#369 | Selling Years of Their Smoke and Mirrors and Open Minds

16:52Colin Moriarty:we can release it and then they'll say there's a there's premiere pro metadata yeah i feel like i

16:59Dustin Furman:don't know i don't want to speak out of school but i feel like i was playing mario 3 at a well advanced stage or a well advanced level personally i mean i don't know if people agree with that or not but i i mean especially for someone that hasn't played it for years but i was playing hardcore. I was doing, you don't have to do every stage in the game. It's easy to skip a bunch of stages. And I'm not talking about the whistle. Even I'm talking about just, you know, you can avoid stage four and world one, you can avoid a stage or two and hammer brothers in state in world two and so on and so forth.

17:28So give me a break.

17:30Dustin Furman:You know, I'm 40 years old. I'm old. I'm broken down. I'm barely hanging on. I'm not 10 years old anymore. I'm not, I'm not going to have create the one game I was like thinking I should play a really hard game for that era like Kid Icarus and really show you how fucking hard it gets you know now do you think anything has

17:49Colin Moriarty:to do with the confidence that you labeled the video as hundred percenting yeah it was too

17:54Dustin Furman:confident it was too confident um but I don't here's the other thing is is that because when you die lose all your lives in Mario 3 you're put back to the beginning of the world you're in so if you're in world 7 which is where I died you just get put back to the beginning of world 7 And it's like, I could sit here and do this all again. And I guess grind this out and we can get to world eight. I could also use a whistle and just get the ground world eight. World eight has the easiest skippable stages. So that was going to be a thing where that was going to be a problem because you're going to have to do all those.

18:23Dustin Furman:But it was too confident, but I think I could do it. I mean, Mario three is fairly trivial compared to some of the other marios. Like we were talking about Mario one, like that's a hard game. That's an unforgiving game. You know, that will literally you have like two lives and then you get booted back to the very beginning if you die like that's the old school hardcore shit um and doing doing mario one 100 percenting without cheating and not really cheating but using warps that's hard that's like an authentic i've done it but that's like an authentic you know challenge you get to those last stages where there's like hammer brothers after hammer brother after hammer brother you guys know the end of mario one i think so yeah like when you get to 8182 and it starts getting nuts it's like literally just hammer brothers everywhere and shit it's like it's like fucking

19:12Colin Moriarty:christ that might be one of my earliest memories is is just blasting through mario one like i remember that very vividly like if i can see like i can see the living room so clearly

19:23Dustin Furman:playing that game i love i love the first mario me too it's fucking absolute stone cold 10 out of 10 classic i mean one of the most it would be shocking to me if anyone out there had not has not played it because it's probably the most iconic game in the world ever in my opinion like it changed everything you look at games before mario went after mario and you can see the delineation between them and the way they handled and then mario 3 is another one of these games we were saying it when we were playing and i'm like damn dude this game is fucking so good like this game is so perfect so many little things in it so many thoughtful additions like it's so playable um yeah and then super mario world by the time you get to mario i mean that's like the the pinnacle of Super Mario games, 2D Super Mario games.

20:10Dustin Furman:Yeah. So thank you for checking that out. Caleb, get out of here. Brett Kahn wrote in and said, sup SS crew, Gears of War Reloaded is imminent. Will you and Micah stream your playthrough now that sacred streaming is a thing? I will send out my first ever super chat if I see that happen. Keep up the great work. I can't believe you guys finally got me to watch live streams. I'll add a payment option to my YouTube account and listen. Yeah, that is a plan that we have is to definitely do that with gears and i was thinking that with um it's awesome ninja guide and rage bound comes out next week so i think i'll play that on stream that following monday as well um so there's going to be some good stuff coming out very colin-esque games and uh looking forward to playing those so yes brett you can definitely look forward to that that was mike's idea actually um and drew wrote in such up gentlemen just a quick tip for colin if you're going to keep doing those five or six hour streams you should really get a desk you can raise up to give your backup a break yeah i gotta i mean i don't how many how much can i complain about the same thing before it it's enough already right i mean i'm not going to do anything about it so so what are we what are we talking about here finally merch last day media dot store t-shirts sweatshirts hats stickers etc go get your copy of hybroxia mike is working on shipping those out still x-door wrote in and said sacred man i have a request of holy urgency when will we get another run of Pope sacred symbol stickers.

21:34Dustin Furman:I've had this image in my mind's eye of putting one on the back of a pickup earlier this year. I bought myself a Tacoma. It's just waiting to have our new Pope Francis bless it with the Eucharist of PlayStation sacred men. Will you intervene divinely? We probably should do that at some point. I want to I mean, I got to sit down with Dustin probably in August and really figure out what we're going to do for merch for the fall and maybe that can be one of the things that we will we will do. We need you to design. Did you already design one for Pope the new Pope?

22:02Colin Moriarty:no i was waiting for there to be some new photos of him like we need it we need the right shot right you're probably there probably is now yeah you need one of him like doing the communion

22:12Dustin Furman:yeah um i'm sure those exist yeah got to look all right let's get into topics of discussion stretch our legs a little more before we get into the news of the week there's quite a bit news to get through but brandon stark wrote in said hey cdc wanted to let you guys know the levity you bring is really helping me get through a breakup with my girlfriend of five years my heart is broken and i'm depressed but at least i know colin dustin and chris are there for me every friday afternoon thanks i'll hang up and call 988 now what's 988 i'm assuming that's suicide prevention or something 988 oh crisis line it's available 24 hours a day in english and in Spanish.

22:50Dustin Furman:If you need emotional support, reach out to the 989 lifeline.org. Now, Brandon, hang in there. Hang in there. Yeah.

23:03Colin Moriarty:It's like that cat poster always says, you know, just hang in there.

23:08Dustin Furman:Yep. Yep. I, uh, we get it. Um, five years, a long time, but I'd be curious to know more. Obviously, if you're heartbroken and depressed, I assume she broke up with you. She ain't nothing but a trick, so don't even worry about it. Dexter Wongsford running and said, hey, Sacred Slags, now I've been as guilty as anyone of turning write-ins in the parade of sob stories. For example, my dog that died, Claire, my uncle JT, who passed away earlier this year, but I thought I'd write in with some good news for a change. I met someone and it's going really well, uncommonly well. She's way out of my league, and every time I show a picture of her to someone, they respond to some variation of really she's into you and I can't say I'm offended because it makes no sense to me either.

23:50Dustin Furman:But anyhow, not to turn into Jean bragging about all the hot girls I've hooked up with, but I thought I'd share a little maybe even huge victory in life. There's hope for you all. That's wonderful. What if this girl is Brandon's is that we were thinking the same thing? Well, that's why I put them in back to back because that's the joke I was going to make. I'm sorry, but then I stepped on you making the joke and then we neither of us were really able to make on each other. You know, um tragic let's kiss get your tickets now for the dog stars

24:24Colin Moriarty:it's no surprise how fast civilization can disappear

24:28Dustin Furman:out there just kill or be killed jacob alordi there are people out there they need our help josh brolin shoot first and inquire afterwards margaret qualley okay tough guy and guy peers Arm up! The Dog Stars, directed by Ridley Scott. In theaters August 28th. Get tickets now. Rated R. Under 17, not admitted without parents. Are you a lifelong learner with a never-ending hunger for trivia? Well, you might like our podcast, The Quizzer's Pit. Hi, I'm Shane Madej. And I'm Matt Riau. Oh, and we love learning. And we love cracking wise and having a laugh. But what we have to tell you is very serious.

25:04Dustin Furman:Every single week we get sucked into a dungeon by an evil space wizard named The Quizzer. and we can't leave until we each give three of the most interesting and obscure effects we can find on whatever topic he asks. Sure, we get abducted against our will, ripped away from our families and lives as we know them, but we have a good time and we get to learn and we get to teach. And once we give the Quizzard enough facts, he sends us home. Big whoop. If that sounds fun to you, then why wouldn't it? Then why not get sucked up with us into the Quizzard's Pit every single Monday? That's Quizzard's Pit.

25:32Dustin Furman:Q-U-I-Z-A-R-D-S-P-I-T. You're going to like the way you learn. I guarantee it. Matt, that's really good. Anyway, the quizards pit wherever you get your podcasts.

25:46Dustin Furman:The great Santini wrote in said, gentlemen, my coworker insists on yawning as loudly as possible while we sit together in an 18 by 10 room. Is this OK or is he autistic? Thanks for your insight. I don't know. Maybe Chris has some insight in this.

25:57Colin Moriarty:Is it OK or is he autistic? I love those are the two options yeah uh look man some people gotta yawn i do know people who are loud yawners and as far as i don't know how voluntary that is i don't know because i swear to god i feel like you can just do it quietly i feel like it's a very optional thing to do you know and but like for some people i swear to god like maybe they i swear people some people can't like there's just no there's no volume knob on them and it's just like it's it's over if i'm yawning you're gonna

26:32Dustin Furman:hear it which to me is just kind of crazy but i'm allowed i'm allowed i don't always yawn loud but i do yawn loud often micah gets mad at me for it she also gets mad at me because i make noises when i sit down like i like uh and we i did it in a restaurant when she's like can you not do that

26:50Colin Moriarty:like that's awesome can a man relax i know can a man just home i know can a man just hang out without being fucking the berated i'm allowed i'm allowed stretcher oh yeah oh yeah when i when you stretch you gotta it's almost like you gotta like pretend like you're dying a little bit Yeah. Exactly. It's perfect. It's so satisfying. It's actually distinctly less satisfying if you're not loud while you're stretching. In my view. See, I think you can control the volume of yawn. I think anyone can. There are like a sneeze though. As long as I've known Holly's dad, it sounds like a shotgun blast. You can hear it.

27:39Colin Moriarty:He can be in the basement two rooms away. And you can hear this man.

27:43Dustin Furman:Yeah. I sneeze loud too. And that's another thing. Mike gets mad at me about, but yeah, that's the thing is like, I feel like if I don't let it out, it, I feel like it's like hurts almost like I, like a, like a, like a bomb exploding underwater. Right. Like, right. You know, now what about throwing up? Are you allowed? I'm a fucking really loud puker. Yeah. 100 % of the time it has. I hate that. That's the case. And I don't throw up very often. really typically only from drinking which i don't you know the last time i threw up actually was in san diego i had to make myself throw up the night after i got really drunk with uh ramon um we were up to like oh right the day of the show um like that we had to do the show the next day and i was in the bathroom in the hotel like i gotta make myself throw up like i gotta get this out um and yeah i i'm i'm allowed i don't know how to do it without making that noise unfortunately but i But the good news is that it doesn't really.

28:39Dustin Furman:I very rarely get. I think I actually threw up maybe earlier this year or last year. It must have been last year from being sick. And I'm like, I don't think that that has happened in. Decades, potentially, like I don't even know, like I'm not really a thrower upper when I'm sick.

28:55Colin Moriarty:Yeah. I mean, you have to have a pretty specific like I remember like in elementary school that happened once where I was like throwing up all day from being sick. And I was like, I can't believe this. But that was like the last. it used to it used to be genuinely that like i would throw up once a year more or less kind of on the dot like not not necessarily like exactly 12 months but like it would get to the point where it's like 2004 or whatever and i throw up i would actively have the thought oh good i have another year before i have to think before i have to worry about this again interesting and that was pretty true for like years and then i started drinking and then it was over then it was just then it was like i guess it's i guess it's either it'll be like twice this month or like not enough for another year i don't know and now i haven't it's been a while i feel like i've thrown up i'm pretty

29:52Dustin Furman:i'm pretty responsible when i drink like yeah i i used to i've blacked out before but that was all in my teens and my twenties. Um, and then you kind of just learn to control yourself. And over time, I just learned little tricks that are common knowledge, but that really are important liquor than beer, right? Always can never go beer than, you know, you can never, you can never get into the harder stuff later. Mixing. If you're drinking and smoking, for instance is a great way to get the spins um damon hatfield at ign when i was in germany with him once was like dude just obviously everyone knows to drink water it's like drink water to almost excess like drink so much water that like you you're gonna get up and pee a bunch and then take a bunch of like i don't know if i don't want to because i always use these words interchangeably and i know they're all different like aspirin or tylenol or something like whatever it is take a couple of those and you're gonna wake up right as rain and he was totally right like there are just ways to kind of finagle because i i talked about how in uh germany once i got really drunk with pear who's the founder of ign pair is german um and we were like really drunk at a bar it was awesome it's a very awesome memory he's a really great person um especially how rich and how powerful he is and like he kind of just could go fuck off at any at any time for many many years like since the 90s when he first really founded ign and he just sticks around and just does his thing with the company, which I think is really cool.

31:21Dustin Furman:But I got into this real, I got into, I think I've said this in the past, but I was awesome because we were drunk and I'm like, what was it like growing up in Germany? Like what was, what's talked to me about German guilt? And like, we had like all these like dead ass serious, like in a bar in Cologne, like where we're, I'm like, talk to me about German guilt. And he was getting into it. He was getting all into it. Like he was getting into like, yeah, like this is what it's like to grow up and like have this meant like this cultural memory and like what it means to us and overcoming all of that and i was like this is awesome and before we knew it was like literally five and i think i had an appointment with bandai which we're going to talk about in a little while bandai namco at like nine and i was like oh motherfucker you know and i'm like literally with the ceo where i can't be like i'm not going to that appointment so i did i rolled out and i what i remember about that is i woke up and i felt fine so that was the also like i got like three hours of sleep or something and then i woke up and i'm like but i was a young man dude that was that's not not i'm not able to do that anymore that's a special relationship to be

32:20Colin Moriarty:blasted with your boss and then you ask him about german guilt he and i yeah oh definitely we've had

32:26Dustin Furman:a lot of crazy i i love my dad and i have a very father-son relationship with my dad so i'm not saying like i needed a dad or whatever but he pair was a father-like figure in many of our lives because we were all in our 20s or like young kids out of college. And he took good care of us. There were some assholes there and he was not one of them. And I'll always remember when like all the times he went to bat for me, you know, they didn't have to open the door for me. I was an annoying 18 year old when I got it when I started interning there and freelancing there and they like accepted it. I didn't at any point they could have been like, you're out of here.

33:06Dustin Furman:Like, why are you even here what are you doing you know um and yet they embraced me and he was a big part of that and i don't know what he saw in me but it was that's always the biggest honor to me is he clearly saw something in me and he is a the most successful person in games media history period i can't think of anyone even remotely close to him i don't know anyone else that lives in the hills of marin that works in games media except for a pair and for people that don't know the bay that's like one of the richest places in the world to be yeah so um he's a great guy i would love to have him on the show sometime we talk behind the scenes every once in a while um but yeah you can have a special really yeah so i i'm sure he must remember that but yeah i remember that and the thing about him and those kinds of conversations is he knew me well enough to know that there was nothing offensive about what i was saying i really was curious about his experience like i can't believe i'm able to talk to you about this like someone i read about it but like what is it like it was really cool um and then i had to go cover games com all right matt goldman wrote in said good morning gentlemen colin how does it feel to be on the biggest podcast in the world the snark tank perfect colin is now a part of the great league of guests including blackman pizza time cory and hamas and racist walt jr is this your biggest accomplishment in your life can you can anything top this so yeah what's going on here because i i still haven't watched it

34:34Colin Moriarty:but i saw that i was the thumbnail it's incredibly stupid it's somebody wrote it because at the end of the show we have people they uh they change their names to whatever and they make me read them yeah we got a lot of that we got a lot of the blowback on that here yeah blowback you get uh so there was one guy who said i think his name was young colin backflipping into a wood chipper and we were just we were just riffing it was like i love mega man like just and we were talking about you reconstituting yourself after you passed through the woodchipper like perfect cell it's happened so i just and then i was just like somebody please draw that i have to see that and somebody made this disgusting video i think you i think did you did you send it to me or like i feel like i saw it in no no i can't remember who the fuck sent it to me but i put it in the discord i think of uh of the sacred discord of like your picture slowly morphing into perfect cell and it cracked me the fuck up because it's so shitty like it's such a shitty it's so poorly done it's it's beautiful but i love that that has no like most of the time the thumbnail has nothing it's just complete bullshit you know that that joke i think literally pops up in the last 10 of the episode that's good while reading the names i

35:59Dustin Furman:love it but uh perfect colin is it's really it's really distressing uh that's good stuff i like racist walt jr oh yeah well we're not gonna get into that finally before we get into the news Lucas Grimista wrote in and said, hey, hello, fellas. I have a very important question. Betty Ann Moriarty, aka Colin's mom, has been a patron at the producer level since day one, which means she pays to be in this tier. LSM benefits from her contribution, which means that Colin also reaps the benefit of the money. Does this mean that Colin, age 40, still gets an allowance from mom? Love the content and congrats on the success of the streaming.

36:38Dustin Furman:Thank you. I'm going to tell you guys something and add something to the lore of sacred symbols. So that's going to be so distressing probably to some of you that well maybe i'm maybe i'm overstating it so i'll just get it out there um my mom still pays my phone bill okay yeah so i'm 40 um i first got a cell phone when i was 16 in high school 2000 and uh had the same number the entire time been on the same plan with my mom back on Sprint, which is now T-Mobile. And just been riding that ever since. So now a few things that I need to note. And these are important. Number one, my mom is afraid of taking me off the plan because we are so deeply grandfathered into like nonsense, like the not like what we pay is nonsense for these phones, like for unlimited data and all this kind of stuff.

37:38Dustin Furman:Like it's nonsensical. um so i've offered many times i i haven't offered recently because i just stopped asking but it's like do you want me to like take my phone like pay for it and she's really afraid that it's going to fuck everything up and like we're all going to pay a bunch more or whatever so that's number one okay number two is my mom doesn't really give a shit it doesn't seem either she likes to do nice things for me there's a third important point is that when i found it kind of funny and we started making more money i gave my mom a five thousand dollar check that I think at least that she didn't want to take.

38:13Dustin Furman:And I was like, this should pay for, I haven't done the math, but this, this must pay for my phone up to this point. Right. You would think let's do the math. Where's my huge, where's the calculator that's so big that you can see it from orbit. Here it is. What do you think my phone bill is like? I don't even know. Let's do an average of$50 a month the entire time. So first of all, 26 times 12 is 312 months. Okay. 50 times 312. Oh yeah, not even close. That would be$15 ,600. So that might have, that might have paid for a third of it. So like for a while. Right. But it's, it's just one of those things.

39:00Dustin Furman:So yeah, I don't pay for my own phone. I pay for the hardware, obviously. you know i often have to like do something to like help my mom with you know i always got to talk to this person you got to do this you got to do it but yeah i just thought i'd add that to the lore yeah mama's boy i feel like i feel like that's not too uncut because like i'm on my

39:23Colin Moriarty:my mom also wants me to stay on the plan for similar reasons we're like we're grandfathered from like a long ass time ago she's just like just stay in especially because i think there's like a military thing with like my dad and so like there's like all there's something else with that do you give her money or does she just i do i do because i'm just like whatever like why not it's it's not really but i'm sure there's like other things that are that i'm grandfathered into also that like i can't nothing's coming to mind exactly but i know that there's like some other plan that i'm not remembering that's like maybe not a phone thing but some other thing that we're grandfathered into that i don't explicitly pay for but it's cheap and they don't care that happened people try to stay into these absurdly grandfathered plans and that's a pretty common thing in my experience okay well you made me feel a little better about it i guess i'm a little jealous calling your mom 25 patron my dad is a patron not at the 25 level though yeah he wants in enough to see what see what we're up to yeah right right Every once in a while.

40:29Colin Moriarty:And he's also very low key. I don't think he ever comments. He's in some of our Facebook groups as well. Oh, that's every once in a while. He'll be like, do you? Did you see this guy talking shit about you? He said, I was going to go in there and I was going to say, but, you know, all these things. I'm like, it's. It's fine. It's okay. People talk shit all the time. Yeah. I mean, you don't got it. I was like, don't expose yourself.

40:51Dustin Furman:You know? Yeah. No, no, don't. Yeah. You don't want silent observer. And don't, you don't got to get down into the, uh, into the trough, you know, I feel like, yeah, I, that's the biggest thing for me is like knowing my family sees the sheer level of abuse that I receive. Um, but that it's part of the, the gig, you know, people that are not in the public eye simply can't understand it. I've said that a million times, like ad nauseum, like it's, it's very easy to dismiss or poo poo it when it would just, it could, it could never happen to you because you're just a normal person in a normal life doing a normal thing.

41:27Dustin Furman:So no one's really focused on you in any specific way. And that brings out the haters. And then you wonder about like people in your life seeing that stuff and how that, how they feel about that. And if you're embarrassed about it or sad about it or whatever, but yeah, you don't want to get involved. You know, that's why I was so excited that when we had Dagan all those years that he was so well received that I didn't have to deal with that. It was like almost unheard of for someone to say something about Dagan, which was weird. And it wasn't like we tried to engineer that. It's just because that's the kind of person he is and i think that's the way he comes off to people which is great um but he had to see that all that shit about me and i know that really bothered him a lot um so yeah so lay low father firman lay low travis firman trav oh dude that's what everyone called him i mean they still do his his buddies yeah that's that's something that's trav yeah that's that's great everyone calls me call or see no one calls me colin you know you don't really call you huh what does micah call you she doesn't really call me anything babe bitch yo well we're always just around each other so it's always kind of presumed that you're talking to the other person i think she did call me colin once recently and i my ears perked up and i was like you know because like i don't think i've heard my mom call me that and like i don't know ever you know uh and other people in my family so it's interesting then of course there were all the people that used to make fun of me and call me colin colin pal they they threw me right into that fire i had to learn what a colon was very early in life why are people calling me this why is this funny and i understood i got it

43:21Colin Moriarty:it's like such a little domino big domino kind of thing just like oh his name is going to be colin and then the big domino is learns what a colon is at five poor guy i know very complicated

43:35Dustin Furman:then i had to worry about colon cancer because some people used to call me colon cancer jesus so i was like all right so you can get cancer in the colon and then and then my grandfather died of colon cancer so wasn't so funny then was it chris well hey man i didn't know where that was going necessarily it wasn't really going anywhere get your tickets now for the dog stars

44:07Colin Moriarty:it's no surprise how fast civilization can disappear

44:10Dustin Furman:out there just kill or be killed jacob alorty there are people out there they need our help josh brolin shoot first and inquire afterwards margaret qualley okay tough guy and guy piers arm up the dog stars directed by ridley scott in theaters august 28th get tickets now rated r Under 17, not admitted without parents. All right, let's get into the news. Let's. Time to talk about things that you're actually here to hear about. This is a big one, although I don't think it really means very much, but it's something worth noting. Sony released a press release today, the day we're recording this podcast, that they have purchased a piece of Bandai Namco, although a small piece of Bandai Namco.

44:52Dustin Furman:The press release writes, Bandai Namco Holdings and Sony Group Corporation today announced the signing of a strategic business alliance agreement. Sony also agreed with existing shareholders of Bandai Namco to acquire 16 million Bandai Namco shares held by those shareholders for approximately 68 billion yen. That's about$450 million. With the acquisition of these shares, Sony will become a shareholder holding approximately 2.5 % of total issues shared of Bandai Namco. Through this business alliance and Sony's investment in Bandai Namco as two of the leading Japanese entertainment companies, Bandai Namco and Sony will focus on expanding the fan community for IP, such as anime and manga, around the world, and strengthening engagement, particularly in the anime field where rapid market growth is anticipated while merging their strengths to create new and emotionally moving experiences for fans, and as a result of those efforts, maximize the value of IP.

45:42Dustin Furman:Bandai Namco and Sony have historically collaborated on various projects in the field, such as games, anime, and music, and they plan to extend this collaboration to a broader range of areas. The two companies intend on implementing initiatives, including the expansions of works, as well as products and services based on IP developed by Bandai Namco, leveraging Sony strengths in areas such as the production and distribution of anime and other video content, as well as merchandising. They also plan to engage in detailed discussions regarding the joint development and promotion of IP such as anime and manga, in addition to planning and technical collaboration on experimental entertainment.

46:13Dustin Furman:Furthermore, the two companies plan to explore opportunities to support creators by jointly developing and operating entertainment-related technologies and services and to engage in joint investments and business alliances and fan engagement areas. Dustin, I'm eager to hear what you have to say about this. I mean, very similar to when we were talking about the Katakawa stuff. What was that last year? There are game implications to this, but this has nothing to do with games. I think that this is specifically interesting with Bandai Namco though. That was way, because remember Katakawa owns From, or the controlling share of From software.

46:46Dustin Furman:So people were like oh it's to get in bed with them and we were trying to explain everyone i'm like that's good but that's not what this is about they're being even more explicit here but what's ironic is it's with a gaming entity so it seems like actually bandai namco is really leveraging this more than sony um i'm very curious as an anime anime i don't say manga you don't really read manga right uh sometimes yeah you would not often you would um but you're in this world much more than chris and i are so i'm curious what you think of this as a strike you as anything that's

47:17Colin Moriarty:interesting and what do you think it's all about yeah well i think it is probably about anime and stuff like that mostly but we have seen uh bandai namco and sony collaborate in games recently specifically like uh the new everybody's golf is a bandai namco game that they're licensing that ip

47:37Dustin Furman:and freedom wars and all the other ones that yeah freedom wars stuff like that so there's definitely

47:40Colin Moriarty:um some collaboration going on there but for our bubble when we think of bandai namco we think of course of video games but as you were saying they also have a significant foothold in the anime business and also like you know merchandise and toys like bandai figures and things like that and sony right now really is on a war path to be a dominant force in the anime industry whether it's katakawa as you said earlier their purchase of crunchyroll um clearly anime unfortunately for you guys is just continuing to grow worldwide. So it makes sense that they, they want to be there in a significant way.

48:24Dustin Furman:Yeah. I do think that there's something just intrinsically valuable to Sony being Japanese at this moment. You know, it's going to be harder and Nintendo too. It's going to be harder for a Microsoft or a Google or even a valve or whatever to leverage. Again, the bona fides of um of the japanese anime art although anime is becoming international and we're seeing that more and more this is interesting to me though because um sony really is becoming a services and ip company and and they've identified that over time but they're really trying to make sure that they're in content and they seem to be almost i don't want to say blasé because they're investing billions of dollars in games but they're they're they seem almost like they're like feel like set they don't really feel like they need to make investments there they need to like start spawning these other things these cross-media places and obviously they're seeing great success like you said dustin in the anime space uh chris this does bring in some interesting sony has its hands i guess in some bandai namco ip now though um here are some of the things that bandai namco owns in case people are curious uh ace combat or tenelico which is funny that they own that they own dark souls um they have the drag i think do they own dragon ball or do they have holding rights in dragon ball because they've done dragon ball video games forever so that's either a really long held license or they actually own a piece of that uh did you i'm sorry i was gonna say that's a good question i know that bandai i think has the rights maybe just for

50:06Colin Moriarty:games and merchandise i don't think they own it own it though but a significant portion they uh

50:13Dustin Furman:they own dig dug that's funny digimon um galaxian god eater they do all they've they've been publishing Gundam games since 1983, which is crazy. Dot Hack, Idol Master, Katamari, Dustin Klonoa? Hmm. Mr. Driller. They do the Naruto games, One Piece games, Pac-Man, Ridge Racer. They do the Sailor Moon stuff. Soul Calibur, Summon Knight and Super Robot Wars, Sword Art Online, Tails, Taiko no Tazuki which is the drumming game tekken time crisis and xenosaga as well as xevious so there's a lot of things that can be tapped by sony now maybe without licensing so anyway i just wanted to read all those things out what are your thoughts here on this and do you have anything you'd like

51:06Colin Moriarty:to add no i mean it just seems like a it does seem like a win-win for everybody there like or at least from a sony perspective where you're your primary um or at least playstation anyway like your primary thing is video games and then like you you have also this massive array of ip to pick from that's not just limited to that i feel like i feel like it's a good idea i don't know i feel like they're in the space of kind of diversifying lately not only with like places from productions with like uncharted movies and you know twisted metal but now this and obviously they're producing the zelda movie that's crazy to me that's so but but that's sony pictures right to be fair right right yeah yeah so yeah i mean it's ultimately the same but yeah i mean they just seem to be setting themselves up for a pretty good future with this i mean that's a crazy list of ip like it's kind of like you said dig dug and i actually forgot like dig dug used to be like one of my favorite things ever and then like i haven't heard about i haven't heard about that in fucking 10 years or something maybe a dig dig dog is awesome last time i thought about dig dog was forever ago and so yeah i mean that's a that's a wealth of ip there hasn't been a new dig dog game since 2008 apparently dig dug island is the game that's real it's a pc game

52:35Dustin Furman:what about mappy who owns mappy oh yeah they own mappy they own mappy yeah mappy rules yeah mappy's got really cool designs like i love the the the um not purple pink cats like the uh mappy's weird like that would that's a weird you're in the house right like there's the thing on the top it's like a it's a yeah it's a very memorable game mappy's a police officer

53:02Colin Moriarty:though so maybe he had like a scandal or something yeah yeah abuse of power maybe we should do a

53:09Dustin Furman:body cam yeah i was gonna say we should do a game called mappy colon body cam body cam and it's him just beating the shit out of those cats dude as someone who watched so i remember the whole ride towards body cams because everyone's like you know police are abusing people and we need to see all the stuff and i'm like okay sure it was what it's unintentionally showed is like yes some crooked cops that are probably behaving much better now because they're being videoed and the insane people that they deal with. If one thing that I've realized watching all these body cam footage is like cops are way too patient and way too nice to people because these people are fucking crazy out there.

53:50Dustin Furman:Like absolutely nuts. There are so many videos of the shit you can watch them forever. So shout out to whoever put the body cam stuff out there because it was done for one reason but it's actually been a great font of humor and insanity and proof of the insane shit that they deal with so Mappy's Mappy was out there in the decades before body cam and he was fucking those cats up and I don't know if he would get away with doing that anymore

54:20Colin Moriarty:no

54:23Dustin Furman:take the nightstick and just break it over their tails right unbelievable

54:27Colin Moriarty:they were thieves though because I think that the idea is they're stealing stuff yeah yeah no they are but he still was maybe he was asserting too much force yeah they have they still have rights

54:36Dustin Furman:you right but mappy was this was the 80s man mappy was like two steps away from waterboarding these fucking cats right and who was gonna say shit you know no one was gonna say shit about mappy because he had that place on the lock he had some sort of racket going on there you never even saw we got to get we got to revive mappy i'm down i never played any of the ports of mappy i literally only played the arcade version so it's not a game that i've ever even really you know like i've never sat with it um you know what game i was low-key really really addicted to on we virtual console was the original mario brothers like the original mario brothers like the the static screen arcade game and i became like super i became like mega obsessed with it

55:20Colin Moriarty:for some reason like getting the higher scores wait is that the one um the static screen yeah

55:27Dustin Furman:it's like coins and like enemies come out of like the pipes and like you're trying to collect the coins and avoid the enemies oh i see oh okay i see what you're saying and that was an arcade game and then it was ported to nes but i never had that version when as a kid everyone had super mario brothers i always wondered how many people bought that game up by accident thinking it was the other one although you would probably had the original super mario brothers because it probably came with your console okay let's see battlefield 6 has been officially revealed i don't know if you guys saw it there's a reveal trailer of two minutes and 10 seconds they say that there'll be more including a multiplayer reveal and a modern day setting reveal um in a further detail on july 31st so we'll check that out they did not release a they did not have a release date but it seems that reliable leakers have said that the game will launch October 10th.

56:23Dustin Furman:So fairly soon, Chris, I'm very eager to hear what you think, because I know you've been looking forward to Battlefield six. Yeah, man. Here it is. Talk to me about it.

56:31Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I'm excited. I obviously the there's a the multiplayer reveal on July 30th, I think, or 31st. So we're not going to see. That's really the main part of Battlefield that I care about. Obviously, the campaigns of Battlefield have generally been kind of OK. I liked Battlefield 1's quite a bit I think that had like an anthology kind of setup that I thought was really cool right yeah that was cool and Battlefield Bad Company had pretty good I remember liking the campaigns for those or the characters in those games but like generally speaking Battlefield's more of like a multiplayer kind of sandbox driven game and so that's really what I'm most curious about but I think it I think it looks great I think it's I mean I've always been a Battlefield fan so it's not really it's not really indicative of you know how the greater public might feel but it's just nice to see like oh hey look it's a it's a modern military kind of uh battlefield game and and beavis and butthead aren't running around you know or like oh american dad isn't drone striking fucking i don't know steve urkel you know what i mean it's it's it's this kind of grounded

57:48Colin Moriarty:this kind of grounded um vibe i i i get why to the outside observer or like even to most people it might seem like oh well this like generic or whatever but it's actually kind of i actually find that it's a pretty underserved aesthetic now i mean even things like rainbow six siege which started off more grounded as like i think i think you can i think you can literally play as pickle rick in in rainbow six siege i don't even think i'm making that up i think i think that's seriously a thing i saw and so it's just nice to see this look this way and it looks great the destruction looks on point um granted it's a live service game so ultimately like it's only going to look this good for as long as long as they decide like hey this is good and then and then there's going to be a point where they're like we need more money and now let's throw out of the powerpuff girls into this and so we'll see if that ever happens i don't know battlefield typically isn't the type of game to do that as far as i as far as i know as far as i can recall they've actually been pretty resilient against that kind of thing so i'm just excited to see a new battlefield um 2040 what was the last one 20 21 42 or 2042 or something yeah the last one was 2042 that came out in 2021 yeah that one kind of launched all all fucked up and uh you know battlefield 5 was kind of was kind of whatever they made some tweaks to the gameplay in that game that i just didn't really or like the really minor systems that really kind of ended up being really jarring and not great in my opinion but i'm holding out hope that this is going to be good uh a lot of it is going to hinge on the multiplayer reveal though like that's kind of that's where we'll really know or when we'll really have an idea presumably there will be betas as well um i would have to imagine so yeah i'm looking forward to it it's it's it's nice to see battlefield again i haven't played battlefield seriously since

59:52Dustin Furman:Battlefield 1 and that was 2016 I think so it's been a while yeah yeah Battlefield 2042 was 2021 they did support it a lot they did three expansions in 22 three expansions in 23 and an expansion in 24.

1:00:08Colin Moriarty:Yeah I've heard I've heard to be fair that it's gotten a lot better and it's it's really good but like to me it's just kind of like it's the first impressions thing like you gotta you gotta nail those first impressions.

1:00:20Dustin Furman:and uh let's see battlefield 5 was 2018 battlefield 1 like you said was 2016 that was the last time i played it battlefield hardline that was the weird like oh that was 2015 right 2015 right that was a weird battlefield 4 was 2013 because that was a launch game i think for ps4 and so on so yeah bad company 2 was the last one i played well before that probably so there was a huge gap in there for me as well and i i'm probably not going to play this but um the interesting thing here there are a few things to say about this dustin as we go over to you the first is that this is the first battlefield game to be made by battlefield studios which is i think four different teams so they're approaching it very much like activision approaches call of duty now so it's dice ripple effect motive and criterion are all working on it which is so weird criterion basically turning into like a prolific racing team now working on battlefield but they've they've done um and it doesn't mean that those other teams couldn't be working on other things like i think specifically motive would be working on other stuff too but i think dice and ripple effect are basically all in on battlefield so they're approaching this in uh in a major bite sort of way of using a lot of assets but they're not trying to do the activision thing of doing it every year i don't think so they're going to have this game out probably for years people are eager to learn more about this and again the october 10th release date seems like it's well reported although i don't think it's been leaked yet or i don't think it's been i'm sorry officially announced yet and there are rumors here that the game might be listed for 80 bucks and we'll get into 80 dollar price points later um so yeah i'm very curious to hear

1:01:51Colin Moriarty:what your thoughts are yeah i was looking also that um this shouldn't be a surprise but this will be current gen only so ps5 series x ns and pc so no ps4 uh release which is nice which is yeah

1:02:09Dustin Furman:That's huge. I mean, that's a bold thing to do, but I think a differentiator.

1:02:13Colin Moriarty:Right. And I'm glad specifically for Battlefield just because so much of their whole shtick in comparison to Call of Duty is about how big the maps are, the destruction of the maps, the vehicles. And so leaving the last gen behind is encouraging that this could be a big step up. with that said I really want to see this reveal I want to see gameplay but I won't tell you what to do but my suggestion is that you should not preorder this game under any circumstances because Battlefield Studios or DICE or whatever has not earned their trust in this situation with how fucking broken their last game was and even the last Battlefield, I guess not the last game, but the last Battlefield 5, also a bit of a disaster as well.

1:03:11Colin Moriarty:I really hope that's not the case because I think Battlefield could be awesome, but they really haven't done that in a very long time. Hopefully this is the one, and it seems like they're putting so much effort with so much money and studios behind it, that it seems like it probably will be great but i i've been excited for too many battlefield games and then been disappointed i very specifically remember when i think it was battlefield three or four the one that launched with ps4 that was for battlefield 4 yeah and it was that was fucked at launch it was completely fucked at launch and ever since then uh i've been skeptical and then proven that my skepticism was correct about battlefield games since then so uh just be be cautious even if this multiplayer reveal is fantastic and i really hope it is they just have have no trust for me yeah yeah until shown otherwise yeah i think that's a

1:04:16Dustin Furman:great point i i would uh i don't even know how they would do this and i don't know that it would even be reasonable but it would be cool for a company like them that's kind of like earning the trust back that understands that there's early kind of players that get burned and bad reputation and everything is to say like we're not even you can't even pre-order the game we want you to like come by at day one based on the strength of what we feel will be like amazing coverage from media and journalists of a game we're really going to deliver to you like we'll show you and you'll be there and use that as a marketing gimmick but it's so risky to and almost foolish to do that when there's probably hundreds of thousands of people that are still willing to buy your game sight unseen.

1:04:57Dustin Furman:Why not just let them do it? October 10th, that's soon. I mean, it's not far away at all. I wonder if pre-orders will probably go live when they show the multiplayer off, and I wonder if these betas in quotes betas, they're really going to be server tests at this point or whatever, and maybe they can finagle and fix some last minute things if they're really going to stick to that release date maybe they make that available immediately or like in august at some point um because there's not much time october 10th is is not very far away so again they have not confirmed the october 10th release date it's just being widely reported based on scraping of data and i think that that billy bill coon or whatever the fuck that guy is that always has the release dates early um he reported it so it's like okay obviously that's and i think that i also think ea published and then deleted something like you can pre-order the game until october 10th which indicates that the or you'll get the pre-order bonuses until october 10th which indicates that's the day the game comes out so i totally agree with you if the game gets good reviews and you're into it after you see more of it and you play the beta and everything then you if you but honestly i've said this how many times have i said this guys it's like why are we pre-ordering digital games period you if anything just put your money down a few days beforehand to secure well the bonuses unless there's some obviously there's going to be something maybe to entice you access to a beta or three days early access to a campaign or whatever but i'm just saying like i i the the days of we used to pre-order games because there was a finite number of them shipped to these places if you wanted your copy of fucking xeno gears or something there's probably your eb was literally probably gonna get four of them and so that's but that's not the so i don't even

1:06:41Colin Moriarty:really understand it anymore you know i don't even recommend pre-ordering a day or two before it or if the reviews are great because that was the problem with the battlefield that launched on ps4 is that i think the reviews were good um but then the servers just didn't fucking work once the you know people started using them so for me like launch day later in the day at best but probably a few days after even for me to buy it just because it's like, dude, I don't, this could be a 10 out of 10 game, but if the servers don't work, then it's nothing. It's a zero as far as I'm concerned.

1:07:23Dustin Furman:Yeah, that's a good point. Yep. If you can be patient, be patient. I know there's gonna be a lot of people excited about it. I will say this. I wonder what you guys think of this is like, this feels like you don't want to be too dramatic. Electronic Arts has a lot of money and a lot of means they're very you know a very famous well-established company that earns an enormous amount of cash but it feels like the last chance for battlefield to really be a thing again i i just don't know how many times they're going to get an opportunity to in this incredibly competitive market where people really are executing and where games that are good are getting eaten alive it's like i don't know man i don't know what uh what you guys think of this you know do you chris do you think that battlefield 6 has a chance you know obviously i hope it does well but i mean it it does feel like they understand the gravity of the situation that they really need to make this work at this point.

1:08:09Dustin Furman:Otherwise there's no, there should be nothing stopping you at that point from just making a new IP or going back to Titanfall or going back to fucking metal of honor. I mean, or make, you know, just do something new, but like the battlefield thing seems like its reputation is not great. And so, and people are so skeptical. If you don't hit here, I don't feel like you shake it.

1:08:29Colin Moriarty:Yeah, it's yeah. I mean, I, I probably, I think I agree. I think there's just too many there's too much inconsistency with with Battlefield as of late. And I do feel like this is probably as the industry gets more and more volatile. I think like this is probably the the last shot for for Battlefield anyway. But I think. Yeah, I don't know. Like, I would say, like, just like if this doesn't work out, like maybe like a spiritual successor or something like I don't know, man, like just just get it right, please. just get it's been long enough right it's been almost damn near 10 years since the last you know critically like well well received battlefield game yeah yeah i didn't realize

1:09:16Dustin Furman:yeah battlefield one i liked battlefield one as well um i even played online great a little bit i'm not very good at it but like i said when i play these online shooters if i can keep my my kill to death ratio somewhere around one i'm feeling fucking right as rain dude

1:09:31Colin Moriarty:i'll be honest with you if like just a positive katie is enough yeah like if it's like 0.8 or

1:09:36Dustin Furman:something then i'm really starting to feel bad about myself because i'm just not very good at these games um i didn't realize though i mean not that i'm obviously people know i'm very critical of metacritic and i think rightfully so because i think it's nonsensical in a lot of ways but it's one barometer to judge things i didn't realize battlefield 2042 was as bad as it was It's in it's 63 and battlefield five was 73. So it's not been good. Like you said, and I don't know that you can keep going this way. This in this direction is spending this much money. I mean, these are a hundred. This game is cost a hundred, hundreds of millions of dollars.

1:10:08So you can,

1:10:11Dustin Furman:but I also think EA understands fully, especially with its success with apex legends that like they need to be in these competitive shooter spaces. They got to make it work somewhere. So maybe this will be the one they have. understanding the gravity of it maybe that's also why they haven't really announced the release date although because maybe they're just seeing but i don't think so i don't think you do all this without a release date in mind and you're that you're confident in it four teams plus all the people you're contracting working on this thing go pulling in the same direction it should it should be okay and people played it earlier in the year and liked it right

1:10:44Colin Moriarty:yeah yeah i'm i'm hearing pretty positive rumblings but at the same time like i don't know I see these drum links and I'm thinking like well are these Battlefield fans like are these like kind of like Battlefield are these the people who are still playing 2042 or whatever and enjoy it and are willing to give the benefit of the doubt I don't know but I've heard pretty positive things about it but we'll have to see I'm rooting for it I hope it does well but like I would agree with Dustin that like the Battlefield as an IP has not really earned the trust of a day one purchase or like a or a pre-order quite yet um i don't think they will really like i think i think you're gonna have to wait and see like what the what the launch day is going to be like and whether or not those servers hold up and then that'll be a determining factor and then and then like once they stabilize then you can check out the reviews and then see like make an educated decision there but uh this really is like the last because you have to figure also like the development cycle for these games is getting crazy you have to imagine and so like if this doesn't hit we're probably not going to see battlefield or another shot at battlefield until like 29 yeah i mean at the earliest i would say yeah at the earliest yeah big big swings so yeah i'm pulling for it i would like a i'm i'm itching for like a modern kind of like old school modern military like grounded kind of game like i like i like those games and i remember liking them quite a bit when i was in uh high school and uh now it seems like every franchise that was that medal of honor is dead uh call duty is jumped 15 sharks at this point um and so it'd be nice to reconnect with that and so hopefully they hopefully they nail it what's that game that just came out ready or not or something oh yeah i keep saying i don't know what that is yeah i talked about playing that on pc a few months back right yeah it's cool it's like a hardcore swat game okay yeah so there's some controversy though because they had to censor it for the console release and then they went and censored the already released pc version

1:12:54Dustin Furman:yeah just to keep everything the same i mean i don't blame them because that's annoying but not a great decision probably uh yeah i saw it i saw it sold a million copies on console which is awesome so you might like it colin really you i think you can play it by yourself because you can

1:13:10Colin Moriarty:command your different guys and it's neat.

1:13:15Dustin Furman:It's different. Maybe I'll check that out. I didn't really consider it for myself, to be honest. Dustin, let's stick with you. Because there's news here from MP1st about an unannounced FromSoftware game that's deep into development. They write, according to information we've been able to obtain the Japanese studio FromSoftware in addition to working on updates and DLC for Elden Ring Night Reign, as well as on an exclusive title for the Nintendo Switch 2 called the Duskbloods, is also in the advanced stages of production on another as yet unannounced project, a multi-platform game with the codename FMC.

1:13:47Dustin Furman:Considering the nature of the source these details come from, everything points to the project being at such an advanced stage that unless it hits a delay, we should be able to play it no later than next year. They later write, Codenames, while seemingly insignificant at first glance, can actually reveal quite a bit about what a mysterious project might be. That said, they emphasize that all of the conclusions are speculative. Like most game development studios, From Software assigns internal codenames to its projects. For example, the codename for Elden Ring was Great Rune, and in game files it was abbreviated as GR.

1:14:16Dustin Furman:Below is a list of codename abbreviations that they know of. So, Dark Souls 2 was FRPG2, Dark Souls 3 was FTP, Dark Souls Remastered FHD, Sekiro had NTCG and NTC, Bloodborne SPRJ, Elden Ring GR, Armor Core 6 FNR, and Elden Ring Night Reign CL. um so we don't really have much to work on here because we don't you can reverse engineer some of this stuff to figure out what it means um or get information after the game comes out from the teams that worked on them about what these acronyms have meant um but that's all we have to work on um with that little bit of information known what do you first of all i'm interested to see what what you know what documents they got probably internal financial documents i would assume

1:15:01Colin Moriarty:what are your thoughts yeah okay so i'll present you three options the pie in the sky the middle ground of would be amazing and then maybe the most likely the pie in the sky is of course this is a bloodborne remake it's not especially because it says it's multi-platform but that would be interesting if they had leverage over sony was like if we're going to remake this game for you or remaster it it needs to be multi-platform would be interesting probably not likely um the middle tier speculation that is possible because i believe there were rumors about this a few months back is that it is the dark souls 3 remastered uh which is kind of cool it's a little weird just in that dark souls 3 if you play it on playstation 5 runs at a seemingly perfect 60 fps there's still some work that could be done on it though and i'm sure it would sell really really well and i would be i mean i would buy it and play it for sure the other thing that this article from mp first points out that is the less exciting but very possible is that it is another armored core game um or a dlc something armored core uh related which is cool i i really like that new armor core game that they did i had a great time with it sold three million copies

1:16:24Dustin Furman:apparently which is pretty crazy and did well so that's as many copies as astrobot yeah it's i'm sorry to interrupt but i was just like yeah no so good so yeah i armored core could

1:16:35Colin Moriarty:make a lot of sense um in fact this article in one of the updates uh point out that uh historically the series has seen uh semi-sequels slash standalone expansion slash spinoffs released not long after the new numbered series so that is the history with armored core but it's also a completely new era for from soft so maybe the history doesn't really matter in this case but um i'm leaning dark souls 3 remastered or new armored core uh probably it's chrome hounds 2

1:17:11Dustin Furman:whoa um yeah i'm looking at actually the games that they've done you know because they really have slowed down since 2009 when they really i think came back onto the scene in a major way with demon souls so it's there are only so many options armored core obviously continues like you said dark souls they do one-offs like the resinae which was kind of weird and then obviously elden ringing everything they're getting going and now the duskbloods um it's so interesting i guess i'm just kind of realizing this now duskbloods is being published by nintendo so there was nothing there's nothing stopping Sony from having thrown money at them to do something for them you know and obviously we know that I guess the rest of a was published by Sony but that was obviously a small PSVR experimental kind of thing it's just kind of frustrating to see that knowing that Bloodborne can be being held hostage due to old verbiage and contracts or whatever we kind of infer based on it the silence about it that like there is the money could solve it right because they seem so in bed with Bandai Namco at this point that it almost seemed like they were never going to work with anyone else.

1:18:19Dustin Furman:Sekiro obviously was with Activision but that was five years ago. Anyway, that just frustrates me seeing that. On behalf of Bloodborne fans, I really don't give a shit one way or the other. Duskblood

1:18:30Colin Moriarty:certainly feels like their riskiest project being that it is a new IP and it's an extraction style multiplayer game. Maybe that's why they wanted to secure a partner to pay for it just in case at this point though I mean from software is so loved and established at this point that people are just going to eat up anything I know people my friend Brandon he's going to buy a switch to when that game comes out yeah and he doesn't care if any other games come out for switch to that he wants to play he just wants to play anything from software puts out yeah it's

1:19:06Dustin Furman:interesting it's an interesting amount of power it's worth noting that it's actually self published in Japan but Nintendo will do the international publishing just to clarify that um do you have any thoughts here chris about what you might like to see i mean there's so many different options i mean what about and i'm just like spitballing here because i don't know anything about you know what people really expect from from soft and obviously elden ring is so big that you think that elden ring 2 would be a huge priority and something that i'm sure is somewhere in development there but is there any desire to go back to dark souls does that even make sense could there be a dark souls 4 maybe i mean i think um i wonder what people how would people feel about that would that make any sense really i think miyazaki said he didn't want to yeah like i think he was like i'm done yeah i'm just gonna i'm just gonna make the same exact game but call it something else pretty much new lore yeah new lore of course

1:19:59Colin Moriarty:new lore i think uh i think we're looking at guys i think we're looking at metal wolf chaos dude i think we're getting rules i don't know i really don't know i mean this it really could be anything i think uh i think it would be dope to see something like that by the way i would love something like a metal wolf chaos again but that would never that would never happen i think um

1:20:22Dustin Furman:dark souls i think is unlikely i don't know at least metal wolf chaos on ps4 right again yeah i think through devolver i'm interesting i think that makes that's a good pair honestly i i wonder like i just feel like they have so much leverage right now i would be like working on getting there's like only so many directions you can go into i think the safest direction is elden ring too i mean i just think that that's yeah would be fucking insane not to do that but i always i talk about this every once in a while when we bring up from soft it's like would they ever revive kingsfield and would it make any sense and like could you like kingsfield would probably sell 10 million copies just based on it being like a from this old game that kind of gave us demon souls and then you know went away but can come back like i just wonder like where their minds are in other words do you want to get like a bunch of irons in the fire and then have a bunch of parallel tracks or do you want to kind of keep it more limited and put lots of money and time into fewer projects and obviously the release cadence has significantly slowed down to the point where they started even missing years for the first time which was unheard of for them they would usually release something every year um so i don't know i i mean i'm kind of an outsider looking in i'm trying to even think like armored cord three million copies pretty good but even by their standards is that even worth pursuing over dark souls 4 or something i don't know get your tickets now for the dog stars

1:21:59Colin Moriarty:it's no surprise how fast civilization can disappear

1:22:03Dustin Furman:out there just kill or be killed jacob alordi there are people out there they need our help josh brolin shoot first and inquire afterwards margaret qualley okay tough guy and guy pierce arm up the dog stars directed by ridley scott in theaters august 28th get tickets now rated r under 17 not admitted without parents all right this next one comes from the playstation blog itself and we we did discuss this maybe last month but this was going to be rolling out but they write new ps5 system update beta previews dual sense wireless controller pairing across multiple devices so they write quote many ps5 peripherals including the dual sense wireless controller designed to support a variety of devices beyond ps5 including pc mac and mobile devices we believe enabling compatibility of our peripherals across multiple platforms creates a more flexible and seamless gaming experience as part of this effort we're excited to announce that the latest PS5 system update beta will preview a new feature that allows DualSense wireless controllers and DualSense Edge wireless controllers to be paired across multiple devices simultaneously, making it easier to switch between them without needing to pair each time.

1:23:09Dustin Furman:Additionally, we're also sharing new details on PowerSaver for games, a new mode that enables supported PS5 games to run with lower power consumption and reduced environmental impact, which will be available at a later date. So first about the controller, they write, Until now, pairing was required each time you connected a DualSense or DualSense Edge wireless controller to a different device, such as a PC, Mac, or mobile device. With this update, you can now register up to four devices simultaneously and easily switch between them directly from your controller. For example, you can take your controller, which you use with your PS5, then seamlessly switch connection to a PC to play PC games or connect it to a smartphone to enjoy remote play from your PS5.

1:23:44Dustin Furman:With this enhanced flexibility, you can enjoy gaming more freely across multiple devices. And they explain how it's done. the power saver thing on the other hand is all based on their quote-unquote road to zero environmental plan that has them getting to net zero greenhouse gas by 2040 and they write quote with this update you may notice a new option in your settings menu called power saver while this feature won't be available during the beta phase once it officially launches supported ps5 games will scale back performance and will allow your ps5 to reduce its power consumption when the feature is enabled optionally by gamers if not enabled or if games do not support the feature the performance will not be scaled back and power consumption will not be reduced.

1:24:25Dustin Furman:Chris, do you use your dual sense across any other devices? I actually only, I still use, I guess I don't have to do this anymore, but I still use my, uh, my PS4 controller on my PC. So I don't even, the PS5 controller is very much for the PS5, but I can, I can imagine that this is a tip of the cap and the sign of things to come understanding that this is going to be more of a multiple platform, um, environment

1:24:49Colin Moriarty:as opposed to something that's locked on hardware yeah no i mean it's a smart thing to to include i don't personally use the dual sense on anything that isn't the ps5 because i i just don't find it the most comfortable controller and also just like i think i've brought up on the show before just the weird the way that it fucks with my pc specifically with like the the microphone and the speakers in the controller like i just like it's i and i understand by the way that that's like apparently something that they've ameliorated i would rather just not think that that's even something that's possible so like i just hook up a controller that has no chance of that happening um usually an xbox controller of some kind but i mean i think it's a smart thing the the thing about this though is that like well i think this is cool it's definitely impressive i like that the the seamlessness of it apparently like there's like a button like you know combos you can toggle between it's cool but it also strikes me as like who the like who what kind of psycho he's playing oh i'm playing bellatro on my phone and then like bloodborne on my ps5 and then like it reminds me of like um i don't know it's almost like in like gooner territory where it's like i gotta have i gotta have i gotta have my phone and my and my computer and like i gotta have all four quadrants on my computer and showing different porn at the same time like relax well like you don't need to be playing this many things at the same time like sit with one game it's it's not for the same you're not using the controller at the same time with these different devices i'm exaggerating it's just i'm exaggerating it's just crazy to me that like um like it's a cool it's cool it's a cool feature set i appreciate it that's dope but i can't i can't imagine that i'll ever really even if i were using the the dual sense for um for pc i can't imagine that I would use it too often because I don't really hook up my thing to it's really just my PC and my PlayStation and I usually wire it to the PC because I figure like well I'm sitting at my desk anyway I might as well I might as well just charge it you know so like I don't know it's it's cool feature set but I'm it's not useful to me I am I'm wondering if it's interesting that they're

1:27:04Dustin Furman:using this kind of real estate they don't speak very much they don't update things too often not as often as i think people would like so there's something to this i guess dustin like what do you think i i assume that they're just seeing more connectivity and being more flexible with their hardware means that people will stick with them more or at least defer to their controllers and they did kind of make a mistake in the xbox 360 era by not doing more with not that it would have really been a really good competitor because the six axis with and the dual shock 3 were kind of shitty compared to the 360 controller but that became like a default pc controller for 10 years basically and that kind of mentality segued into um the xbox one controller and so on so maybe they're kind of trying to proactively do something about that this time around what do you think

1:27:53Colin Moriarty:yeah well i think that i think sony wants the dual sense to be the best controller to buy or in there you know whatever whether you agree or not they want to be the best controller whether you're playing on PlayStation or if you're playing on PC, which is why their PC games, I think all of them, if you connect to DualSense, you can use DualSense features on PC. It's not a PlayStation exclusive thing where you can have the haptic triggers and stuff like that on PC. So I think it is sort of this idea that they want this to be the ubiquitous controller everywhere. And so as far as this feature, I am super pumped about this because I want to play Bellatro on my phone and be playing Final Fantasy on my PlayStation and whatever all at the same time.

1:28:48Colin Moriarty:I recently hooked up my old PC, my old PC that I thought was dead. Turns out some I think was just fucked with Windows because it works perfectly now. I don't get it. I wish I would have known that before I bought a new PC, but too late now. I have it hooked up to my downstairs TV. So I have like a living room PC now that I set up to like auto boot into Steam Big Picture. So I don't have to fuck with a mouse and keyboard thing. So right now I have one DualSense that is dedicated just to that because I don't want to have to go through the hassle of repairing it every time. so especially if you like maybe you only have one dual sense edge and you want to be able to use it on multiple devices because that's your good controller uh this will make things a lot easier so i will definitely be using it for that scenario between the pc and the playstation um and i'm sure there are a lot of people too that use um remote play whether it's an iphone or an ipad particular where switching between those two things would be a lot easier now this power saver thing colin isn't this something that you talked about with morsela is dead and this is basically the targets potentially the target spec for the handheld yeah that's he was saying that so it's

1:30:07Dustin Furman:interesting yeah it's another thing that he he doesn't get nearly enough credit for um for for breaking like things for some reason he has like a reputation in some corners of being wrong and I'm like, about what? He seems to leak things properly all the time. Yeah, this seems to be maybe one and the same, or at least going towards that direction. But I was going to say that regardless of what it really is being done for, Sony is very much into the ESG kind of shit, which is environment, social governance, or whatever, where companies are kind of trying to be proactive about their environmental footprint, about the way they interact with societies and governments and all the rest.

1:30:48Dustin Furman:And they have nothing to lose here because they get tax benefits and they're treated better by regulators. And so they can kind of play it both ways and pretend it's what I always say about hotels that are like, that's what I was going to say. It's the hotel situation.

1:31:05Colin Moriarty:Like, oh, well, we're just trying to make the PS5 more environmentally friendly.

1:31:09Dustin Furman:Right. Exactly.

1:31:10Colin Moriarty:By tanking your frame rates.

1:31:11Dustin Furman:Right. So that's like they can play it that way and kind of get two bites at the apple as it were because they're doing it for two different reasons and they kind of both go towards the same direction for them. So it's unclear like what why they would really do that. I just think it's funny to protect. I'm just going to be real with you. I could give a fuck what how much power my PS5 uses and I would never use something like that like voluntarily make my games run worse. I would make I would have the PS5 take twice as much electricity if it ran the games better. so trust me i don't i don't care about about that but i don't think they really do either but if you read a lot of their you know their their financial releases and especially their annual reports and stuff they have a lot of stuff dedicated to this in a way and talk about sony generally about in ways that other companies in their in the space really don't they are they are very progressive in that way but i but again like we said with the hotel thing i always read the ulterior motives because trust me, the Marriott doesn't care about the environment.

1:32:15Dustin Furman:They are using less water and electricity and that saves them money because you didn't put it because you didn't hang your towel up or hang your towel up and we'll assume you just want to use it again. Yeah, they definitely do that for the planet, whatever you say. But it gets, it's very Randy and thing of getting a good result by appealing to the selfishness of organizations. It's helpful to the environment for you to use less electricity. If you don't care about that and you're just saving money, okay. Fair enough. All right. Next story is about Final Fantasy Tactics. PlayStation blog wrote this interesting piece.

1:32:53Dustin Furman:It's an interview with Kazutoyo Mahiro, who is directing the Ivelis Chronicles, the new Final Fantasy release for Final Fantasy Tactics. And it's pretty interesting. Dustin, specifically did you read get a chance to read this story yeah i read through so yeah the big thing here that i wanted to bring up is maybe we've discovered why it took so long for this game to come to fruition and it's there's there's an interesting admission in this uh interview which is extensive and about a bunch of other things so you guys can go read it if you're interested in tactics but what he basically says is that they um had to remake the game because they lost the original source code and didn't have the master data for the game anymore.

1:33:45So it had to be done from scratch.

1:33:49Dustin Furman:And they also kind of, because you can switch between a more original version of the game and the newer version of the game, they really remade it somewhat faithfully and then put everything over that original bulk of data and art and whatever to make it more modern. so i was curious if uh you have any thoughts on this dustin what you think so maybe we're a little too hard i don't want to say hard on it i just didn't know what was taking so long right this makes a little more sense i guess well it's funny because this is not the first

1:34:18Colin Moriarty:time this has happened to square uh the kingdom hearts collection that you were playing colin uh they had to rebuild that also because they did not have the i i don't know if it was just kingdom hearts one or king marks one and two for sure one uh where they no longer had the source code for it so they actually needed to like rip it out rip out all the assets from a retail disc and rebuild kingdom hearts in order to make that collection so clearly square doesn't at least back then didn't have a good archival process for their source code so yeah it makes sense that this took longer but i think it's cool because when you when you emulate a game you can add some things like you can add rewind features and trophies, things like that.

1:35:05Colin Moriarty:But it's much harder to get in and add major quality of life features. So it's kind of a blessing in disguise, at least for us, that this rebuilt version, they're able to do a lot more to it. Because it's going to offer both modes, the classic mode and the new revised version of it that sounds like it's going to have a lot of quality of life that is really going to make the game much more approachable in the year of our Lord 2025.

1:35:35Dustin Furman:Yeah, it comes out September 30th on PS4 and PS5. Really, really looking forward to it. Chris, are you going to check out Final Fantasy? Did you play Final Fantasy Tactics ever?

1:35:44Colin Moriarty:No, no, I think... No, certainly not. I think I would remember. I think I had a cousin who did play it and would tell me about it all the time, but like I never... Yeah, it probably would have been Final Fantasy.

1:35:56Dustin Furman:It would have been most accessible to you on PSP, probably the War of the Lions.

1:36:00Colin Moriarty:yeah that sounds about right yeah because that was around that time i think um yeah like i i don't know i remember seeing the trailer for this though and i i because i you had talked about final fantasy tactics a lot over the course of uh just doing the show and i just never looked it up because i just kind of assumed it's like oh it's not you know it's final fantasy i'm not really that into it and also tactics i'm not really that into it i've only recently really gotten into tactics games and and by recently by the way i mean like the last like three years or something um and when this trailer came out i remember just looking at it and thinking like oh this looks kind of it looks concise like it doesn't look as um overwhelming as i assumed a tactics game would be in final fantasy because final fantasy overwhelms me it does um just seems like there's a lot to it a lot to learn but uh it looks nice like i don't know i like the style of it like it speaks to me so like i probably will check this out actually but the character class

1:37:01Dustin Furman:system is second to none i think and i think final fantasy tactics is to the tactics you know role-playing genre like symphony of the night is to metroidvanias where it's like it will never really be better than this it's almost impossible to imagine it ever really being better like truly better but everything will build off of this and try their best to kind of replicate and emulate what this game captured and um yeah it's a really it's a special game i'm looking at screenshots of it now it's just yeah i'm really looking for it and the new one looks great

1:37:32Colin Moriarty:i like the look of i just like the look of it like there's like a there's a shot in the in the announcement trailer of like it kind of shows a more slanted isometric view of the tiles where it's kind of like disjointed and it follows the terrain and then it like pans up and it becomes flat squares and that for some reason that that does something in my brain where like that scratches something where it's like i like the way that looks that's a very satisfying transition it's like 28 seconds into the announcement trailer where you can see this like pivot of the camera over the tiles where i'm just like that looks so cool for some reason i don't know what it is but i'm into it i like the i like the look of it i like the style i like that it's like these like these bit these cubic kind of chunks of land kind of hovering in space i think it's like weirdly ethereal yeah it's cool yeah what i'm seeing here is like yeah this that's like what it will look like when you're making your turn basically yeah i just i i dig that i dig whenever like there's like a weird subversion like that there it's like a really just looking at the graphics because there's um there's like a grain to it that's really interesting like it's low resolution yeah um and maybe it's like let me look at it yeah like it actually

1:38:51Dustin Furman:looks the more the higher quality you even i'm watching it in 4k now or whatever i guess 2160 and it actually even looks grainier so that's like definitely something they're going for is like this lo-fi yeah almost it's not transparent but it's this isn't the way the original game looked like the the isometric camera angles and stuff are classic final fantasy tactics that and all of the menus and the turn bar and all the rest but um there's a distinct graphical flair to it too and i think there's a distinct graphical flair to the just the out of game you know concept art and stuff like it's different than final fantasy it's a different chocobo it's a different soldier it's a different you know and then they obviously incorporate the the aesthetic of the white mage the black mage and whatever but they they a lot of final fantasy aesthetic comes from this and this takes place in evilest too which is cool because that's where final fantasy 12 takes place so it's all the same world so and we haven't been there since final fantasy 12 okay um this is a pretty big piece of news i was curious what you guys think of this we talked about this one so the outer worlds 2 um is coming to playstation 5 and other consoles on October 29th, and they announced that it was going to be$80.

1:40:06Dustin Furman:Obviously, it's on Game Pass on Xbox. Obsidian is an Xbox studio, so they're making it fundamentally for Xbox and for Game Pass. So I always looked at this as a way to leverage, you know, pay this kind of seemingly outrageous price for our game or just come get it on Game Pass. But they wrote this on their official social media pages, and I'm reading it off of Twitter. It says, Dear Galactic Citizens, we have received your sos via skip drone about the pricing as an organization devoted to making sure that corporations do not go do not go unfettered we at the earth directorate have worked with redacted to revise the price of the outer worlds too while this will not bring peace to the galaxy or even your local colony we assure you that all we are all here to fight all and for all colonies in every way that we can from the official of the director of the earth directorate and then it's a price like originally priced was 79.99 they just scratched out wrote 69.99 underneath it.

1:40:59Dustin Furman:This is interesting because people really were outraged by this, and I kind of wasn't just because I thought it was a leverage play to make people more interested in Game Pass and that the$80 price point would become a starker comparison, but maybe a bridge too far. Bob Dylan wrote from beyond the grave. Wow. Said, I know this is Xbox related, but everyone take note. They walked back their game price increase. If you vote with your wallet, you will enact change, not polls, not tweeting at people, petitions etc just cold hard cash absolutely um but dustin the pre-orders must have been bad

1:41:33Colin Moriarty:i assume that's why they they did this right well i was thinking back i was trying to i actually was trying to find the episode where we talked about initially where the rumors this was before nintendo's 80 mario kart where we were talking about gta potentially being a hundred dollars and i had said something like wait until someone else tries to pull this off and they're gonna

1:41:58Dustin Furman:realize they're not that guy you know they're not you're not that guy you're not gta bro yeah

1:42:04Colin Moriarty:you're not that guy dude and in this case the outer worlds 2 was not that guy uh to follow up as the first$80 game outside of Nintendo, I believe. So yeah, it makes sense. And I'm sure their pre-orders were terrible. With that being said, I don't think this changes the wave of$80 games that are coming. Yeah. Outer Worlds 2, I'm sure it's going to be great and the fans of that game are going to love it. But I think Maddie said this on Duke when I was editing it, But like when you have Borderlands coming out at 70 and that's a game that maybe could have done it at$80. So they were just too early.

1:42:48Colin Moriarty:They weren't the it wasn't the right game to break the barrier. So but Bob Dylan is right that when you vote with your wallets, you can make change. So keep that energy when a game you really actually do want is$80. Yeah, that's it's not going to happen.

1:43:07Dustin Furman:like right that's my thing is that i love you bringing up that yeah like it wasn't you're not that that guy or whatever like the outer worlds is pretty big they haven't announced really or sales in years but as of 2021 it sold 4 million copies so it's that's a very respectable number um i just think it's impossible to know if people aren't pre-ordering the game because it was 80 or because they're not interested in the outer worlds too like it's probably a little bit of both where I think you can't really, you could do the best you can to save the game here, but you're kind of undercutting your ability to do it moving forward.

1:43:43Dustin Furman:They're going to try this again. And now people know that you can undercut them. And this is what we were saying earlier, but I just don't pre-order the game. You can scare the shit out of these companies by simply refusing to pre-order the game, which is why they're trying to entice you with beta access and five days early access and free skins and all that. I get it. I mean, but uh chris what do you think this is a pretty powerful moment for the consumer i just don't know i just don't feel like anyone's very it just i don't say anyone it doesn't feel like there are very many people interested in the outer worlds too for some reason so i don't i don't know if it's like just too little too late if i'm just delusional and it's going to sell millions of copies and if the 80 price point really was a bridge too far but they're not that guy i guess

1:44:26Colin Moriarty:yeah well i don't know there is also just the reality that this is a game pass game and so like why what that and that inherently is going to hurt pre-orders because if you could just play on game pass on pc and on xbox like why like why even sweat like i agree with you actually it's the wrong game for a multitude of reasons first of all it is it is a smaller kind of more it is a nicher kind of game when you compare it to other like massive games in its in its comparable genre it's an ip that you know is good like i really liked the outer worlds but it's not this massive like system so like you wouldn't be like oh my god i gotta i gotta get the new xbox for the new outer worlds like it's not that's not really the kind of caliber of game we're talking about here not from quality standpoint but just like from like a a general kind of receptive or a reception standpoint and so you have that angle and then you have you know obsidian coming off of avowed about not really that well received not maybe there's like some trepidation some skepticism i know i have a little bit of like well maybe um i'm looking forward to the outer worlds too but like after avowed i'm like i i hope i hope they didn't like stretch themselves so thin between these projects that um that both of them ended up suffering that's kind of on my mind a little bit um and so there's that for the people who are a little bit more clued into the you know clued into this stuff more enthusiasts and then there's the reality of just like well i don't need to pre-order it because it's it's going to be a game pass game like every every aspect of what this kind of game is is like the wrong game to make this kind of move with i think whereas like borderlands i actually feel like the opposite like borderlands isn't available on a subscription service.

1:46:12Colin Moriarty:It's kind of a big game. That'd be a lot of people. A lot of people love Borderlands like way more than Outer Worlds, obviously. And so that's the kind of game that I would be like, oh, well, they probably could do it. And so, yeah, it's just Dustin said it really perfectly. It's like you're not that guy. Yeah. Respectfully. I wonder too. I wonder... This might just be me. So putting that out there with Outer Worlds one, I remember when it was being revealed and shown off, there was like a little bit of like, hey, this this isn't like as big as a Fallout or an Elder Scrolls game. Like this is a smaller, more contained RPG.

1:46:59Colin Moriarty:And I believe that launched at full price at$60. When I played it, I remember thinking, yeah, this definitely feels much smaller for better or for worse. Right. And so I think that people maybe have that mindset that's like, oh, there's giant games like Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 that came out this year that are$70. And then you have a scaled back RPG and assuming that's also going to be Outer Worlds 2, which I honestly, I didn't watch the full Outer Worlds 2 direct thing. So I don't know if it's scaled down. I'm assuming it is based. That's kind of been obsidians thing recently that people are like, well, why would you want me to pay more when you're making smaller RPGs intentionally?

1:47:45Colin Moriarty:You know, so that just adds to the, you know, it's not the right game for that to push it.

1:47:53Dustin Furman:I just I can see it in a different way where it's just even to play as devil's advocate where. I think you're just trying to it's what Chris was saying. like if you're releasing the game on game pass then what do you expect you have to you have to play to the to the whistle here like you have to like go all the way to the end and then start getting the money from people that are going to go on game pass to play it so you have to expect that the game's not going to be pre-ordered to requisite to that that's the entire point wasn't that the entire point right so now you're almost like undercutting your ability to send people to game pass by making the game more affordable to buy it a la carte which just suggests that what i've been saying all these years is definitely i mean it is obviously true they would rather you buy the game they've put themselves into a corner where they're like well we we don't get pre-orders anymore and now we need to make them more attractive even though we don't really want them but we kind of do but we'd rather have you on the subscription it doesn't really make any sense

1:48:48Colin Moriarty:um well maybe the pre-orders were just that bad they you know what i mean where it's like we expect less but this is even less than we expected well yeah they must be i'm interested in the auto worlds too under no circumstances i'm going to pre-order it right well you're getting it on yeah so and i i would bet i would guarantee you that a lot of fans of the outer worlds too or the outer worlds are going to do that because why wouldn't you right right if you give people the option to not pay for a thing that they really think is cool yeah they should they should have

1:49:30Dustin Furman:brought this through more this is going to be a really complicated issue for them though because for microsoft because like i said they're going to try again and now people know you always intrinsically know what you have to do but like now people really know it works and so will you ever be able like what are you going to be able to broach it with and be like no we're gonna stay firm here it's gonna be like fable or some other bigger game where they're

1:49:55Colin Moriarty:gonna try again it's gotta be a big one like that but uh but even that's not gonna go over smooth

1:50:01Dustin Furman:so they're probably like fuck you know i'm sure this has a material i mean dude if you were expecting to sell the game at 80 and you're expected to do x amount of units hundreds of thousands no doubt on ps5 or whatever and then you have to cut that by 10 that's a substantial amount of money like that they have to account for that they like I'm sure that was a big deal internally. And that they let other companies kind of take advantage of the situation inadvertently, like Borderlands coming in below. Obviously, Randy Pitchford didn't do himself any favors, but they were kind of able to take advantage of the moment by saying, wow, we're going to stay we're going to stay pat.

1:50:39Dustin Furman:Just like it's really stupid. Like the kind of thing that like you're like almost wondering if you weren't going to stick to buy your guns and what did you not expect? It's like what we say about Naughty Dog with The Last of Us Online. How did you even get into this position? How did you not know? Yeah.

1:50:54Colin Moriarty:Right. Well, and we still don't really have the first true standalone$80 game. Because Mario Kart World, most of those sales were in the bundle. And that costs$50. I'm sure a lot of people bought it for$80 also. But we have not had a standalone$80 release yet to see how the market takes it. and again it really is going to depend on the game

1:51:22Dustin Furman:well we'll see the outer worlds 2 comes out in late october all right quick thing about split gate 2 this shooter from 1047 games that entered beta earlier this year and then they released officially back in june it's a follow-up to the original split gate which came out officially in 2022 but was playable in various beta forms since 2019, specifically on PC, I guess. They basically wrote a big thing here on social media and released a press release saying, we believe in Splick A2. The game means everything to us. It's been our life for almost 10 years, starting in our dorm room, and we're more committed than ever to delivering the incredible experience you deserve.

1:52:05Dustin Furman:We've heard your feedback and we agree with you. We launched too early. We had ambitious goals with Splick A2 and in our excitement to share it with you. We bit off more than we could chew. We rushed certain features, made some boneheaded mistakes, and most importantly, we didn't give you the polished portal-filled mayhem you fell in love with. So we're going back to beta. We'll be heads down until early next year, rebuilding major parts of the game to capture the spirit of what made Splitgate special. That means reworking progression from the ground up, adding more portals to our maps, simplifying monetization, refocusing on classic game modes you've been asking for and more, which we'll share soon.

1:52:34Dustin Furman:Now more than ever, we need your help. We're returning not just to our roots and what we build, but to how we build it with you. That means more playtests, more surveys, more listening, and truly being community first. Our goal is to combine the DNA of the first game with the best improvements from the second. Rebuilding the core experience isn't a quick fix. It's a long-term commitment. To give ourselves the time to build the splic8 you deserve, we've made the incredibly difficult decision to reduce certain roles and shift our resources to focus on this rework. This is heartbreaking. These are our teammates and our friends, and they helped build what we have today.

1:53:01Dustin Furman:They're receiving severance and job placement support, and we're committed to doing everything we can to help them through this transition. We hope to bring them back when we can. In an effort to retain as many team members as possible, we're also going to be shutting down the OG Splick 8 servers in a month. While we love to keep servers online indefinitely, it's cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past couple of years, and we have to prioritize our team. Like us, we know this game means a lot to so many of you, so we are exploring the possibility of supporting offline or peer-to-peer matches, and when we return, we plan to have a dedicated experience in Splick 8 2 that delivers on the promise of the original.

1:53:31Dustin Furman:In the meantime, Splick 8 2 will remain playable, and we'll still be shipping Chapter 3 as well as fixes and high-priority changes. We hope you will continue to play and support the game. As always, please keep the feedback coming. Chris, what do you think of this? This game has obviously been in a state of certain flux here. Obviously had some bad marketing with the guy's mega style hat that kind of went pear shaped for him. Game seemed underwhelming. They went from beta open beta May 22nd into the release two weeks later. So again, one of the fake kind of betas that didn't really listen to.

1:54:07Colin Moriarty:yeah i mean i played i played a fair bit of both of these games i played a fair bit of splicate one and i i played a fair bit of splicate two i think from what i played splicate two is pretty solid like i don't even necessarily know what they're talking about there's certain decisions there that i i felt weren't really the point like there's a lot more of a emphasis on building loadouts and like attachments and stuff it's it's exactly the kind of thing that pulls me out of a lot of games like this is there's the same reason that i think back for blood failed to capture what was so great about the simplicity of left for dead where it's just like this added this is like no there's got to be systems upon systems it's just like no dude people just people like an excuse to just jump into a simple sandbox and have a good time like you don't really need there's a lot of over developing done in a lot of video games that i do i really don't understand it um and so there was certainly that aspect of it that kind of kept me like i'm probably not gonna play this for too long but yeah i mean it's split gate is weird because i think i it's cool i think it's it's got a neat gimmick it's got an it's got this interesting kind of chaotic flow to it and i think in a lot of ways it plays really well but also it's weird like i feel like i feel like they're trying to do too much like i think even with that what is it that uh announcement with the with the guy on stage with the with the hat or whatever like to me didn't know whatever i don't care it's like corny but like i don't really care yeah it just seemed out it seemed out of date yeah it just seemed like a very like played out kind of thing like the parody hats like we get it but the issue with that really was like the sentiment of like okay make fps is great again and then like yeah we're sick of we're really sick of you know the same old thing anyway here's uh you know a battle royale and we're gonna have a trailer to it that has imagined dragons in it and you're just like what that's such a weird that those that combination of like setup and delivery is insane i wonder how much that license cost to use that song probably do more than it was worth for sure and so like i'm just i look at it and i'm just like man i don't know what they could really do because because truly like on a fundamental level i feel like the game's pretty good i feel like it's doing what it needs to do i just think it's a little over complicated and it did it doesn't need certain things like they put too much into it in some way like so so this idea of like we didn't deliver you the idea that's kind of being presented here that it's not complete is weird to me because i just don't know what you would expect from a free-to-play game that plays really really well that also has a battle royale mode that by the way i have not played because i can't i can't even imagine wanting to do that but i don't know good luck to those guys i think they've got a solid game but uh i just beg i just beg any developer listening to this like please if you're making if you're making a multiplayer game you do especially a shooter you don't need like several different scopes for every fucking gun and or like you don't need this shit let battlefield and call of duty and like more like tactical like that's served people just want this they need shit to sell yeah right they need you they need they need as few barriers of entry to to the core game as possible and that's what that's why a lot of that's why left for dead was successful it wasn't because like they had like all the shit it's just like you jump in like what are you doing you kill zombies and you pick up a shotgun and what's the shotgun called the shotgun you People like that stuff.

1:57:59Dustin Furman:So get it together, I guess. I think it's a little unfair to compare it to Left 4 Dead just because it's... No, I understand. They need something to sell to people.

1:58:07Colin Moriarty:I understand that, but it's not exactly the right combination. But I still think it's real. I think a lot of what's annoying about these games, especially Splitgate, because Splitgate is trying to be an arena shooter or harken back to arena shooters. and arena shooters specifically excel in their simplified arsenal of weapons like there's not like this weird oh there's not this focus on stats and customizing every aspect of your gun that's more for like sim shooters like that's more for like a battlefield more for like a call of duty more for like literally any other kind of game but if they're trying to they're marketing themselves as like portal plus halo which are those are two of them specifically halo and portal are like as mechanically like portal as like a as like a general concept is complicated but like the mechanics of portal are like remarkably simple and like the mechanics of halo are remarkably simple what's complicated is how they interact with each other and how everything works in those worlds but like you can't be like okay we're trying to harken back to arena shooter dna here and then throw in like a loadout system and like this kind of more modern flourish like i get what you're trying to do here but this doesn't really speak to what is special about the kind of game that you're trying to make in fact it it kind of does the opposite it makes it feel more like like what are we doing we're we're armored people like flying around in like a like a fake monday night combat kind of like sports world where we're shooting each other in like neon stadiums but also we're in the trenches trying to build like the best scope like it's i don't know i just don't think it works really like fundamentally as a design decision i feel like every game i've seen try this that's going for this more simplistic style always fails like it never it always it's kind of crazy how reliable of a predicting of a predictory or of a predictable thing it is to tell um but at the same time i've i don't know my time with split gate was pretty good i thought it was fine i have no desire to play more of it because of that but i don't know what people wanted out of split gate i guess if if what they're going for isn't what came out i don't know what they're trying to build like i don't know what the vision is if if that isn't what it is because i feel like if you were going for something that wasn't what you were you simply wouldn't have done what you did you wouldn't have had a you wouldn't have had a battle royale portal based arena i don't even know what the fuck is going on i don't know what

2:00:43Dustin Furman:they're doing that's the one's get you on the record sex delicious though wrote in and said greetings and salutations dcc splic a2 has gone back to the drawing board and entered beta again saying it will re-release in the future i would love to hear all of your takes on this not only did this game single-handedly make fps great again they strive to do it even better it seems can't wait for the re-release so i can put another five hours into it and quickly uninstall it because i realize i'm not worthy of the fantastic product from ohio take care and have a fantastic week gentle boys um they definitely didn't i guess seemingly buy i think i agree with chris where that whole hat thing i think was whatever and it's i think was kind of overblown but they never they didn't buy themselves any goodwill with it so like when things like this happen i think people

2:01:24Colin Moriarty:like to see it unfortunately people were focused on the wrong thing they were focused on his corny hat. And yeah, it's like being offended by it, saying it's political is stupid, but it also was a stupid hat. Probably wasn't the right move. Yeah, I would have said you shouldn't do this. Right. But what they weren't I mean, I guess this was probably in combination, but people aren't focused on the fact that I looked it up. He said, I grew up playing Halo and I'm tired of playing the same Call of Duty every year. So he wears this hat that's already a bad idea, immediately goes up and talks shit to talk for Splitgate.

2:02:02Colin Moriarty:I feel so bad for everyone else at this company that it's like, your boy went up knowingly probably wearing this hat that would antagonize people. Whether it should have or not is up to you. But then goes and talks shit and now your game is failing and you have to go back into beta and lay people off? Ouch. Not a good look. And honestly, I wonder with something like Splitgate, like is it even saveable like they're never going to have the same splash with the relaunch of the game it's not that it's not that I don't see a world where split gate is something big it just seems less likely like you kind of had your shot and you went and this guy made you look like a dickhead by talking shit and then you had like ridiculous price microtransactions they went to be fair they fixed but it's like yeah you you look like a dickhead um and now you're kind of i mean that's not the reason they're paying the price for it but it certainly doesn't help no you know no like just don't you didn't have to go up and talk shit but you did and now talk shit get hit yeah now no one's i mean i don't want to say no one's rooting for them but i'm sure there's a lot of industry people that aren't um so i i wanted to check out split gate 2 just because i played some of split gate 1 i thought was really fun.

2:03:27Colin Moriarty:I just hadn't gotten to it yet, but I guess I still could play the beta, but based on the lukewarm reaction, it was like, eh, I think I'm good.

2:03:37Dustin Furman:Yeah, it's probably, I would say, I mean, I'm not a player of the game, but it just seems based on market conditions, it's probably over. I mean, games do save themselves. It happens. We talk about them all the time. No Man's Sky, Cyberpunk. I mean, these games roar back, but yeah, most games don't. Most games peter out and die.

2:03:55Colin Moriarty:so I don't know I think I think maybe they could like it's because I did like what I was playing like it did feel good it just it just didn't really feel like what they were talking about it just didn't it didn't feel like like a classic kind of it didn't feel like oh man you know the golden age it's like no this is just like a real you know what it actually reminded me of a lot even though even though I'm sure this is only like a really like faint visage of a memory of this game but it reminded me a little bit of like section eight or something like that where like i don't know if you ever played section eight but like it was like this like multiplayer kind of arcade shooter from like i think it was like 2009 or 10 or something like that oh yeah i forgot about this game um it reminds it's it's that kind of a game and it's like it's it's cool and it's fun it's satisfying and it's it's not too bad but like this is it's hardly this you know revival of this like long dead like we missed when fps's were perfect it's hardly that but it's good i would actually recommend like yeah i mean if you're a fan of like if you're a fan of shooters especially like old school older like more physics oriented kind of stuff like it's worth a like a nice five hour play session like i think it's i think you'll have a lot of fun with it but um there is kind of a ceiling there i have a question though about

2:05:22Dustin Furman:about it's funny because it's like why would you name your game section eight it is crazy isn't it i remember even at the time being like that's kind of a because when you were saying it what came to mind for me i was like oh section z which was like the old game but then i was like yes and then i looked at that i looked at the box art i'm like yes section eight yeah section why did they name it that not section eight housing yeah like a game right that's what so for people that don't know or not american the term section eight in american parlance is basically low income government subsidized like housing that is usually considered like ghetto eyes like big brick you know industrial inner city buildings that you know people that live on like government vouchers live in and shit like that so that when people say section eight that's what that means like everyone knows what that means and so like literally and i went and looked time gate made it and time gates a texas they were based in texas so i was like i'm like is this some sort of like weird eastern european thing and they just don't get it it's like no you know what the fuck did you name why

2:06:25Colin Moriarty:couldn't you name it section seven or section nine yeah anything else section eight they dodged

2:06:36Dustin Furman:a bullet though with that because that game being released with that name today like earnestly the the memes would have been fucking crazy i'm sorry i know it yeah you know it oh for sure uh i remember

2:06:47Colin Moriarty:i don't know for what it's worth i remember i remember having a good time with that game but it's also like it's one of those games where it's like that's not making it in you know that's not like in the in the annals of history of like you know the greatest fps has ever made like no one's going to be like section eight section eight at number nine you know like no right right but it's a solid it's a solid romp especially for free because that's what split gate is and so like yeah i don't want to be too harsh on them i think i think i think they did make a fun game and you know for what it is i think it works i think there's some satisfying gunplay in there there's a weapon in there that i think is really fun i think it's called the gravitas that like pulls people in and lets you like like shoot the force back out of them it's like mega satisfying so there's cool stuff in there it's just um yeah man that that that whole we miss when things were cool i don't know dude it's the bad foot forward to put you know what what was the game that

2:07:43Dustin Furman:that time gate made after section eight do you remember

2:07:48Colin Moriarty:oh fuck after section eight i don't even remember do you when was section eight 2009 on xbox 2010

2:07:55Dustin Furman:on ps3 and then they did a sequel in 2012 that was like a digital game but then they released in 2013 a notorious game oh no I don't know and I put them out of business alien colonial marines that oh

2:08:10Colin Moriarty:that's a bummer she's working with them

2:08:12Dustin Furman:and publishing it yeah

2:08:14Colin Moriarty:damn that's a bummer

2:08:16Dustin Furman:they should have called it alien colon section eight and it was about the inner city xenomorphs

2:08:25Colin Moriarty:wow well look not to hype up section eight but like going from section eight to uh to aliens aliens colonial warriors is actually like a it's crazy how much of a step down considering how like budget section eight is there's all sorts of drama around that because

2:08:40Dustin Furman:i don't know how much it was their fault how much it was gearboxes like there's still i feel like there's a lot of there's a documentary in that yeah there was some there's something unresolved in my opinion with that but because i was still a journalist when that was all happening and people were reporting on and it was a lot of interesting things and people were making a lot of accusations because i feel like people weren't wasn't the accusation that like basically because i think borderlands 2 came out in 2012 and i think the accusation people were leveraging and leveling rather at the time and who knows if it's true or not was like gearbox took gearbox was supposed to be making colonial marines kind of subcontracted time gate and then use the money to make borderlands 2 that was kind of like what people were saying and like everything went like totally pear-shaped.

2:09:25Dustin Furman:I'm like, I don't know if that's true or not. As I recall, I don't know if that sounds familiar to you, Dustin, but as I recall, that was like the scuttlebutt at the time. I remember going to an event for Alien Colonial Marines at Comic-Con, New York Comic-Con, probably in 2012. They had actors from the movie there and shit. It was like big. They spent a lot of money on it. They showed the beginning of the game when you're like walking in like the crash ship and stuff and it looked cool didn't turn out cool tell you that much yeah all right finally sales data from uh matt piscatella who again it can insist on posting this on blue sky instead of on twitter so we have to go over there to get it um obviously cercana is what used to be called the mpd group this is tracking of digital and physical sales of video game software plus hardware in the United States.

2:10:24Dustin Furman:So the biggest gaming core gaming market in the world. So always interesting to see how games do here and people can go read like he puts a bunch of graphs and spending stuff. We're really interested in the sales charts, of course. Top 20 bestselling games from beginning the period June 1st, running through June and into early July. We had talked about this actually on the Death Stranding 2 spoiler cast, I think briefly, but Elden Ring Night Rain was the best-selling game of June. Slots in at number one, premieres at number one. And we were saying that that's a pretty big deal because these charts are not based on numbers sold, but on money made, gross income.

2:11:06Dustin Furman:So Elden Ring Night Rain is a$40 game. And actually, I had pulled up this pretty interesting data that indicates, and this comes from Gamatsu, that Elden Ring Night Reign has surpassed 5 million copies sold and Shadow of the Urge Tree has surpassed 10 million copies sold. So huge success there. As I was saying earlier, I mean, Elden Ring 2 being a no brainer. Other interesting games. I'm sorry. Good. No, I was going to say 10 million for a DLC is crazy. That's amazing. Like that's amazing. Death Stranding 2 on the beach slots at number two. That's pretty impressive because it only is going to be counted for about a week.

2:11:44Dustin Furman:So it'll do pretty well in July. I imagine as well. And then Mario Kart World slots into three. I assume these are based only on a la carte sales. Yeah, I would assume, too. That's crazy, because otherwise it would be number one. I assume if they were counting the bundles, it would easily be number one. Yeah. But I don't think that that's the way it's counted. Number four, Call of Duty Black Ops six. And then Stellar Blade pops back up to number five based on its PC release. It was slotted number 185 the previous month when it was just on PlayStation five. Forza Horizon 3 slots in at 6 based on its re-release on PlayStation 5.

2:12:17Dustin Furman:I'll have something to say about that shortly. What's up? Forza Horizon 5. Oh, 5. I'm sorry. Forza Horizon 5. I said 3. You're right. I was looking at the number 3 in the last month ranking. MLB The Show, 25 at 7. Rune Factory Guardians of Azuma at 10. That's a Switch 2 game, right? It's also on PlayStation. Oh, okay. And maybe Xbox, but I have it on Switch.

2:12:37Colin Moriarty:Holly played it. She thought it was pretty good.

2:12:40Dustin Furman:And then not great. Elder Scrolls four is the only other really notable game here at number 16. Star Wars Battlefront two is holding on at 17. So I do wonder if EA is noticing this and seeing this, but I don't think it's probably in meaningful enough numbers. I was said, I was going to bring up Forza Horizon five. We were talking about Reese Elliott earlier, actually, who has been on our show a couple of times now. And, uh, Elliot star, star, star, star, star, star, wrote in star over of that's what it is. I think it says, Hey, symbolers on the recent summon sign. Reese Elliott talked about Forza Horizon five being the bestselling game on PS5 this year.

2:13:12Dustin Furman:We all know this is impressive and has no doubt influenced Xbox and Microsoft. It's a good game for sure, but why is it had such a meteoric success years after the initial release? My theory is that because a lot of people jump ship from 360 to PS4, there's a substantial appetite for these Xbox franchises. I think the sales of Gears will prove this way, one way or another, although it is a re-release. By the way, sacred streaming makes my Monday workday go much faster. Thank you. That's so nice of you to say. It's true, man. Alinea in the Alinea Insight newsletter on Substack, Reese writes Forza Horizon 5 is 2025's top new PS5 game by copies sold.

2:13:46Dustin Furman:He writes, quote, Xbox ported Forza Horizon 5 to PS5 at the end of March 2025, almost four years after its original release on PC and Xbox. Last week, Forza surpassed three million copies sold on PS5, overtaking Monster Hunter World. This means Forza Horizon 5 is 2025's best selling new game on PlayStation consoles for copies sold. Really an amazing success story. So this bumping back up into the charts based on that is huge. And like the reason why it's happening. I don't know. Like, I think Forza Horizon is a really big game. It sold. I don't I didn't sell, but it had more than 30 million players, I think, before it came to PlayStation.

2:14:22Dustin Furman:So pretty substantial. Best selling games life to date or I'm sorry, year to date. So Monster Hunter Wilds is number one. Elder Scrolls of four Oblivion is number two.

2:14:34Colin Moriarty:that's another$40 game isn't it yeah well 40 or 50 yeah something below a 60 or 70 price point

2:14:42Dustin Furman:so that's impressive because again this is by dollar sales i think it's 50 assassin's creed shadows number three so pretty good ubisoft has a hit with that call of duty black ops 6 number four mlb the show 25 number five i mean this goes to show you how big and important that franchise this to Sony, as I say all the time. Kingdom Come of Deliverance holding in at number six, WWE 2K25 at number seven. If you notice, the numbers for these are unchanged one through seven from last month. They're all the same. And then you start getting some of the interesting stuff. Elden Ring Night Reign is at eight, and you can kind of garner how much everything is sold above and below it based on what we know about Elden Ring's Night Reign sales of five million globally.

2:15:23Dustin Furman:split fiction at number nine nba 2k25 at number 10 forza horizon 5 so this is where it gets crazy forza horizon 5 is the 11th best-selling game in the united states this year on any platform based only on the back of its playstation release really amazing civ 7 at 12 minecraft 13 pga tour 2k25 very quietly at 14 grand theft auto 5 15 doom the dark ages probably going to get bounced off by the end of the year but 16 ea sports fc 25 17 red dead 2 18 madden nfl 25 19 and spider-man 2 at 20 although i don't know that that will last either and again impressive because that's based not on copies sold but money made so that's a really impressive slow burn for them nintendo switch 2 was the best-selling hardware in the month this breaks playstation 5's streak of two years i think of being the best-selling hardware in the u.s month by month i was a little confused by this.

2:16:17Dustin Furman:Dustin, go back into your memory. Do you remember, I should have looked this up, but there was this, I remember Sony announcing in November of 2013 that they sold a million units of PS4 in one day in the United States only. Do you remember that? Hmm, not particularly. And this was, and I think Nintendo sold 1.6 or 1.7 million. What was it even? No, it was like 1.3 million switches, I think switch twos. and I remember looking at the numbers and being like how can that it's great I don't really give a shit but I don't understand how those numbers translate like that Sony sell all of their PS4s that they had any access to in the American market in one day and then there wasn't any to find that must have been what happened because I when I saw that in other words when I saw that story I was like Sony didn't sell more than 1.3 million units of PS4 in that first month that seems incredible in the US right but I'm pretty sure that was a thing

2:17:10Colin Moriarty:that happened right yeah Matt Piscatella's numbers are Switch 2 sold 1.6 million. And the previous high was 1.1 million. Right, that's what the problem was.

2:17:21Dustin Furman:So that suggests that they only sold 100 ,000 units from day 2 to day 30 in 2013. They might have just not had any more. PS4 sells 1 million in one day. Yeah, this is a story. Sony sells over 1 million PlayStation 4s in its first day. Remember, PS4 came out in the United States first. It was only available. here. So Sony only sold a hundred thousand units from day two to day. Yeah. You might be right. That might be all they had in the channel. Yeah. But so I, when I saw that number, I was like, that can't be, but I guess it is. That's what the confusion was. Um, okay. So any other data here that we want to take a look at that would be interesting.

2:18:04Dustin Furman:Okay. Here's some, here's some stuff. Best-selling top 10 best-selling games only on PlayStation. So PS4 and PS5, Death Stranding 2 on the beach, number one. Elden Ring Night Reign, number two. Call of Duty Black Ops 6, number three. Forza Horizon 5, number four. MLB The Show 25, number five. And then it finishes off with some predictable games, ending with Assassin's Creed Shadows at 10. And so that's pretty interesting. And finally, I guess, let's see. That's PC, Nintendo. Oh, is the Nintendo stuff counting? Yeah, I guess this is counting Switch 2 for the first time. so mario kart world cyberpunk 2077 and rune factory are the top three and then zelda the two zelda games minecraft at number 10 i'm just curious about that has nothing to do with our show i just didn't even look at those numbers anything you guys want to go into here night rain big hit huge hit yeah death strand and holding on and that's training to doing very well i have to remind everyone over and over again death stranding 2 was never going to sell that well it took two years for death stranding one to sell five million copies and it came to pc and was out on pc for a year before they released that number so patience patience it's a wonderful game my opinion yeah um i think that's basically it is there anything else we want to say about the

2:19:25Colin Moriarty:sales numbers before we move on no all right yeah okay let's get into what we're playing here i'm

2:19:32Dustin Furman:still playing Death Stranding 2. I've beaten it. Like we said, now I'm going for the Platinum or whatever, so I need probably 25 more hours at least I would say. We've talked about it so extensively at this point, especially in a two and a half, almost three hour, I think. Maybe two and a half hours. I don't remember. Sacred Symbols Plus episode that goes live tomorrow from when this is going live on Patreon, so go check that out. I'll leave all my thoughts for there. Obviously, we get deep into the spoiling it and getting into the nitty gritty of the game. And like I said, we want to do a second episode on the game based just on a listener inquiry so we can really probe of all the different parts of the game that we didn't get to talk about.

2:20:05Dustin Furman:Because four of us, two and a half hours, I mean, there's so much to say about a Kojima game. I think we can do even more. So I'll leave all my thoughts for that. But I wanted to read a couple of inquiries, and then I'll hand it off to you guys. Jay Reese Bear wrote in and said, Hey, fellow porters, does it irk anyone else that Sam goes to sleep before taking a shower? It makes my skin crawl seeing Sam fall into bed covered in sweat and blood and tar. Let the man wash off before going to bed. Nothing better than getting into fresh sheets after a fresh shower. keep normalizing barnyard bestiality and keep on keeping on jay reese goodness um you can't say that it bothers the shit out of me there's so much but but obviously it's a game like you don't want to deal with all the cut scenes and people clicking through showering first when they're really just there to save or do other things or just get into the room for other reasons so obviously it makes sense that they do that from a gameplay perspective but it is a little annoying and a little grimy i just love the whole thing that he because it's so hard to animate covers it's so hard to animate pillows like he just like sleeps with his neck like all fucking

2:21:03Colin Moriarty:he like look so uncomfortable he just sleeps no pillow with his arm yeah up like this it's crazy

2:21:08Dustin Furman:this looks so yes i noticed that and that bothers the shit out of me as well um slipwater wrote in i liked this inquiry he says hi guys much like colin i've been replaying the director's cut of death stranding in preparation for the sequel i have been putting in so many hours that when i deliver medication for pharmacy where i work i occasionally find myself wondering if I have the right vehicle for the terrain ahead or what's the best delivery order to maximize efficiency. Am I going to find a mule camp in that field over there? I should get closer and find out. Yesterday, it started raining and I instinctively wondered where the nearest timefall shelter was.

2:21:40Dustin Furman:I haven't experienced this level of bleed through since I played Assassin's Creed many years ago and found myself thinking I could totally jump off of that five-story building if only there was a shitload of hay on the ground. Have any of you experienced this kind of gaming phenomena? Definitely. There were a few things that came to mind for me. Petrus, obviously, everyone sees that's a big thing like everyone but the other two examples are um when i first played grand theft auto 3 uh and i i actually that was around that i drove in that era of my life like that that brief era because i was a senior in high school um i remember me and all my friends being like you you're feeling like you're playing grand theft auto like it's not a good it's not a good feeling like even being a passenger in the car and driving around because we and it was only that specific game because we had never played anything like that before there was nothing that's so normal now to play like driving games that are very realistic grounded in cityscapes and you're kind of going around like but it wasn't really we never saw anything like gta3 before so i remember that being a phenomenon amongst my friends and like people that played it um and the other one was uh like guitar hero and rock band i'm obsessive with those games when i was you know late in college well really like it was late in college but really when i was at ign and we just play those all the time we would go to parties and play those games would come out when everyone would come back from the bar and you just would see it in your head and you'd get really into the songs and I don't know so those are the examples I thought of let's kick it over to you guys and see if you have any examples anything come to mind for you Dustin?

2:23:12Colin Moriarty:Yeah well just most recently this is a game I'll talk about in a few minutes but with Donkey Kong Bonanza I think it was because I was playing it extensively before bed and then this is when I was taking Advil Cold and whatever the Sudafed in it makes it so I was like sleeping really light. So I was like half asleep the whole night and could just see myself smashing the terrain as Donkey Kong. And I was like, what is going on here? But it's always playing too close to bed or in the intensity of the game. So I remember playing either Hotline Miami 1 or 2 on Vita very late into the night and being really frustrated with it and having the worst night of sleep of my entire life because I was like seeing hotline Miami in my mind's eye sleeping um that's another famous example that happened to a lot of people when the witness came out where you would see the grids and the lines and you're like oh that that would be a one of the puzzles in the witness so yeah certainly this happens uh quite often it's interesting that is interesting um anything for you chris yeah i don't know i like the degree by which people talk about this experience like i don't know if i've experienced it but like i've gotten very very deep into games or even just like the vibe or like the narrative of game that i that i feel i feel myself kind of alan wake too was it was a good one because i just kind of i would get into the habit of like narrating in my head about like just like what i was doing it's like this is crazy like i have to stop i have to fucking i have to stop but like nothing nothing to the degree that like every time i saw like i i like i've never seen the text like the uh the tetris like i love tetris but like i've it's never like bled into like my real life at all like in any in any real way but like there's certain i think really it's it's more about like the vibe of like music will really trigger that within me like if i hear like i remember walking i remember when i was um living in upstate new york and i was my parents have like a really big property like they have like four acres of just like two acres of it is just like field and then another two acres is just like straight up woods and so like you just kind of get lost in that area it's it's very weird um and i remember kind of like walking through it and feeling like like a like a almost like a shadow of the colossus kind of loneliness and i got really like oh i feel like i'm and i was it was around the time i was playing that so i was like oh i feel like i'm in shadow of the colossus right now but yeah i don't really have that bleed through typically like not as intensely as other people describe it i wish i did it sounds kind of fun sounds cool yeah i don't really get it anymore

2:26:02Dustin Furman:but i think about games get excited to play them but those are the examples i could really think of where i was like this is effective dr mario is actually another example of like games i just

2:26:10Colin Moriarty:really got oh dude hyper focused on i love those guys i love that game dr mario is so competitive it's crazy i i've i've i i think i think i i i was playing dr mario with a friend when it came out on the switch uh what is it the backwards what is it what is it called dustin the switch online yeah the switch online like i'm dying the library okay i was playing with a friend of mine and he got so mad that i think he put down the control he didn't say anything and he just left

2:26:39Dustin Furman:and it was like the funniest that's the funniest experience i've had tomorrow is awesome the we wear version of it that came out in 2007 or 2008 was so good i used to play it online all the time no i never played that one um you had to be a pretty big nerd to get the we wear version of dr mario i have to be honest with you at that time yeah chris let's stick with you uh i don't know if you want to say any more about that straining too i'm kind of tapped out as far as saying things on the show i think but um it does say you're playing all the tony hawk games so i'll let you take it however you'd like yeah i'll leave the uh the death stranding talk to

2:27:12Colin Moriarty:the spoiler cast go watch it um and obviously watch the follow-up that we're going to do with uh getting deeper into it i liked it i thought it was it's very good i think i walk away from it less enthralled with it than the first game not because it's worse but because it just feels less novel and less new um but it's still a very solid game i think it's paced very very well it's it's very good i highly recommend it death straining 2 kicks ass um but yeah i just kind of wanted to decompress or something a little bit more chill kind of coming off of death straining which was kind of like a herculean um you know very very intense very immersive kind of experience and just wanted to play something a little bit more arcadey and i realized that like i have both i have like tony hawk one and two and tony hawk three and four but i haven't really put that much time into them i kind of like i just kind of tried them out and i was like yeah i remember this and then i kind of was i kind of fell off of it kind of quick when i realized that i just wasn't good at it and never have been that's a nice sobering realization that haven't played Tony Hawk since like the 90s or like maybe like the 2001 earliest.

2:28:20Colin Moriarty:And so to come back to it and realize like, oh, I've never known how to play this game. Like I would only just go, I would, I would go off the ramps, hold circle, spin and just vibe to music. And that was, that was pretty much all I would do in the original Tony Hawk. So coming back to it and realizing that like I had no skill at all, it was like, oh man, I guess I'll put this down. But I picked it back up recently and I was like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to do something that I don't normally do I'm going to go and play I'm going to go and actively play the tutorial and actually learn how the fuck this game works and I learned all sorts of shit that I just totally didn't even realize I didn't know you could grab onto the bumpers of cars I didn't like half the like a lot of this shit I just had no idea so I've been getting really into it and kind of learning the the more like the the special moves for the skaters which as far as i remember in my in my mind's eye of like my memory i don't even remember even doing once in the original tony hawk games because those games were honestly like when i was a kid those were more like soundtracks for me like i would just like play the game vibe like fall watch the skater fall down and bleed which by the way is is a bummer that that's not in the new games like i think it's lame that when you fall down in the new tony hawks you kind of like fall down and then there's like a vhs kind of rewind thing that kind of just like spawns you back to where you and there's no blood or anything like that was one of the more unique things about that game to me it was like it's a sports game technically where your characters are bleeding all over the place it was i thought it was fucking sick so that being absent is kind of lame but um so i've just been getting really really into it i'm trying to complete all these stages i'm working my way through one and two first um because i tried three a little bit and i was like i should really do these sequentially.

2:30:09Colin Moriarty:I'm having a good time with it. I'm learning it a lot better. My score is getting crazy. I'm learning the game a lot more intimately. It's a really mechanically depth game. There's a surprising number of just combos and shit and just mechanics that I had no idea about at face value. So that's been nice kind of rediscovering the old Tony Hawk games and kind of actually diving deep into them. but I'm on one and two right now and I'm going to, I'm going to move on to three and four. I will say I, I have no experience of Tony Hawk four at all, as far as I remember. So like, I know that there's some criticism about that game where like they kind of that game originally was a lot more open-ended.

2:30:56Colin Moriarty:It had like a, like a mission structure. It was very, it was a pretty big departure from the original games. These remakes have opted to kind of retrofit. Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 in the within the structure and the mold of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 so I know that's like kind of like a a point of contention and controversy for it because it's ultimately it's really not a remake of Tony Hawk 4 at all like ostensibly as far as like what Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 is so I only say this to say like I really like these games I think they're good but i have no window into that association for four so if four is like your treasured like tony hot game and it's like the one you really want to see understand that it's not going to be that and you very well might leave disappointed it it has no it does not have that effect for me i actually think it's kind of cool to see a game like that kind of thrown into an older kind of mold that i identify with more but that's that's probably going to be a very very hit and miss kind of thing for a lot of people who grew up with that game but i'm enjoying him a great deal the soundtrack is kick-ass i love the tony hawk pro skater soundtracks i think they're great and i think they did a good job with these new ones of just like putting some new shit in so that's kind of the thing i'm toying around with right now still playing peak also um with some friends uh it's been pretty it's been a pretty regular ritual at this point um they just they just had an update where they added a bunch of stuff in it too so that's it seems like it's getting a lot of support um but that's really all i'm playing not playing anything crazy new or crazy exciting

2:32:40Dustin Furman:not like dustin yeah dustin you're playing donkey kong bonanza blue moose rodent said hey hey super sacred studs with donkey kong bonanza launching a critical acclaim do you think we've got another 3d platformer game of the year contender on our hands just like astra was last year it really does feel like we're in a golden stretch right now between astro donkey kong and indie hits like demons tides and yuka replayly replay it's starting to feel like a real renaissance for 3d platformers would you say this is shaping up to be one of the best 12 month runs of the genre since the late 90s appreciate all the amazing content as always stay sexy my friends yeah so about donkey kong bonanza to answer blue moose's question is it a game of the year

2:33:23Colin Moriarty:contender absolutely uh this will for sure be a game of the year contender not just for game awards but for many outlets and um some of us as well i think this game fucking rules and i actually just beat it last night um and i absolutely love it nintendo just once again showing that they are the absolute best period um making fantastic games just through and through and creative and interesting games uh this is the mario odyssey team and a lot of that dna is there but this is no way like a soft sequel to mario odyssey it's very different it's all about terraforming uh and smashing the world and it's really kind of crazy the level of destructibility in this game where there you can basically like dig entire holes through levels in fact i just saw on twitter somebody went and smashed out the entire first level so you can see just kind of like the skeleton of the level that remains and i was a little unsure about playing as donkey kong um just because i was curious about what his moveset would be like and the main thing in this game is that you unlock the bonanza abilities which each one is different and interesting uh like the first one is like pretty basic like a powered up smash attack so you can do like you're able to blast through denser materials or just kind of blast harder in general donk hong's great at blasting okay um but yeah there's like a zebra that lets you run really fast and it's definitely through and through a collect-a-thon as well but in a good way not like donkey kong 64 like the bananas are kind of like the moons in mario odyssey so i think i think there's a thousand of them in the game and through my playthrough where i wasn't like completionist for each level but i I was going, I was doing a lot in each level.

2:35:35I think I have 400 bananas right now, somewhere in that ballpark.

2:35:41Colin Moriarty:So there's still a lot left for me to do. One of the main concerns people have had is the technical performance. And it's not that bad. It's also not great points either. Overall, when I'm playing the game, it's a pretty good 60 FPS. yes, there are times when there's a lot of shit going on screen that the frame rate will start to dip. So it's a little disappointing for a new the new console. This is one of the new premier games from Nintendo and the frame rates kind of at points, but I didn't find it a huge distraction from the gameplay itself. So I don't want to cut him any passes, but at least there is that that It's not like if it was majorly affecting how the game felt like in tears, the kingdom, I think I would be more hard on it, but it's, it's fine.

2:36:36Colin Moriarty:It's, it's not something to be too worried about, but yeah, I am excited to go back. I don't know if I'm going to a hundred percent this game, but I definitely want to go back and get more bananas. Cause there's like a whole skill tree element to it where you can like level up donkey Kong and level up the different bonanza abilities. and yeah just i am really i don't want to say i'm surprised by it i'm not a big donkey kong guy uh like i was never super into donkey kong country or donkey kong tropical freeze and these games aren't really like that at all since it's 3d it's not like a 2d platformer but um i found it really charming and really cute and there's lots of fun outfits that you can put donkey kong and pauline in and i i cannot recommend this game enough uh one of my favorite games this year like i said nintendo they're just best in the biz when it comes to these kinds of games now is it now is it worth a switch like would you say like is it worth yeah is it worth like a purchase for a console just just to play it since it's like just to play it this is like a game of the year contender if you're already interested in a switch 2 and and you're interested in knowing that nintendo makes awesome games that it's going assumingly the switch 2 is going to be filled with amazing nintendo first party then yeah absolutely why wait it's not the switch 2 is not going to get any cheaper so if you weren't really that interested in mario kart but you want to switch 2 and you were waiting for the game this is probably it yeah that's the thing for me i'm like i don't really want to switch to really right now but like i do like donkey kong quite a bit like i loved donkey kong country like so much and i know that this isn't like that i get it but like everybody talking about it it's making me like damn dude really so i'm thinking about it but i don't know yeah i mean it's i don't know i'm so out of the idea of like scoring games and stuff like that and a lot of people are asking like which is better mario odyssey or or donkey kong bonanza donkey kong bonanza is certainly a better and more fleshed out game than odyssey in fact i was shocked by how long bonanza was by the end i was like wow there's really another level here and another level after that so compared to odyssey it's it's much longer and definitely bigger more fleshed out levels I'm always going to be leaning towards Mario just because I'm a Mario 3D Mario fanboy where I love controlling in Mario's moveset and Donkey Kong as his moveset is super different because it's all about the environment and the destruction of the environment but you're not going to be doing I mean I've seen some videos online of people doing crazy mobility with all the different things he can do it's not quite to the degree of Mario but but yeah is it worth a switch to purchase maybe maybe if you know Chris that there's going to be other Nintendo games that you're going to want to play I mean you might as well pull the trigger I wouldn't say like if the intention is like I am going to buy a switch to and I'm only interested in this game then I mean that's a lot of money yeah well over 500 bucks at that point so I could yeah i'm thinking about like maybe just getting one and then playing through it and selling it or something i don't know yeah i really have no idea because i because i do want to play donkey kong it looks it looks really good it looks like my kind of game too i love terraform i love like destruction physics and shit and uh and just hearing that soundtrack again man i don't know the donkey kong soundtrack is so good oh yeah so it's so damn good like it's always been in my opinion it's always been like my favorite easily like of the nintendo like soundtracks that i've ever heard like donkey kong country like sweeps it's so like that that underwater ambience shit that is so iconic and and good right ah yeah i don't know i'll think about it yeah and and as far as terraforming the most interesting mechanics are later in the game that i don't want to spoil for anybody but they're very cool and i think you'd be into it yeah console's probably not going to get cheaper yeah yeah i'll think about it all right that's all we're playing let's get

2:41:05Dustin Furman:into listener inquiries we wrap up this show six questions comments concerns thoughts and ideas from the audience over on patreon patreon.com slash last day media remember you can support us over there for a bunch of different perks including early ad free access to all the episodes of this show and all the other shows in our network and the ability to submit inquiries to all those shows via the threads in the news feed for each show each week ours publish on Wednesday afternoons and I delete them Thursday afternoon. So you have that 24 hour period or so and you can turn your email notifications on if you want to see the thread come through.

2:41:32Dustin Furman:This is a and especially people you guys are great. You always have great insights into, you know, things for us to talk about at the end of the show and I'm talking to you guys the audience, but I feel like this is an especially strong group of questions in my opinion. We'll start with Bobby Bell. He says hello sacred sirs growing up. My dad would rarely play video games with me. I get it. He would rather have me work on cards, which was probably more of a lucrative trait. Me having a six-year-old daughter who loves to play the Marvel versus Capcom collection could not be more proud of my child's choice of aesthetic.

2:42:01Dustin Furman:My question is, did your parents play with you? Would they even entertain the idea? This is an interesting question because we are in a different era now. In the era I grew up in and that you guys grew up in, and I think Dustin, yours is going to be a little different because your parents were so young when they had you. So they're almost, you know, they were almost they were children themselves. Basically, they were kids themselves. It's like my parents by the time I was like, you know, my parents had me when they were 35, both of them and or 34, maybe something like that. And so they were in their late 30s when I was playing video games for the first time.

2:42:42Dustin Furman:Dagan obviously was there as well. And they really couldn't have been any less interested. Now, there are important caveats. My mom apparently did before I was born was really addicted to Atari for a while, but I wasn't around for this. She was really in like Frogger and shit like that. But that was in like the early 80s. I was born in 84. And then my mom has she listens to these shows. I mean, I don't know if she listens to Sacred necessarily all the way through, but she's shown a propensity and an interest to understand games to consider them. she doesn't play them she's more interested in doing that like my dad has never for one millisecond been interested in video games like really doesn't care doesn't understand them and it's not like an aggressive thing like oh this is stupid what is this gay shit son yeah nothing like that um it's just like he's just blank face like if i show him try to show him something when i was younger or even as an adult or things i've worked on or i just don't think it computes necessarily and so i think that that's different now and so i think it's probably way more common to not only play games with or with your kids but to be the one that introduces your kids to them while i grew up in an era and chris certainly grew up or whatever where it was like this was a societal and friend level influence no one in my life otherwise would have been interested in it so i wish i had parents that were more interested in it you know especially my dad just because I find his level of disinterest and dissatisfaction with it to be tantalizing.

2:44:16Dustin Furman:You know, like, how can I break you of this? Right. As opposed to my mom. It's funny that we're talking about Death Stranding because when Death Stranding one came out, I had just went to visit my mom in late 2019 and it was moving in with her for a while while I was waiting to buy my house. And I was playing Death Stranding one and she watched me play it for a long time. She was like kind of into it. so i could see the but it's hard to teach someone how to play on those controllers and i think they get discouraged very easily not understanding that once you like mastering the camera controls of a third or a first person game is so natural to us but you just have to get there and i don't think they're willing to do it so that's my long answer for this chris did your parents play with you not really i think um because my parents are older

2:45:04Colin Moriarty:also so like my um my dad tried i think he he he doesn't really care about him but like he he did play i think medal of honor with me and he played um something else there was there's i can't remember exactly what it was i think we we played mario two player like the on the original nes i think i have a vague memory of that but it was really more my sister because like my console my consoles were her hand-me-down consoles it was like she it was her nes and her ps1 so like that's really how i got and then like obviously friends at school like because i was playing them at home and i would talk about them at school like it was like oh i play this and you know and the game boy of course with uh um pokemon that was like a huge school thing when i was going to school like i just remember everybody was like trading like they had the cables to trade and so like my parents my mom is interested in like in them as like an idea and she she likes to watch them my dad likes to watch them too depending on what they are like i remember i remember explicitly like setting things up in such a way that like i want to play red dead 2 in the living room when dad is there because i want him to see it and i want i want him to understand i want him to i just want to show him like what these are now because even though he's like seen like he's had enough experience to know that they're not just that it's not just tetris anymore like he understands that but i don't think until i until i showed him red dead too i don't think he understood the depth and the gravity of the shift that it wasn't just like oh tetris that looks better and sounds better like this is like no this is just straight up like you can experience a one of the best westerns ever in this medium and he was like super into it like because i started it in like from the beginning in like a snowy area in the beginning and he was like this is a game this is crazy and he was like fixated and i was so excited about that and then i had to uh fly back so i i couldn't continue it but he he's definitely never gonna play it and my and my my parents are definitely they're done like they're not gonna play anything i think my mom tried which is so i think i've told the story on the podcast before but it's so it's it was such a dumb idea for me in retrospect but like i tried to get her i tried to get my mom to play portal because i thought oh this is like a first person game but there's like no you don't have to worry about enemies or like accuracy like there's no combat there's no stress so i actually thought like in some ways like oh this is actually a pretty good way to maybe get her to understand like what this is but i didn't take into account that like she'd never moved a camera before right or like that that that's a that's a massive leap and portal is actually like in some ways a lot more complicated because it's so complicated i didn't even think about it i just i was thinking about it more from like a the anxiety of like being attacked and like maybe that would be too stressful and yeah that's like a gamers game it is yeah um so yeah i i i tried and and they they respect it and i think they understand but like they never really tried to deeply play but i didn't really need them to i didn't ask them of that yeah right that's the thing with me too i don't really i didn't truly care it was like my own thing yeah i think i learned pretty early that they weren't really

2:48:42Dustin Furman:interested you know and i think i just kind of processed that dustin you had a different

2:48:48Colin Moriarty:experience i think growing up though yeah my parents both grew up uh well first with atari my dad and then with the nes primarily so when i got an nes for christmas my mom was like yo we're playing mario 2 that was her i mean she played the other mario games too but she loved to mario 2 in particular so we played a lot of that together my dad is it's weird because he has a interest in video games and he he played games with me growing up like i remember we played through metal gear solid together for the first time that was awesome um and he had games that he liked to play on his own in particular this is a deep cut he would play a game called the 11th hour uh which is like a horror puzzle game it's the sequel to the seventh guest uh which is more well known but he was really into that i think he played mist back in the day as well so he's been kind of passively interested in games and he'll ask me about games even now to this day um i really tried to get him in on games because his main thing is like i don't have the time i don't have the time to do that i'm like yes you do you just don't want to make the time to play games he had surgery on his neck i think around 2020 so he had all the time in the world so i bought a used ps4 for him set it up and i i brought like all these games over i was like oh you can try this i think this might be interesting to you you might like this um this is when they lived in virginia so i I went home and a few days later He's like oh I'm playing Bioshock I was like oh that's great awesome I can't remember exactly what he said But he was like yeah there's like this quartet Group singing God Only Knows And it was like the Breaking Bad Like Hank or when Walter Screaming Hank from the car He's like Hank you know I was like no Don't play Infinite first like no how could you I was like stop You put in the wrong disc That's awesome so he did but i don't know if he ended up playing bioshock one ironically i think he played the game rhyme or the r-i-m-e oh really interesting i think he played some of that but i don't he maybe got like five hours on that ps4 so i've tried and failed but it is what it may be one day my mom on the other hand she i got her a switch light exclusively to play animal crossing and i think she put a decent amount of time in it and i i gave her some other games like there's this kirby game you might like or yoshi or whatever and i think she maybe tried them but she's just not other than a very particular thing like animal crossing um she's just not all that interested so it's uh it's unfortunate but they used to they used to love it and now they just don't my dad's more interested in playing drums playing bands you know and when he was high school maybe talking to women yeah why'd you no one does that anymore you gotta lock in don't worry about no girls trust me i was right there so crazy are you yeah like i think i'm probably like the most video game oriented person my entire family i think like easily i mean easily if i'm here but i think uh i did i did pass it off to my nieces and nephews though i got them really like i was adamant about it i was like we're playing halo split screen now i don't i don't care if you don't know how to speak yet and they're super into it like it's so funny like my my niece had a baby like i think uh exactly exactly like a year and like some weeks ago and every time i go online like she's playing some crazy eclectic it's it's interesting i'm just like she's playing shit that i haven't played i'm just like that's so that's so crazy she's playing yakusa and stuff i'm just like it's so cool that's it makes me happy it makes me happy to see that it's weird my my mom's sister is and her husband are like low-key gamers where a few years ago remember when there was the thing about mod support coming to fallout only on Xbox but not PlayStation they sold their Playstations to get Xbox so they could play modded Fallout on consoles I was like whoa and they also remember remember when our clips were on Asmongold like his stream I think it was the Concord stuff she messaged me on Facebook she's like well I just saw you on Asmongold's stream I was like

2:53:29Dustin Furman:uh oh what I hope it was in a good context but it was it wasn't a good I was like oh okay well

2:53:35Colin Moriarty:I guess I don't know how aware they are, but that guy's big time, you know, so it's like

2:53:40Dustin Furman:nerve wracking when people that big talk about you.

2:53:43Colin Moriarty:Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think that was just the Concord.

2:53:45Dustin Furman:Yeah, no, it was. That's what I was saying. Like, but when I first heard, I was like, oh, no, like what I do. Right.

2:53:54Dustin Furman:It's terrifying. It is. Bobby, thank you for writing in. Good question. Big, dumb, stupid idiot wrote in. said hey fat colin you're giving jealous x energy when talking about nintendo you broke up with broke up during a rough patch and now you have to watch nintendo fans get rewarded with multiple high quality first party games a year while playstation gives you concord in one sad dad game a year or perhaps you're upset capcom treats megaman like a bastard nintendo having the mario team make bonanza would be the equivalent of the resident evil team making a 3d megaman must hurt to see donkey kong fans living your dream i'll be listening while driving back from family vacation.

2:54:30Dustin Furman:Well, happy family vacation to you and you big dumb, stupid idiot and the big dumb, stupid idiot family. I saw Gene got mad about my feedback about Donkey Kong Bonanza, but I think that most people read into it as me being somewhat facetious. I mean, yeah. um i think reviewing and criticism is kind of stupid anyway and so i i don't uh i think it's it's all obviously deeply subjective i say that as a critic so i'm not inherently insulting anyone's particular reviews and i think everyone needs to stand down a little um i have no regrets no rag rats and um i was a listen i'm not going to be criticized by people that that weren't there in those nintendo trenches necessarily i'm not saying big dumb fat stupid idiot whatever his name is fat no he didn't say fat big dumb stupid idiot maybe he's big dumb stupid fat idiot um but i'm not trying to hate i'm really just being facetious it's fine i'm sure it's a great game you have to understand that the mario odyssey the team that did mario odyssey doing this game doesn't get me excited because i didn't like mario odyssey like i just thought it was sterile and boring personally i really did and i'm not i'm not a hater of 3d mario games i love I was never really super into Mario 64, but you can obviously see how seminal it is.

2:56:05Dustin Furman:And then I love Super Mario Sunshine, and I think Mario Galaxy is a top, I don't know, really like a top 15 probably at least game of all time. So Galaxy is immaculate. So I'm not a hater necessarily on a 3D Mario. It's just that like when someone, so I understand for most fans that obviously really loved Mario Odyssey, which people adore it on Switch for the most part. I can see that being an exciting proposition. And the Resident Evil team working on Mega Man, I think, would be weird. Because Gene said the same thing, actually, on the show. Because I listened to him. And I'm like, that's true, but that's not also the spirit of Mega Man.

2:56:43Dustin Furman:So, Dunk denied. By the way.

2:56:50Colin Moriarty:We'll welcome you back, Colin. I'm not coming back. You're welcome to come. Listen. next Mario 3D game will you try it? Yeah, I'll probably try this Donkey Kong game too

2:57:01Dustin Furman:to be honest.

2:57:02Colin Moriarty:Yeah. If you're, I mean I'm going to say this, I know you're not going to Mario Wonder? Pretty damn good. That's the 2.5D one? Well, it has depth to the background, but you're not, well I guess there is you do go to the background. So yeah, it's 2.5D.

2:57:20Dustin Furman:Like Little B Planet, kind of.

2:57:22Colin Moriarty:yeah kind of i wouldn't say it's an emphasis it's mostly traditional i'm sorry to compare

2:57:26Dustin Furman:from mario gave it a little big planet i don't mean that that's like on a quality level i'm just saying the depth of field please like relax god that's awesome i would never say something like

2:57:36Colin Moriarty:that you know that it's barely 2.5 d there's like a few instances where you go almost like through

2:57:42Dustin Furman:a door in um mario world but is the plane okay so oh so the but the plane is flat is what you're saying so it's like prince of persia the new prince of persia game that is 2.5 d 2.5 d doesn't necessarily include the movement outside of the 2d plane it's the graphical the 0.5 i think is because it's a 3d world in a 2d plane right that's how i that's how i understand it yeah yeah and so you get 2.5 d because you had like the illusion of 3d with like parallax and things like that but like that's not really right one of my very favorite things in old games parallax scrolling especially when SNES and Genesis allowed that from a much deeper way.

2:58:21Dustin Furman:It's like, oh my God, this is so fucking good. This is so good. This is what we, and then stuff in the foreground too. You'd see that a little bit in the NES, but not so much because a lot of it was very intensive. So stand down on the, I'm not a Nintendo hater. I'm a Nintendo realist. Okay. That's all, that's all there is to it.

2:58:42Colin Moriarty:And a realist. Yeah. What does that even, what does it mean?

2:58:46Dustin Furman:It means whatever you want it to be. can't argue with that literally cyber slut 69 wrote in said hi guys can we get a deep dive into why game development takes so long now I truly struggle to understand how it could be has there been no innovation into tools that would speed up the process for Sony games do they not have almost every possible mocap animation saved now surely almost all the assets you could possibly want or save somewhere trees structures etc do studios not build off of all the work from previous games or do they delete it all once they've finished yes games are bigger and prettier now but all the tech evolves so that's to be expected it all seems terribly inefficient and poorly managed to me make it make sense i actually agree with you but i also think that you got to be careful what you ask for because the second someone releases a game and then people start really realizing there are like just assets directly taken from a different game like a different ip in a major notable way the game's gonna get buried by people because people are gonna make fun of it and think it's stupid and cheap or whatever i just think that there's a conflict between people's expectations and then like what it takes to make a game.

2:59:48Dustin Furman:It is inefficient. It does seem weird, but I also think that like it's not they're not spending all this money and doing all and taking all this time for their health. They would love nothing more than Atari games used to be made in like four to six weeks. Do you know that? Yeah, often by one person. That's crazy. You know, we always I always bring up Final Fantasy four, which was made in 10 months by like 14 people. It's a really incredible feat. to do something like that. It's just not possible to do that with bigger games. But I do think that like this idea of taking five, six, seven years in the game is just fucking nuts.

3:00:27Dustin Furman:And there's something that needs to be done about it. Even Death Stranding taking almost what was like zero, one, two, three, four, five. So it took more than five years, like five and a half years. That's kind of. It's crazy when you really think about how much they actually did use again and how much of the game is the first game. And it's an excellent game, but it's crazy that it took them like five years to do that. Not impugning the quality of the game, its value, whatever. It just seems strange to me. But I also understand the business and commercial reality that they don't want to spend all this money and all this time on this shit.

3:01:05Dustin Furman:They feel like they have to. So there is a conflict and a tension between these two things. I don't know what undoes it. Dustin, what do you think?

3:01:15Colin Moriarty:So, game development taking so long, I think it's a multitude of factors. One thing to remember, and I sometimes do this in games where I'll pause and be like, nothing in this game is for free. Like, nothing you just get. think about if you're in a game like uncharted and you're in the in the opening scene like oh look at that um coffee maker someone at naughty dog needed to take part of their day to model and skin and make it look right in the in the scene you know things like that and so as games become um more uh photorealistic not always but in some cases um but just more detailed none of that's for free all of those things need to be made and there are examples colin you mentioned about companies or teams that are reusing assets and how they get clowned for it one example of a team that does do it and people try to clown on them but it doesn't always work is from software who reuse a lot of stuff in between games and that's how they've been able to keep games coming out at a pretty reasonable clip for just one team and yeah it's like you were saying colin too that you got to be careful what you wish for i think there is some degree where developers realize that they need even the things in the backgrounds of their games look good or else people are going to zone in on it and make fun of them think about the stupid craig thing with halo infinite there were things that were wrong uh with that halo infinite reveal but it's like the craig thing it was funny but it was no way showing the quality of what the game was but um yeah that's just the thing now is people gotta be people zone in on these things so punishment rarely fits the crime with that shit by the way like people lock into that stuff it's like oh every blade of grass isn't like unique and so like and so they'll right they'll bleed them dry it's insane yeah it's it's stupid so yeah i think that things could be more efficient and i think that players should be more okay with certain things being reused so it's probably somewhere in the middle yeah it's an expensive i i it's such an expensive medium and i and i do think i wish there was kind of like this middle ground of like and i also do i also just kind of wish there was like a less um i guess zealous kind of enthusiastic press that was kind of more okay with this kind of thing like we there's reused assets in um a lot of other mediums but like with video games it's like a lot more damning like you can even even in like music and shit like people sample like people just straight up sample either old things that they make or like things that other people make and it's not really considered that big of a deal in comparison person but i always think even music videos there's that one warehouse that everyone would film their music videos in that yeah exactly like even like tv shows like sound stages and props and

3:04:21Dustin Furman:shit like there's also i'm sorry i'm interrupting you again but i i'm sorry but i just saw a documentary a small documentary on youtube about wherever back to the future takes place like that town square and how that town square is in everything and they had like all these different shots of it and how they they use different camera angles and aesthetics to try to fix it but it's in like a hundred different things. Sorry. Go ahead. Right.

3:04:40Colin Moriarty:If you're walking down the street and in New York city sitcom in the 1990s or the early two thousands, that's the same exact street in every fucking show. And the back to the future, you know, that's the same situation. Like I, and even the opening shot of back to the future where he's like taken, where he, he grabs onto the car and he's like riding the skateboard down the street. And that's supposed to be in Hill Valley. That's just like, it's like five minutes away from me. It's like in a Burger King parking lot. And they just like put up like a fake wall there. It's like every like I wish. Yeah, I wish there was like a more balanced kind of approach.

3:05:16Colin Moriarty:Like, I don't care if like a game has like a reused, like reload animation, but like some people will and they'll and then there'll be like a video that has like 300 ,000 views about how cheap the game is. And that like that's suddenly three, 300 ,000 people that now have a negative association with your game for no fucking reason. So if you have with the God of War boat animation and all sorts of shit, like it's

3:05:36Dustin Furman:Yeah, yeah. Aloy climbing. Yeah. And it is impressive. It's distressing in some way because Kojima knows how to make games and his people are efficient so that it could take five years to do a game like Death Stranding 2 that is a skin over the previous game. I don't want to demean it like that. I mean, it's an incredible game, but it uses... I know because I played them back to back how much it's reusing and how much has not changed at all. Entire animation sequences and like the way he puts the boxes onto the conveyor belt, the way the road paves, the way like it's all the same. It's the same, the same thing.

3:06:14Dustin Furman:And even with using all of those, it's not kind of like it, it's the same. And even using all of those, this is what I was saying about the tension at the center of all this and why it's an interesting question, but I think people need to calibrate exactly how they feel. It's like people want more games, but there's not enough people, there's not enough money, there's not enough time to buy and support all of them. They don't want AI to be used, but they want the games faster. They don't want people laid off, but they want the games to be quicker to market and more dangerous to make. There's just a bunch of contradictions at the center of all of this.

3:06:48Dustin Furman:But I do think that there is a... I just think the era of the two to three year dev cycle, which was not very long ago, PS3 era for sure. I mean, if a game took more than three years in the PS3 era, people considered it in trouble often um right that that it took like i said this it took five and a half years for for grand theft auto almost five and a half years for grand theft auto five to come out everyone's like what the fuck are these guys doing you know it's so point now right it's like five years is a fucking stat five and a half years is what it took to make death stranding too i mean so it's just things have changed very rapidly and i understand that but i think things are different now i think people's expectations are different i think things are much higher stakes and while there is a space in the a and double a space to win you look at a game like robocop and a publisher like nakon it's like cool that's great but you guys make fun of nine out of ten games like this you're certainly not buying them i i'll say it until the fucking cows come home like the idea of making more and making it easier is not the solution because it's just going to make the volume problem worse so this is the great imagine if we had all these people making games and we had two or three year dev cycles and we'd be fucked everything would fail almost everything would fail except for a few games we were saying this about split gate earlier like it's it might not just be right for it to even enter a market right now there might not even be anyone interested in being able to play there's just a time economy and a money economy and a and a a willingness economy so this is an interesting question Cyber Slut 69.

3:08:21Dustin Furman:But I think the quality is seen in the games that you can get a game that's made by 30 or 40 people with contractors like Expedition 33. It takes a while. It's a double A game in a lot of aesthetic ways, maybe low end triple A. You know, a cheaper price point and it works out for them. But I say nine out of 10 times it doesn't work. I think even a game like Expedition 33 could have come out at a different era and not worked. Like, I don't think that game would have been as well received in the ps3 era for instance um yeah i think things i think people's expectations and tastes and desires and wants are different there's so much there's so much to calibrate that can't really be that you can't calibrate for so you have to just kind of wing it um but i think that like for us to get these easier when you look at again there are games like the elder scroll 6 where like it's like this is insane how long you're taking on this i don't know why you announced it when you announced it i don't know what you're doing behind the scenes but i have some suspicion that when you see the nature of the game and you see how big it is you'll be like oh that's at least a really big game like that's a big fucking game um and so sometimes so in other words i don't want people to say like time necessarily is a problem either if you're taking time and you're going to sell 20 million copies of a game.

3:09:41Dustin Furman:It's time well spent. Yeah. So even then, I don't know. It shouldn't necessarily not take a long time. Whatever. But yeah, even what's another example? Fallout 3 to Fallout 4 was, what, seven years, but they made Skyrim in between. That's the even crazier part. So things have just changed. All right. Mr. Bojangles wrote in, said, Colin, as someone who values free markets and creative risk taking, how do you reconcile the increasing homogeneity of a triple A game design with the consumer behaviors that incentivize it? Do you think players are unconsciously shaping the very stagnation they complain about?

3:10:24Dustin Furman:And if so, where should accountability lie with the studios, the media or the gamers themselves? We said something last week that I thought was really funny. Dustin, or we were talking about we were talking about something I said about merch or something. And I said something like people say a lot of things. And in other words, it's a way of saying talk is cheap. People tell pollsters things, go into focus groups and say things, say things on social media that are aggregated and shown in boardrooms. And then the product comes out and no one cares. But the consumer is fickle and you can't only rely on the things that they say about what they want.

3:11:03Dustin Furman:It goes into what Steve Jobs so famously said. I was listening to a, an interview with, um, what's that guy from shark, uh, not starting shark tank, Mr. Wonderful.

3:11:12Colin Moriarty:Yeah.

3:11:13Dustin Furman:Uh, Kevin O 'Leary, right. That's his name. And he was giving an interview and he was talking about how he was an investor with Steve jobs and how Steve jobs was a complete fucking prick. And that, um, which he was, I mean, I think Steve jobs is an amazing person, but he was notoriously a prick. And he would say things like, I tell people what they want. Like I know what they want. They don't know what they want. And he would say literally those kinds of things. not even beating around the bush. I don't care what they want. And Kevin O 'Leary said something like, you can't really be like this.

3:11:42Dustin Furman:And he's like, listen, Kevin, have you made a lot of money with me? Just go away, basically, and let me do my thing. And you either need that level of confidence in what you do and shoving new markets forward, and that's probably too bullheaded for most people. Not everyone's a genius level. Steve Jobs kind of seer and doer, like a very unique figure. But the other end of the spectrum is listening too much to what the market wants, but not putting your own spin on it and being convinced that you can change perception or minds or give people things that they don't know that they want. And so really, everyone's to blame.

3:12:23Dustin Furman:You say, so it's the studios and the gamers. You ask the media. I'm like, I don't think the media really has any power anymore yeah i think maybe 10 or 15 years ago the media would definitely been the blame for things that have happened but not anymore i i do think studios are maybe too reliant on the things people just say and and it's so easy to say something but not follow through on it um and this causes a a sort of condensing of and a homogeneity of triple a game design but that's what people want you can't really argue with it like people don't want there's there are there are film fans that really want art house films and this really abstract shit and foreign films and but most people just want like action movies and thrillers and like crime dramas and and that's kind of okay um yeah so do you have anything you want to add here either of you oh no dustin's coughing yeah i know chris anything you want to add i mean i don't know

3:13:15Colin Moriarty:i think i think really it kind of takes two to tango i think really like i think it's it's a game of telephone in some way where like maybe like people say that they want one thing but that's another thing too it's like even if you say say you want one thing and then it gets mistranslated throughout like a list of people or like you know through through the lack of context of social media um i think there is something to be said about the fact that like what you want and what you feel can't necessarily be accurately or a lot of people lack the skill to accurately communicate truly what they want or truly what they think um whether that's because of a lack of you know vocabulary to describe it or or what have you but i think ultimately you kind of end up in a situation where there's no everybody's just kind of throwing shit at the wall and hoping things stick and then whenever something works that's what they're going to stick with and i think that's reasonable uh if boring um and safe but i think it's kind of everybody's fault really yeah i feel like um what's nice about gaming at least and i guess this is true for for film as well is that we have a a vibrant and overall healthy independent scene with with smaller games and that's where a lot of that innovation can take place and i think you can see that where there are indie games that end up blowing up and then can have an influence over triple a games where you know the risk is so high and some small team made a risk or or did something interesting and proved that it worked and so they're able to do something without there necessarily being as much of a risk involved um because i wonder like with expedition 33 that's a smaller team that made this game and not to say that um turn-based games are are dead but they're certainly not as alive in the big triple a space outside of a few examples and i think that a game like expedition 33 showed big to big publishers that hey maybe we can maybe there is something still to uh turn-based games that we can do um so that remains to be seen of course but um so yeah it it definitely i can understand feel triple a games feeling stagnant but we can we can have our slop triple a and we can have our innovative games i think at the same time fair enough and are you okay i'm

3:15:54Dustin Furman:sorry uh oh yeah yeah i'm sure i've been trying to go somewhat quick it's the yeah it's the tickle

3:16:00Colin Moriarty:in the throat that it gets you we can get that we can get that you got something you got something for that yeah i think i could scratch it for you oh jesus christ

3:16:15Dustin Furman:blue doogle wrote in and said hail sacred three question for chris i think dustin can probably answer this too i have a new tv and whenever i switch to the ps5 it switches to game mode on automatically i've heard him say many many a time that he cannot abide tvs that are not set up properly for console gaming is there any other setting i should be looking at or can i trust that game mode is all i need i always remember that uh i think i told the story that when i first started working at ign it was the first time i ever had a flat screen tv on my and it was at my desk and like at some point one of the video guys brendan brendan au who's a really great guy he owns like a really famous production company now actually um that does really well um he came up and was like i can't watch you play like this anymore and like took the remote control and like did all of this shit to it um and you used to have to be very manual with it but now it seems like the tvs kind of know a little bit better so what do you think of this yeah i mean truthfully like

3:17:05Colin Moriarty:in my experience this has been the only thing that i think you you really need like the make or break thing that you really need everything else is more subjective and more like okay well you know maybe they're like sound settings or like maybe like specific contrast settings like whatever that's that's really up to the that's up to the eye of the beholder but like game mode really i can't even count the amount of times i've been to people's houses well this was more of a thing when i was younger but like the amount of times i'd go over to play video games at a friend's house and it would just feel wrong like it would just be like this this weird delay that i couldn't quite put my finger on i was like i swear to god this isn't how this works and i would look at the controller and i'd be like is it the controller is like what's it what's the settings like yeah and then my friend would be like yes the controller sure and i'm like no dude i swear to god this is not right and then it would go into the settings it wasn't until years later that i found out it's like oh it's game mode then you go into the setting and basically what game mode does is like it gets rid of there's a lot of post-processing done on the tv to get the image looking really really good on your end and it's more for image quality because that's what a tv is for it's for watching shit primarily um and so game mode just turns off that post-processing basically as i understand it and so there's less of a delay between like the signal going from your machine to the to the screen because that layer of post-processing is not done which means you just get higher you just get like a a more direct more responsive controller to screen input but like that's really the only thing that in my view is deeply necessary for video games because it's all about response time and there are certain games where like a millisecond is like all that'll make a difference pretty pretty drastically so in my view really game was the only thing but like maybe there's another thing that dustin's aware of that i'm not in my experience all it's been though as far as playing the game yeah and i think you explained it very well um why you should have game mode on and for the most part new tvs are automatically just going to pop on game mode and i think that for the most part that's going to be all you really need the thing that's starting to bother me a little bit is when hdr isn't set up properly but that's not your fault um hdr standards and tvs and consoles it's a fucking mess right now um between how hdr is implemented the different hdr settings like whether or not you have hgig on and things like that it's really annoying and that's why people are having such mixed experiences with hdr um so what i recommend there's a fantastic youtube channel called hd tv test um it's this guy vincent teo and it's awesome because he has these really great in-depth videos and if you have a newer tv he's going to show you like how to set it up with each different console um but he's like this guy that has a very he's asian has a very strong accent and he'll be very serious and then he'll include like a dick joke right in the middle out of nowhere and it does this little like sound and you have to see it so vincentio uh hgtv test go to him if you have a new tv or maybe even with your current tv um and i'm more than likely he's gonna have a video showing you how to set it up um how to set up hdr properly dude hdr on the switch 2 is completely fucked as far as setup like there is a very core setting in setting it up and i think they just label it it's like a tiny little thing in the setup and people have realized like oh this tiny little side button when you set up your hdr is actually very fucking important and if you don't mess with it it makes your picture totally blown out on switch 2 and they just don't they don't care um so no surprise from nintendo they don't know how to help people set up hdr but it's not just the consoles it's also the tv hdr is like a weird like because i'm still like it bothers the hell out of me and i don't know how to fix this i've never really bothered because as far as i'm concerned everything works well enough but every time i launch into a game like i'll be on the main menu of like the ps5 or the xbox or whatever and then i'll launch into a game and then the screen will go black it'll do that flash it'll go black for like three seconds and then it'll load in because like now it's hdr and i'm like this sucks like i don't i hate this experience of understanding that it even if i understand i'm not missing anything integral the idea that i know that my experience is being interrupted that i'm aware of it really bothers the hell out of me um i yeah i don't know i don't like hdr really i know that's like crazy to say if you have like a good experience with it but like every experience i've had with it has been like pretty pretty tumultuous and annoying and like i'd much rather just not deal with it at all well if my experience with that first

3:21:55Dustin Furman:flat screen TV was any indication. I have no idea what I'm even looking at. So you have to worry about me. I didn't get, I didn't understand frame rate until it was, well, I mean, I understood it academically, but didn't really care about it until I was shoved down my throat. And then you realize like, oh yeah. So it's, you know, I'm probably using all the wrong settings on my own TV. I think it's fine. Josh Bailey wrote in final inquiry says, good day boys. I hope life is treating you all well why do we the royal we care so much about information regarding news on unreleased games rumors speculation and industry analysis obviously enough people care about this to support such a large industry of news sites independent youtube channels twitch channels twitter accounts independent podcasts and multimedia networks such as this patreon however since the dawn of the digital age i have access to so many games between ps plus giveaways sales etc that i could probably occupy occupy myself for several decades without buying a single new game.

3:22:48Dustin Furman:What is driving this desire to always be looking into the future of what is yet to come? It's a great question, but I will say this, and this is my honest kind of answer, is that there's nothing I care about in the world that I'm not more deeply interested in than the simple product or the simple act of... Music's a good example. I listen to music, but I always love about the band dynamics. Who produced this album? Where did they record it? When? Did they play it live? What does this sound like live? In other words, if I wasn't that deep into it, I just wouldn't care about it at all. And games are the same way.

3:23:27Dustin Furman:I have a real interest in a nerdy interest in just the way things work. And if I don't care about the way something works, I probably don't care about it at all. And there's a million things like that for sure. But if I'm out there gardening in the backyard, I'm looking at the plants and I'm wondering how they're doing and why they're doing a certain way. And what can I do to make them grow better? and how can I increase? Can I trim them? Can I do this? And so like games, obviously, like I love games. So I'm going to be deep into it or politics or history or I'm never if I'm if I'm just into the baseline small talk version of something, then it's like not really an interest.

3:24:02Dustin Furman:So that's what for me. That's how I can most eloquently say it is that it's because I care. I don't care just about that because people like just play games and I'm like, well, I do. I play a fucking asinine amount of games, but there's more to it than that. Of course. Any thoughts before we move on? Or I guess leave.

3:24:22Colin Moriarty:I wonder, and maybe I'm thinking about this too deeply. I watched a video, a Hank Green video a few weeks ago about how a lot of the attention economy and like the dopamine addiction stuff. and one of his arguments was like we as humans in our adaptation or evolution whatever are we've survived by constantly thinking about what's next um where are we what are we going to eat next where's the next place we're going to live what's the next part of my life after i'm done this what's after that right and i wonder if that can kind of be translated into how we feel about our entertainment as well where we're constantly thinking about what the next game is and wondering what that's going to be like and so there's maybe some of that and it's maybe to our detriment sometimes where a lot of times we think about and talk about games way more before they come out than after um not always and i think we do a pretty good job here in that we talk a lot about the games we're playing whether it's on this show or on summon sign and we do spoiler cast so we do try to extensively um talk about the present as well but certainly there's certain games that it's like how how long how many hours have we talked about judas at this point right you know how many hours have we talked about grand theft auto um particular i mean grand theft auto in particular is going to be like i don't know we'll probably have more pre-release content on Grand Theft Auto 6 than actual content when it comes out.

3:26:04Colin Moriarty:But I think that's just how we're built, that we're just constantly moving on to the next thing.

3:26:11Dustin Furman:I was going to say, I also just feel like in even our own coverage of games, we do the best we can, but I feel like we're never in, and I don't mean we, I guess I'm saying again, the royal we here, is that we're never in the same place anymore. Everyone's scattered to the winds. There's very few tent poles, like true tent poles, even a, I keep bringing up Astro Bot, which I loved, we all loved it, but it's like even a perceived console tent pole like that sells 3 million copies. It means that there's just not that many people that played it, you know, like then you can't do that extensive level of coverage for it.

3:26:43Dustin Furman:It doesn't seem like there's, it's just harder to know what to even cover anymore, which is part of the challenge of doing a show like this. Anyway, Chris, do you have anything you'd like to add?

3:26:57Colin Moriarty:Yeah. I mean, I think I just wish people were a little bit. The amount of incuriosity I see kind of makes me sad because I think like if you if you're interested in something, I think it behooves you to be to care about like. And by the way, like this is it doesn't mean that you necessarily have to care about like, let's say if you're really interested in video games that you have to care about, you know, you know, the percentage of shares of whatever company goes to who. or like or anything in particular but like i think you should have some deep level of curiosity about some aspect of that process like i'm i personally find myself really really deeply curious about the actual process of making these things about like the the decisions that are made and into as far as like you know why this engine you know why this mechanic for what reason like why why was this cut from the game was this was this a budgetary thing was this like a a design philosophy thing what is the inspiration for the for the narrative what is the inspiration for the vibe where where like where do these things connect and from where like that to me is like really really deeply enticing and i love reading about that i i even just talking about we mentioned judas just now like i remember very very like a long ass time ago way before the show watching uh ken levine's narrative lego speech like and i watched that thing i watched that thing probably like over 10 times because i was so like transfixed on like what what was this next thing going to be um what is what is the thought process going into whatever it is we're going to see from this guy max from somebody who made something that i consider so pivotal and so seminal and so yeah i i would i would say that like i think it's i think it's cool to care i don't know I don't think it's lame to care.

3:28:52Colin Moriarty:I don't think it's. And again, people have different. Buckets in which they pour their care into. And I think that's fine. But if you don't care about anything, if you're not deeply curious about some aspect of this thing or something that you care about, then you probably. Yeah. Like you said it, Colin, like you might not care about it that much.

3:29:13Dustin Furman:Yeah, it's it's hard for me to. And this is just me. I'm only speaking for me. It's hard for me to interact with very much and not be curious about it. maybe I'm overly curious, but even, you know, it's like the sports slow season. And we like to like, just have a sport on in the background when we're eating dinner and just kind of dicking around at night. So put on ESPN, ESPN to CBS sports, whatever. And instead of NFL is obviously training camps kind of kicking up, which is good. And, but like NBA is over baseball is kind of boring for me. The NHL is not starting yet. So like where I'm watching like women's softball and lacrosse and all these things that are cool.

3:29:48Dustin Furman:It's like fine. But when I'm watching this, I'm like, how does this work? And then I go on Google and I'm like, how much are these people being paid? And then I go and look at the standings and then I'm like, oh, the attendance is pretty good. Oh, there's an interest here. Oh, they're expanding. So I just interface with the world like that. I just love to know more. I appreciate if you don't. That's cool. But I think a lot of people are built the same way. So I think that that explains a lot of it. but on that note, it's a short episode today, shorter than usual, but that's okay. There's not a whole lot.

3:30:19Dustin Furman:We're in them dog days, the dog days of summer, dog days.

3:30:25Colin Moriarty:I got the low voice for it right now. you do dog days.

3:30:28Dustin Furman:Oh, it's them. What's them dog days down here in Savannah? It's almost got a, you don't even want to hear what he has to say next. You know, it's going to be something awful, you know? Yes, certainly not. All right, let's go around the horn and say goodbye to everyone. Chris, goodbye to you. Be well. Have a good rest of your day. Any plans?

3:30:49Colin Moriarty:Um, I don't know. I think today, finally, I'll, I'll, I'll probably get my haircut. I tried the other day. Like, I think the last episode I tried to go get it and then they were like booked until I got there like way late and they're like, we can't fit you. And I was like, okay, cool. So I just walked in the sun for like 40 minutes for no purpose. But it's good to be active. Yeah, but we're out early. we're out early today compared uh and i i had a pretty hearty breakfast so i'm not gonna have to spend time cooking lunch so yeah i think i'll just go handle that it's getting really annoying yeah it's your conspicuous hat wearing yeah it's it's too much it's it's irritating because it's getting that it's it's that thing now where i'm like i feel like there's a bug on my face all the time because of my hair is like touching you know what i mean it's just like instinctively i

3:31:38Dustin Furman:feel like there's something crawling i was like i can't do this yeah understood all right godspeed Dustin goodbye to you are you gonna rest get some sleep go ahead and I actually tired I was

3:31:47Colin Moriarty:I was just thinking I right now at this exact moment I feel better than I have for the last five days wow you're euphoric right now I'm on the well it's one of those things when you're sick for so many days like when you're at your worst point you're like man I take the feeling normal for granted right right yeah this this sickness wasn't really that bad in comparison let me my throat was a little fucky and whatnot but it was fine um but now now i'm starting to feel normal again i'm feeling the feeling the energy of that excellent so if i could just get rid of if if you could help me out with this tickle in the back in the back of my throat i can help you out you know um then i'm gonna be set for life i'm ready to do anything really oh i got something i got something to go ahead and open wide open up why boy i'm real why i just can't stop molesting crazy um what do i do so tonight i don't know what i'm gonna do probably just go float around the pool and hang out but um and do some work um but tomorrow we're

3:32:54Dustin Furman:going to it's micah's birthday last week so we're gonna go stay at a hotel tomorrow and uh go out to dinner and and just chill and then a weekend of uh death stranding i'm sure as well and uh yeah So that's basically it. We appreciate all of you guys out there. I'll see you next week for the streaming of, well, obviously first we'll see you for sacred symbols. Plus that's training to on patron.com slash last day media, and then be streaming the sacred league on Monday at 1 PM. Eastern. So we'll see you then on our YouTube channel for last day media. And we'll see on the next episode of sacred symbols, et cetera.

3:33:24Dustin Furman:And so on. Appreciate all your support out there. Patreon.com slash last day media for early ad free access and other perks. Last day media. Store for merch. We'll see you next time until then. Goodbye. See ya. Take care, guys. 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 Furman. The show is produced by executive producer Dustin Furman. All of Last Stand's theme music is by my best friend, Ramon Narvaez.

3:34:02Dustin Furman:As you know, all of Last Stand's shows, including Sacred Symbols, are fan-funded on Patreon at patreon.com slash laststandmedia. 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. Thank you.

3:34:32Dustin Furman:Ben Soto, War Chief, Erimo Loner, Ace1924, Hector Games, Jorge Trevino, Dennis Mirum, Simon, Andreas Wessling, Frederick Bach, Indigo Blue, Skygen100, Kaiman Togru, Lars Cerny, Fake Viking, Basil Frank, Sander Svedson, Nashville Nibbler, Teddy Anderson, Nicholas Johansson, Uppercut, Hypeguy98, Youngstream, Marcus Mossberg, Evan Bake, Havard Oya, Fugjug, David, Sammy Rocklin, Papsy, Victor Blomberg, Thomas Person, Panic, Detective McNulty, Johannes Magnuson, Axel M. Bjork, Adam Shablawi, Zixton Larson, John Oman, Octo Fontas, Berg, David G, SHP87, Victor Fallin, Eric Steinslin, Philip B. Rainsford, DDDDDCCCC, Havard, Rocketman, Fred Carlson, Jonas Johnson, Dennis Lofgren, Jorgen Stenhammer, Gilfie Tratterson, Marcus, Marius Carson-Peterson, Breno Bezera-Bloom, Jennifer Rutkowski, William Holbert, Ross Marenka, Morgan Ashley, Azan, Michael Vecchio, Daniel Diamor, Patrick Leslie, Jacek Dabowski, Headbastian Joel, R.

3:35:44Dustin Furman:Ryam, Bjorn Johnson, Pontus Gustavusen, Bjorn Carlson Wendell, Bob Harrison, Elmator, Aaron Cham-Turin, John Nell, T, Lucas Jagerskog, The Thime, Taxmanen, Jerry Erickson, Lollipopper, Simon Erickson, Patrick Garbino, Johannes William, Gungner, Christopher Hansen, Jacob, Juke, Anis Malik, Janik Raphael Anderson, Kevin Rafa, Jackie Gatt, Lass, Kai L, Krang, Tommy Lofol-Johansen, Emil Vissing, Patrick Kekirly, James, Nicholas Fear, Toby Rothensburg, Huy Tran, Emil M, Neil Amon, Blackjack, Kyle J, Vance Cody, Aaron Betke, Jean-Francois Forzi, Marcelo Goudes, Donald John Vaders, Boy, Lumo, Rafael Alves, Ricardo, John Cordero, Guilherme Dos Santos Merlin, Eduardo Perez, Alex Porto, Diego Dos Santos, Matthias Philippe Badowski, Victor Elmo, Bruno Baxter, Pizza Fria, Henrique Coelho, Guilherme Figueredo, Matthias Garces, Stove, Deadpool 2099, J.P.

3:36:48Dustin Furman:Lynch, Sweet Jones, Ethan Linares, Jiraiya, Wizard Infantry, Zen Red, Matt MGS24, Angry Living Meat, Hugo De La Guia, Eddie Smith, Uncharted Shinobi, WTF, Wesley Mullins, Logan Little George, Timothy Tolkien, Brian Williamson, Jorge Padua, Rallo, Danio, Adam Refriended, Jordan Vallett, Ross R. Lowe, Will Williams, Shane Brekke, Michael Mash Potato, Aaron Temple, Sweaty Magic, Nate Izod, Hargeet Chani, Josh Sullinger, MyNameIsMayo, Eddie Medina, Jason R. Zahn, QN, Grayson Maxwell, Electric Soup, Whiskey Sin, Corey Bcom, Relentless Rex, Alan Tuniak, Dustin Klingman, Jad Rita, Terry Tip, Jacob Hancock, Dustin Graff, Zach Cohen, Peyton Stone, Fuzzy Bear Michael Buffel Dan Root Asak Parades The Shady Mailman Christopher Morgan Randall Holsey Dio Ordai Josh Godfrey Betty Ann Moriarty H-Trons Norse Nuts Jake C Trey Woodward Antonio C Alan Einer Jay Getter Bjorn Campbell Jeff Mercado Trelon Zainal Yuichi Gregory Slavinsky Gus Remington James John Zial Boots Alex LaPare Saul Balcazar Eduardo Banda Adam Bader Matt Flowers, Joseph Baker, Kendrick Caius, Jimmy Rodriguez, Dave Alvarez, Chris Galvin, Mason Bouchard, Anthony Marola, Saqib Alam, Kyle Hagel, Colin Love, Daryl E.

3:38:15Dustin Furman:Naaman, Toby Ryland, Stewie 108, Patrick Montgomery, Ian C., Richter 86, Christopher Devayo, Chris Morton, Mark Liberto, Johnny Waffles, Lawrence Adams, Roto 24, Jonathan Coates, Simon Peterson, Sean Mason, Josh Gravelick, Organic Produce, Carlos Algaret, Miranda Grubba, David Castanez, Joosh, Martin Beck, Gavin, Jerome Ferreira, Nathan R., Joe McPartlin, Gary Cavallo, Christopher Moore, Dennis Usel, Lou and Ray Loper, Jonathan Cortez, Alex Hobeck, John Schultz, Adam Kay, Alan Tremblay, Ryan T. Mandel, Pork and Beans, Tony Zaniga, Shane Miller, Alex Cabrera, Corey Dustin, Nicolaj Hanson-Turton Anthony Vasquez Jorge Pal Cannonball Jones Mr.

3:39:02Dustin Furman:Tom Phil Crone Throw7 Adam Nix John McKinney Michael Gates Alex Gates Sean Chandler Gio Corsi Joey Gondaliger Alex Monez Justin Payne Justin Wagaman Austin Riley Chad Lewis Enrique Perez Joshua Smallwood Shane Rayum Don Lee Brad Cooley Mad Mock Media and Jonathan Rice