#367 | Here We Go, Down That Same Old Road Again

50:59It is readily available. Very interesting. Now, the real term that it all spawns off of is the royal we. But that would be from the perspective of like a monarch when he would say we. Right. Right. Royal you is. Oh, there's actually a Wikipedia page for the royal we. Interesting. The royal we majestic plural is the use of the plural pronouns used by a single person who is a monarch or holds a high office to refer to themselves. A more general term for the use of we, us or are to refer to oneself. So. Yeah, it's a split off of that, but it's funny because I, Logan, maybe you did you go to the local library in 1930 and go to the card catalog.

51:42Start kind of thumbing through it. Trying to find the answer. You could just ask Google Gemini. Told me right here. The term royalty refers to the usage of a pronoun you to address an individual, but the implication that the individual represents a larger group or entity. Yeah. Thank you for. I feel like it's weird that like that's because I kind of took that for granted, I guess, because I heard that a lot growing up like like. And it would always be like, oh, well, you wouldn't do this. You know, you wouldn't let somebody like go on your lawn and take a shit. You wouldn't download a car. You wouldn't download a car, right?

52:15It's just like, well, not me specifically, but you, you know, generally it's, I guess it is kind of hyper specific grammar stuff that like, I guess a lot of people don't really use. It is probably older fashion. Oh, it's definitely, I mean, I mean, obviously Royal is kind of crazy. I just took umbrage with the fact that it's like, even we even looked at like, like it was some conundrum in 1982 where someone's trying to figure out like, what was that actor's name? You like, you're trying to tell me you went on Google typed in Royal you definition and nothing came up. yeah that is that what you're telling me

52:49logan your band from writing in for three months gotta go to the public library by the way have you been to a public library recently no i've been a public library in many years many years i went i went to one recently just because like i think i was i was like hanging out with a friend of mine i was like oh i gotta return some like cds and i was like oh it's interesting that you get cds from them i think it's just like kind of like a thing but it's like really nice like i'm kind of surprised I was like, oh, shit, they got like 3D printers here. And it's like, what the fuck? Really? This is not.

53:15Yeah. At least like where I'm at. Ghost gun.

53:20Shinzo Abe, watch out. Oh, no. Dude, I love the Trump Abe memes. I don't even know if they were really good friends or not or whatever. But like, they're so funny. The Abe memes with Trump. That shit is crazy. Like that. That shit is crazy that somebody just built. like it looks it's unfortunate that i don't know anything about shinzo i'll be like i have no idea like politically i i genuinely have no idea yeah i actually don't know where he stands like in terms of their own i don't even know anything about japanese politics to be honest no no yeah me neither at all so it but it is unfortunate that like that happened because like unfortunately the gun that that guy made looks fucking cool like it just it just looks sick and it's kind of crazy that somebody just made that like with like it with with a box of scraps you know it's it's insane what what was that that all of it was i think it was an oliver stone film and the american president maybe or something like that it was called i don't remember exactly what it's called but the beginning of it in the 90s like early 90s movie the guy like kills someone maybe it is the president he kills with like a wooden gun do you guys know what i'm talking about have you seen it's like a famous scene in a movie he like gets through security with it um god what movie is that dustin are you looking it up uh i searched wooden gun movie and there's a movie from 1979 called the wooden gun but wooden gun movie assassination yeah like oliver's in the line of fire maybe that's what it is i don't i don't even know if it's an oliver's stone movie i just feel like it is because it's a weird conspiracy movie um anyway i'll figure it out when another time it doesn't really matter but i just remember watching it on like hbo when i was a kid or something like very you know it was like one of those haunting things you remember as a kid he's like holy shit that's possible you know yeah yeah and it was like long before 3d printing whatever it's like some some fucking you know joel like character whittled a fucking gun at a wood yeah anyway that's crazy man um all right logan thank you for writing in lame dumb and gay wrote in and said greetings i've got to issue a firm stand down to all the hosts after last week the weird and insane pronunciations are getting out of hand.

55:33Colin, the audience has long been acquainted with your schizophrenic pronunciations of compass and Dustin's adorable struggle with Jaguar and Jaguar, but Chris has crossed the line last week like the fucking Zodiac killer. He pronounced Fanta the soda like Fanta and I just can't take it anymore. Get it together and be normal. Thanks. I'll begin playing Russian roulette with my fully loaded revolver and listen. That's not Russian roulette. That's suicide. Please be careful. Lame, dumb and gay. Thank you for writing in. Don't do it. Be careful while you do it. yeah be careful um don't hurt you oh my god yeah you guys getting a little out of control the darkness i don't understand we're all black pilled at this point i get it you know um right doom pilled is that the new term yeah doomer or like something like that because i remember looking up the term black pilled like a couple years ago and it was like this is like an incel term and all that i'm like oh okay and then i just now i just see people using it you know it's it's it's like anything like it has etymology or like roots somewhere else and then it just kind of becomes the part of the greater lexicon it is whatever it's i don't think anybody these days using the term black pill is like necessarily an incel at this point but yeah this is a bit this is a bit of a controversy yeah this is crazy to me because i feel like either people don't know how words work or just people are just like insisting i i'm fairly certain to the degree that i i did not say fanta all right i said fanta which is which is how bro like the literal the theme song for fanta which i think by the way both of those pronunciations are valid font uh fanta and fanta the literal theme song is don't you wanna wanna fanta like literally like it's in the song and i know it's a german drink so like i don't know what the fuck they're doing really marketing specifically to latin americans nazis make fanta yeah i think they literally made it to compete with uh coca-cola because they got a bar go to whatever oh geez yeah they just they didn't want they didn't want them having like a a stranglehold over their military so they just made made a competitor but yeah so like you got to stand down with this nobody said fonta if i said fonta i said it once as a joke because it's not that's not how anybody would pronounce it to literally look up the song by the way it's nice we record long enough that between the three of us someone's gonna say something weird but i don't chris in your case do you ever when you're making a video just say one word slightly wrong on purpose yeah that's i mean that's easy engagement no that's exactly yeah i know yeah i'm very aware like we don't have to do it we don't have to build it in but it works right that's the kind of thing happens naturally in a podcast but like in in videos i've definitely i've definitely left like editing mistakes in there like like specific ones where i'm just like someone's going to point this out and that's that's a comment and that's a thread and then that's like it's unfortunate that that works but like it does it's crazy fanta the movie is in the line of fire a 1993 american political action thriller film directed by wolfgang peterson and starring clint eastwood john malkovich and renee russo it's about a secret service agent yeah i never heard of it yeah god the things that stick with you when you're a kid like i don't even that's like all i remember about that movie because i was haunted by it and i probably watched it multiple times because you know how like when a movie was on hbo you would be able to it would be on like 17 times in a day sometimes that wouldn't be 17 times in a day maybe 17 times in a week do they even play movies on hbo anymore it just seems like it's all tv shows now i have no idea they must be i think hbo literally like i was on hbo max recently and they had like a live channel yeah like a linear channel yeah I had no idea.

59:17I don't know how old that is or if that's a relatively new thing, but I looked and I was like, what the fuck? This doesn't look like anything I've ever seen. And you click and it basically acts like HBO. And it's the same kind of... It reminded me of exactly the feeling where it's just like, oh, here's Mrs. Doubtfire again for the 2000th time this week. We're going a little long, so I'm going to delete this one. I don't want to linger too long with the intros. An hour is enough. I have things to do. I have a fucking life to live. I can't be I really don't actually have nothing to do and I have really no life at all actually so this is your life yeah this is like what I wait for basically I might as well be cryogenically frozen waiting to record secret symbols um all right let's uh this is a little bit of a segue question into the new into the news and we have a couple of those we'll begin here Aaron Anderson wrote in Dustin I was very curious what you think of this Chris Chris is like the Barry Bonds of the situation in which he got out of losing you know the home run race but was his back corked we really don't know aaron writes in and says hey cdc this is just for colin since you are about to start up a new game for yourself after losing the summer bets i was curious when you're when you are going to inevitably fall in love stockholm syndrome style with this game and eventually finish it into a huge spoiler cast with dustin and brad i look forward to months and months of content of the series as you become a huge fan but being serious for a second will you stream your nightmare or post it on YouTube.

1:00:40It's got the making for great content as we bask in your misery. Thanks and God bless your poor, poor soul, Colin. Well, we'll see when I get to playing it. But the question, Dustin, and I'm curious, what percentage odds would you put on that I actually like it? hmm it's tough because kingdom hearts one as far as far as gameplay is the worst one in my opinion because I could see that maybe if you were playing two, then maybe we'd be a little, maybe a little spark there. Maybe. But overall, the percentages, it's not zero. Maybe 3%. 3%. Yeah. I think the only thing that could happen is that you start playing it and you're like, well, I've invested four hours.

1:01:28I'm going to finish it now. Like I could see maybe that happening. It's a 15 to 20 hour game. i have no idea i can look real quick it definitely it definitely sounds like one like it's a ps2 era yeah early ps2 28 hours 28 hours great i don't think the platinum is very easy it's not i looked it up already that the uh the ps3 one is a lot harder than the ps4 one they have the same lists but the ps3 trophies don't stack so um you have to beat it apparently like three or four times but you could do like a run through kingdom hearts on ps4 that i guess like you have to beat it on in under 15 hours on the hardest difficulty and a couple other things and you can actually just do them all at once but in the original ps3 which is not the original release but the ps3 re-release and so i guess it wasn't on vita i was thinking of final fantasy 10 on the ps3 release in that collection.

1:02:27You had to beat it like four or five times. I don't think I'm going to do that, but I'm going in with an open mind. You guys have, you know, the Royal U have spoken enough about this game over many, many, many years. This game predates my time even in the industry by a year. I, the funny thing is, is that I don't have a problem with Disney up to that era. Really? I think Disney's fucking lame as hell now personally, but yeah but yeah like it's just like super lame like beyond lame and it has like in my opinion a lot of the lamest ip that they're really milking to like star wars and marvel and all that stuff so it even makes it lamer but just their own shit i feel like it's like i don't give a fuck about any of this and it's not it's not because i got older i don't think because i what i i think it's still probably true for most people but like when i was growing up in the 90s everyone went and saw the disney movies i even remember the sequence that they came out in right like generally like when these movies like Hercules was around 96, 97.

1:03:24Mulan was 98, 99, somewhere in there. That's my favorite one. Little Mermaid was the turn 89, 90, somewhere in there, I think. Then you got Beauty and the Beast, and then you got Pocahontas and all this. I remember the general cadence of them because you were familiar with those movies, but it's not like that anymore. At least it doesn't feel like that. I only saw Frozen for the first time a couple of years ago, and I actually thought it was pretty good. Very charming. but Disney just has this lame ass vibe, but it didn't in my opinion in 2002. So we'll see. I'm going to try to be open-minded about it because I have to do it.

1:04:03Yeah. I'm not going to like grin and bear it. It's a lame way to go into it, but I, I think 3 % is low. I'm going to say like one in 10. One in 10. Yeah. Wow. Very interesting. Yeah. It's a, what if I, what if i spite platinum it like i did assassin's creed 2 that would be awesome that's that's you wouldn't be spiting me at least that's the podcast beyond thing that might even that might even you spite uh platinum assassin's creed 2 why that's like an old podcast beyond thing that might even predate dustin listening to the show i don't even know like people used to bust balls that about assassin's creed 2 and how much i'd like it and then i'm ignoring it and then i like and so i finally just sat down and platinumed it and i'm like i didn't like it i thought it was it was overrated and boring i played it more deeply than most of you leave me alone and uh hell yeah so maybe i'll do the same thing for like you don't have the platinum joke for assassin's creed 2 why are you telling me about the game you know you know it better than i do i don't think so and so maybe i could do the same thing for kingdom hearts really just seize the day yeah um but i won't i won't i did the platinum death stranding finally we'll get into that in a little while okay so we have a nice percentage odds of uh what are you going to do with your so are you are you playing your thing are you into it already or are you gonna are you do you stream no not anymore but i am gonna stream this uh so i don't know when so i'll probably uh report on that sometime next week but i do plan on streaming it for overwatch 2 uh not really excited about it but some people not happy about it being overwatch 2 as my choice or not or what was selected for me by brad because brad knows firsthand how much I bitched when Lockmore one of the things for our you know me and Lock and Brad Ben stuff like that I once made a like was like Lock please play this game with us maybe it was Call of Duty I was like if you play with us for a little bit I'll give you a few rounds of Overwatch and man it was a bad time but they these guys play ranked and they play it's not even fun it's so serious they're like locked in and And everyone gets frustrated.

1:06:11Just not what I'm into at all. I want to play friend slop games. And we'll talk about that later. Yeah. Friend slop. Friend slop. You want to listen to I want to be Tracer? I want to be Tracer. Oh, my God. Oh, no. You know some fun lore about that? It's like the guy who did that song did our original Star Tank theme. Oh, really? Yeah. I want to be Tracer. Oh, my God. Awful. Just awful. Brian Garrido wrote in PSA. And this is a good PSA. That's why I'm reading it. Hey, CDC, a friend and I have a tradition of checking in every couple of months and discussing the games we're looking forward to. We like to comb through the upcoming games and talk about what looks good, looks interesting, especially lesser known titles.

1:06:58This exercise can be somewhat annoying because websites don't have much outside of a giant list of games with bare bones information, title release day platforms. And you ended up having to do a ton of Google and YouTube searches. I finally got fed up and went and created a gaming calendar with everything you need on all on one page. I found it useful and wanted to share what's what games are coming out.com. This is a great site. I pulled it up here. You guys can go to what games are coming out.com. A readable calendric. Is that a word? I don't know. I'm making it up. Look at all the big games you can you can sort by PS5, PS4, Xbox series, switch to switch one and PC.

1:07:36and um it's really useful i just wanted to give you a shout out i thought this was awesome that you did this and it's got little information so like you click on a game and then it'll bring like a trailer and some screenshots information about what you know who made it and when it's coming out to the various platforms i totally agree with you there's so many one of the most valuable things in my journalist days that we used to run at ign were these recurring things of like what was coming out and it was really useful and they would scrape google and do really well and search whatever but now you see these lists because i look them up sometimes game spots comes up euro gamer has one a few others and i'm like this shit sucks it's like just a list of fucking game it's just a list of games yeah like there's no context and there's too many games to know like what is going on here so this is a good way to kind of get the games on here that matter like for instance i use this to figure out ninja guy and rage bound is coming out this month i didn't even realize that july 31st can't wait that game looks fucking awesome oh my god i can't wait to play that so what games are coming out.com brian gorito nice work yeah all right let's get into the news the biggest news of the week is well the last of us part two getting a new mode and this comes from the playstation blog they write introducing the last of us part two remastered chronological experience out today this is written by jonathan norenbush who is the old podcast beyond host long after I did it.

1:09:01He writes, it's been such a thrilling time for us here at Naughty Dog, especially as we've become welcomed. I'm sorry, so many old and new fans to The Last of Us into the franchise to celebrate all of your support. We have a surprise in the form of a free update hitting The Last of Us Part 2 remastered today. So it's already out as you're hearing this available for players as part of a downloadable update. We've introduced a new way to play the story of The Last of Us Part 2 like never before chronologically. Those who have already played will know its story and is told non-linearly as Ellie and Abby's motivations, realizations, and emotional stakes unfold across myriad flashbacks and present-day storylines.

1:09:29While the structure is very intentional and core to how our studio wanted Part 2's themes and narrative beats to impact players, we always wondered what it would be like to experience the story chronologically, and now we finally can answer that question. Through the chronological mode, we believe players will gain even deeper insight into Part 2's narrative. Players will be able to see how Ellie being gifted a guitar flows so neatly into her learning to play, for example, while the journey through Seattle will showcase the fascinating parallels between Ellie and Abby's crisscrossing journeys.

1:09:53You'll see just how close they come into running to into each other, how their actions impact each other and more. Dustin, what are your thoughts on this? This comes packing, by the way, a new gold trophy. If people want to check it out, what are your thoughts here? Pretty interesting. Um, and honestly, kind of surprising that they would do this just because as it mentions in this writeup that, uh, the story was designed to be, uh, nonlinear, right? And so to go and do it this other way, I'm sure was not an easy task to do. And it is, I guess it makes sense that they are doing something like this to update it now while the show is, you know, just finished game still probably selling a lot of copies.

1:10:37And maybe this could entice people that maybe played last of us part two on PS4. They haven't picked up the remastered version. Maybe they weren't that interested in playing it, but now they can go and play it in a whole new way. For me personally, uh i'm i feel burnt out on last of us part two and i haven't even played it recently yeah just between the show and all the conversations and all those have been great but i i have no interest in this right now and i think if i did play it again i would want to play it as intended uh just as a personal preference but i'm sure there are interesting aspects of it Like with the beginning be very non-combat for a while without talking about, I think about the earliest flashbacks in the story.

1:11:26Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. The pacing in terms of gameplay would be totally off, but I think that would just be part of the understanding that the game wasn't designed to do this. So this is primarily from a story perspective and not a gameplay perspective. Yeah. It's an interesting idea. I'm over it at this point. I mean, maybe in the years to come, I would go back and play it this way. Sir K. Daddy wrote in and said, Sacred Crew, with the recent update to The Last of Us 2, are any of you wanting to do another playthrough in chronological order? I know that was one of the things Chris suggested as a fix for the story, but wasn't sure in your interest to keep up the great work.

1:12:00Chris, where are you on this? Yeah, so look, it's cool that they're doing this. I think it's like a neat option to have and any kind of free update to a game that has been out for a while is already kind of like a that's that's I find it hard to complain about that kind of thing but it's worth noting that that's the suggestion that the game runs chronologically as like from my perspective as a fix for the story really only matters in so far as the intention from the beginning to tell the story that way and what I mean by that is I think it would have I think the story would have been probably better served to be written from the ground up to be told chronologically not so much the version of the game that we have now kind of Frankensteined to make that to make it a linear progression through time if that makes sense like I just don't feel like the game's designed to be told in the way that it's that it came out And so I think that would ultimately be like the best way to play it, even if I think reorganizing the timeline would have been better off in like the writer's room.

1:13:14But it's it's it's cool that that option is there. It just kind of reminds me of people who are like, oh, well, should I play Metal Gear Solid in chronological order? And it's like, well, no, you should play it in the order that they came out, because every game, the third game exists with the understanding that like Metal Gear Solid 3, although it takes place in the beginning exists in the context of many people having played the previous one so it gives a lot of context to why you should care about that game in the first place and so like it's it's kind of that situation where it's like you could do that but i really would only i would really only see value in this as somebody who's playing the game again just to just to find like some kind of different experience with it like this is definitely not just because i said oh a linear like a a more linear sequence of time would be interesting does it mean like oh they added it i haven't played the last of us i'm gonna play it like that no you know but it's a cool option i think it's i think it's neat and it makes sense to do it while the show is kind of like still somewhat in uh in the in the recent past we'll present at the duality of man here now rube rupak wrote in and said it's such a first world problem to complain about a single player game i bought five years ago still getting updates but shouldn't we at some point say hey it's done if you wanted to constantly update a game maybe make a live service oh that's right maybe focus on the next thing you've already years behind due to a cancellation of your game and it was already like was already like a 10 it doesn't need all this especially when the studio has an image of now re-releasing and re-updating the game over and over feels weird to complain about a game i love so much getting free support but that's how i feel cheers boys this is a common refrain but then jason w also writes in and says cdc with a chronological mode being released for the last of us part two i'm excited for a new reason to experience the game again i expect the original format will be the better story order but playstation studios are under appreciated for their excellent post-release support we get new modes for the last of us new levels for astrobot online modes for the ghost of shima new spider-man outfits and new game plus added regularly there's more than that i mean you know god of war and god updates a few other games come to mind too such as cyberpunk baldur's gate and no man's sky is also having great support but two of those examples needed to in order to repair poor launches and reputations playstation studios consistently adds great free content to the first party game to their first party games is this a mis-selling point for sony first party games this is i think the important part of it is and rube i think i think your instinct is right on in both counts i think your instinct to say like it's enough already is a good instinct but it is hard to complain about the value proposition.

1:15:50The games are only becoming cheaper to acquire and they're adding more and more and more. And I was even surprised when I played The Last of Us Part II this last time, this past spring or early summer on PS5 for the first time. I'm like, there's a lot of shit in here. This is a lot bigger of a game than just with ancillary features and options than it was when it came out on PS4. And does it distract from the main projects? Honestly, probably not. I mean, there's probably a small team of a couple of dozen people that are messing around with The Last of Us. And this chronological order thing, I don't know if either of you guys would know, but like, was this something that was pioneered by Sony?

1:16:30Because the first example I remember of this happening was Beyond Two Souls. Oh, yeah. They updated that on the PS4 with a chronological order thing, which I had never heard of before. And now they're continuing it with The Last of Us. I just think I get I worry about the last of us is overexposure because I care about it. But I also have to remember that we're not the normal player of the game. You know, my sister and her daughter are playing the last of us this summer. Two thirds of the audience, as Neil told us, and I've said ad nauseum of the HBO show never played the games. So. I understand where they're coming from, and I honestly, we give Sony a lot of shit, but they should be applauded for for releasing new modes and free updates to these games.

1:17:19Some of them cost money, but most of them don't. They did a lot to God of War. They did a lot to go to Tsushima. They've done a lot to Astro Bot. I mean, new Astro Bot stuff just started rolling out today from when we're recording. And by the way, shout out to Genki for spoiling the Astro Bot, the bot that was put into the game. I don't know what the fuck is wrong with people. Like, why are people it's been out for five seconds, dude? dude, you know, and I like I'm scrolling through my feed and like, oh, he's in the game. I'm like, great, dude. That's awesome. Thanks for spoiling that. That's really awesome.

1:17:51Thank you to me this morning. Thank you so much. It reminds me of when I was at IGN and we had Uncharted on Vita. So people might remember Vita came out in Japan in December of 2011, but we didn't get Vita in the West until February 2012. But all the launch games were in English. I don't know why they were like separating them. and I don't care about spoiling this now, but it was a spoiler at the time. It's like Greg wrote a story for Golden Abyss where it was like,

1:18:23I forget what the title of it was, but he was like, Sully is in Uncharted, Golden Abyss. And I'm like, I actually, I think it was like over the holidays or whatever, and I haven't played it yet. And I think I texted him like, this is a spoiler, you know, like, because it's a prequel and all this shit. and I was like why are people so eager to like spoil the game so quickly like shut up Genki shut the fuck up

1:18:51Jesus Christ but the Astro the Astro Bot updates are like they're going the point is is that they are going above and beyond especially with that game and they don't have to go that hard and I think it's kind of cool that they are and I really don't think it distracts anything and it is a really awesome precedent that they're setting for their own games so rube do i want to complain about it yes but will i it's not really for me so try to be a little more open-minded than that genki you better keep your fucking trap shut stand out all right guys i don't know if you saw this twisted metal season two got a new trailer posted and uh it begins on july 31st which is the day that ninja gaiden gaiden rage bound comes to ps5 as we were saying earlier um what did you think dustin did you get a chance to watch this two minute official trailer yeah uh i like uh is it calypso right yeah um it's the guy from barry it's the guy from barry yeah it's no ho hank yeah barry uh looks pretty looks pretty fun in fact i think what i saw from this trailer is more what I wanted from season one like this is actually twisted metal agreed because it's about the tournament so I thought the season I thought season one was decent I wasn't in love with it so I'm more interested now in season two after seeing this trailer so looks cool Chris did you get a chance to watch what do you think Axel is in there yeah yeah it's pretty awesome i'm looking forward to it it looks it looks ridiculous um it looks fun but like there's a part of this trailer that really bothers me and it's something that always bothers me with like i don't know why trailers do this but it's the most presumptuous shit i've ever seen where there's always a title card where it's just like from the twisted minds of the Deadpool like you know what I mean like I it's so irritating when there's like this like pretend like outsider thing like from the twisted minds of the writers of Deadpool and it's just like what do you come on you wrote you wrote like three major mainstream blockbuster but like what do you the twisted from the twisted mind of Dr.

1:21:18Phil like shut up like what are we doing with this but that aside Noho Hank awesome I love seeing that guy. Yeah, he's great. I really love Barry. I thought Barry, yeah, that's where NoHoHang comes from. That's a really great show. It really is. Barry's wonderful. Barry is a highly recommended show. But yeah, this looks fun. Axel looks ridiculous. Yeah, it's awesome. It's awesome. I love that it's so faithful and so dumb. It's so crazy seeing this in live action. But yeah, no, it looks fun. I'll definitely be checking it out. I didn't finish the first season. not necessarily because I didn't like it I just kind of forgot that I was watching it it was very weird like it was just kind of I wasn't that into it really but this looks more this looks more my speed for sure yeah I think I think I agree like I liked the first season I was surprised by how good I thought it was actually it wasn't great I didn't like how it and this is what Dustin was saying it's I've said this before and Jaffe and I were reflecting on this not so long ago was I was like what what's so fun to me about the original twisted metal game on ps1 is it takes place in the real world that's what's fucking nuts about it it's not like a post-apocalyptic car game it's about a card tournament of people crazy people killing each other in the real world and they're not they're never gonna be able to do that here because they've predicated it on this post-apocalypse but at least they've gotten as you said dust into the tournament and i think looks awesome like i'm surprised by how good it looks and hopefully they do a nice job but this was one of the this is one of the biggest peacock shows ever so which is so funny i think in the top five so it did pretty well for them i don't know how we'll cover it what did we do last time we did like three episodes right we would do like one two three four five six seventy nine something like that um we're not going to do an episode by episode in other words episode by episode coverage of twisted metal but we'll cover it multiple times in like supplemental episodes of Sacred Symbols Plus for sure.

1:23:22I'll get Peacock and we'll check it out. From the demented mind of Martha Stewart. I'm trying to find the card because I know what you're talking about. I can't remember exactly. It's earlier on. They're all walking. It's 32 seconds in. Yeah, there it is. From the Twisted Writers of Deadpool. Cool. I feel so self-congratulatory. I am so outsider, dude. You don't get me. so yeah july 31st if you're interested in checking that out on peacock and i think it looks pretty dope yeah all right stalker 2 has finally been officially revealed for playstation 5 it will come out um apparently uh the end by the end of this year the game obviously was a little bit beleaguered when it came out last year on windows and on pc and xbox series x and s as a timed exclusive, but they do promise or at least are aiming for a Q4 2025 release.

1:24:24Stalker 2 is, of course, a well, there's so much fascinating about Stalker. The first is that a Ukrainian studio is behind it, although I think that they've they've moved since then. I think we're working maybe out of Malta at this point, but they were in Kiev for many years. GSC Game World is the studio's name. The second is, is that stalker two was in some form of development for like 15 years, maybe even more than that before it came out. And it's kind of an interesting situation with them. Obviously the war in Ukraine didn't help, but that's really not the reason because stalker call of Pripyat.

1:25:02Yeah, I have it up here. So stalker got like a bunch of updates or whatever. And the last one was 2009. So between 2009 and 2024, there were no new stalker games. and they did do one game in their cossack series back in 2016 so they've been working on this game for a long time it looks pretty cool the stalker series there's a stalker collection on playstation i i really am not familiar because it was such a pc centric series and i'm pretty sure the stalker trilogy that came out or the ports were the first time they were ever on playstation but i could be wrong about that so it's honestly not a series that i'm really familiar with and i'm not entirely sure I'm going to play this game, but, but it is coming for those that are interested.

1:25:41I think it looks cool, but I just feel like I don't have any context. I feel like a little bit of a poser. It has a 73 on Metacritic. It'll probably do a little better on PlayStation because they've had time to kind of fix it. Any interest in this game, Chris? Yeah. I mean, I played it when it launched on, I think, yeah, when it launched originally on Game Pass, I played it. And I liked, I liked it kind of a lot. Like I got really into it. like i got weirdly obsessive about it um there it's a very vibe oriented game like there really is something about kind of being in in that space with the the sound design that they do and the attention to detail that's there it's it's really cool um and there's certain certain parts of that game are like really stunningly beautiful like it's it's it's it's a really gorgeous looking game in motion of course it's it's very euro jank and you can feel that for sure but like it's a pretty good looking game and i think the reason like i stopped playing it i got pretty deep into it i got like i think i i probably shouldn't say a number because i think i'm definitely like over 10 hours into it definitely like maybe like closer to 15 um but the reason i stopped playing it was because although i was having a good time i heard from lock that like an essential feature wasn't in the game yet and it was like i can't remember what it's like a life or something or it was some weird system thing uh that directed the ai to do certain things that it wasn't really doing in the base game which i i hadn't noticed i was having a good time with it regardless but like i was like oh i guess i'll wait for them to add this this uh supposedly really important feature and then i think by the time it finally got added to the game i was just kind of i moved on to other things so i'm definitely interested in going back to soccer 2 at some point but um i don't know when that's going to be you know i got to be in the right mood for that game it's a very mood driven game like i could see myself playing that game it's very much like death stranding in some sense where i'm just like i could see myself playing this game at like one at some point before i had originally started playing it and being like not the same for me but just kind of hit at the right time yeah it looks very immersive um yeah yeah Dustin any interest in stalking no I played a very little amount of it on Game Pass PC uh didn't feel like a game that was really for me a little too I right out right at the beginning I had a bug that fucked up that immediately I had to reload a save to nothing crazy but like 20 minutes or something and that kind of soured my initial feeling and I also you know heard from lock about it not being quite ready yet in some ways so i put it down um i'm not saying it's a game that i would never like but um i'm just not really all that interested overall but um cool it's coming to playstation finally what that exclusivity window wasn't too long it seemed it's probably a year you would assume yeah yeah november just to just to provide some context yeah so this this update was like the a life system and so it would enhance like simulation of life in the zone uh just add more like dynamic elements to like i guess like storms and like ai ambushes and stuff like that like that wasn't working when i had played it apparently interesting i'll keep an eye out for it i really feel like i have no context for it so you know what colin if you played um oh my god was it adam fall oh yeah adam fall earlier this year it's it's kind of like it's very similar to that although i would argue like a little bit more i liked it a little more than yeah hopefully the gun plays better than adam fall that was the problem with that game i beat it but it was i i haven't even thought about adam fall at all since yeah since i beat it to be honest all right stalker two heart of chornobyl i don't know why they're spelling like that that's probably the proper name spelling of it coming out sometime soon later this year okay boys is the final fantasy 9 remake canceled this is interesting oops i just closed my uh document window so i can't even read what i was going to say anymore let me open it back up there we go so there well let's give everyone the proper context first final fantasy 9 remake has been long rumored and is almost certainly or almost certainly at least at one point did exist because it was in the GeForce leak, the famous GeForce leak that we cite from a few years ago.

1:30:19That has pretty much all come true. For the most part, there's that Bioshock game. Yeah, that's a little annoying. I'd love to play Bioshock again, but Monkey D. Luffy wrote in or Luffy. How do you say that? Luffy. Luffy. Unless you're Jeff Keighley, then you say Luffy on stage when announcing a new one piece game nice well maybe he didn't announce it but it was on did you really say that that's awesome yeah he said monkey d luffy oh boy i was like jeff jeff jeff you fool oh that's awesome hi cdc what is going on with square enix and final fantasy 9 in the past week final fantasy 9 has had a bunch of anniversary posts from official playstation and square enix social media pages but nothing on the remaster or remake final fantasy 8 had barely any recognition on their anniversary why are they mentioning it so much if they won't give us the remake thank you and excuse me while i go shove a vivi staff up my anus that's really oh teach their own vivi's at least ostensibly human but he is a child so it's his staff yeah right right right unless well let's just let's just leave it for now yeah let's just so put a pin in that game rant the website game rant writes rumor final fantasy 9 remake possibly canceled and they write in part quote the final fantasy 9 remake project may have been shelved according to a known gaming industry leaker who cited a source familiar with the game the leaker statement came on the 25th anniversary of final fantasy 9 as swear enix marked the occasion with a video and various pieces of new merch that players can pre-order all right let's see though all rumors must be taken with a fine pinch of salt a credible leaker stated ahead of final fantasy 9's anniversary date that a remake may not happen after all according to a reset era post by a known leaker nate the hate who we've i don't know the nature of this person but we've definitely cited this person before and they definitely have connections the final fantasy 9 remake project could be in trouble nathan hate said quote as of last check it remains a development to my knowledge but i need to do a fresh check and see what a more current status is as i did hear a month or so ago that it was in trouble and possibly canceled end quote nathan hate added that it was only one source that claimed that final fantasy remake 9 remake was canned and said he needed to verify further if the information was correct or a final fantasy 9 remake is still being worked on and as they know in this story Obviously, this was in the GeForce League from 2021.

1:32:36So this game has been much like Final Fantasy Tactics, which is finally going to emerge later this summer, has been in development for a long time. This person is reliable. I don't know, man. Would you cancel it so late in development? Could it not be coming together that badly? What is the nature of this remake if it's coming together that badly? Is it something bigger than we assume? because again with the final fantasy tactics stuff we i well i don't want to say we i definitely assume they were doing much more to it because of how long it was taking and really what we ended up getting was not much i mean it's the game and it looks cool there's little bells and whistles retranslation relocalization that's all good stuff but i don't know what's taken years and years for to do this and i so after seeing that i was kind of readjusting my expectations for final fantasy 9 remake where i'm like this is probably i never thought it was gonna be a final fantasy 7 scale one.

1:33:30I want to be clear about that, but I thought it was going to be something maybe more than maybe it is. But if it's taking so long and there are problems behind the scenes, then potentially it is canceled. But I'll say this. I don't believe that it's canceled because I just feel like that would be a big move. Even when a Final Fantasy VII remake was in trouble, they just restarted it and brought on a different team. Clearly, they were aiming to have it ready to go now. final fantasy 9 came out late in the ps1 generation when it was still very common for there to be a gap between japanese releases and american releases so the game did come out in early july in japan we didn't get it until mid-november of 2000 i remember that very well because majora's mask and final fantasy 9 came out like two weeks apart and that was a fucking sick fall for games plus the dreamcast was buzzing still and there was like a bunch of stuff going on so it was really it was a good time and final fantasy 9 is a great game i have not played it in a long time, probably since college.

1:34:26Have I ever even messed around with it? So I barely remember it. But yeah, Dustin, what are your thoughts here? Do you think it's in trouble? I will say, by the way, Dustin, to pitch it to you, if the game is in trouble, you should cancel it. If it's not good, you shouldn't release it. Square Enix is doing a great job right now. You don't want to fuck around with it. It's better to not release anything. Eat the cost, write it off. You know, do what you got to do. But I just don't know that that How can a Final Fantasy IX remake of some sort get so over its skis that it can't be executed on? It seems hard to believe.

1:34:59Yeah, it doesn't really make sense. I wonder, with Final Fantasy VII Remake, and you alluded to this, Colin, it was originally with CyberConnect, right? and why they would entrust one of their most popular, maybe the most popular Final Fantasy game outside of their first party or their internal studios, I guess, is beyond me. But they realized their mistake. And so that game took quite a long time. And so I wonder if they kind of did the same thing where maybe they were farming it out, weren't happy with it, and then they brought it internal. Now it's not going well. it's it's all speculation i'm frustrated because i've wanted to play final fantasy 9 in particular for years now uh because how many years ago was the nvidia leak 2021 2021 so yeah late 21 yeah so it's been quite a while so i've been waiting because i thought oh well i'll just play the remake when it comes out and i've been waiting and waiting and now it seems like all my waiting maybe for nothing so i it seems odd to me that it would be so difficult if you're not making remake it to the level of final fantasy 7 and you're maybe you're just going in like okay we're doing all new environments we're remaking the act we're literally remaking the original playstation one game i just feel like it shouldn't be that difficult but what do i know i've never developed a game before so hopefully if it's bad if it's bad either cancel it or just wipe the slate and do it do it the right way even if we have to wait another four years or something i'd rather that happen but um it's hard to say the fact that the leaker here nathan hate wasn't sure himself and wanted to check in on it.

1:37:03It's like, well, go ahead. Let's find out. Yeah. What's going on? Yeah. It's a strange piece of news. Do you have anything you want to add on this, Chris? We don't really know very much right now, but. Yeah. I mean, I also don't really have that much context for Final Fantasy. Of all the Final Fantasy games, I think it's genuinely the one I know least about. Like, I genuinely, I have no concept of even what Final Fantasy 9 even is. It was very exciting at the time. You guys were little at the time, but it was a really big deal for Final Fantasy fans because it was a return to form. Yeah, because seven.

1:37:38When you go back and play five, four to a degree, but five and six, they're more futuristic. They're really steampunkish and kind of strange with their engineering and like what's in this in the world and stuff. But they were all fantasy themed. And seven was so controversial with a lot of people because it was truly modern. and that's what I didn't like about it at first. It was hard for me to wrap my mind around that. And then 8 kind of kept it modern. And so 9 was a return to form and people were really excited about it, especially because 9 felt like a return specifically to 6. It wasn't. I mean, it's nowhere near as good as 6 and it's not really a similar game.

1:38:13And I think the art style is a little weird in 9. The character models are a little weird. But it is a great game. It's a fun game. And you can play it right now. I mean, it's available on PS4. You can just play the original release. I'd like a live Chris reaction. I'm sure you've seen this before, but this is what the, some of the characters look like in Final Fantasy nine. I personally hate it. Yeah. Oh my God. I knew, I knew you wouldn't like it in particular. I don't, I like video, but the other is cool. Yeah. Yeah. I don't hate the, the main, the middle person, the, the, the guy in the middle there.

1:38:52What's his name? I was going to say Vaughn, but that's not true. I can't even remember his name. i like the grocery stuff i don't i have uh yeah this looks uncanny and gross um specifically the main the the person on the left and she's looking to the side yeah she's looking to the side so like there's plausible deniability there i don't know exactly how weird she looks and the character on the right looks kind of cool i like the design i think that's garnet right and then yeah zidane is the main character and then vivi i remember because he's the mage character he was cool because I don't see walk seeing vivi like in seeing a you have to remember seeing a mage like that was very nostalgic at that time we hadn't seen a mage looking like that since final fantasy five and we wouldn't even known that in the west really at that time so it would have been final fantasy four so except for of course tactics if you played that but I said he was like an ewok but that's not the right star wars term you walk so you're thinking of a jawa jawa how embarrassing yeah that is embarrassing little jawas fake jawas all right guys this news is for me capcom is acknowledged a megaman very exciting news video games chronicle writes despite no megaman in seven years capcom says it's one of our most important ip and they write quote capcom has reiterated its reverence for the megaman franchise and said it's continuing to consider ways to revive the classic game series.

1:40:18While a number of retro compilations of older Mega Man titles have been released in recent years, entirely new entries in the series are few and far between. Mega Man hasn't seen a new release since 2018's Mega Man 11, and then there was an eight-year gap between that and the previous entry, 2010's Mega Man 10. For the second year in a row, during the question and answer portion of its ordinary general shareholders meeting, Capcom's management team was asked for an update on the status of the Mega Man IP. Their response reiterated that the company values the series and will continue to consider how it can release new entries.

1:40:43Quote, the Mega Man series is one of our most important IP, and we are continuously considering ways to develop it further. However, we do not have any additional information we can share at this time. End quote. According to Capcom's own internal data, the Mega Man series has sold more than 38 million units over its 36-year history. During the recent Q &A, the company said it's also popular in terms of merchandise. Quote, while we do not disclose individual sales figures by IP, we receive a particularly high volume of inquiries about the Mega Man series from overseas markets. we will continue to focus on expanding this business further.

1:41:16Please do. I feel like we're on the verge of something good with Mega Man. I feel like they are keeping their cards close to their vest. There simply is no way that there's not a Mega Man game in development. I refuse to believe that they would do that. Whether it's Mega Man 12 or Mega Man X9 or just a new Mega Man game or a 3D Mega Man game or Mega Man Legends 3 or whatever Battle Network, Star Force, like it could be anything. It's just weird that It's frustrating because it's frustrating just because Mega Man is kind of one of those series, in my opinion, that's meant to be replicated. Like it's meant to be made every few years.

1:41:52It's a style of game. It's a game that's the same as it's always been. It's just gotten a little more complicated. And in fact, Mega Man 11 is probably, with the exception of the original Mega Man game, the worst Mega Man game in the mainline series. It's really beautiful. It's really cool. I love Russian Mega Man designs in it. The boss designs are fucking awesome. I love that figure skating robot master. is like fucking it's like such a great idea um because it really encapsulates like what megaman supposed to be about and mike and i always make fun of it is like it's supposed to be about like robots that are do that do real things and then they get reprogrammed and like bastardized you know so having like a figure skater or something like that is kind of like a figure skating robot that's just like totally made into this evil wily robot is a dope idea but um they just don't seem that interested in doing much with it and megaman 11 really messed with the gameplay a lot and i wasn't crazy about that that was you could like slow down time i don't know if you guys you probably didn't play it was like a really weird thing where you had this like gear system where you can like slow down time and there was something else you can do make yourself really powerful but you had to like balance it and i was like you don't need to reinvent the wheel in in 11 yeah yeah there was like a whole system like a whole subsystem of like gameplay that sounds familiar and yeah it was i was fun i liked it i beat it several times but i beat it on hard i think and everything it was it It was a really fun game to play, but they didn't need to reinvent the wheel.

1:43:10And honestly, Mega Man 9 and 10 is exactly what they need to do. The problem is, is that there's no money to be made in games like that. You guys were still young, but you were what, 14 or 13 when Mega Man 9 came out. That was like a huge deal because it was like, oh shit, you released an NES game. This is a straight up NES Mega Man game. Nothing about it is modern. Inti Creates made it. That's how they got put on my radar in a major way. And it was sick, like it was sick. And it's like, they just need to do that. But how much money can you really make selling Mega Man 12 as an 8-bit game for 20 bucks?

1:43:45Is it even worth it? But it's just, it's annoying that they, Capcom is doing such an awesome job. They're reviving Animusha. That new Animusha game looks insane. How good that game looks. Resident Evil is awesome. It's been awesome for years now. Pragmata looks great. Even little things like Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, I thought was really cool. Street Fighter is bubbling on. they're doing a street fighter movie and all these kinds of things like where's fucking mega man dude yeah stop annoying it is it is weird i do remember when mega man 9 came out and i remember being i remember being excited about it because that was in a time i mean i guess nostalgia is always in vogue in some way but like that was particularly in the era of like early like proto content creators in especially in the video game space like like avgn like focusing on like a lot of retro stuff at the time retro stuff which is still retro stuff it's just double retro now i guess um so nes was very much like something that i was paying attention to and to see like megaman 9 kind of explode or like kind of appear out of nowhere i mean like oh this is cool i like megaman 9 a lot i actually had my niece and nephew uh play it uh because i was just like i think i think you guys are going to be bad at this and they were like no and then they were but it's surprising to me that well first i'm trying to remember what the name of the project was like but wasn't there going to be like a thing that let you create megaman levels yeah megaman that was megaman universe and that was that was canceled it was playable and done i they that was during the inafune like we're canceling everything era um yeah because that's how legends 3 got eaten as well but that that that universe game was a remake of megaman 2 in 2.5d that would let you make like Mario Mario Maker stages and it was actually before Mario Maker.

1:45:29That's like the funny thing is like they were actually almost at this potentially seminal idea. I put a picture in the chat by the way that's Tundra Man who's the the figure skater robot and I love I just love that design. I just think it's not loading. It's oh it's not oh it doesn't not work I'm sorry. It doesn't work alas. Because yeah they should do it do it a Mega Man Maker where you can much like Mario maker switch between NES style maybe then you can switch to Mega Man X style and then maybe there's a modern 3d like Mario maker does I think that would be awesome obviously a new Mega Man games probably the most ideal but the other thing Colin they've done all these amazing collections of Mega Man they're exceptional legacy for even those I was gonna say stupid I've never played the the Game Boy Advance games even those got collections where's the megaman legends collection with one two and tron bond yeah that would be cool with all the you know doing all the art yeah people are out there buying tomba you know and you and you're not releasing megaman legends they'll do it i think i think they'll do it because yeah they did get to the battle network games and they're it's not even all the battle network games i don't think so they probably have to do a second one of that star force which i was never really into um because star force started doing and actually battle network started doing it later on too is like Pokemon really bastardized the Game Boy Advance, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance market, because now everyone was like, we're going to do two versions.

1:46:55And I'm like, ah, fuck. And so I think with Battle Network three, they started doing that. And I think most of the Star Force games also had that. And I was really turned off by that after a while. I was like, I don't want to even Zelda did it. Remember with oracles of ages and seasons? You guys were kids for that. But those Capcom games, those are awesome. One was like action oriented. One was puzzle oriented. It was just like, come on, guys. But it was a good way, I guess, for them to extract extra revenue. But yeah, I did put the Tundra man wiki from fandom in your end of the link into the thing here.

1:47:22And yeah, that's, that's what we're working with now with Mega Man bosses, which I think is cool. Like it's getting cool. And by the way, not to put too fine a point on it, but the Jada, the Jada toys or whatever they're called JDA toys line of Mega Man toys. They're fucking awesome, dude. Like they are so good. I just ordered the new run of them, Woodman and Bubble Man. and uh i was like dude i would have i've said this before but i would have died to have figures like this when i was a kid i would have shit myself if they made megaman figures like this when i was a kid it's like why did it take so long the coolest part of the series of the fucking bosses why did it take 30 years to make a bubble man figure you know like like a real like and and you can tell the people that are making them are like really into it and that's like so cool it's not like some task that someone's doing it but they're like really doing a nice job colin you passed on the the one vintage megaman thing i sent you from too many games yeah i was what 200 bucks it was 200 bucks for this but it's also like that's the shit i'm talking about about people not caring look at the spelling of wiley on the box oh you know like they're not even normally spelled w-i-l-y but and and in some of the early games they translated w-i-l-e-y but in in megaman like established capcom lore for decades it's wily w-i-l-y so i was even looking at that box i'm like come on you know it's like not even fucking spelled right but i'm trying to let me see if let me see if this works like look how fucking good i i guess you guys don't really know what these guys look like but like look how good that toy looks that bubble man toy it's like are you fucking kidding me how good this is like his facial expressions the different ways his hands go the different stances it's beautiful dude like i would have died for something like this when i was a kid it's like god almighty just make them all like this please and they're finally getting to the good ones because they got through all the megaman ones which are cool those are the classic ones fireman and whatever but now you're getting like bubble man wood man you know they're doing snake man it's like yeah this is sick sick sick sick sick love it love it can't wait to get them even the swimming he has like a swimming motion and stuff it's like so cool wow all right shout out to you bubble man we hardly knew you all right let's see what else we have going on here oh this broke today so this was actually in the news a few weeks ago and i cut it out because i was like we should just really wait for the vote before we talk about this but um people might remember that SAG-AFTRA, the actors union here in the States, has been in a long running, I guess, strike against specific video game publishers and developers.

1:50:11They've kind of one-off picked off publishers and developers that have agreed to their terms. And so they've been working more and more, but they've still not been working with a bunch of different companies, including EA, WB, Take-Two. So this has wide ranging effects on a lot of big games, including Grand Theft Auto. I mean, there's like a lot of things. So SAG-AFTRA was upset and went on strike last year because of AI with games, by the way, with game, not strike like generally in movies and film. They went on strike with games because they were happy with like the AI tools being leveraged against them, diminishing money.

1:50:45There's really not a lot of returns. Once you do a character, you're quickly eliminated. People are always recast. There's like a lot of things going on. So they put out this new agreement that the voting members approved 95.04 % to 4.96%. So an overwhelming approval. And they write, quote, the agreement provides compounded increases in performer compensation at a rate of 15.17 % upon ratification plus additional 3 % increases in November 2025, November 2026, and November 2027. Additionally, the overtime rate maximum for overscaled performers will now be based on double scale. The health and retirement contribution rates to the after retirement fund will now be raised from 16.5 % to 70 % and then to 17.5 % in October 2026.

1:51:30The new contract also accomplishes performer safety guardrails and gains around AI, including consent and disclosure requirements for AI digital replica use and the ability for performers to suspend consent for the generation of new material during a strike. So some pretty big gains here. Dustin, I wonder what you think, though. we're not too in the weeds on this issue, but I think just with the AI situation itself, it's like, what are you going to really do about this ultimately? How are you going to stop this from really happening? And I think it's going to be up to the companies to either respect the art or not, and that's going to be up to them.

1:52:05But I would imagine AI is going to still eviscerate this space, unfortunately. And I wonder what you feel about that. How do you feel about that? yeah i ai in particular i understand particularly for protecting your own voice um because that's kind of the interesting thing is like owning the rights to the sound of your voice which i think makes sense uh obviously this was a big deal a few weeks ago with uh darth vader in fortnight uh where it was so funny it was so funny i was fucking dying watching that shit i was like oh He signed and agreed before his death that, you know, he was fine with his AI being used to replicate his voice.

1:52:52I didn't know if he knew to what extent it would be used like that. Certainly it was in the contract, so I guess that's fine. But yeah, we'll be weird once we get to the point where it's like, oh, AI can fully generate a unique character. And I guess potentially act in a way that is convincing. Sounds horrible to me just because I think that, especially after playing Death Stranding, there's so much of those actors personalities in each character. I mean, just look at Troy Baker and Higgs, dude, like to me, like that character is inseparable from him. And I think part of the reason what makes it so great.

1:53:40and so when you design a character and then apply a completely synthetic voice to it it's like well what there's no heart in it uh at that point so that sucks so i don't know what's going to happen other than probably not good outcome because money always wins unfortunately chris should we replace you with an ai bot an ai agent on sacred symbols yeah go ahead the uh should we license your likeness i don't know this whole thing is weird i i i've it's it's weird for me especially because i like i i know this world and i've dabbled in this world and i've worked in some capacity in this world and for me it's like i think yeah it would it be objectively more convenient and cheaper to just have like a computer like create a random performance out of just out of nothing and then you just have something that you can work with like sure but in my experience and based on the people that i know who work in the space like a lot of the fun is directing a real person and and say like ad-libbing and improvisation and i don't know like i feel like there's a lot of joy from even just the people making the stuff that like i don't know what would is the incentive to truly just cut out all of the enjoyment out of making the thing so that you just have a product to sell like that kind of sucks um and i would hope that enough people in this space actually do you know what this really strikes me as this strikes me as something that only happens when the people in the space don't actually like what they're doing you know what i mean where it's like i feel like you would only want ai to do this kind of thing if you didn't like being involved in it it's like i don't like dealing with actors i don't like getting interesting takes and it's like what are you doing in the what are you doing in the space then go like i don't build toilets or something like it's it's weird it's it's a confusing end goal i guess but we'll see how we'll see how it shakes up i i would imagine though that like there's there's a black pill here where it's just like yeah i don't know we're probably just gonna everybody's just gonna be replaced with some fucking speech to text yeah we'll be in battery and that'll battery packs before long i'm sure um it's very lame by the way uh oh my god genki tweeted another character i went and put astrobot as a muted thing because he's not the only one i mean i'm sure there's what is there's gonna be many on him nonetheless oh sure um all right sag after congratulations on your new agreement hopefully this makes things easier i think chris is right though it's like or at least i think we've all been saying it's like is the idea to like eliminate all of the workers yes it absolutely is a lot of people don't give a fuck unfortunately and that's why i think not to be like a farm market guy but it's like our farmers market guy but it's like that's gonna be what i think gaming kind of turns into and if you want to like this is the artisanal game this is the game that was made with no ai this was the game that was made by real people that were paid fairly in societies that don't enslave them and shit like that you know like i think i think it's like the stories that used to be told about a lot of the old cartoons in the 80s and 90s about how there was like south korean animators like chained to their desk fucking drawing this shit that fucking sucked because they had like two seconds to do everything and that's why the intro is like the turtles intro or the gi joe intro or whatever they were like beautiful and then you'd like get into an episode and it was like three frames a second and like the coloring was wrong and the characters were wrong and everything's like these guys are just fucking doing this under a barrel of a gun basically who wants to even who wants to enjoy shit like that you know yeah yeah I don't know hold on a second Micah Micah she must be gone I forgot I just was realizing I never showed the stained glass that your mother sent me on the show I have mine over here grab that this is a complete non sequitur but since it's on my mind There you go.

1:58:16Yeah, look at that. It's sick, dude. Yeah, I sent I sent her money for just the supplies and the shipping and she sent sent to me in short order. It's awesome. She she will be making more. Look forward to it. They're going to be so limited, though, because these take a significant amount of time each. Yeah. So please look forward to it. Please look forward to it. OK, what else here? Oh, there's an update to the stop killing games movement. so we talked about this what last week i want to say um so there's a movement you can go to stopkillinggames.com there's this entire european citizens initiative where people are signing documents to get the european union to kind of acknowledge this idea that games shouldn't be indefinite but rather perpetual it's a little deeper than that but i think that that's the best way to put it it says here just to kind of reiterate stop killing games is a consumer movement started to challenge the legality of publishers destroying video games they have sold to customers.

1:59:14An increasing number of video games are sold effectively as goods with no stated expiration date, but designed to be completely unplayable as soon as support from the publisher ends. This practice is a form of planned obsolescence and is not only detrimental to customers, but makes preservation effectively impossible. Furthermore, the legality of this practice is largely untested in many countries. So the idea is to get X amount. I think it's over a million real signatures. And then I think the European Commission has to address the problem. This is very similar. We've brought this up in the past.

1:59:38Remember, I don't know if the White House does it anymore, but Obama's White House and I think Bush's White House too did a thing where if something got like a hundred thousand do you guys want to talk about was like a hundred thousand signatures and they would have to acknowledge it and there was and people would get like really weird shit through so I remember one of them is like and I thought this was so funny that they really did shit like this where one of them was like could we could NASA create the Death Star like why don't we make the Death Star and they earnestly released a report about how much it would cost to make the Death Star and it was like more than all the money in the history of the humankind basically to make this thing it was really cool like they actually explained it like very seriously of like why out like why we and it was tongue in cheek of course but it's like here's why we can't make the death star and so this is a way to force people to acknowledge a problem and aside from the fact that it's literally like a giant genocide ship right right you know we probably don't want to you know do that yeah but hypothetically if that was not a big deal if the genocide part wasn't there yeah hypothetically speaking of course so video games europe responded obviously again this is very european centric that's why i want to really nail that this is a really a european industry thing right now um the european video games europe is a members group of video game creators that's existed since the 90s of you pay like a small amount of money and you join it's not a union really, but just like a, what would you call it?

2:01:06Like a professional organization. And so they had a, an answer to this and posted something about it. And it's gotten a lot of bad publicity, but I wanted to read it and see what you guys think. They wrote, we appreciate the passion of our community. However, the decision that discontinue online services is multifaceted, never taken lightly. It must be an option for companies when an online experience is no longer commercially viable. We understand that it can be disappointing for players, but when it does happen, the The industry ensures that players are given fair notice of the prospective changes in compliance with local consumer protection laws.

2:01:36Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players, as the protections we put in place to secure players' data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would even leave rights holders liable. In addition, many titles are designed from the ground up to be online only. In effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create. we welcome the opportunity to discuss our position with policymakers and those who have led the European citizens initiative in the coming months this is one of those situations not unlike what we say in my opinion about game pricing where it's like you can say whatever you want but people just don't want to hear it the reality is is that what I think this save video game or stop killing games thing is saying is simply unreasonable it's not really possible to do what they're saying to do with all games.

2:02:26It's not. It almost comes from a position of not even understanding how it all works. And that to me, I'll be interested to see what you think, Chris. Because single player games are one thing. And I don't think they're even really talking about that. They're really talking about multiplayer games, games as a service, online only games. But if the cost of, if the figurative cost of making an online game is like, all right, when you're pre-planning and you're and you're pitching it. It's like, by the way, the game has to be alive forever. it's like what do you how do you even account for that and i don't think that's what they're arguing for though yeah this oh well i got that yeah either of you it's fine well i i just feel like this is the kind of the fundamental misunderstanding i think this is not about like if if there's a game that is purely like it's a pvp you know something like concord or whatever like there's no argument that's like oh this should live forever you know the argument is that if there are if there are elements of these games that exist um particularly the crew is actually a really good example because that's a that's a primarily online game with a single player campaign that is all off by the way that's why you're bringing it up yeah yeah and it's also just a good example but i would argue there are other games that i would argue kind of fit into this mold things like um i would argue i would argue even something like uh the division or something or things like those where it's just like these are very playable single player experiences fundamentally like you don't really they don't really rely deeply like deeply fundamentally on uh like an online presence of like other people or like main maintain servers although like you know that's kind of the problem is like some of them do like for for no discernible reason other than like it's core to the functionality of like certain features but like i think the argument here is that is not that like every single multiplayer game needs to exist forever or be supported in perpetuity i think the argument is that there are certain games that's that are simply behind this weird wall of like this is online only but not for any real purpose like what purpose does the single-player campaign of the crew have to be only accessible through the internet when it's a single-player campaign that doesn't like there's no like what is the benefit of that it would be like if your single-player campaign for your first-person shooter was inaccessible like it would be like if halo 2's campaign was rendered unplayable just because like the servers went down yeah i agree with this we're in agreement with this completely yeah right well that's i think the that's i think the core fundamental argument of what they're trying to get out here i don't think anybody's necessarily arguing that like oh i should be able to play you know uh overwatch on dedicated servers forever it's like no that's absurd right no expect those games to die i i think that the only thing for me when I was reading over the Stop Killing Games FAQ is that I think, from my impression, based on this FAQ, is that they are kind of saying, like, we need to have a blanket.

2:05:30All games need to have some way of operating afterwards. And I mostly can agree with that, I think, because there are examples like The Crew. Last week we brought up Anthem is going offline. I didn't play Anthem extensively, but I would imagine that there should be a way to make some kind of option to play it offline without servers um in the this is the anthem yeah exactly sorry i had to do they should have had that as the theme song or at least one trailer right right uh with that song in this faq it talks about large-scale mmos and it says isn't it impossible for customers to run those when the servers are shut down and the response says not at all however limitations can apply several mmorpgs have been shut down and have seen server emulators emerge that are capable of hosting thousands of other players and it goes on but i'm like that's the thing where it's like i i just don't think that when you're signing up for an mmo that it should be expected that it's able to run because and you should be able to have to create support for Joe Schmo to set up a dedicated server.

2:06:44Cause I do agree with the statement here where it's like that could create a security problem. If for, if they're creating a system for people to create dedicated outside servers for an MMO, that sounds a little, eh, not good. So it's like, I agree with stop killing games in general. I think they take it a little further than I would personally. Yeah. I, I think, we're in general agreement that single player there's there's i was always against like this on like why is this game have to be connected to the internet like what is the purpose of this i understand that you want to scrape data and understand how people play the games i imagine you can even do that with like ghost packets of like ghost data where you can just have the game send occasionally ping the server and send things like you don't have to actively monitor the game it's not really the way it works and it did seem capricious and unnecessary to do stuff like that to games but yeah i want to be clear that and i think this is what the european state the european games industry statement was saying which i think is relevant and important it's like this is simply not going to be possible with a lot of games and truly if you don't understand that then i don't know what we're supposed to do i'm sorry chris no no no you're sure i was i was just agreeing yeah yeah like yeah not not everything and and yeah the licensing issues are fascinating too because it's like what if you are what if marvel rivals goes offline or something and it's like so now are you just going to use the Marvel rivals game on a private server?

2:08:10It's like that just, that seems like a licensing nightmare. That seems like that's never going to happen. I really think, and I think I said this last week that this will probably be solved simply by changing the way you purchase games on storefronts. Why can't you just put by license? And then maybe a little box comes up on PlayStation. It's like, did you read the Eula? Yes. The understanding, you know, that this is not, this is a, and basically like it would be i would love for companies and i asked i've asked hogan in the past like why don't companies just speak clearly and he's like well i think part of it is they want it to be arcane and weird but they also want to make sure that they're covering their all their bases as sufficiently as possible but it'll be interesting if sony just literally had that button and it's like a question mark and you click on it it's a little pop-up and it says like we assume something like we assume these games will be available in perpetuity as long as playstation exist the playstation network is live or whatever but anything can happen kind of thing.

2:09:03You want to verbalize it a little bit better, more eloquently than that. But it doesn't have to be this whole EULA that no one's going to read. It should be bullet points that's accessible. If you hit people with a couple hundred words, they're not necessarily going to skip it over. If you hit them with this thing that's paginated, I mean, come on, man. Yeah. It's ridiculous. And I do think even by license or even just something like subscribe, i've seen floated around as like an alternative like to to these games which would but which would by the way put games that could market themselves and could put themselves at on the store as buy at a at a particular advantage at least psychologically because i think more people would be willing to hit buy on something that they're interested in then subscribe if you like subscribe would be like what the fuck what is that or buy license like yeah what's that so yeah i don't know i again marvel rivals is as an example is one of the like this is purely pvp you know so like i don't i don't think there's like a real expectation those games really only function as long as other people play them and you know these these games they are expected to die right in some in some way but like i i death stranding is actually a great example because like death stranding if you think about death stranding and what it is like the core kind of design philosophy of that game kind of requires internet connection because it really is about like you know getting these like these likes and and building these things for other people and then seeing other people contribute to your thing but imagine if that was like okay so that's this is a core fundamental principle of what death stranding is this is kind of like the core of the game and what makes it work um if you can't have that then uh you're not allowed to play the game at all you know what i mean there's a lot of games like that or at least there used to be and um they don't really need that like you can play death stranding offline it's not the intended design, but you can and you can because it's a game that you bought and you own.

2:10:55Right. And I think that's relevant. I'm going to reach out to this guy. I cut you off. Oh, I was just going to say, and I'll let you finish Dustin. There's an email address at the bottom. I'm going to reach out to this guy, see if he wants to come to the show so we can just get to the bottom of this. Yeah. I think there are options for even a game like Marvel Rivals. Because you think about Halo 3's Xbox 360 servers are shut down. You cannot play matchmaking on it but you can do a custom game on on halo 3 so maybe there would be an option for some of these games i guess i wanted to be clear because i said about private servers earlier it's very different than running a private server that any people can connect to and run the game world on is very different than running a peer-to-peer custom game so just to be clear on that i think there are definitely games that could set up a situation where you have a peer-to-peer custom game type situation that absolutely i would support requiring it to have those for a game that you buy um but it gets weird when you get into games that are so heavily network focused and run on a world server or whatever that's like i just don't i don't see that working out well yeah it's possible it's possible to run a world of warcraft classic server um i don't know about making it a requirement for blizzard to provide ways for people to do that that are potentially insecure right that's that's up to the and ultimately like the user base for a lot of games are they're dedicated don't worry they'll they'll get something working i think but there's there's a line here particularly that bothers me and i guess it's like it's predicated on the the misunderstanding of like what they're trying to do like the idea of just like oh we can't support these games in perpetuity forever just because we've launched them it's like yeah but there's a line here it's like these proposals would curtail development developer choices and make these video games prohibitively expensive to create like prohibitively expensive more prohibitively expensive than like a 400 million dollar concord disaster like what do you mean like yeah how much more expensive can they get like how like that's i i straight up don't believe that that's great like you're telling It's more expensive to just be like, hey, guys, before we start making this game, some aspects of this need to be functional.

2:13:11So let's just put in place a guardrail to make sure that in some way, if we're building a game that lends itself to this kind of design philosophy, that we have a way of ending the life of this game without leaving our customers in the dirt, that's$300 million? No. Yeah. That's insane. That's an insane perspective. And again, yeah, I think I think I don't think anyone's not in agreement that like single player games, co-op games like they should they should exist in perpetuity as long as these platforms are alive. I think that like there's just only so much you can do if if Sony goes bankrupt or something in 20 years, it's over.

2:13:48There's nothing you can, you know, like. Right. Yeah, of course. But I think they should communicate that better. And that's why I was thinking like the legalese bullet points, I think, would be really good of like everyone knowing what they're getting into. But I think most people get it. because there is an ephemeral nature to everything now anyway you're renting game pass games you're streaming netflix series you're subscribing to nfl sunday ticket you don't really own anything this is actually closer to ownership than you probably yeah no exactly well that's what i'm saying it's like this is actually like even owning a license on psn for 30 years is closer to owning something than you're probably ever going to own in your life you know like i own my house and i still have to pay fucking property tax no one really owns anything you know yeah bullshit all right the remaining pieces of news we can get through fairly quickly here new playstation plus games available for playstation plus game catalog so if you're at the premium or extra tiers extra of course is the middle tier premium is the highest tier some pretty cool games actually included in here and actually terminal autism wrote into us and said hey boys credit where it's due this month's ps plus lineup is stacked diablo 4 cyberpunk 2077 risk of rain to banishers planet zoo and even bluey for when you rage quit diablo and need a hug it's like sony finally remembered it's a subscription service and not just a monthly exercise and disappointment thanks i'll go put on some lipstick kiss a bus at full speed and listen okay terminal autism well i like that name it's a great name yeah it's good um this is a really good month i think people are usually quite dramatic because it's it's all additive the game catalog is in existence games get taken off but the games are being added you're not being nothing's being removed it's not like the essential games the three or four games we get with essentials some of those are hit or miss this i think people are a little too crazy about um but this is a an undeniably strong month cyberpunk 2077 for ps5 and ps4 is available and apparently apparently playable via cloud on portal totally right i saw a video of someone doing it which is pretty cool um the game abiotic factor is available banishers ghosts of new eden which is a game I played last year but didn't beat it wasn't bad by initial imagination it was actually quite good I don't I just kind of got bored with it I think I was just it's a game I can imagine going back and playing again Bluey the video game the only the only context I have a Bluey is when they the scene of them going around when they sell their house you know I'm talking about I think I know what you're talking about like it's like a really emotional moment where they're selling their house and they're thinking about all the memories and whatever and then like they end up not selling the house because it's like a And people thought it was really controversial because kids don't really have that level of agency.

2:16:28And obviously, like everyone's childhood home haunts them like mine does. Like I think about it. So anyway, Planet Zoo console edition, Risk of Rain 2, Tropico 6. If you want to be a communist or a communist, New World, Aeternum. And then over on PlayStation Plus Premium, the non-Jaffe Twisted Metal games, Twisted Metal 3 and Twisted Metal 4, both from the PS1 era are available. and that will be specifically for premium members although they'll be available a la carte to purchase as well probably for five or ten bucks each i'm not entirely sure um cyberpunk's available now abiotic factor goes in july 22nd that might actually be a day and date release and then everything else will be available july 15th including twisted metal three and four so please look forward to it next week dustin anything here for you i'm curious about playing cyberpunk still because i played a lot of it when it came out never finished it i went back to it a few years later didn't play as much and did not finish it and i know that i i think it has cross save with pc so i'm thinking about getting that set up and maybe playing a little bit because i've realized with certain games i just want to be able to chill out on the couch and i feel like cyberpunk might be good for that so might check out that um other than that i is this abiotic factor that's a multiplayer see 90s sci-fi twist oh it brings a 90s sci-fi twist and rich character progression to multiplayer open world survival crafting genre yeah it says abiotic fact it came out on steam in 2024 abiotic factor is a survival crafting experience for one to six players set in the depths of an underground research facility and it's 34.99 so that is nps plus is not so bad okay yeah um it looks kind of like uh not exactly deep rock galactic but it's it's got like i'm skimming the trailer it's got a little bit of that it's less about mining though and more like survival and it is a day and date release on playstation so it comes to playstation that same day that's why it's on the 22nd all right so there's that i do recommend banishers if people are curious it's cool cyberpunk is obviously fantastic right um i can say yeah good i can say risk of rain 2 is really really good like if you've got uh if you got some people to play with which um should be because it's free um or it comes with your subscription yeah what's going on with that game because the first one was 2d and this one's 3d right yeah yeah it this is um man it's been a while since i played it but i had a really good time playing with my buddy lyle and uh it's just kind of like a it's a flow state kind of arena sandbox kind of it's not a looter shooter exactly it's kind of if you look up gameplay you'll know immediately if it's if it's your kind of game really um but it is it's a it's a fun cooperative kind of game yeah gearbox i think published both of them and then i think gearbox actually ended up taking over development of risk of rain too at some point i think the guy who made it or the team that small team that made risk of rain sold it so it's now under take two's umbrella i guess it did very well yeah it's fun it's a good time let's see yeah 650 000 players after a week the game had sold over a million copies after a month four million copies by 2021 so a lot of people out there playing it probably and it's very well received it's not it's not a game i've ever played but it's older than i remember too it came out in 2020 yeah actually it was before even ps5 came out yeah interesting i'm kind of curious about planet zoo i've been wanting to get into these like weird like i've been having this weird yearning for like a like a tycoon kind of game i don't know what it is exactly but like i'm i feel like i feel a call dude to these kinds of things roller coaster tycoon it's time have you played it before no i've never played like as far as i remember i don't think i've i think i've played to the extent that i have played it i've barely played it you know what i mean like i might have like clicked around on like a friend's thing maybe there is a vague memories of it but not really there's a very dedicated community that you can buy roller coaster tycoon 2 really cheap either on steam or whatever but it's called open rct 2 and they basically went and made it so it runs flawlessly on modern computers widescreen support all it it's great because i think i was having like a i think i got the itch to play something like that and i think there was like something i don't know if it was roller coaster tycoon specifically but there was like a tycoon kind of game of that genre and it was on xbox game pass and then i installed it and then it just like wouldn't it straight up just wouldn't run because it was just too old or something quality okay cool great um so i just kind of gave up but roller coaster tycoon 2 you said yeah here i'll send you the website this is the yeah do that the project that lets you make it run flawlessly with a lot of other convenient features too oh cool yeah i'll save this yeah my friend and i my friend bryce was really into this game in the must have been the late 90s right early early early early 2000s depending on which one um probably the original one yeah this is war coaster tycoon 2 so this is probably not even the one we played 2 is just really an expanded version of one um and it's it's it's honestly one of my favorite games of all time i play it every at least once a year um so does holly now too she just put it up the other day just randomly so yeah it's i like these kinds of sim games they're fun there was a whole late I mean, they still are, but I remember when they were trying to do all sorts of things.

2:22:21But the Sim series and everything, there was just, it was like all the rage. It seemed like it was a part of, like, I remember my friends, like adult dads playing these kinds of games on PC in the 90s. The Diddler wrote in, said, hey, fellow Diddlers. I know people complain about the PS Plus price hikes, but has the service been substantially better since the subscription price increased? since the increase i managed to play diablo 4 dragon age dying light 2 destiny expansions and many other triple a titles the service hasn't gotten worse it's only gotten better of course for many games journalists and people with a lot of time and money on their hands they probably already played these titles but for people like me who don't have the time to play every game when it launches ps plus has been a tremendous value as colin always says if games stopped releasing today there would be more than enough games to play i'll go oil myself up now and slide down the side of a building diddler thank you for writing is that a known way of doing that oiling yourself up and down the side of a bill yeah i don't really i don't know yeah unless you're unless you're trying to escape unless you're trying to escape the top of the luxor i don't i don't know if that's going to really help you right exactly like you need some pyramid like like the pro best shop yeah yeah i do i do think people over you gotta the subscriptions are going to cost a lot of money.

2:23:40I mean, it's the same thing with Game Pass and it's going to be, and it is even more so with Game Pass because of the new inclusions in there with Call of Duty and all these things, you're going to pay for it, man. And it's really a matter of what you get out of it. I think it's just about the particular consumer. I want to buy my games because I, imagine me last month, I played Death Stranding one, like all month, basically with rare exception. What would I have gotten out of a subscription service for that? Like I could just buy the game and just play it. I don't have to worry about all this option and choice that I'm not even taking advantage of.

2:24:10Well, if you're jumping around or you have kids or there's just a bunch of people using your account or whatever the case might be, or you're more casual and you don't have a lot of time and you don't have a lot of money. I think the PS Plus and Game Pass are both really high value propositions. I don't know. People just want to pay nothing for everything. And it's just not the way it works, unfortunately. And I do think there's a high quality catalog of PS Plus games. I won't go as far as to say this, but I think if you... I've heard people make the argument that if you just remove the day and date stuff, PS Plus is actually a far better catalog of games at this point than what's going on on Game Pass.

2:24:46So I think it's quietly come into its own. People have had problems with PS Plus for fucking 15 years, dude. Long predates this new trio of options and the game catalog and all the rest, so you're not going to please everybody. If it exists, there will be problems with it. Right. That's right. That people will find. That's exactly right. Okay. We have new game sales data for the month of May from Serkana. Again, Matt Piscitella insists on posting this stuff on Blue Sky, where I just feel like no one's seeing it. And then people just screen capture it and then put it on Twitter. So I don't really understand the point, but I'm over on Blue Sky on his account, Matt Piscitella.bsky.social.

2:25:30he writes may 2025 us video game market highlights from surkana may 2025 projected us total spending on video game hardware content and accessories grew one percent compared to a year ago to 4.1 billion dollars in the u.s year-to-date spending finished the month six percent behind 2024's pace at 21.8 billion dollars now the news we really want to know of course is the top 20 best-selling games physical and full digital games from the nintendo e-shop playstation store xbox and pc stores from participating retailers nintendo platforms for instance aren't really counted fully because they don't count um digital and so on and so forth but the best-selling game in may in the u.s across all channels was elden ring night rain by bandai namco and by the way this is ranked in dollar sales that's a 40 game right so that's a lot of copies um because it's competing with 60 and 70 games here and then microsoft dominates two through five and this is something I was talking about on the Xbox 2 podcast I was on recently.

2:26:26Number two, Doom the Dark Ages. So sold a lot better than I thought because it didn't seem like a lot of people were talking about it. I was happy to buy it. I still haven't played it. Forza Horizon 5 at three. All in the back of PlayStation fans. The Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion Remastered at four. And then Call of Duty Black Ops 6 at five. Other notable games here. MLB The Show 25, a Sony game at six. Anything else interesting? Assassin's Creed Shadow is holding on at 11. Star Wars Battlefront 2. Remember we were talking about this a month or so ago that people are trying to kind of force this game back in and seem to get a third one.

2:27:02It went from 135th in April to 12th in May. So there is a lot of movement there on the game. Split Fiction holding on at 13. F-125 a new edition at 15. Helldivers is up to 16. The Last of Us Part 2 at 17. Capcom Fighting Collection 2 is a new entrant at 19. So a lot of interesting games there. And then if you focus in on year to date, so this is all platforms, all channels from the beginning of January through the end of May. Monster Hunter Wilds remains the best-selling game of the year, followed by The Elder Scrolls 4, Oblivion Remastered at 2, and Assassin's Creed Shadows at 3. Call of Duty Black Ops 6 is 4.

2:27:43MLB The Show, 25. Quietly dominating at 5. Other games on the list that are interesting, Kingdom Come Deliverance 6, Split Fiction 8, Civilization 7, 10 night rain is already the 11th best-selling game of the year forza horizon 5 is the 12th best-selling game in the u.s of 2025 millions of copies sold on playstation pga tour 2k25 good investment on 2k's part 14 doom the dark ages is at 16 and spider-man 2 holds on as the 20th best-selling game of the year so far um what else here is interesting they do split it up by platforms let me see if i can find it here here it is top 10 games in order of dollar sales between may 4th and may 31st on ps4 and ps5 full game and digital as well as physical elden ring night reign number one doom the dark ages number two forza horizon number three call of duty black ops 6 number four mlb the show 25 number five oblivion remastered 6 gta 5 7 minecraft 8 Assassin's Creed Shadows 9 NBA 2K25 10 yeah so Microsoft 5 of the 10 games top selling games on PlayStation or Microsoft games really impressive stuff anything else to say not really the Switch numbers are interesting just because I think they're combining Switch and Switch 2 numbers and obviously is this yeah Nintendo platform so Mario Kart 8 was May's best selling game this is before Switch came out though right so this is going to be the last look at an unswitch two list that will get corrupted and bastardized because this list is always really boring when i look at it it's like minecraft smash brothers hogwarts legacy just dance just dance 2025 was the seventh best-selling game on switch that month and mlb the show at number 10 although not published by sony published by the mlb okay any thoughts here before we move on um i'm sorry dustin i'm interrupting you already ps5 best-selling console up three percent year over year good i was thinking we had discussions i don't know months ago about like now that microsoft is releasing their games on playstation once they build up a base are they going to want to do game pass a curated game pass just for playstation i think that would be so stupid yeah at this point i think this is a lot smarter yeah yeah just they can release their games on playstation they can get sales and do game pass they can have their cake and eat it too at this point with these sales dude like forza cracking uh what was it number 12 of the year from just playstation crazy yeah again alinea tracks the the sales of that game on playstation at around 3 million copies all full priced between 70 and 80 bucks i think you could have paid because there's early access and it and it appeared to have so it appeared to have pre-ordered a million copies that's crazy dude that's a i mean it's not surprising dude it's a good ass game like forza horizon 5 like i don't really care about those types of games at all but even i played that for like a shockingly like a shockingly long amount of time for me to play it looks really great i just don't play car i used to actually love i used to specifically love the need for speed series since the ps1 the ps2 era and i so i i like cargain it's just not really it looks fun it's just not i'm not gonna play that was the 2021 right yeah 2021 yep yeah so i probably would have played it a lot longer if they didn't undercut if they didn't famously undercut the release of that game by releasing halo infinites multiplayer like three weeks earlier some shit yeah that's right yeah um it's funny because it it's doing even better than I could have ever imagined it doing and I wonder if they feel the same way or if it's like a this is kind of at the top end of our we were thinking about this is about the number we would sell it seems like it's so many copies and if this is how well it's doing if this is how well it's doing with Forza it's I mean, how many copies of gears are going to sell?

2:32:07Yeah, I don't know. At 40 bucks. I mean, it's not going to maybe be quite as impressive, but and then Halo. Inevitably, I just think we'll see. Who knows? Yeah, who knows? But let's see how these sales from Serkana compare to the PlayStation sales over on the PlayStation blog. So they have the PlayStation stores downloadable stats for June. So we're a little bit ahead here. So we've gotten the maze numbers. We're going to have to wait a while for the Sakana numbers for June, but we already have the June numbers for PSN. Not surprisingly, Death Stranding 2 on the beach was the best selling game for the month on PlayStation Network for June.

2:32:47And Grand Theft Auto 5, number two.

2:32:52Elden Ring, Night Rain, number three. Rematch, which is apparently a very popular. Almost, I don't want to speak out of school here. to me it looks like a rocket league styled soccer game i don't know if that's like accurate no yeah which is funny because that's what rocket league also is yeah right it's it's it's weird i remember when they i remember when they first showed this game off and i remember being like they just took rocket league but made it the thing that rocket league was they made a son they made a soccer game yeah it's really weird like it's it it almost feels like they devolved it in some way or they I don't know.

2:33:30I thought it looked like way more generic because it's just it didn't feel as novel or gamey. But that game is like quietly very. Like weirdly popular, like way. It's huge. Totally. Complete surprise to me that that people like that game as much as they do. Yeah, it's sold a million copies pretty quickly, I think. And it is on Game Pass. so it is being yeah a million unique players in 24 hours a million units sold and three million players in three days so it's really big i mean soccer is yeah in my opinion inexplicably big let's be honest but um like it's a it's a fun game it's a great game i'm going to enjoy the world cup next year in the states but why it's so big is anyone's guess have you guys watched a hockey game before what's wrong with you people i i feel i feel this way about all these things but like i know but but i i guess yeah because soccer is so universal like worldwide huge i guess it shouldn't be surprising in retrospect and it didn't look like it was like poorly made or anything i i can't i really can't explain why this just completely i was so miscalibrated this game i really thought i really thought when i first saw this i was like oh this looks nobody's gonna care about this i've never been more wrong about anything yeah yeah rematch so rematches at fourth forza horizon five other notable games let's see i guess at nine would be expedition 33 10 would be mlb the show delta rune at 12 that's the what's the what's that game called undertale undertale right that's like the sequel to it um oblivion's hanging in there a game called rooftops and alleys the parkour game was number 18 i've never even heard of this game I keep seeing it on the PlayStation store like when I go and peruse and wade through all the garbage that's one of them it's not one of the garbage games but I keep seeing it it seems pretty big on Steam I feel like this might have been in one of the games this yeah I recognize this game actually it looks cool just to note again the best selling PS4 game for the month of June was Star Wars Battlefront 2 so there is something interesting there a little bit different from usual behemoth from skydance was the best-selling psvr2 game beat saber at number two really weird shit going on with that one and then free-to-play best our most played free-to-play game split gate two for the month of june i think the death of that game is being overstated it doesn't seem to be doing well on pc but if it's the number one game for the month in free-to-play in june on psn that's a pretty extreme number of people i mean it's it's ahead of fortnight rainbow six siege and roblox so yeah i don't think that that's uh maybe it'll be a maybe it'll come and go but that's a pretty big number of people how are these how is this number quantified though is it new downloads is it time spent they don't say is it microtransactions purchased my assumption is is it's raw downloads yeah because it would make sense like surely it's not getting more time than fortnite um but in its release month got more downloads but maybe people played it and immediately were like nah maybe it is time played but yeah that would be unbelievable yeah especially with roblox so i actually have a letter later on where there was a roblox game with 21 million people playing it at the same time which is like what that's a third of the fucking playstation audience we're dinosaurs man i know like what the fuck even is that dude i i still to this day i have tried and it's not even like for for lack of trying i don't know what roblox is i've looked into i've i think i've actually played it a little bit and i still don't really understand yeah i don't either it's like a it's like a it's like a it's like a universe and an engine with different games in it you make it interact i don't really understand it either i am very old you're old come on what you just what you just said is like something that i'd expect to hear like somebody's like mumbling outside of a 7-eleven right right right it's like it's a universe in an engine like when we like when we saw the kid the fortnight kid when we were walking to the diner that day it's still one of my favorite memories of the show i love that that's an all-time crazy that didn't feel real in that moment right when we were just walking talking about how annoying it was that we couldn't escape fortnight and then some kid walks by with his mom talking about like v bucks or something yeah i was like it was crazy it was like we were just like fucking dead up laughing i was like i couldn't even believe that that just happened so yeah it would be interesting if they gave us more information about how this data is garnered um because they really i'm looking here doesn't really say this is just the the month's download charts i mean that's how they describe it yeah it's gotta be raw downloads right right i can't think of i can't imagine that it's anything else let's see all right well that's that and then the only thing oh this is just like kind of a psa for the tens of millions of you that are still playing on ps4 including many of you listening thousands of you listening to this no doubt there is a new firmware update for playstation 4 12.52 if you guys click on i don't know if you went to the page it's so funny it's like 12.50 at 12.02 12.0 it's all the same thing we've made some security fixes we've improved the messages and you build it we've made some security fixes we made some security fixes it's like all right so just be aware that you're gonna have to download that if you turn on your ps4 at some point yeah all right let's get into what i'm sorry did you want to say more please well one thing one thing like a little quick it's not necessarily playstation related but i thought it was cool that this happened castle crashers getting like i guess i think steam related dlc like for the first time a long ass time after 17 17 years 17 years crazy uh just thought that was interesting uh shout out to the behemoth There's a really interesting, weird team that made some of my favorite shit ever.

2:39:21I love Castle Crashers, so it was nice. It was cool to see that. It's a neat little update, too, although I don't think it applies to the console versions of the game. It seems more Steam-centric. I don't know that for sure, but this is so weird. I saw this news that it was on Steam. I don't know what their plans are for the console version because they just released Castle Crashers on PS4 for the first time, right? Because it was on PS3. I'm pretty sure it just came out. Yeah, something recently. I could be wrong about that. yeah but no but yeah it's like it seems more pc oriented because it's like the whole premise of it is like you could build your own guy so you could go in and like they give you basically the template for like creating your own character and you draw it you draw it out and like it gives you the positions of like the head and the body that you have to like draw so people can just create their own their own characters in castle crash and they can make them as demented as they want which is i think it's really cool but that seems very like pc oriented i'm uh i'm wrong by the way Castle Crashers came to PS4 in 2019.

2:40:18I was thinking of Alien Hominid, which just came out. Oh. Which are re-releases of their older games before Castle Crashers. Castle Crashers is exceptional. I loved that game, and I was so excited when it came to PlayStation. It's a wonderful game. Yeah, because it... Genuinely. It took two years for it to come to PS3, but that was one of the games I would... 360 was like really... I was really attracted to and very into the downloadable ecosystem on Xbox much more than the retail ecosystem because yeah it felt so much better than playstations and there were games i absolutely fucking fell in love with on that system like castle our um shadow complex i always bring up where i'm like this is so fucking good and it took it years for that to come almost 10 years for it to come to playstation which was crazy um yeah summer of our summer of arcade was a good good good time what was that ninja game there was a ninja game that was really good and plus oh and plus is the ninja game or um mark of the ninja was one mark of the ninja is one of them but i think it's n plus that i'm thinking of yeah yeah this is the one i'm thinking of i loved n plus i loved n plus so much n plus was like that like it was like 2d platformer and it was like really minimalistic right yep i had a great it got a great like cypher was kind of a electronic soundtrack and my favorite thing about that game is like it's physics oriented like the whole thing is like physics like it's all about like weight and momentum and shit is so good and plus plus that was when it finally came to playstation because um and plus came to psp weirdly i remember yeah but never to uh psn like ps3 but yeah good good memory man because i was like yeah what the because mark of the ninja is another one that's from that era that's really good too but and then of course you have like limbo and like i was pretty into those and they would it was such a different era because they would stagger them it would be like every month you'd get one of these games it wouldn't be like seven a day like it is now right yeah it would be like explosion man and super meat boy and right explosion man that's right that is that's i think that really is why i love that that era so much it was just so many good like weird oddball shit that you would get for so cheap so good and there was the ps3 kind of copy of explosion man called explode them on i don't remember what is that is that real yeah it was actually pretty good i felt bad for them because i think that they kind of didn't know oh yeah about you know and there was misplosion man right or whatever right and so it wasn't quite the same game but i just felt bad for them because i remember writing a preview for it they came and like showed it to me and i was like and people were just like fucking brutalizing it and they're like i get it sony's trying at least there are so many good psn games man like from the ps3 era that are just gone like well they're they still exist but no one talks about anymore the game horde i loved that game that game was so good.

2:43:01There was a game called Sideways New York that was exceptional. PID was a really good game. There's like so many games just buried on that fucking thing. Anyway. Oh, other shout out Trials HD. The Trial Cycle. People loved it. It wasn't so much on my alley, but that was a huge game. I mean, that is a huge game. I think people still play Trials. That's Ubisoft, right? I don't remember. Yeah. It might be now, but I think at the time... I don't think it was at the time. Yeah. I think it was... Well, it says trials HD publishers, Microsoft game studios. Oh, okay. Developers read Linux on the Wikipedia.

2:43:37I don't know how accurate. Yeah. Then he probably ended up buying it later, which is a wise investment because every once in a while it would pop up at like their E3 conference for UB later on. Yeah. All right. Let's get into what we're playing. And yeah, that is cool news, by the way, about Castle Crashers. And people should go play Castle Crashers. What a unique game that was. Really fun. Cute. Bloody. Strange. Funny. Yeah. Very fun. Hard. And highly playable with other people. I mean, highly recommended to play with other people. All right, let's see. We're all playing this. All right, so I'll go first.

2:44:08You two are both playing the same games. So I finally beat Death Stranding Director's Cut. It's my 183rd platinum. Well, I beat it, I think, even as of last week, but I platinumed it. Scott Stapping Young Lad wrote in and said, Colin, not building out a zipline network in Death Stranding is wild. My man out here delivering packages by truck like a jabroni. That is all. Did you guys see the statistics that I shared on Twitter? if not i'll bring them up um i did i don't remember them specifically yeah i'll uh i'll link you guys to them here in the chat here it is copy this paste it here and then so played it on hard total likes received 437 ,549 pretty good yeah uh 117 legend of legends you only need 80 to get the platinum but you have to do them in a certain order so i had to do a bunch of them that i didn't need to do to try to get the ones that i needed um play time 98 hours 53 minutes and 18 seconds i would argue that that is very well measured i'm very obsessive about that stuff as you know so i think death stranding has been i think people why wildly i was listening to our podcast actually chris from 2019 and i said i played it for 56 hours and when i played it now i'm like there's no fucking way i played it for 56 hours like not even close it must have been more like 25 or something because the clock just runs so what i would do i really so i knew that so i would save and then just quit to the menu and on ps5 it just goes so quick it's like not even a big deal it's like almost like pausing it itself so yeah that that time is accurate i guarantee you that time is accurate so not because it's psn i think says 120 hours and it's not quite that long so yeah 98 53 total distance traveled 1 ,272 kilometers 213 on foot 245 by bike 763 by truck 49 by roadster 1.4 kilometers by zipline this is what really drove people insane what are your thoughts on this that is so crazy because the ziplines are so fucking efficient they are so efficient but that's the game i know what you mean though like because i i'm only i mean in death stranding 2 i've kind of got i kind of got obsessed with the metagame of the roads but i'm hitting a point now where it's like the roads aren't going where i need them to go right and now now i'm starting to invest in like building zip i'm bringing so many pccs with me it's crazy um yeah and now i've got like a really good system where i could just and that's just that is satisfying in and of itself just building like a network of things that get you to zoom from it's just it's just crazy to me that like it's only 1.4 kilometers like i i figured like sure maybe it might be less than a lot of other things but like that it's only 1.4 kilometers is crazy to me because what even is that zipline like what i think it's it's like whenever i saw a zipline that was already attacked like already affixed by another player and it worked and i came across it i would use it so that that otherwise i never built one except to like get the trophy but i gotta say i i think i didn't realize this until later in the game because i'm just stupid is that i always assumed not that i really needed to build very much i just felt like there was so much in my there's so much shit in my um in my universe or whatever and that's one of the things i was saying in our spoiler conversation was it's actually a little annoying i don't like the the degradation system for the things you build or the things that other people build because then your world just ends up being stuck shoved with other people's rusting contraptions everywhere like i have to keep these things up i didn't even put this here and now it's just gonna fucking sit here looking like shit in my world it really bothered me but i didn't realize that it's like I wasn't using the PCC enough because I always thought that the PCC really needed to be utilized alongside like metal or ceramics or whatever to get the first thing built.

2:47:52And I was like, oh, I just don't want to do that. It's just annoying. But then you just you set the PCC down first and then you go get the items. And I didn't really do any of that. So it wasn't until I started playing Death Stranding 2 that I'm like, oh, yeah, this is like much more actively functional than it seems because you can just build something on the fly. Yeah. I guess it was when Death Stranding 2 specifically is like, oh, you have to drive a really long distance build. You just throw the PCC out when you need to, you know, make a generator. And I'm like, yeah, but I don't have any fucking metal or anything like that.

2:48:22And then I was like, oh, you can just do it. And then to upgrade it one, two and three times, you have to use this item. So that was a little lost on me. But there are certain items that do require metal, like a bridge. Right. Maybe that's why I got confused. Yeah. Like the PCC one stuff doesn't. I think in the PCC two stuff, at least in the first game, does. I don't know how exactly it works, but director's cut is a phenomenal game there. It is. And this is what I was saying is like, it is one of those games that's deeply flawed. Like, and this is why I wanted to talk a little bit about that's training too.

2:48:52I've only played it for about five hours, but the combat in the game is just so cumbersome and frustrating and it makes me not want to fight. And it really makes me wonder what this game would have been like, not nonviolently, but just the bit like it's so violent that you couldn't do anything about it. That would be like a really interesting thing. like we're participating in violence in this world would almost be like a death sentence so you just don't do it so when i moved on to the second game i was like and i think you said this last week dustin is like the combat is really good in the second game like it and it truly now i do feel like the new game feels like metal gear solid five and i think this is what you were saying before i was like yeah this is you're like far cry tracking character like you you're using like your binoculars to mark them and then like you're sneaking around the mat the mazer charge gun the pistol which is awesome that he has a pistol slot now which is really cool because that actually frustrated me in the first game it's like why doesn't he have just a fucking pistol on his like uh just charging it and there's a council of the people on the top of the screen i was like this is a totally different game actually and i think i would have only realized it to the extent that i do if i i literally the same night started playing it after beating and platinum and Death Stranding 1.

2:50:09And I really, really appreciate the work that they've put into fixing parts of the game. It's funny how similar it is and even identical it is to the first game. Like the animations are the same. I was looking at it like the animations when he crouches down to put things in the, when he brings things to like a station and he puts things on the little conveyor belt or whatever. It's like, it's all the same. It's the same stuff people would make fun of Horizon or God of War for. the rolling animations and shit but the in-between stuff is so first of all the game is stunning beautiful like stunningly beautiful i was like holy shit yeah um only imagine how beautiful horizon 3 is going to be like it's going to be incredible no doubt the dinosaur robots and everything's going to look fucking crazy on decima and i really dug i won't spoil it but the game gets into very quickly things that you never see in the first game and one of the things that you never see in the first game and i don't think this is a spoiler really is you really never see how anyone lives like you don't you meet certain people you interact with certain people there are certain environments but you never really see how like the only evidence that anyone lives anywhere is like the population numbers outside of a place where it's like population 123 ,000.

2:51:30And it's like, okay, there's a city under here somewhere. But the game almost immediately shows you different stuff, which is cool. And the performances are great. Finally, a day night cycle days gone. Not having a day night cycle was weird. I didn't really quite understand it. It's almost like something they didn't get working or something in time. And it almost felt very similar to Adam fall. What I said about Adam fall, Adam fall doesn't have a day night cycle, but I actually think that's part of the storytelling and why it's creepy. It doesn't really play that way in Death Stranding. So I, I, I like that immediately.

2:52:03They have you playing at night. Um, it tells you when the sun's going up and when it's going down, the game changes. Like they, they had this archetype of a game and then they really were able to success. It's classic sequel stuff. It's like they were able to, to build upon it meaningfully with systems. And I, and so it is so similar to the first game and yet actually quite distinct from it as well and i really i really really dig it i think it's real and i'm not tired of it i'm just so in the death stranding zone i'm like this is just dope there are games that are beckoning me because like uh system shock 2 comes out today from when we're recording um and i really want to play doom as well because doom is finally finally really really fixed now they actually like it was kind of fixed but now they really did fix the trophies so I want to get into that as well so I really has nothing to do with Death Stranding it's just that there are things that are actually beckoning me now but I'm I just I'm really really into it and I'm excited to see more there are things in the game that I think don't make any sense in the story and I don't even want to say what they one thing I'll say is like I'm not quite there are like plants and trees and shit and I guess I haven't gone through like the codices to see like how they explain it but that's not supposed to be possible like the entire idea is that the water of the time fall deteriorates things and then turns into water so it's it's why the animations of like the grass quickly growing and dying over and over again was so cool in the original game so there's like certain things there's things with the character fragile too where i'm like micah pointed out something about or i'm like you're right what what is that all about um but my suspicion is is that this is all explained so and the level of depth in the codices is control level um to the point where i don't even i'm like i'm not even reading any of this maybe i'll like go through it at some point later but it's like there's so much shit like i can't i don't have time to fucking read all this i have to deliver packages you know so um so yeah I'm really, really so far enjoying it.

2:54:18There's just so many nice touches. One complaint I have. Death Stranding one seems a lot more imperfect. Like I was saying, I think the combat's bad. It's annoying at times to play. It's not always fun. It is too long. And it's not about the platinum. It's like the pacing's wrong. So it's like it has all the makings of something excellent, but it's not quite excellent. You can see that this game, although I highly recommend it because it is so unique and so interesting and so Kojima and maybe his zaniest work yet. and the second one does seem to just kind of quickly check boxes to clean some of this stuff up so really really enjoying it pleased to see that's doing pretty well i think it sold a couple million copies which is good i think it took two years for death stranding one to sell five million on both ps5 and pc so it's not like it was ever a huge game to begin with and i think that's basically all I want to say because I don't want to I don't want to spoil it too much for people I assume you said you had a you said you had a complaint but did you did you mean to not oh wait yeah maybe I did oh yeah right oh I'm sorry you're right I'm sorry Chris the complaint was they seem to have arbitrarily remapped the buttons and this is only really stuck out to me because I'm playing the games back to back there are a lot of things that you have to unlearn how to do and then relearn how to do them.

2:55:39So, and again, it all seems arbitrary. The auto wreck or whatever the fucking, the audra wreck or whatever it's called, the pulse thing. Yeah. Is on L1 now instead of R1. Crouching is on R1 instead of circle. Reloading is on circle instead of square. It's like, what? And I was looking through the, and I wonder if they'll add this later. It would be kind of cool if they did. Although maybe it's very similar to how I felt about Dying Light back in the day where I'm like, why are you making me use the buttons like this? and then it all makes sense because it's what i remapped dying light actually when i started playing and it was like almost unplayable um so like they know what they're doing and i assume that maybe the similar thing is happening here and i just don't have the full grasp of what the vision is yet but it would be cool for them to give you a death stranding one control option like go to death stranding one controls because it's just it's little things but it's like everything's on the wrong button like you're doing all the same things but why is it all just on different buttons so i'm really so i'm constantly crouching when i should be pulsing i'm constantly like why am i not reloading and that's because i'm hitting the fucking wrong button climbing picking picking things up used to be with you know you'd pick up um the golden artifacts of the time fall with uh square now you pick it up with triangle you climb up with triangle instead of square like there's it's like i'm telling you guys like there's probably 10 or 12 different controls that are just like yeah we're just oh i i could believe it yeah um i can't yeah i would imagine after like a hundred hours with the first game you're probably having a a little bit of a like it was this is this was exactly my suspicion when like i started death stranding director's cut just to kind of get a feel for it where i was just like okay i'm in the mood for this now but like i feel like something i feel like i'm gonna get too used to how this works and i can already tell that there's so much to fix that like enough is going to change where it's going to frustrate me getting used to i can't get used to this and so i was just like i can't i can't yeah yeah more customizable controls controls would be cool but again i want to see the vision full i'm so early into the game i mean the psn already tells me i'm 10 through the game so but again knowing how death stranding one worked with really a lack of coherent pacing i I assume the game is the same.

2:57:54And I looked at the trophies. I mean, there's like what, 15 or 16 chapters. So there's just no way that the chapters are all the same length. But I'm digging it. It's cool. And yeah, shout out. Do you guys have anything else you want to say? We'll spool up at probably have to do two of them again. Spoiler casts, because I think some of you are ready to go. Yeah, Brad and I are done. So Chris, where are you in it? I'm still working my way through it. I think I'm on chapter 10. okay i think i could be right it's around there though it's like nine eight nine ten um i haven't had a lot of time to play this week but i'm about to jump back into it tonight but uh i think depending on when you guys want to do it um i could be done with it i think pretty soon but yeah yeah again i want to platen at the platen i'm supposed to be easier than the first game um but i'll probably just beat it first anyway but i like but what i really do because there's a grind inherent to the platinum that you could just kind of overcome by doing it in the moment because the big thing is getting everything the five stars and i think there's 50 facilities or something in the game um so it's like i just like doing that at the time and that's like where the grind comes from i enjoy watching the stars go up that's the other thing too is the game just tickles that statistical like it just gives you so many stats and there's so many fucking screens and like is an S rank and then you have the little like all your bars are going up and then the the grid is growing and like it's like it's like just it's perfect for Colin I would say Colin though it may be inefficient to do to max out everything as you find it because as you play the game you will unlock more tools that will make the grind easier when you do go back to them yeah that makes perfect sense that makes perfect sense that's what i'm doing now is that i'm done with the story and so i just went and five starred everything in the first area uh which actually is a little more i don't want to say it's more difficult because the terrain isn't that bad you cannot build roads right just like that just like the first part of the death of the original death there was no roads there either right yeah so yeah i am wrapped up with the story uh overall I think it's awesome.

3:00:13A great game. One of the best games of the year. I know the number one question people will be asking is, is it my game of the year? I think Claire Obscura is still my number one. I have a few complaints about the story that I cannot get into at all until a spoiler cast. I think, Oh, I think last week I said that I really liked Kojima's back to his weirdness in this game. and overall 90 % of the time I think it's great. There's a few points in this game that I felt I was thinking about George Lucas when he was after he watched the screening of episode one where he said I think I may have gone a little too far in a few places.

3:00:54And I thought Kojima I think you might have went a little too far in a few places with this. And that's dude and I fucking love Kojima weirdness.

3:01:32we'll talk about in the spoiler. when i posted my i posted a tweet about how i'm going in and five starring places and i was using a truck someone's like why aren't you building zip lines i'm like dude don't get me wrong i love zip lines i use them a ton in the first game but i feel like it's very important in order to efficiently five star everything you really should be driving a truck or something that you can pick up that cargo as you're going from place to place so keep that in mind the truck is just in my opinion i i cater to the truck so much because not only for the roads but it's generally all terrain it's best in the snow it's best on hills the controls get really finicky like it's so easy to like lose control and just fall down a hill and have to just do it all over again because the kind of turning is really weird but and it protects your items from time fall and you can store the most amount of items and it has the biggest battery so to me it's like there's almost no downside to using the truck that's why i it's a little slower but you can do way more what i would basically do is like i would have i think i said this last week is that or maybe i didn't it's like i'd have like 14 or 15 16 orders at once and i would just be going from like place to place and like dropping off two things and picking up three things and going to the next place dropping off one thing picking up one thing and just like constantly yeah moving around and i just i enjoyed playing it like that but i understand i understand the satisfaction of spending the time to make an efficient way through the game like i'm sure that's incredibly satisfying it's just right i'm not going to play it like that yeah i think it'll be more efficient to use zip lines much like the first game in a mountainous region where the roads are not going to quite cover everywhere you need to go yeah but yeah well anything else we want to say about the game before and because you guys are also playing peak and i don't want to skip over that but is there anything else to say about death stranding too um no i mean i'm still really really enjoying my time with it i think uh i've been doing this thing where i've been singling out certain certain locations that i like i like the people and i like what they i like what they give me and so i like anytime i'll i'll do the truck thing too like i'll find i'll scour for a very specific like oh that goes to the pizza chef pick that up pick that and anything and i load the truck as full as possible with those and then i drive and then i just watch the like an entire column of things get delivered and it's like that shit's satisfying.

3:04:00I love that feeling. It's great. But no, I'm still really liking it. It really is so deeply it is so deeply Metal Gear Solid V. It's crazy. At a certain point, there's a crescendo that you, there's a precipice that you reach where you're just like, oh, this is a this sandbox is insane. Yeah. But yeah. Colin, I have a piece of advice for you in your five star journey. I learned that you cannot get more than one star per order submission. So, so, so in other words, not to pack them together. Right. Right. It's actually, I guess the way it works is that, so let's say you're dropping off two orders and six lost packages.

3:04:53it will only increase the star about amount by one it cannot go any further the game secretly banks right that's what i noticed in the first one yep yep yep okay i didn't i couldn't remember that's how it worked in the first one so it definitely does yeah you have to be if you think you're getting close to that final star like you have to like submit multiple orders it's a little annoying yeah there's something similar because i noticed that in the first game where because there were certain things that would happen after one stars two star like they would join the network after one stars, they would join the UCC, USC after two stars or whatever.

3:05:25And so you would want to go beyond that, but that would be the story beat. And then I would notice the next time I would deliver to them, I would get like two stars because it's so it wasn't obviously banking, but I kind of inferred that that was what was happening. So yeah, it's good advice. Yeah. Yeah. All right. What about Chris? I'm sorry, Dustin, you want to talk about because you didn't talk about it last week, right? Chris did. Yeah. Yeah. Chris did. And this, when Chris talked about this, it piqued my interest. I said earlier about friend slop games uh that's a term i don't think jimmy invented it but that's what he called it he's like yeah you're into those friend slop games i'm like you know what yeah i am i am 100 into friend slop games and so that the idea of friend slop i think kind of the core of that is lethal company where it's a usually relatively cheap multiplayer game usually on steam to me it's very focused on the proximity chat being a major part of the game and them being co-op.

3:06:30So Peak in particular, and Chris talked about this last week, is a game where you and three other friends are, it's like Lord of the Flies. So you're a bunch of like Boy Scouts or Cub Scouts, whatever, and you crash land on an island and you need to get to the top of the mountain. and then once you reach the top then you realize it's like oh this isn't the top there's another level and so the entire game is based around climbing and you have a stamina bar and that's kind of the the the core of everything where you start you have full stamina if you pick up items that's going to reduce your stamina bar because you're carrying that weight as you play you'll start to get hungry that will reduce your stamina bar so you need to eat items in order to get rid of that you can get poisoned that's going to eat away at it too you can get injured so it's all about managing this stamina bar um and then where the friend aspect comes in is that uh you you can once someone climbs something they can like there's like this grab mechanic where you can like help and pull people up and so you really have to play efficiently it's like okay well this guy this this person has the most amount of stamina so they'll be able to reach the top and then if i eat this thing and then if he grabs me at the top we can get to the next spot.

3:07:51This game's fucking hard. We've reached the third level and that was one time. We've been stuck on the second level most of our playthroughs but we've been it's just like a silly fun game. A big part of it is the proximity chat. When someone doesn't quite make that grab and you're watching them fall to their death and there's a little bit like you're playing up like i saw brad like ah like fall to his death and then you're like brad are you okay and then you just hear like dead silence you're like oh no brad brad didn't make it and then when they actually initially there's like a window where you can if they fall and they can and they're almost dead you can carry them on your back to try to like revive them if you get band-aids uh if not then they die and there's a little their little ghost head will pop up and then you can talk to them so it's like oh no is brad dead and then eventually he'll show up and he's like you fuckers didn't pick me up right or something like that so i love these kinds of games and i can't get enough of them are a lot of them very samey yes but usually they only cost between five to ten dollars and you play them for i don't know sometimes i mean lethal company we probably have at least 30 hours in that game so it's like even if we buy one of these games and play it for five hours it's like certainly well worth the amount of money and that you know that fun experience that we had so peak is pretty good i'm a big fan of it so far the latest friend slop game uh but chris i'm thank you for mentioning it last week because I had no idea about this game and I looked it up I was like oh shit this game's kind of taken off uh in a lot of ways so yeah yeah no it's it's it's real good it's it's it's fun I love anything I'm such a I'm a physics whore man like I love I love anything that like you can watch somebody tumble off of a mountain and gain momentum and then cartwheel off into the distance it's it's hysterical to me in the proximity chat I love this focus on proximity chat like in these in these games i think it's it's an underrated aspect of a lot of and it also it just incentivizes this older school of kind of like yeah we're not going to be in a discord or we're not going to be in like a i mean sometimes technical issues will pop up and we're in a discord for backup in case usually like we have all of our stuff muted and if like we get disconnected or whatever we'll be like hey i disconnected you know right but generally speaking we're in the game and and And a lot of these games in particular, I noticed it more with peak, but I'm sure it's in other games.

3:10:35Like I played a little bit of repo over the last week too, just cause I've been trying to delve into these a little bit more, but peak has, it plays with the sound a lot where it's just like, you can be far away from somebody. And obviously that does the standard thing where it's, it lowers the volume. So like it simulates how far away they are, but like also like if you're in a cave, it'll have like this reverb. So it's, it's, it's, it's just really cool the way that immersive. yeah it's it's weird because it's like it's not believable at all because it's so cartoonish but it is like it's it does suck you in and it's really cool um i've only gotten to the the third i've only gotten to the third level twice so far it's it is hard that second level is that's like a snow region where the winds will pick up and then you'll start to get this cold meter that builds up and it's there's a there's a crazy thing about that level that area in particular that's insane but it's yeah man i'm a big fan of these games i think peak has been the one that i i think i gel with the most i think i think there's something about repo and lethal company that i did enjoy but it felt um i don't know i think it's maybe just the horror tinge or like the tension tinge of like oh there's um you know it you gotta the environment's just very like it's a different vibe like peak is a very different vibe than repo and lethal company even if these all these are all games about like proximity chat and and friends kind of fucking around there's there's something to like the the bright colors and like the kind of it feels more fun off the bat because it just kind of feels more inviting um and i'm really into it um i've only i've not played that much of it i i think i only have like a couple hours into it it is it's one of those games but um definitely like five hours of it and yeah i'm into this i hope i hope we get more of these i'm totally a friend slop fan i love that name the nomenclature i've seen i've seen that percolating around i think it's like it's totally it's crazy how you can hear something that's totally accurate you know like how did you how did i not think of that when describing this to people it's like it's totally french slop well yeah because there's so many of these games and a lot of them um i've tried to dive into some of the like the less popular ones and often they are not very good yeah but even then you spend five dollars if you play for a few hours it's like who cares right yeah no no harm no foul really at that point but but um i i think peak is among the the better ones it's good it's it's it's in repo lethal company tier i think for sure yeah the one other cool thing i forgot to mention is that uh the map resets every day so the levels are the same where it's like you know what you're getting into and what environmental hazards are in each level but each day they reset so when we're playing a session or whatever and we die we can kind of play again and know what we're getting like know which way to go we went this way last time great but the fact that resets every day it's like oh you can't there's no one set path every time you well every day that you play the game it's different my one of my favorite things too about this is that like there's a you can really sabotage like they've added certain things into this game that apparently weren't there uh in in earlier versions i don't know i don't even really know how new this game is really but like apparently like i saw some tweets about like oh they added a blow dart or whatever or uh which is like a new addition um so you could like blow blow a dart into somebody and poison them and like and they'll start to get sleepy and then they'll and then they'll get their body will go limp because they've passed out and if they're on like and if they're climbing or if they're on like a slope they'll slide down and basically die and you can feed you can feed other people so if you have like an apple you can like walk up to them and force feed it to them but like you so you can really force feed people poison if you if you want to do that that's a good idea it's hysterical it's it's it's it's just a lot of fun man i love i love these fuck around games big fan uh highly recommend peak if you uh if you have the means to play it i can't imagine this is a particularly demanding game but if you're if you're on pc at all um give it give it a shout out give it a look there's a funny thing too where so if there's fire you can cook any of the food items you have they'll give you more stamina but you literally should cook every food item so uh if you have there's like bottles of energy drinks and peccari sweat you can make like cooked energy drink and it gives you more and even bandages it's like oh yeah bandages you should cook them for the cooked bandages and they will heal more i don't know why but i love it yeah it's fun it's good stuff that's funny um those are really the things i'm playing like i think uh i'm also on stream kind of dabbling in i'm trying to because i was looking at my achievements for like the master chief collection it's like i play halo all the time like every now and again i never mention it obviously because it's just a given but like i noticed that like my achievements for the mcc are like over 50 and i was like hmm and so i've been doing like these streams of like doing maybe grinding out some trophies so i've like speed runs because that's part of the trophy too is like speed running those games so i've been doing that a little bit too but that's like more of like a secondary thing cool yeah there's a lot to a lot kind of starting to stack up for me i don't know what i'm gonna keep playing death training too i'm just so in the zone yeah certainly i'm being beckoned in other directions but i gotta say man i'm not bored but i'm very i'm very weird yeah so don't take it from me maybe you wouldn't want to play death stranding and death stranding 2 for 200 hours i don't know all right that's all we have for what we're playing and we'll have more on death stranding 2 in the coming couple of weeks i think max on sacred symbols plus so patreon.com slash last day media if you want to hear more of our thoughts in depth spoilery all the rest let's get into listener inquiries as we end our show though as we always do six questions comments concerns thoughts and ideas from the audience over on patreon patreon.com slash last day media look for the thread in the news feed each and every week for our show and all the other shows we do on our network you just post in that thread we pick through them you'll feel you've heard your inquiries throughout the show you'll hear six more now of a random variety and we start with jason says fellas am i cooked my attention span is fucked recently i seem to can't play any games for more than a 10 minute chunk of time before having to look at my phone to get that dopamine hit from various social media timelines if there's a cut scene or a loading screen or even just a silent moment in the game i have this obsessive compulsion to put the controller down pick up the phone and feast my eyes on pointless dribble like a zombie it really gets in the way of making meaningful and consistent progress through any game am i cooked is my brain fried what do i do about this should i just fucking throw myself off a building knowing my dumb ass i'd probably take one more look at my instagram feed on the way down to my demise fuck my life thanks and stay cool fellas wow really brought us on a little bit of an adventure there um i think we're all suffering from this personally, maybe not.

3:17:47I have remarked many times in the past that I feel bad for kids today. I feel like I would be fucking shattered beyond belief in this environment if I was 10, 15, 20. I feel fortunate that I grew up in the era that I did where I remember what it was like before all of this stuff that I was basically in a – I mean, the crazy thing you guys can't even relate to is i was basically an adult after college by the time the iphone came out which is yeah you know the iphone came out my senior year in college and no one had one and um it wasn't even until several years later that people really started using them fully you had blackberries and you were sidekicks and things like that it was like 20 it was like 2010 2011 right i started noticing that everybody kind of had them right like i got my first smartphone in 2009 which was a palm pre and i loved it it was that that phone was fucking sick um and i didn't get an iphone until 2012 maybe something like that that's when i got one um and i really resisted for a long time because i wasn't really i didn't want to use an iphone i felt like it was kind of lame but then i eventually realized like this thing is actually pretty perfect um and it's been perfect for all these years since in my opinion i know a lot of people don't like it which is fine but i I just feel like this is something everyone's going through, and I think you have to make certain moves to lift yourself of that burden.

3:19:13I know people that don't bring their phones into their bedrooms, for instance, before they go to bed. You don't even have a TV in your room, right, Dustin? No. Which is like anathema to my whole experience, but good for sleep, good for rest, good for sex, probably. You're having a lot of kinky time. No, no, no, no. I'm suffering right now. Dying of thirst. Oh, my God. Oh, boy. Um, but I just, I wanted Jason, like he's, he's being funny about it, but I just think like I am, I struggle with it too, dude. I, Mike always reminds me that it's really overstated because of the way I use my phone. But like when it comes up every week and it's like, you've used your phone for seven hours a day, you know, it's like, it's like what?

3:19:54But then she's like, dude, that's not true. Like you, you sit there playing video games with an earbud in and you're listening to YouTube for hours or whatever. And I'm like, yeah, but I'm also listening to YouTube while playing a video game like that in and of itself that's like the family guy uh clips with like subway surfers gameplay underneath it right right right i need stimulation right it's like i get annoyed by that even with uh with just podcasts and things where it's just like constant yeah constant unrelated footage like everyone just seems fucked beyond repair at this point old young male female whatever like any socioeconomic status everyone's got a phone i just don't want you to feel too bad about it i just think it is what it is and you have we have to i have no discipline at all so i'm not going to sit here and tell you like what to do but i think that like it's within your own control to just not do it and you do easy things like just put your phone on the counter in the kitchen and just like and then be in the living room and you have to get up to get it and it just becomes inconvenient little things like that but then i have my watch going off you know got an email got a text message i had to get rid of the watch the watch i the watch i had to be like i can't i can't be doing this it isn't very it's incredibly convenient and also deeply inconvenient all at the same time it's mega convenient but like it exacerbates like i remember being like i'll leave my phone in the other room and then it's just like oh it doesn't matter because i have this fucking watch and i did the whole like oh turn separate it but it's always it's it's this thing where it's like it's always in my peripheral like i'm always seeing it um even if i'm doing something yeah it sucks man it's it's hard i i don't know how you um i don't think being cooked is a particularly unique experience as far as all this goes i think i mean there's a lot of money going into making this technology as addictive as possible in some ways it's a miracle that you're even aware of it um so don't feel too bad about it but also like you know also recognize that you're not helpless either right exactly it can be easy to feel that way because ultimately like there's a lot of science going into making making you feel that way but it is ultimately like i i got into the habit of um like i don't keep my phone charger in my room i keep it in my office and so like basically like if i go to sleep and i charge my phone i set my alarm so it's loud and in my office but like i don't have my phone in my in my in my room when i'm going to sleep yeah i'm like i'm like on my phone like when i'm going to bed like reading wikipedia articles about snowball earth or something like that it's like what the fuck am i doing you know um so i'm sympathetic because i i just knowing myself knowing my addictive personality knowing my curiosity it's like man i would have been i was addicted to the internet when i was like 12 you think i wouldn't have been addicted to the the second we were on the internet in like 96 I was like oh my god this is like the rest of my life I'm going to spend on this stuff and so it was now it's the internet but it follows you and uh if it's in your pocket and everybody's on it and you have to be on it because the work you do regardless of what you're doing honestly requires you to be on it right exactly and I I um I just I don't know I just I'm sympathetic to it I kind of just understand it it's like the everything that's ever been and every piece of knowledge and all the information and all your friends and all the social media and the news and videos and it's like all in this one thing it's like almost unfathomable of course you're going to be fucking addicted to it yeah like it's it's i i've articulated this before and you guys are young enough to remember it's like one used to go on the internet right it was the thing you did you went into the computer room or your bedroom or in a computer lab at school or whatever and you went on the internet and you logged in you know and all that and now it's just like now you're just in the internet yeah now you have to log off yeah right it's um yeah i don't know it is i understand it it's it's overwhelming and there's also this crushing sense of like everything is connected to the point where like it's almost like this this soft hell of nothing new to discover like if you ever look up like oh oh, I wonder what this is.

3:24:18Like, all information is so, like, I think it's part of why, like, people don't spell well is because, or, like, why people are, like, bad at, like, grammar or whatever. It's because, like, oh, I could just look at, like, I'll look this up or whatever. What does this word mean? And then I'll look it up and I'll be like, oh, there it is. But, like, I'm aware that, oh, if I ever need to know what this word means, I'll just look it up. Right. And so, like, it's in one ear or the other. And I'm aware of that happening. Like, it's crazy. I think, yeah, I'm sorry. Go ahead. I was just going to say, I think for Jason, um, I totally, it definitely feels like we're all cooked and there's times where I feel like I'm cooked as we've been talking about these different things where you're like, man, I've been, uh, looking at Instagram reels or Tik TOK or whatever for, uh, way longer than I expected.

3:25:06Or I feel like I need to look at my phone all the time and I don't really need to. But I think what's important to know is that I think it's just like any other addiction that you can rewire your brain if you are willing to put limits on yourself and start the process of changing your brain to not being addicted to the dopamine hit of your phone. um it's like a you know you can you can stretch your attention attention span out if you work at it and you're like okay well you could start like i'm gonna watch an episode of a show and i'm not going to look at my phone and maybe that's all you can do start with that um it's just mainly having the willpower to put those limits on yourself and doing the long process of resorting out your brain.

3:26:00I'm certainly not there. I know that there are times where I'm like, okay, I got to start putting limits on myself because it's like, oh, I I've watched Instagram or whatever for way too long. Not perfect at keeping at that, but it is crazy, particularly with like movies or shows where people are like, oh, it's so long. And I'm like, like Oppenheimer, people that didn't want to watch it because it was three hours. I'm like, are you kidding me? Like that's fucking awesome. Yeah. I, I, I often find myself, I don't watch much TV and movies anymore in my life. So those are some of the times where I'm not on my phone.

3:26:37If I'm really engaged, I'm almost surprised by how engaged I am in it. Like you lose yourself. It's what I always used to love that. When you had to go into a really bad time and you'd start to forget about it for the first time. A girl broke up with you or you're in a painful situation. And then you like went out a time without remembering it. And then you remember it an hour later and you're like, Oh yeah, I'm sad. And then slowly it gets better and better. could be a similar thing with with tech but i mean i'm just um i think it's only gonna get worse and there is that awesome early black mirror episode about the people that like opt out of technology um and it would be it's cool like i know it's very luddite-ish and stuff but i kind of fantasize about a future where like you can really just opt out and like go live somewhere where like it literally is the 1980s or something and oh i've yeah i fantasized about i fantasized about like an emp going off oh yeah oh no the internet's gone oh man oh dang bummer i don't know i i do think of a bit something that's helped me a lot again this is to varying degrees of success there's some days where i'm just like oh i'm i'm cooked i totally fucked today up you know i'm just like oh i spent like three hours scrolling and i'm just like god damn it what did i just do and then there are other days where i'm i'm really good about it and i haven't been on my phone at all but um generally i think a good way to go about this is kind of redefining your relationship with boredom to the point where like boredom is not something to be avoided it's just something that happens and it's fine that it happens and it's not like a problem to be ameliorated and if you just like recontextualize what boredom is to you and like how you should feel about it that alone will like that alone is a really good tool because i think boredom is actually really an important thing to experience personally i agree i i don't know i should have seen this coming for a long time because i i've had moments in my life i mean like i remember my family owns like a beach house in new jersey and it didn't have internet connection in like the early 2000s or whatever and we used to have to go there i didn't really want to go frankly but you know like my parents or my mom wouldn't and family would meet there and whatever and i would be like going nuts yeah what am i supposed to be doing why am i and this was in like 2001 or 2002 and then the last time i remember really feeling this was in 2015 so it was almost 10 years ago was my friend Mike got married in Cornwall, Connecticut, which is like in the middle of fucking nowhere.

3:29:13And there was just no connection for your phones. I don't know if it's still like that, but there was no connection for your phone. And I was there for three or four days and I was going crazy. I was like, I have no idea what's going on. I have no idea what anyone's saying. I have no idea what's been announced. I was like losing my mind and I was I realized at some point I'm like, this is fucking sad, dude. You know, um like get get it together it's not and i wasn't like obviously acting out or anything like that i'm just saying like mentally internally i'm like fucking sort your mind out dude i remember being really upset that i couldn't watch football that weekend and like it was weird like in my mind and i'm like why you just like fucking live your life but um you know that's the life i've cultivated for myself over the last 30 years on the internet i guess so yeah cameron keogh or cove or i don't know yeah says hey sacred hosts he actually says hey scared hosts a topic that you have you guys have talked about often is the push to live service to match overall gaming habits you guys have remarked before that you three are unlike most gamers who may just stick with one live service game my question is if you guys had to stick with one live service style game which would you pick and why my pick is final fantasy 14 because of its free trial which includes the entirety of a realm reborn and the award-winning heaven's word heaven's word i hate that term it's It looks like Heaven's Sword, but I think it's Heaven's Word.

3:30:38Expansion up to level 60 with no restrictions on playtime. I'll cast Obi Saga on myself and listen. Don't do that. Don't cast Obi Saga on yourself. At least have the joy of eating. Right. This is a great question. That's why I put it in here. Thank you for writing in, Cameron. Dustin, if you had a clue in on one game and one game only because your life now was consumed by games as a service, which would you pick? Destiny 2. because I probably only played about half of all the available content and I really did like it, but I just got too far behind. And so I'd love to go and play everything that's available now because I think the last thing I played was the Witch Queen.

3:31:23So there's quite a few expansions after that and I do like it. But the times I've tried to hop back in, I've tried to do casually and there's no casually hopping back into destiny two i need to relearn uh pretty much everything so if i needed to dedicate myself to a live service that would be it i'd still have a lot of familiarity going into it but i would love to go and see that story to completion i just don't know if i'm ever going to do it now chris what about you yeah i don't love the prospect of this but uh but i think um i don't know honestly probably halo infinite because there is it is a live service but there is a single player campaign element to it there is custom game flexibility to it where it's not just the game it's not just destiny 2 in the sense of like destiny 2 has a lot of options but you you don't have a lot of um you don't have a lot of command over how broken those options can be it's very it's a very customizable experience there's also that map maker which i could see myself making like weird projects in if i get bored of like everything else i feel like there's a lot of content there that it probably would probably would be satiated for what i feel like i would go insane at a certain point but that's the one that i feel like would ward insanity off for the longest i was thinking about this for myself like what would be the answer and I actually thought Destiny 2 was one of them just because I love shooters.

3:32:53There's so much content and highly replayable. I mean, obviously, look at people like Cog and others. I don't know if he's still grinding in it, but I know a lot of people just play it over and over again. I knew people like that even with Destiny 1 back in the day. My friend Craig Baradon that I worked with at IGN for many years was obsessed with it. And that was really the first time I ever really clued in on people playing the same game forever, like not on console. PC people have always done that, But like with MMOs and builder games and 4X and all that, like people just get immersed in that shit.

3:33:22I get it. It's different on console. The answer is probably something like Madden. Which is not it is a game as a service. It's obviously a purchase game, but Hell Divers 2 is a purchase game, too. And I think we count that as a game as a service. Maybe Madden or and I was even thinking like something that's like deep. I love baseball. I just don't really like the MLB as in its modern interpretation. But like MLB, the show would be another interesting one. just because I know the game is so fucking crazy deep. You can play... I've said before, my nephew's roommate in college is in the 2070s or something, and his career mode or his campaign mode or whatever, it just goes and goes and goes and makes up players and makes up teams.

3:34:03It makes up scenarios. It's so cool. I can see myself getting really sucked into that, and you could play on an A team or a double-A team or a triple-A team and work your way up. It would probably be some sort of sports game. I just don't play sports games anymore. Sports games used to be a big part of my, especially as a kid, it was probably a third. I mean, from the late NES, early SNES era. So like baseball stars, and then into like the NHL games and the Madden games and everything all the way through probably the early aughts or the early 20 teens. Actually, I played sport game, a lot of sports games.

3:34:33It's just not part of my life anymore. For some reason, I just kind of got bored with it, but those games are popular. College football about to, I think college falls out now, actually. So you're about to, we're about to deal with that as being the number one game again okay Miguel, two Miguel's he has more of a statement here though we can discuss it of course, Miguel A. Brewer wrote in and said hey CDC, I wanted to write in to let you know that I've thrown caution to the wind and I've been buying sequels to games I didn't complete or enjoy and surprisingly I found a lot of success I couldn't stand Breath of the Wild and last year had a blast with Tears of the Kingdom I made it all of an hour in Henry Simulator 1 with Kingdom Come Deliverance but this year Kingdom Come deliverance 2 is making a strong case to be my game of the year and lastly i got as far as chapter 4 and 30 hours into sam's road building extravaganza before deciding to leave bb28 permanently hanging in sam's private room and i'm happy to report i was able to wrap up the main story in death stranding 2 late wednesday night and had a blast we've all heard don't buy a game at launch wait until the patch but maybe we should be waiting for the refinements of the sequel cheers interesting anathema to everything i believe about video games but to each their own like playing death stranding two without having beaten and understanding that's training one doesn't even make any sense to me but that and i know there's like the the way to catch up in the beginning there's like a 17 or 20 page thing that i think dead man reads to you or something and catches you up it's kind of insufficient i thought it doesn't tell you a whole lot um i just personally don't understand playing games that way but teach their own i mean you really got to do whatever you got to do so if you're finding enjoyment in the sequels to games that you didn't enjoy.

3:36:09I don't think that that's necessarily unusual because the sequels are almost always stronger. We were talking about this with Death Stranding 2, the refinements. You already know what the game is. Now you get to refine it. But I think that's a pretty dangerous road you're walking because you're going to run into things that you don't like for fundamental reasons. I think I'm most surprised about Breath of the Wild to Tears of the Kingdom. Those seem... I only played Breath of the Wild. I didn't play Tears of the Kingdom, but they don't seem radically different to me. Maybe they are. Kingdom Come Deliverance 1.

3:36:35you're very wrong really i actually yeah good i actually didn't really like like i mean i i liked breath of the wild as much as one could i guess like i i enjoyed it i i dug the vibe of it but uh tears of the kingdom really felt to me like oh this is this is the real one like it just feels like they did a lot more and the best way that i can describe it is like breath of the wild one kind of feels like a survival game in some aspects and but like it's not truly but like it's got some elements of it um whereas like i feel like tears of the kingdom feels like more like an immersive sim and by the way when i say these things it's not literally true it's like you know but the spirit of it like being like ascend in tears of the kingdom is fucking crazy cool like and it is way cooler than i think anything in any ability in breath of the wild and like ultra hand being able to make build your own functioning it's it's truly crazy um and i kind of i remember playing tears of the kingdom and being like damn i kind of wish i didn't even play breath of the wild because the only parts of this game that i'm bored with are is the fact that like i know this map already and i'm going through the same like i know this area and so i wish that i i remember feeling like i wish this was all new to me because this feels like the real one but i feel like i'm getting sucked out of it because i'm remembering like oh i know this i know what this area looks like i know i know what i know what's awaiting me around this corner because i remember this map um i think i think this really all depends on what is important to you in video games and it's always been for me like story's always been like one of the one of the last things like i always appreciate a good one and if some and if a story is like really really good it can make all the difference but like i've always engaged with things more on a gameplay and a systems level so for me like seeing you seeing this guy talk about like um uh specifically tears of the kingdom and breath of the wild like makes total sense to me even kingdom come deliverance and kcd2 like those are story heavy games obviously but like the from what i've experienced of both of them like the leap between them is crazy like it it almost makes kcd2 almost feels like it almost makes the first game in my opinion kind of like not unplayable but like it really feels like oh this is way better yeah it feels like more more clean and if you're if your primary way of experiencing games is through like the game feel and like and mechanic mechanical depth and and refinement and and wanting to basically enjoy every moment of your interaction with a piece of software and not have to deal with hiccups and and the narrative isn't the most important thing to you then i think i can understand it i think with a game like that stranding it's a little more confusing because that stranding although this training 2 is significantly more refined as we were talking about earlier i do think that stranding 2 is also such a deeply narrative experience that i i think um i don't know i i can't imagine i love the gameplay death stranding i think it's fantastic but what's pulling me forward is the story and so i don't know i don't know i don't know if i could just play death stranding without meat keeping me going yeah i don't really i don't get it personally but it's kind of games like that final fantasy 7 was the same thing i felt about when people were playing the remake i'm like you really got to trust me on this it just do what you want i'm not gonna try to control you but it doesn't make any sense what you're doing and then the people that played rebirth without playing remake i'm like i want to fucking kill you i hate you um yeah kingdom calm was the one that really i i gleamed onto here quite a bit too because i i didn't play either of them but i watched micah play them extensively and that first game was fucking rough dude i was i couldn't believe i she was playing on switch obviously so it wasn't right but that's not not what i was like jesus christ man this game is brutal but teach their own miguel a brewer thank you for writing in oh wait calling yeah you skipped the first oh yeah you're right you're right you threw me off yeah you're totally right timestamps.

3:40:38You're totally right. Yeah, I'm sorry. You're good. Miguel Almeida, we have the other Miguel, wrote in and said, hi, CDC. I wonder if any of you guys ever felt like your job made you enjoy games less. I feel like everything that I do as a job turns into obligations and inherently less fun. Do you feel like you have to play games in order to keep the podcast interesting? And do you feel like you would enjoy games more if you could just play them more organically, meaning you wouldn't need to play the next big thing, but just play whatever you wanted? I recently found myself rushing through Expedition 33 to be more part of the conversation, and I think it sort of hurt my enjoyment.

3:41:07Thanks to keep up the good work in my opinion i don't understand that mentality at all for people like you that miguel i'm assuming you don't do content or like have a show or whatever maybe you do but part of the conversation it's like just play games to at your own pace as i was making fun of genki before i couldn't even play the astrobots been the astrobot dlc has been out for fucking five minutes and that dude is already spoiling all the bots in it so you got to play your own pace if you're an enthusiast. I don't really understand the crush that people feel if they're just an enthusiast. Just play whatever you want, man.

3:41:40But as far as I've reflected on this recently that I feel like I'm enjoying video games more than I have my entire adult life. And I don't think that that's a coincidence because my entire adult life was spent covering video games professionally since I was 17 and 18 years old. It started immediately when I became an adult. and ever since then I never really played for fun very much and the more that I with last stand have embraced just playing whatever I want whenever I want it's great not really and having an audience that doesn't pressure me generally into playing things what I think for critics is important people in the media is important is always be playing something but because I think you have to keep your bona fides up I think you need to be involved in games to play and then studying the industry, which I'd study very deeply.

3:42:30I love studying the industry. I love looking at the numbers and the finances and seeing how things are doing. I really enjoy it. And I think that that's more important actually to me being a good podcaster than the games I play. I've been playing video games for almost 40 years. Like I have a fundamental understanding of them. I know what they are. I know how to talk about them. I know how to explain them. I know what you just learn the vocabulary as you go with the lexicon. But I try to tell everyone in my, in my company that works for us is to like not feel pressure to necessarily play things to feel like you need to be part of or to start a conversation, but rather just kind of follow your heart.

3:43:07And I think that that often brings me to newer games that I'm excited about. What's important to me is that when people look at my trophies personally, it's like I almost certainly play games by hour and more deeply than almost anyone you would listen to in the podcasting space. And I think that that's my strong point. It's not necessarily being up on everything. It's playing things deeply. And that's what I enjoy. So has it been ruined by in the past? Yeah. Yeah. I was fucking tired of shit a few times. And yes, anything that is a job becomes a job. Playing music can become a job. being an actor can become a job all these things that seem glamorous right and fun you still have to perform you have to you're an athlete you get paid millions of dollars you still got to go out there and play so yeah i i i have it has turned into a job in the past and it has really weighed on me but those are years past and i don't feel like that anymore and i especially don't feel like that now i just play whatever um and i'm sure it bothers some people but doesn't really matter to me.

3:44:21Dustin, how are you feeling about this? Has this room, has being in this, and last stands really the first full-time job you've had in the industry. So you haven't been doing this nearly as long as I have. So I don't know that you've had enough time to let it accumulate either. I also feel like the days of being able to keep up with things are just so long over that you've never really experienced that idea of like, you could conceivably play everything that's meaningful. Those days are 15, 20 years in the past. yeah i think most people in our in this in the game creator space or whatever content creator space uh definitely would have that issue where it's like you have to play this it does become work even in my little amount of experience with my old website there was a lot of times where we were just taking any codes that people were willing to give us as a very small website and And so it's like, man, this game that I'm playing for a review fucking sucks.

3:45:16Or it's just not really a game that is of my taste, but it's what we have to do in order to try to grow this thing. And that very much becomes work. But for last year, no, I don't think that it hasn't changed the way or feels like work at all because of the way we have things set up. I think there are times where the constant conversation or things around games gets old and really annoying and boring. Um, you know, I am so fucking sick of last of us debates and Zelda debates. Um, and God bless our discord. I love you guys. Um, it's Groundhog Day every fucking day when it comes to The Last of Us and Zelda and things like that.

3:46:09And it's not just in our community. It's all over gaming, like with Twitter and things like that where it's just like, I've had enough of certain things. And that actually can taint certain experiences. I think Last of Us in particular, just that I think it's a great game, a great series. I am over it uh because of the constant debate over it and i'm like just if you liked it great if you didn't like it move on um so i think being so having gaming being every almost nearly every aspect of my life certain things do get tiresome absolutely so um but as far as actually just sitting and playing the games i'm very thankful that no that does not uh really feel like work to me at all chris we've reflected on red dead too as being an experience that really pushed us yeah oh hold on micah that's good news okay cool um sorry we've been having our hvac has been acting weird but it seems like it's okay now um that was the last time i felt like i was really crunched by something and that was around the time we stopped even accepting codes so i don't know how have you even really had a position to feel like that you also feel much more pliable than i am in terms of you really go anywhere and play anything so you're going to be attracted to a bunch of different stuff and i like that about us personally yeah i think so too i i there is i i've definitely had to like readjust because i think growing up i i let games simmer for a long time like i think i would play something like mass effect for or mass effect 2 for months you know i mean it would take me like three months to finish Mass Effect 2 which is like laughable in hours count but like I was always kind of it used to be that I would play games I would get into like this one day right where I would be like all right all I want to do is play video games and then the rest of the week was like do music stuff do video stuff do other things like I it was very much like it was very much something that I cared about but it was always like the way that I engaged with them was very like spur of the moment and it's been an adjustment having to like always be doing something i guess in some sense like for week to week it's not crazy it's not even remotely close to like the crunch that we had for red dead 2 it's not even remotely that to that degree but there is like some pressure like okay it's a new week of sacred symbols and it's like okay what are we playing it's like oh fuck i didn't play anything and then i'll like find something because i feel like i feel like maybe i should have something to say um which has become more natural by the way as time has gone on but i remember that was an initial kind of thing where i was just i remember initially it felt like oh i don't know if i i play games deeply and there are certain games i play a lot for sure and i like thinking about them and i like dissecting them but week to week like i might be i bet there's in a two-week period it used to be that i would play games for like two straight days and i would barely fucking sleep but then the next two weeks was like i would i would be out filming something or i would i would be traveling or doing some weird fucking thing that i have no business doing um i just live a very strange existence but to the degree that it's even remotely close to like old school games media or to the even just to the to the idea that the idea that this guy's espousing where he feels like he has to rush through a game to be part of the conversation i i i think red dead was the last time i felt that genuinely like that i felt rushed and even then it was like i loved the game and i did earnestly want to see what was happening next anyway so it did it it felt begrudging but also kind of willing as well it's very weird my experience with that with that but yeah the whole being part of the conversation that whole term for that term my entire career and i understand why it's important for publications but i just could not care less about being part of the conversation i just i don't even really know what that means it's like i want to have my own conversations at my own pace with my own community when the time comes i think people shove this shit down people's throats too quickly to the point where they can't even digest them like i saw people putting up death stranding to spoiler cast like the week the game came out i'm like the game just came out like why is this even useful yet other than to just hit the embargo and i remember i remember that drive i just i'm so i'm out of it i don't you know our audience doesn't expect it they don't want it and that's cool enough for me but we've programmed them to do that and like maddie i i give a lot of credit because it seems like he is constantly churning out criticism which is really a lot i used to be like that i used to review multiple games a month it's a lot to to do and then you have no time to play for yourself and that's how you start to resent the field and it's no wonder that there was a time you know almost 10 years ago i was like i don't want to do this anymore you know like yeah i was definitely starting to feed it where you when i was 16 i would have died to work at ign and by the time i was 30 i was like please get me out of here you know so i think anything can fall apart rather quickly and i don't know you just got to be true to yourself and what you're enjoying if you're not enjoying video games anymore then that's okay but you should do things out of enjoyment not because you need to watch the newest hbo show or see the newest film to be part of this nebulous conversation or it's like i don't i don't care yeah all right there's also yeah just a quick thing there's also the thing that like that still sticks with me even though i know it's completely illogical whereas like there's i still have like a like a like a residual feeling whenever i'm playing a video game that like i'm not i'm not being productive which is i which is funny because it literally is productivity for me it literally is like part of the job but like i look at the clock like that like oh 40 hours in death stranding too and i'm transported immediately back into my room in like high school where like when i go down to the kitchen or whatever to grab like a like a water or something and it's like ah welcome to the land of the living it's just like oh fuck it's like i still feel that nagging feeling in my head it's like damn i should be doing something else which is unfortunate yeah that's just that's just hammered into me that's that's not going away it's ridiculous timothy mccarthur wrote in said greeting cdc within the last month or so on on so a roblox game broke the concurrent player record which now stands at just over 21 million having watched my kids play said game called grow a garden I couldn't figure out the draw until the weekly update came along the creator of the game comes on for one or two hours prior to said update and interacts with all the players via a global chat and gives free upgrades and unlocks things normally behind RNG are actual live events the future of gaming I know it's lost on you Colin since you don't enjoy anything multiplayer but the social interaction with friends combined with the interactivity of a live person or perhaps AI seems to be a huge draw it's not only that I don't enjoy multiplayer games Timothy it's that I have no friends um so yeah roblox as we were saying earlier is a mystery this grow a garden thing i don't really know anything about um i will say that this could be the future but it's such an off the reservation idea for me that i'm not the person like i'll be i'm already a relic basically and by the time this sort of thing becomes normal in all these different games i'll probably be fucking dead so um it doesn't sound exciting to me but i'm curious what you guys think is being more open to multiplayer live interactive experiences do you think that then that sounds like a cool idea i mean that's a great way to draw that's not unlike what an artist will do doing an ama or something as their record is coming out or something or going on tour like bringing attention to it so it's not that unusual but um that sounds like a really neat idea we should play roblox one day and figure it out yeah we should like like we'll figure it out i'm looking at game like videos of this grow a garden and i i gotta be honest i'm like disgusted by it the fact that this is i i get that we're not the market for it but i see something like this which i don't i'm yeah this sucks i'm looking at clips with no audio i don't know much about it the speed at which you said that yeah this yeah this sucks go play a real a real game yeah like what is wrong with you guys but the thing is no this is the primary audience of this is children right this looks like a literal spam ad yeah this is like it looks like it looks like a fake lego game basically you know like this this looks like something you'd see like in the in the upper right hand corner of like amish donkey or like albino black sheep like advertising something to you This is making me feel depressed.

3:55:10I'm actually getting angry as I'm looking at it. Yeah, I am too. And then I look, I just looked up the videos and it's like, I grew every mutation on burning bud in Roblox grow a garden four days ago, 950 ,000 views. It's like, oh, okay. What? Yeah, this, I mean, this looks, I'm sorry. This looks like shovelware, but obviously I think it's, but obviously I think people are making it and customizing it. I get the appeal of the play box, the sandbox. It's what you're saying. It's like you see something like this and then you look at something like Death Stranding 2 or whatever. And you're like, what are you kids doing?

3:55:48You kids fucking demented. We played real video games when we were kids. We didn't play this. Why can't you be normal? When I was six, I was playing Kid Icarus. You're playing Grow a Garden with 21 million people. There were only 24 million GameCubes.

3:56:13God, yeah, I don't know. Even with the context of the question, I don't even understand how that... I don't even understand how what the person is describing, this live event where the person comes in. I don't even understand how that would even function in this...

3:56:33I'm lost, honestly. Let's try to translate this into Boomer talk. You know, the Boomer sacred symbols crew here. The thing that I can kind of think about is like the one versus 100 live game on Xbox. Oh, yeah. That was cool. That was cool. That was cool. Some of the Fortnite event early on when it was like brand new, like Fortnite's doing an event. The world's going to fucking explode or something. I did one of those and it was neat. it was a neat execution like seeing something like that um happen in a game and i think destiny has done one as well they've done a few live live events yeah the first one i remember was really lame or something like it was just not very cool so i like the concept of it um it's i'm not really into games for the most part that do this kind of thing anymore occasionally of course i talked about liking destiny 2 or whatever and i think about the mmos that have had world events like there's a bunch of youtube videos about when the matrix mmo game went offline they did like a cool event for it where like the world was you know being deconstructed and stuff like that pretty cool uh so if they take this concept and apply it to a real fucking game i would be into it um jesus christ man i'm here's the only good news okay about roblox which is headquartered in San Mateo.

3:57:58I never knew that. That's like right south of San Francisco. I never even saw their building, but I'm looking at a picture of it now. Revenue 2024. 3.6 billion. A lot of money. Operating income. Negative 1.06 billion dollars. They're losing so much money doing this. And that's the crazy thing. This is like, how? certainly not on production. so like how are you losing how are you losing a billion dollars a year is it just like servers is it because it's so popular is that it can't be they're probably trying to rapidly grow the company at the same time as well why is roblox losing money and even they've been losing a billion dollars a year for years apparently roblox is experiencing significant growth in users and revenue but has reported losses for several reasons high operational costs developer exchange fees a substantial portion of roblox revenue is paid out to the independent developers who create content infrastructure trust and safety building and maintaining the computing infrastructure to support millions of daily users reliance on a young demographic for revenue the platform's revenue primarily comes from in-game purchases with a large amount of users being children slowing growth and user engagement monetization of older users and new revenue streams etc so who knows if they'll ever circle you know ever really be able to square this thing because you can't lose money like that indefinitely.

3:59:23You're going to have to figure it out. So maybe this thing will just disappear, which would be, I don't want that. I know people like it. I'm not trying to be mean, but it's certainly not a profitable endeavor. So you're losing a third of your, you're losing a third of your operating income or you're a rather, yeah, you're, you're, no, you're losing a third of revenue in operating income. It's like, Oh, you at least like want to break even or something. that means that's a burn rate of four four and a half billion dollars a year you know that would be every year they're spending enough money to make conservatively like 15 playstation games

4:00:06excellent all right just i'm i'm looking this whole game feels like you know that uh silent hill remake where they had the comic sans on the sign yeah yeah yeah that's what that's what this whole thing feels like there's a there's a doctor's office in my area that uses comic sans i'm like you can't do that you can't use comic sans it's too identifiable although when i first got microsoft word in the mid 90s i loved comic sans i used to write all my papers in it i'm sure that's so funny i'm sure everyone explains a lot yeah yeah explains a lot of things explain a lot if you really get into the war i would love that illegal immigration and you yeah i called like colin moriarty i think i literally wrote like a paper on like jefferson davis or something in comic sans yeah it's like that is absolutely psycho uh that was in that was in middle school all right uh final inquiry comes from spicy vodka who says hello ls team i just wanted to share a specific example about how gaming has made its way into education.

4:01:10I am a special education teacher at my local high school, and we received a grant from the state of Oregon to offer a class called Video Games as Literature. Students get the opportunity to play games while being able to write papers about the storytelling and artistic approaches with games such as Red Dead 2, Fallout, and Skyrim. These students get access to PS5, Xbox, and VR. As a special education teacher, my main objective is ensuring the students on my caseload graduate. It's been the time of my life to help write papers about video games that mean so much to me and share my gaming experience and perspectives with my students.

4:01:37I will note I've had just as many female students as males taking this class really great stuff going on in education and i thought you would like to hear about what the u.s seems to be hear about that when the u.s seems to really want to rip down public education much love from a small town in oregon thank you for writing in spicy vodka i just want to say really quickly and i come from a family of teachers like i have both my sisters are teachers my sister-in-law is a teacher all in the public school my brother-in-law is a principal my mom was a teacher she was really more of a professor cousins like whatever so I'm not trying like I have a lot of teachers around me but like people are rough on US public education because it's really bad it's not has nothing to do with the teachers for the most part it's just a really inept system no one can read no one can do math no one like it's like what the fuck is going on out there so don't take it too personally I know it's hard to say that like on a personal level it's like no one is I think going after the individual.

4:02:32It's like the powers that be have really botched the public education system. And I've recommended many times, I think it's called Sold to Lie or whatever, which is the documentary, the many part documentary about reading and why people can't read anymore, which is because they just 20 or 30 years ago were like, we're not going to read English the way we read it for a thousand years anymore. Now we're going to do it this way. So don't feel too bad. I think people are just, it's multi-directional, but people are mad at the system, right? Not the individual teacher. So don't be too upset. this is great.

4:03:05And I love seeing this not only for schools, but for special education kids, I think is awesome. We take film and music very seriously. When I was in Northeastern, I took a rock music class as one of my electives, which was really fun. And I wrote an entire like 15 page paper on the 311 song, No Control, which is a really random song. And it was taken very seriously and everyone can pick their song and you really go into it and the depth and you're breaking it apart and you're looking at the lyrics and the composition and people have been doing this with film for a hundred years right like film studies class the interpretation i've watched amazing documentaries on like what's that it's called room 451 or whatever that really awesome documentary about the shining um about like breaking it down room 237 237 yeah whatever it is i just threw a number out there um it had to be it had to be some three-digit number so i had one in 999 chances of getting it right.

4:04:01So it's cool to see games being treated like that. I think games have been treated like that in our space for a while, probably for the last, not for very long. I would say 15 years, maybe. Certainly the rise of YouTube and the YouTube video essay and people really diving deep, breaking down the stories and the lore. We're where we need to be now. And I think now it's time to proliferate this to the wider masses. And this is the way you do it. I remember when I was that kind of funny I my ex's cousin who was actually a Moriarty interestingly they she taught at a private school in San Francisco and I actually went in and gave like a little seminar about games to them they were like in like older elementary young middle school kids and like we played games and we like talked about them and we played like Gone Home and like a few other things it was fun and you could see and they wouldn't let me film it unfortunately because i wanted to film it until i put it up but um it's like a it's a cool opportunity to introduce games to kids although they don't need that i think it's an even better opportunity to introduce games as something more serious to parents because like one of the big things that i think there's a disconnect with i know this with one of my own sisters is she like won't let her kids play games during the week and i'm like why they're watching tv they're watching movies they're on their phones like what is what don't you understand you know like about the phone is what the phone's way worse well that's what i'm saying like i've said this too about like my dad's married to a woman nancy she's a really wonderful woman but she's she doesn't know anything about what dagan and i do right or like like she's in her 70s right it's like and when i told her she's she knows i work on games wherever but she didn't know that i was like writing the stories and she literally was like game video games have stories i'm like yeah like people just don't get it they don't think there's any in other words a lot of people don't think there's anything to analyze.

4:05:52There's nothing to scope out, educate yourself about, dissect. They don't get it. Doing this, I think, is a good way to get it on the itinerary. Then it gets brought home. Parents take it more seriously. Kids realize there's something here. This is a great way to emphasize the seriousness of the art, I think. I love seeing it. You don't really have a question as much as a comment, which is fine, Spicy Baca, but I want to give you props for doing something like this. And I think it's important that this stuff is integrated more and more because I think games are, if people, people that don't understand video games now are themselves relics.

4:06:30It's been what, 20 years since video games started taking, making more money than movies. It's like, come on, get with the times, but still you need to push people over the edge. This is a great way to do it. So keep up the good work, spicy vodka. Do you guys have anything you want to add or should we wrap it up? No, I think you said it well. All right. Yeah. Let's go then. That was a good episode of sacred symbols of PlayStation podcast. hope everyone out there enjoyed it let's go around the horn and say goodbye to everyone Chris goodbye to you be well any plans for the rest of your day yeah I'm gonna see I think I'm gonna try and see Superman tonight oh I've heard it that it wasn't it's not great but I don't know it's not I'm not the one to judge so yeah I don't know I don't I don't care about Superman yeah really at all like I've never given even a half a damn about it I think I was like vaguely interested in the animated series when it came out the animated series was cool the batman i liked or batman yeah but like i don't think i really watched it intently i just kind of liked the bright color like i was more into batman and spider-man the animated series than i was superman i just remember getting a toy i remember getting a superman toy and like burger king or something i was like oh i like this but i didn't really i don't know superman's never been prime for me but i'm a big fan of james gunn i like uh i like him as a director i think he does really good stuff and I don't know I'm just curious as to how they're going to handle it because Superman in my lifetime hasn't really been done well like entirely like I think Christopher Reeve is like the the last the only good real interpretation of Superman that people can universally agree upon and even that kind of fell apart after I think the third and fourth movie yeah um so yeah I'm just curious to see if it's if it's good if it's interesting if it's uh if it's anything like his other things which if it is and i mean i'm expecting to enjoy it but we'll see yeah i've said this before and i used to you know um quite controversial because my old co-host was a mega super superman fan but i always felt like it and i tried to like he would lend me comics and i would try to understand it better but i always kind of found the character a little lame if i'm being honest it's like yeah me too it's he's too powerful he can do everything he's super strong he flies he's like impervious to everything he comes from space like it's like just like selects but again it's because he comes from that era of like no one really knew what they were doing and in some sense like he was one of the prototypes for what we have today and so you have to respect him for that i do think the character design is cool especially in the cartoon from the 90s that you're mentioning with the little thing of hair in front of him and stuff and the triangular build of him very much in that batman art style i i think that the aesthetic is there they just i just don't think the character is very interesting like that's the dc the only dc character i really care about is batman otherwise marvel is just so much more interesting and really neither of them are very interesting to me anymore but yeah no i i mean i'm in agreement but i'm also i think i'm a film person first and so i'm just curious as i'm curious as to how it's gonna go um i'm a big james like i think i found james gunn when he when he made super i don't know if you ever saw super but super is a fucking weird like that's apparently one of his lowest rated movies but i loved that movie no i've never seen that movie is crazy it's like rain wilson and it's uh i feel like if i explain it anymore it's it kind of ruins it but it's interesting i i recommend watching super if anybody's curious but yeah i'm probably gonna see that tonight in the meantime i'm uh no it's only two o 'clock here yeah so the world kind of awkward amount of time yeah before a movie but yeah just figure it out stick around yeah um all right well good to see you have a good rest of your day dustin goodbye to you you're lonely now i we were we're gonna talk after the show we have things to do but i was talking to you a couple of days ago and we have things to do when you were talking about coming here maybe now you're not obviously but i was like i was wondering still i'm like is he trying to tell me he wants to come here and i'm not giving him the proper duty like yeah come come be with us if you want if you're lonely if you're feeling lonely so you're always welcome yeah i appreciate that um but uh i have many i've i've many plans now going forward uh both both some work stuff to do so tonight i'll be editing this show uh i got tonight i'm watching the last episode of squid game uh let me tell you fucking bleak yeah very cheery show to be watching by myself uh so i'm looking forward to that and then my dad during the show texted me because he got some kayaks on facebook marketplace a few months back and he wants he wanted to know if i want to go out on the lake on sunday cool not normally my thing but why not so hopefully i don't drown yeah yeah go hang out with Papa and I got to figure out what to eat tonight.

4:11:19Cause I'm not going grocery shopping and I'm not eating hot dogs again, but that's all we got ordering. So I'm either going to order something or sit in my bell in my, in my car and eat Taco Bell and listen to like the persona soundtrack for ultimate sadness. You know, it was a wild thing to barge in on. Yeah, I did that. I, one time got Taco Bell drive through and ate it in my car and this persona soundtrack was on. I had that moment of like, self-reflection like oh yeah this is who i am in my 30s it could be a lot worse deeply well be well be safe and uh when does holly come back she comes back tuesday morning and i have to wake up at like 4 a.m to go pick her up so i'm not excited about that she um that's a hell of a voyage for such a long for such a short trip in my opinion yeah yeah yeah i agree i think it's christ you know yeah it's a long trip even real is it really even there like that's a place where i'm like i'm not even sure cambodia is actually there honestly i knew the name cambodia well i knew it was a country but i don't i you couldn't before she started playing the trip i didn't know where it was yeah it's by vietnam yeah right by Vietnam I would have never if I had to if I had to if you put a map in front of me and it was like sight unseen like where's Cambodia and you had a gun to my head I'd be dead within seconds yeah I wouldn't even try I only know Laos and Cambodia's location because they were both involved in the Vietnam War so they have to be attached to Vietnam and I know where Vietnam is so that's that's easy enough for me to track but she went to Taiwan which I think is the most interesting but did she get a chance to spend any time there because I really want to see Taiwan especially before the Chinese take it she only got to spend time in the airport so not really but yeah her layover was in Taiwan and what's funny is when she booked the ticket initially the two flights she was either going to fly and have a stopover somewhere in the Middle East maybe Thailand's not in the Middle East where was it somewhere that she was going to stop it was like she booked the ticket and then three days later all the Iran stuff was going on oh she's like oh i'm glad i'm glad we're going the other direction around the world what's this what's the city she flew into in cambodia it's called like nam pen or something right like uh panam pen yeah yeah that's where she was the last few days yeah that's uh so she flew from pittsburgh to seattle to taiwan to panam pen yep man she flew on a hello kitty plane yeah micah told me that that's cool they didn't plan that which it's perfect because both her and my mom love san rio and hello kitty yeah i think that's why she knew so that was it was even decorated on the inside hello kitty that's cute wow that's very nice that's cute well she's probably living like a queen over there i'm sure it's not very what is i would be no what i'm trying to know like how how well she eats and all that kind of stuff for how little she's going to spend and oh yeah her the hotels were like insanely cheap i bet she's like we're really splurging by spending a hundred dollars a night on this one oh my god a hundred dollars a night is probably like the nicest place in the fucking oh yeah she was like this place is amazing i was like cool most of them have been um one of the hotels i think was like 12 and i was like that sounds sketchy but sure enough it looked fine um so that's so insane yeah i i watched that that guy bald and bankrupt which we really love and he travels all over the world and he always stays in these like shady hotels for like$10, you know, and all these random places.

4:15:01And some of them are actually pretty impressive for like what you're getting. And some of them are just horrible, but you would get nothing like that for here. All right. Well guys, good to be with you. I'm going to, uh, what, yeah, five 20. I don't know what I'm going to do. Maybe walk the dogs or something. I don't know. And relax and rest. Um, so I appreciate you guys. Appreciate all of you out there for your love, kindness and support. Be well, patron.com slash last day media for early at free access and all sorts of other perks. Last day media. That's door for merch.

4:15:28guys. Sacred Symbols, a PlayStation podcast, is a product and trademark of Last Stand Media and Colin's Last Stand LLC and is proudly recorded in the USA. The show was conceived by, is written by, and is directed by me, Colin Moriarty. My co-hosts are Chris Raygun Maldonado and Dustin Fuhrman. The show is produced by executive producer Dustin Fuhrman. All of Last Stand's theme music is by my best friend, Ramon Narvaez. As you know, all of Last Stand's shows, including Sacred Symbols, are fan-funded on Patreon at patreon.com slash lastnamemedia. The following names are at the producer level on Patreon, our highest tier, and we're grateful for your thoughtful and kind contributions to our independent endeavor.

4:16:10Thank you.

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