Most Anticipated Upcoming Games In 2025, Plus PHANTOM BLADE ZERO, And Roger Impressions

<v Speaker 1>Hey, everyone, 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 on the latest gaming news, reviews,
<v Speaker 1>and exclusive reveals 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 Newshound himself, Wesley LeBlanc.
<v Speaker 2>Hello, Hello, I'm COVID free this week.
<v Speaker 1>Let's go Hell yeah, appreciate you trucking through last week.
<v Speaker 1>I was listening to the show and you sounded fighting
<v Speaker 1>for your life.
<v Speaker 2>Honestly, I did listen to it back and I was like, oh, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>he definitely, he definitely has COVID. I I felt decent
<v Speaker 2>enough to record, but I sounded like way worse.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, well, glad you sound better this week. You know
<v Speaker 1>sounds good. You know him, you love him? Are newest higher?
<v Speaker 1>What his velvety voice, mister Eric Van Allen, Hello, velvety,
<v Speaker 1>velvety voice. I've never been told that before. No, you
<v Speaker 1>got that, Belvis.
<v Speaker 3>Usually I get told I have a face for radio.
<v Speaker 3>So that's that's a nice little compliment to get every
<v Speaker 3>now and then.
<v Speaker 1>It's like, I like to think some of the hottest
<v Speaker 1>people on Earth working radio.
<v Speaker 3>Honestly, they do meet your local radio co hosts, you know,
<v Speaker 3>while it still exists, while radio is still around.
<v Speaker 1>Yes, and we've got a special guest making his first
<v Speaker 1>appearance on the game and former show Freelance or Extraordinary.
<v Speaker 1>You can find his work at en Verse and Rolling Stone.
<v Speaker 1>Mister Hayes Mattson, how are you hello?
<v Speaker 4>I'm good, Thank you for having me. Ah, absolute pleasure.
<v Speaker 1>Honestly, absolutely. What are your thoughts about the state of
<v Speaker 1>appearance in radio? Do you think I think we've hit
<v Speaker 1>a new high in terms of attractiveness? And where would
<v Speaker 1>you rank each of us on that list? Just putting
<v Speaker 1>you on the spot right away.
<v Speaker 3>No no, no, no, no, no, no no no no.
<v Speaker 2>You're just gonna say, like, what are your thoughts?
<v Speaker 1>What are your thoughts? What are you thinking?
<v Speaker 4>I think I listened to local radio a lot, and
<v Speaker 4>I agree that hot people are on the radio, honestly.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, we're talking about the the Cuba Gooding Junior Movie Radio.
<v Speaker 3>Actually okay, yeah, yeah, classic two thousand threes finess I
<v Speaker 3>think it was that year.
<v Speaker 1>But yes, we've got a big show today. We're gonna
<v Speaker 1>be talking with Hayes and Wesley about Fantom Blade zero.
<v Speaker 1>You guys took a trip all the way to China,
<v Speaker 1>which is still pretty wild to go play the game.
<v Speaker 1>You guys got to go like a cool ass event, Wesley,
<v Speaker 1>and I think Hayes you were there for this two.
<v Speaker 1>You guys went to the Great Wall of China and
<v Speaker 1>nothing went wrong. It sounded like it was just a
<v Speaker 1>completely smooth journey to one of the literal world won.
<v Speaker 1>So we're excited to hear all about that. I'm gonna
<v Speaker 1>be talking about a cool little game I played recently
<v Speaker 1>called and Roger, and then we're gonna round out the
<v Speaker 1>show with us going down our most anticipated games of
<v Speaker 1>twenty twenty five, the remainder of the year, starting pretty
<v Speaker 1>much from now throughout December. We got our handy dandy
<v Speaker 1>release calendar up, which you can find on gameformer dot com,
<v Speaker 1>and we're just gonna be shouting out some stuff that
<v Speaker 1>we're personally excited about and maybe what we think you
<v Speaker 1>guys should maybe keep an eye on. And yeah, it
<v Speaker 1>would be a very fun show. But before we get
<v Speaker 1>in all that, if you want to support Game Informer,
<v Speaker 1>the best thing you can do is subscribe to Game
<v Speaker 1>Informer magazine, which is what we're known for. We've been
<v Speaker 1>making video game magazine since nineteen ninety one. If you're
<v Speaker 1>watching the video version right now, you can see Wesley
<v Speaker 1>and Eric holding up our two issues that we put
<v Speaker 1>out since Game Informer came back. We got the Borderlands
<v Speaker 1>four issue. We've got our latest issue, which is for
<v Speaker 1>Vampire to Masquerade Bloodlines two. As we've said over and over,
<v Speaker 1>this isn't the Game and Former magazine. If your grandpa
<v Speaker 1>or your dad, this is brand new, better paper. It's bigger,
<v Speaker 1>the covers are glossier. You can hug it like it's
<v Speaker 1>your own child, much like Wesley is doing. And look
<v Speaker 1>at this, look at the beautiful artwork inside. It's an amazing,
<v Speaker 1>an amazing piece of print that we put together ten
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<v Speaker 1>generally there's sometimes sales prices that I won't list right
<v Speaker 1>now because it changes all the times about a time.
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<v Speaker 1>might not be there by the time you listen to this.
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<v Speaker 1>you enjoy Game Informer, we urge you to subscribe. And
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<v Speaker 1>And yes, we appreciate the support as always and as usual, Yes,
<v Speaker 1>without further ado, Wesley Hayes, you guys went to China,
<v Speaker 1>what like two weeks ago or however long it was ago? Uh? Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>how was the how this happen? Anyway? Because I don't
<v Speaker 1>have all the trips I hear in the game industry
<v Speaker 1>of people being flown all over the place, China is
<v Speaker 1>the one that really you see pop up a lot. Hayes,
<v Speaker 1>I'll start with you, how how was the trip? Have
<v Speaker 1>you been to China before? And how was it?
<v Speaker 3>Uh?
<v Speaker 4>No, I've never been to China, and I before then,
<v Speaker 4>I'd actually never been outside of the United States. So
<v Speaker 4>this is my first international trip, and it's a big
<v Speaker 4>international trip to take. You know, we'll talk about it more,
<v Speaker 4>but it was. It was fascinating, Honestly it was. We
<v Speaker 4>spent a lot of time in Beijing and then a
<v Speaker 4>couple of days in Shanghai, two very different cities. Shanghai
<v Speaker 4>is very like, technologically advanced, and Beijing felt very traditional,
<v Speaker 4>I think old traditional, like not in a bad way,
<v Speaker 4>but you know, food was phenomenal, probably some of the
<v Speaker 4>best food I've had in my life. Since I've gotten back,
<v Speaker 4>I've told everyone that, like, I don't think I can
<v Speaker 4>have Chinese food for a couple months because I'm just
<v Speaker 4>going to be extremely disappointed by whatever I eat. We
<v Speaker 4>went to the Great Wall, we saw the bund in Shanghai.
<v Speaker 4>We went to Phantom Blades MOCAP studio. I was absolutely
<v Speaker 4>one of the most fascinating behind the scenes looks I've
<v Speaker 4>ever had in a game.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and that's why you guys were there. Primarily was
<v Speaker 1>to go to a big event hosted by is it
<v Speaker 1>S Games, the developer of a fanom Blade zero they
<v Speaker 1>had this giganme like thousands of people showed up at this.
<v Speaker 1>I think Wesley and your previews. You have a big
<v Speaker 1>preview and a travel log again our upcoming issue of
<v Speaker 1>the magazine talking about this, and looked like it was
<v Speaker 1>in a big like steel mill or something.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it was a it's called park. Yeah, it's a
<v Speaker 2>like decommissioned iron factory that's like a megacomplex. It's like
<v Speaker 2>multiple square acres of land, and it was the ho
<v Speaker 2>it was host to like the two thousand something early
<v Speaker 2>two thousand Olympics and the twenty twenty two Winter Olympics,
<v Speaker 2>and now it's like a it still stands like it's
<v Speaker 2>still an old iron factory you can tour, but they
<v Speaker 2>turned it into the place of this gigantic S party,
<v Speaker 2>which yeah, we were there for like a preview to
<v Speaker 2>preview the game, but we were there alongside hundreds of
<v Speaker 2>content creators and influencers and then like up to two
<v Speaker 2>thousand members of like the public, just like Chinese locals
<v Speaker 2>who wanted to play this game. So it was less
<v Speaker 2>that we were there on like a preview trip and
<v Speaker 2>more that we were invited to an event equivalent of
<v Speaker 2>something we'd have here like in the States. It was
<v Speaker 2>a pretty nuts.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, And I'm curious about what you guys played, because
<v Speaker 1>I played the game last year in Games Calm, and
<v Speaker 1>it was about, I think, like an hour demo. It
<v Speaker 1>was kind of it was like in a section where
<v Speaker 1>you just killed a few enemies and then got to
<v Speaker 1>a boss at the end. I couldn't tell you much
<v Speaker 1>about like just the environment because it was kind of
<v Speaker 1>just like like it didn't stand out, not that it
<v Speaker 1>was bad, it was just like, oh, you're like in
<v Speaker 1>a Chinese environment and you're fighting for a temple, and
<v Speaker 1>like I think that I took away to most was
<v Speaker 1>just like how good the combat felt and how great
<v Speaker 1>the animation was loved, Like, how was the demo? Like,
<v Speaker 1>did you guys enjoy the game?
<v Speaker 2>I'll let you go forays.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, oh sure, Yeah, so the demo you played, I
<v Speaker 4>played that at GDC. This demo. If you saw the
<v Speaker 4>Year of the Snake trailer, which has like the Disciple
<v Speaker 4>boss where you're fighting seven different disciples, that's what this
<v Speaker 4>demo is. But it's the entire level leading up to
<v Speaker 4>that boss, which apparently this level is a side area
<v Speaker 4>in the game. They've said that multiple times that this
<v Speaker 4>is completely a side area and optional and all that.
<v Speaker 4>But you got more of a sense with this demo
<v Speaker 4>of the structure of the game. Like we've seen the
<v Speaker 4>combat a few times, but here we got to see
<v Speaker 4>kind of the level design, which is very inspired by
<v Speaker 4>Dark Souls. Its Souls like level design kind of grafted
<v Speaker 4>onto a high intensity Devil May Cry kind of combat system.
<v Speaker 4>So it's not a Soul's like, but it has souls
<v Speaker 4>like elements to it.
<v Speaker 1>I think it's an important distinction. I think a lot
<v Speaker 1>of the trailers gave the impression of a Soul's like
<v Speaker 1>and when I played it at games Calm, I was like,
<v Speaker 1>oh no, this is much closer to like a regular
<v Speaker 1>stylish action game.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, they're actively He's the director Soul Frame, who me
<v Speaker 2>and Hayes both talked to which Soul Frame. Which is
<v Speaker 2>Soul Frame. Yeah, and this is before Soul Frame was
<v Speaker 2>announced by the war Frame.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, I was going to ask, Yeah, he's not situation.
<v Speaker 4>He's not like.
<v Speaker 2>Grafting onto this new ip quickly. He's like, but no,
<v Speaker 2>he he's very like intentional with like we are inspired
<v Speaker 2>by souls like level design, not like to a degree
<v Speaker 2>of like copying. It's very inspired, but like, we actively
<v Speaker 2>do not want our game to feel like playing a
<v Speaker 2>Soul's Like in terms of combat and challenge, Like you
<v Speaker 2>are supposed to feel like a badass martial artists who
<v Speaker 2>is incredible at what they do. There is some challenge.
<v Speaker 2>And then somebody told me in my interview which I
<v Speaker 2>can't remember if it's in my feature, that's going to
<v Speaker 2>be an upcoming issue. But like for him, he says,
<v Speaker 2>it's kind of silly, and maybe he's talking of other
<v Speaker 2>developers who knows that for a team who's developing their
<v Speaker 2>first like Triple A game, because this is you know,
<v Speaker 2>they mostly do mobile games and this is their first
<v Speaker 2>big breakthrough Triple A game to try to do a
<v Speaker 2>Soul's like because the souls like requires like trust from
<v Speaker 2>the player and you have to earn that. You have
<v Speaker 2>to earn the ability to be like, I'm going to
<v Speaker 2>screw you over and over and over, but I promise
<v Speaker 2>the reward at the end is going to be a
<v Speaker 2>sense of accomplishment that you can't get in other games,
<v Speaker 2>which is what from Software is mastered. And he's like,
<v Speaker 2>we're not going to do that. We don't have the
<v Speaker 2>trust of players. Yet instead, we're going to focus on
<v Speaker 2>Chinese martial arts and making you feel really cool while
<v Speaker 2>defeating these enemies in very glorious fashions.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, what's the premise of this game? Exactly?
<v Speaker 2>Like, that's a great question. Who knows't We didn't get
<v Speaker 2>to find out anything really about the story.
<v Speaker 4>I do have a little bit of insight into this story.
<v Speaker 4>It's the point they haven't talked a lot about yet.
<v Speaker 4>But essentially, you play as a character named Soul who's
<v Speaker 4>this like martial artist, very inspired by like heroes from
<v Speaker 4>Wusha films, and you're in this like decaying world and
<v Speaker 4>Soul has only a number of days to live and
<v Speaker 4>he's trying to take down some kind of assassin organization.
<v Speaker 4>But the big thing I know about the story is
<v Speaker 4>that when I talked to him a GDC, they showed
<v Speaker 4>me these three pillars for the game, where it was
<v Speaker 4>level design inspired by Soul's likes, combat inspired by Devil
<v Speaker 4>May Cry, and a cinematic story inspired by Resident Evil
<v Speaker 4>and Alan Wake. And when I talked to Soul frame
<v Speaker 4>this time, he said that the inspiration there is a
<v Speaker 4>tinge of horror. It's not a horror game, but like
<v Speaker 4>Resident Evil or Alan Wake. There are like horror vibes
<v Speaker 4>to it, so it's kind of this decrepit world what
<v Speaker 4>they call. They've coined the term kung fu punk for
<v Speaker 4>their kind of world and their esthetic, where it's steampunk
<v Speaker 4>mixed with traditional Chinese martial arts and kung fu and
<v Speaker 4>things like that. So essentially, you're playing as a character
<v Speaker 4>who has days to live trying to take down some
<v Speaker 4>kind of shadowy assassin organization in a Wusha inspired setting.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and for those that don't know what wusha is, like,
<v Speaker 1>it's a specific genre of martial arts film. The easiest
<v Speaker 1>shorthand is probably Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in terms of
<v Speaker 1>the most well known. Definitely popularized it here. Yeah yeah,
<v Speaker 1>so like yeah, kind of like Chinese martial arts, but
<v Speaker 1>with like a lot of kind of fantastical elements mixed in. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Something also fun about the games, not story really, but
<v Speaker 2>the protagonist is also named Soul. Yeah so okay, I
<v Speaker 2>love it.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, really good. Actually, this Phantom Blade zero is based
<v Speaker 4>on a mobile game that s Game made called rain
<v Speaker 4>Blood like a decade ago. It's the Soul was the
<v Speaker 4>main character there. It's the same world called the Phantom
<v Speaker 4>World but it's this game has kind of allowed them
<v Speaker 4>to fully deliver on the vision that they had with
<v Speaker 4>that mobile game.
<v Speaker 3>I feel like we're seeing a lot of that recently
<v Speaker 3>with mobile games specifically moving into premium products. A Dungeon
<v Speaker 3>Fighter was doing it, a DNF whatever, Grand Blue has
<v Speaker 3>been doing that.
<v Speaker 1>Honor of Kings or even just mobile developers getting more
<v Speaker 1>into the triple A space, especially in Asia and over. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>like Stellar Blades probably maybe the best example of what
<v Speaker 1>I did.
<v Speaker 2>A one of my last features in our old gi
<v Speaker 2>era was like a big wide swath. Look at like
<v Speaker 2>South Korean development, and it is a lot of mobile
<v Speaker 2>developers who are like we have we've kind of reached
<v Speaker 2>our limit in the mobile market, and a lot of
<v Speaker 2>players over there are moving from mobile to consoles and
<v Speaker 2>PCs now. So instead of like relying on mobile market,
<v Speaker 2>we're going to continue our mobile games and build these
<v Speaker 2>console games, which Japan has done for years. Obviously Japan
<v Speaker 2>is their game development scene goes way back. South Korea
<v Speaker 2>is starting to do the same and now talking with
<v Speaker 2>Soul Frame and he has a lot of industry friends
<v Speaker 2>obviously in China, he said, like the same things happening
<v Speaker 2>in China's like a lot of these teams are. They've
<v Speaker 2>made money on mobile games, they're ready to to push
<v Speaker 2>for new audiences and new limits on console and p see,
<v Speaker 2>and that's what we're seeing happening here. Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>Interesting, this is a premium game, right, This is not
<v Speaker 3>any like it is what you would traditionally consider like
<v Speaker 3>a box, you know, buy at once play it sort
<v Speaker 3>of thing, rather than a free to play gotcha style
<v Speaker 3>anything like that.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, this is a single player action RPG, and PlayStation
<v Speaker 2>is partnered with them. I don't think publishing is the
<v Speaker 2>right word. I don't know if they're publishing. Soul Frame
<v Speaker 2>was very cautious. He just kept saying partnered, So like
<v Speaker 2>PlayStation has partnered with them. I don't know if it's
<v Speaker 2>part of the that Hero project, which I know is
<v Speaker 2>like another of.
<v Speaker 4>The specific China Hero project. But PlayStation is marketing it
<v Speaker 4>to a degree because it was revealed during a state
<v Speaker 4>of play. It was like the close out trailer in
<v Speaker 4>a state of play.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Something that I learned from talking to him was
<v Speaker 2>this game has it's got a lot of excitement behind it.
<v Speaker 2>I think one that has to do with like Blackmith,
<v Speaker 2>Wukong's six Last year, you know, multiple million copies sold
<v Speaker 2>and like a lot of eyes on the Chinese game
<v Speaker 2>development scene now and people are kind of looking at
<v Speaker 2>this game as one of those, like one of the
<v Speaker 2>next games.
<v Speaker 1>To do that.
<v Speaker 2>But he told me, like when they announced the game,
<v Speaker 2>when they revealed the game in the PlayStation showcase, he
<v Speaker 2>did not know, like they did not realize that was happening.
<v Speaker 2>And then it happened, and he was like, oh, we're
<v Speaker 2>not like close to being done, and people are very
<v Speaker 2>excited about this game.
<v Speaker 1>He asked me to send them a trailer.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, like they get yeah, they get launched to this
<v Speaker 2>like main stage. And then I can't remem if it
<v Speaker 2>was him telling me or maybe he told you Hayes
<v Speaker 2>at a different maybe a GDC, that the same thing
<v Speaker 2>happened with the Game Awards. Was it two years ago
<v Speaker 2>or this recent one.
<v Speaker 4>Uh, I can't remember if it. I don't think it
<v Speaker 4>was last year. I think it was two years ago.
<v Speaker 4>But they had a trailer at the Game Awards and
<v Speaker 4>he said that and they closed the show. Yeah, they
<v Speaker 4>sent the trailer in, but they didn't know where it
<v Speaker 4>would appear. They just thought they'd be in the show.
<v Speaker 4>And then the game War's happened and they were the
<v Speaker 4>big closeout trailer and I was like, oh, okay.
<v Speaker 2>And so like, there's this team of what I think
<v Speaker 2>forty ish people developing this cool kung fu punk game,
<v Speaker 2>and multiple times now it's been like grand staged in
<v Speaker 2>front of the world and they're like and people are
<v Speaker 2>clamoring for it, and they're like, whoa, We're just we're
<v Speaker 2>just making our game. We didn't know we were gonna
<v Speaker 2>be like continually pushed up this way. That said, though,
<v Speaker 2>good on this team, because like they're rising the occasion, well,
<v Speaker 2>at least what I've played so far. I'm I am really,
<v Speaker 2>really really stoked about this game. It's easily one of
<v Speaker 2>my most anticipated for next year, even though they haven't
<v Speaker 2>said when it's coming out. I definitely don't think it's coming.
<v Speaker 3>Out this year.
<v Speaker 2>It's a good it's a good action game.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. I also, like, I want to touch on the
<v Speaker 1>animation because that's something that was a big sticking point
<v Speaker 1>in some of your writings, and it even when I
<v Speaker 1>played it last year, and that was something I was like,
<v Speaker 1>this looks so fluid, and I like, I don't know
<v Speaker 1>if I automtically assumed it was mo cap, but it
<v Speaker 1>was like like apparently they actually got a bunch of
<v Speaker 1>like legitimate like martial artists in the MOCAP studio to
<v Speaker 1>capture all the movements for the characters. And you got
<v Speaker 1>to do a bit of that too because you also
<v Speaker 1>also a Chinese martial artists.
<v Speaker 2>Don't know, people know, Yeah, as a Chinese martial artists. Uh.
<v Speaker 2>We went to Shanghai and they we went to their
<v Speaker 2>MOCAP studio and yeah, they had like ten or eleven
<v Speaker 2>uh men and women who were just like these incredible
<v Speaker 2>martial artists like doing stuff. They had like the harnesses
<v Speaker 2>all the way to the ceilings and like the things
<v Speaker 2>around their waist where they could spin in the air.
<v Speaker 2>They're doing like flips over each other, doing like the
<v Speaker 2>parallel leading spinning over. It's it was the coolest thing
<v Speaker 2>they're just having literally, yeah exactly. And then that we'd
<v Speaker 2>see like on the screen it appearing like in game,
<v Speaker 2>you know, in like a gray scaled flat environment development.
<v Speaker 2>And yeah, basically like everything you see in the game,
<v Speaker 2>all the the animation. I don't want to say all
<v Speaker 2>of it, but I imagine like ninety nine percent of it
<v Speaker 2>is mo capped to a degree where like, oh, if
<v Speaker 2>Soul's performing move, somebody performed that on a sound stage.
<v Speaker 2>Those enemies jumping off that horse and doing a flip
<v Speaker 2>in the air, whatever, somebody performed that on a sound stage.
<v Speaker 2>And like you said, what you get is this incredibly fluid,
<v Speaker 2>sick looking animation that is seems like it's I think
<v Speaker 2>it's like a I don't want to say New Frontier,
<v Speaker 2>but like it's somewhere the action genre could go, because
<v Speaker 2>it really does add this whole new level of authenticity
<v Speaker 2>where you're like wow, like, especially knowing what I saw
<v Speaker 2>in game people performed. It just adds this crazy level
<v Speaker 2>of immersion where it's like, yo, this is real, Like
<v Speaker 2>people did this and I'm doing it now. This is
<v Speaker 2>so sick.
<v Speaker 4>And they've been doing that for years too. They've been
<v Speaker 4>mo capping for years. Their action director is named Master
<v Speaker 4>Yang and he's he's a master in kung fu. He
<v Speaker 4>went to school in China for kung fu. And I
<v Speaker 4>was told that they've been obviously I don't know to
<v Speaker 4>what degree, but mocap Works started in twenty eighteen, so
<v Speaker 4>they've been doing it for for a long time. And
<v Speaker 4>like Wesley said, you know, every action in this game
<v Speaker 4>is mo capped, even like certain enemies, like flying enemies,
<v Speaker 4>you know that's mo capped with a base and holes
<v Speaker 4>are kind of filled in with animation where it needs
<v Speaker 4>to be, especially in fights like the disciple fight where
<v Speaker 4>you have seven different characters and it's hard to mo
<v Speaker 4>cap seven different people. So if you have characters rolling
<v Speaker 4>around or going in front of each other, things might
<v Speaker 4>get blocked off. So it's all mo capped, but then
<v Speaker 4>there's animation layered in to kind of smooth it over
<v Speaker 4>and fill in the gaps.
<v Speaker 1>And is oh, go ahead, you finish your thought.
<v Speaker 2>I was just gonna say, Master Yang like he is
<v Speaker 2>working these men and women we had to go through
<v Speaker 2>like this little he taught us like the five base
<v Speaker 2>moves of Chinese kung fu, like the five poses, and
<v Speaker 2>let me tell you a bunch of like journalists impressed
<v Speaker 2>and they're doing these Dude, we were sweating. I was
<v Speaker 2>drenched trying to do these moves, and he was not
<v Speaker 2>like he's like him and his crew were not letting
<v Speaker 2>other like they're like.
<v Speaker 4>Simple stuff, like the most basic basic forms.
<v Speaker 2>And they're like getting onto us about getting our hands
<v Speaker 2>right and all this stuff. And I'm like, Yo, I'm
<v Speaker 2>here for work. I'm not trying to work out right now,
<v Speaker 2>I am dying and you are pushing me stop.
<v Speaker 4>There were points where it was like, my legs just
<v Speaker 4>literally will not move like that no matter what I do.
<v Speaker 3>Like a fight at the end of this That's what
<v Speaker 3>it was, Like, What's what's happening here at the end, Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>we're going to fight each other.
<v Speaker 2>Like what it was to eventually get in the mocap wires,
<v Speaker 2>which I did, and I was not good at it,
<v Speaker 2>and I was I was so bad at it that
<v Speaker 2>I didn't get to try a backflip, which if you
<v Speaker 2>were good enough, if you did the like first couple
<v Speaker 2>steps correctly, like the matrix run through the air and stuff,
<v Speaker 2>you could eventually move on to try the backflip. But
<v Speaker 2>I could not get the matrix step down. And Master
<v Speaker 2>Yang came up to me, and he through the translator,
<v Speaker 2>was like tell him, uh, maybe we can keep working
<v Speaker 2>on it and next time we can try. The next time,
<v Speaker 2>just tell me I suck and I'll move on.
<v Speaker 1>Dude's trying to be polite. Let you down lightly. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that's awesome, And I guess to wrap this up, you guys.
<v Speaker 1>Also because I I love hearing about this. You know,
<v Speaker 1>the game may not be a soul's like, but it
<v Speaker 1>sounds like you had a soul's ish experience just trying
<v Speaker 1>to give to the Great Wall of China, which is
<v Speaker 1>a one I'm super jealous of you because that's one
<v Speaker 1>of my bucket list places. I'm really I'm jealous, but
<v Speaker 1>I'm very happy for you guys that you guys got
<v Speaker 1>to go do that. But also, you know, Wes, I'll
<v Speaker 1>pass it on to you. It sounds like it was
<v Speaker 1>not as that is easy, and maybe it could have been.
<v Speaker 2>Well, I'm going to pass on to Haes because I
<v Speaker 2>actually wrote about it in our issue, and I want
<v Speaker 2>to save my perspective. I mean, in my perspective is
<v Speaker 2>basically the same as Hayes. We were together the whole time,
<v Speaker 2>but yeah, take it away. It was as a crazy story.
<v Speaker 4>So we you know, we had like one day free
<v Speaker 4>the trip basically, and we both agreed that like, from
<v Speaker 4>going to China, I want to go to the Great Vault.
<v Speaker 4>So we bought tour tickets the night before and then
<v Speaker 4>Wesley got a message that morning that was like, well,
<v Speaker 4>the section of the wall you're going to has been
<v Speaker 4>closed because of like level red warning for geologic disaster
<v Speaker 4>or something, because there had been flooding in northern China.
<v Speaker 4>So we tried to figure out a different section to
<v Speaker 4>go to, and the tour guiy told us it was closed,
<v Speaker 4>and we had someone called and they're like, oh, no,
<v Speaker 4>this section's open. It's not closed. So we spent the
<v Speaker 4>day trying to figure out what section we could go to,
<v Speaker 4>and we finally figured out it was open, but ticket
<v Speaker 4>sales would close at four thirty. So we got a
<v Speaker 4>d D, which is the equivalent of Uber like an
<v Speaker 4>hour and a half trip, basically fifteen dollars. Everything is
<v Speaker 4>incredibly cheap there, and so we got dropped off at
<v Speaker 4>the wrong place. We got dropped off at a visitors
<v Speaker 4>center that was closed, so we didn't know where to go,
<v Speaker 4>and we were trying to figure out. We were asking people,
<v Speaker 4>there's a surprise language party. Four. It was US two
<v Speaker 4>and two journalists.
<v Speaker 2>Us to West Finlan at a gamer and Alejandro at
<v Speaker 2>a what's the name of the site? Three?
<v Speaker 1>Yes and Spain, Yeah, your RPG party.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah. So there's a surprising language barrier in China, as
<v Speaker 4>we both found out, like very very few people speak English,
<v Speaker 4>but everyone's very nice and willing to try and communicate
<v Speaker 4>with you. So we're using like translation apps to talk
<v Speaker 4>to officers and tourists and trying to figure out where
<v Speaker 4>we're supposed to go. And there's this taxi driver that
<v Speaker 4>overhears us asking people and he doesn't speak a lick
<v Speaker 4>of English, but all of a sudden, he's like, come
<v Speaker 4>with me, come on. He just starts waving to us
<v Speaker 4>and he rushes us over his vehicle. Yeah, and so
<v Speaker 4>like we're already, we've already bought in. So I think
<v Speaker 4>all of us are just like whatever, because.
<v Speaker 3>Bill goes off in my like literally, if y'all can
<v Speaker 3>see our disc right now, it was like one side
<v Speaker 3>of the discord was like, yeah, let's get in a taxi,
<v Speaker 3>and then Marcus and I are like, yeah, what is.
<v Speaker 2>Only ninety minutes up into the mountain.
<v Speaker 4>It was a with like a real taxi with.
<v Speaker 1>A strange man saying no, no, no, come on in.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, but we get in this car and this is
<v Speaker 4>this is the part. Like we get in his car
<v Speaker 4>and he speeds off and he like speeds past these
<v Speaker 4>officers at a barrier and he is like flying through
<v Speaker 4>the mountain passes playing Mario Kart. He is laying on
<v Speaker 4>his horn to get people to jump out of the way.
<v Speaker 2>Like literally he's on his phone watching like they don't
<v Speaker 2>have TikTok in China, but they have like an equivalent,
<v Speaker 2>and he's on his phone like while driving, he's scrolling
<v Speaker 2>watching videos like laughing, like this is it's felt like
<v Speaker 2>out of a movie scene. And we're all just like,
<v Speaker 2>I don't even think I have a seatbelt on the back.
<v Speaker 2>I'm just like, you know what, Like we're here, We're
<v Speaker 2>gonna see where this takes us.
<v Speaker 1>Say, this is just crazy taxi.
<v Speaker 4>But he gets us, gets us to the ticket window
<v Speaker 4>at like literally four thirty when it closes, and he
<v Speaker 4>jumps out and goes to the ticket window and like,
<v Speaker 4>I don't know what he said to them, but he
<v Speaker 4>convinces them to sell us tickets. And so like we
<v Speaker 4>barely got in and we bought these tickets and we
<v Speaker 4>get up to the to the tram like the ski
<v Speaker 4>lift tram, and they're like, oh, you gotta buy tickets
<v Speaker 4>to the wall, And at that point all of us
<v Speaker 4>are like, whatever, it's cheap, someone pay. We'll figure it
<v Speaker 4>out later. And we get up on the wall. The
<v Speaker 4>whole thing man, and this like thick, thick fog has
<v Speaker 4>rolled in.
<v Speaker 2>So we're on the wall silent hill too straight.
<v Speaker 4>Up but you can't see off of it. We're up
<v Speaker 4>there for like twenty thirty minutes, and then the officers
<v Speaker 4>that oversee the area are like, oh, everyone has to
<v Speaker 4>get off the wall. There's torrential rain coming. So we
<v Speaker 4>had to walk down the wall like forty five minutes
<v Speaker 4>in this thick fog.
<v Speaker 2>And they're like yelling at us at every turn, like
<v Speaker 2>there's officers everywhere, they have batons. They're like, we don't
<v Speaker 2>have time to really stop.
<v Speaker 4>No trying.
<v Speaker 1>Now, you don't know what you're saying, but you just
<v Speaker 1>sort of Yeah, we inferred.
<v Speaker 2>From others that the rain was coming, and we were
<v Speaker 2>also probably I really think we might have been like
<v Speaker 2>the actual last group reached the wall, uh, and we
<v Speaker 2>were told we're not gonna be able to ride the
<v Speaker 2>lift down, which usually you do just ride the lift down.
<v Speaker 2>We had to like actually hike down.
<v Speaker 4>To walk like fifth and.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and it's not like you're like, it's not and
<v Speaker 2>it's it's stars basically like it's it's not stairs, but
<v Speaker 2>it's it's so uneven and like you know, it's it's
<v Speaker 2>five hundred years old, and like, yeah, sometimes you're going
<v Speaker 2>up massive hills. Other times you're you're trying to walk
<v Speaker 2>down and you're doing that fast walk shuffle where you
<v Speaker 2>can't stop and you're like please don't fall, please don't fall.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, And the whole time there's a dude behind us
<v Speaker 2>who's just like laying on us to move forward. We
<v Speaker 2>don't have time to stop or like taking the sights
<v Speaker 2>because we have to keep moving forward.
<v Speaker 4>But we did meet and it's just guys from Saudi
<v Speaker 4>Arabia that when we were got the taxi driver, they
<v Speaker 4>were also trying to get up to the wall and
<v Speaker 4>they somehow made it too, and so we talked to
<v Speaker 4>them like, oh, yeah, we came. We came for a
<v Speaker 4>day to see the wall and then we're going back
<v Speaker 4>to study at Rai.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, wild trip. And then we reached the end and
<v Speaker 2>then at the bottom of the hill at the base
<v Speaker 2>of the wallpart we were on the Bottling Wall is
<v Speaker 2>like this really cool but spooky town. It's like, I
<v Speaker 2>imagine it's very torsty. It's dark outside. Yeah, there's neon
<v Speaker 2>lights and lots of cool stuff, but it was it
<v Speaker 2>was dark and foggy and moody, and they had like
<v Speaker 2>sirens going because of like incoming rain and time to
<v Speaker 2>get out of the town and that kind of stuff,
<v Speaker 2>and it was just crazy. They also had the KFC,
<v Speaker 2>which I thought was funny, a cup of pictures of
<v Speaker 2>KFC because it was.
<v Speaker 3>Like there when they built the wall actually exactly, Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>The kernel of the wall. Yeah and yeah, so it
<v Speaker 2>was just like it was just wild. And then we
<v Speaker 2>had to find a way to get back home, which
<v Speaker 2>we did with a taxi or a d D or whatever.
<v Speaker 2>And yeah, it was definitely the kind of the kind
<v Speaker 2>of trip that my bosses, our bosses would like have
<v Speaker 2>not if I would have told them as it's happening,
<v Speaker 2>they would have been like, Wesley, you were not actually
<v Speaker 2>allowed to do that. I mean, you were on a
<v Speaker 2>work sanction trip. You were not going to go up
<v Speaker 2>to a wall while there's flash floods ninety minutes into
<v Speaker 2>the mountains. Do not do that, which is why I
<v Speaker 2>did not tell my boss about this until after.
<v Speaker 4>But it all worked out in the end.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, I'm on one hand, on one hand, I applaud
<v Speaker 3>your go gitterness. I think that's great. On the other hand,
<v Speaker 3>we got to work on your self preservation.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's like, I'm I'm very happy that you guys
<v Speaker 1>got to see it. But I do feel like forgetting
<v Speaker 1>a neck car.
<v Speaker 4>If there weren't four of us, we wouldn't have done
<v Speaker 4>some of these things, Like if I was by myself,
<v Speaker 4>I would not have done most of that, right. Yeah,
<v Speaker 4>But the fact that there was four of us we
<v Speaker 4>gave us solidarity, especially when everyone was like, you know what, hell,
<v Speaker 4>let's do it.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, you're like, yeah, four of us are harder to
<v Speaker 3>mess with than what.
<v Speaker 1>No, we just learned basic stances, use those exactly.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, walk, But yeah, that it was wild. It
<v Speaker 2>was the wildest work, you know, because when we go
<v Speaker 2>on work trips, it's fun to like, you try to
<v Speaker 2>go and explore the area you're in if it's somewhere cool.
<v Speaker 2>And that's definitely the most wild, risky adventure I've been
<v Speaker 2>on outside of work hours. But it was worth it. It
<v Speaker 2>was fun, it was really cool, and I'm glad I
<v Speaker 2>got to see the wall. And now there's a very
<v Speaker 2>crazy story that the four of us have.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Well, yes, you can keep an eye out for
<v Speaker 1>our next unannounced issue of the magazine and you can
<v Speaker 1>read Wesley's full Phantom Blade zero preview and then his
<v Speaker 1>rendition of this wild story. It's a pivot much like
<v Speaker 1>second to complete. Oh what that was?
<v Speaker 2>Hayes has a lot of good coverage already. Yes that
<v Speaker 2>people should go check out. Yes, absolutely, go to inverse
<v Speaker 2>dot com.
<v Speaker 1>Check that out. Man, the game I'm about to talk
<v Speaker 1>about probably couldn't be any more different than Play zero.
<v Speaker 1>But I played a very very cool little indie that
<v Speaker 1>dropped a couple of weeks ago called and Roger. Have
<v Speaker 1>you guys played or seen this game at all?
<v Speaker 3>I've heard of it. I know a lot of people
<v Speaker 3>who's uh tasted opinions I respect in the industry have
<v Speaker 3>been saying, play this game and don't learn anything more
<v Speaker 3>about it, just go play it. Uh So I'm already
<v Speaker 3>breaking one of those rules here now by being on
<v Speaker 3>the podcast, but.
<v Speaker 1>I will avoid because this game is going to be
<v Speaker 1>tricky to talk about in terms of the plot, because
<v Speaker 1>kind of the mystery of the game is what is
<v Speaker 1>actually happening here. So I'm gonna have to apologize if
<v Speaker 1>I sound like I'm like talking around things, but like
<v Speaker 1>the Yeah, so it's a kind of like a visual
<v Speaker 1>novel se puzzle game that reminds me a lot of Florence.
<v Speaker 4>I was just Lawrence.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, I love Florence, and I had to look
<v Speaker 1>up to see if this is the same developer, just
<v Speaker 1>because there's so many kind of like sort of the
<v Speaker 1>game design. It's it's very similar in how they approach
<v Speaker 1>sort of gamifying their like really like personal interactions sort
<v Speaker 1>of the the base premise I can give without getting
<v Speaker 1>into any spoiler territory is that you it follows a
<v Speaker 1>young woman who is missing her father, and she comes
<v Speaker 1>home one night and there is a man in her
<v Speaker 1>house that she does not recognize and doesn't know what
<v Speaker 1>his deal is, and the guy is very being very
<v Speaker 1>insistent that they know each other, and there's some like
<v Speaker 1>sinister overtone like what is happening here? Why is this
<v Speaker 1>guy at like he knows me, I've never seen him,
<v Speaker 1>and things sort of go from there. It's a very
<v Speaker 1>short game, like you can easily finish it in an
<v Speaker 1>hour if even it's just three chapters. And basically what
<v Speaker 1>the game works is that it's got like a like
<v Speaker 1>the way they sort of like every scene is sort
<v Speaker 1>of its own playable vignette, and what I like about
<v Speaker 1>the game a lot, excluding the story stuff, is how
<v Speaker 1>they sort of take actions like walking around or sneaking
<v Speaker 1>or even just like conversations and find really neat and
<v Speaker 1>kind of bespoke mini games to play to accomplish these things.
<v Speaker 1>Like there's a sequence where you're trying to sneak from
<v Speaker 1>this guy and you're like trying to hide behind a couch,
<v Speaker 1>and like I said, you're just it's pretty much like
<v Speaker 1>a point and click game where it's like, Okay, here's
<v Speaker 1>some footsteps on the ground. If you click the footsteps,
<v Speaker 1>you'll move forward, but you're also trying to hide from
<v Speaker 1>like his gas. You kind of have the time like Okay,
<v Speaker 1>if I click these footsteps, I'll move like a certain amount,
<v Speaker 1>and if he sees me, then it's you know, game over.
<v Speaker 1>Or there's like, well, the game is really big on
<v Speaker 1>it's sort of like clicking and dragging things in really
<v Speaker 1>neat ways, Like there'll be like little a little button
<v Speaker 1>that appears a lot and it'll be like, hey, just
<v Speaker 1>drag this button, and then by dragging this button in
<v Speaker 1>a bunch of wacky ways, maybe you'll sort of like
<v Speaker 1>have a conversation with someone and based on sort of
<v Speaker 1>the path that the no takes, it's sort of exemplifying
<v Speaker 1>maybe the tone of the conversation. So if it's like
<v Speaker 1>a very like maybe like tumultuous talk, the path that
<v Speaker 1>the line takes reflects that, because it starts to get
<v Speaker 1>a little bit more jagged or wacky, and it's just
<v Speaker 1>sort of like in your mind you're like, oh, okay,
<v Speaker 1>like just because it's not there's no spoken dialogue in
<v Speaker 1>this game at all, So it's all about just using
<v Speaker 1>the gameplay to sort of give you an idea of
<v Speaker 1>like I think I know sort of contextually what the
<v Speaker 1>emotion or tone is in this scene, and there are like,
<v Speaker 1>you know, word bubbles, but there's just no voices and
<v Speaker 1>the Florence comparison because Florence did that a lot, and
<v Speaker 1>one of the things I like about the game where
<v Speaker 1>it's like, oh, like, how do we sort of sell like, oh,
<v Speaker 1>these two having a conversation, But it's very awkward where
<v Speaker 1>there's like that cool minigame where you're trying to drag
<v Speaker 1>the word bubbles into the little slots and at first
<v Speaker 1>it can't fit because it's supposed to be like, oh
<v Speaker 1>it's they don't really, it's awkward, they don't know what
<v Speaker 1>to say to each other, but then as they get
<v Speaker 1>easy with each other, the word bubble start fitting in.
<v Speaker 1>It's a lot of that kind of stuff. Like there's
<v Speaker 1>a really cool segment where you're trying to escape this
<v Speaker 1>guy and you're trying to get through a door but
<v Speaker 1>you don't. It's like a series of like, Okay, I
<v Speaker 1>need a key and I need to turn it the
<v Speaker 1>right way and I need to push through the door.
<v Speaker 1>And to sort of like create that panic that would
<v Speaker 1>come from that, there's like a bunch of different dots
<v Speaker 1>on the screen and only one of them does what
<v Speaker 1>you need to do, and you're just clicking through all
<v Speaker 1>of them, and the ones that don't work just kind
<v Speaker 1>of drop from the screen and you're just trying to
<v Speaker 1>find the one that actually does the thing you're in too,
<v Speaker 1>So you're like frantically clicking and you're like, I don't
<v Speaker 1>know if he's like right behind me, and I don't
<v Speaker 1>know how much time I may or may unhapp but
<v Speaker 1>I need to find the right one. Or like you
<v Speaker 1>have to remember certain sequences where it's like okay, I
<v Speaker 1>need to brush my teeth, and again they give you
<v Speaker 1>a bunch of dots, and it's like one of these
<v Speaker 1>dots turned the faucet on, another one puts toothpaste on
<v Speaker 1>the brush, and then another one, you know, does the
<v Speaker 1>actual brushing. But they're moving around the screen and I
<v Speaker 1>kind of have to try to keep track of which
<v Speaker 1>one is which, and you have to do it in
<v Speaker 1>the right order. So again, it's just like this is
<v Speaker 1>supposed to be challenging to her for some reason, So
<v Speaker 1>it's like effective in making you feel like this is
<v Speaker 1>a really basic action and I cannot do it and
<v Speaker 1>it's taking me a longer, and again I'm trying. It's
<v Speaker 1>so hard to talk about this game without trying to
<v Speaker 1>contextualize why things are like this. But again, that's one
<v Speaker 1>of the draws of this game is like I think
<v Speaker 1>it does a good job of like right off the bat,
<v Speaker 1>you're intentionally supposed to be very confused about, like wait,
<v Speaker 1>what is happening here. You'll jump through like things are
<v Speaker 1>sort of told out of sequence, or like you'll jump
<v Speaker 1>through differ diferent phases of this person's life, and so
<v Speaker 1>you're trying to piece together like, Okay, this is happening
<v Speaker 1>at this time, what does this mean? And I think
<v Speaker 1>it does go a good job where like the first
<v Speaker 1>chapter is supposed to intentionally be confusing, but by the
<v Speaker 1>time you get to like midway through chapter two, at
<v Speaker 1>least for me, I started to understand what was happening here.
<v Speaker 1>And I think it does a good job of like
<v Speaker 1>not dragging it all too long to where you just
<v Speaker 1>feel lost the whole time. And I think when things
<v Speaker 1>do start to become clear, I think it feels really rewarding.
<v Speaker 1>And also even after finishing the game and I want
<v Speaker 1>to go back and replay it, and I was hoping
<v Speaker 1>to do it before this but just didn't have time.
<v Speaker 1>It's like I got I'm pretty sure I got what
<v Speaker 1>the game was going for. But even then I was
<v Speaker 1>talking to my girlfriend who played it too, and we
<v Speaker 1>were just sort of picking each other's brains, like do
<v Speaker 1>you think this is what was actually happening? And I
<v Speaker 1>think we're both pretty much right. But it is one
<v Speaker 1>of those games that it's kind of fun to talk
<v Speaker 1>to someone and say, like, what did you get out
<v Speaker 1>of this? What do you think was happening with her
<v Speaker 1>and the guy, and sort of like just the the
<v Speaker 1>journey they went on, it's apology if this all sounds
<v Speaker 1>very scattershot, because again, this is a very hard game
<v Speaker 1>to talk about without being able to even even like
<v Speaker 1>lightly get into, like any of the story revelations. I
<v Speaker 1>think things start to kind of unravel once you do.
<v Speaker 3>I feel like every once in a while we get
<v Speaker 3>a game like this Behind your Eyes or before your
<v Speaker 3>Eyes Before your Eyes came to mind immediately as something
<v Speaker 3>where that's also a game that you can probably be
<v Speaker 3>in about an hour, ye and to tell you too
<v Speaker 3>much beyond very very basic story setup, and even that
<v Speaker 3>is kind of giving away some of the push and pull.
<v Speaker 3>And I'm always I've made some enemies in the past
<v Speaker 3>for my stance on I don't think we should be
<v Speaker 3>as concerned about spoilers as people tend to get. But
<v Speaker 3>in this case, it's not necessarily a spoiler so much
<v Speaker 3>as like the actual journey that you go on. It's
<v Speaker 3>important to inter it with an open mind, and to
<v Speaker 3>inter itt with just kind of like being presented with
<v Speaker 3>what's in front of you, the way that you crack
<v Speaker 3>a book for the first time. Maybe you don't read
<v Speaker 3>the back cover and you can just kind of let
<v Speaker 3>the story take you from there. I think, especially with
<v Speaker 3>the short game like this that can be really powerful
<v Speaker 3>and impactful. I've really found that with story games Florence
<v Speaker 3>Before Your Eyes Try to There was another one I
<v Speaker 3>played recently that was also really really good. That was
<v Speaker 3>a short story based game, and it's killing me that
<v Speaker 3>I can't remember it. But even something that I would
<v Speaker 3>consider like medium short, like What Remains of Edith Finch,
<v Speaker 3>those can be really powerful sequences and really powerful little
<v Speaker 3>games so immediately interesting those that might have been.
<v Speaker 4>Even something like Journey kind of falls into that, right
<v Speaker 4>or like it's hard to properly describe the experience of
<v Speaker 4>playing Journey without actually playing.
<v Speaker 1>It, And I think it also depends on like everyone's
<v Speaker 1>reaction to it will be different, so sort of like
<v Speaker 1>what I take away from it might be different than
<v Speaker 1>what you guys might take away from it, just because
<v Speaker 1>I interpreted like maybe a mini game or a certain
<v Speaker 1>conversation a certain way, which will paint it in a
<v Speaker 1>completely different light. So even like sharing what I would
<v Speaker 1>think about it might not be indicative of maybe what
<v Speaker 1>is actually going for. But yeah, like I think, like
<v Speaker 1>I said, this is one of those games where I
<v Speaker 1>think going into it relatively blind is better. Even the
<v Speaker 1>Steam description doesn't really say much about it, like it
<v Speaker 1>doesn't delve much beyond what I just said. So it's
<v Speaker 1>only on Steam and Switch I played it on. It's
<v Speaker 1>very much a point in clicking, like you primarily have
<v Speaker 1>a cursor and then occasionally sometimes you'll hit the buttons controls.
<v Speaker 1>Uh no, not on switch To. It's only on switch one,
<v Speaker 1>like a switch one native game. So I played it
<v Speaker 1>on switch To, and I had that thought of like, oh,
<v Speaker 1>but I tried it. It didn't work, So I'd say, like,
<v Speaker 1>you know, ideally, I guess you want to play does
<v Speaker 1>the mouse but it's totally fine just using the joystick
<v Speaker 1>to move the cursor around. It also does some like
<v Speaker 1>some fun fourth wall breaking stuff where again I need
<v Speaker 1>to play it again and see if there's anything to this.
<v Speaker 1>But like a lot of the chapters, or all three
<v Speaker 1>chapters start with you going through what would normally be
<v Speaker 1>basic menu set up for a game of like hey,
<v Speaker 1>change the lighting, make sure you know the symbol is
<v Speaker 1>barely visible, or hey, are you sure you want to
<v Speaker 1>use this language? Do you want to turn the volume up?
<v Speaker 1>And they mess with that in a lot of really
<v Speaker 1>cool ways that again I'm like, I, what why are
<v Speaker 1>we doing this? And yeah, like when you first do it.
<v Speaker 1>Initially I was like, okay, like this is legit, and
<v Speaker 1>then things don't behave the way that you think they should.
<v Speaker 3>Uh, that is an all time thing to do in
<v Speaker 3>a video game, imo, Paranormo syites if you never played it,
<v Speaker 3>Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's got some really good
<v Speaker 3>stuff in that department. Man your cell on this game.
<v Speaker 4>It's cool.
<v Speaker 1>I think every I like, I say, it's only like
<v Speaker 1>five bucks too, it's pretty cheap. So yeah, was it in?
<v Speaker 2>Was an inscription that looked at your files on your
<v Speaker 2>computer and like used images to like for something from
<v Speaker 2>I thinking of a different game.
<v Speaker 3>It maybe would have been. I mean, that's that's Daniel
<v Speaker 3>Mullens went to your Likeny Island did stuff like that
<v Speaker 3>for sure.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. I know A dokey doky Literature Club also did
<v Speaker 1>that on the PC version, Like you had to go
<v Speaker 1>into your say file, like your actual file folder to
<v Speaker 1>do a thing.
<v Speaker 3>The hex from Daniel Mullens did that as well.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, so cool. Yeah, it's cool. I want to
<v Speaker 1>play it again. I would like to write a review
<v Speaker 1>for it if I have time. But so you know,
<v Speaker 1>TB D on that. But yeah, Ann Roger. It's out now.
<v Speaker 1>Like I said, switch Switch one specifically, and much like
<v Speaker 1>four ninety nine.
<v Speaker 3>Oh perfect, Yeah, that's perfect. I looked it up during that.
<v Speaker 3>It's from Tiery Hands Studio, who I'd not heard of
<v Speaker 3>me before.
<v Speaker 1>I think they have one other game that they made
<v Speaker 1>call check Case Time from twenty twenty three. Not familiar
<v Speaker 1>with it.
<v Speaker 3>But that sounds familiar. I feel like I might have
<v Speaker 3>gotten press releases or something about it. But it's also
<v Speaker 3>published other under a Kodansha, which is really interesting. I
<v Speaker 3>forgot that they were doing some some publishing. So that's neat.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, alrighty from a game that has already come out
<v Speaker 1>to the Games on the Horizon. We're jumping to this
<v Speaker 1>section of the show where we're going to run down
<v Speaker 1>the release calendar for the rest of the year and
<v Speaker 1>shout out our most anticipated games yet to come. I
<v Speaker 1>believe we're just sticking within the calendar of twenty twenty
<v Speaker 1>five year, which you know, there's plenty of stuff. I
<v Speaker 1>love this because I love like in your head, because one,
<v Speaker 1>there's so many cool stuff coming out, and also it
<v Speaker 1>reminds me of how quickly this year feels like it's
<v Speaker 1>gone by already or it's like, oh, we're already a
<v Speaker 1>mid August, like we're already over halfway through this year,
<v Speaker 1>which might be good.
<v Speaker 2>Before we before we jump into that, I want to
<v Speaker 2>pop question, not pop question, pop quiz. I don't know
<v Speaker 2>what it's for everybody. I want to know what, like
<v Speaker 2>your your two biggest backclog games are right now before
<v Speaker 2>we look ahead, what games are haunting you? For me,
<v Speaker 2>it is uh Death Straining two, which I need to
<v Speaker 2>play still, and probably Donkey Kong Binans even though it
<v Speaker 2>just came out, but I can already tell that that's
<v Speaker 2>it's gonna be.
<v Speaker 1>As so are these games we have games from started
<v Speaker 1>at all, or stuff that we have started but haven't finished.
<v Speaker 2>Started but have been put on the back burner, games
<v Speaker 2>you haven't started, whatever, the games that are haunting you
<v Speaker 2>when you think about games coming up and games you
<v Speaker 2>still need.
<v Speaker 3>To finish and from this year, yes, yeah, this year
<v Speaker 3>we go my full backlog. There's my number one with
<v Speaker 3>a bullet is Kingdomcome Deliverance too?
<v Speaker 1>That's the one I really need to sit down and plagues.
<v Speaker 1>I know, like Wesley, you scored it like a nine
<v Speaker 1>point five, right.
<v Speaker 2>That game is incredible and it's gonna go I don't
<v Speaker 2>know if it's it's not like a sleeper hit this year,
<v Speaker 2>but I can tell that a lot of people didn't
<v Speaker 2>get around to it because it is truly an incredible,
<v Speaker 2>like actual role playing game. Yeah, that I thoroughly, thoroughly loved.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, like it's one that's gonna come up game of
<v Speaker 1>the year. So it's like I need to absolutely get
<v Speaker 1>to that. And also it just sounds cool. And then
<v Speaker 1>the other one, I guess is I'm slowly chipping my
<v Speaker 1>way through it, but it's been so hard except that
<v Speaker 1>just been busy with either work, games or just life stuff.
<v Speaker 1>But I'm crawling through Claire Obskier Expedition thirty three, which
<v Speaker 1>is the other like goaty contender, like I am. If
<v Speaker 1>you want to know where I'm at, Like I only
<v Speaker 1>have four party members and I only recently got the
<v Speaker 1>fourth one.
<v Speaker 2>Oh, got a lot of game going. Yeah, I mean
<v Speaker 2>it's not that long of a game though, so like
<v Speaker 2>that's definitely way more doable. Kingdom Come is like at
<v Speaker 2>minimum sixty five hours. I'd say, Claire Obscurt, you can
<v Speaker 2>roll on like thirty hours just mainlining probably what.
<v Speaker 4>About you Hayes Kingdom Come is definitely the big one
<v Speaker 4>for me, partially because I'm like the big RPG guy,
<v Speaker 4>you know, and that's like the one RPG of the
<v Speaker 4>year I haven't played. But I also never beat the original,
<v Speaker 4>and I stubbornly feel like I have to beat the
<v Speaker 4>original before I play the second one. I know I
<v Speaker 4>don't need to.
<v Speaker 1>Kyle is going to crash through your wall like the
<v Speaker 1>kool Aid Man to yell at you and say, play
<v Speaker 1>the new fun thing.
<v Speaker 4>The other one for me is South of Midnight, which
<v Speaker 4>I know isn't that long. It's just like it's the
<v Speaker 4>game that I keep thinking every time I get through
<v Speaker 4>a review, I'll play it, and then I get another
<v Speaker 4>review and I just I just don't have time. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>I think I literally said this last week, but South
<v Speaker 2>of Midnight is like my game of the year. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>so far with the bullet and I'm on to occur
<v Speaker 2>in South of Midnight kick because I finally just watch Centers,
<v Speaker 2>which is, you know, same vibe, and now I'm reading
<v Speaker 2>Ring Shout, which is another same vibe book. Fantastic so far.
<v Speaker 2>I just love like South Americana like literature like that,
<v Speaker 2>like black literature is so good and South of Midnight
<v Speaker 2>really is it's a treat.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, good game. At least that one's like said, it's manageable,
<v Speaker 1>like it's like, yeah, twelve to fifteen hours or so. Yeah.
<v Speaker 4>I think I'm gonna try after I get through the
<v Speaker 4>August rush of reviews, let's try and ship back that one.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, but you Eric, I think for me this first
<v Speaker 3>answer feels a little bit like cheating because it is
<v Speaker 3>an old game that has been on my backlog forever
<v Speaker 3>that just got an HD version, but Bravely Default I
<v Speaker 3>would like to actually finish that one out. I've always
<v Speaker 3>heard really good things about it from people who love RPGs,
<v Speaker 3>love job systems and all that, so I am one
<v Speaker 3>of those people. So you're remaster, yes, yeah, the Bravely
<v Speaker 3>Default Flying Fairy HD whatever it's called. It's yeah, something
<v Speaker 3>I figured there might have been like a remastered or
<v Speaker 3>maybe like a storybook edition somewhere in there. I don't know,
<v Speaker 3>but yeah, it's really good so far. I really enjoyed it,
<v Speaker 3>and it just keeps being that game that I play
<v Speaker 3>for a bit and then new game comes up and
<v Speaker 3>I disappear, and then I have to come back and thankfully.
<v Speaker 3>It has some pretty good mechanics for getting back into
<v Speaker 3>the game, but I always kind of have to refresh
<v Speaker 3>myself on everything I was doing and get back in.
<v Speaker 3>And then the other one is Despelotte, which was a
<v Speaker 3>soccer football depending on you know, where you come from,
<v Speaker 3>a game about just kids playing soccer is my understanding.
<v Speaker 1>But it's like, so I play this, and that's also
<v Speaker 1>a very short game, like an hour or two maybe,
<v Speaker 1>but yeah, it's like set in Ecuador during the I
<v Speaker 1>think like two thousand and one, and it's like, I
<v Speaker 1>guess during that year that was like Ecuador had like
<v Speaker 1>a crazy run in the World Cup that kind of
<v Speaker 1>like ignite I did the country. I'm like, oh my god,
<v Speaker 1>this is the best we've ever done. And it just
<v Speaker 1>became this cultural moment and sort of like that's the
<v Speaker 1>backdrop for this story of this kid that is like
<v Speaker 1>really into two soccer slash football, and you're sort of
<v Speaker 1>like living his daily life throughout one week, going through
<v Speaker 1>his stuff. But that's kind of like everything of it's
<v Speaker 1>kind of painted with the kind of hysteria of how like,
<v Speaker 1>oh my god, we might get to a World Cup,
<v Speaker 1>what does that mean for us?
<v Speaker 4>And it's really interestingly it's juxtaposed against really huge political
<v Speaker 4>upheaval in the country too.
<v Speaker 1>Yes, so like.
<v Speaker 4>That's happening, but you're seeing it through the eyes of
<v Speaker 4>like this big soccer event, because he's a kid and
<v Speaker 4>that's what he cared about.
<v Speaker 3>There's another game that came out last year that was
<v Speaker 3>also on my backlog that I still haven't got around
<v Speaker 3>to you. I think it's called nineteen twenty one A
<v Speaker 3>Deep Slumber or something like that, but it was it
<v Speaker 3>was similarly a game that was about everyday life during
<v Speaker 3>political upheaval. And I I always really like those kinds
<v Speaker 3>of games. They're really fascinating, especially if they exposed me
<v Speaker 3>to just a piece of history that I'm not personally
<v Speaker 3>familiar with and like put me there. Like that's the
<v Speaker 3>thing that games can do, right, is put me in
<v Speaker 3>the middle of those things and helped me experience them
<v Speaker 3>with context, with world understanding around it. So Desplote art
<v Speaker 3>style alone already had me in. And then the idea
<v Speaker 3>of incorporating culture, sports, place and culture all that kind
<v Speaker 3>of stuff within a place of the world that I'm
<v Speaker 3>not very familiar with all sounds fantastic. So that's that's
<v Speaker 3>one that has been on my radar, and a good
<v Speaker 3>friend and very good writer, Moys's Taveris wrote a great
<v Speaker 3>piece on it over at Digital Trends if you want
<v Speaker 3>to check that out, and basically sold me on, Yes,
<v Speaker 3>I need to play this before the year's out. Alrighty, well,
<v Speaker 3>now that we've set our picks, I'm gonna ask all
<v Speaker 3>of you to find a knife because we're going to
<v Speaker 3>make a blood pact that we're all going to finish
<v Speaker 3>these games by the end of the year. Okay, just
<v Speaker 3>very like Tom Tom sorry, Huckleberry Finn style. We have
<v Speaker 3>to reconvene in December and see who is who was
<v Speaker 3>finishes probably the easiest. Yeah, I My my tastes, as
<v Speaker 3>I have learned, is that all of my games are
<v Speaker 3>on one of two ends of the spectrum. I love
<v Speaker 3>a good like eight hour or less game, and I
<v Speaker 3>love a good sixty hour or more game, and everything
<v Speaker 3>in between whatever wasted. You either got to put time
<v Speaker 3>into this or just like you know, an evening or
<v Speaker 3>two into this, and anything in between, like what are
<v Speaker 3>we doing here? Which is weird. That's where clear Upscure
<v Speaker 3>was kind of strange for me, where I was like, oh,
<v Speaker 3>that was a moderately paced, nicely you know, measured out
<v Speaker 3>game that felt weird to me, but I know I
<v Speaker 3>look out in that way so bravely default. I don't
<v Speaker 3>think it's two it's.
<v Speaker 1>A long.
<v Speaker 2>It can be.
<v Speaker 1>The end game gets pretty there's a twist in a
<v Speaker 1>way that I didn't like. At the time.
<v Speaker 4>You think it's ending, and then it's like, oh, I
<v Speaker 4>have twenty five more hours.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, let me tell you I've played. I'm so familiar
<v Speaker 3>with it. Yeah. I love a good Tales game ending
<v Speaker 3>where it's like, oh, we're done. No, we're not, We're
<v Speaker 3>not even close to done. What are you talking about?
<v Speaker 3>And decided we should do that.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, Well with that in mind, well, uh, I guess
<v Speaker 1>we'll maybe take turns going around a horn, just the
<v Speaker 1>just shouting out some stuff, and you know, if there's
<v Speaker 1>a if we say anything that anyone else also is
<v Speaker 1>excited about, we'll sort of chime in. Since I'm the
<v Speaker 1>captain of the ship, I will start as offt And
<v Speaker 1>it's a game that comes out pretty soon at the
<v Speaker 1>end of the month. And I don't know if I'm
<v Speaker 1>necessarily as much excited about this game as I am
<v Speaker 1>just extremely curious about it because it's been, it's been,
<v Speaker 1>it was now so long ago, but it's a lost
<v Speaker 1>soul aside.
<v Speaker 4>That was my first yeah yeah, So.
<v Speaker 1>It comes out August twenty ninth. For those that don't
<v Speaker 1>notice game, it's what we would call like it was
<v Speaker 1>like weird Devil May Cry Final Fantasy fifteen, where the
<v Speaker 1>protagonist looked almost suspiciously like knock this, like legally distinct
<v Speaker 1>knocked this. And this was originally developed by one guy
<v Speaker 1>in China and it was supposed to be for PS four.
<v Speaker 1>So this is how long ago this was announced, because
<v Speaker 1>I don't think the PS five I need to be
<v Speaker 1>announced yet. And apparently the story was that he was
<v Speaker 1>making this game by himself in his old time, put
<v Speaker 1>out a trailer that looked extremely impressive, especially for a
<v Speaker 1>one person studio, and it caught the attention of Sony,
<v Speaker 1>who then reached out and basically formally took on the
<v Speaker 1>game as a publisher. And I believe he has since
<v Speaker 1>kind of like been given a team or recruited a team,
<v Speaker 1>but it's not just him anymore. And it was one
<v Speaker 1>of those games where you would hear about it once
<v Speaker 1>in a while with a new trailer and then it
<v Speaker 1>would disappear for like a couple of years, and he'd
<v Speaker 1>be like, whatever happened to that game? And then out
<v Speaker 1>of nowhere, it would resurface with a new trailer and
<v Speaker 1>they're like, man, look out as based his action is
<v Speaker 1>and this guy has like a weird floating like crystal
<v Speaker 1>dragon buddy that helps him out in combat. I still
<v Speaker 1>don't know what is actually happening story wise, it just
<v Speaker 1>but as a stylish action Sikoh, I'm like, yeah, this
<v Speaker 1>is this is the stuff. I like, this looks cool. Hope.
<v Speaker 4>I actually followed this game very closely over the years,
<v Speaker 4>and funny enough, it was directly inspired by the trailers
<v Speaker 4>for Final Fantasy fifteen, because I remember following the developer
<v Speaker 4>Yang Bing when he announced it and he said, like,
<v Speaker 4>I watched the trailer's Final Fantasy fifteen and I wanted
<v Speaker 4>to make a game, and so that was kind of
<v Speaker 4>the basis for it. And then he got signed onto
<v Speaker 4>the chiny Hero Project and founded Ulta zero Games. And
<v Speaker 4>I'm fascinated to see what that game even is because
<v Speaker 4>it's very Final Fantasy inspired and very Devil May Cry inspired.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it was supposed to come out earlier this year,
<v Speaker 1>but it got one last delay into its current date
<v Speaker 1>of August twenty nine. It's like, I like to think
<v Speaker 1>it's close enough now where it can't possibly be delayed again,
<v Speaker 1>but stranger things have happened. But yeah, I just want
<v Speaker 1>to see what just what is this like? Is it
<v Speaker 1>good as like well the years of development kind of
<v Speaker 1>show will it feel like a game from its time
<v Speaker 1>or will it kind of will it post a genre
<v Speaker 1>forward in any interesting ways? But uh, yeah, that's that's
<v Speaker 1>my first one. How about us?
<v Speaker 2>I'm gonna go with Final Fantasy Tactics the Evilist Chronicles.
<v Speaker 2>It's tactics, it's you know, you know and love it.
<v Speaker 2>It's a blow up game, and I'm very excited for
<v Speaker 2>Square to finally be doing something with it. I fall
<v Speaker 2>on the side where it's not like exactly what I
<v Speaker 2>wanted necessary remake. Yeah, I actually kind of wanted an
<v Speaker 2>HD two D remake, which is like you know, old news.
<v Speaker 2>At this point, it's every game Squaren makes I want
<v Speaker 2>an HG two D remake of and I'm not like
<v Speaker 2>super sold on the like visual changes necessarily, but there
<v Speaker 2>is the old still play, like the old classic way.
<v Speaker 2>I just hate that you have to do the new
<v Speaker 2>art to get all the new uh like features in
<v Speaker 2>the vo and stuff. I wish I was like a
<v Speaker 2>button you could turn the art on and off. Sure
<v Speaker 2>that said, I mean these games are great and I'm
<v Speaker 2>excited to play them again on like modern consoles. There's
<v Speaker 2>not much to it. I just love Final Fantasy, I
<v Speaker 2>love tactics and take anything. I need people to show
<v Speaker 2>up and support this game, even if you don't have
<v Speaker 2>any interest in playing it. Please for us for the
<v Speaker 2>tactics siccos please we need more.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Do you think they'll do DS games? Anyone talks
<v Speaker 1>about like A two and stuff?
<v Speaker 3>Oh? I love A too, I hope.
<v Speaker 4>So I just played through A two like I beat
<v Speaker 4>it a week ago.
<v Speaker 1>Oh they won't.
<v Speaker 2>They probably won't, I hope.
<v Speaker 3>So I would like to.
<v Speaker 4>They did say in my interview the director said, my hero.
<v Speaker 4>He said that they want to make more tactics games
<v Speaker 4>and they think it's viable. But it all largely depend
<v Speaker 4>on how this remaster does. Enthusiasm behind it.
<v Speaker 2>Will this game reach square Enix sales?
<v Speaker 4>Expit exactly? They have to prove.
<v Speaker 1>So I guess we're not getting one. Then I guess.
<v Speaker 3>I have a feeling that if we were to get
<v Speaker 3>more tactics from just from Square in general, they'd probably
<v Speaker 3>sooner return to the well of Triangle Strategy or do
<v Speaker 3>something with Asano versus this project. But I would love
<v Speaker 3>to be proven wrong. I am always happy to be
<v Speaker 3>proven wrong. I just I need this to happen so
<v Speaker 3>that way the Tactics ups well continues, and eventually Atlas
<v Speaker 3>will have to remake. Should make me tense, a Devil
<v Speaker 3>survivor one of the greatest tactics games ever made. It
<v Speaker 3>has to happen. You're running out of games to remaster Atlas.
<v Speaker 1>I know you are.
<v Speaker 3>I'm keeping it tally, how.
<v Speaker 1>About you, Hayes.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, so Tactics would have been my pick, But my
<v Speaker 4>other pick is actually Trails in the Sky first after
<v Speaker 4>another remoke. I am, as Eric knows, I'm a huge
<v Speaker 4>Trail sicco and it's it's a series that's hard to
<v Speaker 4>tell people to get into because there's ten games and
<v Speaker 4>they're all one hundred hours long, and it's like it's
<v Speaker 4>worth it. It is worth it.
<v Speaker 1>But yes, former editor and RPG enthusiast Kim Wallace, I
<v Speaker 1>would talk to her because she was a big Trails
<v Speaker 1>person and would be like swear By like, it's one
<v Speaker 1>of the best, like low key series out there. You
<v Speaker 1>should get into it. But also it's not the easiest
<v Speaker 1>thing to get into. Is there's so many one.
<v Speaker 4>Of the best stories in video games, hands down, But
<v Speaker 4>that's what you say. First Chapter is going to finally
<v Speaker 4>give people like a full remake of the first game
<v Speaker 4>and a really good entry point because the first one
<v Speaker 4>is you know, I still love the first Trails in
<v Speaker 4>the Sky, but it is dated. It is clearly dated.
<v Speaker 4>So I think Falcom has come a very long way
<v Speaker 4>since then and integrating a lot of the lessons they've
<v Speaker 4>learned and updates, and they're really surprisingly league or just
<v Speaker 4>animation that they have now. I'm just I'm so excited.
<v Speaker 4>It's it's an all timer of a story. That game
<v Speaker 4>made me cry multiple times, and I will probably cry
<v Speaker 4>again in the remake, I'm sure.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, So this is the safe like I can if
<v Speaker 1>I want to get into the city.
<v Speaker 4>This is where you start the place. There is now
<v Speaker 4>a definitive.
<v Speaker 2>How many games this is it?
<v Speaker 4>You play this game?
<v Speaker 2>How many games after this remake do I need to
<v Speaker 2>play to be caught up?
<v Speaker 4>Oh my gosh, there's two. There's two Sky games. The
<v Speaker 4>crossbel Game.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, the Sky, Well, no, there's three Sky games, right,
<v Speaker 3>it's it's.
<v Speaker 4>FC SC and third I'm saying after.
<v Speaker 3>Oh, after that yeah, so two so three in the
<v Speaker 3>Sky Chapter four and Cold Steel yeah.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, and then there's Reverie Steel.
<v Speaker 2>Right.
<v Speaker 4>Then there's two Daybreak games.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, twelve.
<v Speaker 4>So if you want to be updated for Trails through
<v Speaker 4>the Horizon when it comes out in January, you need
<v Speaker 4>to play twelve games.
<v Speaker 2>That's that. Ten and one that looks like Forbidden West.
<v Speaker 3>Took me a second, but I got there.
<v Speaker 1>I got there. It's legend. I've always wondered this because
<v Speaker 1>it's the same developer. Legend of Heroes. That's its own thing, right, Yes,
<v Speaker 1>that's not okay. They don't intersect with each other at
<v Speaker 1>all or anything like that. That's its own.
<v Speaker 4>Legend of Heroes is like the franchise, and Trails is
<v Speaker 4>the sub series.
<v Speaker 1>What happened?
<v Speaker 3>Yeah?
<v Speaker 2>I see, but back right now.
<v Speaker 4>To be quite honest, none of the games before Trails
<v Speaker 4>are really that worth playing.
<v Speaker 3>So some of the older heroes are kind of very
<v Speaker 3>like they show their age, but you know, there's there's
<v Speaker 3>something to be found.
<v Speaker 4>I do wish they would like update them in some
<v Speaker 4>way because they had awful localizations. That's that's the one problem.
<v Speaker 1>We'll wait for another another big remake those Eric, How
<v Speaker 1>about you?
<v Speaker 3>So I have like two games that would put is
<v Speaker 3>my my top two for this year right now, we've
<v Speaker 3>had a very RPG stacked go around right now. Uh
<v Speaker 3>So I will move my like one point two five
<v Speaker 3>down and do my number one with the Bullet. Because
<v Speaker 3>I talked earlier about games I love on the spectrum.
<v Speaker 3>I love like smaller our count or large hour count,
<v Speaker 3>and I'm not sure there are many games I've put
<v Speaker 3>more hours into, at least single player wise, more than
<v Speaker 3>Slay the Spire. So Slay the Spire too, which is
<v Speaker 3>currently set for an ambiguous twenty twenty five date if
<v Speaker 3>it does come out this year, is going to be
<v Speaker 3>my number one. The Bullet. I love the first slave
<v Speaker 3>Slay the Spire. I think it is the best deck
<v Speaker 3>builder out there. I think if you want to understand
<v Speaker 3>deck builder, roguelikes just the design space in general, Slay
<v Speaker 3>the Spire is a foundational text in that regard, and
<v Speaker 3>the idea of doing a sequel, I imagine is daunting
<v Speaker 3>for the team at megacrit But I cannot wait to
<v Speaker 3>see what they do with it. I think there's so
<v Speaker 3>much space to explore that has been explored already by
<v Speaker 3>fan mods and additions to the game, the addition of
<v Speaker 3>the Watcher and stuff like that. But I love Slay
<v Speaker 3>the Spire. I just I don't think there's many other
<v Speaker 3>games out there that can match it. And there's so
<v Speaker 3>many games that have tried to do what Slay the
<v Speaker 3>Spire does and just end up showing how masterful Slay
<v Speaker 3>the Spire is as a game. It's hard to like
<v Speaker 3>talk it up because it's ultimately just you're climbing a tower,
<v Speaker 3>you're finding enemies or making choices on a branching path.
<v Speaker 3>But the simplicity begets the like just depth of how
<v Speaker 3>much you can do, how challenging it can be, how
<v Speaker 3>much it makes you think about all the decisions decisions
<v Speaker 3>you're making and the bill crafting you're doing on the fly.
<v Speaker 3>It's it's a wonderful game. So yeah, I want Slay
<v Speaker 3>the Spy or two to come out and just wreck me,
<v Speaker 3>just mess me up and just ruin all future plans.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, I guess for my next one. Man, this is
<v Speaker 1>tough because I'm like scrolling down some you know what
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna go with, Mortal Kombat Legacy Collection. I'm combat fan.
<v Speaker 1>It's my favorite fighting game series, and it's one of
<v Speaker 1>my favorite franchises just in general. I've been playing it's
<v Speaker 1>literally since the first game hit arcades, and I've played
<v Speaker 1>all of them, even the crappy spinoff adventure games. Anything
<v Speaker 1>Mortal Kombat. I'm just want to get my hands on it.
<v Speaker 1>I love this idea of just bundling a lot of
<v Speaker 1>the old games and a lot of even tho the
<v Speaker 1>obscure handheld games, which I've never played those into one package.
<v Speaker 1>This is by Digital Eclipse. This is like, it's not
<v Speaker 1>technically part of the gold Man series, like the making
<v Speaker 1>of Karatka and Lamas off the Jeff Mencher story, but
<v Speaker 1>it's it's in that vein because it's got the interactive documentary,
<v Speaker 1>which I'm excited to watch. It's got like Ed Boone
<v Speaker 1>and John Tobias back together, which was pretty wild to see,
<v Speaker 1>and then talking to some of the live action actors
<v Speaker 1>from like the first three Mortal Kombat games. It just
<v Speaker 1>going through the history of the series, but it's bundling
<v Speaker 1>MK one through four multiple versions of them from the
<v Speaker 1>arcade versions to like you know, Superintendo Genesis, PS one,
<v Speaker 1>you know sixty four. Most recently, they announced that MK trilogy,
<v Speaker 1>which is my might be my favorite two D Mortal
<v Speaker 1>Kombat from net era, like it's to me it's the
<v Speaker 1>best version of three and it was probably my peak
<v Speaker 1>of like fandom during at least the nineties, as well
<v Speaker 1>as like GBA games like the like Deadly Alliance for
<v Speaker 1>gbas in there, which is crazy and apparently we still
<v Speaker 1>don't even know what the full pack it is because
<v Speaker 1>I interviewed someone from Digital Clips during Summer Games Fest
<v Speaker 1>and ats like, oh, no, we haven't announced everything that's
<v Speaker 1>in here, which was evidence because they announced trilogy after that.
<v Speaker 1>So I did ask them explicitly, like are any of
<v Speaker 1>the adventure games in here, like Mythology, sub Zero or
<v Speaker 1>Special Forces? And he kind of gave me a KOI
<v Speaker 1>like maybe, you know. So it's like I would love
<v Speaker 1>to have those. Those are terrible games, but I would
<v Speaker 1>love to have like a modern way to play them.
<v Speaker 1>So yeah, just as a Mortal Kombat sicko, I think
<v Speaker 1>that's it's such a cool idea for a bundle, and
<v Speaker 1>I'm super excited to see what that full lineup of
<v Speaker 1>games looks like.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, I thought that crashed seconds. That's really weird but
<v Speaker 3>well timed.
<v Speaker 2>Speaking of crashes, my next most anticipated game is Garfield
<v Speaker 2>to Garfield Cart two.
<v Speaker 4>All you Can Drift.
<v Speaker 2>I'm a I'm not, I'm not excited.
<v Speaker 1>They were like, well, this must mean something to him.
<v Speaker 4>I know.
<v Speaker 2>It's like I could probably go into this and they'll
<v Speaker 2>they'll take it.
<v Speaker 4>If you have some emotional connection to Garfield, I'd buy it.
<v Speaker 2>I'm a big Garfield guy. No, I'm actually gonna go
<v Speaker 2>with the game that I bet has a lot of
<v Speaker 2>people have not heard of, which is great because that
<v Speaker 2>I want to inform people of it. We are game performers.
<v Speaker 2>It's called Blood Thief. I have a ride up on
<v Speaker 2>it on an upcoming feature because I spoke to the
<v Speaker 2>dev behind it and it is my favorite game of
<v Speaker 2>the recent Steam Next Fest back in June. It is
<v Speaker 2>a p S one esque like Neon White type game.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know what you want to call those, but
<v Speaker 2>like the first person, ultra fast, ultra kill like runner
<v Speaker 2>type games, but it's set in like dungeons and medieval
<v Speaker 2>medievals is the easy way to say it. But for me,
<v Speaker 2>the demo takes place on a lot of rooftops, so
<v Speaker 2>it was very It reminded me a lot of Brandon
<v Speaker 2>Sanderson's Misborn series, which tragically does not have any video
<v Speaker 2>game about it and should. It is a hyper fast
<v Speaker 2>first person game where you just need to advance through
<v Speaker 2>anyone that's in front of you, and it's like a
<v Speaker 2>one hit, one kill type situation. And what that means
<v Speaker 2>is every speed run through a level, because it is
<v Speaker 2>basically speed running, similar to like Neon White, is actually
<v Speaker 2>like a puzzle and finding the optimum route through a level,
<v Speaker 2>whether that's like you know, kicking this guy and then
<v Speaker 2>dive sliding forward so that you can launch up and
<v Speaker 2>then teleport to this guy, knife him and continue. And
<v Speaker 2>the cool thing about it, like the fun twist, is
<v Speaker 2>that your health is constantly depleting your blood which powers
<v Speaker 2>your moves as well, so in a very doomsque way,
<v Speaker 2>you can't like hold back. You need to get in
<v Speaker 2>there to survive. You need to like get up in
<v Speaker 2>front with the action and kill and it's just so
<v Speaker 2>so good. The demos of on Steam right now. I
<v Speaker 2>urge anybody interested in these types of games to try
<v Speaker 2>it out. But it's coming later this year, and it
<v Speaker 2>is far and away my favorite game I've played on
<v Speaker 2>Steam next Fest and it's one I'm like continually excited for.
<v Speaker 2>It is so good and that the visual style is
<v Speaker 2>really cool. I can't emphasize how PS one it looks.
<v Speaker 1>It's awesome. Yeah, the game, what's cool is a demo?
<v Speaker 1>Still love like the people.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's a it's a it's a public demo, and
<v Speaker 2>and the dev told me that it's like the last demo,
<v Speaker 2>so like it's the most it's the final demo for
<v Speaker 2>the game, so it'll be the most like true representation
<v Speaker 2>of what to expect because he's been very public about
<v Speaker 2>the game's development since, you know, years back, putting out
<v Speaker 2>like pieces of the game for people to try and
<v Speaker 2>tweak and and yeah, very excited.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, yeah the game. That's super COOLO excited for that. Hayes.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah. I think my second one's got to be Mina
<v Speaker 4>the Hollower Yacht Club's new game, the Shovel Night developers.
<v Speaker 4>Shovel Knight to me is like one of those like
<v Speaker 4>Mount Rushmore of indie games kind of game, and Miana
<v Speaker 4>the Hollower just looks and I played the demo too,
<v Speaker 4>and it's just fantastic. It's like their take it's almost
<v Speaker 4>like their take on like a traditional Zelda, right, but
<v Speaker 4>they've integrated so many interesting mechanics where you have like
<v Speaker 4>you have a whip like in Castlevania, and you have
<v Speaker 4>the HP restoration system like in Bloodborne, where you attack
<v Speaker 4>to gain HP back, and you have that dig mechanic
<v Speaker 4>where you can go underground and pop back out, and
<v Speaker 4>there's just so many interesting things happening in that game.
<v Speaker 4>Not to mention like the art style really evokes like
<v Speaker 4>those GBA Zelda games, and I just I love how
<v Speaker 4>it looks. I love the soundtrack is incredible. I so far,
<v Speaker 4>I love everything about it. It's one of those few
<v Speaker 4>games that, like, even before I played the demo, I
<v Speaker 4>could look at trailers and be like, that's probably gonna
<v Speaker 4>be in my top five games of the year. I
<v Speaker 4>don't usually say that about a game beforehand without having
<v Speaker 4>played it, but this is the one that I'm like,
<v Speaker 4>this looks so much like my jam in every single
<v Speaker 4>imaginable way.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I really. I played the Switch demo that they
<v Speaker 1>released like a week or two ago last week. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>and yeah, I had a blast with it. Also, it
<v Speaker 1>just looks nice on like a big switch to screen,
<v Speaker 1>which it was pretty treat but yeah, yeah, pretty much
<v Speaker 1>echoing everything you said, like I love how Zelda it
<v Speaker 1>is and also a little bit of Castlevania and there
<v Speaker 1>just maybe like the sub weapons stuff reminds me of Castlevania,
<v Speaker 1>but like digging around stuff, like there's some cool like
<v Speaker 1>environmental puzzles and like obstacles that seem to be designed
<v Speaker 1>around it.
<v Speaker 4>I think it's nice to like because you see a
<v Speaker 4>lot of games that are like inspired by two D Selda,
<v Speaker 4>but you don't see a lot that try and do
<v Speaker 4>something like genuinely really unique with that that format.
<v Speaker 2>We have a really good documentary on our YouTube channel
<v Speaker 2>shop about having the followers creation. Two cool things about
<v Speaker 2>the game and the documentary is it was like a
<v Speaker 2>side project or like a solo project that someone of
<v Speaker 2>the studio was working on and now Yacht Club Yeah
<v Speaker 2>saw it and they were like, Yo, this is so cool.
<v Speaker 2>We're going to make this our next game, which is
<v Speaker 2>very exciting. And something really exciting to me is like
<v Speaker 2>you said, hey, Shovel Knight is like it's so good.
<v Speaker 2>It's I feel like it's kind of behind the renaissance
<v Speaker 2>of indie that started back in like, you know, ten
<v Speaker 2>years ago now, but they haven't put out a game
<v Speaker 2>real well, they've put out some you know, new stuff. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>and like I'm so excited to see what Yacht Club
<v Speaker 2>has taken from the landscape in the past decade. Like
<v Speaker 2>they were looking, they were watching, they were seeing what
<v Speaker 2>games were doing, Like what what have they taken from
<v Speaker 2>the past ten years of game development and created with
<v Speaker 2>mina super exciting, awesome.
<v Speaker 1>Eric back to you.
<v Speaker 3>My number. My close runner up was Octopath Travelers zero.
<v Speaker 3>Octopath Traveler too, is one of the most underrated RPGs
<v Speaker 3>the last five ten years. Easy. I think anybody who
<v Speaker 3>is going like turn based is back because Claire Obscure
<v Speaker 3>is like, you need to play Octopath. You need to
<v Speaker 3>go play Octopath. Trust me on this. It's I was
<v Speaker 3>not a huge fan of Octopath Traveler one. I've said
<v Speaker 3>as much. I thought it was an okay game that
<v Speaker 3>had some neat ideas, but ultimately didn't really live up
<v Speaker 3>to its concept or some of the things it was
<v Speaker 3>drawing on. Oxopath Traveler who solved all that and then
<v Speaker 3>some with its path actions, with its storytelling, with the
<v Speaker 3>character writing, individual characters that I think are some of
<v Speaker 3>the best RPG party members in any RPG. Again, like
<v Speaker 3>in recent memory, characters like Partiitio and Castie and Temenos
<v Speaker 3>are just so incredible. I love Oswald, the bulky Black Mage.
<v Speaker 3>I love that we get like a bear black mage
<v Speaker 3>who just like got buff and he got jail body
<v Speaker 3>and then just came out and started casting spells. I
<v Speaker 3>love that for him. And so take all that. Now
<v Speaker 3>you've got Octabath Travelers, which seems to be kind of
<v Speaker 3>a reconstitution of ideas and stuff from Champions of the Continent,
<v Speaker 3>which was the Octapath Traveler mobile game. It seems like
<v Speaker 3>they're Square isn't being super upfront about what is being
<v Speaker 3>reused versus what is new outside of a few new
<v Speaker 3>features and mechanics, but it seems like it is repurposing
<v Speaker 3>some aspect of that into something new, which I think
<v Speaker 3>sets a really cool precedent for Square. I would love
<v Speaker 3>to see Near Reincarnation come back in some way because
<v Speaker 3>that's kind of a really big entry in the Near
<v Speaker 3>series when it comes to the lore and it being
<v Speaker 3>gone sucks.
<v Speaker 4>So some really good stories in it too.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, yeah, yeah, My former colleague and freelance writer Timothy
<v Speaker 3>Mamblo has been posting a lot about it because he
<v Speaker 3>is also an Octopath sicko and has done a lot
<v Speaker 3>of writing about it, so URGI to check that out.
<v Speaker 3>But it's I just love Octapath Traveler like like two
<v Speaker 3>completely one meo. I already loved the style of one,
<v Speaker 3>and it was the some of the other stuff that
<v Speaker 3>just didn't hit for me, But with two it felt
<v Speaker 3>like it came into its own and now Octopath Traveler
<v Speaker 3>zero seems like it's really doing some cool stuff with
<v Speaker 3>the concepts and the ideas of Octpath Traveler as a whole.
<v Speaker 3>Just a very classic, feeling, forward thinking RPG that seems
<v Speaker 3>really exciting, and I would almost dovetail this into this
<v Speaker 3>is a twenty twenty six game, but it also then
<v Speaker 3>gets me excited for Adventures of Elliott, which seems like
<v Speaker 3>it's going to be very good from what little I've
<v Speaker 3>played so far. We want to talk about Zelda games
<v Speaker 3>that feel like they're evolving and moving forward, but that's
<v Speaker 3>that's a twenty six game. That's a different story. Talked
<v Speaker 3>about Traveler zero.
<v Speaker 1>Play that demo. You should play the demo.
<v Speaker 3>It's a cool demo.
<v Speaker 4>I think it's interesting with those demos.
<v Speaker 2>How do you feel about Zero?
<v Speaker 4>Oh? God, that I was just saying. I think it's
<v Speaker 4>interesting with those demos that team Asano does that they
<v Speaker 4>every demo they do, they take a bunch of feedback
<v Speaker 4>and like directly say like, hey, we want your feedback
<v Speaker 4>and we want to use it in the game.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, they've they've been really good about that. I remember
<v Speaker 3>that specifically with Triangle Strategy there were like specific changes
<v Speaker 3>that were made from demo to final game that I
<v Speaker 3>think bore out very well. Yeah, Asana has been on
<v Speaker 3>top of it lately. Wes, what were you asking?
<v Speaker 2>How do you feel about Zero? You make your own protagonists.
<v Speaker 3>In it, which is interesting.
<v Speaker 2>It's an interesting change for Octopath and the storytelling they do.
<v Speaker 2>How do you think that's going to fare out?
<v Speaker 3>I think this is me assuming because one of the
<v Speaker 3>shots that we see in the trailer for Zero shows
<v Speaker 3>a bunch of characters, some of whom look a lot
<v Speaker 3>like characters we've seen an Octopath traveler already kind of
<v Speaker 3>joining banding together in some big fight and spoilers, I
<v Speaker 3>guess for some Mechanics and Ocpath travelers sometimes there are
<v Speaker 3>big fights that involve the party, like the and I
<v Speaker 3>think the way that game plays with party size has
<v Speaker 3>always been really interesting, the way that you can do
<v Speaker 3>kind of different runs. You recruit your characters and put
<v Speaker 3>them together in whatever order you want. Theoretically, you could
<v Speaker 3>beat the game with just one character if you really
<v Speaker 3>wanted to, or you could go through and get everybody
<v Speaker 3>and stuff like that. So I think the ways in
<v Speaker 3>which they're doing that. Having the created character might not
<v Speaker 3>fully realize the whole eight stories coming together in the
<v Speaker 3>way that Octabath Traveler one and two did, but might
<v Speaker 3>open them up to other storytelling avenues and also might
<v Speaker 3>kind of solve problems they would have run into bringing
<v Speaker 3>in new stuff from both what they're making now and
<v Speaker 3>what they're trying to incorporate from Champions of the Continent.
<v Speaker 3>It's probably just something that might make life a little
<v Speaker 3>bit easier, and if it does that, then it does that.
<v Speaker 3>I think it's cool. I don't really dislike created characters.
<v Speaker 3>I think the only thing I run into is when
<v Speaker 3>they feel like they're just kind of there as a
<v Speaker 3>placeholder for for you as a person, Like we needed
<v Speaker 3>some sort of body to put in here, and we
<v Speaker 3>didn't design a character or viewpoint or framing around it.
<v Speaker 3>So we just have here's Billy. You know, he's he's
<v Speaker 3>he's you. Essentially, I'm interested to see that. Yeah you
<v Speaker 3>know who's not Billy. But yeah, Traveler Zero I think
<v Speaker 3>looks really good and is also really soon. I think
<v Speaker 3>that was the surprise of that showcase was early. Yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 3>that's that turned around fast, So I'm looking forward to that.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, that's for my next game. I'm going to
<v Speaker 1>swing for defenses here. You know what, you love it.
<v Speaker 1>It's Metroid Prime for I believe. I believe it's coming
<v Speaker 1>out this year. I don't think it's getting delayed. I
<v Speaker 1>know it's a point of contention with our friend's over
<v Speaker 1>a giant bomb, but I'm in the camp that the
<v Speaker 1>game is going to come out this year. I don't think.
<v Speaker 1>I don't think I can slip again, honestly, because I
<v Speaker 1>don't know what else Nintendo would have for the holiday,
<v Speaker 1>which is when I presume it's gonna be coming out
<v Speaker 1>at this point, maybe like a September and October well
<v Speaker 1>probably does well. I don't know. Nintendo's weird they surprise us,
<v Speaker 1>but like, yeah, it's coming out next month. Surprise, but
<v Speaker 1>whenever it comes out, I'm gonna play the hell out
<v Speaker 1>of it. I love Metroid, I love Metroid Prime. I
<v Speaker 1>think Prime one particularly it's one of my favorite games ever,
<v Speaker 1>and I think it's like viz for maybe the best
<v Speaker 1>Metroid game with Super Metroid for me. Everything i've seen
<v Speaker 1>A four looks awesome. The like new Psychic Power stuff
<v Speaker 1>looks cool. I want to mess around with the mouse controls.
<v Speaker 1>I've not gotten to plate it at all. I haven't
<v Speaker 1>been on those preview beats for it, so I've just
<v Speaker 1>had to live vicariously through our peers as they talk
<v Speaker 1>about it. But it just looks like it looks it's
<v Speaker 1>just what I want. It's like, yeah, that's a new
<v Speaker 1>Metroid Prime game that looks nicer and runs at like
<v Speaker 1>one hundred and twenty fps. Apparently that's sweet. Give it
<v Speaker 1>to me. Like that's one of those games where it's
<v Speaker 1>like a seems I have just don't talk to me
<v Speaker 1>because I'm just gonna want to play it is like
<v Speaker 1>leave me alone. So yes, fingers crossed that we get
<v Speaker 1>a date soon. I just I want it.
<v Speaker 2>My next game is kind of not cop Out but
<v Speaker 2>Drastic World Evolution three I'm not actually excited to play it.
<v Speaker 2>But my nephew, who is nine, loves these games. They're
<v Speaker 2>the first games he's somehow the first games he like
<v Speaker 2>rolled credits on and beat his Drastic World Evolution two,
<v Speaker 2>went back and played. One loves these games. Is so obsessed,
<v Speaker 2>like it was a big deal when they announced this,
<v Speaker 2>Like we I met up with him and we watched
<v Speaker 2>the trailer together. He's so excited about dinosaurs. He can
<v Speaker 2>name every single dinosaur on screen without even like needing
<v Speaker 2>to be told. He's like a dinosaur fiend. And he's
<v Speaker 2>somehow really good at Drastic World Evolution, which are like
<v Speaker 2>not easy games, especially for nine year olds. I play strategy, Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>they're tough. Yeah, And I just it's it's really cool.
<v Speaker 2>This will be the first because two he played like
<v Speaker 2>after the fact, this will be like the first new
<v Speaker 2>game where like we get to go and hang out
<v Speaker 2>on release day and like play it and I get
<v Speaker 2>to watch them and I can't wait. I think it's
<v Speaker 2>going to be so cool, and it actually it does
<v Speaker 2>look pretty cool. I mean, I like dinosaurs. It's hard
<v Speaker 2>not to be excited about dinosaurs.
<v Speaker 1>Frank, are you worried though, that your nephew is slowly
<v Speaker 1>turning into John Hammond.
<v Speaker 2>He might be, but he I don't know. He has well,
<v Speaker 2>John Hammond loved dinosaurs too, and my nephew has like
<v Speaker 2>a very a deep love for animals, Like he doesn't
<v Speaker 2>like when people squish bugs, he doesn't like animals being
<v Speaker 2>hurt or anything.
<v Speaker 1>Like.
<v Speaker 2>He really really loves like nature and stuff and wants
<v Speaker 2>to be a zoo keeper and like. So I'm hoping
<v Speaker 2>that he he stays on the path of the true
<v Speaker 2>and not the Hopefully capitalism doesn't get in.
<v Speaker 1>There he falls into a bunch of money. Then yes, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it's like I can play this game for real. Now,
<v Speaker 1>all right, what do you have for your third Yeah?
<v Speaker 4>My third game, strangely a tactics RPG heavy section, is
<v Speaker 4>a Demon School.
<v Speaker 3>Oh you stole my game.
<v Speaker 4>I'm a huge tactical RPG siko. But I also think
<v Speaker 4>Demon School looks really interesting because I love the social
<v Speaker 4>simulation of persona, right, I don't love that A lot
<v Speaker 4>of games have tried to do that and do it
<v Speaker 4>really poorly. So one of the things I'm always looking
<v Speaker 4>for is when a game tries to do social simulation
<v Speaker 4>in a really interesting way. I think My favorite is
<v Speaker 4>Fire a Month three Houses, because it kind of inverts
<v Speaker 4>it with you being the professor and your train and
<v Speaker 4>your students, and it kind of was like a fun
<v Speaker 4>inversion of Persona and Demon School. I think looks like
<v Speaker 4>it could be kind of like one of those interesting
<v Speaker 4>takes on social simulation and school life and stuff like that.
<v Speaker 4>And the art style looks impeccable too. I'm hopeful. I'm
<v Speaker 4>just I'm honestly hopeful that it's going to be like
<v Speaker 4>one of the breakout hits of the year.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. I played it at the mix during SGF and
<v Speaker 1>I really had a good time. It's one of those
<v Speaker 1>games I'd kept an eye on for like God, it
<v Speaker 1>felt like that games is floating around for years now,
<v Speaker 1>but SGF was the first time I'd gotten to go
<v Speaker 1>hands on with it, and I was really impressed because
<v Speaker 1>I like tax this game too, but it had a
<v Speaker 1>bit of specifically into the breach and just because of
<v Speaker 1>like the enemy is kind of like telegraphing their attacks
<v Speaker 1>and you kind of have to plan around that, Like
<v Speaker 1>you're pretty much just like plotting turns and then just
<v Speaker 1>hitting the play button and seeing how things go and
<v Speaker 1>seeing if you planned everything the way that you thought
<v Speaker 1>you did, which I was a huge into the Breach fan,
<v Speaker 1>so it was it was clicking those boxes for me
<v Speaker 1>of like, oh okay, it's one of these. I like that.
<v Speaker 3>And yeah with the cool art direction like you mentioned before. Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>I'm really excited about this. This is going to be
<v Speaker 3>like perfect Switch game when it comes out. Yeah, all right, Eric,
<v Speaker 3>what is your third I'm still mad. My Demon School
<v Speaker 3>was much very good. Who could have guessed?
<v Speaker 4>Now?
<v Speaker 3>With that in mind, I huh, this is interesting. I'm
<v Speaker 3>gonna float maybe one that bends the rules a little bit.
<v Speaker 3>And this isn't so much as I think this is
<v Speaker 3>going to be a Grand Slam. I just want to
<v Speaker 3>see how this pans out. I want to see if
<v Speaker 3>this becomes a ripple change or not in the genre
<v Speaker 3>that it releases in. Uh two x KO is supposed
<v Speaker 3>to hit some sort of open, closed beta access thing
<v Speaker 3>this year. It seems like the release Cadence is hewing
<v Speaker 3>towards what they did with Valerie, what Riot Games did
<v Speaker 3>with Valerie.
<v Speaker 1>This is the Riot Games fighting game.
<v Speaker 3>That's the League of Legends fighting game. What was the
<v Speaker 3>original name Project L like Project L, which I hate,
<v Speaker 3>that was a better name I two x KO sounds
<v Speaker 3>like you're going to go play NBA too ka.
<v Speaker 1>I've been saying this.
<v Speaker 3>I'm like, Yo, you want to go play some two
<v Speaker 3>x KO. I'm like, that's a weird way to pronounce
<v Speaker 3>NBA two K but yeah, let's go the like no,
<v Speaker 3>we're playing League of Legends, And I was like, oh, okay,
<v Speaker 3>Project Dell makes it sound like it's an underground fight
<v Speaker 3>club type thing, like there's there's a bit more of
<v Speaker 3>a vibe to it.
<v Speaker 1>I am sure. Have you tried pronouncing it twice co
<v Speaker 1>and saying I feel like that better?
<v Speaker 3>No, I don't like TwixT code.
<v Speaker 4>That sounds like like a K pop.
<v Speaker 3>Band two times knockout. That's would just call it by
<v Speaker 3>its full name extended.
<v Speaker 1>Uh.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah. I'm really interested in two x KO because I
<v Speaker 3>think it's taking a really different approach to fighting games.
<v Speaker 3>It's a two on two tag fighter, It's from a
<v Speaker 3>team that knows fighting games. It's got rollback neck code
<v Speaker 3>from the jump, which most most fighting games do nowadays.
<v Speaker 3>I feel like the the the era of convincing fighting
<v Speaker 3>game developers that like rollback net code is a good
<v Speaker 3>thing has finally ended and we are now living in
<v Speaker 3>the blissful glory days. The golden hour of everything has
<v Speaker 3>rollback net code now we finally accepted that we need
<v Speaker 3>good online to play fighting games. But character wise, I've
<v Speaker 3>played some of the previous open beta or open alphas
<v Speaker 3>or whatever that they've had, and it's a really interesting
<v Speaker 3>game coming from somebody who really likes tag fighters. I
<v Speaker 3>grew up playing Marvel versus Capcom two on both the
<v Speaker 3>Arcades and then on Xbox three sixty when that port
<v Speaker 3>came over there. I love Dragon Ball Fighters when it
<v Speaker 3>came out. Stuff like techn tag tournament has always been
<v Speaker 3>big for me. King of Fighters has been really big
<v Speaker 3>for me, even though that's not like a tag fighter,
<v Speaker 3>that's like a sequence fighter. I don't know what you
<v Speaker 3>want to call it. Capcom versus S and K two
<v Speaker 3>another game in that style, But any sort of team
<v Speaker 3>based fighting game has always been very appealing to me.
<v Speaker 3>So I love the idea of League of Legends careters
<v Speaker 3>because I'm also a League player getting involved in this
<v Speaker 3>kind of stuff. What I'm kind of iffy on is
<v Speaker 3>their initial launch model, which which seems a little bit sparse.
<v Speaker 3>Ten fighters I believe at launch. Via is the most
<v Speaker 3>recently confirmed one and closed out the starting roster. And
<v Speaker 3>also some of the animations can vary wildly. They're the
<v Speaker 3>VI level three super was getting some response on social media.
<v Speaker 3>I wouldn't be surprised to see that one maybe tuned
<v Speaker 3>a little bit later, because it's one of those ones
<v Speaker 3>where if I'm VI doing the super, it's like ah
<v Speaker 3>ah ah, and like the opponent is like off screen
<v Speaker 3>then you can't see them at all, and they're just
<v Speaker 3>kind of like yeah, yeah, yeah, where's There are other
<v Speaker 3>super animations in that game that look fantastic. I love
<v Speaker 3>Allowey's with the big monster consuming the character. I love
<v Speaker 3>Broms where the poros roll in and attack. Like there's
<v Speaker 3>some really good stuff in there. So but that being said,
<v Speaker 3>League of Legends is a universe that, as Arcane showed
<v Speaker 3>and as games like The Ruined King showed, there's a
<v Speaker 3>lot to explore here. There's really great characters, really great designs,
<v Speaker 3>really cool world building stuff that I think is like
<v Speaker 3>ripe for exploration, especially within the bounds of a fighting game.
<v Speaker 3>And I can't imagine not just getting tons of awesome
<v Speaker 3>cool designs with everything from kind of your conventional fighters,
<v Speaker 3>like you know, a set or a riven to characters like,
<v Speaker 3>you know, what would Shako look like in a fighting game?
<v Speaker 3>What would Timo look like in a fighting game? What
<v Speaker 3>would Malzahar look like in a fighting game? I think
<v Speaker 3>you can do some really cool stuff like that, so
<v Speaker 3>I'm really interested in it. I also have to blame
<v Speaker 3>Alex Manikin for getting me back into League of Legends.
<v Speaker 3>He did this to me in twenty twenty five, the
<v Speaker 3>year of Luigi.
<v Speaker 2>Twenty that's almost criminal. We need to have a talk
<v Speaker 2>with them.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, yeah, it's it's bad friends, right, he knows, he
<v Speaker 3>knows this about me. He was like, you won't play
<v Speaker 3>a League of Legends and I was like.
<v Speaker 1>All right, and here we go.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, yeah, but no, it's it's cool and I like
<v Speaker 3>that that riot is expanding beyond the Mobay. They've been
<v Speaker 3>trying so much stuff, and I feel like Tea fight
<v Speaker 3>tactics really good. There've been some other stuff that they've
<v Speaker 3>tried that seems to have varied. I love the single
<v Speaker 3>player stuff in Legends of run Tara, their deck game,
<v Speaker 3>but it feels like they're still kind of waiting for
<v Speaker 3>the next thing that takes off at the level of
<v Speaker 3>League of Legends. Maybe two x KO is it? Maybe not,
<v Speaker 3>who's to say, but I could see this being a
<v Speaker 3>big game and potentially having a big tournament at EVO
<v Speaker 3>next year and stuff like that if things go well.
<v Speaker 3>So the closed launch of two x KO is my
<v Speaker 3>game number three.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, we'll do one more round here before we wrap
<v Speaker 1>up the show, so make it count and you can
<v Speaker 1>do this too. But before I say my final game,
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna just quickly shout out some honorable mentions. A
<v Speaker 1>ghost of Yote excited for that keeper double Find's next game,
<v Speaker 1>Love double Find, very interested in that game. Me know,
<v Speaker 1>the Hollow Words one we talked about before, and then
<v Speaker 1>stuff like out of Worlds two. Want to play that
<v Speaker 1>Silent Hill f which you know I talked about in
<v Speaker 1>the show before. But the last game I'm gonna choose
<v Speaker 1>as my most anticipated game for twenty twenty five is
<v Speaker 1>Ninja Guiden four. Love Me Some Ninja Guiden. As I
<v Speaker 1>mentioned when we were talking about Fantom played zero. I
<v Speaker 1>am a stylish action just fanatic, and I played this
<v Speaker 1>at Summer Games Fest, and out of all the games
<v Speaker 1>I played there, this was the only one where I
<v Speaker 1>was genuinely bummed that I had to stop playing. Like
<v Speaker 1>even sometimes when you go to events like this, if
<v Speaker 1>it's something I'm having fun with, when they call time,
<v Speaker 1>I'm just like, well, okay, you know, I can wait
<v Speaker 1>for you know, when it's supposed to come out. This
<v Speaker 1>is one where I was like so locked in. It
<v Speaker 1>was like just as a Ninja Guiden fan, where I
<v Speaker 1>it's just like literally like the room melted away. It's
<v Speaker 1>like nothing exists in here. I'm just going in here
<v Speaker 1>as this little shaggy hair Ninja's you play a new
<v Speaker 1>guy nim Yakimo and you're just tearing through dudes and
<v Speaker 1>everything looks super nice, and I'm just like, yeah, this
<v Speaker 1>is this is gaming right here. And also that is
<v Speaker 1>it's just a cool meeting of minds because this is
<v Speaker 1>developed by primarily by Platinum Games, with Team Ninja the
<v Speaker 1>series developer sort of like overseeing it. And it's like,
<v Speaker 1>oh again, as a fan of the genre, just couldn't
<v Speaker 1>be better. Like I love Platinum's work. I'm a huge
<v Speaker 1>Bandeta guy, love Metalview Rising, Team Ninja again, I love
<v Speaker 1>the three D Ninja Guidans and Neo and all their stuff.
<v Speaker 1>So it's just like, oh, this is a dream come
<v Speaker 1>true for me and what's cool about the game is
<v Speaker 1>that it is simultaneously like it feels faithful to Ninja
<v Speaker 1>Guide in a way where like, if you didn't know
<v Speaker 1>Platinum was on this, you probably wouldn't immediately guess it
<v Speaker 1>because it behaves the way if you're a fan of
<v Speaker 1>this game you would want. But as a fan of Platinum,
<v Speaker 1>I can see the Platinum touches and just sort of
<v Speaker 1>the the influences, like it's got the middle Gear Rising
<v Speaker 1>Perry system, which is like pretty sweet. Yeah yeah yeah,
<v Speaker 1>and then just other little like additions that they've added
<v Speaker 1>to the game where it's like, oh, this this is
<v Speaker 1>just this is peanut butter and jelly basically. Yeah. It's
<v Speaker 1>like I don't really have much more to add other
<v Speaker 1>than like it's just fun as hell. Like I like
<v Speaker 1>I said, I played for like what was that like
<v Speaker 1>thirty minutes I think we did, and I was just
<v Speaker 1>like yeah, like nothing mattered again, like I said, it's
<v Speaker 1>like this is just so much fun. So I'm super psyched.
<v Speaker 1>I think this is and it's not too far away.
<v Speaker 1>It's like end of September. I think it's pretty cool.
<v Speaker 1>Early October, somewhere in October something like that. I might
<v Speaker 1>be wrong.
<v Speaker 2>October twentieth.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, so maybe it's further away than I thought. But anyway,
<v Speaker 1>it is my Halloween treat. That my my pre Halloween
<v Speaker 1>treat will be Ninja Gag four.
<v Speaker 2>There's still plenty of time to play Rage Bound as.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I'm like halfway through that game is super fun.
<v Speaker 1>And there's also that that Ninja Gay in Black or
<v Speaker 1>Nina Too Black they came out earlier this year, which
<v Speaker 1>was a really good remaster.
<v Speaker 2>If they came mm hmm, okay for my last game,
<v Speaker 2>I'll do some honorable mentions Pokemon Legends z through A
<v Speaker 2>Uh mostly just excited to see how that pans out.
<v Speaker 2>I as boring as it is, like that performance needs
<v Speaker 2>to work on that game. I will like that game
<v Speaker 2>will ride or die for me on performance, which is
<v Speaker 2>a very lame way to talk about games, but like
<v Speaker 2>that's the state of Pokemon. I'm like, yes, yeah, I'm
<v Speaker 2>also way more interested in than Arcius because I'm I
<v Speaker 2>like a city environment over like a open world, you know,
<v Speaker 2>rural environment any day, and the fact that it's set
<v Speaker 2>like exclusively in Lumios is really cool. I think the
<v Speaker 2>z through A tournament is a cool idea. And I
<v Speaker 2>like that it's pretty drastic of a sequel in terms
<v Speaker 2>of changes compaired Darcy. I think it's a really cool
<v Speaker 2>thing for them to do, to change so much, even
<v Speaker 2>though Arcis was like well received, ball x Pitvolver Digital's
<v Speaker 2>big game coming this year. I think everyone needs to
<v Speaker 2>play the demo. It's it's a roguelike brick breaker, and
<v Speaker 2>it is as obsessive as it sounds. It's really really good. Yes,
<v Speaker 2>And I know it's just the I'm same and it's
<v Speaker 2>like just the demo. But my actual last game was
<v Speaker 2>one that you already mentioned, Marcus and your little honorable mentions,
<v Speaker 2>Ghost of Yote. You know, it's the easy answer. YouTube committers,
<v Speaker 2>don't worry. We said it. I'm talking about it. You
<v Speaker 2>don't delete the comment that says.
<v Speaker 1>Talking about it.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, Ghost of Sushima is awesome, obviously, you know, it's
<v Speaker 2>an old book. At this point, like I'm excited for
<v Speaker 2>this sequel. I think what I'm most excited for is
<v Speaker 2>so Ghost of Sushima was up against the open world
<v Speaker 2>formula like that. That's kind of what it was tacked going,
<v Speaker 2>was the tired formula that Ubisoft had kind of distilled
<v Speaker 2>open world games into and I think it did a
<v Speaker 2>really good job of changing that up and giving us
<v Speaker 2>something different. Ghosts of Yota is cool because it's now
<v Speaker 2>it's competing against itself as well. Like I'm I'm less
<v Speaker 2>interested in how sucker Punch is going to break the
<v Speaker 2>open world formula. They already did a really good job
<v Speaker 2>with that with Sushima. Now I'm interested to see, like,
<v Speaker 2>is Yota going to feel familiar and too familiar, too
<v Speaker 2>repetitive and like because it's more Sushiamo, or are they
<v Speaker 2>going to be doing something bigger, something grander, something different
<v Speaker 2>to its open world to like distinguish itself in this series,
<v Speaker 2>Because I'm honestly not in the mood for more like
<v Speaker 2>Ghost of Sushi mood in terms of like what that
<v Speaker 2>game is. It was. I really liked that game and
<v Speaker 2>what didn't like blow my socks off, but I enjoyed it.
<v Speaker 2>I don't necessarily just want another forty hour adventure of
<v Speaker 2>that that is with just a different protagonist. I'm excited
<v Speaker 2>to see what Sucker Punch took from games in the
<v Speaker 2>last five years and they are going to do to
<v Speaker 2>this formula to keep it interesting and why it warrants
<v Speaker 2>a sequel That is not a direct sequel, but a
<v Speaker 2>new protagonist in this series.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I'm hoping it. The thing I most want from
<v Speaker 1>that game is someone that really likes Soushi Mood but
<v Speaker 1>didn't love it as much as most people. Is that
<v Speaker 1>I hope it that really westernly vibe that that first
<v Speaker 1>trailer has. I hope that wasn't just the trailer, Like,
<v Speaker 1>I hope the game kind of reflects that.
<v Speaker 2>I thought that was like a cool sort of like tone,
<v Speaker 2>like wild Western vibe.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, like a wild West vibe that I hope is
<v Speaker 1>actually like present in the game. It wasn't just like
<v Speaker 1>a I don't know, like a style thing from the trailer.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and that is coming up soon October second. That's
<v Speaker 2>like so soon.
<v Speaker 1>Actually, that's really yes. And we got to get through
<v Speaker 1>Kingdom Come Deliverance too, Oh gosh. Yeah yeah, Hey, what's
<v Speaker 1>your last one?
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, so you've you both have said most of my
<v Speaker 4>honorable mentions, So my pick and my honorable mention are
<v Speaker 4>going to be kind of curveballs. But my mention is
<v Speaker 4>Sonic Racing Crossworlds, which I played summer game and is
<v Speaker 4>like surprisingly fun. The racing feels really good. It has
<v Speaker 4>this really fun like crossworld system where you change tracks
<v Speaker 4>in the middle of a race. It has like really
<v Speaker 4>deep customization of cars and not to mention, like I
<v Speaker 4>can play as Echibond in it, i can play as
<v Speaker 4>hot sun Amiku in it. I can play a SpongeBob
<v Speaker 4>in it. It's just like everything. And then my full
<v Speaker 4>pick is Damon x Machina Titanic Scion, Yeah, which I
<v Speaker 4>feel like a lot of people probably haven't heard of.
<v Speaker 4>The first Damen x Machini was like a really interesting
<v Speaker 4>mech game on the Switch that had a lot of
<v Speaker 4>I thought it had a lot of really interesting ideas,
<v Speaker 4>but it felt kind of like underbaked in terms of
<v Speaker 4>narrative structure, Like it just felt like it could have
<v Speaker 4>been more and all regards, like, Titanic Scion looks like
<v Speaker 4>that more that I wanted from the first game, Like
<v Speaker 4>it has a much more narrative. It's art style has
<v Speaker 4>been very much refined as like a really interesting mech
<v Speaker 4>system where you're not like necessarily in a mech, you're
<v Speaker 4>in like a armor suit mech kind of thing. And
<v Speaker 4>that's a really interesting idea because you don't see a
<v Speaker 4>lot of mech games where you have like the Iron
<v Speaker 4>Man kind of suit instead of a standard mech. So
<v Speaker 4>I think it just looks really cool and like I said,
<v Speaker 4>kind of this forwarding of the first game that could
<v Speaker 4>be really meaningful, and we just don't have enough mech games,
<v Speaker 4>enough good mech games.
<v Speaker 3>Is it you suit a mech that's.
<v Speaker 4>In this game? I think it technically applies.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, I've never thought about it this hard, but now
<v Speaker 3>I'm like, is suit mech?
<v Speaker 1>I don't know? I mean like iron Man like his
<v Speaker 1>Iron Man?
<v Speaker 3>Is iron Man a mech?
<v Speaker 4>Yeah?
<v Speaker 2>Like Spider Man and mech in.
<v Speaker 3>But then wouldn't that be like Gundam. A Gundam is
<v Speaker 3>just a really big suit, then some gun like logic
<v Speaker 3>thrown at me.
<v Speaker 4>Fighter has like the Pacific rim style, where like they're
<v Speaker 4>in these suits directly controlling this.
<v Speaker 3>They're in the like the vard suits doing the are
<v Speaker 3>you put up?
<v Speaker 1>I think you're caught up on scale, like you're saying
<v Speaker 1>if it's not like a giant sized thing, that it's
<v Speaker 1>not me.
<v Speaker 3>I think it's also control scheme to an extent, like
<v Speaker 3>do you have to pilot something versus it being an
<v Speaker 3>extension of your natural bodies motor functions?
<v Speaker 1>You know. I think if we could do both. Like
<v Speaker 1>Iron Man, he can send the Suit to do things
<v Speaker 1>on its own sometimes.
<v Speaker 3>If he needs to, but doesn't like Jarvis do that
<v Speaker 3>stuff or whatever. The replacement for Jarvis was.
<v Speaker 4>So by extension.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, huh is Jarvis a part of him? Does this
<v Speaker 3>Unit two have a soul play near automata?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah?
<v Speaker 3>Anyways, I don't know that's that's a tax taxonomical question
<v Speaker 3>that I don't have the answer for. So Suit mech
<v Speaker 3>I guess.
<v Speaker 1>Sure we'll go with that. Yeah, that's last game.
<v Speaker 3>I don't know. We're so deep into the podcast that
<v Speaker 3>just like fried my brain.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>For my honorable mentions, I want to shout out good
<v Speaker 3>Night Universe, which is the next game from the Before
<v Speaker 3>Your Eyes team, very excited for that. I want to
<v Speaker 3>shout out Digimon Time Digimon Story Time Stranger, a game
<v Speaker 3>that I was very surprised by at SGF ended up
<v Speaker 3>being my favorite game that I saw at SGF. It
<v Speaker 3>was very very good. I'm also very interesting blood Lines too,
<v Speaker 3>because I am a longtime Bloodlines one fan and I'm
<v Speaker 3>just really curious where it landed. Yeah. Yeah, you know,
<v Speaker 3>after years and years of that development, shifting round and
<v Speaker 3>going to different teams and going through different iterations. I
<v Speaker 3>just want to know what it is at the end
<v Speaker 3>of the day and how much that bloodline's name ends
<v Speaker 3>up carrying into the final product. But I think for
<v Speaker 3>my last big one, it's another ambiguous twenty twenty five,
<v Speaker 3>I believe still. I checked the calendar and I think
<v Speaker 3>this is still labeled as a twenty twenty five. I'm
<v Speaker 3>like double checking it now and definitely not ramping at
<v Speaker 3>the moment to make sure it is. It's coming soon
<v Speaker 3>on Steam, so maybe I won't say though it was Witchbrook.
<v Speaker 3>I believe Witchbrook is kind of ambiguous where it's going
<v Speaker 3>to land, so that one is kind of up there. Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>it's it's on our release calendar is twenty twenty five.
<v Speaker 3>But I'm curious about that one because I think just
<v Speaker 3>the idea of you know, somewhat magical living in a
<v Speaker 3>community and going to a magical college and doing all
<v Speaker 3>the sorts of you know, just kind of vibing and
<v Speaker 3>doing magic stuff is like really appealing. I really want
<v Speaker 3>to see that. I love the art style, I love
<v Speaker 3>the way it's all laid out. I love that's coming
<v Speaker 3>from Chucklefish. Obviously, this is not the next star to
<v Speaker 3>that that'll be Haunted Chocolate tear down the line. But
<v Speaker 3>I think Witchbrook has looked really promising, and every showing
<v Speaker 3>that's had so far, it's looked like something that can
<v Speaker 3>really stand on its own and do something really cool
<v Speaker 3>and be even a little bit more than its premise
<v Speaker 3>of just magical life sim So I think that one
<v Speaker 3>has real potential to basically drop and completely dominate the
<v Speaker 3>conversation for months afterwards. So if you're looking for a
<v Speaker 3>sleeper pick, I think that's it's not even really a
<v Speaker 3>sleeper pick. I feel like most people once they hear
<v Speaker 3>about it and see it, they're like, oh, I want
<v Speaker 3>to play this game right now. Yeah, So I have
<v Speaker 3>a feeling that this one's going to be quiet until
<v Speaker 3>all of a sudden it isn't, so that one's definitely
<v Speaker 3>on my radar. Would be my last pick. Yeah, that's
<v Speaker 3>another game that's been floating around for like feels like forever.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah yeah, but okay, Yeah, that's a whole lot of
<v Speaker 3>games for.
<v Speaker 1>Everyone to chew on there. We'll see how many of
<v Speaker 1>them pan out, hopefully all of them. And yeah, we'll
<v Speaker 1>be playing Nose as well as again Blood Packed. We
<v Speaker 1>said we were going to finish our backlog games, so
<v Speaker 1>we're gonna hold you like people watching are gonna hold
<v Speaker 1>us to this.
<v Speaker 3>We trust the audience to keep us accountable on this.
<v Speaker 3>If you at home want to do a blood pack,
<v Speaker 3>hold your thumb to the screen and Miller messaging me like,
<v Speaker 3>why did we get demondetized in the last episode. Don't
<v Speaker 3>worry about it.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's I assure you, it's only for good reasons. Yes. Well,
<v Speaker 1>that wraps up the show. Everyone, Thank you so much,
<v Speaker 1>just for a bit of quick housekeeping. If you're listening
<v Speaker 1>to this on audio, be sure to visit game Informa
<v Speaker 1>dot com. You can also check us out on YouTube
<v Speaker 1>at YouTube dot com slash game Informer, where you can
<v Speaker 1>look at our beautiful faces as well as check out
<v Speaker 1>all of our other video features, new gameplay Today, video reviews,
<v Speaker 1>all that wonderful stuff. You can check us out on Twitch,
<v Speaker 1>twitch out tv, slash game Informer. We're trying to get
<v Speaker 1>some live streams up and going again, and you can
<v Speaker 1>also reach out to each of us individually on social media.
<v Speaker 1>You can find me on Blue Sky at Marcus Stewart
<v Speaker 1>seven West can where can the people reach out to you?
<v Speaker 2>On Blue Sky at Wesley LeBlanc and you can see
<v Speaker 2>my adventures on TikTok, which are in production at Wesley
<v Speaker 2>the Blanc seven. I'm trying to be more active there.
<v Speaker 2>I have not been active for a week now, so
<v Speaker 2>I'm already failing. But you know, it's as it goes.
<v Speaker 1>We'll get there. Eric. Where can people find you on
<v Speaker 1>social media?
<v Speaker 3>I don't do a ton of social media these days.
<v Speaker 3>I mostly just randomly shout thoughts into blue Sky over
<v Speaker 3>at smusy. So if you want to just see really
<v Speaker 3>dumb posts and thoughts that I have at like two
<v Speaker 3>in the morning, that's a great time to just go
<v Speaker 3>find that and be rewarded for that. Yeah, find me
<v Speaker 3>over there.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, and hey, first of all, thank you again
<v Speaker 1>for joining us. Where can people find you online? And
<v Speaker 1>please feel free to plug anything that year working on.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, so you can find me on blue Sky for
<v Speaker 4>social media at soul Fleet sol Fleet. Most of my
<v Speaker 4>work will be on Inverse dot com, but in the
<v Speaker 4>near future I will be launching a new newsletter. It's
<v Speaker 4>RPG focused that's entirely my own, so keep an eye
<v Speaker 4>out for that.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, Well, thank you for listening, guys. Everybody on
<v Speaker 1>YouTube Spotify, Apple Podcast, wherever you enjoyed the show. We
<v Speaker 1>love you so much and we'll see you next Thursday.
<v Speaker 1>What a new episode of the Game and former show. Bye.