829: Fantasian

Hey, everybody, It's Tuesday, February twenty seventh, twenty twenty four.
Welcome to the Giant BombCast, Episode eight one hundred and twenty nine. I
am your host today and I am also powered by nzxt Jan the Shoah joining
me co captain of the ship. You know, he's ready to wrangle chocobo's
if you need him to. Jeff crob houty, everybody, I am here.
I'm ready. Mostly I'm like thinking about getting to that PACs because I'm
here with my teammate, Jeff Backlar. Jeff Backlar, did you know that
you're my team mate? Wait? What what are we doing? You're playing
in sixty four games? What? Today? No? A couple of weeks
where oh this was? This was? You're asking me about any S versus
sixty four? I like any better? Okay, well then you're gonna be
playing any S games against Mike Manatti. Never mind. Oh it's funny though.
If we we make you and you and Mike play against you're probably right.
All right, congratulations, you're back to the n sixty four. That
was fast. I don't understand what am I doing though, Like I don't
know Dan, Dan Doco dare live. Dan's gonna come with a bunch of
challenges in these games, so we gotta do them. We'll see, Okay,
no one's gonna have fun except for Dan. No dance there. Yeah,
I didn't hear that name. Uh here, ready to ski down the
slopes of video games and video news and emails and perhaps movie talk. Jeff
Backler, Hey, what's up? Listen? Something fucked up going on in
front of my house right now. It feels like there's always something happening.
I know there's a lot of activity in New Jersey. Uh, there's this
is I don't know what to do there. I have these I have a
column in front of my house and I think there's an animal in it and
it can't get out. Is this and I nope? This is lin.
There's you know, there's like sheet metal that wraps around what's presumably it's some
sort of like iron or concrete column marble. You have marble columns, come
on marble maybe next door but not me. And there's something in it and
it's been trying to like it's like flapping around. It's a squirrel or some
sort of bird. I guess it got in through like the top where there's
a little opening and it's rattling around, and what do I do. It's
gonna die and die in there and then it won't be a problem anymore.
Yeah, but I just feel bad, like, is this something I need
to do something about? People? There are tons of animal corpses in there,
and eventually it'll rise up to the top where they won't get trapped in
there anymore. That cream dead animals rise to the top. That's right,
Okay, Uh introducing folks, where we've come up with a new face,
a new name, a new persona. He's not team captain of the team
though Tam and I had a separate meeting to discuss this that he's probably gonna
feel like he is, but he is not the team captain of the team,
either Tam or myself. We have earl. I mean, it sounds
like there's a vacancy for team captain then, is what I am here?
That's right? I don't know who else is on team Yeah, so I
assume it what the jeffs and Dan versus team Tam. Come on, it
is Jeff Jeff and see against Tam. And because is Dan dance like the
host? Okay? Yeah, okay, And like we're all competing like against
Console slow I have like an ny S opponent is what's happening and it's me.
It's what it sounds like. Yes, question, when did you guys
go ahead? When did you guys do this? He says, it's gonna
be like the the basic one. So that's gonna be a lot, I
mean a lot of Mario Mike. We both lost the last time we played
Mario. So yeah, you're pretty good. You're better at to D marian
B. But like Mega Man's not on there, and I'm gonna keep it
that way. Yesterday, Oh okay, that's fair enough. Okay, yeah
I was. I was dead set of like, all right, we need
to establish these teams and then by Wednesday establish a team name so we can
make up fun shirts because I want fun shirts. And then I want the
drama of tam Earl and I fighting over whose team captain. So we're just
we all have like the sea patch on us. That's the internal drama.
And I also want promos against each team. I can kind of promo right
now. I don't even care. It's easy. Well hang out real quick
that this is our panel at packs. It is called Dan doco there.
It is going to be like a competition. It's going to be a you
know, team versus team of sort of relay race kind of. And we're
gonna have different packs challenges that that's going to include the any ass Super Nintendo
N sixty four, So we're just gonna do all this stuff on nso since
that's easy, and then when there might be some other bonus challenges that involve
other things, we'll see. Dan's putting it all together right now. He
sounds like he's having a lot of fun. This one is the Saturday Night
one. I can't remember which one is, maybe the Friday Night one.
Okay, the Friday Night one, thank you? So yes, it's gonna
be It's gonna be a good time. The the X factor here, though,
that is that we have yet to factor in, is how uh how
Nikki will contribute to the chaos, because Nikki will also be at uh at
Packs East, helping Dan make Dan's dreams come true. Wow, I'm a
little terrified. A little terrified. Oh okay, and doesn't dream, he
he just does, he just does. How's it going, boys, what's
happenings? Popped? Going good? Yeah? Going real good? Yeah?
Absolutely no. Actually, I played so much, so much Billatro over the
weekend that iaid it was unhealthy, like I legit started thinking that it was
an actual problem, and I foreshoot problem. So this is interesting because I
feel that way too sometimes, and I think it's only because this game has
like casino gambling games. We play a lot of games all the time.
I don't feel guilty about it. I play this. I played a ton
of hades. I never felt guilty about it. I played more hades than
this, and never felt guilty about this. But suddenly there's like poker chips
even though there's no real money, and I play for an hour, I'm
like, this is kind of like a sin that I'm doing over here.
It's not even a lot of money. I mean, like you only win
like fifteen dollars out any real money though, So it's not like, yeah,
there's it's nothing to it. There's no reason for it matter. Yeah,
the only only thing you're losing is time. And you know, as
Mike and I know, I'm sorry, Earl, and I know time is
a valuable thing. That's the greatest sacrifice. I guess I still don't know
if like there's still a lot of blotcho that I don't even like have a
like that that's called a flush. No. No, I understand the rules
of poker, and I understand the deck building, uh manipulation that this game
provides. What I don't understand is some some of the perks to some of
the jokers, like for I'll read a lot of the descriptions and then I'll
be like, oh, I understand the multipliers, I understand extra chips,
I understand some of the other rules. But then it'll get into like if
you choose the blind and then have a tag, and I'm like, I
don't know. I think it's complicated it, but I don't know what that.
Just pick up on all the specific and verbiage and and all that stuff
early on those Just play for fleshes and you'll be fine. Hey, Jeff,
you win yet? No, I won a bunch. Yeah, I've
not won either. I've played some amount of this game too. I get
to win. Well, I didn't know. It's better than all of you
as like a person. You're having fun, though it sounds like you're so.
I look like IoT having fun. He's having more fun than I am.
I think it sounds like you don't have a problem though, and having
a problem is kind of fun. Yeah, I did win an addiction,
so that's something I did win something to talk to a doctor about. That's
great that I talk to my dad. You can give them money that he'll
give to me later. And yet Mike wins again comes back to me,
So call you the house from backlar A blind is like the round that you
were playing, right, sure, then I know, yeah we set off
when the blind when you picked a blind and be like, okay, now
you get too common jokers if you have space. Okay, so now it's
okay, sure, okay, but I don't say the tag one. Now
that one I would like you just to explain to me. Yeah, what's
the tag? The tag one is like the little bonus you get when you
see the badge, the little so when you yeah, when you skip the
blind, you get the tag. And sometimes the tag will be like,
oh you'll get two Arcana packs or you'll get like a free reroll on the
boss, and that's what the tag is, right, So the one that
says like you'll like sometimes when you skip a blind, he says, hey,
you'll be able to carry this tag forward or whatever. So you get,
like, the next tag happens twice. Yeah, so if in your
small blind, which is the first round in a or the first instance in
a round, right, and that says you'll get a double tag if you
the next tag you acquire will happen twice. Okay, all right, I
understand it now, thank you. Yeah. I feel like I get a
little too precious with my jokers as well, and I try, Yeah,
I don't. I don't sell them back enough. I also like, I
I see something like with the planet cards and it's like, oh, you
want to level up four of a kind, and it's like, motherfucker,
I'm never getting four of a kind. I don't need that planet card,
you know. Yeah, I mean you'll get if you start going for four
of a kind. So if you start building your deck in that way,
getting all the time, and really that is like when I've got the closest
to winning is really min maxing to the point where it's like, okay,
I do have almost half of my deck are kings, and I have the
thing where every king I have in my hand is one point five x and
and then I have one that's gonna set them all off again. And I
got really close, but that I missed out. And it's like all about
like believing that once you start going down the path of like, okay,
maybe I can actually set it up so I'm getting straight flushes if I'm willing
to discard until like you know, ride or die. Obviously it's still a
little bit of a risk. But if you build your deck in that way,
you can really amplify the chances in such a way that it feels much
more possible. That we have to have the right jokers, and like those
multiplier jokers are very important. It's also important you can organize your jokers.
It's important to have the multipliers at the end after just like the normal malts
or whatever, but multipliers, I mean like the times two's instead of like
the plus four multiplier. It sounds confusing and I didn't understand the difference for
a while. The other thing, too, is like those rewards for skipping
blind sometimes actually are worth it. You need to pay attention to those nis.
I started doing that a lot, and that's uh, you know,
I mean, sometimes I'm burning out much quicker, but then the runs that
do go are much more successful. Sometimes just ones like everything from the next
shop is going to be free, I'm like, well, I always I'll
always take that skip blind in Yeah. I mean, well, the whole
point of trying to win around is get enough money to buy stuff, So
of course like free MegaR cannot pack like okay, yeah, I can't stick
for that, yep. Or if a free like joker pack, it's like,
yeah, jokers are going to be the things that make the biggest difference,
so yeah, go for it. So uh do y'all When y'all jump
into an instance of Bulato, are you do you have your specific strategy in
mind? Are you kind of trying to adapt as you can? I do?
And that's when I find that I'm failing the most if I have something
I'm trying to recreate where I'm like, god, that was so much fun
and I got so close and almost one. I just want to have that
King deck again I was talking about And it's like, you know, it's
like that's actually the most random part, Like getting a four of kind during
the hand, you could sort of fudge that, you could force that to
happen. Getting the right jokers. There's one hundred and fifty different jokers,
right, and like you're unlocking more all the time, so as you as
the more you play, the less likely it is you're going to be able
to build the exact build you want. So you really do have to start
just going with the flow, seeing what's working, and then start moving in
that direction and kind of play along with the game. At least that's what
I found. I say, early on, I think the best, the
most likely strategy you're going to stumble onto is flushes, because there are just
a lot of tarot cards and other things that make it easier to set up
flushes, and you can kind of early on figure out what suits you're going
to favor and try to make that work. Yeah. Fact, it's almost
a problem for a while where I kind of feel like all of my good
runs were flushes. Eventually I was discovering other strategies and like getting weird jokers
that were making other things work. Yeah, something that uh I think I
found. I fell into the trap way too for way too long of hunting
for flushes and straights and ignoring virtually any and every other type of hand.
And then last night I got all the way to the very last boss and
I was maybe like five thousand chips short, but my my winning stuff.
God, my my winning combination was three of a kind because the end multiplier
I leveled it up. Did you have that half joker that like, if
you only play three cards you get like a multiple. Yeah, that's cool.
Yeah, yeah, that was one of them. And then I I
don't know if the math still counted with it, but you no, I
guess it didn't count actually, because that's why that that joker was just not
dinging or getting the extra bonus. It was the joker where you get like
a plus multiplier if there's a pair in the hand. But since it was
three of a kind, I don't think it was ticking off. But it
was still a gray yeah, because it was holographic, it still had the
other like multiplier over it. So that's why I didn't ditch it, and
I would. I would also like, yeah, the flush strategy is definitely
the one I played the most early on. Absolutely I would. When I
started ship things around, I was like, you know what, I'm I'm
going to just try to see what happens if I'm if I can maximize my
return on pairs and even high card and so every time I would get a
planet and the option to choose either up to upgrade my pair or my high
card. I would just keep doing that and I had like level seven or
you know, X seven or x eight on these, and I was I
was also doing the thing. Ever chance I had to turn something in my
hand into a steel card, which is that one point five X. So
it's like I'm holding all these things in my hand that can amplify it.
I'm playing a high card and then it's like getting that big multiplier and it's
like, no, that was that was huge, and I'm like it really
is going off like a slot machine at that point, just making all those
sounds because you're getting so many things happening at once. So it's like,
yeah, there is no like, oh, you should definitely be going for
flushes or anything like that. You could make just about anything work. But
again it's a rope light. You gotta go with the flow with all this
really easy sorry, it'd be a really easy and fun competition. Just had
a lot of people playing to see who can win or run first. Right,
So it has the seed thing, so we can all take the same
seed and we can just all start at the same time, so it's like
we can even guarantee we will have the same exact kind of luck. Oh
wow, and we could just do that, do that all at the same
time. We can all have like you could look at Tetra nine, just
have everyone's boloatro screen up at the same time. I love that. What
I was thinking is we can do this next Friday. Everybody's that's the plan
right now. What I was thinking is we do that idea, but then
we preview the first round, right, so we'll see whatever blinds there are,
whatever uh tags, and then like the boss so then you can kind
of like prep mentally for what that is, like that whoever is like coming
up with the seed tanks it purposely we all started new. I feel like
jazz. I love it. I love it. My my ulterior motive is
and I don't know how the grand calculus of the universe is working out in
my favor, and that a lot of people are now not learning poker hands.
Yes, Nicky discovered what a what was it a flush? Today?
Yeah? I learned about yep. So you know, when we all get
together, perhaps maybe it impacts East or hard game Fest capacity. Maybe we
get some underground GB Texas hold them games poppin', you know. Yeah,
God I. I mean, so we're like final fantasies happening later this week.
That's why we're like moving this spilatro idea to next week and then Mike,
but I still want to just have a giant bomb poker night. So
what did we poker back? I think it's coming. I think it's like
having a high tide moment the taste maker, right, yes, Polkes and
did it? You know, I'm not I'm going to take any creds,
but you addicted it into uh like uh popular popularity, which is amazing.
Like what will you do next? There you go like, you know,
uh, mister influencer, whoever cut the check, I'll do it, you
know, I'll influence everyone. We got this. This is why I think
I could lead a cult. And that's the that's a douncer out doing your
cult. Jeff, what's going on with your microphone? It's not it really
is not no control over it. It's not happening on my feet. It's
just when I send it to Jan, I don't know. It's weird purple
audio listeners, and it seems to beginning more and more purple. It's taking
over more of the screen. It's really weird because in the preview feed I
have of of grub on my Oh he's just gone now I got rid of
the purple. Uh. It's like trying to fix a CRT that I put
a MAGNETUD help me, I think, Yeah, I think you're turning into
like the matrix. It like fixs it a little bit by little bit.
I mean, if if you want to know what's happening there, it's almost
certainly like the codec. It like tries to keep as many pixels the same
as the last frame so that it could save bandwidth. And I think it
just got confused somewhere along the line, and so it just needed a full
stupid what a idiotic You prefer the Minati codec. Yeah, yeah, certainly.
Well, well here's the thing, A little peak behind the curtains,
y'all. I just want to untangle us completely from v mix entirely and just
rely on obis and a lovely user of the website. I forget your name.
I know the user icon oddly enough, but they suggested vd O ninja.
This used to be called obs ninja. I remember Brad Shoemaker and I
were just like with a pickaxe and like a shovel trying to figure this shit
out pre pandemic or like into the pandemic, and then we just kind of
abandoned it and wound up using other Ship and now they've rebranded and it's it's
it's pretty neat. It's working pretty well. The reason why except for the
blob taking over my life, but the reason why I like it grub when
I when I can pick a codec for this room here, I guess what,
guess what codec? It lets me pick Patroska a V one baby Hell
yeah? Just uh, anyone else have anything else to say about Bilatro?
I mean, there's plenty to talk about. I I don't I don't want
to spend the whole show on it. I think I played it for the
first time on for like a long session on steam Deck, and I was
just like, same, thank you and thank you for this existing. It's
phenomenal that has thirty thou current players on Steam now it is taking off it.
Yes, yeah, it's really impressive, and it just I mean,
really is that good? I mean, so, Jane, when you first
already talking about it, and I'm like, this sounds like it's going to
be a good game, but not one that's like, I'm is somehow like
you know, that much better than any of these other like indie card games
that pop up on on Steam, just because I'm like, yeah, mabe,
yeah, it probably has pretty decent ideas in there. It's like,
no, it's it just does everything right. It makes every choice to make
it that much more fun to play, and I really do find it to
be really impressive. Yeah. I think what adds to it is just the
snappiness and like how fast you can get in and out. And I think
it's a testament to a good rogue, like where if you fail immediately and
then like the carrot on the stick is still there to just pick up another
run asap. It's It's great. It's fantastic. This. It it like
a satisfies an urge that I has has felt dormant and a void that has
been created since I kind of got tired of playing Slay the Spire just because
of like that combat and just having this just be pure numbers and chance,
just like okay, all right, feed me, eat me more, yep.
I mean I do have a game like Bilatro about like once a year,
it seems like, and it was, you know, last year,
in the year before Vampire Survivors. It doesn't remind me how I felt about
Dead Sales. Again, I played like eighty hours of in a week when
I was like really just going crazy for that game. There's a handful of
other like these Rogue Lights where it's like, yeah, just like it has
a really good base gameplay, and then actually unlocking things is just as satisfying
and really changes things up and draw some drastic ways. Have you guys gotten
it, like any of the really crazy decks I've seen Some people use something
called like an erratic deck, and it basically every time you not erotic erratic,
every time you roll it, it'll have like, you know, seven
kings and ten fives then, but it still only has fifty two cards.
So you get it. You can see it. You're like, Okay,
I have to like really think about what the strategy is going to be,
and it's like, oh, I have like twenty two hearts. I really
should just be going for flushes this whole time. So it's like, Okay,
want to get to that point where I could really start like messing these
these runs up? Gone that crazy? Yet? I unlocked a checker deck,
which is like your your deck is only two of the suites instead of
four of them, so obviously you're like really stumpers for flushes right away.
It just just actually sounds pretty good instead of being wacky, I guess.
But unlocking that's kind of like once you once you beat it once, the
metagame becomes beating it with all the other decks because that unlocks more decks.
Once you beat it with so many decks, you unlock challenge mode. I'm
not even sure what that is yet. So there is like a reason to
keep just like you know, all these good rogue lkes, there's a reason
to beat it beyond that first time. This game has that too. Yeah,
this has that. Uh. I don't know what it is, but
I haven't felt similarly about a game since Hades, where it has tasted there
forever to actually beat and have a successful run. Yet I'm still coming back
in and just learning and adapting more and more. Yeah, Like I like
roguelikes. I don't know if I like them quite as much as say,
like like grub like dead cells and things like vampires fiber. We're like,
they're fine by me, and I like them. Hades was the one I
really like. This is kind of up there with hades for me. This
is just totally firing on all cylinders for me. Oh yeah, Like it
is interesting, like which hands will actually count getting a flush royale or whatever,
a flush house excuse me, where it's all the same suit, but
it's three of a kind and two of a kind and seeing that that counts
as something different than a full house or a flush It's like, oh,
it's a flush house, which is in a real hand and poker, but
it's one of the secret hands. And of course, like five of a
kind, you would expect five of a kind of work, but it does,
and that's cool to get. And then once you do that, you
can actually start getting the planet cards to upgrade those as well. And I'm
like, man, I don't know if I'll ever get on a run where
I'm not going to be expecting to get flush houses that often, but maybe
maybe. Yeah, that really successful run I had where three of a kind
was really popping off. One of the planet cards I found was black Hole.
Yes, and it upgraded all of the hands. Yeah, really cool.
I've gotten black Hole whole once and I'm like, man, yes,
yeah, uh. And and you know, I think similarly to like Hades
is like or probably dead Seales. More is the discovery factor and like whatever
else you a friend post about Bilatro and like their deck comp or whatever.
I'm like, I've never seen any of that shit, Like Mike, when
you're talking about that checker deck, never seen that ship? Yep yah that
I love like discovering things I didn't expect to work. I got a joker
that uh at the start of each round would kill the joker to its right
and then take its sell value and added to its multiplier. And I bought
it at first for just some reason, I didn't even realize what it did
and was mad at myself. Then I realized each round I just bought a
new joker to feed it, and my multiplier from that got so large that
it kind of took me through to a win there. So just stumbling across
these strategies that I didn't even consider is a lot of fun. Oh God,
Blacher is a lot of fun to honestly talk about it for like the
whole Yeah, I mean absolutely, ah, really really good month. You
know what is surprisingly had uh? I was trying to work ace up its
sleeve or is that jewla fairmore? Mike I've seen that you've been streaming and
playing this grub. I know you want to keep playing this. I do
want to keep playing it. You know, I've completed this game. I
think this is a work of art. I completed it too, I you
know it playing through it just to beat it. It's probably only gonna take
you about three hours, and it's a really fun three hour playthrough. But
there's like other stuff to get you can do like a one hundred percent thing,
But I don't know, like I, yeah, there is something beautiful
about this game in terms of just if we were grading games on a scale
of being able to do the thing that they set out to do, then
then this is a ten out of ten, right, like, hey,
let's make a tribute to those weird, awful CDI Zoda games. It's still
obviously have it be that, but actually I haven't played pretty well and be
a lot of fun. Gosh, Like it makes you think it's janky,
and there are things about it that are jinky, but it controls how it
should. It's fun, the progression makes sense, the loop is good,
and just all that animation, Like I get that it's a joke. Maybe
not everyone understand, but you should understand the joke. Just go and look
at the cut scenes for those CDI Zelda games. You immediately understand the joke,
and I think you'll be able to have a lot of fun with this.
I think, if anything, it is because I've never played through that
original CDI Zelda. I've only seen like cinematics and stuff. Right, that's
most people. But I feel like our z has maybe improved that game in
retrospect and kind of made me appreciate I don't want to say the art,
but like, whatever the fuck it decided to be that, I'm glad it
exists. Right that they're awful. They look terrible, and I've been thinking
about those games NonStop since I saw them at a CDI like Demo Kiosk when
they were new. It's not like something that aged poorly. Even right when
it came out, everyone was like what the hell is this? And I
think that their existence has enriched my life. Yeah, And it's those games
were like this huge promise, right that that or that switch to CD and
video and it's like fmb's the future and all this stuff, and it's like,
okay, cool, what's that going to actually look like? Well,
it turns out like, yeah, you can have this technology, but executing
on filmmaking and animation was really really challenging for these people that had no experience
doing that. And then at the time we were like this just looks bad
and silly at most people. I think some people got it right away where
we're like, this is awesome, this is like punk rock. But at
the time I was definitely like this looks bad. I'm like, I don't
why would I care about this? You guys are doing a bad job.
And it turned out no, they were just making like well, it was
bad, but it was like this whole other aesthetic that now I fully miss
and I wish there was more of it. To me of Bram Stroker's Dracula,
it's like phra Insis for Copla was like, hey, I'm gonna save
some money, so we're gonna make this movie as if it's like an old
movie with like really cheap looking, not cheap looking, but like really obviously
fake sets, like it's almost happening on a sound stage and you're supposed to
know that because it's a movie that's spiritually from the nineteen thirties. It's like,
this is like in that same thing where it's like, we're just gonna
start drawing stuff because we can, and we don't necessarily know how we're doing
how to do that and make it look like a Disney film, So we're
just gonna start drawing the next frame and the next frame. And then once
they get you know, a thousand frames of the animating and they look back
and they'm like, this looks messed up. It's so warped and weird,
and it's like, well, since then, we've had this whole style of
animation on Comedy Central and an adult swim that feels informed by that, and
so now I have this huge amount of nostalgia for that era, and to
have our zet come along and like fully understand that and grasp that and have
a ton of fun with it is like really fulfilling. I think the beauty
part of our z is that it is obviously inspired by the Cdislda stuff,
but it's totally not paying attention or honoring any type of animation framing cinematic rules
at all, and it just throws all that out a window. Like instead
of cutting to like the next character, they'll just slowly start sliding into frame
and like they'll be looking at you, the player, and you're just under
the pretense of like are they talking to each other, and then like out
of nowhere, like one will cartoon style like run away to the foreground and
then come back, and none of it matters to the actual scene that is
playing out to. Like the level right, like the one that a lot
of folks probably saw after upf is just that wolf just howling, and like
the wolf just skidaddling away after you you give him citizenship to the town.
Just so fucking fantastic. Also, like the the voice acting so overdone in
the best way possible. Yeah, and they got they got some some like
people from kind of all over the place in the industry. MVG's in there,
John Lemon's in there doing voices. So uh, it's just a lot
of fun. You have a freaking Hotel Mario mini game, just furthering the
CDI madness. Yeah. I think it's just really impressive, and I hope
we get more games like this, Like I want to see somebody try to
make a good version of Mortal Kombat mythologies, and I still want like cheesy,
cheap live action cut scenes, and I still want to basically be an
action two D game with fighting game controls. But now we can kind of
make that better and still capture that the stuff that is good about that game,
the cheesiness and the hokiness. I feel like we were getting some of
that cheesiness and hokiness in the three sixty era with like the Xbox Indie arcade
stuff Like I remember some god awful, terrible two D fighter platformers that still
had a little bit of merit to it, right that that, you know,
given a little bit of jug we could get to the same caliber of
metrologies, it turns out. I mean, if you if you think about
these things for long enough, it's it's still they become a part of you,
whether you cared about them in that way in the first place or not.
And so when someone's like, well, here, I've been thinking about
it for a long time as well, and I'm gonna make something that's basically
that, it feels like you're making this connection with this whole other era and
this these other people who fully appreciate these things the way you do. And
that's really nice. I mean, honestly, like Finaff is just kind of
like night Trap, right, I guess I haven't played a ton of Five
Nights at Freddy's, but I always thought it was pretty similar to the way
that Night Trap worked. So it's like that's already sort of had a second
life, and I want this to happen with all of those games. R
went back Sewer Shark, Dude, Sewer Shark was my two rules. I
played a bunch of it, like last year because it was on that Sega
Genesis Mini too, and I'm like, it's still like, Okay, I
have very vivid memory of like going to the one kid who had Sega CD,
going to their house and just like night Trap, Sewer Shark, Night
Trap, Sewer Shark, just that tandem for about eight and a half hours,
not really making any meaningful progress in any of that, just sort of
like watching it because you thought it was weird that there was like full motion
video and it was you know, you're like twelve and that's good enough and
yeah, yeah, my friend had Willy Beamish and we would play that.
It's like most of the time we spent waiting for the game to load,
because it was a two minute loading times every single scene. Wonder part of
it's just because you know, there's a little bit of a stagnation obviously now
in terms of the kinds of games we see, whereas in the nineties it
was there's just so many different eras in that one decade that there is something
wild about seeing this, this really short lived era of this. Yeah,
these early cedy games and kind of bringing that back and sort of optimizing it
is interesting. I haven't played any of this. I I've watched all the
videos on it. I am intrigued. I can relate to like the very
quick flash in the pan like time period that this is very much sourcing its
uh it's aesthetic from I think it's super easy to have missed this as well.
Oh yeah, uh And I find I think it's why, you know,
I'll be interested to see how it does because of just how uh missible
I think this eras for a lot of people. Yeah right, I think
they probably know this, of course. Yeah, it's like going to appeal
to a certain set of freaks. And I count myself among What are the
twenty year olds think of it? I guess, right, I guess that's
the question, because because there is like a fondness about eight bit stuff right
in a way that like, I don't know if that's same gets applied,
right. Yeah, Like most people are like would glance at this and be
like, oh, that looks really bad. How much is it? Oh?
Eight hundred dollars? Okay, no, thank you, and then they
just would never think about it again. And I was like, well,
I guess I'm gonna be thinking about that for the rest of my life life
now, so I'm glad they made this game for me. I think I
want to play through the CD that I always say too. I've been afraid
to say it because then I'll never get them on Blake club But I want
to the funny things you could get them on Bla Clubs, aren't they like
pretty short? Yeah, but you know somebody here had to play a long
game not too long ago, and maybe. Well so, there's three of
them, and two of them are just like our zet It's one you play
that only plays link. The third one you also play a Zelda, but
it's a top town game like more traditional Zeta. Yeah. Of all like
live action assets and real bad loading screens, and it's probably the worst of
them. It looks like the assets in the top down graphical style are like
just JPEGs pasted onto a screen. It's weird. It looks very weird.
That's Zelda's adventure. The other ones are link faces of Evil and Zelda the
Wand of Gammel on this. Okay, I can make us constantly. That's
why this is really hit for me. Well that's the difference between you and
I. But okay, you don't think about Wand of gambled on Backlar burns
like, what else is coming out mid March that I could just dedicate some
time on this website. The dragons dragons thing between then and now, I
mean, you're gonna to play Final Fantasy, I guess, but but beyond
that we might be able to spit some time in there. I don't know,
man, what's hard for cd I emulation is a little weird. But
I think somebody like decompiled and remade this at least the two's out of games.
I'm not sure. I think we can get it working all right,
going from one beautifully hand drawn game that is our zette to another beautifully hand
drawn game not hand drawn. I don't know. Someone drew it. Unicorn
Overlord. I checked out the demo, folks. It is fucked up.
He is fucked up. The people that the whole indust doing this to me.
They gave me infinite wealth at the beginning of this year, and then
they gave me Persona three reload, and then I thought, like, Persona
Threeason not for me, and then I stuck with it and realized, oh,
it is for me. Okay, there's a dog in this game.
And then I was like, you almost did there? What am I becoming?
And then f F seven Rebirth comes out. We'll talk about that in
a few That game has absolutely destroyed me. This this might be it,
folks. I might be done with games after this game because Unicorn Overlord,
if I were to distill it, it is a RTS auto battler. That's
it, but done in the beautiful, gorgeous style that we all know and
love from Vanilla Ware. How it works is god. So you get a
level, a map, and then from there you deploy units and those units
have different tile formations, so you have up to I believe six units per
tile set, and then with that tile set of units, you can deploy
them to go anywhere across the map. Sometimes you have to get them to
take over or reclaim a town, or sometimes it's just to wipe out enemies.
So you can divide your divide and conquer or you can set your groups
of units to go in the same direction. In one group of units maybe
a little bit faster because they're on a horse versus on foot. And then
once you get to the battling against the enemy units, if you are close
enough in proximity your two friendly units, you can swap them so you can
kind of do a leap frog. And how the battle works, it's all
automatic. The only thing you do is set the formation of your specific units
and set their abilities. So how the turns play out is that there are
active points and there are passive points. Everyone exhaust their active points first and
then their passive points pop off if the conditions are met. So say when
you enter in a battle, your first person's active point is to automatically hit
the first enemy, like they'll go and slash, and then it'll go in
order from there of the active points, and then the passive points will trigger.
So, for instance, you'll have a a passive point of like,
all right, if any of my homies are hit, I will automatically heal
them. Whoever gets hit first, I will automatically heal them. And that
applies for the enemy units as well, of like, all right, if
we get hit, we're all gonna guard up, or I will automatically guard
for you. And then it just starts popping off from there. And you
know in late game Final Fantasy Tactics or even Final Fantasy seven remake and Rebirth,
where the encounters are almost playing themselves because the ability, you've gone to
a point where the abilities are just popping off after a while gambits and okay,
yeah, exactly like that. You were just setting off gambits constantly and
letting them play out and just seeing how they interact with each other. So
after everyone exhausts their action points, whoever has the higher HP of that encounter
will win the battle. And if the enemy has not been wiped out after
that initial encounter, you have the option to strike them again, and all
of your own action points will trigger off automatically first. So sometimes you'll take
turns with priority with action points against you and the enemy. But if you
are getting the first strike in after they've been weakened, you will, you'll,
you'll you'll have priority there. And guys, it's fucking me up because
everything sucks you up, jan I know, especially especially it's because it's like,
yo, we got tiles, we got tactics, we got pretty two
D people. Yeah, Jan, you're just you're just like the consumer.
That's what I'm gonna call your consumerism is a problem. Jan, I wouldn't
know Christmas. You're just the consumer like everything. It's like, well ship
if no one wants us, I bet Jannell bo like a lot of people,
aren't that. People people like this looks so good? And you you
are mister focus group. You are just like does Jan like it? He
does? Print a million of them? Grub what was that? J rpg?
We we we did a quick look of field Chronicles. Yes, this
is like if deal Field Chronicles was more manageable with a controller and good right.
I've seen a lot of people in chat saying this is actually kind of
like Tactics Ogre Games, which I never really got to play, or Ogre
Battle. I think it's the same thing that I never got to really play
those. This looks so good to me. The only reason I think I
don't want to play the demos because I know I'm going to just buy this.
Do you know if you can carry progress? I know it's a long
demo too, yeah, people say it's like eight hours worth of just in
the demo, so I don't know if your progress saves over, but it
did give me the option like in an hour in two save, so I'm
assuming that this will just help you skip over the initial prologue stuff. Yeah,
Chat says, Progress says okay, because yeah, I mean, I
don't know. Vanilla Ware games are usually very good. I like Thirteen Sentinels
a lot, and this looks absolutely gorgeous. I am totally ready to dive
into this one. So I am excited to hear that you're really liking it,
because yeah, I'm me too. I was like, Okay, I
figured it would be like no good art, probably decent gameplay, all this
other stuff. To sound here, it's like, really hitting for you is
very exciting. You said the combat's kind of automatic. Is it automatic,
like into the breach where you are setting up the pieces and you know exactly
what they're gonna do, and you're just like then hitting the go button and
the things that you knew were gonna happen, we're gonna happen. Or is
it sort of more random and so you're kind of setting up contingencies, like
you said, where it's like if you were to happen to get hit,
someone's going to heal you, Like how much pre information do you have before
each turn? There you kind of run into both instances with that grub because
sometimes you will come across a new type of enemy that is, let's say,
more susceptible to magic attacks. So maybe your first encounter with them was
all all your melee units, so you're not really doing a bunch of damage,
so you'll kind of have to set that melee unit to go somewhere else
and send in like your magic dudes to go clean up shop afterwards. So
there is a little bit of that. There is a little bit of experimentation
of like, okay, is this gonna work against these people? And then
kind of like the fire emblem formula starts to kick into your head of like,
Okay, I recognize these units just by looking at them, so I'll
send these dudes to go fight those guys. Okay. From my time with
the demo so far, I don't believe there's any advantage to terrain. At
least that's what for where I'm at right now. Who knows that could completely
change, And I think I was initially turned off because I didn't want an
auto battler type of thing. But I think there is enough strategy still happening
in your team comps, in your unit composition here to rectify that there's still
tactics happening. And I feel like Dalo Field Chronicles, I really liked the
premise of it because he was an active ish, turn based ish type of
game. Right. It was almost I think it was like real time,
but it was so slow it might have well been have been turn based.
I think that was that one. Yeah, I like that too. I
think the maps in Dalo Field Chronicles were a little bit too big, and
since you only had four or five units slowly trudging across the map in some
scenarios, I hate that too. Yeah, but I think this kicks into
where a game like Fire Emblem or Advanced Wars even succeeds, where you have
multiple units that you can fork off and still find success if you are planning
ahead enough. The only thing I don't like about the game is that I
am just I just don't like the medieval fantasy setting. I think after Thirteen
Sentinels, I was like, all right, let's go in a bunch of
mechs, let's eed, some YACKI soba and some hamburger. Stay. It
sounds like you need a fantasian game. Oh my god. I couldn't believe
I worked myself into a shoot with that one where it's like I originally thought
that and like that's funny, and then at some point I like, no,
that's what that is about, right, Yeah, you're right. Jeff
on gay best Board Eggs asking Eva if the game fitation is a portmanteau of
a apportment to portmanteau, Now I feel staated. It doesn't matter you say
tomato toto. Yeah, but then of is fittation a portmanteau of the words
fantasy and age? You should listen. I asked the hard hitting questions on
my show. I'm a journalist. You're lucky you asked that to Emma not
to be had to be nice to seeing producer extraordinary or host extraordinary. Emma
Fife's eyes like slightly dim after you said that, and then came back and
of like, all right, well how am I going to save grub?
It was? It was amazing. If it's not, they should that's what
it should be. I would have said, what the fuck did you just
ask me? Uh? But like, if anything I've said about Unicorn Overlord
interests you, definitely check out the demo. I also think the writing is
really good as well, which I fucking hate because then I'm actually gonna want
to play the game to completion. It ends okay, because here's the thing
that gets me. I'm a fucking sucker for showing in style stories of like,
sure, well all right, I'm I'm the little orphan boy and I'm
gonna go make a bunch of friends and friendship will be the thing to say
this guys. I mean, Annie turned out kind of it, and Batman's
pretty good, right, but like, yeah, like the first big tutorial
boss ish encounter you have is just like with a dude that you used to
know and then before you're about to your your night friend is gonna kill him.
The main character steps in is like, wait, I need to know
why you did this? Hey, so and so do you remember when we
used to play out in the fields and you used to watch and protect me?
What happened? Man? And then he like comes over, he uh
gets over whatever brainwash spell he was under, and then everyone's like, oh,
we're all friends. I love you. It's like a ship this yep,
that's that's Jen's Friends and Tiles. That would be the name of your
game, Friends and Tiles. Friends and Tiles. That's the autobiography God and
you have to read it. Tiles and Crane Games, the Channel chillis story.
You can only buy it if you play the Crane game. That's actually
that's a really good idea. I like that. My books available now,
but only inside of Crane Games. I would I would have to go get
that. Well, there's that Crane game in Persona three. Jane. You've
seen that, right, Yes, of course I've seen that. Did you
get the Jack frostalls for Elizabeth? I did, just very thankful. I
needed to. I needed to do that. Uh well, well we'll talk
about f F seven and a little bit. But Jeff Grubb, you've been
playing a game and you were showing this to us in the mic pre check
here called Window Kill. Yeah. This just came out on Steam and it
looked pretty interesting and it's actually this really neat thing where, just to give
you an idea, when you boot up the game, the menu, like
the opening like splash screen menu opens up in like seven different little windows on
your screen, and then the game itself is played in this moving shape shifting
window. And I want to say window, I mean like straight up application,
a Windows application window, and it shrinks over time. And what you
need to be doing is you need to shoot the sides to bang out the
side of the window to make it bigger so you have more of a play
space and you can move around. It's like Geometry Wars basically, like the
basic gameplay is a slow moving Geometry Wars with little geometric shapes coming to either
hit you or to shoot things at you. You're avoiding those and at the
same time, so you could shoot those guys to get rid of them.
At the same time, you're trying to shoot the walls to keep your window
of the application growing bigger so you have enough space to move around. Then
occasionally a major enemy will come along and you'll see like, oh, this
is like a big laser being coming from off screen. All right, I
need to track that down, So you start shooting the window in that direction
to move over to that part of your screen. And once you're there,
the big this big enemy will be in his own little window that you need
to like join up with so you can get over there and start shooting at
him. And it's this, it's this really cool idea and it's really well
executed. I've only played a little bit. I don't know how long.
Is this a gimmick that wears off relatively quickly? H you know, I
played for a couple hours last night and a little bit more this morning.
I think it's just a really cool idea. It has a shop like any
at any moment, as you're killing these enemies, you get like some currency.
You hit the space bar, You're gonna upgrade your speed, your shot
speed, like how much damage you're doing all this stuff, your max health.
So it's like very quickly you get into that loop of upgrading. And
that was keeping it very interesting for me. Uh but just the idea of
the way it looks and the way it functions is immediately so eye catching that
I thought it was really all one. This is this is just really clever.
It's clever. Yes, Like if your minds me if anything else right,
like like you said, like maybe it does, like you know,
run out of ideas or maybe become not fun. I don't know, but
just seeing this and like just brings me back to like Windows ninety five like
Shenanigans, where you would just sort of like like, there's no way this
game is not born out of that monotonous like you know, the shit you
would just do in Windows right when you first like got that gooey right,
and you were just that's how you were just sort of interacting with everything.
This is really smart. This is very good. Exact I think it's like
five dollars, yeah, four fifty right now it's on sale. This game
both looks really cool and looks like one of the most Jeff grub Bass games
I've ever seen in my life. Yes, definitely. As soon as I
saw I'm like, oh, that looks like the kind of thing that's going
to tickle my fancy. It turns out my fancy was tackled. Absolutely good
for your fancy. Do you think you naturally put yourself at a disadvantage if
you play this game with an ultra wide monitor? Yeah, I was thinking
about that, yeah, Or maybe that gives you like more space to work
with. Ye. So I wonder if like, once you're in the corner,
if you're like, if you are sort of trapped there because you've moved
all the way to that edge, and now if you're there, you got
to like move back the other way, and if there's something there, you
have nowhere else to go. So if you have more play space, maybe
you have more placebo. Actually don't know if it would go to this other
because I have a second monitor and it didn't seem like it was like migrating
up there. I wonder if that's something you could enable. Maybe that would
be too frustrating, But either way, it's just like such this like as
soon as I saw it, I'm like, I get what they're going for.
And then to play it and actually see that it works the way that
you're imagining it works like that was the coolest, the coolest part about it
for me so far. This game reminds me of like how pop ups are
like kind of all over your face in some movies and TV shows of people
entering in computers. I don't like that this could be possible market research and
how we have to fight off and click away from ads in the field.
They used to be much more dodgy than they are now, Like it used
to be a much different experience. But I hear what you're saying. I
never feel safe clicking on any link as long as it's not on giant bomb
dot com. Oh my god, I watched the whole thing about pig butchering
last night. What you click on? Do you guys know what pig pig
butchering is. It's butchering a pig to eat eat its meat. No,
it's actually the most successful new like sort of like internet scam. Let's tell
us about it. Uh, John, it was on John Oliver last night,
and uh, as he as he does, he goes into great detail
about like what it is. It's basically, Uh. It seems like a
lot of these scams start, you know, when you get like a random
text message that's just like, hey, you missed your doctor's appointment and want
to reschedule, and you're I was gonna say, I have gotten a bunch
of messages recently on my email where it's like, hey, there's a withdrawal
from your account. Click on this word document. Oh no, it's not
even that. It's not even that. It's like much. It's much more
social engineer engineering. It's like it's like, you know, you get some
completely unrelated thing and you and what they they're just look that that's the first
thing, like you the second you interact with that they've got they've got you
on a hook, right, Uh so you so people reply and then like
through that like no, sorry, I think you have the wrong text,
the number or whatever. They slowly build a relationship with the with with the
mark, right with the target, and uh slowly but surely they basically get
them into they start talking about money, but not necessarily asking for money.
It's much more like cerebral and layered than like I'm a prince from an African
country, right, Like it's uh, it's it's building trust, and then
it's basically showing you how to make money in crypto. And then people all
right, of course, look, you know we all say it and we're
all like, yeah, of course, what these schmucks who fall for it,
like they deserve it, but the insane amount of like real realistic experience
of it all like these people are building fake apps that show you like transactional
wealth and they like make you think you're running your own account. They're not.
They're like, I don't want any money. They're like, but here's
how to do it, right. It's it seems very in depth and very
like scary. I think you know people who are very online like have a
sort of radar that would probably go off for stuff like this. And then
it also got into like the people who are doing the scamming and how some
of them are like like working, you know, like slave workers, and
they're being threatened. It's it's real. That story got real dark, real
fast as it does. But that's what pig butchering is. It starts off,
you know, it's fattening up the little piggies getting ready to uh.
And like the people that were scammed, the victims, they had on on
the on the on the story. I mean they were out like two three
hundred thousand dollars and they and they were like, hey, I know how
to I know when I'm being scammed. And this was the most non scamm
thing I've ever it was. It's wildly uh in depth. It doesn't make
me. I am like at a point now where I'm like any email,
I really don't recognize any message. I do not know the source or I
don't know exactly why they're contacting, which isn't great because like I don't keep
track of like doctor's appointments, so when they are asking me to remind me
about that stuff and I'm being suspicious of that that just means I'm missing a
doctor's appointment. But I am getting more and more suspicious about that stuff because
it does seem both more sophisticated and also I feel like I'm not as vigilant
at like, oh making sure one percent, like once I'm like looking at
it that I'm going to be very careful about it. Sometimes it's like,
oh, the email is putting the word doc as a button you could just
click, I like clicking buttons, And I'm like, oh, if I'm
going to be like that, I have to like put up a guard before
I'm even like looking at these things in the first place. So so I
mean, look like I'm I'm just having parents who use the internet is like
upsetting, Yeah, where you're just like, you know, my you know,
my dad bonehead thing a while back and you know, hasn't really suffered
any consequences from it, but like certainly walked over the line and I had
to kind of like grab him and sit him down and be like this is
bad, bad boy. I'm getting I'm worried that we our generation, the
generation who grew up the first generation to grow grow up with the Internet.
Right, when are we gonna when is it going to be like our number?
Right? Like, when are we finally going to be the I mean
we will be the latest marks eventually, right right now? Our parents.
So I'll tell you a scam that that came across me that I that,
Hey, Jane, you're in the clear for ten more years. This scam
was so good and I caught it, and I was like proud of myself
that I caught it. But it was so good that I was like,
I think ninety out of one hundred people would have fallen for it. It
was so fucking good, was it? So? Back in twenty twenty when
uh, you know, mortgage rates had plum did right right during the pandemic
the start of it. I should have butterfu let me look, let's not
get into that thing. But yes, I could not not refinance the mortgage.
It was insane what mortgage rates were at. So I started the process
to REFI I went through this you know, broker, and it was the
day to wire the closing money. Right. So I'm on the phone with
this person and I'm like, hey, tell me the routing number, right,
I got to wire you this money. Told me the wiring number.
She goes, I'll also email to you. And I was like, okay,
great. The email I got was spoofed to look like it was from
her. Now the title agency's logo on the top of the email the same
domain. Okay. I was like, I call them back, right,
I go, you have a mole. There's someone in your company who is
sending out fake emails, phishing emails. What's going And like they were all
like, I don't know, I don't know what you're talking about. I
said, I just got an email from your domain. Like it's all all
the metadata's there. It came from you, guys, and you and and
it was a false wiring address. I would have wired five digits right to
worth of money to this place. What are we doing? I did,
And they were just sort of like my real estate adrient mentioned that that is
something that does happen. I was like, oh, She's like She's like,
like, I will call you to confirm anything before you send any money.
I was like, oh nuts, I didn't know that was happening.
But you literally have to like almost you almost have to like go and see
the person and bring a laptop, right. You almost have to like have
that person in your eyes say, being like, tell me the number?
What the number? You know? I couldn't believe it. Like if you,
if anyone else got this email from the title agency, like you just
talked to them on the phone. Why would you expect How could you expect
someone at that very moment you hang up to send you an email that's fraudulent?
Right then and there, within five minutes the email came in. Yeah,
that's nuts. So that just meets someone's in the inside there, right,
Like how could you? Yeah, someone said, like their network is
desperately compromised. That's right. Like, and I was just like, you
guys are gonna something terrible is gonna happen. I said, look like I'm
gonna report all this. I have to, just because I need to do
something because this was so appalling. Uh and yeah, I don't know,
but uh, just be careful, especially wiring lots of money. You gotta
gotta be sure. Anyway, pig butchering, let's go. Oh sorry,
oh what the fuck is that? There? We go? I killed it?
No, are you playing Unicorn or Balatro? Sorry? H okay,
that got rid of it. Apologies folks at home watching, Well we have
now gotten to the game of the week, Final Fantasy seven Rebirth. Folks
at home, we had a lovely roundtable review cast discussion last week. Full
house, actually a full hell house sounds like. Also what happened to almost
happen to? Jeff Beckler there, uh where you know, tam Lucy,
Emma, Mike and Turboseean and Grub Lovely moderating the panel. We're going over
that. Uh So, if you want to hear some deep talk, some
spoiler free deep talk about Final Fantasy seven Rebirth, I highly suggest checking that
out. But I wanted to share that this game, it's fucked up.
This game is also fucked up. Fucking hate this game. Everything up?
Okay, consumer, jan tell us about it. Let me tell you why.
You know, what do we got? We got a lovely group of
lovely people that that think and feel with their feelings and their brains. And
then they all they're all friends with each other, and then it's a fun
story talking about eco terrorism and just consumerism and capitalism and just wanting to just
burn it all to the fucking ground and forgetting the past, not letting the
past color of judgment. And also Tifa is in this game. I've heard
this I've heard this about this game is that it's kind of a teeth word
that we've defeated the woke, canceled culturalist. Try to keep Tifa away from
it. They did, you see they they got people got macas they rewoke
it because that's right, Yes, they put they put a shirt on her
and put a shirt when Tifa is underage in a flashback, they put uh
slightly less cleavage on her. So it's a woke now the respects wore back.
Never mind, everybody cancel the parties, all right? Well, uh,
but also I just wanted to say that, God, this is the
best Kingdom Hearts game ever. What you mean, like the this is what
parts always should have been. Nomura should have let me control Donald and Goofy
from the get go and make those party members actually useful, give me direct
control over them, or at least issue commands, because I really enjoyed Final
Fantasy seven remakes combat system, and this is pretty much the same, but
the added improvements are fucking absolutely amazing in terms of like it feels like a
rhythm game at points where you get into a boss encounter. The bosses in
this game fucking love them. I love fighting the summons, they're so good,
Mike, and then just being able to fire off like insane combos with
like the crew, and I feel like this is uh. I ran into
this with Like a Dragon, where I wound up not using some party members
just because I didn't find them useful to my play style. I love how
everyone controls here. Everyone is so diversified, and this game will do the
thing where it kind of forces control over specific characters and some story beats,
and I don't mind it at all. I enjoy it because it gives me
like a deeper appreciation in like figuring out the mechanics there. And also I
will not stand for some UFI slander out there, y'all. Yeah, yeah,
let's go UFI Defense Force right here. Shut up, Dan, shut
Dan Reiker exactly. I have no dog in this fight. I don't care.
Also, the most fun player to care at the play as. Actually
I played like as UFI, maybe even more than Cloud. By the end
of the game. She was just so useful with all of her elemental attacks
and god, later on she can make a little clone of herself, so
you're kind of like doubling up on stuff, and oh, it is very
fun. Mike, how have your thoughts and feelings on FF seven evolved since
we spoke last about it? Just that I think of freaking rules. I
think it's great. I think it's the best game with the words Final Fantasy
seven in the title. I absolutely love that. I'm very excited I had
far more people to play it. I haven't played it since the deadline,
just because I like played so much of it in a dense period of time.
But I really do want to get back in there and kind of like
one, largely because I don't care about like platinum trophies, but this game
has a sort of in game trophy shelf case that you get for completing task,
and that's what I care about. And there's a fucking treasure chess that
you can only open when you get all that stuff done, and I'm like,
well, what's in there? There's gotta be something good in that treasure
chest. What you're hiding in there? I gotta see it. It reminds
me of completing Jim Andy's journal. Kingdom works too, so I could unlock
that movie that I could have just watched on early Google videos back then or
whatever, but no, no, I gotta got it real media players.
Yeah, exactly. No, I just love it, I you know,
and I've seen, like you know, the reviews have been very positive,
and I've seen even the small complex people have and even some of them I
can kind of agree with, and a lot of them I even don't.
I love of all the mini games. I love that this game seemed to
have a mandate of we're gonna have so many mini games because that's something that
Foum fifty seven wasn't known for. We're just going to blast players with it.
And I love that. And some of them are just kind of like
simple, like it's like a normal fight, but you have to do these
things. And then other times it's like you're playing a completely different game.
Yeah, everyone's going to freak out over Queen's Blood. I think I can't
believe how much fun Queen's Blood just it's Queen's Blood. The kind of thing
where if they did a standalone game, would you play it? Oh yeah,
they could absolutely gwentch that shit up and it went. It's what the
industry calls that. Yeah, it maybe be smarter, like, don't expect
it to like what they did with Like this is going to be like Carstone
we're gonna, you know, hopefully supports for five years, just make a
really good product that can maybe have a couple expansions. I don't know.
Right, it's out for ten bucks and that'll be fun. Yeah, I
definitely want more Gwent in my life, for sure, not Gwen Queen's Blood,
and I was actually on the other side of means Blood initially. By
the time y'all were talking about the game last week and then spending some more
time in Queen's Blood and unlocking some more booster packs and cards. You can
get really fucked up in that game. In Queen's Blood, specifically in such
a good way where you absolutely bone this the computer opponent, where you almost
feel bad for how much you are dominating because just how some cards will will
work with a board. You wind it behind enemy lines and it's so good.
It's so good, right, and you can really like position It's about
positioning and scoring. A positioning can really mess up the opponent's ability to score.
It's this game that's both beautifully simple and complicated, and it ramps up
in a really satisfying way in terms of that complexity. It's just very well
executed and it's a difficult thing to do with a card mini game, right,
that's supposed to just be one component of something that we're doing inside this
game. And I am coming to Final Fantasy seven Rebirth from a similar position
as Lucy last week, where I have never played the original Final Fantasy seven
somehow, despite checking out ninety percent of Final Fantasies and just knowing most of
or some of the characters and story beats through cultural osmosis over the years,
and just meeting Cloud and company through Kingdom Hearts. But I'm enjoying everything about
it, especially with a story Tam and Emma touched on it. Part of
the thing that I love about this story where I'm at so far, I'm
about like thirty plus hours in, and that's just me mainlining everything and occasionally
dipping out for the side quest stuff or the side content. I love,
love, love, love the relationship between Tifa and Erth. Like I've heard
this repeatedly now that people really do this very well done, and I think
that's like, go ahead, sorry, I know, it's just incredibly wholesome.
And I feel like in games with big ensembles like this, sometimes the
side characters just get swept under the rug in favor of whoever is like on
the cover right, Like, in the process of finishing the story, no
one cares about anyone else in the Cody Rhodes universe other than Cody. Eventually
finishing the story. We've forgotten about Ja main event jay Uso in this but
here, Tifa and Eric and even read thirteen Barrett have such a heavy chunk
of the story that you can't help but be invested in it. And you
know, I'm sure it's probably fun for someone even more fun for someone that's
played the original Final Fantasy seven. They're just seeing how everything's reimagined and the
different liberties that they may be taking with the story. Maybe I don't know,
But here, as someone just completely frust to it, I absolutely love
it. These feel like real characters and not just like one dimensional characters that
are just party members to heal you. Yeah. One complaint I've seen about
Rebirth and remake, it's just from people who don't inherently like that they took
one game and they're kind of making three games, and to them it's like
they're stretching it out. I think that expanding the story is doing a ton
of good because you are getting things like an actual relationship with tifan Aris.
A lot of RPGs, your party members will have a relationship with the main
character and never with like amongst themselves very much, and expanding here allows a
ton more of that, a ton more of development for all these characters and
for a lot of other characters. Even some of these new characters from remake
get to come back here and have these fun moments. So I'm all for
that. Actually, I think that just expanding these games, you know,
because look the story of fun Fantasy seven, like the actual plot of Fun
Fantasy seven, I don't know if that's what I ever liked about the game,
or most Final Phasy games or most video games. It's really the characters
actually, So just having more character moments, that's what's going to make me
happy. That's what I want, and that's what they one hundred percent take
advantage of by smartly breaking this game up into these three chunks and being able
to really dive in. I mean, just think about in remake, how
Jesse suddenly became this interesting character and they play off of that, right,
you have moments calling back to that character here that are really impactful that just
could not exist in the original game. I think I got to that moment,
or maybe it's one of those moments, and as someone that really really
fell in love and became very thirsty for Jesse in remake, I was it
was a very strong gut punch that I didn't think the game would be able
to deliver to someone that had only played remake prior to this. Yeah,
it's great, and I kind of I get yelled at sometimes for this,
but I think that the original Phanphasy seven kind of becomes less interesting because halfway
through, because the plot really loses focus on all this Shinra stuff, which
is so important. The beginning of the game just kind of focus on Sepharoff
wanting to summon a media and destroy the world because he's a bad guy,
blah blah blah. And again, with like this larger format here, they're
really able to make Genra still feel like a much bigger part of the game,
whereas they really begin to disappear into the background as the original game went
forward and forward. As someone who never played through all Final Fantasy seven,
I've definitely started a couple of times had some fun with it. It doesn't
the stretching it out never really occurred to me you could tell from a distance
site No, they're just going deeper and so they can do more with this.
And also, these games are bigger when you make them today. So
if you're trying to replicate a game from the nineties with like full you know,
like cut of the cutting edge, state of the art technology, you're
going to need to take your time, and it's gonna you're gonna have like
lim a your budgets per game and try to get as much money out of
as possible. So that always made sense. What I've heard about this game
that does have me the most excited about it is the stuff where it's like
it's about the characters and their relationships. That is, like, you're right,
that's what I come to most game sports, what I come to most
movies and books for. So the fact that they're nailing that here and everyone
that I've talked to seems to universally agree that that's the best part of this
game or one of the best parts. It's like, Okay, I cannot
wait to get into this and actually start playing. And I think the sheer
audacity with a lot of the characters to just wholly be either super cheesy,
super corny or like super emotional. I think comes off as very authentic and
earnest. I think it's part of the success of Infinite Wealth with me of
like, all these characters are just feeling their emotions and they're just like doing
their thing, even if part of their thing is being very is overacting.
And I feel like the cast, the extended cast a Final Fantasy seven rebirth
really nails that. But the thing, grub, the thing that fucking just
sings, is just playing the game as well. The common system rules so
much, it's just so good. Like it's the uh, the synergy abilities
that that you you unlock, and just like the different combinations of those and
how like, oh, almost any permutation of of three of any of these
these party characters will work somehow and will work incredibly well. It's great.
I really didn't like enjoy playing as Earth in remake, but here homegirls firing
off lasers like orbital lasers, and it's sick as shit. She really benefits
from some of these new synergy abilities because like one of them is just called
bodyguard. Just press a button and a character will kind of appear in front
of you to defend you. For a bit because whoever you're playing as will
often draw the attention of enemies, and at least build is so cast or
focus and cause she needs to kind of plant herself in a specific place and
cast abilities, it could be difficult. So that stuff kind kind of makes
it a bit easier to get a handle on her here, and I don't
find the game to be supermashy like game Like supermashy games kind of like tend
to give my hands like a lot of fatigue because of the tendonitis. Here,
completely fine, it's completely great. I feel like I feel like a
coach sometimes when I get the ATB gay just to fill out completely, and
then we're just firing off abilities and syncro abilities left and right, and then
like, hey, you know what, let's throw a fucking summon into this
shit. Let's do that too. It's a small thing, and the last
gift did it. But I love that when you do like quote unquote pause
the action to issue those ATP abilities. It's not a pause, it's a
really slow emotion and it just feels so satisfying every single time. It's very
good and I can't wait for people to play it, and I don't want
to spoil anything. I haven't gone to the very end, but I need
to spoil something. Oh god, it is near and dear to my heart.
Hey, everyone's been warned. Yeah, so so as soon as the
twenty ninth rolls around, as soon as like everyone is downloading and buying that
game, I'm gonna tweet something out. Oh no, all right, yeah,
is it about a boat? A boat adjacent? What is the best
method or best version? I should say to play the original Final Fantasy seven
probably, which is great, which is great. There's something about the way
that all those remasters look with the kind of smoothed out character models on the
blurry background. Still, I bet the best version involves getting the Steam version
with some mods. I bet there's like a really good mod pack that does
some kind of like AI upresing on those pre rendered backgrounds or something like that.
Ye, Steam with mods would be the way, and it's from phasey
seven. I bet there's a very easy guide exact what you need to do.
I bet you'll still get a good experience if you just play that Switch
version. Sure, but uh yeah, that's what you need to do.
Uh. And you know, my specific use case is very specific because I
have fiber where I live. But I've been playing through Final Fantasy seven Rebirth
almost entirely through Chiocky for steam Deck, and it is absolutely amazing. The
only times where it feels like it's been a little it's dipped a little bit
or Lancy has been suspect is through some of the Rhythm games. Oh yeah,
but there's there's not So there's not a bunch of those. There's just
like one specific portion where where the the story kind of puts you, puts
you in that position. But yeah, it's absolutely it's absolutely fantastic. And
just seeing that ship right there and like almost falling asleep while someone's talking and
then having that steam Deck almost fall on my face exhilarating. That's that'll that'll
keep you put some hair on your chest. Yeah, you talk about the
stuff in June on. I assume yes, because I think that's one of
the things what people are complaining about being forced to do minigames or complaining about.
And again to me, I was like, that's like one of the
top three best mos in the game. I like the lead up to it
because of how Silly Leaps so great. Yeah, ah, I absolutely adore
that game, so much. I'm yeah again so excited when we're people to
play it. I'm probably gonna be thinking about that game a time for the
rest of your what in ridiculous first two months this year. I can't believe
I could make a top ten. I could make a top ten right now.
Probably it's insane easily the spoon is full everyone, there's too many games
on it. I do want to add I was feeling a little bit discouraged
seeing everyone's opinion on whatever the ending is supposed to be. But I feel
like my tolerance for bullshit and Final Fantasy stuff maybe closer aligned to yours,
mike Ye and hearing Emma's take on the ending being like, oh oh okay,
and I feel like I am wedged in between you two when it comes
to Final Fantasy again, no spoilers. I know people think that they're going
to infer something from what I'm saying, trust, but you're not. But
yes, look it's it's like it's indulgent and it's a lot and honest and
didn't bother fine, yeah what again? What I really care about? Like
these great great character moments and fantastic boss fights, and the last few boss
fights are fantastic. They were great, So yeah, they didn't really bother
me. The last thing I'll say about Rebirth, at least for this week,
is I am exhausting my console's memory with screenshots and clips Oh yeah,
yeah, or ninety percent of them from the beach No, no, no,
fine, no, y'all respectfully and disrespectfully. I multiple times have felt
like the text avery uh the Wartoon Wolf of Aga. My jaw is dropping
on the floor and my eyes just bulging out, and then my partner looking
over, looking over and means like, are you playing one of those games
again? I'm like, no, no, no, no, this one's
for work, Tifa's game. In a lot of ways, Tifa gets a
ton of screen time in Rebirth and it rules. Twenty twenty four is kind
of the year of Tifa, especially if she does show up and tech and
like, I think we're all expecting her to big year for Tifa, biggest
year ever. So the thing is I came into f F seven uh remake
dead Set just because, like, I don't know, I kind of like
Tifa more that I was like Tifa all the way. I don't give a
shit about Earth. She was kind of in Kingdom hearts, but she wasn't
useful. But yo, the fucking writing in this game is getting me to
care so deeply about her in such a way. Can we say the thing
about the dates? Is that definitely one of the things we can't say actually
specifically written it is written out like that. But just like the answered,
the relationships you explore are just like, Oh, I thought I felt some
way about all of these characters. I'm one over, I'm one over.
Yeah, yeah, I thought it was actually more of an airth person I
wasn't remaking. Then this one's like, oh, I'm dang it. No,
no, nope, it's hard. It's hard. We're all read thirteen
people now read thirteen ers. Ah, but man, you also, I
don't understand why people would hate you. Fee. She's got a giant Shurikin
on her back. Yeah, look, she could fuck She has a bit
of that thing that I had with that coffee girl from Tech, and she
could sometimes be a bit one note, just yelling about material lot. She's
the comic relief. She's self proclaimed comic relief. I can't lay great.
Some people, I'm like, yeah, she's a goober. It's fine,
it's funny and we all need goobers. We need goobers. Some people are
mad at me because I pointed out the Turks Reno and rude because like what
the play stationed account posted a picture. I'm like, ah, these two
dudes are back. I love to see it. And I was like,
yeah, these two are great. I'm like, these are the two that
dropped the plate. They killed thousands of people, including women and children,
and I I never even said the words you shouldn't liked them. But I
had a lot of people get mad at me for suggesting that they can't like
them. But I don't know. That's the whole thing. The weird,
the vegeta syndrome of media where UH war criminals and genocide committer has become fan
family my top tier list of atrocity committers. Yeah, yeah, so it's
fun. Uh we shouldn't put that as the episode titled no, We'll think
about it though. During this break, can't put that one on there,
Mike, but he says he kill terrorists. Yeah, print that on the
back of the podcast. People were like, oh, I a witch also
kill people. I was like, yeah, that's a whole new sentence.
We make the Alive movie the what movie. No, they just did a
new story Isn't Alive based on a real thing? Or there's there was a
real plane crash right where people crash and ate the football team and they had
to eat each other something snow right, people of the snow people, snow
society. What are we talking about? Yeah, Jeff Beckler, how did
we get here? Uh? We got here? These are like the cool
atrocities that you're talking about. Yeah, these are like the the you know,
the sort of like acts of God. If you man, I'm never
going to have a political career if I start if I keep saying things like
cool atrocities. Let's make new slurs. Uh Yeah, I mean I think
new slurs are are interesting for like sci fi movies, like when they're like,
you know, you hear like a weird word in there. I like
fake like fictional drug names too, Yeah, stuff too. I like when
the droid from the Prequels are called clankers. I like that. Yeah,
all right, I'm gonna go think about my words. That's too harsh of
a slur word for you, Mike. You don't like clanker. It's upsetting.
You need one for Disney adults. I'm just Disney asults is the slur.
It's too much of a mouthful. It's got to be like two syllables.
Tops. It's fine. I shorten and makeup words all the time.
Uh, and I'll think of one during this breakoffs, we'll be back with
some video game news. Boys. This news music is gonna sound terrible.
We'll fix it. I should just start talking about the news. Huh.
That's that's like that toss is normal. That's what That's what that was.
Huh. All right, well, you know what, fine, I will
do exactly that. I got a lot of news here for you, everybody.
Uh. Pretty busy week, but today popped off with what is going
to be seemingly the theme of this year. More job losses in the video
game industry. PlayStation has cut nine hundred jobs, affecting the studios that make
games like Spider Man and the Last of Us and Horizon. Sony's PlayStation division
is undergoing significant layoffs with the closure of its London studio and cuts at other
studios like fire Sprite, as well as the aforementioned Insomniac games Naughty Dog and
Gorilla. The layoffs amounting to nine hundred people, or about eight percent of
PlayStation were confirmed by outgoing Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan, who described the
decision as extremely hard. Affected staff across major SIE regions, including the Americas,
EMEA, Japan, and APAK, will receive severance benefits. These layoffs
come amid discussions about the evolving economic landscape and changes to how SIE develops,
distributes, and launches games. Other recent high profile layoffs in the gaming industry
include those at super Massive Just Yesterday, The makers of Until Dawn layoffs themselves
recently a couple weeks ago. Microsoft's also laid off about eight percent of the
employees working on Xbox across Xbox activisions some of their other subsidiaries. Twitch has
also had layoffs. Riot that we are approaching I think about eight thousand,
nine thousand layoffs in the industry so far in twenty twenty four. This is
that eight percent number keeps popping up. Everyone's just cutting their workforces by about
five to eight percent, and here we are once again someone else cutting that
many people. Unaffected studios include Sucker Punch. You get the sense that,
like, hey, if you have a game coming out soon, well we
need all hands on deck. And if you have a game coming out six
years from now. Well, you know, you just launched a game.
What have you done for us lately? And so you got we're gonna cut
some jobs. It's rough out there, No, I mean, look,
these games are all terrible games. They don't do well right now. They
don't make any money, they don't make comy, they don't sell like twenty
million copies for the last They don't make any fucking money. They are all
released at a gigantic loss, and uh it, you know, it puts
all these companies deep into the red. And that's what explains massive layoffs.
Of course, I'm fucking kidding right there, because you can has has had
huge profits for the last several quarters. The last one was a little bit
down, but they were still a very profitable company. So I don't want
to fucking hear any more financial reporting. I don't want to know how good
you're fucking doing, because it doesn't fucking matter. It doesn't fucking matter,
because you're just gonna lay off everyone else because you didn't do as good as
you are already doing, right yep, So what what are we even doing
for? What are we even doing? They're just setting themselves up for bad
times. You look at PlayStation right now, what is the most obvious problem.
It's the fact that PlayStation studios releases I've kind of slowed to a crawl.
Well, how is that going to look like going forward? When you're
cutting jobs from like three developers and Naughty dogg Intosomniac that have done nothing but
good things for you, Like they are the backbone of that entire exclusive structure
and you're gonna cut them off like the with CUD. I mean, they
said something that seven Rebirth came out about how they're able to do this so
relatively quickly because it's a giant game, And he said, well, hey,
we have people who've been working with each other for a while. It's
not just that you're gonna have less people working there, which is already a
fucking huge problem. But people are more efficient when they are working with people
that they have worked with for a while. The problem right now is that
these games that Sony likes to make are very expensive and they take too long
to make. This isn't gonna help that at all. That problem was already
getting worse. Now it's gonna get exponentially worse. There's absolutely no regard for
the future. When making this move, it's just about maximizing profits for the
next financial report, so we can keep investors happy for just a little bit
longer, and then we'll figure out what we got to do for the next
quarter. We can't keep thinking quarner by quarter like this, or financial year
by financial year like this. It's gonna go nowhere they did, this will
continue to happen forever because it is allowed to happen. That's it, that's
it. There's no labor protection. Yeah, on that point, people that
worked in these studios in America done today. People in the UK are going
to go through a consultation period. People in Japan, I think that work
in Japan for Sony are going to be working them for quite some time before
like this happens, so they have a chance to find new work. And
like Sony has to pay for that process. You can tell the regulation how
it affects what it is like for everybody in America. Fucking cut loose spot.
Everyone gets through severance, Yes, but that's like that was then,
like just being competitive. Everyone has to give a severance to like attract these
people in the first place. But when it comes to actually how they're treated
out the door. It is just good luck and have fun in America.
I think that the most baffling and frustrating part one of the components, at
least, is all these people that have made these projections and are in turn
bragging about all these profits. They're facing no backlash as far as I know,
in any of these layoffs, No one. Trine's retiring. He's getting
his golden parachute. He's out. God, I hope a bird crashes into
his golden parachute. Yeah, yes, so much for him leaving on top,
by the way, because he's leaving with this now. So this is
you know, his legacy is that he did not set PlayStation up to succeed
on his way out. They somehow seem to be in a bad position despite
winning the made up console war, which is more made up than ever.
God, if you spend any amount of your time yelling at somebody because of
the box they play games, Yeah, look who you're rooting for. Look
who you are in the bag for, these motherfuckers who do not care PlayStation
one and this is the victory lap. Congratulations. Okay, PlayStation one Xbox
lost both laid off eight percent of their workforce. Yeah, yeah, what
are we talking about here? What were we doing? What were we doing
with that time and energy? You made the world worse place for no reason.
Great, I'm glad you yelled at somebody on the internet. It is
reminiscent of how the industry felt going into the PS four and Xbox one generation,
where they were very unsure about the future. Then they were unsure about
how consoles were going to sell, like, we're probably not gonna it's not
gonna be like trending down where like Sony was trending downward at that time because
the PS three. So they're like, okay, well, we're not sure.
N Xbox was we're gonna do this TV stuff because we see people buy
Xbox and then actually they use it, use the Xboxes to watch TV and
Netflix, so we're going to focus on that instead. They then start up
that generation and both those consoles did very well. The Xbox one actually sold
pretty well. PlayStation four obviously was a huge seller. Then they were like,
okay, well, we're going to slowly build up the software and get
that going, and Microsoft kind of struggled and stumbled and then never really actually
accomplished that and Sony did. They got a bunch of studios going. But
now they're like, we don't think we're gonna be able to justify making these
games for the industry that we sort of built up to look this way.
The industry needs to look like, hey, you put out a console,
then you put out exclusives for it, and now they're like, well,
we don't think that's gonna work. Who fucking did that? And so what
what do you what do you talk I mean, what are you talking about?
This is the industry you built. Everything seems to be set up to
favor these console companies, and yet they still can't find a way to consistently
make it work for more than a five year period. So okay, everything's
gonna be good for five years, and then after that we're blowing the whole
thing up and we don't know what's gonna happen. And they just they just
got a surprise smash it with hell Divers too, that the books couldn't possibly
have accounted for. Big Hit got to be making a lot of money.
It doesn't even fucking matter. It doesn't matter. So you know, we
talk about, hey, the backbone companies, studios losing workers of course,
at the same time, London Studios yet another team that was doing weird,
interesting stuff. They did a lot of like the really sort of gamy VR
games recently. Right, it's like, hey, well London Heist or whatever
it's called, where it's like you're actually gonna go in there and it's it's
gonna tell you a story, but it's gonna have a lot of cool gameplay
moments, and like they were like one of the studios putting out games for
that thing that made the PlayStation VR fuel like it was a real platform.
It almost seems like they're punished for being the VR studio. The VR games
prot didn't sell very well because it's they're fucking VR games like a fraction of
an audience. So now this studio is getting shut down. They were doing
interesting things, so we're not even getting like obviously Japan Studios shut down a
while ago now, and they were some studios that would do some interesting things.
It's like okay, we need yes, yeah it was. It feels
like a huge mistake, and yet like everything all the choices they're making seem
to reinforce exactly what happened there where it's like we can only support the studios
that are making the biggest, most most expensive games, the ones that will
take six years to complete, and probably in the future are going to start
taking seven eight years and three hundred and fifty million dollars, And it's,
oh, why are you going further down the road when that's clearly not the
answer and actually part of your problem. I don't get it. And it's
not their fault that PSVR two was just not well received. Of course,
not everyone that a PSVR was like always looking forward to the London studios games
that I always hear them talk about that, and so it's like they did
their part. They held up there in the bargain, make something interesting for
this platform that barely anyone was buying games for. What can you do this
is It does feel like Sony Microsoft probably won't do too many layoffs after this,
but that doesn't guarantee that they won't have anymore. But it seems like
they were like, hey, let's pull the band aid off now. But
the industry does feel like it's going to continue going through this. I think,
especially now that we see it's happening at Sony, it's like, Okay,
it could be anybody. Obviously, Sony's last financial report did detail how
they are concerned about this upcoming year. Last year they sold the piscol year
that's going to come to in at the end of March, they expect to
have sold about twenty one million PS five through that twelve month period. They
originally anticipated to twenty five million. That was always a sky high number.
It seemed kind of out of reach. But they did about everything they could
to sell twenty five million PS fives, including cutting the price aggressively in several
deals for the PS five. So they've kind of like they've done what they
can with like good deals to get people interested into PS five to come buy
it. And now they're going to go into this next year whether they said
they hey, we're worried about profits now, so that means we can't cut
the price of the PS five as frequently. So that means they're probably going
to sell fewer PS fives. And that's why they keep talking about, hey,
we're on the second half of the PlayStation five's life cycle. They expect
things could start trending down this next year. And I said, ooh,
that does seem like a problem. If you were a company that your costs
keep growing, and that is that it brings us right back to what does
PlayStation do. We've been talking about this on this show and on Game US
Morning for weeks now because at the Xbox news would come up and people were
like, all right, the Xbox seems like they're in trouble, and we'd
always remind hey, no PlayStation is not out of the woods, and here
they are basically having the exact same problems as Microsoft. How do you guys
feel about the future of consoles? Matt Piscatella this whole week. He's the
Circana analyst that always does to stuff when I talk about the MPD numbers,
the Icana numbers. He's the guy that writes all that stuff, and he's
been kind of having arguments with some fanboys all this past week, being like,
guys, it's just the two thousand and eight dynamics of selling consoles are
gone, and they're gone for good, and no one's really thinking that way
that works at these companies in any leadership role. They're not thinking about,
Oh, the future is okay, we sold one hundred and forty million PS
fours or whatever. Now we're going to sell two hundred million PS five it's
like, no, we're going to sell about as many PS fours or maybe
even fewer. And if your audience is shrinking, how are you going to
make more money as you are mandated to do to keep your investors happy?
What's the future here? I don't think they'd have any inkling of what the
future is because any like in retrospect now, looking at any story to come
out of PlayStation Sony whatever, it just feels like absolute bullshit to just try
and turn a quick buck. Like I thought it was cool that the PSBR
two they were trying to get it to work with PCs and thinking like,
oh, whatever possibilities that could open up, But now just like, oh,
it's because you're getting rid of that studio, one of the most more
innovative studios that were supporting that uh piece, and you're not gonna make any
other games for it. Yeah, And now like I'm thinking about like the
PlayStation Portal and like how half baked that fucking shit is, And it just
happens to keep selling out for whatever reason. I don't know, I still
very many of them. May I guess that scarcity is leading to profits there?
It just seems like no one knows what they're fucking doing, and I
just don't know when the shoe is gonna drop. M Well, I mean
like on a long enough timeline, Like you just can't keep firing everyone and
expect people to spend money on your thing. Like if no one is employed
and you the disparity between the highest uh wealth owners and the people who have
nothing, you are eliminating the people right Like I don't. We're just not
on a very sustainable trajectory. Games. Yeah, I don't want to consume.
Yeah, I mean I was gonna say, uh, brom there Dad,
No, I'm kidding. I think chance of realization that he that the
call is coming from inside the jan house, Hi capitalism. Uh. They
know that they need to do more PC ports like Day and Date That helped
of held Diverse too. That seems to be the stress in their last financial
report a year or two later. People just kind of don't care as much.
I think both Microsoft Dancing Microsoft Lague has kind of tried this. They
got to find a way to make smaller games and still have their audiences care
about them. They gotta have a way to get fifty million dollar games or
less or even more. But you can't only have games that cost two hundred
million dollars or more and take seven to eight years or more be the only
games that excite people because they are just gonna be so few of those.
I get. I know that things are gonna take longer and take more money
to make, but I just can't believe we went from like a Naughty Dog
making four big, huge games on the PlayStation three to now we're gonna get
one real game of generation from them. That's just not gonna be enough.
For how much that you depend on something like a Naughty Dog, something has
to change, and something fundamentally on how we're approaching the whole process here.
And the reality is it's like it's gonna change with them or without them,
right, because at a certain point people will grow to learn that. It's
like, Okay, yeah, I really like it when naughty Dog puts out
a game. Those are my kinds of games. But I like, if
I start looking forward to only those games like that is like not to be
grim five more maybe in the rest of my life, Like that's weird to
think about that. But so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start looking
to other places for my games, and if I can't if that's like readily
available to me and like interesting stuff's happening on other platforms, people are gonna
start looking away. And I think that Obviously, third parties in indie studios
make games on consoles, but these companies finding ways to facilitate that and make
that a bigger thing. Obviously, Hell Divers two is working on PlayStation,
but it's working even more on PC. And maybe that's just because it's a
game that appeals to PC players. I don't know, but it's like this,
these are the kinds of lessons that need to learn. How do you
enable and empower other studios to do things that fill in these gaps frequently and
often and make that the norm, make it feel like, hey, we
show up to this console to play all kinds of stuff and not just the
biggest games. And I really I don't know if the answer is because at
a certain point video gaming was built on this foundation of the thing we're all
most excited for is the thing that looks the best does look the most expensive,
and it's like we just got to maybe get over this hump of like,
okay, well they look about as good as they're going to look.
The barrier for a long time was the GPU. It was how powerful the
system was, and now it's how much time and money you have. So
just by the nature of that, like by physics, well, if you
spend more time and more money, it's going to look better than than the
Joneses down the street. And so you got to spend more time and more
money. It's like, oh, okay, well we need to actually think
about that and criticize that and understand it and maybe get ourselves off that path
because that leads to the path of unsustainability, something we've been talking about for
years and now here we are. This is the end result we've been talking
about. Grand Theft Auto six comes out next year, and it's going to
be this game made with more money and more time than anybody else can afford.
It's not like, oh wow, we're here now with video games,
this is what we expect going forward. No, it's going to be an
anomaly now and we're gonna have to maybe accept like, yeah, maybe there's
two or three game series that can afford to do that anymore, if maybe
two of them are like the Last of Us and whatever they're working on at
rock Star. But Yeah, we can't. We can't be doing this forever
anymore. I want these big companies to know I don't give a shit about
puddles, right, I don't fucking care. Just just yeah. I feel
like the games that I've wound up glombing onto and just thinking like, wow,
this is a real uh good use of technology is like more stylistic shit.
I don't need shit to look real. I don't want to see Peter
Parker's creepy smiling face. Just put that fucking mass back on him. Mm
hmm. Yeah. Let me. Let me choose one of the suits that
looks like a cartoon character, which I play as the entire time I'm playing
that game because I don't care. Or he maybe make a really expensive Spider
Man game and have it be a giant success, huge hit, and then
have a bunch of people laid off. Anyways, I don't even know iron.
That could never happen. That's how it works. It's a meritocracy we
live in. If you make something good, you can reward. Yeah,
that's exactly it. Yeah. And then yeah, Jim Ryan is leaving.
It did seem like he was He knew all this was coming. He's the
own sense. He announced his retirement that they were looking at their financials,
they were looking at the outlook of how long it's going to take to make
these games. He was looking at like the release schedule, and knew they
we were going to have to say stuff like we are not going to have
any franchise Triple A games released in the entire fiscal year that ends in March
twenty twenty five. And those are a bunch of problems that no one knows
how to solve, let alone Jim Ryan. And so he got out.
But you're right, this is, like I mean, at the very least,
he did write the blog post about this, so he did like take
some ownership of it, so he's going to be associated with that. But
who the fuck does that help? No one. I hope everyone affected here
is lands on their feet. The industry seems real rough. If people are
done with games and want to like leave and go work in like, you
know, finance, I don't blame them. I totally understand, and I
hope that they I hope the industry misses them because we probably will. We'll
probably to get it like down the line, like why aren't these games as
good as they used to be and say, well, some people with like
really special knowledge left the industry because of a bunch of layoffs in twenty twenty
four and twenty twenty three, So we don't deserve them if we can't keep
them employed after making awesome game after awesome game, it sucks, all right.
Moving on, There was a Pokemon Direct earlier this morning. You guys
got up at Mike. You were there, bright eyed and bushy tailed.
Jan you were also there. Yeah, I was, I was, I
was there. You were there. They made some announcements. I wrote down
a couple of things. Guys, I only understood half of what was going
on. Yeah, well you were in the woods, is why you know.
I was in I was literally skipping through the woods while this was happening.
Pokemon Go added new Paldean Pokemon with horizons. Event they keep adding Pokemon
from the other games. This is just them coming from which this is Sprigetito
and Fuake Coco. Which jen is that from? I can never remember the
newest one. Yeah, I think that that's the newest one. That's scarlettle
Violet. Yeah, let's see. Yeah, this is gonna be happening pretty
soon. I think they said it's uh. March fifth to March eleventh is
the event that coincides with the series premiere of the new anime launching on Netflix
in North America on March eighth. Then, the Pokemon trading trading card game
Pocket was announced for mobile devices. There's already a way to play this game
on mobile, and I'll PC with TCG Live. I think it's called uh,
this is not that, but it's still basically that I don't understand.
What is this? Yeah, so that other game is just made by the
Pokemon uh you know company. Yeah, and this yeah, this one like
has other involved Yeah, DNA, some people actually know how to make mobile
games and creatures. So it looks a lot spiffier for mobile. It's got
this. Uh even just opening that packs looks nice. Apparently you get two
free packs of day and then you do play the game. But it's like
a trunk cadd version of the game, so it's meant to go faster.
So at first it was really confusing. I look at it more, I
kind of get it. I'm even kind of intrigued a little bit, especially
if you do get two free packs a day. Although Sean explained it as
this is like dual links to tg tcg's Live Master Duel and I don't understand
that either. I can go ahead and translate that please. Duel Links is
a streamlined version of Yu gi oh, so instead of five lanes, there's
only three, and from the trailer it looked like that is the same case
for this Pokemon card game for mobile. I think part of the hesitation there
is that folks that went all the way in on that existing game have an
existing inventory. Uh just you know, just a generic folks. Who could
it be huh mister consumer him? Did I go on eBay and perhaps buy
a bunch of Pokemon card codes to flesh out my digital library? Yes,
yeah, I do, certainly. Okay, we don't need to slut shame
me right now. All right, I was gone for the pod last week.
Just let me have this, Okay. So I think there's a little
bit of hesitation there of like, all right, does that card library carry
over? And then because of the nature of anything mobile, God, I
can just feel them charging so much for like, all right, you want
to open another park today? And then just seeing how whatever ladder that's gonna
look like. God, yeah, I saw that video. That's bad.
That's bad news. They're coming for you now, they're trying to. They're
trying to. Luckily I've thrown my phone out the window. Yeah, that's
the only thing you can do. That's the only thing that works and can
keep you safe. So you're probably gonna be fine now. Yeah. And
then there's Pokemon Legends Zadasha zaw Hot. So that did get me laughing,
Mike when I was on my walk when you started as that's announced for Switch
it's releasing in twenty twenty five. Kind of nuts or switch or was a
Switch logo? Man, there's a bunch of things about this I find interesting.
I thought Legends was possible. I thought just a remake was more likely,
But man, I was right. What is this like when you say
like you were expecting the Legends, is this just going to be Legends archaist
like the game I played and really liked. I think So it seems like
there might might be some kind of city building or management system in it.
So this one is set in that region that looks like Paris from the X
and Y game Lumio City. Yeah, will Yeah, So it's just Paris
and there's like a blueprint in all this stuff, right, But they're using
the Legends tag, and unless the Legends tag is just someth time they're going
to do for anything experimental, I assume there is still that loop that I
really liked in Legend is Archaeus, where you you know, it's open world
but kind of streamlined in this pleasant way. I hope that's still a part
of it. If it's just like we're making a city builder, gosh oh.
Sean says that there was a quote that it takes place all in Lumia
City. I mean, it is a big city, but yeah, what
the hell does that mean? Because that just sounds inherently like a very different
the urban Pokemon. Hell yeah, let's get some of those. I mean,
in comparison, like Legends Archius was what feudal ish Japan, it was
like yeah, yeah, yeah, it was an isa Kai right in.
Yeah, big like but like open undeveloped areas, so very different than what
this almost can be. But also a dense city. God. I saw
the towns in Scarlet and Violet. I was not impressed. Uh. And
that's the other component here. If I thought whatever they were going to show
here was almost certainly going to be something for the Switch this holiday because we
have no idea what the Switch is getting this holiday because maybe we thought that,
you know, originally that was when I switched. It was probably supposed
to launch, So you need something for the Switch, I figured a Pokemon
game. Maybe no, because this is coming twenty twenty five. So is
that because it always was? Is that because this was always meant to be
a switch to game? So it's getting pushed back with the console. I
don't know. But either way, boy, what is the Switch going to
get this holiday? Well? This is this is? Uh? Is this
supposed to be a different team than the team that worked on Scarlet and Violet?
Like this is the same Legends Archaist team. It would assume this is
just what the Archaist team went to work on right after that, right,
So I hope they had a little bit of time in between releases to make
something. Archaist wasn't that long ago, though, jan that was early twenty
twenty two. Was not long ago? Why? Two? It was early
twenty twenty two, very old. My guts hurt? Okay, I had
an epiphan Yeah, what was your realization? All right? At the end
of the Pokemon Direct earlier, I asked the panel of Nikki, Sean,
and Mike who they thought the starters would be in Legends. Za, uh,
legendsa legend, Legends, it's the more powerful Legends. Yeah, because
we had different starters for Legends Archias. If this is going to take place
in Lumo City, which is Mike Generation six or uh, yes, that's
right. See red and blue, gold and silver, ruby, sapphire,
diamond, pearl, black and white, X and Y six okay six,
And probably the most popular starter out of Gen six is froky To Greninja.
You are going to have a Parisian Greninja that uses his tongue as like a
fancy Paris scarf. He's going to have a little an ascot an ascot.
Yes, yes, oh my god, I'm calling it now. And if
it doesn't happen, well, Pokemon fucked up. They should have cut the
check to the pro conceiving. Yeah. Well I'm speaking of fucking up.
Like Sean's suggesting that maybe this a Legends Moniker that we assumed would mean a
game that is like Archias every time, like I guess a little bit more
like Monster Hunter, he said, might not mean that at all, and
maybe it's just any time they put a game into the far past, and
it could be any kind of game, and if they're doing that, they
have messed up. That is like the wrong thing to do. That is
not what anyone wants. You can put games in the past, who cares.
But the whole thing, we weren't excited about Legends Archaius because it took
place in the past. Are you crazy? What are you talking about?
Right? There's a yeah, there's a few weirdnesses there. I'm still weird
about that. We just skipped the Black and White generation, which is a
lot of people's favorite. It's a beloved one to kind of lead even they
know that they would mess that up and it would be bad. Hopefully,
hopefully Black and White remakes are still coming, I guess even later. But
I don't know. Maybe maybe this is a me thing. I did not
like X and Y. Nothing wrong with the setting, I guess. So
if you're just using that setting, it's a new game, fine, whatever.
Oh so what is with this name? I know we're making fun of
it because at first it just said Boogeymon Legends Z and that was cool because
we never got like the Z version component to X and Y and then they
had to go and fuck it up with this dash a bullshit and the other
how do you say it? Is it Pokemon? You're supposed to say Pokemon
z dash A. I don't know. Well weird. The other component here
that I know that Mikey's not a big fan of is seemingly mega evolutions have
returned. Legends are legends? Are tab of the hut dye are melting?
Had uh fudged with with the meta in such an interesting way, and I
feel like I just wrapped my head around terrastrializations. Then now I got to
remember all this fucking mega evolutions shit now uh pokemons. I mean, this
is not gonna be a revelation to anybody, But Pokemon's definitely in that state
where Zelda was, where it's like here, here's Zelda again, but we
got a new gimmick, and it's like Pokemon's over and over again. Yes,
it's been that for a lot in that loop. I would rather have
a two D game where Pekachus is going excuse me, because that'd be exponentially
more interesting than a lot of I guess it is a little bit. Maybe
it's a relief that they're like, listen, we're not going to try another
new one. We'll just go back to the gimmick that people seem to like
the most, which is megas. I guess yeah, that that is definitely
the most popular game, and I am in the minority for not liking that
one, and that's fine. I just I don't like all those gimmicks where
it's just like some button you push once per battle and watch an overly long
but still not all that extra and cut scene for some temporary power boost.
Like I get it that we had to find a way to make abilities that
just increase your stats exciting, so we just kind of had to give it
this visual flare. But it's just a lot of it's a lot of busyness
to me. And again, I think because when they first announced, I
was like, oh, that's cool, I'll be able to evolve my charizard
to a fourth tier and it's not actual dragon fine, right, And it's
not that it's like it's it's like going super Saiyan instead for a little bit.
If anything, that I am interested and excited for is kind of handpicking
specifically which pokemon are in this title, that we don't need all of them
because a lot of them are garbage. Some of them are literal garbage.
That's what it's nice about Legends. I think like Legends kind of had a
small ish Pokadex. Really there's a lot about Legs that worked for me is
that it kind of rained a lot of things in it streamline things in a
pleasant way. Like I liked actually just capturing Pokemon by literally just sneaking up
on them and throwing a ball at I'm more like the anime. I was
like, yeah, I don't actually need to get into a battle with everybody
and like make sure I have the false wipe TM on some trash Pokemon and
do that whole rigamaro. No, that's fine. Uh look, Let's Go
games kind of have you on board with that, Like, actually, this
is just how I want to catch Pokemon. Now, let's fine. I
still maintained that the Let's Go games were probably some of the stronger, more
recent Pokemon games. I am a little surprised Let's Go we're like the first
switch Pokemon games. I'm a little surprised we're going back to Legends before getting
Let's Go Another agree, I thought that's why if I had to put money
on it beforehand, I'm like, well, we're gonna get anything that's not
something to do with black and white remake. We could probably get a Let's
Go, especially since you obviously just do it with the you know, gold
Silver generation, which again, yeah, one of the most beloved generations,
So you just do Let's Go Togapi or whatever. It seems like that would
do well. Yeah, if they didn't want to split the versions again,
because there's no clear mascot other than Toga p and I don't know, Mayroll,
maybe you could just still jo too. Yeah, that'd Beeple point out
that it was the Let's Go games where a byproduct up ghost popularity, and
I'm sure that was the case, but I think that there's still like maybe
you know, to call them Let's Go, maybe do something else with them,
but having the simpleized version of I like Let's Go, I would be
fine with it. And I as much as I know they were associated with
the Pokemon Go, in my mind they stand alone. Yeah. I never
even I don't really even associate them personally myself. All right, I guess
the only the last thing to talk about before we move on from this is
this was announced for twenty twenty five, not twenty twenty four. I don't
think they put a finer date on it than twenty twenty five, but they
did have a logo for the Nintendo Switch on it. This probably is also
like a big deal switch To launch game. Right, So there was another
tweet. I believe it's by the state side Pokemon company that didn't explicitly say
Nintendo Switch in their their copy. They said platforms. I believe, yeah,
I mean, I think they're being coy about this for a reason.
It seems like this game is lining up for Switch systems broadly, and it
will be something that is mostly associated with switch to probably will and if this
is on switch To it there's gotta be some kind of bump in fidelity.
I know. I just went on this huge ramp about, like this huge
rant on Sony chasing that fidelity dragon. That's the true poking about company about
companies their own case. He's a little bit of that dragon. I think
just a smidge like this can't come out and look a bit better than Scarlet
and Violet. Right, there's gotta be a pretty decent leap here, all
right. Bravely Default producer teases an announcement for later this year. Uh,
the producer of the Bravely series to Moya Asano has hinted at a new announcement
later this year in celebration of the third anniversary of Bravely Default two, basically
celebrating Bravey Hey. Braveley Default two is three years old, and basically said
he in twenty twenty four. We will have more news coming up soon.
Mike, I know you like the Braveley Default games to a point. Are
you excited about the three? Do you think that's what's happening here? If
I had a guess, I think maybe they're gonna bring Braveley Default one and
maybe Bravely Second to the Switch, honestly, which would be nice. Yeah,
Braley Default's weird for me because I love Bravely Default. I even really
liked Bravely Second, and then for some reason, Bradley Default two did like
nothing for me, and I have no idea why. I don't know why
it felt that different to me. But yeah, it might be a new
game. But you know, it's almost kind of surprising that we haven't had
those games ported over to Switch yet, right to those original ones. A
lot of the popular three guest games, especially ones that don't really depend on
touch screen gimmicks or three D gimmicks, and Braveley default doesn'ts on either end.
It would be surprising if we didn't get parts of those eventually. Let's
see PlayStation Portal surpassed Sony's expectations. This is from Tony Steve been Totello,
not Tony stee Tillo Steven game File, uh gaming's most Italian reporter. UH
Sony's unusual. Well, I'm sorry, Mike didn't mean to put you down
like that. Uh. Sony's unusual and perpetually sold out new handheld gaming device.
The PlayStation portal is hot, hotter than the company thought it would be.
Although we don't have any numbers to share, the demand has continued to
exceed our expectations. Play PlayStation's VP of Product Management, Hiromi Wakai recently told
Steven Totolo the portal has been sold out for the last couple of months pretty
much NonStop. People would like WARDO sixty four. I'd be like, hey,
it's available now, and then it sells out in seconds. So PlayStations
like, yeah, way more people thought won it than we thought would,
So it's exceeding our expectations that doesn't mean it's some like huge, massive success,
uh Sirkana the map is Katello thing we were talking about earlier. He
put out the results from January and they moved the PlayStation portal from hardware over
to accessories because basically as a PlayStation five accessory, and it was the fifth
best selling accessory of the month, he said, whereas like the PlayStation dual
Sense Edge, that two hundred dollars controller was the number one in terms of
dollar sales. This was fifth in terms of dollar sales. So a two
hundred dollar controller for the PS five still selling better than this two hundred dollar
controller with a screen on it, and then there's like four other things selling
better than this, So that seems to come down to supply. Like PlayStation
probably just didn't make a ton of these things, but at the very least
seems like they could sell more if they were to make more. So I
don't know, I'm just like not going to get a portal at this point
because I am having such a good time using the Steam Deck. Do any
of you guys have interest in a portal? They have a portal, they
sent me one. I haven't really used it a whole ton just because I
have so many other things to play in that space, right, like Switch
or even on my Roger outline. Now, I bet I bet Sony,
and I think Microsoft's the same thing. They both are just racing to figure
out a way to make actual portable versions of their modern console. Yeah,
that probably can't happen, Well can't probably doesn't happen until the next generation for
both companies, right, so they can like make it fit into their their
hardware lineup their hardware stack. But I think you're right. I think they're
both trying to get to that point as quickly as possible. Uh, Pentiment,
this is a weird one. Pentament somehow ran better on the PS five.
Not that this is a game that matters how many frames per second you
get, but it ran out one hundred and twenty frames per second on PS
five, And some people pointed out, Hey, that original thing, when
you like acquired Bethesda, you said the games would be first or better or
best on on Xbox and here it's only sixty frames per second and it's one
hundred and twenty frames per second on PS five. Again, no one really
cared because they're like, it's Pentiment. But it's like why did this happen
really quickly? Josh Sawyer came out. Josh Sawyer is the director on that
game. He's like, this was a bug as part of like basically as
part of putting this on PS five, we discovered it and we fixed it,
and now this is going to run at one hundred and twenty frames per
second on the Xbox. But I guess it's like people are like, well,
why didn't you notice before the PlayStation Why did you need the PlayStation version
to figure this out? But I don't know. There was a little bit
of a hubbabaloo about this. It's not much. And look, I know,
I get real upset if something's in thirty fps and not sixty fs,
but kind of past sixty fps, I can't really tell that much. To
be your eyes don't work. I mean, I get it now, Mike's
right, like, I think ninety frames per second, I'm still like noticing
it. I'm realizing like on the handhelds when I'm using those, but you're
write anything above that it is huge diminishing returns. I just think it's funny
that they're like, yeah, this, uh, this is a bug.
Yeah fixed it? Uh huh, all right, We're just gonna flip the
switch. Now it works on Xbox Happy. It's weird. I love the
Internet because I can both be yelled at for caring about games being sixty instead
of three fs and for saying that I can't tell the difference between sixty and
one to lose lose situation, just looking for it's to be mad at you.
No matter what you say, We're gonna find out what it is.
Don't worry. I like it. Last story here. Apple Arcade has the
stench of death about it, according to many developers asked about it. That's
just the hedgehog. They put him on there, so that is what happens
when you put Sonic on there. No Multiple sources from Mobile gamer dot biz
express concerns about the future of Apple Arcade, citing a decline in developer payouts
and a shift towards family friendly IP. Apple Arcade is facing criticism due to
several developers saying the payouts have grown smaller and smaller over the last several years,
to the point where it's like no one's really even counting on that anymore,
and it doesn't seem like Apple Arcade and Apple are going to developers.
The way they used to and green lighting projects. That's just that's kind of
over. Apple Arcade has already been. Apple already rebooted Apple Arcade once.
It sounds like there's a possibility that they might try to do that again.
But at the same time, it's like Apple just never takes game seriously,
and so why are they surprised that this is the result. Whenever they take
something seriously, everyone's like, oh, well, then we better take it
seriously. And then whenever it comes to gaming, everyone so we know you
don't really mean this, like you've never cared about games. So I think
most people are just happy to ignore them. And for me, like Apple
Arcade, it's definitely something I've eyed a couple of times. There's that teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles game that's basically haitis. It's good, yeah, and I've
heard great things about it. Well, I can't wait to play that.
But at the same time, like I know it's going to come to Switch,
it's going to come to PC in like a year, I'll just wait
for that. So that's what I've been doing. And I think that at
a certain point they're like, this is an uphill battle and we're going to
look for other ways to get some success here. A lot of the people
who don't like playing games on phones, like like a me, just aren't
going to do this anyways. And a lot of people do like playing games
on phones just probably already have like their games on the phone anyways, or
they don't think they need to pay for a subscription, right And if people
have an Apple rcie subscription, and then like a lot of people, it's
like I got to get rid of at least a few these subscriptions. I
think Apple Ark is one of the first ones to go for a lot of
people. Yeah, yeah, agreed. Uh. And like the other aspect
is like, if you're looking to play, like, I don't know,
a Triple A style game, you have found ways to do remote play on
your phone already, and you're not going to your phone specifically for any of
those titles. Yeah, Like I really am interested in that Hello Kitty Animal
Crossing, Like it's good God adventure. Yes, And I'm yes exactly,
And I keep like getting emails about it. I'm like, oh, yeah,
I should go check that out. And then I like stop myself.
I'm like, even if I were to like get a device to play that
one. If it was like on my TV, that'd be a little bit
of asshole. So maybe I'll get an iPad or an iPhone to play it
on. I'm like, I just don't like the idea of sitting on one
of those devices just eating up battery playing those games when I could just wait
for it to come to a dedicated gaming device where I don't ever have those
feelings. So I expect it to come to switch eventually and I'll play it
then. And that's kind of where I'm gonna keep sitting with that. Apple
Arcade is the kind of thing where it's like, it's almost surprising that they
don't just stumble into success with that because I think they give away a trial
with every Apple device that people buy. It's like at a certain point most
people just like kind of let those trials go into them then paying a monthly
fee. But it's like, I think a lot of people aren't even activating
the trials, so it's it's weird. I think a lot of the stumblings
or parts of Apple ArKade that are unappealing is a lot of those games are
not specifically made for the iPhone. It's just like an experience that you can
get or will eventually get. Like you said, Greb on the Switch on
PC, what was the like what the Golf I feel like was very good
and that was like the go to recommendation for Apple Arcade initially when when that
came out. It was fucking fantastic that in that puzzle game that later shut
up in other places. Yeah, a lot of blocks. I can't remember
the name, but hey also has a Fantasy Asian Jeff, Yeah, Fantasy
Asians. Yeah, Brianstone, thank you, Fran Do you see they're doing
that? Developers doing another what the is called what the Car? Now?
Yeah? I saw that. I'm just like, oh, yeah, should
check car. Yeah, that's the best place to play mobile games. Of
course, I'm a bad person. I'm gonna wrap up the news by handing
the show back over to Jam and think about Oh wait, no, real
quick. Xbox Era. They did an Xbox book that I contributed to.
They're doing a second run. Uh the kickstarter for it. I'll tweet this
in a little bit, but they did. They spent so much money on
shipping the first one that the book is like not even like made a ton
of money for them. So this second run is like really their their opportunity
to make some of that money back. And it's a good book. It's
like really pretty and I'm in it, so you should buy it. So
I'll put a link out there for it. There you go. There you
go buy books, ever, and go buy a book. I I just
had a thirty two X book come in the mill. Oh, would like
to check that out something I think about a lot too, and I never
really had one. Uh And we will go read some emails after this break.
Before we get to emails, I need to see this book. I'm
a pro. I'm pro books. Yeah, there we go. Look at
this The Complete Sega thirty two X Guide by uh Sean Along aka RGT eighty
five. It's nice. It's got like a little bit on I think just
about every thirty two X game, or at least a lot of them.
I just got this in haven't looked at it yet. I'm gonna get that.
That looks great. Very excited though. Thirty two X is a fun
little curiosity. I love the way the cover looks like a thirty two X
box. This is on Amazon again, the Complete Sega thirty two X Guide.
I want. I need to write a book. I was I was
going to say, I want to fleece people. Sure we know that you're
you're like, you're flim flam man. The way to do it. I
didn't write a book with my brothers. We wrote a nineties Disney book and
there was like a guy on the line to publish it, and then he
just disappeared. So we had this book written mysteriously it's written. Why you
do that thing where it's like people going, yeah, pubbing like on demand
they can like, uh, yeah, you already did the book. Is
it just a text? What's that? Is it just a text or have
you guys already like laid it out and everything. It's been like laid out
and everything. So okay, get that pdf up on there and yeah,
Amazon can do it. By it. Mike, there's what you do and
stuff. Again, you go to bond Yellow, get him to write a
forward for you. Yeah, you're right, Yeah, I would tell my
brothers, I'll figure that out. About about the time when I this all
happened was also when everything started kind of popping off for me with the with
the videos. Hold Mike, you know, yeah, I'm just sorry.
It's this massive weight of success is just keeping me from Disney Book Publishing Dreams.
I'm gonna get on that. God is Mike Manatti the Drake of Giant
Bomb? Yes? Is that Josh and Drake? Is that what that is?
Oh? No, you mean the way more famous Drake. Oh I'm
sick. That's not a joke. You were serious. It's not a joke.
Oh God, I was like, well I did. Was was Drake
the one that had like crazy get rich quick schemes or something? I don't
know. That's Josh how also how he puts them out of order? It's
Drake and Josh. I've never heard anyone say Josh and Drake. It's not
Josh and Drake. It's like someone saying Kellen keenan. Yeah, that's I
don't actually seen Drake and Josh, not Josh and Drake and Josh. I
never really watched. It's what I thought of the first mouth to say that,
buy your book? Why don't you set up a pre order? Get
that going? Also buy my book? That it'll it'll be stupid anyway.
Anyway, speaking about stupid, let's get to something incredibly not stupid. And
those are your emails emails. Yeah, Drake wasn't Oppenheimer right, he was
the button pusher. That's no, that was Josh Peck. I can't keep
him straight. Wow, he's sound like a stupid asshole. I think actually
a fantation. Yeah, uh, there's nothing about white people in that movie.
BombCast at giant bomb dot com is the email address to send your emails
too, and I love and appreciate and read all of them, no matter
what they're about. I'm slightly freaked out about whatever the fuck is going on
with the video right now, but I'm gonna choose to disregard that and trust
in your emails. First email comes from Eli from Austin. Eli writes in
and says, like most nerds my age, I was obsessed with Final Fantasy
seven growing up. My friends and I would talk about it endlessly. TIFO
was maybe my first crush. Seproth was the coolest motherfucker around. I loved
everything about that game. But I don't think I've ever finished any other Final
Fantasy game. I think I played maybe twenty hours of fifteen and then stopped
playing it, and I never even touched the older Pixel Final fantasies. I
just feel complete apathy for the rest of the series. You'll have any serieses
that you don't really care about, but there's that one game in the series
that you adore for some reason or another. Also, Jeff is an insane
person for not watching movies in a single sitting. Eli, I'll get some
real problems, motherfucker. Eli Ormustin, sent from my MacBook while at work.
I don't watch movies in a single sitting, but not because I don't
want to. I wish I was, but like, life just gets in
the way these things. Yeah, I like these are the words of someone
who has nothing important going on. Dutch movies they're not very good anyways.
Like it's just like, oh Man is a very Dan reichert ass take is
all I'm gonna say. It's like, what else could you possibly be doing
besides drinking beer and Edie McDonald Yeah, put my kids to bed, Yeah,
dealing with life. I for me a long time. The answer to
this question probably would have been a hit Man, because I only cared about
Hitman twenty sixteen, and now this one. It's like, well, then
Hitman two came out, Hitman three came out, and I'm like, I
was planning to go back to Blood Money. I probably will play the rest
of them, not all of them, and care about them. But Hitman's
like the closest answer to me for this, I don't have anywhere. It's
I only played the one and never touched another one. Uh, first off,
you should put some more found fantasies. They're pretty neat. But you
know, I played Silent Hill two and did and did really like it and
then never had desire to like play any other One's. Part of the problem
is that almost everyone says, no, I'm not anymore. I'm not,
I'm not I'm not a big boy. Now, I'm in my my brave
phase. I'm not afraid anymore, but brave. Yeah, this is my
brave character arc. The part of the problem is that when there's a franchise,
maybe that happened with seven for him, a bit where everyone talks about
one the most, like being the best one definitely happens a Silento two,
and obviously people like other Salon Hills. But I was kind of like,
well, I played the best one. I don't really know why I need
to go and play all these other ones, or at least it's not a
priority kind of answering this question, But I I'm sorry Mike Manatti, I'm
sorry to have to say this in front of you. Oh exactly, I've
never quite cared for normal Mega Man one through eight or whatever they're at now,
or the X games those whatever. That's I think that's totally fair.
But as we know, I love the Battle Network game and I also like
the Mega Man zero games. Yeah, those are good. Those are hard
too, Those are some of the hardest ones, but they have a bit
more character stuff in it, whereas like X has a little bit the normal
games have like none, They're more anime, I guess as well. Yes,
yes, Zero is definitely much more anime. X is decent anime also,
but a different flavor. But yeah, maybe that's why I like normal,
Megan man It's it's like, flavor of anime is Saturday Morning cartoon anime,
and I'm like, yeah, this is cozy. I like that,
just fine. I only played Fallout three. That's interesting Vegas. Every other
Fallout I guess. I touched Vegas New Vegas a little bit more than I
touched four, and then I don't even I'm sure there's other Fallout games,
but I fall three was dope. Fall Out three is good. I loved
it. I played it to completion and really dug it. And then I
was like, oh, I think I'm good on that. Just kept living
my life. I should play New Vegas. Yeah, I also play New
Vegas. Yeah. New Vegas is fun. That's good. Like one of
the most Jeff Grab games I've never played a lot. Then you agree with
me about Fallout four being mid after you play New Vegas, we'll see.
That's what's important, is that you like something else less. That's what will
make me happy. Yes, what's important is I fixed my opinions to align
with Mike Manatti. Yeah, I guess. I guess I'm like that with
Pickman four. Now, I guess I'm like this. I think a lot
of people are like it with boulterers Gate now where boorters Gate three? Yeah,
I've heard that a bunch. Now. Yeah, I almost barely even
think of boaters Gate three as the third game in a series. In a
lot of ways, kind of just this this thing that happened. I did
play a lot of Border's Gate Dark Alliance. That was a lot of Yeah,
buddy, yeah, song tavern that the tavern keeper or over there,
oh mama ouga yeah, respectfully, respectfully, respectfully. Next email comes from
Jared in Iowa. Hey, crew, I've been playing a ton of Blattro
since it dropped on Tuesday, and after seeing Jan post a picture of his
Bolottro fit, he got me thinking, what would your Bolatro joker cart ability
be? Mine would be to give plus four multi for every time a blind
a skipt as I'm all about doing as little work as possible while making myself
just useful enough that you don't want to get rid of me. Cheers Jared
and Iowa. I think I should get like plus three multi for just not
playing a flush because it's very difficult for me to do anything excide from flush
builds. I would be like you get a bonus for like a random set
of cards and it changes every round because I can't remember what they were last
time because of bad memory. Uh So it would be like ive seven,
ace and two and it would just be completely random each time. Mine would
be your multiplier goes up the more money you spend. Yeah, I'm probably
in line with that. Jan. I'm always at zero dollars at the end
of every fucking turn. You know some At first, I was like,
I don't want these juggers that just give me money. I need multipliers multipliers.
Having money can help though, really, Yeah, I started using the
deck that gives you money interest. That's last one I won with and give
me even just having ten dollars extra the beginning, that can really help you
get rolling the interest. That's the yellow deck, the interesting Yeah, I
think that's I think it was a yellow deck. The green deck is the
one you're thinking of. Back green deck you raised? Yeah, right,
mind you you just start with ten dollars from the beginning. Yeah, I
hope they they will or it's just one person, right, I hope this
person will, Like I'm sure there's a plan to just add more stuff in
like new like right, like of course joke. Yeah, yeah, you
know it's gotta be poker, so like we can add go Phish cards so
that would be fun. Yeah, they did this with Uno. If I
was the Uno people, if I was mister Uno, I would be on
the phone right now. Please, mister you know is my father? Call
me? Darryl trying to think of oh Dar Daryl. Next email is about
the Three DS and comes from David from Roanoke, Virginia. Hello, Bombinos.
I was helping my sister move out of my parents house and I found
my year one three DS that I let her borrow almost ten years ago.
The only games I have on it are Mario Kart seven, the fourth Smash
Bros. Game, and some other weird games like Projects Project x Z one
and Code of Princess. Since the three DS store is down, my options
are to buy physical me What are some games that are worth the cost?
Parentheses just emulated on my PC? What's the point of keeping this three DS?
Love what you do? Wish I could do it? David from Roanoke,
Virginia. Hack it hack that three DS dot Guide three DS dot Guide
even I hacked a three DS. It's very easy and you'll just get all
the games. And three DS games are going to be so much more satisfying
on your three DST with the three D slider than doing some emulator on your
views computer. And let's let's let's be clear. It's so easy. Especially
once you have it set up, you're like, well, now I got
to go track down the games. No, you don't. There's a thing
called the h shop that gets installed when you do the hack, and it's
just an e shop, but ilegal. It's great, it's awesome, and
you just you just go to the store, this filthy, dirty pirate store
and get all the games that way. It's not like Nintendo is sell them
to you if you want to buy them, So just go get the Age
shop, have that on your three DS, and then whenever you like,
someone talks about a game like I want to play that, oh, I'll
just turn on my three DS and go find it and download it and not
have to do any extra work. It's fantastic. So yeah, just make
that happen. I'm disappointed. I thought when you said h Shop, my
eyes lit up because I thought it was something else. Yeah, I mean,
listen, that's that's your steam though. Yeah, all right, right,
lots of good games on three ds. Link Between World's Legend of Zelda
game is probably the best one you can get on there. Firemon Awakening is
still my favorite fire embum. Both of the Kirby games, Triple Bucks and
Planet Those are really good. Tons of fun. Yeah. I actually talked
about Bravely Default Bravely Second earlier. If you like j RPGs, gosh,
yeah, just uh, tons and tons of good stuff that you get on
there. Later releases Warrior Wear Gold and Rhythm Heaven Mega Mix. Well,
this wasn't too late, but those were Those are actually really good. I
think that's the jors Mask and Cockernet Time three D are the best way to
play those N sixty for Zoda games. Still to this day, kid Icarus
Uprising is something of a cult hit now. The three D remix of like
older eight bit and sixteen Big games. Streets Age is really good, Outrun
is incredible. Excite Bikes actually pretty cool. I'm got a bad version of
Snake Eater even. Something that I noticed this morning after doing the Pokemon direct
talking to my partner, and my partner and I are about to celebrate our
eight year anniversary, so really it's two years because it's February twenty ninth Leap
Day. But you know, she's been around me for eight ish years now.
She knows what I do for a living, right, she she knows
what the video games are. I tell her what this is. She has
a Nintendo switch that I borrow because mine broke, and I was telling her
it's like, yeah, there's there's gonna be a new Pokemon game. You
might be into it later. It's like the one that you didn't like,
And she was like, oh, what are they putting it out on the
DS. I'm like, what wow, not even to change of stuff,
not even the three DS you go DS? Yeah, oh yeah that rules.
Oh that's incredible. That's like, is that like dance Dad? Who's
confused? Why they don't keep making games for the WEI? Yes? So
you guys like on the outs now, like what's different? Room? We
we just moved, you know, so we we gotta we gotta hang tough.
If you explained it like she would like yeah, of course, Like,
yeah, I was just wrong because like Dan's dad is like, no,
I'm pretty sure you're wrong, Dan, But we was very popular.
We're still making games for that. Oh how dare we compare anyone to dance
Dad? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. There is no comparison. I
I just looked at him, like, you you have a switch. It's
the last time you thought about a d S. When have we said the
word Nintendo DS in this household? I found I found a d S I
at my parents place a couple of years ago. Nice thing? Is she
thinking about the DS light or like the d S? Fat? Oh I
think about a light? That's what fat? Yeah, No one's thinking about
that. That was a really ugly piece machine. I think it was bad.
I hate I hated looking at it. Like today, I probably would
appreciate it more. Yeah, but it's not one that's like, oh it's
like keat sheet or key shy do you say that whatever? Where it's I
always like, yeah, kitchen, thank you. I have like an affinity
towards like no. I think I think still pretty ugly. Yeah, it's
like someone blew up a little lego piece, you know, like that little
corner piece is fucking what are we doing? And I do really want to
play a Link between Worlds again. It's been I haven't played since that first
time, and it is oh really, however, you crossed your arms as
you were saying that this is trusting. You gotta just protect yourself. The
forums are very like timidating, so this is my power stance. It was
I was playing Mario Maker this morning through some of those levels, and uh,
something really stupid happened. And then of course, like everyone's like,
Dance calling you right now, Dance trying to get in the call, and
I'm like I let him in and he just starts laughing. In the first
like two minutes, is him just laughing at me? So I gotta say,
like, you should really limit your time with that. It seems like
a mental health issue or like it is. Honestly, I feel better after
that than after the ten hours of Bollattro I played over the weekend where I
was wow, yeah, well it was just like again because like I'm like,
I am like putting off responsibilities to play boloatro and that always feels.
Well, you didn't agree with me, but I think there's something like about
feeling guilty about playing bilottro because it has casino aesthetics to it. No,
I know, I think you're onto something for sure, Yes, but I
just knew that it's like it goes beyond that for me where it's like no,
it was because I like didn't do the dishes. That's why I was
feeling bad. Yeah, but dishes are fine where they are in the scene
with you my very good point. Who can argue with that? Oh you're
gonna make your bet? Why I'm gonna go back in the bed And me
started getting this kick about making her bed. I'm like, we don't do
that in this house. I I his face, Huh, she's a huge
Jordan Peterson stand. Yeah, I don't know all of a sudden, like
in the last six months, making the bed has become like a thing in
my house and I don't I don't know what to do about it. Yeah,
it's weird. I never I never really saw the point, right because
you, like you said, we're gonna mess it up here again by the
end of the night. But I mean it does look nice when you walk
in the room, So I get is that what it is? It's just
for like that pop. Like, I get that a little bit. There
are so many other things I want to clean or like tidy up first then
exactly the bet. I guess it's easy. I don't know. My mom
would try to like make me feel bad like I had to make the bed
because you wouldn't. I was like, I didn't ask you to do that.
I can going on there, right, you know? Can I ask
you all gen something? Yeah? Of course it's a white people questions have
come to a god with your questions really good, let us let us unpack,
let us unpack our culture for you. Uh. Have y'all ever vacuumed
your mattress? I think I did you. I think you mentioned this recently
and then I did a little bit and it was. I was getting kind
of scared of how how much stuff was coming out one of those roller like
sticky things that you used to get like roller. Yeah, no, y'all,
y'all next time you change your sheets. No, no, no,
I don't want to know. Oh you need You'll be a better person after
this. No, No, what's gonna happen? Is it gonna like turn
black and you're gonna mattress just getting like sixty pounds of weight over? It's
like something inane used to like seep through and trickle down and sixty pounds.
I don't know what recimply priced. You can just get new ones. Yeah,
I don't. I've never heard of anyone vacuuming their naked mattress. That
just sounds yo, I mean it sounds logical. I'm just terrified of the
results. I think, how much would someone to pay you after you vacuum
the mattress to get a like a little like a teaspoon of it in your
mouth? Why would you do like how much? Like? Why is your
brain? I'm operating like much? What the fuck would you do it for
five hundred dollars? No? And also I don't I don't want to.
I don't want to see this through. I don't want to see this through.
It just seems so fucking demented. What are we doing? Don't don't
say no because you think a better offers coming. Seven hundred and fifty dollars
Jeff for a spoonful of your mattress dust. No that's not enough. Well,
you don't have to swallow. You've got to get a big mouthful of
the cool oh cool, thanks for your permission to spit, Mike Manati,
I would probably still say no, Sorry, Bud. Yeah, I have
a number in mind, and you're nowhere near it. So yeah, I
do you think I'm five figures? How much money? Twelve hundred dollars?
Jan, My partner is the cleanest person I've ever met, so yeah,
Oh dude, for twelve hundred dollars, Yeah, that is that is so
much sicker than me getting a mister slate tattip, Like it's not even on
the same radar. Like, dude, think about all the times in your
sleep you may have passed gas. Oh my god, you were just espally
just could be dead skin. Probably that you're putting in your mouth cool cool
particles, articles, particles that's getting lit I feel like bug ship particles,
probably pet dander. Yeah, just like stuff like sweat. Yeah, yeah,
I just again like sweat. This is this is just this is just
the thing I just cannot jagular with. All right. I just can't think
you're doing something wrong there, chief Uh too far? Okay, we talked
about Mariomaker. That next emails about Mario we'll pivot into whatever this is Hello,
Jeff and Jeff Adjason persons. Last Friday, Dan was watching a level
in Mario Maker that he made himself nine years ago. He then went,
wait, what the fuck is that? Why did I do that? That's
so stupid. My question is if that quote was instead said by God?
What did he see on earth to make him make such a comment. This
is such a good question. By the way, Jeff from Quebec like you're
I like you. I think this is a good question. I like you
love Yeah. He saw the film adaptation of Cats. Where are the buttholes?
Where's the butthole cut? I thought, I deliberately put buttholes on those
cats. It's got too far trying to guy buttholes. God saw a net
and was like, yeah, was that? What was that? We got
a movie so in that even he wouldn't be able to handle it. Yeah,
I think so, ad father son in the Holy Spirit. I need
to see this moment where Dan was upset. Again, I didn't remember any
of it ten years ago, this incredible amount of time, like here for
a normal percent to be difficult. Let alan Dan, who I had to
remind like twenty times the difference between Blaze the Cat and Amy Rose the Hedgehog
while he was playing Sonic six. Yeah, it wasn't gonna happen. So
so what was it like? Why was he up? Was he just like
there was a better way to do it? Or he just stupid? I
think he was very convoluted. The actual solution and path to beat the level
that Grub had spent maybe like an hour hour and a half going in a
specific direction. Yeah, that is not the actual solution. Oh that's just
needlessly that's the entire level. Yes, that's cool, exactly what Dan makes
a piece of ship. Okay, cool, cool, cool. So it's
all about finding the critical path, that's right. It's it's always trial and
error. I mean, come on, if you're designing levels through that,
I mean you're just my my favorite part of that upf which I suggest everyone
check out. Is when Patrick, Dan and I are checking the successful run
after Patrick had been playing that level for who knows how long eight hours they
said, maybe longer eight hours or so, and then one of us saying
I think it might have been me saying like, were you inspired by half
life to do this? And then Grubb just being flabbergasted and breaking down as
a person. What could you possibly mean? Like, I'm thinking about it.
I've been thinking about it, Jan, and I'm like, what,
how does that even translate to this game. I want to tell you,
I really do that. I'll figure it out. I want the moment of
figuring these things out. It's like Dan seeing a roar shack blob and being
like, there's only one thing to see there, and you should all see
the same thing I see, and now do my Marrio Maker level. Yeah.
Like you said trial and air, but with Dan, it's like trials
and tribulations in air, like he is a tribulation upon this earth. No,
I did say this great trouble, great great suffering. Okay, I
said this earlier in the chat when you were playing Mariomaker this morning, But
it is exactly like Assassin's creed. Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
Jeez, that's that's Dan's level. Design a baby. Now, I'm nown
like I started with one of the doable levels that they made on the Giant
Bomb streams with the chat, and even that's like, I mean, like
I'm figuring it out, but it's still pretty difficult. So my god,
one of these other levels where I have no idea and no where, don't
even really know where to begin, that's gonna be really rough. I'm gonna
have to detective it. I'm gonna have to like slowly, piece by piece,
figure out every single little thing. Are we going to get to go
backstage at like wrestling? Though? At least I coffee you said that what
we're gonna get? Are we gonna get to go backstage at wrestling? At
least like Patrick did? No, I don't. I mean, it sounds
like he's just gonna send Biggie out to kill me, So I don't know
the Yeah, you could be there why he kills me? Sure, man,
you could support him or me whoever you feel to support, to support
in the moment. All right, now, you're being funny. Next email
is from Paul. They write in about pinball. Oh High Bombers John wrote
in last week about how to learn to play pinball. I wanted to add
my own two cents and say that I invested in all the Pinball FX tables
as they went on sale, and I find that their recreations of real life
table are a good way to practice. Obviously, yeah, nothing comes close
to the real deal, but they have some instructions on how to play all
the games in an easy to follow, step by step manner. It helped
me go from merely flipping the flippers to targeting specific lanes and objectives. I
highly recommend it. Plus, the tables are cheap ball. Yeah, for
classic games, that's not a bad idea at all. You know, you're
just not gonna get anything in like the last ten years or so. If
you want to play modern ones, my uh my bar that has pinball machines
that got an Indiana Jones machine in it was like with the first four movies.
It was pretty fun though. The multi ball was neat because it literally
tipped over an actual arc of the Covenant and like all the pinballs dropped from
it. That was a lot of fun. That one's pretty old too,
yeah, but probably was like when Can of Crystal Skull was relatively knewish.
I'm guessing yeah, you did that, so yeah, yeah, right,
now that's good. That's a good game. Good game. Yeah. But
I also have a Monster's Pinball Machine. I just think it's funny that there's
a Monster's Pinball machine. That's the one with the underplayfield too, right,
there's like a see through part, right, Yeah, yeah, I don't
think. I don't think people are really too hot on that game, but
I enjoyed the times i've i've played it. I just like the Monsters,
you know, Eddie Sure, Eddie Munster, Yeah, you've got that laugh.
That's the guy. I think I was always too much of an Adam's
Family loyalist. I think I take the Munsters over the Adams Family any day.
I got to be honest, I'm sorry that the worst. Sorry,
Like it's a bad take, but it's also a very Mike Manatti like is
it where you're coming from? Like, yeah, like, what could you
possibly be basing that on? It's the It's to Adams Family movies in the
nineties are treasures, and I realized they're not the same. It's like to
be the Monsters are the origin of Dragula. So if it's based on them,
then I'm all aboard. So that's what regular is a huge? Is
that what's happening? Not really there's a so yeah, so like make your
case, you fool. I think that there's more heartwarming moments in the Monsters.
I think he likes cozy thing. Yeah, I think that. I'm
Family is a little one note, like, I get it like old sitcoms,
and I think Munsters is more like an actual old sitcom. So if
so, you're you're you're talking just about like the old black and white sickens.
Yeah, I'm not. Yeah that's what I'm thinking. I mean,
look in the movies. Yeah, that's fine too, But I don't know.
I just Eddie Munster is nice and he's always giving heartwarming speeches. Like
there's that clip, there's that viral clip where the daughter or something was like
people were mean and Eddie Munster explains why racism is bad or something. I'm
like, that's nice, Eddie bun. Now you're saying that we like that
Adams family we like racism. Well cool, Look I'm not saying it,
but family monster, who's Eddie monster kid? Right? I just like I'm
perfectly ok with with like, uh, you know, giving you the old
sixties sitcoms. Yeah, we're talking about the sitcoms. I think I probably
would have more fun watching the Monsters. Yeah, like sure, but like
anyone, uh you know, they made that like relevant and walking around in
twenty twenty four is not like Musters movie like last year that's supposed to be
terrible, right right? Was it? Was it like animated on purpose?
No, it's it's live action and it's supposed to be awful. Uh,
I kind of maybe need to see it. Ed Michael R. O'Leary says,
it's garishly live action and I definitely need to see that. Okay,
cool? Yeah, Hey Jeff, what's going on with Ridge Racer? Do
you uncover anything about the future of that series? No, it's too busy
watching old episodes of Monsters. That's okay. Yeah, you get all y'all
The Monsters movies on Netflix easy to find. Sure, I'll TV and see
what happens. My kids are unless Christopher Lloyd is playing Fast in it,
I don't give a ship. Why would you exactly The Monsters exactly exactly.
Adam Family movies are so good, they're so good. They are true phenomenal.
Even the second one, which has no right to be good, was
excellent. Y'all. I need to get this off my chest because I don't
know where else I'm gonna get the chance to say at this le and I
know that I like most of everything, or try to find them your consumer
jam, we know c J. You know consumer yo, the Live Action
Avatar, Last Airbender. It's not as bad as ever the Internet, y'all.
Everything needs a defender. This is one I'll defend because y'all need the
fucking get over your fucking life in assuming that a television show is going to
fix you, all right, I like that. I do like that take.
I like that, Okay, cooking Earth Go Earth, Bend and fucking
touch some grass. People fucking saying that the m Night's Shamalan movie is better
than this are fucking broken inside in more ways than anything is ever Any piece
of media is gonna fix you, dog. I did uh, I did
get We did a mount rushmore JRPGs, and it was like one of the
first times where I got kind of frustrated with the fandom getting like coming back
at us about that one, because they're like every single one. I'm like,
these aren't the best JRPGs. And no matter how many times they explain
that it's not necessarily the criteria, they just couldn't get their mind around them,
Like how do you not know what Mount Rushmore is? And it's like
no, They're just all they consume is anime. They don't think about anything
else. You guys need to just like expread your wings a little bit,
Please go touch some grass Earth threat And here's the thing, y'all. Like,
I admit, there's some creative liberties that I don't fucking agree with.
I don't like all of the casting costumes are okay, cgi could be better,
absolutely atrocious, But the parts that they did nail in the casting fucking
nailed all right. And also yo yo yo, yo yo, come close,
babies, come close. This is the first time, I one of
the first times I've gone to watch anything that's primarily Asian. So I'm gonna
ask that the Council of Whites just let this keep happening, let this one
slide, and let's get a season two. Have a blessing, yeah on
behalf of all. Also, also, the fucking cartoon is still going to
fucking be there. Yeah, got it raised. The only last Airbender media
I ever consumed was the m Night Shamalan movie. I don't have an opinion
in this. I don't have a say that movie is a stain on humanity.
Wait? Can I start watching that show with the girls? They are
five and seven the cartoon? Yeah, they could watch it now, Okay,
yeah, you think they would appreciate you? They would they would like
it or would it be they would one hundred percent like it, And I
think it'd be something that they'd want they eventually revisit and be like, oh
wow, this is about that. Dan wants me to show them twenty four.
Ada's already in the room half the time when I was watching twenty four.
So, I mean, anyone can watch four. It's the most sacred
bullshit ever, Like you can just it's it's easy sacra Is that really what?
I just think it well, not sacerate, it's just like it's so
low steaks and uh like I thought that like there's nukes involved. Yeah that's
for Jeff Bacalo. No, it's it's just it's so unseerious that you can't
believe anything that's happening in that fuck. That's fair catastrophe of a television program.
Speaking of white people, News John Waters. Do you guys know who
John Waters is? Yeah, of course, the number one white the first
white person. Uh. He's making u his first movie in twenty years with
Aubrey Plaza. WHOA, Okay, that's fantastic. Are they gonna kill a
chicken in this one? Are they gonna eat dog shit at the end of
this one too? Is phenomenal news for anyone who likes freaky deeky of the
cinema. Oh, John Waters, you can have it. Make Audi Plaza
have a spoonful of the vacuum dust from a mattress at the end of the
movie. All right, I was gonna read another email, but after thinking
of a spoonful of my bed, I can't reading. We got a bunch
of stuff popping off, as always on Johnny bomb dot com. Games Mornings
for the rest of the week, Red Grub. Yeah, Gamess Mornings for
the rest of the week. That's right. Uh, I'm gonna have one
tomorrow morning, and it'll be good and fun and informative. Even I'm gonna
make this one informative. There we go, There we go. Uh,
perhaps maybe the finale of Blake Clubs. Oh god, that's tomorrow. Mortal
Kombat metrologies like McCamy. I misspoke earlier. I said the number one white.
The number one white is on g of course. God, Jeff,
what do you think do you think? I you think I just go back
to that last level? You think I tried to get while if I were
you, I would butt my head against the safe file I have. And
I think because of that, you're probably better off going back to Bridge and
just being responsible. Young man. Going back to Bridge is so miserable.
I know. Well, okay, here's my here's my real advice. Go
back to Bridge. You at the beginning of the stream. If it goes
bad, give up right away. But there's a chance that you're gonna have
that thing where I took a break. I came back and now this is
easy for some reason, so I didn't realize you were You got yourself into
a bad spot there. Yeah, because like your safe out keeps so many
lives and continues in IIMs you have, so my safe all right now is
no lives and no continue So like I get one shot at the last level
with no checkpoints, and you know, the last level was very difficult,
So it's frustrating. But that last that level four, it also very frustrating.
It just getting asked it once was kind of a challenge, so going
doing that again just seems miserable. It makes it feel like I didn't actually
make any progress even though I did so, I don't know, we'll see
I wish, I wish you nothing about the best mic. I could be
done with this game tomorrow if I can beat it. That's I just really
want to get a tan record chat. I just yeah, you know what
I'm gonna Dan's up next, right, he's gonna do this. Can I
find the costume and send him the game back of our Yeah? I I
need to, I can, I can? Is there something I can do
to like make it worse for him? Like I feel like I haven't pushed
my put my thumb on the scales at all here. Well we could think
of something. Man, we can always like calling Alex too if we need
to, like get some recommendations. I just want to, you know,
I sometimes you just got to see someone sweat a little more, you know,
he's not Yeah, oh he's played one game. Me and I could
both play three. Like he gets away with too much shit. He gets
away with a lot. Maybe you should have to write a review when he's
done about SUPERMANSI should be to its metacritic. Well, I'm not a psycho,
Mike Patrick write a book. Yeah, we gotta. Let's everyone have
a think on this U as long as it involves him playing. Yeah,
Superman sixty four, I'm not changing that. Yeah, let's let's figure it
out together. I have a couple ideas in my back Pocke great love it.
Some of them are more physical than uh you think. We also got
an episode of Voicemail dumb Truck this week and no BCR this week because we're
just going to do a fat upf Yeah. We played Final Fantasy for quite
some time, for quite some time. I believe Tam and uh Lucy are
gonna be hopping in and co piloting with Grub Final Tam Lucy, let's regrub.
Yeah, there is there we go, and I'm probably gonna play some
Mars on Thursday. You know, I'm gonna try to just beat it.
Yeah you probably can't. You can do it. There's a lot of people
watching who might even be there, who know what to do next to is
perfect, And that's fine. I'm not worried about spoilers, and that gemes
very good about Like, yeah, maybe some things are frustrating, but every
single screen is like a checkpoint. There's infinite lies, and there's checkpoints even
within those screens. So death is not too much of a setback. There
we go, not much setback. Death is not a setback. You can't
trust the sorcerer sometimes. You can't trust the sorcerer sometimes, and you can
trust me that this podcast has come to a close. We will see you
next week for another episode of the Giant BombCast. It'll be eight thirty next
week. Holy smokes love a good number. And I love you for listening.
I appreciate you for listening. So does Jeff. So does Jeff,
so does Earl. And we'll see you next week for another episode. Oh
the Giant Bombcab. It's gonna be March next episode. Shut up down the
month of Jeff. We should do a March madness. I don't know of
what of brain disease alride