The Outer Worlds 2, More Ghost of Yotei, And Battle Suit Aces Interview

<v Speaker 1>Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Game and Former Show, a
<v Speaker 1>weekly podcast covering the video game industry. Join us each
<v Speaker 1>and every Thursday for a discussion of the latest gaming news, reviews,
<v Speaker 1>and exclusive reviews with Game and Former staff and special
<v Speaker 1>guests from around the industry. I am your host, Marcus Stewart.
<v Speaker 1>I am joined by the incomparable Kyle Hilliard.
<v Speaker 2>Hello, Hello, Hi, thank you. I No one can compare
<v Speaker 2>to me.
<v Speaker 1>That's right. Sure said it with the confidence of someone
<v Speaker 1>that stands alone. And we're also joined by the one
<v Speaker 1>and only Charles Heart. Hi.
<v Speaker 3>Hello, I've got bad news. I've come down with a
<v Speaker 3>horrible allergy to good, good games.
<v Speaker 1>There's so many good games.
<v Speaker 3>Right now that I'm just sneezing my brains out.
<v Speaker 2>We were all supposed to get vaccinated for it, but
<v Speaker 2>we just like every year for the last twenty five years, I.
<v Speaker 1>Gotta play it.
<v Speaker 3>If you play the demo for the game before it
<v Speaker 3>comes out, that's like the vaccination. Yeah, and I just
<v Speaker 3>didn't enough time.
<v Speaker 1>It is.
<v Speaker 3>I should have made a plan and gone with a friend.
<v Speaker 2>We'll talk about it in a week or two. But
<v Speaker 2>I definitely had a game that I booted up today
<v Speaker 2>and or last night, and I was like, had the
<v Speaker 2>genuine thought of like, oh god, this, this one's gonna
<v Speaker 2>be a problem, isn't it of just like another like
<v Speaker 2>good game that I don't want to not play, And
<v Speaker 2>I was like, oh, jeez, okay, thanks for making good games.
<v Speaker 2>Game developers.
<v Speaker 3>We are hitting that time of year where like every
<v Speaker 3>new recommendation of games comes with an apology at the front,
<v Speaker 3>I'm so sorry, you guys. Is really good and we're
<v Speaker 3>gonna have to play it probably to the end.
<v Speaker 1>It's like, oh God, I want to to see my family.
<v Speaker 1>To stay on the vaccine analogy, if if a regular
<v Speaker 1>size good games a vaccine, then a full on doctor's
<v Speaker 1>appointment feels like the game that I've been putting off
<v Speaker 1>all year that is apparently excellent, and that is Kingdom
<v Speaker 1>Come deliverance soon, because.
<v Speaker 2>Remind me of one it's because a major surgery that game.
<v Speaker 1>Because everyone says like that game is fantastic, but it
<v Speaker 1>is massive. It is not a short game. And I
<v Speaker 1>know we gave Wesley reviewed it and finished it and
<v Speaker 1>gave it a nine to five. And I've said this publicly.
<v Speaker 1>I think on a previous episode that it's like, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that is easily the biggest game in my back law
<v Speaker 1>that I have not touched on, and I really need
<v Speaker 1>to start digging into that at least start Goaty season
<v Speaker 1>and all that stuff. But yeah, it does feel like
<v Speaker 1>scheduling a well, an amputation sounds mean maybe just like
<v Speaker 1>a good procedure that's gonna make you feel better afterwards,
<v Speaker 1>like a well, actually an amputation. But if it was
<v Speaker 1>like in a cyberpunk world and they're like, we're gonna
<v Speaker 1>put a cool robot arm on it, Oh, like this
<v Speaker 1>is it sounds bad at first, but the aftermath is
<v Speaker 1>actually gonna be So you're gonna have a cool cyber
<v Speaker 1>like laser cannon arm.
<v Speaker 2>Guys, can I tell you about a cool Star Trek
<v Speaker 2>the Next Generation thing that I've been rewatching Star Trek
<v Speaker 2>the Next Generation recently. There was an episode where just
<v Speaker 2>something was happening to the crew at night and they
<v Speaker 2>couldn't figure out what it was, and like the spoiler alert,
<v Speaker 2>what was happening is they were getting like taken by
<v Speaker 2>aliens to another dimension and being experimented on and putting
<v Speaker 2>back into their world while they were like knocked out.
<v Speaker 2>It's like really creepy, but one of the things they did,
<v Speaker 2>which like gave me a nightmare, as like a forty
<v Speaker 2>year old man was they removed Commander Riker's arm and
<v Speaker 2>then reattached it, and so like when he was like,
<v Speaker 2>he was like, I had a weird dream last night.
<v Speaker 2>The doctor like scanned them and they're like, your arm
<v Speaker 2>was removed and reattached last night. You don't remember that?
<v Speaker 2>He was like, no, that's just that idea. It was
<v Speaker 2>just so creepy to me that like a portion of
<v Speaker 2>your body could be taken off and then, unknown to you,
<v Speaker 2>put back.
<v Speaker 1>It was a good episode. I like this. That makes
<v Speaker 1>me wonder if it's happened to you exactly. You get it, man,
<v Speaker 1>what some.
<v Speaker 2>Aliens might have pulled me into another dimension?
<v Speaker 1>Were they like studying the arm? Yeah, they were like
<v Speaker 1>studying humansky, Yeah it's you. It's weird. Yeah. It reminds
<v Speaker 1>me of my thought experiment of if the dragon Balls
<v Speaker 1>were real, if we lived in the dragon Ball world
<v Speaker 1>where oh, a villain blew up the planet and we
<v Speaker 1>all died, but they used the dragon balls to wish
<v Speaker 1>us back and erase our memories, which happens a lot
<v Speaker 1>in that show. Who's to say that something like that
<v Speaker 1>has not already happened, and we were just unaware because
<v Speaker 1>our memories are raised up, like, yeah, we were all
<v Speaker 1>killed at one point, brought back memories are raised so
<v Speaker 1>we have no idea that this even just this aspect
<v Speaker 1>of like existence even exists to us, Like this is
<v Speaker 1>beyond our understanding. So yeah, so now that we filled everyone,
<v Speaker 1>all of our listeners with existential dread, thank you for
<v Speaker 1>joining us for a fun episode of the Game and
<v Speaker 1>Former show. We're gonna be talking about our new cover
<v Speaker 1>story on the Outer Worlds too. We're also going to
<v Speaker 1>be talking a little bit more Ghost of Yote, kind
<v Speaker 1>of getting a little bit more in depth about the
<v Speaker 1>opening hours of the game. Charles even playing a cool
<v Speaker 1>indie called Consume Me that I'm excited to hear about.
<v Speaker 1>And also we've got a fun little game kind of
<v Speaker 1>piggybacking Charles after the last week's discussion of Hades two,
<v Speaker 1>where you have since published review gave it a ten
<v Speaker 1>out of ten, the rare Game Informer ten out of ten,
<v Speaker 1>and you've come up with a fun game where we're
<v Speaker 1>going to kind of delve back into Game and Former
<v Speaker 1>history and see if we can sort of determine the
<v Speaker 1>other ten out of ten games that Game Informer has
<v Speaker 1>that we've awarded in our over thirty years of existence.
<v Speaker 1>And then at the end of the episode, Eric Van
<v Speaker 1>Allen has a cool interview with Trinkett Studio to talk
<v Speaker 1>about their new strategy game Battlesuit Aces. So packed episode,
<v Speaker 1>let's jump right into it. Before we do that, though,
<v Speaker 1>on a related subject of the cover story, if you
<v Speaker 1>would like to read our Outer World two issue, and
<v Speaker 1>I'm holding up right here, you got to go to
<v Speaker 1>gamiformer dot com slash subscribe baby, Go there, get yourself
<v Speaker 1>a magazine subscription in issues a year. If you subscribe now,
<v Speaker 1>it will include this one. This will be your first
<v Speaker 1>issue that comes into mail. You get it physical and digitally,
<v Speaker 1>or you can get it just digitally at a reduced price.
<v Speaker 1>But if you want to keep up with the latest
<v Speaker 1>gaming news, reviews, in depth features from not only Game
<v Speaker 1>Informers STAF, but from a host of wonderful contributors across
<v Speaker 1>the industry, get yourself gaming more. Ah Game Informer magazine
<v Speaker 1>subscription right here, Look at Aunty right here telling you
<v Speaker 1>you gotta do it. Auntie's Choice Game Informers, Auntie's Choice,
<v Speaker 1>I guess technically.
<v Speaker 2>In universe I love. We've talked about it a bit,
<v Speaker 2>but this issue is cool. Like I love this cover.
<v Speaker 2>It's very like, like we change the font of the logo.
<v Speaker 1>It's great cover. Yeah, yest, look at us. I know
<v Speaker 1>we've talked about it every week, but we can't shut
<v Speaker 1>up about it. How much better The paper quality is
<v Speaker 1>nice and thick, shining glossy, won't fall up part at
<v Speaker 1>the first sign of moisture. You gotta get you want
<v Speaker 1>to be you know, I'm Marcus.
<v Speaker 2>I'm gonna use this opportunity now rather than later to
<v Speaker 2>plug There's a feature in this in the Outer Worlds
<v Speaker 2>to issue that I like a lot. We worked with
<v Speaker 2>Anna Diez, who is a contributor over min Max and
<v Speaker 2>she was a writer Polygon for many years. She has
<v Speaker 2>a big piece where she got She talked with Toby
<v Speaker 2>fox Uh, the creator of Undertail and Delta Roun, who's
<v Speaker 2>who's usually a pretty quiet person, doesn't do a ton
<v Speaker 2>of interviews, but we have this big piece that Anna
<v Speaker 2>talked to him and talked about the sort of extended
<v Speaker 2>development of Delta Roune. It's the ongoing process. I really
<v Speaker 2>love how that piece came together and it's in this issue.
<v Speaker 2>And and that little piece of fan arn't right. There
<v Speaker 2>a little bit of nepotism going there because my daughter
<v Speaker 2>drew that in the top right.
<v Speaker 1>But that's her. No, that's good. She's a good artist.
<v Speaker 1>Is this her? Is this her making her game in
<v Speaker 1>former debut? Has she ever appeared in the magazine? And
<v Speaker 1>she was.
<v Speaker 2>She was in the Rainbow six Patriots issue obviously as
<v Speaker 2>an infant when she was just born.
<v Speaker 1>We had a picture in there. But this is to
<v Speaker 1>talk about Rainbow six.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, she was really disappointed when now I got canceled.
<v Speaker 2>She was, Yeah, but she's a great artist. But yeah,
<v Speaker 2>I just really like that piece.
<v Speaker 1>I think.
<v Speaker 2>I think it's an awesome piece and it has my
<v Speaker 2>kids are working it, so yeah, very exciting.
<v Speaker 3>And we also have a really big section on Marvel Games,
<v Speaker 3>which is pretty cool. We got like a trio. I
<v Speaker 3>went to Montreal to play Marvel Cosmic Invasion and then
<v Speaker 3>Brian played is it.
<v Speaker 1>Marvel tocon colon Fighting Souls. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>I talked to the team a little bit. Yeah, I think.
<v Speaker 3>Where the the token and fight I know Souls is
<v Speaker 3>at the end in Marvel's.
<v Speaker 1>At the front. And I always mixed with them in
<v Speaker 1>the words yeah, and then Kyle, you saw Deadpool VR. Yep.
<v Speaker 2>I played a bunch of Deadpool VR and talked to
<v Speaker 2>Twisted Pixel, who was a developer that I've been a
<v Speaker 2>fan of for a long time. I love the Explosion
<v Speaker 2>Man games. They're just a hilarious developer based in Texas,
<v Speaker 2>I believe. But yeah, I got to talk to them
<v Speaker 2>about Deadpool VR after playing a bunch of it.
<v Speaker 1>So yeah, good issue. Yeah, and oh yeah, good job
<v Speaker 1>to everyone. We all worked on this, and of course
<v Speaker 1>the centerpiece of the issue that we're about to talk
<v Speaker 1>about now is of course the Outer World's two. I
<v Speaker 1>wrote this cover story, my first cover story since we
<v Speaker 1>came back as an outlet. Got to visit Obsidian Entertainment
<v Speaker 1>with Wesley LeBlanc over in Irvine, California. First time I've
<v Speaker 1>ever got to visit the folks over there, and that
<v Speaker 1>was a really fun visit one because I'm a big
<v Speaker 1>fan of City and it's one of those developers I
<v Speaker 1>think I I wasn't consciously aware how much I enjoyed
<v Speaker 1>their games until I did the kind of the head
<v Speaker 1>count and like, oh I really like Fallout New Vegas.
<v Speaker 1>Oh I really liked about. Oh, I really like Grounded,
<v Speaker 1>Oh I really liked I Go Back. Like I thought
<v Speaker 1>Dungeons Each three was a fun co op game. It's like, oh, oh,
<v Speaker 1>South Park the Stick of Truth. Like they've got just
<v Speaker 1>a storied RPG history, and they also have one of
<v Speaker 1>my favorite off slobby, just because I've been to quite
<v Speaker 1>a few developers at this point, and I'd say more
<v Speaker 1>often than not, a lot of their offices tend to
<v Speaker 1>be pretty sterile, especially at the entrance. But like Obsidian,
<v Speaker 1>like you could not mistake their studio for anyone else,
<v Speaker 1>Like the moment you step through the door, it is
<v Speaker 1>just wall to wall, just like posters of all their
<v Speaker 1>games going back to like stuff like you've forgotten about
<v Speaker 1>like Alpha Protocol to the Outer Worlds.
<v Speaker 2>How dare you forgot Alpha Protocol?
<v Speaker 1>Mark? Kyle, tell me the name of the protagonist in
<v Speaker 1>Alpha Protocol.
<v Speaker 2>Obviously it's Jason Jacob the game I definitely did not play.
<v Speaker 1>That would be I mean.
<v Speaker 3>That him, do you know the protagonist name? Like Kyle
<v Speaker 3>could have been really confident and would you have known
<v Speaker 3>he was wrong?
<v Speaker 1>I mean, I know it's not Jake Jason, but it
<v Speaker 1>might be like I don't know.
<v Speaker 2>All right, Alpha, you want to get Chris Alpha, that's
<v Speaker 2>your what's your it's not my real guest, all right,
<v Speaker 2>what's your guest? Charles for the protagonist of the game.
<v Speaker 3>To be clear, I have never heard of Yeah, I'm
<v Speaker 3>I'm going Tomas.
<v Speaker 1>Oh no Toaster's guests.
<v Speaker 2>The answer was course, because I don't want to spend
<v Speaker 2>too much time off of vertical here, because we're here
<v Speaker 2>talking about the old It's Michael Thornton. See I might
<v Speaker 2>as your clubs, Michael, James, Thomas, Michael. We were like
<v Speaker 2>circling in.
<v Speaker 1>Those are out those are also names, it turns out,
<v Speaker 1>but Outer worlds too, Marcus. I'm sorry to sidetrack you there,
<v Speaker 1>no no, no, no, but yeah, like kind of the the
<v Speaker 1>point of that setup was just like they are studio
<v Speaker 1>that very much kind of where's it's it's RPG history
<v Speaker 1>and like love of RPGs on its sleeve. And that's
<v Speaker 1>kind of one of the main sort of like mantras
<v Speaker 1>with the Outer worlds too, because I really liked the
<v Speaker 1>Outer Worlds, you know, Washington, twenty nineteen. What I appreciated
<v Speaker 1>about it was that it was a very kind of
<v Speaker 1>like succinct take on like a big open world, but
<v Speaker 1>as the RP, particularly fall Out, like you know, it's
<v Speaker 1>like a lot more focused that it's like half the length,
<v Speaker 1>but it still had like like the trappings of like
<v Speaker 1>us Fallout and maybe a little bit fall in New
<v Speaker 1>Vegas was just like, Oh, you got our your companions
<v Speaker 1>that all have these distinct personalities, and they got like
<v Speaker 1>their little loyalty missions, and you've got these wacky weapons.
<v Speaker 1>You've got like the Vat's equivalent with like the time
<v Speaker 1>slowing down the canic. I think it's called like time
<v Speaker 1>dilation in the outer worlds. It's like, okay, like all
<v Speaker 1>the like kind of the parts of what I like
<v Speaker 1>about Fallout or here just in a smaller package. And
<v Speaker 1>I enjoyed the game. But you know, even they admitted like, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>we knew even before the game came out that you know,
<v Speaker 1>there we where we could expand on this, and you know,
<v Speaker 1>we took in a bunch of feedback of people that
<v Speaker 1>you know, enjoyed the game but also felt it lacked
<v Speaker 1>a kind of like RPG complexity of some of their
<v Speaker 1>previous releases. So that was their kind of one of
<v Speaker 1>their main pillars was like all right, let's let's really
<v Speaker 1>dig into like making this a deeper and more reactive
<v Speaker 1>RPG experience. So Wesley and I got to play the
<v Speaker 1>first probably like three or four hours of the game.
<v Speaker 1>There's one big section we cannot talk about, Like we
<v Speaker 1>played the opening prologue, which they are very tight lipped about.
<v Speaker 1>Like I can kind of like give like generalities, but
<v Speaker 1>like there's like a big story conceit that they have
<v Speaker 1>not talked about in any of the like preview coverage
<v Speaker 1>that pretty much sets up the adventure and like why
<v Speaker 1>you're doing what you're doing, Like all you know is
<v Speaker 1>that you play as an agent of the Earth Directorate,
<v Speaker 1>which is sort of like the governing body from Planet
<v Speaker 1>Earth that sort of monitors all of the activity in
<v Speaker 1>the like the different Earth colonies across space. And you
<v Speaker 1>are sent to a brand new colony called Arcadia, leaving
<v Speaker 1>Halseion behind from the first game because they have kind
<v Speaker 1>of for a long time been is or like isolated
<v Speaker 1>them from the rest of sort of like colonized space
<v Speaker 1>because for one, it's governed by a basically like an
<v Speaker 1>authoritarian regime called the Protectorate, whose founder was the person
<v Speaker 1>that invented skip give drive technology, which is basically what
<v Speaker 1>allows ships to travel at the speed of light like
<v Speaker 1>FTL travel. So because of that, they are extremely rich.
<v Speaker 1>And then also Arcadia is just this very resource our
<v Speaker 1>resource rich colony. And but there's been this emergence of
<v Speaker 1>riffs around their colony. It kind of like like tears
<v Speaker 1>into like the fabric of time and space that have
<v Speaker 1>just appeared around the colony, and it has disrupted trade
<v Speaker 1>routes between Arcadia and the rest of space. However, to
<v Speaker 1>Protectorate is kind of okay with this, like they kind
<v Speaker 1>of want to use it for their own gain, and
<v Speaker 1>so you are sent there to kind of figure out like, Okay,
<v Speaker 1>what is going on here. We need to you know,
<v Speaker 1>maybe get these trade routes back in and and and
<v Speaker 1>set things right. So you visit Arcadia. However, on top
<v Speaker 1>of the Protectorate, who has had like an iron grip
<v Speaker 1>on the Arcadia for a long time, their control has
<v Speaker 1>been challenged by the arrival of Auntie's Choice, which is
<v Speaker 1>the merger of the Spacious Choice and Anti Cleo's Stores
<v Speaker 1>from the first game. Like Auntie Cleo, who is kind
<v Speaker 1>of like the figurehead of her company, it's kind of
<v Speaker 1>implied that basically her company did a hostile takeover of
<v Speaker 1>Spacious Choice because she is like in charge of it
<v Speaker 1>and they are pretty much like like the first game
<v Speaker 1>was very much a giant sort of like humorous commentary
<v Speaker 1>on like late stage capitalism or maybe like late late
<v Speaker 1>late late late stageism.
<v Speaker 3>I was gonna say on that on that note, is
<v Speaker 3>Auntie Cleo of a real person? Yes, okay, I was
<v Speaker 3>gonna I assumed it was, like, I don't know why
<v Speaker 3>I assume this. I assumed it was like a Jemima
<v Speaker 3>type thing. Well just that it's like people think it's
<v Speaker 3>a real person, but it's actually just like an idea
<v Speaker 3>of person that.
<v Speaker 1>They made up. But yeah, like a brawny man situation.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah clean.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, no, no, Auntie Cleo Israel looks this is look
<v Speaker 1>what she looks like here on the game and former cover.
<v Speaker 3>She know you keep showing me an illustrated picture of
<v Speaker 3>this person?
<v Speaker 1>Is show you a photograph like a real.
<v Speaker 2>We tried to get podcast Charles, but she wasn't available.
<v Speaker 2>We went over that you can keep going.
<v Speaker 1>But yes, and uh, well she's like a central character
<v Speaker 1>in the game, like you actually encounter her pretty early on.
<v Speaker 1>I don't like I don't think she's like the main villain.
<v Speaker 1>I think it sort of depends on who you decide
<v Speaker 1>to work with out of the the three factions in
<v Speaker 1>this game. So, like I said, there's a Auntie's Choice
<v Speaker 1>rolling into Arcadia wanting to take it from their own,
<v Speaker 1>like in their minds, they're liberating quote unquote the populace
<v Speaker 1>that has kind of been living under this very brutal
<v Speaker 1>authoritarian regime from the Protectorate. But also there they're just
<v Speaker 1>they're at the setup shop and just to make a profit,
<v Speaker 1>so they're not depending on your perspective, they're not much
<v Speaker 1>better than them. It's just sort of like a different
<v Speaker 1>kind of bad. And then there's also the third faction,
<v Speaker 1>which is the Order of the Ascendant, which is a
<v Speaker 1>kind of like a religious based like like a a
<v Speaker 1>science based religion that's kind of a spin off of
<v Speaker 1>the God. I forgot the name of the Order from
<v Speaker 1>the first game, but it's like a similar thing of
<v Speaker 1>like it's like these rogue scientists that have kind of
<v Speaker 1>formed almost this like religious belief around this prophesized equation
<v Speaker 1>called like the universal equation, where they believe that they
<v Speaker 1>solve it, they will unlock this predictive formula that will
<v Speaker 1>basically allow them to predict the future and alter future events,
<v Speaker 1>and so they want to get a hold of that
<v Speaker 1>so that they can kind of steer humanity towards what
<v Speaker 1>they believe will be like a higher plane of being
<v Speaker 1>that will benefit humanity in their eyes. So they and
<v Speaker 1>they actually used to work with the Protectorate, but then
<v Speaker 1>they split off and now they're at war because they're
<v Speaker 1>you know, like they believe in sort of like intellectual freedom,
<v Speaker 1>which pretty much runs counter to what the Protectorate believes in,
<v Speaker 1>which is like, you guys are just collecting the machine.
<v Speaker 1>We run the show. There's no there's no nuance about like.
<v Speaker 2>There's no conversation here.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, like talking up Citian about it. They use
<v Speaker 1>North Korea as a inspiration point for the protector an
<v Speaker 1>idea of the Yeah, always a good sign of course,
<v Speaker 1>and yeah, like I what's exciting about the sequel is
<v Speaker 1>how much Fallout New Vegas specifically is an inspiration. Like
<v Speaker 1>talking to Brandon Abler, who is the game director for
<v Speaker 1>The Outerwards Too, he talked about how he was pushing
<v Speaker 1>very hard for factions to be sort of the one
<v Speaker 1>of the primary pillars in the sequel, because he's a
<v Speaker 1>huge Fallout New Vegas fan, Like, he was not working
<v Speaker 1>at Obsidian at the time that Fallout New Vegas came out.
<v Speaker 1>He wasn't even he didn't even work on the first
<v Speaker 1>Outer worlds like this, this is first established interesting. Yeah, okay, cool,
<v Speaker 1>but yeah he's talking about you know, like one of
<v Speaker 1>the things I really loved about following New Vegas was
<v Speaker 1>just like how colorful and interesting each faction was and
<v Speaker 1>how it feels like, you know, the game can go
<v Speaker 1>in so many different ways depending on who you decide
<v Speaker 1>to align yourself with, but also it doesn't kind of
<v Speaker 1>cheapen that by making it to where you're like, oh,
<v Speaker 1>you can be everyone's friends and you can do everyone's
<v Speaker 1>quest line and it's okay, And they're like, no, no, no,
<v Speaker 1>if you choose one or two, you're gonna lock yourself
<v Speaker 1>out of all these other narrative threads. At some point
<v Speaker 1>you're gonna have to make like hard choices about who
<v Speaker 1>you're gonna roll with. And that is true in this game.
<v Speaker 1>Like you know, in the beginning, you can kind of
<v Speaker 1>test the waters and work with all three factions depending
<v Speaker 1>on what you believe in, and it's sort of like
<v Speaker 1>you can either help them as just sort of a
<v Speaker 1>means to an end maybe you do actually believe in
<v Speaker 1>what they're into, or you can try to like pit
<v Speaker 1>them against each other. And they even said that if
<v Speaker 1>your speech skills are up to snuff, you could even
<v Speaker 1>maybe try to get them to cooperate together, but apparently
<v Speaker 1>that's like very hard to do. So just there's so
<v Speaker 1>many different ways that the story itself can go to
<v Speaker 1>depending on how you interact with everyone in the game,
<v Speaker 1>And like said, they're like reactivity seems to be one
<v Speaker 1>of the big sort of like selling points with this game,
<v Speaker 1>like whether you're just in conversations with the characters and
<v Speaker 1>you've got the same like choice driven dialogue, but like
<v Speaker 1>everyone seems to remember the things that you do a
<v Speaker 1>lot more like the simple kind of like a simple
<v Speaker 1>example I had was we got to explore a new
<v Speaker 1>section of the game that we talked about in the
<v Speaker 1>cover story called Paradise Island, which is sort of the
<v Speaker 1>first real zone after the prologue. It's pretty much the
<v Speaker 1>equivalent of the Emerald Veil, which is was like the
<v Speaker 1>first real section in the first Outer World's game. This
<v Speaker 1>is where you're gonna like really encounter all three factions
<v Speaker 1>for the first time. And there was a mission that
<v Speaker 1>Wesley and I did where we had to like basically
<v Speaker 1>access this vox like a vox relay, which was this
<v Speaker 1>big satellite on the island, And there's like a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of different ways that you can go about this, but
<v Speaker 1>sort of the centerpiece of that choice or decision making
<v Speaker 1>was this bridge that was guarded by the Protectorate and
<v Speaker 1>it's the only way to get to the vox relay.
<v Speaker 1>And Wesley and I, when we started playing together, we
<v Speaker 1>made a vow to like play completely different characters just
<v Speaker 1>so we can see in different ways that things can unfold.
<v Speaker 1>So I played a because the See the Outer World's
<v Speaker 1>two style is the same sort of like character building
<v Speaker 1>of like you pick a sort of background for your character,
<v Speaker 1>like kind of like setting up their origin story. Like
<v Speaker 1>I chose a scientist who had been fired because in
<v Speaker 1>his mind he was too good at his job and
<v Speaker 1>everyone got jealous and we got rid of him. And
<v Speaker 1>then I generally was playing like a respectable, like a
<v Speaker 1>good person, pretty affable, and was big on stealth, which
<v Speaker 1>was another big thing with the sequel was that allowed
<v Speaker 1>for more stealth options in the level design, like there's
<v Speaker 1>a lot more opportunity to kind of sneak around and
<v Speaker 1>access different areas without having to engage people, whereas Wesley
<v Speaker 1>with the hard opposite, he basically chose like a douchebag,
<v Speaker 1>arrogant like idiot because he can still be a you
<v Speaker 1>can still be a dumb character in this game, which
<v Speaker 1>is one of the kind of the fun character traits
<v Speaker 1>in the first game, Like you could just pick an
<v Speaker 1>idiot and he would get all these like really funny
<v Speaker 1>dialogue responses that just highlight how stupid you are. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>and also he just was like he would just like
<v Speaker 1>murder everybody, like She's violence was like his first answer
<v Speaker 1>to everything. And you kind of meet two different characters
<v Speaker 1>that both work for Auntie's choice, and they're like, hey,
<v Speaker 1>it'd be great if you, you know, help me out
<v Speaker 1>with this favor. But if you help one of us,
<v Speaker 1>you can't help the other one because we have two
<v Speaker 1>vastly different ideas for how you want to tackle his thing.
<v Speaker 1>So I chose to help one guy. Wesley chose to
<v Speaker 1>help this woman who was kind of like like he was.
<v Speaker 1>She was kind of like, hey, let's just brute force
<v Speaker 1>a way across this bridge, because I worked for like
<v Speaker 1>kind of the military, whereas the guy I had was
<v Speaker 1>sort of like the sniveling like mayor of this town,
<v Speaker 1>and he was a lot more about subterfuge and stuff like, hey,
<v Speaker 1>you know we can we can slide in there. No
<v Speaker 1>one needs to note that we're doing this. So I
<v Speaker 1>wound up complimenting both of our place those but I
<v Speaker 1>like the myriad of ways you can get through this
<v Speaker 1>was really impressive and sort of like hopefully indicative of
<v Speaker 1>how the rest of the game is supposed to take shape,
<v Speaker 1>because I went up to that bridge and immediately you
<v Speaker 1>can kind of see the different ways. Like I talked
<v Speaker 1>to a guard who sort of said, no, you can't
<v Speaker 1>come through. However, maybe we can help each other out
<v Speaker 1>because I'm looking for these traders at escape and maybe
<v Speaker 1>if you bring to me, I can let you pass.
<v Speaker 1>And I thought about it, but I since I was
<v Speaker 1>role playing a good person, I was like, well, I
<v Speaker 1>don't know if these people are deserving of this, so
<v Speaker 1>I'm just gonna say I'm gonna shelve that for now
<v Speaker 1>and see if there's another way in. And then I
<v Speaker 1>wound up just exploring around the perimeter because this song
<v Speaker 1>this big cliff in this ravine and found like a
<v Speaker 1>hole that just led inside. So I just kind of
<v Speaker 1>snuck in and then but then very quickly was alerted.
<v Speaker 1>And also everyone here was a bit above my pay
<v Speaker 1>grade in terms of level, so I kind of just
<v Speaker 1>like very quickly got into a shootout where I just
<v Speaker 1>kind of sprinted to a room that had a button
<v Speaker 1>that lowered the bridge and then just sort of like
<v Speaker 1>ran across a bit like a hail of gunfire. It
<v Speaker 1>was not elegant, but it worked. But then talking to Wesley,
<v Speaker 1>he was like, yeah, I in my little mission, I
<v Speaker 1>found like rocket boots somehow, and I just like flew
<v Speaker 1>over the wall and no one saw me. Like he
<v Speaker 1>just bypassed everything because he found these rocket boots. And yeah,
<v Speaker 1>and then even talking to a developer, they were saying like, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>there's like at least five or six other ways that
<v Speaker 1>are like fully supported that you could have gotten by that,
<v Speaker 1>and that's not accounting for any like you know, if
<v Speaker 1>you just make up your own solution, like just some
<v Speaker 1>like like some workshop uh sort of like solutions to
<v Speaker 1>this problem. So yeah, like it's a it's like a
<v Speaker 1>small example of sort of the the abundance of options
<v Speaker 1>at the game is trying to present. But yeah, it's
<v Speaker 1>the gun plays better, which is probably one of the
<v Speaker 1>most satisfying things for me. Like it's a lot closer
<v Speaker 1>to something like a destiny in terms of just like
<v Speaker 1>how much it better it sho that's high praise.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, I mean yeah, I remember the first game
<v Speaker 2>the gunplay was like south of Fine, you know, right,
<v Speaker 2>it was just like it was alright, you know, like
<v Speaker 2>that's good.
<v Speaker 1>Like Fallout honestly, yeah, yeah, yeah, Like I think Fallout
<v Speaker 1>and the first Outer Worlds were kind of kind of
<v Speaker 1>like bolstered by the time slowing ability that made the
<v Speaker 1>gun play a lot more tolerable absolutely, whereas now it's like,
<v Speaker 1>oh I can just I'm actually having more fun just
<v Speaker 1>like popping off headshots and not even having them feel
<v Speaker 1>like I have to use the time distillation or whatever
<v Speaker 1>as a crutch. You can like mantle and slide now,
<v Speaker 1>So it's a little bit of a I mean, I
<v Speaker 1>don't I don't think this is maybe a direct inspiration,
<v Speaker 1>but it just reminded me of a vow because of
<v Speaker 1>like how much the traversal feels good in that game.
<v Speaker 1>It seems like that carries over to this game, like, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>you can mantle up things, and there's a little bit
<v Speaker 1>more verticality and the level design because of it, you
<v Speaker 1>can just run and slide and like knock people over
<v Speaker 1>if you have a certain trait. So it just feels
<v Speaker 1>a lot better to just get into fights with people
<v Speaker 1>and because and especially for like escaping too. It's it's
<v Speaker 1>it's a beautiful game. It looks nice. Yeah, like the
<v Speaker 1>art direction, like we we had a pretty nice chat
<v Speaker 1>with the art director there about sort of like the
<v Speaker 1>art nouveau style of the game. Like I said, we
<v Speaker 1>only got to see the prologue section and then Paradise Island,
<v Speaker 1>which is this tropical island, but it again had the
<v Speaker 1>kind of like fun reveal of just like Okay, you've
<v Speaker 1>been in space mostly for this prologue. Now you're on
<v Speaker 1>an actual planet, and look at all this exotic fauna
<v Speaker 1>in front of you. There's like these big pink like
<v Speaker 1>they look like giant flowers basically, but there are ostensibly trees,
<v Speaker 1>Like here's this like rolling ocean next to you, and
<v Speaker 1>then like this cool looking art nouveau city off into
<v Speaker 1>the distance, like it looks really nice, which is you know,
<v Speaker 1>like a big plus and yeah it's some again as
<v Speaker 1>a fan of the first game, it's it seems like
<v Speaker 1>so far it's doing what you would want from like
<v Speaker 1>a perfect sequel of like taking the things I liked
<v Speaker 1>about the original and just dialing it up a little
<v Speaker 1>bit more, while also like addressing some of the pain
<v Speaker 1>points like the lack of stealth options or like good
<v Speaker 1>stealth options in the first game, like now there are
<v Speaker 1>like it feels like stealth is a more supportive play style,
<v Speaker 1>and then doubling down on like the character building with
<v Speaker 1>like more of the the Perkson flaw system, which was
<v Speaker 1>one of the cool things about the first game, but
<v Speaker 1>also reworking it to make accepting flaws more of an
<v Speaker 1>interesting choice because if you didn't. The first game, the
<v Speaker 1>person flaw system was basically whenever you did a behavior,
<v Speaker 1>if you behave a certain way repeatedly, you would get
<v Speaker 1>a flaw associated with it, and it was sort of
<v Speaker 1>meant to add like you would take on a drawback,
<v Speaker 1>but you would be rewarded a perk point for it.
<v Speaker 1>So it's like, hey, you know, maybe you'll character will
<v Speaker 1>perform a little worse, but you can improve your other
<v Speaker 1>traits faster, and I thought that was fine, but being
<v Speaker 1>rewarded perk points felt kind of like after a while,
<v Speaker 1>it felt kind of like easy to ignore, Like there's
<v Speaker 1>other way.
<v Speaker 2>There were other ways to get perk points, right, so
<v Speaker 2>it's like, yeah, just naturally they just turn those away.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>I remember not really engaging with that part of the
<v Speaker 2>game too much because it's like there's not really a
<v Speaker 2>big upside here, you know, to what what what ultimately
<v Speaker 2>makes the game easier. Like I remember that one of
<v Speaker 2>the flaws when they were sharing this the updated system,
<v Speaker 2>where they have like you're better at stealth when you're crouched,
<v Speaker 2>but like if you stand up, your knees make a
<v Speaker 2>loud noise and get everyone's attention. Like stuff like that
<v Speaker 2>is like funky and weird and would make the game
<v Speaker 2>more interesting, you know. But it's like I was like,
<v Speaker 2>I don't you know, So I'm glad that they're sort
<v Speaker 2>of reapproaching that and reevaluating it.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, now the flaws instead of a perk point, they
<v Speaker 1>all have an inherent bonus built into it, so it's like, oh, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>maybe your knees crunched, but also here's like a positive
<v Speaker 1>trait instead of just a perk point. They didn't get
<v Speaker 1>into the specifics for some of the like positive traits.
<v Speaker 1>They were just kind of being a little bit vague
<v Speaker 1>of like like there was one one of the new
<v Speaker 1>flaws is just called flawed, like the flawed flaw, and
<v Speaker 1>it only activates when you've taken on two or three
<v Speaker 1>more flaws, and it basically makes it so like you
<v Speaker 1>have to automatically take any other flaw that might arise
<v Speaker 1>throughout the game. But you know, he didn't want to
<v Speaker 1>say what you would get, but he's like, you, if
<v Speaker 1>you do that, it comes with a pretty significant like
<v Speaker 1>positive bonus to taking on all of these flaws, which
<v Speaker 1>I'm curious about.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, Well there's the other one where it's like you
<v Speaker 2>you might just randomly steal stuff just by looking at.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, like if you're someone that likes to steal a lot,
<v Speaker 1>then you'll get the cleptomania flaw. And it basically like
<v Speaker 1>occasionally when you just look at something, you'll just automatically
<v Speaker 1>take it. That's very funny. Yeah, I like that.
<v Speaker 3>Did you get any flaws when you were playing Marcus?
<v Speaker 1>No, just because we weren't playing long enough for that
<v Speaker 1>to for that system to kind of kick in. So yeah,
<v Speaker 1>they just told us some of the ones that you know,
<v Speaker 1>we're in the game, but they say they're all goofy
<v Speaker 1>and fun. And they were talking about because I asked them,
<v Speaker 1>is there such a thing as a flawed that's too stupid?
<v Speaker 1>And they said no, because they're It was like, is
<v Speaker 1>there like like a is there such a thing as
<v Speaker 1>too silly? But they're you know, they said, like, well,
<v Speaker 1>what's fun about the flaws is one, they're kind of
<v Speaker 1>almost like they're optional, so that means they can they
<v Speaker 1>have a license to be as stupid and and ridiculous
<v Speaker 1>as they as they want them to be. But also
<v Speaker 1>they're oftentimes designed to spice up like subsequent playthroughs of like, oh,
<v Speaker 1>you beat the game once on maybe like a normal
<v Speaker 1>amount of flaws, and you want to play it again,
<v Speaker 1>but you want to spice it up, so like, maybe
<v Speaker 1>I'll take on this really weird flawed that's just kind
<v Speaker 1>of fundamentally change the way I engage with this game.
<v Speaker 1>So yeah, I like that idea. Like I said, I didn't.
<v Speaker 1>I like I had some flaws to a point, but
<v Speaker 1>I definitely didn't take on nearly as many as I
<v Speaker 1>as they probably wished I would, because they was pretty
<v Speaker 1>easy to turn down. But adding bonuses built into the
<v Speaker 1>flaw itself definitely would make me consider it more. So
<v Speaker 1>I'm curious see what those bonuses actually are.
<v Speaker 3>It's hard to commit to something like that. I found
<v Speaker 3>when I was playing the game, like, it's really fun
<v Speaker 3>in theory, but to be I think there was one
<v Speaker 3>There was like a genre of flaw where it was
<v Speaker 3>like like if you got hit by insects a lot,
<v Speaker 3>like big insect enemies, you'd get like ettomophobia or whatever,
<v Speaker 3>where you have like a fear of insects and like
<v Speaker 3>they do more damage, but you get a per point,
<v Speaker 3>And it was like, well, why would I. I'm already
<v Speaker 3>I'm doing so bad. You pointed it out to me.
<v Speaker 3>Why would I take more gaming from them forever for
<v Speaker 3>a perk point? I almost think it would almost fit
<v Speaker 3>better for like a roguelike situation where it's like you
<v Speaker 3>can try stuff out and see if you like the
<v Speaker 3>benefits without having to be like, there's thirty more hours
<v Speaker 3>of this game and my knees are gonna pop every
<v Speaker 3>time I stand up. But I still think I like
<v Speaker 3>that they're more distinct now I'm curious to see how
<v Speaker 3>it feels, and as the as someone who's more into
<v Speaker 3>TV RPGs lately, where it's like failure is kind of
<v Speaker 3>more inherent to it. I'm playing more role playing games
<v Speaker 3>with like the the fun idea of like I am
<v Speaker 3>just gonna be flawed and like try to fail more
<v Speaker 3>often at stuff.
<v Speaker 1>So I'm interested in this, Yeah, and like sort of
<v Speaker 1>off of that point of failure, like I like that
<v Speaker 1>they and they were saying they're doubling down and sort
<v Speaker 1>of the you will not see everything in this game
<v Speaker 1>on the first place. They're like, this is not a
<v Speaker 1>game where you can kind of like mind max it.
<v Speaker 1>So again, you are not going to be friends with
<v Speaker 1>every one, like you're gonna have to. There's going to
<v Speaker 1>be a point where you're gonna have to choose which
<v Speaker 1>faction you're gonna roll with or none of them. Like
<v Speaker 1>you can play through this game without sort of like
<v Speaker 1>getting close to any of the factions, like they were saying,
<v Speaker 1>the main storyline is faction agnostic, so it's like if
<v Speaker 1>you feel like you don't need them, or if you
<v Speaker 1>want to role play like more of a lone wolf character,
<v Speaker 1>like there is a like there was a narrative thread
<v Speaker 1>that sort of you know accommodates that, which is exciting,
<v Speaker 1>but yeah, they're like, you know, we want this, like
<v Speaker 1>kind of part of feeling like a true role playing
<v Speaker 1>experience is sort of knowing that you are giving up
<v Speaker 1>an entire like questline or you know, thread because of
<v Speaker 1>this choice that you made, and that in turn makes
<v Speaker 1>your choices feel like they matter. Right. So, like I said,
<v Speaker 1>like that was the thing that Fall in New Vegas
<v Speaker 1>did really well, So I'm excited to hear that they're
<v Speaker 1>like really tapping into that with this game. And then
<v Speaker 1>kind of the last big thing was like, you know,
<v Speaker 1>you got the Companions, So you got six new companions
<v Speaker 1>in this game. I only got to see three of them. Like, uh,
<v Speaker 1>like if you remember the companion trailer, like with the
<v Speaker 1>ones you get immediately are like Niles, who's sort of
<v Speaker 1>the like he's like another Earth Protector and agent, and
<v Speaker 1>then the the robot Valerie, who kind of like this
<v Speaker 1>drone that floats around. And the companions now also have
<v Speaker 1>like their own specialities that are sort of based on
<v Speaker 1>their backstories and personalities, where Niles is a mechanic, so
<v Speaker 1>his sort of like special skill is that he's basically
<v Speaker 1>a work bench with legs, so if you can craft
<v Speaker 1>weapons and AMMO by talking to him instead of having
<v Speaker 1>to find a work bench, which is really really useful.
<v Speaker 1>And then Valerie she's pretty much a just a mobile healer,
<v Speaker 1>so she'll just like during firefights, will just be throwing
<v Speaker 1>health packs at you and stuff. The only other character
<v Speaker 1>I got during my time was Inez, who was She's
<v Speaker 1>kind of like a I think, like a battle like
<v Speaker 1>kind of like a battle cleric, like like she's a
<v Speaker 1>she's granting combat, but she can also help with healing.
<v Speaker 1>But she has this like her character has like this
<v Speaker 1>grafted almost like weird chicken arm on her back that
<v Speaker 1>is sort of part of her, Like her whole character
<v Speaker 1>arc is that she, like in that universe, I guess,
<v Speaker 1>grafted soldiers are kind of looked down upon, and she's
<v Speaker 1>kind of trying to prove like no, no, no, we we
<v Speaker 1>can be valuable too. And you can upgrade her by
<v Speaker 1>swapping out her initial grafted arm with the grafted arms
<v Speaker 1>of other creatures, and each of them will give her
<v Speaker 1>like an added different power. All Right, Uh, it's weird, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it is weird, But they're saying like yeah, your companions
<v Speaker 1>are apparently more reactive in this game, not only just
<v Speaker 1>with you, but also with each other because they each
<v Speaker 1>come from like a different faction. So if you take
<v Speaker 1>someone like you have a a companion named Tristan who
<v Speaker 1>is from the Protectorate and it was like a higher
<v Speaker 1>ranking kind of like judge dread like guy in that group,
<v Speaker 1>And if you have him in your part with someone
<v Speaker 1>from Auntie's Choice, you know, their factions are openly at
<v Speaker 1>word with each other. So initially they might not get
<v Speaker 1>along and will be bickering constantly as you're going around,
<v Speaker 1>you know, doing stuff. But they were saying, like, you know,
<v Speaker 1>maybe your companions might do Maybe they'll do things that
<v Speaker 1>might make the companion that they weren't getting along with
<v Speaker 1>like them more. So it seems like they react to
<v Speaker 1>each other almost as much as they react to your choices.
<v Speaker 1>But you know, like kind of built on the first game,
<v Speaker 1>Like you know, if you piss them off too much,
<v Speaker 1>they might attack you or leave the group. You can
<v Speaker 1>kick them out anytime. You can even do things like
<v Speaker 1>sacrifice them if you want to to try to solve
<v Speaker 1>a problem, Like if you have a companion that you
<v Speaker 1>don't really vibe with you can like sell them out
<v Speaker 1>to an opposing faction and then they'll leave their party forever,
<v Speaker 1>or they just or but it also might make the
<v Speaker 1>rest of the party mad at you for doing that,
<v Speaker 1>depending on who they are, if they like that person too. So,
<v Speaker 1>like I said, it seems like a deeper interactions you
<v Speaker 1>can have with the with your partners in this game. So, like,
<v Speaker 1>I love the companions in the first game, especially, like
<v Speaker 1>I mean, Parvati was kind of the companion that stole
<v Speaker 1>the show, was voicing her. Yeah, she's the first one
<v Speaker 1>you get in the Outer.
<v Speaker 2>Worlds, the Secret the trick, the trick to companion, your
<v Speaker 2>favorite is probably gonna be the first one because you
<v Speaker 2>spend the most time with them, you know. It's kind
<v Speaker 2>of like the secret weapon, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. I did spend the time with Niles to to know, like,
<v Speaker 1>oh I love this guy, like he seems fine, like
<v Speaker 1>he seems cool, but like, yeah, like I feel like
<v Speaker 1>especially because I replayed a good bit of the first
<v Speaker 1>Outer Worlds before this cover trip, So getting to hang
<v Speaker 1>out with Parvati again was very nice because I remember
<v Speaker 1>I was like, oh I love her. Yeah. Then again
<v Speaker 1>immediately you're just like the moment you get here, you're like,
<v Speaker 1>she seems cool. I don't want anything bad to happen. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>she's She's kind of my benchmark for like, not only
<v Speaker 1>campanions in this game, but like most other companions in
<v Speaker 1>other games. Yeah, so I don't I don't don't know
<v Speaker 1>if Niles. Niles didn't have that immediate impact on me,
<v Speaker 1>but he also goes through a much different arc that
<v Speaker 1>again I can't quite talk about because it's all related
<v Speaker 1>to the prologue. Yeah, but yeah, like I said, the
<v Speaker 1>game comes out god October twenty twenty ninth. Yeah, it
<v Speaker 1>was just like twenty ninth. Yeah, it was six or nine,
<v Speaker 1>depending on which one. Yeah, what direction you decide to
<v Speaker 1>flip it in, But overall, I walked away positive from
<v Speaker 1>my time playing it and speaking to the devs. You
<v Speaker 1>can read the full cover story right now, actually, if
<v Speaker 1>you're a digital subscriber, it's up online and the print
<v Speaker 1>issue should be going out starting in early October. But
<v Speaker 1>I'm looking forward to it. Like I said, I was
<v Speaker 1>a fan of the first game. Everything I've seen and
<v Speaker 1>played at the second game has me optimistic that they've
<v Speaker 1>will stick the landing with it, and if they do,
<v Speaker 1>that'll be quite a hat trick for them, because this
<v Speaker 1>is their third release this year.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, about and Grounded two Out World's too for
<v Speaker 2>those who just for anyone who wasn't sure what their
<v Speaker 2>other two games were this year so far, it's crazy.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, but yeah, check out our cover story right now
<v Speaker 1>for the out Worlds too. We'll have some other online
<v Speaker 1>content going out over the month, some other written features
<v Speaker 1>and videos up on the Gameformer dot com.
<v Speaker 2>And you might have asked them a lot of questions
<v Speaker 2>in rapid succession.
<v Speaker 1>Who's who's to say we might have Yes, we have
<v Speaker 1>another rapid fire.
<v Speaker 2>That you're just just coming out right and saying it,
<v Speaker 2>you know, Yeah, I'm.
<v Speaker 1>Like Kyle's subtlety there.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah that's good.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, but uh yeah. Moving on from the Outer Worlds too,
<v Speaker 1>we're going back to to Yota. Is it you'll taste?
<v Speaker 1>Is you'll take a place yo Taste the Mountain?
<v Speaker 2>Yes, Okay, it takes place in Zo which has Jota Mountain,
<v Speaker 2>and it's it's it's not gonna feel like going back
<v Speaker 2>for most listeners because I think even by the time
<v Speaker 2>this episode comes out, I think the game still will
<v Speaker 2>not have been out at this because I think it
<v Speaker 2>comes out October third.
<v Speaker 3>I think you're saying going back like we had the
<v Speaker 3>conversation last Yes, yeah, I know.
<v Speaker 1>Yes, but yes, Ghost of Charles, you have now started it.
<v Speaker 1>We're gonna get into a little bit of a a
<v Speaker 1>little bit of a deeper discussion about the opening hours.
<v Speaker 1>Spoiler free, I would imagine, right, or like, I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>if anything you can.
<v Speaker 3>I'll keep it spoiler free.
<v Speaker 2>I mean the game, the game first, the episode. When
<v Speaker 2>this comes out, I think the game will have just
<v Speaker 2>come out, you know what I mean, Like, so yeah,
<v Speaker 2>for sure spoiler you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I say this is someone that still has not
<v Speaker 1>at the time of record.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, I was like, at the very least the thing
<v Speaker 3>I will say that is not spoilery. But I I
<v Speaker 3>really like how this game opens up. I feel it
<v Speaker 3>starts very strongly and uh yeah, I'm like four hours in,
<v Speaker 3>maybe five hours in.
<v Speaker 1>And yeah.
<v Speaker 3>One of my things with games, I mean, especially when
<v Speaker 3>you play a lot of games, it's like you gotta
<v Speaker 3>gotta get to the meet on the bone. That's not
<v Speaker 3>a phrase, but get it should be interesting as quickly
<v Speaker 3>as possible. What I love about Ghosts Vote is like
<v Speaker 3>it starts off it's like, this is your main character,
<v Speaker 3>this is a bad guy. This is why you should
<v Speaker 3>hate the bad guy, and this is why this main
<v Speaker 3>character is cool as hell, And now you can play
<v Speaker 3>the game. Yeah, and it like it wastes absolutely no time.
<v Speaker 3>And then also it starts in such a way that
<v Speaker 3>you're playing as Atsu and she already has like a
<v Speaker 3>bit of a reputation, like right once you're playing the game,
<v Speaker 3>And that's something I really like that. It's not you're
<v Speaker 3>not trying to build yourself up over time. There's no
<v Speaker 3>they're not trying to ease you into it. They kind
<v Speaker 3>of drop you.
<v Speaker 5>In and.
<v Speaker 1>We a weird connection of I do.
<v Speaker 3>Improv is a thing I do outside of work, and
<v Speaker 3>one of the things they talk about in an improv
<v Speaker 3>scene is to establish your relationship with the other person
<v Speaker 3>on stage as quickly as possible. You're making up these characters,
<v Speaker 3>but they should probably know each other somehow, because that's
<v Speaker 3>going to inform a lot of the scene. And what's
<v Speaker 3>tough about a lot of like early stories, specifically in
<v Speaker 3>video game is you were like a new person in
<v Speaker 3>a new world, and you keep introducing yourself over and
<v Speaker 3>over again. It's like it's kind of boring. There's only
<v Speaker 3>so many introductory conversations you can have. And what's so
<v Speaker 3>cool about this is like everyone knows WHOTSU is, or
<v Speaker 3>at least who the own rio is, and she'll walk
<v Speaker 3>into a room and people are like, oh, it's her,
<v Speaker 3>oh oh.
<v Speaker 1>And they'll have pre existing opinions of her. So did
<v Speaker 1>I do the thing? We're like a like a gun
<v Speaker 1>slinger when they go through a town and like they're
<v Speaker 1>closing the they're closing the shops as you wants. Is exact?
<v Speaker 2>I mean, is kind of a Western at heart, you
<v Speaker 2>know in some ways.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, I kin a beat for beat that is like
<v Speaker 3>the first time you play, you walk through a town
<v Speaker 3>and that happens. Yeah, yeah, not even exaggerating. I couldn't
<v Speaker 3>have made market, I couldn't have set markers better up
<v Speaker 3>for that. That's exactly what happened. Yeah, and it's I
<v Speaker 3>think the other part is the gameplay wise, the way
<v Speaker 3>the open world is set up. So you start off
<v Speaker 3>and it's you've got the OT six and you are
<v Speaker 3>you have these targets, but they're like pretty off in
<v Speaker 3>the distance, and just when you start off, you're in
<v Speaker 3>this like southern area, you're like pretty close to Mount Yote,
<v Speaker 3>and you can just kind of explore this area and
<v Speaker 3>it does a really good job of like all of
<v Speaker 3>the first things you might just naturally encounter are like
<v Speaker 3>cool and or important game player story moments where it's
<v Speaker 3>like it's like positive reinforcement of like you want to increase,
<v Speaker 3>You want to explore this world, don't you if you
<v Speaker 3>go are here. Oh there's a health upgrade. Oh here's
<v Speaker 3>another steal point. Oh there's like a wandering merchant that
<v Speaker 3>you can have. I now you have this stuff, and
<v Speaker 3>oh you walked in this building.
<v Speaker 1>Now maybe you.
<v Speaker 3>Can buy a bow for yourself.
<v Speaker 2>And it's so good at getting you distracted, like in
<v Speaker 2>a positive way, like it really you take like two
<v Speaker 2>steps and you're like wait, what is that? And it's
<v Speaker 2>like it's just really good at pulling you in different
<v Speaker 2>directions in a way. That was like when I was
<v Speaker 2>reviewing it, it was almost hard because I was like, I
<v Speaker 2>gotta stick to the main story. I got to see
<v Speaker 2>this thing to the end. But I was like three
<v Speaker 2>hours later and I was like, oh, geez, I haven't
<v Speaker 2>done any mainline stuff. If I wasn't, even if it's
<v Speaker 2>totally by accident, you know.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, there there's I have yet to there's a few
<v Speaker 3>instances where you stop and I'm like, I don't even
<v Speaker 3>think it's like a side quest proper, but it'll just
<v Speaker 3>be like some Ronan, which is like a samurai without
<v Speaker 3>a master. Ronan are like harassing some people and you
<v Speaker 3>go up and talk to them, and it's just is
<v Speaker 3>like a little mini encounter and there's like full dialogue
<v Speaker 3>and it's interesting every time. It's not like repeated, but
<v Speaker 3>it's like they're harassing this kid for some reason, and
<v Speaker 3>then all, okay, that's like a merchant I can get now,
<v Speaker 3>or like I can offer to pay them to let
<v Speaker 3>this guy go, or I can kill them all, and
<v Speaker 3>I'm gonna kill them all. But it's just like a
<v Speaker 3>there's not like a I don't know, like a standard
<v Speaker 3>encounter of just like a bunch of people like hey,
<v Speaker 3>it's you, let's go mug mugatsu.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, there's Spider Man sort of lines that you can draw,
<v Speaker 2>but even Spider Man had like, oh there's a crime,
<v Speaker 2>let me go take care of this crime. Yeah, Yote
<v Speaker 2>like even keeps those crimes quote unquote right, it's different,
<v Speaker 2>but like those even all feel different and unique which
<v Speaker 2>is which is wild that they pulled that off.
<v Speaker 3>There's a part of Spider Man where it's like the
<v Speaker 3>crime like it's kind of a part of the Spider
<v Speaker 3>Man fantasy that he is the friendly neighborhood Spider Man
<v Speaker 3>and he just kind of routinely stops crimes. It's just
<v Speaker 3>kind of like a thing Spider Man does where it
<v Speaker 3>doesn't necessarily need to be interesting, And in this one,
<v Speaker 3>it's like, well, if you're like lots of killing people,
<v Speaker 3>so it's kind of a big deal every time she
<v Speaker 3>chooses to do it and every time someone messes with her,
<v Speaker 3>and it treats every like fight with that reverence. So
<v Speaker 3>she's like, if you want to fight me, I will
<v Speaker 3>kill you, and that's what's gonna happen, and it often does.
<v Speaker 1>Yah.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, I played. I played fifteen hours of Ghost of
<v Speaker 3>Sushima and honestly barely remember any of it. And I
<v Speaker 3>don't know, I don't know if that game is way
<v Speaker 3>better than I remembered or what it is.
<v Speaker 1>But I'm like.
<v Speaker 3>Really clicking with Ghost of Yote in a way that
<v Speaker 3>I was like, I was like not even I was like, Oh,
<v Speaker 3>it's cool that this game's coming out.
<v Speaker 1>It's cool.
<v Speaker 3>It's getting a sequel, and obviously I like erka Ishi.
<v Speaker 3>I talked about that a bunch of last episode. But
<v Speaker 3>outside of that, I was like, yeah, it's a game
<v Speaker 3>that's coming out and it's like quickly become a thing.
<v Speaker 3>I was like, ah, man, this is.
<v Speaker 1>Like good good, this is good good.
<v Speaker 6>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>I'm happy to hear that because I liked Sushima a lot.
<v Speaker 2>It was my game of the year that year, and
<v Speaker 2>like Yota, I like even more. And I was it
<v Speaker 2>is that question that you asked yourself. It's like do
<v Speaker 2>I just am I just like, was I already locked
<v Speaker 2>into this? Or is there a big improvements here? So
<v Speaker 2>it's cool to hear that, like this is clicking with
<v Speaker 2>you more because I think it. I think it is
<v Speaker 2>a better game overall. I do prefer it over Sushima
<v Speaker 2>for a number of reasons.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, there's also like no ui no, it's just a
<v Speaker 3>really cool choice of like if you're in combat, you'll
<v Speaker 3>see your health bar pop up and then enemies have
<v Speaker 3>like a stagger meter. But if you're on your horse
<v Speaker 3>riding around, the camera angle goes into the aspect ratio
<v Speaker 3>goes to like a wide screen view, and there's just
<v Speaker 3>there's no markers, there's no nothing cluttering up the screen,
<v Speaker 3>and just like unless you're pressing buttons are actively engaging
<v Speaker 3>with something like every moment looks like it's like a
<v Speaker 3>shot from a movie. Yeah, it's gorgeous.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, which is something the first game did very well too,
<v Speaker 1>of just sort of trying to like make it as
<v Speaker 1>immersive and just like just decluttered or screen as much
<v Speaker 1>as could, like you know, the win thing, it's like
<v Speaker 1>the thing everyone talks yet. Yeah, yeah, which is still
<v Speaker 1>that's awesome.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, and uh uh sorry, you can go have market.
<v Speaker 1>No.
<v Speaker 3>I was gonna say, in uh Ghost of Sushima, you
<v Speaker 3>have different sword.
<v Speaker 2>Stances, right, yeah you had? But were these stances or weapons?
<v Speaker 2>I actually don't remember.
<v Speaker 1>I thought there were stances because it was sort of
<v Speaker 1>like a rock paper scissor thing of like, oh, this
<v Speaker 1>guy's coming at me this way, so I should go
<v Speaker 1>I should use this stance because it's like good against
<v Speaker 1>the other stance, isn't I mean that?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, which is what I'm I think you're asking Charles,
<v Speaker 2>is like that that was in Sushima that you know
<v Speaker 2>there's a version of Yotay, But.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, in Yota it's different weapons, which is the thing
<v Speaker 3>they kind of like advertised, but I didn't. I didn't
<v Speaker 3>know what to what extent different weapons would be like
<v Speaker 3>a thing. But I think different weapons is a lot
<v Speaker 3>cooler in different stances. I like what they were going
<v Speaker 3>for with those of Ssushima, but this this like weapon Arsenal.
<v Speaker 3>It kind of reminds me of a Jedi survivor where
<v Speaker 3>you have like a bunch of different like lightsaber types,
<v Speaker 3>and you can have preferences, but there's also difference that
<v Speaker 3>are different stances that are better against certain weapon types
<v Speaker 3>and such. And I only have like two of them
<v Speaker 3>right now, but I know there's more out there in
<v Speaker 3>the game.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it takes in a way that I compliment the
<v Speaker 2>game on. It actually does take a while to get
<v Speaker 2>all of them. That's good because it's like it doesn't
<v Speaker 2>want to just throw everything at you at once, and
<v Speaker 2>it does make receiving them a big deal, you know.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, And you'll go in an area it's like, oh,
<v Speaker 3>this this this ancient master has been hiding on this
<v Speaker 3>island for a while ever since he mastered the weapon.
<v Speaker 3>I should go see him at some point, and it
<v Speaker 3>never like pushes you over there. But I do like
<v Speaker 3>that way that it's like the rewards for exploring are
<v Speaker 3>like significant.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I also like that.
<v Speaker 3>It's maybe it slows down later in the game. I
<v Speaker 3>don't know, but it seems like every time you do
<v Speaker 3>an alter of reflection where you get like a skill point,
<v Speaker 3>basically it's like a one to one, like you get
<v Speaker 3>it alter, then you get an ability like it's not
<v Speaker 3>and that I like. I I I'm always a little
<v Speaker 3>bit frustrated late game in open world games where it's like, oh,
<v Speaker 3>now I gotta start doing two or three in order
<v Speaker 3>to get something, and it just kind of like drags
<v Speaker 3>it out. And this is one where it's like, no,
<v Speaker 3>you want to do a new thing, you can get
<v Speaker 3>it right now.
<v Speaker 1>Ye all, it's all one to one.
<v Speaker 2>You never have to spend more than one experience point
<v Speaker 2>on an upgrade, and it's never like, well, actually, I
<v Speaker 2>take that back, it's not truly necessarily. I was gonna say,
<v Speaker 2>it's never like your sword does ten percent more damage.
<v Speaker 2>There's a couple things like that where it's like, you know,
<v Speaker 2>you might do more damage, but but I mean, for
<v Speaker 2>the most part, like every single upgrade is like it's
<v Speaker 2>significant and does sort of make you feel like you've
<v Speaker 2>changed your sort of you know, utility belt of things
<v Speaker 2>you can do, which is cool. Yeah, I man, I
<v Speaker 2>love that game so much. I'm still playing it. I've
<v Speaker 2>beat it, I basically done everything. At this point, I'm
<v Speaker 2>like kind of waiting for the game to come out,
<v Speaker 2>like a little behind the scenes, I guess, for like
<v Speaker 2>a pre release game. I can't see the trophies I
<v Speaker 2>have yet. Like when you're playing the game, it'll the
<v Speaker 2>trophy alert will pop on screen and I can see
<v Speaker 2>it then, but I can't go back and see my list.
<v Speaker 2>And this is definitely one of those games. Not that
<v Speaker 2>I'm like a big trophy achievement hunter guy necessarily, but
<v Speaker 2>if it's a game I love, I'm always looking for
<v Speaker 2>excuses to stay in the world. And Sushima is one
<v Speaker 2>that I did everything, I got the platinum for and
<v Speaker 2>I and I want to do that with Yota as well.
<v Speaker 2>And I think I would assume I'm pretty close, but
<v Speaker 2>I won't find out until launch day.
<v Speaker 1>That's interesting.
<v Speaker 3>I remember platinuming Spider Man two before it came out.
<v Speaker 2>You can, I mean, you can do it, but you
<v Speaker 2>just can't look at the list of trophies is all.
<v Speaker 1>Gotcha? Gotcha? Yeah, some games will even when it's pre released.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, it's funny sometime on Xbox sometimes what will
<v Speaker 2>happen is like you play a bunch of the game
<v Speaker 2>and then on launch day when you boot it up,
<v Speaker 2>you just get all achievements. So you'll just have like
<v Speaker 2>for five minutes, it'll be like ach achievement, achievement.
<v Speaker 1>It's not the best, like someone just dumping money over
<v Speaker 1>your head or something. I don't know.
<v Speaker 2>Next time, next time it's one of us runs into that,
<v Speaker 2>we should record it just so just to like share,
<v Speaker 2>like this is what it looks like when you play
<v Speaker 2>it early.
<v Speaker 1>Because it's it's always funny. That's got to be a
<v Speaker 1>YouTube video, right, yeah, just if you need a dopamine hit,
<v Speaker 1>just like a loop of achievements off in succession.
<v Speaker 3>I would love a game now. This is this is
<v Speaker 3>making come up with an a different indie game where
<v Speaker 3>the game you boot it up and it's the credits
<v Speaker 3>sequence and then you get like a billion achievements and
<v Speaker 3>the game is about the post game of the game.
<v Speaker 3>It's like a meta game.
<v Speaker 1>But it starts off and it's like.
<v Speaker 3>Congrats, you did all these things of the game.
<v Speaker 1>No, I don't know.
<v Speaker 2>There was like a farming sim recently that had that
<v Speaker 2>sort of structure, because the idea is like you had
<v Speaker 2>already done the crazy Adventure, the crazy RPG adventure where
<v Speaker 2>he went and killed God, and now you are just
<v Speaker 2>like a farm I remember what game that was.
<v Speaker 1>That's not sure. Actually that does sound bag with me.
<v Speaker 1>I don't. Yeah remember, okay, awesome. Yeah. At the time
<v Speaker 1>that we're recording this, I am gearing up to stream
<v Speaker 1>the beginning of that game tomorrow and our Twitch and
<v Speaker 1>YouTube channel me and Brian Shay will be playing through
<v Speaker 1>the opening of Ghost of Sushima, so a Ghost of
<v Speaker 1>yo Take excuse me, Ghost of Yote. So by the
<v Speaker 1>time you're listening to this, that should be in our
<v Speaker 1>archive up on YouTube and Twitch, so check it out.
<v Speaker 1>I'm excited to finally dig into that thing. It should
<v Speaker 1>be fun. But yes, another game, Charles, Can we can
<v Speaker 1>we actually do? Can we do the top tens thing?
<v Speaker 3>Now there's a little in between Charles talks about games.
<v Speaker 3>I'm very excited about it.
<v Speaker 1>I'm excited too. Okay, we I'll throw it to you, Charles.
<v Speaker 1>What is what is this?
<v Speaker 3>Okay, Well, if you listen to the show last week
<v Speaker 3>or you paid attention to the Game Former site. I
<v Speaker 3>reviewed Haities two and I gave it a ten out
<v Speaker 3>of ten. It's a big deal, very excited about it,
<v Speaker 3>and it's not something that happens for often a Game Informer.
<v Speaker 3>And one article that we don't have on the site
<v Speaker 3>that I'm hoping to write up this week and hopefully
<v Speaker 3>by the time listening to this it's up. It's just
<v Speaker 3>like all of the ten out of tens game Informer.
<v Speaker 3>And so I got Margaret, who's one of our big
<v Speaker 3>behind the scenes people. She got gave me this big spreadsheet,
<v Speaker 3>this excel file that has all of Game Informers old reviews,
<v Speaker 3>and just sorted out the tens. And I thought it'd
<v Speaker 3>be fun if we played a little trivia game here
<v Speaker 3>with Kyle and Marcus to figure out how much you
<v Speaker 3>guys know about Game Informers tens. In a new segment,
<v Speaker 3>I like to call gi auta know.
<v Speaker 5>G know.
<v Speaker 1>O, Man, you came prepared.
<v Speaker 3>I came prepared. So this is g I auDA know.
<v Speaker 3>That's the new theme song journal.
<v Speaker 1>Hold on, Charles, I forgot what it was called. Again,
<v Speaker 1>what is it calling? I think it was? Did you
<v Speaker 1>say it's the new jan I was like, I think
<v Speaker 1>it's also the first thing.
<v Speaker 3>All right, well, just getting started. My first question, how
<v Speaker 3>many ten out of tens has Game Informer awarded?
<v Speaker 1>All right?
<v Speaker 2>Do we buzz in on this or we kind of
<v Speaker 2>just both give guesses?
<v Speaker 1>I guess right?
<v Speaker 3>I think I think you guys can both give a
<v Speaker 3>guess and I'll award points for each person.
<v Speaker 1>Is there a prize for this? Are we we do?
<v Speaker 1>We do the adults gi contradition of betting a steak dinner.
<v Speaker 1>I think I'm ready.
<v Speaker 2>I think I'm ready with my guess.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, I'll let you go first.
<v Speaker 2>I'm going to say twenty five, which I was kind
<v Speaker 2>of going on, like not to give you too much
<v Speaker 2>insight here, Marcus, but I was like maybe about one
<v Speaker 2>a year, maybe, you know, like and then going down
<v Speaker 2>a little bit. It's kind of like my thought, So
<v Speaker 2>twenty five is my number?
<v Speaker 1>I think, hmm, so it's twenty five. But we've been
<v Speaker 1>around over thirty years. Yes, yeah, we definitely haven't done
<v Speaker 1>it every year, I know. So I guess that's a
<v Speaker 1>that's not that's a say I'm gonna say trying to
<v Speaker 1>think I feel like and I feel I say feel
<v Speaker 1>because I have no evidence for this I feel like
<v Speaker 1>tens are thrown around, probably a little more in the
<v Speaker 1>early days than they are, like in the nineties, than
<v Speaker 1>they were post two thousand. There were two this year.
<v Speaker 2>If you want to get technical, well, I guess actually
<v Speaker 2>that's not true.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, technically I'm gonna say, I'm gonna round up
<v Speaker 1>to say thirty rounding up. I heard it down, interesting.
<v Speaker 3>And you said twenty five copy five. Yeah, Marcus gets
<v Speaker 3>the point. It is thirty two.
<v Speaker 2>Oh wow. Okay, obviously more than I expected.
<v Speaker 3>More than I thought as well.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, all right, that's a question one.
<v Speaker 3>Only seven of those were in the last decade, Okay,
<v Speaker 3>so you're correct that it was a little a little
<v Speaker 3>more front loaded in terms of TENSA I.
<v Speaker 1>Just my mindset was, like I think they were still
<v Speaker 1>figuring it out, Like you know.
<v Speaker 2>Is this is there a factor here, Charles with this
<v Speaker 2>database of like there were there was a time when
<v Speaker 2>multiple reviewers reviewed the same game, but I don't think
<v Speaker 2>it was often that, like a game would get multiple tens,
<v Speaker 2>right two ten years.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, it's a good it's a good question that I
<v Speaker 3>I tried. I tried to do some due diligence, specifically
<v Speaker 3>with the first ten that was recorded. That's one of
<v Speaker 3>the questions on here. I was like, is this really
<v Speaker 3>the first one? And I like went through. Luckily we
<v Speaker 3>have the whole digital reaction to the way. Yeah, I
<v Speaker 3>just thought it. I know we're older than the year
<v Speaker 3>that this review was done. Anyways, Uh So I was
<v Speaker 3>going through and I was trying to verify it. It was
<v Speaker 3>like hard for me to find. But also the spreadsheets
<v Speaker 3>sometimes it it does delineate whether someone was a first
<v Speaker 3>opinion or a second opinion. But I think this is
<v Speaker 3>just the primary scores.
<v Speaker 1>Yes, all right, that was question one.
<v Speaker 3>Question two a little bit easier, each of us being Marcus, Kyle,
<v Speaker 3>and myself each given one ten out of ten.
<v Speaker 1>I believe.
<v Speaker 3>Kyle, which game did Marcus give a ten out of ten?
<v Speaker 1>And Marcus? Which game did Kyle give a ten out
<v Speaker 1>of ten?
<v Speaker 2>I actually do you know Kyle's Yeah, I know it's Astrobot.
<v Speaker 2>Marcus gave Astrobot at ten out of ten?
<v Speaker 1>Is that correct? Marcus? That was like, yes it is, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that was I mean, I only wrote that a few
<v Speaker 1>months ago. Just sense I have a harder one. You're lucky,
<v Speaker 1>I actually do know this. Oh god, Okay, if I'm
<v Speaker 1>not mistaken, Kyle, because I think you still get some
<v Speaker 1>flak for this. It was the Legend of Zelda Skywards Sword.
<v Speaker 2>Correct, hmmm, I'm afraid not not correct?
<v Speaker 1>No, it wasn't.
<v Speaker 2>Oh I did not review Skyward Sword.
<v Speaker 1>Oh I thought that was you.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, you got the series correct.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's not surprising. Oh, now I know it's too
<v Speaker 1>late now, Well what is it? Just just for the
<v Speaker 1>it was a breath of a while. Yeah, oh I
<v Speaker 1>thought that the Breath of the Wild. Yeah, oh, I
<v Speaker 1>thought you were. I was.
<v Speaker 2>I was a newbie when Skyward Sword came out. I
<v Speaker 2>had just started, so I wouldn't have been. I wouldn't
<v Speaker 2>have been cool enough to because I know I wouldn't
<v Speaker 2>have given Skyward I mean I like.
<v Speaker 1>I would say, I know we gave it a ten? God?
<v Speaker 1>Can I can I ask who was that it was?
<v Speaker 3>Let me see, I do have the uh.
<v Speaker 2>I do I do get a little bit of a
<v Speaker 2>I should get a little handicapped for g I I
<v Speaker 2>don't know just because of you know, since twenty eleven,
<v Speaker 2>I've been here longer.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, I don't know who this is. It's it says Phil, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>Phil color Phil Coler.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, okay, who went on to for a while.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, I saw a fun someone posts on it was
<v Speaker 3>like ar slash gaming. Maybe it was like a Reddit
<v Speaker 3>post recently where they in honor Haitesu coming out did
<v Speaker 3>come pile the most tens awarded by like the they
<v Speaker 3>they categorized like the big outlets being IGN, Game, Spot Game,
<v Speaker 3>Informer fam an Edge. I think they were saying, it's
<v Speaker 3>like the five things that were And Skyward Sword is
<v Speaker 3>one of those games that's gotten like a bunch of
<v Speaker 3>tens and was one in the replies where it's like
<v Speaker 3>it's so interesting because it's not. It's not received by
<v Speaker 3>the world as like one of the definite ten out
<v Speaker 3>of tens, but among the reviewers at the time it
<v Speaker 3>was like, yeah, we get it, we like it.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, I mean Zelda's Zelda's It's pretty easy to
<v Speaker 2>give a ten to Zelda because those games are so crucial.
<v Speaker 2>But I am I will forever be confident in my
<v Speaker 2>ten for Broth the Weld, just because it was such
<v Speaker 2>a departure that was so successful, you know what I mean.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, No, I can get by not controversial.
<v Speaker 2>That's why when yeah, Marcus, I think and you said,
<v Speaker 2>you still get flak for this. I was like, honestly,
<v Speaker 2>I don't really think I do for Breath the.
<v Speaker 1>Wild, don't think yeah, If yeah, I would have, I
<v Speaker 1>might have given it a ten too. I I adore
<v Speaker 1>a game of course.
<v Speaker 3>Question three. There has only been one issue of Game
<v Speaker 3>Informer with two ten out of ten scores in the
<v Speaker 3>same issue. It's issue one for it as Batman Begins
<v Speaker 3>on the cover, and it's from December two thousand and four.
<v Speaker 3>What are the two games that receive ten out of ten?
<v Speaker 1>Another game of ten?
<v Speaker 2>Batman begins a game that I'll defend. There's any would
<v Speaker 2>have given it a T if I reviewed it.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't say that. I said I would defend it.
<v Speaker 3>I pulled this issue up in the archive, so this
<v Speaker 3>would have been seeing the feature about Batman Begins, because
<v Speaker 3>it's about the game but also about the movie, and
<v Speaker 3>they have like the cast listing, and.
<v Speaker 1>I just thought this one here go. I looked that.
<v Speaker 2>I looked this up A twenty and fifty. God, I
<v Speaker 2>love that we have our website back you guys. Twenty
<v Speaker 2>and fifteen article that Kyle Hilliard wrote titled thirteen Ways
<v Speaker 2>two thousand and fives Batman Begins, Beat Arkham Knight to
<v Speaker 2>the punch.
<v Speaker 1>Oh my god, wow, insane. So this would have been
<v Speaker 1>I have I think I have my guess. Yeah, the
<v Speaker 1>year of this issue then four probably this is December
<v Speaker 1>two thousand and four, so my two tens. I'm guessing
<v Speaker 1>I have my guesses. I don't know how you want
<v Speaker 1>to do.
<v Speaker 3>Should we I'll get I'll let Marcus go first this time,
<v Speaker 3>because you went first.
<v Speaker 1>With the I'm still trying to think of it. I guess, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that's fine. I think I have one. Trying to think
<v Speaker 1>of what the other one could be. Two thousand and
<v Speaker 1>four tens. Okay, I think I I'm gonna say Halo
<v Speaker 1>two and god did this come out this late? Trying
<v Speaker 1>to think of an editorial cycle might have been different
<v Speaker 1>than too of like when would this have come out
<v Speaker 1>versus when it would have been printed in the magazine? Right? Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>But the only fact ten out of ten game I
<v Speaker 1>could think of would be Half Life two. I was like,
<v Speaker 1>was it that? Was it fall that they came out?
<v Speaker 1>I don't know the month that I was gonna say
<v Speaker 1>Halo two and Half Life two because this is the
<v Speaker 1>only like ten things I could pick up into four
<v Speaker 1>g I would yeah.
<v Speaker 2>I was gonna say Halo two and Meddle Yourselt three,
<v Speaker 2>those are gonna I.
<v Speaker 3>Guess that's a good guess, too great guesses. You're both
<v Speaker 3>correct on Halo two. But the second game was GTA
<v Speaker 3>San Andreas.
<v Speaker 2>Oh, of course I don't believe.
<v Speaker 3>Uh yeah, neither of those other games got it ten game.
<v Speaker 2>Half Life two, nor Metal Corseult three. I mean they
<v Speaker 2>scored well, I'm.
<v Speaker 1>Sure, but yeah, yeah, probably, but the base doesn't count
<v Speaker 1>because it's not a ten, So you might as well
<v Speaker 1>just delete those from history. Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>Question four. Our tents have come rather sporadically over the years.
<v Speaker 3>How long in months was the longest gap between ten
<v Speaker 3>out of ten scores and months?
<v Speaker 1>It's impossible. This is just gonna have to be guessed.
<v Speaker 3>No, you can start, you can start at years and
<v Speaker 3>then go to months. I don't know estimate, but it's
<v Speaker 3>kind of close, is why. I why it's at months?
<v Speaker 1>Okay, I'm trying to thinking, all right, and the time
<v Speaker 1>that I've been here, because I'm like, maybe this is
<v Speaker 1>during I think there's only been since I've been hired
<v Speaker 1>three tens, and there was a there was a gap
<v Speaker 1>between my ten and the ten that came before, but
<v Speaker 1>it wasn't the biggest. That's the question. You said, twenty
<v Speaker 1>seven months, Kyle, that's your guess. I'm going to say
<v Speaker 1>over two years. Oh man, that's a good number. I'm
<v Speaker 1>gonna say thirty months, thirty months, thirty months.
<v Speaker 3>That goes to Kyle Hey. So it's interesting. So it
<v Speaker 3>kind of depends on what you count as when the
<v Speaker 3>ten came out. I am assuming we're going by the
<v Speaker 3>time the review was published, because then the longest gap
<v Speaker 3>is from elden Ring to Astrobot.
<v Speaker 1>That's what I was thinking in my head. That's the
<v Speaker 1>one I had in mind because that's the only still
<v Speaker 1>only one I have any reference.
<v Speaker 3>For twenty five months that was from February.
<v Speaker 1>Of twenty two was alden Ring.
<v Speaker 3>Wait did I do my math wrong?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah? I was like the elder Ring, I know came
<v Speaker 1>out in twenty twenty two because that was our GODI
<v Speaker 1>that year.
<v Speaker 3>I did do the math wrong, so it would be
<v Speaker 3>closer to thirty so it would have been.
<v Speaker 1>I got the point, though, I'm tell you I'm not.
<v Speaker 1>I'm not giving it up.
<v Speaker 3>Thirty seven months then, because elder Ring was reviewed February
<v Speaker 3>twenty two, Astrobot was March of twenty five, right, so yeah,
<v Speaker 3>so thirty seven months.
<v Speaker 1>So Kyle give me my point back, Kyle, right, you
<v Speaker 1>can well.
<v Speaker 3>No, no, yeah, Marcus goods point yeah yeah, okay.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I'll take you My math was wrong.
<v Speaker 3>I was doing so much for it would have been
<v Speaker 3>uh closer because the game came out six months before
<v Speaker 3>it was published, so it would have been thirty months.
<v Speaker 1>So good job, Marcus, you did.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, so that point goes to Marcus. The other close
<v Speaker 3>ones were both twenty months. That's from Red Dead two
<v Speaker 3>to the Last of US two and that's the Last
<v Speaker 3>of US two to elden Ring. Okay, so very it's
<v Speaker 3>just all this recent stretch, we've been very sporadic, and
<v Speaker 3>this is the first time we've had.
<v Speaker 1>Okay.
<v Speaker 3>The first ten in Game Reformer did not actually receive
<v Speaker 3>a full page, appearing instead in the Classic GI issue
<v Speaker 3>of a section of issue RANG which was released in
<v Speaker 3>the year two thousand and.
<v Speaker 2>Also retro reviews for a period.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>For the record, me finding out that a magazine released
<v Speaker 3>in two thousand had retro reviews in it is so
<v Speaker 3>funny because that's the year I was born, and I'm like,
<v Speaker 3>that was that's like finding out George Washington had a
<v Speaker 3>history class. What do you mean you're you're the history
<v Speaker 3>George Washington? What did you have to learn about the
<v Speaker 3>American history?
<v Speaker 1>It's not even I forgot I was subscribed to Game
<v Speaker 1>Informer as far back as to that. I forgot that
<v Speaker 1>the retro reviews were a thing. Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>So, and to be clear, this, as as far as
<v Speaker 3>I can tell, is the earliest ten.
<v Speaker 1>It is.
<v Speaker 3>There's no fanfare. Uh, it's not like a big deal
<v Speaker 3>that they call out in the text. And then the
<v Speaker 3>ten that follows this, they're like, a few games have
<v Speaker 3>gotten it. But but we don't give these out very often,
<v Speaker 3>so it's possible that there's one that's in the early
<v Speaker 3>days that slip under the radar, or maybe they were
<v Speaker 3>when they were writing it, they were like, we're actually
<v Speaker 3>not confident whether this is the first ten. So we're
<v Speaker 3>just gonna say there were some before this.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Those were weird because it was like they kind of
<v Speaker 2>almost like almost didn't count in a weird way. I
<v Speaker 2>don't know, you know, but yeah, yeah, I have a guest. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>but I keep going first.
<v Speaker 1>So yeah, okay, keep in mind we were found in
<v Speaker 1>the nineteen ninety one that would have been Super Nintendo
<v Speaker 1>Era Genesis Era two. I. There are definitely games on
<v Speaker 1>those platforms, mainly Super Nintendo that I could see getting
<v Speaker 1>a ten, especially at the time. There's two to stick
<v Speaker 1>out in my mind as probably the best guesses for
<v Speaker 1>S and E S maybe three. I think there's a
<v Speaker 1>safe choice here, so I might just go with that.
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna say Super Mario World.
<v Speaker 2>Kyle, that Mario World was gonna be my guess, so
<v Speaker 2>I'll go with No, you can keep the same guess. Well,
<v Speaker 2>but then what we have to split a point?
<v Speaker 1>This just goes first.
<v Speaker 3>You both you just both get a point.
<v Speaker 2>I'm gonna say super I'm gonna say Super Mario Brothers three.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, Oh, Marcus gets the point?
<v Speaker 2>Was it World?
<v Speaker 3>It was World?
<v Speaker 1>Marcus, that's the point.
<v Speaker 3>I tried to give it to you. Yes, So I'll
<v Speaker 3>pull it up because it's I'll read it here. Uh.
<v Speaker 3>Of the more of the more than one hundred games
<v Speaker 3>we've covered in Classic g I over the years, it's
<v Speaker 3>the prices of cover that Super Mario World has never
<v Speaker 3>been featured on this page. Actually, it's not too unexpected,
<v Speaker 3>because there really is no doubt that this game is
<v Speaker 3>a true classic in every sense of the word. So
<v Speaker 3>it's an interesting thing of I think this game came
<v Speaker 3>out in ninety one and Game four was founded in
<v Speaker 3>ninety one, I believe a little bit after Mario World
<v Speaker 3>came out, So it was a thing that like they
<v Speaker 3>probably were just like, we don't need to review this
<v Speaker 3>game that came out three months before we were founded,
<v Speaker 3>but then never went back to it.
<v Speaker 1>So interesting. Interesting, Yeah, do we do buyelines on those
<v Speaker 1>retro reviews? Like I'm just.
<v Speaker 3>Curious, think, so, I don't see one on here.
<v Speaker 2>There's a period of time where like articles didn't even
<v Speaker 2>get bylines early on.
<v Speaker 3>I think, yeah, yeah, I was trying to find the
<v Speaker 3>writer on the Batman Begins cover story and I couldn't
<v Speaker 3>find it just at a glance.
<v Speaker 1>R Yeah, cover stories didn't have bylines for a period time. First, Chris, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it was Christopher Nolan. Actually he did write that. Guests
<v Speaker 1>contributed rights.
<v Speaker 3>The second ten out of ten did get a full
<v Speaker 3>bait and it came one issue later in November of
<v Speaker 3>two thousand. What game was that?
<v Speaker 1>Okay, November, Kyle goes first thousand, Kyle, You're going first?
<v Speaker 2>Is that I'm still trying to think I'm bad with years,
<v Speaker 2>so I always have to think of, like, where was I.
<v Speaker 2>So I was like I was, I was like late
<v Speaker 2>middle school, freshman, high school. I think, So what games
<v Speaker 2>was I falling in love with at that time? Is
<v Speaker 2>it Majora's Mask? So you're guess that's my guess, But
<v Speaker 2>I think I think Major's Mask was two thousand and one,
<v Speaker 2>so I might have this might be a disaster, Marcus,
<v Speaker 2>what's your guest?
<v Speaker 1>So Majora's Mask was awesome my guess, debating, but it
<v Speaker 1>wasn't my like Lock. It was like my front runner.
<v Speaker 1>As I go through my roller decks of games that
<v Speaker 1>came out in two thousand, it's but Major's Mask was
<v Speaker 1>the one that immediately came to mind. Okay, but also
<v Speaker 1>the game so polarizing, like with the reviewer of given
<v Speaker 1>it a like, would they have landed on the side
<v Speaker 1>of the fence? I really loves that game. Man. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I'll just stick with majors Masks Mask.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, you're both incorrect. The answer was Tony Hawk's pro
<v Speaker 3>Skater two.
<v Speaker 1>Dang it. I knew that that.
<v Speaker 2>I did know that too got a ten. I also
<v Speaker 2>I also knew Akarina did not get a ten.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, Akarina got a nine to seven five.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, which is why it's just a piece of garbage
<v Speaker 2>and I never even think, right, yeah, Tony Hawk two
<v Speaker 2>got a ten.
<v Speaker 1>I forgot.
<v Speaker 2>It's funny the reception on that, like Tony Hawk was
<v Speaker 2>like huge, And then I remember like that Tony Hawk
<v Speaker 2>really like disappeared for a while, and I remember even
<v Speaker 2>us like like Game Game Informer looking back on that
<v Speaker 2>and being like, I can't believe we gave that a ten.
<v Speaker 1>What were we thinking?
<v Speaker 2>But now it's like come back around again. We're all
<v Speaker 2>we're like, yeah, no, Tony Hawk's amazing. Why would we
<v Speaker 2>have ever say yeah, mm hmm.
<v Speaker 3>There's a that second opinion on that. It was Reiner
<v Speaker 3>and he he gave it a nine to seventy five
<v Speaker 3>and was like, yeah, it's kind of buggy.
<v Speaker 4>But.
<v Speaker 1>It was like that almost feels like it's like I
<v Speaker 1>gotta find something wrong with this.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, all right. Speaking of Majora's mask,
<v Speaker 3>there are some game series have received lots of tensa
<v Speaker 3>former Zelda being one of them, and others that we
<v Speaker 3>have mentioned that I've not given all the answers to
<v Speaker 3>what game series has received the most tens from game
<v Speaker 3>Former Marcus, this is a question for you or you're
<v Speaker 3>going first terways hm hmm.
<v Speaker 1>Is this relative to the number of entries in this series,
<v Speaker 1>like if it's a series that doesn't have like a
<v Speaker 1>ton of entries versus something like Zelda it.
<v Speaker 3>Has, like uh, I mean there's a good amount. First
<v Speaker 3>and Second Play both have a good amount of games
<v Speaker 3>that have come out.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, he said, Zelda's definitely one.
<v Speaker 2>Well, yeah, we know Zelda is one. I can list
<v Speaker 2>a couple of the tens that the tens that the
<v Speaker 2>Zeldas that receive tens, I think, But I don't know
<v Speaker 2>if there's any other series, frankly that I can be like, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>this entry got a ten and this centry got a
<v Speaker 2>ten other.
<v Speaker 1>Than you can guess Zelda. I know, it almost feels
<v Speaker 1>too obvious, like Yai, it's a trick, but it is
<v Speaker 1>the one that immediately comes to mind too, even before
<v Speaker 1>you even before the setup. It's it's it's the prestige series.
<v Speaker 1>I really don't want to just say, can Kyle go first?
<v Speaker 1>Do you have an answer? Kyle? I feel like I'm still.
<v Speaker 2>I have I'm gonna say Zelda, but I do have
<v Speaker 2>another series. I think could be second. That would be
<v Speaker 2>that if you went Zelda, I would have taken Do you.
<v Speaker 1>Know what I'm gonna say, Grand Theft Auto?
<v Speaker 2>Okay, okay, And I mean I'll officially I'll officially stick
<v Speaker 2>with Zelda. But the other one that I was thinking
<v Speaker 2>was a God of War I think has gotten high
<v Speaker 2>acclaim from us. It is Zelda, Link Between the World,
<v Speaker 2>Skyward Sword, I believe, wind Waker, Breath of the Wild,
<v Speaker 2>I know, but I was.
<v Speaker 1>Like, I'm trying to find like what series could possibly
<v Speaker 1>surprised you, and I felt like g A has got
<v Speaker 1>a couple of tens on a few tens under its belt.
<v Speaker 3>Marcus GTA is in second place. That was the correct
<v Speaker 3>second answer. GT has three or four? Or because they
<v Speaker 3>gave a ten to Vice City and then they give
<v Speaker 3>a ten to three that also comes with Vice City.
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah, they re released it for Xbox is like
<v Speaker 2>a bundle and then yeah, three didn't.
<v Speaker 3>Get a ten, but this is a or No, maybe
<v Speaker 3>three did get a ten.
<v Speaker 1>I know that. Yeah, No, three is a better version
<v Speaker 1>of the game because the Xbox was more powerful. It
<v Speaker 1>was like the definitive version of three.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, so it's that one has four will count that
<v Speaker 3>as four, but Delda does have five. It has the
<v Speaker 3>ones Kyle mentioned. And then also Twilight Princess.
<v Speaker 1>Came out this year like it was supposed to, because.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, just got i know, Got of War three got
<v Speaker 2>a ten, but maybe none of the other ones did.
<v Speaker 3>Actually, uh, God of War one got a ten.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, so that's so that's another one that, like a
<v Speaker 2>few entries got tense.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, yes, yeah. The next question is which Game Informer
<v Speaker 3>editor has awarded the most tens.
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna guess Reiner.
<v Speaker 4>Mmmm.
<v Speaker 3>And this is this is where it gets kind of
<v Speaker 3>weird because I mentioned that this. Wow, my cats are
<v Speaker 3>fighting in the background.
<v Speaker 1>Really ye, Lion Kings Cell the versus g TA bag there.
<v Speaker 1>It would be very funny.
<v Speaker 3>It's it's kind of unclear on the spreadsheet because earlier
<v Speaker 3>it does delineate whether it's a.
<v Speaker 1>Going at it. Yeah, for audio listeners, the cats are
<v Speaker 1>really going to town and back there punching at each other.
<v Speaker 1>They're not picking up on Charles. If you want to
<v Speaker 1>just let them finish out their tussle.
<v Speaker 3>It's hard. It's very distracting over here. Okay, Uh, it's
<v Speaker 3>hard on the spreadsheet. It doesn't delineate whether it's a
<v Speaker 3>second opinion after a certain year.
<v Speaker 1>So I'm pretty.
<v Speaker 3>Sure that these are all uh first opinions from this person,
<v Speaker 3>but it also counts second opinions, which kind of I
<v Speaker 3>don't know, it's not particularly close.
<v Speaker 2>I'll say that, Yeah, I mean, Marcus says Andrew Reiner,
<v Speaker 2>former Veteran in Chief. I would with I would also
<v Speaker 2>guess Reiner, but for the I'm just my own arbitrary
<v Speaker 2>rule that I can't have the same guests as Marcus
<v Speaker 2>that Charles is not enforcing by any means. I would
<v Speaker 2>say that maybe Joe Juba is the other one who
<v Speaker 2>gave the most tense because I know he gave. He
<v Speaker 2>gave a few. I think he did God of War
<v Speaker 2>three and BioShock Infinite. Probably maybe a handful of others maybe,
<v Speaker 2>But yeah, so that's my guess. Jojuba, former reviews editor Jojuba.
<v Speaker 3>Uh point is going to go to Marcus.
<v Speaker 1>Seniority man. He was just there.
<v Speaker 3>So you're saying this, and I actually don't see.
<v Speaker 1>I think I just have like baked in memory of
<v Speaker 1>reading so many Game in Former issues and just like
<v Speaker 1>subconsciously remembering Reiner just giving not that he gave like
<v Speaker 1>he was given out tens left and right. But again,
<v Speaker 1>like you said, his seniority there being there that long. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>you just like I just remember, like, yeah, there's a
<v Speaker 1>few tens the Reiner's name. Do you know how many
<v Speaker 1>tens he gave out?
<v Speaker 3>Uh? Sorry, I'm the spreadsheet doesn't have Joe Juba on it,
<v Speaker 3>and now I'm throwing off am I getting I'll be right,
<v Speaker 3>and I.
<v Speaker 1>Just don't know the ballocher close is too late.
<v Speaker 3>Reiner's tens we got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, there's no way Jona more than twelve said twelve
<v Speaker 1>tens in Max's twelve tens.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, Reiner had four tens in a row where it
<v Speaker 3>was all Rhiner tens. We had Resident Evil four, God
<v Speaker 3>of War, Twilight, Princess, and BioShock.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, after a while, we just started replacing the number
<v Speaker 1>ten with just the Reiner seal of a pros.
<v Speaker 3>It's just his face zone all right. Next we're question
<v Speaker 3>nine nine out of ten here, Marcus got that point
<v Speaker 3>real quick.
<v Speaker 2>Oh, thank god, Charles, you are keeping track because I
<v Speaker 2>have not been.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, And then Kyle, did Kyle get the Zelda one?
<v Speaker 1>He did or did he?
<v Speaker 2>I did because I yeah, I was like at Zelda,
<v Speaker 2>I'm just gonna I'm just gonna grab that since Marcus
<v Speaker 2>doesn't want to for some reason.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, so currently the score is four to two.
<v Speaker 1>This is up. Well who's winning? I'm up Marcus.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, two questions about I'm gonna start taking this.
<v Speaker 3>Actually, this next, this next question is going to be
<v Speaker 3>a bunch of points.
<v Speaker 1>So we'll launch of the points. Oh no, okay, and
<v Speaker 1>each individual thing will be pointing.
<v Speaker 3>So several long running series have only received one ten
<v Speaker 3>across game informers history. I'll name the series. You guys,
<v Speaker 3>guess the game that got the ten. Like, for example,
<v Speaker 3>I would say Legend of Zelda, and if only ocre
<v Speaker 3>enough time got a ten, you would try.
<v Speaker 1>To guess off. Gotcha.
<v Speaker 2>I'm laughing at your example, Charles, because we just listened
<v Speaker 2>sell the games. I got a ten, and you picked
<v Speaker 2>it for your example.
<v Speaker 1>One of the ones that didn't. All right, the first
<v Speaker 1>one uncharted.
<v Speaker 2>Two mm, yeah, it's got to be two. Yeah, I
<v Speaker 2>I I'm not I'm taking the seriously now, I'm not.
<v Speaker 2>I'm not my own arbitrary rules.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah yeah, yeah, correct, Okay, I was like I said,
<v Speaker 1>it's so fast. I hope my confidence wasn't in this lip.
<v Speaker 1>Okay Resident Evil.
<v Speaker 2>Four four correct, Yeah, you just spoiled that one for
<v Speaker 2>us because you went through rhiners.
<v Speaker 1>Metroid. Ohh Prime, there's oh super Metroid was out by
<v Speaker 1>the time we were an outlet. Right, it's after ninety one. Actually, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it absolutely is after ninety one. You know what I'm
<v Speaker 1>gonna I'm gonna go Instagram, gonna guess the Metro that
<v Speaker 1>came out the same day as Prime Fusion.
<v Speaker 3>Oh, Marcus clutch pick, he is correct.
<v Speaker 1>I remember Fusion getting all this acclaim when it came
<v Speaker 1>out himself out like and then yeah there you go.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, okay, I'm glad you didn't say Super Metroid because
<v Speaker 3>that was that was not one of them. And also, uh,
<v Speaker 3>we were talking about like the earliest year that we
<v Speaker 3>gave a ten was in two thousand for this ninety
<v Speaker 3>one game. So I don't think whatever Super Metroid got,
<v Speaker 3>I don't think it was a ten.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so Fusion got a ten, but Prime did not.
<v Speaker 1>Wow, All right, cool.
<v Speaker 3>Next one, Mass Effect two three?
<v Speaker 1>Well, actually, whoa.
<v Speaker 3>Markus? Are you are you debating changing because Kyle said it?
<v Speaker 3>Are you debating, uh said regardless of.
<v Speaker 1>You know what, two, I'm sticking to my guns. Two's
<v Speaker 1>the best one, all right, and Kyle said three. I
<v Speaker 1>said three. Kyle's correct. I was there.
<v Speaker 2>I was like when it happened, and I remember thinking
<v Speaker 2>Joe was a lunatic.
<v Speaker 3>And last question in this category ratchet and clank.
<v Speaker 1>I do want one it was I actually genuinely know
<v Speaker 1>this one. I think it was. I'll let Kyle guests first.
<v Speaker 2>I think it was the second one, which I think
<v Speaker 2>is called Going Commando.
<v Speaker 1>I am. I don't know if it's like like Charles,
<v Speaker 1>do you know the Rationing Clank series well enough to
<v Speaker 1>know the name?
<v Speaker 3>I don't know that. I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>I can confirm, but I didn't know if this would
<v Speaker 1>like like I it is the second Rationing Clank game
<v Speaker 1>is called Going Commando.
<v Speaker 2>Just this is just for okay, okay, all right. So
<v Speaker 2>that's my official answer. Then the second Ratching Clink Going Commando,
<v Speaker 2>that's my second. That's my official final answer, Marcus.
<v Speaker 1>It is the third Rationing Clank game up your arsenal.
<v Speaker 3>Marcus is correct.
<v Speaker 1>That one I remember as a huge Rashing Clank fan
<v Speaker 1>reading that review, which I believe Reiner wrote, I'm not mistaken,
<v Speaker 1>but I remember being so excited, like, oh like a
<v Speaker 1>ten whoa, and I bought it immediately as someone that
<v Speaker 1>loved the first two games. Yep, yeah, all right.
<v Speaker 3>Last question, current score is Kyle with five, Marcus with eight.
<v Speaker 1>Marcus is runaway with this one.
<v Speaker 2>So on less side, this is worth four points.
<v Speaker 1>There's no maybe it is. Maybe that's more fun.
<v Speaker 3>I don't know, all right, Question ten Game Informers tens
<v Speaker 3>are all critically acclaimed, but one of the games is
<v Speaker 3>more acclaimed than all the others. Which Game Informer ten
<v Speaker 3>out of ten has the highest score on Metacritic?
<v Speaker 1>Oh? Interesting? I wonder if it's a game we've already
<v Speaker 1>talked about it, if it's something we haven't touched on
<v Speaker 1>h Okay, highest score.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna say, gosh this
<v Speaker 2>stuff because there's probably some older game that didn't have
<v Speaker 2>a lot of reviews. But I guess I don't. I'm
<v Speaker 2>just gonna say Breath of the Wild, like, but I'm
<v Speaker 2>guessing it's probably something that with fewer reviews, But Breath
<v Speaker 2>of the Wild, I'll just I'll plug that in.
<v Speaker 1>That's a good one. That's definitely in my short list. Hm,
<v Speaker 1>you know, this might be a It's it's wild to
<v Speaker 1>say that this might be a long shot because of
<v Speaker 1>how generally beloved this game is. But I'm gonna say
<v Speaker 1>Residue before.
<v Speaker 2>By the way, By the way, can I also safety
<v Speaker 2>answer Tony Hawk two.
<v Speaker 3>All right, he's gonna say your guess was breath the
<v Speaker 3>while your guess was You're both incorrect. Okay, I will
<v Speaker 3>give you each a second guess and give you uh
<v Speaker 3>the two caveats. One is more of a fun facting
<v Speaker 3>caveat one fun fact. This is one of I believe
<v Speaker 3>three games on Metacritic. Yeah, one of three games with
<v Speaker 3>a ninety eight or higher. Wow, So it's one of
<v Speaker 3>the top three of Metacritic. And two it is not
<v Speaker 3>a game I believe we have said by name up
<v Speaker 3>to this.
<v Speaker 2>Point, Okay, because we have said Tony Hawk two. So
<v Speaker 2>my safety answer is mood, Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>There's one game that I when he said it that
<v Speaker 1>there's one game in mind. But I don't know if
<v Speaker 1>we gave it a ten, like I think we scored
<v Speaker 1>it very high. I don't know if we gave it
<v Speaker 1>a ten. So I'm afraid to say.
<v Speaker 2>It we haven't said it by name. Gosh, is it okay?
<v Speaker 1>Is it? No?
<v Speaker 2>We said that one. Actually this is hard man.
<v Speaker 1>Hmm.
<v Speaker 2>That clue is like throwing me.
<v Speaker 1>Off something we have not said. So it's like it's
<v Speaker 1>good to narrow it down. It makes me.
<v Speaker 2>It's a game that we gave that Game Former gave
<v Speaker 2>it ten, but we haven't discussed it today.
<v Speaker 3>Correct, we have. We have mentioned the series in passing.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, I don't know. Is it the last most part one?
<v Speaker 1>It's Kyle's Guests.
<v Speaker 2>Because like the re release, like the PlayStation four version
<v Speaker 2>of that game, Game in Former gave it a ten,
<v Speaker 2>but not the PlayStation three version. Yeah, I don't feel
<v Speaker 2>great about my answer, but I'm gona stick to it.
<v Speaker 1>Geez, something we have not said. I mean, there's there's
<v Speaker 1>one we haven't really said, but I know it didn't
<v Speaker 1>get an idea. Why are you doing, as Charles? Why
<v Speaker 1>the games that we gave tens to? Now? God, I'll
<v Speaker 1>go through my database of things. Okay, we have not
<v Speaker 1>trying to, like my brain is like contaminated, but things
<v Speaker 1>we've said already.
<v Speaker 2>I know I actually do have another one now, but
<v Speaker 2>I've already read neered my answer I think there's there
<v Speaker 2>is a ten that I can think of that we
<v Speaker 2>haven't that we haven't talked about ten.
<v Speaker 1>I mean there's one I want to say, but we've
<v Speaker 1>talked about it. Is it like when you say talk
<v Speaker 1>about it like it it's not just that it was
<v Speaker 1>an answer to the part of a question, like if
<v Speaker 1>it's like mentioned as part of the question, itself not
<v Speaker 1>necessarily an answer.
<v Speaker 3>I don't think someone has said the full title of
<v Speaker 3>this game.
<v Speaker 1>Have you said maybe this game?
<v Speaker 3>I don't believe so, maybe at all? Like what I said, again,
<v Speaker 3>we've we mentioned the series in passing, but I have
<v Speaker 3>not said the name of this game.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, so it isn't a series.
<v Speaker 2>That sounds like my other answer is going to be Overwatch,
<v Speaker 2>which is not really a series.
<v Speaker 1>What is now?
<v Speaker 2>I guess it is not? Yeah, I guess it is now.
<v Speaker 1>Put some respect on Overwatch Seu's name. Apologies, Marcus.
<v Speaker 3>I'm going to give you ten seconds.
<v Speaker 1>What you count down line? Okay? Eight?
<v Speaker 3>Seven, six, five?
<v Speaker 1>My answer is the worst one three. I would say two,
<v Speaker 1>the last of us part two, Gyle, you say last
<v Speaker 1>was part one? Yeah, I hate it because it's not
<v Speaker 1>the right answer.
<v Speaker 3>The answer is grand Theft Auto four.
<v Speaker 1>We did mention it, not four though not four.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, we mentioned saying Andreas. We did not mention Grand
<v Speaker 3>Theft Auto four.
<v Speaker 2>Fine, my still my favorite Grand Theft Ado. Honestly I
<v Speaker 2>love four.
<v Speaker 1>So that's that has a ninety eight. Oh wow. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know if I would have guessed that. Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>The other just for people curious, the other three games
<v Speaker 3>of the top three, Number three is Grand Theft Auto four,
<v Speaker 3>Number two is Soule Caliber has a ninety eight wow,
<v Speaker 3>and number one is Opera.
<v Speaker 1>Enough Time, which we did not give it ten. See.
<v Speaker 1>I guess. The one that was find in my mind
<v Speaker 1>was Portal two, but I was like, I don't believe
<v Speaker 1>we gave that a ten. No, we we didn't give
<v Speaker 1>it a ten.
<v Speaker 3>So yeah, well that's that's the game.
<v Speaker 1>I would say.
<v Speaker 3>Other I don't I think we we went through most
<v Speaker 3>of the surprising ones.
<v Speaker 1>Metal Gear.
<v Speaker 3>We gave tens to two and four.
<v Speaker 1>I remember four, not the other ones. Yeah, I definitely
<v Speaker 1>remember four.
<v Speaker 3>God War two thousand and five, BioShock and BioShock Infinite.
<v Speaker 3>There's some that were like pairs.
<v Speaker 1>Mastered Infinite was the other one that was on my
<v Speaker 1>brain for that last question. But I know, it was
<v Speaker 1>like the game is pretty divisive, even even at the
<v Speaker 1>time when everyone loved it, before everyone turned on it.
<v Speaker 1>But I was like, there's no way they got a
<v Speaker 1>ninety eight.
<v Speaker 3>And then StarCraft two got a ten, Arkham City got
<v Speaker 3>a ten.
<v Speaker 1>Yes, I remember that.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, read de Redemption two got a ten. And I
<v Speaker 3>think that names basically all of the games. Yeah, and
<v Speaker 3>so there you go. That's all the tens. There again,
<v Speaker 3>there's thirty two of them. Thirty second given by me.
<v Speaker 1>And that was a question of the of the three
<v Speaker 1>tens that we have each awarded, which which of our
<v Speaker 1>games is the as Metacritic basically, who agrees with our
<v Speaker 1>tens of the most.
<v Speaker 3>Oh, it's definitely definitely Kyle.
<v Speaker 1>It's got to be Breath probably. I mean people love Astrobot.
<v Speaker 1>People do love Astrobot.
<v Speaker 4>But I.
<v Speaker 3>Mean I have I have the list here that I
<v Speaker 3>haven't I've looked at, but I'm pretty confident.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's like yours is pretty fresh. Charles at Haiti,
<v Speaker 1>is that what your guys guess are or what do
<v Speaker 1>you think I'm gonna stick with. I'm gonna say I'm
<v Speaker 1>still said, Oh, Astrobot, I mean I was gonna support mine.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah yeah.
<v Speaker 3>Breath of the Wild is a ninety seven and is
<v Speaker 3>rated like number six on like the full list of
<v Speaker 3>best games.
<v Speaker 2>It looks like Astrobots ninety four and Hades is also
<v Speaker 2>ninety four. Haites two. Okay, sticking up there, I did it,
<v Speaker 2>so I made Zelda.
<v Speaker 1>You win Kyle? All right?
<v Speaker 3>Well, and that was that was everyone's favorite segment.
<v Speaker 1>G I and wait, do I not get to take
<v Speaker 1>a victory lap? I? Yes did. The winner is market
<v Speaker 1>victory music.
<v Speaker 3>To be clear, I'll send I'll send the my jingle
<v Speaker 3>to Eric when he edits this episode that goal that
<v Speaker 3>clapping sound will not be in there.
<v Speaker 1>I'm just not to say. It's like, I don't think
<v Speaker 1>that's going to come through for the logo. Mm hmm.
<v Speaker 1>I really thought.
<v Speaker 2>I really like went in with a lot of confidence
<v Speaker 2>because I was like, I've been working at GI longer
<v Speaker 2>than Marcus. I was there for the Mass Effect three ten,
<v Speaker 2>but that's about the only thing that helped me with so.
<v Speaker 3>All right, anyways, that was everyone's favorite segment.
<v Speaker 1>G It's back to you, Marcus. I mean, I'm about
<v Speaker 1>to throw it right back to Yeah, yeah, I guess
<v Speaker 1>the next game we're going to talk about is a
<v Speaker 1>cool little indie called Consume May And I still have
<v Speaker 1>to stop myself from saying consumme because that is clearly
<v Speaker 1>the wordplay, especially because this game is themed around food.
<v Speaker 2>I thought it was just hold on, I thought it
<v Speaker 2>was consumed me.
<v Speaker 1>It consume me. But doesn't it make you want to
<v Speaker 1>say consumme like the broth? Like? Is that not? Is
<v Speaker 1>that not the play here? I don't know. Maybe it's not.
<v Speaker 1>Maybe it's maybe it's not. Maybe I.
<v Speaker 3>Would say there's a lot more of all consuming people
<v Speaker 3>being consumed by their decisions and life and stuff than
<v Speaker 3>a reference to consumme specifically.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, I just like that, but it works. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know. Yeah, can I read the for those that
<v Speaker 1>don't know what this game is, can I read this
<v Speaker 1>theme description real quick? I'm sure it'll light enlighten everyone.
<v Speaker 1>And this is lowercase, by the way. Uh did you
<v Speaker 1>feel stupid, fat, lazy and ugly in high school? Well?
<v Speaker 1>I did? But at least I made a life simulation
<v Speaker 1>RPG about it. That's good. That's it. That's the theme description.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, so I'm playing Consume Me. I'm planning to write
<v Speaker 3>a review about it, but I haven't written it yet
<v Speaker 3>I've just finished it this morning as of recording, and yeah,
<v Speaker 3>it's good. It's a cute it's it's cute, but it's
<v Speaker 3>deep and it's it's a lot of it's a lot
<v Speaker 3>of things. It's a complex flavor. So, uh, it's it's
<v Speaker 3>a game. It doesn't sound fun. It is a game
<v Speaker 3>about a high school girl struggling with an eating disorder.
<v Speaker 3>It's like the basic premise of the game. The one
<v Speaker 3>thing that I appreciate is when you boot the game up,
<v Speaker 3>it's like, it is interesting how they were like, we're
<v Speaker 3>not gonna we're not gonna make this like subtext. We're
<v Speaker 3>just gonna be very clear about it. It's like, don't
<v Speaker 3>gamify your eating like this. It's a bad idea. It
<v Speaker 3>won't go well for this protagonist. We just want to
<v Speaker 3>clear that up up front. Don't play the start of
<v Speaker 3>this game and then think I'm gonna give myself points
<v Speaker 3>for the things I do don't eat. And because of that,
<v Speaker 3>there's also stuff where they abstracted a little bit where
<v Speaker 3>instead of calories or something, it's food is measured in
<v Speaker 3>bites and instead of weight numbers. There's just like a
<v Speaker 3>little thumbs up when you hit the goal that you're
<v Speaker 3>trying to get. But it's about this girl and she's
<v Speaker 3>in high school and she decides she wants to start dieting.
<v Speaker 3>She basically has this like alter ego of herself in
<v Speaker 3>the mirror that gives her bad self talk. And the
<v Speaker 3>game is essentially it's a life sim where you have
<v Speaker 3>like a certain number of actions you can do each day,
<v Speaker 3>and you're like managing your lifestyle. So a lot of
<v Speaker 3>it is like the dieting portion of it and like
<v Speaker 3>exercising to keep your calorie count or your bytes count
<v Speaker 3>low enough for the day. But then there's other responsibilities
<v Speaker 3>you have, where like there'll be school, so you have
<v Speaker 3>to study enough to pass the test. She gets romantic interests.
<v Speaker 3>Eventually you have to like do actions to like maintain
<v Speaker 3>the relationship and stuff. And it's good. I think it's
<v Speaker 3>it's gonna hit really close to home for some people,
<v Speaker 3>especially if you I imagine if like a woman or female
<v Speaker 3>identifying person were to play this game, it would hit
<v Speaker 3>very close.
<v Speaker 1>To home for them for some specific stuff.
<v Speaker 3>But as someone who doesn't have that identity, I still
<v Speaker 3>find it very specifically uncomfortable. It reminds me kind of
<v Speaker 3>of it. It has a lot of the style you
<v Speaker 3>would see like in the movie Turning Red, where there's
<v Speaker 3>like just very pops of like extremely expressive out of nowhere.
<v Speaker 2>But the movie that walked so K Pop Hunters could run.
<v Speaker 2>I love Turning Red.
<v Speaker 3>Yes it's a good but I also love Turning Red,
<v Speaker 3>but also kind of I'm getting parts of Eighth Grade,
<v Speaker 3>which is a movie that Bo Burnham directed, which is
<v Speaker 3>like a very specific look at like an eighth grade girl,
<v Speaker 3>which is a very hard watch for me personally, where
<v Speaker 3>it's just like such intense secondhand embarrassment you feel watching
<v Speaker 3>this person. And it's a lot of that of just
<v Speaker 3>like it's a very in ways it's very like fun
<v Speaker 3>and stylistic, and then it's also very like raw and
<v Speaker 3>upsetting to me at times. But I think it's really
<v Speaker 3>interesting as a concept to there's a lot of ways
<v Speaker 3>of like people make things into games and it becomes
<v Speaker 3>a thing of like why why are we making this
<v Speaker 3>a game? Why is this a game versus some other
<v Speaker 3>medium of storytelling. Sometimes it's like if with Ghost of Vite,
<v Speaker 3>it is cool to be the one that is doing
<v Speaker 3>the fighting and you know, dispatching the enemies and making
<v Speaker 3>the decisions of what saying, dialogue whatever. This is one
<v Speaker 3>that plays with the idea of you as a player
<v Speaker 3>making decisions and gamifying things, and it's basically the moral
<v Speaker 3>of a story, which it says upfront, is like, not
<v Speaker 3>everything should be gamified. It's not necessarily healthier or more
<v Speaker 3>productive for your life to give yourself points for doing
<v Speaker 3>these things in that thing. And there are times that
<v Speaker 3>like the main character will talk I cannot remember her name,
<v Speaker 3>which is bad because I just played the game. I
<v Speaker 3>want to say that it's May, but I don't think
<v Speaker 3>that's because that's the main character in Turning Red Ye.
<v Speaker 3>But there's even times where she's like talking to someone,
<v Speaker 3>She's like, I have to talk to you three times
<v Speaker 3>a day because our relationship now that we're long distance,
<v Speaker 3>it's like we have a poison condition and we lose
<v Speaker 3>two hearts of relationship every day.
<v Speaker 1>And the guy.
<v Speaker 3>Responds, he's like, what are you talking about. That's not
<v Speaker 3>how people work at all. If you need a break
<v Speaker 3>from talking to me every day, we can just not
<v Speaker 3>do that and we'll be fine. And it's just like
<v Speaker 3>a way that it's very much an internalized way that
<v Speaker 3>this main character perceives herself and gamifies all these parts
<v Speaker 3>for life, and then when you look at it from
<v Speaker 3>an external perspective, all the other characters are like, that's crazier,
<v Speaker 3>that's weird, or I don't know why you're acting so
<v Speaker 3>weird about this, and she's like, I'm being completely normal
<v Speaker 3>almost am I gonna get enough points to pass to
<v Speaker 3>the next day? And it's really cool. It's like a cool,
<v Speaker 3>cool concept for a game.
<v Speaker 2>The same as Jenny, by the way I looked it up, Jenny, Okay,
<v Speaker 2>there you go.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>No, this has been fascinating, just even the way the
<v Speaker 2>developer has been like marketing it and stuff and just
<v Speaker 2>like being really like opening a vein, so to speak of.
<v Speaker 2>Just like this is like a very personal story that
<v Speaker 2>I'm approaching with a lot of humor, and like I
<v Speaker 2>I've been really sort of intrigued by it.
<v Speaker 1>And I'm glad to hear that you that you like it?
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, yeah, same, it's on it Yeah go ahead, Marcus.
<v Speaker 1>Oh no, I was looking at like where where can
<v Speaker 1>you play this? And it's like it's just on PC. Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>I played on Steam Deck ran great, no issues there.
<v Speaker 3>I I do find it deeply stressful at times. There's
<v Speaker 3>stuff where like, uh, you've got like I mean, there's
<v Speaker 3>so many tasks you have to juggle and you're managing these.
<v Speaker 3>You have a mood meter and energy meter and like
<v Speaker 3>a gut meter. So if you're like too hungry, you
<v Speaker 3>can't do certain stuff because it's going to spend up
<v Speaker 3>some of your gut. But also if you have too
<v Speaker 3>many bites in a day, then you're going to like
<v Speaker 3>fail your diet goals and get a game over. So
<v Speaker 3>there's like a lot of managing in a way that's
<v Speaker 3>like kind of not fun at times, in the way
<v Speaker 3>that games like try to not be fun. But uh,
<v Speaker 3>another thing I didn't mention is when you're eating. Uh,
<v Speaker 3>she like rationalizes food as like Tetris pieces, and you're
<v Speaker 3>filling out this grid on your plate of all these
<v Speaker 3>different foods that are different shapes.
<v Speaker 1>So there'll be like.
<v Speaker 3>A little bit of cheese just takes up one square
<v Speaker 3>versus like an orange slices two squares versus like a
<v Speaker 3>watermelon is a big like squiggly w and so there's
<v Speaker 3>a game of fitting it in the shapes but not
<v Speaker 3>putting like like there's a cookie that'll show up and
<v Speaker 3>it's very convenient shape it's like a three little squares
<v Speaker 3>in an L shape.
<v Speaker 2>Uh.
<v Speaker 3>But it's a lot of calories or a lot of bytes,
<v Speaker 3>so it's not usually ideal to do because then you're
<v Speaker 3>gonna go over your count. And yeah, it was stress
<v Speaker 3>stress will to play. Oh, eventually you will mock the
<v Speaker 3>ability to uh stay up late. You can just hit
<v Speaker 3>a button that's to stay up late. You add one
<v Speaker 3>more activity point to your day. But it costs a
<v Speaker 3>certain amount of energy. But you can drink energy drinks
<v Speaker 3>and then stay up later, uh to get more energy
<v Speaker 3>to you will to stay up late button. And it
<v Speaker 3>gets in this like weird cycle where it's like I
<v Speaker 3>feel crazy that I've made her drink so many energy
<v Speaker 3>drinks and stay up so late. So I'm spending all
<v Speaker 3>of my in game money on energy drinks and I
<v Speaker 3>can't spend it on like hanging out with my friends
<v Speaker 3>or whatever. And it's like a really really effective way
<v Speaker 3>of being Like I don't know, there's it does not.
<v Speaker 3>It does not glorify this lifestyle. There's not a part
<v Speaker 3>in this where I'm like this seems like a good
<v Speaker 3>a good idea.
<v Speaker 1>Good to see it, Like, yeah.
<v Speaker 3>I think my my one thing with it is that
<v Speaker 3>the ending was kind of uh, it kind of lost
<v Speaker 3>me a little bit. It's it's a semi autobiographical game,
<v Speaker 3>so it's like slightly based on this I think real
<v Speaker 3>life Jenny's life yea, and as such, when you have
<v Speaker 3>autobiography stuff like that, it's it's hard to end it
<v Speaker 3>because it's like it can start off with a very
<v Speaker 3>interesting premise of someone's life, but rarely doesn't actually end
<v Speaker 3>in a clean spot. And it was kind of anti
<v Speaker 3>cli climactic for me. I guess I'm still like trying
<v Speaker 3>to figure out exactly how I feel about It's not
<v Speaker 3>enough to like ruin the game, but there's also elements
<v Speaker 3>that are introduced sort of late in the game where
<v Speaker 3>I'm like, I don't really understand where that came from,
<v Speaker 3>and like I understand it was a part of your life,
<v Speaker 3>but the way it fits in the game, Yeah, the
<v Speaker 3>way it fits in the game is kind of odd.
<v Speaker 3>All I can I can specify a little bit is
<v Speaker 3>that like religion starts to become a thing in like
<v Speaker 3>one of the later chapters that is like a U
<v Speaker 3>you can pray and you gain like a bunch of
<v Speaker 3>stats back, Like the character just becomes very religious, and
<v Speaker 3>that's kind of picked up at this point and it's like, oh,
<v Speaker 3>is this game about her finding religion? But then it
<v Speaker 3>kind of drops off a little bit more towards the
<v Speaker 3>end in a way that was like I wish that
<v Speaker 3>if this came at such like a crucial moment in
<v Speaker 3>the story, that I wish it had been like either
<v Speaker 3>commit to it or don't do it at all, you know,
<v Speaker 3>like don't forget about it, make it like the whole
<v Speaker 3>pointed thing. But yeah, that's kind of nitpicky. I do
<v Speaker 3>find it fun in a weird, sick way of gamifying
<v Speaker 3>all this stuff, And uh.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, good game. How long is the game? How long
<v Speaker 1>to take you to?
<v Speaker 3>Uh, it's five or six chapters and it took me
<v Speaker 3>about like five and a half hours. But I'm also
<v Speaker 3>someone that in these sorts of games, I spend a
<v Speaker 3>lot of time just looking at menus and trying to
<v Speaker 3>think about what my next move is going to be.
<v Speaker 3>So you could easily probably do it in five hours,
<v Speaker 3>maybe four and a half, maybe four if you're real sick.
<v Speaker 1>Oh, but you really just.
<v Speaker 2>Want to speed up life, get out of eighth grade
<v Speaker 2>as quickly as possible.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, we've all tried to speed run eighth grade. That's right,
<v Speaker 1>as you should. Yeah, speed run middle school. Honestly, that's
<v Speaker 1>my advice to kids. Now, Yeah, constantly, I'll not now
<v Speaker 1>on steam, especially consuming me.
<v Speaker 2>I'm just laughing again, I didn't even realize. I just
<v Speaker 2>laughing at your flippant child's just Nope, that's wrong.
<v Speaker 1>I swear I'm not doing this on purpose. My brain
<v Speaker 1>just won't just consume.
<v Speaker 3>Space me and she becomes consumed by her anxieties and
<v Speaker 3>her schedules overwhelming and all this stuff is.
<v Speaker 2>It's not about super Marcus. I don't know where you're
<v Speaker 2>getting this from.
<v Speaker 1>They just want some I just want some beerra tacos,
<v Speaker 1>just which is very good. Yeah. Yes, Adam's theme Now
<v Speaker 1>it's actually on a little bit of a discount for
<v Speaker 1>the theme autumn sale right now for those interested, thirteen
<v Speaker 1>forty nine go pick it up. And yeah, that'll wrap
<v Speaker 1>it up for us. Of course, as we mentioned at
<v Speaker 1>the top of the show, stayed too because we have
<v Speaker 1>an interview that our lovely video editor Eric Van Allen
<v Speaker 1>did with the developer behind Battlesuit Aces, which is the
<v Speaker 1>new strategy game coming. God, did I get a date? Actually,
<v Speaker 1>I think it did recently. I think comes out like October, yes, right,
<v Speaker 1>very soon, October seven. But it's from the creators of Battleshifade,
<v Speaker 1>which is a game that I really enjoyed back when
<v Speaker 1>God that was like twenty nineteen. I think it was
<v Speaker 1>a while agoy while my switch, but I really liked
<v Speaker 1>it and beca because of that, I've I've kept an
<v Speaker 1>eye on Battlesuit Aces. But yeah, that's coming out.
<v Speaker 3>In margins that we're twenty seventeen.
<v Speaker 1>Twenty seventeen, that's right, Yeah, yeah, that's the Actually, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I guess in hindsight that did that did feel like
<v Speaker 1>an early switch memory for me. Yeah, but yeah, battlesued
<v Speaker 1>Ace is out and about just about a week or so.
<v Speaker 7>Hello, and welcome back to the Game Informer Show. We
<v Speaker 7>are here with Trinket Studios, makers of the upcoming battle
<v Speaker 7>Suit Aces. That game's coming out October seventh. That'll be
<v Speaker 7>next Tuesday for those of you listening on PC, PlayStation
<v Speaker 7>and switch. But before we talk about the game, let's
<v Speaker 7>meet the developers. Let's go around the horn real quick
<v Speaker 7>and start with my name twin here.
<v Speaker 1>Eric. Hi, Hello, introduce yourself.
<v Speaker 4>Eric, and I am the art director of Trinket studios,
<v Speaker 4>anything visuals. That's my job.
<v Speaker 1>Awesome, awesome, Tom, how about you?
<v Speaker 5>I don't know. Sensibly I'm the president. I used to
<v Speaker 5>joke to that man. I did Twitter and taxes, but
<v Speaker 5>don't really do either of those things right now. So
<v Speaker 5>mostly programming, programming by trade, and then design and nonsense.
<v Speaker 5>I theoretically make sure that Eric and Ben can work
<v Speaker 5>more efficiently, but at this point we're all just overwhelmed.
<v Speaker 7>Ben, how about yourself?
<v Speaker 1>Hi? Yeah, my name is Ben Perez.
<v Speaker 6>I'm also a programmer, just sort of wearing a lot
<v Speaker 6>of the similar hats of Tom. Programming design lately, lots
<v Speaker 6>of sort of administrative work getting ready for release.
<v Speaker 1>But that's the life, right.
<v Speaker 7>Battlesuit Aces, why don't we start with you? Tom, give
<v Speaker 7>me like a top down pitch. What is Battlesuit Aces.
<v Speaker 5>Working on? Making this perfect?
<v Speaker 1>Battle?
<v Speaker 5>Chef bread was so easy? But I think the best
<v Speaker 5>way to look at it is, what if you made
<v Speaker 5>a narrative card battler RPG.
<v Speaker 1>What if you.
<v Speaker 5>Matched up Star Trek with all the early nineties mecha
<v Speaker 5>anime you could and Cowboy Bebom and then you turn
<v Speaker 5>that into a delicious soup the core of it is
<v Speaker 5>really it's a character driven card game where the deck
<v Speaker 5>you're building, all the cards are pilots with their mecca,
<v Speaker 5>the battlesuits, and the core story is that you're collecting
<v Speaker 5>these relic suits from an ancient alien race that are
<v Speaker 5>helping you defeat a very dangerous foe, the Frenzied. But
<v Speaker 5>along the way you meet, so you're gonna meet. There's
<v Speaker 5>something like seventy five characters and they're all voiced, and
<v Speaker 5>so it's very much like an old school RPG, except
<v Speaker 5>the combat is all card back and the narrative is
<v Speaker 5>just this visual novel with way too much polished.
<v Speaker 7>How did the idea for this first come about? Because
<v Speaker 7>your previous game that we talked about, Booshep Brigade, that
<v Speaker 7>was a I believe in twenty seventeen that feels like
<v Speaker 7>a long time ago. It was a bit of a
<v Speaker 7>gem that I really liked on on Switch and it
<v Speaker 7>was such a good early launch title I think for
<v Speaker 7>that console. But to go from food baddler, you know,
<v Speaker 7>cooking show side scrolling action competition to sci fi deck
<v Speaker 7>building rpg. What kind of led to you taking the
<v Speaker 7>jump between those two genres or was it just you
<v Speaker 7>wanted to explore more, you wanted to try something completely different, I.
<v Speaker 5>Could feel it, or you eric your call.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, I think the first thing that kicked off this
<v Speaker 4>project was really about the pipeline actually, because Battleship Brigade
<v Speaker 4>was all hand animated, so it was a very genuous
<v Speaker 4>project to work on. So one of our first thoughts
<v Speaker 4>going into this project was, okay, no animation, no hand
<v Speaker 4>to animation, So what's something we could make that you
<v Speaker 4>could use still you know, artwork, And so that started
<v Speaker 4>us on the path to a card game and some
<v Speaker 4>visual novel segments because we have to have characters, have
<v Speaker 4>to have story right, And then I think the sci
<v Speaker 4>fi aspect just is a natural evolution of whenever you
<v Speaker 4>do a fantasy game, you kind of have to follow
<v Speaker 4>it with a sci fi game kind of, you know,
<v Speaker 4>like even from Software does the similar thing like Armored
<v Speaker 4>Core and you know, dark Souls and all that stuff.
<v Speaker 4>So it just felt like we had already explored the
<v Speaker 4>fantasy fantasy space, so let's, you know, do sci fi fantasy.
<v Speaker 4>But yeah, Tom, do you want to attend.
<v Speaker 5>I think I think the pandemic so in the way
<v Speaker 5>that battle Cheperade sort of came out of us watching
<v Speaker 5>Iron Chef and Master Chef a lot while we were
<v Speaker 5>trying to figure out what came to make a lot
<v Speaker 5>of Battlesuit Aces came out of Mecca anime but really strong.
<v Speaker 5>I think like the Spark was watching Star Trek during
<v Speaker 5>the pandemic, Like we're all watching a lot of Star
<v Speaker 5>Trek and being like this episodic format is so appealing
<v Speaker 5>and cool, and I love getting to know the characters.
<v Speaker 5>I love hanging out on the ship, Like you get
<v Speaker 5>to feel like, Okay, this is this cool family. We're
<v Speaker 5>all Firefly fans as well, and it was like like
<v Speaker 5>Eric's saying, you want to you want to get into
<v Speaker 5>like a cool sci fi world, and we just kept
<v Speaker 5>building on that concept of like sci fi family, like
<v Speaker 5>we want all the characters in the fun that was
<v Speaker 5>in Battle Chef where they're all endearing and heartworming and
<v Speaker 5>like there's not there's conflict, but it's still sort of
<v Speaker 5>like fun conflict. We wanted all that, but in that
<v Speaker 5>context of like let's not hand animate everything. And so
<v Speaker 5>we just kept growing from there and then eventually it
<v Speaker 5>started becoming its own thing where you're like Okay, what
<v Speaker 5>is the right amount of plot for an episode? We
<v Speaker 5>had some early prototypes where Eric wrote, like an A
<v Speaker 5>and B plot in an episode and you're like, and
<v Speaker 5>then you put like one or two card battles in that,
<v Speaker 5>and you're like, wait a second, this is very hard
<v Speaker 5>to follow, where like a in a show, some things
<v Speaker 5>can be a little easier, but if you like stop
<v Speaker 5>in the middle to play a card battler, you're like,
<v Speaker 5>then you come back and you're like, Okay, what plot
<v Speaker 5>line am I following? Which characters? And also there are
<v Speaker 5>times you don't want to split up your deck for
<v Speaker 5>narrative reasons. You want to like have your deck. We
<v Speaker 5>still do a lot of things where like more scenarios
<v Speaker 5>they're sort of plot driven, But we don't want to
<v Speaker 5>be like every time you're the deck you've been building
<v Speaker 5>gets like split apart, and it's you're not playing the
<v Speaker 5>same game anymore. So finding that like right balance of
<v Speaker 5>like how the narrative can inform the battles and then
<v Speaker 5>how the battles can help inform the narrative and the
<v Speaker 5>items you get and all of that.
<v Speaker 7>Were you big card game players before all this? Because
<v Speaker 7>we talked about the sci Fi influences and watching Star
<v Speaker 7>Trek and all that. But I'm curious, did you play
<v Speaker 7>a lot of either deck Builders, you know kind of
<v Speaker 7>Slay the Spire and stuff like that. Did you play
<v Speaker 7>a lot of magic, Like how much did cards kind
<v Speaker 7>of feed into this from the outset?
<v Speaker 5>Slay the Spire definitely really sparked something when that came out,
<v Speaker 5>and for a while, battlesde So it was definitely more
<v Speaker 5>of a rogue light until we realized that, Like we
<v Speaker 5>were like, let's make a narrative rogue light and that
<v Speaker 5>is very difficult. There are some games that have pulled
<v Speaker 5>that off, but that's like a very different narrative structure
<v Speaker 5>than we wanted to tell. Like we didn't want it
<v Speaker 5>to be like this character can be good, evil, anything,
<v Speaker 5>like the collection of characters you gather, like they can
<v Speaker 5>be any permutation under the sun. I guess we got
<v Speaker 5>some of that, but like we went from like this
<v Speaker 5>can be an anything story to like, these are these
<v Speaker 5>characters that we love, We want to put them in
<v Speaker 5>these situations. We can still get replayability and tons of
<v Speaker 5>player choice, but we don't have to be like restart
<v Speaker 5>the narrative all the time.
<v Speaker 7>Right when it comes to the actual deck building. So
<v Speaker 7>when you play through this game, I got to play
<v Speaker 7>a build of it a while back, and the idea
<v Speaker 7>is that you're going through this adventure and you're kind
<v Speaker 7>of going from place to place and choosing where you go,
<v Speaker 7>and that ultimately ends up choosing the pilots that you recruit,
<v Speaker 7>the things that you get, the things that you add
<v Speaker 7>to your deck, and those cards kind of are representative
<v Speaker 7>of both your growing strength but also end up being
<v Speaker 7>the people that are on your ship. What was kind
<v Speaker 7>of was it difficult to manage that having your narrative
<v Speaker 7>ties being tied into your gameplay tie and feeling like
<v Speaker 7>players were getting good gameplay iteration, but also telling the
<v Speaker 7>story that you wanted to tell and have the characters
<v Speaker 7>show up the way you wanted them to show up.
<v Speaker 5>Absolutely, And the short answer is that it was very
<v Speaker 5>complicated for their narrative team. There's a lot of conditionals
<v Speaker 5>in every episode for like did you do this episode already?
<v Speaker 5>Do you know about this relationship? Do you know about
<v Speaker 5>like this person doing this thing? That got really complicated.
<v Speaker 5>But the larger thing, the challenge that was there that
<v Speaker 5>we identified very quickly when we were like Okay, cards
<v Speaker 5>are characters. We're like, how do we make it so
<v Speaker 5>that the player gets to choose that they're investing in
<v Speaker 5>a card and their character, and how like, how do
<v Speaker 5>we link those things so that when you play with
<v Speaker 5>a card more or like you like using it, how
<v Speaker 5>do we give you more of that character in like
<v Speaker 5>the when you're talking to characters on the ship, and
<v Speaker 5>how do we unlike more for them? Basically, so what
<v Speaker 5>we came up with is sort of there's an ambition
<v Speaker 5>system where it's sort of like an achievement per card.
<v Speaker 5>When you achieve that card's ambition, which is usually it's
<v Speaker 5>like something that works off of their abilities and usually
<v Speaker 5>becomes easier if you put items in them that accentuate
<v Speaker 5>that ability. But if you do their ambition, then you
<v Speaker 5>can equip more items to them. It gives you another
<v Speaker 5>item slot or mod slot, and then that also unlocks
<v Speaker 5>a crew mission, so you get to choose as you
<v Speaker 5>play through the game, you get to play different faction
<v Speaker 5>missions and different crew missions, So as you unlock the
<v Speaker 5>factions and the crew members, you get to choose who
<v Speaker 5>you're going to spend more time with. Narratively, like in
<v Speaker 5>these episodes and those are where we got to really
<v Speaker 5>go wild because we knew we weren't going to be
<v Speaker 5>forcing players to play all of them or something. They're
<v Speaker 5>very much like your personalized narrative, and so some players
<v Speaker 5>are going to play some that there are never going
<v Speaker 5>to see and they're going to be like, what the
<v Speaker 5>heck are you describing? Because those are the ones where
<v Speaker 5>we got to get really weird with it, like some
<v Speaker 5>of our favorite Star Trek episodes where like go like
<v Speaker 5>going into a time bubble and playing the flute, like
<v Speaker 5>things get things can get really weird, and we really
<v Speaker 5>embraced that. And there are also times when we really
<v Speaker 5>got to focus on an individual character. Instead of being like,
<v Speaker 5>your ship's mission is this, we got to be like,
<v Speaker 5>here's a really weird thing happening. Enjoy.
<v Speaker 7>So within this you also have kind of card game archetypes,
<v Speaker 7>sorts of I believe it was a colored system and
<v Speaker 7>things like that, and you know, reminiscent of same magic
<v Speaker 7>gathering or I mean a lot of card games use
<v Speaker 7>color systems these days. Did that kind of give you
<v Speaker 7>also a framework to start to think about how these
<v Speaker 7>characters can kind of play off each other. Did you
<v Speaker 7>ever have a moment where you said, I think this
<v Speaker 7>character fits this archetype really well, and maybe that started
<v Speaker 7>to influence the way that the character written or designed
<v Speaker 7>in the process.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah, absolutely, there was sort of a goal alongside the
<v Speaker 5>don't have any hand drawn animation was let the characters
<v Speaker 5>feel like they're bonding in the game. We really wanted
<v Speaker 5>to feel like, yeah, these these two cards synergize, but
<v Speaker 5>it goes beyond that, and that was an area that
<v Speaker 5>we just prototyped so so much, trying to get that
<v Speaker 5>feeling of I don't know, like like camaraderie and there's
<v Speaker 5>just like something really like you want to see those
<v Speaker 5>friendships not just in some dialogue, but like on the board,
<v Speaker 5>see them interact. And then we ended up being able
<v Speaker 5>to like really emphasize that when it happens with like that.
<v Speaker 5>We call it the battle chatter system, where like the
<v Speaker 5>characters are all identifying things happening in the in the game,
<v Speaker 5>and then they talk about it and so you get
<v Speaker 5>to see the friendships or the rivalries, which are even
<v Speaker 5>more fun maybe play out in the battle. So you're
<v Speaker 5>getting like narrative tidbits in the battle. But yeah, so
<v Speaker 5>that that was like a big goal is trying to
<v Speaker 5>trying to communicate more than it's not just mechanics in
<v Speaker 5>the battle, you know, it's not just like a whole
<v Speaker 5>bunch of abilities. There's like characters here bonding and talking
<v Speaker 5>with each other and getting getting hurt together.
<v Speaker 6>It could be kind of kind of interesting to talk
<v Speaker 6>about the like mechanical history of that too, because we
<v Speaker 6>had a version of the game that more directly had
<v Speaker 6>that feeling of like let's team up an attack now,
<v Speaker 6>where you'd put cards together and they they'd all have
<v Speaker 6>the same color and they would sort of combine and
<v Speaker 6>they could be attack in unison. So it was sort
<v Speaker 6>of like the more I am able to put cards
<v Speaker 6>together that have the same color, they'd link and they
<v Speaker 6>could all fire or trigger their abilities at once for
<v Speaker 6>the same action point. Back back then we had action points,
<v Speaker 6>but that for whatever reason turned out to be sort
<v Speaker 6>of difficult to balance, or you know, we say to
<v Speaker 6>each other say to each other a lot, like we
<v Speaker 6>probably could have finished that game in that way, but
<v Speaker 6>we just chose not to, So that that system sort
<v Speaker 6>of morphed into like, Okay, the colors are still there,
<v Speaker 6>but they're like there's this energy banking system that the
<v Speaker 6>energy gets put over here and all the other cards
<v Speaker 6>can use them.
<v Speaker 5>There's a big graveyard of maybe okay mechanics that Eric
<v Speaker 5>drew amazing mockups for. I think that's like one of
<v Speaker 5>the hardest things. Like we look back at Eric's mockup,
<v Speaker 5>we're like, I see how we could have solved that problem.
<v Speaker 5>Now we probably should have made that game too, But
<v Speaker 5>there's a the energy banking system that the colors that
<v Speaker 5>you allude to and then Ben echo like that reminds
<v Speaker 5>me of a big goal with sort of make this
<v Speaker 5>a streamlined card game. We want to have like like
<v Speaker 5>Hearthstone did a great job, like to some degree, like
<v Speaker 5>take magic and then streamline it some more, and we
<v Speaker 5>wanted so that's why there's not a hand for instance,
<v Speaker 5>it's a draft system, and then there's lots of balancing
<v Speaker 5>to do with that that we really didn't figure out
<v Speaker 5>how to make it feel right until like two months ago,
<v Speaker 5>with like how to manage your draft and using command
<v Speaker 5>points to redraw stuff like that that really like fixed
<v Speaker 5>a lot of the things that we're always unsure about.
<v Speaker 5>And then all of a sudden you're like, wait a second,
<v Speaker 5>we can solve this in this in this clear way.
<v Speaker 5>And everyone's gonna love it, and that that's like such
<v Speaker 5>a relief, like the whole like years of game development
<v Speaker 5>go by and you're like, I know this is a
<v Speaker 5>problem and then you finally solve it. But that that
<v Speaker 5>general vibe of like we want you to be able
<v Speaker 5>to understand your actions very quickly, but then there to
<v Speaker 5>be tons of interesting We always say order of operations
<v Speaker 5>and how you play a turn like who fires first
<v Speaker 5>can have a dramatic impact. And once we had that
<v Speaker 5>like mindset, like what order you play like the cars
<v Speaker 5>that you have out, or like what what order you
<v Speaker 5>trigger their attacks basically and knowing how that's going to
<v Speaker 5>affect things. And then once we understood that philosophy, then
<v Speaker 5>it was like, okay, now we can design the cards.
<v Speaker 5>And so some of the like initial cards that like
<v Speaker 5>the for instance you played in the demo, I don't
<v Speaker 5>know when that was a long time ago, like nine
<v Speaker 5>months ago. Yeah, a lot of those even initial cards
<v Speaker 5>changed to better reflect that. So like Jaeger's ability originally
<v Speaker 5>was just like oh he's cool. He had as a
<v Speaker 5>spread attack and that means he shoots not just straight across,
<v Speaker 5>but the three cards across from him and that's like
<v Speaker 5>kind of interesting.
<v Speaker 1>But then we.
<v Speaker 5>Layered on a cost reduction. His ability costs less when
<v Speaker 5>allies get kills, and so then it makes sense if
<v Speaker 5>you can get a kill, try to get that kill
<v Speaker 5>before using yeager, save his energy so he costs less,
<v Speaker 5>or tried to do that over multiple turns, and then
<v Speaker 5>he could attack for free. And then just like those
<v Speaker 5>little changes make it so that the difference between like
<v Speaker 5>just attacking, you know, with whoever has energy and like
<v Speaker 5>an optimal turn start getting bigger and bigger. There's more
<v Speaker 5>and more space for creativity and realizing cool scenarios or
<v Speaker 5>cool sequences to take advantage of. And like, just like
<v Speaker 5>in the last month or two, as we're trying to
<v Speaker 5>like finish and test for difficulty, and like we got
<v Speaker 5>to play through the whole game, make sure all the
<v Speaker 5>vio matches the script. Then you're playing it and you're like, oh,
<v Speaker 5>this is actually pretty cool, Like that goal actually played
<v Speaker 5>out in reality after all this time of being like
<v Speaker 5>just designing hundreds of cards to some degree in isolation
<v Speaker 5>where you're just like, okay, we need an enemy group.
<v Speaker 5>Make an enemy group, and then all of a sudden,
<v Speaker 5>they're like real cards with art and you're they have
<v Speaker 5>abilities that you're reacting to, and every scenario can feel different,
<v Speaker 5>and it's not just like do the try to build
<v Speaker 5>the same engine every time out of your deck, Like
<v Speaker 5>your deck isn't just like ten cards that you're like, Okay,
<v Speaker 5>play this card, then this card, than this card I win.
<v Speaker 5>We really wanted to be like, you're making interesting choices
<v Speaker 5>on your side every time, and the enemy is making
<v Speaker 5>it so you need to think more about which version
<v Speaker 5>of possibilities is the right one for this scenario.
<v Speaker 7>So you talked about choices within a card match, and
<v Speaker 7>I'm also interested in hearing about choices that happen outside
<v Speaker 7>of that. We talked about the episodes earlier, and there
<v Speaker 7>seem to be some branching paths in the game. How
<v Speaker 7>much of that ends up playing into Obviously there's choice
<v Speaker 7>in terms of where you go, who you end up recruiting,
<v Speaker 7>and things like that, changes who is on your ship,
<v Speaker 7>who you can interact with, build relationships with, and things
<v Speaker 7>like that. Does it also start to affect the broader
<v Speaker 7>scale of the game as well? Do any of these
<v Speaker 7>things start to impact story potentially endings? I know we
<v Speaker 7>don't want to talk any spoilers because the game's about
<v Speaker 7>to be out. But is there a lot of branching
<v Speaker 7>when it comes to that narrative.
<v Speaker 5>There's a good amount. There are like sort of two
<v Speaker 5>things we wanted to achieve. We want to make it replayable,
<v Speaker 5>but not infinitely replayable, like we're like, you should play
<v Speaker 5>this maybe two two and a half times that you
<v Speaker 5>would have seen everything or almost everything, you know. But
<v Speaker 5>we also wanted these characters to be them and maybe
<v Speaker 5>Eric if you want to jump in on this. But
<v Speaker 5>the way that our writer Megan like presented this this
<v Speaker 5>like path to Us was sort of like like we'll
<v Speaker 5>take the main character, Heathcliffe. He is not going to
<v Speaker 5>be like evil. You're not playing him as either like
<v Speaker 5>choose between Evil Heathcliff or like paragon Heathcliffe.
<v Speaker 1>You're there.
<v Speaker 5>We're going more for like there are three flavors of chocolate,
<v Speaker 5>like mocha, chocolate chip, I forget what the and like
<v Speaker 5>road Yeah, like there's still he's still chocolate. And this
<v Speaker 5>isn't exposed to player at all. But they're introspective, affable,
<v Speaker 5>and decisive, and so those are to some degree like
<v Speaker 5>they're all flat. They're all Heathcliff. But it's like how
<v Speaker 5>Piccard are you in this season?
<v Speaker 1>You know?
<v Speaker 5>Or like Howl from Firefly are you for this part?
<v Speaker 1>And where?
<v Speaker 5>And none of it is like you're building up points
<v Speaker 5>and now you're like locked in. You're like, I'm only
<v Speaker 5>affable now. It's at every choice point you get to,
<v Speaker 5>you get to you know, pick your flavor or choose
<v Speaker 5>your scoop of ice cream or whatever. But so we
<v Speaker 5>wanted to feel we wanted the choices to be constrained
<v Speaker 5>in like a meaningful way where these are the characters,
<v Speaker 5>these are this is what happened. There are some larger
<v Speaker 5>choices that affect the end, and like who you have
<v Speaker 5>in your deck by the time you reach the end
<v Speaker 5>affects things as well. But we didn't want it to
<v Speaker 5>be like the like you can choose to beat the
<v Speaker 5>villain or you can choose to like, I don't know,
<v Speaker 5>go farm strawberries like that. It was very much like
<v Speaker 5>we want to tell a story, but give the player
<v Speaker 5>freedom within within that like core plot, so there's like
<v Speaker 5>there's critical missions and then there's just like a ton
<v Speaker 5>of other missions that you'll experience along the way of
<v Speaker 5>a single run.
<v Speaker 7>Do you have any particular favorite standout missions or anything
<v Speaker 7>like that. Stuff that really felt like when you played it,
<v Speaker 7>you're like, oh, this is this is what we envisioned
<v Speaker 7>coming together in one moment.
<v Speaker 5>My mind always goes to the Belmont Crew mission, but
<v Speaker 5>I feel like that's that was just two weird. So
<v Speaker 5>there's one mission, Belmont's Crew mission. Belmont is the chef
<v Speaker 5>and he makes a dish using some alien fruit that
<v Speaker 5>looks like strawberries and it is psychotropic, and so you
<v Speaker 5>get of you get like a weird sequence during he's
<v Speaker 5>tripping with the captain and they're experiencing something from like
<v Speaker 5>a childhood sim game that he used to play, and
<v Speaker 5>it's like a real battle but for for the player,
<v Speaker 5>but like in their world it's wild. And that's where
<v Speaker 5>we got to highlight some of the like really wild
<v Speaker 5>view like Sung Juancho pros d plays the the end
<v Speaker 5>of the Allies that show up in that mission, and
<v Speaker 5>it's just like like one of those opportunities, like you
<v Speaker 5>we have an advantage of like this being drawn, you know,
<v Speaker 5>like it would be it would be really hard to
<v Speaker 5>do some of the wacky stuff in that episode, and
<v Speaker 5>and that's one of I don't know a handful of
<v Speaker 5>missions where you don't have your deck with you. You're
<v Speaker 5>not like it's not you don't have a ship with you.
<v Speaker 5>It's a battle that's designed just for that situation. So
<v Speaker 5>like the enemies are all like custom little gremliny things
<v Speaker 5>and you're there with like the duck, these like duck
<v Speaker 5>knights defending a palace, and it's just like weird and fun.
<v Speaker 5>And so that gives us an opportunity to show off
<v Speaker 5>like the card mechanics and make more of a more
<v Speaker 5>of a designed puzzlely set up where you're like, okay,
<v Speaker 5>like this is how this duck works. There's like a
<v Speaker 5>duck Knight and a duck Granny and like and this
<v Speaker 5>is how the palace cannons work. And that's just a
<v Speaker 5>really fun sort of like I don't know, palate cleanser
<v Speaker 5>or like resets your expectations about what this game could be.
<v Speaker 5>There's some stuff that we really wanted to do in
<v Speaker 5>Battle Chef, like use the mechanics in a fun different way,
<v Speaker 5>and we got to pull it off here in a
<v Speaker 5>bunch of crew missions and faction missions.
<v Speaker 7>That was a big thing in Battle Chef was you
<v Speaker 7>had kind of the cooking battles, but then there were
<v Speaker 7>side things that you could go do the puzzles to
<v Speaker 7>kind of figure those out on the side, and then
<v Speaker 7>they would kind of inform the mechanics and maybe help
<v Speaker 7>you come to grips with the mechanics of the game
<v Speaker 7>and then apply that further on. And so does it
<v Speaker 7>feel like you're kind of just building up skill in
<v Speaker 7>that way too over these missions that as you play
<v Speaker 7>with stuff, as you make these choices, you're kind of
<v Speaker 7>teaching the player, Hey, this is the possibility space of
<v Speaker 7>what's out there.
<v Speaker 5>Absolutely, and that's like something that so between episodes. At
<v Speaker 5>the end of every episode, you end up back on
<v Speaker 5>your ship and that's where you can talk to characters,
<v Speaker 5>and there's like a very dynamic system for which characters
<v Speaker 5>are available to talk to based on sort of like
<v Speaker 5>battle performance and who you've been upgrading and who's recently
<v Speaker 5>joined the ship and the episode that just happened. But
<v Speaker 5>also like we wanted that to feel like sort of
<v Speaker 5>the town and battle Chef brigade, and so there is
<v Speaker 5>a sim chamber full of puzzles. That was something that
<v Speaker 5>like we wanted to do forever, just like Belchier's workshop,
<v Speaker 5>because it's so appealing to solve a puzzle that's using
<v Speaker 5>the card system that you're now understanding or still in
<v Speaker 5>the process of understanding, in a more focused environment where
<v Speaker 5>you're not like, oh no, there's some narrative thing going on.
<v Speaker 5>And it also gave us the opportunity to, just like
<v Speaker 5>in bowscheff reinforce mechanics that may not be clear to
<v Speaker 5>someone who's not like a really hardcore card battler player
<v Speaker 5>or like a deck builder player, So we get to
<v Speaker 5>be like, oh yeah, if you didn't notice, like check
<v Speaker 5>this out. And and then we also have sort of
<v Speaker 5>bounties which just straight up use your deck, and there
<v Speaker 5>are great opportunities to practice using your deck, and then
<v Speaker 5>and also think about what mods, so you also get
<v Speaker 5>to you can craft mods out of the ingredients you've
<v Speaker 5>been collecting, the crafting materials, and then you can also
<v Speaker 5>upgrade your cards with those mods or just mods that
<v Speaker 5>you've collected in episodes. And so we definitely were like,
<v Speaker 5>we'd love that in Battleshupherdgaye that sort of like pacing
<v Speaker 5>break and now there's just like way more story involved
<v Speaker 5>in that as well.
<v Speaker 7>When it comes to the story, I do have to
<v Speaker 7>ask the big question romance is their romance and how much?
<v Speaker 7>If so?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, there's.
<v Speaker 4>I think it's tricky. It's tricky because we're not h
<v Speaker 4>standard typical like sorry, we're not a typical dating simulator
<v Speaker 4>game where the entire focus is about like trying to
<v Speaker 4>court and romance the characters. But you know, as Tom's
<v Speaker 4>been saying, we have storylines that we feel are canon,
<v Speaker 4>you know, that we wanted to tell, and so there
<v Speaker 4>are budding romances, you know, between the characters on the cast.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and so.
<v Speaker 4>With these you know, episodic content, you can have the
<v Speaker 4>choice to explore them further as well. So you could
<v Speaker 4>miss them, but if you're like I really like these characters,
<v Speaker 4>you could discover that actually they have uh you know,
<v Speaker 4>romantic interests that they pursue, and we we aren't shy
<v Speaker 4>about like you know, uh, we actually have characters become
<v Speaker 4>in a really shit like where they're not just like
<v Speaker 4>will they or won't they for the entire like ten seasons.
<v Speaker 4>We don't do that. We just like they are adults,
<v Speaker 4>and they are they like each other, and they're going
<v Speaker 4>to become in a relationship. So yeah, it's I'm looking
<v Speaker 4>forward to people discovering those.
<v Speaker 7>That's I like that because I think an underrated part.
<v Speaker 7>When I think back to one of my favorite series,
<v Speaker 7>Mass Effect, there's the secret scene you can get when
<v Speaker 7>you stumble upon Garrison Tally spoilers from Mass Effect three,
<v Speaker 7>I guess, and I always always love that idea. That
<v Speaker 7>romance can sometimes feel like a player centric thing, but
<v Speaker 7>having it bud amongst your crew, amongst these characters that
<v Speaker 7>you've been building up and not just focused around you
<v Speaker 7>is really exciting. When it comes to the characters. I mean,
<v Speaker 7>even in the demo I played a while back, there
<v Speaker 7>was an incredibly diverse set of characters that all kind
<v Speaker 7>of seem very distinct, very different from each other, even
<v Speaker 7>from their designs themselves, to the robots or they're the
<v Speaker 7>mechs sorry that they pilot, and how I mean, was
<v Speaker 7>it difficult to create such a vast, you know, swath
<v Speaker 7>of characters coming from from different backgrounds, identities, the way
<v Speaker 7>they pilot, the way they fight, or did it just
<v Speaker 7>kind of feel like you were kind of popcorning and
<v Speaker 7>coming up with stuff and a little bit more easily.
<v Speaker 4>I feel like it came pretty pretty naturally, pretty popcorn
<v Speaker 4>like just having fun with it a lot of it
<v Speaker 4>came from a place of wanting to have characters that
<v Speaker 4>I didn't see in shows that I was watching, whether
<v Speaker 4>it was anime or live action, you know, Star Trek
<v Speaker 4>and stuff. So for example, you know, like Heathcliffe himself,
<v Speaker 4>it's just like I'd love to see an Asian captain,
<v Speaker 4>you know, as the leading male you know, characters of
<v Speaker 4>the game, and and a lot of the characters come
<v Speaker 4>from that kind of point of view of just wanting
<v Speaker 4>to see more of this kind of diversity, if you will.
<v Speaker 4>And then it's a ton of fun to design and
<v Speaker 4>draw the visuals of the characters. But at a certain
<v Speaker 4>point it did become you know, kind of like a
<v Speaker 4>chin scratcher of like, okay, well you have the visual,
<v Speaker 4>but now they need to become a real person. So
<v Speaker 4>that's where Megan, our writer, such an incredible job, like
<v Speaker 4>flashing out so many of the characters, you know, to
<v Speaker 4>a really deep level beyond just their surface visual.
<v Speaker 7>Ben Tom, do y'all have any favorite characters from the
<v Speaker 7>castie all want to shout out?
<v Speaker 1>In particular?
<v Speaker 5>I think Darciana might be my favorite. She's like extremely
<v Speaker 5>spunky and sincere and always coming up with ideas for weapons,
<v Speaker 5>she like helps make all the mods that you install
<v Speaker 5>in your mix, and she's just like always positive and fun.
<v Speaker 5>But there's also a character, Robin in the Hunter's Guild
<v Speaker 5>later on, who is extremely loud and her ability is
<v Speaker 5>super good. So Darciana's ability is like whenever someone else
<v Speaker 5>gets a kill. She also fires like a sidearm, and
<v Speaker 5>that's like an extremely good one or fun to use,
<v Speaker 5>and like as you move her around to like get
<v Speaker 5>get like combos, basically it's really fun. But Robin has
<v Speaker 5>an ability where if she she has spreadshots, so she'll
<v Speaker 5>hit three targets across from her. If she kills one,
<v Speaker 5>she fires again, and so you can set up really
<v Speaker 5>awesome combos where she's firing multiple times and like yelling
<v Speaker 5>at the top of her lungs about it. She's voiced
<v Speaker 5>by el Smith Eastman, and it's just like the perfect match,
<v Speaker 5>you know, like like it just feels like she's Robin
<v Speaker 5>is having an awesome time in these battles. I don't know,
<v Speaker 5>I'll send it to you.
<v Speaker 6>Ben, Yeah, I gotta say. Oddly, Mirabelle and Falcon are
<v Speaker 6>two suitsmiths that you meet early on in the demo,
<v Speaker 6>and I really like them because they ended up just
<v Speaker 6>sort of being almost like a shtick, like the straight
<v Speaker 6>laced one, and then the goof the goofs are even
<v Speaker 6>though Falcon like Goofs by uh sort of like teasing
<v Speaker 6>you and making you think he's serious, and mirabel is
<v Speaker 6>actually just serious all the time. But it's kind of
<v Speaker 6>cool because to an extent it feels like the that
<v Speaker 6>aspect of their personalities reflected in their mechanics, Like they
<v Speaker 6>all the Suitsmith's faction is about armor and utilizing armor
<v Speaker 6>and protecting yourself or turning into a weapons somehow. And
<v Speaker 6>Mirabelle has regular shielding armor shielding which just absorbs damage
<v Speaker 6>and it's you know, decreases as you take damage. But
<v Speaker 6>Falcon has play d in which absorbs the entirety of
<v Speaker 6>one hit, no matter how much tame it is. But
<v Speaker 6>there's something cool about how, you know, there's these different
<v Speaker 6>flavors of armor within the Suitsmans faction and it sort
<v Speaker 6>of mirrors the fact that they have these different different personalities.
<v Speaker 1>Awesome.
<v Speaker 7>I'm curious as we kind of wrap up here, you
<v Speaker 7>look at this fall and I feel like an early
<v Speaker 7>I don't know theme for this this Fallen gaming has
<v Speaker 7>been a lot of games launching out of nowhere, people
<v Speaker 7>talking about how much games can kind of take up
<v Speaker 7>the mind share. You know, Silk Song came out, everybody
<v Speaker 7>panics and scatterers. Haiti's two Shadow drops, you know, one
<v Speaker 7>point zero, and in a couple of weeks everybody freaks
<v Speaker 7>out scatters. Obviously y'all are about to drop. I can't
<v Speaker 7>imagine there's there's a panic switch sitting anywhere that y'all especially.
<v Speaker 1>Want to pull.
<v Speaker 7>But has it kind of felt weird, you know, going
<v Speaker 7>into this and seeing that there's a lot of concern about,
<v Speaker 7>you know, timing when to drop a game. What's the
<v Speaker 7>best time there's so many games coming out, or do
<v Speaker 7>you just feel like you want to put a game
<v Speaker 7>out and see how it does.
<v Speaker 5>We're in between those two. It's it's definitely just terrifying
<v Speaker 5>all the time launching a game. The thing that I
<v Speaker 5>tell myself the most though, is we just got to
<v Speaker 5>do better than Battle Chef. Because Battle Cheffer we had
<v Speaker 5>promised with Nintendo, like put us in a direct. They
<v Speaker 5>demanded that we would come out that year. So it
<v Speaker 5>ended up coming out Thanksgiving, like we we were able
<v Speaker 5>to say Holiday of twenty seventeen, but that meant that
<v Speaker 5>we had to figure out where in the holidays to release,
<v Speaker 5>and we were like, okay, we'll go after Mario Odyssey,
<v Speaker 5>and like, look, no Triple A games are coming out
<v Speaker 5>this Thanksgiving week and we're making a food game. Maybe
<v Speaker 5>this will work out. But that was like one of
<v Speaker 5>those like in retrospect, probably wasn't the right call, but
<v Speaker 5>like so we're just like, okay, we got to do
<v Speaker 5>better than that. Like we're not going to be Thanksgiving week,
<v Speaker 5>We're not going to be Halloween week. Like it is
<v Speaker 5>just purely terrifying, and like if Silksong had been October seventh, WED,
<v Speaker 5>I don't know what we would have done.
<v Speaker 7>Conversely, though, I guess what do you and this can
<v Speaker 7>be our last question? What are each of you excited
<v Speaker 7>for players to kind of get hands on with in
<v Speaker 7>this game? Is there a particular aspect of the game,
<v Speaker 7>something that you're really excited for people to see. We
<v Speaker 7>can start with Ben, what are you most excited for
<v Speaker 7>players to see once they get their hands on the game.
<v Speaker 6>I'm kind of excited to see feedback, you know, obviously
<v Speaker 6>on the entirety of the game, the story, the characters,
<v Speaker 6>the art, but I'm also excited to see how people
<v Speaker 6>feel about the card game onto itself. I think for
<v Speaker 6>whatever reason, I think I feel the team's a little
<v Speaker 6>better position to like react to and respond to player
<v Speaker 6>feedback and do it in a quick way. I think
<v Speaker 6>we're just the type of game we're making. Lets us
<v Speaker 6>you know, react faster to somebody saying like this is
<v Speaker 6>really imbalance. If everybody agrees we can, we can tweak
<v Speaker 6>that pretty fast. As compared to Battle Chef, which is,
<v Speaker 6>you know, a brawler that it's a little harder to
<v Speaker 6>like fine tune. And I think just because we're we're
<v Speaker 6>self publishing this ourselves, like we're just a little more
<v Speaker 6>prepared to just react quickly to you know, people's feedback
<v Speaker 6>and provide you know, more content when we can.
<v Speaker 7>What about you, Eric, what are you most excited for
<v Speaker 7>for for people to see and check out?
<v Speaker 4>Yeah? So even though there is a giant mount everest
<v Speaker 4>of artwork assets people can see, the thing I'm actually
<v Speaker 4>most excited about is is on the audio side. So
<v Speaker 4>the combination of Carlos Insane in the Rain, all of
<v Speaker 4>the music that he's done so lovingly, Like there's a
<v Speaker 4>lot of episode specific music, there's like faction specific music
<v Speaker 4>that he's done that I just can't wait for people
<v Speaker 4>to hear and you know, fall in love with and
<v Speaker 4>then be listening to the soundtrack over and over and
<v Speaker 4>then also just oh my gosh, the voice talent, like
<v Speaker 4>every one of the seventy plus characters's voice, and there's
<v Speaker 4>so many great performances across the board. So I'm really
<v Speaker 4>excited for.
<v Speaker 7>That awesome Tom.
<v Speaker 5>How about you, I'm I think I'm just purely excited
<v Speaker 5>to see people react to this story and these characters.
<v Speaker 1>Like we we.
<v Speaker 5>Definitely told a more mature story this time. It's not
<v Speaker 5>like massively more mature, but like Blischebrigade was basically like
<v Speaker 5>high schoolers in a cooking tournament, like college, I guess,
<v Speaker 5>but this is a little more mature, and I think
<v Speaker 5>it hits harder Like Ballaschep Bargade had characters being friends,
<v Speaker 5>and this is like, Okay, there are characters and relationships,
<v Speaker 5>and there are characters going through the things that we've
<v Speaker 5>experienced in our own lives, like with family, and to
<v Speaker 5>some degree like this is a found family story, but
<v Speaker 5>it's also like people going through the time of life
<v Speaker 5>when you're making choices about like who's in your family.
<v Speaker 5>And we've onboarded a lot of people in the last
<v Speaker 5>like I mean, it's not too many, but like as
<v Speaker 5>we finish, we're like, okay, we need more people to
<v Speaker 5>help with all these different things. And they play the
<v Speaker 5>game and they're like, oh, this part made me cry,
<v Speaker 5>and I'm like, damn, like like I think this it
<v Speaker 5>really hits Like there's something about having voice acting and
<v Speaker 5>Eric's like beautiful characters with all their expressions and poses
<v Speaker 5>that and this story Like as you get to know
<v Speaker 5>a character and you really feel for them as they're
<v Speaker 5>going through something and you understand who they are, some
<v Speaker 5>of the crew missions are like flashbacks and you're like, oh,
<v Speaker 5>this recontextualizes like the first six hours that I s
<v Speaker 5>find with this character. I now understand why they were
<v Speaker 5>like that, and that just feels like really meaningful. So
<v Speaker 5>I'm really excited to see, like see how people feel
<v Speaker 5>about like really connecting with these characters, because I think
<v Speaker 5>Eric and Meghan and so many other people on the
<v Speaker 5>team have done an amazing job.
<v Speaker 1>Awesome.
<v Speaker 7>That's Battlesuit Aces. It's coming out October seventh, very soon
<v Speaker 7>after this pod comes out on PC, PlayStation and switch
<v Speaker 7>go check that out. Make sure to make some time
<v Speaker 7>think I think trick it's a pretty fun studio and
<v Speaker 7>make some pretty cool games. I think it's going to
<v Speaker 7>be worth your time. Y'all, thank you so much for
<v Speaker 7>coming on the show and hanging out and chatting. We're
<v Speaker 7>gonna send it back now, don't go far. There's more
<v Speaker 7>GI show where this came from.
<v Speaker 1>All righty, thank you for listening to that interview, and
<v Speaker 1>we will see you next week with another episode of
<v Speaker 1>the Game Former Show. Bye w