Game Scoop! : Donkey Kong Bananza: Killer App or Filler Snack?

0:06This week on GameScoop, we're discussing Mitchell Saltzman's glowing preview of Donkey Kong's big Switch 2 debut, and we reveal just who the heck is actually making that game. We'll also chat about Death Stranding 2 and all the games and summer fun we've been having. Right here on GameScoop.

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3:04Welcome to Game Scoop. I'm your host Samuel Claiborne and I'm joined this week by Justin davis scoop nick limone i'm back baby and a rare but welcome appearance from mitchell saltzman what's up mitch hey what's up uh rare and unusual sighting of mitchell saltzman but you're gonna be sighted around the network i think this week because you got to do something special we'll talk about that in a second we've got a great show for you today despite our regular host being away uh damon's on vacation he'll be back next week but in his absence we're going to be discussing death straining too uh nick i believe is beat it mitchell you didn't beat that yeah right no not even close yeah i i'm i'm maybe not i'm maybe close i'm not sure i'll have to figure that out without spoiling it i will also be discussing discussing last week's capcom live stream which showed some games and showed a lot of other stuff too uh and then uh uh we have a but first though as already alluded to but first today we'll be talking to mitchell about the donkey kong bonanza preview um that he uh got to play hands-on uh time with donkey kong a couple different saves i just watched the video read the uh preview i'm excited to jump into it shall we let's uh you called it maybe the switch to killer app it's out on july 17th uh tell us why you think this could be the reason why we all need to own a switch uh you know i think it's just everyone who has a switch to right now i think it's really waiting for that you know big single player nintendo kind of experience uh you know mario kart is is awesome it's also very known quantity it's it's more mario kart uh logan would hate to hear me say that but it really is it's more mario kart um and yeah like just you know people want that that nintendo kind of mascot platformer at the beginning of of a console's life cycle i think donkey kong bonanza is absolutely that This is developed by the Mario Odyssey team.

5:00Sorry to spoil that little thing that we were teasing before. I brought a little history of that team that we can go over. So there's still more to talk about there. Cool. And yeah, it really has the fingerprints and the DNA of the Odyssey game. I was going to say games. Of Odyssey all over it. I wish it was Odyssey games. Yeah, right. The way text boxes will come up. and it will show a picture of the character that they're talking about right after they mention the character. Just the movement, the focus on movement abilities. Everything feels very Odyssey-esque. The existence of Pauline. The existence of Pauline, for sure.

5:45The return of Pauline, right? Did you get motion sick while playing this game? No. I mean, I've seen people talk about that. uh i i am not a person who typically gets motion sickness so nothing about this game really made me think i would never have thought that that was an issue uh just by playing this myself do you think that's because it's like higher frame rate and you spin the camera a lot is that basically it like that's kind of the ingredients that make some people i spend the i spend the camera a lot in like pretty much every game i play that's not a first person shooter right so you kind of love the camera spinning games like devil may cry on forward right yeah for sure i kind of wonder if it has to do with the fov when you go and bury into like the side of a cave because it seems to get much narrower because you lose a lot of your screen space when it's covered by you know mountains so i'm wondering if that's it but as someone who is a little bit sensitive to some uh fps games that don't have adjustable fov sliders i did not get motion sick playing this game at least in the Nintendo Switch 2 preview event where they demoed the first level.

6:52Right. So Nick has also played the game. You've gotten to do a little bit of the, you said for the first level, but then Mitchell, you got to play other save files basically. Is that how it worked? Yeah. So I got to, I don't know what Nick's demo entailed. I imagine it was probably the Lagoon Lair. Yes. It was what we're seeing right now on the B-roll. So the demo stops right after you enter this lagoon that opens up. Okay. So I played a little more than that because I got to play two sublayers of the lagoon layer. And then I got to play a kind of mining town. After that, that was a lot of mine cart rides and a lot of mountains and everything getting from mountain to mountain.

7:36and then I got to play pretty classic looking like jungle style level with like a poison purple swamp and uh you said that's back from somewhere where is that back from odyssey I remember I feel like it's just a general nintendo thing like there's just a lot of you're right about it whenever there's there's uh jungles you know mario has a lot of jungle levels with purple poison waters yeah that's a good point I'm so glad that it looks like this is shaping up nicely Like, obviously, it's not a final review that will come when the game comes out, but it's risky, right? Like, this isn't a sure thing in the way that, like, Mario games and Zelda games are pretty much the closest thing we have to a sure thing in video games these days.

8:17And like, you know, this this era of Nintendo allowing sort of player self-expression in in Mario Breath of the Wild and Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. And now the Mario team's getting in on the act with the new Donkey Kong game. I love it. Like, you know, Nintendo sees games like Minecraft being the biggest thing on Earth. And instead of doing what a lesser developer would do and just say, OK, well, you know, I guess we're going to make, you know, a mining and crafting game. they put such a unique spin on it and just the confidence and faith that they have in both their players and their level design of like we're gonna let you wreck up the whole thing we're gonna let you build things and just do whatever you want solve the puzzle however you want and it's just gonna work and it's all gonna be fun and um it makes me so excited to see that these previews are so positive so far and Mitchell you said something important earlier which is just player movement and the options for how donkey kong gets around the world like they looked really fun in the donkey kong direct but like look that's no substitute for getting a chance to go hands-on with it yourself right like so the fact that uh you know i trust your judgment and that it sounds like that that's an enjoyable part of the game gets me even more hyped yeah and i think you know an important part of any good platformer is to have like very basic movement and have levels that are kind of designed around just doing the thing that the game wants you to do.

9:43Going from point A to point B, you can find your own way to it. But I think good platformers have ways to make it so that you can get to point B either faster or you can take some sort of shortcut. There's all kinds of different options to get to point B. And with this game, obviously, it's taken to a whole other level because you can go through the level. You can take all different directions. You can do stuff like roll jumps or you can roll off the edge and do a jump while you're off the edge to get a little more distance. You can rip something out of the ground and slide on it. And while that is faster, it's also a little more risky because you don't have quite as much control.

10:26You can't really stop on a dime. So stuff like that is what I personally look for in a platformer. And I think Donkey Kong Bonanza has it in spades. yes one thing that uh stood that stood out to me when i played the game mitchell is that within first the first 10 seconds of like actually sitting hands-on with the controller one i immediately understood what every single face button did because it's like so intuitive but what stood out to me is that the game just felt amazing the second i touched it what i want to know is does that feeling persist as more and more mechanics get introduced because one thing that was included in my demo was the transformation stuff or any like environmental shifts to the gameplay mechanics because the direct is the thing that revealed all those transformations that you get and that skill tree that comes with those transformations did you get to play around with any of that stuff so i only got to check out two of the transformations i got to check out the kong uh bonanza and the ostrich bonanza kong uh i say it in the i make a cheeky little joke in the written about him just being bigger, faster, and stronger too.

11:37Which is a reference to the DK rap. Thank you for explaining the reference, Sam. Yes. But, you know, he's able to plow through stronger materials. It's all really satisfying. You can see it right there if you're watching the B-roll. What would normally take like a couple hits to break through, like the Kong Bonanza, you can just smash through it like with ease. and the ostrich one is more kind of like a I would almost liken it to one of the Odyssey transformations where it's it seems very level specific so like if you need to you know make a a jump across a gap that you wouldn't normally be able to you know jump to you can instead transform to the ostrich and kind of just flutter over to it so I didn't really I didn't really experience a lot of the very you know unique things that you can do with the ostrich other than just gliding over to different places i'm sure there are going to be some is it level specific or can you now that you're the ostrich you can go back to old levels and fly through it is not level specific so i believe once you get a transformation you can just transform that's a pretty big deal if you just have like a free flying even temporary character right yeah it it's kind of like cool to have you know you can switch but you can switch whichever one you want in any kind of moment.

12:55It's almost like having extra tools on your tool belt. If a boss would be better suited for you to turn into the giant Donkey Kong, you could just do the Kong Bonanza versus if you need to get over some sort of hazard, then you switch to the Ostrich Bonanza. How fast is that special meter charging? Is this a transformation that's happening constantly or do I want to save this for a very critical moment so it depends on how much gold is around you so if you if you notice whenever you collect little pieces of gold you're charging that little meter in the bottom left um so if they're you know if you're in a boss fight i think typically you can like dig underground and like you know hit a bunch of gold that's underground you can get charged up pretty quickly um but if you're in an area that's you know not doesn't have a lot of that collectible then you might want to save it a little more.

13:52I'm like, I'm appreciating the more, you know, and again, I watched the direct, I've been following this game since it was announced, but like, as we're watching this footage here and talking about it, like sort of how combat oriented it can be and just, you know, the mix of play styles of your platforming around and grappling and jumping up on things and doing very sort of traditional 3d platformer activities. But like Mario doesn't have much in the way of like punching and kicking and grabbing an enemy and throwing it into another enemy. And like it just the level of juice that this game seems to have with, you know, kind of that feeling of impact when when you are making contact with an enemy and you're kind of comboing things together.

14:32It feels like it's really, really spot on. It's giving me vibes of almost something like a beautiful Joe of like, it's not just a platformer. It doesn't seem like, but it is seem to put an emphasis on, you know, obviously destructing things, but like punching, kicking, like other verbs in the game besides just like jumping and climbing on things. Yeah. And throwing your hat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's that's a really, you know, astute observation. I think that that's probably the reason why I gelled with it so much. Like, I think a dirty, dirty little secret about me is that while I liked Odyssey a lot, it was not one of my favorite, you know, Mario games.

15:09I still prefer, you know, the galaxies. Get, get, get. It's too late. All right. You know what? I know what I'm not welcome. No, no, no, no. That's cool. I mean, obviously, you're entitled to your opinion. But, you know, I just, I love the kind of design of the kingdoms of Odyssey. I just, I don't know. I didn't like tripping over a rock and landing on a moon. Like, that was how common they felt in the game. Right. It wasn't special. yeah it wasn't it wasn't as special special to get like the main collectible in the game there's a little bit of that in bonanza but i think what makes me kind of you know not even think about it is just how fun it is to move around how fun it is to you know engage in combat with these enemies there's a bunch of like combat challenge encounters that you can you can find and you know again going back to that whole thing of like you know you can just do it the the way that the game expects you and then that's fine but i like to figure out ways to be like as efficient as i can in doing it so i'll like i'll pull out a rock slide on it and try to do it like with still with like 13 seconds left and to me that's how i find you know how i squeeze some more fun out of what is otherwise a fairly basic combat encounter um but yeah so you can do all that stuff in in this game and i love it for it they kind of remind me of the p switches in mario kart world if i may make that kind of comparison where the game is like all right here's time for a time challenge you have to do x objective figure it out and then you just kind of like like you said you achieve the objective as fast as humanly possible but it's in how you achieve it is what i think plays to the game strengths if odyssey was all about you can get wherever you want if you are good enough at the game to figure out the platforming techniques i think this has that same sort of mechanic and kind of design thesis centered around its combat where it is more improvisational you can just kind of go with the flow it's almost like la where you're just kind of vibing with whatever's happening and then you're improvising whether that be sliding on a rock picking up another rock throwing an enemy into another picking up dynamite rocks or whatever they're called and doing all that stuff like it just seems like it's more centered around expression via combat which i I think is a really interesting thing to do.

17:32100%. And, you know, it's also just a cool callback to how the old Donkey Kong games were. Like, you know, all the hidden bonus rooms that you just go into a room, there's not really any direction you get other than, like, find the coin and you're just kind of expected to figure it out. Yeah, exactly. There's all kinds of stuff like that in this game. There's even, like, straight-up bonus rooms that have that music playing. well what are the the mine cart and 2d levels are those like work pipes you go into and suddenly the game is 2d i guess i saw one of the mine cart areas just connected you but some of them look like like actual challenges yeah so there's like these kind of challenge podiums they're different colors gold is like a bonus room uh black i think is either a combat challenge or a platforming challenge but in any case there's there's all kinds of different little podiums that you can you know smash and then you fall down into a little bonus area and it's either a combat challenge a bonus room or some sort of platforming challenge challenge that rewards you with a banana so you can envision those getting really hard right yeah i could that could be where the challenge becomes and we you touched on something interesting here this is a little bit inside baseball but like you know docking on country was made by rare it wasn't made by japan right it was made by this you know european western company and there's been rumors forever like Like, we'll never get an on-the-record comment.

18:52But there's been rumors that, you know, Japan and Nintendo never really liked the direction that Rare took Donkey Kong, right? Like, you know, like, they redesigned them. You don't really see the Kremlings or K. Rool in any sort of Japanese games. Like, they sort of, like, they don't pretend like they don't exist. But, like, this Donkey Kong game is so interesting to me, again, and kind of that inside baseball way of it's clearly paying so much homage and care and kind of love for donkey kong country which you know nintendo or at least the japanese nintendo teams have kind of i mean not literally ignored but like didn't really seem to want to have too much to do with for a long time and now they're swinging kind of hard in the other direction and there's it's like miss pac-man with namco like yeah doesn't really really acknowledge miss pac-man because it was designed by some mit students and distributed by uh midway in america yep and so when you get collections sometimes miss pac-man's not on there and just like it's it's kind of it's always felt that way yep very similar and then then it does there's this there's this uh undercurrent i guess we'll find out when uh when dk bonanza comes out of like there's like k rule truthers of like is he in the game oh yeah there's a whole conspiracy yeah there's a whole conspiracy and like some people think that like if you freeze frame the footage like one of the little islands like looks like a kremlin had a face and he's like is this like i and like i'm honestly i'm like 50 50 on like you know they clearly seem to be sort of i shouldn't say clearly like i don't know like yeah i think it's 50 50 whether the kremlings and k.roll are like behind i already forget the villain's name but it's like is that mario yeah is yeah that's that's another rumor is that mario jump man show up as a bad guy i will say they there is so it's not a surprise that cranky kong is is in the game but he does have some some cheeky kind of fourth wall mentions of of mario in in his dialogue that i encountered which was really fun that's cute but isn't isn't cranky kong supposed to be the original donkey kong i'm pretty sure they don't want you to really think too heavily about well because he could he kidnaps Pauline when Pauline's older.

21:05So what's happening? And that's even, that's like, you know, I don't know if Mario has lore in the way that Zelda, you know, sort of, kind of, sort of does. They unified the timeline and yada, yada. But like, but there are implications of like, Pauline is young in this, right? And like, so in the original Donkey Kong, you know, he kidnaps Pauline and Mario comes and rescues her. And it's like, are we playing the true story of what happened there? That's kind of the vibe I'm getting where this is like, here's what actually happened. Here's what the history books will tell you that Donkey Kong kidnapped Pauline, but here's how it actually went down.

21:40It's kind of what I'm getting at. Or none of that checks out of Cranky Knows Mario. Right, and then there's an implication of, so Pauline becomes an adult and becomes mayor of a city that it's named after Donkey Kong. It's like New Donk City. Right, right. What's going on here? I didn't make that connection, but that's got to be what happened. this is gonna be why they call it new donk city so this is a this is an odyssey prequel maybe like i don't know it's very weird don't think about it too much is my advice so you already brought up some comparisons to mario kart world and i think there's a really important one that's actually being shown in the b-roll right now and that's what do things unlock what do bananas unlock and what do the fossils unlock and you mentioned it i would just like to hear from you like how useful is it to spend a lot of time going around collecting stuff please please explain exactly what those unlock and then we'll go into the details yeah so the bananas uh are the main collectible they're kind of like moons and odyssey um those uh unlock skill points basically every every five bananas you find you get a skill point which i actually really like one of you know talking about the the things i didn't like about odyssey uh it was kind of like the feeling of collecting moons just kind of for collection's sake once you power up the the odyssey to move on to the next kingdom um here there's an actual you know gameplay benefit to collecting the bananas every five you get you get to get a new skill and the skill tree isn't the most exciting skill tree in the world it's mostly just about improving like your health or like you know your the i don't know some some sort of aspect about your your power your punches um but there are a couple of them that give you new skills and i haven't explored that deeply into it but i hope that there's more of that because that's what i i always look you know look forward in a skill tree i like to have new toys to play with rather than just you know making my old toys slightly better um and then bananas are likely also a level gate or do you think you can just get through the game without connecting collecting bananas um i don't so it's not really structured like odyssey in the way that you know you're just collecting moons and then you go back to the to fly to the next kingdom you're always moving downwards into the world yeah so i i think it's more about unclear yeah i think it's more about going through like that layer's main quest beating a boss and then jumping down to the next layer okay so then fossils are the other one right and then fossils are the other main collectible those are god they're everywhere there's so many of them uh and those unlock different uh like you know cosmetics for for dk to to wear like you can pants and ties you get a new tie you can get uh new colors for his fur um all kinds of stuff like that and they also they do have some sort of gameplay benefit as well like you can get uh you know some sort of shorts that make you better at swimming um so it's stuff like that plus two to poison poison resistance is that happening yeah probably god two percent poison buff uh so uh you also mentioned that there is some sort of interconnectivity between levels that's more than just falling up or falling downwards and jumping back upwards again there's there's fast travel and then like ways to get between the layers but but the sub layers seem to be almost are that would you describe it as one contiguous open world or is it like levels and there's like fast travel between them no it's more levels and there's fast travel between them i i kind of make the mention in my preview that to me it felt like the size of a sub layer was about the size of like a mario sunshine or mario galaxy kind of kind of level um but they are connected you know by the fact that they are sub layers of kind of like the same general theme of a level so you know the the lagoon layer once you beat a boss in the the first sub layer you'll go down to the next sub layer and And it's the same enemies.

25:40It's the same kind of story behind what's going on in that layer. But you can still fast travel back up to a previous sublayer, still search for some moons. There's ways to get up to a previous layer and access a previously unaccessible area. So there is interconnectivity between the sublayers. It's like Banjo-Tooie. Yeah. It's been a while since I played that game, but probably. I'll take your word for it. Well, there's more banjo DNA in this too, because you always have another creature on your back that's pulling off some of the powers. Also has the transformations, also has the googly eyes.

26:17It is rare inspired in a lot of ways. Rare, as the kids would say. Yeah. I have not seen any abilities that Pauline is able to do other than just sing. Is that a co-op feature? The her, you shooting yeah and stuff like that? Yep. That's very cute. I was forced into co-op by the Nintendo representative. That's a cool visual effect to see her Yaz turn into stones and then break. It's very stylish. Yeah, it's cool. Yeah. I talked about this in the preview also, but it's meant for a parent to play with their child. It's not really something I would invite my best friend over and be like, hey, you want to play Donkey Kong with me?

27:01All you have to do is just shoot the things while I do all the fun stuff. So any final thoughts, Mitchell? It sounds like you're hyped. Justin seems vindicated in that the game looks better and better each time we look at it. Nick's already played it. Probably beaten it, actually. Dude, I'm just like, I'm very jealous that one. I'm seeing a bunch of cool stuff it looks like you got to play through. And it just hit me. This game is like 16 days away. I cannot wait. It's crazy, right? I'm so excited. Yeah, I mean, as someone who's just a huge, huge Donkey Kong fan, uh like i i am so excited that this game exists i'm sorry what's what's your favorite donkey kong game besides tropical freeze you can't use that one i can't say tropical freeze um it's probably dkc2 so yeah okay that's interesting because i feel like the dkc2 uh like crowd came about after i mean i didn't even play that i thought that game looked kind of kind of stupid when it came out i didn't want to play it i didn't want to play the third one but I played the heck out of the first one so I was always surprised that Natu has risen in the ranks of being the cool classic one, that's neat So I had a second Genesis growing up and DKCU2 was like my friend would have and I would go over to his house and play it and that was like it's that envy you feel of being a Genesis owner and looking at something that's so much cooler looking than anything on Genesis and very polygonal and just I remember that really stuck with me that just kind of envy of wanting to play donkey kong country um but yeah okay uh so the question about who is making this game has been something that we've talked about on this show um that we did an interview this week and kind of that answer has been revealed mitchell were you involved in that i don't know who did that interview i don't know how it happened but we made a new story about that uh i was not in any interview interviews they mentioned during a presentation before we got to play that it was being developed by the Odyssey team.

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33:02It's very confusing. but this week the confirmation was that we know now that it's odyssey team and so good and you know what's interesting i didn't make this connection till just now is that tokyo team made donkey kong jungle beat back in the day yeah that might have been that might have been good platforming game dude that's my favorite donkey kong and i completely like you know we're talking about this lineage of like donkey kong country and like i just i i momentarily blanked on jungle beat even though i love that game and so it was they made jungle beat and then they made mario galaxy and as far as i know that's like when the tokyo team kind of got their start was like those products i think yeah so the the the kind of speculation recently though was that you know who is making this is it is it like a splatoon team is it something you know right is it just is it the wonder team just went on to make this it's who knows but like now like it's the word is out that it's like odyssey and what's funny about that too is they usually don't find that out until you see the credits of the nintendo game which is even crazier because they just don't share that information but this is this is the odyssey people that's what they said they're also there they you know people have uncovered these rumors from like five years ago that's like you know rumor has it the mario odyssey team's making the next donkey kong game and you know like those rumors constantly right so it it kind of came and went but now it's do you think that's like their clock is right twice a day situation or like or you know like who who would even know like you know leaks can come from a variety of places right like someone has access to the youtube back end and then they know what's going to be in some you know private uploaded video or they work for some third-party ad agency that's making the billboards that are going to be before e3 you know like there's all these sources of leaks but like who would know what like a japanese internal Nintendo developer is working on.

34:56So it's like either, you know, someone said something to someone or yeah, they just, they just, you know, they dug up two tweets of someone that happened to be right. Fight, you know, like you said, the clock is right twice a day, but, but it is, it is out there now. We're like, oh yeah, this was leaked five years ago. And like, nobody really noticed. Do we know what retro is working on? They're just, just the Metroid prime four then. Oh, well, I don't remember. I don't, I would need to look it up. I think there were either they have a second team working on something or they had a second team working on something.

35:28And then that project was canceled. And now they're all in on Metroid. Like, I can't I can't quite remember. I'm so curious, like, if the Donkey Kong 2D, you know, style thing is going to continue now that there's this, you know, big 3D Donkey Kong situation. Right. Maybe there were rumors. I would need to dig it up. Maybe there were rumors they were making a third Donkey Kong game and then Nintendo put the squash on it, probably because they, you know, were working on their own their own internal project. but i can't remember now yeah yeah i mean there's a pretty uh detailed view that did you know gaming does that covers a lot of the um retro canceled games like including a zelda rts strategy game a sheikah like wii game things like that so there's probably some overlap there with what y 'all are talking about okay so we should talk about what we've been playing and uh i've kind of surprised but i think this happened a little while ago now but nick you beat in dust stranding oh yeah that's crazy yeah i rolled credits on it after about 41 hours i kind of took my time with the game i got everything i needed out of it before i was like all right i think i'm ready to finish this game but even since i finished the game there is still a lot of stuff that i am doing that i was like oh shoot i can't believe i didn't do this this is cool there's just a lot more optional content over the first game that uh is pretty darn impressive in terms of things that are just hidden away if you decide to explore or not explore and it's wild to me that you can go through the entire game without discovering any of it like playing pac-man is a thing that i didn't know existed until i saw our ign video about it and i was like what that's nuts that's weird that is nuts can't you like actually get rid of bts on yes in the world by by getting playing pac-man there's a map-based pac-man game and then when you eat the ghosts in the map-based pac-man game they they are reduced in that bt section of the world it's so insane but uh good game yeah i i very much enjoyed my time with death stranding 2 and you know i i think i've said i've done the comparison to phantom paid so many times that everyone's probably tired of it but man it just feels good to have that level of uh like verbs to play around with again and like toys that are genuinely fun and interesting to mess around with it's so funny because i was talking to mark medina about metal gear and uh he he famously uh does not play any metal gear games i'm like mark you realize that death stranding 2 2 especially it's basically like there's so much taken from Metal Gear Solid 5 in that game.

38:10Yeah, those are the two that's the best comparison is 5, right? Yeah. To the point where I'm like I cannot believe you haven't played Metal Gear Solid 5 yet because if you love Death Stranding, I think you would love Metal Gear Solid 5. I think it's the best use of loot ever in a game. You just walk around enemy base and just take everything you can. I love that. Whatever you can fit on your back. Kojima continually revisits. No, I mean in 5. In 5 in Metal Gear Solid 5 you use those little reverse balloon parachute things. oh yeah yeah and it's the best feeling in the world once you can start taking tanks and stuff when you tag them it's so great kojima does name drop phantom pain straight up uh in some pretty interesting ways i was like oh this is a little on the nose koji what's going on yeah that's really funny when that happens um so you can you can keep messing around in the game after some point of no return that's no problem it encourages you to do that yeah exactly there's um a lot of preppers that you can't even as far as i'm aware i don't know if you can actually unlock the relationship with them until after the game ends but that might just be a thing where i just didn't uncover any of their cargo in time but there were still like four or five preppers that i needed to connect with i mean i'm so glad to see i mean look the first this has always been a franchise of like you know that that gamers gate like that that was like if you know you know and if you like this kind of thing like you know the the first game had a big cult audience but it was not what am i trying to get at the first game was not like a sure thing right like yeah divisive and got kind of mixed reviews and it's like look this has a lot of cool ideas and some people are gonna love it it's not a game for everybody and it does feel like the sequel sort of smoothed out like just some of those some of that friction and just made a game that like like i'm just pumped because like i did not love the first death stranding like i kind of bounced off it but i'm very intrigued about i'm like debating do i need to go back and beat one or can i just you know watch a story recap and jump into two i hear the director's cut is very visitable now like but i i only played the first one and when it first came out so i don't know the director's cut has a lot of quality of life features that make that first game a whole lot friendlier but i think playing two strand games strand type games back to back might burn you out on the genre uh pretty heavily so i would recommend a story recap and just jumping into two man it's uh it feels very different and like you said it removes a lot of the friction that prevents you from truly enjoying the game that's exactly see that's what i that's what i want to hear i don't know if this is deliberate or what i'm looking at the director's cut is not on sale anywhere it's just 40 or 50 bucks i'm like what Like your sequel's out.

40:58Like the original should be a good time. The original should be 10 bucks. So, you know. So, but yeah, like the first one, the first one obviously had its lovers, but it had like its detractors too. And so to see that this one has a little bit more like mainstream appeal is really just appealing to me. Mitchell, where are you at with this game? How far are you? I'm probably about like four or five hours in, I would say. Okay, so you're just kind of, and it's something that you'd play for pleasure now you're not going to play it a bunch more of a war cream yeah yeah uh i i would i asked mark uh am i going to be doing anything work-wise for death stranding because if i am though i'll get really into it if not i'm probably gonna you know put it on the the back burner for now um and he said i didn't have to worry about it so uh but yeah i i i also didn't i i i was very lukewarm on the first death strand the first uh sorry i can't say that word death stranding um it was a game that i i respected a lot i had fun towards the end i think the on-ramp is very very long on the first game like it just it takes so long before you you start getting into like the really fun stuff where you're you're getting all those extra tool like you know toys and tools that you can use to you know clear out a base or you know make dealing with BT is not quite as stressful or, you know, because every time I got to a BT in the first game, I was like, you know what?

42:26I'll come back to this another time. I don't need this in my life right now. Yep. It's, they're stressful fights. But I think what you were saying about, like, it's this one smoothing out the kind of rough edges. I think it really, that is exactly what it does. And I think that the gameplay of Death Stranding 2 is what I wanted the gameplay of Death Stranding 1 to be. So I think it's a huge improvement over the first, and I'm excited to get back into it. That's rad. I've also heard, hey, Nick, I'm curious to get your take. Like the first, I don't know how many hours of the original I played, like maybe eight or whatever.

43:03And like it was just this Kojima stereotype of like the cut scenes just went on forever. And I'm like, I don't know. I don't care about any of this. I don't know what's going on. I'm confused, and I'm not having a good time. And I've heard the sequel strikes a better balance of like, it's completely insane and off the wall, but like that, that the cut scenes don't go on and on and on and on forever. Like I've heard it respects you. You also have some agency in this game. It's like, do you want to pick up this Moby Dick book and watch a, you know, a 15 minute backstory video? You don't have to.

43:33I mean, they kind of trained you on that. I think the game's at its best, whether or not you care about its overarching story. i leave to you i'm a i'm a big fan of it but where i think the beauty of this game lies in its story beats is the optional like more intimate moments that are just like opt-in whether or not you want to like you'll be listening in your room and uh listening to your uh portable music player and go on a song when suddenly doll man looks at you is like hey sam i got a little something to show you and then you get invited to like a private music video with doll man and it's like one of the most coolest, elegant, beautifully animated things I've seen in a minute in terms of just, oh yeah, Kojima just made up a music video with a very popular Japanese artist named Daichi Muyura.