going back to their catalog thing they announced a few years ago and I think maybe we've only gotten one of those games so far, but I know that they announced like, oh, we're even going to look like Jess at Radio, we're going to look at da-da-da-da-da-da.

Speaker 1:
[160:15] I don't know who's doing the dev work on that or if that's internal or what, but yeah.

Speaker 2:
[160:20] But it does seem like that this is a strategy that's emerging from IP holders, from Japanese IP holders. Maybe not only Japanese, maybe that's short sighted of me, but like, hey, we have all this stuff, we don't have the people in house, we'll contract you, go make a Vibribin game, you know?

Speaker 1:
[160:37] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[160:38] Or whatever.

Speaker 1:
[160:38] I think that that's very possible, that is the route they go on. Because you look at some of the other stuff, like they started, was it Dark Outlaw Games? That was the Jason Blundell studio.

Speaker 2:
[160:49] Right.

Speaker 1:
[160:49] And they started that and that went away before they even got to ship anything. And so I look at it as like new leadership came in, they're also facing down the turn of a generation, whether they're ready for it or not economically. I mean, how much do you sell a PS6 for? And all of that stuff, they know what that console is going to be. They know what those devices will be, I'm sure.

Speaker 2:
[161:13] But do you feel ready for new devices? Or do you feel like it's?

Speaker 1:
[161:17] No.

Speaker 2:
[161:18] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[161:19] The refrain I hear from the audience all the time, from people who listen to the show is it doesn't feel like, and it's something I sort of share, is the idea that it feels like the PS5 never got off the ground, like the generation never started. There hasn't been enough games out on it yet for them to be talking about replacing it next year. And so I think the, but my answer to that is the PS5 is not going to go. Like PS4 games were just announced this month.

Speaker 2:
[161:48] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[161:49] Like the PS4 has not technically gone away. And I think it will be a very long time if ever, if there is a PlayStation 6 game that does not run on PS5.

Speaker 2:
[161:58] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[161:59] Especially if they are also making a lower powered hand held that is less powerful than a PS5 that they are considering to be a PlayStation 6. So I think that they will have a three device strategy that will include the PS5. Or device, if you count the PS5 Pro. It's a mess, right? With these very messy times. And I think that that's probably the right move considering how messy these times are.

Speaker 2:
[162:26] Yeah. And again, what harbored prices are going to continue to look like.

Speaker 1:
[162:30] Right.

Speaker 2:
[162:31] In the world of tariffs and in the world of oil shortages and in the world of everything else. Just simply how expensive this stuff is. Even if all of that stuff, even if their prices were the same, how much money people have in their pockets right now is different. Right.

Speaker 1:
[162:46] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[162:46] And I got to, I got to really know that I'm going to actually use a big box before I buy one. Right. Especially I have a good PC. I'll be fine. You know?

Speaker 1:
[162:56] Yeah. Yeah. And I think Sony strategy of pulling their games off the PC makes a lot of sense when I look at the road they're going down and I look at globally, when I think about Japan and what they care about there on that front, I go like, oh yeah, I see why they would, they would care about a handheld more than they might care about going to PC. Yeah. Like you're like, okay, yeah, that sort of makes sense.

Speaker 2:
[163:16] I like a handheld. Maybe they'll get me, you know, maybe they'll get me with a cool, you should make it a phone too.

Speaker 1:
[163:22] It's not going to run Phantasy Star Online.

Speaker 2:
[163:24] You don't know that. You don't know that, Jeff.

Speaker 1:
[163:27] Okay, you're right. I guess I don't know that.

Speaker 2:
[163:28] They're bringing it back.

Speaker 1:
[163:30] If it plays PS4 games, it will play PSO2.

Speaker 2:
[163:33] It will play PSO2, but it will only play PSO2, or sorry, it will only play New Genesis, or it will play original 1.0 PSO2.

Speaker 1:
[163:39] I think PS4 can install both.

Speaker 2:
[163:42] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[163:42] Because I literally just installed it last week and I loaded it up, and you need to load up on another platform and generate a code to link your account, and that's where I went like, I have a life to lead.

Speaker 2:
[163:51] I can't do this right now. You can't be doing this. But yeah, I had a PSO, PSO, original PSO or whatever, PSO volume 2. Or was the GameCube one volume?

Speaker 1:
[164:02] One and two.

Speaker 2:
[164:02] One and two. Three is cards, of course, which card, the card battle game, which I actually didn't get into despite being a card sicko. But I played some PSO, PSO last year. And I went, maybe, maybe I should go back and play some PSO 2. I booted up New Genesis and I went, I don't want to play this. This isn't what I want to play. And then I started down the path of getting ready to play PSO 2 original. And instead I downloaded the Dragon's Dogma online fan server because I know where I'm actually at, which is one of the novel experience. I had played some PSO 2 before. I wanted to play something I hadn't yet played before. But very similar itch, I gotta tell you. Very similar itch.

Speaker 1:
[164:41] Every year and a half or so I play some PSO 2, wherever it's at in Genesis or otherwise. And then I just go like, man, this is... And that's a game that still gets monthly drops on Game Pass. Like they still give you some, like here's the February pack of credits. And every month I go redeem them. And so my inventory is just rotten with shit and I don't even know what it does anymore.

Speaker 2:
[165:05] Yeah. How many Vocaloid outfits do you have for your character?

Speaker 1:
[165:08] None. My guy looks like Tails, except he has a Sega Saturn for a head.

Speaker 2:
[165:14] Oh. Cooler than Tails.

Speaker 1:
[165:16] And a cowboy hat on top of the Saturn, of course. It's great. It's a great game.

Speaker 2:
[165:23] I have to introduce a friend to PSO this year. The Friends of the Table season we're doing currently is like a JRPG style season. And I kind of pitched it to the crew as like, we're going to do like a 90s, late 90s, like Dreamcast style JRPG. There aren't that many of those. What if we had to make one? And I had a friend who was like, I've never played a Dreamcast game. Because they were, I don't know why. I don't know. Maybe they're they're from the UK. Maybe they didn't like the blue spiral. They only like the orange spiral.

Speaker 1:
[165:50] I don't know.

Speaker 2:
[165:50] That's fine. I don't like it either. But I got to show them PSO for the first time. And I got to show them the chat system for PSO for the first time. And that was a little like treating someone to a fruit they'd never had before. You know what I mean? Like, you've never had an apple? You've never had an apple? Because this is fundamental. You just have an apple, you know?

Speaker 1:
[166:10] Look at this.

Speaker 2:
[166:11] Look at this. I don't even like these that much. But if you never had one, you got to have one, you know? Simple chat, just all time good feature. So.

Speaker 1:
[166:24] Yeah. And it predated me's in a lot of ways. I feel like the types of shenanigans people got up to making weird fucked up me's. Yeah. Simple chat had all of that.

Speaker 2:
[166:34] And listen, if they're going to go in, if Sony is going to go in on portable again, the Monster Hunter portable games are kind of the inheritor of the PSO, lobby stuff and all the other rest of it. Like, I think we're ready. Sega, if you're listening, we all have these little devices. It's time. It's time to make PSO 3, PSO 1 again.

Speaker 1:
[166:57] Right.

Speaker 2:
[166:57] We get to play it. It's good. Dark Falls is there. Red Ring Rico.

Speaker 1:
[167:01] Yeah. Can I play as Red Ring? No, I don't want to.

Speaker 2:
[167:04] You don't want to. You don't want to.

Speaker 1:
[167:06] I want to play it as a short robot, short as possible, so I can see a lot of the screen.

Speaker 2:
[167:11] See over your head.

Speaker 1:
[167:14] And I'm going to shoot these fucking wrappies.

Speaker 2:
[167:16] Get these little M guns.

Speaker 1:
[167:17] Yeah. God. Yeah, dude. It's so good. And I play the first three hours of PSO every few months because I lose a save on an emulator or I'm on a different device or like, I have like save syncing set up in a lot of ways now, so that doesn't happen as often. But like, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[167:38] I got to Caves 2, my most recent play through. I was like, yeah, I made it further.

Speaker 1:
[167:44] Yeah, exactly. Speaking of games with cool guns, Splatoon Raiders was, they gave some updates this morning here about the release of that. It will have new amiibo, but also they're confirming it for a July 23rd release. This is going to be a game that costs different amounts of money depending on how you want it.

Speaker 2:
[168:08] Oh, really?

Speaker 1:
[168:09] Yeah. Much like with the announcement of Yoshi, having so digitally it will be $50 and physically it will be 60.

Speaker 2:
[168:16] Huh.

Speaker 1:
[168:17] Nintendo was trying to paint this as a discount for digital users, whereas some people are taking it more as a price hike for physical users. I can't decide which it is. I'm inclined to think of it a price hike on physical, but also the cost of goods there is greater. And so you can at least tell yourself the story as to why that makes some kind of six cents.

Speaker 2:
[168:39] Well, Jeff, their players cover a wide breadth of geography, preferences, and tastes. So while there isn't a single model that's best for everyone, this change responds to a lot of feedback they've gotten so far. They will continue to listen and learn.

Speaker 1:
[168:54] I'm OK, good. As long as they're going to continue to listen and learn, then I'm fine with it. This is the single player Splatoon game. The trailer looks good. The trailer actually, again, as someone who always played as a ranged character in PSO, I did have a moment watching that trailer where I was like, this is like Splatoon. Oh, but also like, I don't know, this is, it reminded me a little bit of PSO, and then somehow in some disgusting way, a little bit of like Borderlands. And I don't think it's going to be a loot game or anything like that. They're not making that game.

Speaker 2:
[169:22] Sure.

Speaker 1:
[169:23] But like there was a part of me that was like, man, what if they made that game? What if they actually just made a full on loot game with kids and squids and I could equip fucking plus two ink guns and all that.

Speaker 2:
[169:33] You're like, that'd be cool. That'd be pretty cool. Yeah, I don't, what is the structure of that thing? I watched that trailer, level-based, challenge-based, because those games have had single-player features and single-player boss fights.

Speaker 1:
[169:45] Part of it, I think, is an outcropping of some of the single-player stuff they've done. But I can't tell you, because I watched the trailer too and some of the other stuff, and I was like, oh, okay, all right. But I don't have a firm grasp on what exactly they're making there in terms of structure. But what if they made a full on loot game? People would be pissed, I think, actually because I think there are enough people that are mad about loot games these days.

Speaker 2:
[170:09] There was some crafting or something in the trailer, right? You get an upgrade, maybe there's upgrades. Those are the upgrades.

Speaker 1:
[170:15] You got to have progression, right? I mean, you're making a single player game, you got to have access to the more powerful stuff later.

Speaker 2:
[170:21] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[170:22] So.

Speaker 2:
[170:23] Yeah, I'm down. I'm excited for it. The music is going to kick ass, right?

Speaker 1:
[170:28] Yeah, right. Like it'll hopefully it'll have, you know, like a great number of clothes to equip and such like that's you can't. I don't think you can make a splatoon game without that.

Speaker 2:
[170:39] But yeah, that's the thing that I'm going to be missing is like, it seems like from the trailer that you're mostly in this, like abandoned island that's all covered, but like the street wear game to me. Yeah, exactly. It's an urban city game to me.

Speaker 1:
[170:54] So maybe about color ways.

Speaker 2:
[170:56] It is. It is a game about color ways. Like that is what it is. It's a game about sneaker scalping and you got to be there and flip that shit, you know?

Speaker 1:
[171:06] I need to, I want to buy the equivalent of the Supreme Brick. That would be a good weapon in that game.

Speaker 2:
[171:13] That would be a good weapon in that game, you're right.

Speaker 1:
[171:16] The trailer for the Assassin's Creed Black Flag remake leaked.

Speaker 2:
[171:20] I missed this.

Speaker 1:
[171:21] It looks like a better version of Assassin's Creed Black Flag. It's not going to have multiplayer or any of the DLC from the sounds of things. Sure. I don't know. It's weird, man. I liked this game. And yeah, I liked this game. I have zero interest in playing it again. Yeah. I think it's part of that is just like I think Assassin's Creed is just I just don't. I don't think I want that anymore in any of the forms that they're issuing it.

Speaker 2:
[171:50] Yeah, I like that game. Why do I not want to play?

Speaker 1:
[171:53] The last one was good. Shadows is good too. Like it's not cool. Yeah, they're not necessarily making bad games. They had a few rough ones for a while there. But man, there's nothing necessarily wrong with these games other than I just don't connect with them and you know what? It's because they moved away from Desmond.

Speaker 2:
[172:11] Yeah, they gave up on matters. They gave up on Desmond. We never got the Desmond game when he would be the modern day assassin.

Speaker 1:
[172:17] Exactly.

Speaker 2:
[172:17] We all thought we were going to get. He hits like three guys with baton or whatever in that game. Who cares?

Speaker 1:
[172:24] Yeah. I want him running through fucking city streets, eating the shit out of modern day fucking Templars.

Speaker 2:
[172:31] I want him to have a rivalry turned friendship with Aiden Pierce from Watch Dogs. That's where it was all going very clearly. I want them to kiss. They're going to kiss.

Speaker 1:
[172:42] They're going to kiss.

Speaker 2:
[172:44] I don't know what happened. I think they just made too many of these.

Speaker 1:
[172:49] Yeah, I think they made too many of these. I would also argue that somewhere along the way here, you could say the same thing about Far Cry. Yeah. Ubisoft had lost its soul. Whether it was the editorial board that was sucking all of the interesting things out of the white supremacist Far Cry, and all of the games around that era. All of them. Yeah, they just, they sanded off anything interesting about those games and just started turning a crank.

Speaker 2:
[173:18] I've told you, I heard from some Watch Dogs Legion devs over the course of many years from different people that the editorial board came in and like insisted that every character you play as in that game needs to have a gun. And they were like, that's the whole point of the game is that sometimes you're a grandma who doesn't have a gun.

Speaker 1:
[173:37] Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[173:38] Well, oh, well, they said gamers want guns, put a gun on them. You know, guns.

Speaker 1:
[173:45] Yeah. Which, yeah, we do. Yes.

Speaker 2:
[173:47] Yes. Let's talk about Marathon, which we didn't even talk about how good the guns feel in that game. Oh my God.

Speaker 1:
[173:52] And they look incredible.

Speaker 2:
[173:53] Looks so good.

Speaker 1:
[173:54] The Burt.

Speaker 2:
[173:56] The Burt is so good.

Speaker 1:
[173:57] That is my favorite. Like Destiny has a lot of that good shit, too, where it's just like, here's a gun with no fucking barrel because it's the future and fuck you. And you just look at it and go like, how does this even work?

Speaker 2:
[174:08] Yeah. But yeah, I don't know. I feel like and I think that I think the thing that's confounding is I play with something like Shadows and I go, yeah, I'm having a pretty cool time. I think there's some cool ideas in this game. This game is neat, but I don't care about it. It's like having really, really, really good fast food where it's still just fast food. Like I like it. I'm having a good time with it, but I'm not, it's not going to stick to my, I'm not going to be like, damn, do you remember when I got that really good fast food burger?

Speaker 1:
[174:36] Those Jack in the Box tacos were the greasiest. I love it.

Speaker 2:
[174:39] They might hit in the moment.

Speaker 1:
[174:41] Oh, yeah. Yeah. For me, Shadows was also an exercise in colorblindness stuff. Like the accessibility was bad. That was funny because it came at a time when they were issuing press releases about their amazing accessibility suite. We've got these great tools for accessibility and color and all this other stuff. I'm sitting here going like, no, you fucking don't because I can't play this game unless I dumb it down to the easiest setting because the parry windows are what they are and the red flash on this. The options were bad for that and the Prince of Persia side scroller. They fixed it in that to some extent, but unless they've changed it in the last six months, Assassins was still like, I just couldn't see shit.

Speaker 2:
[175:24] What's the gold standard for good colorblind options in that silent fashion game? Titanfall, interesting.

Speaker 1:
[175:31] And this is something that more and more games do, but Titanfall allowed you to just customize any color. And it's HUD stuff. It's not necessarily like the in-world. Some games do like Doom 2016 and Eternal I think did it badly, where their colorblindness option was like, turn on a filter that makes the whole game look red to me. And then when I'm streaming it, people go like, why do you have to get the cables plugged in wrong? So it's like a bad option on both ends there. I don't need the world tinted. I need HUD elements that stand out, especially for like when you, hey, here's an unblockable attack, right? Ghost of Yote, similar type deal of like, an unblockable attack is coming in and it has a red glint. And then this one has a yellow glint. The thing I've discovered over time about my colorblindness is that because I cannot rely on it, I filter it.

Speaker 2:
[176:26] Right?

Speaker 1:
[176:26] And so even colors that I can see normally, it takes me a little bit longer to pick it up because I'm just not...

Speaker 2:
[176:34] You're never going to rely on it intuitively.

Speaker 1:
[176:35] Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like even when you throw a yellow attack or this attack or this attack, if it is something I have to differentiate by color instead of pattern, Yeah. it's already fucked.

Speaker 2:
[176:45] Right.

Speaker 1:
[176:46] No matter the colors. And so Titanfall does it really well because like you need, this is an ally, this isn't. Like you need HUD elements that are colored the right way for that on a map or whatever. And they just let you open up a hex grid or, you know, like just customize all of that stuff. And a lot more games did that in the wake of that. But that was one of the first games that I remember that I went like, oh shit, they awesome. They finally did the fucking thing.

Speaker 2:
[177:08] Yeah. I felt that way about a lot of that game Jeff.

Speaker 1:
[177:12] Well, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[177:12] It'd be cool if they made one of those again too.

Speaker 1:
[177:15] Well, there's an indie game on Steam that's running demos every time I try to launch it, it just crashes. But the trailers sure look a lot like Titanfall.

Speaker 2:
[177:23] I hope it feels that way. I hope they get the double jump, right?

Speaker 1:
[177:26] Well, yeah. We'll see. Last story here. Iron Galaxy has announced a fresh round of layoffs. I think we're talking about just the changing face of the game industry and how a lot of the stuff works. Iron Galaxy is, they didn't get specific here. They say a number of teammates and friends are losing their jobs as we adjust to a new company structure. Ever since 2020, when everything about making video games started to change, people have been waiting for business to get back to normal. These are the conversations we've had with colleagues and partners on our travels to the places where game creators gather. This year, we're adopting a new posture to accept these current market conditions as permanent. Iron Galaxy, they've come up a lot over the years. It's the company that Dave Lang founded, for those that don't know. And most recently, they've been known for doing the development work on Tony Hawk 3 plus 4. But they primarily are, like they will port games to platforms and do all this sort of work. And I look at this as like, there's probably a lot more competition in that space. And I bet all of the companies that are looking for help in that regard are probably not willing to spend as much on it. And Iron Galaxy is a US based company.

Speaker 2:
[178:48] Right.

Speaker 1:
[178:49] They were never, even to hear them tell it, describing the services that they offered. They were never the cheapest option, but they thought of themselves as the best option. And I wonder if it's a case of a lot more companies are going with cheaper options that are maybe not as good because they can't afford it or what have you. But yeah, it's an interesting, that's kind of like one of those canary in a coal mine type things because that was one of those studios that for years and years, it felt like they had more work than they could handle. And to hear them tell it, it was always like, man, just like everyone needs help and we've got the best people in the world for Unreal Engine, this or that. And so I imagine that when they say, hey, the nature of the industry has changed, like, yes, it absolutely has. So I think it just kind of gets back to what we were talking about earlier.

Speaker 2:
[179:42] Yeah. You read this as them saying, in order to be sustainable for the next few years, we can't be the size that we are. Yeah, or we can't be running the business the way we've been running it.

Speaker 1:
[179:57] Right. And they're a company that's kind of reliant on work coming in.

Speaker 2:
[180:03] Right. Sure, the health of the industry, this is a Waffle House index situation, right? The industry isn't healthy, so studios like Iron Galaxy end up taking that hit in a way.

Speaker 1:
[180:15] Yeah. And so they have to kind of adjust to kind of fit the amount of work that is coming in or that they can handle or what have you. At a time there, they shipped Rumbleverse, and it looked like they were going to maybe make some more of their own stuff. And I imagine that that is, I would guess that that is not going to be much of the case going forward. Though I would, again, that Tony Hawk thing they shipped was fucking awesome, way better than you would think. They made new levels for that game. I didn't know that. Yeah, there's like three new levels in there that are like great. They're like great Tony Hawk levels. Like you play them and like I came away from it going like, they need to make a brand new Tony Hawk game and these people need to make it because. They get it shit. Yeah, they nailed it.

Speaker 2:
[180:59] That's a bummer. I mean, that's great that they did it. Yeah, it's like actually makes me like well up a little bit to think about someone cracking how to make good new Tony Hawk levels in our era. You know what I mean? It's like someone like put out a really good like early 2000s or early 90s R&B record. You know what I mean? We lost this recipe. I thought we didn't know how to do this anymore. Yeah, but it also makes me sad to think that they won't get the chance to do more of it.

Speaker 1:
[181:27] You know, right. Well, I guess I ultimately we don't know, right? We don't know what they will or won't get a chance to make my that's something that's completely reliant on Microsoft, right?

Speaker 2:
[181:37] Right.

Speaker 1:
[181:38] Right. So so probably not. I mean, like we're being real, like Microsoft is not man, exactly in the best spot, but that's absolutely a game that should be happening. You know, we think about Game Pass and the value of Game Pass and everything. Like that's a perfect kind of Game Pass sized game for people that don't have the knowledge of what that franchise was. And it's a great purchase for anyone who was there.

Speaker 2:
[182:01] Yeah. Well, that's the other half of this. The Microsoft Game Pass stuff is like, I think when a lot of us were really moved by it before so many things, it was in an era before the acquisitions and before all the mergers and before all of the concentration which really shifts how that thing works, and what its position is in the industry. Again, on top of everything else.

Speaker 1:
[182:24] Yeah. Well, Austin, we should do this again sometime.

Speaker 2:
[182:27] Would love to.

Speaker 1:
[182:28] But we're out of time. Where can people find out more about Realis?

Speaker 2:
[182:33] It is over on Kickstarter. It'll be on Kickstarter through the end of the month. You can just go there and search for Realis, R-E-A-L-I-S.

Speaker 1:
[182:40] I want to read that book.

Speaker 2:
[182:41] You should read that.

Speaker 1:
[182:42] I still have the players, A-D-N-D players' handbook. I still can flip that open and read about swords and staves and saving throws and all this other shit.

Speaker 2:
[182:52] I did a podcast last year where we just read through the Monster Manual, and that was two years ago. It was three years ago. Time is fucked. But it was cool. It was cool to just go through that thing and be like, yeah, these guys are sick.

Speaker 1:
[183:05] Yeah, this was the first time I ever heard about a gelatinous cube.

Speaker 2:
[183:08] Yeah, man.

Speaker 1:
[183:09] Like reading that and go like, oh my god. Yeah, yeah. That's cool. I don't need to play A, D, and D. I could just read the books. As an only child, that's what I did.

Speaker 2:
[183:18] You and me both, brother.

Speaker 1:
[183:19] Yeah. You and me both. Read those books and went, these are sick. I don't ever want to play this. These are incredibly sick.

Speaker 2:
[183:25] That's where we got the, I read them for years, then finally got the chance to play and went, I think I could do something with this.

Speaker 1:
[183:33] Yeah, cool. All right.

Speaker 2:
[183:37] That's going to do it for us here. It means a lot that you have me on. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1:
[183:41] It's great to finally catch up. It's been for real. Stupid amount of time. But yeah, let's do this again. Absolutely. All right, everybody, that's going to do it for this week's show. I'll be back on Wednesday to, I don't know, play some video games or something. Maybe I'll get back into, I mean, marathons. All right. All right. We'll see you next time. And I'm going to go click a button that stops this right now.