transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:17] Hello, and welcome to CORE, everybody. We're here to talk about video games on CORE. That is why we exist, and so we will therefore be doing that here shortly. My name is Scott Johnson. Joined today by Beau Schwartz and Jon Jagger. Hello, gentlemen. Hello.
Speaker 2:
[00:30] I touched the stone, Scott.
Speaker 1:
[00:32] Uh-oh. Well, you know what happens? You suffer the same fate, which I don't know what that fate is.
Speaker 2:
[00:39] Two free tickets to Wally World.
Speaker 1:
[00:41] Nice. I have worse fates than that. That's not bad. Anyway, we're here. We're going to talk about some stuff, including Diablo IV's final or its newest. I shouldn't say final. I hope it's not final.
Speaker 2:
[00:54] Scott Prophecy Johnson.
Speaker 1:
[00:56] I hope it's already. So this already breaks a record. They've never had more than two expansions before, or they've never had two expansions before for a Diablo game. So this is the first for that. Also, early word on this expansion is really good. And some of the people who have already been playing with an early release character and pre-order stuff and all that, I'm actually pretty bullish on next week's expansion launch. So I'm looking forward to that. We'll talk about that in a few other things coming up. But before I do, a quick mention that the CORE Nerdtacular All-Stars team, we do this thing called Frog Pants All-Stars at Nerdtacular. Brian Nibbett is the host of it. He writes all these trivia questions and interesting interactions for us to have. We basically compete. We have teams that compete. And as it turns out, partly because Beau never took the seeding test.
Speaker 2:
[01:45] Oh, is that part of it?
Speaker 1:
[01:47] That's part of it. A little bit part of it.
Speaker 3:
[01:49] Sorry, Brian. I'm sorry.
Speaker 2:
[01:51] Because here's the thing that I think is fun about it. Actually here, say the team first. I'll tell you why I think it's fun. I didn't know that piece. That actually makes me a little sad, but also explains a lot.
Speaker 1:
[02:01] It also may explain a little bit. So somehow, it seemed kind of a freaky circumstance when I first heard it. But we have all ended up on the same team. So the CORE crew, me, Jon, Beau, we are all on the team with my sister, my brilliant, highly educated mental health professional sister, Wendy, is on our team. Now, she thinks she's a liability. She's like, oh, you guys have no idea. I don't know any of these nerdy things. Brian's like, it's not all nerdy stuff. In fact, a lot of it is absolutely not nerdy, and you may have an advantage there. So we had this back and forth this morning about it. But right now, I believe, Jon, we had to come up with a name. We're still sort of working on this. I still think Jon's Cerebral Cortex is the best. That's my favorite. There's some other good ones in here, like Fatal Core Way is interesting.
Speaker 2:
[02:51] I liked that, but it's a little wrestling focused. Not everybody knows what a Fatal Core Way match is.
Speaker 1:
[02:56] Yeah. I had a couple of people pointed out to me and I went, oh, because I didn't even know. Obsessive Core Pulsive is one of them. I kind of like that one.
Speaker 3:
[03:07] I came up with Cheat Chodes.
Speaker 1:
[03:08] Cheat Chodes was briefly thought about. I still think it's got some meat to the bones. Then there was one of the one I really liked. What was it? I can't find it now.
Speaker 2:
[03:20] Let's see. These are all ones. I started with Cortisons.
Speaker 1:
[03:23] Cortisons, like Cortison, Cortisons.
Speaker 2:
[03:27] The Cortestins, CORE Memory, four CORE and seven years ago. Fatal CORE Way, Games and Brains, Psycore Logical Warfare, Obsessive CORE Pulsive.
Speaker 3:
[03:42] Wait, it should be Psycore Logical Corefare.
Speaker 2:
[03:45] Oh, that's right. That's good.
Speaker 1:
[03:47] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not bad. Add that to last.
Speaker 2:
[03:50] Obsessive CORE Pulsive. Feelings aren't facts, which is apparently a therapy phrase, but I think it's a funny trivia name.
Speaker 1:
[03:57] Yeah, I like it.
Speaker 2:
[03:58] Scott Johnson and the Riverside Funtime Gang.
Speaker 1:
[04:01] I don't know the reference here, but I like that one. Stupid and fun.
Speaker 2:
[04:04] I just wanted a stupid name to put on there. And then the last one I came up with, which I do think is probably my favorite so far too, which is Cerebral Cortex.
Speaker 1:
[04:12] Yeah, CORE in all caps, you know, that whole thing. So we'll be making a decision soon, but this was just, it was an exciting turn of events because I did not expect the three of us to be on one team. And somehow, I think the way Beau got on was, we had to do the seeding test basically, and that's Brian's way of saying, here are these short time tests, they don't count for anything, they're just to help me decide who's going to go where, so we have even teams. And it's a pretty common thing to do in big trivia stuff. And so, yeah.
Speaker 3:
[04:42] I'm checking the trivia questions now. May God bless whatever team I end up on.
Speaker 2:
[04:48] You're ours. Well, this is why I was so excited, because I went, oh, look at all of us on a team together, and then I went, wait, this was seated. So that means, across CORE, we have some of the brightest, and we have some of the dumbest. And like I said, okay, so wait a minute, you take the three hosts of CORE, and Wendy, who's clearly smart, and somewhere in there, we fall. We get the full spectrum of the seed. Only Brian Ibbett knows who the dumb one on CORE is, although apparently it's technically Beau because he didn't take it, so we missed him.
Speaker 1:
[05:28] Yeah, you only got a zero because you didn't take it.
Speaker 3:
[05:30] You would have done fine. I'm doing so badly right now. Look, listen to this question. The first product that was sold on this three-letter cable network was the Windsor Shower Companion and AMF M Shower Radio. I don't know, I just put TMZ.
Speaker 1:
[05:43] Because you probably don't have QVC up there.
Speaker 2:
[05:45] I could not think of QVC and I did HSN.
Speaker 1:
[05:49] Oh, that's not bad, though. That's a pretty good fallback. I wouldn't fault you too bad for that. My understanding is you did pretty good on the overall percentile.
Speaker 2:
[05:57] I woke up for, I'm not kidding. This sounds weird. I woke up from a nap, groggily made up my way into the office and went, Oh, I got some tests to take. I sat down, I went through it as best I could and submitted it. I was like, I didn't fill out some of them. Some of them are wrong. I just sent it and then I was like, did I even follow instructions correctly? I sent Brian a message. I said, Brian, I'm be honest with you. I woke up from a nap and then took your test. I don't know if I did what you wanted me to do. Can you tell me if I did it right? He was like, yeah, you did fine.
Speaker 1:
[06:33] Okay.
Speaker 2:
[06:34] Okay, great.
Speaker 1:
[06:35] Yeah, I think you did well from what I heard. I can't remember the exact score. I ended up in the higher percentiles, which surprised me because I'm usually in the very middle of the road on his questions because some of these were tricky, but I got a lot of it. Apparently Scott Fletcher is the guy to beat. That dude freaking aced it. Just nailed it. Yeah. And he'll be in this. He's on someone's team.
Speaker 2:
[06:56] I think we'll do good because one, I think Beau is a dark horse here because he got himself in the loser's bracket by not participating.
Speaker 3:
[07:06] I'm just a horse. I'm a dark horse. I'm just a horse.
Speaker 2:
[07:09] So he's got secret power. I had taken a nap. I was groggy. So hopefully you'll get a less fog brain to me. I think we'll do good.
Speaker 1:
[07:20] Yeah. I think we're not going to, I'll bet we go to the finals. If we win, that's a different thing, but it's not. Another thing too is a lot of these are, the seating test is very different than the actual competition questions. They're not, they're not as obscure. The whole point of seating is to give like this weird range and then see kind of where you land in that range.
Speaker 2:
[07:40] Also, like if we win with you on the team, that's a little, it's the phrase gauche. What it like, we don't want to do that.
Speaker 1:
[07:48] You don't want the guy who's in charge of the event to win.
Speaker 2:
[07:51] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[07:51] So I'm not saying we're going to throw it on purpose, but unless the other teams are just terrible, I mean, whatever, I've only been on the winning team once out of like the five times we've done this.
Speaker 2:
[08:04] So yeah, we don't want, we're not, we're aiming for, you know, if we do a number two, if we're a solid number two.
Speaker 1:
[08:13] Yeah. Love a solid number two.
Speaker 2:
[08:15] In the ball.
Speaker 1:
[08:16] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[08:17] I think that's a high victory for us.
Speaker 1:
[08:19] I agree with that. Well, we'll see what happens. Exciting stuff.
Speaker 2:
[08:22] And if we win it all, then the competition just wasn't good enough for our politeness.
Speaker 1:
[08:25] That's right. And we're talking mid-June, which means you guys have time to get tickets if you're home listening to this. Go get them, frogpants.com. Get an intacular ticket. If you can't come, you can get swag back anyway. That'll help support the event. But we'd love to have more CORE people there and hanging out and meeting Jon and Beau and me and everybody else. It's going to be a great time. Liam O'Brien. I'm sure he'll do Illidan for a hot second on a mic. I haven't asked him yet, but maybe he will. I don't know.
Speaker 3:
[08:52] Is Liam in the trivia game?
Speaker 1:
[08:54] No, because he's only there for one of the full days. So if his team won, he wouldn't be able to rep the next day. But he will have a role in doing something with the competition the first day. I just don't know what that is.
Speaker 2:
[09:09] He's a busy person because him and Critical Role are at the Phoenix version of Phoenix Comic Con. I don't remember what it's called. The Phoenix Fan Fest or whatever.
Speaker 1:
[09:19] To what color is that?
Speaker 2:
[09:20] Right before. To the point where I thought, is he gonna be on our plane? Are we gonna be flying over there with Liam?
Speaker 1:
[09:29] He comes back here in August or September to do our Fan Fest again. And I already told him, I said, I'll have way more time that day because I'll go out there and see him and meet him and stuff. But then I'm gonna take him somewhere fancy. Like, I don't know, a nice place.
Speaker 2:
[09:47] Ruth's Chris.
Speaker 3:
[09:48] Ooh. Where?
Speaker 2:
[09:51] I don't know why I picked that.
Speaker 1:
[09:52] I love a Ruth's Chris. I love eating there. I hate the name.
Speaker 3:
[09:55] Ruth's Chris?
Speaker 1:
[09:56] Ruth's.
Speaker 2:
[09:56] It's a very hard name to say without sounding a little on something.
Speaker 1:
[10:01] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[10:02] Oh, Ruth's Chris.
Speaker 2:
[10:04] Yeah. Ruth's Chris.
Speaker 1:
[10:05] Because it's possessive.
Speaker 3:
[10:05] Apparently we had one in Ontario. They exist in Toronto anyway.
Speaker 1:
[10:08] I had one in Hong Kong. It was amazing. But the name is screwy. It's possessive like someone named Ruth. That's who started the chain or the start of the first restaurant. Ruth's like it's hers. And then Chris.
Speaker 2:
[10:23] Well, shouldn't Chris have been the one to start the chain, but he's owned by this Ruth person.
Speaker 1:
[10:28] That's what it sounds like. That's the literal English.
Speaker 2:
[10:30] It's Chris's restaurant, but Ruth's like it's Ruth's. It's Ruth's Chris, not Ruth's Chris, not Jackie's Chris. There's a lot of Chris's. Chris is a common name.
Speaker 1:
[10:41] Many Chris's.
Speaker 2:
[10:42] Chris Redfield, Chris Columbus.
Speaker 1:
[10:45] Yeah, I like that Redfield came first. That's amazing.
Speaker 2:
[10:49] Yeah, but this is Ruth's Chris.
Speaker 1:
[10:53] I think Chris Redfield, oh, never mind. I was going to make a comment about him punching rocks and somehow it connected, but it doesn't. It doesn't at all. I take it all back. Well, anyway, more on that, frogpants.com. Go check it out. Let's get to today's news. There is a fair amount. Xbox Game Pass had a reduction in cost and value, depending on who you are or maybe where you are. Jon, explain what happened here. What did they do?
Speaker 2:
[11:20] Well, you remember the new CEO said, hey, we think Game Pass is too expensive.
Speaker 1:
[11:26] Yeah. Talked about it last week.
Speaker 2:
[11:27] Yeah. Sounds right. Well, Game Pass Ultimate is being dropped to $22.99 per month, but it will no longer include Call of Duty on launch.
Speaker 1:
[11:40] No more launch day Call of Duty. It could come later though. They're leaving that door open, did they say?
Speaker 2:
[11:45] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[11:47] Let's see. Starting today, is that today? Today? Let's see.
Speaker 2:
[11:51] No.
Speaker 1:
[11:51] No, 21st, a couple of days ago. Starting Game Pass Ultimate cost $22.99, like you said, down from $29.99 and PC Game Pass will now cost $13.99, down from $16.49. Note that that is still higher than the number they increased it from prior.
Speaker 2:
[12:11] Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[12:13] I don't like shit like this. I like that the price went down, but it's literally been less than a year since that last hike, I think, or maybe it's not. Maybe it's been more than a year, but it feels like it was barely two minutes ago that they did a freaking price hike, and now they're like, well, let's walk it back a little. I don't want to be one of those gamers that's never happy no matter what they do.
Speaker 2:
[12:34] Right.
Speaker 1:
[12:34] But all this jumping around is just not giving me confidence. I don't like it.
Speaker 2:
[12:38] Here's the thing, it's very hard to talk about value. It's very hard to look at something and go, this is good value, this is bad value because it's going to be different for everybody. I'll tell you, I don't like Microsoft that much right now. I wanted to cancel Game Pass. I have a family that uses it. I ended up lowering it to its lowest tier instead of the Ultimate, which is what I had. I'm not a big supporter of them. But if I'm being honest, especially because I do have the Fortnite Pass, premium pass, whatever it is for Fortnite, and that is now part of the Game Pass, this is a good deal. Like, it's like $13, I think, more than what I would pay for just the Fortnite one. So it's basically, that's what Game Pass is costing me. That's a pretty good deal overall. But that's for me. If you love Call of Duty, this is a shitty deal.
Speaker 1:
[13:40] Yeah, you're screwed.
Speaker 2:
[13:41] You know, like this is a bad deal. So value and what is a good deal and what is a bad deal is gonna be subjective depending on who it is. My frustration and anger about it wasn't about the price hike in that they made it too expensive. It was that they hiked it by such a large margin and then tried to tell you what a good deal it was for you. And I don't like being pandered to in that way. Don't, you know, don't, that old phrase, don't piss on my head and tell me it's raining, right? Like, that's what it felt like to me. That's where the anger was. This is a reduction. It might put it in the like reasonable for you field. If it does, you should get it. You should do whatever you can, especially these days, to save yourself a little bit of money. If that's still too much for you, don't do it. I do think it's at least worth acknowledging, okay, they're kind of going in the right direction, but that's not gonna be the right direction for everybody. So, to me, it's not as easy as like yay Microsoft or boo Microsoft. You just kind of have to judge it for yourself and act accordingly.
Speaker 1:
[14:50] Yeah, this is the market adjusting and then it is still on us to make value decisions based on those adjustments. It makes me happier than where it was, certainly. I'd like it to be back where it originally was, that'd be nice. Jerry Tolbert in the chat says, the fact that COD was 25 percent of the cost of game pass is somewhat disconcerting. Well, it's not a direct correlation, but that's an interesting point because the reason they're doing this, pulling COD out of there as a day one and waiting, it sounds like a year before it would ever show up on game pass, which coincides with the new Call of Duty potentially, which would just take over the slot, so you're never getting the newest Call of Duty on day one anymore. The reason they're doing that is they lost many millions of dollars on not getting enough subscriptions to make up for the fact that now that thing was essentially free for those users, and prior to this, it was a $59, $69, $79 purchase. So they lost money on Call of Duty really for the first time, maybe not for the first time, but really lost revenue, countable revenue money on Call of Duty because they included it in a service that kind of made it free and virtually free. None of this is free. But so I wouldn't say, hey, that was 25% of the price, but I would say it was a huge part of the revenue that did not pan out. And I think the price hikes were in response to that. And that was the wrong way to go because then regular people who don't play Call of Duty were like, why are you doing this to us? So it's kind of a cluster, the whole thing, to be honest. I guess in the end, I'm happy it's lower. So I'm not going to complain about it. I'm just, will it get me to get back on? I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I just bought, I did a thing Jon saw me contemplating in the chat or in the Discord. I saw that Avowed was on sale. Who's breathing? Do you hear that breathing? Is that me?
Speaker 2:
[16:48] I don't know.
Speaker 1:
[16:49] I think it was Beau. I think it was Beau.
Speaker 3:
[16:51] Yeah, because I remember I put the mic in my mouth so that you could hear me.
Speaker 1:
[16:57] What do you need? Do you need oxygen to breathe or something? My gosh, just kidding.
Speaker 2:
[17:02] What is this?
Speaker 3:
[17:02] Where are the mics coming in here?
Speaker 2:
[17:04] Expecting people to breathe.
Speaker 3:
[17:07] I should really put monitoring on. I don't do monitoring.
Speaker 2:
[17:10] Honestly, though, it could have been me because I am still allergy to up. And so breathing is a trick.
Speaker 3:
[17:19] Yeah, I can keep the monitor up.
Speaker 1:
[17:21] Yeah, you're fine. But anyway, what I was saying was, what was I saying?
Speaker 3:
[17:24] Can you put a noise gate on me?
Speaker 2:
[17:25] It's like, it's like not separate about.
Speaker 1:
[17:28] Oh, you know what? I can actually. Yeah, but I was talking about a vowed. The vowed went on sale on Steam. And I said, you know what? I played it on Game Pass, but I never finished it. And I really like about and I like, you know, I like the entire like Pillars of Eternity universe in general. And so I was thinking, oh, geez, sorry, I may have messed up. There we go. So I thought, well, I'll just I'll finally get it here and then I'll play it here. And that's what a month and a half or whatever of Game Pass as it was currently constituted. That's how I make these decisions now for Microsoft games. I don't go, I'll get it day one and I don't go, I'll just play it on Game Pass. I go, I'll wait for a sale where it's roughly a month or two of the cost I would be paying for Game Pass and then I'll get that game. That's weird that I'm doing that math. I'm not sure they want me doing that. You know what I mean? So I don't know.
Speaker 2:
[18:22] I was in a similar boat with Avowed when I ditched Game Pass Ultimate. It was my goal to finish that game because it was one of the games from last year that I really liked. And then I realized, oops, that was a Game Pass experience. I don't own the game anymore. And I did pick it up again because I do want to play through it at some point. But yeah, it kind of bites you in the butt. It makes you realize that like, hey, it was a real good deal up front. But if they decide to do something weird with the service, you might be hoping for Steam sales down the line.
Speaker 1:
[18:55] Yeah, yeah. So that's what I did. 37 bucks on sale right now. It's not bad. I highly recommend it at that price.
Speaker 3:
[19:02] So you got Ultimate?
Speaker 1:
[19:04] Whoops, let me turn Beau back up. I ended up, no, I ended up getting just, getting the game by itself on Steam because it was on sale.
Speaker 3:
[19:10] Oh, right, right.
Speaker 1:
[19:11] That's a good idea. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:
[19:12] It was cheap.
Speaker 1:
[19:13] And I was like, I'm also cheap, so.
Speaker 3:
[19:16] Well, you know, that's why that's the whole Steam lifestyle. You buy it when it's like cheap and then you don't play it. But one day you might.
Speaker 1:
[19:25] Yeah, I might one day. Actually, I think I am gonna. Yeah, actually, I know I'm gonna because you know why? I reinstall, this is gonna sound weird. I didn't do anything with it, but because my PC, it's a whole story, my PC, my Windows installs got some serious issue and I got to reload. So in the meantime, what little game time I had this week, I was like, well, it's either gonna play it on my Mac or a Steam Deck or do something. And I went, you know what? Those Pillar of Eternity games just got, or at least the first one just got turn-based mode. I kind of want to see what that looks like. Love that game.
Speaker 3:
[19:56] Well received too from the articles I read about it.
Speaker 1:
[19:59] Yeah, from what I'm hearing, people really liked it. So I installed it, started a game. I'm like, it's got me in the mood for this world and this stuff. And then I saw the Game Pass sale. I was like, sweet, I think I'll get that. And then it says it's Game Pass or sorry, Steam Deck Verified, but it's a little rough on there. So I started it, played a little bit, but I'll go back to it. My PC is working again. But yeah, at the end of the day, the point of all this is, they made it more affordable again. And no one else is lowering prices on anything right now. So I'm trying not to be too critical of this. It's also new leadership, new changes. You know, you expect this sort of thing.
Speaker 3:
[20:41] Yeah, but it's not like... Look, it's... I feel like this is a... You know how, like, a rising tide rises all ships?
Speaker 1:
[20:50] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[20:51] While, like, rising poo makes everything poo? It's not just like... It's not just like Microsoft. Like, the price of everything streaming is ridiculous.
Speaker 1:
[21:02] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[21:02] Like, I know I feel like I'm, like, stuck 20 years ago, but the whole cool thing about Netflix was, like, five bucks has got a ton of shit on it. Who cares if it's old? It's good stuff.
Speaker 1:
[21:12] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[21:13] Today's world, it's like, you know, 20 bucks at Disney, 20 bucks at Prime, you know, 20 or 30 dollars at Netflix, 30 dollars, you know, my Patreon. Like, it starts to add up to be just tax. So, at a certain point, you know, they say it's your responsibility. We have freedom in our countries. So, it's your responsibility whether you're going to buy some shit or not. And my feeling is it was a cool deal at five bucks. It's not a cool deal at hundreds of dollars. And so it's not really Xbox's fault. Like it was arguably a good business decision. Like it made sense, especially during the, it's like I got all these games. And it's fun to have it when you don't own a lot of games. Because you can turbo charge and try things. But if you get into the gaming habit long term, this is a bad proposition. You are overspending on games in the long run, given how deeply they get discounted. And how, you know, on Steam, you can very easily buy games and save them for later, buy them super cheap. You can get free games all the time on Epic. It's from a, if you do any PC gaming at all, it's a bad deal. And if you're Xbox only, maybe it's kind of worth it. But Xbox has lots of sales and cheapos too. And you can only play one game at a time. So if you're just like, man, I really like an avowed, and that's all you're doing, why not just buy it? Because in three years, you might be like, that game I really liked, I'm going to replay it. I'm still playing Witcher 3. Bought it eight years ago or something.
Speaker 1:
[22:48] Yeah, 10, 11 years ago.
Speaker 3:
[22:50] I'm my own Netflix when it comes to games. I just don't need the service. And I think a lot of people are being honest and have to watch their finances to some extent, especially in today's world where everything's going up like crazy. It doesn't make a lot of... This is a very cuttable feature of your life. Like when you're looking to save money, you're looking to do things more responsibly. What are the things I can cut? Well, how about this recurring bullshit I don't need?
Speaker 1:
[23:20] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[23:20] If you have tons of disposable income, like who cares? It's fine, whatever. That's like a lot of these subscription services. And I'm not going to sit here and judge you and be like, you shouldn't buy it because it encourages them to do it. Like whatever, it's your money. I don't care. But I think it's one of the first things to go on a budget. And if you're like me and just get irritated when you spend money on something and get zero from it, except, well, the service was made available to you, you know, then you're not going to do it. So I think it's like not so much that it's a problem with Xbox or leadership. I think it's just a problem overall with how we're conducting business over the internet. And it's just getting worse and worse. And it's going to just keep getting worse and worse because that's...
Speaker 1:
[24:01] I think there's an adjustment coming because I think people are starting to... It's starting to hit a wall where people are like...
Speaker 3:
[24:07] Like at some point, there's a chilling effect, right? So like gas prices are going up, like we are... Like people who are middle incomes are going to start more and more experiencing pain in their wallet and these kinds of things are going to go first. I would have to think.
Speaker 1:
[24:20] Yeah, I would think so. I went through this recently, a little wrestling match with a service that I thought was a good deal and it was relatively cheap, but I had an ebook subscription where I can check out like four books at a time and read them. Amazon's got a version, the Kobo service has a version. I was using the Kobo one, but they're roughly the same. I got a month into it and went, I'm only reading two, three chapters a night, which is about my speed with a new book. I like to savor it. I don't speed through them. I like the science fiction book I'm reading right now. I realized by the rate I was going, fairly thick book, it's going to take me a few months to finish that book with everything else I have going on. I read a couple hours, maybe an hour or a night or something. And it hit me, I'm like, by that time, I will have paid these guys $7.99 for three months straight, whatever that totals, for one book. That I could have bought for $9.99 or less than just checking it out. And I would have spent one of those months worth on just the book I'm reading. And now I own that book in perpetuity. So if it ever gets pulled from the other service, I don't get screwed. So I just think we all have to occasionally take stock like that and go, what am I getting out of any of these Netflix? What am I getting out of Netflix every month? And really think about it. Forget about what the world tells you or what everyone says you have to watch or whatever. What are you personally doing? If you watched one movie and then four months went by before you check Netflix again, I promise you, you should cancel Netflix. Like it's so dumb.
Speaker 3:
[25:54] And it's not even like, like we, you know, when you go to the movie theater, you're kind of renting the movie and we spend overly much because of the experience and stuff. Like, like it isn't really even like a push your glasses up. You own nothing when you spend this. It's like, man, we do that kind of stuff all the time. When you go to the movie theater, you know, it's like, it's not even that it's just like, like you said, how much are you really using it? And they rely on set and forget. Like being a pro active subscriber, you know, the business depends on laziness is what I'm trying to say.
Speaker 1:
[26:27] Yeah, a little bit.
Speaker 3:
[26:28] Responsible income. Because that's why I only try to sub to one at a time, because I just hate when I'm paying for nothing. Like on principle, if McDonald's was just like, can I just going to take 20 bucks out of your wallet? I'd be like, no, illegal. We're going to court. I'm going to make a big stink about this on my social media account. So I don't know why we let these tech companies and their silly subs get away with it. And not that I suggest we should do anything crazy, just unsub. So I feel like if you do that assessment, you start to see like, it's basically a variable value proposition. If you're either in a mode where you're going to try lots of stuff, it's very valuable. Or if it's a service, you actually just end up using a lot. Like if you watch Netflix every day, it's probably still super worth it at 30 bucks because you're using it every day.
Speaker 1:
[27:25] Yeah, dollar a day.
Speaker 3:
[27:26] But you have to make that assessment because the companies are throwing, they can't manage your time for you. Like in a way, it's not unreasonable for them to be like, we're just providing the service, give us the money. That's why I guess they're permitted. But like, it's a lot of bullshit, I just feel. I feel like it's a bit of a dirty business, I guess, when your business is like, well, it'd be better if they didn't use our service, because then that saves us on hydro and server costs and all, you know, and they just give us the money. Like that's ideal. And it feels like not a great way to conduct your business.
Speaker 1:
[27:57] It feels bad. Yeah. Well, I agree with that. Well, more on that as we see it play out, but prices are lower now. Maybe some bad news for that Fallout New Vegas rumor mill that we've all been counting on pooping out of Fallout New Vegas game. Chris Avalon says he does not think Bethesda can do it. It's not necessarily for sure that they're not doing it, but he claims.
Speaker 2:
[28:23] But it's interesting. So this was a story that I was like, oh, it's a little story. You know, this Chris Avalon co-founded Obsidian Entertainment, so would be a person in the know from those days. But I thought, it's an interview they did with a YouTube channel called TK's Mantis. Not one I'm familiar with, but apparently an interesting channel.
Speaker 1:
[28:50] I mean, it's TK's Mantis. It's exciting.
Speaker 2:
[28:52] I don't know. I don't know who they are. Apparently, this was a real good interview because here's the thing is, as I was reading through the quotes, this got more and more interesting. So it started with just like, maybe you could read it as a bit of a shot. I don't know. It kind of makes sense. Saying that he just didn't feel that they had the development chops to do it. And it's like, oh, shots fired. But where it gets interesting, and I'll kind of read. So I'm going off of Video Games Chronicle that put up some of the quotes here from this. Is he said, he was asked, and you think other than that, fundamentally it would be an impossibility for them. And he said, yeah, for one reason, Fergus Urquhart, I don't know if I said that correct, chose not to give Bethesda the original game's source code after development had ended.
Speaker 1:
[29:48] Probably the chief engineer guy, chief software guy.
Speaker 2:
[29:51] So apparently there was a, when they're giving the developers, like these are the things you need to meet, and this is what you earn for what you meet. The last milestone was give us the source code, and they were going to pay them $10,000 for that. They opted not to deliver the source code, and he said, I can speculate on a couple of reasons why they wouldn't have done that. They might have felt cheated about money, might have been just a bad relationship, whatever. They decided, no, we would rather hold on to the source code ourselves than give it to you and collect $10,000, which is really interesting. He says, as far as he knows, they have not asked for the source code, so they don't own it. And he doesn't think they have the development skills to reverse engineer it.
Speaker 1:
[30:44] Here's another quote. He says, they may have aspects of the code, but everyone that I talked to after that period of time said they had no idea how to reassemble it. I mean, yeah, that's not, I mean, that's probably very true. Reverse engineering is a thing, but usually it's a lot more complex for something like this. Like, you don't just throw it into a LLM and say, tell me the code. It doesn't work that way. So I don't know. Now I'm nervous not going to get this shit.
Speaker 3:
[31:13] There might be some legal requirements behind it as well. Like-
Speaker 1:
[31:16] Could be.
Speaker 2:
[31:17] Well, I mean, I mean, I don't know.
Speaker 3:
[31:20] But like, Obsidian and Bethesda are now both owned by Microsoft, so can't they just be like, isn't this just a case of them not paying themselves? You know, like, isn't this kind of bullshit at this point?
Speaker 1:
[31:30] Well, it's a good point. Now that you say that, they are all owned under the same roof. So in theory, if someone has the code on one side, they should be able to get it. But it sounds like from these quotes that maybe this head of software engineering on the game didn't give it to anybody.
Speaker 2:
[31:45] It's a good home. Maybe it's currently holding down some papers.
Speaker 3:
[31:49] He's got it on a hard disk in a landfill somewhere. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[31:53] Or he took it to, what's the place called? Medieval Knights or whatever the hell it is and left it there with a porn stick from what's his name and bam, lost forever, lost to the wind.
Speaker 3:
[32:02] They should be able to reverse it into the field.
Speaker 2:
[32:06] I don't know. We'll see. We'll see if it happens. I think a lot of the rumors we've heard is that Fallout 3 is the next one coming, not if they're going to do a remake or a remaster or whatever you want to call it. That it's going to be Fallout 3 and not New Vegas, which is damn.
Speaker 1:
[32:25] That'd be a real shame. I mean, I want the 3 remake personally as well. I want both though. I'm very picky about on this one point of I need New Vegas.
Speaker 2:
[32:35] Yeah, there's one I want no matter what. And there's one I will take.
Speaker 1:
[32:38] Yeah, that's it right there.
Speaker 2:
[32:40] For me to be happy, it has to also come with the other one. I don't know. I thought it was an interesting story. It's an interesting point, whether it ends up panning out to be true or not. But it's sad news, but man, it makes you really look at that relationship and go, boy, what fun that must have been dealing with that mess. If you're at a point where you're like, you know what, keep your $10,000, I'm going to keep the code, thank you. It really says something.
Speaker 1:
[33:11] It also makes me wish I was there at the time because this sounds so crazy because this was Bethesda going, well, we want to keep scraping money off this new IP that we've got. We've shipped 3, 3 was successful, buggy but successful. We don't have the resources to poop out another kind of middle bit before whatever 4 is. Let's sub this out to Obsidian, they're good at this sort of thing, but we're only going to give them a year and they're going to have to cram. It's going to be the worst, they're sleeping under their desks, it's going to be that bad and they're going to have to go, go, go, go, go and then ship at the end and at the end there's still disagreements, nobody's really happy, whatever, the game ends up becoming an all-timer, it overshadows anything Bethesda proper has made with Fallout and they can't escape the shadow.
Speaker 2:
[33:59] It's gotta be some bad feelings games, across the board there, whether it's how Bethesda treated them in terms of expectations and timeframe and delivery and all that stuff, I'm sure there's a lot of bad feelings on Obsidian from that but there has to be some pain on the Bethesda side too where it's like we gave them a year, we gave them no time, strict deadlines, they scraped and rushed this together and they made something that people put above everything we've spent years building.
Speaker 1:
[34:34] Yeah, yeah, I think it probably annoys the hell out of them and all the fans wanna do is say, when do we get a remake of that? Anytime you do anything, well, what about New Vegas? Like, we're making a new fallout. Yeah, but what about New Vegas? And the show is full of New Vegas shit. Like, you can't escape it. I don't know how they ever overcome it, to be honest. There's bruised egos. I think the reason that Todd Howard is only two foot three is because he cannot get over this after all these years.
Speaker 2:
[35:01] He's taller than me.
Speaker 1:
[35:02] Oh, shit, I always forget that.
Speaker 2:
[35:04] He's taller than me.
Speaker 1:
[35:05] I may much. I may have a-
Speaker 2:
[35:08] He's not gonna tower over me.
Speaker 1:
[35:09] It's a little hyperbole on my part, I'm afraid. Yeah. Anyway, Todd Howard's fine. I just bet there's a lot of bad blood there. I just think there's a stink.
Speaker 3:
[35:19] There's a thing there, but those guys have moved on too, right?
Speaker 1:
[35:23] Yeah. But now, like you said, they're under the same umbrella of ownership, so maybe they need-
Speaker 3:
[35:28] I mean, they're not working together and the new- Is it Ashishara? She just could come in with a baseball bat and be like, seems like you guys don't want to get along.
Speaker 1:
[35:39] Robert De Niro and Untouchables smacking the bat. Hey, you guys do your shit. I don't know. It doesn't sound like hurt at all. Do your shit. Well, anyway, let's see how that goes. Maybe we'll never get it and I'm sad to hear this news. Although the modded version is very nice. I just wanted a nice modern.
Speaker 2:
[36:00] I think that's what I'm going to have to do. As somebody that wants to play through it, I think I'm just going to have to find a way to get it to run nice on my computer and put some mods on.
Speaker 3:
[36:08] I think it's crazy that they haven't done, given the success of Final Fantasy VII remake, that we just don't have a Fallout 1 done in the Bethesda engine.
Speaker 1:
[36:17] Yeah, we had to wait for some open-source team to make it.
Speaker 3:
[36:20] Oh yeah, there's someone who did it. Oh, did we talk about it on the show? We did, yeah. It did look awesome. But I mean, you're a video game company and you like making money. I don't know, seems like pretty low-hanging fruit to get a team together. You'll find fans of the franchise willing to work passionately on it, I'm sure.
Speaker 1:
[36:41] It feels like bad foresight on their part. They just didn't see it for what it was. I don't know, bums me out.
Speaker 3:
[36:47] I think CD Projekt Red is doing Witcher 1.
Speaker 1:
[36:50] Oh, I didn't know that.
Speaker 3:
[36:51] I think as part of their suite of projects, there's a Witcher 1, because Witcher 1 is pretty much unplayable. Such a turd.
Speaker 2:
[36:58] Witcher 1 is a different vibe for sure.
Speaker 1:
[37:01] It was weird at launch. That game never really worked.
Speaker 3:
[37:04] It was officially announced in Curling Development by Fool's Theory. They got a partner to work on Unreal Engine 5, Open World. They're just going to make it Witcher 4 style, but it'll be Witcher 1. I'm like, cool, I will pay money for that.
Speaker 1:
[37:16] That's what Oblivion is. Oblivion is a third-party contract deal that's not the first one.
Speaker 3:
[37:23] They're like, let's do Oblivion. I'm like, why don't you start with part 1? I don't know. Anyways, that's just me.
Speaker 1:
[37:31] They went all the way back to the original. What was the Elder Scrolls that was so huge?
Speaker 3:
[37:35] We've plateaued to a certain extent.
Speaker 2:
[37:36] Dagger Heart.
Speaker 1:
[37:37] Dagger Fall.
Speaker 2:
[37:39] Dagger Fall.
Speaker 3:
[37:41] Dagger Heart is the RPG.
Speaker 2:
[37:42] Hold on. Yeah, that's right. That's right.
Speaker 1:
[37:45] Dagger Fall is so cool.
Speaker 2:
[37:47] Elder Scrolls.
Speaker 1:
[37:48] But it's very empty.
Speaker 2:
[37:50] Dagger Fall, yes.
Speaker 1:
[37:52] Dagger Fall would take a lot of extra work because right now, Dagger Fall as it currently stands, maybe a ton of like an explorable space, virtual space, bigger than any game ever or whatever. I think it still holds the record.
Speaker 2:
[38:05] It is massively bigger. It's big as I think they said, isn't as big as the actual UK or something.
Speaker 1:
[38:11] Yeah, it's larger than any games world and almost as big as a nation.
Speaker 3:
[38:17] They don't have to do that though. I feel like Final Fantasy VII Remake has given people a very strong, other companies a very strong case for make the game fundamentally different. But yeah, nobody in modern ways and people will find people who enough people who enjoy and pay for it.
Speaker 2:
[38:36] Like if they remade Daggerfall, nobody's going to go. You removed the two copy paste trees that are slightly close together near a snowy embankment. That was my favorite two trees copy pasted next to each other near a slight snowy embankment. A 15 minute walk out of town and you've ruined the integrity of the game.
Speaker 1:
[38:58] The entire game.
Speaker 2:
[39:00] The world is huge but it is nothing huge. Like it's full of nothing.
Speaker 1:
[39:07] It's like an ounce of cat poo in your birthday cake. It just ruined the whole cake, Jon.
Speaker 3:
[39:11] I think there's probably going to be some people that are going to lament, oh they used to make games better or whatever. But like I'm not playing the old Elder Scrolls. But if they released the modern version, there's a chance I would.
Speaker 1:
[39:20] Yeah, very good chance you would. Even if Far Cry got like that treatment, that level of loving remake, you'd play that.
Speaker 3:
[39:29] Yeah. So I'm just saying there's lots of opportunity, because we've plateaued because gaming is big business, and gaming needs reliable source of income. It's not good when the technology companies like Nvidia and Windows and stuff move the ground too crazy underneath the feet of all these big companies that are pinned up by a status quo that is largely much more acceptable. If we don't move on from gaming technology for the next 10 or 20 years, it's stable where it is. There's lots of great gaming experiences that can be built. We love advancement, but we're at a period where we don't need a lot of technological advancement.
Speaker 1:
[40:05] No. Ideas and-
Speaker 3:
[40:07] They have these old games at the time, they would have loved to have made way better that they can now, and probably reliably do good sales on some of these highly recognized franchises. To me, Fallout 1 and 2 and the old Elder Scrolls are just sitting there waiting. If they're not good at imagination because they're not a startup anymore willing to take risks, then they should just take their beloved things and do what they do best and make them awesome.
Speaker 1:
[40:35] I agree. Wraith in the chat had a good point. Says, Fallout New Vegas is Microsoft's Bloodborne, where fans keep asking for a remake, but then it never gets made. Yeah, it feels like that.
Speaker 2:
[40:43] It's a little bit true. Although I feel like for different reasons. Bloodborne, I think is tricky because it's so near and dear to them. Well, I actually I do think there's also a rights issue somewhere in there with it as well.
Speaker 1:
[40:56] There is some messy thing from.
Speaker 2:
[40:58] They from software, they've said like that's their favorite game. So you would almost think that they're a little more precious about it and wouldn't want somebody else to work on it. Whereas I think Bethesda wants to pretend New Vegas doesn't exist, except people won't let them.
Speaker 1:
[41:13] Yeah. Hi, I'm Todd Howard.
Speaker 3:
[41:15] I was still there. So if there's bad blood, one of the bad bloods.
Speaker 2:
[41:18] Oh, he knows. Remember when we made Fallout 4? What about New Vegas?
Speaker 1:
[41:22] What about New Vegas? Shut up, you little bastards.
Speaker 3:
[41:24] We're never making it again.
Speaker 1:
[41:27] Oh, man. I do want to. I kind of wish I had a fly on the wall in there. I'd love to know that. I'd love to hear Todd Howard talk without cameras.
Speaker 2:
[41:35] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[41:36] I don't know why I think it would be controversial.
Speaker 2:
[41:37] I just feel like people asking George Lucas about Mara Jade.
Speaker 3:
[41:41] A little bit. Yeah. He freaks out.
Speaker 2:
[41:46] All right.
Speaker 1:
[41:46] Here's another note. Blizzard is releasing the opening or has released the opening cinematic for the new Diablo IV expansion. I played it at the top of the show or a piece of it. It is very cool. Man, I'll tell you what this Diablo IV story team is willing to do, and your reaction to it may vary, but they are willing to let characters. Do I need to put up the spoiler baron for it's cinematic, an opening cinematic?
Speaker 3:
[42:13] It's a piece of marketing.
Speaker 1:
[42:15] Okay, it's marketing. I'll just say it then. They just strangled and killed What's Her Beak from the first-
Speaker 3:
[42:24] The name is Narell.
Speaker 1:
[42:25] Narell from the game. He just lifts her up in the air and pops her neck.
Speaker 2:
[42:30] Yes. Beloved What's Her Beak. We will all mourn the passing of such beloved iconic characters as Deckard Cain.
Speaker 3:
[42:39] Before anyone gets too excited, she might not be dead. She might be dead but comes back as a butterfly. Please no.
Speaker 1:
[42:48] That's a bad reference for the Deckard Cain people.
Speaker 3:
[42:51] They're already mad about butterflies. Death is not always the end in these games, so I wouldn't get faked out by it too hard. But if you really want to kill off a character in Diablo, just stop putting them in the game. That's like the worst tier, the biggest thing in Diablo III, huge character arc. They're like, we're not going to show a death scene. He's in the Maui surface.
Speaker 2:
[43:17] He ate so much food, he exploded. He's the new gluttony.
Speaker 1:
[43:20] I do like this though.
Speaker 3:
[43:22] Big character in Diablo IV, where's Loretta after? He's like, I went to the picnic and I'll be back. So you're there, guys. Like no story, no nothing. When they make a big show of killing somebody, it's like, oh, they're not dead. The way you truly die in sanctuary is if they just stop giving a shit about making anything for the character.
Speaker 1:
[43:40] You know what I love though, this opening thing right here, let me go back to it a little bit. I love this sea of souls in that water.
Speaker 2:
[43:47] Visually, there's a lot of cool stuff in this. Like this opening bit, I thought was amazing. I was like, oh, this is so cool. And then it got to the story bit, and it reminded me that I didn't play the last expansion. And I'm like, I got no idea what's going on.
Speaker 3:
[44:00] You didn't miss anything. The last expansion was Narelle's missing, and you find her. There, congratulations, you've played the expansion.
Speaker 2:
[44:07] Yeah, but I didn't know who the dude was.
Speaker 3:
[44:09] Oh, okay, the dude is Jesus. He's Akarat, and you resurrect him by going to the spirit world, but Mephisto takes him over secretly, but you as the player see the cinematic. That's it. It's just Mephisto and Jesus' body.
Speaker 1:
[44:20] He's the one in the teaser where the Paladin's shield comes back and just rips him in twain.
Speaker 3:
[44:27] Yeah, it seems like everyone pretty quickly figures out it's Mephisto. It's like he's the Lord of Hatred. Nobody knows, and it's like, yeah, you're not Belial. So everyone's just like, clearly, you're not Jesus. You're Mephisto pretty quickly.
Speaker 1:
[44:43] I like the tone of it, though. I like the look of it.
Speaker 3:
[44:45] He looks cool, though.
Speaker 1:
[44:46] I'm actually excited, and I'm hearing some really good things about the rework of the of the skill trees, which they haven't released yet. You can't play the pre-orders didn't give you access to that. So whatever that's going to be, I'm excited to fiddle around with that. You can build some really neat builds without feeling like you're locking yourself into corners all the time and having to respect.
Speaker 2:
[45:04] So wait a minute, how does that work for like the Paladin, which you can play? Does Paladin have a new skill tree?
Speaker 1:
[45:13] That's a great question.
Speaker 2:
[45:14] I'm assuming they didn't design an old skill tree just so they could make it into a new skill tree later.
Speaker 1:
[45:19] No, that's a great question. I don't know. It's in the same structure, like the same layout.
Speaker 3:
[45:23] My understanding is just there's more nodes and options. It's not like Barbarian doesn't have Whirlwind anymore. It's just you remember from D3 again, where every time there's new content, D4 gets closer and closer to D3.
Speaker 2:
[45:39] I can't wait for them to add color.
Speaker 3:
[45:42] Well, in D3, you'd have runes that would highly modify like how they played. I think that's what the new skill tree is, is just like basically not precisely the rune system, but more modulation of existing abilities. I don't think you're getting dramatically new abilities per class.
Speaker 1:
[46:01] No, but there's just the usability of them, and the changeability, and the kind of like.
Speaker 3:
[46:06] It's the rune system. It's a little more like runes. You'd have Whirlwind and then you'd have different runes. One of them makes dust devils, the other one increases the size, the other one burns less resource when you do it. Like, it's, I would say the original skill tree in D4 was very like, basic. It's like, oh, when you spend 30 rage on your Whirlwind, make enemies vulnerable. Okay, cool.
Speaker 1:
[46:29] And I know people like to shit on Diablo IV. I know it's a favorite sport of Blizzard fans slash haters.
Speaker 2:
[46:35] No, you just think that because you talk to me too much.
Speaker 1:
[46:39] No, no, no, I don't. I think you, the thing is I know you, I know where you're actually at. Like if Diablo IV suddenly became awesome, Jon would be the first to admit it. He doesn't hold a grudge that you won't turn around on. Fallout New Vegas is a great example of this. Like it used to be the thing you least cared about and you thought three was the bomb and you've completely flipped on that. So I've seen that enough to know that your opinions are valid and the minute they're not or something changed that made you have to reassess, you reassess. That's different than the people I'm talking about. It's very different. The people I'm talking about are just hating to be hating. They're still playing anyway. They're just being dicks. So to them, I would say, whatever, live your life. For me, I'm actually excited about next week. I'm excited about the... And it sounds snarky to say they're pulling some of what made three work well to four. I see that as nothing but a positive thing. I don't think it's capitulation. I don't think it's anything.
Speaker 3:
[47:36] I know it's good.
Speaker 2:
[47:37] Because that's what I wanted it to be like to from. I know.
Speaker 3:
[47:40] I always say that as a positive for Jon's benefit because it's like, you know, he still wants the color back. I don't know if we can.
Speaker 2:
[47:48] Yeah, I'm telling you, they patch it into this game. And oh my God. Holy, holy shit. If this game actually became interesting to look at. Oh my God, I would be mad about that either.
Speaker 3:
[48:00] I think Diablo III, like I like the grim dark look as well. But I think having played a lot of foreign, a lot of three, if you were to give me a Pepsi taste test, I'd want the Diablo III taste. You know, I don't want the long run. Long run. Chris Messon is right.
Speaker 1:
[48:16] That is all that is all the indication for that. For me, I don't. That's a really interesting question. I don't dislike the look of three at all. But I do like grim, dark, fantasy settings.
Speaker 2:
[48:29] Things can look grim and dark with color.
Speaker 3:
[48:33] Yeah, as a pro color guy, I'm like, yeah, you know.
Speaker 2:
[48:37] I will tell you right now, what's the Elder Scrolls-like game that you played that's all King Arthur and stuff?
Speaker 1:
[48:43] Avalon.
Speaker 3:
[48:45] Avalon is a good example of having a lot of color.
Speaker 2:
[48:47] That's got a lot of color, and it's just as grim dark as Diablo. You do not have to look like your monitor is broken to be grim dark.
Speaker 3:
[48:56] I think what Jon is talking about is not the grim dark. It's that it feels like the Diablo IV idea of grim dark is to put a gray matte over everything. You know how you can do that in OBS, where it's like you can change the color palette of your camera feed to be dramatic or actiony, and it changes the tone, right? Maybe it's more blues, maybe it's warmer and more reds are emphasized. Diablo has this thing that we're going to make sure there's gray pigment in everything. I'm here for Jon. I support Jon.
Speaker 1:
[49:29] Like I said, I like them both. I think the color where it's needed is there, and that's usually in the combat. But when you're just walking around town, yeah, it's a little drab.
Speaker 3:
[49:42] There's a drabness to it that isn't necessarily grim dark. Anyways, that hasn't stopped me from playing, but like I see it, I sort of agree with it. But yeah, I think, you know, this is probably going to be, it's going to be interesting time to play Diablo, because like you said, it's the first time there's a second expansion. So we're in uncharted territory. And I want to give a shout out to a comment about who supported, you know, the best way to kill, the way they kill people in Diablo is not to give them death, but just to stop talking about them. I can't remember who was it said it, but they said that's what they did to Diablo, right, digital hype. They killed out Diablo this way too. Like Diablo IV is like zero Diablo. The most expansions ever, still zero Diablo. I don't think there's going to be Diablo in this one either, to be honest.
Speaker 1:
[50:31] If they do a third expansion, though, there will be Diablo. Let's go ahead and make that bet now, because I'm pretty sure that's going to happen.
Speaker 3:
[50:38] I would hope so.
Speaker 2:
[50:39] Are we going to bet on if there's going to be another expansion? If there's going to be an expansion or if there's going to be a Diablo?
Speaker 1:
[50:45] There will be a Diablo IV expansion after this one, a third and perhaps final, but there will be a third expansion to this game, to four, and it will feature the Dark Lord himself.
Speaker 3:
[50:57] You're not going to Diablo V without seeing Diablo and Diablo IV.
Speaker 1:
[51:00] Yeah, you will see Diablo and Diablo IV in the third act of this three part.
Speaker 3:
[51:05] I don't know, man. I need to know the odds of this thing.
Speaker 2:
[51:07] One of my major criticisms of Diablo IV is that it felt like an extraordinarily long act one. And I feel like this is also backed up by the fact that the game had two cinematics. And one of my favorite things about Diablo is you get an opening cinematic and then you get an act one cinematic and then you get an act two and then an act three and then an act four and then an epilogue. So I feel like by the cinematic principles of Diablo, this expansion is now our third slash act four cinematic.
Speaker 3:
[51:44] I think it's act two. I think we're still in act two.
Speaker 2:
[51:47] You think we're still act two? Oh, they just protracted it into one.
Speaker 3:
[51:50] Well, my opinion is, so you haven't played Vessel of Hatred. My opinion is it's a nothing burger.
Speaker 2:
[51:55] It's about a half an act.
Speaker 3:
[51:57] You're skipping, it's a third of an act at best.
Speaker 1:
[52:00] I mean, I wouldn't call it nothing burger.
Speaker 2:
[52:03] I think this concludes act two.
Speaker 3:
[52:04] Here's the full story of Spoiler Baron. Here's the full story that I remember from Vessel of Hatred, Spoiler Baron. Oh, really?
Speaker 1:
[52:12] You want the Baron?
Speaker 3:
[52:13] I don't think it matters. I don't think anyone cares, but let's just bring him out.
Speaker 1:
[52:16] All right, he's coming out.
Speaker 3:
[52:17] This is the full story, all right?
Speaker 1:
[52:19] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[52:20] Like at the end of Diablo IV, you go to hell, fight Lilith, it's cool and shit. You come back, the army comes back. One of the guys in the army gets disillusioned, kills you, and then he's cranky, and Narel goes missing. Then you're back alive somehow. I can't remember how you get resurrected, but you somehow back alive. You go look for Narel, you kill the knight that killed you, you find some people in the jungle, they help you find Narel by looking for Jesus, Akarat, Mephisto's hanging around.
Speaker 1:
[52:50] In dog form.
Speaker 3:
[52:50] Mephisto wants to kill Narel. You save Narel, kill Mephisto, Mephisto and Hobbits inhabit Akarat's body. That's the story. That's literally all that happens pretty much. It might be a few thousand things.
Speaker 1:
[53:03] It's very interstitial.
Speaker 2:
[53:04] It's not a full act.
Speaker 1:
[53:05] It's very interstitial.
Speaker 3:
[53:06] It's just like you go from A to B. It's a story beat in a big narrative. This is one Witcher mission.
Speaker 1:
[53:14] Does it feel a bit like... I'm going to take down the Baron. Does it feel a bit like the way they did the StarCraft 2 with the three acts? Like there really are just three games or three acts in this game and they're doing it by expansion rather than a new game?
Speaker 3:
[53:27] I know the stories in each entry of StarCraft is phenomenal. It's like one mission in StarCraft. I'm telling you, Vestal of Hatreds from a story perspective is some of the worst that Blizzard has ever done.
Speaker 2:
[53:43] That's what I think. I'm telling you that first all of Diablo IV feels like... I'm not talking about content. They stretched it out. I'm not talking about length of content. Narratively speaking, Diablo IV, the base game you got, feels like act one of any other Diablo game. It sounds like based on what Beau just described and what I'm anticipating this next expansion to be, that these two next expansions will constitute when put together act one or act two, I guess it would be, of Diablo IV. I still think we're only at two acts of this game.
Speaker 3:
[54:23] If that, it depends. I mean, it's reviewing well, so maybe there's a satisfying fulfillment that we've completed act two of Diablo IV.
Speaker 2:
[54:31] Well, that's what I think. Yeah. So instead of saying it's like a half act, it completed act two.
Speaker 3:
[54:36] This makes a lot of sense. They're owned by Microsoft now and they've been trying to get a game like Destiny off the ground for a while and Destiny is like, the literal definition of edging in the story. It's like here's a whole $70 game that is just limited in scope because we want to keep telling stories so we can't blow it all. It's the opposite of throw everything at the wall. You get like a big release like Red Dead Redemption and you're just like, man, they threw everything at the wall in this release. It's so good. It's so much. There's a different business model that's like throw everything at the wall, remove 90 percent of it and release that first thing. Then we'll put the remaining 90 percent over nine more releases for the next 10 years.
Speaker 1:
[55:17] That's sandbag. You're talking about story sandbagging.
Speaker 3:
[55:21] That's what Diablo IV feels like to me.
Speaker 2:
[55:24] In Diablo IV's defense, that first expansion did release at a time where they were still or had only just walked back, they were going to do annual expansions. That was originally a plan. If you're getting an expansion every year, having it feel like part of a story isn't the worst thing in the whole world. But if you're going to release in an expansion time window, it should feel complete. I do think that by what I have read, I've read reviews that have said words like a satisfying conclusion to this arc, so I'm assuming it wraps up. I think it at least gets us through Act 2. Maybe if there's still enough interest in Diablo, I think there's probably plans for what would be Act 3 and Act 4. I don't love that this is how their approach is to Diablo. I would rather, I liked the old method, but that's me.
Speaker 3:
[56:30] Yeah. They're doing it like the RPG world shifted. This is what the Path of Exile model. Path of Exile model is new content every six months forever. So it does make a lot of sense that Diablo would chase the dragon, because I think the way they generate sales apart from the box copies is, you sucker me into going to buy the Doomskin. I can play for a week and I cannot help myself, but drop 60 bones on a bunch of useless pixels like a big chump. So I feel like they're probably doing well, and I think we will get more content past this, because I think over the years it's very easy to be like, Diablo looks cool, let me play for a season. I play for two weeks, and at minimum, I'm probably buying a battle pass. Like they're earning 20 bucks for their effort from a lot of... There's a lot of people in their 40s who grew up with Diablo who don't want to play Diablo II anymore, and will go in and do it. I think Diablo III was kind of the experimentation. They did it backwards. They released a game, released the expansion, it went on life support, and then seasons popped off and got popular, and they were like, oh shit, we should have like, you know, you can see the course correction in Diablo IV where seasons were a thing right from launch. And, you know, to the point where I think they went too far and they put the best armor sets for sale, and I think that's, I really think that's a crime. I think like, once stop killing games is done, with whatever it is they're doing it legislatively, they need to stop killing Diablo items should be the next movement.
Speaker 1:
[58:08] Start signing that petition today.
Speaker 3:
[58:10] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[58:11] Did you see, speaking of, just to, just to aside, stop killing games is maybe making some headway because Ubisoft announced that they are putting plans in place for if The Crew 2 or the other The Crew game, I can't remember what it's called, but apparently there are two of them. When they, if they ever have to be taken offline, there will be an offline mode for both of them.
Speaker 1:
[58:33] See, that's how you do it.
Speaker 2:
[58:35] They're not going to shudder it like they did The Crew, which was one of the inspirations for the Stop Killing Games movement. So it's having an impact and also that's ongoing right now. So those discussions are actually happening.
Speaker 3:
[58:51] So I feel like of all those arguments, the one where it just completely invalidates your game is the most egregious. There's a lot of different things they can do, but we're switching your game off forever, randomly, whenever we feel like it.
Speaker 1:
[59:06] Yeah, it sucks.
Speaker 3:
[59:07] Definitely a problem.
Speaker 1:
[59:08] I forgot what that's called. There is another crew game that's got a whole other name. I forgot. I haven't played any of the crew games, so I can't really speak to them, but I'm sure they're okay. Some people like them. All right, moving on. There's a rumor Street Fighter VI, next DLC character roster will feature Vega. So get happy about your claw man. Hager. Everyone likes Hager from the side scroll and beat him up of your former mayor. Former mayor. Gokin. Gokin?
Speaker 2:
[59:39] Gokin.
Speaker 1:
[59:39] Gokin. And Tifa Lockhart. What? What?
Speaker 2:
[59:43] Yeah, so take this very much as a rumor. This is not confirmed, but it came from somebody who accurately leaked a previous roster. So there is a level of credibility to it. But that's the rumors that we're getting Vega, Mike Hagar, Gokin and a guest character from Final Fantasy 7, Tifa.
Speaker 1:
[60:10] Look, that's exciting, right?
Speaker 2:
[60:12] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[60:12] What do you think? What do you think? I mean, Gunners are stoked. That's for sure.
Speaker 3:
[60:17] My one question is how thick do you think Tifa's size will be in Street Fighter?
Speaker 1:
[60:22] Well, they don't want to be as, like Chun Li is the queen, right?
Speaker 2:
[60:26] You can't out-thigh Chun Li.
Speaker 3:
[60:28] No, but like-
Speaker 2:
[60:28] It's not like Tifa is known for her thighs. She's known for a couple of things, but thighs.
Speaker 3:
[60:33] Generally speaking, what I've seen of Street Fighters, the women in Street Fighters, they all are muscly and have very thick thighs. Tifa is like, she's only got one thick feature notoriously from Final Fantasy 7 where she's actually fairly thin, maybe unrealistic beauty standards, whatever, whatever. But I'm curious about her Street Fighter rendition, if she'll just be like, no, no, all of her proportions are getting thickified.
Speaker 1:
[61:02] I mean, that's exciting. I'm happy for all the Final Fantasy fans. That's great. But Mayor Hagar, dude.
Speaker 2:
[61:10] Scott's like, why are we talking about Tifa? We could be talking about Mike Hagar.
Speaker 3:
[61:16] Yeah, I love him.
Speaker 1:
[61:17] He's ridiculous and over the top, and that's great. He should be in everything.
Speaker 3:
[61:20] I think Tifa Street Fighter is like, why hasn't this happened?
Speaker 2:
[61:25] I'm going to. Well, I guess there was a big push and petition to get Tifa into Tekken. That was the big everybody wanted Tifa in Tekken. Then Tekken got Clive from Final Fantasy 16. People were like, I don't think we're going to get a second Final Fantasy character. Yeah, and people were sad, and now I think Tekken fans, if this ends up being true, I think the Tekken Street Fighter war is just beginning.
Speaker 1:
[61:50] Yeah, you thought it was over.
Speaker 2:
[61:51] But it's going to be some upset people.
Speaker 3:
[61:55] Are you really excited about Haggard?
Speaker 1:
[61:56] I love my Haggard. Look at him.
Speaker 2:
[61:59] Look at this.
Speaker 3:
[61:59] I know.
Speaker 2:
[62:00] He's so excited. He's been Googling him in the background ever since we talked about this.
Speaker 3:
[62:04] He's a dude in cargo, like khakis.
Speaker 1:
[62:07] I have a thing about characters that shouldn't be in the game. They have like, look at his mustache and his work slacks and fancy shoes.
Speaker 2:
[62:16] I just want to remind everybody, this is the mayor of the city.
Speaker 1:
[62:20] Yeah. Yeah. He's the mayor of whatever city is in Final Fight. I don't know the city was called.
Speaker 2:
[62:26] Final Fight or was it Streets of Rage?
Speaker 1:
[62:28] Final Fight. Streets of Rage was the Sega deal.
Speaker 3:
[62:30] He's from the SNES.
Speaker 2:
[62:32] Oh, that's right. Yeah. Final Fight.
Speaker 1:
[62:33] Yeah. Final Fight is the Mike Haggard game. Like all the other people who gives a shit. Look at it. Big hairy guy with a mustache walking down the street.
Speaker 2:
[62:42] Honestly, let me tell you the part that surprised me. More than more than any of these. Is Vega wasn't in Street Fighter 6 already?
Speaker 1:
[62:50] That's weird. That was really weird to hear.
Speaker 2:
[62:53] I didn't know that seems odd.
Speaker 1:
[62:54] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[62:55] That is Vega not popular because when I was a kid, I thought Vega was the coolest character. He had Wolverine claws, wore a mask. That was all very cool things to a small child looking at a character. I was like, oh, my gosh, claws and cool mask.
Speaker 1:
[63:16] They've done this before. They hold some popular famous characters for DLC because that drives sales. But that did surprise me. I thought Vega was your starting eight, always there.
Speaker 3:
[63:27] Yeah, but it's just how late he's coming out. I just went to the Street Fighter Steam page and I'm like, the latest character is someone called Ingrid, who looks like a fairy. I was like, so they've added every weird idea they've had before Vega, so you know.
Speaker 2:
[63:45] Yeah, it's interesting. Did we talk on the show? I know we mentioned it maybe pre-show. We all saw the new trailer for that movie, right?
Speaker 3:
[63:53] Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:
[63:54] Street Fighter movie.
Speaker 1:
[63:54] It looks awesome.
Speaker 2:
[63:55] It's so good.
Speaker 1:
[63:56] I can't wait.
Speaker 2:
[63:56] I can't stop watching it. I've watched the trailer four times.
Speaker 1:
[64:00] Yeah, I can't wait for it. I'm so stoked. It's clear to me that they understand what they're working with, and it will have to be a terrible plot or something to lose me. They're doing exactly what I would want, so I'm all in. That's how I feel about the new Skeletor, He-Man deal too. I feel the same way.
Speaker 2:
[64:21] Yeah. The voice he's doing for Skeletor isn't terrible, but it's also not Skeletor.
Speaker 1:
[64:27] No. I would like something a little more. He-Man.
Speaker 2:
[64:33] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[64:33] He's got that higher thing, that higher register, and they've never gotten it right outside the cartoon.
Speaker 2:
[64:39] So it's a bold choice to take a character that looks that cool and then give him the most like, I'll get you, kind of voice.
Speaker 1:
[64:47] I don't feel so well, like all that stuff. He's the best. I'm a big Skeletor main. So bring it on. But both of these-
Speaker 3:
[64:54] They should put Skeletor in Street Fighter.
Speaker 1:
[64:56] Yeah. Hell yeah. Oh my gosh. He's been in something.
Speaker 3:
[64:59] Classic Skeletor.
Speaker 1:
[65:00] He's been in Mortal Kombat, right? I think. I think. Hold on.
Speaker 3:
[65:04] Has he?
Speaker 1:
[65:05] Let me look this up.
Speaker 3:
[65:06] I don't think I've ever seen him in a fighting game.
Speaker 1:
[65:08] Was- Why did I just type Sammy Hagar? Because I'm thinking of Hagar. I'm thinking of Hager.
Speaker 2:
[65:13] Sammy Hagar?
Speaker 1:
[65:14] Who were we just talking about?
Speaker 2:
[65:16] Mike Hagar?
Speaker 1:
[65:17] No, the one that we were saying-
Speaker 2:
[65:18] Skeletor.
Speaker 1:
[65:19] Oh, Skeletor.
Speaker 3:
[65:19] Skeletor in a fighting game, basically.
Speaker 1:
[65:21] In a fighting game. Let's just check. I don't think so. This thing will probably say, oh, that upcoming side-scroller deal. Okay, here we go. Yes, a few, depending on what you count as a fighting game. Let's see, the most prominent Masters of the Universe, the arcade game. Back in the 80s, that's something I've never seen. Let's see. Okay, 8-bit. Nope, you know what? Oh, no. Oh, never. Okay, he's not in Mortal Kombat. Damn.
Speaker 2:
[65:50] No, that would be a good one.
Speaker 1:
[65:52] Yeah, all bloody and whatever.
Speaker 2:
[65:54] Yeah, rip his skull off.
Speaker 1:
[65:55] Do you ever see him escape? He manned that one time through a mirror. It was like a portal mirror and he walked in it, but his arm came out and then smashed the mirror and cut his arm off. That's how he escaped. So his arm's still here laying on the floor, but he escaped through the mirror by reaching out and punching the mirror. It's amazing.
Speaker 2:
[66:13] That's hard core.
Speaker 1:
[66:14] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[66:14] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[66:15] Somebody in the chat find that. It's a great little gift.
Speaker 2:
[66:17] That's rough. Also, how is it that Street Fighter used Four Non-Blondes, but the Masters of the Universe movie didn't?
Speaker 1:
[66:27] I don't know.
Speaker 2:
[66:28] I think they're like so far Four Non-Blondes. You know, what's the song called? What's up? I always want to say, yeah, it's what's up.
Speaker 1:
[66:37] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[66:39] The Ninja Turtles movie, the last Ninja Turtles movie used it. Not only did they use it, they used the He-Man parody version in the movie.
Speaker 1:
[66:48] Oh, I think it must be cheap to license and costing.
Speaker 2:
[66:53] I don't know. Well, they used both. They started with the actual song and then when it picks up, it switches to the He-Man version. So Ninja Turtles using the actual He-Man version, Street Fighter using the song, Masters of the Universe not using the song.
Speaker 1:
[67:08] I don't get it. I mean, at least not in the marketing so far, so we'll have to see if they do it later. But yeah, I'm flummoxed. All I know is Man at Arms is played by Idris Elba and I've never heard of a better idea in my life than that with a mustache. Again, the Mike Hagar freaking mustache, man. Give me a big bushy mustache on a guy in a video game or a movie and you got me. That's not a gay. I'm not gay. All right.
Speaker 2:
[67:31] Well, good that you qualified. If Beau made a D&D character for you, he's like, sorry, Scott, we're going to play D&D, but you don't get to make your character. He handed you a character sheet and it was just Mike Hagar. How happy would you be?
Speaker 1:
[67:44] I would be stoked for this campaign. Are you kidding?
Speaker 2:
[67:48] We all in.
Speaker 3:
[67:49] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[67:49] Hell yeah.
Speaker 2:
[67:50] He wouldn't even be mad.
Speaker 3:
[67:51] But he's a wizard.
Speaker 1:
[67:51] Oh. He needs to be, if we're going-
Speaker 3:
[67:57] Barbarian.
Speaker 1:
[67:58] Probably barbarian, yeah, skill wise.
Speaker 2:
[68:00] Political barbarian.
Speaker 1:
[68:01] Yeah, he'd be smart.
Speaker 3:
[68:02] He's a barbarian mayor.
Speaker 1:
[68:04] He'd have a bunch of smart stats, but he would also be just thuggish as hell. That's the whole point, is he's smart and politically savvy, but he's got to clean up these streets, you know?
Speaker 2:
[68:14] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[68:14] So he takes off that shirt.
Speaker 2:
[68:15] He's better to do it than him.
Speaker 1:
[68:17] Yeah. Grows out that big old freaking stash and goes to town. All right. Moving on. The Elden Ring movie has a whole bunch of images leaked. It looks kind of exactly like you'd expect. It looks like the game. We also know a lot more about the cast now. This is exciting because what's his beak is directing and writing. For some reason that didn't open. That's because I'm opening the wrong one. There we go. Alex Garland, that's who I was trying to say. Guy makes no crap as far as I'm concerned. My most excited reason that I want to see this. But if you look at these pictures, if you're not here live, I'll try to describe these to you. But it's basically a post on X where they show off some of the locations and they look exactly like what one might imagine they look like. A lot of ruins.
Speaker 2:
[69:06] It's pretty much exactly what you see in the game.
Speaker 1:
[69:09] Yeah, except this chain link fence for some reason. They got that in the shot.
Speaker 2:
[69:13] The chain link fence, not so much. I'm going to put another one. I'm going to put it in our Discord here, Scott, because this is obviously part of all of our interests. There's footage of the Dung Eater.
Speaker 3:
[69:28] Oh, what? It is. They're going to put the Dung Eater in the game?
Speaker 1:
[69:35] Dude, they're further along than I thought.
Speaker 3:
[69:37] They're actually filming this.
Speaker 2:
[69:38] Look at them throwing stuff at the Dung Eater.
Speaker 1:
[69:40] All right, here we go. I'm going to play it. Let's see what we get. Oh, look, they're throwing poo at the Dung Eater.
Speaker 2:
[69:46] Vegetables and stuff.
Speaker 1:
[69:48] That's the Dung Eater. I mean, it's obviously filmed by somebody's camera.
Speaker 3:
[69:53] It really takes the magic out of it, though. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[69:57] Dude, the way movies are made are way less cool than the way they look when they're done.
Speaker 3:
[70:02] I know, for sure.
Speaker 2:
[70:04] I've heard a lot of people that are like, there's no lighting or atmosphere. Yeah, a lot of that stuff gets edited in posts these days.
Speaker 1:
[70:10] Yeah. Also, the way things are filmed and the way the cameras work and how they're running at the time, that all makes a difference. Don't let somebody's cell phone... Like I saw some, there was some leaked footage of Furiosa before it came out, and it just looked like it was a million miles away, it looked like somebody's phone, they're holding it vertical, and people are like, well, that looks dumb.
Speaker 2:
[70:29] I'm like, well, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[70:31] I don't know why that's even a thing you'd say. To me, that's telling. If you say, well, that looks dumb, then you don't know how anything works ever in the world. Look at this, I threw some flour on the ground.
Speaker 3:
[70:42] Can you believe that's bread at some point?
Speaker 1:
[70:44] It's like, no, that's not how bread works, dip shit. Anyway, I don't know if the bread thing works, but that's what I went with. Hey, guess what else? Tomorrow, Final Fantasy Fan Fest, the Final Fantasy 14 Fan Fest is a thing. I wish you have a better idea of what's going on since the freaking vacation expansion that Jon sort of liked. You liked it.
Speaker 2:
[71:07] It was okay.
Speaker 1:
[71:08] Yeah, you liked it. I shouldn't say you didn't. I mean, I don't want to.
Speaker 2:
[71:10] Well, it wasn't, no, I mean, it wasn't their best. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[71:12] Right.
Speaker 2:
[71:13] But.
Speaker 1:
[71:14] Where do you, do you wish you were going to Fan Fest? Is this a thing you'd like to attend?
Speaker 2:
[71:18] I tried, but I was like, I'm not gonna try super hard to get tickets. I applied, they do a really weird ticket system. I didn't get any. And I was like, okay, it's not meant to be. I've got a lot of other stuff going on. So if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. So yeah, I kind of wish I was going, but it didn't pan out.
Speaker 1:
[71:37] Is this Vegas this year?
Speaker 3:
[71:38] Where are they doing it?
Speaker 2:
[71:39] Anaheim.
Speaker 1:
[71:40] Anaheim, okay. So they're live in 19 hours. So everybody mark your clocks.
Speaker 3:
[71:45] Oh shit.
Speaker 1:
[71:46] Yeah. Get in there, Beau. Get that written down.
Speaker 3:
[71:49] Well, no, I'm just excited for the Final Fantasy fans.
Speaker 1:
[71:53] Oh yeah. Oh, I'm stoked for Final Fantasy fans. I'm stoked for me.
Speaker 2:
[71:56] The new expansion's gonna be?
Speaker 3:
[71:58] Yeah, maybe. The new expansion for After Vacation?
Speaker 1:
[72:01] Well, one would assume.
Speaker 2:
[72:02] Vacation's done. Vacation's over. It's time to get back to business.
Speaker 1:
[72:06] What is this Beastmaster talk? Is there something about a new class?
Speaker 2:
[72:09] Yeah, they added a new job Beastmaster.
Speaker 1:
[72:11] Already in the game or is this coming?
Speaker 2:
[72:13] Yeah, it's a limited job. I think it's in the next patch.
Speaker 1:
[72:19] Like DoorDash or?
Speaker 2:
[72:21] No, so like in Final Fantasy there is already a job that's what's called a limited job. It's basically, it's too weird. They don't balance it and it doesn't do regular content. It's not in line with it. So the one that is currently there is Blue Mage which basically steals the attacks of enemies. So they're weird. And so usually they are usually about an expansion behind in the content that they can do. And it's kind of weird how they work and they're doing the same thing with Beastmaster. It's not a full new job, which is what Final Fantasy calls classes.
Speaker 1:
[73:03] Right.
Speaker 2:
[73:04] But it's an experience you can go through if that's something you're interested in.
Speaker 1:
[73:07] And famously that game lets everybody try them all, which is cool.
Speaker 2:
[73:10] Yeah, you can try it. You don't have to, it's not like I gotta roll a new character and try this. If you want to try it, you just try it. If you don't like it, you just go back to what you were.
Speaker 1:
[73:18] If you're not used to that, it really throws you. Because when I first tried to figure that out, the system of it, I made it way over complicated. Because in my head, I'm like, well, you don't do this in an MMO. How the hell do they do that? It's really not that hard. You do some introductory quests, you get a, what is it? You get like an item in your thing and you click it. And now you're that guy. Yeah. It's really simple.
Speaker 2:
[73:39] The pistol or the weapon because weapon types are exclusive to the job.
Speaker 1:
[73:45] Yeah. That's cool. Well, we'll hear more about that and many other things starting in a mere 19 hours from now. Good luck to them. And finally, just a brief mention. Shapes Z with a 2, sorry, Shapes 2 with a Z.
Speaker 2:
[74:01] Shapes Z with a 2.
Speaker 1:
[74:03] Shapes Z with a 2 is out. Today is the day, man. 1.0 happened today and I had forgotten today. I thought it was next week, which is crazy because I've been so into this game and like eyeballing release dates and all that. So I haven't been able to get in. When we're done today, I'm going to try to carve out some time to get my groove on in the new mode. They basically have a new like onboarding, like main mode that no one's really seen. I guess there probably have been some beta testers, but I'm so excited for Shapes 2 to be out. I'm so excited. That will be on my list of favorite games of the year at the end of the year. I've only been playing it for three, but anyway, or two.
Speaker 2:
[74:38] When it come out. Finally, it's the year. I think it came out last year.
Speaker 1:
[74:42] Yeah, maybe late 24, maybe. I don't know. Time, how does it work? We're going to take a break. When we come back from this break, we're going to take a look at what we played this week, including a little bit of Vampire Crawlers. Turns out some of us had some time for that, and much, much, much more. Stick around, we'll be right back. Hey, everybody, we're back. Welcome back, everybody. We've taken our break, and that means we're fresh and ready to talk about the games we played this week, and we're going to start with that right freaking now. A little shared play this week. There's some others. I did get some more Crimson Desert time. We've kind of talked about everything we're going to talk about there until we see something insane or finish it or whatever. So we'll talk about new stuff this week. And that new thing, at least for Jon and I, I'm not sure about Beau, although he did play the demo like crazy. The Next Fest demo that came out.
Speaker 3:
[75:39] I played it a lot.
Speaker 1:
[75:40] Yeah, Vampire Crawlers happened. Came out. The Vampire Survivors team putting out a thing that is nothing like Vampire Survivors except kind of is.
Speaker 2:
[75:51] Yeah. It's a little bit like it.
Speaker 1:
[75:54] It's a lot about, I don't know how to describe the game. The game is awesome. I love, love, love, love what they've done here. Let's get a little video going. There we go. It's basically kind of a hybrid of the freneticness of the Vampire Survivors formula, but you're fighting with cards, so it has a turn-based aspect to it that does kind of slow the action down a little bit, which is part of what I like about it. But it's also insane. So the stuff you're doing, there's literally a button to just play all your cards. You don't have to look at them all if you're like, these are all damage cards. I'll go for it. But there is some strategy in slowing down and saying, well, if I play this like do extra damage card first, then this other card, it will crit higher and I'll get more damage from that one card. And then the rest of these, I can just burn. There's some of that. Jon, thoughts. As the resident, the guy who really got us into this, made in a weekend of Vampire Survivors genre.
Speaker 2:
[76:53] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[76:53] What, how did this land on you?
Speaker 2:
[76:55] I freaking love this game. I imagine being them and just being able to be like, guys, what if we just made a friggin banger, after banger kind of game system set up here? Like, I can't believe it's this good. I really can't believe it's this good. It's like, aren't you guys busy enough? But I guess when your game's made in a weekend, right? I guess that gives you a lot of time to figure out how to make the next one amazing. This is so much fun. And at first I played, I was like, yeah, that's cool. And I was like, I'm just gonna play a little bit more of it though. And I was like, yeah, it's all right. It's all right. And then I was like, I'm gonna play a little bit more of it though. And now I have 11 hours in it.
Speaker 3:
[77:45] Holy shit.
Speaker 1:
[77:46] Not bad for a game nowadays.
Speaker 2:
[77:47] I have unlocked 105 of 161 achievements.
Speaker 1:
[77:52] Damn.
Speaker 2:
[77:53] Which is relevant to this game. You'll probably hear people, and it's worth maybe mentioning, talk about their achievements in this game. In this game, achievements are tied to unlocks. So there is kind of like, every unlock in the game has an achievement associated with it. So it is a metric with which to record something of progress, because it's not just like, look at my achievements. I'm so fancy. It is also like, hey, look, I'm progressing through the game. It's super good. It is a very fast paced game. I thought it was really bad at first. I probably was. But like Roguelikes, there are permanent power ups that you unlock as you go. So it is going to become slightly easier as you go. And I'm sure like Vampire Survivors, there's gonna be a lot of weird secret stuff that slowly rolls out that you can discover and ways you can break the game. And I went from runs with a particular character where I was like, I can't even beat a single floor with this character. What is going on to now where it's like, I don't know if I could die. Like besides the friggin Reaper that shows up at the end that just cheats and kills you instantly. But even then, they do give you a number of health that that Reaper can do. So theoretically, you could survive. And I'm curious to see if fighting the Reaper is a possibility in this game like it was in Vampire Survivors. But yeah, like, it's kind of cool the way you can break it. It works very similarly to Vampire Survivors, where it's like, oh, I'm going to take this card. You know, so you like garlic is the good example, right? So, you know, I got the garlic card. And then there's a card for heart. And if you played Vampire Survivors, you know, if you take garlic and you take heart as two of your items, those can merge into a single more powerful item. Well, same thing in this. If you take those two cards, there's a place you can fuse them into a more powerful card. And you lose the two and you get a more powerful one. And it's really neat the way they have woven all these mechanics from the one game into this game, while still being a really solid card game in and of itself. And it's kind of, you know, you run around in this 3D environment, kind of like an old 3D dungeon style. And you can, you know, use WASD, Q&E to turn in there. Every time you unlock a new character, it's kind of exciting because they come with their own things and you can just do some crazy stuff. I'm watching the footage and I'm like, yeah, I'm not even close to this power level yet.
Speaker 1:
[80:48] Oh yeah, some of this stuff. Like this thing right here, whatever this screen grabbed it for a shot of that. But like, whatever's going on here.
Speaker 2:
[80:55] I'm not to that power level yet. I've done some crazy things. I haven't done anything that crazy, but I'm looking forward to it. I can see the parts moving where that's gonna become possible because every now and then they'll give me something and I'm like, well, that's cool. Or you know, you can put little mods on the card. And that was kind of an eye opener for me too, because I got one where it was like, hey, subtract the mana cost of a card by one. And at the time I only had one card I could put it in and it had a mana cost zero. I was like, throw it on there. Well, now it's mana cost negative one. And when I play that card, I get a mana back. I was like, oh, it goes in reverse too. We can do negatives and then negatives will empower because if you do in a chain, negatives now empower zero cost cards, which usually don't get a bonus because they're zero. But if you have a negative cost card, now all those zero cards get their more powered up version as well. So all of a sudden, there's all these extra possibilities just from knowing that one little detail. It hasn't been super relevant yet, but it could be going forward. And it's getting to the point where there's some crazy effects going on because I've got, you know, stupid little birds flying above the enemies, bombarding them every turn and puddles on the ground taking them out. Like it's got all the chaos for vampire survivors thrown in there. And I got to tell you, you know, we've also been real big sellers of Slave Spire 2. They also announced a bundle on Steam of Vampire Crawlers and Slave Spire 2, where if you buy the two of them together, you get 10% off.
Speaker 1:
[82:45] Yeah, look at that price, it's crazy.
Speaker 2:
[82:47] That's crazy good.
Speaker 1:
[82:48] They made a big marketing push about how this was nine bucks at an ounce and it's still nine bucks. Like they're really pounding in that this thing is cheap. But yeah, like there's no reason not to get this. By the way, it's got a longer title than I thought. It's called Vampire Crawlers, the Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors. That's the literal title of the damn thing, which is weird. It's getting incredibly good reviews. Like based on what Beau said, I was already sold when he played that demo and talked about it. The other thing I want to not understate is if you are a fan of old school wizardry style, you know, Grimlock 1 and 2 for modern audiences, but that grid based sort of dungeon crawler, move, move, move, attack a thing, turn, look. Like there's something about that I will love forever no matter who does it in what game. I'm just into it. It's just an aesthetic I love. And this game incorporates that so well into navigating around and doing what you got to do, even finding secrets. Sometimes stuff's breakable and it doesn't, it's not obvious. So you want to bump into things before you leave a corner and pop open a chest or blow up a thing, a torch and get a bonus or whatever. Like there's just little things like that that make that part of it really resonate with me. The game is rad, man. Super rad. Vampire Crawlers is a banger. This year is already pretty good with some early bangers. I think this one is really special. Beau, did you get a chance to play this at all?
Speaker 3:
[84:17] Not since launch, no, but I played a ton. I played everything in the demo pretty much. So I understand how fun it is. I just don't have a lot to add, except I will be getting to this because it is quite fun. I just know as soon as I start, it's hard to put down. Yeah. And I still cranking out some Slave Spire. So it's like...
Speaker 1:
[84:39] It's a little bit of cross purposes there.
Speaker 3:
[84:41] Mainly my week's been... Look, we'll talk about it with the games I've played, but I've got a mountain to climb and nothing else is getting done until I've climbed it.
Speaker 1:
[84:51] You got to Yennefer to please, if you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3:
[84:54] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[84:54] We'll get to that. Yeah, this thing for 10... And also the price, it's just stupid cheap. And I love everything these guys are doing the weird things they've been helping other people publish as rad. Like I'm just quickly becoming like a massive fan of Ponkle and everything they're up to.
Speaker 3:
[85:10] So you guys passed the second biome? I think the demo only had two biomes, like the field and the library. So I haven't seen anything.
Speaker 1:
[85:17] I'm in the second one. Sounds like Jon's passed.
Speaker 2:
[85:20] So yeah, there's the field, the library, then there's a bridge and then there's...
Speaker 1:
[85:26] Oh, I might be at the bridge. I didn't know that was a biome though.
Speaker 2:
[85:30] Then there's a dairy.
Speaker 1:
[85:32] That's a dairy. They're like areas. They're not really biomes as much as they are like...
Speaker 2:
[85:38] Well, there's multiple levels within it as well. So like there's three different stages on the forest. And then you go to the library and there's three different stages on the library. But yeah, there's a dairy plant and then there's another bridge. And I think that's where I'm at. I don't think I've been able to beat the final or the next bridge.
Speaker 1:
[86:04] It's also coming to phones now.
Speaker 3:
[86:09] Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[86:10] This seems like a no brainer on my phone. Like it will be it will play really well and look good and be super easy to control and perfect for toilet time and not a pay to win thing or any of that.
Speaker 3:
[86:22] On the toilet, you're going to be playing hemorrhoids or hemorrhoids.
Speaker 2:
[86:25] I think this game is slightly deceptively longer than you think it is. Like this is like, oh, God, I played for that long kind of game. You don't want to you don't want to be on the toilet for too long.
Speaker 3:
[86:36] No new heavies, no new runs, runs, take time. And plus, you're also trying to play with all the different heroes. And it looks like there's like 20 of them, at least.
Speaker 2:
[86:44] There's a lot.
Speaker 1:
[86:44] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[86:45] And the crazy thing is, is one of the unlocks is the ability to play as multiple heroes at the same time.
Speaker 1:
[86:51] Oh, my gosh.
Speaker 2:
[86:51] You create a little adventuring party and you can bring in up to three as you have it unlocked.
Speaker 3:
[86:59] I think you can play all of them, because one of the things I spied in the trailer was, you know, when they're showing the highlight reel and they're blowing cards all crazy like, and you know how those guys have special hero cards? I forget what they're called.
Speaker 2:
[87:13] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[87:13] One of them is a hand playing, I think, every hero card in existence. So I'm like, well, what does that mean?
Speaker 2:
[87:20] Sounds like so, yeah, there are some abilities that let you pull in other crawlers and you can also find them in outhouses. So I don't know if there is a cap to what you can do with that. So there might be some really crazy stuff in there.
Speaker 3:
[87:36] I'll take a screenshot because I have it like right up in front of me. I'll screenshot it and show you what I mean. And I know it's kind of a spoiler, but it's in the trailer.
Speaker 1:
[87:44] So that's fine. I don't think it's really there.
Speaker 2:
[87:48] No, I mean, like this, these games are pretty much...
Speaker 3:
[87:51] Look at that hand. That's like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.
Speaker 2:
[87:56] Look at that.
Speaker 1:
[87:56] Yeah, there was more in the beginning. That video showed what was going on forever, which really captures the essence of what vampire survivors is in general. That's the other thing I really like about it. They're trying to match the vibe and the freak of the first game or the other game, because these aren't the same genre. They did. They still make me feel like I'm in, if you want to call it a universe. I'm still in universe. I'm still having those feelings in the dopamine hits that are similar to the other game, but it's a different game entirely.
Speaker 3:
[88:32] Although I'll point out one of these cards, they all seem like vampire hunters and mages and undead, but there's a panda whoops. Where's the panda?
Speaker 2:
[88:42] That's Cavallo and he's great.
Speaker 1:
[88:45] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[88:46] Yeah. He's in there.
Speaker 1:
[88:47] Jon knows the lore. He knows the lore.
Speaker 2:
[88:49] I mean, you can't see him because he's a little tux, but one of those is a dog. So if you go, it's panda skeleton with a halo. And then the next one is a dog. He's a little white dog.
Speaker 1:
[89:00] Okay. Oh, all right.
Speaker 2:
[89:02] Then you got your Simon Belmonts and Antonio. The girl with the green hair.
Speaker 3:
[89:09] They're all like emu Castlevania characters. Like they didn't make it past concept art. Like, what about Simon Belmont's brother and Antonio?
Speaker 2:
[89:18] Well, and then they became so big that now the entire Castlevania roster is in there, too. Like, literally every Castlevania character is in this game because the ripoff Castlevania game got so big that Konami was like, you want to put the real thing in there?
Speaker 3:
[89:37] Can we be in your garbage game? It'll only take two minutes.
Speaker 1:
[89:39] Because you know, they had two choices there, really clear choices. They either jump in and support it and have some fun, or they have a legal battle that takes forever and everyone already hates Konami for 10 reasons.
Speaker 3:
[89:54] The other thing about the game though is they're going to have a legal battle, meanwhile everyone there is playing it on the toilet anyways. It's one thing to have a legal battle where you hate it. I'm sure people at Blizzard hate the, actually generally probably don't like some of the private server stuff, just because of the way it is. But we know they genuinely like Final Fantasy XIV to the point where they crib. I think Konami probably everyone there was just playing it anyway.
Speaker 1:
[90:25] This game is great though, really, really good. I have no negatives here. Oh, Steam Deck on this is fan-freaking-tastic. Controller support is also excellent. It's very intuitive, it's not fiddly at all. It's just bat-bat-bat-bat-bat. I want to play all my cards, hit X.
Speaker 3:
[90:46] It really is fun using the mouse to fling cards. In many games, you just click. It's always faster, so I wondered about.
Speaker 1:
[90:54] Yeah, it depends. I mean, your mileage may vary.
Speaker 3:
[90:56] This game plays fast. You could play this game as slow as shit, but because it's so easy to put your... You just sit there and go, what order do I play things in? Click, click, click, click. You are tricked into playing the game fast, because there's a bit of that too.
Speaker 1:
[91:12] Now, you're not flinging cards, but you roll through them with a D-pad or analog stick, and you're hitting A just to play them. It's super simple.
Speaker 3:
[91:19] Oh yeah, because you don't really got a target. It's not like Slave Spire, you want to carefully pick your targets.
Speaker 1:
[91:24] Those work really well too. Those play great on a controller as well, no doubt.
Speaker 3:
[91:28] I just noticed Slave Spire slower because I have to think about it.
Speaker 2:
[91:34] Whereas this has a play all button to just play your cards. You're like, I am so overpowered, I'm not going to think about it, just play all the cards. It's like, is it in the right order? Who cares? It just goes left to right, plays all the cards all at once, and just bam, there you go. Bam, there you go.
Speaker 1:
[91:49] It's extremely satisfying. It's just like, it's very slot.
Speaker 3:
[91:53] It's very slot machiney.
Speaker 2:
[91:54] In fact, one of the early unlocks in this game is the ability that when you go back to a stage you've cleared before, on the first floor, a little nuke button will pop up and you press it and it kills all the enemies on the first floor and gives you the XP for fighting them. So then you just walk around and pick up items.
Speaker 1:
[92:15] Yeah, you're just kind of grinding otherwise. That's a great solution to that, you know? It's really the, I mean, I don't know what the final tier of gameplay in this game is, but I'm guessing it's bananas.
Speaker 3:
[92:26] I assume if it's pretty good, there'll be some expansion. Like we're probably going to, we're gonna have a Contra expansion or something.
Speaker 1:
[92:32] Oh dude, shut up. This is ripe for that. Hope they do the same thing they did on Survivors. Just go nuts with the DLC.
Speaker 2:
[92:40] Scott wants exactly the same collaborations. Give me Contra and Castlevania.
Speaker 3:
[92:46] They should change it up. They should do like Baldur's Gate or Divinity or something like that.
Speaker 1:
[92:50] Well, I mean, whoever want, I'll bet people are anxious to work with these guys. Just about anybody would do it. What an amazing game. I love it. This will also get talked about at the end of the year.
Speaker 3:
[93:00] Is Magic doing anything with these guys? It seems like Wizards of the Coast is on a definitely an IP partnering spree with Magic the Gathering. I did find out they're doing a collaboration with Dwarf Fortress, which is a weirder one. Dwarf Fortress is the game that's been worked on for 40 years or whatever, 20 years, and they're doing cards with them, which doesn't seem like a popular commercial thing. It's not mainstream, but it's definitely very well known. Look at, here's a card, for example.
Speaker 1:
[93:38] Dwarf Fortress intimidates the shit out of me.
Speaker 3:
[93:41] Look how crappy the card looks.
Speaker 1:
[93:42] Oh, they're talking, not even the graphical Steam one that's up now. This is the old school, wow.
Speaker 3:
[93:48] Well, the graphical Steam one is just an overlay. When you buy it, you can play the ASCII version or the graphical. It's interchangeable, like Diablo II resurrected or whatever.
Speaker 1:
[93:59] So, they're going to have a combination of that or is it all going to be like this ASCII?
Speaker 3:
[94:02] I think it's like a limited set. I don't think it's like a full set. It's like one of their things. Actually, there's a whole bunch. Let me just link the Reddit thing. It's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:
[94:11] It's cool.
Speaker 3:
[94:12] This is the kind of collaboration where you're like, I'm not a big Dwarf Fortress fan but respect.
Speaker 1:
[94:18] There are a few games in this world that intimidate me to even look at and to me, Dwarf Fortress has always been on that list of like, do I even want to go near that?
Speaker 3:
[94:25] Even these is magic cards. I'm like, I don't think I want to show other people these cards. Like, just scroll through the images, like right to go up to the image and scroll through the carousel.
Speaker 1:
[94:34] Oh yeah, look at that. That's just like the old school. This is the one that scared me. The graphical one at least feels like I can deal with it. But aren't that Nestea game? And then what's the other one that's super popular? Ah, it's basically a colony management sim. They're all rip offs of this, aren't they?
Speaker 3:
[94:54] Rimworld.
Speaker 1:
[94:54] Rimworld.
Speaker 2:
[94:56] Rimworld.
Speaker 1:
[94:57] Rimworld, that's it. Yeah, Rimworld is all about people's butt holes. Just kidding. It's all about whatever it is.
Speaker 3:
[95:02] No, it's just emerging gameplay where like because the graphic fidelity is not high, the way they've expressed the game is all these emergent properties like your civilization can worship toilets. And then everyone has a name and so Bart becomes disillusioned with toilet worshiping, enjoys aliens to overthrow your colony with alien lovers. Like it's just like apparently this crazy story generator, you know?
Speaker 1:
[95:29] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[95:30] Which Rimworld is always one where I'm like, I just don't like the graphical style of it, but that style is always like such a huge turn off.
Speaker 1:
[95:36] The little meeple guys, I hate them.
Speaker 3:
[95:38] Yeah, like I mean, I remember trying, my brother loves Prison Architects and I'm like, man, I need to play it, you know?
Speaker 1:
[95:44] Well, that one at least goes for an 8-bit aesthetic that's sort of familiar to your, you know, I couldn't even stand it, but Rimworld has been worked on for a long time too.
Speaker 3:
[95:52] And when you hear like what happens in Rimworld, you're like, I have to play this. Like, this is crazy.
Speaker 2:
[95:57] Yeah. Some of the most interesting, compelling things you ever hear.
Speaker 3:
[96:01] Here's a review. Here's just a rant. I had 60 chicks suffering from hypothermia. I sold them to a vendor. When the vendor left, they all collapsed and died. I basically got paid for murdering a whole generation of chicken. Like, what is this game even about? Like, I'm just like, okay.
Speaker 1:
[96:18] Yeah. I'm curious about it. I always have been, then I just, I'm not, I can't. I don't know, I just can't.
Speaker 3:
[96:25] I built a wooden hut, built a bed, studied hard while trying to survive, built a drugs bench, become addicted to drugs, had mood swings and smash stuff, I tried to become clean. Then I bought Rimworld and discovered a new addiction.
Speaker 1:
[96:36] Oh my gosh. Hello.
Speaker 3:
[96:38] I think this is the joke that probably happened.
Speaker 1:
[96:39] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[96:40] Anyway, Rimworld looks cool. Maybe one of these days they'll try it. But back to Vampire Crawlers, I think they should do something probably with Magic or D&D or just something new. I don't want them to do. The other stuff for Vampire Survivors is cool, but I bet you they could find some new territory.
Speaker 1:
[96:58] Yeah, they could experiment around. No matter what they do, the game is off to a hell of a start and it's rad.
Speaker 3:
[97:03] Or maybe just the Dung Eater expansion here, the Dung Eater and some different kinds of Dung.
Speaker 1:
[97:07] Yeah, work with the Elden Ring people. Alex Garland's Vampire Crawlers. I don't know, you'd have to play with it. I'm going to talk about Windrose now. This is a game I played this week and Beau was going to play it, but I played it instead.
Speaker 2:
[97:23] He stole it from me.
Speaker 1:
[97:24] Yeah, it was gifted to me by two people and I had to turn one of them down because the other one had already gifted it. Steam got confused and tried to give me two copies, which is impossible. So anyway, thanks to everybody who was so nice. Windrose for those not in the know is this new survival craft open world game that is suspiciously a thousand times better than Skull and Bones. And it's from a small indie team. We talked about it a little bit last week. It was already taken off. Yeah, very, very small team, but they're making a pretty special game from my initial time in this game. Let me give you some of the basics. So it's open world. It's survival craft. So if you're thinking, what's the one you want to play?
Speaker 3:
[98:15] Valheim, Entrouded.
Speaker 1:
[98:16] Yeah, maybe more Entrouded than not, because there's more gamifying in here than there is in the kind of non-handholdiness of Valheim. This game's a little bit more like there are quests.
Speaker 3:
[98:27] The maps are not seeded either. They're not procedural, it's a static map.
Speaker 1:
[98:30] Yeah, I think so. But there's stuff that happens on the islands in different places that is, the events are procedural, and also where the boats are in the water.
Speaker 3:
[98:38] These games have different levers that are more, you know, yeah. But it's that genre of game where you're free to build things, it sounds like.
Speaker 1:
[98:48] Yeah, so basically, there are quests. In some ways, it feels a little RPG-ish, and you progress toward more unlocks by doing those quests. That's kind of how all of these are, but this one's more bespoke, more like you're just sort of used to. There's a full character creator, as you can see here. It's pretty good. It's definitely early access, and by that, I just mean I can tell there's some places that will get more polished as time goes. It's mostly just small stuff, surface stuff. There's already some pretty good depth under the surface here. Compass-based exploration, you build, you craft, you survive. Procedurally generated world, but the, I think, so it's some kind of combination. They claim procedurally generated, but Beau's right. There's some...
Speaker 3:
[99:36] I mean, it could be. I'm not 100% sure. Sometimes, the whole terrain is formed from Valheim, whereas in Shrouded, it's a static map, and whereas other games, it's a static map, but events are randomized. I mean, it's tough to say, but this game is also like a micro MMO, where you can set up a server and invite what the maximum is, but you can invite friends to go and play with you and build shit together.
Speaker 1:
[100:03] Yeah, you can have your own server. There's options to do that right in the main menus, but really, the meat and potatoes are the thing where you start out, you get shipwrecked. Let's skip ahead to the gameplay. Oops, he keeps going to his menu. You get shipwrecked on this island and you got to go do all your basics, some basic cooking, pick up a lot of wooden stones, hit some trees, some of the stuff you're used to. Immediately, I'm already liking some of the quality of life stuff like, we'll just say survival craft, open world stuff as a baseline and here are the things I like that they change. First of all, the motif is amazing. I love pirates, so I'm super into that. The music reflects it, the look and feel of everything. It's very much like, yarr, we're on the high seas kind of vibe. You has a day night cycle, which I think works really well. You can also sleep through the night if you want to, so you don't have to just work through the night. You can actually kind of create your favorite time of day, plus certain things happen during certain times of the day that you want to sleep up till and that sort of thing. Anyway, you explore your initial island and your goal there is to learn the basics, cook food, build tools, gather resources, kill animals, feed yourself. There's a hunger system, a sort of happiness or comfort level I think is what it's called, that you're trying to maintain all the time and you can improve that when you go back to your camp and you can kind of just rest there. You can build every weapon you find in the game is buildable. So even if you find some rando thing, you can, let's say you find two of them, the one you're using is cool, but then you find another, you can actually melt that down and when you do, it'll give you all the resources it took to build it and a recipe to make more if you want. And it's fully co-op as well. I'm playing solo right now just because that's how I roll with these things usually, especially in early access, but you can have up, I think you end up to might be six people, maybe four, I can't remember.
Speaker 3:
[101:53] Can you have more if it's asynchronous, like max six at a time?
Speaker 1:
[101:56] Oh, I don't know. That's a good question.
Speaker 3:
[101:58] What's fun about these games is like, they might be multiplayer, but it's also just fun to have a server where you're just playing, maybe you play solo, but like you can see your buddy's houses and stuff.
Speaker 1:
[102:06] Yeah, you can go and there's a lot of that I know with different levels of like, don't let people in my house or let them in if they want, but don't let them change anything. And it's a little like V-rising I guess in that way. Lots of server options of difficulty sliders. Some people have said, oh, this is like Souls-like combat. It's not, it's A, it's not that hard, but B, even if you find it.
Speaker 3:
[102:26] Everything that has dodge, parry, attack, strong attack.
Speaker 1:
[102:29] Yeah, if it has a stronger and a weak attack, it must be a Souls-like, but this one really isn't at all.
Speaker 3:
[102:34] The famous Souls-like, Zelda, what's with Zelda?
Speaker 1:
[102:37] I turn all that stuff down just cause I'm not there for a challenging fight with boars in the forest. I'm there to be creative and kind of have a more chill experience. And they let you do that. You can do all those things. And you can change those settings between sessions if you like. Once you set the server, it's not set in stone. You can go tweak a lot of that stuff in between play sessions. This early part is a lot like these games are. Find stuff, build stuff, do the recipes, finish the quest, get to level two, have a better weapon now. Oh, I found my first town. I can sell and buy while I'm there. They're actually NPCs and they sell you stuff.
Speaker 3:
[103:13] Are you building your boat? I think that's one of the big draws to a game like this would be not only do you fabricate your living place and your resource fabrication, but that you can build your boats.
Speaker 1:
[103:26] So my understanding is yes, although your initial boat is crafted from a shipwrecked boat that you have to make ready for sale.
Speaker 3:
[103:34] I would hope you could steal boats too. You're a pirate after all.
Speaker 1:
[103:37] 100%. Yep.
Speaker 3:
[103:38] The most frustrating part about Sea of Thieves is you got to buy all the cool shit. This game does it right. You don't have to craft your boat. You can steal a boat.
Speaker 1:
[103:47] You can steal your boats. You can board other boats, take them over, kill everybody on them, get their loot, leave the boat to just float there or take it. Like a lot of, you have a lot of options that way. There's a fast travel system in the game. So, and you kind of determine where that happens. As you can see here, he's just mining. You find mines in the thing and you got to go start doing metallurgy stuff and all that to build better weapons and better armor. And they kind of walk you through all that stuff. I'm trying to see if this particular video gets us to where he gets to choose his first boat. But basically, I had to take a little skivy, skivy? It's not the word, skiff? Skiff. Out into the ocean and go find...
Speaker 2:
[104:25] Scott Johnson's sails in underwear.
Speaker 1:
[104:28] I had to find this island and then on the island is where my first boat is. It's the wreck and I have to fix it up. And I'm in the middle of that right now. I'm still pretty early. Some players are like way further than me and then you see a lot of coverage of this game right now.
Speaker 3:
[104:43] Early access, so this is also one of those games where you don't have to play the crap out of it because more is coming, you know?
Speaker 1:
[104:49] Yeah, there's a lot coming. It's really solid now, which is exciting because everything else should just be gravy. I think it's resonating and selling like crazy and reviewing so well because I think there's a hunger for this genre to be done well. I don't mean survival craft, I mean pirate shit. Every time someone tries, it fails or Ubisoft fumbles it or Black Flag was as good as it got, and then Sea of Thieves is fun, but then the solo players feel a little left out. This seems to be aiming to really repair that. One of the things it does really well is ship combat. I've only seen ship combat happen through videos, and I'm not finding it here, I'll show it to you. But basically, it looks like legit, like legit ship-to-ship combat and boarding mechanics, and like all that stuff's been thought out. The water looks great. You know, think Sea of Thieves, but just way more to do and keep and have and control.
Speaker 3:
[105:53] It looks cooler, too.
Speaker 1:
[105:55] Yeah, and it looks cooler.
Speaker 3:
[105:55] Sea of Thieves is great and all, and it has great water, but it's very cartoony.
Speaker 1:
[106:00] Here you go, here you see some ship-to-ship.
Speaker 3:
[106:01] Yeah, more serious tone to it. Even though it doesn't have to be like a serious, super serious thing, it's just... You know, that was what seems appealing about Skull and Bones where it's just like it's a pirate simulator that captures the actual vibe.
Speaker 1:
[106:17] And the building you're seeing him do here, super intuitive, really fast. People are making weird shit like that right there. Like big, gnarly structures. It's cool. So I'm really impressed. I'm I'm this pulled me off a multiplayer. I'll play with you for sure.
Speaker 3:
[106:36] I'm like super I just haven't gotten to it because I got other stuff in. But it looks fantastic.
Speaker 1:
[106:39] They pull the they pull this pulled me off of Crimson Desert quite a bit because it just was immediately compelling. And I'll be back to Crimson Desert.
Speaker 3:
[106:47] But it's just I think survival game is good when you're like looking forward. There's like tears of progression, right? So you know, you're like looking forward to collecting all of the resource to build the thing that you need to build the next thing and then learning, right? Like that discovering. It's like open world gaming, but open world, you know what to expect. It's like stories, items, you know, has like very like structured pathways where like a crafting game feels like, am I going to discover a recipe? Am I going to discover a cooler island that I'm going to want to move my base from and start building here? You know, like there's just lots of cool stuff that can happen and it's more emerging gameplay rather than scripted by the game designer.
Speaker 1:
[107:31] Jon, you can make a hot lady pirate, by the way. Nice.
Speaker 2:
[107:35] Who doesn't like a hot lady pirate?
Speaker 3:
[107:36] If all three of us are into it, it'd be fun to actually be into a survival craft game, the three of us that we all liked.
Speaker 1:
[107:43] This is one I feel like I'm already getting behind in a way that I was really surprised. I think it is because they're not trying to make or break or do anything crazy new or even less than in the survival craft market when there is a ton of competition in there. Instead, I feel like they're just making a great pirate simulator. If that sounds good, well, you're not alone. It's currently enjoying very nice reviews, very positive at 89 percent. It's hard to do much better than that with your early access.
Speaker 3:
[108:15] It's a popular genre. Jeff Kaplan's making The Legend of California. I still need to taste the soup. I don't want to be doubtful, but the idea of California is not appealing to me. No, you're not alone.
Speaker 1:
[108:27] The title's weird. I don't like the title.
Speaker 3:
[108:29] The people working on it are very talented, so it might just end up being great. I don't mind the cowboy thing.
Speaker 1:
[108:35] They turned down my interview request, by the way. Here's what they said.
Speaker 3:
[108:41] They responded to you at least. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[108:43] They said basically, they've been so busy with this initial rollout of info and announcement and meeting this and press that, and it sounded to me like they were just like, we're going to give ourselves extra crunch if we don't just focus. So we're going to put them again.
Speaker 3:
[108:59] Definitely the way this stuff rolled out because there was just the first interview at first, but I've seen a deluge of visits. I think Kaplan was on S-Fans stream or something for an hour and a half. This is a marketing plan. They planned out a week or two of press junkets, YouTube style basically, including their own videos. So that's not just some bullshit. Sometimes you get a response and you're like, come on guys, just give me some bullshit. But it actually seems pretty sensible. It grocks with what I've seen. So they're probably like, okay, we came up for air now, they're working on the game.
Speaker 1:
[109:39] Yeah. She claims they're going to get back to me before.
Speaker 3:
[109:41] I know, Super Lakefront would be done right now if I didn't have to do the show every week. Yep.
Speaker 1:
[109:47] People will be playing it on their Nintendo entertainment systems as we speak. Anyway.
Speaker 3:
[109:52] I did spend a bit of time with it. I've been not working on it, but I've been kind of...
Speaker 1:
[109:57] Oh, that's a good update. I like hearing that. Well, anyway, big thumbs up so far for Windrose.
Speaker 3:
[110:02] I've been crapping the project from the beginning and starting again.
Speaker 1:
[110:05] Oh, crapping the project.
Speaker 3:
[110:08] Crapping the project. Let's crap this piece of crap.
Speaker 1:
[110:10] Let's do this crap.
Speaker 3:
[110:11] But anyways, it sounds great. I look forward to trying it.
Speaker 1:
[110:14] Yeah. Big thumbs up for Windrose. It's cool. And I'm excited to keep moving through it. It seems like there's already a ton of new content or ton of content in there, even though they're in early access.
Speaker 3:
[110:24] We could do a Lakerun minigame in Windrose.
Speaker 1:
[110:26] Hell yeah, we could. I also played Blacksmith Master, and this was handed. This was given to me by Otakunnet21.
Speaker 3:
[110:37] Otakunnet21.
Speaker 2:
[110:38] Otakunnet21.
Speaker 3:
[110:38] There's been a list there forever.
Speaker 1:
[110:40] I've never said it right. Is it Otakunnet?
Speaker 2:
[110:43] Yes.
Speaker 3:
[110:43] I don't even know how you said it.
Speaker 1:
[110:48] Otakunnet.
Speaker 3:
[110:50] Otakunnet.
Speaker 1:
[110:51] Otakunnet. I mean, it's phonetic. It's fit, sort of, ish.
Speaker 3:
[110:56] Like, Otaku's been around for a long time.
Speaker 1:
[110:58] Yeah, he's been in...
Speaker 3:
[110:58] There's a lot of things you don't say. No, I just mean the word, but I guess you don't say the word that much.
Speaker 1:
[111:03] No. I mean, what is it usually used? What's the context?
Speaker 3:
[111:06] It's a Japanese word for like, I think you have a thing for a thing, like a...
Speaker 2:
[111:11] Like a fetish? Like a super fan.
Speaker 1:
[111:14] Oh, so Jon is an Otaku for Resident Evil.
Speaker 3:
[111:19] Yes, that's... Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1:
[111:21] Okay.
Speaker 3:
[111:22] Actually, no. If he was Otaku, he'd have like a Chris Redfield haircut and be wearing it.
Speaker 2:
[111:27] Isn't it like specifically for like anime and stuff, or is it something that can be labeled for anything? I've only ever heard it for...
Speaker 3:
[111:35] It's often connected with that kind of stuff, but it could be anything. Like it basically just means fan or a geek.
Speaker 2:
[111:40] Yeah, most commonly anime, anime, I almost said it the best way. Anime, manga and video games.
Speaker 1:
[111:48] Okay. Oh, video game. Well, then it works with Resident Evil. And Leon S. Kennedy in particular.
Speaker 2:
[111:53] Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[111:55] Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:
[111:56] I'm a Leon Otaku.
Speaker 3:
[111:57] And you're a World of Warcraft Otaku.
Speaker 1:
[112:00] I am. I like that. Well, I'm a ship breaker Otaku and I'm an Otaku for Shapes 2 with a Z out today, 1.0.
Speaker 3:
[112:11] Exactly.
Speaker 2:
[112:12] Oh, my gosh.
Speaker 1:
[112:13] I'm so excited.
Speaker 2:
[112:14] But how much money were you paid?
Speaker 1:
[112:17] I feel like I have been, but I'm telling you. Well, I mean, the dev did give me a key forever ago. And it was just because I said something nice at the time it was Twitter.
Speaker 3:
[112:25] It's all it takes to make you an Otaku.
Speaker 2:
[112:26] He's trying to get in with Shapes with a Z3 as soon as possible.
Speaker 1:
[112:31] Oh, man, that game. I'm so excited to dive in. I just didn't know it was today.
Speaker 3:
[112:36] What Shapes should do for future? Not that I'm telling them what to do, but they should blend it with the survival crafting game.
Speaker 1:
[112:42] All right.
Speaker 3:
[112:43] Like it's Shapes with a Z. Two Zs.
Speaker 1:
[112:50] Couple extra Zs.
Speaker 3:
[112:51] Anyways, whatever. But yeah, you're a otaku. That word's been around for a while.
Speaker 1:
[112:55] Well, thank you, Otaku Net, right? 21 for getting me this game. It seems very cool. I'm not very far. I barely started it. It was having a seven PC, gaming PC issues. Ended up playing it on my Mac and it runs great on there. But the game is Blacksmith Master. It's made by the same people that made a little game that I raved about when it came out called Tavern Master. Do you guys remember me talking about Tavern Master?
Speaker 2:
[113:19] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[113:20] Yeah. Lots of Tavern stuff. In fact, if you look at it, you go, oh, similar art style, low poly characters, and cool environments, and whatever.
Speaker 3:
[113:31] So this is like a follow up to that.
Speaker 1:
[113:34] Yeah. Very different game though, as it turns out. So far anyway that I've played, you're literally hiring a bunch of blacksmiths that do everything from what you'd think like forging swords, and hammers, and all that.
Speaker 2:
[113:46] Wait, so you're not the blacksmith, you're just hiring blacksmiths?
Speaker 1:
[113:50] I'm like the god mode of blacksmith games. Yeah, I manage them all.
Speaker 2:
[113:54] Oh my God, what are we doing?
Speaker 1:
[113:55] So we got people who are out digging, we got people making it. Think of it like, you know what it's like?
Speaker 3:
[114:01] It's like Walmart, but for blacksmiths.
Speaker 1:
[114:03] It's like Sims kind of, where everybody's got a job to do, and they're all just doing it. But it's not that different than Tavern Keeper, because it was the same thing with the servers in there, and the bartenders, they're all just autonomous dudes.
Speaker 2:
[114:17] I'm sure it's fine. This is not meant to be a condemnation of the game. And obviously, this is CORE Core, it's for you. But you said Blacksmith Master, and in my head, I'm thinking of good boy Henry, hammering away, making his first horseshoe, or whatever. And I'm like, picturing that, and then all of a sudden you're like, so you've got a fleet of blacksmiths, and I'm like, you took something that in my head was very like, yeah, yeah, get into it, and then made it the worst version of what I could possibly imagine. I'm just like, what is this? What have we done?
Speaker 1:
[114:52] Yeah, it's more of a, think of it as more of a tycoon game. And I'm paying these, these blacksmiths, they work for me. So do the people who go out and gather materials. Most of the god mode stuff is me placing items around, you know, decorating, creating a better place, you know, managing the money.
Speaker 2:
[115:12] A little shop.
Speaker 1:
[115:13] Yeah, having a little feudal shop. I get to name the shop. I think I called it Chode or something like that. It is very cool. And I like it so far, but it's super early. So I don't have a ton to add to that, except I'm grateful to Otaku. But also these kind of games are kind of my jam. I played that tavern game to death, just into the ground beat it.
Speaker 3:
[115:33] I haven't I haven't played it yet, but I did pick up recently along with the dealers of games, Tavern Keeper, the other one like that.
Speaker 1:
[115:39] Oh, yeah, that one's also very good. Similar deal where you're managing, you know, the tycoon game, really. It's that genre, but anyway.
Speaker 3:
[115:48] But the fantasy ones are fun, because they have fantasy stuff.
Speaker 2:
[115:51] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[115:52] At some point, you're probably going to make extra special blacksmith items.
Speaker 2:
[115:55] You do.
Speaker 1:
[115:55] Already I'm making horseshoes that are extra special for these knights that have to.
Speaker 3:
[115:58] The greenest arms.
Speaker 1:
[115:59] Yeah. And it's for all these, it's for these adventurers and stuff that you'll never see do their adventuring, but they're like, it's a lot of high talk about taking down dragons and.
Speaker 3:
[116:09] Oh, they could do like marketing stuff, like Geralt could come in and be like, could you craft something for me and play Gwent?
Speaker 1:
[116:17] I'll be over here taking a potion that'll probably kill me. I'll be back. Anyway.
Speaker 3:
[116:22] Different games, like it could be Cloud coming in, like it's ripe for some fun crossover, but I don't know if that will happen.
Speaker 1:
[116:28] It's cool. But I'm early, so we'll see. Next up, I played Mouse PI for Hire. Yeah, that's right. One of the bigger releases, indie releases of the last few days. And if you're wondering if this game was as cool as it looked, it is as cool as it looks and also kind of cooler in a way I didn't expect. So just a quick note for those not familiar with this, for those watching, you're seeing video of it. But basically, they took a 1930s era kind of rubber hose animation style, like Cuphead did, and in this case, put it in a black and white first-person shooter world. When I was first told about this game, I was like, well, it's probably just a boomer shooter. I moved through these environments and kill stuff. And yes, you do that. But there's a lot more going on here than they let on. It is still primarily that action game that I just described. But in addition to a ton of weapons, lots of different enemies, a very inventive key or a lock picking mini game. It might be my favorite actually. There's also a fully playable card game in this. There is a fully manageable, almost like a Phoenix Wright figure out who done it mode. They're not mode, but just built into the game. Part of this is finding clues and then sussing those clues out and then going and doing a mission that will finally solve the cases that you're given. Everything's voiced, all of the interactions. There's lots of characters and freaking dialogue trees in this thing. Not the most complex ones you've ever seen, but because they don't need to be. The boss fights are always cool as well, but there's just a ton going on here that isn't just run and gun. That's what I thought this was. I was like, well, I like a boomer shooter, I like a little doom, give me a key, open the door, go to the next place. That's way more than that. I think this game is rad and deserving of the overwhelmingly positive reviews it's getting on Steam. It's doing well on other platforms. The only place that didn't do well was IGN for some reason.
Speaker 2:
[118:33] I was going to say, okay, but now you have to do what everyone who has talked about this game does and comment on IGN's review of it.
Speaker 1:
[118:43] I don't know why we have to do that with them, but I guess I'll address it and just say, I wouldn't use any reviews from any sites to make any decisions in your life unless it's a voice you trust. I'm not saying that they're wrong. I'm saying it's the wrong guy probably reviewed it in the sense that, I feel like after reading that review and I did go read the whole thing, I feel like they gave this review to somebody who doesn't like this. It's kind of thing. I mean, shooting, first-person shooters. In fact, his complaint was, there's too much shooting in the shooter, the first-person shooter, and I would actually argue, there's more stuff besides the shooting than I expected, which is what's making it special, not just a shooter. So I don't know what they're doing over there, whatever. They're assigning people to the wrong projects, but this game is super cool. A big recommendation I played, streamed it for three hours or something the other day. Had a nice little group in there watching it. I don't have enough nice, I don't have any bad things to say about Mouse PI. I don't have enough nice things to say. It's polished. I mean, they've been working on it forever, right?
Speaker 2:
[119:50] Like when they first announced this, and I got you and I, and the three of us were watching it on one of these like E3 deals or something, and it feels like it's been forever, and it's just polished and well thought out and paced really well, and the levels are good, and there's skill involved, but not so much that you hate it or get mad at it or throw controllers. Like there's, it's just a cool game. So I say hats off to these guys for making something very unique. And very, very fun. There's even this top-down, there's an overworld, Jon, see this right here?
Speaker 1:
[120:24] Oh yeah, I saw that, I've seen, I'm anxiously getting to it. I had other things to play this past week, we'll get to that, and then right now I'm doing a Vampire Crawlers cleanse, sometimes you get into a big thing, and you gotta cleanse. I'm in the cleansing phase.
Speaker 2:
[120:45] Getting all the cliff out of your guts.
Speaker 1:
[120:47] Yeah, I think that's gonna be the next thing, is gonna be Cliff. Who's Cliff?
Speaker 2:
[120:53] Pretty crazy how between January and February, or excuse me, April, we're in, how heavy it's been with the releases. I'm not used to this much spring stuff. Maybe we said this every year, but I don't feel like spring is always this packed.
Speaker 1:
[121:08] I don't know, I thought this year was looking like it was gonna be pretty slim pickings, and we've had a good year. When we were doing the most anticipated for next year, I was like, is this it? Really? I guess I'm not looking forward to next year. I think we might have even said during our Game of the Year stuff, it's a year to catch up on the stuff you missed. But it hasn't felt that way at all.
Speaker 2:
[121:34] I also forgot, let's just glance to your notes. I'm glad you put this in there. I totally forgot to say, Vampire Crawlers came from Shatterproof. Mouse PI. This Mouse PI game came from Dr. Tolbert. Also, and I think it was, yeah, it was Andy, was it Andy?
Speaker 1:
[121:50] AndyW5x5?
Speaker 2:
[121:51] Well, I got two, again, I got two of those and he was one of them and I can't remember which one I had to turn down. I think it's the other guy. So yes, I think it was AndyW5x5. I got confused on that. Gave me Windrose. So there's a lot of generosity. But notice that almost every game we've listed here today, with the exception of the main thing you played this week, are all small indie games. And I think that's it. That's the difference. It's mostly like every year now you can count on these like magical game experiences that have broken into the mainstream and sell millions of copies that technically are just like two, three guys making them. And that's different than the usual AAA output. So anyway, there's all that. Now one other thing to mention, I barely cracked into it. This is the funniest game I've played this year so far. Maybe of the last couple of years. And I barely cracked it. That's how funny I think it is. I didn't expect to laugh. I played a game called Lucky Tower Ultimate. Now this is weird. The best way I can describe this is it's a rogue-like where you go into this tower. See this guy, it goes into this tower. The art style is already kind of funny, but your goal is to not die. As you can see, he's dying a lot. You die a lot because you don't know what shit is and every run is different. There's no sameness. It's very random and weird.
Speaker 3:
[123:16] What the hell?
Speaker 2:
[123:19] You get trapped by stuff you didn't see coming. Then the next time you may recognize it, but then it'll behave differently than what you expected. This game wants you to die, does not want you to make it. Puzzles, weird stuff to kill, strange weapons that you pick up throughout, an ever-changing thing. It's all different every time you go in here. Sometimes you kick ass and you're doing all right. Sometimes you just get wrecked the second you stepped in there. I don't know what to even compare this to. But something about the combination of the art and the dialogue, this guy's constantly going, or a skull, what does that do? Then it'll explode and murder you or whatever. Just lots of funny little dialogue.
Speaker 3:
[124:02] The game is unhinged, but like...
Speaker 2:
[124:04] It is super unhinged. It's awesome, you guys.
Speaker 1:
[124:07] So far... I kind of like the look of this. I would be curious for a follow up.
Speaker 2:
[124:13] I can get a little more time in it.
Speaker 1:
[124:14] I can tell you. Yeah, if you get a little more time. One of these screenshots looks directly out of King's Quest V.
Speaker 2:
[124:19] There may be some references.
Speaker 1:
[124:24] I looked at it and I'm like, I have a nostalgic memory for this place. Am I just imagining this or is this true?
Speaker 2:
[124:29] I only had about 45 minutes in it so far, but it's pretty cool. It's in the 90s for reviews. It's not just me, people like it, but it's just a weird ass game that is actually funny. I'm not used to funny games. That's a rare thing when a game makes you laugh.
Speaker 1:
[124:52] Hard to do, very few succeed, but some pull it off.
Speaker 2:
[124:58] Sometimes...
Speaker 3:
[125:00] Is this procedural or is it always the same?
Speaker 2:
[125:02] It's never the same. It's procedural every time. That's part of what makes it crazy. Cause there are times I've been in here where it's just the stupidest, wildest thing happened. And then I don't see that again for like a long time. And then it will surprise me again because it had been so long. A lot of variety. I've not had... I mean, in the 45 minutes I played, that's probably 10 runs. Like, it's a lot of runs. And I never saw anything the same twice. Like, it's all very different. Couple of lines he says.
Speaker 3:
[125:28] You gotta escape, like you're in boxers and you gotta just get out.
Speaker 2:
[125:31] You're trying to get lower and lower. You're trying to get to the bottom of this tower so you can get out because that's the exit. The guy taking a shit in there. Oh my gosh. I don't know why I found it so funny. This just grabbed me by the like mad magazine nerve and wouldn't let go. So. Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[125:46] I mean, it's got a very distinctive art style. Like this seems like the work of one artist.
Speaker 2:
[125:52] I don't know. I don't know what to compare this to, like old cartoons or something like early Ren and Stimpy, maybe. I don't know what to compare it to. But anyway, more on that later. Lucky Tower Ultimate. We'll see how it holds up over time. I really like it. I also got one other thing from Shadow Proof. I haven't checked out yet called Sayonara Wild Hearts. And it's some kind of like, you know what that is?
Speaker 1:
[126:16] I also was gifted that.
Speaker 2:
[126:18] What is that? It's like a rhythm game or something.
Speaker 3:
[126:20] I haven't played it yet.
Speaker 1:
[126:21] All right.
Speaker 2:
[126:22] I'm excited to check it out.
Speaker 3:
[126:23] It looks like a music game for sure.
Speaker 2:
[126:25] No idea what's going on there, but I will check that out soon.
Speaker 3:
[126:28] That's a 2019 joint.
Speaker 2:
[126:30] Oh, it's older. It went on sale or something.
Speaker 3:
[126:32] Yeah, it must have gone on sale. I don't know. Maybe it's good.
Speaker 1:
[126:34] I don't know.
Speaker 3:
[126:35] I've never heard of it.
Speaker 2:
[126:36] I'll try anything. That's how I roll. Jon, what did you get up to this week?
Speaker 1:
[126:41] Yeah. So first of all, seems we're doing thank yous. I just want to do some quick because some of them we've already talked about, and it just doesn't make sense to do it any other way than to just thank a bunch of people real quick. So for Vampire Crawlers, a thank you to Shatterproof who provided that. A big thank you to Viator003 for Celasta, the complete collection of Celasta 1 and 2, Dr. Tolbert for Mouse PI for Hire, and AndyW5x5 for Windrose. If I didn't already say Poppin Fresh for Pragmata, but we're going to actually talk about that one. So, just thank you. All of a sudden, a bunch of games just came in.
Speaker 2:
[127:20] Yeah, out of nowhere.
Speaker 1:
[127:22] Out of nowhere, and I'm looking forward to getting to them when I can.
Speaker 3:
[127:27] Sam, the list is way too long. You all have been very generous this past week.
Speaker 2:
[127:30] Yeah, I've been really nice, and they've all been bangers, what I've played so far, so I'm excited about this. Anyway, so you're the one that played the big AAA though, the big one that came out this week.
Speaker 1:
[127:41] Yeah, the big one, defying all the odds. Capcom, maybe you've heard of them. Maybe the best video game company in the business right now, I think. They're having a good year.
Speaker 2:
[127:55] Kicking ass.
Speaker 1:
[127:57] Capcom.
Speaker 2:
[127:58] Capcom.
Speaker 3:
[127:58] Oh, Capcom.
Speaker 1:
[127:59] They put out three games this year. Oh, right, right, right. They've all done well, so.
Speaker 2:
[128:05] Wait, what's the, oh, Street Fighter 6?
Speaker 1:
[128:08] No, they did Resident Evil 9.
Speaker 2:
[128:11] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[128:11] They did Monster Hunter Stories 3.
Speaker 2:
[128:15] Monster Hunter stuff. All right.
Speaker 1:
[128:16] They did the, actually, they did four, because they also did the Mega Man Star Force collection.
Speaker 2:
[128:22] Oh, right.
Speaker 1:
[128:23] And they did Pragmata. Now, Pragmata, we kind of have talked about, I played the demo for it, kind of raved about it. I said, I think this is going to be kind of a dark horse for the year, because it felt like when the demo came out, not a lot of people were talking about it, and I was like, I think this game is going to be good. Beau played it and he liked it. So it's out and I have beaten this game. I basically sat down and couldn't put it down. This game is really, really good. It is, it's very much of what you see is what you get, and I would recommend anybody go out and play the demo and see if it's something that you dig, because if you like the demo, I think you'll like the game. The game is pretty much an extended version. Obviously, systems evolve, items evolve, enemies evolve, places you go evolve, but it is all built on that framework. So if you liked the demo, odds are pretty good, you're gonna like the main game. And it is the story of a astronaut. He's not really an astronaut. He's like a maintenance worker. His future going to space isn't a big deal, so it's not really like his career as an astronaut, but he's a spaceman, goes to the moon to help with some needed repairs on the moon with a team, and through circumstances beyond his control, finds himself the sole survivor of his expedition, and he befriends a young Android girl who is able to help him try and survive to try and get back home. That's sort of the premise of it. We saw the trailers and stuff for this a couple times before it came out, and I will tell you, it was a game where there was a lot of like, huh, that's interesting, why is there a robot kid? If you can make robots, because you're fighting robots, why did you make a robot kid? You know, like, there's a bunch of these regular robot looking robots walking around with Protoss arms. Why we got a robot kid? Why is she wearing a big poofy jacket? What's going on?
Speaker 2:
[130:42] I'm sorry, Protoss arms. Now, I'm excited.
Speaker 1:
[130:46] The robot enemies, when they attack you, their little arm comes down and a giant torch laser thing comes out of the top, like a Protoss.
Speaker 2:
[130:53] Badass.
Speaker 1:
[130:53] That's great. That's how they attack? Yeah. All right. It's really good. And because the idea is they have, they've gone to the moon, the moon uses a thing called lunar filament to basically 3D print just about anything, which is a nice, it's just a nice excuse to change it up. So if you think it's all gonna be like sterile halls and moon business, nope, they have areas that look like you're in a bizarre, you know, inception style New York City to forests, to all sorts of different stuff as you kind of go through the various biomes of the game. And it's really, really solid. I fell in love with the story. Now what's interesting is for good and for bad, the reason I was able to play through this entire game is my wife took the kids down to see her parents for the weekend and left me to my own devices, which meant I was free to play as much of the game as I wanted, which was a good thing. But also this is very much, you know, people have referred to this game. I've seen the joke. I don't know who came up with it first, but I see it almost every time the game gets talked about. They call it dad space, which is a very funny joke.
Speaker 2:
[132:17] Or the dad, the dad core genre or something like that. I hear that a lot.
Speaker 1:
[132:21] Well, I mean, dad space, it does look like dead space. And there's a lot of similarities to dead space. In fact, there's even like an item that's like repairs your suit that literally looks exactly like the gun from dead space.
Speaker 2:
[132:34] Oh, wow.
Speaker 1:
[132:36] So dad space is pretty funny, but this is definitely the story about a parental relationship. Like you can tell whoever wrote this story is either a new father or is reflecting on being a father or a parent. And that is the narrative that they're telling here. And not having my kids around when I played it definitely made me connect with the material in a way that was like, oh, I'm getting through this. No problem. Also, it's hit and super hard for me. So the story really, really worked for me. I absolutely fell in love with it. It's the topics that it hits on are all things that I think about pretty regularly. And so this game, this game clicked for me in a way that I don't think it's gonna click for everybody. I think that in general, if that sort of story is compelling to you, to me, the easy five out of five game, right? If that sort of thing isn't your vibe, I still think the core game play and loop behind it is solid. And I still think you'll probably have between a four to five out of five experience with it, because it is just a fun third person shooter. It plays very much just like, it almost feels a bit retro in its design.
Speaker 2:
[134:01] I've heard some say there's like a 360 era shooter with really nice graphics, and they don't mean that negatively. Like it's a throwback to a kind of linear progression shooter that we don't make anymore, or as much of?
Speaker 1:
[134:14] Yeah, yeah, because it very much is like you pick the area from a list, and it gives you a percentage of how complete it is in terms of finding items. Items are frequently big, floating things that you walk over and pick up, you know, like there are elements that feel very retro. It's not over complicated with systems, which is good because the conceit is the hacking. And even that, if you don't like the hacking, there are things that somewhat trivialize the hacking going forward. There is like an auto hack upgrade where the game will run it for you. But they put the resource cost really high. So it's like you can do it, but you're going to pay for it with basically what is your super meter. So you can you can minimize your need to hack, but you're not going to get to do your super or anything like that if you're doing that. So they do a good job of balancing the effectiveness of it. Once I beat the game, it does unlock a new game plus mode, a higher difficulty, and there's even what feels like DLC, but it's obviously not DLC because it's included in the base game. But it's very much that thing of like, hey, we found a new section for you to go to, and there's a bunch of challenges and new bosses for you to do in this section. Which, if you can complete all of those, does unlock a different ending to the game. Very minorly different ending to the game. And so that stuff is really interesting to do too. Lots of crazy costume unlocks and new items, even post game that you can play with. So far, it hasn't let me break the game as significantly as something like Resident Evil 9, where it's like, right now if I play Resident Evil 9, I can pull out a rocket launcher and shoot as many rockets as I want.
Speaker 2:
[136:06] You've trivialized that game at this point.
Speaker 1:
[136:08] It's very broken. It's not quite to that level with this. You still are. This game actually has a very interesting difficulty curve. I feel like it never got too hard for me, but it never got trivially easy either. It felt like it held the line really solid through most of the experience.
Speaker 2:
[136:30] That sounds awesome. It's got damage numbers too. Beau, you like damage numbers.
Speaker 1:
[136:35] It does have damage numbers. You can use those damage numbers. There's a lot of interesting ways you can play it too. I played probably the most boring way you can, which is I liked my gun doing a bunch of damage, so I stuck with the pistol through the whole thing. Even after I unlocked other guns, I was still mostly just pistol and the other weapons that you pick up along the way. But there are builds where you can work more on building up heat, because there's a heat meter that lets you do a stagger and do big bursts of damage. And so that play style is built more around doing lots of little damage consistently to build up a heat gauge. And then there's also builds that are focused mostly on hacking, to where it's like, okay, well, I'm not going to worry so much about shooting. I'm going to just hack and dodge. That seems crazy to me, but I'm sure builds exist that allow for it. But that's like the antithesis of how I played the game. So to me, if somebody was like, yeah, I played through, just hacked, I'd be like, you're wild.
Speaker 2:
[137:39] You're a crazy person.
Speaker 1:
[137:41] What are you doing? But it's cool that it gives you those options. And yeah, I really liked it. I'm hard-pressed to choose what I liked better between this and Resident Evil 9. They hit in very different ways. I think probably the nod would go to Resident Evil 9, but the fact that I'm even debating it is... Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[138:04] I think you're gonna have to put a pin in that because Capcom also is releasing Onimusha this year, so.
Speaker 2:
[138:09] Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[138:10] Oh, geez, that's right.
Speaker 2:
[138:11] That's right. That's a total new take on that series, right?
Speaker 3:
[138:14] Yeah, it seems like a refresh and it looks like pretty high fidelity.
Speaker 2:
[138:17] Man, they're having a year, dude, geez.
Speaker 3:
[138:19] Yeah, it's a big Capcom year. Like so far, there are two or three, maybe even three or three. I just don't know about Monster Hunter. I don't know if that.
Speaker 1:
[138:27] It was well reviewed. And I guess speculation is that it sold over a million probably.
Speaker 3:
[138:32] But it's the Wilds one, OK?
Speaker 1:
[138:35] No, this is the they have some I didn't even know this. I don't know how I didn't know this because it feels like this is the Monster Hunter that I should be into.
Speaker 3:
[138:44] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[138:45] But apparently they have an RPG series set in the Monster Hunter universe called Monster Hunter Stories.
Speaker 3:
[138:52] All right.
Speaker 1:
[138:53] And this is the third chapter of it. I actually thought about getting this game, but I was like, well, I should play one and two first. And I had that sitting in my cart for a while. And then the sale went away and I went back to expensive again. But I'm intrigued to try it. But apparently it's it's doing quite well. And yeah, Capcom freaking doing it.
Speaker 2:
[139:16] Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 1:
[139:17] Love to hear their games aren't going to be for everyone. Obviously, you know, Beau doesn't care about Resident Evil. If you don't care about Resident Evil, you're not going to you're not going to feel that way. But to the audience that likes them and likes the stuff they make, they're having a crazy good year.
Speaker 3:
[139:32] Look at these reviews, man.
Speaker 2:
[139:33] Overwhelmingly positive for a brand new title from a major publisher. Triple A level stuff. That's a rarity these days.
Speaker 3:
[139:40] I heard an unhinged take about Pragmata, though. That it's a Psyop by the Japanese government to get Japanese men more interested in raising children because they're having a birthright.
Speaker 2:
[139:52] I love it.
Speaker 3:
[139:53] These are the scripts.
Speaker 1:
[139:53] The internet is a place where people can say a whole lot of bullshit.
Speaker 3:
[139:57] This isn't me saying it. I just read that.
Speaker 1:
[139:59] No, I know.
Speaker 3:
[140:00] But I mean, look, the thing is, I think from the early marketing, Diane looked a little iffy, just in terms of Uncanny Valley, like at first, I was like, oh, this looks like it might be crappy. If it was a poorly written game or character story, you'd look at that and probably go like, this is just junky stuff, but people are liking it.
Speaker 2:
[140:26] Yeah, I keep hearing there's just a real wholesome thing going on, and it's this real dad energy that feels legit and earned, and I think that's freaking great. That you can release that in the same year that you made Resident Evil 4, sorry, not 4, 9, and keep me up at night with the weird shit you're pulling in there, and then do this. I think that's a crazy company, and I think it's awesome.
Speaker 3:
[140:51] There are companies that have released more than one game a year. You're mad, and Capcom's like, all right, we're doing four this year.
Speaker 2:
[140:57] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[140:58] You know, and it's like, okay.
Speaker 2:
[140:59] They all have the massive potential to be game of the year.
Speaker 3:
[141:02] And they're still supporting Street Fighter, which looks like it's, you know, it's doing good.
Speaker 1:
[141:07] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[141:09] I really do want to play this. I came this close to buying it, and I was like, well, I got to play Windrose. So this is a...
Speaker 1:
[141:14] I think you'll like it. It's not that long. It plays really well.
Speaker 2:
[141:19] Kind of respects your wallet too.
Speaker 1:
[141:20] That's the other thing.
Speaker 2:
[141:21] It's only 60 bucks. It's not bad.
Speaker 1:
[141:24] It's kind of crazy. I will say one big difference from the demo. So if you do take my advice and you're curious about it, and you play the demo, one thing I will say, I feel like it plays better, and maybe it's a false memory, but I started playing the actual game, and I thought this plays a lot better than what I played in the demo. I mean, they tightened it up or something? Yeah, it feels like they tightened up the graphics on level three, for sure. Something's hitting a little better with how it feels. Like it felt a lot better to play than in the demo.
Speaker 2:
[141:58] Well, that's good, because they need to, she was glad to hear that, because they need to get another one designed.
Speaker 1:
[142:03] Yeah, another another video game design. We can't leave that old commercial unquoted. The best. Yeah, the bosses are really big and bombastic. You're showing that right now on the screen. Like this is the kind of stuff you're dealing with. And, you know, I think the only thing that from the demo I was a little unsure about is I was like, you know, Hugh comes across a little cheesy. And as I played it, first of all, I didn't get that feeling. It felt appropriate to him. And I think that the character is actually really good. I think all the characterization in the game is actually spot on for what it needs to be. And so I really, really liked it. It, again, it just tells a neat story. Maybe it's the fact that, you know, we're telling a story about an Android that's six years old or so and I have a five year old. So I'm I'm basically the target audience for this right now. I'm willing to admit that.
Speaker 3:
[143:06] I guess we can't do spoilers of it, but she doesn't, you know, she's an Android. There's a whole like, yeah, she's a robot. It's always like she's a six year old Android. I'm like, is she a two week old Android that just looks like a six year old Android?
Speaker 1:
[143:17] So this is a good question, Beau. And here's what I'm going to say without a need for a spoiler baron. When you look at this, there's a lot of questions that immediately come to mind. Why would you make a robot kid? Why does the robot kid act like a robot kid? Because theoretically, a robot kid should be able to act like an adult. Why isn't there a robot kid when there are other robots that look completely different running around? Why does any of this look like any of this? Why is anything? I'm not going to give spoilers because it is tied into the story, but I will say that everything that I thought was weird or had questions about is explained in the story.
Speaker 2:
[143:52] Oh, really?
Speaker 1:
[143:53] Yes.
Speaker 2:
[143:53] That's good. I'm glad to hear that because I don't want. What I was worried about here is I'd get some weird anime stuff.
Speaker 1:
[144:01] Yes, it's not weird anime like haha, wouldn't it be funny if robot kid like it's not that there is a reason for it. There is a purpose for it. Whether you're happy with that reason, I don't know. I'm not going to tell you how to feel, but it is all of it is explained and it is part of what the narrative is, which is why I'm not going to say what it is because it's tied to it.
Speaker 2:
[144:22] All right. I'm excited about this game. It's very cool. The RE engine too, dude. Cheese. Cheese Louise. As far as I'm concerned, just make video games in this for the rest of time. It's beautiful.
Speaker 1:
[144:33] They're making magic over there and they're not afraid to do new IPs. This isn't Mega Man Pragmata or some other thing. It is just although there is a fun Mega Man reference hidden in this game.
Speaker 2:
[144:49] There's some Resident Evil stuff too. It's like a Leon.
Speaker 1:
[144:51] Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's definitely references to other Capcom things. The Mega Man one is really on the nose. Really? Yeah. There's a little robot in your because there's a safe zone where you go, which kind of ends up becoming like a little hangout where you put a bunch of stuff. And if you idle long enough, sometimes the robot screen will go vertical and a little sprite of what is clearly Mega Man slightly modified to look like an astronaut. Will make the full Mega Man like blooping in sound and appear on the screen. That's pretty good.
Speaker 2:
[145:28] That's pretty good. I like that.
Speaker 1:
[145:31] They lean into it.
Speaker 3:
[145:32] Lots of reserved energies. I remember.
Speaker 2:
[145:37] Are they?
Speaker 1:
[145:38] I give them credit for doing something new. Not a lot of people are right now.
Speaker 2:
[145:42] Yeah, we shouldn't let that go unsaid because we're always whining for that. Gamers, the royal we of gamers are always going, do something new, I get regurgitate the same shit. They did.
Speaker 1:
[145:55] Here it is.
Speaker 2:
[145:56] This is very new and different. This is conceptually weird, maybe structurally or we know how to over the shoulder third-person shoot. We're used to some of these genre things, but they're packaging it in a very unique new way with a new IP, new characters that are resonating with people. They're literally doing what you're asked. So if you're out there complaining at all, I shouldn't assume people are, maybe they aren't.
Speaker 1:
[146:20] Let me build the straw man.
Speaker 3:
[146:21] I don't think anyone's complaining about the game.
Speaker 2:
[146:24] The next Resident Evil game should be called Straw Man.
Speaker 1:
[146:27] Resident Evil Straw Man.
Speaker 3:
[146:30] I'm going to put it on 97% on Steam. I don't think anyone's complaining about it.
Speaker 2:
[146:34] No, it seems to be doing great. The PS5 Pro version apparently is a beautiful showcase of it. It's certainly the best running console version, but it rivals a maxed out PC in terms of fidelity.
Speaker 1:
[146:47] That's what they said about Resident Evil 9 as well. I think Capcom's figured out the PS5 in a magic way, it sounds.
Speaker 2:
[146:54] Yeah, this engine is super efficient or something. But I saw a clip where she goes one, one, one, zero, one, one, one, one, zero, zero, one, one, one. She does binary, like Bender. It's just like Bender.
Speaker 1:
[147:05] She does that. And I think my favorite thing is there's these little data stick things. And she gets one. And the first time she gets one, she just goes, and bites down on it. And then like her eyes turn blue and she starts processing it. And I guess that's how she inputs the data.
Speaker 3:
[147:24] It's like trying to slow her as an energon. Is that what they do?
Speaker 1:
[147:27] Yeah, she just bites down on it.
Speaker 3:
[147:30] It's a weird abstraction that shouldn't technically work as a form of energy resource, but sci-fi cartoon reasons.
Speaker 2:
[147:36] Yeah, but is it like if Optimus Prime needs to load up on energon, he just takes a big old bite of it?
Speaker 3:
[147:42] Yeah. Well, they put it in their chest. They take fuel and they turn it into energon, which looks like psychedelic LSD liquid.
Speaker 1:
[147:54] Yeah. But I love that anything can turn into it. Yeah. You can fill it with gasoline and it fills like a liquid and turns into that. You can fill it with lightning. Whoa. Shoot lightning in there and turns into a liquid.
Speaker 3:
[148:07] It's just a laser cube. What's the science fiction? It's just like it's burying the lead. What is this fantastical container?
Speaker 2:
[148:15] Here's what needs to happen. Capcom needs the license to Transformers and use this engine to make us a Transformers game. That's what needs to happen.
Speaker 1:
[148:23] Man, that'd be so good.
Speaker 2:
[148:24] And give it a Japanese like art spin a little bit, like a little more edgy, a little more edgy. I literally mean the edges of the robots, like make them, like that Marvel thing they're working on, the fighting game.
Speaker 1:
[148:37] Yeah, like that.
Speaker 2:
[148:41] Oh, all right. Well, Jon, I'm glad. Seems like a lot of points on this one. Very excited.
Speaker 1:
[148:47] Yeah, I really liked it. Highly recommended. I don't know if I'm going to 100 percent it, but it's still installed. I'm still looking at it going. I did go online and watch the hidden ending because I was like, I don't know if I'm going to go through and get the hidden ending. I was left a little, a little emotionally drained at the end of the game. And I was like, I don't know if I'm going to go through and do it and I was like, I'll just look up and see what the ending is, the secret ending. So I did. And then I started playing it and I was reminded of the other part of it which is the game is super fun. And I was like, maybe I'll do it for myself.
Speaker 2:
[149:24] Did you, what was I going to say? The emotional, I mean, you saying that is points to the game. It sounds like the game actually resonates and is not just a, you know, a kick in the butt.
Speaker 1:
[149:37] It did. And, but part of that is, I'm not going to say that that's a promise for everybody. There's probably some people that it's not going to emotionally land for and stuff like that. But I do think a lot about, you know, I am a dad, but I also think about being a dad a lot.
Speaker 2:
[149:53] Yeah, what it means.
Speaker 1:
[149:54] I supposed to be like last night, not to get too sob story or anything like that. But my son ran into the room and he said, Dad, there's a problem. And I said, what is it? And he says, the strawberry light on my wall isn't on. And I said, that is a problem. We got to go solve that. And he said, come on. And he started to run away at the same time I started to pick him up. And I went, oh, do you want to walk by yourself or do you want me to carry you? And he goes, I want you to carry me. I said, all right, good. So I picked him up, so I'm carrying him. And he's laying his head against my head as I'm carrying him to his bedroom. And I said, man, you're getting so big, buddy. One day, I'm not gonna be able to do this anymore. And he goes, that's gonna make me really sad. And I said, yeah, me too, buddy. And he looked at me and he just gave me the biggest hug in the whole world. And it was so sweet. I was like, I'm not gonna cry. I'm not gonna cry about this. Especially because in my head, while all that's going on, is one of these days when I pick him up and carry him somewhere will be the last time we ever do that.
Speaker 2:
[150:59] There will be a last day.
Speaker 1:
[151:00] It's not gonna be announced. It's not gonna be, this is it. This is the last one. It's just gonna happen. And all of a sudden I'm gonna look back and go, I don't get to do that anymore.
Speaker 2:
[151:10] Yeah, no, trust me, someone who did this with three kids, you don't see it coming. You don't even know that day was gonna be the last one. And then you forget that when that was.
Speaker 1:
[151:20] And so I live in my head about these things a lot.
Speaker 2:
[151:24] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[151:24] And so this game dealing with stuff like that, because Hugh isn't a protagonist that's like, I hate children and I'm never gonna be around one. Oh no, a robot kid. Like, Hugh's just a guy. He doesn't have kids. Like the closest you get to getting his feeling about kids is one of his co-workers is like, I can't wait to get back to my kids on Earth. He's like, oh, you got kids? Good luck. Yeah, like that's about all you get from his point of view.
Speaker 2:
[151:50] This isn't like Joel and Ellie where Joel is annoyed for a lot of time about having to drag this kid around. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[151:56] Yeah. So it's just one of those things where it's like, I think about it, it talks about it. This is the kind of game I would make probably if someone was like, write what you think about. Like, I would write something like this, so it just landed with me.
Speaker 2:
[152:14] Love it. Well, there you go. Get it. Pragmata. Contender for Game of the Year.
Speaker 3:
[152:20] Pragmata.
Speaker 2:
[152:21] Up against other Capcom properties. Crazier for them. All right. Beau, let's talk about years ago, I drew this picture of Geralt over there here. Say this image. Just his back. I drew this after I thought I was done playing the game and was never going to go, so it was this little sad melancholy thing. But Beau has turned him around to look directly into your eyes and say, let's go, it's only been 11 years.
Speaker 3:
[152:46] So I've been playing this a little while ago, I was mentioning I was playing this. Like how far, have you guys finished Witcher 3?
Speaker 2:
[152:53] I finished everything except for the blood and wine business.
Speaker 3:
[152:56] You did all of Heart of Stone?
Speaker 2:
[152:57] Yes, the one before that.
Speaker 3:
[152:59] You've done Heart of Stone as well?
Speaker 1:
[153:00] I've completed all of The Witcher 3.
Speaker 3:
[153:03] So including blood and wine?
Speaker 1:
[153:05] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[153:06] So you haven't done that yet. I hear that's the best thing on the planet, blood and wine.
Speaker 3:
[153:10] Yeah. So I played a while ago, years ago, up to near the end of the main campaign and didn't do any expansion content and dropped off. And then recently, I'm like, I need to start from the beginning so I forget what it was and did that and then dropped off again. So this week, my to-do list, no joke, right now it stands at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 games that come out in the last two weeks that have been gifted or I bought for myself.
Speaker 2:
[153:40] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[153:41] That is on my to-do list. Oh, that's not including Vampire Crawlers. So 13. Plus Crimson Desert, 14.
Speaker 2:
[153:47] All right.
Speaker 3:
[153:48] So I've got 14 games that, you know, like it would be useful to play for the show because it's new games. But I sat down with my son and I said, listen, this is the second time you like 80 percented Witcher 3. It's going to happen again and you're going to have to do it again. And frankly, Witcher 4 is coming. And Witcher 1 remake, I think, is like also being worked on. I got to play it. Also, Crofton told me there's a rumor there might be a new DLC for Witcher 3 coming out in May.
Speaker 2:
[154:17] Oh, what? Really? Oh, right. No, he's right. There was talk because they want to bridge the stories between it and 4. I think that's that's happening.
Speaker 3:
[154:26] So he's like, you're welcome.
Speaker 1:
[154:27] I have to play all of Witcher 3 again. The whole thing.
Speaker 3:
[154:30] Yeah. Well, let me tell you, it's long.
Speaker 2:
[154:32] Get out of Skeleton.
Speaker 3:
[154:34] But it is long. And so I got to a point where I've played like 80 percent again. I'm like, Beau, you're climbing Mount Everest. You can't just stop climbing Mount Everest. You stop to play some Diablo bullshit, gave yourself an eye twitch from playing that game too much. Did you really? Yeah, I've been having dry eye in one of my eyes.
Speaker 2:
[154:52] I get that too. And it's usually, it's like usually game like.
Speaker 3:
[154:55] I've done a lot of like this stuff, like you blink less when you look at screens and you get older and the shit just bugs you more. At work too, I look at screen. So I'm just like, I've like, I got to give myself a good clean down. It's getting better. But like, anyways, Witcher is easier to look at screen wise because I can look away and take breaks. And you know, when I'm playing Diablo, I'm like, another, another. So I think part of it was just Diablo's fault.
Speaker 2:
[155:22] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[155:24] So yeah, so I'm just like, oh, you got to finish this. And so like I did all the points of interest. I'm up to before the Battle of Kaer Morhen. And last night, the night before, like, I was like, oh, you can do Heart of Stone before finishing the game. I did Heart of Stone and finished it. Oh, and wait, does that scale or something?
Speaker 2:
[155:44] I must.
Speaker 3:
[155:45] Well, I'm up to level, I'm in my level 30, so I can do Heart of Stone. And narratively, it doesn't, I looked it up. It doesn't disrupt the main campaign. So you don't have to do it after the main campaign. Although it is a little weird. I don't know if Yennefer lives or not at the end of the story, but like the whole Shawnee thing was pure torture because they give you this lovely lady to woo. And I'm like, I already avoided Tris and Kira and now like Shawnee. I'm like, you know, it's like, you know, so I had to also be like, no, thank you, because Yennefer is going to read my mind.
Speaker 2:
[156:15] No, thank you.
Speaker 3:
[156:17] I can say whatever.
Speaker 1:
[156:18] Thank you.
Speaker 3:
[156:19] And Yennefer is going to be like, you know, even though I know it doesn't disrupt it, I looked it up, you know, romance and shine. It's still like not consistent with my playthrough. Like I'm going to remember. And Yennefer is just one quick mind read away. Like, why would I? Why would I do that? You know, even though they do, they do so much to make it like very romantic and you kind of want to get into the moment. It's very, very cruel of CD Project Red, really. But man, that DLC, I haven't I did the wedding. I haven't laughed at a video game. It made me realize it quite some time because it is so cheesy and it shouldn't be funny. But it's really funny seeing Geralt act that way. I'm trying not to spoil things for people because I think there's a lot of people who've missed content in Witcher 3, who should go back and play. I almost feel stupid for not having played it sooner.
Speaker 2:
[157:18] It's an all-timer for a reason.
Speaker 3:
[157:20] Gontor O'Dimm is amazing. That whole thing.
Speaker 2:
[157:23] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[157:23] The whole thing because then I went into a rabbit hole after playing it and I'm like, usually Geralt, those are what he's up against. A poor guy will be like, there's a demon with horns and you're like, you mean a succubus? He's like, no, it was a fucking demon. You're like, it's a succubus. Like everything told me it's a succubus. He's like, no, no, no, it was terrible. He's like, yeah, I'm only a Witcher and do this all the time, but sure, we'll go with your explanation. That's like every Witcher 3 mission. Yeah. He always knows what he's up against even before he's up against it. What was really fun and kept me hooked was that he is Geralt stumped about what he's dealing with, and consequently as a result as a player, you're stumped. Even after finishing it, I was like, I think I'm still stumped. That was very refreshing considering all the hours you put into before where you just pretty much know what everything's about, even if you don't fully know. You're always in the process of triaging what exactly it is you're dealing with and they fit familiar signs.
Speaker 2:
[158:26] Sure.
Speaker 3:
[158:28] What an all-timer, though, dude, like that was, I don't even think what an interesting character is good as this story. I think this was phenomenal. The story in this was phenomenal.
Speaker 2:
[158:38] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[158:39] It was a crazy interesting character to build up because he's just a dude you meet in the tavern early in the game in tutorial land in the game. It was funny because before I played the DLC, I was just thinking back to it and I was like, what's the deal with the guy that was like, I'm Gontor O'Dimm, the master of mirrors. Who the fuck talks like that?
Speaker 2:
[158:59] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[159:00] And like, he's just a guy at the freaking table. I was like, yeah, that's weird. And then I played the DLC. I was like, they finally made good on it. Cause that's a weird thing to say. And I never really thought about it at the time.
Speaker 3:
[159:13] It's foreshadowing, but like the best in the best way. It wasn't ham handed like, oh, here's an NPC you're going to see later.
Speaker 1:
[159:20] No, I just thought he sold mirrors or something.
Speaker 3:
[159:23] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[159:24] And then he was weird.
Speaker 3:
[159:26] He's there for an implicit purpose and he's in the world. I mean, it had me thinking about stuff like Half Life and even Cyberpunk where Mr. Blue Eyes is everywhere and G-Man is everywhere and it almost got me thinking, oh, G-Man, we always think it means government man.
Speaker 2:
[159:43] Yeah, usually.
Speaker 3:
[159:44] But it actually can mean something else. We're getting into spoilers. I don't know if we've all played it, but for viewers, we might want to put the spoiler baron up a little bit.
Speaker 2:
[159:51] All right, we can do that. I think this is... Well, and it's appropriate because the spoiler baron is literally the baron.
Speaker 3:
[159:58] Yeah, yeah, that's why we have the spoiler baron. I was talking about The Witcher, but just playing shit. I've played 30 times. Yeah. So finally, it's some new stuff, but...
Speaker 2:
[160:06] All right, what did you see?
Speaker 3:
[160:07] Let's skip ahead five minutes, but just that like, he's like his initials, Gontor O'Dimm is G-O-D, like he's God. And like at first, I just still couldn't shake the feeling, like even though he was like not a djinn or a demon, he was still some kind of, they call him evil incarnate, but like because of the whole mirrors thing, he's a reflection. So if you see him as evil, you're probably evil, but if you're not that evil, he's not that bad. And so he's the monotheist god. And I was really fucking awesome. Like it was so good.
Speaker 2:
[160:43] Yeah. I'm glad.
Speaker 3:
[160:45] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[160:46] Are you, so are you Dun Dun?
Speaker 3:
[160:48] Dunzo? No, well, I still got to finish the main story, which I've never finished before. So I'm going to, I probably knock it out tonight.
Speaker 2:
[160:54] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[160:55] Cause it's not, I'm not that far. I do the battle of Karamorin and then do whatever bullshit with Ciri and whatever the ending is. I have no idea after 10 years. I still don't know.
Speaker 2:
[161:04] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[161:05] And then I'm going to do Blood and Wine right after. So probably another week of this and hopefully I'll be mostly right.
Speaker 1:
[161:10] I mean, you might not like Blood and Wine as much. I think most people, a big part of why Blood and Wine hits is because it is so different from everything else Witcher that it feels like a good breath of fresh air in a way, because it's like you go to a place that is literally the opposite of Witcherland, where everyone's like, oh, Griffin sat on my house, it's gone. To where now someone's like, a Griffin and 80 people are like, let's get it, go! And they think it's the best thing ever. It's colorful, it's over the top, it's very fantastical.
Speaker 3:
[161:44] I'm sure it'll be good, but yeah. But to me, Heart of Stone, the story, it's just good. It's always good when a story actually grabs you. When you're like, I genuinely want to know what happens next, and I genuinely can't predict what I'm actually dealing with. I didn't figure it out. I needed a bit of help after, and I was like, man, that's an impressive piece of content.
Speaker 2:
[162:07] Well, I'll be curious what you think of Blood and Wine then, because everybody always tells me that it's the greatest thing ever made. Like it's better than the whole game.
Speaker 3:
[162:14] There are different reasons. I just think narratively, it was well-written. The Heart of Stone expansion was just well-written. I was like, it's not what I expected at all. For some reason, I expected a weird side quest, and it turned into just this big thing that I wasn't expecting.
Speaker 2:
[162:31] My friend Corinne is a professor at the U. She teaches game narrative, like literally teaches about how to write for video games, and she claims, she told me once that the Witcher 3 Blood and Wine expansion or DLC is a master class in video game writing, is what she said.
Speaker 3:
[162:47] Could be. I'm just like, if it's even better and that's largely, you've said that before and it's largely what I base my understanding on, largely why I'm playing it now. Sure. But Blood and, I just don't feel like Heart of Stone gets a lot of the same. I don't hear a lot of that.
Speaker 2:
[163:05] Yeah, less so.
Speaker 3:
[163:07] I had low expectations of like, oh, here's some side quests before the real good DLC. I was like, holy shit, this is really good. How is Blood and Wine going to be better than this? But I don't know.
Speaker 2:
[163:17] But that's awesome.
Speaker 3:
[163:18] I'm glad I've got back to it because now it will fully, I think it's already hard enough playing Witcher 3 without knowing anything from Witcher 1 or 2 or the books. It's already hard enough. So when I play for the remake, I'm actually going to know who some of the damn characters are. Like you meet Falmer, who's this guy? You talk to him for all of 10 minutes to say goodbye and I'm like, okay, I guess that was important. I don't know who the hell that guy is.
Speaker 2:
[163:47] Do you get time for anything else or is that your main?
Speaker 3:
[163:49] Yeah, I tried one of the games on my list. I did actually try. Syntopia, which I was excited about last week.
Speaker 2:
[163:57] That's right.
Speaker 3:
[163:57] This is a god game where you have to manage the bureaucracy of hell. By when people die in the overworld, they come to hell and you got to beat the sin out of them. Then once they're clean of sin, you can send them back to the real world. Except it's not earth. It's just a weird fantasy island video game style. Instead of humans, they're called humus. The plural is humus.
Speaker 1:
[164:22] Wow.
Speaker 3:
[164:24] You got to beat the sin out of the humus. Basically, it's like a factory game where the souls have to go through these paths, and then you have to apply, if they have different kinds of sins, you have to apply different types of buildings. There's a campaign, and I'm only in chapter 2 of the campaign, so I didn't get very far, but it's introducing me to all the buildings and what they do. But it's a very stable client and no bugs. The game looks pretty. It's weird.
Speaker 2:
[164:49] I like the style.
Speaker 3:
[164:50] Yeah. The humus look really weird. They're human, clearly, but not quite like they bang. But when they bang, you can interrupt their banging by ringing bells. You have a god hand, so you can mess with them. Okay. Then there's also, but they don't get pregnant and give birth. It's just they spawn from eggs at the temple, but they have to have sex somehow for that to work. So I don't know if it's a wireless pregnancy.
Speaker 2:
[165:17] Oh, no. Bluetooth pregnancy?
Speaker 3:
[165:20] Sure. It's not one-to-one with realism. They accrue sin, but they don't really do sins. You don't go around and actually murder. The best you can do if you want to get souls is you can use your god hand to throw them off cliffs and they die. Then the souls go to the train station and Steve, the reaper, drives them to the underworld, and then you go and process souls and make the administrator happy.
Speaker 2:
[165:47] Are there comparisons to black and white and black and white 2? Are those as well as fair comparisons?
Speaker 3:
[165:52] I've never played black and white.
Speaker 2:
[165:53] Oh, okay.
Speaker 3:
[165:54] I don't know how much of a god game it is versus just, it feels more like a factory game. It honestly feels more like shapes with a Z, but it's with sin and souls than shapes.
Speaker 2:
[166:03] Interesting. Well, I like my automation.
Speaker 3:
[166:06] You're on a floor and then you have to organize souls by sin type and then have them go in the right buildings. And then if they didn't fully get cleansed, you can set gates where you send them back. They got to spend more time in the cinema where they clockwork orange style, hold the souls open.
Speaker 2:
[166:25] It's kind of great.
Speaker 3:
[166:27] It's a fun idea and I enjoyed a little bit of it. I just didn't play a lot because like I said, Witcher 3 is just, it's a mountain I have to climb and we're doing it. I dug the game so far. It's fun. It's a fun little thing.
Speaker 2:
[166:38] Yeah, it looks awesome. This is going right up my alley. I didn't realize there was so much automation in it.
Speaker 3:
[166:42] I wasn't sure it would be janky, but it didn't feel janky at all. It feels like it's like lots of great graphics, lots of good UI and even though it's a game called Syntopia and you're managing hell, it's definitely not grim dark. It's not intense or anything like that. It's very cutesy and it sidesteps actual like, there's no reading from Ezekiel 32.7 or there's just none of the religious, and that's probably for the best, none of that contemporary religiosity in this. It just takes that aesthetic and has some fun with it.
Speaker 2:
[167:17] Go make it a little silly. I like that a lot. That's cool.
Speaker 3:
[167:20] But yeah, it's actually kind of a fun game. I definitely give a recommend.
Speaker 2:
[167:24] I like the pentagrams because it reminds me of Doom. I like when a game is not afraid to show pentagrams. People used to get offended by those.
Speaker 3:
[167:31] I'm speaking of which the pentagrams are the hardest. Oh boy.
Speaker 2:
[167:34] Oh yeah? Okay.
Speaker 3:
[167:37] That's the whole thing, right? That's how you keep.
Speaker 2:
[167:39] I don't remember. It's been so long.
Speaker 3:
[167:41] There's been a lot of, that's true. You don't remember the game for me?
Speaker 2:
[167:44] I mean, it's really, yeah, it was about, well, I wasn't, I finished it. Well, I haven't finished it. I need to do, you know what? When you're at Blood and Wine, I should fire that up and play Blood and Wine.
Speaker 3:
[167:54] You should play Blood and Wine, because I, like people have, like, because now that I've played Heart of Stone, and I'm at to where I'm at, sometimes when someone's like, I just didn't care for the game so I didn't play it, you go, that's cool, everyone has different tastes. But sometimes people, especially your friends, you want to set them aside when they're fucking up. And even though it's a hard conversation, you tell them, you're really fucking up. And now I feel like I'm at the point with Witcher 3 when someone says, and Pepperoni Pete's like this, I just didn't like it, it's not that good. I was saying, you're actually making a mistake, bud. Like, it's not a question of taste, you're just wrong, you like games and you're not playing this, you're making a mistake.
Speaker 2:
[168:34] Take that, Pete.
Speaker 3:
[168:35] And I feel like Witcher 3 definitely rises to this occasion where it's like, if you've bought it, if you've expressed an interest and you haven't gotten through it, but you've not finished like I've not for 11 years, you're messing up, you're making a mistake, you're missing something pretty cool. So yeah, so now that it's good.
Speaker 2:
[168:54] Fill that FOMO, Pepperoni Pete. Feel it.
Speaker 3:
[168:56] That's right, that's right. Although it's all spoiled now, so you may not want to do it, I don't think you will.
Speaker 2:
[169:02] Yeah, and then a little.
Speaker 3:
[169:03] You know, the game came out in 2015, so we're on year 11. Yeah, we're 11 years. By the way, Witcher 3, they did a big update, Scott. Are you tracing a shit game?
Speaker 2:
[169:10] You know what, that game never didn't look good. To me, it's like one of the...
Speaker 1:
[169:15] I should play it again.
Speaker 2:
[169:16] It's one of those signs where you're like, holy shit, we have peaked a little bit. We can make games within a range that look incredible, and we don't need to have 400 new consoles to do it.
Speaker 3:
[169:27] Witcher 3 does not need a remake, and it's been 11 years, and I would say, like, don't bother.
Speaker 2:
[169:32] Yeah, I don't think they'd...
Speaker 3:
[169:33] If this game came out this year, you'd be like, man, pretty sweet game.
Speaker 2:
[169:37] Yeah. Good, good Yennefer graphics. Sorry, she's my type. Let's go, let's go down. Oh, you also played Slave Spire 2, right?
Speaker 3:
[169:48] Yeah, well, I never say, just if you want to know everything I played this week, of course, wake.
Speaker 2:
[169:52] Wake.
Speaker 3:
[169:53] How many of you played this week? Everything I played this week.
Speaker 1:
[169:58] I was running.
Speaker 3:
[170:00] I think you put out words super great today.
Speaker 2:
[170:03] I know what love is, Jedi. Anyway.
Speaker 3:
[170:05] You're right. Yeah. So, careful now.
Speaker 2:
[170:12] Well, no, I mean, we've all seen Forrest Gump. It's fine.
Speaker 3:
[170:15] I know, I know. It's fine. We haven't ventured into that territory yet. I'm just a little worried at my. I would definitely. I definitely thought about throwing some firewood into that. And I would know we should just leave it there. Fair point. So or so that's what you play. Slave Spire is still good. I'm going to get to Vampire Crawler soon. So, you know, all right.
Speaker 2:
[170:41] Yeah, I can't wait to talk more about that with you. And that game is going to be played for a while. All right. Good deal. We're done with games. We're going to do some quick feedback. And then we got to mash up. And then we're out of here. Let's do this email first.
Speaker 1:
[170:52] That's a good question.
Speaker 2:
[170:53] Literally an email. This is from Ed Orange who says, Hey, CORE crew belated. Congratulations on 500 episodes. Well, thank you. We're only 19 over the 500.
Speaker 1:
[171:03] Yeah. You got us within 25.
Speaker 2:
[171:06] Yeah. You're all good. Says I've been listening on my daily commute since August last year and I've been wanting to reach out and say how much I enjoy the show. You're all very entertaining. The way you argue points and give reasons for your viewpoints is always really refreshing. I'm turning 40 this year, so I am also listening to plenty of Play Retro, something I hope Jon would appreciate. I'm currently playing through Dragon Warrior Monsters on my Game Boy Color. Wow.
Speaker 1:
[171:27] Nice. I'm honestly the bigger thing is that you have a Game Boy Color to play.
Speaker 2:
[171:31] Hell yeah.
Speaker 1:
[171:32] Good on you for holding on to that. I didn't realize he was so bad at that.
Speaker 2:
[171:36] Got the actual device. I'm the same as you. I would be like, new consoles are out, I'm selling what I have. I always do that.
Speaker 1:
[171:42] I'm friggin destroy the past, blow it up, or trade it in a GameStop, one of the two.
Speaker 2:
[171:48] What do they call that? A scorched earth policy? That's what you got?
Speaker 1:
[171:51] Yeah, I have a tendency to do that, and then the problem is I get nostalgic for things. I sabotage myself, because I go, I don't need this, get rid of it, get rid of the stuff in my life. Then a couple years later, about 10 years goes by, and I go, I wish I still had that.
Speaker 2:
[172:08] Yeah, I do the same thing. I'm a little better about it now, but also it's all peaking now anyway, so I don't know. Back in the day, if I'd have hung on to my original SNES, I would have been happy. What prompted me to finally reach out with Scott's comment about Cockneys and where in England they come from? They're from London, not Manchester. The term derives from the insult, a cock's egg or a rooster's egg. Someone who in some way an affront to nature, oxygen thief, mouth breather, you get the idea, which eventually involved to cockney. I didn't realize it was a rude term. I thought it was just like the way you sounded. Anyway, it says there's also cockney rhyming slang, which is used all over England. I'm from Hull, which is famous for being pretty rubbish, but it does have some world-class feats. I'm a big fan of the Hull patty, which you get from a local chippy.
Speaker 3:
[173:01] Oh, here we go, we're getting authentic.
Speaker 2:
[173:02] Holy hell.
Speaker 3:
[173:03] We're getting some authentic stuff.
Speaker 2:
[173:05] A local chippy, I assume those are chips, like fries or whatever. Anyway.
Speaker 3:
[173:08] A Hull patty is a deep-fried battered disc of mashed potato seasoned with sage, onion, and herbs.
Speaker 2:
[173:14] At a local chippy.
Speaker 1:
[173:15] Sounds good.
Speaker 3:
[173:16] Yeah, I guess a local chippy would be like a chip wagon.
Speaker 2:
[173:19] Yeah, like a chip, we'd call it a French fry place is what we do. I guess, I don't know.
Speaker 3:
[173:27] Freedom fry place.
Speaker 2:
[173:28] He says, sorry for the long one, keep up the great work, you legends at Orange. PS, Beau, I understand the milk in bags. Also, I missed the letters where you guys guess what's correct.
Speaker 1:
[173:39] Oh, the dear, the dear Martha's game show.
Speaker 2:
[173:41] Yeah, you never know. Stuff comes around here and there. We just change things up. Yeah, the milk milk bag thing. I got more emails. Actually, I got emails to the to TMS about this, I don't know why that happened. But they're like, you know, those bags Bo talked about on core.
Speaker 3:
[173:56] Those are real.
Speaker 2:
[173:57] We had those growing up. Those bags.
Speaker 3:
[173:59] We escaped containment on the TMS.
Speaker 2:
[174:01] Yeah, it left the containment fence and went over to another fence.
Speaker 3:
[174:06] When you start emails, they're just brine. It would be funny if it was like, why am I getting all these emails?
Speaker 2:
[174:12] They just came to the official TMS one, but it was still weird to have them be out of the show. And there were multiples of them.
Speaker 1:
[174:17] CORE has gotten so long, it actually runs into TMS now.
Speaker 3:
[174:22] But I think TMS, they like to send you shit, right? So maybe you get some milk bags in the mail.
Speaker 2:
[174:28] That'd be great, I'd take those. I'm not even a big milk drinker now, but I want to drink them.
Speaker 3:
[174:32] By the time they get to you, they'll probably spoil.
Speaker 2:
[174:34] That's a good point. Plus FedEx has been delivering things that are supposed to stay refrigerated to the wrong house. They keep doing that. FedEx has fallen off the wagon, man. I don't know what's wrong with these people.
Speaker 1:
[174:44] Let me tell you, I already told you, they don't get anything to my house. They've gotten better, but that was a lot of lost packages.
Speaker 2:
[174:52] Yeah. I've sent stuff to Jon multiple times. FedEx is the worst. UPS is pretty good for me. USPS is okay when you can track things. But Fed, something happened over there. You guys had the movie with Tom Hanks and the skate to the tooth and all that, and you can't maintain a freaking brand like FedEx that used to be known for the quality of your deliveries. Now, you're just expensive and shitty.
Speaker 1:
[175:18] We need another Castaway.
Speaker 2:
[175:20] That's it.
Speaker 1:
[175:21] Get some money and love their way.
Speaker 2:
[175:23] That's right. He needs to make fire again. Whatever. Whatever you got to do.
Speaker 1:
[175:26] I have made fire.
Speaker 2:
[175:29] I like that movie. Anyway, thank you for your message. We have lots of these and they're very nice comments, by the way, and also that helps me with Cockneys. So if anyone out there has anything else they want to say, they can send us emails at show at core.show. I'm not going to say it twice so I f it up.
Speaker 3:
[175:44] No, I think you're right.
Speaker 2:
[175:45] Yeah. Well, I know I did because I'm reading it, but I'll do it one more time. Show at core.show. Nailed it.
Speaker 3:
[175:52] That's why you did it. It's easy to remember.
Speaker 1:
[175:54] I'm not going to do it twice, Scott Johnson, before doing it a second time.
Speaker 2:
[175:58] Within five seconds of saying it.
Speaker 3:
[176:00] Perfect.
Speaker 2:
[176:02] Not only that, but you can email or you can text us. You can also send us voicemails. Just go to their website and check it out, frogpants.com/core. Here's a mashup from Jamie who gives us one called Core Classics, Sleeved for Her Pleasure.
Speaker 3:
[176:17] Oh, shit.
Speaker 2:
[176:19] Who do you think said that?
Speaker 3:
[176:21] Probably me.
Speaker 2:
[176:22] Okay. Beau said Sleeved for Her. I actually agree. I think we all vote Beau.
Speaker 1:
[176:25] It sounds like it's from when we were doing Magic the Gathering stuff. So might have been the inspiration, but I don't think I said it. I think it was either a Scott or a Beau. I'll say Scott just so we can have a winner and loser.
Speaker 2:
[176:38] All right. I'll say Beau, you say Scott. Beau says yourself.
Speaker 1:
[176:42] Beau said Beau.
Speaker 2:
[176:43] Okay. Beau said Beau. I don't like the game you play as a kid. Let's play Beau said Beau. All right. Well, here it is. Enjoy.
Speaker 1:
[176:49] Greetings, adventurer.
Speaker 2:
[176:50] If it's mashups you seek, the mashup guild you shall find at patreon.com/mashupguild.
Speaker 1:
[176:58] Also back then there was only one flavor. Look at all these fancy flavors.
Speaker 2:
[177:01] Oh, they've got some in it.
Speaker 1:
[177:02] Back in my day, there was only one flavor of balls and it wasn't very good.
Speaker 3:
[177:05] Then I'm stuck in a corner and the big beefy guy is eating my chode. No, what?
Speaker 2:
[177:11] What? I mean, I'd eat dragon beef. That's fine.
Speaker 1:
[177:17] Well, what if it was a talking dragon? What if it's the, I am the last one.
Speaker 2:
[177:22] I'm super intelligent.
Speaker 3:
[177:24] Wouldn't you have to purify dragon beef if it had magic in it?
Speaker 2:
[177:27] Dragon beef.
Speaker 3:
[177:28] You wouldn't want to grow 50 nipples on your forehead after eating dragon beef. Dragon beef is like, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. 50 nipples.
Speaker 1:
[177:37] Like a lube manufacturer, I'm tangentially connected.
Speaker 2:
[177:41] People think it's for their machinery, their machines, their robotic chocobos. No, it's for doing it.
Speaker 3:
[177:47] It's WD-40 for the robotic chocobos.
Speaker 1:
[177:50] Yeah. That's not what it was used for.
Speaker 3:
[177:52] It's doing something else to those robot chocobos.
Speaker 1:
[177:54] It went on a butthole.
Speaker 2:
[177:55] It went on a butthole, there was coitus. We know what's up. There was coitus. So, well done there with the-
Speaker 1:
[178:02] It's a follow-up podcast to There Will Be Dungeons. There was coitus. There was coitus. Their consolation will be in Xbox.
Speaker 2:
[178:10] Yeah, you'll still get the Xbox, but you'll have to face down the oily pipe of Jon's- Uh-huh.
Speaker 1:
[178:16] That's what they called me in high school, the oily pipe.
Speaker 2:
[178:19] Our old pal, Civ, loves it. He wants to have coitus with it. He wants to make love to it.
Speaker 1:
[178:24] There was coitus.
Speaker 2:
[178:24] Yeah. Our hot new show. There will be coitus. There will be coitus. Come on, let's fall. Check for it. Watch for it.
Speaker 3:
[178:29] What happens if you kill a dragon, eat it, and it comes back reborn and you're like, I feel like it worked out fine for you.
Speaker 2:
[178:36] Yeah. I just can't get this picture out of my head of a cow standing on two back feet going, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 3:
[178:43] Shut up, cow.
Speaker 1:
[178:44] I don't understand you. That means your food. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[178:47] I must eat you. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 1:
[178:51] Hey, I got a product for you.
Speaker 2:
[178:52] It's called the Razor Gaming Fingersleeves. It sounds fake.
Speaker 1:
[178:56] The way we just set it up.
Speaker 3:
[178:58] It sounds fake too.
Speaker 2:
[178:59] I think it sounds fake like it sounds like something somebody made up, but I could see these being okay. Are they worth 10 bucks?
Speaker 1:
[179:04] 10.99?
Speaker 2:
[179:05] Probably not. Go cut your own from some pair of gloves.
Speaker 3:
[179:08] If they make your lady happy, it was an addition to being good for the game. Maybe it's worth it.
Speaker 2:
[179:12] Oh, wait, what?
Speaker 3:
[179:15] Oh, gross. You get two of the sleeves. I mean, depending on how they... Anyways, moving on.
Speaker 2:
[179:23] They make your lady happy. Wait, no one said sleeve for her pleasure though.
Speaker 3:
[179:29] The one.
Speaker 1:
[179:30] It was an implication, not a...
Speaker 3:
[179:33] That was a pretty old one. I guess that was a classic mashup.
Speaker 2:
[179:35] It was an old one, yeah. I think we've even played it before, but it was a joy to hear again.
Speaker 3:
[179:40] I remember those finger sleeves though. Oh boy.
Speaker 2:
[179:42] I do too. They were 10 bucks and they were stupid expensive and no one should pay that money. Dumb.
Speaker 3:
[179:46] Unless they make your lady happy. It's cheap. There's other toys that make your lady happy that cost a lot more.
Speaker 2:
[179:55] I got a question about that. Why is that kind of stuff so damned expensive? Do you think it is just because the things get cranked up because they know people are just horn dogs and they'll do anything? Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 3:
[180:09] They're not that expensive.
Speaker 2:
[180:10] Like if you go, if you buy, okay, let's say.
Speaker 3:
[180:13] How much is a dildo these days?
Speaker 1:
[180:14] Well, I don't. I don't know. How much is a dildo?
Speaker 2:
[180:19] I don't have any idea. I just know that.
Speaker 1:
[180:20] As the person who most recently purchased one, Scott, how much is a dildo?
Speaker 2:
[180:24] I'm wearing one now, if you know what I'm saying. Hold on. I'm gonna go to Amazon and I'm gonna say.
Speaker 1:
[180:31] Who buys their dildos from Amazon?
Speaker 3:
[180:33] They don't buy from Amazon. Go out with your lady to a sex shop and look, Shots Toys Real Rock 5-inch Crystal Clear Dildo with Balls in Ottawa at the Stag Shop.
Speaker 2:
[180:45] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[180:46] On the store. $14.
Speaker 2:
[180:48] Okay, that's not bad.
Speaker 3:
[180:49] With coupon code code, after coupon code bloom.
Speaker 2:
[180:56] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[180:56] Because it's $25.99, but you save $11.99 for what seems to be a perfectly serviceable crystal penis.
Speaker 2:
[181:04] Look at the nightmare I just sent you this link on Amazon. It's a nightmare. No one should look at this page.
Speaker 1:
[181:09] You know what? Mad respect to you for being willing to look for dildos on Amazon to permanently wreck.
Speaker 3:
[181:16] Oh, dude.
Speaker 2:
[181:18] That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 3:
[181:19] They're gnarly.
Speaker 2:
[181:20] Look at that stuff.
Speaker 3:
[181:21] Nobody wants that first dildo. These 8.6 inch skin thrusting games, realistic silicone, strong suction cup.
Speaker 2:
[181:28] No, nobody wants that. No.
Speaker 3:
[181:30] I don't know why you would want what's on top. I just don't think that's me.
Speaker 2:
[181:34] How about that thing? How about that bit of business that I just put in there? How do you want to deal with that?
Speaker 3:
[181:39] That's a pretty normal one.
Speaker 2:
[181:40] No, that is not normal. That is the most abnormal thing I've ever seen in my life. Nobody has this coming out of their-
Speaker 3:
[181:48] A two prong dildo is like a normal dildo.
Speaker 1:
[181:53] Two people together can create this.
Speaker 2:
[181:55] But they molded it like someone's got a deformation. They were born like that.
Speaker 3:
[182:01] Yeah, they're not meant to be realistic. But that's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:
[182:04] These are hyper realistic.
Speaker 1:
[182:05] If it was meant to be realistic, it's like picking a human in an MMO. You can have that.
Speaker 2:
[182:10] I guess so.
Speaker 3:
[182:12] I mean, I get that it's a little disconcerting, you know, but it's just a toy, it's just a toy.
Speaker 2:
[182:16] Yeah, it is.
Speaker 3:
[182:18] I mean, look at- so that's a dildo.
Speaker 1:
[182:19] It's a little double dong action for you.
Speaker 3:
[182:23] I mean, the vibrator is a little more expensive. There's some in the 70 range, the 200 range, but that's like, you know, I bought a FitBit and that was like too much. It's not that, like, you know, it's got a little- it's got a battery and an engine or whatever. An engine. It's got an engine. You know, something that makes the thing move.
Speaker 2:
[182:43] Yeah, well, I mean, I'll take your word for it.
Speaker 1:
[182:46] An engine. Don't think that a hemi.
Speaker 3:
[182:48] I think this is pretty gross, but like if something's going to look a little more like a toy and not gross, it'll look something like this.
Speaker 2:
[182:55] Oh, OK, I get that. Yeah. Wait, what? Hold on.
Speaker 3:
[182:59] What are we doing there? It's called the Royal Embrace Dual Stimulant.
Speaker 1:
[183:03] Yeah, it's.
Speaker 3:
[183:05] And this one's battery powered and vibrant.
Speaker 1:
[183:07] I like that Scott's turning his head to try to figure out how it goes.
Speaker 3:
[183:11] This is why I like showing of the sex toys, because some of them, if you know how to use them, make sense. But if you don't, you're like, what the hell am I looking at? Because it doesn't look like a penis, right? It just looks like it looks like the three seashells of devilish. Yeah, I'm getting three seashells.
Speaker 1:
[183:28] He doesn't know how to use the...
Speaker 3:
[183:29] Now that I'm aware of like how, you know, vanilla is, even though it's scissoring was, you know.
Speaker 1:
[183:34] Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:
[183:35] No, I mean.
Speaker 3:
[183:36] I said the same picture didn't mean to. Yeah, I was going to say, what is this? This is the same exact photo. I got another picture for you.
Speaker 2:
[183:42] Oh, gosh.
Speaker 3:
[183:42] It's not bad. It's not bad. It's just you're going to look at it and go like, what is going on?
Speaker 2:
[183:47] Oh, hold on. Wait a minute.
Speaker 3:
[183:51] What do you do with that?
Speaker 2:
[183:52] That's for an alien to use.
Speaker 3:
[183:54] No.
Speaker 2:
[183:58] Hold on. Okay.
Speaker 3:
[183:59] But you should figure it out with your-
Speaker 2:
[184:03] All right.
Speaker 3:
[184:03] Where's that?
Speaker 1:
[184:06] Hold on. Where's that? Okay.
Speaker 2:
[184:08] Never mind.
Speaker 3:
[184:10] I wish we could share it with the chat because they don't know. It's called, the name of the toy is called CalExotics 3, Triple Orgasm Double Penetration Rabbit Vibrator. It's only $101.50 after coupon code BLOOM.
Speaker 2:
[184:26] Sorry, kids.
Speaker 3:
[184:27] I'm thinking stuff right now in Ottawa. I don't know how late they're open, but I could get one right now.
Speaker 2:
[184:31] Any parents scrambling for their phone in the car trying to shut off the Bluetooth?
Speaker 3:
[184:38] Here's one. I got to show you this one though. You're going to love this one.
Speaker 1:
[184:41] You're going to love this one.
Speaker 2:
[184:43] Am I going to love it or am I going to hate this?
Speaker 3:
[184:44] You're going to love it because, oh no, I set the same, oh god, I don't know my copy. It's not working. You're going to love this one. Copy image, please.
Speaker 2:
[184:54] Killing me there.
Speaker 3:
[184:54] Why does the copy image not work?
Speaker 2:
[184:56] I don't know. Windows, man. I'm mad at Windows right now, so I'll blame everything on it.
Speaker 3:
[185:01] Okay, let's go.
Speaker 1:
[185:02] Why will Windows not let me copy and paste these dildos?
Speaker 2:
[185:05] Yeah, what's the deal there?
Speaker 3:
[185:10] There you go. Here it is. Thank you.
Speaker 2:
[185:14] What are we looking at here? Hold on.
Speaker 3:
[185:16] Okay.
Speaker 1:
[185:17] I know Scott has looked at a lot of these and we've all laughed as he tried to figure out how it works. I got to admit, I'm a little flustered.
Speaker 3:
[185:25] Let me tell you the title.
Speaker 1:
[185:26] So for everyone, it looks like Donald Duck having an orgasm.
Speaker 3:
[185:31] It's an orange, not orange. It's a yellow shaped, it looks like an egg. It has a hole at the top and a power button.
Speaker 2:
[185:38] It looks like a lemon to me.
Speaker 3:
[185:40] It has a wireless envelope to it, but I think that's just showing what it is.
Speaker 1:
[185:42] It does look like a lemon. You know what? After I blew it up and I can see it in 3D, it makes a little bit more sense. I thought this was a flat object.
Speaker 3:
[185:49] Let me tell you that the name of the product is called Bella Squeeze Lemon Vibrating Clitoral Stimulator. That's normally $120 for that little thing, but it's $57.99 after saving $62. No code.
Speaker 2:
[186:04] Somebody is getting ripped off here.
Speaker 3:
[186:06] I like that. It looks like a lemon and I'm like, Scott, how do you use the lemon? He's like, I don't know.
Speaker 1:
[186:13] I'm so happy that this is a part of the actual video game show and pre-show or post-show content.
Speaker 2:
[186:21] Archie though, I know who's really glad. His name is Jamie Brand and he's stoked right now.
Speaker 3:
[186:26] Yeah, we're going to give him. All right, here's, I found one.
Speaker 2:
[186:28] Oh my gosh, another one. All right, give me one more. I don't know if this comes out all alien. I'm weird. I'm going to be annoying.
Speaker 3:
[186:34] This one you'll probably figure out pretty easy though. I think, but it's just, it's just, I don't know.
Speaker 2:
[186:39] Oh, hold on. Oh, okay. Okay.
Speaker 3:
[186:45] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[186:45] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[186:46] I mean, you got to say that.
Speaker 2:
[186:47] And that's a little-
Speaker 3:
[186:49] We have a baseline of understandings, so that's good.
Speaker 2:
[186:52] Yeah. And that's more space age. For some reason, I find that fine. Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[186:57] What you sent us was, what you sent me on Amazon was just a bunch of nasty cocks. And I'm like, toys don't have to look like that. They can just look like toys. Don't go to Amazon to buy sex toys. Nobody will be happy with that.
Speaker 2:
[187:12] Oh, gosh. I'm so sad I asked the question. The original question.
Speaker 1:
[187:15] Well, I will say on this most recent one, it looks like the toy has a little tongue sticking out trying to lick the penis.
Speaker 2:
[187:21] Well, yes.
Speaker 1:
[187:23] You see what I'm saying? Yeah. That's what it looks like. I think that might even be what it's supposed to simulate, but it's what it looks like.
Speaker 2:
[187:30] Oh, gosh. I don't want... Apologies to everybody for this.
Speaker 3:
[187:33] I don't know what the current hottest is. We're just finding stuff. This is the Ottawa sex shop. So if you come to Ottawa on the Glebe and find the sex story.
Speaker 1:
[187:41] The Glebe?
Speaker 3:
[187:42] Glebe. It's part of town.
Speaker 1:
[187:43] It sounds like the name of one of these.
Speaker 2:
[187:46] Get the Glebe.
Speaker 1:
[187:47] Which one of these would be the Glebe?
Speaker 2:
[187:49] They're on sale. 20% off on the Glebe. Tell me what...
Speaker 3:
[187:53] Glebe is like a neighborhood. You know how you have like...
Speaker 2:
[187:56] Like the avenues or the whatever you call it.
Speaker 3:
[187:58] Like the boroughs you might have in New York where you're just like, this is, I don't know, Staten Island.
Speaker 2:
[188:03] Why are they called the Glebe?
Speaker 3:
[188:05] Just the name of the... I don't know. There's probably some history.
Speaker 1:
[188:06] Because the Glebe was taken.
Speaker 2:
[188:09] They were too Glebe about the name, so they said Glebe.
Speaker 1:
[188:11] All right.
Speaker 2:
[188:12] I've learned a lot of things in the last 10 minutes. I can tell you that.
Speaker 3:
[188:15] Glebe. Hang on.
Speaker 2:
[188:17] Oh, no. It's going to be so...
Speaker 3:
[188:18] Because the land was originally allocated to St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in an 1837 survey. Glebe has historical meaning, church lands.
Speaker 2:
[188:26] Okay.
Speaker 3:
[188:27] Look at you guys saying it sounds like a sex toy, defiling the Christian origin.
Speaker 1:
[188:31] It does sound like a sex toy.
Speaker 2:
[188:33] I mean, it does. You know, it kind of does.
Speaker 1:
[188:37] Give them the Glebe.
Speaker 3:
[188:38] Terms of life, the Latin Glebe or Glebe or Glebe.
Speaker 1:
[188:42] Glebe sounds like the Glebe.
Speaker 3:
[188:48] Can you, honey, can you change the batteries in the Glebe, please? You're going to use it later.
Speaker 1:
[188:54] Scott got rid of it. He's like, well, I'm done with this.
Speaker 3:
[188:56] Well, the screen, my God. Isn't this very dangerous for Scott? Because there's like five different things you can click on, including stuff he posted.
Speaker 2:
[189:03] I'm not going to show anybody. No one's going to see our Discord.
Speaker 1:
[189:08] I cannot wait for Kim to open up Scott's Amazon in the near future and see the recommended for you.
Speaker 2:
[189:19] Just go, honey. I can hear it right now. What are we doing?
Speaker 3:
[189:25] It's just for work and if you can tax write off, you can.
Speaker 1:
[189:29] I was just showing Beau and Jon something. It's fine.
Speaker 3:
[189:32] There's actually a funny bit because I watched a bit of the Conan podcast the other day. You know the guy that does the video games all the time? They're raking him over the coals because he buys nerd shit for himself so that he can write it off as a tax write off by just mentioning it and they're like, you're defrauding the government because it's not like he brings it on, he'll just buy a sword and he'll say, I got a new sword. And that's the extent of it and then he just does the tax write off. Conan's like, you're doing fraud, sir, like what the? And you're not telling me, it's my show, not your show.
Speaker 2:
[190:07] I like that guy. I know you're talking about. He's the one that will sit with him and play when they play like a pocket.
Speaker 3:
[190:12] Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's that guy. He's like, he sits in the background where they do their shows. But like they're just talking about like ways to get around taxes. And then he confessed what he did. They're all like, dude, that's over the line. That's funny. I think it's genuine. It's starting to make me laugh. Because like you can't just buy nerd shit, say it on the show once, and then tax write off like $1,000 purchase it. Anyways, it's really funny.
Speaker 1:
[190:33] When my wife was trying to figure out our taxes, she's like, it shows on your company card that you bought Transformers 1 on Amazon Video. And I said, yeah, we talked about it on the show. Did you? I said, yeah, we talked about it on the show. I said, probably multiple episodes talked about it on the show. We tried to get Beau to watch it a bunch on the show. I don't know where she landed on that verdict, but that's where I landed on it.
Speaker 3:
[191:05] I think that's fair. That actually counted as substantial. What he's doing is like just saying it, the word.
Speaker 1:
[191:11] He got a new sword, a tax write-off.
Speaker 3:
[191:13] That's pretty funny. He's like, I buy things and try to save them on the show and they get the tax write-off and they're like, Conan's like, actually he was genuinely pissed about it.
Speaker 2:
[191:23] Quick note, this thing called Glebe is a bottled water.
Speaker 3:
[191:27] That's not how you spell the Glebe.
Speaker 2:
[191:29] How do you spell it?
Speaker 3:
[191:30] G-L-E-B-E.
Speaker 2:
[191:31] Oh, like Glebe.
Speaker 3:
[191:33] Swap the B and the E at the end.
Speaker 2:
[191:35] Oh, okay. All right.
Speaker 3:
[191:37] Well, understandable mistake.
Speaker 2:
[191:39] They make some kind of beverage drink thing on carriers and coasters and stuff. But anyway. Well, there you go. Ladies and gentlemen, it's time for us to say a couple of words before we get out of here. And that is this, you need to support this show. I mean, obviously from the last 15 minutes, if you've learned anything, we need your support. So please do be like Tanned Behind and Leopard Jones. Leopard Jones is a little rough.
Speaker 1:
[192:07] This is the audience you attract with the kind of talk we've just had. You attract the Tanned Behind and Leopard Jones.
Speaker 2:
[192:13] And Leopard Jones.
Speaker 3:
[192:14] Tanned Behind has definitely bought a dildo for sure.
Speaker 2:
[192:17] Probably. And it's a good tanning lotion, who knows. Thank you. Yeah, if you want to support us, you can. You can go to patreon.com/coreshow or core.show, which is our substack. Either of those things will get you all these cool benefits such as no commercials ever, pre-show content every week, host specials and other great stuff, articles here and there, all kinds of content, and a great way just to support your favorite show and get no ads. The ads is the best part. No ads. No one wants ads. Don't have ads. Do this instead.
Speaker 1:
[192:44] Yeah. Good thing we didn't promote any products in the past five minutes.
Speaker 3:
[192:48] We should make a CORE dildo, guys.
Speaker 2:
[192:50] No. No, we will not be doing that. I don't even know what that business, can you imagine working in that business? It's probably weird.
Speaker 3:
[192:58] We'll get a partner. We'll just slap our logo on one and Glebe.
Speaker 2:
[193:02] They'll do it. Anyway, that's it for us. frogpants.com/core for everything else. There's still plus, by the way, speaking of 500 episodes, there's still those 500 plus mugs you can go get yours today. If you haven't already got one, it's up there on the site. We're going to get out of here now with a letter home to Martha about the games we played today and why they were so great. Take it away.
Speaker 1:
[193:27] My dearest Martha, I know you're not listening anymore after all the talk of sexual items, but in case you are and forgot in that dialogue what we talked about prior, surprisingly there were video games on this show. These were what they were. Vampire Crawlers, Windrose, Blacksmith Master, Mouse, PI for Higher, Lucky Tower Ultimate, Pragmata, The Witcher 3, Syntopia, and Slave Spire 2.
Speaker 2:
[194:04] Wow. Quite the selection of quality entertainment enjoyed by all three.
Speaker 3:
[194:07] By the way, all great Ildo model names.
Speaker 2:
[194:10] Yeah, every one of them. Every one of them. Well, well done, everybody. Well done, everyone listening. It means you got through it and so did we. We'll be back here next week with another episode of CORE. If you want to watch this live, we do it at 1 PM Mountain Time and then as long as it takes, clearly. That's going to do it for us, for me, for Beau and for Jon, bar for Jon, Beau and Jon. We'll see you next time. Bar for Jon. This has been a Frog Pants production. Find all our shows at frogpants.com.