transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:15] And welcome to Into the Aether, It's a Low Key Video Game Podcast. My name is Brendon Bigley. My name is Stephen Hilger. I like Final Fantasy VII, Scott, maintaining an optimistic outlook and going outside. And Brendon, I've been living the dream.

Speaker 2:
[00:28] Dude, we are both living the dream. I feel like you and I have been really, really, unbelievably excited for Tomodachi Life in a way that I feel is... Honestly, I didn't see this level of excitement in most other people about Tomodachi Life.

Speaker 3:
[00:45] Even currently, to some degree.

Speaker 2:
[00:48] Tomodachi Life, I think, has been a hit in the way Pokopia was. Like, the amount of Tomodachi Life I've seen flooding social media has been unreal in the same way when Pokopia released. I was like, I didn't even know this many people had Switch 2s. In this case, I was just like, I didn't know this many people were interested in Tomodachi Life. But as we've said many times in the lead up to this game, if you knew anything about the first game and you were on Vine when Vine existed, you saw an unbelievable amount of Tomodachi Life on Vine.app.

Speaker 3:
[01:20] Even more recently on TikTok, I feel like there's a whole subgenre of TikTok that is like me is singing operatically about blue topics, let's say.

Speaker 2:
[01:28] Yeah, yes. Which, you know, all of that, I think, led to Nintendo basically blocking the ability to share stuff out of the Switch for Tomodachi Life, Living the Dream. And I just need to remind the people at Nintendo that people couldn't do that on the 3DS either. And all of that stuff was all over the internet. People were just filming it with their phones. And in some ways, that even made it funnier to like sit in your bedroom, film, you know, I don't know, Hank Hill singing about propane and then upload that to Vine made it funnier than if you could naturally export that video out of your 3DS.

Speaker 3:
[02:02] Yeah, that decision feels it feels so at odds with the game in so many ways, because like the game has like an entire, like one of the buildings is a photo booth where you can like, you know, share and save screenshots. So it feels like it was definitely decided after the game was made that like you can't do this, which, you know, I've seen some people say that that's in place to give Nintendo like any kind of plausible deniability if there is anything that goes viral that is like a real person or something that's like, I don't know though. I mean, from my point of view, it feels like a dumb decision, to be honest. Like I just think that this makes me sound laissez-faire in terms of like, like lawmaking, but it's like people are gonna do it anyway. You might as well just make it easier. You know, like the people that are gonna share rants and stuff are gonna do so anyway. You might as well make it more easy and fun for everyone else to share what they're making in this game.

Speaker 2:
[02:55] Yeah, the game would benefit greatly from the ability to share more widely with people, which is a thing that I've seen a lot also. And a thing I feel personally, like the ability to share me's or designs or like foods.

Speaker 3:
[03:07] That's the big one, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[03:09] And stuff like that. Like, you know, even in the 3DS one, if I'm remembering correctly, they did have the ability to like generate a QR code for stuff that you were drawing in the game.

Speaker 3:
[03:17] You feel like there's like a street pass thing or something, probably.

Speaker 2:
[03:19] Yeah, I might be mixing that up with Animal Crossing New Leaf, which I know had the QR scanner in the Able Sister shop. But either way, like, it's so interesting to me that this game has gone so viral so quickly, that simultaneously is a game that Nintendo is desperate to not have people sharing stuff from. But I think there's got to be just kind of like a silent acknowledgement all around that everyone's going to do it anyway, as you're saying.

Speaker 3:
[03:40] Yeah, and it also almost adds to this rebellious air about the game, that like, we're doing it despite Nintendo's wishes.

Speaker 2:
[03:47] Yeah, right.

Speaker 3:
[03:48] But anyway, I guess to kind of briefly explain...

Speaker 2:
[03:50] We should talk about what the game is, right?

Speaker 3:
[03:52] That's something I try to keep in mind whenever we talk about anything, is like, I know that there's a decent amount of people listening who are not playing these games, I just want to make sure the conversation makes some degree of sense for everybody.

Speaker 2:
[04:03] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[04:04] Doubly important for this game. If we just launched into what we're doing, it would actually make no sense for everyone, even people who have played it. So, Tomodachi Life for the 3DS, I actually never played... Did you play the 3DS one or did you just like witness it?

Speaker 2:
[04:18] Oh, a lot. Yeah, no, I loved the 3DS one, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[04:21] Yeah, I didn't play it, but I knew of it, but basically it was an elevator pitch would be like the Sims meets the Me's. So in Tomodachi Life, you would like make a bunch of Me's that could be anything. So they could be like you, they could be, you know, recreations of famous people, whatever you want them to be. And then in the game, there would be these sort of like developing relationships between the Me's, they would fall in love, they would become rivals, they would get mad at each other. And then there were all the, the game has built within it like an absurdist sense of humor anyway. So like combining that with whatever you create kind of leads to like the madness you would only really get in like a Jackbox party game, but like as a life sin is sort of what was happening. And so it was a cult hit on the 3DS. And this, this game is, I don't even know if anyone expected a sequel, to be honest. I don't know if that was something that was like on the horizon at all.

Speaker 2:
[05:17] No, not in a million years. But I thought maybe hypothetically like a port of the 3DS one. And even I remember during the Nintendo Direct when they started to announce it. I was like, oh wow, they're porting that game to the Switch. That's awesome. That's a great idea. And then it was like, oh no, this is a full sequel. And then also in the weeks leading up, they did some like Nintendo developer interviews on their website, on their blog as well. And they said they've been working on this game, you know, how true this is, but they've been working on this game actively since that game came out. So it's been like nine years.

Speaker 3:
[05:46] That makes sense to me, especially considering this is launching on both Switches. Like this, this to me kind of feels like the swan song of the Switch one. I don't know if that necessarily means it will be the last game made for Switch, but it kind of feels like I would expect, you know, for the remainder of the year and next year that most Nintendo first party stuff will be Switch two exclusive.

Speaker 2:
[06:08] Yeah, we're kind of entering no man land for first party stuff for Switch now. They haven't, they haven't done a Nintendo director a long time. They skipped the one that they usually do in the early part of the year. So we're just kind of like left adrift, wondering what's coming next, which I'm really interested to see what they have. But yeah, I mean, this game, this game is out on Switch one. There's technically not a Switch two edition, but it plays so well on Switch two that like you wouldn't really be able to tell, which does tell me that they were targeting both consoles. But it's definitely been in development so long that it was like it basically was in development throughout the entirety of the Switch one life cycle.

Speaker 3:
[06:41] And it kind of feels weirdly like an acknowledgement of everything that's happened before. And like is also like we talked a lot during our Pacopia discussion about how that game's inherent relationship with Animal Crossing and the kind of future one can imagine for Animal Crossing after playing Pacopia.

Speaker 2:
[07:02] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[07:03] And this game is like another iteration on that idea. So to kind of explain.

Speaker 2:
[07:08] I wanted to talk about this too.

Speaker 3:
[07:09] Living the Dream. So the whole premise is that you have an island, much like New Horizons, and you populate it with me. So the game kind of like it does a good job tutorializing because there are a surprising amount of systems for a game this silly. But like you make your first me. And when you're making them, you know, choose their appearance and everything. You also choose their personality. There are like five or six meters that you have like a gradient of.

Speaker 2:
[07:37] Yeah, it's like, are they slow or are they fast? Are they polite or are they honest? Yeah, stuff like that.

Speaker 3:
[07:42] My favorite thinking. My favorite meter is the thinking meter, which is between serious and chill. Yeah, like that's a weird way of thinking about intelligence. But basically, depending on where you map them and you can edit all this after the fact. But like there are four overall personality types and then there are like four subclasses within each one. Yeah, it's kind of like Animal Crossing where there's like, you know, lazy, cranky and normal and stuff here. It's considerate, outgoing, ambitious and reserved. And I really love that because I feel like this game's whole thing is like really rewarding your creativity and giving you the tools you need to make all your Mii's actually feel like unique characters. Despite how much you'll end up seeing a lot of the same events repeated and stuff, I am kind of blown away at how like alive this game feels. But you know, as you make your Mii, they will ask you like you can feed them to make them happy. You can also give them clothes and renovate their houses. They all kind of start like with sort of neutral clothes and a neutral home. And basically, as you play, as you make your Mii's happy, you collect like this weird liquid light called warm fuzzies that you then like once you have enough, you can put them into the fountain and that will level up your whole island and give you a wish. And you can use the wish to basically add to the pool of stuff you can buy or give your Mii's. So like you can add like, I want to be able to buy this furniture in the store. Or I want to be able to give my Mii a guitar to play. And for all the Mii's, they also have a happiness level. And whenever they level up, you can give them either like a hobby, a catchphrase, which is great, or a little quirk. And that's where you can really, that's where they really come to life. Like for one of my Mii's, if you call my stream, one of my Mii's is a ghost named Gehost, Giovanni Host. And when I got the quirk to allow him to float instead of walking, like my whole brain lit up. I cannot believe I got this to like canonically work.

Speaker 2:
[09:50] Yeah. Also one of the other things you can get by the way is the Kid-O-Matic, which is a spray that you can spray on your Mii and it turns them into a baby version of themselves.

Speaker 3:
[09:58] Yeah. So weird.

Speaker 2:
[10:00] Which I will never use.

Speaker 3:
[10:01] Yeah. I was like, what is this? Yeah. So, and that's the thing too. Like basically the two ages of the characters are either kids or grownups. And the Mii's can also fall in love and have kids as well. So you can have up to 70 Mii's, which feels like, like I saw a lot of people complaining about that online. I'm like, these-

Speaker 2:
[10:22] That's not enough?

Speaker 3:
[10:23] That's not enough. I'm like, these Mii's are so high maintenance. I currently have like 16, I think. And even that feels overwhelming.

Speaker 2:
[10:31] I'm at 20 and I capped it there.

Speaker 3:
[10:33] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[10:34] I don't want to do any more than 20 for now, especially because like when you hit 20, it upgrades this playable area again. And I just needed more space. So I was like, okay, I'll do 20 and then I'll upgrade the space. And then I can like start to give people like their own plots of land instead of just having all the houses crammed together.

Speaker 3:
[10:49] Yeah, I've been wanting to like, whenever I add a new me, I want to make sure they've met everyone and that I've like, you know, customized their look and their house and gotten a sense of like who they are.

Speaker 2:
[10:58] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[10:59] The game really lets you play your own pace though. If you want to just make 70 me's and watch chaos unfold, you can, but I've really liked to, like I liked kind of seeing this weird fictional reality slowly unfold. I did make a me named Everyone So Far. That is just a stamp. You can like use face paint, which is like that opens up infinite possibilities. Like I saw that clip you shared of like someone drew the random encounter with the slime and Dragon Quest.

Speaker 2:
[11:26] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[11:27] And that was the me's face. But like as you make me's you can, you have stamps of everyone's face. So I just stamped everyone's face over like a blank face. And that me's name is Everyone So Far. And I'll update their look over time. So good. And their voices like this. Like you can't hear what they're saying. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. But yeah, so basically like that's kind of the loop of the game is like you make me, you make them happy. You can make more stuff on the island. And the features on the island are like there's a clothing store, there's a furniture store, there's a store that lets you make assets within the game. So you can actually like just draw. Like I've just started to do that more often. Like one of the me's I just made is actually one of my Baldur's Gate III characters, Murth, who's a tiefling. And so I wanted to have her have the like demonic eye. So I chose an eye and I drew black under it. So like it looked that way. I also gave her horns. And that's like a very like small version of what you can do. I also, because G-host is currently living with Barbara Code, the robot, I made the exterior of their house. Like you can eventually like make the exterior of the house look like whatever you want. You choose like a geometric shape and then you can draw on top of that. But there's also some templates. So there was one really good looking like SNES future dome that I made like this kind of robot house.

Speaker 2:
[12:55] Oh, that's great. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[12:56] So all this to say like, I honestly, I feel like I've been channeling something while playing this game because I was expecting it to be like funny and fun, but not really that gripping. Like I was sort of expecting this to be like something I played and streamed once or twice and then kind of dropped like indefinitely. And I recognize that like, if you compare this to say like Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley or like similar kind of games or the Sims, I think most accurately, I don't know how deep the systems go compared to those games, but they're much deeper than you would expect this game to be.

Speaker 2:
[13:36] Yeah. It keeps revealing different layers of itself over and over again, over time. And I think maybe one good piece of framing for this game and one way that I would just kind of couch it to people is like, don't go into it really expecting like, there will be a lot more active play than you'll expect, I think. But I think that the best way of going into it is thinking of it as basically like a playable reality show or sitcom. Like that's kind of the idea is like, you're just taking these characters and throwing them on an island and seeing how they interact with one another. And you will realistically and play the demo and find out for yourself. But like you will realistically derive enough enjoyment from just that aspect of it in itself. Like that will be enough to get you by. But as you're alluding to, like the systems in this game are so deep and the hooks are specifically so enticing. Yes, that it does become a game. I wasn't expecting this at all either, but it does become a game that's like really difficult to put down. I was up until like 1.30 in the morning the other night playing this game.

Speaker 3:
[14:34] I have 20 hours playing already. It's been out for like four days.

Speaker 2:
[14:38] I'm somewhere over the 10 realm, but in no way did I expect to be like 10 plus hours deep into Tomodachi Life already. And that's just because like, you know, any time there's a free moment where you're just like sitting there and you're not actively doing something, one of your me's will be like, I have something that I need help with.

Speaker 3:
[14:54] Yeah, do you want to play Shadow Quest with me?

Speaker 2:
[14:57] Yeah, or they'll like trip and fall, which then means like you need to bring another me over to help them up or they'll be hungry or they'll like want to go on a trip or, you know, they'll be bored for some reason or another. And constantly they're asking you to do things. And if you just get into that loop, it's very hard to break free from that loop. And then the more you do that loop, the more systems they start to also unveil on you. Right. So like you get to a point where, as I was just saying, once you hit 20 me's, they upgrade the size of the island so you can like re-terraform your entire island. And then once that happens, like, okay, well, now I have to move all the houses around.

Speaker 3:
[15:29] Yeah, I did that when it first expanded because I didn't like how they were all living in a mall, even though my island is called Newist Jersey.

Speaker 2:
[15:37] That's like, yes, perfect.

Speaker 3:
[15:38] And so I made like one island, like the residential area that has the fountain in the middle and then the restaurant in like the top left. And then there's a literal boardwalk that connects to another island. That's where all the shopping happens. And then there's like a more like concrete kind of park with like cobblestone. That's where the news tower is and the Ferris wheel and other things. And it's like there's sort of three different interactions with the me's in this game. There's like them asking you for stuff. And then there's sort of like either a literal game or like, I want to be friends with Barbara Code. And then they'll go and talk to her about parallel realities.

Speaker 2:
[16:17] And then you can they'll be like, you'll say, oh, yeah, you should go do that. And they'll be like, what do you think we should talk about? And then they give you the opportunity to like write whatever you want. And it'll be like, okay, is it an activity?

Speaker 3:
[16:26] Yeah, like an activity, a person, a thing, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[16:28] Which is the best.

Speaker 3:
[16:29] So yeah, your island will have its own lingo. So when you just overhear them talking, like I'll hear like Sabrina Gilles going like, an optimistic outlook, garlic clove, watching horror movies. Like what's happening? But they'll either be like a game or you'll get like these vignettes that always are like really surprising and fun and kind of add to the meaning of the relationship with these characters. Like when you get the restaurant, I unlocked a random scene where three of my characters all had punk pompadours and they were like talking about like being punks together. But also like more meaningfully, like I was surprisingly moved by this game, like genuinely when the first characters to get married were Beth Shoegaze and Para Morgan.

Speaker 2:
[17:15] Can you describe, okay, wait, it's worth, let's take a step back for a quick second.

Speaker 3:
[17:18] That's what I mean, it's impossible to talk about.

Speaker 2:
[17:20] One thing that I think is interesting about Tomodachi Life is the different ways in which people play this game. Like some people will play this game and they will just create these based on like their friends and family and that'll be it.

Speaker 3:
[17:30] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[17:30] Some people will play this game and create characters based on, you know, like video game characters or movie characters. And then there's this-

Speaker 3:
[17:37] Kiryu and Majima are like in every one's game. I think this is canonically Kiwami 3 in my opinion.

Speaker 2:
[17:43] Yeah, yeah. Sorry to Sega, but you dropped the ball on that one. So now we get Tomodachi Life. And then the third version of this is, yes, you're making what you're doing, which is like basically entirely original characters, which is not how I'm playing. I'm kind of doing a mix of all three. So like the only real people in it are myself and Persia. And then most of the other characters are like characters I pulled from movies and fiction and video games and stuff like that. And then I have one original character because I just wanted one and her name is Gumi. And she's this like little old lady who loves yoga and hamsters and has a pet parakeet. And she is the protagonist of my Tomodachi Life experience actually.

Speaker 3:
[18:20] I love that so much.

Speaker 2:
[18:21] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[18:21] I this is what I mean by I feel like I've channeled something where like I my first me was screaming Stevie, but everyone calls him screaming steve which like you can actually edit the pronunciation, which is so cool. It's also worth noting like this game is surprisingly inclusive with like the non-binary gender options and like you can make everyone's dating preferences whatever you want. Yeah, it's really lovely to see that, especially right now.

Speaker 2:
[18:46] That was a big issue with the first game by the way, that like Nintendo got a lot of hot water for that the first time around because I didn't do it.

Speaker 3:
[18:51] Yeah, I'm glad they made the effort to be more inclusive this time. Yeah, but my first me was because I was playing this on stream initially, like at the day it came out, I streamed which is on our YouTube. If you want to watch it, it was a lot of fun. By the time this episode comes out, there will be two streams of mine on our YouTube. If you want to catch up on the lore of Screamin Stevie in Newest Jersey. But I was like, should I make myself? I made a fictionalized version of myself. So I look somewhere between myself and a Don Hurtzfeldt cartoon. Screamin Stevie is an outgoing charmer. He's got a very intense expression. He's, whenever I try to like, you can drag your me's and force them to interact. Whenever I do that, he gets into a sword fight or tries to scare someone else, which is not unlike how I am. But then from there, everyone's been in OC. And you know, like I wasn't surprised to learn about myself that I like making original characters, given my interests. But I was surprised at how invested I got in like the internal lore of NU'EST Jersey and how much the game gave back when I put like an ounce of creativity into these characters. Like getting Barbara Cote and G Host to actually act like a robot and a ghost was incredible. And then Paramorgan and Beth Shoegaze are both like in a band. And Paramorgan, I was making, I wanted to make, like I tried with every me to kind of just let my subconscious drive and I'd be like, okay, like this character is gonna be like, I need a rebel on the island. The energy is too passive. I want like a rebellious spirit. So I made this character with like spiky red hair and like kind of angry expression. And everyone in chat was like, this looks like the lead singer of Paramore. Immediately, like you just made Haley Williams.

Speaker 2:
[20:36] Yeah, that's funny.

Speaker 3:
[20:37] So I named them Paramorgan. And then I made another character named Beth Shugase who was like bangs covering her eyes and is like a very nervous but artistic soul. And there was a point in my second stream where, so I mentioned before, there were like kind of three interactions with the me's. There's like them asking you to play a game or to like have them become friends with someone else. There are the like cut scene vignettes. And then there's just like them on your island interacting freely. And that's where the game impresses me the most because like Animal Crossing New Horizons, for example, I think one of my main, like I love that game. And that's the game that I think for the foreseeable future will always be the reference point for a game like this. But like very quickly, the villagers in that game kind of feel like decorations and not characters, because they rarely go outside of their house or outside of like the area around their house. They're kind of just waiting for you to talk to them. And they'll occasionally like sing or work out on the town square, which goes a long way, but like it's not very often. Like it's very rare that you'll see them like doing something that isn't just like waiting for you to talk to them. And this game, like based on how you've made your island, the Mii's are like always out and about talking, interacting. And there was a point where they all gathered, like literally every Mii sat down and listened to Beth Shugay's play guitar. And she sang about how she was in love with Paramorgan. And then they got married. And to hype Beth Shugay's up to propose confidently, I had to play a shmup in her head where like I moved Beth and she like shot all these intrusive thoughts down. And they got married and I was like, this is a genuinely moving story that I only feel partially responsible for. Like the delicate balance of like, yes, you can like set characters up and tell them to like pursue the other, but like you kind of have to wait for the other character to want it too. It's just out of your control enough that it feels exciting when characters fall in love. And a lot of it is like not what you want it to be too. Like there's a tension to characters, like being jealous or like becoming rivals. But like Beth Shugay is in Paramorgan getting married. I would be surprised if there's any game that moves me quite as much emotionally as that moment. It was like genuinely beautiful in a way I wasn't expecting. So I just, I think that like Animal Crossing I think has more of a foundation to be played long term. I do kind of get a sense that I will eventually like beat this game. I will kind of get to a point where I've built out my island in a way that I like and I've made all the me's that I actually want and they've all.

Speaker 2:
[23:25] You've unlocked all the extra stuff from the Wish Fountain. Yeah. And then what happens after that?

Speaker 3:
[23:31] That is a very compelling 40 hour experience. Like what I just described. So it's the difference between I think Animal Crossing and this is, I've been thinking a lot about between this and Pacopia, what do I want from the next Animal Crossing? And I think the unique advantage Animal Crossing has is its connection to our time and deliberately being a slower paced game. I don't want them to lose that because there's a piece of me that feels a little bit hypnotized by the like constant feedback loop of both this and Pacopia.

Speaker 2:
[24:02] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[24:03] Like Pacopia especially, I actually feel overwhelmed by sometimes. Like I actually like I've made a mission to go to one part of the island and do one thing. And on the way, like eight Geodudes asked me to like give their life meaning. I'm like, can you wait a second?

Speaker 2:
[24:17] It makes me grateful for the moments where they tell you like, this won't be done for three hours or like come back tomorrow.

Speaker 3:
[24:23] Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2:
[24:24] I'm like, OK, great. Like you're giving me a very clean break point to walk away from this game.

Speaker 3:
[24:28] That's the interesting thing too about Tomodachi Life is it is tied to our real time and that like every day the Mii's will give you like some money to spend. And they do go to bed if you're playing at night. Like not all of them will be awake.

Speaker 2:
[24:41] Yeah, I got to a point when I was playing at one thirty in the morning the other night, I think I had sixteen Mii's or somewhere in that vicinity. And ten of them were asleep and there were just like six of them walking around. I was like, I think I'm getting the hint from this game, but I should also go to sleep.

Speaker 3:
[24:53] I recommend playing this game on your birthday as well, which I did, because it was recently my birthday. It was also me and Screamin Stave's birthday at the same time. He was like, it's like I'm looking in a mirror. Like, ah. But the birthday event is also surprisingly sweet, although it is very end of Evangelion. Like, congratulations, like you get a first person view of all the me's. And the most haunting moment was, because it was midnight when I played, because I had friends over who wanted to see the game. So we were playing it together and I'm glad they got to see the birthday event. It was fun. But there's a character on my island named Drew Neutral, who has a sort of like...

Speaker 2:
[25:28] I love that name so much.

Speaker 3:
[25:29] He's, I think he's the star of the island because he has like the cat ears hair, a very neutral expression. And he talks like this, everything ends with a little song.

Speaker 2:
[25:41] Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[25:41] So it cut to him. He just went, you can do anything. That's the thing. They do recognize like your presence as like the god of this island.

Speaker 2:
[25:54] Yes. Yeah. Yeah. When you start the game, you get to choose like, what is the name of the island? And also, what do you want the Mies to call you?

Speaker 3:
[25:59] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[26:00] And I did one of the pre-filled options was Divine One, which I chose, which does give the island a little bit of a cult energy, which I wasn't really anticipating.

Speaker 3:
[26:09] I just went with Stephen and I'm glad I did.

Speaker 2:
[26:11] Yeah. But I do like it when, you know, like 16 Mies will show up on the beach and be like, Divine One, we love you.

Speaker 3:
[26:18] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[26:18] I'm obsessed with it.

Speaker 3:
[26:19] I just, this game also like taught me that I'm more into ships than I thought I was. Like I'm so invested. Like I, Paramorgan and Beth Shugay is OTP obviously.

Speaker 2:
[26:29] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[26:30] But Barbara Code and G-Host are living together and Barbara is head over heels for G-Host, but he's like a little, like he's ultra friends with her.

Speaker 2:
[26:40] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[26:40] But he has not fallen back in love yet, despite my efforts.

Speaker 2:
[26:44] Just a one way crush.

Speaker 3:
[26:44] And every now and then he's like, Should I live with Andrea Dromeda? I'm like, no, you live with Barbara. Stick with Barbara.

Speaker 2:
[26:50] Yeah. But maybe it's a better situation for them to get out of there. If it's a one way crush that goes on for this long, maybe it's emotionally devastating to live with your crush. It does not have those feelings back.

Speaker 3:
[27:01] That's the kind of emergent storytelling you get from Tomodachi Life. I think it will happen eventually, but it is funny how it all plays out. And that's kind of what I mean about it not fully being in your control. So it does feel like the character, you can tell them when they fall in love, you can say, you're not in love, and they'll just drop it.

Speaker 2:
[27:20] Yes.

Speaker 3:
[27:20] But it does feel halfway between the characters choosing for themselves and you kind of guiding them to that.

Speaker 2:
[27:29] But even if you're trying to force two characters to fall in love together, you could just pick them up and drop them next to each other over and over and over again. And at a certain point, that might backfire on you as well.

Speaker 3:
[27:39] And that's kind of what I learned with GHost, asking if you could move away. I'm like, oh my god, Barbara Cote is the one for you. Your house is named Ghost in the Shell. You got to fall in love.

Speaker 2:
[27:48] Oh my god.

Speaker 3:
[27:49] Yeah, that's when they move in together, you have to name the place.

Speaker 2:
[27:53] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[27:53] So right now, the three houses where people have moved in together, there's Barbara Cote and GHost, Ghost in the Shell. There's a vampire named The Count. And there's a woman from space named Andrea Dramata. And their house is Blood Moon. And then Screamin Stevie moved in with Sabrina Gills, the Merfolk gal. And their place is called Gilgis Island.

Speaker 2:
[28:18] That's so good. Gilgis Island.

Speaker 3:
[28:23] All Screamin Stivet and Sabrina Gills do is take pictures of each other and sword fight. They're the perfect couple. And she took out the remote and was just attacking Stivet with the remote. And then he took out his camera and was like, great pose. It's so weird. It's a weird place.

Speaker 2:
[28:40] The only characters who are living together on my island right now are Claude Von Regan and Shiori Fujisaki, which I did just call the Golden Deer as soon as they moved into a house together.

Speaker 3:
[28:51] That's amazing. Yeah. I, the only like, I, I've got deep enough into newest Jersey that I was like, I think it would complicate things to add like a IP, like another IP to this. But I have added to, I think I mentioned this earlier, I added two characters that were my Baldur's Gate three player characters. So like characters I've made in other games. So Snout and Mirth are both in newest Jersey. I also made a guy named Eggy, who's just like a white head with two like kind of vacant eyes. And everyone has fallen in love with him, including the everyone so far me. That is just like a car suit with everyone's head stamped on him. So anyway, it just, I feel like a different person after playing this, but I feel like a better person as well. It's really fun. I think this, depending on, like I think this is a very enjoyable game. I think most people who play this will have a really fun time. Whether or not it's like a fun week or your new hobby depends on how invested you are in like creating your own stuff. Like I do think this is a game that you, I don't want to say you have to find your own fun. Like it's way more rewarding to have like a personal stake in the characters and in like the objects you've made in this world. And you know, I think a lot of people are making like, yeah, they're making, you know, pre-existing characters and it's going to be funny no matter what you do, you know. But I have been, I have been surprised at how, how sweet it is as well with, with, but that also depends on how you play. Like what was a genuinely moving marriage for me could be like a very funny event for a different pair of characters.

Speaker 2:
[30:32] Yeah. So like, for example, the characters who are about to probably get married in my island, I went with a friend of the show, Brendan Klinkenberg to go see in the BAM Cinema Center, The Taking of Pelham 123, the 2009 movie starring Denzel Washington and John Travolta, where if you haven't seen it, Denzel Washington plays like an MTA employee who's like the guy who kind of decides like, okay, well this, this subway car is going too fast, so this one's going to slow down or we're going to reroute because there's construction on this track or whatever. That's his job. John Travolta in one of the most bizarre performances of his career definitely plays a guy who goes by the name Ryder with a Y who hijacks a subway car and parks it in the middle of the tracks and demands 10 million dollars from the mayor who's played by James Gandolfini.

Speaker 3:
[31:20] Oh wow.

Speaker 2:
[31:21] It's an unbelievable movie. I mean, like, yeah, it's one of those ones.

Speaker 3:
[31:24] It sounds like a Metopia or a Tomodachi Life Island.

Speaker 2:
[31:27] Yes. Just worth mentioning, it's directed by the guy who directed Top Gun as well. So like there's a lot of unintentional camp in it. So everyone in the theater was basically howling, laughing the entire time. Like it was a great time. But saw that movie, got home and downloaded Tomodachi Life. So one of the first characters I added was Denzel Washington's character, whose named Walter Garber. So I added Garber to the game. And later on, I added Meryl Streep's character from The Devil Wears Prada, Miranda Priestly, who is basically Anna Wintour, who runs Vogue, but in the Devil Wears Prada universe. And they have fallen in love against all odds. Like they are as opposite ends of the New York City spectrum as possible, I think. But they have fallen in love and I'm obsessed with their love. It is so funny to me anytime they hang out. And they will always talk about coming first on rogue-like leaderboards.

Speaker 3:
[32:17] Yeah, the top of the comes up a lot on newest jersey is remembering and thinking about the big flush, which I conflated with the big crunch, which is like one of the hypothesized endings of the universe.

Speaker 2:
[32:28] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[32:28] So Drew Neutral is always talking about thinking about the big flush. His like interior decoration for his house is just like a blank void. So seeing Drew Neutral with his like cat ears, like, yeah, knees up thinking about the end of the universe. So weird. It's the perfect game. I think this was destined to be another cult hit. Because I think what I said at the top of the episode about how like our reaction to this is probably more enthusiastic than most. I do agree that it's like going viral and people are like having a lot of fun. And I think it will stick around. Maybe not to the same degree as like New Horizons being this like pop culture event. But I think this will always have a community around it. But the reviews have been like okay. Like if you look at like Metacritic, like it kind of gets like a lukewarm sample platter of like sevens and eights.

Speaker 2:
[33:20] Which I think makes sense for this game because I think as you're saying, the amount of creativity you bring to it is what you're going to get out of it.

Speaker 3:
[33:26] Yes, exactly.

Speaker 2:
[33:28] So I think inherently it's a game that is designed to kind of not connect with every single person.

Speaker 3:
[33:32] That's exactly right. And it's interesting to see the like audience response. Like this is one of the best reviewed games on Backlogged, which is like an otherwise pretty harsh place.

Speaker 2:
[33:43] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[33:44] Like when a game comes out there, it just gets review bombed like kind of for a few days and then it balances out.

Speaker 2:
[33:49] Right.

Speaker 3:
[33:49] But people love this game. And even on Metacritic, like again, these are not like definitive sources, but just kind of getting a sense of like, what is the immediate response. It's interesting to see the disparity between the audience response and the critical response. And again, like you're saying, it's by design, not for everyone. Which I think is, if there's any kind of mantra to carry forward, I think it's that media in general should be more comfortable not being for every person. You know, in sort of an effort of like trying to reach the most eyes possible and like get the most money possible. Like I really find it refreshing when a game is like, this is just for the freaks. Like this is just for people that want to see Kiryu and Majima get married and make a fictional universe.

Speaker 2:
[34:37] Are there any other me's on your island you want to talk about?

Speaker 3:
[34:40] Let me take a look here. I do have a list. G-hosts and Barbara Code mean a lot to me, as do Para Morgan and Beth Shugay's. I already mentioned Drew Neutral and Sabrina Gills. There's a bizarre, I made them siblings. They're kind of like the personifications of day and night. There's Tommy Tomorrow and Yuna Yesterday. Neither are especially popular. And Yuna Yesterday loved Screamin Stivet, like, immediately, before they even knew each other. And then Sabrina Gills confessed her love to Stivet on the Ferris Wheel. And Yuna Yesterday was, like, waiting under the seat to be like, no, no, no, no, it's me he loves. So I had to send her on an emergency trip to Kyoto to get her out of the post-Stivet depression.

Speaker 2:
[35:25] That's one of the things when you can up, when you upgrade your island, you can send your me's on a trip.

Speaker 3:
[35:28] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[35:30] Gumi and Waluigi are like a burgeoning romance, and they went on a trip to Oceania together, which was amazing.

Speaker 3:
[35:36] Another favorite is Snowdave, who's like a big yeti. And one of his quirks is his voice is just like twice as loud as everyone else's. So he was like, I'm Snowdave. And he's a great guy. He eats everything in one bite. Just a very like kind of jolly giant on the island. Yeah, the newest ones are the two Baldur's Gate 3 characters, Snow and Myrth. They seem pretty chill. It balances out Eggie and everyone so far also being the new addition. So I also think I'll probably cap it at 20 and just kind of see how it all plays out. But it's so fun and it's it's so fun to share with friends. And the thing about this game is like unlike Animal Crossing, where I think because that game reached such a wide audience, I talked to a lot of people at that time, like in 2020 when it was like taking over, a lot of people I talked to felt stressed by that game because they felt like whenever they shared their island, it was getting compared to what people were sharing on Instagram or whatever. And it was always like, I've made like a real world accurate recreation of Tokyo. And like, yeah, I have eight Raymans, you know, and like all this stuff.

Speaker 2:
[36:39] I'm using like forced perspective to make it look like there's a cityscape in the background, you know, by terraforming the island and adding specific items up on top of the mountains and stuff like that.

Speaker 3:
[36:50] I think this game kind of limiting what you can make to the sort of inherent simplicity of the Mii's, even though the face paint opens up like all of art to you. I think like the game having a smaller audience and also being like inherently sillier, I think kind of deletes some of that FOMO in my opinion, you know?

Speaker 2:
[37:10] Yeah, I think it's really helpful that in the actual like island terraforming part of it, the Mii's will frequently ask you to do stuff and they will show you their own vision of how it should be laid out. So like one of the first ones that happens at the beginning of the game is the paddles have a Mii like during the tutorial, it'll be like, yeah, can you can you put some roads down and it'll show you like where they think the roads should be and then you could just say yes or no to that, which is honestly really helpful. And I've been kind of letting the Mii's drive on that front as far as like connecting the world goes, you know, frequently they'll be like, I think there should be a bench here and it's like the worst possible place for a bench. Yeah, which is fine. That's whatever. Because you could say yes, put it down, you get the happiness that you just pick it up and put it somewhere that makes more sense. But when it comes to actually like putting down pathways and designing the island, I'm like kind of letting the Mii's do it, which has been really fun.

Speaker 3:
[37:59] Yeah, and paths are important because like they will veer off of them, but like that will, it seems to actually influence like how they get around.

Speaker 2:
[38:07] Yes.

Speaker 3:
[38:07] So like I purposely wanted to have wooden pathways in the residential area. And then that leads to the boardwalk that connects to the, once you get into the shopping area, it's like asphalt and concrete and like cobblestone pathways. It's also fun, like the ground tiles. You can also eventually make your own ground tiles too, which opens up like infinite possibilities. But like I like how for the grass tiles, there's one that has like kind of weeds grown on it. So I tend to like put those tiles on the edges like near the sea. Like this, I like how the kind of feels like a little bit overgrown closer to the water. And then there are some spring blossom trees. And then around that, I'll put the like spring blossom petals around the tree. The one thing, I hope this game does get updates. As much as I love the like user created options, I have, I'm already pretty close to unlocking every like furniture item. And there really isn't that many. It's a lot of just like lamps, benches and like a seesaw. I think they could easily add like a few dozen more items there and it would go a long way. Because the thing about the user items, other than the aesthetic, is that like, like it's interesting, like I made two items of food. There's Stevie Cake, a Steve Cake and Tomorrow Juice. And so the cake is, because Stevie was like, it's my birthday. Can you make me food? So I stamped his face on a piece of cake and drew an S in icing. And it's hot and sweet. It's a night, no one likes it. Tomorrow Juice though has Tommy Tomorrow's face next to a lightning bolt. And I wrote like tomorrow in fancy font. And that's a sour like wake me up drink that is actually very popular. But when you make a food item, you can choose like, is this, what is this? What's the flavor? So you can give it like meaning. It's not just like a picture, but some of the like island objects like are like, I don't know how when you make a seesaw that you bought from the store, the me's will literally like write it together. And I'd like to see kind of more stuff like that, like more possibilities of like the vending machines and like those kind of items.

Speaker 2:
[40:10] I would bet there will be more, because they already have seasonal items that are in the game.

Speaker 3:
[40:15] That's true, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[40:17] There's like, like right now, because it's spring, they have a cherry blossom thing going on. We're like, they have cherry blossom stuff that you can buy. That's like both ground tiles that have cherry blossoms on them. You can get a house interior that is like literally a cherry blossom tree. That's like raining petals onto like a picnic set, which is where Shiori Fujisaki lives. And of course, and a bunch of other stuff like that. And then also every day they will rotate in and out to like food items and what is it like the black market?

Speaker 3:
[40:43] I love that.

Speaker 2:
[40:44] That one like weird stand that just it restocks three times a day and always has like weird stuff on a wild discount. But also like the clothing store will have new items every day. And sometimes it's just like items that you already have but in new color ways, which is cool. But sometimes it'll be like completely new stuff. Like I was streaming the game the other day and somebody in chat was like, I think you should make a Big Daddy from Bioshock. And I was like, that's a great idea, but I have no idea how I do that. And literally the next morning I woke up and checked the store and they had a full Diving Bell suit. And I was like, done, easy.

Speaker 3:
[41:14] The fashion is so fun. It feels, that feels like very influenced by Animal Crossing and Splatoon. Like there's some really fun outfits in there. And the characters will like, when you give them new clothes, they'll either like it or not. I think it largely connects to their personality. I've noticed that like, if they're outgoing, they'll tend to like more kind of athletic clothes. And reserved people love cardigans, it seems. Like there's like sweaters and more comfy outfits. But my thing is like, as long as they like it, like if it's a look that I want them to have, and they feel like they don't love it, but they like it, I'm like, that's fine. I just don't want you to not like what you're wearing.

Speaker 2:
[41:52] Yeah. Yeah. The only person on my island who I refuse to change, even though they constantly ask me to, is Betty Boop. Who the day that I made her also in the store, they had what was literally called a silver flapper dress. I was like, come on.

Speaker 3:
[42:08] Perfect. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[42:09] So I did like a monochrome Betty Boop instead of doing a colorful one. So she's just like literally shades of gray with really stark little black lips at the bottom of her face and stuff. She's constantly like, I want something else to wear. I'm like, I'm sorry, you're Betty Boop.

Speaker 3:
[42:24] This is your Betty Boop. You can't change.

Speaker 2:
[42:27] This is your life, Betty. I'm sorry. I don't know what to do for you, which is great. You can also, at a certain point, you can start to make your own clothes as well. They let you draw your own clothes, which is cool. I have a Commander Shepard on my island, and I'm waiting for the moment that I can start to draw my own clothes so I can make her actual N7 jacket and stuff.

Speaker 3:
[42:45] Yeah, I thought about making Tali and Garrus eventually if I want to eventually have other IP, but I think I got to stick to my original design of just OCs.

Speaker 2:
[42:54] The only two times I've used face paint so far were for Link. I needed to add the dangly hair pieces that he has because I just couldn't make it work without doing that. And also Jake Sully from Avatar, James Cameron's Avatar, because I drew the lines on his face. Jake Sully, very antisocial. He is constantly in his house by himself and he's constantly talking about how bored he is. And then whenever I drop somebody to hang out with him, he's like, no thank you.

Speaker 3:
[43:19] Yeah, I find that the face paint, actually there's a pro mode I've found actually makes it easier.

Speaker 2:
[43:27] I agree.

Speaker 3:
[43:27] Maybe it's because I have experience using drawing software, but simple mode, if you're trying to do things cleanly, is a lot harder. But in pro mode, you can duplicate layers and rotate things and you have way more options.

Speaker 2:
[43:42] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[43:43] I get why they have, okay, here's just a few things to get you started and if you want to go deep, you can. I also wonder if this is a mouse mode compatible game. Because the one thing that's preventing me from really going wild with the create stuff is just it's hard to draw with the controller. But you can also, I think, use the touchscreen, which might, I wonder if you could actually just use a stylus on the screen.

Speaker 2:
[44:06] Yes, I have seen people like I have actually right here. I have the official Nintendo Switch stylus.

Speaker 3:
[44:11] Oh, shit.

Speaker 2:
[44:12] Which you could use.

Speaker 3:
[44:13] I'm going to get that.

Speaker 2:
[44:14] Which is cool. Yeah, I've watched people like really do. Like I saw somebody on, I think it was Instagram Reels. They made a photo accurate Danny DeVito. Like literally, like it really like it was it was Danny DeVito and he turned around and he like had Danny DeVito's actual real face because you could get really, really, really intense with pro mode. So no mouse mode, which I do find surprising, but I guess that's because it's technically not a Nintendo Switch 2 game.

Speaker 3:
[44:39] Yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker 2:
[44:40] Running on the Switch 2. But I would bet anything now that you've said that, especially after they added like Mario Paint and stuff.

Speaker 3:
[44:46] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[44:46] Mouse mode. I would bet that they add a Switch 2 version eventually that has mouse control.

Speaker 3:
[44:50] Yeah, I also don't know how this is selling, but I imagine it's selling pretty well, especially considering it's on both Switches and is on the slightly cheaper side.

Speaker 2:
[44:59] Yeah. Yeah, it's like it's a $60 game instead of a $70 game, thankfully. And I also think the virality of it will push a lot of sales. I think a lot of people will just want to have that kind of experience. And I think that it is going to come down to a lot of people like getting pulled in by the viral clips they're seeing and then being like, oh, wait, I actually don't know if this is for me. But either way, I think like it's kind of hard to not have fun with it as long as you just have like a weird time. As long as you give yourself over to how strange it's going to be, because it is like absurdist at all times, it'll be a good time.

Speaker 3:
[45:28] Yeah, it's probably the most gripped I've been by a game this year, which is hilarious considering how great this year has already been. But I can't think of another game I've just put 20 hours into in like three days.

Speaker 2:
[45:41] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[45:42] And a lot of that is just because of how fun it is to like, I really enjoyed streaming this and sharing it with people. You know, like, and that's that's where I think the major disappointment of the sharing options comes from for me is just like, if this had more multiplayer stuff going on, I think it would be like even higher for me.

Speaker 2:
[46:01] Yeah. Is there like a multiplayer element in this game even?

Speaker 3:
[46:03] You can visit. You can send me to a friend's island if you're playing locally.

Speaker 2:
[46:09] Oh, no online at all.

Speaker 3:
[46:11] Yeah. So you have to like be in the same room together, which I guess is a decent compromise when you consider like they're worried about, you know, the stuff people can make and randomly encountering that on the internet. But like if you're playing locally, it will be someone you know, most likely. So it's disappointing. But I don't know. Yeah, I definitely. The thing is, like, I have friends who will come over to play this. So like I'm excited for Drew Neutral to sabotage their island on that note. Shall we move on?

Speaker 2:
[46:41] Yeah, we can move on. Tomodachi Life Living the Dream. It's good. It's on the Nintendo Switch. I imagine you'll hear about it again. I didn't talk about my islanders, so I'll bring them.

Speaker 3:
[46:48] Oh yeah, do you want to? I want to hear about your. This is the very.

Speaker 2:
[46:50] Do you or should we? Maybe we could wait till our next update.

Speaker 3:
[46:53] Yeah, why don't we? OK, we can wait if you want. But I feel bad this is the newest Jersey centric.

Speaker 2:
[46:58] I think that's what the people want. But I'll tell them how Frodo Baggins is doing eventually.

Speaker 3:
[47:05] Frodo, sorry, G-host is here, you got bumped.

Speaker 2:
[47:09] All right, let's take a break when we come back. Our other two games are both out this week, which is exciting.

Speaker 3:
[47:15] See you then.

Speaker 2:
[47:16] Bye bye. We're back from our tiny break and we're here to talk about a new game by Ponkle, the creators of Vampire Survivors. They have a new game that's out, I think it came out yesterday as of the time of this episode releasing and it's called Vampire Crawlers. It's worth mentioning we got code for this game. They reached out and sent code to the two of us and AJ as well. So we've been playing this for a little bit. I will say right at the top, this is a game that I've been looking forward to ever since the Steam Next Fest demo. Whenever that was, I guess like February, I think that was the most recent Steam Next Fest. I even made a video for Wavelengths that was talking about the three most anticipated games of the year based off of Steam Next Fest and Vampire Crawlers was the first one on that list and then the second one is actually the next game I'm going to talk about. Then the third one was Alabaster Dawn, which got a release date for Early Access, I think in May.

Speaker 3:
[48:08] Hell yeah, I can't wait for that.

Speaker 2:
[48:10] We're getting all three of those games pretty close together, which is pretty nice. But Vampire Crawlers.

Speaker 3:
[48:14] We almost don't need Fire Emblem anymore. I hate to say it, but I feel like I can't wait, but I feel like this year is already stacked enough.

Speaker 2:
[48:22] My most recent episode of Wavelengths, the thesis of it was basically you could freeze in time my goatee list right now. I could present it to you in December and people wouldn't bat an eye. They would be like, oh yeah, that's enough. But the idea that there's more stuff coming out is absurd to me.

Speaker 3:
[48:35] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[48:36] Absurd.

Speaker 3:
[48:36] It is interesting though, I feel like in recent years, we talk about this a lot, that the big game of the year contenders are coming out earlier and earlier. Capcom does that, I feel like Resident Evil always comes out in February or March for some reason. And I feel like everything, I feel like the last month to be in the Godi conversation for a lot of major publications and just general conversations is maybe October. But I feel like it all happens between March and the summer for the most part.

Speaker 2:
[49:09] Yeah, I think this year in particular, we're seeing a lot of stuff front-loaded because of the Grand Theft Auto 6 bomb that's going to drop at some point.

Speaker 3:
[49:16] I forgot that was coming out this year, which shows you what kind of video game podcast host I am, for better or for worse. If you want to listen to this, that's all the information you need. We went 50 minutes on Tomodachi Life and I forgot GTA was coming out. That's exactly the vibe of the show.

Speaker 2:
[49:35] I think this year in particular, we're just seeing a lot of stuff front-loaded because people don't want to... They want to steer clear of it. The same way people got mad at Team Cherry for releasing Silksong with no notice. I think everybody's moving their stuff early just to steer clear of Grand Theft Auto. But honestly, I mean, we just talked about games that are not going to be for everybody. I imagine I will play that game a little bit and then have the same experience I have with every Rockstar game, which is like, yeah, I think that's probably not for me, but I'm glad I checked it out. And then move on to whatever sicko RPG comes out that same day.

Speaker 3:
[50:03] Yeah, yeah, like I can recognize.

Speaker 2:
[50:04] Falcom will have something that weekend, I'm sure.

Speaker 3:
[50:06] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[50:07] Then we'll play that.

Speaker 3:
[50:07] That will probably come out the same day as Kyoto Xanadu, the only game brave enough to not change its release date.

Speaker 2:
[50:14] Yes. And it'll be fine. It'll be as if Grand Theft Auto didn't come out that day also. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[50:21] Yeah. I'll check out GTA 6. I've learned with Rockstar that I'm way, way more into Red Dead. Like Red Dead 1 and 2, I genuinely love. But GTA, I can recognize like the importance of that series, but I've never personally connected with it. Even especially doing all the console episodes we have. Like I always, any GTA game for like DS or PSP is always top of the list. And then I'm like, maybe.

Speaker 2:
[50:46] Yeah. Well, yeah, I remember from the PSP episode, my big takeaway playing those games was like, it's cool that they're there. And I imagine if you had a PSP at the time and you got to play Vice City Stories or something, you would probably lose your mind because it's amazing that that game runs and exists and like is as good as it is. But it still has fundamentally the same gameplay and problems that I have with most of the other GTA games. To be clear, I always end up playing like 10 to 15 hours of. It's not like I'm just like playing it for an hour and then bouncing off of it. But basically every GTA game I jump into and I realize at a certain point, I'm like, I don't know if I want to be playing this anymore. And then I just kind of bail. And I imagine the same will be true of six, realistically. I think five is the one that kept me the longest, though, just because I think the story was more compelling because it was built around heists, which I'm a sucker for.

Speaker 3:
[51:30] Yeah, five I haven't actually played the campaign of. But like what I know of the characters and the three different protagonists, I felt like that was the beginning of Rockstar kind of like almost taking a meta lens to their stories, where Red Dead 2 feels like more explicitly that, you know, where like there's the inherent dramatic irony of it being a prequel. So like, you know, so much of that game is like, you know, this this big plan. And then we know how the plan goes from the beginning. But GTA 5, I remember each character was sort of like a different take on a GTA protagonist. It's like, you literally have a character that personifies like the thoughtless kind of rampage mode that people do. I'm curious what a GTA game looks like post Red Dead 2. That's kind of my main interest in GTA 6. Yeah, I mean, again, going back to Not Everything is for Everyone, like that is a game that will probably be for most people. We're just like two strange men who will play Cuter Xanadu instead.

Speaker 2:
[52:28] I think this is maybe the perfect lead-in actually to actually talking about Vampire Crawlers.

Speaker 3:
[52:32] Yeah, I was going to say, I think they gave us code and we're like, GTA 6.

Speaker 2:
[52:37] Vampire Survivors is also a game that blew up and you and I, I don't think connected with on the level that most other people did. I liked it more than you did, but I still didn't have like my time with Vampire Survivors the same way I think most people did when it came out. And that game in particular, yes, it is a riff on other games that came before it, but like became a blueprint for an entire genre. Like the amount of games that you and I get pitched on that are survivors likes and they're called survivors likes.

Speaker 3:
[53:02] It is a force on Steam.

Speaker 2:
[53:05] I feel like every month we have at least like one or two developers reaching out and being like, I have a new survivors like if you're interested in playing it. And it's not that I'm not, I have played a lot of them and I've enjoyed a lot of them, but I do think it's notable that the people who made Vampire Survivors are not making Vampire Survivors 2, they're making Vampire Crawlers instead.

Speaker 3:
[53:20] Yeah, I agree. Vampire Survivors, that was also like, that felt like the unofficial Steam Deck launch title. I remember when the Steam Deck came out, I felt like the two games that people used to pitch the Steam Deck were Elden Ring runs on this and also Vampire Survivors is like the definitive Steam Deck experience because you can kind of just veg out and like, you know, have like, I get the, I enjoyed that game and I think that I understood the appeal, but I think on a subjective level, I found it to be just a little bit too passive for me. And that kind of, I learned that playing games inspired by Vampire Survivors, because like there were other kind of rifts on that formula that I found even just adding one or two additional mechanics went a long way for me. So I think I knew that I had the potential to really like this game, but I think in a similar way, I was excited for Vampire Crawlers, because I'm like, this might be the iteration that I need to fully connect with what they're doing here.

Speaker 2:
[54:20] Yeah, so Vampire Crawlers is basically, they're taking some elements of how Vampire Survivors worked, especially all of the items and all of the characters or the survivors are now crawlers in this game, but it's like a complete genre shift into a first person dungeon crawler, roguelike deck building game. And all of the items that you would get in Vampire Survivors become your cards in Vampire Crawlers. It is a very pixely, old school dungeon crawler kind of vibe when you're looking at the map and when you're traversing the map. It feels like they just took a, oh my god, I just forgot the name of that series. What is it on DS?

Speaker 3:
[55:00] Oh, Half Been a Hero.

Speaker 2:
[55:01] No, no, no, the first person dungeon crawler games.

Speaker 3:
[55:04] Oh, Etrian Odyssey?

Speaker 2:
[55:05] Etrian Odyssey, yes. It feels like you just took an Etrian Odyssey game off the DS and blew it up to 1080p. That's kind of the visual fidelity of it. But you make your way around this dungeon by literally pressing the D-pad in whatever direction you want to walk. And you can use the right analog stick to turn your entire body to look at walls and stuff. And you go up against enemies who are like, they show up as waves of enemies. And you get a hand of cards. And like basically every deck-building roguelike game, you know, like a Slay the Spire or whatever, there's like a set amount of mana that you have per round. And then each of the cards will have a certain amount of mana that they cost to use. Some of them will cost zero and one and two and so on. And these cards will be like, the whip is the first one you get because you play as the main guy from Vampire Survivors who is like the Simon Belmont clone guy. And when you use the whip, it just whips and hits every enemy in a line. If you get the magic wand, it will only hit the enemies who are targeting you and want to attack you. If you get the King James Bible, it will create a ring of Bibles around you that will hit all the enemies in front of you. And you're basically doing the same kinds of things you would have been doing in Vampire Survivors, but it is significantly more active and also, again, from a first-person dungeon crawling perspective. But as you continue to defeat these enemies, it fills up the Vampire Survivors XP bar at the top, and when that fills up, you get to add a new card into your deck. I find this game to be basically exactly what I wanted from Vampire Survivors, which I know is weird to say because they're completely different genres. It's a little apples and oranges, but there is an element of this game where while I'm playing it, I think about it and talk about it and play it in the way that my friends who loved Vampire Survivors talked to me about that game. I find that as I'm build crafting and as I'm thinking about each action that I'm taking through Vampire Crawlers, it is engaging me in the way that they talked about that game. So I think this is a brilliant, brilliant game and a great decision on Pankal's part to take what worked about that game and see if they can shuffle some of those ideas around into a new genre like this. I think it's extremely, extremely successful. I've played a lot of it already. I know you're earlier on, but I'm curious how you're feeling about it so far.

Speaker 3:
[57:16] Yeah, well, first of all, I really admire Pankal for finding the success they have with Vampire Survivors and not just doing that over and over again. Their next two games have been, what was it? Kill Brickman? What was the Brickman game?

Speaker 2:
[57:30] Oh, Kill the Brickman, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[57:31] Total deviation in all ways. And now there's this dungeon crawler, rogue-like deck builder version of Vampire Survivors, which I would imagine is not the obvious next step. Like that, I don't think that's something that a hardcore fan of Vampire Survivors would be like, they're definitely gonna do this next, you know?

Speaker 2:
[57:49] Yeah, exactly. I feel like they could have just added DLC to Vampire Survivors forever, or made a sequel or whatever, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[57:55] So I appreciate the swings they're taking here. And I agree that on a subjective level, the additional choices the player has to make, cause the thing about this game, and I think the thing that I've been thinking about the most in terms of like, when this game is fully out and how it will be received, especially considering the legacy of Vampire Survivors. When you compare it to Vampire Survivors, and you and I are coming from a similar experience with that game, I agree fully that Vampire Crawlers is what I wanted Vampire Survivors to be, and that it is still like a comforting, sort of like somewhat passive, extrinsically motivated experience, where like there's a thrill in just sort of seeing like, the number go up and new abilities and taking on, it's sort of like a auto battler muso in a sense, where it's like these, you know, waves of enemies, like popping into power up dust and just sort of like the thrill of that. But again, with Vampire Survivors, I found it to be a little bit mindless on a personal level. And this game even just giving you the task of like, you have to decide where to go and like the risk reward of like, do you take on every enemy before the boss or do you just go right to the boss? What card are you choosing? What card are you playing? What gems are you using to upgrade your cards? I think the biggest sort of question mark for me about this game is the who is this for of it all. And that's the inherent risk of taking a swing like this, is like potentially alienating the core audience. Because the thing about this game is that, well, I agree that it's working for me. The audiences for deck builders, rogue lights, and dungeon crawlers are very intense and sort of expect a deep, deep systems, kind of by default, especially dungeon crawlers. I don't really think there is a casual dungeon crawler out there, except for maybe this one. And I don't say that in a disparaging way. I just think that like this is kind of giving me like, I want to play Atria and Odyssey, but I don't want to like think too much about it, which actually there is a big place for for me. So like, I love that. I wonder if like the Dungeon Crawling audience is like hungry for that. I do imagine that some people might think, oh, this is fun, but it's not like complex enough for me or it's not deep enough for me. Now, again, this is an early impression. So I imagine like even just the like you play through as that Belmont character and then you kind of go back to the hub area and you can keep track of all your unlocks and you also get new characters that are essentially new decks. And the mage character deck is way more interesting like immediately to me because it's all about like drawing more cards and giving yourself more experience so you're upgrading faster, you have more mana to spend. So it's all about like spending more cards, which is really cool. So like, I think it is kind of giving me like this simple thrill of vampire survivors with like a few more things to keep in mind. But I do wonder how it would compare just like in a vacuum against other dungeon crawlers.

Speaker 2:
[60:57] Yeah, I'll say. So I've played. I played about, I think, two or three hours of the demo for Next Fest, and then I've played about six hours of the game, like the full release. And that was one of my questions going in, because I remember even when I was playing the demo at a certain point, I was like, I do feel like I'm kind of doing the same thing over and over again. I feel like I'm kind of just like grinding for gold so I can get more upgrades, because they also do the vampire survivors thing where like in the village where you can get all your upgrades and unlock new crawlers and stuff, you get the like permanent sat upgrades that are like, you know, increase your might for every run or increase your max HP for every run and things like that, which is, you know, it's cool that they have that, but I was like, I feel like I need something more. And I will say that at the point that I'm at in the game now, I do feel that complexity starting to trickle in more, because the more of the game you play and the more time you spend like experimenting with new things that you find in a dungeon, the more they will unlock for you as well that will add to that complexity. So things like, for example, like there's a thing you can get in the village eventually that's like a tent, like it's like an Arcana tent that will have a bunch of Arcana cards that will add like new abilities to your crawlers or your stuff. So, you know, you can get these like modifiers that will change your runs just based off of that. But also, as you're saying, like each of the crawlers that you unlock have their own decks that they start with and have their own special abilities. So like the first one that you have, the guy with the whip, his whole thing is that every time you use an attack card, which are like colored red, every time you use an attack card, it increases your damage dealt for that encounter, which is cool, and it incentivizes you to play a certain way. But eventually, like I got one eventually, that every single time you use this guy's like crawler card, he increases the amount of an attack that will be used at any given time. So if you can continue to like run through your deck over and over again and pull those cards and increase the amount a lot, I was getting to a point where I was using the Axe card, but I had my amount at like 30. So it was basically like I used that card 30 times by spending two mana. That's where the game is starting to get really fun and interesting and weird for me. And starting to get into that realm that we always talk about with like what makes a successful roguelike of every single run can feel different. It starts to feel really strange, especially I think a lot of this comes down to the gems. So a lot of these cards will have gem slots in them, which you mentioned. And as you continue to play the game, if you find chests or if you like, sometimes if you just beat enemies and level up, you know, experience wise, you'll get the ability to take a gem and slot it into that card. So a free to use card like the whip, which does eight damage to all enemies that are facing you. If you add a gem that like increases the area of effect for all encounters going forward, suddenly that free card that like didn't do that much damage becomes significantly more valuable to you. Or like I got one eventually that when you use a card, it just puts it right back in your hand. So for example, if you use that on the whip, suddenly you now have 16 damage that you're doing to every enemy that's in front of you, which is significantly more valuable as well. Then they also get into like some of the synergy stuff, which I really like. One of the I think the first relic you unlock in this game, relics are kind of how they start to like really shift the gameplay around a lot. But the first relic you unlock is this one that makes it so if you can spend your cards in increasing mana order, it will make each card in that sequence more powerful. So like if you use a whip which costs zero mana, and then you use the magic wand which costs one mana, and then the axes which costs two mana, when you use that whip, it'll just do the normal amount that the whip does. But going from zero to one with the magic wand will make the magic wand more powerful. And then if you can use the axe after that, it makes the axe even more powerful. And that kind of calculus that you're running in your head of like, okay, like I was just streaming the game where we started recording and I had this one hand that was like six cards and it was zero one two zero one two. So I was like, okay, I need to very specifically decide like how am I gonna use this like zero and then which one mana card do I go to next? And then which two mana card do I go to next? And then I'm gonna start the sequence over again so I can get that buff a second time. That's where the game is really starting to work for me. And this is actually, I think for me, at the point that I'm at, where I start to bump up against what the game tells me it is versus what the game actually is. Because the game itself, literally the title of the video game is called Vampire Crawlers, colon, the Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors. Which I think is interesting that they're trying to just denote what a new genre for themselves, first of all, by calling it the Turbo Wildcard. I find that very funny. But also, if I'm to break down what they mean by Turbo Wildcard, I think what they mean is that you're supposed to be playing this game very, very quickly. It's supposed to be as mindless as you are, in some ways, as vampire survivors. And I think all of that comes down to the design and decision that they have of mapping the X button to just play all cards at once. They just have a button where if you get a hand and you don't really care the order that you're playing them in, or you know you'll win the encounter no matter what, you can just press the X button. It'll just throw every card out there at once. And it'll give you all the armor, or increase your mana, or do all of the effects all at once. And I have found, personally, that the more of this game I have played and the further into runs I've made it, and especially when you beat an area, like the first area is the forest, you unlock a more difficult version of the forest, and so on and so on. You get more and more difficult versions of each level as you continue to beat them. The further into this game I've gotten, the less time I've spent pressing the X button, because I do need to be thinking more about my card order. And I think that's where this game goes from being like, we're a fun flirty time where you can just press the X button and use all your cards, and it doesn't really matter, and you're just making your way through this dungeon and just trying to unlock stuff the way you did in Vampire Survivors, to like, now actually I think that thing that you were talking about, it is getting complex enough where I do need to sit there and I need to like stare at my deck for a while and I need to stare at my hand for a while. And that I find personally more rewarding and has made me more invested in this game, but it does raise different questions for me about the intended audience for this thing. Because I think people who come into it thinking it's going to be this like Vampire Survivors mindless experience and then actually find out it is not casual and it is significantly more hardcore, that's like the opposite flip that I think you're talking about also. So you kind of land in this place where like it will please people. Don't get me wrong. There are people who are going to play this game and find it very dangerous and they're going to love it the same way I do. Like I love this game. I'm going to play it all the time and it runs on everything. I should just mention that. Like I played this on my PC. I played this on my handheld PC. I put this on my Android handhelds and it ran perfectly like emulating through Steam. I have streamed this game to my phone. Like it works on everything and also it's coming out natively on mobile at some point as well. Not at launch, but eventually. They've already announced it's coming to iOS and Android. It plays everywhere and it's great, but I don't know if I will be the kind of person who will play this game on the subway while I'm going to the movies or something. If I am like six levels deep in difficulty on the third realm or whatever.

Speaker 3:
[67:58] Yeah, I think that's where the question mark is for me. Because I think it sounds like as you get further in, it's less of the auto-baddler of vampire survivors. But it's simple enough for a long time that you also might alienate the people coming briefly from Slay the Spire 2, who will probably be like, I'm already on Ascension 20 with the silent, I'm going back to that. And I don't think that this game doesn't necessarily need to compete with Slay the Spire. That's an unfair battle for any deckbuilder. But I do think...

Speaker 2:
[68:31] It's just the circumstances of the release timing, though.

Speaker 3:
[68:33] But I think that there is... Kind of like how I said, I remember saying after we did our Dreamcast episode that playing games like Power Stone and Project Justice reminded me how much I missed the sort of party game, fighting game, as much as we're in a really exciting time for fighting games right now. And there are at least three very active, very good fighting games to choose from. I do think that at this point when a fighting game comes out, it kind of has to be some version of an eSport. And I liked the era in the 2000s where Capcom was making weird shit like Plasma Sword and Power Stone and games that could be played seriously but were largely made to be fun, kind of mindless crowd pleasers.

Speaker 2:
[69:19] This was actually the point that we made on this week's Any% episode. Somebody asked for Patrons, $5 a month, you can get Any% which is a show that we do every week where we have to do a topic in 10 minutes or less. It's the opposite of this podcast. Anyway, this week's episode of Any% was somebody asking like, what do you think happened to sports games and what would you like the two of us do to fix them? And both of us answered at the same time, bring NBA Street back.

Speaker 3:
[69:44] Yeah, exactly. And so I kind of see this game as a version of that for both dungeon crawlers and deck builders. I think the deck builder genre currently has more examples of this, of games that are kind of made to like light your brain up for a bit, but not be too complex because they want you to play fast. Dungeon crawlers, though, I cannot think of a casual one. I would say the most player friendly dungeon crawler I've played is probably Potato Flowers in Full Bloom, really underrated, really good dungeon crawler, but that is also a very difficult game. It's just friendlier in terms of how it explains the rules and how it shows. It has that soft 3D aesthetic. More people should play that game. It's awesome. I think that this has a place. When I say who is this for, it's not a judgment. It's more just like, I think this is a rare enough approach at this genre that I could see certain audiences bouncing off of it, but I think it's perfect for you and me. I think this is exactly what we wanted it to be. And again, I'm always going to root for Ponkel to try out weird shit with their success.

Speaker 2:
[70:51] Yeah, I think the shift in sentiment, especially, I'll be blunt, the shift in sentiment you and I have had about Ponkel and their output, because Vampire Survivors, when that first came out, you and I were on the team of people who were like, it really just feels like you ripped off Castlevania's sprites and ripped off another video game and then made something that just happened to be significantly more popular, which is more power to you, but there was an element of it that I was a little bit salty about and then eventually grew to like that game a lot and they eventually worked with Konami and actually implemented Castlevania into the game, which was pretty sick. I feel like, as you said earlier, there was a direction that that studio could have taken where they just iterated on Vampire Survivors until the end of time and basically drove that idea into the ground. And instead, here they are with this like surprisingly deep, very rich combination of like 15 different genres with the aesthetic layer and the like knowledge, like previous player knowledge of Vampire Survivors all brought into it, that I think makes the game really approachable if you're a Vampire Survivors fan, but also has a level of depth that, you know, I think people who play that game might not be used to and will be really excited by. Yeah, I think the game is really successful, at least in terms of what it's like trying to do. But, you know, I still do circle around this question of, like, how is it going to be received? Because, you know, you and I and AJ liking it a lot, you know, that is 100% of the people who I know who are playing this game. Liked it a lot.

Speaker 3:
[72:17] Yeah, I, if I had to guess and not to limit the game's success, you know, at all, but like, I don't see a world where this is the size of Vampire Survivors. I don't think they are expecting that either, I would guess. You know, when you take this kind of deviation, it's not going to hit the same highs. But yeah, I think, I don't know, I think it will do okay. Again, I think the biggest, the biggest thing that's up in the air is like, the audiences for these genres, you know, what they come to expect at this point. It's such a competitive space, you know, that like, you do kind of have to think about, like, how does this compare to Atria and Odyssey and Slay the Spire, which is like a very intimidating question.

Speaker 2:
[72:55] But I will say like, you know, my wife, Persia, has played, I think, 250 hours of Slay the Spire 2 already, somehow. She's played an unbelievable amount in that game, and she saw me playing Vampire Crawlers the other day on the TV and was like, when does this come out?

Speaker 3:
[73:07] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[73:07] Like, I want to play this right now. So I think there is an incentive and there's an inviting aspect to this game that I think will work in its favor, which I'm interested to see how that pans out. I just, I'm really excited for this to be on my phone. Like, that's, I've been playing a lot of, Nubby's Number Factory just came out on Google last week also, which I will say, I don't love that it's in landscape mode because the game is vertical, so it feels like it should be in portrait mode, which I find very strange. But it hasn't stopped me from playing an unbelievable amount of Nubby's Number Factory on my phone already. And I think when this is on my phone, basically anything I can do to get me away from Marvel SNAP is a possibility because every couple of months I re-download Marvel SNAP because they have an event that seems interesting to me. I'm like, ah, cool, I'll check that out. And then I get sucked back into that game. I just don't want to be. I'm not spending any money on it anymore. And I haven't well over, I don't know, a year or two. But I just don't want it on my phone anymore. And the thing that always gets me about Marvel SNAP is that it's vertical.

Speaker 3:
[73:58] Yes, the lower portrait mode. But yeah, Vampire Crawlers is cool. I definitely want to play more of it. And maybe we could revisit it once I'm further in. Because I think that the jump in my enjoyment from just seeing the difference in characters, and there's so many characters. I only have a few currently. Really, I think I probably would be closer to your level if I wasn't living the dream for the past three days. But thank you again, Ponkle for Code. And I'm excited to play more of this.

Speaker 2:
[74:25] Yeah, me too. It's a good video game, and I think it's only 10 bucks also.

Speaker 3:
[74:30] Always a plus.

Speaker 2:
[74:31] Always a plus. Check that out if you're interested in that. That's coming out, well, it's out already.

Speaker 3:
[74:36] You can buy this eight times, or Mario Kart World once. I'll just say that before someone in the comments will.

Speaker 2:
[74:44] Yeah, let's take a break, and when we come back, we'll talk about another video game that came out this week, or comes out this week. You get me.

Speaker 3:
[74:50] See you then.

Speaker 2:
[74:51] Bye bye. Hello, Stephen. Welcome back.

Speaker 3:
[74:55] Hey.

Speaker 2:
[74:56] This has been this has been a big episode of new video games. Yeah, not not always the case. I will say at the top of this segment, you and I were talking before we started recording about wanting to get into Monster Hunter Stories 3, which I guess is technically still a new video game, but yeah, it's still a couple of months old at this point.

Speaker 3:
[75:09] Well, yeah, for the past month, it's been it's been classic Aether of just like I got back into this game from 2011.

Speaker 2:
[75:16] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[75:16] Whatever.

Speaker 2:
[75:17] Yeah. Especially like as we were gearing up for the Vita episode, which, oh yeah, it should be out relatively soon for patrons. We recorded that one. So that's in AJ's deft hands currently editing.

Speaker 3:
[75:28] Yeah, that was a lot of fun. I dare say I really liked that episode. I'm excited for people to listen to it.

Speaker 2:
[75:34] I also dare say that.

Speaker 3:
[75:35] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[75:35] We both we both dare say that.

Speaker 3:
[75:36] It was a very spring day and and Vita means spring.

Speaker 2:
[75:41] Vita means spring. All of that said, this week, new video games and one that is also coming out this week is called Titanium Court, which is one of my most anticipated games of the year. Basically, entirely based off of like rumblings I had heard from around people who were like in the industry, especially during the IGF awards, who were like AP Thompson, one of the developers of Consume Me, which won the IGF Grand Prize last year.

Speaker 3:
[76:09] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[76:10] Had another game that he was working on in secret the whole time and has been developing like since early pandemic days and was also going to come out in 2026. I just kept hearing about this game Titanium Court and was like, that sounds interesting. I was excited to get my hands on it and I talked to a couple of people who were able to play it and they were like, this is really good. You're going to like it a lot. And eventually there was a Steam Next Fest demo and I started playing it. And the way the only way I can really describe this game, I think you should maybe just play the demo if you're interested in this. But I will say the pitch of this game is like an absurdist blending of match three meets a tower defense game that is also a rogue like like all of those genres, like shoved through a Monty Python filter basically is kind of how I pitch this game. It's very stark in its presentation. It's got like this kind of very pixely, almost like MS Paint 1.0 vibe to it that has this like blue and purple aesthetic to it visually. And the game opens with you waking up in this like other alternate alternate world. It's like a castle in like a fantasy world. And somebody comes up to you and is like, hello, you're you're our new queen of the fairies. And we're about to go to war. And we need we need you. We need you to lead us to victory. And the way battle works in this game is you show up on a battlefield and the battlefield is like a match three game that's filled with different kinds of terrain. So it'll be like waterblocks and and wheat fields and mountains and things like that alongside your own castle, which just takes up like one square of this grid and then enemy castles, which are all over the place. And you start to match three. Right. So like if you match three waterblocks, you get water as an item in your inventory. And if you match three mountains, you get stone in your inventory and you're able to match a certain amount of times. But most importantly, at least at the beginning of the game, like before you really know what you're doing, most importantly, you can match the enemy castles together and get rid of them as well. So like as you continue to match three, you can like start to remove enemies from the combat area. And when you're done matching three, at a certain point, they'll just like stop you from matching anymore. And at that point, you then need to look at all of the things that you've acquired in your inventory, all the like stone and water and wood and food and stuff like that and money. And you can buy units for combat. So some units will just like go out into the world and they'll like chop down trees and get even more stuff like more resources for you. But some of them are like actual combat units that will go out to enemy castles and they'll like try to overtake the castles and knock them down and stuff. And there is a like kind of turn order on the left side of the screen that's like a clock that's ticking down. And you can see as you start to buy units like when in the turn order, they'll start to like show up on the map. And you can also see where the enemies will show up on the map. And as soon as you like have bought all your units, all the units you want to buy, you just press start and this like great incredible electric guitar riff will just start playing as all of your units start to like flood out into the map. They'll start to like, you know, knock down trees and bring resources back. They'll start to make their way to other enemy encampments and fight and other enemies will come towards you and try to overtake your court. And there's just this like little riff that plays in the background while you watch this timer go down. And eventually when it gets to the bottom, you either survived or you didn't and you move on to the next spot and you continue to do that over and over again.

Speaker 3:
[79:31] So you're kind of putting a plan in motion and then it plays out. You're not kind of, it's not like RTS or something.

Speaker 2:
[79:37] Exactly.

Speaker 3:
[79:37] That's really cool.

Speaker 2:
[79:38] Yeah, it's a really smart idea. So this like main gameplay loop of a run consists of you playing match three to get resources that you then use to buy units that you can send out into the map. Like whatever's left of the match three becomes the terrain of the actual battlefield is a really cool idea.

Speaker 3:
[79:56] That's awesome.

Speaker 2:
[79:57] But it all leads back into like when you win or lose, most likely lose a run, you go back to the court and you're the queen of the fairies and you need to just like navigate social life as the queen of the fairies in this like extremely, extremely absurdist world. Like I can't overstate to you how weird and fun this game is in terms of its writing and how many ways they decide to introduce the match three of it all into stuff. So like for example, one thing you can do in your bedchambers is like go take a shower. And when you take a shower, it's also a match three game where like you have to match the water that you put on your body and the soap that you use to scrub yourself. But you can also match like little dialogue bubbles that will then like give you new shower thoughts.

Speaker 3:
[80:44] That feels very consume me. I can see the connection to that game.

Speaker 2:
[80:47] Exactly. And as you start to match these dialogue bubbles, they'll like sometimes have you thinking up new interactions and new things that you can do in the game or it will start to explain mechanics. I think the biggest thing about this game and my plea to anyone who's interested in this is it is very intentionally obfuscating how you're actually supposed to be playing it. It is deeply, deeply confusing because it wants you to be confused at the beginning of the game because you are a person who is taken from our world and brought into this fantasy world where like all of these fairies who are basically just like guys in suits are like we love going to war. War is the best. It doesn't matter if we live or die. We just think this is like the coolest thing in the world and you're like, no, but you're dying like that's not a good thing and that like give and take of what's going on there. Like I'm trying to think of any good example. Like one good example is sometimes while you're playing through the game, you will see like a bunch of eggs on the battlefield and you can't match the eggs with anything. They're just like there. And when you're done matching three and you're at the phase it's called high tide and low tide. High tide is when you're matching three and low tide is when you're like actually doing combat. So when high tide is over and you're choosing your units that are going to go out into the world, you'll see the option to like select this egg and a guy in a suit will be like, Hey, do you want to buy this football? And you're like, that's definitely an egg. That's not a football. And he's like, I don't know. Here we call them footballs. Do you want this football? And he's like, actually, you don't even need to pay me to take this football. I'll pay you to take this football. And you have this moment of introspection where you're like, well, if this guy is offering to give me money and this egg, obviously it's bad for me to have this egg. So what does it mean that I'm like taking on the responsibility of this egg? So of course, you know, because it's a roguelike and you should just kind of be poking at everything to see what, you know, try to make sense of the world and how to do things. You start to ask questions about like, all right, well, yeah, I'll say yes to the egg. And when you get the egg, it gives you the opportunity to like do a couple of different things. So you can like either, you know, heal your court to max health, or you can get some free units or free resources, or like they'll literally just give you money and you have to decide what to do there. And when you get the egg, the egg just appears on the battlefield and has its own health meter. And you have to also protect the egg. So you have to protect your court and the egg, wherever it ends up being on the battlefield. And if the egg breaks, you get penalized like very heavily, basically the opposite of whatever it is that you selected as your like buff for getting the egg, they then take away from you, which is very interesting. There are systems in this game that will go completely over your head for a long time. It does remind me a little bit of blueprints in that way, where like, it's kind of hard to tell at first how intense the game is in terms of like what it's keeping track of and how you are able to manipulate it until you get to a point where like a character over breakfast one morning will just be like, oh, did you know you could do this? It's like, oh, I had no idea. And then you start to do this. And then it suddenly like radically changes the way you're playing the game. Even down to like every time you lose the game, if you like lose a run or if you win a run, there's this like wine glass that shows up and it will start to fill up a little bit with wine. And every time the wine glass fills the top, you get extra comfort, which allows you to like change the dynamics of the game a little bit.

Speaker 3:
[83:51] Warm fuzzies.

Speaker 2:
[83:52] You get warm fuzzies and you can put them in the fountain. And it'll allow you to like change on a run to run basis. It'll be like, okay, what do you want to spend your comfort on? And it'll be like, you can start with like free units or you can start with extra health at the beginning of a run or whatever. So there are permanent upgrades that happen over time that will like make the actual gameplay a little bit easier. But there's also strife and strife is when you beat the game. They have like basically opposite meter that makes things more difficult. And there is an actual linear progression in the narrative. Well not maybe not linear, but there's a narrative progression to this game where like you as the queen of the fairies want to go home. You're like trying to find a way out of this world. And you need to kind of like Hades like go going to the Underworld and going to Mount Olympus. And you need to beat the game both ways. In this game, as far as I can tell so far where I'm at in the game, I don't even know how many hours in I am, but you need to beat the game with like maximum comfort and maximum strife to be able to progress even further. It's so hard to explain and so good. Like it does feel to me like a game that I would consider to be like bumping up against being like a true art piece in some ways as both like a piece of writing and also the aesthetic of the game. Like I think if you go watch a trailer for this, you'll know what I'm talking about. But like there are these like hyper pixelated, very abstracted images showing up on the screen at all times. Like there was one moment where I had beaten the game and the queen woke up and looked out the window and it was like there's a bike race happening out the window. And you just see these like MS Paint bike riders, like not animated, just like MS Paint bike riders, like sliding across the screen to like indicate that they're moving. So there's this like kind of art house vibe, I would say, to both the music, this like kind of twangy electric guitar music that's happening at all times on top of what it's doing visually. But I also think is like a commentary on Roguelikes. I find it very interesting. Like, you know, I talked about Nubby's Number Factory already, but Nubby's Number Factory was a game I brought to the show as also kind of a commentary on Roguelikes. Like, the absurdity of the ways in which they described what the items in Nubby's Number Factory did and the ways in which they synergized being like, you know, first peg popped pops 15 more pegs, you know, stuff like that. And the item is like literally a little guy with like feet named Poop Butt, you know, like that's that's commentary in its own way. But I think this game being like you are very literally a character who is like a fish out of water in this case, who needs to try to find their way home in this world that is like completely, completely backwards and has again like Monty Python logic does in some ways, I think, replicate the feeling of going into a Roguelike not knowing anything. Like I think there is a narrative literalization to the idea of what you do as a player when you play a Roguelike in Titanium Court, which I think makes it brilliant. I this is a game that to me at least feels like it has this endless well of new ideas that it wants to throw at me, which I'm really interested in. I have heard from more than one person that there's like a musical number in this, which I have not seen or heard. I just am like, I'm very excited to play a lot more of this game and it comes out, I think the day after this episode comes out. I would recommend checking it out. Just like Vampire Crawlers is a game that kind of runs on everything. Like it just, it feels, it's out technically on PC and Mac, but it like, you could play it again on like an Android handheld and emulate it very easily. You could stream it and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 3:
[87:11] Yeah, I looked it up cause I needed a visual reference based on what you were saying. And it looks like it's coming out on the 23rd.

Speaker 2:
[87:17] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[87:17] But it looks really cool. My, actually my first thought when you were describing it was Baba Is You.

Speaker 2:
[87:23] Oh yeah.

Speaker 3:
[87:23] Which weirdly has kind of a similar aesthetic too.

Speaker 2:
[87:26] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[87:26] But while you were pitching, I was like my brain, because I'm, I feel like we're also conditioned to think of like it's this meets this.

Speaker 2:
[87:33] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[87:33] I was like, how would I even pitch this based on how you're describing it? And that's actually a good sign.

Speaker 2:
[87:38] I think so too.

Speaker 3:
[87:39] I think being unpitchable means you're doing something interesting. Yeah. Well, not unpitchable, but like you can't easily just graft it from two things.

Speaker 2:
[87:47] Yes. I think our friend Chris Plant over at Postgames has an interview with AP Thompson this week on the show. And I started listening to it before we started recording today. And one of the things that he said was like, he doesn't even think of Match 3 as a genre. He thinks of it as like a mechanic. And maybe a dunk, maybe not so much a dunk, but like some of the way that he was talking about it was like, there are some games that just use Match 3 as a genre. And that's like kind of boring if that's all it is.

Speaker 3:
[88:14] Like Candy Crush or something.

Speaker 2:
[88:15] Yes, but if you use it as a mechanic in something else, it's like that's kind of an unexplored territory right now. And that's, I think, the thing that was really driving him when he was trying to put this game together being like, I want to make a strategy game, like an almost tower defense strategy game that uses Match 3 as your main way of interacting with the game's world is a really interesting idea. And then wrapping all that up in the idea of a roguelike that has kind of a narrative, long-term exploratory piece of it, where you need to literally use your brain and read a lot of dialogue to kind of untangle the thread of how this world even works, and how some of the words, like the football and egg equation, how some of the words they use work for some things and don't work for other things. It's very interesting. And I feel like you can't sit down and play a session of this game without experiencing something like that. I got earlier, a couple days ago I was playing this game, and a character gave me, they were like, I'm developing love potions, and I want to give you one for free. And they gave me the potion of loving baseball. And that just appeared in my in my bed chambers. Sorry, no, in the Queen's chambers, like in the office. And the whole idea was like it just needed to sit out in the sun for long enough to like be ready until it started bubbling. So like a couple runs later, eventually I went and checked on the potion of loving baseball. And then I it was like ready to drink. So I drank it and it was like it didn't seem to do anything. Like I don't have any particular affinity for baseball, so I don't know what's up here. And then like probably five to ten runs later in the game, this guy came up who was like one of the enemy commanders who like showed up to try to negotiate. And he just started like waxing on, not even like waning on maybe even about like existentialism and nihilism and just started like talking at length about how like the heat death of the universe is coming for us all. Everyone is doomed. Like there's no tomorrow. Like why even try anything? And as he's like droning on and on, you start to realize that he's doing this as like a tactic to kind of destabilize you as a person. Like he's trying to actively like make you emotionally fraught. So you'll no longer be good at war. And as he's droning, as he's droning on and on and you have this realization, there's a little text box that pops up that's like suddenly the potion of loving baseball kicks in. And as he starts talking, you just start seeing all these images popping up on screen of like pitchers throwing baseballs, a home run. You see a big scoreboard show up on screen. And you're like, my love of baseball is overtaking this man's ability to bring me down into his emotional depths. And the potion of loving baseball saves you from this experience. Like, is that a pre-scripted thing? Probably. But it just feels so natural in how unnatural everything in this game feels.

Speaker 3:
[90:52] That also sounds just like Tomodachi Life, to be honest. Like I feel like that is a conversation you can very easily have in that game. That sounds amazing. I like the idea of going back to the Match 3 as a mechanic. That's what we both loved about the Puzzle Quest series, or at least the one on PSP and the newest one.

Speaker 2:
[91:09] Which he did shout out. He shouted out in the post games two games as like major inspirations, both right up our alley. One of them is Puzzle Quest for the PSP and the Nintendo DS, and the other one is Henry Hatsworth in The Puzzling Adventure.

Speaker 3:
[91:20] I mean, we are all fighting the urge to say that this is Hatsworthian. It's a Hatsworthy game. But in both games, I think, prove that idea, right? That match three is not the entire experience. Hatsworth is literally divided in half, where you have a platform game on the top screen of the DS, and then a match three on the bottom, and you can inform the platformer with the puzzles. And then Puzzle Quest is like, you're just playing a 90s CRPG, but instead of turn-based combat, it's match three. They just basically changed, how does combat work? And yeah, I think it's interesting when games incorporate puzzle design into a genre you wouldn't otherwise associate that with. I feel like there's even a small version of that in Resident Evil 4 with the inventory management. There is a little occasional puzzle game. A world in which you just had a carrying capacity in Resident Evil 4 is less fun than making it an interactive Tetris thing.

Speaker 2:
[92:21] I agree with you.

Speaker 3:
[92:23] I'll just roll six, make it a puzzle whenever that game comes out.

Speaker 2:
[92:27] It should just be a match three game.

Speaker 3:
[92:30] Todd finally got to Puzzle Quest and that's it. It's going to be all about puzzles.

Speaker 2:
[92:34] It's just going to be puzzles. Titanium Court, really good. I'm interested to hear your take on it. I'm still early enough on that I'm like, I can't say where it'll land on my goatee list, but the more of it I play, the higher it goes, is how I'll put it.

Speaker 3:
[92:50] Well, goodness for you, it is April. So we have a plan to figure that out. But I get that this year has been very front-loaded with immediate goatee contenders. But we'll have to see. Maybe we'll do a top 30 come December.

Speaker 2:
[93:05] Yeah. I have 36 games on my list right now.

Speaker 3:
[93:08] That's insane. I don't think I've played 30. I've just been living the dream. Let me see. I think I have like seven. Let's see here. Nine. I have nine games.

Speaker 2:
[93:16] Nine games.

Speaker 3:
[93:16] I'll catch up.

Speaker 2:
[93:17] You'll catch up. You'll get there.

Speaker 3:
[93:18] I did finish a lot of stuff too. We were also doing Vita Prep, which is why I was like, there is something. Anyway, that sounds really cool. I'm excited to play it.

Speaker 2:
[93:26] I think you're probably going to like it a lot. I like it a lot a lot. I hope a lot of people check it out. That's Titanium Court. Another game I was provided a code for, I should mention.

Speaker 3:
[93:33] Cool.

Speaker 2:
[93:34] But that said, I want to bring up two games that I'm interested in playing soon. Now that we're done with Vita and the Persona 4 bonus, I feel like those two episodes were losing large for a long time.

Speaker 3:
[93:44] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[93:45] There are a couple of games I had on the back burner that I really wanted to check out and play outside of just Monster Hunter Stories 3. But I really want to get to Paranormous Sight now.

Speaker 3:
[93:52] Oh, fuck yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's a light and breezy. Well, it's not light and breezy, but it's short. You'll have a good time with it.

Speaker 2:
[93:57] Yeah. And I started playing Esoteric Ebb that...

Speaker 3:
[94:00] Oh yeah, that's also on my backlog. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[94:02] Dude, it's so good.

Speaker 3:
[94:03] Yeah, I'm excited to play it. It seems fun.

Speaker 2:
[94:04] Especially kind of like with Vampire Crawlers, like you and I were not as into Disco Elysium as most people were.

Speaker 3:
[94:10] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[94:10] And I was kind of hesitant about checking out Esoteric Ebb because I didn't want just like another experience of everyone telling me I was going to love this game. And then I ended up like not connecting with it.

Speaker 3:
[94:18] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[94:18] Love Esoteric Ebb. It's really good. I need to play more of it before I bring it to the show. But like I've played two hours of it and I love that game. And I think you'll like it too.

Speaker 3:
[94:26] That will come up for sure. I've also been debating when is it time that I go give Disco Elysium another shot. Cause I love like the craft of that game.

Speaker 2:
[94:35] Yeah. I respect a lot of what's going on in the game.

Speaker 3:
[94:37] I just don't enjoy the moment to moment gameplay, which I guess is also like kind of the point sometimes. But every now and then, you know, it's, we're all human beings. There's a game that gets incredibly popular, but you don't choose when you're in the 0.03% of people that don't really like it that much.

Speaker 2:
[94:54] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think with Disco Elysium, I've probably played three to four hours of it, three to four different times. And none of those times that I have in a moment where I was like, and now it's clicking for me. So I just, I feel like I just need to at this point say, unfortunately, that game's probably not going to work for me. Maybe when I'm like 75, I'll play that game and have a different experience.

Speaker 3:
[95:13] That's always your thing. You're going to have a really busy retirement home career.

Speaker 2:
[95:17] It's going to be great.

Speaker 3:
[95:19] I finally played Octopath 2.

Speaker 2:
[95:20] Eastern Terracab though, I think you should really check out. I think you're going to like it.

Speaker 3:
[95:23] I was just thinking of what are the games that are universally beloved that I didn't really connect with. And off the top of my head, it's Disco Elysium, Expedition 33 and Outer Wilds. And I think of those three, the one that I've put the most time into that I think I could love as much as everyone else is Outer Wilds. I just like got very dizzy and sick playing it. It's not like I didn't like it, just like I actually was physically ill playing it. But the other two, I think at this point, I know Expedition 33 is not for me, but the other two I think I will go back to one day.

Speaker 2:
[95:59] Yeah, you and I are weirdly aligned on the games that we tend to not connect with, which I find interesting.

Speaker 3:
[96:04] Yeah, it's interesting. Cause I feel like we, I don't think very rarely has there been a time when one of us loves something and the other one hates it. I feel like the biggest disparity is like one of us is really into something and the other one's like, I like it. I'm not on your level, but I can, I'm happy or happy.

Speaker 2:
[96:23] Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[96:23] That's like the biggest the Canyon ever gets.

Speaker 2:
[96:26] Yes.

Speaker 3:
[96:27] But when one of us like isn't connecting, and this is not to say with those games that we like hated them. We just like didn't get on everyone else's level.

Speaker 2:
[96:35] Yeah. Like I finished Expedition 33, but I don't like love it. I think.

Speaker 3:
[96:40] What the fuck is wrong with you?

Speaker 2:
[96:43] I thought it was like pretty good.

Speaker 3:
[96:45] I've had multiple people be like, Stephen, there's an airship. Why don't you love it? I'm like, do you think that's all it takes? I mean, actually it kind of is. It is. My only top film on Letterboxd is Procaroso.

Speaker 2:
[96:56] There are a couple of things in that game in particular that I think in another world, you would have gone head over heels for. Like the overworld stuff, the airship stuff.

Speaker 3:
[97:04] No, there's a lot. I mean, we-

Speaker 2:
[97:05] Eski, the big like clown man, I actually think you would be really into.

Speaker 3:
[97:09] There's a lot I really liked about that game.

Speaker 2:
[97:10] Expedition 33, what were the other ones?

Speaker 3:
[97:13] For me, it was Outer Wilds and Disco Elysium.

Speaker 2:
[97:15] Yeah, Outer Wilds too. That's a game that I also liked, but didn't have like a religious experience with, you know?

Speaker 3:
[97:20] Trying to think if there's any other, if there are like older, cause those are more modern. Trying to think if there are like older games that people like adore. Oh, Final Fantasy Tactics.

Speaker 2:
[97:27] Oh yeah.

Speaker 3:
[97:28] Yeah, Final Fantasy Tactics, I tried to get into again via, I'll go this segment is just at the opposite of the ethos of the show. It's like, here are things that everyone else loves that we sort of like. But I tried to get into Final Fantasy Tactics again via the Evil East Chronicles remake, which is wonderful. That's another game where I'm like, I love the writing. I also like really, really love Tactics Ogre. That's the weirdest thing is I love Let Us Cling Together, which in many ways is like the harder and weirder iteration of Final Fantasy Tactics.

Speaker 2:
[98:01] And we love other Final Fantasy Tactics games.

Speaker 3:
[98:03] Yes, just that one, it's like eating porridge to me. I just like can't ever, like whenever I try, I'm just like, oh, this is such a slog. I got more into it for the PSP episode. Like it made an honorable mention and I was like, I finally got to a point where like once I was able to like customize my units more and stuff, that's when it started to click for me. But like everything I like about it, I kind of get more of in those other games I mentioned. And I recognize that these all might be bad takes, but that's just like we're all, we all owe it to ourselves to have like four to seven bad takes.

Speaker 2:
[98:35] Nobody's perfect.

Speaker 3:
[98:37] Nobody's perfect.

Speaker 2:
[98:38] And you know, very nice that all of you listen to this podcast every single week, but it's worth mentioning that we are fallible and we can have some bad takes every once in a while. You're allowed to disagree with us.

Speaker 3:
[98:49] Yeah, and if you disagree with us, you should add us at any time of the day and tell us why we're wrong. No, I'm kidding. But yeah, I'm very excited to play Titanium Court. And this year, there's already Esoteric Ed, Monster Hunter Stories 3. I'm trying to think if there's anything else that just came out that I'm like dying to get back to. That's the other thing to do, is you and I kind of went down different paths. I played and finished Paranormicide and Resident Evil 9. And you're now circling back to those.

Speaker 2:
[99:14] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[99:14] Oh, shit.

Speaker 2:
[99:15] Yeah, Resident Evil 9. OK, that's going to be first on my list, actually. I'm going to finish that this week.

Speaker 3:
[99:20] Yeah, I think you're going to really like both. I think you're going to really... I think you'll like this Paranormicide more than the last one.

Speaker 2:
[99:25] I think so, too, based on what you said about it. Yeah, I'm excited.

Speaker 3:
[99:29] It's really good.

Speaker 2:
[99:29] We should wrap this episode up.

Speaker 3:
[99:31] I've had enough. I'm tired of talking about games that I didn't like as much as everyone else.

Speaker 2:
[99:35] I gotta get back to Living the Dream.

Speaker 3:
[99:37] Have you considered talking about esoteric ab?

Speaker 2:
[99:40] I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna do that next time.

Speaker 3:
[99:42] Do you want to have a big esoteric ab or a small esoteric ab? Everyone knows having a Mondo-sized esoteric ab is the only way to go.

Speaker 2:
[99:50] There was a while where the only term that I had added to the Lexicon was podcasting and it was horrible. It was like I needed to be able to add more stuff. And thankfully I have a big roster of terms that are floating around the island now.

Speaker 3:
[100:04] Yeah, once I added thinking about the big flush, it all kind of came into focus.

Speaker 2:
[100:07] Yeah, hell yeah.

Speaker 3:
[100:09] Anyway, thank you so much for listening. Into the Cast.Online is our website. All relevant links and information are there. If you want to support the show, the best way to help it grow is to share with a friend. You can also rate and review us on your podcast app of choice. You can support the show directly at patreon.com/into the Cast, as well as through our merch store. You can get merch and personal messages and commercial ad reads at Into the Cast.Online. The VEDA episode, as we mentioned before, has been recorded. It's a lot of fun. That will be out for patrons on the $5 tier or higher by the end of the month. I'm really excited to share that. That's a lot of fun. I really like the list we landed on and our top five is fun. So not a huge surprise, some of the picks, but I think talking about the VEDA was like, I found of all the console episodes we've done, the two that have felt the most educational were the GameCube and the VEDA and the Dreamcast too. But I feel like it's, in a weird way, playing through the commercial failure consoles is more rewarding on an educational level than not. But yeah, it felt like I was, you described that episode as me catching up to your past. Because so many of our bonuses are like, Brendon finally plays FF7 or whatever. It's like, this is me playing through the era in which you got very into games and game design.

Speaker 2:
[101:27] Yes. Yeah. And also it's worth mentioning, there are games that you and I discovered throughout the course of doing prep for that episode, which will probably come up on the show eventually.

Speaker 3:
[101:37] Yeah, definitely. I mean, there's a lot of go toys in there for sure. And yeah, there are other games that like, there were a few where it was like, because for the console episodes, we try to put in as much time as possible, but they're kind of inherently a bird's eye view. So there are a few games where I'm like, I played enough to get a sense of how much I liked it, but I definitely want to see more of it. Especially considering how many like, long visual novels are on that console. So yeah, very excited for even more Vita.

Speaker 2:
[102:04] Even more life.

Speaker 3:
[102:05] Even more life. And that's Spring, baby.

Speaker 2:
[102:08] That's Spring.

Speaker 3:
[102:09] Yeah, that's a wrap on this week's episode. Thank you so much as always. We will see you next Wednesday. Until then, take care of yourselves and have a great day.

Speaker 2:
[102:16] Do a flip. Bye, everyone.

Speaker 3:
[102:20] Have you considered the big flip?

Speaker 1:
[102:39] TWG, the worst garbage, the online.