#371 | Count Money All Day, Count Money All Night

26:34Dustin Furman:or some shit i don't know some some of that some nerd games some western rpgs and euro slop yeah

26:40Colin Moriarty:Yeah, we euro slop 100%. But he does have a YouTube channel. It's very good. So go check him out there.

26:47Dustin Furman:The there was a actually, Chris, there was a clip that of me and you on the most recent one that made me like laugh out loud when I was watching it, like watching it and screening it to make sure we can publish it. And it was like I did my you know, I was saying Trump had or there was a temple on an island and you're like, it's so normal to have a temple on an island. And I was like, oh, my God, it's maybe that made me laugh so much. Why do we even care? Yeah.

27:15All right.

27:16Dustin Furman:Let's get into some topics of discussion, stretch our legs before we go any further. Now, I have two interesting comments this week that I wanted to start with because they're really deep and sad, but in a different kind of way, maybe than we usually get into to the point where I'm not entirely sure they're real and I feel bad even feeling that way because of what they say. All right, so Levi Williams wrote in and said, Dear Sacred Brethren, my childhood best friend and fellow LSM patron Derek Wechter unexpectedly passed away in his sleep last Friday. He was only 32. I miss him deeply. Please send positive thoughts to him and his family.

27:55Dustin Furman:Now I know this name because he's definitely written into the show and I know Levi Williams's name as well but I just is this like a joke or is it true I don't know but I'm reading it just in case because it's a horrible situation if he's passed away I know that name I'm pretty sure he's in the credits but maybe I'm wrong on that where are we on this RIP and peace Derek Wechter if your friend Levi Williams isn't lying because here's the thing guys how many times i have to say it i just believe you right but i know that you know that and it's created this sort of weird nexus of this tension yeah i don't want to be taken advantage of there is also just the varying divide of senses of humor where it's like i would this seems like something that i would do like if sween had like if sween listened to shows and was like a big fan i would probably I would probably write it to that show that he's a fan of and be like, hey, my best friend Sween just passed away.

29:10I wish you could. Could you please send him your thoughts and prayers? And then he'd listen to it. And then that would be the joke. But it's just for us. But I don't know if that's people in this audience necessarily. I feel like I would. I feel like I believe this probably.

29:23Colin Moriarty:Do you know anything about this, Dustin? Yeah, I'm looking up their names on Patreon now. Both of them. i i think we should treat it as real yeah and then if it is exposed to be fake then we can have a laugh about it but strongly say never do that again yeah um if we if we treat it as fake before it's before it's truly fake then we're more of the assholes than like if we just treat it as earnestly and then it comes out that it's fake well that we're we're not we didn't do anything wrong right right that's true this is exactly should he really be passed away this is exactly probably how he wanted to be remembered on on sacred circles so now this other one is interesting

30:09Dustin Furman:too because there's even a component of it that you guys don't know about because i put obviously this letter and you could read it but let me get into this luke childs wrote in or someone associated with luke giles says hey colin chris and dustin my name's spencer i'm 15 and i'm writing this for my dad's phone while he's inside 7-Eleven grabbing drinks. He left me in the car and the line looks long, so I've got a few minutes. My dad's going through a divorce, and honestly, he's taking it really hard. I've seen him cry more times than I can count, and every time he lies and says he's fine, but I know he's not.

30:42Dustin Furman:The one time he actually looks like himself, like he's not completely broken, is when he's listening to Sacred Symbols. That's why I'm writing to you. Also, Chris, thank you for meeting us in New York. My dad still talks about it and regrets not getting a selfie with you. So here's my request. Can you tell my dad on the show that I love him and that he shouldn't give up. He went from feeling like a great man sleeping in his car overnight. Now he's working two full-time jobs just to get back on his feet. He only gets Thursdays and Fridays off and he spends those days with us, me and my little brother Logan.

31:07Dustin Furman:He never really writes to you guys on Patreon. The only time I ever saw him comment was when we were planning the New York trip and he was excited when he read it on the show. It meant the world to him. So just let him know he matters. He's not alone. And me and Logan were in his corner. We want him to win. Sign Spencer and Logan, even though he's just whining in the background, it didn't help with this at all. I know how Colin feels about AI, but I'm 15 and it wrote it better than I could. Hmm. Because it's a pretty well written letter for a 15 year old. But there's a component to this that we don't that you guys didn't know about because he wrote in again with an amendment.

31:39Dustin Furman:With a phone number. To Luke Childs. And I say we get we call him and get to the bottom of it right now.

31:49Colin Moriarty:Hmm.

31:53Dustin Furman:Let's see. Let's see if he picks up.

32:02Jesus Christ.

32:16Dustin Furman:Riveting. I wouldn't pick this up either because it's obviously going to be like a block number but we'll leave him a voicemail if it goes to that this is good radio this is good radio hey is this Luke? yeah Luke this is Colin Moriarty

32:34Colin Moriarty:no shit

32:34Dustin Furman:yeah I uh you're on Sacred Symbols right now we're recording it oh you sounded a little disappointed he was like oh no I was walking on the laundromat Oh, you're going to the laundromat. Do you have sons named Spencer and Logan? Yes. They wrote in to sacred symbols. They did? Yeah. And they were saying that you were having a little bit of a hard time and that they loved you. And that they wanted you to. Yeah. And that are you going through something? Are you going through a divorce? Is that what's happening? So. Yeah. So this was true. So. All right. So you can't hear the guys. but um so yeah you're you're i guess you were in 7-eleven the other day grabbing drinks he said luke or your son spencer says and then he took the time to write this on the patreon thread a letter so so go so make sure to listen to it when it goes live tomorrow hello yeah can you hear me yeah i'm losing the signal hold on okay okay try again yeah so i just wanted you to know you were in i guess you went to 7-eleven to get drinks and your kids wrote on into patreon to us and so that's what they said so that's crazy so this was this was true and then they in a dm they sent me your phone number oh so i'm calling you now this is so here so here so that's it i just wanted to say hello that you're going to be on the show.

34:06Colin Moriarty:I'm almost in tears. Thanks.

34:12Dustin Furman:We're in your corner, Luke Childs. Thanks, man. All right. I'm going to let you go. Be well. It's good to hear your voice. And give your kids our love. They're good kids.

34:25Colin Moriarty:Thank you, man.

34:26Dustin Furman:All right. Bye. We touched a life.

34:31Colin Moriarty:Wow. we touched a life does that make up for the divorces

34:36Dustin Furman:probably i'll leave that up to the fates

34:41yeah i remember that i remember that interaction in new york too they're nice

34:47Dustin Furman:so good kids yeah we got to the but they weren't lying it sounded so fake it did it's i mean that's

34:54Colin Moriarty:the thing because already people have no disrespect people have a really hard time figuring out how to write into this show they send a patreon dm they post it on the last week's post so they they were at 7-eleven at the pristine time of that 24-hour period that he knows or just luck i guess to go in and write that at that time and then admitting that it was ai that also kind of made it seem a little yeah that threw me like what's going on here but i can't i mean wow that that the mention of ai is like i believed it up until then you know what i mean like the mention of ai at all kind of like threw me because i was like well wait what what yeah well that was

35:42Dustin Furman:the thing is like i was a precocious young man i wrote pretty well for a young person but it's not common and that was like all i was good at so reading that it's funny when i got to that i'm like oh and then but then seeing the dm with the number i was like i think this is real yeah But I wanted to wait and see. Yeah, well, we touched a life. Perhaps three, because I mean, I think this is going to bring the whole family to get the child's family closer together now around this show, Sacred Symbols. Yeah. That was nice. That went better than I thought, for sure. Why did you think I was a little perplexed by your conversation?

36:22Because I was still under the assumption that like, was this completely fake? Are we going to get these kids in trouble, basically?

36:29Dustin Furman:oh right well i mean that's their fucking problem right sorry that's your fucking problem you know true yeah you're writing into the show i again just assume that i'm gonna believe anything you

36:39Colin Moriarty:tell me well that paid off yep yeah yeah luke uh things are gonna turn around it might take a little time um but we believe in you um you guys have been there for me so we're gonna be here for you and obviously doing a great job with your kids i mean yeah they obviously love you a great deal

37:07Dustin Furman:so or they wouldn't know like that's a that's a big move that's a big move that would have been like when i was a kid if i like called sean hannity on am radio and i told him and i told him to tell my dad that i loved him yeah crazy

37:25Dustin Furman:captain crash out wrote in that's a great name great name it said gentlemen my eight-year-old daughter just got her first platinum with astrobot i also picked up the astrobot plat and i know firsthand it's not an easy platinum trophy to get i swear i was more proud of my daughter's accomplishment than any of my trophies she never got overly frustrated and if she got stuck she put the controller down and said i'll try again tomorrow she obviously doesn't listen you know the whole parental guidance thing but if you could give grace a big old shout out i'd love to have her have her listen thanks for all that you do and know that it's appreciated that's wonderful i probably would have dropped out of school in like the eighth or ninth grade of

37:57Colin Moriarty:trophies existed when i was a kid like i'm lucky the trophies didn't come out until i was all the

38:04Dustin Furman:way through college so i i was like all right it didn't interrupt it didn't stymie my intellectual growth right it's like the difference between starting to smoke weed when you're 14 or drinking like when you're 15 or like starting in your 20s you'll probably be better off if you just wait until you're in your 20s yeah generally welcome grace this is wonderful i love to hear that eight years old is a good is a good age to get into platformers in my opinion yeah oh my god that's exactly how old i was i think when i was like getting really into them platinum though like i mean like yeah i mean i remember there weren't any platinums but there were you could 100 % games and that was like a that felt like the best experience you could possibly have back then i remember so and astrobot's a great first one to get to like that's a good that's a really solid like well rounded like no fat at all on that game crisp i wonder how she felt about the ape escape portion that's a pretty let's see if she does those challenges how she does those challenge stages now yeah yeah it doesn't count it doesn't count if you do the challenge they completely rip the experience what were you gonna say doesn't i was gonna say you have to do like the core game content

39:18Colin Moriarty:the main challenge stages which those are pretty tough yeah yeah it's not it's not i feel confident

39:25Dustin Furman:in her that she'll be able to do the dlc ones yeah yeah actually that's what i was thinking was for and i'll i'll i'll actually i'll just nail it down now is that the monday stream i think will be me doing the last five of the uh astrobot stages that just went live that are supposed to be like the hardest ones i've not played them yet so um maybe we'll do that but i'm i don't even want to put this out there because maybe they're really difficult and i'm like i'm gonna have a really hard time with them but i'm afraid that they're not as hard as people are saying and then i'm gonna be done in like an hour well just read super chats it's fine yeah that's what's good about a stream it's kind of free form yeah the um as long as i remember to get as long as i remember to put the game up on the screen yeah do you think with with astrobot like how many are they done now is this it i because i haven't said but i would say i would think so because i've specifically i know they keep doing it and i've just or they keep adding new stages and i'm like i want to play them but like i've just been kind of waiting for them to stack because i'm just playing other things i'm just like i'd rather just have like a bunch to get to at once and i'm thinking about it now or it's just like okay now's probably a good time i haven't played in a while clean that clean those up especially because now do you get trophies for them or no yeah there are trophies for all of them god damn it yeah that's yeah i have to do it because i have the i hate having the platinum in something but not having 100 yeah that's annoying like i have a lot of those like i come i guess i come from like prior times or like i almost prefer the 100 to the platinum in the first place like take away my platinum and give me 100 any day in my in my opinion but yeah i have to get the hundred there there are so there are all the bonus stages and then there was like some christmas content that also had trophies that's pretty fun yeah some other stuff so they're they're fun trophies to get but yeah maybe i'll yeah so that's what i'll do for the monday stream um is get through those stages and then we'll see what happens from there because i was i was first thinking about playing mafia oh that's right that's out soon right and like maybe i can do both of those things i don't know we'll we'll see i'll decide you know what just give me a fucking chance here to figure it out myself why am i getting mad at everyone i I don't know.

41:27Dustin Furman:That doesn't make any sense. Zach Apuzo wrote in and said, hello, gang. I discovered I work with a girl whose last name is literally Tarman. Do I risk my job and message her on Team Sam? It's Tarman. I don't. You got to think of a different thing because you're not Tarman. Yeah. That's the problem with the whole joke is she really should be the one who's aware of the joke and speaking in that Australian accent. As George Miller. Yeah. To you.

41:55Colin Moriarty:you're asking for an awkward uh interaction she doesn't know what that training two is she doesn't give a shit and she's just say let me like what and then you're gonna have to explain and then she'll say oh cool yeah that's exactly that's gonna be the whole interaction you just you just saw so vividly to the future it's crazy that's exactly that is exactly how that interaction She'll go, oh, cool.

42:20Dustin Furman:Yeah. And then and then she'll make a mental note that you're a nerd or something. Actually, it depends on what you look like, probably, too, because, you know, I love that one that cartoon, that meme where it's like the guy like leaning around the cubicle and he's like looking good, Jean. And she's hot. And then it's like the ugly guy doing it. She's like, HR could be a similar situation with you. It's like tall man, like around the corner.

42:43Dustin Furman:And so if you're looking good, you know, you're handsome. You got nice hair and pearly whites.

42:48Colin Moriarty:maybe she'll be into it if this is the zach i'm thinking of then he i see him at too many games every year i'm 95 sure this is the zach so i know who this is how does he what does he look like he's pretty he's fashionable so he looks good all right so that's a little that's a little bit of information that's relevant i believe he's a scientist also oh that's great we'll tell you what give it a try yeah let us know how it goes yeah let us know how it goes right in again with the follow up let us know the results yeah what do we care

43:25gambling with people's lives and then just shut it off and just not care until next week that's how you get two divorces yeah that first

43:34Dustin Furman:divorce is definitely like you were just waiting for like if I'm the one who convinced you to get divorced come on yeah that the other one though is that might be on us that's yeah serial crop dusting harry potter actor manual ass sniff i don't know who that is that a character from the actual movies i don't know i have no idea says hey colin speaking of section eight did you know that south peak games also responsible for two worlds legendary and velvet assassin was headquartered in middleothian is that what you mean when you say you do things a little bit differently down here i didn't know that and i went and looked and you're right just for people that know middleothian is like the next town over for me i had no fucking idea that's really weird like truly weird.

44:16Dustin Furman:South Peak Games was a double A publisher for probably from the mid to late 90s through the financial crisis. And I was looking them up to see like some of the things that they publish otherwise. And some of them are pretty interesting because they did publish a few fascinating games. But one of them was the 2009 game X blades. Do you guys remember that game? I do. Specifically the box art. I was like the box art is so inappropriate that I can't even believe that that was the box art. that game yeah yeah x blades i remember the box art specifically because i remember the box art specifically because i i was i was just like what is what is this why is this on the xbox store it's crazy like i i there's one specifically with her ass because it seems like there might be two of them like i'm looking at the ass one yeah the ass one was the original one yeah right when i remember it's like holy moly what is going on with this box like that's it's kind of a in some way it's a different era in the more sexualized way but in some way you you're kind of surprised you got away with something so graphic yeah that's that's like i'm not even like a prude really but that's like that's pretty egregious for box art you know like jesus christ but cheeks save something for the game i know x blades gaijin entertainment which is this all right this game this game was i think it was like okay i was about to ask yeah i was about to ask a stupid question and the question was was this game good yeah you know the answer yeah all right finally president of the uca small pp man wrote in and said hey fellas can we take a second to acknowledge how truly unhinged the openings to the show have gotten last week not long after Colin thanked the non-existent write-in for his rant threatening to cancel his own wife's show because Gene was talking too much shit you received a write-in regarding the three-year anniversary of the tomb raider script at the end of your response you proceeded to speculate and subsequently research exactly how long ago that happened and found yourself and found yourself surprised that it was exactly three years ago you know the very reason why you received the right in the first place never changed boys thank you for writing it I really have no idea what's going on anyway I'm like totally broken.

46:34We're all we're all fried, cooked, sauteed, poached, steamed. We're every everything is we're done. The Internet is fried us like sincerely. I think like even if you're like cognizant and you're aware of it, like that's one thing it's like good for you, I guess. But like it's still true, you know, like you're still algorithmically like I'm just completely

46:57Dustin Furman:baked. I'm totally I am. I'm I know no one knows how fried I am more than me. because dude I didn't catch that either I don't remember that at all like I don't remember like I think I remember you talking about like oh it was three years exactly and I was like wow that's crazy it's done it's over oh I just got a email from my pillow oh really are they setting up the next January 6th yeah I don't know they need more money oh the body pillow is on sale They got to say that my body pillow now. Oh, the body. I have the it's not. I don't know if it would be considered. It's like long. It's probably this.

47:38Dustin Furman:I don't know what that would be. Three feet, two and a half feet. But I snuggle up with that thing. I'm going to tell you what. I'll tell you what. I love my Mike Lindell body pillow.

47:52Colin Moriarty:How hard would it be to print our own body pillows? Like surely we could probably get printed just like a case. Yeah, like a pillow. That might be good. yeah yeah we should consider that that would be a funny idea there's that image that goes around

48:06Dustin Furman:i don't know if it's real or not but of the one of the um one of the guys from red letter media on a pillow i don't like i like but like an anime version of them yeah um you know i'm talking about sounds i think i remember that but i don't know if that's like actually real or if that's just like a meme i can't see it quite quite well enough i can't quite envisage it in my mind's eye like the apple well the reality is like if you see anything online anymore it's it is crazy how like if you see anything online from this point forward you might as well not have seen it because it's it's pretty good chance it's not real at all because we're at that point yep it's great it's really wonderful i'm definitely not captured by it at all and i definitely don't just spend all my time on on the internet and playing video games all right let's get into the news yeah i wanted to start with just a quick uh nod here because i didn't know about this and then i went and looked it up and it's pretty cool noah the nintendo nerd wrote in and said hey cdc i just wanted to spread the word about the ghost of yote film festival happening this month at alamo draft house if you didn't know sony acquired alamo last year and this seems to be the first gaming relevant development to come out of the purchase each weekend in august a different classic samurai film that inspired ghost of yote is being screened complete with an exclusive menu of japanese dishes and a pre-show showcasing the game.

49:23Dustin Furman:They even have a popcorn bucket in the shape of a rice basket for you degenerates out there. I went to the first film last weekend, 1962's The Tale of Zatiochi, and afterwards got tickets for the rest. As someone who enjoyed Tsushima slightly less than most, this is doing a great job of getting me in the mood before launch. It also has me pondering possibilities for the future. A film festival curated by Kojima, perhaps? I'll keep my eyes peeled for any listeners attending at the Twin Cities locations. I'll perform Harry Caray on myself and listen. Well, if you perform Harry Caray on yourself, if you're not going to listen.

49:52Dustin Furman:So be safe out there and be well. That's really cool. I went and looked it up. I went and looked up the popcorn bucket specifically. Very nice collector's item. I didn't hear about this. I don't know how I didn't hear about this. They're not doing it. Well, I'm going to say they're not doing a good job of promoting this, but I never go to the movies. So how the fuck? I haven't been to an Alamo Drafthouse in almost 10 years probably at this point. So I think Independence Day 2 was the last movie I saw once. So that was 2016. Jesus Christ. What a choice. Well, I'm a huge Independence Day fan. Like the first movie is fucking awesome.

50:23Dustin Furman:No, no. Correct. So I had to see the second one. But it was it was one of the worst movies I ever saw in my life. Yeah.

50:31Colin Moriarty:Yeah. I couldn't believe it. I was like, how did you fuck this? Wait, did you say that's the last movie you saw in theaters? No, Alamo draft. Oh, at Alamo. I was like, OK, I know. I know you've seen a few since.

50:40Dustin Furman:Well, I remember because I got really I'm not really drunk, but I got pretty drunk because I was like, this is so boring. I was just eating and drinking. I couldn't believe how badly they botched it. But yeah, no, I. But honestly, I've probably been to fewer than 10 movies since then. Yeah.

50:55Colin Moriarty:Yeah. Did you hear about this?

50:57Dustin Furman:Do you have an Alamo near area?

50:59Colin Moriarty:No, no, no Alamos here, unfortunately. I think I saw a few weeks ago, like the popcorn bucket circulate. And I saw, I was like, oh, they're showing these films. Sounds cool. A lot of these samurai films, I've never seen any of them. And they're supposed to be amazing. So I think it's a cool idea as far as like integrate product integration. and alamo's sick i wish we had anything near that cool around here but um yeah do you have any do

51:27Dustin Furman:have any of those kinds of theaters around you because i love i do love that whole notion of like going and watching the movie but you're eating and like it's so cool you just you order your food they kind of discreetly bring you your drinks they have good cocktails i dig it personally

51:39Colin Moriarty:yeah we don't have anything like that around here i i think the last movie i saw alamo might have been the most recent indiana jones movie and anytime i've gone there this was when my parents lived in virginia it's cool i just i'm too cheap for it dude at the like at the end i'm like man it was a bunch of uh mediocre food and the drinks are all right but they're expensive i'm like man i just spent like a hundred dollars it was more than a hundred bucks i don't i don't know i don't

52:08Dustin Furman:know their finances well enough to be able to speak about this definitively but i'm a little surprised. I know that the movies are actually fairly cheap, like the tickets are actually fairly cheap to go there because obviously their margin is on food. But you would think that like you would just even make it free with a minimum purchase. Right. In other words, like reserve the spot and you have to spend 30 bucks or whatever and just remove the movie ticket from it entirely. And I bet you the psychology of that would allow people to spend more money more freely as if they're going to a bar or going out to a restaurant and you're kind of getting free entertainment like the house band or whatever i don't know if that's really manageable but i would think that that would be an interesting an interesting idea um but i totally understand i mean it's crazy how much it can cost you can even get drinks at the bar before like they have a bar there or at least in my experience and so it's like what are we doing yeah dude i can't even imagine how expensive it

53:00Colin Moriarty:probably is now because i was there like what three two or three years ago now and everything is somehow exponentially more expensive than it was even just two or three years ago it's probably

53:11Dustin Furman:heinous so i i um when i was at kind of funny the son of the founder of alamo draft house was a big fan i don't know if i lost him in the divorce or not like i don't know like which way he went but he sent us like thou as i remember thousands of dollars of gift cards to alamo like I think I don't think I ever even used like what they like my portion of it or whatever it was literally like a few hundred for each of us or something and I always remember that but I don't I never haven't heard from him since so I probably lost him

53:47Colin Moriarty:he's probably got good advertising because I'm sure that anytime you guys went to a movie

53:51Dustin Furman:you talked about going to Alamo yeah we would go to the one in the there's one in the mission in San Francisco or there was I don't know if it's still there and then there was a really good good Mexican places everywhere there but a good Mexican place right around the corner and go get food afterwards. It was pretty cool. Yeah. I actually went and saw suicide, the suicide squad movie there and the power went out. It's a very funny story in my mind. Like right before the movie, the power went out and I was like, I'm taking, I literally was to the guys was like, I'm taking this as a sign. I don't want to see this movie.

54:19Dustin Furman:And I, and I, and I, and I left and went home and they ended up going to a different movie theater in the suburbs to see it. Cause we needed to do it for a review. But I was like, that's a sign from God. That's hilarious. Which one? the one i guess it was the original right yeah 2016 maybe it came out that's a good yeah that's a good movie to get a sign from yeah yeah i was like that is so because i was like i don't really want to see this movie but i was like going in and then that happened i was like i'm out of here that was the universe clearly protecting you that that that first suicide squad movie is terrible it uh i've heard bad things about it that's the one with will smith right yeah it's like will smith it's weird that he's even in i actually didn't couldn't he not do independence day 2 because of suicide squad i think that there was like a filming conflict because i think they came out around the same time too which is like that's always true with him that's always true with him i feel like uh i feel like he's always picking i mean granted both of those are bad oh yeah doesn't he have like four or five like seminal roles that he turned down like truly seminal neo neo in the matrix um there was something else there was another character too like i don't i'll look there's like i think there's like two other ones where it's just like oh um jango right neo in the matrius he also oh and he had and he was offered the lead in inception he was great he was offered the lead in in phone booth i remember that because that was the first time i'd ever heard of colin farrell and that was the first time i ever really there was a colin in the real world that i ever knew about right um Um, Yeah, that's so yeah, it's Inception, Django and the Matrix.

55:57Dustin Furman:That's that's quite the run. That is fire your manager at that. You know what I mean? Like, that's crazy to to miss out like one. I think everybody has like one that got away in that world probably. Right. It's like, oh, I could have done. I should have done this or whatever. I actually think somebody had a similar experience with Will Smith in Independence Day where like they were going to get the role for Will Smith's part and they turned it down because they thought the script was dumb or whatever. that i don't remember who the fuck it was it was bad no no the original oh the original oh no not bad not bad it was like some actor i saw some interview i wish i could remember his name somebody in the audience will know but like he was giving an interview about like how like yeah i read the script from for independence day and it comes to that scene of the him punching the alien he goes welcome to earth and he's like this sucks and he just threw the script off the highway or whatever and then he went to go see and he was like damn I could have had this role so it happens to everybody I would imagine in that business it's a competitive business I love the first independence I love the whole thing about welcome to earth but he doesn't really say it like that if you like watch he doesn't say that he says welcome to earth yeah but everyone is like welcome to earth

57:15Dustin Furman:like that's what people really believe it's like the sin bad uh movie that everyone thinks exists but doesn't it's like oh yeah the genie one i remember that movie though i do too i don't know that's a weird i don't know that's that's a that's a whole thing that i've just agreed for myself to never talk about because i think it would send me spiraling i'm convinced that that movie is real but we don't talk about that all right let's see no we don't um dustin i'll be wanting to hear back about the ghost of yote film festival at alamo from me yeah okay i just got to drive like six hours yeah all right cool yeah that'll be good actually just have someone go and you can facetime yeah in the movie that'd be great the worst possible way this is it is cool that they're doing this i like this trend of like re like old movies in theaters again yeah I like that too yeah it's a cool it's a great way to get to be able to see things that you weren't were in it like I would love to see like airplane in a theater you know what I mean with like a bunch of people who like are just like gonna be that's that seems like a really fun experience speaking jive I love that scene that's like my favorite scene that goes around every once in a while on social media too I always watch it when it when it happens okay and yeah you saw the new naked gun yeah yeah yeah they they did a pretty good job i i was pretty surprised by it every every bad joke was in the trailer though which is like confusing to me but that was like it really blew my mind it's like all the worst jokes were in the trailer it's like they didn't want you to see it it's it's very weird i wonder how it's i wonder how it's doing i haven't i don't ever look at the yeah i don't know i box i don't i i think it was made with a pretty lean budget it's a comedy so like i think it's probably doing even if it's doing bad it's probably doing well but uh i don't really know um i think it's on par with the original naked guns but i don't think it's better than police squad if that makes sense have you ever seen police squad yeah well no the the show the show yeah no i've never seen this show police squad no the i'm surprised at how much funnier the show is we were saying that the other day i think like maybe a couple months ago you and i were discussing i was like i don't think i even really knew that it started as a tv show i didn't know either so when it says like naked gun tales from the police squad or whatever i just thought that was the subtitle no me too but it's yeah it's like it's like a six episode show and like the show is a lot i i think it's funnier the movies get like wackier and wackier as it goes along it kind of becomes like this the situation where like i think they want leslie nielsen to be wackier but like i actually think he's funnier when he when he's like an airplane when he's just completely monotone and completely straight that's what like the police squad is like and that's what the first naked gun is like but then the naked gun 2 and 33 is like it's it's way more wacky which is still funny but it's like i would say the new naked gun is is like the naked gun movies where it's like it's it's about like that's pretty good but like police squad is hysterical i uh i couldn't believe how funny it was when i just really appreciated that they acknowledge norberg and i in the and and that i i'm surprised they did it in the trailer because i think that would have been fucking hysterical to like have that in the movie and not have anyone really know you know that like they actually acknowledge oj simpson which i think is just fucking hysterical to me yeah because he's awesome in those movies like he is great hysterical this yeah because his the first scene of him is amazing where he's like he gets shot up and then he like burns his hand on the stove and then he leans on the wet paint him leaning on the wet paint and going oh no it's like one of my favorite it's it's really good the original naked guns are great um and the new one's really great too i do recommend it but but if you can get your hands on police squad which by the way is a bitch to get a hold of it's not streaming i i found it on like some random link on twitter by happenstance and that's how i watched all of it but like that is some preem preem stuff.

1:01:26I wonder who owns the rights to it.

1:01:27Dustin Furman:That'd be interesting to get that going again. Yeah. All right. Let's get into some other news here. So yeah, go see Yote stuff happening at your local Alamo draft house. If you want to check that out, I thought that was pretty cool. But the news begins with new Sony financials. They've released their financial statement for Q1 2025. We're obviously in calendar year, CY Q3. So they're always two quarters behind. So this is the beginning of their new fiscal year um they've announced that they've now surpassed 80 million ps5 sold and those are obviously still shipped to it's so funny the whole ship to sold thing like they don't make consoles that they're not going to sell people are like acting like there's really much of a difference in the differentiation between this i'm like not really we're talking about probably a million units in difference that like what's in the channel to what's being sold They don't keep making them and selling them to the places that aren't set themselves.

1:02:23Dustin Furman:Something doesn't make any sense. I don't know what anyone's talking about. Over on games industry app is they have a nice little melt. How's he say meltdown? I'm having a meltdown. They have a nice little cut down of everything that's kind of important there. This is because they're a Japanese company. They released their statements late last night and then their financial call didn't go up until three in the morning. So I haven't watched it yet. so I can't get any of this stuff out myself because we had to do the show. I didn't want to delay the show too much, but here's what they say. Quote, Sony has released its financial results for Q1 2025, revealing an 8 % sales income and 127 % operating income increase year on year for its games and network services division.

1:03:02Dustin Furman:The company also revealed PlayStation 5 and game software sales have seen a boost since the same period last year. And we won't talk about numbers in the end. Who gives a shit? According to the financial results, Sony's GNNS division saw an overall increase of 8.1 % year over year,$6.3 billion. Sales are up across the majority of the division with hardware sales up 4.7%, game software sales up 11%, and network services like PlayStation Plus up 8.3%. Sales in its other segment, however, are down 3.2%. Breaking this down, Sony revealed that sales physical software hit$157 million in Q1, up 10 % year over year, while digital software sales were$1.38 billion and saw a more substantial increase of 40.6 % year over year.

1:03:48Dustin Furman:How does that make you feel, Dustin? Only$157 million in physical sales for the quarter, up$1.38 billion in digital sales. I think that's an 83 % ratio as they report, the highest they've ever reported.

1:04:02Colin Moriarty:Oh, it's not surprising.

1:04:03Dustin Furman:No. The number does fluctuate though. It's important to note this. If you look at the numbers, quarter over quarter and year over year the number is always highest this quarter and it goes down um as we get closer to the holiday season as people i think buy more physical games and as more triple a games come and people want them box so it'll probably go back down to the 70s but it has never been as highly reported as 83 which is it was now so very very interesting add-on content sales are up 0.6 year over year while other software dropped to 23.5 year over year the report also revealed that PlayStation 5 sales have seen a small 4.2 % increase.

1:04:41Dustin Furman:PlayStation's third-party titles have seen a major 22.9 % year-over-year boost, and first-party titles are up to by 15 % year-over-year. Really great results. Dustin, do you have any reflections that you want to share on these? It's not too much to say. I mean, it's not a huge surprise. Operating income up 100. I mean, they're starting to make up over 100%, so they're starting to make pretty substantial amounts of money. And as I read, Sony made more money in profit this quarter, this last quarter than they did for the entirety of the PS one generation or about that. Which is like, what? Like, I don't even know.

1:05:24Dustin Furman:Obviously, these numbers are unadjusted and the games industry is a lot different now, but that's fucking crazy. It's also worth noting in the PS generation they lost money so they're making it's it's just i don't know it's pretty remarkable but 80 million ps5s give me three to five minutes on this three to five well that's i don't know if i

1:05:42Colin Moriarty:can cut it down that much if i'm being honest okay um but yeah it's it's i i think the the main thing that's interesting to me and i think you pointed this out last night on twitter is that This is everything is up, but imagine how up it's going to be when Grand Theft Auto comes out, because that is just going to be such a big system seller, not only for PlayStation 5, but I think also that's going to be the game that's going to motivate people to buy another PlayStation 5 with PlayStation 5 Pro, whether it's 60 FPS or 30, whatever. it doesn't matter uh if there are people when that game comes out are going to say where am i going to get the highest quality grand theft auto experience and assuming assumingly it's going to be on playstation 5 pro so um it's just it's the same kind of thing that we've been saying uh with the last financial results is that this past year there's been all this a lot of doom and gloom around Sony because of their first party output being much lower in the past.

1:06:47Colin Moriarty:But the same thing we said then still stands. It just it simply does not matter.

1:06:52Dustin Furman:Nope, doesn't matter. Nope. You can look at it as them doing it with one arm tied behind their back. If you look at the lack of software and stuff, but just from them. But again, just that it doesn't it doesn't matter. And it's it's it matters to us. We want those games. I want those games. But to the market, it really doesn't matter. I mean, you could even see that with just Death Stranding, too. I think Death Stranding 2 is extraordinarily good. It's my game of the year so far, but it probably is only sold one and a half million copies or something. I would just predict. I mean, that's just me throwing it out there.

1:07:20Dustin Furman:Now, that's not a huge surprise. As we've said before, it took more than two years, I think, for it to hit five million and it had to go to the original and it had to go to PC for that to happen and then wait a year. So it was never a huge game. It's like a Metroid. It's the Metroid of PlayStation. And yeah, but it just goes to show you like that's kind of the zeitgeist for PlayStation hardcore fans. But there's most people that play on PlayStation. Don't give a fuck. about Death Stranding 2. And I just can't imagine. I keep imagining, Chris, how... And this is what Dustin has been saying. It's like, imagine where they'd be right now if they were really firing on all cylinders.

1:07:56Dustin Furman:And they didn't... They weren't a more... They're amortizing all the losses that they've taken. So, like, they're showing profit, a significant profit, even when they're losing hundreds of millions of dollars on some of these various games. So, what are your reflections on this? Anything stick out to you? yeah well i mean i think i brought this up on a previous uh when we talked about financials before i don't know if it was super recently but like i know in the last like month or two where i do think a big part of the story is the fact that this generation is uniquely cross cross gen like the the ps4 is very very active um sony's doing well and so yeah and the ps5 is doing well too and and it's you call it momentum call it a lack of real competition um whatever it is um they're doing really well with very little on the docket or at least very little on the docket that would seem to drive people to to the platform and so yeah i mean they're they're healthy which is just goes to show i mean like look money talks the internet's allowed but money talks and um it's all all sorts of doom and gloom about playstation and what's happening to the what's happening to it or whatever but people are out there buying yeah the doom and gloom is i mean the doom and gloom is nonsense just yeah just absolute fanboy fodder like just disruptive annoying yeah detached from reality aspects of it i think are for sure we'll say more say more well i think like i think there is validity and being kind of like oh man i wish we could i wish we got more out of the like development times being long and and budgets being overblown and you know i do think there's like valid you know ways to feel like disappointed by certain things but ultimately doesn't really seem to matter and that's the way it is yeah the it's um i agree with you i mean i'm disappointed in a lot of ways too and like i i do think the ps5 generation is missing definition it it seems like it just kind of is is going and happening and I feel like maybe it's because gaming is becoming more than ever more agnostic where one of the three competitors has kind of been knocked out and with that comes as from the competition as we understand it where yeah and so I think that brings with it a distillation of that experience kind of put into other places making them seem less defined specifically with playstation in other words playstation being dominated by xbox games which is happening whether or not they go out and buy them or not i mean activision and bethesda i'm never really going to consider those xbox games but they are microsoft games that kind of tints things a little differently i think that that's fair yeah and oh good i mean i just think it's a it's a generation this generation is a generation that's kind of tinted in the colors of the past in a lot of ways where it's like there's you know remake remaster whatever collection and then there's a lot of old games from xboxes you know uh from xbox coming like gears of wars coming this month it's very exciting very cool um but i think just generally you know when i think about ps1 to ps2 and ps2 to ps3 and even ps2 ps3 to ps4 like it felt like there were a slew of games that were like you had sequels of course but it felt like they were you reached the point in a complete trilogy a lot faster back then and so it made it more natural for the next machine to also move on to something new whereas i think the trunk or like the the extension of game dev cycles have made it so a lot of what was big on ps4 is still big now like i think about even just like halo for the xbox generation and then like oh ps4 uh and and xbox one all right now it's destiny but like you know we're ps5 now and it's it's still it's still destiny you know what i mean it's still god of war is going to be a new god of war it's it's still horizon from ps4 and so like i just think that kind of makes it feel like more ps4 rather than like oh this is ps5 like that's to say we haven't had new ip obviously saros is coming intergalactic is coming but intergalactic is coming way way late in comparison to when we would have expected something like intergalactic to come out for a new generation it used to be like oh a new generation's coming we're going to get a new ip in like a year that's what it used to be like but it can't be that way anymore and i get that but it does lead to a psychological feeling of like this generation just feels ill-defined yeah or it feels like it lacks an identity that's i agree with that prior generation it's funny on the moore's law podcast that I do with him about PS6 that goes on Sacred Symbols Plus tomorrow.

1:13:07Dustin Furman:We talk a little bit about identity problems and that generation... Because he's talking about how... And basically, the word about PS6 is that it's going to be a more affordable machine. He contends that the PS6 will be cheaper than people think and that it could be as cheap as$500 when it comes out. With that, it's going to be a much cheaper machine for them to make and it's going to be really powerful. He's basically saying like a reliable 4k 120 machine and we were saying um and he was saying like it's not gonna and we were basically saying i nes to snes and especially snes to n64 felt like huge jumps i remember when i played super mario world as a kid and i was like you could tell and feel the difference and then obviously n64 and the move to polygonal and 3d gaming speaks for itself and then i think there was a big jump from ps2 to ps3 as well i feel like that's not ever going to happen again.

1:13:59Dustin Furman:And people kind of have to accept that it simply can't happen again. And what he, and what Tom was making the argument for was you have like 120 Hertz monitor. It's not going to get any better than 120 frames. You have a 4k monitor. It's not going to get any better than 4k. Now it's going to be, it can get better, but you're going to have to like adapt your life and get an 8k television or all of these different things. And so we're getting to a point where what the machines are, how the machines are going to differentiate themselves by generation are going to be the things that they do to the inside of the game like ai right procedural generation the way you deal with npcs and quests and that's going to be the power because we're reaching a we were talking specifically about that stranding tour i'm like that stranding two is so fucking beautiful that it is photorealistic in a lot of ways there are there are times where it's like this is how can it be any better than this right and so i don't feel like i'm looking for power differentials and so it has to come from the games and i do agree that there have been awesome games this generation but there are games that can be played anywhere and that's fine for the most part and that's fine i don't really give a shit but i don't so i think you're right and i don't blame people for saying there's something so there's like a je ne sais quoi that's missing about this generation but i just think it will either be captured late in the generation or which is kind of what happened with ps4 actually when you really think about it i mean it obviously had some defining games but it really hit its stride very late i mean it's last two major games were the last of us part two and ghost of tsushima that's pretty crazy true um yeah but ps4 also it's ps4 also started with weird like the order was that you know what i mean like there was there was something there even if things didn't always hit bloodborne um yeah and the sad reality too is like it might not even like we're focused on this stuff because we're clued into it and we're in tune with even just prior generations and we care but like the reality is too that like while there may be a lacking identity in ps5 it's very possible and i would argue probably even probably very very likely that nobody cares nobody really cares about that like we do but like your average person probably doesn't give a fuck about or your average person who's playing on playstation i should say obviously your average person doesn't care about anything right but your average uh person playing playing on playstation probably doesn't care that the ps5 doesn't have a mascot you know what i mean like i i i can't imagine that they do and that's kind of reinforced by the fact that they're selling well and it doesn't really seem to be impeding them in any real way um it's really more of a vibe than anything for the hardcore people and it might not matter at all marco bruno wrote in said high secrets sony's cfo lin tao just recently stated that 40 of the companies i don't think so i don't think lin tao is a sony cfo i thought hiroki tatoki was cfo um recently stated that 40 of the company's first party software revenue for q1 was from live service the exact quote via video games chronicle is quote for q1 the live service ratio was about 40 for the full year it's a little less probably between 20 and 30 so in terms of the transformation It's not going smoothly, but from a longer term perspective, if you look at the changes over five years, you see there's definitely there's definitely been a change.

1:17:19Dustin Furman:I quote my question is, what do you think she means by transformation?

1:17:24Dustin Furman:I can't I'm not saying it's you, Marco, but just generally everyone's got to stop sticking their heads in the sand. The transformation is that they're going to make more and more and more and more and more money on games as a service. It just is what it is. I'm sorry. If I was in control of the games industry, if everyone purchased games like I did, and I'm not saying the volume of games, I'm saying if you purchase the games I did, it would be a very different gaming ecosystem. But most I am the outlier. These two guys, Dustin and Chris, are much closer to the normal gamer today, and they're also outliers.

1:18:04Dustin Furman:The they I don't know. I don't know how else to say it. It's just like we can't, and again, I'm not trying to pick on you, Marco, just because I know you're asking an earnest question, but the transformation is in becoming a company that churns games as a service dollars with supplemental single player experience dollars. The amount of money being made on these popular games as a service cannot be made by single player games. It's not that it won't be, it's that it can't be. They simply can't sell enough of them. there's not enough interest in them they cost too much to make they take too long to make so that's what they mean and it's cool to see that they acknowledge that they kind of everything up although i think they've acknowledged that several times at this point um other things they noted i don't know if you saw this chris that they they said that bungie is being further integrated into playstation studios which is not a huge surprise i mean obviously just a complete waste for sony to do this but they have to salvage it in some way so that's happening and i don't something else that i thought was really interesting as well um and i'm amped about this because i am a protectionist is though it's not it's not forcing sony to create playstations in the u.s i don't know if you guys saw that all playstation fives being sold in the u.s will now be made outside of china so and they've officially like acknowledged that that that's how they're avoiding tariffs and in fact if you look at their financial guidance, not only do they increase sales expectations, but they also increase sales expectations or at least net income expectations based on the fact that they think tariffs will be less effective for them now that they've figured out how to move their production outside of China for the US.

1:19:46Dustin Furman:So half a win for that economic model, I guess, but good that they figured out and it won't raise the price of PS5. This is the economy of scale that Sony can flex that a lot of other and something that Tom was saying a lot in our podcast is like they just have technological economies of scale that most companies can't imagine. Obviously, not to the level of Apple or something, but on the next tier below that so they can keep the cost down. Monkey D. Luffy wrote in. That's how you say it, right? Yes. Says, hi, CDC. Sony just released its financial results and have over 80 million PS5 sold. With the sales success of the PS5 and the Switch 2, why in God's green earth do some people think that PlayStation hardware would go away after the PS6 and be replaced by streaming.

1:20:32Dustin Furman:I don't understand how Jaffe and even Colin thinks this is possible with the sales success of the PS5. They've been talking about the Sony hardware decline for years and it never happens. There will be a PS6, PS7 and beyond. Thank you and I'll hang up and listen while I use a grater on my own skin. That's something that happens in One Piece? All the time. Yeah. I didn't know if he was referencing the show.

1:20:53Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I don't know if Monkey D. Luffy ever i mean he does almost rip off his arms a few different times but it doesn't involve a greater so fair enough monkey do luffy thank you for writing in i just feel like i i agree again

1:21:07Dustin Furman:if it was up to me we would play games the way we play games now forever dedicated hardware ethernet cables downloadable or disc like i don't give a fuck if people use disc i think that should be an option for people i don't see why you wouldn't make that an option i think you can imagine that the PlayStation 6 will have an external disk drive. I think that that's going to be a thing. But I just feel like eventually it's got to run its course, right? Or maybe not. I just and I agree. People have been prognosticating this for a long time. I mean, by the time on live came on to the market, which is like been almost 20 years, right?

1:21:48Dustin Furman:People are like, oh, this is the end. and you've seen the OUYA and Google Stadia and all these different ways of doing things to try to like decentralize and send to the cloud or whatever all and offload all this stuff and obviously there's a lot of technical limitations specifically in the United States because not everyone has good internet and you have to have certain data centers near you it's why I always tell Jeff he's like he's having a great experience when he plays cloud gaming and stuff because he lives in fucking San Diego yep I mean period end of story if you live in Duluth you might have a different outcome.

1:22:19So Chris,

1:22:21Dustin Furman:actually, Dustin, let's go to you first on this one. I'm sorry. Where are you on this idea that we will eventually migrate away from this console? Is it safe to assume there will be a PlayStation 7? I hate that we're even talking about this. I put the letter in here.

1:22:37Colin Moriarty:Yeah. I feel like for the foreseeable future, including up to PlayStation 7, I imagine that we will be buying dedicated hardware and it comes back to what you were saying about people's internet even brad when i was at his house who lives and he lives in irvine right his internet was ass sorry brad but i was suffering trying to download and upload episodes uh when i was at his house compared to here um and even for me where i have fiber two gigabyte up and down a lot of these streaming services simply are too far away from my location and so most of them don't run very well i have been told that there are some that are better than the others uh the nvidia one is supposed to be pretty good i haven't tried that but anytime i've tried xbox cloud streaming or playstation for that matter um because i have tried that in the last like month or two uh it's very impressive and for a lot of people it would probably be good depending on the game it's not good enough for me and i'm sure it's not good enough for a lot of people so until that level of infrastructure is met which i don't see for quite a while i can't see our hardware being replaced by streaming i think the harder thing to tackle is that and this is what we were talking about earlier with playstation 6 is that let's say it is a consistent 4k 20 box certainly you can go higher uh you can do higher resolutions and more easily you can do higher frame rates like my monitor here is 240 hertz but what is the well i'm gonna let you finish yeah so here yeah that's actually what i was about to get into is that 240 hertz is appealing to me when i'm playing certain types of games particularly shooters the high frame rate um it does get rid of a little bit of latency right um you feel like the connection to the game feels quicker or stronger not like like your internet but just like you visually are getting more information now with that being said anything beyond 120 hertz is not appealing mass market i would think for a console audience it's just not most people aren't going to see difference in fact most people can't see the difference between 60 and 20 and 120 which i feel like is pretty obvious but for a lot of people they just see and they're like oh i it looks exactly the same so that the problem then comes with playstation 6 if it is a 4k 60 machine or 4k 120 where do you go from there um at that point the upgrades need to be as we were saying within the games themselves so i think that there will be better technology in terms of like upscaling ai frame generation uh developers will always take advantage of as much bandwidth you can give them so it'll be different in how those uh like playstation 7 is presented because there's not going to be like a in theory there's not going to be like well this is it's now higher resolution and now it's higher frame rate it's like well if we peaked there then you know you have to find new ways and new things to do with the hardware itself so all this long 20 minute rant did i hit the 20 minutes yet yeah no that's you've done well yeah yeah uh all that being said i believe that for at least playstation 6 and playstation 7 we will get boxes it's just the infrastructure for any kind of streaming is not there yet.

1:26:30Dustin Furman:Do you have anything you want to add, Chris, on this? Are you in the of the will we be playing the same way 20 years from now? 20, certainly not 20. Yeah, certainly 20. Certainly not 20. I think I don't know. I think it's more likely the issue with streaming, I guess, in the way that we expect it to be, meaning not the way that I use it, where like I install a game on my on my on my real hardware and access it through my Steam Deck or something within my own home network. That works really, really well. I play a lot like that. And it works surprisingly. Like there's barely any latency. Like I wouldn't necessarily play like a PVP multiplayer game in there because I'm sure there is something.

1:27:13And obviously that's more bandwidth being used to connect you to the game and to stream it. So like it's just kind of generally inconsistent. But the way that we think about streaming now where it's like, oh, no, I don't even need hardware. I can stream it to this device from like some server far away. That is not necessarily, that's not a technological limitation. That's more of like, I mean, realistically, that's a corporate limitation. There's a lot of like, if you really analyze the way that internet companies operate, even for a half second, you know that they're not, you're not. we have the ability to give everybody really good internet the technology is there like in spades the reality is it's like there's all sorts of politics involved and it's borderline drug war turf shit it's it's ridiculous so i don't foresee that getting fixed at all in in the foreseeable future i just that's that's done i've lost hope entirely for that so no matter how good technology gets like that's a problem that will always be there and so like that's kind of whatever um i think it's more likely that the technology to reach the bare minimum or or the colloquial maximum of like what we would expect out of our hardware be that like 4k 1 4k 120 i would argue even 4k 60 is really like probably like what most people would really care about i don't think most people give a shit about 120 i see the difference but i'm also like Like I can see the difference between 30, 60 and 120.

1:28:49But to me, 60 is perfectly fine. Like I've seen 120. It's like, yeah, that's good. I don't need it if it's going to impact my if it's going to impact everything else. I think it's more likely that we're at a point now, like you were talking about with graphics, where we've just kind of hit a point now where this is all we really need to be able to do. We really only need to be able to do 4K 120. Like we could do 4K or 8K 240, I guess. but nobody cares about that and it's a lot of resource management that goes into that and so if we just focus on this technology will get better devices will get smaller and i think i i foresee a future where like the technology to run a game at 4k 60 which will be bare minimum at that point will be small enough that you could feasibly probably integrate it into a display or like into a tv and you probably wouldn't even need a dedicated piece of hardware anyway you just need like maybe like that device to be able to run it and then something in the tv to connect you to the service um i think it's more likely that that's where things will probably go um than a streaming future where like we're all just like streaming stuff to our machines because even even within the context of people who play video games in those spaces streaming is still a really really niche kind of outlier way of accessing that material like even within our niche of niche of niches and so i just i don't foresee that being something that they dedicate a lot of time to figuring it out especially because the problems that arise from trying to solve that problem or the roadblocks that arise from trying to solve that problem don't even have anything to do with them or their ability to make technology but more about like politics that are completely outside of their control anyway and so that's really what i see in the like maybe by the time ps7 comes out like i i could see the ps7 being fucking small like like absurdly tiny um it's funny you said need because tom was even saying tom has this idea that they might even do a ps6s style console and he was saying that it would be the size of like a router um yeah i mean i could see it even smaller like i i genuinely i mean really think about think about the fact that an iphone can run resident evil 4 remake like at a shitty frame rate to be fair but like that it does that at all with that in that form factor is crazy and if we have a ceiling where we just kind of collectively agree it's like it doesn't really need to be bigger than better than 120 or 4k 120 or 4k 60 technology is going to allow you to facilitate that easier and you won't need a bigger machine to facilitate for like 9k 10k 15k all the cooling you need to put into it and shit yeah it's it's that i think is more likely um in fact i think it's pretty certain i don't know how quickly we'll get there um and i don't know what the landscape will look like but i have to imagine

1:32:02Dustin Furman:that that's probably going to happen um i'm totally with you that we should have some sort of armistice like tech race armistice at 120 for like 4k 120 and because and this is what i was I didn't want to interrupt us when he was flown before, but that's what I was going to say is like, who like 240 frames a second.

1:32:25Colin Moriarty:Yeah.

1:32:26Dustin Furman:It's like, what do we do? Like, really? I've played it. I've played games like that and it is cool, but like, I, I definitely like, I don't need it at all. Like, it's not something that's like a, that's even close to a, like a make it or like 60 to me is so fine. I, it's so, it's exactly as perfect as I need it to be. 120 is nice. It's an, everything but that's the thing it's like it's everything's like nice like that's nice but then like there's like a necessary i think 60 is the new necessary really yeah for for games that don't for games that aren't obviously pushing the envelope anywhere else like i have no doubt gta 6 will be 30 frames per second and people will eat it up and they'll love it um that's because i assume that game is going to be doing so much else um right to make up for that but not every

1:33:13Colin Moriarty:game is that the thing about high frame rate games colin is that it's it's really specifically for hyper competitive games like playing counter-strike on pc right um and even then like if you if you had me play counter-strike on 60 120 and 240 i'd probably do a little better at 120 than 60 but it's not really going to make a difference for for me as a as someone who doesn't play counter-strike but for hardcore competitive um like people that are in you know big esports tournaments that reduction of that latency and the other thing too is that once you get beyond 240 because there are monitors that do more than that that do like 500 plus hertz uh it is completely diminishing returns at that point like 240s it has to be because like how can you discern it

1:34:08Dustin Furman:at some point like you know like maybe like i wonder what the human eye really discerns even well a lot of that really comes down to like almost that's really only useful for like cameras and like footage for for being able to you know what i mean like being able to capture more frames and more data yeah like if you're slowing it down or whatever yeah to do to do slow motion like i know there are cameras that i know that there are cameras that could like capture like millions of frames or something like something ridiculous so that they're able to capture every single detail and slow it down but yeah there are diminishing returns even on like a typical computer monitor is only so big to the point where like i even feel like a 4k monitor is pointless like i don't know if you get much out of a 4k monitor compared to like a 4k tv um just because it's like like imagine having an 8k monitor but the screen is already like so small like what do you even it's like having an 8 it's like having a 4k phone screen like what do you get what are you getting

1:35:03Colin Moriarty:out of that the 4k monitor i can see though because you're sitting so close to it it actually makes more sense to me than a 4k tv because when you're sitting that close the pixel density is going to be you know it's going to be a factor sure yeah i just feel like the pixel density being smaller in the first place kind of makes it feel higher resolution than it than it actually it's almost like an illusion of things kind of look better on monitors anyway because they are condensed and you are so close um that i i don't even really know like i've played primarily at like what is it uh oh my god what's that 1440 1440 to me is like entirely perfect like i have no issues like 1440 is like oh that's perfectly fine i don't even really need or see much of a benefit to 4k although mainly 4k the benefit is it looks slightly better but then it's harder to run and i'm always going to err on a better performance frame rate than right you know just get a 4090 chris that's what i always tell lock lock's like oh it doesn't run well on my computer i'm like just just pony up the money come on what's the problem i don't need it to run better i'm just kidding no but i've heard this argument i said also i'm saying i'm just kidding to the audience because i know that that is like the douchiest thing ever to be like oh just buy a 4090 bro just buy just get the 5090 bro come on what's the problem take out a second mortgage and get a fucking graphics card yeah i don't know um there's a video uh that i highly recommend if people are interested in this topic from linus tech tips called does high fps make you a better gamer uh where they brought in esports pros and had them play at different frame rates and try to do it scientific uh that's pretty pretty interesting pretty telling about this there is definitely a cutoff of what is uh what makes you better yeah i think if you need i shouldn't say that i was gonna say like i feel like if you need to play a 240 hertz to be good at a video game you're probably not that good at it you know what i mean like i feel like if you need that much information just operate the way everybody else is what are you doing you can't hack it can't figure it out

1:37:22Dustin Furman:shall we move on anything else to say about this did we use all the letters monkey monkey deluffy thank you for writing in monkey monkey deluffy

1:37:32Colin Moriarty:deluffy

1:37:34Dustin Furman:deluffy all right here's some news out of media molecule sony owned studio best known for a little big planet of course. David Smith is leaving the studio. 20 years ago, I founded Media Molecule, he writes, with some wonderful people. It feels like only yesterday that I was noodling away on the prototype that grew into LittleBigPlanet. Today, I'm announcing that I am leaving Media Molecule to focus on personal creative projects. Most of the founders came from Lionhead, a chaotic petri dish of creativity, and I couldn't have wished for a better training ground. Strongly influenced by that unconventional creativity, Media Molecule was born of a restless yearning to make exciting new experiences that we deeply believe in.

1:38:11Dustin Furman:we love making games and so we naturally wanted to share that joy of creativity with our players i'm proud to say that all of the games we've made and are making the spirit of creativity and joyfulness suffuses them all this has been an unregrettable use of those years more recently i've been feeling a growing itch to explore truly wild ideas and make things based on my personal whimsy though i still greatly enjoy the creative dynamic of working at media molecule there simply aren't enough hours in the day to work there and on my personal projects without entirely giving up on pursuing that mythical creature called the work-life balance so i've made the difficult decision to step away.

1:38:41Dustin Furman:I hope to be involved with Media Molecule in the future and to drop in from time to time. I greatly enjoy working with the team. It's a very different bunch to what we had 20 years ago, but the positivity and free exchange of ideas remains true to the founding spirit of the company. I'm leaving the company in very good hands. David is the gameplay director and has been the gameplay director of all of their games and you can kind of use that all of their games comment a little loosely these days because they haven't released a game in many years now. this is the final of the four major co-founders of LittleBigPlanet to leave.

1:39:16Dustin Furman:They're all gone now. That's Alex Evans, Mark Healy, and Kareem Atunia, the other three. And obviously, like you said, they came from Lionhead. Lionhead itself came from Bullfrog. So this is a pretty interesting legacy of creative games. Obviously, Peter Molyneux's spirit is heavily imbued into Media Molecule, even though he had nothing to do with the studio. you can see that being like the the shadow playstation version of a model new studio of course lion head was purchased by xbox in 2006 before the release of fable 2 which i think came out in 2008 so um they were in the family for a while and that's when those guys split off and made a media molecule pitch a little big planet phil harrison obviously heavily involved in getting that over the over the finish line all the rest um dustin where are you on on this i I don't know.

1:40:05Dustin Furman:I just can't. I don't want. Again, I don't like talking loosely about people's jobs and these companies. It's real. It's a real life. It's disruptive. It ruins people's fucking lives when they. But like, I just don't know how the studio is still going. And. I've said before, I'm really, really hope I'm wrong, but like I can imagine a reality where these guys don't release another game. And. They've just wasted so much time. so much time so much energy i was thinking that when they showed up with what would become dreams at the ps4 reveal event in new york city that was january 2013 they were already two years distant from little big planet 2 at that point and tearaway obviously was released in 2013 on vita but that was like a small group of people that were doing that game on the side like these guys literally really have released virtually nothing and dreams obviously was their big project totally mismanaged but as much as i it pains me to say like these guys dropped the ball and are really i don't know it's just disappointing like we could have had a few more media molecule games in this time period and had that whimsy and that kind of that spirit that people loved and they just weren't able to execute on it so while david smith leaving is a huge deal because now that's the last of the original people i don't know that the team has had much spirit in a while And I feel bad saying that because I know a lot of hardworking people work there and they're trying hard, but it's just like, I don't know what you're doing.

1:41:31Dustin Furman:I just don't know what you're doing.

1:41:33Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I wonder, surely they're underway with a new project at this point. I wonder if they're going to make something more traditional, which what does that even mean for a medium molecule game? I think going back to LittleBigPlanet would be weird. but they're this like the the creation aspect of their games is so core and they've kind of went full maximal with it with dreams and we saw how that worked out and it's interesting in your interviews with shuha i can't remember which one where he was talking about how um the plan was to or they wanted to sony wanted for it to have the ability to export games and they kind of were couldn't figure that out so uh the ball definitely was was dropped on that i wonder for um for david smith if they let's say they are working on a traditional project um that's a little more safe and maybe it's not exciting for him um again totally speculation right now he might have personal projects he at he's at the point where he's probably got some money and he can go and start a small team and kind of bring back that original energy from Media Molecule where they might be kind of locked in right now where it's like, yeah, you guys waste too much time.

1:43:01Colin Moriarty:We need just something that is going to do well, right? And so who knows? I could totally see him wanting to go and do an independent project and potentially make tons of money depending on how good his idea is and the execution but media molecule right now it's like yeah when are we gonna see something because even think from the time that dreams has kind of gone away it's been quite a few years now so what's going on it's been whoa like i just think

1:43:38Dustin Furman:woefully mismanaged like you can't you can't give the create your your your flighty spacey creative studio you can't give them all that rope you just can't you you gotta produce the game you gotta produce the project and keep them focused it's it's i don't know chris what are your thoughts here on this uh dave smith leaving all the founders now gone i think media molecule still has more than 100 people working at it so they're doing something of some size i don't know they're obviously not going to push the power limit in the envelope so they don't need a shit ton of people working on these games but I don't know what do you have to say what are your reflections I don't know I feel like it's just regrettable how much time was wasted on Dreams I guess and we could have got more out of them I don't really know I feel like it's I think the criticism is fair I also just kind of feel like I don't know what they're working on now i would have to see what they're working on you know what i mean like i would have to see what this next thing is to feel any type of way really because ultimately um they are still a very unique studio and they're they do very weird shit and so depending on how interesting or how good this this new thing looks i i might feel completely differently than how i feel right now but obviously how i feel right now is painted by dreams and and just the amount of time that it has been since their last proper game and so that feeling is kind of like trepidation it's it's just kind of like well i don't really know what's going on obviously losing i i don't know i i i don't think i don't think people going like choosing to do something else after being with a studio for a long time or being anywhere for a long time is necessarily a bad thing or it's not necessarily an indictment on whatever it is that's happening at that place sometimes people just reach a point where you're just like well this is good i just i gotta do something else um and this this doesn't feel quite like you know a game director you know leaving in the middle of like you know a high profile game that's being created you know what i mean like it doesn't it doesn't have that air to me and so i don't know if this doesn't concern me any more than i have been concerned i guess i should say it doesn't really move the needle for me because i've just been confused as to what's been taking so long in the first place for years anyway so that that this doesn't really um change things i guess for me yeah but yeah one thing is clear that the only clear thing is that like we gotta see i gotta see something like we gotta we gotta see something um and i don't know how you really do that i obviously i always advocate though about i always talk about not showing things too early though so like maybe they maybe things are too early but that even feels crazy because it's been a while so i don't know i mean dreams came out and it's on in 20 i mean it launched finally in 2020 it was it was out in early access before that but it's unclear when the team really started making something new because i think that they were trying to support dreams for a long time you know they ported it to psvr they were gonna bring it to pc so i'm sure that was like heavily on on its way obviously all the tools and integrations like shepherding things so i'm not entirely sure they've been working on this new game for more than a couple of years maybe whatever it might be and i really hope i'm wrong i would love to see what i would love to see what comes out of them but i think you know to use a dustin term like a ship of theseus is kind of it's like who's even there anymore that worked on a little big planet the last little big planet game from media molecule came out 14 years ago can you can you believe that 14 years it's been since a little big planet too and i just i'm i think tear away is cool but it gives them an excuse for like the more i don't want to say uneducated but like not as connected gamer that's like well they made something in between and it's like i was there for the previews of those games i was interviewing people like they made it they made they were making it so clear that that was like a side team that was doing a small project while they worked on their next big thing, which was dreams.

1:47:48And so I don't know, man.

1:47:50Dustin Furman:I just don't know why you give these guys so much rope and why dreams. And it's something I talked about with Shuhei was like, why? And obviously things well, well out of his control. But I'm surprised that there wasn't more of a strategy. I think we've said in the past is like when you get when you spin a thing up like dreams, you have to have like an execution of like what we need. And it's got to be more than just the game. Like we have to have a route of sale for new products. We need to bring people into this game without them needing the game where they can try products without downloading the package file and all these.

1:48:19It's like you shouldn't even bother if you didn't have those things at the end.

1:48:25Dustin Furman:It's like making a great video and putting a shitty thumbnail on it or giving it a stupid title. Like I title every episode of sacred. You know, like you just. It should be noted with sacred symbols, stupid titles. It's like we can get away with that. if this was a new show or like trying to upstart or something, it would be really stupid not to name the podcast like PlayStation five sales explode. And, you know, the end of media molecule or something, but it's like, no, I'll just name it some 80s song lyric instead. But you have to kind of earn that. And I don't know. I just I don't know. Very.

1:49:05Dustin Furman:I'm very curious about what their true health level of health is. And I really feel like if Sony has to make further cuts, and I don't think that that's out of the question, considering the state of the economy, inflation is still, well, inflation's tamped down in the US, but it's not great in other parts of the world. Costs are going up. It's like if they have to cut more, I think media molecule is next. Has to be. It has to be media molecule and bend, right? Those are the two, unfortunately that are going to be next on the chopping block if they really do shut the more things down or if they found more studios and need to blow bloodlet elsewhere just it's sad but i think that there's no and then i think once you lose those two teams you have no more fat like now now it cuts the bone if you get through them then you start getting the sucker punch in Santa Monica, Naughty Dog, Polyphony, Gorilla.

1:50:03Dustin Furman:So I don't know if that makes sense to you guys. I would assume. I don't think that would be anyone else but them. Yeah. All right. AJ White, you had a letter here, but we already talked about everything you wrote in, so we're just going to go to the next story. And the next story is about Bioshock over at Bloomberg. jason schreier oh what is this hold on a second i had a little thing here i had a it was a a captcha but it was one of those things where i had to hold down a button oh yeah but over on so this actually was written last week and when the story went live i'm even sure i'm even pretty sure before the last episode of sacred symbols published but we had long since recorded it the day before and so we weren't able to incorporate what i think is a pretty substantial story and it comes from jason over at bloomberg he writes next bioshock game changes leaders after development turmoil there's actually two pieces of news in here he writes quote take two interactive software inc is overhauling parts of the next bioshock game and shaking up management after senior executives expressed they were unhappy with its development according to people familiar with the situation the new bioshock which is being produced by cloud chamber recently failed a review by executives at 2K Games, the publishing subsidiary of Take-Two, said the people who weren't authorized to discuss private information and asked not to be identified.

1:51:28Dustin Furman:The game's narrative was identified, weird writing, the game's narrative was identified as an area that was particularly in need of improvement and will be revamped in the coming months, the people said. 2K Games subsequently ousted studio head Kelly Gilmore and moved creative director Hogarth De La Plante to a publishing role. In a recent All Hands meeting, Cloud Chamber staff were told that the company needs to become more agile and efficient, leading to worries that layoffs may follow, the people said. 2K gave Bloomberg a statement and said the following, quote, we are working hard to set Bioshock up for the best possible future.

1:51:58Dustin Furman:Right now, we have a good game. We are committed to delivering a great one. We are working closely with the leadership of the studio to define this path, end quote. Bioshock is one of the most successful franchises in gaming, as we know, with more than 43 million copies sold across three games, but hasn't had a new entry since 2013, Jason writes. Now, here's the other interesting piece of news and by the way this team has been cloud chamber has been working on bioshock since before the pandemic so they've been i would assume the game is as it's constituted now content complete you would imagine and was probably presented and it's just not good enough which is interesting you got to treat bioshock with a lot of care you're stepping into some pretty big shoes with ken levine obviously but here's the other one Chris quote 2k games was also developing a remake of the first Bioshock game but that was shelved earlier this year according to people familiar with the plans and quote what's going on over there how I mean I don't want to I don't want to say how hard is it to have the blueprint of Bioshock and just replicate it just do exactly what they did but make it prettier I'm not saying that doesn't take incredible skill but the hardest part is done for you which is the design of the game the writing the story just so it's really crazy that take to botch that but that's what that in video leak was bioshock rtx or whatever remember ray tracing yeah um that must have been an acknowledgement of them working on that build so that was also in development for a while and they totally pulled the plug on it such a disappointment because uh i don't think bioshock really needs to be remade but if they did it right i wouldn't hate it certainly not it would be awesome to have it in unreal five or whatever the fuck they would build it and i don't even know because i think bioshock is an unreal 2.5 right or something oh yeah i feel like i remember seeing unreal all over that game yeah um well chris i mean we're all bioshock fans but i'm wondering what you think of this as i reported back in what 21 22 this particular version of bioshock is at least as it was constantly when i was told about it um and this was obviously verified by many other reports later was it takes place in antarctica so it's like an arctic setting and it sounded cool but it's good but not great what do you think yeah i mean i don't know i i am kind of i i was not hungering for more bioshock because i i do feel like it it's just such a unique thing i love it so much and so part of me was when it went away for good i was kind of like like like almost like relieved that it couldn't get ruined or that it wouldn't have like you know but you wouldn't have like bioshock 3 or bioshock 4 you it didn't like didn't get like sequel itis or something um i like when good things are generally left alone um and so when i heard that a new team was making one in the first place i was i was already kind of like i don't know man like do you you think you can really do as good can you get can you get to that mark of weirdness and i don't know i like it just seems like a really difficult thing to undertake and that's i guess i guess i respect it in some way but that's that's not a position that i would be envious of i'll put it that way like i wouldn't be envious of the person who has to figure out how to make a brand new bioshock from scratch and have it live up to the old ones like i i that's a that's a rough situation i feel like to be in but as far as like that that remake like I don't even I don't know how you botch a Bioshock remake unless like maybe they wanted to unless they maybe wanted to make it more of a true immersive sim or like you know lean more heavily into some of the stuff that was maybe left on the cutting room floor for Bioshock and maybe maybe that was where they fucked up I don't feel like Bioshock needs a remake at all i don't think it really does either but i mean but i wouldn't the gameplay could be a little tighter um i don't hate it i think it's awesome but i could imagine a much better version of bioshock but i again i don't think i need it because i think it it does stand up i played it well it's been probably five years since i last played the original but yeah but it's great it's yeah i mean i guess it's like a dead space thing i guess where like i could i could see it being done well and i and i could see it maybe like completely being like the completely preferred way to play maybe they'll fix that my final fight is not that's a good point because dead space is newer than bioshock so right yeah so it could even you could argue that it actually was more deserving than even what motive did to dead space which was awesome yeah i i don't know i i really love bioshock and i i'm very protective over it and so like hearing this is both concerning but also kind of like nice because it's like oh they acknowledge that it's good but not great and they understand that that's not good enough that's nice to know that they hold it in high regard enough to to to you know clarify that and to acknowledge that and not be like well we spent a lot of money making this so uh you're putting it out now you know i'm glad that that's not what's happening but at the same time what do you do to make a good game great like how do you like how do you do that the word is is that like they're going to focus like on the story which is not a good to me in some way that's a great sign because yeah right exactly like in some way it's like okay because that could be tweaked that can be tweaked you can move things around you can cut things you might be able to go get some like pick up shots with mocap and but like the gameplay works it's like okay so that's maybe a good sign but it like you said it's Bioshock.

1:57:42Dustin Furman:If the story isn't working... You don't really have anything, actually. It doesn't even matter. So I agree with you. I agree with you completely. These are big shoes to fill. Very difficult shoes to fill. Mega Maddy wrote in, and we'll get to you, Dustin. He says, hey, Sacred Saints, with the news this week that Bioshock 4's development is going back to the drawing board, at what point does 2K call time of death on this whole thing? Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite are my two favorite games ever, and I also love Bioshock 2 and think it's criminally underrated. I agree. I'll get into that in a second.

1:58:14Dustin Furman:I say that to make the point that a great Bioshock game can and has been made without Ken Levine but after six years since it was announced we've seen nothing from Bioshock 4 not even a CG trailer that would make Dustin and Chris say no gameplay no hype and with Judas on the horizon it seems like a new Bioshock would just be eclipsed by that anyway so at this point do you think Bioshock 4 ever even sees the light of day I don't want the game to be canceled and I don't want anyone at Cloud Chamber to lose their jobs but I think at and at 2k at large seem to have totally fumbled this entire thing they couldn't even get the remake of Bioshock 1 off the ground anyways thanks for all you do.

1:58:43Dustin Furman:I'll hang Sonic by the neck and listen. What do you do? It's criminal. I'm glad that you brought up Bioshock 2 because I've been thinking about that as well because there is something that Chris is saying that's true that it's hard to fill the shoes of Ken Levine and that I think any Bioshock fan acknowledges that Bioshock 1 and 3 are the best ones. But Bioshock 2 is underrated. And I do believe that if people didn't know that it wasn't a ken levine game they'd probably like it a lot more um i've i've thought that for years i that might be their least favorite one i think it it's not because ken didn't work on it it's because it's rapture again which is cool but that's the difference so what i'm saying is is that another team could make a bioshock game and i think it could be pretty good the challenge that you have though is that bioshock 2 they they relied on old assets and old world that was already created for them they got to make new stories in it now you're making something totally different something totally new long divorced from bioshock the last bioshock game came out on ps3 so it's it's a precarious sort of situation but i i think dust dustin in my opinion they're talking about it like it will come out because i think you might just pull the plug at this point um but they're saying that they have a good game they want to have a great game i think you would probably maybe even ignore this story if you were really thinking about pulling the plug so i'm not worried about it existentially um and how it interrelates with judas might ultimately hurt

2:00:09Colin Moriarty:it but i don't know about that either so what do you think yeah i well okay i'm looking through this bloomberg article again um going slightly out of order it says right now we have a good game uh but we are committed to delivering a great one do you lose your job as studio head for delivering a a good game yeah and not a great game true that's a good that tells me the game is not that they're painting a nicer picture than things actually are that the game actually is not very good uh and someone lost their job over how not good it was so to me i think that 2k sees how much money is on the table with bioshock and 2k of all people have enough money to burn um that they are willing to see through see it through to get it right um and maybe the problem is the story which it's if the game is in theory based on time mostly done it's kind of hard depending to the extent of what changes need to be made with the story um so yeah my thought is that the game actually probably is not very good at all uh and that they are scrambling to see if they can fix what's there so who are the new the new studio head Hogarth De La Plante is has quite the job I had said it's not necessarily a new studio to a publishing role

2:01:39Dustin Furman:I read that as the two people that were in charge one of them got fired and one of them got demoted

2:01:44Colin Moriarty:oh right okay yeah okay so even better or even worse

2:01:49Dustin Furman:probably because they're going to fulfill he has a contract to fulfill or whatever and they're going to pay him out but yeah so it's basically like the studio lead and the director are both out yeah so i agree with you it's it's what happened with fair games i think although that that hit more with um at haven with jade raymond as producer executive producer and studio head she obviously left in quotes but i can't imagine that that was unrelated to the really soft reaction of project hearts um close test so i don't know i you're

2:02:17Colin Moriarty:that's a great point it's a fair point on the bioshock remake i i think i agree with you guys that it doesn't need to be remade sort of like how Dead Space didn't need to be remade but we saw you guys mentioned that how great it came out and I could totally see a full graphics overhaul along with tightening up some of the gameplay I specifically think of like the aim down site in Bioshock 1 is pretty dated at this point and I just think seeing Rapture in a beautifully remade graphics with ray tracing and you know all the niceties we have now it could be incredible i mean it's it's goosebumps if they could do it like dead space and keep it like pretty much like oh this is kind of how i remember it and even maybe even doing some gameplay things where it's like instead of having separate levels and it is actually just rapture is one location that you seamlessly go to like like the game implies that it is that would be cool and there's there are certain things to improve for sure i just like i i guess i don't understand how they couldn't figure those things out when i mean like colin you said the hardest part is done for you oh yeah that doesn't make any sense the only thing you have to figure out is tightening up the the controls a little bit making the the exploration more seamless and then my note would be to just fix that last fight because it's just yeah it's just weird it's weird it's not it's not good it's very video gaming i love it's funny i love yeah good i love bioshock with all my heart it's a bad part

2:03:59Dustin Furman:of that game i think it's like i'm sorry chris i was gonna say i think i think the i'm sorry to you twice i think i was just gonna say i think that the the boss the last boss fights in both bioshock and bioshock infinite are both not very good um yeah yeah yeah they're just they're the the weakest parts of the game which is fine because the rest of it is so good um but it's like the zero gravity parts in dead space one where i'm just like damn these are not good at all and the remake fixed it completely like those are some of my favorite parts in the remake and so if they can do that with the parts of bioshock that if they can refine bioshock to a point that's even more perfect than it already was like that would be really cool i just don't know how that wasn't i don't want to say easy to do because that trivializes a lot of work but like again And the hardest part is done.

2:04:42Right.

2:04:43Colin Moriarty:We have a few very good examples of these more very direct remakes, whether it's Dead Space, Oblivion recently coming up. We've got Metal Gear Solid Delta, which is remains to be seen whether or not that's of, you know, good quality. It looks like it will be, but who knows? So it it's certainly seems like a company like 2K could get it done. So I'm very confused why that would be shelved. yeah one thing i i would like to say because you mentioned like oh with bioshock 2 and that like if people didn't know it was a ken levine game people would like it i don't disagree that that's true but that was not i will say objectively that was not the case with me like i remember playing i didn't know who ken levine was until 20 until bioshock infinite and i remember playing bioshock 2 and being like i don't feel i don't like this at all i still haven't finished it because i just don't like I didn't like being a big daddy.

2:05:39I thought that was like, yeah, it's not. It's definitely it's a choice.

2:05:44Dustin Furman:Yeah, I think they tried to figure out how they could reuse the world and came up with some solution. But I agree with you. It's the weakest by far, but I don't. Sure. I think people are a little hard on it where when the Bioshock collection came out on PS for what was it? I don't know, eight years ago or something, and I platinum to all of them again. It was like. This is pretty good. especially removing the multiplayer distractions and all the rest and just letting it be and about that and there is doesn't bioshock 2 have like iconic dlc or am i making that up

2:06:18Colin Moriarty:yeah wasn't it is it fulbright yeah fulbright the deal right yeah minerva's den yeah minerva's

2:06:24Dustin Furman:that's what it was where people like really love that dlc people love all the expand or not all of them but many of the i don't say even many they're not that many some of the expansions of Bioshock. I yeah maybe I'll get around to playing it. I definitely didn't like it at the time because I just felt like I was just too slow and I was like I don't know if I want to be this character really in this world but uh it's also been like 13 years since I've tried Bioshock right so maybe maybe it'll strike you differently because you're you're very much in your I know you're very much in your uh immersive sim pocket especially right now I don't know if it will scratch that itch, but it's it's certainly going back to Rapture is.

2:07:02Dustin Furman:It's always a pleasure. Yeah, it's so it's so fucking cool. Like Rapture is just the coolest sit like setting in game, one of the all time greatest fictional settings in video games. Certainly, certainly just and Columbia is not so far behind to be perfectly honest with you. That's why I was excited to see the Antarctic, whatever, because it's like you obviously have to either go to space and maybe that was an idea, but Judas obviously is going to space. So you nix that. And the other way is like you can do something underground, which would be interesting, but kind of redundant with what they did with Rapture under the water.

2:07:36Dustin Furman:So maybe you go to the Arctic where no one will see you. And it's set, you know, in the 30s or 40s before satellites. So no one would even know you were there. And yeah, it's exciting. But I don't think I would be able to. I mean, maybe I'd have an idea for a story or something, but I agree. I would be very intimidated doing this.

2:07:52Colin Moriarty:what about a bioshock about a wealthy financier who owns an island with a temper

2:07:59Dustin Furman:oh yes dude

2:08:01Colin Moriarty:bioshock with Jeffrey Epstein the central figure he's the Andrew Ryan of the game that'd be a it's like some CIA thing from the 70s or whatever yeah oh my god Jesus Christ

2:08:23so stupid i don't like i don't like the context that puts the little sisters in

2:08:28Dustin Furman:yeah oh yeah it's bad news it's bad news bears man all right i wanted to check in with a china hero real quick of course the china hero project is sony's initiative to help fund and extract games out of mainland China for use on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. And they've had some varying success. We bring up over and over again, Fist, Forge, and Shadow Torch, Animal Mutational, Hardcore Mecha, Animal Force, In Nightmare, and most recently, Evo Tinction are some of the games that have come out of China Hero. So nothing too huge, but the biggest China Hero game I think yet is coming at the end of August.

2:09:04Dustin Furman:By the way, there's probably six or seven games coming out that week that I'm going to buy, which is nuts. I don't know the last time that's even remotely been true. Maybe not, maybe like five, definitely. And so one of them is Lost Soul Aside. Lost Soul Aside was one of the first China Hero Project games and has been in development forever. And it is finally going to come out August 29th. We know it because the game has gone gold, according to postings on social media. This game is significant, not only because it's probably the highest quality game that they've done, but it's the one, the first one that Sony itself has opted to publish.

2:09:39Dustin Furman:So this isn't some sort of loan or pub fund style thing where you pay Sony back and then you can publish elsewhere. Sony is publishing this game outright. And I think Convaleria is the only other one that they're set to publish. So that's a pretty big deal. Before we move on, I was looking at, they've been posting some videos of the game. I've watched quite a bit of the gameplay. I think this game looks fucking great. Like I really, really do. I don't know that it's going to do very well, but it is one of those games, Dustin, that remind like I feel like if the right people play it, if the right people learn about it, if the game gets a little bit of momentum, and I mean in the streaming space, kind of the influencer space, I feel like this game can get a little bit of attention because it seems like it's really going to be up people's alley.

2:10:21And I don't know if they even know it exists.

2:10:24Dustin Furman:And I don't really blame them for not knowing. At some point, you will forget that it exists because it's been in development for so long. What are you thinking? Lost Soulicide.

2:10:32Colin Moriarty:Yeah, every time I see gameplay of this game, I think it looks awesome. I feel just a little bit of hesitation just in that I wonder if the story is going to be lame or, you know, maybe it won't run very well or something. I don't know. There's just like a few question marks about this game. Still, I almost feel maybe a little less than like Stellar Blade. I felt pretty confident that Stellar Blade was going to be good, that I bought it on launch day and it was great. so I'm hoping that that's kind of situation where this game comes out and we're all like really surprised by how full featured and great it is so this is a game that when it comes out I'm gonna be waiting I'm gonna wait and see what the reviews say before I make the purchase

2:11:21Dustin Furman:what are your thoughts on Lost Solicide Chris are you gonna check it out when it comes out to PS5 and a pc as well august 29th i don't know man it feels like a busy time so like that this this hasn't really grabbed me yet it looks good but i there's something about it that's like i i don't see a i don't see a hook for me really um it just kind of looks like not final fantasy as i look at it and i don't know if that's really like all that it does it does resemble Final Fantasy 15 aesthetically and an action of 16. Right. Yeah. Not as pretty. Yeah, sure. So I don't really know how I feel about it.

2:12:05It's not particularly enticing to me. If I were to check it out, though, I would probably this is definitely a wait to see like what the temperature is kind of thing. Like I wouldn't buy this sight unseen, you know, or like a preorder for sure.

2:12:21Dustin Furman:there are 13 other china hero game projects in development right now some of them are called ran lost islands unending dawn the guard the god slayer and so on and so forth um ai limit is recently released which is another one of them but one i wanted to bring you to your guys attention so there was a recent uh show china joy which is a up-and-coming chinese games show and obviously China Hero has a pretty prominent role there and PlayStation has a pretty prominent role there. They showed a game called Exiledge, E-X-I-L-E-D-G-E, all in capital letters. This is one of the China Hero Project games.

2:12:59Dustin Furman:I was curious if you guys watched this gameplay. There's only about a minute and a half of gameplay. This game kind of looks dope. This is the next one I'm going to keep my eyes on. Dustin, did you get a chance to watch the gameplay? It's like a third-person shooter with some action combat components and I'm kind of impressed with how good this game looks. I don't know if I'm getting over my skis or whatever, but I wanted to put it on people's radar. Maybe go check out the gameplay. What do you think?

2:13:23Colin Moriarty:It looks like it has a nice mix of different things, specifically the dashing left and right gave me a little bit of... What game is it from earlier this year? From... Which one? The moon game. Not the moon game. Oh, I'm going to die.

2:13:44Dustin Furman:He's losing it. i'm going to die hey when that happens what i don't know i don't know ps5 exclusive that has the girl celine oh um oh you're talking i thought you were talking about an upcoming game returnal returnal i'm sorry i thought you were talking about it dude you said earlier this year not only am i dying people just purposely crash their cars no i you said earlier this year so i wasn't even thinking about anything oh well that just goes to show how far i'm dying yeah that that's what threw me because what i thought it looked like uh some bit of returnal too but then you said earlier i was like it's funny that you remembered celine but you didn't remember

2:14:20Colin Moriarty:i told dude i'm we talked about being cooked earlier yeah two hours in the show that was a moment we're well done um but yeah some of the some of the elements remind me of of that which i think is cool art direction it's hard to tell from this two minutes there's the part where it shows like the overhang that of like a skeletal like a robotic skeleton almost kind of a little horizon-esque in some ways visually so i feel like it feels a little generic visually but the gameplay looks cool so uh i'm i'm down to see more anything from you chris on this does this

2:14:58Dustin Furman:look interesting you i'm really it reminds me a little bit of um um i don't know a different sort of third person shooter that we kind of need that's a little bit more action oriented almost something like evil west i mean it's it's not nearly the same but like something that that seems a little different um i know what you mean yeah what what do you think i think it looks all right like i i the dodge particularly i like um just because it looks very gamey it looks like uh it like it's not grounded in realism at all like it almost it almost could probably be a little bit cleaner the animation of it but i like that it's it's kind of gamey it it i don't know if this even makes sense because i don't i'm not even confident that i've really even seen what this game looks like but it this feels like uh it's got like binary domain energy or something like we're like it just kind of feels like okay this is like some rant it's some extra thing i don't even know where i would put this as far as like what this looks like because it kind of looks like it looks like a lot of things i've seen but also nothing it's weird it feels contradictory to look at but it looks like it could play well and i like some of the designs i like the guy at the end with his red gun and the he's got like almost like a death stranding one higgs golden kind of skeletal mask looks kind of neat i'm curious we'll keep an open eye yeah we'll keep an eye on that and the other 13 games that are currently in the china hero project remember there's the indie hero project underway with its first half dozen or so projects kind of spooling up and then mena hero project hasn't announced their games yet but that's going that's the middle east and north africa so sony i think doing a really wonderful job aggressively getting into these emerging markets and extracting games from them i think it's just the app they're absolutely dominating their competition in this regard they're not they're not very impressive and obviously they have a lot of inertia they're selling a lot of units um of their hardware and all the rest but i don't think they're necessarily acting very impressively or proactively in some ways i think this is one of those examples where they're lapping everyone where they're just they're going and finding shit and i think that that's cool now the problem is a lot of this stuff just getting pooped out and no one knows it even exists um i know people are complaining about that with ai limit and evo tinction is another one of those games where it's like this is pretty cool i don't know why you didn't bring anyone's i mean you must have sold nothing in the tens of thousands of copies of evo tinction probably i think that's probably even generous it's too bad so i don't know like exactly what their plan is but i think you should expect a little bit more of a push of lost soul aside because sony is really publishing it they have a lot of money wrapped up in it comparable to the other games okay a few more pieces of news here mp first we've been talking about these guys a lot recently this website mp1st.com mp first they report starfield ps5 release plan for 2026 alongside expansion 2 they write quote while more and more xbox games are being released on the ps5 one xbox exclusive game that still hasn't been announced for the ps5 is Bethesda's Starfield.

2:17:54Dustin Furman:Given Microsoft's multi-platform publishing stance, it's just a matter of when the sci-fi RPG will be available on Sony's console rather than if it will ever be released. For those on PS5 hoping to play Starfield on their console this year, that won't be happening just yet. According to our sources, MP1st was told that Starfield won't be released in 2025, partly due to the RPG's weak sales of the first expansion, Shattered Space. Instead, Microsoft is leaning towards releasing the Starfield PS5 version in spring 2026. From what we were told, Starfield's release on PS5 is planned to coincide with the game's second expansion and other quality of life updates we're also not expecting any announcement about the ps5 version of the game at this august gamescom so don't expect it to be shadow drop like bethesda's the elder scrolls 4 oblivion remastered um do we care i mean uh there have been so many people over time that told me that i should play this game that i would really like it especially because i'm such a sport of sports i'm a sports nerd but a space nerd but I just I don't know man like I just maybe I'll maybe I'll see like what the quality of life updates are what it looks like but it just didn't look very good like I just don't know that I care but I know it's gonna it'll probably do pretty well I would assume they would sell a couple million copies probably on PlayStation at least because I think there's I know that Starfield is a weaker Bethesda mainline game it's not Fallout 3 it's not Fallout 4 it's not the elder scrolls three four five whatever but i still think that the game is a much more respectable seller than people give it credit for and is certainly well above the mean so i think it's safe to assume that that game is good for a couple million on ps5 easy and i think there's probably a lot of latent interest in it so um did you both played it on game pass well well i've been varying amounts i i played it on steam for let me see actually i have i haven't i have steam open right now 95 hours wow that's a lot i liked it i i maintain i think i think starfield's kind of good i don't think it's it's definitely not seminal and it's definitely not like breaking the mold or anything but it feels it was doing the things that i kind of wanted at a time where people kind of like because i i had open world fatigue i didn't care like i don't want to like go off into the distance and like explore something and that's not what the that's not really what the game's about and that's not typically what bethesda does like bethesda typically does do that where it's just like oh it's an open world and you go off and explore and you kind of get lost in it starfield is more i would i would compare it more to like a mass effect 2 where it's more about hubs and kind of quest lines and character interactions it's it's pretty good like i i think it plays pretty well compared to a lot of definitely compared to a lot of bethesda games i like the vibe of the nasa the nasa punk aesthetic is cool i actually do think on some level of the bethesda games that i know and have played i do think starfield i i think you probably would like starfield because it isn't like this open kind of like arduous like ubisoft kind of thing it is more linear it's a little bit more direct it's more about vibe it's got good it's got pretty good gunplay too i mean for you know for for a bethesda game um yeah i don't know i think it's kind of overhated it's definitely not fantastic it's not like 10 out of 10 or anything but yeah i had a great time with it i'll keep it open i think about it every now and again too i think about like i i heard that expansion was terrible um but i think about it every now and again like i i get this kind of feeling of just like yeah it was fun to kind of board enemy ships and just run in with a net running it boarding an enemy ship in the middle of space and then running into it with like a knife and killing everybody is hilarious like it's a ridiculous the idea that is so insane um and so i i kind of defend it but it's definitely not everybody's cup of tea yeah i'll try to be no dust i don't know if you have anything to add i'll try to be open-minded about it when it comes out but i just i don't know i i just don't think so i could see you liking it more than skyrim than than you would like sky yeah yeah i'll i'll see maybe although i like skyrim way more maybe i'm just being too hard on it what

2:22:12Colin Moriarty:you think well chris i respect you and your opinion is 100 valid i want to say that before i continue chris is free to think whatever he wants and i know there's lots of people like starfield there is no quality of life update that could make me like this game none um it's just the way it's designed i cannot stand the constant getting in and out of my ship and loading a million times they can fix that which i don't think it's possible there's no quality there's just no quality of life i put i looked to see because chris brought his hour count in i have 10.7 hours in the game you can't tell me that's not enough time to try to get into this game um but anyway starfield i'm sure it will do very well on playstation 5 i'm sure there's lots of people that will play and i'm sure there's tons of people will play and enjoy it i don't think that there's you know i don't think it is necessarily a bad game at all uh it's just very not in line with what I'm looking for at all.

2:23:16Colin Moriarty:So hopefully with a new expansion, hopefully it's better than the last one. Either way, yeah, this will do pretty good on PS5. I don't think it'll do

2:23:24Dustin Furman:for the numbers, but I think it'll do well. They'll probably be the second biggest game they've released.

2:23:28Colin Moriarty:And so Xbox players, look forward to the tweets where they say, hey, thanks for beta testing it for us. Xbox fans, thanks. Appreciate it.

2:23:37Dustin Furman:Well, now the Xbox fans think they're all going to get God of War in The Last of Us. Keep hoping.

2:23:48Dustin Furman:All right. Maybe. Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? All right. This was announced last week. I don't certainly give a shit, but a lot of people were excited about it. This was specifically when we were streaming. Was it on Monday when this was announced? We were streaming when this was announced.

2:24:05Colin Moriarty:Yeah.

2:24:05Dustin Furman:I don't know if it was a Friday.

2:24:06Colin Moriarty:I was like, we got to we got to wait. Was it on Friday?

2:24:10Dustin Furman:I was like, we got to we got to hold the episode. We got to cut in. Darksiders four has been announced. I like the logo and that they're using the four lines like the you know, there's an alternate Roman numerals are obviously I I I I I I and then IVV and so on. But there is a Roman numeral alternate that does four as four eyes, which is cool. And you see that on some like old inscriptions and stuff. So I think that that's pretty cool. The original Darksiders, of course, came out in 2010 from Vigil Games, and the sequel also from Vigil Games arrived in 2012, and those were both published by the old THQ.

2:24:44Dustin Furman:And then the Darksiders IP was acquired by Embracer Group or what would become Embracer Group and revived under the THQ Nordic banner. THQ Nordic's fully owned studio Gunfire, which I believe is in Texas, took over the game and they released Darksiders 3. in 2018 and then dark siders 4 hasn't been dated but is officially announced also from gunfire people are amped about it i've always felt like i'd probably dig dark siders i just never really i played the first one a little people look at my trophies i don't know exactly how far i got into it on ps3 but i never played any of the other ones and um maybe one day but it's just it's one of those things that's like i don't know i don't know if i'll ever get to this but i probably would like it.

2:25:31Dustin Furman:So this doesn't do anything for me, but I have to acknowledge it. Any thoughts on Darksiders 4 from either of you?

2:25:37Colin Moriarty:I have never played a Darksiders game, so I cannot give you 5 to 10 minutes.

2:25:44Dustin Furman:323 ,000 views on the trailer in 6 days. It's not great, but not nothing on the official Darksiders YouTube account.

2:25:53Colin Moriarty:What was that Diablo like that was in the Darksiders world? Genesis? maybe i've heard that was good that was the airship syndicate um like top down game yeah that was that was from like oh yeah darksiders genesis i heard really good things about that that was the one that intrigued me the most uh currently as a mixed reviews on steam oh interesting something something went awry something went wrong chris are you a darksiders guy i don't we never really

2:26:23Dustin Furman:talk about darksiders i feel like i feel like you've not you're not a darksiders person um i I mean, not for any real valid reason other than I just really haven't played it. I've only dabbled, I think, to the extent that I think I might have rented one from, like, maybe. No, Gamefly was probably before. I don't know. I've played a little bit of Darkseidus. I just don't remember the context. I don't remember if it was, like, a demo or if it was at a friend's house or what. But I liked it. I just didn't like it at that age enough to, you know, save for weeks or months. to go buy it full price or even at a bargain bin.

2:27:03So clearly it didn't stick with me. But I'm kind of with you, Colin, where like I always suspected that like, yeah, I probably would like these. I don't know if I would love these, but I think I would like them. But I just never I never got around to them. And I never even I don't even think I don't even think I've ever even seen them at a glance on sale for a price that I would want to get them for. you know like this it just hasn't been a part of my life at all dark side it's completely passed

2:27:30Dustin Furman:me by but um i heard people like it though yeah people do dig it and i i wonder how it'll do and darksiders 4 i felt like the comp that people used to make most was zelda i don't know if that like really yeah like like old zelda i've heard that yeah which is i don't know if that holds up through all the games but i remember specifically the first one was people were like it's a 3D Zelda game. And I was like, that's interesting. And I think that's why I gave it a chance. But I was I was blazing through so many games at the time. I didn't I wasn't keeping up very well. All right. Just a few more things here.

2:28:06Dustin Furman:I saw this posted on Automaton, the website. We've been automaton-media.com, which is a website. We've been citing more and more often these days as they translate a lot of things outside of Japan. And they write Silent Hill F features more action gameplay to avoid being a Silent Hill 2 clone, but also to appeal to younger audiences, producer says. And they write, quote, this highly anticipated new mainline entry into the Silent Hill series titled Silent Hill F is scheduled to release on September 25th. While the game will be making a stylistic departure from the direction of previous titles returning fully to its Japanese horror roots, it will also switch things up when it comes to gameplay.

2:28:42Dustin Furman:Silent Hill series producer Matoi Okamoto and Silent Hill F director Al Yang, much easier to say, recently talked to GameSpark about why they decided to shift towards more action focused gameplay with the new title. GameSpark is a Japanese gaming website, so Automaton was kind enough to translate. And they say Okamoto explains that while his goal for the Silent Hill 2 remake was to maintain the appeal of the original, he wanted to take a different approach with Silent Hill F. Quote, inserting more entertaining and thrilling action into Silent Hill F was an idea I had ever since the early phases of the development.

2:29:11Dustin Furman:And since Neobart's entertainment is a company that's tremendously good at making action games, this is also one of the reasons why we decided to choose them as developers. The Silent Hill series isn't considered a game that has entertaining action per se, but as we're opening our doors to new players we began to wonder what it would be like if we added more of those elements into the game um challenging action games are gaining popularity among younger players nowadays so i believe that if we implemented such elements into the game it would resonate well even with people who are new to the series and he also goes on to say and i thought this was a really interesting quote we didn't want to end up recreating silent hill 2 over and over again we were aware that there was no reason to keep making clones of it so in order to avoid repeating what previous major titles did, we decided to make an action game.

2:29:51Dustin Furman:Make the action, I'm sorry, stand out more. The game, like I said, comes out September 25th. I'm super excited to play it. But I'm wondering what we think about this, because Silent Hill is not known for its action. We're kind of fresh-ish off of Silent Hill 2 Remake last fall, and it's much more of a deliberate horror game with action components in it. I platinum the game, so I beat the game using no guns. so obviously it's not incredibly action oriented you have to fight obviously once in a while I use crowbars and wooden boards and shit but it's different it's a puzzle game really at it's heart so what do we think about this Dustin Silent Hill being more action oriented Silent Hill F September 25th does this appeal to you it appeals to me

2:30:38Colin Moriarty:yeah it definitely appeals to me I appreciate that very clearly they're like we just don't want to keep making Silent Hill 2 obviously silent hill 2 is the most popular game in the series and i could see the inclination to just keep doing that but i think that you can take what made silent hill 2 great and still apply new things like a more action focused and the previews are out for this game i watched a few of them i think i watched ign very positive on it um it's in this article from uh automaton media they were saying that the previews uh were divided opinions with some people expressing concern over souls like combat i don't know if the combat i saw in the ign preview looked souls like maybe learning some boss patterns but we can't just apply boss patterns to souls like so we'll have to see i love the setting of this game i think it's in the 60s in japan and so So while Silent Hill has gone outside of the town of Silent Hill many times before, seeing in a more traditional Japanese look, I think is so cool.

2:31:52Colin Moriarty:And there's something extra creepy to me about pure Japanese horror. So everything I've seen about this game looks great to the point where I'm I'm going dark on it and I'm really, really excited to play it. And I'm so happy that it's not much further away with September 25th.

2:32:11Dustin Furman:Yeah. Chris, are you excited about Silent Hill F? Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I think it's a good idea to maybe make it a little bit, give it a little bit more of an identity as opposed to just being, you know, above Silent Hill 2. I think it's a smart call. I think they would do well to maybe, because I don't know, Combat obviously was not the strong suit of Silent Hill 2. and even in some of the trailers or some of the preview for silent hill f i've seen the combat does or what you can infer from the combat what little is shown or what little is implied it does kind of still look like it might have a little bit of that jank um maybe they can fix that up or or maybe that's intentional or maybe that's i don't know uh but i think generally it's a smart it's a smart move i'm looking forward to silent hill left but at the same time like i kind of don't even know how i feel about sign on hill really because i think sound hill 2 is a fantastic remake and i remember thinking like wow this is a this is an exceptional game for sure but i also i think back to it and i was like i don't know if i really enjoyed playing that game like as an experience like i don't know if i was i don't know if i was enjoyed it it was a harrowing kind of like depressing time it is a it is so i don't know i don't really know how i feel like i don't know if that's good or bad really you know but new silent hill is exciting and especially one that takes place in like a i just love the setting and just the look of it i think that alone is kind of enough to draw me in and and if i end up playing through it and getting monumentally depressed then i guess so be it i'm looking forward to it to september 25 ps5 please look forward to it um and hey shout out to konami yeah i just i feel it right now like i feel like there there's a spark within again small one j just released the um the gradius collection right which is cool it's expensive that's why just principally I'm not buying because I'm like I'm not paying$40 for this but I'll buy it for just like I don't want to send you a I always tell people I buy right I buy games to show support but the opposite is true too if I feel like you're kind of getting a little crazy with your pricing and putting together the salamander games and shit onto like these old NES arcade games and charging$40 for it is egregious in my opinion that's a$20 game so I'll gladly pay$20 for it but they seem like they're kind of they got some life within and I love Konami I'm rooting for them we go way back me and Konami and I just hope when it's time for Castlevania that they blow us away like they've kind of been doing it with Silent Hill like I just hope and the collections that they've been releasing some of them Castlevania collections I just hope like they get it because I'll know in five seconds after watching that trailer when it comes out if they get it or not.

2:35:17Dustin Furman:And I just hope they get it. It means so much to us. We've been waiting for so long now for a Castlevania game. It's crazy. It's been 11 or 12 years since Lords of Shadow 2, and Lords of Shadow 2 sucks.

2:35:35Dustin Furman:So the last good Castlevania game was on DS, and that's wild. not even 3ds all right that was 2008 i want to say i was curious what you guys think of this we're all musicians um the original publisher so red octane is the original publishing and producing body of a guitar hero obviously they ended up with harmonics and harmonics became kind of famous for making these games but red octane was kind of the the driving force behind them red octane was purchased by activision pretty early on and that was to acquire the guitar hero name and all the rest and i think it was done for fairly cheap like shockingly cheap compared to like what it probably would have been worth later on but as we know music games kind of fell off a cliff there was obviously like the rock band spinoff that was like its own silo of games that they were trying you know that others were trying to do there was dj hero that was in the guitar hero family um and and then guitar hero like what did the whole band thing too and then there was and then they went away and then there was that revival in like the mid 2000 aughts where both rock band and guitar hero i believe got new games remember this and they didn't do very well i'm pretty sure mad cats went out of business because of how bad one of those did um not unlike what you draw to the thq perhaps just hardware is just expensive if it's not going to sell if it's not going to move you're in a lot of trouble so i don't know if this is a good thing or not but i'm curious what you guys think like i'm a little surprised that guitar hero or rock band or something aren't big anymore but i think that they did serve a certain purpose and place for certain generations and i just feel like music these days is so much less band oriented obviously there are a million bands i know people go to festivals but like in popular culture it's not really bands and so it would be hard to do something that i think wouldn't be like either kind of niche or legacy and then you wonder if it's even worth the squeeze but i know you guys you guys both play guitar hero when you were kids i mean you must have been the perfect age because you were like 12 or whatever that's awesome i mean And that would have been like, yeah, it was the best.

2:37:57Dustin Furman:It's a good time. Yeah. Cause I loved it and I was, I was way older and I loved it. So yeah. All right. So are you guys into this idea of, of red acting kind of coming back and they say they want to bring back the rhythm game genre. Yeah.

2:38:10Colin Moriarty:I, I'm super pumped about this. If they can pull it off. Right. Right now. It really sucks. A few years, maybe last year, I'm trying to remember. we had a conversation on this show about how there's the fortnight festival which is basically they absorbed harmonics and then made them make a rock band mode on fortnight uh and it's disappointing it's cool that they tried to do it and i think that there's been some guitar hero controllers that work with it but to me that experience is all about the well i guess when we're specifically talking about rock band it's it's the local play um and playing the drums and having the the microphone things like that and it just wasn't it and it was so disappointing to see like oh man this is what harmonics now is relegated to is a a fortnight mode so to see red octane try to bring this back and there's been dude there's been some really great looking new guitar hero controllers announced this one company crkd uh has a a guitar that's partnered with gibson uh coming out or it's either coming out or is out that looks phenomenal so the hardware is there to make this happen uh the hardest part of course is going to be licensing and the songs like these games live well it'll live and die by the tracks in it so i really hope they're able to work that out because i feel like it is time for a revival of either guitar hero or or rock band i i'm totally i'd love to have overpriced plastic instruments all over my living room again if it means i can have that experience of of playing with my friends to the point where even like i want it back so bad i think it was last year i i have a modded well my xbox 360 isn't modded but you can do a modded save to put custom songs in Guitar Hero or Rock Band 3.

2:40:11Colin Moriarty:So I have that all set up. I still have instruments. I still have the drums. And so New Year's Eve, we were playing Rock Band and had a great time. So I'd love to see that brought into the modern era. It's going to be tough comparing to how great things were at one point.

2:40:29Dustin Furman:Yeah, I wonder. Guitar Heroes with Activision, Rock Band was MTV. but I don't know who owns that now. I guess Madcats actually was the one that ended up acquiring it and then obviously that tanked them or that version of Madcats anyway. I think Madcats is back. It's like a different shell company now or whatever. I'm not entirely sure about that. Something new, a new name. But you're right. The licensing is going to be a challenge. The hardware is going to be a challenge. Sourcing new music is going to be a challenge. I don't know. I'm rooting for them. I think music games are an awesome idea.

2:41:10Dustin Furman:There's a lot of money to be made if you do it right, but I think you have to hit the zeitgeist and I just don't feel like it's... I remember when it was in the zeitgeist, people were fucking obsessed with Guitar Hero and especially Rock Band. Like when Rock Band launched, what was that, the fall of 2007? I was just out of college. That was my first year at IGN. We played that shit constantly. Constantly for years at people's houses in the demo room at the at the at the site in our various living rooms like i don't know man i don't i just think that that would that helped carry it and i don't know that it's it's just not like that anymore and and without that i don't know that it'd be it becomes more like guitar smith or whatever the fuck that game's called from ubisoft where it's like it's a cool little thing but it's never going to be this breakthrough and that's more of a realistic guitar playing game but um you know who as far as i can understand as far as i i um can see do you know who is behind this red octane money this is interesting about the survival you know who's funding it is embracer it's the first it's i think it's interesting it isn't oh but i also think it's interesting it's like the first time that i think they've really made a true investment since they started to unwind so maybe a little bit of promise yeah for them to yeah maybe for them to kind of make a not a comeback but stabilize a little bit it would be nice it would be nice to see that kind of thing come back i i do think i don't know if this is uh cynicism or or i don't know realism i really don't know but i i do think those games hit at a perfect time and i think culture was where it needed to be i think tech was where it needed to be i i don't i don't know if you can recapture that really in the same way because also i just feel like people are more antisocial now too i feel like people don't want to really like i wish that wasn't the case but like i feel like generally speaking people kind of don't do that anymore like get together and play games like i feel like that doesn't happen i agree it was it sounds funny but it was it was during the pre and nascent smartphone era by the time smartphones even became a like a true thing like where people reliably had them it was over and i'm not saying those two things are interrelated but that's the era of it was more present and yeah amenable to fun and partying you didn't have it you didn't you didn't have access to an immediate distraction everywhere you were and so you would you would find ways to do it with other people and now it's like i don't know if that really exists i would love i would love to see these games re-emerge um i i just i wouldn't necessarily bet on it all right three more pieces of news to get through and then we'll get into what we're playing um and we can go quickly on these but i have to acknowledge this one because i think it's a big deal genshin impact the mega popular one of the most popular free-to-play um games as a service on playstation platforms is officially discontinuing updates for playstation 4 um it says quote and this is on social media and there's a website you can go doing home uh the ho yo verse i fucking i just hate that name you know the website for for ho and actually the website's ho yo lab it says starting from september 10th 2025 genshin impact on ps4 will be removed from the playstation store after this date accounts of playstation network that i've never downloaded genshin impact on ps4 will no longer be able to search or download it via the playstation store accounts of playstation networks that have free users that a previous endowment against an impact and still redownload it at any time via store library even if the game gets deleted from the device until the in-game purchases on ps4 are delisted top ups and purchases will still be available through the playstation store and the in-game shop and then on um february 25th 2026 all in-game purchases against an impact on ps4 will be removed from both the playstation store and the in-game shop and so you'll have to go and migrate over to playstation 5 if you still want to play on playstation we have a letter from about this from Treferoth who wrote in and said, Greetings, Secret Sirs.

2:45:21Dustin Furman:Three-year free listener turned Patreon subscriber here. Welcome. What's your take on Genshin Impact officially dropping PS4 support? It's one of the biggest live service titles out there, and now it's leaving behind a huge player base. With all support and login access ending in August 2026, I find myself wondering a few things. Where will the weebs go? If not the PS5, should we brace for a global shortage of glass jars? Considering the PS5 is now within 2 million units of PS4 time-adjusted, and with Grand Theft Auto 6 on the horizon, should we expect the PS5 to begin to surpass the PS4 in time-adjusted sales?

2:45:49Dustin Furman:Thank you for the years of content. As someone who has never subscribed to a patron before I finally got got. Keep up the fantastic work. I'll auto erotic asphyxiate myself. Kick the chair and listen. Jesus. Why do so many of you have death wishes? It's weird. Thank you for writing in. So. There and Tom and I talked about this on sacred plus as well, like Sony is subtly start. And this isn't a Sony call per se, but Sony itself is starting to subtly move people. they I think I really think MLB the show not coming to PS4 is a huge deal this year because they're such a reliable seller and people do stay on that old hardware for it and they make it's not a it's not a matter of not making the version anymore they make a switch one version of MLB the show so certainly they can make a PS4 version of the show they're choosing not to because they don't want people to be playing it there anymore and I think that there are certain big publishers now they're gonna have to decide if they really want to truly move on to the next console it's just easier and neater to get people to move over but they're also probably comfortable doing this because they see the numbers themselves and they think that they can take the risk and maybe force some people over certainly there's going to be some attrition when they do this some people are just simply not going to move or they'll move over to pc or the mobile i mean genshin impact is on everything but i would expect to see a little bit more of this because i think as we get closer to ps6 it just seems unthinkable that we would have the ps4 the ps5 and the ps6 all going at the same time.

2:47:13Dustin Furman:It's like, what are we doing? This simply can't be. And as Tom brought up a great point, it's like abandoning the PS4 is especially vital simply because of the hard drive. Like we got to let it go at some point because it's actually the lowest common denominator in a lot of shit. And it's not good. So I don't know. I don't think they're not again. So this is not Sony's call, but I would expect to see this more and more. I think it's going to be a little scary, though, for a lot of companies to do this because they have a lot of reliable people. You don't want to just ditch them, but you kind of want to nudge them.

2:47:45Dustin Furman:It's time to get a PS5 for Christ's sake.

2:47:49Colin Moriarty:Yeah, it's been fine. I'm glad you brought the thing I thought of immediately was the hard drive because on the replies to this tweet or other places I saw online, people were confused. They're like, well, this can run on a phone. Why can't it run? It continue to run on PS4. And it's like, well, the hard drive really is the biggest factor. And it could. I mean, I don't know Genshin too well at this point, but it could be impacting some of the things they want to be able to do with the game going forward because they have to continue to support a system that runs on an old-ass hard drive. But the most important thing is what you said, Collins.

2:48:26Colin Moriarty:The numbers are probably just showing that it's like we're not as worth it as it was before to support PS4. And it's just, it's time. Move on.

2:48:36Dustin Furman:Yeah, I think... I don't know. What do you think about it, Chris, before I move in? Oh, well, I mean, I... How will this affect your ability to play Genshin? Yeah, I don't know. It's going to really throw a wrench into my entire life, this move. I specifically only have a PS4 in my room for Genshin Impact and I've been playing it in secret for years. This is devastating to me. No, I mean, I want this to happen already with more things. I've been kind of an extremist on this where it's just like i i would i would have loved it on day one if we were just like no ps5 that would have been fine for me but um i get the reality why that is a is a difficult decision to make even from sony's perspective i mean they're making a shit ton of money uh being active on both platforms at once so like i see um and it can be scary to leave that many people behind especially if the game doesn't necessarily require that you know like there are certain games that clearly can still run and and that's fine but if you're trying to do more with your game and you're feeling and you're feeling hamstrung by old tech as as one would be with tech from i mean that's 2013 tech it's actually even older than that because it had to be finalized before 2013 so you're operating on like pretty pretty old tech in the in the late 2020s mid 2020s you you gotta at some point find a way to break free and uh i don't know i'm i i i have no experience with genshin impact at all but uh i would imagine this is probably going to be a a net positive i am i will say to the point you play the game can be played on your phone but not your 12 year old phone right you're playing it on a computer but not your 12 year old computer

2:50:34Dustin Furman:so it's time to kind of stop holding 12 year old hardware to a different standard it's an old machine it's fucking old um i know that there you know money's a problem for a lot of people or interest being um baited to this new console with games that you really feel like you want to play but at some point five years in it's like it's time yeah it's time and it's hurt because it's hurting everyone but again sony's going to be very um hesitant to move on because they are so reliant on the mau of these old consoles i mean you can just tell when when you're talking about having 125 million or so monthly active users on playstation network there are only 80 million ps5s and you assume some of them are not even being used so you're talking about tens of millions of people on ps4 that's a lot of people um i just wanted to point out that there's seven minutes of new pragmata game footage you can go find online this is also from china joy the chinese game show i don't know if you guys have any thoughts on this i think this looks fucking awesome it's kind of like and the first uh comment on the video describes it as a puzzle shooter it kind of is it's this weird third person shooter the girl's hanging off the guy's back um we've seen a little bit of the game before but this is seven minutes of uninterrupted gameplay with some commentary over it but the commentary is obviously not in english so it's not gonna be very useful to you.

2:51:54Dustin Furman:I'm excited about this game. I think the game looks fucking sick. It looks different. It's not quite as run of the mill as I thought it was going to be. Although I was excited to play and I thought it looked cool. And again, I love the theories that it's a Mega Man game and stuff. I don't think it is, obviously, but it's a funny theory. So I just wanted to point that out. Do you guys have anything you want to say about this? People should go search for this. I think this game looks cool. Pragmata.

2:52:15Colin Moriarty:Yeah, this I believe is the same as the demo that I got to play at Summer Game Fest. it looks like it's running I never judge a demo an event like the final product but between that demo and this one it's definitely running a lot better and yeah the unique puzzle shooter aspect it was really hard for me to describe like a month or two ago what this game was like because I hadn't really shown what the moment to moment gameplay is like but it is it's weird in a good way

2:52:49Dustin Furman:um and then finally in fyi the marvel token fighting souls closed beta for ps5 is running september 5th through 7th reese redman wrote in and said yo sacred boys did you check out anything from evo this past weekend it continues to be the most fun gaming event around the matches were great the meltdowns were better and the announcements were fantastic announcements were fantastic lucy from edge runners and strive looks fucking perfect i did see a little bit of evo reese but the biggest thing i saw was that this is actually happening that um marvel token obviously I think was playable there, but also that this beta is happening.

2:53:21Dustin Furman:They also announced that they want to keep the game going for 10 with 10 years of updates, which I thought was interesting. I mean, I think that's ambitious, but depending on how the game does, I think that that's entirely possible. There's a website set up at playstation.com for this. You can simply register by clicking on the button, signing into your PSN account there and so on and so forth, following the instructions. So just Google that because it's a pretty long URL, but you'll find it. And if you're already in the closed beta program, I think that you might even be submitted automatically so are either of you guys going to try to play this probably not i assume no no i'm

2:53:53Colin Moriarty:not i don't even know if i'm in the beta program but uh i wouldn't i couldn't tell you if it's good or not uh i'm too stupid but i did watch a tiny bit of evo and it looked it looks fun yeah there was makes me wish i understood but i just don't yeah there was that one guy that was melting down

2:54:07Dustin Furman:but apparently it was like an ode to another thing that happened right yeah it was a bit yeah that's cool it was still fun it was a good gif yeah it's fun chris you're laughing let's uh let's go to you what happened i checked my phone when i went to go get some water and i i love the spam messages that i get on twitter because it's what it's obviously bots but it's like some of them are really funny and this and i'm curious as to how this works on people but like this was this one says doctors told me cancer is incurable i've decided to travel alone and bid farewell to this world in silence i've moved children my only regret is not being able to spend this life with you you were my first love and i will love you forever in my heart i will leave behind this precious legacy and i hope this friendship will bring us closer together in the next life please keep this information safe and it's just like some some login with a password and it says the balance is two million dollars dude chris i have i'm looking i have the exact same message

2:55:08Colin Moriarty:not once but twice yeah no it's great it's it's so disrespectful it's so great and it's like the profile picture oh yeah oh my god oh god when those guys had a party and they all got like yeah they all cooked their skin with ultraviolet lights or some shit and like

2:55:33Dustin Furman:dude nfts are so fucking stupid that like it's i understand like the whole crypto blockchain well i don't really understand it but i understand the use of having like decentralized money and blockchain technologies for security and all this but like yeah the whole the idea that these guys were like and we're gonna have jpegs and but you're gonna and anyone can have the jpeg but you have the real one i'm like every now and again something like that'll happen and i gotta learn to trust my gut more often you know what i mean because like when that first came out i was like saying this is nothing but this is it's a complete bullshit and it was totally totally right it's complete nonsense that lasted for exactly like what like a year yeah it was ridiculous people ate shit doing that which is wild because i think you see some of these like the storefront still exists in like the exchanges and it's like you know fractions of a penny compared to what it was um wild wild stuff all right speaking of wild crazy times let's talk about the games that we're playing i'll go first just to get my stuff out of the way here i platinum death stranding 2 it's my 184th platinum it took me 103 hours tall man wrote in and said colin it's tar man i wanted to know how you enjoyed the rest of death stranding too this was easily my favorite game of the year so far and even though i called some of the twists i was still delighted when this when they happened i think one of the things that makes the game so interesting is that if you go for the platinum it's like two games in one the first half is all the collecting and story whereas the second half where you're just getting the five stars is more like power wash simulator where you kind of just zone out after planning out routes for you to take anyway i'll leave to keep fisting the tar that tar now whatever man i don't know he really is fisting the tar though yeah yeah yeah he is he certainly is it's a literal it's literally true yeah spoilers

2:57:30Dustin Furman:death stranding 2 is my game of the year so far i want to be fair that i've only played by my eye seven games that have come out this year everything else i've played this year which is most of what i played is doesn't come out this year so it's not a lot and there are more games coming out that i think could compete for this um one of them i'm playing now is pretty damn close and i'll talk about that in a minute but uh i loved it and i i do love the post game it took a long time i was getting a little frustrated at the end because there's like an in-game timer that you have to wait to like do certain things you have to sleep at certain times to like get people to send you the right message so you can do the next sub order and it's it's annoying but i did enjoy the process generally speaking excuse me i'm burping and um and i i it's one of those procedural sort of games where I'm like, I just got into it, where I was like, yes, I am really into this.

2:58:22Dustin Furman:I want a five star everything. I get so satisfied. I had a little, at some point I went and when I was like in the post game, I wrote, I had 23 places that I didn't five star and I wrote them all down on my legal pad. And then I was like scratching them off as I went. It was very satisfying, very tactile, but really highly recommended. I think it's a great game and, um, really, really, really into it. Um, Ross Stoddart wrote in and said, Hey Colin, how does it feel to be an influencer? Ninja Gaiden Ragebound wasn't even on my radar, but I checked out your stream on Friday and it piqued my interest.

2:58:53Dustin Furman:Noticing I could get a 10 % discount with PS Plus, I decided to spend 18 of His Majesty's Great British Pounds and dive right in. Now, I am loving the game and want more Ninja Gaiden. Sadly, the classic side-scrollers are not available on PlayStation. However, I noticed Ninja Gaiden 2 Black was on sale, so I went and spent another 26 of the King's currency on this franchise. Safe to say I'm hooked and really looking forward to Ninja Gaiden 4 later this year, so thanks for introducing me to the series. that's wonderful the 3d ninja gaiden games are not really my thing um ninja gaiden the original ninja gaiden on xbox i actually liked a lot but it's very hard which is cool that's fine but the 3d series is not really where it's at the reason that this ninja guy and ragebound game was so exciting to me was because it was truly the like first time in 30 i want i want to reiterate this 34 years that there was a side-scrolling Ninja Gaiden game, a new one.

2:59:47Dustin Furman:The original Ninja Gaiden came to NES in the late 80s, and then we had Ninja Gaiden 2 in 1990 and Ninja Gaiden 3 in 1991. They were some of my favorite games when I was a kid. Dagan bought all of them for me. I've told that story before. It's like a fucking hysterical story. I still remember it. It's weird because I was so young, and you don't really usually have memories like that that are that specific, but for people that don't remember, it's that Dagan gave me the three Ninja Gaiden games loose. like he bought them used, but he gave them to me in a bass shoe box. And he gave me the, and he like gave me the box and I unwrapped it.

3:00:17And I was really upset because I thought he got me shoes and he knew that I was going to be upset.

3:00:23Dustin Furman:And so he did that on purpose. And then inside were like the three cartridges for the Ninja Gaiden games. That was probably my seventh birthday, maybe something like that. So a series that's near and dear to me. And when Ninja Gaiden was revived on Xbox by Tecmo before they got with Koei and became one company in 2004, Ninja Gaiden came to Xbox and that was a cool thing. And then Ninja Gaiden 2 came out to Xbox 360 in 2008 and so on and so forth. But I wasn't really into that series. So this really connected connects with me. Anyway, I beat Ninja Gaiden Ragebound. I actually beat it twice. I 100 % of it.

3:00:56Dustin Furman:And it's fucking awesome. Like it is so, so good. That I'm blown away by it. Definitely one of the great games of the year. and I just could if you're in the side scrollers I mean you gotta do it you gotta get it it's just so wonderful there are 25 stages so it's pretty long um you can go back to all of them there's like a world map which has never happened in a side scrolling ninja guiding game before there are collectibles on each stage you have to find so I got all the collectibles there's like an in-game shop where you buy power-ups you have two different characters to use although you use them at certain times you can't like switch between them indiscriminately there are two different endings so i got both endings you make the you make the choice at the end so it's not like you have to do different things or like know what to do you can just like literally beat it again and just do the different different ending the different choice or whatever it's beautiful stunningly beautiful and we saw that on the stream that we did yeah but And I was like, Jesus Christ, like the more and more I got into the game, the more I'm like, this is a really fluid and this is a little weird.

3:02:05Dustin Furman:There's a puzzle to it, to playing the game. And I wonder if this resonates with people that have played it. Ninja Gaiden, the original Ninja Gaiden trilogy were more like fast Castlevania games. And what I mean by that is you weren't slow in plotting with incredible knockback. You had a quick sword and you were like moving around a side scroller, an action side scroller. But the reason it was like Castlevania is you had sub weapons. so up and be would be like a ninja star and you would use or whatever and you would use like heart containers whatever you would get as your currency so you would destroy torches and candles and pick so it was very much like that it was very much in that spirit um this game is a side scroller with basic attacks but there's this whole system in it where some of the enemies have these auras around them blue or pink auras and you use either your male or female ninja's weapon so the female ninja uses like kunai like knives and throws them so if the enemy's pink with the pink aura and you kill them with the appropriate weapon which is hers you get your next attack with either character is super powered so you'll notice that enemies start appearing in certain sequences and orders and you're trying to get to the enemies that have like those auras around them so you can use them on the powerful enemies on the screen so there's like a little puzzle element to every encounter that's kind of interesting and i really really enjoyed the additions to it the story is very much a it's not a retelling of the original game at all because it literally isn't you're playing as a different character but it's like about the cia and stuff like the original game people should go look up the original ninja gaiden i mean all three of them are like this but the original ninja gaiden is the first game i ever experienced that really really tried to tell a story.

3:03:48Dustin Furman:Not like a role-playing game with some text boxes and stuff, but had cut scenes. They were minutes long. It wasn't anything spectacular. It was just moving images and text, but it felt real and adult. The music was intense. It was scary. This game really does a really nice job of recapturing all of that. Shout out to the game kitchen. They understood the assignment. I will say that there are a couple things that I do want to call. I don't want to question, but the game isn't that hard um and i think that's by product of there being no lives so one of the things that makes those old games really difficult is and we talked about this the last week i think a little bit is like striving to get further into a stage just to learn knowing you're probably going to die but just trying to figure out what's going on so you can get better and better as you go but the checkpoints are so numerous and there are no lives where there really is no penalty to dying so some of the bosses are fairly hard until you learn how to play them like when i beat the game through a second time i was like blazing through it compared to the first time when i was really getting stuck on some of the bosses and like really had to think about things so to ameliorate this there's a hard mode that unlocks after you beat the game and what's funny is the hard mode is fucking brutal like like to me harder than ninja guide was immediately they it's the same game but it's redesigned in a lot of ways so for instance you're going through like a burning building in the beginning of the first stage whatever and in the game it's just in the background but in the hard mode it's like everything's actually on fire like you have to jump around the fire and like there's like seven times more enemies and all sorts of stuff now there is a what they call an assist mode in the game which is like a way to cheat and i'm thinking about using that to calibrate the hard mode to make it a little bit more reasonable because it seems like this is it went from normal to like extremely hard wherein i would have loved for it to go from normal to hard which would have been like a half step up not two steps up or so i want to kind of mess around with that and see what happens but i've gotten all the trophies in the game other than the hard mode trophy and some of like the stage specific trophies like you have to beat a stage without stage beat stage two beat stage one two without dying or whatever like i just have to get those miscellaneous stuff but i have everything else and um there's highly recommend it it's just really really really great and we got a letter from thomas hodge who says howdy cd and c this one is for colin forgive me if you have but have you tried the blasphemous games with your love of 2d i believe this might be with be your in with souls likes thanks for the the content and god bless well the studio give the game kitchen that made ninja guy and rage round made the blasphemous games and i did play blasphemous one a little bit when it came out i bought it but i wasn't really into it and this makes me want to be a little bit more open-minded and try to get back to it.

3:06:31Dustin Furman:I think there are different kinds of games, but they definitely deserve respect for what they've done here. And I even reached out to my friend that I used to work with at IGN, John Robinson. That's one of the PR heads at Koei Tecmo. And I was like, you did a really phenomenal job. Like, congratulations on such a great game. So that's my experience with Ninja Gaiden Ragebound. All right, let's go on to Dustin. Let's hear from you. You've been playing Ludo and Delta Rune.

3:06:59Colin Moriarty:yeah i've been a little bit of a lull just because there's so many games coming out so i thought now it's a good time to either get to stuff that i've been meaning to get to check out something new so ludo is the first one and shockingly i discovered this game by browsing the psn store uh which i know is a near impossible task now but you gotta you gotta have the right feel to like when you look at a game in the playstation store like okay what are the star ratings what are the screenshots look like is this actually maybe something interesting and of course i did external research by like looking up the game on my phone a little bit but this game is really cool it is i described it on twitter as it's it's a psychological horror game with elements of pt and the stanley parable um so you're in a house that has uh it like loops through different times throughout the game.

3:08:01Colin Moriarty:There's no combat in this game. It is purely a puzzle story experience. So I think that that could block some people off from enjoying this game at all. But I mentioned with it being like the Stanley Parable, there is a narrator of the game that starts by narrating your existence but soon evolves into something more sinister. So this game definitely goes off the rails in ways that I didn't expect. It has some fourth wall breaking and I will leave it at that. But I was just surprised by this little game that I had really never heard of. And I posted that tweet about it and Hogue was like, now I know you don't listen to BitCast because I said the exact same thing about it being PT and Stanley Parables.

3:08:55Colin Moriarty:I was like, oh, OK, so there are a few other people that have checked this out, but it's 20 bucks and it took me about four hours to beat. So the price, I would say, is a little high for what you're getting, because in my opinion, there's absolutely zero replay value to it. but what's there numerous times throughout the game i was like oh that's interesting that i've never seen anyone do anything quite like that before which is rare for me at this point in my video game career my other complaint is that some of the puzzles are a little bit obtuse that i got to a point i was like i don't fucking get it and i just looked it up online and i was like man i would have never got that uh it's not too crazy it's not like it's fucking missed or something like that but there are just a couple puzzles i was like uh what but visually it's very cool very striking and as far as its psychological horror elements it's mostly about the feeling and an unsettling feeling to the game there are a few jump scares in the game but they are pretty tame but i felt on edge the entire time i played ludo so i think for certain listeners that if you like puzzle focused like uh kind of outside of the box thinking with games i would recommend checking it out like i said a little steep for what it is at 20 bucks but i don't think you'll be disappointed by it so check it out it's a it's a little gem uh in in the psn i think it's also on pc as well but a little gem to check out a little bit of frame rate issues too i've never had this on ps5 where if i let the game run uh like i would come back to it after i would put my ps5 to sleep and then come back uh and it would start to like stutter a little bit so hopefully they clean that up but check out ludo pretty interesting game the team behind it i believe this is their first game broken bird games so this is their their debut title so i've got my eye on them because this this first entry pretty interesting uh delta rune is the other game that i've been playing i've been meaning to get back to this game for a long time in fact it was revealed what over five years ago now uh and so delta rune is the sequel pseudo sequel to undertale from toby fox he's been releasing it in chapters over the past many years so that's why i was waiting is that initially was just chapter one and then chapter two came out and both of those were free and then it was at the launch of the switch two they released chapter three and four and those were paid and apparently there are more chapters coming uh so at this point i was like fuck it i just gotta play this game undertale is one of my favorite games of all time i just gotta dive in at this point and so i'm it's been a little bit boring because i did play chapter one when it came out and at that point i decided to wait so i'm retreading the things that i had already done i'm not overly impressed with it so far uh some of the the charm of undertale it's kind of like you're getting just the same type of thing obviously it's a totally different story and the biggest mystery for me is that how it connects to undertale um because things are very different but the same in in delta rune so i'll have more to report on that in the future but uh yeah just finally getting to that and still annoyed that even when i finish it it still won't be done so uh but at some point i just got a given fair enough all right and uh we'll move

3:12:55Dustin Furman:on to you here chris it says you're playing deus ex the conspiracy deus ex human revolution director scott so in your deus ex pocket yeah yeah i'm in i'm in i'm in a deus ex hole right now and uh so i finished i finished uh the conspiracy the obviously the ps2 port of the original deus x and um it's amazing like the original deus x is probably one of the most impressive games i've ever played with the understanding that i was going back in time to play something that was inherently dated inherently limited and uh in many ways primitive but shockingly just complex and deep and what a good what a good vibe to that game the soundtrack is incredible i didn't even realize this organically as i was going through it because you just kind of don't think about it but every level and every area of the game has its own subset of soundtrack so basically like there's a there's an ambient track for new york city and there's an ambient track for you know the other places that you go and then there's a specific combat track that plays for the specific whenever you get into combat in those specific sections it's not like it's not like skyrim where it's like the same you know when you put it but you get you know you're about to go into combat because it's the same music everywhere it's like every single there's every single area has its own kind of leitmotif and it's it's it's so cool like even just the music that plays in conversations in these locations are specific to their locations and it's so vibrant and it's so it's got so much character and so much charm i think it's very funny uh i don't even know and and i don't even really know if it's like unintentionally so there's certain there's certain lines that this guy whoever's playing the main guy in deus ex jc denton whoever's doing this voice is like killing it because it's it's some of the best line delivery i've ever i've ever experienced anything there's a part i can't remember if it was early on or in the middle point where you're trying to get into like you're trying to get information at like a nightclub or whatever and this this lady's there it's like hey i can give you the i can give you the code to the back room for uh you know for 300 credits or whatever and if you've already broken in there you could just be like nah i already went in there man and then and then she goes like oh that was like my one shot at that was my one shot at making money it just cuts to the main guy and he goes like why don't you try getting a job but it's not delivered like it's trying to be funny it just is and there's so many things like that it's like what a shame what a rotten way to die like so much so many iconic it's so good and uh yeah dude this game shot up so high in like my so like it's on par like i really think it's like bioshock tier like where it's just like this is fucking fantastic not in the same ways obviously the story is very like you know kind of all over the place it's very like conspiracy headed and it it definitely feels like it's more uh it's more dedicated to kind of throwing you into this crazy rabbit hole that keeps spiraling than it is about sticking to one thing necessarily but the sheer choice and you know consequence sense of playing through this thing it has me really curious to to play it again i can i can see a future where i'm going to i'm probably going to platinum this um because it is that good and obviously i was in this hole and i was like man i really like deus ex i want more i've heard really negative things about the invisible war and i wasn't quite ready to to sour my experience quite yet maybe i'll get to it eventually but i figure i'll put that on the shelf for now and i thought about deus ex human revolution uh eidos montreal i believe from i think 2013 um i remember playing this game a little bit when i first uh when it first came out or around that time and kind of not really liking it not really getting it i didn't really understand what an immersive sim was it's very similar to the first time playing prey and i was just i kind of figured like oh this is just not a very good first person shooter or whatever and this isn't for me um and so i put it down and i'm i picked it back up now and it is and to be fair i'm playing the director's cut which is different and we'll get into that but yeah deus ex human revolution is also surprise surprise very very good i'm so shocked that i didn't see what was so cool about this when i first played it granted it is different than it used to be like i i remember the original human revolution having uh what people affectionately refer to these days as a piss filter where like that whole game is so golden that it's obnoxious and i remember that at the time and being like i don't like this it feels too monotone it makes everything kind of feel the same and i just i wasn't into it also didn't help that i i just didn't know what the fuck was going on it It was a new series.

3:17:58I just kind of wasn't into it. The director's cut, as far as I'm aware, and as far as I've been able to discern, the cut scenes still have that kind of golden hue. And I think because I think they're pre-rendered, I think. But a lot of that gold is kind of removed outside of the places that just kind of needed to be. So that's been nice. It makes the places feel a little bit more distinct and varied from one another. And it's real good, man. It really feels like... there's elements of Deus Ex Human Revolution where it's like, man, I wish Cyberpunk was like this. And that's not again, it's they're very different games and they're both very good for very different reasons.

3:18:38I think Cyberpunk is probably pound for pound a better overall experience. But the flexibility of what you can and can't do and when you can and can't do them in Deus Ex versus Cyberpunk just feels like I actually feel like I have some agency here. Like I could go through this entire game in a very, very different way. And even something as simple as like the conversation minigame where like if you upgrade, if you choose to spec into conversation, like you get access to being able to read people's like personality profiles at like a glance by like analyzing their heart rate and stuff. and it it kind of shows you where on the personality spectrum they fit in after you've spent enough time talking to them and how to best like manipulate them to get what you want in in the dialogue options and there's even like an unlock for like pheromones that you can release like mid conversations to get them to like agree with you and it's like it's super fucking cool and and really deep it's definitely i don't know if it's as as charming or as deep as the original deus ex necessarily but it feels really good it feels really good to find uh clever ways through certain combat encounters and one of the most there's a particular section in this game that i i really loved and i felt it like oh this is so cool where and it's gonna sound kind of bog standard but like you're able to kind of sneak around and and hack computer terminals and choose like based on your level decided it's like oh i can i can disable these turrets i can uh i can make them i can disable these turrets or i can make them friendly or whatever and that's that's cool that's in a lot of games but what's cool about it is like if you have enough strength these are like wireless turret platforms basically and if you have the strength unlocked if you've specced into that you can kind of like you can go in hack it from like some separate computer terminal make it fight for you and then just kind of pick it up and move like walk through the level with it and it's just gunning down everything and you don't even have to do it you don't have to shoot anything you don't have to spend any ammo you can set it up ahead of time if you feel like people might barge in and and completely break certain combat encounters with this kind of flexibility and it's really fucking cool i'm really liking human revolution i'm about let me see uh it says i've played 25 25 hours so i'm pretty deep i think i put maybe like four hours in before so probably i'm call it even about 19 20 hours into the game and i'm really liking it however and i'm praising this guy i really love it but i hit something recently that was like oh no and i looked it up recently and i was like yep okay this is uh this is what this is so the director's cut includes a dlc i believe called the missing link i'm not super sure on that though and it kind of forces you to play it it doesn't really give you an option to avoid it or save it for later it just kind of like here it is it's in the middle of the story now it feels very disconnected to what the fuck i was just doing and it's it's noticeable and what's particularly frustrating is because this dlc i mean presumably this was for people who had finished the original deus ex or who had finished the original human revolution and wanted to you know delve into something new for a first-time player going through it in the middle of the game when this dlc starts immediately the style is different of how conversations work and how they play out and and immediately you lose all of your stuff all of the stuff that you've and it's not even and by the way i don't even say that to say like you lose your guns or whatever you lose all of your upgrades like all of them so everything that you've specced into everything that you've kind of plotted it kind of goes out the window to facilitate this dlc that's kind of intended to bring you back to the start so that so that people who had who had finished it can have something to grind towards but as it stands as a first-time player it's like not having the option really fucked the flow because i was getting in i was so i was i was so into my exact layout of like what i had done and now to do that all again in the middle of this game really sucks i'm not enjoying that at all i think i i hate this trope in general in video games where it's just like oh we're gonna take away everything and that would be one thing if it was just your equipment or like your armor or whatever but to take away like literally the skills that you have specced into and like things that you would presume would would stay that's really lame and it is easily the worst part of this and i kind of regret not playing the original like without the director's cut because i have a feeling that like i would have come away from this game with a far stronger feeling uh positive than uh than i'm feeling right now because right now i just feel like i'm all right i gotta get through this dlc so i can get back to the game and hopefully get the rest of my skill points back and hopefully remember exactly how i had said everything that's another thing too like and that's to be fair that might be just me being too anal about that kind of thing but i really i'm i really grow attached to my exact plan in a game like this and so that's kind of a blemish it's unfortunate uh i looked it up and a lot of people have similar issues with it but um yeah apparently the rest of the game uh i'm sorry i said weird weird paint weird pacing or yeah it's just a it's a strange decision to not let you choose to do it um i don't i don't get it it's a weird choice especially for a director's cut which you would assume would have more that almost feels like something that would be in the not director's cut you know what i mean like it seems like a like a publisher decision or something but but um human revolution is still very good i would just just bear in mind that there is a point that comes up where everything that you've worked towards is gonna go go out the window and presumably come back but i hate that shit and i know a lot of people do too so just be aware of it human revolution though up until this point has been fantastic i love it i love this story i love the characters i love this world it's very very cool i'm really into immersive sims right now man i don't know what it is i can see that that's great they're hitting um probably after this make it to a system shock too that's what

3:25:21Dustin Furman:i was gonna ask yeah that's sitting on my cross media bar i have to get to it at some point although i although maybe like i don't know maybe i'll be too maybe i'll be immersive sim down and I'll be ready to rage bound is sitting on my steam deck. So maybe I'll do that as like a palate cleanser between, but I'm in a good, I'm in a good game hole right now. Like I'm really liking things. Yeah. I'm really like everything that I'm playing. The glory hole. Yes. The glory hole. There's a, you guys aren't into football, but the Jerry Jones, do you guys know who Jerry Jones is famous? Not even the Cowboys.

3:25:53Dustin Furman:He's like the enigmatic. He's an old man. And he's like, really like talkative. And he's like the GM of his own team. And, And he I got it. I got to send it to you guys because it's like famous in the NFL world is that like he's multiple times used the term glory hole in like a press conference, not knowing what it means. So he's like, we want to be in that glory hole, you know, like that guy. Like he's like this like old Southern man when he's talking about like winning. That is insane. And so I listen to a podcast where they play that like they have a soundboard and they play that all the time.

3:26:23Dustin Furman:Got to got to say. Oh, you'll love that. that's the bummer about you guys not being into sports is that there's a whole world of funny fucking shit happening that you would love i'm sure you would love it you would think it was the funniest like some of the stupidest shit like on every night on sports something funny happens that like makes the rounds that everyone's fucking hysterical about i've seen some standouts like i think i i somebody was i don't even know if it was like confessing to something or he was like depressed on air and then he was like that's a home run by fucking oh yeah yeah yeah right right i don't know who it was or like what the situation was but somebody brought somebody wrote into the start every now and then people write into our other show uh with stuff like that and we'll look it up and we'll we'll crack up there's good stuff but i'll let it filter through the people who know it you know what i mean that way i mean yeah they'll be the yeah they're the perfect filter for you okay so that's what we're playing that's training to ninja guy and rage bound deus ex a conspiracy deus ex human revolution director scott ludo delta rune lots of good stuff there i'll be moving on to mafia is out by the time this comes out this podcast i'm definitely gonna play that um what else there was oh i gotta play doom the dark ages and i think that actually might be next i'm kind of in the mood for a shooter did you guys see that that hex and cross heretic game was announced oh uh and came out which is like a weird magic shooter so there's like a few things that i want to uh check out that's a little more action-oriented and then and then like chris was saying i got to get to i also have to get to system shock to remastered and i'm really looking forward to that as well oh yeah one hour ago and you've you've um yeah i saw what we were when i was peeing uh and then uh you uh i've gotten me kind of in the mood for immersive sims like i need to this is a joke with you obviously but i need to go back to pray at some point i never beat pray 2017 pray and then yeah and then i um i loved system shock remake i thought it was awesome system shock 3 like i'm like that's like what whatever that is with war inspector and like every it's like whoa man yeah i'm so i'm so in for whatever that is now like it's it's a really cool genre man like i'm really i don't even really it's such a weird genre to explain too because there's nothing about it that is particularly like it really is a vibe you just kind of know you just kind of know that you're playing one when you're playing it and when certain things happen uh i don't know it's weird they're so cool though i'm so into them

3:28:59um this hex this hex and shit looks really cool though yeah it does it does i'm looking

3:29:03Dustin Furman:the boomer shooter in the boomer shooter revolution and there aren't enough magic shooters none of you played Immortals of Avian because none of you have any taste you're too busy watching Marvel movies and fucking playing Fortnite but you could have played Immortals of Avian but you didn't I played it only someone did I platinum that bad boy I showed my love and my respect but now we're going to play Roblox instead forever you could just play a You just play prey and Roblox, right? Those two games go like peanut butter and jelly. I'm sure when someone's made some rip off, did you see that thing about peak?

3:29:42Yeah, like just pirate the game. Just just pirate.

3:29:45Dustin Furman:Yeah, it's dude. I've said I've said it before. I'm going to stand by Roblox fucking sucks. Yeah, I see it. The more I like look at it, the more I watch video of it, the more I read about it. Like this shit sucks slop and they're losing. So they're losing$300 million a quarter. a hundred million dollars a month get it together i i gave it the benefit of the doubt in the sense of like look man i don't know i i could just be old and out of touch maybe this just isn't for me or whatever but like the second this kind of thing pops up where it's just full of like literal stolen games it's just like oh well no this is objectively shit

3:30:27Dustin Furman:um just garbage awful yeah i'm looking at a video of it right now it's like jesus christ surprised they're like it just bothered me i was trying to explain this to jaffe and he was like oh it's big it's what the kids like i'm like but it sucks like kids used to like good things like i look back and i'm like wow i mean obviously people like shit too but it's like wow we just played mario 3 a few weeks ago right it's like this is fucking awesome still to this very day we played there was like kids were attracted at one time to good things now they're attracted to roblox and it's a lost cause i mean it's a total lost cause we are dinosaurs like this is yeah slowly gonna happen i'm fine with that but it's a bummer even fortnight you know what i mean like fortnight is of a level of quality like there's something there in fort like that's a real game it's a real ass video game what a roblox what what is that what is roblox it's it's bootleg looking it's i don't know like it's it's that guy outside of it's that guy on the street in the 90s in new york with like a bunch of like self-printed really skinny dvd cases it's like here's garfield the movie it's on it's on some plain white disc with sharpie written on it and it's filmed on a camcorder and some guys go into the bathroom immediately walking in front of the screen feels looking at this i'm like looking at this and i'm like this is just there's a video called testing one roblox game from every year by a channel called the laugh ability and i'm just looking at that i'm like dude like what the fuck i can't believe this like like that this is like what kids are into oh my god save the children there's a mean of the hollower demo out for switch only god you guys are so annoying yacht club's so annoying

3:32:29Colin Moriarty:way i'm not gonna play the console it's already in my house way

3:32:35Dustin Furman:it's right here switch one yeah but it's on switch one oh it's on switch one too that's well there you go are you gonna are you gonna play it yeah i'll probably well actually probably not because i really don't like my demos but it's but i did play the shinobi demo when we were doing Ninja Gaiden, I played it for about two minutes. I'm like, I don't know. Even during the disc era, what do they call it? The jam packs and whatever the fuck. Yeah, demo discs. Yeah, like PlayStation Underground and whatever. I wasn't that into it. That's a really fond memory for a lot of people, but for me, I'm like, I know what I want to play.

3:33:11Dustin Furman:It's cool, I guess, to mess around a little bit, but I wasn't crazy about it. Dude, I loved I loved the demo discs like the like I had most people did I think yeah like the PlayStation magazine like that was how I was introduced to like so much stuff you know there were demos that came with games that I did care more about like I did buy zone of the enders specifically no I ended up liking zone of the enders but I bought it specifically for the Metal Gear Solid 2 demo and I bought something for fine oh the bouncer came with Final Fantasy 10 I want to say so there were there were like it was cool and those it's so funny to think of how expensive and unnecessary all that that was like a a dvd case with two disc slots another disc printed all that kind of shit um yeah but i remember specifically getting zone of the enders at smith smith haven mall in new york just because i was so excited to play metal gear solid too and and so i did but zone of the end ended up being really good so all right let's get into listener inquiries wrap this show up and get the hell out of here six questions comments concerns thoughts and ideas from the audience over on patreon patreon.com slash last day media just use the threads in the news feed each week to submit your inquiries to the various shows you've heard your inquiries throughout the show already and we'll get into six more now starting with the moss greeting sacred crew i listened to the moriarty cross hogue episode and it was incredibly interesting i love the content so i wanted to say thank you there's something i'm not fully understanding about the steam payment processor story and i sincerely apologize if it was said and I missed it.

3:34:37Dustin Furman:What power does collective shout have over the payment processors? Why did they cave to their demand so quickly? I would love to hear from you. And remember, petroleum jelly is the wrong kind for a sandwich. I'll try to keep that in mind. Thank you for writing it. I went over this story with Hoag, but I wanted to kind of include you guys because it is a bigger story. It's kind of becoming a bigger thing. I wanted to just kind of get you on the record. Did you guys keep up with this? What's going on with Steam and Itch dot io we talked about it a little bit last week right and i've been there's some updates but about like didn't steam make a comment i think steam said i think what happened was mastercard had said like they weren't pressuring anyone or something it was one of the payment processors then steam was like yes you are kind of is that the update you saw i can't remember very good um so i was just i wanted to quickly talk about this this collective shout and remind me that we talked about this last week a little bit right yeah yeah we did a little bit did we get really deep into it i don't think we did not some somewhat deep yeah it was like yeah good kind of no it was kind of we got kind of deep into it we definitely haven't heard we haven't talked about any of the new stuff that's happened and i'm a little out of touch with it i haven't seen much about it in the last like couple days well i wanted to specifically speak about this collective shout um organization and like what kind of power they have and this was something that i think was a little controversial, but some people took umbrage within the conversation that Hogan and I had, which I suggest people go on to patreon.com slash last day media, listen to yourself are, are, you know, somewhat regular legal discussions between Hogan and I are a lot of fun.

3:36:17Dustin Furman:Um, people have been asking like, what kind of power does, and, and, and this is what the Moss is asking is like, what kind of power does collective shout have? Like, why do come, why do, why listen to these people at all? and I feel like the system is kind of broken down in this regard because Hogue made a really good point like I think he said something akin to the like collective shout is doing what the collective shouts of the world are supposed to do which is like to be abrasive and agitate for change and bring attention to things that they want change and I think that that's like their freedom to do that but I am concerned that people capitulated so quickly and so rapidly.

3:36:58Dustin Furman:And I do have a question as to like, what really that is all about. And I really just think it's a matter of people not understanding the space and not wanting to have trouble. Like I, but this is the thing that I'm so confused about with the payment processors and their interaction with these various organizations is like, I would just want to know as little as possible. I think I said that last week, like the best course forward is just know as little as possible. We don't want to know. We don't care. Well, we care. just don't tell us don't make it obvious what you're doing and so if you're going to have a model like that like a laissez-faire model like that then you have to expect that there's going to be organizations like collective shout that are going to come after you and that you need to hold your own but i think the thing that bothers me about the story too a little bit is that i think there's more blame to go around than just at collective shout and the payment processors i do think that there's some sort of obligation by the storefronts to not bring this kind of heat on themselves to begin with and this is very similar to i mean it's actually a little bit more extreme than what happened when the srb was created in that like this was a reaction to stuff some stuff that really maybe shouldn't have been released i'm not saying that like night trap or mortal combat or anything like that are amongst those games but you look at um like custer's revenge or something which was earlier than those games it's like that's a pretty bad game you know like it's not to say that it shouldn't exist in and of itself it's to say that like there should be people smart enough to know that this shouldn't exist on your platform that you shouldn't sell it that you need to make it harder for people and so i do think that there's like a small element of this story that's being swept under the rug which is that like steam and these other companies have some sort of obligation and if people want to read i don't think i read it on this show but i think i read it on sacred plus where i read one of the like the the offending description of the the major game that they were offended by and it's bad it's like why was this on the show why was this on your storefront again i'm not saying it can't exist right i'm a freedom of speech person can do what you got to do i guess but i don't know so i just wanted to throw that out there i don't know if you guys have anything you want to say but um i do understand this idea that like there's a capitulative sort of attitude where no one fights this is what's so interesting about american eagle right now right the pants company.

3:39:19Dustin Furman:I don't know how serious it really is, but the Sidney Sweeney ads or whatever. It's like, and then people complaining about them and then American Eagle standing up and saying like, well, we stand by the ads and stuff like that's what you would expect the company to do. I would assume a company that's thought it all out and kind of understands and has gamed it out, war gamed it, figured out the way things are going to wash out. It just seems like Steam was ill prepared for this. And I don't know what you expect is going to happen when you're not paying attention to what people are publishing. and the shit that's getting through it's just it's confusing to me so i like valve i like steam but um and collective shout is seen i've heard from people especially in australia because that's where they are that being like these guys go after a lot of shit and a lot of it is dubious and i'm like yes but that's not their fault they're winning like they're getting scalps because they're allowed to get them you have to someone's got to stand up and say like, no.

3:40:16Dustin Furman:And that's what's weird is that you would think the buck would stop with Visa and MasterCard and PayPal. It's like, where do you go from there? Like if they have, if who's, who has a problem with MasterCard or Visa, you're kind of the top of the chain. You make the decisions. You are the processor of the payments. You are the access to the liquid money. Anyway, just wanted to throw that all out there. I don't know if you have anything you guys want to add or should we move on? No. All right. Slipwater wrote in and said, hi guys, for time immemorial. I've heard that Game Pass is a great deal, but at this point, I feel like some of the industry voices are gaslighting us.

3:40:49Dustin Furman:In the UK, Game Pass Ultimate is 15 pounds a month. PlayStation Premium is 13 pounds 50. In your neck of the woods, it's$20 a month for Ultimate and$18 for Premium. Both services offer hundreds of games, many of which are excellent no matter which side of the console coin you are on. And there is a lot of crossover between both platforms. Game Pass boasts day one first party games and more frequent day one third party offerings, although PlayStation is slowly gaining ground in that area. But is that the reason for the plaudits? The way I see it, Game Pass, you pay a little more money for a slightly better service.

3:41:20Dustin Furman:Don't read me wrong. I'm not trying to steal anyone's joy. If you like Game Pass, that's great. I'm just fed up hearing commentators singing its praises when I think Sony deserves at least some of the love for its own subscription service. Am I totally off base here? And if so, what am I missing? Dustin, you're a user of both. And Chris, well, maybe of other things too. And Chris, I think you are as well. I've never had PS plus extra or premium so I've never used it but I know people that have and really enjoy it I think there's something to this I just think the day one games count but I also don't want to understate how well PlayStation plus is doing Sony doesn't report numbers anymore but it's almost certain that they have substantially more PlayStation plus users than there are Game Pass numbers and the reason that that matters is because it's not well it's no longer PS plus to gold it's now ps plus to game pass because everyone that's online on xbox now has some form of what they are counting as game pass so sony is silently i think winning especially because they're spending and losing way less money by ingesting games that probably could sell a la cart in there um but i'm wondering what you guys think if they if they stand up to each other um and if sony deserves a little bit more credit for ps plus extra than they're getting

3:42:29you want to take it either way uh i so i feel i don't know man i think i understand the uh inclination to compare them it is fair in some way but i do feel like the fact that the reality is that game pass functions not only well as like a a tool to find new games that people otherwise wouldn't play but also dude the day one stuff on game pass is just kind of like that that is a point where it kind of defies a lot of compare there's really no equivalent thing like that where you're going to get the entire first party library of of like that's insane when you when you consider how big xbox first party is because of all the acquisitions like that's insane like i played tony hawks pro skater three and four through game pass just recently you know Claire Obscura was it was like a that's not a first party game obviously but that's like that was their day what doom like I mean I I understand what you're saying like the ps ps plus as it stands is very good it's how I played DSX and uh it's cool to play some of these older games and like there's value there for sure but like I just think I I don't think you do I you don't do PlayStation plus any favors by comparing it to something that is so clearly it's so value rich that it's destroying the brand like it is so clearly customer and consumer focused that it almost doesn't give a shit about the company that it's meant to support like oh yeah you can uh one dollar for game pass and then like actually we'll give you that dollar back if you don't want it like they it's game pass is too good it should be worse

3:44:14but yeah i don't know that's kind of how i feel about it yeah yeah yeah go ahead i agree it's

3:44:20Colin Moriarty:well playstation plus premium at 18 a month is a very good deal and a great value but of course as chris was saying when you compare it to game pass it's like yeah uh a 70 game on the service along with everything else at a pretty regular rate if you're interested in those games that's insane. I think that PlayStation Plus Premium's pricing is probably a little bit more healthy whereas Game Pass I would assume the prices for that will go up as they're still trying to gather users. So it really just depends on how you look at it. But yeah, if you're frustrated because you see a bunch of people talking about Game Pass value, it's like yeah, they're talking about the$70 games that are regularly on it.

3:45:10Colin Moriarty:and that's where that sentiment comes through. But just because they're saying that it doesn't mean that PlayStation Plus isn't a good value either if you're the type of user that wants that back catalog. So yeah, just depends.

3:45:21Dustin Furman:Yeah, as a business and I'm interested in the businesses and how they work. I think most people don't give a shit. I think Sony is probably actually extracting more profitable value out of their version of the subscription because they have so much less invested in it. So it's really all upside where even Microsoft, we saw from the leaked letters from the Activision FTC situation that people inside were afraid of what they were doing and the erosion of their own their own value so which is why those games are now on playstation so yeah i think both are just doing their own thing and i think they're reflections of the way the individual companies feel about their own catalogs um and the way that i mean you're not gonna be able to beat call of duty like we were saying on day and date on game pass i mean it's just that's a huge value but that comes at a major cost well dude even that um what was that one month where it was like it was like a oblivion and then clear obscure and then something like and doom i think right doom yeah like all that in the span of like a week and a half that's that justifies that that alone that two-week period justifies the cost of game pass for like several months, probably like a year.

3:46:33So like, I don't know. I just, it's not a good point to comparison. Yeah. Or a point of comparison.

3:46:38Dustin Furman:They're both, I think they're both doing what they need to do. It seems like both are pretty static. Sony not acknowledging the numbers anymore as a sign that they're probably plateaued, if not falling. It's a little hard for me to believe that PS Plus numbers are falling though, because like you kind of need to have it to play online. That's the way most people are playing games now. it just seems like that's probably just not growing enough to report yeah i think that the numbers are obviously yeah you're you know they're either inaccurate or being obscured for other reason but um anyway all right next up is pikachu was almost a tabby cat with huge naturals writes in and says hey gents seems like ea could not have asked for a better reaction from fans regarding their battlefield 6 reveal this feels like the first time in years that the internet is just happy with the game.

3:47:25Dustin Furman:That being said, if the momentum builds to a successful launch and people are not happy with the Black Ops 7 reveal, is there any chance that Battlefield could be the best-selling shooter this year? I saw an interesting story about this too in regards to Battlefield kind of competing with Black Ops where they were saying, it was from Insider Gaming and Tom Henderson I think wrote it where they were saying that there was internal sources at Activision saying that like they're not really afraid of Call of Duty failing. But they called it something that I thought was fairly ominous, at least according to him, which was too big to fail.

3:47:54Dustin Furman:That's not what that means. Too big to fail means that something systemically breaks down if it fails. I don't know if they're meaning like – we obviously came to terms with that – or we got to know that term rather during the recession back in 07, 08, the banks that were too big to fail. They literally could not fail. call of duty definitely can fail but i don't think it's going to i think it has a huge audience one of the things that i've seen out of battlefield and especially the uh the pr around it the marketing around it is them saying like it's going to be a more serious game like we're not going to have these crazy skins we've been talking about this in here too like the beavers and butthead skins and all these kinds of things that have made call of duty more of like a fortnight clone and i think activision seems to be kind of undercutting its own value and certainly there's more competition in the space now however it's hard for me to believe that battlefield gets anywhere close to selling more than Call of Duty.

3:48:48Dustin Furman:I could be totally wrong about that. I think Battlefield is going to do great. Yeah. But I think that would be a first. And I just don't think that that's going to be the reality. Now, if you compare Battlefield 6 is going to exist for a long time. Call of Duty will move on to the next Call of Duty next year. If you want to compare game over game like Battlefield and Black Ops 7, Battlefield might ultimately sell more copies, but certainly not in competition with each other before they move on to the next Call of Duty. You guys know a lot more about this than I do, though, so I'm very eager. Chris, what have you thought about Battlefield 6?

3:49:19Dustin Furman:I think the betas, people were queuing up for it. I don't know if it's going now or what's happening. Yeah, I saw even as we've been recording, I've seen many like Steam notifications popping up of like so-and-so is playing the Battlefield 6 open beta. I don't really know how to get involved in that. I would like to, but I'm not really clamoring. I'm playing a bunch of other stuff. the beta is only going to be open for like a brief period of time i also am not really all that confident that my computer will be able to run it to be honest i feel like uh it looks really intensive and uh and my computer is kind of it's not i mean i have a i have a 3080 so it's not like decrepit but it's it's far from far from current um so i i don't really know what to what to make of that but i i will say like dude it looks great and i'm really excited to play it but i can i can wait to play it with with everybody on on launch and i i will ultimately be waiting to see how how it launches because battlefield has a tendency to with the exception of one i think um battlefield generally kind of launches in a fucky kind of place i know that was for battlefield 4 i know that i know that was certainly true for battlefield 6 or not battlefield 6 battlefield 5 i know that was certainly true for battlefield what is it 2042 or whatever so i'll probably wait to see but like i did i'm i'm feeling good about it it looks it looks really good people are saying it's very good um vibes are up right now as far as battlefield goes and i am happy that they're kind of leaning into the or leaning away i should say uh from the the kind of wacky um ungrounding cosmetics that have kind of subsumed a lot of other live service games i don't know if that'll necessarily translate too much because ultimately i do think those things make a shit ton of money um but i i applaud it i think it's a good move ultimately dustin what are your thoughts yeah can your computer handle battlefield

3:51:27Colin Moriarty:oh yeah you know like i said to luck spy 4090 no problems right right right um but uh as far as it being more successful than call of duty i feel like by design battlefield will never be as big as call of duty in that right call of duty in its like soup fast paced dopamine hit over and over type gameplay it's just always going to be more appealing than a large scale military like realistic military shooter not necessarily like armor or something but you know what i'm trying to say um certainly battlefield this year has potential to be bigger than ever um and i'm dude i i definitely want to check out this beta i was looking the early access to the beta starts today but the open beta starts on the 9th so you could always pre-order and then cancel your pre-order if you want to get in today or tomorrow which is maybe what i'll do um so yeah it it could be battlefields time but it's just it's just not going to there's i understand the mentality of like call of duty's too big to fail i i understand what he meant is that people are just going to buy Call of Duty year in a year out.

3:52:45Colin Moriarty:It doesn't matter how good Battlefield is. Right, right. I understand what he meant. I just was saying that

3:52:48Dustin Furman:it's not really what that term means.

3:52:50Colin Moriarty:Right, exactly. So I hope it's great. Everything I've seen from it is looking really awesome. Yeah.

3:52:58Dustin Furman:Well, Pikachu was almost a tabby cat with huge naturals. Thank you for writing in. Vince wrote in and said, what happened to five minute video reviews? I noticed that over the last few months and I'm not sure why. I remember IGN used to have these five to seven minute reviews of most games. It got longer and longer and now the donkey kong bonanza is a whopping 19 minutes thanks for the quality content i feel like there i have a really obvious answer to this but i'm wondering if you guys agree i don't want to say it chris well i mean watch time right engagement time right i mean that's it's that's the name of the game on for succeeding on youtube now and and for succeeding anywhere now really like you like long-form content is really outside of phone platforms like tiktok and you know instagram reels like that's kind of the it's the name of the game is to have like the long long form videos that people put on in the background and you know even something like 20 minutes which is not necessarily something that you would put on like a podcast it's

3:53:47Colin Moriarty:it's longer and i do think it actually is beneficial to have longer when you're i actually felt like seven minute or like five to seven minute video game reviews are always kind of unsatisfying like to me because i actually i wanted to know more like i wanted more from it like i want to know more about this thing and and so it seemed kind of like weird like maybe maybe some games don't don't require that much uh conversation but i always felt like especially back in the day like these could be these could be longer so i actually think it serves both the the um like what a game deserves as far as like reviewing it and also just bottom line stuff like mid rolls watch time audience engagement it's just kind of a synergistic kind of marriage of those two things.

3:54:37Dustin Furman:I agree. Reviews back in the day when websites started reviewing games, we had magazines so the space was very limited. They went in the exact opposite direction and people might remember old reviews on GameSpot, IGN, all those websites were like sometimes thousands and thousands of words, like multiple pages. I think the Grand Theft Auto San Andreas review at IGN was like eight pages or something, which is like, what the fuck? What are you even doing? And we truncated and truncated and truncate when I was there to get it shorter. Now I think it's swinging back again, like you're saying to kind of respond to the expectations of the algorithm and like what people are really looking for.

3:55:12Dustin Furman:And they like these deeper looks and you need watched what I think people are confused by like one thing on YouTube. And I understand if you're not in the world, like why would you know you don't get paid based on views? You get paid based on how much watch time you get. That's why like our podcast, like I have very modest view numbers, you know, 20, 30, 40 ,000 views per week, depending on the show. But our watch time is like insane. I think the average watch time on our videos is like 50 minutes that's like unheard of you know levels of engagement on youtube and that's how you make money on youtube so they're certainly just trying to lean into it in fact wasn't it like people used to put like the um used to like spoof their videos to make them as long as humanly possible right like uh right what do you what do you mean like black like at the end the video would be 10 minutes and 30 seconds but like the last two minutes would just be dead air to like reach the assert oh yeah it was like that's the other thing and we've talked about this on the show, Chris, is that like people also don't, none of us really know what's what everyone gleans information off of YouTube and thinks they understand it.

3:56:14Dustin Furman:There are like experts. Like we used to have them at IGN like that. You think they understand how to use YouTube. And even those people are dead ass wrong. I've talked about how, um, I don't know if you guys remember IGN first or not IGN first. It was IGN. God, I brought this up in the past. Thank you for start IGN start. It was our YouTube channel, like the separate YouTube channel. And we got a bunch of money from Google to make it. And they gave like a bunch of like these grants out to everyone. And we thought it was the best idea to make a new channel. So like we had the IGN channel, then we had the IGN start channel, which was like all this different stuff that like game shows and all these different things that we were doing.

3:56:48Dustin Furman:And then we realized like we really what we should have done is just kept it all on the same channel, like splitting it up. so like people's instincts even these highly paid people are not right so it's just to go on to say we were talking about this about how you and i both don't believe that actually like we were making fun of people using grape instead of rape in a video or like you know unalive yourself and all that kind of stuff and we were saying like i don't believe that that ever mattered like i just truly don't like i i say crazy shit on these videos all the time it only matters to the to the to the extent uh that if it bothers the right person and they show it to the right person you know what i mean like that's the only conceivable way because i i have plenty of videos where you know i i'm notorious for cursing i don't say that's a point of pride i wish i wish i didn't actually as often as i do i'm just used to it and the complete monetization no problem at all and then i watch a video of somebody like censoring themselves it just bothers the hell out of me because i just know i know for a fact they don't need to do that i know for a fact it's not a necessity that you do that um it might hedge your bets right and that's you know fair enough i i get it on some level but like yeah it really is just watch time i remember the meme was always like you see the watch the runtime of a video and it was always like 10 minutes and in two seconds it's like ah you you know what you're doing right definitely you know exactly you got to that 10 minute 10 minute was the threshold i remember or like qualifying for mid-rolls and to be fair like you know it's been the case that youtube hasn't paid per view for the overwhelming majority of its lifetime at this point like that ended sometime the time frame i think was around like 2009 to 2012 maybe even earlier between 2011 um and you knew and you knew that that was the case because that was around the time that animation stopped being like the big thing because and it used to be like an animator could really really do well because they could make something that was like maybe like a minute long and it would catch the zeitgeist it would be quick and and spicing and everybody would care about it and then millions of people would watch it and then that would be a healthy chunk of change but the second it became watch time um it became less reasonable to to you know to dedicate time and money into into making short animations because it just that that wasn't fulfilling watch time it was it was the worst idea you could possibly do and that's why a lot of animators ended up doing podcasts together to make up for the watch time that they were that they were losing uh for their for their cartoons it's it's really interesting um how it all shook up that way a big piece of youtube history too was the reply girls you remember those yeah of course yeah of course they kind of also ruined it because they like they would just have a title oh that was like the same as another video and it would be like five seconds or like 10 seconds and somebody like ha that was a good video and then they get paid per view right and because it has the same title and it's like oh well the watch time i do think the watch time was an earnest attempt to kind of like make it so like people who were making garbage weren't rewarded for it because you know if you click on something and it's not what you're looking for you're going to x out immediately and then they won't the people who do make the thing you want to see and they'll get rewarded for it but i do think it had kind of negative consequences because now now now people just figured out that they could just make a long drawn out garbage and do the same thing like this so yeah welcome um dustin you have anything i saw that you posted a video on your youtube channel today well no what is it a tier list tier list for those games for a blog yeah okay so you you understand the youtube i mean you're in charge of our op here you have anything you'd like to add yeah well there's definitely i mean

4:00:49Colin Moriarty:the the main reason i would say from big outlets probably is that it's longer more watch time it's going the more watch time means it's going to feed out to more people more watch time also means you can put more ads directly baked into it obviously um cpm which i think is clicks per million of clicks per meal it's uh clicks per thousand it's french oh okay yeah so that also dude dude, YouTube is so weird. You can get paid different amounts based on what your video is categorized in. So like gaming YouTube is so saturated that the CPM on it is very low. But I've heard like finance YouTubers or legal YouTubers, the CPM is like way higher.

4:01:39Colin Moriarty:You can get way less views and you're monetized and make way more money. We should just start

4:01:45Dustin Furman:mislabeling all of our stuff.

4:01:47Colin Moriarty:Fantastic idea.

4:01:49Dustin Furman:we do technically get into legal issues yeah yeah yeah yeah youtube loves that kind of thing

4:01:55Colin Moriarty:um from a personal perspective on reviews though i am at the point where i do i do not like long reviews um especially for a brand new game if i'm watching a review it's mainly because i want to know what it what's the game about um and whether or not the reviewer thinks it's good or bad i I don't want to know everything about the game. I want to experience it for myself. I'm using the review as a product of like to inform myself on whether or not I think I'll like it. I think that a lot of reviews have kind of started to fade into more like critique territory where interesting. In our modern gaming YouTuber slash media landscape, reviews are more so content than anything else where people are like, I want to watch the review, this person's review.

4:02:53Colin Moriarty:And it doesn't matter whether or not they've played the game or not. They really want to know what that person's individualized opinion is. And obviously, there's a lot of value with that. um so yeah my my preference is a a five minute review when i'm looking for an informed purchasing decision but there are youtubers that do like insanely long reviews like um joseph anderson does a bunch on um uh like from software games he's done like witcher games and they are fucking long as hell but they're not intended as a uh something you watch to make a buying decision it's for people that want to analyze every aspect of a game so it's kind of a different space uh of what these two things are it's just because of those things we mentioned earlier as far as like youtube watch time and what the market is looking for in these reviews it makes sense that they're

4:03:49Dustin Furman:longer now i love long form content a lot we make long form content too but in game like i don't even really like reviews of games. I've never watched video reviews and I'll often look and see like if I just what a website gives it gives a game or like their their their synopsis or whatever at the end. But I'm just not much of the consumer of criticism. So I can't I don't really have a huge opinion. I was a prolific writer of criticism at one point, but I'm really reading any of it to be honest. Devin McCarty wrote in said sacred Triforce. Is there a technical or financial reason some games support online co-op, but skip couch co-op I grabbed firefighting simulator and construction simulator for my son, Parker.

4:04:28Dustin Furman:And while we're having a blast with the scenarios, it'd be way more useful if we could actually squad up. But there's no friggin local co-op just online. These games are crazy detailed and clearly well made. But to play side by side, we need separate consoles and profiles. His fifth birthday is coming up. Might have to bite the bullet and get him his own PS5 so we can squad up properly. But I'm also trying not to raise a bougie baby gamer just to fight a digital fire. I'll hang up, consider gutting his birthday wish list and listen. Why not? I mean, you're the son, your son, you can make, you can morph him into whatever you want right now in terms of a console game.

4:04:58Dustin Furman:You can make him a huge nerd. I say you buy him that PS5 if you can afford it. But the local co-op stuff is a technical hurdle. It's hard to get a game, you know, if you're like, so I would assume in this firefighting simulator, construction simulator game, you're not going to be able to use the same perspective. You're going to basically be running the game twice. It's a form of like what's going on on PSVR, basically. That's how I would explain it. So I and also I would say that couch co-ops is not that important anymore. It's just not the way people play. So I remember like split screen for Gears had split screen borderlands.

4:05:35Dustin Furman:It's like this is a technical hurdle. It's hard to make it to do this, but also but I guess it's like you're cutting the you're cutting the point of view in half. So it right. So it should use like half as much, but you're running it. the the issue is that you're rendering a lot at the same time especially it depends on the game obviously like there's some you could see it happening like real time like i remember towards the end of the 360 generations when you started to notice i think you kind of get diminishing or maybe diminishing returns isn't necessarily the right term but like halo combat evolved split screen or something on the original xbox that didn't really matter because you weren't really losing much detail anyway because those games were kind of already crude in some sense um but i remember with halo reach specifically doing doing co-op with people or like going into forge and being like damn you could see actively everything looking worse the second somebody another perspective was drawn and it really is a matter of like rendering and all the you know some physics has to has to be processed multiple times like it's it's a it's a it's a pretty intensive thing especially for modern games where the expectation is that if it's not 4k 60 i'm shitting all over it it's going to be a key point in my 50 minute review about how shit this runs or how like oh man this this npc looks like garbage because i have four people running running on the same screen um it is unfortunate i too wish that it was more of a focus and i do think for some games i think you should just kind of bite the bullet like halo infinite not having split screen co-op i think is insane because i think that's a that's a franchise that people understand it's like okay yeah you're going to sacrifice some stuff but like this is so core to this franchise that like why wouldn't you do this but generally speaking it's it's a risky thing to do because then you're also putting yourself you're putting your game in front of people in a context by which it can look bad and i think that's um just not appealing to a lot of people especially in a in an environment that is so hyper it's a very hyper aggressive environment like people make up their minds in a second if they see something even slightly askew so i could see why they've opted to just not even open them open themselves up to that issue in the first place.

4:08:04Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I agree with everything you both have said. But in addition, because he asked if it's a technical or financial reason, it is both. Because I think that, I mean, in the case of Firefighting Simulator and Construction Simulator, I'm sure these aren't, I don't know anything about these games. Maybe they're insane sellers that I've never really looked into. But either way, there's a financial cost in deciding to develop a co-op mode. And so when they're deciding the budget of the game and what their priorities are and whether or not they want to do a couch co-op mode they might be able to look at their stats from previous games be like yeah this isn't really something people are asking for and it's going to be a technical hurdle and it's going to cost us money to make and it's going to take away from other things we could do so we're just not going to do it so i think that's probably often the case as well and something that's worth noting too is that like we are we're of a certain age right like we're we're early 30s mid 30s late 30s um our there's a pretty good chance that our first interaction with a video game playing with another person was in person you know like that was pretty much the only way to do it um and so that that's important to us and we value that but from the perspective of a younger player who their first experience playing a game with somebody else was almost assuredly online or you know fortnighters or pvp like like they had their own screen and maybe maybe they were through a mic maybe it was xbox live psn whatever and so the the idea of like playing in person just i mean not only is this not important it might be completely alien to a a large percentage of people like i can't imagine like there's it's not only not been facilitated but it's also just not really the way that younger audiences engage with even the even the co-op games that are really popping right now not even just on pc i mean you know repo and peak those these are all like discord hangout games they're not like games that you play in person so i just think the reality is that we're old yeah and this is important to us and not really important to people who grew up

4:10:24Dustin Furman:without it i went and looked um firefighter simulator the squad is probably what he's talking about this came out in 2020 on pc and it seems like it's done and it came out 2022 on psn on steam it has 4 143 very mostly you know very positive reviews classhood is very positive it's 25 bucks and it's getting a sequel called ignite this fall and on psn it has um 2713 ratings which indicates that it's probably sold hundreds of thousands of copies and then construction simulator um came out in 2022 on pc and came 2022 as well to console it has 8714 very positive reviews on all on steam and on console it has 5 ,495 uh star ratings so these games are pretty big low key which is not a huge surprise like some of those games are and maybe even some of the big games are shit but there's like a similar those are both published by the same publisher they're a german publisher and uh some of these games are like kind of good and then some of them are sloppy and shitty and i think you just need to know like which one you're getting when you when you buy them.

4:11:39Dustin Furman:Devin, thank you for writing in. Finally, Derek Mozzarella wrote in and said, good day, Sacred Crew. What are your thoughts on soon approaching ID verification that's happening with Xbox and various websites due to the UK's new laws? I see a lot of uproar, but is it justified? People constantly fear monger about children being targeted online. And if parents aren't going to be responsible with how their kids use technology, I don't see what's wrong with making it just a little bit harder for kids to go places they shouldn't. Unrestricted internet has been a disaster for kids. I think we can all agree.

4:12:05Dustin Furman:You have to show an ID when you buy alcohol after all. people don't want to use their face or id to verify their xbox account but they'll happily give apple their face to open their phone every day or their thumbprint to use apple pay your personal data is no more secure with apple than it is with xbox or playstation i don't know about that anyways curious to hear your thoughts i'll leave food out at my campsite in grizzly bear country and listen i think based on history our data is substantially more safe with either with apple than it is with sony or microsoft but um i both agree and disagree if they really could did you guys see what happened did we bring it up on this show that the t app oh yeah and like how like there's an app called ttea and it's like for women to like gossip about men basically and then their shit was basically just they had all these id verifications like tens of thousands of them just sitting in like a fucking photo bucket basically and someone someone like not even people were saying like this isn't even a hack because literally they were just sitting here like in the open for anyone that just went into the API, I guess, and figured it out.

4:13:11Dustin Furman:So I feel like it's too risky to expect people to want to put their social security numbers out there or their IDs, their state IDs or whatever. But I also, or your passport, but I also think that it's not an unrealistic expectation to see like that might be the direction it goes in. In some ways, I don't mind it. In some ways, I do. It really depends on what we're talking about. I don't want the government in my business. If we have free interactions with corporations and some of them want your information and some of them don't to like try to circumvent or stay within the bounds of various legal guidelines in various countries and stuff, then that may be what we have to do.

4:13:50Dustin Furman:And we have to decide if we really want to do that or not. But I really am. So it's not so much that I'm concerned about Apple or Sony or Microsoft having my information. It's a concern about is that information safe? I could give a fuck if Sony has my ID? Who cares? Like, what are they going to do with it? But it's a matter of like, what if someone gets hacked? And Sony got hacked. It was a long time ago now, but it happened. And the Sony Pictures hack was even more recent. So it's not like they were as a corporation impervious to that. But I'm referring to the PSN hack, of course, in 2011. The one thing that I think is a problem is the way that laws in certain countries interfere with all of us sometimes this is true and good and sometimes it's true and bad so a good example of it being true and good is like i i don't know if it started because i haven't bought an iphone in a long time but iphones are going to start being made with usb cable like oh so yeah right that was bc right that was that was because of a lawsuit in europe very specifically and apple was like it's just and it was basically over e-waste being like you're making all of these fucking phones with these proprietary ports, like what we, there are industry standards.

4:14:59Dustin Furman:You can, you should be able to use any USB-C port or cable to be able to charge your phone. And Apple lost that case. And then they were like, well, it just makes sense for us to just do this, to make this everywhere. Like we were, we're not going to make up a spoke phone for fucking Europe. So that was a positive change, but there are a slew of negative things that happened too. And like the UK's, the UK has got a very onerous state. I mean, I'm sorry. It is from an American point of view. It's obvious. and that infringing and interfering with the way we do business and interfere and interact with our companies is a problem so i just think it goes both ways part of me is it's like the patriot act back in the day the argument about that used to be and i was totally i i supported the patriarch that was totally wrong it was a ridiculous thing to support just like the iraq war but at the time was like if you have nothing to hide you know then what are you worried about and i'm like no that's just that's totally insufficient so we got to figure it out the other thing too is the anonymity the anonymity of the internet i think is somewhat important it would be hysterical to out everyone on the internet like as far as who the the randos are and shit like that people hiding behind you know fake you know personas and all the rest but it's kind of the spirit of the internet is is opting in or out and dealing with the repercussions one way or the other so those are my thoughts you guys have anything you want to add about this

4:16:23Colin Moriarty:doesn't yes my thought especially with the xbox playstation angle is in my opinion both of these consoles have parental tools on them fucking use them you know um it seems weird to me that it's like oh no we need to make sure the government needs stepped in to make sure that are being used right it's like to me it's a major failure of of like parental responsibility that it's like no just go in and make sure that your console's locked down so that your kid's not playing shit that's gonna mess them up or something like that same with the internet too where it's like yeah you probably shouldn't let a young child have full reign of anything they want to go see on the internet because there's things that they they should not see at that age so it's unfortunate to see like i mean i guess in uk but who knows it could happen here too that it's like um you know scanning your face or scanning norman reedus's face from death stranding too i don't know if you guys saw that people were getting around it by like scanning him from the game it's uh i don't know i guess this is just more of a statement about society in general it's just like dude take take some responsibility um you know you see these stories like my kid spent five thousand dollars on on fortnight skins it's like dude that's your fault i mean it's partially your kid's fault but it's your fault for not putting any fucking restrictions on there take

4:18:00Dustin Furman:responsibility parent for christ's sake yeah it's it the buck the buck stops with you not the

4:18:05Colin Moriarty:corporation sorry i remember the day that i asked my dad because i had money i think i had cash and I asked to use his credit card to buy something on Xbox 360. And he looked at me and he's like, I will let you do this. You will never spend money with this without me asking or we're going to have a problem. And I was like, yes, sir. You know what I mean? And I never, ever used that card unless we had a conversation beforehand about it. Obviously, some kids maybe not aren't trustworthy, but those tools are there now. Yeah, but those tools are available now.

4:18:38Dustin Furman:Right. And that's your problem. Yeah. Like that it's, it's, so I agree. I just think I, my general stance is that we need to have more personal responsibility for ourselves. Um, but again, it's a complicated situation we were talking about earlier in the show with steam and like their own corporate responsibility and stewardship and all these things. And so I don't trust, I trust Microsoft more than I trust Sony with my data, to be honest with you, but I trust Apple more than both of them because Apple's never had a problem as far as I understand or nothing that I really remember anyway. So I don't know.

4:19:15Dustin Furman:I'm just bummed that in some ways the globalized world brings us good change and in some ways the globalized world brings us bad change. And the free and open internet is American. I mean, the internet was an invention of the American government, you know, and we ended up having a shell over it called the World Wide Web, which was created obviously at CERN and in the UK. but um it's like we have some sort of we should we should steward it in a way where we want to see it go and i think there are a lot of competing tensions around what that should look like because there are some people that just want to get rid of anonymity on the internet completely and yeah that to me is unacceptable and i'm not an anonymous user anywhere my fucking username on game facts was c moriarty right you know like i chose not to be anonymous at all so I'm not really trying to protect myself.

4:20:11Dustin Furman:It's like, I just feel like it's, it's part of the culture, but anyway. Yeah. Should we wrap it up? My friends. Yeah. All right. Let's get the hell out of here. That's it. That's it for this episode of sacred symbols. A good one in the books. We hope you enjoyed it. Thank you for joining us. We hope you're well out there. Let's go around the horn and say goodbye to everyone. Chris. Goodbye to you. Be well. Any plans for the rest of your day? I don't know. what am i doing probably nothing i think today's kind of like a completely empty day which is nice i might just like my cook oh make myself something cool but well enjoy good to see you dustin goodbye good to see you be well any plans for the rest of your day

4:20:59Colin Moriarty:nothing crazy as far as plans but boys you mind if i crash out for one second yeah i posted Finding Duke went live today At 5 to meet the requirements Of the Ninja Gaiden 4 embargo I did I posted the show I posted it during while we were live here Well not while we were live but while we were recording I gotta show Ben Not our Ben a Patreon username Ben First comment only LSM show That can't be bothered to consistently upload At the same time Excuse me when have we never posted When have we skipped a show

4:21:31Dustin Furman:Yeah that show is the one that moves around The most but to say that it it's usually to accommodate something because they're the ones that are most, they're the ones that are most involved in the industry and have to navigate around embargoes while we have, don't have that problem on sacred symbols because we refuse to work with the publishers. So, right. But to act like that's a regular thing is.

4:21:50Colin Moriarty:Yeah.

4:21:51Dustin Furman:Absurd. And it's for an embargo,

4:21:53Colin Moriarty:like relax, Ben. Just relax, Ben. So yeah, that's, that's my only crash out for the end of this episode. Tonight, I'm going to try to get into the battlefield beta. I think. I will pre-order to get in and then steam makes it so easy. You can just cancel, cancel that pre-order. Cause again, as I'm, I'm sticking to my word with battlefield six. Yeah. No, even if, even if this is good, no pre-orders, they don't deserve it.

4:22:21Dustin Furman:I'll probably end up doing it. Um, we'll enjoy. Well, yeah, we'll report from that next week. So for me, uh, go walk the dogs. I got to work out. Just going to hang out tonight. Um, I got some shit to do tomorrow and then the weekend of gaming. I don't know what I'll play. mafia or doom maybe finish up ninja gaiden and just kind of just relax be a nice relaxing evening it's it's been cooler here it's like been in the high 70s or you know low 80s hazy for like a week now a little rainy so it's it feels very unusual for august the dog days oh what uh i don't know i just went to i opened up steam and i was gonna pre-order it but it says it just says join the battlefield play test and so you just do it i guess oh cool there you go i wonder if it's not going to let you actually log in though oh maybe yeah i'll give it a shot yeah who knows all right all right my friends will be well thanks again thank you all out there for your love kindness and support we appreciate you we appreciate your support of sacred symbols couldn't do without you patreon.com slash last day media for early ad free access and a bunch of other perks last day media dot store for merch i'll see you on monday as usual for streaming on our YouTube channel in the afternoon.

4:23:29Dustin Furman:And until next time, 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. 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.

4:24:16Dustin Furman:Thank you. Quez, Gaila Kovacs, Fotis Lido, Albion, Aladdin Slow, Meme Soulstring, Terevin, Namaste25, Jacob Perochta, David Patchalek, Zdenik Padiviter, Callie Magnuson, Robin the Intern, Ben Soto, Warchief, Eremo Loner, Ace1924, Hector Games, Jorge Trevino, Dennis Mirum, Simon, Andreas Wessling, Frederick Bach, Indigo Blue, Skygin100, 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, Pabzi, Victor Blomberg, Thomas Person, Panic, Detective McNulty, Johannes Magnuson, Axel M.

4:25:05Dustin Furman:Bjork, Adam Shablawi, Zixton Larson, John Oman, Octo Fontas, Berg, David G, SHP87, Victor Fallin, Eric Steinsland, Philip B. Rainsford, DDDDDCCCC, Havard, Rocketman, Fred Carlson, Jonas Johnson, Dennis Lofgren, Jorgen Stenhammer, Gylfi Tratterson, Marcus, Mariusz Garson-Peterson, Breno Bezera-Bloom, Jennifer Rutkowski, William Holbert, Ross Marenka, Morgan Ashley, Azan, Michael Vecchio, Daniel D 'Amour, Patrick Leslie, Jacek Dabowski, Head Bastion Joel, R. 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 Lofel-Johannes.

4:26:16Dustin Furman:Thank you.

4:26:39Dustin Furman:Guilherme Figueredo, Matthias Garces, Stove, Deadpool 2099, J.P. 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 Mashpatate,

4:27:18Dustin Furman:Thank you.

4:27:48Dustin Furman:Thank you.

4:28:14Dustin Furman:Thank you.

4:28:39Dustin Furman: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 Zuniga, Shane Miller, Alex Cabrera, Corey Dustin, Nicolaj Hanson-Turton, Anthony Vasquez, Jorge Pal, Cannonball Jones, Mr. Tom, Phil Krohn, 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.