#372 | Let's Get Physintcal

17:18Dustin Furman:And they like reversed. It's like a famous case of like business stumbling. Rocking will rake for no reason. And I think they were feeling the pressure from Pepsi, which was finally starting to come up in the 80s. So anyway, fuck sugar, Coke and sugar, Pepsi. I don't want that in the United States. I feel like that's so crazy. I feel like every time I've ever had Coke in a can that was or like Coke that was just. I never liked soda growing up specifically because I think it was that and then I remember the first time I had coke from a glass bottle and like like in like he like here in California I was like oh this is actually like a good drink I still don't drink it all that often because I ultimately still don't like the fizz of soda like I don't get it but like I would entertain a glass bottle proper sugar coke way eons before I would ever open up a can i might i might for the first time go and protest if they do this i'm gonna go outside of the coke factory in atlanta yeah and uh and be like bring back the corn syrup bring it back i don't know what we're fucking talking about but we're here on sacred symbols a playstation podcast it's good to be with the boys today and it's good to be here with all of you out there we go up each and every week you can get us three days early and ad free over on patreon patreon.com slash last day media couldn't do without your support over there five dollars a month is the sweet spot.

18:42Dustin Furman:That's where many, many people are and we appreciate you, but you can go$1,$2,$5,$10, $25. There's all sorts of different tiers. The$5 tier gets you early ad-free access to this show and all the other shows in our network. The ability to submit inquiries to the show, you get access to the Discord. You can use the RSS feeds to feed the shows without ads and early directly to your podcast service of choice. You can do the same with Spotify. And there's a lot more on Patreon as well. Sacred Symbols Plus is another perk. Our weekly supplement to Sacred Symbols where we do deep dives and game discussions and interviews and so on and so forth.

19:14Dustin Furman:So again, Death Stranding 1, or Death Stranding Director's Cut and Death Stranding 2 review discussions are over there. I sat down with lawyer Rick Hogue recently to talk about a bunch of legal matters. I talked to Tom from Moore's Law's Dead about the PlayStation 6 and the PlayStation 6 handheld, which is very exciting. Coming up is, I don't even want to say what it is. It's something that people have been asking for for a while, and we're recording this tomorrow, and it'll go live on Saturday. So the day after this goes live on Patreon, Please look forward to it. And Sacred Streaming. I would say it's going off without a hitch, but that's not true.

19:44Hashim Barakat wrote in and said, good day, Sacred Boys.

19:48Dustin Furman:I was saddened by the technical issues and Leslie Benzie's sabotage during your mind's eye stream. I really enjoyed your reactions and Gene's commentary, and I hope that you go to continue your stream, your platinum journey. Also, would you consider streaming other fun, bad games like Collins, Game of the Century, Amy? Thank you for the great content. As always, I will take my expired medication and safely dispose of them. That's wonderful. i say you keep the medication to trade in a future apocalyptic situation because it'll be a little inert but it will probably still be valuable people are going to want your fucking percocets and your uh and your advil and so on and so forth maybe not a pharmaceutical though um yeah the last stream didn't go very well it was fun but we had a lot of it was good right right yeah um but we have some solutions set up that we're going to try now for the next one that we just did it actually dustin and i before the show that we're recording now to see if it would work we have more experimentation to do but i think things will be a little bit more stable this time but it was still fun it was cool to say with everyone i'm not going back to mind's eye on stream we'll talk about mind's eye later um but recent uh streams you can check out on vod on Patreon.

20:53Dustin Furman:The Sacred League returns, so part one of that. Deep dive into E3 1995, which was really fun, and so on and so forth. I'm thinking about finally getting to the Astro Bot DLC now. Maybe we'll do that again this week. Seems like some people were disappointed we didn't just do that, so maybe I will just do that for Monday. Let's just assume that that's what's going to happen. Then if I want to call an audible, I'll do it. But I want to get through this Astro Bot DLC. I was also thinking about playing Mafia at some point. But I probably I really just want to play it on my own because I'm looking forward to that game.

21:26Dustin Furman:But I thought maybe it'll be fun to connect to my Sicilian roots. These are my people. Yeah. So, in fact, when it takes place, my family would have long still been in Sicily. So perhaps my people are in it. I don't know. I don't know if they would be aware of there are zeros. But we were but we were bouncing around. Go go erase Colin from history by playing mafia. The old country just going on a spree. Yeah. And killing my great grandfather or whatever. i mean definitely connected so he fades away you call you're gonna fade away on a on an episode one day and we're gonna be like what happened it's like not too many people bought mafia yeah it's the grandfather paradox so yeah i'm slowly getting erased yeah um merch lastdaymedia.store t-shirts sweatshirts stickers etc free shipping in the united states on all stickers go check out what we have to offer and get your copy of habroxia physical if you haven't already We have plenty of those left over.

22:20Dustin Furman:Okay. Let's get into some topics of discussion, stretch our legs and see what's happening with the people out there. And then we'll get into the games discussion. There's quite a bit of news this week. We'll get into what we're playing. I've been playing quite a bit. And then we'll end the show as we always do with six questions, comments, concerns, thoughts, and ideas, games related from the audience. We'll begin with Zach Apuzo. Says, boys, I'm writing in as an update to the Tar Man co-worker situation under some unfortunate duress. So people might remember last week in episode 371, Zach Apuzo wrote in saying that there was a woman, right?

22:53Dustin Furman:A woman named with the last name Tarman, and he was going to like see, make some sort of comment that would be death stranding related. Anyway, I was fired for my job the day after sacred was published. And in fact, my manager just so happened to walk into the lab and saw me watching and laughing at my segment last week while I was in the middle of filling test vials. I woke up to an email about my termination with zero further information. While I doubt this was the true reason, my manager was a dickhead. I like to think it was Sacred Symbol's fault for not only causing divorces, but now the dismissal of my job.

23:26Dustin Furman:Jokes aside, I'm really down about this and questioning my career in the pharma industry. The podcast keep my head up. I guess we'll never know what Tarman would have said. You can blame this one on us if you want. I mean, if that's what makes you happy.

23:38Colin Moriarty:Definitely blame me.

23:39Dustin Furman:I mean, everyone else blames me for everything, too. So you can play me for this, but it might be that you were dealing with pharmaceutical vials while laughing and watching a podcast. That had something to do with your dismissal. So could have been any podcast. You could have been listening to fucking Pat McAfee for all I know. You're going to go blame him. So I don't know that I Zach. I don't know that I fully take. I'm happy to take credit for people's divorces. Right. Like that's great. I think that's fun. I enjoy that. but this I can't really take credit for because you could have been watching and doing anything that you were you were you were you were not in the zone working is it is it obvious to everybody around you that you're listening to a podcast like do you just have earbuds in and your phones like kind of tucked away in your pocket because it I feel like to the outside observer just kind of looks like you're cackling at pharmaceuticals well yeah that's true that's concerning but he that's a break that's pretty concerning man he used the verb watching though he said saw me watching and laughing so like what's he did he have his phone maybe out tipped on something yeah like i i agree with you yeah i don't know i don't know i don't know all i'm saying is like if i like i i will say like somebody cackling to themselves at vials of medicine it's like

25:03Colin Moriarty:it's like a mad scientist situation like imagine like about like you know right it's immediately

25:10Dustin Furman:it's immediately concerning sure i get it i see what happened well zach i'm sorry that you lost your job if you're in the farm industry i assume that you're gonna be just fine but um yeah i'm sorry that that happened to you maybe you should be more you know when you're clocked in clue in yeah when you're clocked in lock it lock it right right that's right say big on your landscaping project at Menards. Whether you're looking for edgers, pavers, or wall blocks, Menards has the largest in-stock selection of concrete landscape block ready to take home today. Build a beautiful border for your landscape with our interlock edgers on sale now through August 16th.

25:52Dustin Furman:Save big on landscape block at Menards. Also check out our weekly flyer on menards.com for all the great deals happening now.

26:00Colin Moriarty:Save big money at the Nards.

26:04Dustin Furman:Wrote in, wrote in. And said. It's wrote W-R-O-T-E-I-N-N. So like the wrote in. Good morning and afternoon, everyone. Colin, I have thought this for a while, but had to write in this week because of something you said recently regarding episode titles. You are correct that you have an audience that will listen to your stuff no matter what you title the Sacred Symbols episodes. if LSM was only you, I would not be writing this. I just feel like it is a bit selfish to title everything song lyrics and severely limit your reach. In my opinion, you are actively making your employees lose money by not growing the audience with better titles for your biggest show.

26:40Dustin Furman:That exponential growth can easily lead to support for other shows at LSM and everyone else's personal endeavors. You have earned the right to title the shows whatever you want, but more people should get to hear the podcast. It's wonderful. They're not just going to find it if the title is song lyrics. Everyone gets paid enough, I think. I think we're fine. You know?

26:59Colin Moriarty:Wow. I think everyone would like to make more money. Yeah, sure. Well, I don't know what I can do.

27:06Dustin Furman:I don't know. There's anything I can do about that, unfortunately.

27:08Colin Moriarty:Well, there was a suggestion right there.

27:13Dustin Furman:Do you have any feelings about this, Dustin, as the producer? Everyone else does name their shows appropriate. Well, I don't want to say appropriately. It's like you can name it whatever the fuck you want. Like, for instance, if someone signed was named like stupid shit, I wouldn't care personally. but I know that you know Maddie does very clickable headline thumbnail stuff for sake for Duke I know it's weird I know it's like antithetical and to things and it doesn't make any sense but I like being weird and off the radar and like that people have to kind of like get into it I like that it's not clickable I like that we don't do clickbait I like that every headline isn't like PlayStation going third party and question with like three question marks on it.

27:57Dustin Furman:And I'm like on the fucking thumbnail or whatever. Like I like that. We don't do that. That's easy. What's not easy is naming your show after Limp Bizkit lyrics and not telling it and then going an hour without any PlayStation coverage every episode. We're finding the real ones, in my opinion. So I'm totally fine with it personally, but I don't know if you guys have any thoughts

28:18Colin Moriarty:about it well i think there's some truth to this um because we are definitely limiting ourselves like here's the thing i think that last stand as a whole everyone can on their individual shows as you mentioned do different things but we're never gonna be it would never make sense for us to be full-blown YouTuber titles, thumbnails. You know, like if we started soy facing in every thumbnail and doing Mr. Beast type stuff, I think we would lose a lot of our core audience. That would be a bad idea. Same time, I think we could have our cake and eat it too. I mean, this is public. You can see this on our YouTube.

29:07Colin Moriarty:Sacred numbers currently, along with a lot of shows, are just down. and I think that has to do with the console where we're at in the life cycle this is normal so it wouldn't hurt to increase our discoverability wouldn't hurt to ask people to subscribe to our channel there's some things I think we could meet in the middle without losing who we are that would help things grow so that's my thought take it or leave it

29:38Dustin Furman:Should I name this episode something insane? And see.

29:43Colin Moriarty:Well, that's not what I was recommending, but you could. Certainly. It's up to you.

29:51Dustin Furman:I'm already writing down. Hold on a second. I'm already writing down an idea.

29:56Colin Moriarty:But just the title isn't necessarily going to make things flip over the night either. I don't think.

30:01Dustin Furman:Yeah. I personally don't really look. This is. I personally don't really look at the number like the traffic numbers. I don't like I have no idea. You know, I do look at iTunes to see just where we are. That's more important to me than like how we're doing overall is like where we are amongst our peers. And we're always near the top. Oh, yeah. So I didn't notice that traffic was down, to be honest.

30:23Colin Moriarty:It's not like a crazy. I think everyone's traffic down. I was talking to somebody recently that like right now, that's just kind of this space across the board. I mean, especially being summertime, too. but uh these things have been flow you go up and down yeah i don't know i uh i appreciate wrote in the uh the write-in and um i don't is it unfair to the other shows i don't really see it that way

30:56Dustin Furman:um i actually see it totally differently than that that the other shows are all or were i mean they're all permanent fixtures but they were all experiments created using sacred symbols money to try to spread the field and um that they all owe themselves to sacred symbols because without sacred none of them would obviously exist at all and so it's the audience that watches and listens to this or watched and listened to this that then found those other shows so it's a gateway drug to those other things um so because i've said before like the easiest way and this is how you know that i'm not really money hungry is that the easiest way for us to make money is to just do sacred symbols get rid of all the other shows and everyone that does them and just do this and i'm not saying once a week like do it multiple times a week multiple sacred symbols plus episodes streaming we would we would that would be the route to make the most money so obviously that's not i don't know if you guys disagree but i think that's fairly obvious like the double and triple down on the massive brand but i actually wanted to do the opposite which was use some of the cachet that this show built to spread it to other shows to try to spread the risk and get people more content for their buck for bang for their buck if it makes any sense that's the one thing i'm really proud of with us is like when i started this in 2017 five dollars a month and when we started saying it's like five dollars a month at one time got you knock back and fireside chats then it got you knock back fireside chats and sacred symbols now five dollars and that was like 2018 now five dollars a month gets you sacred symbols sacred symbols plus punching up summon sign um and duke and and the streaming vod's and they're like so we've never raised prices and we've just given you more and more and more so i feel like i've kind of put my heart on my sleeve in that regard where i'm like i'm not actually trying to maximize funds.

32:58Dustin Furman:I'm trying to like do cool things and try to find the next sacred symbols, you know, and I'm proud of all the shows. I think they've all done really well. So I'm happy with them. So and it's not so much about public traffic. It's like how we're doing with like crowdfunding. And while the stats that we're getting for. I was looking actually today at like what the website tells me and then like what the app tells me and the numbers are like totally different. It's like what is going on? the only thing we know for sure is how much money we're making because that's obviously a like a tangible number that gets put into our bank account every month and that's great so that's the only number that really matters to me actually and like the people that are enjoying it through that like so i've said before like there are there are channels with millions of subscribers that do hundreds of thousands and millions of views on their videos that don't make anywhere near as much money as last time like and so it's it's so i don't think people should be confused about like what is valuable to us as a company which is like public traffic is nice but not really what we're trying to do but uh maybe we'll just do sacred symbols should we fire everyone

34:06i mean sure it seems like that's what wrote in is suggesting so yeah and we'll blame it all on him project wrote in yeah that's crazy i i don't know well i i like how weird it is like i personally would name it even worse yeah i would have it i would have it be like lol and then that would be it that would

34:29Dustin Furman:be the title of something like whatever it doesn't matter now i'm not i'm not naming them just random lyrics the lyrics do have something to do with the subject matter of the show but you would have to know the subject matter of the show and then cross-reference them right right um so like i use the guy like may 26 i named the episode 360 i'll confess this you're my tragedy that's a godsmack lyric but it was about bungie and how bungie's like unraveling right um and uh such a beautiful lie to believe in is may 19th um it's like the disparate nature of the fiscal reports with like the rumors about the brand or whatever.

35:14So it's not like I'm just like listening

35:17Dustin Furman:to a song and then like being like, I like that lyric and I would put it in here. It's usually like trying to find the fit. It's a way for me to be, to exercise a little bit of creativity, I guess, in a very mundane life. Um, I'm glad you feel that way. Chris, a little bit of balance then I'm right. I'm somewhere in the middle. Yeah, I guess one of the things that I love seeing more and more, and I see this about punching up, I see this about someone's sign. I see this about Duke I see this about everything is when people are like this is my favorite last stand show it makes me feel good like less pressure is on me like people are finding their way and they're really attracted to these other shows and it's not about my show I actually dig that a great deal makes me feel good makes me feel good for the people that do those shows and it makes me feel good for the business spread the risk a little bit so yeah anyway Dustin I'm going to name this since we're going to talk about physint we'll name it let's get physical physical yeah that's yeah let me write that down physical it's all I would call it I would call it see I would name it Colin dies in this one for real Colin dies in this one parentheses parentheses for real for real right right yeah gone sexual remember those gone sexual dude that's vintage stuff now that's like 2016 2017 all right so yeah i'll put fizz into the uh into the title we'll see how it does timothy mcveigh's delivery service wrote in and said please rank how autistic the following fan bases are sonic one piece kingdom hearts roblox marvel it's an interesting one one piece would be the least right i think there's a lot of it though a lot of it to know i think it would be towards the bottom maybe of this which to be fair this is a pretty high concentration list right this is a high high autism zone this would be on the lower i i mean a person i would i probably say sonic at number one probably then kingdom hearts probably close second um and then

37:37Colin Moriarty:then kingdom hearts i don't know i'm i'm part of two of these cultures um so i feel like i have the most grounds to to rank these sonic and roblox yeah sonic and roblox but i agree i agree with chris so far sonic number one yeah definitely kingdom hearts 2 yeah roblox 3 one piece 4 marvel 5 because marvel is the most mainstream yeah yeah okay yeah that's the only one i'm not sure about is roblox because i think roblox is so popular with like kids that like i don't really know how to gauge it quite yet it really depends on because i feel like every child is autistic quite frankly like i've never met a kid who's not like who doesn't just walk out to people and they're just completely they're honest to a fault you know right i totally know what you mean where it's just like i saw a kid was going like oh your your your husband just died right you're just like yo and you can tell that it was like it's not like but you just know it's not malicious and you know that and you also know there's like well that kid's not autistic but like fundamentally uh so i don't know roblox is the roblox is too the data is too weird on roblox but i think i would i would be comfortable putting that in the middle but if you're an adult playing roblox oh terminal yeah if we're considering adult audiences of these ips then

39:11Dustin Furman:we can probably roblox one it sounds like it's becoming yeah i'm sorry no roblox would be one if it was adults if we were just if this was just an adult right right that's quick you're you're off the reservation i don't think i took any of the inquiries about roblox this week but like all the shit it sounds like it's becoming like the molestation simulator oh cool like there's this like awful things happening to people on it all the time like adults meeting these children and then like it's just end the game sucks right well it's a one thing if it was yeah it would be one thing if it was if you were getting molested on a good game right yeah like if these if these kids were getting met in like bioshock 2 multiplayer right it would be like way it would be way less offensive to me that sounds more sinister though but i see what you're saying

40:03Colin Moriarty:sure wasn't there a thing that like there's there's like pedophile hunters that do this on roblox yeah oh yeah yeah instead of the real life thing one of them i think got banned maybe there's a lawsuit going on there's something something happened with these pedophile hunters on roblox i support them i support them hunting these people down yeah virtually you're saying big business would protect pedophiles no way crazy that's i'm telling you that i think that that's what the

40:32Dustin Furman:epstein stuff is truly all about by the way is like the politicians are one thing but i really believe it's like the unraveling of the economy is actually what's in that it's all of it um roblox i'm rooting against it i hate it i mean because i've been watching more videos of it um and i just continue to say i'm like this shit unequivocally sucks whether or not you're whether i don't give a fuck if a million millions of people if 24 million it's got the highest concurrence apparently in history of gaming um yeah yeah with in-game games which is even crazier but i'm like i don't care i don't care i i find it offensive plus people are getting molested on there so yeah again insult to injury yeah that would be another good title though by the way roblox i'm rooting against it i fucking can't stand it like it is slop garbage and i am thrilled that they're losing all this money.

41:40Dustin Furman:I know that they can make a lot of moves to become profitable, but it's my sincere hope that this thing never becomes profitable and gets launched into the sun. At least Fortnite is quality. It just bothers the shit out of me. I can't believe it. Neil Druckmann is sitting there single-handedly making, by himself, intergalactic. And you're over there playing your fake Lego game. With people from that is crazy with people that want to hurt you. And Dustin, they want to hurt you.

42:19Colin Moriarty:Oh, I know. And they have.

42:23Dustin Furman:You want to talk about it? No. Okay. Fair enough. Timothy McVeigh's delivery service. Thank you for writing him. Ricardo Chavez wrote in or Chavez. I don't do. I don't I don't speak Spanish very well. I don't know if you guys haven't noticed. Dear CDC, who gets ravaged the most by taxes? I would assume it's Chris, but word around the grapevine is Virginia is also quite high. I was curious about this, so I went and looked it up. Yeah, I mean, California is awful. So, Chris, California has a graduated state individual income tax, which ranges from 1 % to 13.3%. Chris is probably on the higher end of that.

43:07Dustin Furman:there is also a jurisdiction that collects local income taxes California has an 8.84 % corporate income tax rate California also has a 7.25 % state sales tax rate and an average combined state and local sales tax of 8.85 % of course California's property taxes are notoriously low so that's nice but you don't own anything Chris and you're not going to own anything and you're going to like it that's true as the old saying goes I wouldn't buy anything all hell black rock go yeah um and then pennsylvania for you dustin pennsylvania has a flat 3.07 percent individual income tax rate i didn't know that that's fucking awesome no matter what you make flat taxes the best there are also jurisdictions that collect local income tax pennsylvania has a 7.99 percent corporate income tax rate pennsylvania has a six percent sales tax rate and an average combined state and local sales tax of 6.34%.

44:06You have high property taxes

44:09Dustin Furman:in Pennsylvania, 1.26 % effective property tax rate. Virginia has a graduated state income tax with rates from 2 % to 5.75%. Virginia has a 6.0 % corporate income tax rate, 4.3 % state sales tax, 1 % mandatory statewide local add-on sales tax 5.77 % combined state and local sales tax and a 0.72 % property tax rate i win sorry guys oh well sorry about that but you're close you're close second doesn't i'm surprised that the property taxes are higher where you are than they are where i am yeah and my property tax has gone has your property tax gone up a lot mine has i don't know oh because it's an escrow yeah right yeah um yeah the man taxes

45:01Colin Moriarty:taxes are so horrible i can't stand when i hear people defending taxes i know imagine imagine defending taxes dude listen i think that tax defenders are people that have taxes removed from their paycheck and then think when they get a tax refund that it's like free money. When you are taxed as a individual contractor, when you get paid something, you have to save your tax. You have to take your tax money out manually, save it and pay it yourself. It's awful. So I don't get a tax refund. And I am acutely aware every month when Colin pays me, how much money I get stolen from me. I got to put it, it's horrible.

45:49Colin Moriarty:I got to put it into a separate little. I have a separate little thing in my bank. Right. It's not my savings. It's just my tax savings. I get to watch that number go up every month and think about, ah, I'm getting robbed. You know, at the end of the year, I'll put this all out through the TurboTax and it will just all disappear.

46:09Dustin Furman:And my life will stay exactly the same. The life of the 1099. I remember that when I was a freelancer and did some other things. and i still get 10 99s if i like um you know well not so much anymore but if i do things for like you know a consult or whatever um it's it sucks because it's like the greatest mistake everyone makes that that does that originally which is like not setting that money aside that happened to me yeah and you have and you have to do it you know you just have to do it for your own mental well-being so you don't have that huge hit yeah um yeah yeah my uh my dad did me assault my first

46:44Colin Moriarty:year working initially it was going to be i think like under the table type situation when i was editing for someone but then i ended up doing so much work that he was like uh actually i can't do that i gotta i gotta 1099 you uh but i didn't have anything saved but i think i was still considered a dependent um so my dad helped me out because i would have been absolutely fucked so my dad did me a huge huge solid um yeah you gotta be careful the first time dude what is it after six hundred dollars or eight hundred dollars yeah it's like six six hundred i think you have to report it um you gotta report it and it's yeah it's an it's uh my first job was

47:25Dustin Furman:under the table in high school my first two jobs i didn't pay taxes they didn't they were paying me in cash no one was reporting this money um and i didn't think twice about it and uh yeah it is a sad sitch out there. So many people just getting robbed there. But yeah, I was curious. I thought that was an interesting question because I was like, I really don't know. I mean, I know California is the highest because I know that when I left California and moved to Virginia, my taxes were slashed. Nothing changed. In fact, the company was just doing better and better and I was paying less and less.

47:56But the property tax thing sucks because property taxes are contingent on the

48:00Dustin Furman:value, the perceived value of your property and your house. And as the value of houses go up and up and up it's not a fixed rate so my my my property tax has gone up like 1500 since i've lived here you know which is kind of crazy when you think about it and there's this whole movement about getting rid of property tax i don't know if you've been seeing this about like trying to like either but i i think that's a horrible idea personally but um isn't it why why is it a horrible idea why aren't you defending taxes and that well yeah no i well no i think that you have to have some sort of revenue, you know?

48:34Dustin Furman:Right. So not against any tax.

48:37Colin Moriarty:And I think you're the same, Colin.

48:38Dustin Furman:Yeah. I think income tax is crazy. I believe in a, I personally, if it was up to me, I would, I would institute a consumption tax. And so that you would get, if you made$40 ,000 a year, for instance, you would get$40 ,000. Well, maybe minus whatever your state taxed you, because your state could still tax you. But I would get rid of the federal income tax. And then it would just be like you know on non-essentials you would pay you know a 10 tax or whatever um on that way like you you paid it at the point of consumption because right now we're paying it at so in so many different ways and that's what bothers me the most but no you need taxes for so no i think it's weird that people defend a tax a constellation of taxes that nets trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars and yet we still don't have enough money it's comical it's ridiculous but local taxes don't bother me and property taxes seem to be the most the fairest thing because it's for people that own something and then you pay into like your schools and your roads and so on so i i think that that's fine um but yeah the income tax man the income tax was introduced at one percent

49:42wow it's crazy that we have all this money and then it goes away that's really the that's kind of the thing that bothers me the most is like i don't even necessarily mind paying high taxes it's just a matter of like where are we spending it's like oh it's gone yep it's just like oh you don't get you know you're not allowed to have health care actually never mind we're gonna send it to uh i don't know some drone in the gaza strip or something it's like yeah it's awful i mean what

50:01Dustin Furman:do you mean what is it saying it's awful i mean how much money we spend on on the military is embarrassing actually in my opinion you could literally half it and you would still have the biggest military in the world i buy like a mile i think ice is the fourth most funded military operation in the world which is so we have the number one and number four militaries now um then you got people volunteering for it like by the way you're getting suckered so hard wait they're volunteering to be in it without being volunteering to be nice for like just just to do it it's like brother you are that is so stupid i i that's so stupid i have a friend whose uncle was doing i was like yeah it's so why would you do that you get at least get paid at I mean, do you guys do we get Christ?

50:47Dustin Furman:Psychotic. Yeah, we're so militarized. It's so sad how just like, yeah, we we spend so much money and that's on like what? I don't know. I don't even know. I don't want to get into it. All right. Jonathan Turner. Final inquiry says, Colin, I've been thinking about starting my own business, likely something in it since that's my field for now would just be a side venture to bring in some supplemental income. It's a bit of a daunting idea, and I'd really value your perspective. do you have any tips or advice that might help me decide whether to move forward or hold off starting a business is all consuming i mean that's all i would say to you is that like if you're not willing to be consumed by something you'll fail if you don't if you're not consumed by it and um now you can get to a point where you're not totally consumed by it and it runs and it's working but to get it off the ground and to get going like you have to dedicate yourself it's like being married to it um and i still feel that way about my own business all these years later that kind of has a lot of people doing things for it and it is steady and stable and yet it's still like a thing that's on my mind on a constant basis and consumes time randomly always so I don't know anything about your field I know you want to do it on the side as to bring in supplemental income but just understand what you're getting yourself into entrepreneurial pursuits are difficult and I truly I'm not saying this for you Jonathan sounds like you're ready to go but i truly believe that uh most people should not work for themselves like i i don't it's not that i don't i don't want to say most people don't have what it takes i don't think they want to do what it takes i think a lot of people have what it takes yeah and i think it's a much more peaceful life to get a good job and work for someone else and let them worry about everything that's my opinion i know it's easy for me to say from this perch but i also want to want to reiterate i never expected this to happen to last end it was my thing it was just something i named for me and now it's got all these other people involved i don't know um be careful and uh be deliberate that's what i'll say be deliberate i don't know how you do an it business on the side

52:56Colin Moriarty:uh because my understanding when i did some freelance it work many many years ago the guy that ran the business, it was, as you were saying, Colin, all consuming because, uh, and maybe it's something I don't understand about certain ways of doing it, but like he was like on call that if a business, some their, their shit went down, like he had to go, he had to go fix it all the time. And he had multiple clients. Sometimes he had to send other people when there were multiple clients that needed stuff done. So that sounds, uh, if you have a main gig and you're starting an IT business on the side.

53:31Colin Moriarty:I guess it depends on what kind of clients you take on and what you do, but that sounds... Normally, we do recommend if you're starting your own business, you got to keep your steady at the same time before it's ready to become your main business. But that

53:47Dustin Furman:sounds a little scary to me. Yeah. I mean, good luck. I think it's awesome. I love people getting into the entrepreneurial spirit. I just think I want people to go in wide-eyed and know what's going to happen, which is that it's going to, it can blow up and be a huge success and make you lots of money. And that's awesome. That's the fucking dream. Capitalism is a wonderful thing, but I just, I also just see the misery that a lot of business owners have and regret. So just want to make sure people know what they're doing. All right, let's get into the news. We mentioned earlier that we were going to talk about Fizzint.

54:24Dustin Furman:And of course, Fizzint is the upcoming Hideo Kojima game that he's collaborating on with PlayStation. It was announced. When was that announced? 23, I want to say. And he's obviously doing that game OD as well with Xbox, which is, I think, more of like a film-like project. I don't know if it's a game per se. I don't think we know anything about it. And obviously, Death Stranding 2 just came out, Death Stranding 2 on the beach, which I think we all loved. So anyway, the website IndieWire has a story Hideo Kojima on Death Stranding 2. The sequel's big changes and improvements post-pandemic and how we hope to cast David Lynch in a game.

55:02Dustin Furman:I thought that was pretty interesting, but he talks a little bit about Fizzin. And IndieWire actually comes out and asks him what he's doing today. This is a pretty good interview. I don't know if you guys read the whole thing. It's like cool questions that are being asked, very free form. IndieWire says it's Tuesday in Tokyo and Death Stranding 2 has been out exactly a month. what are you working on today? And Hideo Kojima says this. He says, well, I'm checking the data of the players all over the world, what kind of weapons they're using, the routes they're taking, all this data. And I also see these small bugs here and there.

55:34Dustin Furman:So I'm deciding where to fix and what to fix. I am also starting to work with the team on OD because that's a new project and also doing Fizzint all by myself because that's at the conceptual stage. So I'm doing that. And also I have all these interviews every day and promotional photo shooting, things like that. So I don't feel like i finished the title to be frank so interesting information there about three different games first of all fascinating to think about the um the telemetry and heat mapping and all the rest of a game like that straining too it must be so fun to look at that people to look at a map and just see where everyone's going what they're doing and like what some rando is doing as he's going in around the entire map like in a weird way that they never expected that must be so fun a way to experience people playing your game like you never could you would have to wait people used to get devs used to get really excited for e3 gamescom comic-con to watch people play to like really be able to sit there and watch them play because other than focus groups and stuff you really wouldn't have a lot and now they kind of just get to do it with little ghosts of you to an extent so that's pretty neat but um other things here that he mentions od so that's the Xbox project again and it sounds like it's funny because he says I'm starting to work with the team on OD because that's a new project and then like I said Fizzant which is more in regards to our own podcast says he's doing that all by myself because it's at the conceptual stage why are we announcing so early and what does it mean to be at the conceptual stage for a game like Fizzant did they pitch anything or did Sony just say like oh we want to work with you again and we want to do something like Metal Gear or whatever.

57:11Dustin Furman:I don't know. What do you think, Chris? I think clearly that's it. I mean, if it's at the conceptual level right now, then like, yeah, I mean, clearly when we heard about it, it was nothing. It's kind of disappointing in a way because you get excited for these announcements and you'd like to think that there's like this impetus behind it, this amazing. Maybe there was an amazing pitch and all these kinds of things. Certainly, you have to assume some conversation happened, but I guess I always look at it as being like, we have something really actionable. And then years later, they're like, yeah, we're still kind of figuring it out okay so what did you announce yeah remember it was that crazy drone shot yeah they had of of him and herman holst dustin what do you think about this yeah i'm guessing that physics was

57:53Colin Moriarty:maybe a like a pitch document and as far as like here's a the basic idea of what we want to do with the story here's the basic idea of the gameplay and here's what we want to do in terms of the multimedia aspect and that's all it really was i would imagine kojima now is actually writing out the story trying to get things in lines in terms of what the gameplay will be so the team can actually start building what his idea is od is interesting because i feel like this would be uh he says i'm starting to work with the team on od so i wonder if this was a situation where his concept work was all done and there's maybe a smaller team at Kojima Productions that was like starting to get the tech ready for this because as you were saying, it doesn't seem like it's going to be a traditional game, some kind of movie hybrid that who knows?

58:54Colin Moriarty:Because wasn't there something too that that game, it has to do with Xbox's cloud? Yeah, I think that was right.

59:00Dustin Furman:Yeah, I think you're right. I'll look it up.

59:02Colin Moriarty:So maybe there's some backend stuff and now they're kind of really ready to, to get going on that, which I'm pumped about. It sounds really interesting. So, but yeah, if isn't, it is funny to think of, we always joke like everyone treats death stranding, like that's Kojima's game and no one else worked on it. We always attribute it to Kojima, which I get it. You know, he's the, he's the mastermind. It's his vision. But right now with Fizzant, he literally is like, yep, just me working on it. So, Look forward to that in, I don't know, five years, six years.

59:37Dustin Furman:Yeah, six mid PSX generation, probably, which is fine. It says here on the OD Wikipedia page, it will, quote, explore the concept of testing your fear threshold and what it means to OD on fear. Kojima stated he is, quote, working with Xbox game studios and their cloud gaming technology to take on the challenge of creating a very unique, immersive and totally new style of game or rather a new form of media, end quote. So now I think there was some speculation that this game might have been canceled because it was announced in 2022 and we have not heard anything about it. And Microsoft has been canceling a bunch of other shit, but this game was confirmed to have still been in development.

1:00:16Dustin Furman:So not a huge surprise there. I don't think that you would want to sever your connection to Kojima if you're Xbox and you have something kind of tenuous with him right now that could build into something greater. Although I think Fizzant is I'm not saying this because it's a PlayStation podcast. Yes, I think it's fairly clear. Fizzant is the real project as far as like what they're trying to do with the game. Yeah, it says Kojima described the project as avant-garde and in an August 2025 interview, which is the one that they're talking about here, he stated that it'll be something totally different and that people will love or hate it.

1:00:45Dustin Furman:Further remarking that he believes the real evaluations of the game will come in 10 to 20 years from now. It's kind of interesting. See what it is now. Chris, what do you think? I mean, we know what Fizzant is. to a degree because it sounds like it's a return to metal gear or at least that kind of um that kind of gameplay stealth gameplay which you love sure so what do you think it is i mean is it going to be some sort of military thriller uh yeah i mean i would i would imagine so i think i think um a key point of their pitch right was that there was like multimedia facets to it right that it was like kind of transmedia yeah sony pictures i think yeah i wouldn't be surprised to see it maybe leaning into um i know a lot of people didn't play this but like quantum break was kind of doing something kind of somewhat similar to this like i could see them kind of incorporating live action um elements into whatever this is going to be whether it's like completely separate things that tie into it or or whatever but um yeah i mean i would expect a military thriller of some kind um i don't know i don't know what else to really make of it because it seems like they're still really conceptualizing it yeah i wonder i wonder like i in other words i guess what i'm asking is and what i'm curious about is is it really going to be just like metal gear or will it be a stealth game of a different spirit or is it going to be like some weird conspiratorial american well fucking bizarre enemies and like that's what i'm really curious i'm curious and i kind of want it to be that because we're not getting that anymore but i also feel like it's just metal gear and that's kind of corny so yeah maybe yeah i i don't it's i like kojima a lot i think he makes really interesting things but i do think i don't know if he can really stray too far away from metal gear like not i don't mean that as being like entrapped by your legacy or something or like he really wants to get away with that i think the type of game that he wants to make is always some form of metal.

1:02:45I mean, Death Stranding 2 is... That's right, too, is like very Metal Gear. It's very, very, it is. I mean, particularly Metal Gear Solid V, but I mean, Metal Gear Solid V is Metal Gear. It's not. It evolves on what he was doing. It's like Metal Gear games.

1:03:05Dustin Furman:It's an evolution of Peace Walker, I think. Yeah. And it's a which in and of itself is obviously like, you know, rooted in what Metal Gear Solid is. So like, I think whatever this game ends up being, it's I feel like it sounds like I'm saying he only knows how to make one thing but i i really do feel like this is just kind of the wheelhouse it's it's the same way with you know david lynch and surrealism or you know there's certain certain directors that are just like they're in their pocket with this specific like sam raimi and horror like i love those spider-man movies but like there's there's horror scenes in them they're just like clearly like you you you know what you're doing and i think he knows he knows like techie sci-fi surrealist heady weird shit and if he's going in a direction of like yeah this is going to be kind of like metal gear military sci-fi like i would imagine it's going to be pretty similar maybe leaning into the only question to be is like whether or not it'll lean more into grounded stuff or whether or not it'll actually lean more into kind of the fantastical elements that like we see like maybe maybe it's a fusion of death stranding in metal gear in that way where it's we get like that kind of grounded like this is military op kind of stuff but you have something like a bt or or like not exactly but you know conceptually kind of on the same line where it's just like whoa this is heady and weird and not necessarily something you would see in metal gear although metal gear gets fantastical um there's a different vibe to it so i don't know it's still early i like i'm i'm into it because i really liked metal gear solid five and so if if if we get some, uh, some more of that, maybe I think what I will say is like, I would prefer a more linear kind of approach.

1:04:44I like the sandbox. I get it. I appreciate an open world, but like I miss even just games I'm playing right now, where it's just like, it's, it's a lot more like focused and streamlined in that sense. I'm like, I miss this.

1:04:58Dustin Furman:Yeah. I need something. I like this. I want something that's more like shadow Moses or something where like a facility, a shadow complex where, where you can do things in different orders or there's like doors that you can't open yet and like your and like wait reasons to backtrack but it doesn't need to be yeah i totally agree like a an open world map it should be an open space or like a space that you experience like you would a normal metal gear game so it doesn't need to be like mgs3 or something where it's like very linear but i don't yeah i don't the open nature of these games are cool but it removes a lot of the gravitas of the story and the character and the oomph of what you're trying to do when you give people that much freedom.

1:05:38Dustin Furman:So I agree with you. And I guess since they're going to be doing movie components and gaming components, that there's going to have to be beats that they're going to have to hit and all these. Maybe it's about the unification, too, of PlayStation six, six is purported graphical fidelity and film where things are going to look more. You're obviously You can be able to tell the difference, but look closer. Photo real. Yeah. Because again, Death Stranding 2 is just you assume physics going to be on Decima and Death Stranding 2 is. Gorgeous. I mean, now there's a lot. There's not a lot going on in the game.

1:06:14Dustin Furman:It's easy to make like a game that environmentally looks photorealistic when you don't have to run much of anything else in the game. You can really focus on that. but I feel like there's a lot of potential here. I think even the modeling of the characters and stuff is amazing. So yeah, yeah, for sure. So I just, I think they're at the cutting edge personally. Now the thing I'm fascinated about too, and Dustin, I don't know if you have any thought on this is like Kojima's games. Don't metal gear sold very well. It's worth noting that metal gear solid five, I think in a month sold as many copies as the original death stranding did in a few years.

1:06:54Dustin Furman:So obviously Metal Gear had a big push, but Death Stranding wasn't a huge hit. Like we said, it took a few years and two platforms to reach 5 million units. And that's why when people are like, oh, Death Stranding 2 doesn't seem to be doing well. I'm like, Death Stranding 2 seems to be doing exactly like what Death Stranding did. Like, I don't know what people expect. And so I'm a little. It's like you want the gravitas of Kojima without with while knowing that you're probably not going to get the smash commercial hit from him. and that's why I'm so fascinated by this willingness to kind of give him a lot of resources and money and have the real first crossover project between PlayStation Studios and Sony Pictures in terms of this thing that will be both where it's announced as it was in 2024 at the Sony Pictures lot just fascinated like I guess I guess what I'm saying is in a roundabout way like what their expectations could be for this because and I want let's put it even a step further like would you have even been interested in doing this if you knew how Death Stranding 2 was going to do which is flat, I would argue.

1:07:53Dustin Furman:Again, I think that Stranding 2 is doing fine, but I don't think it's like lighting the world on fire. And I think people have a misrepresent, misremembering that the original Death Stranding sold the exact same way. So, yeah, what are your thoughts?

1:08:06Colin Moriarty:Well, I mean, getting into deep, deep speculation, but maybe when Kojima made a deal with PlayStation after he left Konami, they were like, hey um we're gonna fund and help you with some of these out there projects well specifically death stranding um we would like you to eventually make us what you're known for um in the future right maybe i don't know maybe maybe not as far as fizzin and versus death stranding we haven't we don't have anything to go off right now so again deep speculation but if this is in the line of metal gear i would imagine that it's going to be commercially a lot more successful than death stranding death stranding is just obviously still very popular and sold millions of copies and we love it and our audience loves it but there's still a lot of people that uh they see either what the gameplay is or just the world and that's not appealing uh to them they don't want something weird uh something like metal gear might appeal to a much wider audience just because it's like oh cool guy doing spy stuff with guns that's like a very universal appeal still to this day um i mean they're still making mission impossible james bond movies and so i would imagine that simply just from a matter of what it is uh if it is like metal gear that it will sell more than Death Stranding.

1:09:41Dustin Furman:Yeah, you're probably right. Certainly right. Death Stranding is a very strange game, but I think excellent. Just absolutely phenomenal. Love it. Just understand it more than ever after coming off that 205 hours of Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2 that I played consecutively in seven weeks or whatever it was. Just an insane... That was pretty exhausting. I'll say that. Pretty exhausting. all right just wanted to touch on this real quick we were talking a few weeks ago about light of moderum which is um this uh upcoming game that sony from tencent that being published by tencent that sony has a problem with and is suing tencent and its associated studios and and level infinite which is kind of its western publisher and so on and so forth over it because it's such a blatant copy of horizon and sony contends that it was intended to be a horizon game and that it was pitched them as a horizon game multiple times and so on and so forth we've gone into this on the show and especially on sacred symbols plus so people should definitely go to patreon.com slash last day media if they haven't already and listen to the episode i did a couple weeks ago with hoag where we go very deep into this issue we go through the entire lawsuit and talk about all the comparisons and where they can get away with things and the shamelessness of it all but also kind of the looseness of inspiring things and really interesting conversation but it seems like Tencent is feeling the heat because the website, the game post notes that Tencent has, quote, unquote, quietly updated its Steam page to tone down the Horizon vibes.

1:11:12Dustin Furman:And it says, quote, these tweaks include rewriting the game's description, swapping out multiple screenshots, changing the key art and adding a release window. The original store description leaned heavily into language that matched Horizon's themes. said it said originally quote in a world overrun by colossal machines explore the vast open world build your base of operations advanced technology train mechanimals and take on formidable bosses starting from the primitive age forge a new path of development defy the machination survive the mecanimals end quote writing sucks now it says quote make smart use of everything around you to stay alive and face off against formidable bosses every step is fraught with danger and requires courage only by overcoming the challenges of survival can you carve out a place for yourself in this unforgiving land.

1:11:55Dustin Furman:The writing is so bad, but that's what it says now. And then it, you'll have to go to the website to look at this on the gamepost.com. But it says, quote, several images that previously showcased sweeping landscapes, robotic creatures, and environments reminiscent of Horizon Heaven removed. The updated set features more general open world survival imagery that doesn't lean as heavily into the sci-fi tribal tech aesthetic. So they show side-by-side screenshots of what was removed and what was added. And interestingly, quote, the main promotional images has also been swapped. The old version prominently featured the red haired protagonist who was appearance through comparisons to horizons, Aloy the new artwork instead spotlights to in game creatures, a penguin like animal and a dog like companion shifting focus away from the human character entirely.

1:12:42Dustin Furman:Like I said, they're dead to rights. I think to salvage this, they're going to need to do things like this. And that's what Hogue was saying is, and again i'll remind people that hoag's theory of the case and it seems not a theory of the case but an idea he had which i thought was interesting although it seems like because of the changes this is not what they're going to do is that he was like i wonder if they're just going to be like just give us the fucking license like let's just make money we'll give you a great deal or whatever and as people that aren't familiar with the lawsuit might not know and i'll reiterate is that and again as i said earlier is that it's not just that horizon this looks like horizon and and is clearly copying horizon, but it's that it was pitched explicitly to Sony as a horizon game twice.

1:13:32Dustin Furman:So really dead to rights level shit. Dustin,

1:13:37Colin Moriarty:what do you think of the changes? Dude, I think this is hilarious. This feels like the situation of like mom told you to clean your room. So you just shove everything in the closet. You're like, Oh look, I'm all good now. it's like dude we saw not only the screenshots but the trailers uh and how as you're saying dead to rights this is swapping out a few of these uh a few of these screenshots um the damage is done i mean the lawsuit is seemingly going to happen so um there's going to need to be a lot more changed with the actual game itself and even then i think even if you change a lot this this stink is still there yeah i mean um first i mean fuck tencent and it's not just because of this

1:14:25Dustin Furman:like i don't i don't give a shit about that company so what you know them eating shit means nothing to me um but this is so shameless because as sony claims these guys pitch them on an asian horizon like a horizon that would take place and because conceivably this is obviously going around all over the world we only see the united states in horizon which is part of why it's boring and why I wish they would go somewhere else. Although it might not really matter. Ultimately, it's going to be, you know, these same fucking animals and the same kind of story, this global story. But and they say so.

1:15:00Dustin Furman:I mean, Sony has this fascinating shit like where they're like, they pitched us this idea and they showed us a picture of Aloy standing on the on the great wall of China. And they sent us these screenshots or the screenshots were in their deck of their team playing Horizon at the studio. It's like, this is crazy. like i actually can't believe that they're going like that they were going ahead with it and uh i do i really do wonder where this lawsuit's gonna land we'll have to find out

1:15:26Colin Moriarty:uh yeah go ahead we can ten cent ten cent was like are are you still talking about horizon zero dawn still after all the after all that we've done right you know this is yeah it's gonna be it's

1:15:42Dustin Furman:one for them. I'll be curious about it. I wonder if it sounds like it's going to be more of a survival game and you're going to be crafting and having maybe a little base of operations and all that stuff. So it is differentiated in some way, but what I was saying was, why would you want something? It's like getting away with it, but you all know you did it, right? Everyone knows you did it. And it's like, but why would you want something from a team so creatively bankrupt? Horizon, say what you will about Horizon. People have a lot to say about it. I love it. A lot of people don't, but it's clever.

1:16:15It actually is unique in its presentation.

1:16:20Dustin Furman:And like people be like, oh, it's, it's very, it's very generic. It's like, it's generic to have a, like a future, a futuristic game of robot dinosaurs fighting like these, these American Indian themed characters that use all these interesting, like, I don't think so. I can't think of anything like that personally. And there's a million copies of everything and And that's fine. I think copies are fine, too. It's just this is so blatant. And so it's what it's what I say about fan fiction. It's like, what are you putting all your energy into this for? You have the energy to just make something new, just make something new, just tweak it.

1:16:54Dustin Furman:It's weird. So I'm actively rooting against this game. But if it comes out, the bigger thing is, is like, would Sony allow it on their platform at all? And you can imagine Sony just being like, we don't want this game on there. And this is what I was saying to about the legality of it. And Hogue was like, it would obviously be very questionable. It's like Sony could just be like, we're not putting any of your shit on. On PlayStation Network until you sort this out, but you can't use that leverage, apparently. And nor should you really want to. You probably kind of cut your nose off to spite your face.

1:17:24Dustin Furman:Chris, you have anything you want to say about this? Because the next one I really want to talk to you about. But I don't know if you want to talk about this first. Nothing that nothing that wouldn't be a repeat of what you guys have said. I do think it's funny that they that they did these asset swaps. And I do think they're dead to rights. And I'm curious as to what they're going to do or how it's how it's going to unfold. Yeah, it'll take some time. I'm sure it's interesting behind the scenes as everyone kind of corresponds with each other. But this is what I really have to ask you about, Chris.

1:17:56Dustin Furman:Bilbo Donging wrote in and said, hey, sacred gooners. wanted to ask about the hell divers 2 teasing in their latest trailer and get your thoughts on it for those not in the loop the nt something halo something halo as it played the theme for halo 3 odst let's just say my weapon was cocked and loaded the moment i heard that music again weapon being my boner yeah thank you for that i felt like a sleeper agent woken up is this something that interests the three of you to return once more for another dive or the three of you all dived out for now so there is a trailer hell divers to put out this um this new post with a minute 29 trailer this was on august 12th if people want to go check it out it says recruiting now enlisting the hell divers and crush the enemies of liberty to bring the shining light of managed democracy to the darkest corners of the galaxy deploying the xbox consoles on august 26th as we know report for duty and deliver freedom one bullet at a time see you on the front lines and obviously they're promoting the standard and super citizen editions that people have to buy on Xbox.

1:18:53Dustin Furman:And yeah, the music at the end now, I wouldn't have recognized that I never played ODST. I got only the Halo three. So what do you think of this, Chris? I mean, I thought about you immediately and I pretty sure we were saying or you were saying I wouldn't have said it that these kind of games fit with each other thematically. Well, no, you're not thematically, but visually. Oh, yeah. So the mix up here would be great. I wonder what you think. yeah there's probably arguably no more natural fit for a collaboration for helldivers than odst specifically like everything is damn near the same i think even when it came out i think i was saying like this is an idiot this is an odst game and i think it was even pitched at microsoft that like uh that halo studios wanted to do something like this and they passed because they thought no one would like it la mal but uh but yeah no i mean it's it's cool like hearing that music again seeing i don't really know what the what that last bit was like it's see i get what they were trying to evoke but like i wasn't sure if that was like i haven't played uh hell divers in a while so i don't know if that's i don't know if that location is there already i don't know if that's supposed to be new mombasa maybe i'm not super sure but if it's a new map that'd be cool if it's weapons that'd be cool if it's armor that's cool like i i dig it i think it's a natural fit makes genuinely perfect sense um and it's cool to see it happening i'm actually surprised at how quickly it seems to i don't know because i feel like i would have expected this maybe far later um the fact that this is already kind of being shown so close to the release um on xbox implies that it's fairly imminent so that's exciting it's cool i think it's a very natural i wonder what i wonder what the length of the collaboration is going to be like are we going to get a warthog in there are we going to get a dude because that would be something uh as as far as like how interested i am in this like i mean like it's ultimately going to be a a loose collaboration it's not going to be really anything substantial it's not like a it's not like a new halo game so i'm not like pumped about it but i'm definitely curious i'm definitely going to check it out just because it's been a while since i've played hell divers 2 in any serious capacity So I'm sure there's a lot of stuff there that would be interesting to me anyway.

1:21:14But yeah, I'll definitely dive back in to see this. If for no other reason than just to see how well these things mesh, because I suspect they'll mesh very well.

1:21:27Dustin Furman:Yeah, well, let's get you on the record first, Dustin, because I'm interested on this from a specific perspective. But yeah, what do you think of this?

1:21:34Colin Moriarty:Yeah, it makes perfect sense stylistically. and it is cool that it's like hey if you're going to another platform a collaboration with like this I mean it's makes perfect sense and I would imagine too that this Halo crossover will apply for PlayStation and PC audience will be able to get these skins so it's a reason for your established audience to dive back in and check it out but most importantly I wonder if there's been so many rumors about a halo game coming to playstation and i wonder if this could be like a light warm-up thing get people thinking about halo again before this inevitable whatever it is whether it's a halo ce remake um that's kind of what it's leaning towards now over master chief collection whatever it is uh start to get that halo feeling uh people thinking about halo not just on xbox but also on playstation yeah it's already going to be a confusing day august 26

1:22:41Dustin Furman:because hell divers comes to xbox and gears comes to playstation the same day um yeah a little bit chaotic there on that front very excited about gears coming and play that with micah we'll definitely stream that on sacred streaming um and i haven't played the original gears in many many years almost two decades which is crazy it's not been quite two decades because it hasn't been out for two decades but pretty close um but what i was thinking about it was in a similar vein dustin which was well there's a lot of semantical questions about this what is the nature of the i guess what i'm saying is like what is the nature of all this in that will the first halo content that we get on PlayStation actually be this Helldivers content, which it seems like the answer is yes, because obviously they're not going to just do this on Xbox.

1:23:28Dustin Furman:This will be on everything. And then, yeah, does that kind of break down the final wall with Forza breaking things down and Gear is about to break things down with Halo? I mean, it's basically that's it after that. I mean, that's that's basically puts everything on the line. I do wonder. I don't know if you Chris, you probably would have been more likely to have seen this, but there was like some reliable Halo data hacker that was saying that there's some indication of a somewhat imminent PlayStation port of something being announced in the Halo universe. I can't remember the guy's name. I do remember that.

1:23:56That was like a month back, right? Or like a month or two back.

1:24:00Dustin Furman:Well, I saw it again. That might have been a while ago, but I saw something again about this where someone was saying something about and I didn't put it in here because I don't really think it's that interesting anymore that Halo is coming to PlayStation. I think it's fairly obvious. But yeah, I wonder what the timing of all this because Dustin, to your point, like, could you manage to do something on that day? where it's like, oh, by the way, this is coming at this point or something too. But I probably not. I mean, why would you want to distract from Helldivers just arriving? I am very curious how Helldivers does on Xbox.

1:24:29Because we know Final Fantasy 16 bombed.

1:24:34Dustin Furman:This is a very different sort on Xbox. This is a very different sort of game. And I suspect that it's going to do well. And I think the best way we can manage to get numbers from this is to, first of all, Sony might be happy to give us numbers at some point and might feel compelled to. But we can kind of compare it about if it bumps Helldivers back into the top 20 cumulative sales for either the month of the year. Remember, the fifth bestselling Xbox game last month, which was Final Fantasy 16, didn't even make it into the top 20 for the month, meaning that the game sales were really bad, not enough to even get into the top 20 cumulative.

1:25:12Dustin Furman:Helldivers will probably, I think, be well in the mix. Is your feeling that this game will do well, Dustin, on

1:25:18Colin Moriarty:Xbox? I think it's more likely to do well than Final Fantasy 16 just because, I mean, it's not that Final Fantasy has no history on Xbox. Famously, Final Fantasy 13 I think broke that barrier a long time ago, but the Xbox audience is much more focused on shooters. And this Final Fantasy 16 is also a single player game. And in this time in between, Helldivers has lived on. Obviously had some ups and downs, but I still think there's a lot of people still playing it, still interested in it. And probably a lot of people that maybe play it on PlayStation, but only play it there out of obligation because Xbox is their home platform and where their friends are.

1:26:09Colin Moriarty:And so they might switch over there. so i in in terms of like how big it's going to be i really don't know this will be a really interesting litmus test but i think we can lock in it's going to do better than final fantasy

1:26:23Dustin Furman:for sure yeah um chris will you plug back into hell divers for this this is i think the key to bilbo's question here yeah i think so i think i i gotta see what what it's gonna be you know like I want to know how far they go with it. You know, like how much is going to be there? Is it going to be the weapons? Is it going to be just the weapons? Is it going to be just the armor? Is it going to be both? Are we going to get a vehicle in there? Because that Jeep, I mean, like, brother, that's, I mean, you could make that a Warthog fucking mega easy. Yeah, yeah. Just reskin it. It's kind of questionable.

1:27:02But like, I think, yeah, no, I'll definitely jump in. I already have it. There's no point not to. Yeah. And it'd be so surreal. it's worth noting that it's not necessarily the first time that the halo material has been available on playstation master chief came to fortnight a long time ago so it's not like it's like this is necessarily a huge deal it's just interesting because i think the project makes sense and also because it's obviously a um a sony published game uh that's doing it that's kind of the the key thing here and and so i i just got to see it i'm um i'm looking at the

1:27:34Dustin Furman:trophies just to make sure that this was still true and it is is that i i personally believe helldivers has an arrowhead and sony have missed an obvious opportunity they've never added trophies like no no reason to like to try to coerce people like me and many other people back to the game they've released a lot of content and they obviously have people engaged but i'm surprised that little things like that they haven't done especially of a second party game like this could get an amazing amount of leeway, no doubt, to add a shit ton of look what Astro Bot's done. Yeah. Astro Bot has added a fucking asinine amount of trophies to the game.

1:28:10Dustin Furman:They don't just add the content, but they give you a reason otherwise to come back to. And I think I know that doesn't matter to many people, but that's the thing that would get me to go back to. I don't have the Platinum and Helldivers 2 because I don't know that I'm going to be able to do some of these things. So I wasn't. And frankly, I wasn't even trying to get any of the trophies. I just enjoyed playing it. I played it for, what, 50 or 60 hours or something like that. But I don't know that I'll ever really go back either. I'm open to it. I'm amenable to it, but I just don't know. All right.

1:28:39Dustin Furman:There's a video. Well, there's two things to talk about from take two. We can kind of take these together. There is a CNBC interview, a clip from a few days ago from when we're recording entitled Take Two Interactive CEO on Q2 earnings, gamer growth and GTA six. So it's an interview on the CNBC show Money Movers with Strauss Zelnick. and I put this into our discord I don't know if you guys watched it but I thought it was an interesting interview with him just because I'm fascinated by Strauss Delnick because he's one of the very successful executives in the games industry that fully admits that he doesn't play games at all and it's interesting to talk to hear him talk about the business with such mastery he knows like what he needs to know trust the people that he needs to trust or whatever so it's a really interesting interview to listen to as they discuss the Q2 earnings for Take-Two's fiscal year but deep within the interview, he's asked about Grand Theft Auto 6 and it's May 2026 release.

1:29:36Dustin Furman:And the host asks him, you know, how confident are you? And he says, quote, my level of conviction is very, very high. End quote. Dustin, what do you make of this? I think this is bigger than people let on, though I think anything can change and maybe they just don't know. Maybe right now they believe the game will come out in May. But I don't think it's a small thing to have the CEO of Take Two speaking on CNBC specifically to investors. It would seem like a flat out lie. Otherwise, to people that are most in tuned and would have a problem with that, that might be buying or selling based on the things you're saying at that very moment.

1:30:16Dustin Furman:And so this indicates to me that they might be internally pretty locked on this date. Do you think that that's an accurate read?

1:30:23Colin Moriarty:I feel like it seems pretty accurate at this point that the release date will be May 26th. Just because my speculation is that when it was supposed to come out this calendar year is that it's done. And this extension is like, look, with this time, we're able to completely make this like, you want the 10 out of 10 greatest. I mean, potentially it's going to be the highest reviewed game of all time or pretty dang close. We can lock that in with this extra polish time. I'm certainly, even though if he hasn't played the game, I'm sure he's very in tune with what state it's at, what the delays were for.

1:31:15Colin Moriarty:So I wouldn't see him saying something like this unless he really knew because, Because the original delay, I guess, is that we thought it was coming out this year, but we didn't have a date. And then when the actual date came, it was just not this year. So it was a delay, but also we didn't know the initial date to begin with. So I would say lock it in. It's happening. And what they're doing now is just polishing up to make this absolutely as good as it possibly can at launch.

1:31:47Dustin Furman:That's what we're going to get into next about something else he said in an interview with IGN. But Chris, do you think that we will be playing Grand Theft Auto 6 in May less than a year from now? Yeah, I mean, I see no reason to really think otherwise. It's already been delayed, and I think it's in fairness been delayed to a point that seems, or at least from my memory, is more typical to a GTA release date. I don't remember exactly when five came out, but I remember four was like April or like kind of like early, early in the year of 2008. and so now that it's in that space again it's like yeah i think so i think the game's largely done i just think it's really a matter of probably polish probably like working out some technical quirks maybe maybe getting a little bit more familiar with uh the different skews now that ps4 or ps5 pro is out i don't know i i just think a lot of the the hurdles are kind of done um and so yeah i just don't i don't think it's going to get delayed again we'll see yeah i'm i'm again he can say anything and probably get away with it but i just feel like it would be a weird venue to do that on a cnbc show watched exclusively by people who care about money and investments and only that video only has 6 000 views it's not like this thing has been making the rounds or anything like that um okay and then i wanted to connect that story to an ign report called bioshock four is going to come out take two ceo straal zelnick promises and this is interesting because he was able to the and the wesley yin pool the writer at ign was able to speak to strauzelnik um upon their fiscal report and you know obviously he was appearing on cnbc to talk about that but also all the calls and q a's that go around around that with uh investors and he says when asked about bioshock 4 quote it's going to come out that i can say hand on heart without question.

1:33:44Dustin Furman:End quote. This is what we were saying last week is I feel like it's so deep into development and you would just have pulled the plug by this point that they just need to get it right and that they said something like we have a good game but we need a great game. Now this is where I think Strauss Delnick has some interesting stuff to say and it's really fascinating to hear him speak so candidly about game development and what they're doing. He says quote we don't talk about how long our development cycles are. We have had some ups and downs along the way that is accurate. And we have had changes in the studio leadership.

1:34:17Dustin Furman:That said, we have very big shoes to fill on Bioshock because of the legacy of Ken Levine, the legacy of what has gone before, which has been so successful. And we need to make sure that this experience is true to the Bioshock DNA on the one hand and a massive step forward on the other hand. That's always challenging. We think we're up to the challenge, but it has not been seamless. And then he says this later on because they write on IGN. there hasn't been a new Bioshock game, blah, blah, blah. And all these things are getting canceled, like Everwild and Concord. And it's clear AAA development is getting longer.

1:34:49Dustin Furman:And it's being it's getting complicated. And he said this, which I thought was pretty candid. I quote, I think it's a reflection of the fact that as entertainment businesses mature, consumers see quality and everyone realizes that the consumer is highly demanding and properly. So the strategy of this company has always been to make the best entertainment, not necessarily the most entertainment. Of course, sometimes we've fallen short, but frankly, a precious few times. And I think some of our competitors have realized maybe a little late in the day that consumers are not okay with okay. Good is the new bad.

1:35:19Dustin Furman:Great is the new great. And our goal here is to make everything exceptional. So I thought that's really refreshing to hear. Again, it seems like Take-Two is kind of living by that. For instance, getting rid of private division was a major step forward towards that what differentiates ea from take two is that they're both of a similar size but ea invests in smaller games and then gets sometimes you get a morals of avium and sometimes you get shit from hazelite right where like the games that sell 10 15 20 million copies and you discover that take two is trying to be more deliberate releasing fewer games and trying to go for quality and i love that good is the new bad great is the new great he's absolutely right there's no room for good where is the good game going to exist there are good games everywhere you can fucking trip over them on any platform but because there are so many good games and fewer great games but yet still a high volume of great games too many great games with few too few dollars chasing after them It's a precarious situation.

1:36:26Dustin Furman:So the only way you can ensure that you will probably win. And this is what you were saying about Grand Theft Auto. Both of you is like polishing. It is like release just really great shit. And frankly, they do. I mean, I wonder how Borderlands is going to be. I suspect it's going to be great. Borderlands 4. We'll see. NBA 2K is widely respected as the best sports game. And certainly one of the. At least it was. And one of the highest selling ones. Um, interesting, interesting approach and I respect it and I appreciate that less is more and more in those specific fewer packages is good. So wanted to tie those two things together.

1:37:10Dustin Furman:Anything else to say before we move on?

1:37:12Colin Moriarty:I think it ties into, uh, what he was saying on, uh, that first interview was that CNBC? No.

1:37:21Dustin Furman:Um, CNBC was the first interview and IGN was the second CNBC.

1:37:24Colin Moriarty:see there's a part where he's talking i think they ask him if they're like uh they're talking about you know the possibility in a recession environment are they immune to that and he's like well no i wish you could say we were immune to it but we're we're not but in times where people have less money to spend they may pass on a game that is good kind of like you were saying like good is not good enough but when you have a game that is truly great then that becomes recession proof where people, despite having less money are going, you're like, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if I can't feed my wife and kids tonight.

1:38:04Colin Moriarty:I need Grand Theft Auto six and they'll buy it anyway. And so I think it's especially important as we are currently in and may potentially get into worse financial times as a whole, not just in the U S but across the world that quality absolutely does matter because people will start to prioritize things and you have to be the most appealing.

1:38:30Dustin Furman:There's no room for duds and there have been some really expensive ones. Concord obviously was a majorly expensive dud but look at Justice League and like Kill the Justice League actually sold fairly well. It's reasonable to expect that that game sold more than a million copies if not even well beyond that at full price because of where it was charting for months. You guys might remember it was still like one of the 20 bestselling games the year it came out and they still lost 200 million dollars on it. Like, can you imagine? And I'm talking about Warner. It's like crazy levels of money going into these games and you just got to polish it up and make it really count.

1:39:13Dustin Furman:And it seems like that's what they're trying to do. I respect the shit out of that. Again, could just be talk. But I think that they've been living by that mantra with the exception of their sports games, of course, which are annualized. And I wish, again, as I've said many times, there hasn't been a move to really shake up sports gaming, annualized sports gaming since Sega famously charged. And I don't know if you guys remember this$20 for NFL 2K5. Do you guys remember that? That was like a major deal. And it was the one year that they beat Madden. They like Madden was 50 bucks and they were 20 bucks.

1:39:45Dustin Furman:And I think that's when EA got scared and then wrapped up the NFL license so that that couldn't happen anymore now Sega doesn't make sports games anymore but they they did at one time and they were awesome I loved the NBA 2k series back in the day so all right there's that we'll keep an eye on this I like that he kind of shouts out Ken Levine you can read between the lines by the way of like his respect for him and ghost story and why they're given so much leeway because he understands like what he's trying to do that i'm again i'm fascinated by shavzelnik there's nothing fake about him compared to a lot of other executives that like we used to make fun of jim ryan where he's like i'm playing well i'm right now i'm playing the newest ratchet and clank game you know ratchet and clank a rift apart available now on playstation 5 like that kind of shit like this guy's just saying like i don't play games but i just make a lot of money yeah for us to make games and he has like he must be a nice thing to have lieutenants around you that you can trust and that they deliver the goods and you just let them do their thing and make massive i mean it's not a really a huge risk because like grand i thought i was going to sell but it's no small thing to spend 1.5 billion dollars or something on a game like whatever they've spent on Grand Theft Auto 6.

1:41:11Dustin Furman:I don't know, man. Crazy shit. That game is going to just be monumental. Yeah, it's going to be a monster. I'm really eager to see how it moves hardware. There are going to be millions of people that buy hardware for that game. Yeah, a bit a traditional big game, especially at this part of the life cycle. If a huge game comes out, might sell a couple hundred thousand units of a hard of hardware for people that didn't yet buy in, but you're talking about something so substantial. People still many, many millions still playing on PS4. We'll talk about that in a little while too, about people playing on PS4.

1:41:43Dustin Furman:But in the meantime, let's move on to Resident Evil. There are two Resident Evil stories that I thought we could talk about here. The first is a reliable leaker talking about future remakes in the Resident Evil series. And so aesthetic gamer one who is Dusk Golem, Dusk Golem a fairly long time reliable source of Capcom and Resident Evil news he said on Twitter quote the next remakes are Resident Evil Code Veronica and Resident Evil Zero they should be releasing in 2027 and 2028 though I'm unclear the second which is coming out first and which is second but that's what I'd say to expect so this gives us some good news he's kind of said similar things in the past and he says as much on his own Twitter um resident evil code veronica came out on dreamcast in 2000 and code veronica is associated with resident evil 3 resident evil 0 came out on gamecube in 2002 love it love that game and that's associated with resident evil 1 the reason that i think that these are important and i mean timeline wise resident evil 0 is happens before the original resident evil resident evil code Veronica happens during Resident Evil 3.

1:43:00Dustin Furman:Thus, I think it makes sense to get Code Veronica out first. Then you get out. And I think you see where I'm going with this. Then you get out code zero or Resident Evil zero. Then Resident Evil one. Right. At that point, you're in 2030, 2031. And it true. And we and then we would. This is the craziest part. At that point, we will have been 20 years removed from remake on GameCube. And you could really justify the move now to do the first game again. Dustin, what do you think of my theory?

1:43:36Colin Moriarty:I think that's a fantastic theory because the demands for one are very high. My buddy, my buddy, Brandon just played Resident Evil one remake for the first time. And he comes from the the remake era of Resident Evil. and I think maybe his first Resident Evil game was 7. So when he went back to play that, he was like, I hate this. I like the world and I like Resident Evil, but I just can't get into this style. And I get that. I'm sure there's lots of people that want to go back, but they're just not into the fixed camera angle aspect of it. And so while it already has been remade, it does feel like that is the ideal one to do but code veronica and zero for me personally are the ones that i would like to see remade the most because i haven't played either one i bought them both because they're both available on playstation 4 yeah they are at this point now side question colin if i was to play one of these which one should i play first oh code veronica is on the ps3 right is zero i think there's a ps4 version because i think i let's see code veronica

1:44:53Dustin Furman:ps4 because there is a ps4 version of resident evil zero for sure yeah um yeah code veronica

1:45:01Colin Moriarty:ps4 okay 15 bucks nice i bought them i bought them both on sale i think a year ago yeah it's

1:45:05Dustin Furman:cool i mean dude i remember code veronica being so interesting because of it coming out on dreamcast and um it you know so dreamcast came out the fall of 99 and it came out the following spring i remember and then it was ported to ps2 and i think it was like the next year or something like that so you can play it there as well um and then of course there was like the gamecube port because of all like there was like all the all the shit going on with the gamecube ports around resident evil 1 and resident evil 0 remake resident evil 1 remake what were you saying though dustin you asked

1:45:35Colin Moriarty:you which one should i play i'm guessing i should play code veronica first and then zero i just feel

1:45:40Dustin Furman:like because it's associated with resident evil 3 and resident evil 3 remake is more recent yeah you would probably go there and then yeah and then play zero which leads into resident evil 1 but yeah I'm amped for more Resident Evil. Capcom is doing such an awesome job and apparently we're going to see more of Resident Evil 9. That's where we're at now right? Requiem is that what it's called? At Gamescom maybe?

1:46:07Colin Moriarty:They're going to show more of it? It's either Gamescom or Tokyo Game Show. I think Gamescom they have a playable demo so you're right. Yeah it's Gamescom.

1:46:15Dustin Furman:So that'll be cool. Gamescom is I think the biggest it's ever been this year I read. So with like the most, it's like 1500 different companies, something crazy like that. Again, just to show you how out of control everything is. Like, I don't even know how you pay attention to that much content. You can't, you can't account for that much content. It's just micro dividing everyone too much, but that's the market will sort all of that out. The other thing I wanted to ask you guys about is this idea of this resident evil movie. Now, Now, Josiah Elmer writes in and says, hey, CDC, what are your thoughts on Zach Kregor's comments about directing the upcoming Resident Evil movie?

1:46:52Dustin Furman:In my opinion, this is how video game movies should be approached. Real fans with real talent coming in with their own vision. I think creating his own story in that universe is particularly smart to avoid getting bogged down in existing characters. Kregor's other two horror movies were awesome. So I think this movie is in good hands. So this is the guy that did that movie Weapons, right? Yeah, Weapons and Barbarian. And Barbarian. And he's also from the whitest kids, you know, which is wild. Right. Someone I didn't use the comment, but someone wrote in about that, too, which is hysterical.

1:47:21Colin Moriarty:I had no idea. I did not know that. That's amazing. It's insane. You see, if you've ever seen that sketch where he's like where he's directing the people and he's like, I need that happier. And with your mouth open, he's the director in that sketch, which is awesome.

1:47:35Dustin Furman:But well, there was an interview with the website Inverse, and he just noted. obviously I think he's doing the round for weapons specifically but he was talking about the Resident Evil movie that he's leading and he says quote let me say this, this is not breaking the rules of the game I am the biggest worshipper of the game so I'm telling a story that is a love letter to the games and follows the rules of the games and he says and that's the end of the quote and then it says that said, Kreger won't be retelling any story within the saga, though it will align with Resident Evil lore, Kreger's film is firmly quote outside of the characters of the games it is obedient to the lore of the games it's just a different story i'm not going to tell leon's story because leon's story is told in the games fans already have that end quote so this is making the rounds is something that is that is great now dustin we got a letter letter a few letters from the audience stating that you would maybe talk about this in a different context somewhere

1:48:26Colin Moriarty:or this guy and were you talking about weapons somewhere uh maybe it was summon sign earlier this week that i was talking about weapons because i saw it over the weekend okay yeah so i i'm not

1:48:37Dustin Furman:familiar with it but um it seems like people like it oh you saw it as well did you see chris yeah what do you think i didn't know how to feel about it and then i i kind of because i i walked out of it was like that was not what i was expecting but as i thought more about it i i like it more as i

1:48:55Colin Moriarty:thought about it yeah yeah i don't know if it deserves initially it had a hundred percent on rotten tomatoes i don't think it does anymore i don't know if it deserves that uh but you're right a few days removed i'm like yeah that movie i mean i liked it right out initially yeah but i'm liking it more as time goes on i think the trailer or like the the promise of the trailer isn't isn't kept really it's one of those kind of like where like the vibe was not the vibe of the trailers or the marketing was not what we got which at first kind of threw me off because i was like oh well i don't know i was kind of interested in seeing that but what we did get i think was very good um but uh i after seeing weapons i was like yeah i could see this guy doing resident evil actually because like that movie is way not what you think it is and i think uh resident evil could could benefit from some of that i think my the thing that i'm debating is clearly because barbarian is is really good too i like weapons more than barbarian uh But he clearly has the talent.

1:50:00Colin Moriarty:And from these comments, yeah, it was some insight that we were, we were talking about this exact interview based on these comments and saying how he adores the games and they're going to be lower respectful. That all sounds good. Very good. It's a little weird to me that they're not going to have any Resident Evil characters or even kind of touch on the games because I think it would make sense to have at least a little bit of that in there because when you remove the fan favorite characters from Resident Evil like what is it at that point like what is it that really makes it Resident Evil like it's not like the actual lore of Resident Evil is anything groundbreaking people it's not the only reason but people love those games because they love leon they love claire um so and chris right uh so i think it seems like a little bit of a weird move but i'm gonna based on how good weapons was i'm gonna trust him for now i'm just excited that yeah to have

1:51:12Dustin Furman:someone that knows the games and i don't know anything about this person but just someone that knows the games knows the series and doesn't want to replicate any of it is cool, but rather like add to it, make something of your own using the world. And Resident Evil is such a huge story. I mean, even though we've gotten quite many Resident Evil games over the years, it's just still a highly incomplete story. There's got to be so much going on. Yeah. Around the world that we don't know. That's why I think it that's why I think it works. Like even even just Raccoon City, you see so little of you see like people's certain people's stories in that game, but that's a whole city.

1:51:47You know, like there's all sorts of shit happening. there's probably like a you know there's a gym teacher somewhere out there like freaking the fuck out like i think uh i think it makes sense i do think it would be interesting to maybe have like some there's got to be something i i do think i mean obviously depending on what like where he chooses to set it and what time he chooses to set it i would imagine that like things that happen in the games will overlap with it like if there's like some kind of if there's some kind of like obvious event that is unavoidable to anybody in that setting i would imagine that that would probably be touched on or at least referenced or given some kind of credit but i do think following like new characters or just completely different people detached from the core cast is probably a smart move at this point it's kind of i would rather see that than and i think he kind of understands this intrinsically it's hard to adapt characters that we already love and already have like a very specific kind of feeling about like you're never really going to hit it 100 um it's always going to be kind of off i think it's why fallout succeeds actually like fallout's a pretty good example like where that's that show doesn't really have any there's one character in like the last episode or something that like that exists in the games but it's really more about the world and the vibe and if you can do that for resident evil i think i think it'd be really cool and uh potentially a really great way to onboard people onto the games and into the world and and based on i and based on weapons i have not seen barbarian but based on like the tone of weapons and how like i don't even know if i should like say too much about it but like i think i think that would work for uh for resident evil fair enough yeah i'm

1:53:35Dustin Furman:i'm interested to see this the i don't i'm not familiar with the old resident evil movies i I remember the first one came out when I was a senior in high school. Mila Jovovich or whatever. Mila Jovovich. It's like an action movie series, right? Yeah. It's gotten a lot of like it's done well and it's all. But what I find funny is that it's driven by Paul W.S. Anderson, who directed. I don't know much about him, but I know that he directed a favorite of mine of Ben Horizon, which is a late 90s sci-fi movie. and but he's married to that mila woman which i think is hysterical yeah so entirely yeah it's entirely just a vehicle for and it's like fine that's that's what they they do really well though apparently like yeah they do they've made a lot of money they have it's true have you guys

1:54:20Colin Moriarty:seen there's a red letter media actually put this a clip 12 years ago on their channel uh it's just a clip of them watching the end of resident evil afterlife it's three minutes long dude i i promise you uh not just you guys but for the audience them watching these this minutes of this movie you don't need any context it is i was dying uh watching this video highly recommend it i'll have to check that out the only thing i know about the resident evil movies is that there's like a scene with like a laser there's like a laser vivisection scene yeah yeah is it that's the scene that's the only thing i know about it and it's it's it is wild to be fair but it's uh yeah i've not seen any

1:55:04Dustin Furman:of them like oh i'm reading about so that paul ws anderson also wrote and directed the monster hunter movie from so he must have a relationship with capcom and guess who stars in that movie

1:55:16Colin Moriarty:he also must have a relationship with garbage trash i just love that she's also the star of

1:55:22Dustin Furman:that movie so capcom must have i take a shine to her it's a complete fucking racket i know it's crazy it's ridiculous god bless i mean if you got the money to do it like why not i guess i'm sure she's a perfectly nice woman i don't know anything about her i mean i remember i i honestly can only think of one thing that i ever really knew her from and it was the fifth element which is an awesome movie but and that's before the resident evil movies but i don't i don't know like her her chops or anything i'm not trying to judge her i just think it's a little weird but you know that's hollywood baby all right um i was disappointed in this and i should have brought this up earlier although i guess it makes more sense now is that we do our our uh bet every year for metacritic scoring where we pick 12 games and then you take the best 10 and this game getting delayed has fucked me in our game this year almost positively ensuring that i cannot win so it goes that's the way it goes sometimes yeah crimson desert has been delayed originally intended to come out in q4 it will now come out according to our friends at gamatsu in q1 and during the earnings call from pearl abyss which is the south korean studio that's making the game and publishing it they say well before the qa session i would like to first share an update on the development status and release schedule of crimson desert which many of you have been curious about currently crimson desert has been in the process of voiceovers while also carrying out tasks such as console certification in preparation for its release.

1:56:49Dustin Furman:In the case of marketing, we plan to participate in Gamescom and PAX West, and in September we will join TGS to strengthen our marketing efforts in the Japanese market. The launch of Crimson Desert, our first large-scale AAA console game, has been unavoidably delayed by one quarter from the previously announced schedule. This is due to longer-than-expected timelines arising from schedule coordination and collaborations with multiple partners for offline distribution, voiceovers, console certification, and other launch preparations. We sincerely apologize for not being able to meet the originally promised fourth quarter launch schedule well fuck me right Pearl Abyss because I believed you that you're going to do this but obviously things conspired against them and that's okay also getting a little bit more time with other games I think is good we don't really need Crimson Desert right now I will say this so for people that are not aware Pearl Abyss is a fairly prominent South Korean studio has more than a thousand employees and most of them work on a game called Black Desert Online which as I remember only came out the PlayStation 5 this year.

1:57:43Dustin Furman:But Black Desert Online is a fairly notable MMO that first came to PS4 in 2019. So that's kind of what they're known for. And this particular game, Crimson Desert, was originally supposed to be some sort of sequel in the MMO world that I think because they realized they didn't need to release a new version of their original game. They were like, let's make this into something that's single player and standalone. maybe not unlike what is happening with grand blue and like the different components of that series there's like the rpg there's the mmo there's the fighting game and so on and so forth so they're trying to do a a similar thing here i think this game looks fucking awesome i gotta say and i'm really looking forward to it i don't know anything about it i don't know anything about the world maybe it's gonna suck but just the gameplay i've seen the screenshots i'm like this looks great dude um really really amped about this dustin i see you nodding along knowingly are you disappointed for the delay of this pearl abyss game i guess a little bit but there's so

1:58:44Colin Moriarty:much other shit coming out that i'm i'm perfectly happy uh without i'm perfectly happy to see you

1:58:49Dustin Furman:lose a game on the meta i'm gonna have to absorb a zero on my almost certainly yeah i i was just looking i'm gonna get lucky because judas i don't think it's happening this year and path of exile

1:59:01Colin Moriarty:too which is in early access i saw a few months ago the director say yeah we're probably not going to leave early access this year so last game on my list is baby steps yeah that's going to come out september right so that's that is coming out in september so i will not absorb zero but i don't think i'll beat chris depending on his games but um as far as crimson desert highly recommend And there's our episode of Summon Sign. Brad went hands on with it. I was sitting beside him watching him play. And this game, I feel like it's not a sleeper because it's gotten a lot of press. But I think people are underestimating based on what I've seen how cool and awesome this game could be.

1:59:47Colin Moriarty:I don't know much about the world either and what the story is going to be like. but in terms of gameplay and the world and the simulation going on, the map that Brad was playing was like this giant battle going on. And all these different characters were fighting their own standalone battles that you could go and interact with each one. It's got a lot of interesting traversal, some Breath of the Wild type stuff in there. So I'm highly anticipating this game. And so, yeah, the delay is a little disappointing, but if it makes the game it sounds like they're delaying for other reasons but i'm sure they're going to spend this time wisely polishing things anyway yeah why not so i'm very excited for it i

2:00:30Dustin Furman:agree with you i think they have a hit on their hands with this game and i do wonder like what the cross pollination will be with black desert online it may be minimal but it's like what see it's like what um ccp was trying with uh and actually ccp owns pearl of this which is funny so maybe this is connected to that but ccp is the studio behind eve online the icelandic team and obviously they've been trying to break out of eve online dust 514 was a great example of this on ps3 it's just to make some sort of cyclical environment and i'll never forget how cool dust 514 was on paper like it just was the coolest idea and just never came together but very very ambitious so maybe a way to kind of like cross pollinate your games and get people to to buy in i think this game chris looks a little bit like witcher to me too like a really enhanced Witcher yeah game which I think is now quite attractive what do you think no I think it looks great I just it also like I can tell just by looking at it it's like this is an overwhelming thing for me I could tell I was like this is gonna be I have to this has to come out right when I'm like in the mood for something like this because if it isn't I'm gonna put it off for fucking for years but it looks impressive it looks technically really great um looks smooth it looks interesting um it being delayed i think is also good because it just i mean that's never really i'm really of the mind that that's never really a bad omen really or not an omen necessarily i just i don't think it's bad for the game to be delayed you know it's usually results in a net positive so yeah i think it'll i think it'll be great it looks really high quality yeah i'm um i'm very interested to see how this uh this all goes down when this game comes out because I agree with you, Dustin.

2:02:09It's not so much a sleeper

2:02:11Dustin Furman:because it is getting attention, PlayStation showcasing and stuff, but it does seem like one of those games that will just sell like 5 million copies or something and everyone would be like, whoa, where did that come from? So I'm really, really excited to see more of it. And yeah, I imagine a second, third week, January release, how big that would be. Just like boom, right after the holidays, you got a little bit of a lull. The winter season is encapsulating you. the days are short you need something cozy i think it would do really well and i agree with you it doesn't seem like at least what they're saying is the way i read it is we are trying to pass certification we can't pass certification once we pass certification we can get the games published because that's what they were saying as far as like distributing the games on disc everything's coming together too late and it's not worth rushing and like we're in august you know we're not going to make it.

2:03:05Dustin Furman:It's good. I expect an early Q1 release. By the way, they're also working on a game called Doki V, which is a Pokemon clone of some sort. I was reading about earlier. It's like a monster hunting game of some sort. I don't know. Doki V? It doesn't have the E. It doesn't have the accent over the E.

2:03:24Dustin Furman:The characters or the creatures are called Dokkebi.

2:03:28Colin Moriarty:I've seen this before. It looks... I saw one screenshot. I was like, this is a cool. And then I saw all the human-like characters.

2:03:38Dustin Furman:Yeah, it's a little unsettling. It's a little unsettling. If you guys go look it up. It looks kind of... You know what it looks like? It's kind of like Foam Stars. Like that foam, that bright Foam Stars aesthetic. they look like i mean it's all weird looking children you know who's gonna love this game pedophiles well yeah but but but furries they're gonna love it oh yeah right them too i'll just leave it there i was gonna take it a step further but we'll just leave it right yeah

2:04:19Dustin Furman:I just thought that was interesting to throw out. So we were talking a week or two ago about Genshin Impact. Being willing to move off a PlayStation 4. They're already starting that process and it'll complete next year and you'll have to play on PS5. If you want to still play on PlayStation, you can obviously play on your phone or on PC or on another console if you like. So they're cutting off the PS4 and the next game to do this that's been announced is PUBG in the next big game anyway. That's doing this. And they announce on their website that. Quote today from when they're writing this, which is the 13th.

2:04:51Dustin Furman:We'd like to share an important update regarding the PUBG console service. As mentioned in our 2025 roadmap, we've been preparing to transition PUBG console to current generation consoles. Starting November 13, PUBG console will be supported only on PlayStation 5 and Xbox series X and S. The shift is a necessary step towards aligning PUBG console with current gen consoles to provide our players with a more stable gameplay environment. on console and who ensure a smoother, more seamless experience with future updates. We've decided to transition to current-gen consoles. Following this transition, console players will see improved visuals and more stable frame rates.

2:05:24Dustin Furman:In addition, we expect to reduce ongoing crash issues through memory-related optimization. As part of this transition, we'll be ending support for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It weighs on us heavily to deliver this news to our console players who have enjoyed PUBG on PlayStation 4 for so many years, and so on and so forth. It's been eight years since it came out. so the transition schedule is that there'll be live server maintenance on november 13th at which point the ps4 and xbox ones versions will be shut off and disassociated with the existing versions and you can go from there and actually um playstation 5 pro now is at 2160p and playstation 5 is 1440p with 60 frames for both um this is interesting news just in well josh kiskalt wrote in about it said CDC push square had an article about pub G being the next game that will kill off PS4 support it's seeming more obvious Sony is doing whatever they can to get people off PS4 and I am guessing the SSD has a big part to play do you think this is a good sign that we will see more games taking advantage of the SSD or do you think this is more of a financial decision things and keep it rocking I honestly don't think it's Sony doing this I think Sony is perfectly happy to let people use PS4 for as long as they want at least in the midterm I think it's these companies seeing diminishing returns and being held back by hardware that came out in 2013 simply got to move on at some point and i think the ssd yeah is a major part of it but i think they're probably comfortable they probably reached a bench line internally where they're like we are feeling fairly safe to do this so we'll streamline things make things easier and then sony has the advantage of which is neither here nor there of of having some people update the ps5 probably to continue to play um there's an article on games industry.biz that i was reading uh probably should have cited it but i forgot to where they were saying that whoever was writing it was saying that the word is is that like companies are now really going to en masse start jumping off of ps4 and that by this time next year it's going to look very very different over there so i think and by the way i think it's funny we're talking about grand theft auto 6 i think grand theft auto 6 plays a little bit of a part in it where these companies are probably looking around seeing increased adoption option of the new hardware.

2:07:33Dustin Furman:Plus, there's going to be a huge stream of people that really will not move on, but will move on by the time Grand Theft Auto comes on that might play our game. We might see some cross-connection with GTA Online or something like that, so we're comfortable to make that move as well. So I think these things are all somewhat interconnected, but just wanted to throw that out there. So PUBG says goodbye to PS4. Next big one up. I wonder who will be after that. PlayStation Plus games. We don't have PS Plus Essential games, but we do have PS Plus Game Catalog games. This is for the game catalog at the mid-tier extra and at the higher tier premium as well and so the new games being added to playstation plus extra and premium are as follows so the game catalog games available at both of those tiers the mid and high tier mortal combat one is coming spider-man for both ps4 and ps5 marvel spider-man sword of the sea and earth defense for six unicorn overlord nice little addition there artillery rise of three she's got some fat thighs sitting here on this in this picture

2:08:31Colin Moriarty:that's why people love her con that's why you might love her um i've never played one of those

2:08:36Dustin Furman:games but i do love her i mean artillery rise of three alchemist of the end and the secret key i think micah had said that she was like interested in an artillery game but it was so uncomfortably sexualized that it was even bothering her oh the new one yeah where she's like i can't do this

2:08:51Colin Moriarty:Dude, if I recall, it was like just like a brief ass shot. She couldn't handle the ass. It's interesting for her. Yeah. Yeah. With all the she wants to fuck a boat from Zelda. She can't deal with an anime girls. I clothed. That's too normal for her.

2:09:13Dustin Furman:Indica, which is that weird story game that came out. Harold Halibut and Coral Island. These are the games that are available. And then on PlayStation Plus Premium, Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 will be available in their PS1 formats. Very nice. Probably without trophies. Unfortunately, Capcom doesn't seem to be interested in putting trophies on their games. Dino Crisis doesn't have trophies, for instance. But those will be there if you want to experience them as they were originally released in the late 90s. Chris, is there anything here that you might be interested in with your PlayStation Plus?

2:09:44Dustin Furman:If you added a PlayStation Plus extra subscription, I don't think you do. I don't think so either. um no everything everything that i'm interested in here i already own or have played like spider-man uh i guess like the probably the only thing that i'm even slightly curious about is earth defense force 6 but i strongly suspect i know kind of how my time with that will be which will be like oh this is fun and then i'll just kind of peel off of it yeah it's perfect it's perfect for a subscription service yeah no totally uh this is i don't know i can't speak to the quality of many of these games.

2:10:19I don't know how people feel about Mortal Kombat one. I feel like I feel like that's one that has soured a little bit from what I've from the things that I've heard from the fighting community. I'm not really sure how accurate that is. These are tell your. I can't even those thighs

2:10:36Dustin Furman:or those thighs alluring you. There's even a little bit of a shine on them. You see that. Oh, what are you gay? There is a shot. I mean, they're very thin. I mean, they look. is the assumption that these are like big thighs they look they look pretty big they're normal a normal healthy person's thighs but but uh regardless

2:10:59none of this speaks to me this is kind of a miss for me honestly although i mean resident evil two and three being there is nice um were they not there before i could have sworn no i think it was just one yeah one's there one director's cut yeah maybe i'm thinking of

2:11:14Dustin Furman:they were on ps3 and beta and psp yeah okay they're in that sort of thing in fact they definitely are there yeah yeah i'm surprised that it took this long to get here but i mean cool like those are good like the classics nice job but none of this really speaks to me it's kind of an off month for me i wouldn't say it's a bad month because i don't know the quality of any of these but nothing for me um let's see yeah for me i mean i don't have it but unicorn overlord I want to play, but I'll buy. I might have already bought it, actually. Sword of the Sea is kind of a cool-looking game. You surf around.

2:11:50Dustin Furman:I like this water. I don't know. Spider-Man, obviously, we've played. So yeah, there's nothing here for me. There is, Dustin, a Death Stranding 2 game trial available at the premium tier as well. So that's five hours of gameplay if you want to check it out, and then you can buy the full version if you enjoy. Anything for you otherwise?

2:12:07Colin Moriarty:I think this is a fantastic month for for my taste unfortunately i feel like my extra slash premium is going to expire soon and i'll probably stay off until i find something worthy of uh the deal to get it but if i am staying on unicorn overlord i've been wanting to check out i've heard amazing things about that this indica game i have looked and thought about buying this game multiple times but just not sure if it would be something i'd be into i've heard really great things about it um so that would actually i'm into because the first one that i would check out on this list if my subscription hasn't lapsed yet um because i don't think it's very long either like you can get through it pretty yeah i've heard some things about it's like four hours or something yeah uh but i've yeah i've heard it's really cool and as far as the ps1 games resident evil 2 and 3 i think this is fucking awesome we've been wanting some more some more substantial titles from the uh backwards you know i'm not backwards compatibility but the the classics library and two resident evil 2 in particular i've played through to remake uh a bunch of times now but i really have no connection to the original and so while i probably wouldn't play through all of it this is one that again if my subscription hasn't lapsed i'd love to boot up and just see what it was like on the original playstation well there'll be available a la carte 10 bucks probably yeah what is the makes sense what is the i closed it what are the um i should look at oh what was this what are the dates these are

2:13:51Dustin Furman:going live does it say august 19 so you have you have a few days from when this goes live to prepare

2:13:58Colin Moriarty:yourself to gird yourself good i'll be busy the next few days anyway what are you gonna be busy doing i'll tell you about it i'll tell you all about it pretty soon like on the show yeah i'm gonna be busy with a game oh okay i was like holy shit i'm busy i'm packing up baby i'm getting the fuck out of here and getting out of dodge and you're never gonna hear from me that'd be awesome

2:14:23Dustin Furman:if you actually just fell off the radar like you didn't die but like you just disappeared that would be i would i would totally accept that i was like that would be that would be awesome if you were just like i'm done and you're just like there's like you really have no choice yeah oh yeah yeah but yeah i would have yeah what am i saying i would have to i would have no i would

2:14:38Colin Moriarty:literally have no choice in the map i would imagine in like two months someone takes like a blurry photograph of me like in some you know eastern europe or something like is that him you know i've got like a long beard searches on at that point yeah you're like the christian

2:14:55Dustin Furman:videos or pictures that people take every once in a while i don't know if i like that comparison but i get it yeah i whether you like it or not is immaterial to the comparison right immaterial is such a such a callous word i know it is it's a totally ridiculous word i never get to use it it's a good word but it is so uniquely disconnected um all right uh well we have ps plus games we also have ps and sales information for july 2025 the top downloads on psn and there are us and canada charts and then the european charts the european charts are different people can go into those if they want um but i like to focus on the us charts because like we could speak to them with a little bit more authority and the market's bigger so it's just maybe a little bit more interesting from that perspective but if you go to the places why you can see both of the charts the top selling ps5 game in july digitally college football 26 not a huge surprise there ready or not number two we think we just we discussed it on the sacred streaming i believe that this game is fucking blowing up i mean pardon the pun millions of copies sold i think on console specifically on playstation i would assume which is i didn't i didn't know and it's

2:16:08Colin Moriarty:this is one of those things where it's like okay you know it's dude it's it's such a it's a really cool game it's very different you know it's not like call of duty it's like socom right it's like yeah you got like if you're coming in with a crew you gotta check each door you gotta put the little camera under and then when someone breaches the door throw in a flashbang try to take out the enemies uh and dude the subject matter of some of these levels are as dark as hell uh you're getting into some nasty stuff in this game uh but yeah crazy it's blowing up on console i think it might Jimmy that told me.

2:16:45Colin Moriarty:So if he's wrong about this, don't blame me. Blame him. That it sold more on console already than it's had in its entire life on PC.

2:16:53Dustin Furman:I think that's probably true because I think it's like it's in the millions. Yeah, that makes sense. Very interesting. I don't know if it's like aggressive marketing, if sponsored content of getting your game bubbled up, people just seeing the right things when they're on TikTok or Instagram or whatever like they're looking at because I'm so detached from like what young people especially are seeing like i've never one time in my entire life been on tiktok i just don't know it i don't know anything i mean i'll see tiktok videos if they're on twitter but i've never like right actually been on tiktok so someone like screen grabbing them and like sharing them but uh so i i always wonder like when a game comes out of nowhere like this is it is it that i'm detached from reality which is potentially true or is it like that there was like a really canny marketing campaign for this or people were really excited about it i'm interested in it i keep seeing people a lot of people on my friends list are playing it but it it i think you do you have to have multiple players or can you play it with like oh so you can like play it and then the computer will control

2:17:52Colin Moriarty:the other characters the well the computer will control but you are like the squad leader and you

2:17:57Dustin Furman:give commands like rainbow right again and so this is this is the insanity of how i used to play right i really used to play rainbow six by killing my squad in the beginning of every of every uh chapter yeah and then just playing it like but as if it was a third person sure like that's literally how i played the game so yeah i think i don't think ready or not would let you do that

2:18:19Colin Moriarty:i mean you could your score at the end of the mission would be horrendous it's so funny that

2:18:24Dustin Furman:i literally used to do that but it is true and because you have to like you know direct them and it's just like so much i was like i can't it's like an rts it's like i can't i can't it's hard for me to wrap my mind around real-time strategy games with the exception of like my my babies versus rts like like plants versus zombies as an example is technically it's a tower defense game but it's real time like i i just can't work on that level it's like yeah you use the smoke grenade and then you go to this corner and you you have my back here it's like i fuck off everyone just die i'm just gonna do this myself there are fewer things i want to see more than the designers of that game sitting and watching you play through like one-sided glass watching you completely do away with all of their like friendly ai work everything that they did to make sure that that friendly ai is as is as comfortable to use as possible you just shoot everybody and just go by yourself well so crazy i wonder

2:19:29Colin Moriarty:hey ready or not has cross play this is this is a prime sacred stream we should do it not a bad idea might be might be kind of cool i don't know if we need three or i think we could play three a fourth would be good but i don't know if it's three or four but i mean at least three of us i want to be the can i be a man pick it up uh no but it's like my dream of playing a white a white mage in final fantasy 14 the most tedious thing you've ever done in your

2:19:56Dustin Furman:entire fucking life probably like literally the most i can't even imagine a more tedious thing so i gotta do it at some point well i'll do it in the old folks home in five years all right so college fall 26 one ready or not two holding strong number three

2:20:16grand theft auto 5 you have to laugh it's just it's just insane it doesn't make any sense

2:20:26Dustin Furman:like how can you not have it already

2:20:32Dustin Furman:it is fucking bewildering man nba 2k 25 is fourth so no surprise there call of duty black ops 6 is five. And then let's see, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater three and four. I feel that's at six. I feel like that kind of came and went. I feel like now it's not a huge surprise. One and two. I mean, maybe I'm misremembering, but people loved one and two. I think in the zeitgeist a lot more than three and four. And especially one, like I know that people love two and love three in the various ports, whatever, but like it was so unique and new. Everyone fucking loved Tony Hawk's Pro Skater in 1999. It was like.

2:21:07Dustin Furman:Yeah, the biggest thing ever. And I feel like so I feel like when it was in 2020, I guess one one and two came out from Vicarious Visions or whatever. I felt like that really captured a moment. And I feel like this kind of didn't capture the same moment. I also saw that they really gutted the soundtrack, which is a bummer. I don't know if they had licensing issues or whatever, because that was not a problem in the first game. I think they got everything but what a few songs from the first game. And they had a better they had a better hit rate for the for one and two as far as like the stuff that they could get back the second one's a lot more of like kind of like a feels kind of like a bloodbath as far as like what managed to get through i do know also that three and four what there was a lot of work done to four to kind of reformat it into the the old format of one two and three right because i think four is like more of like an open world kind of mission design kind of game it's it's not really like the first three at all um and so people were probably looking forward to people were probably more like oh well i i that's not really for then so that is so there's more there was definitely more like um unease going into this one also a different group of people right it's a different studio because i think the people who handled the iron galaxy yeah it's iron galaxy instead of um vicarious visions i think that the vicarious yeah so what are the great names by the way great yeah fantastic um but yeah so that was kind of leaning against it i think it's great i have no context for what four was supposed to be but i quite enjoy it in the uh in this remake i think it's good i think it functions i think it's it works perfectly fine but i do think it's one of those things where it's just like if you hear about it and you hear like oh this doesn't function at all like how it used to you're probably like man i guess i'll skip that one yeah all right so the other the other ones on here i thought this was interesting forza horizon 5 hanging on at 10 ahead of death straining 2 at 11 um forza horizon just racking up copies sold i'm be i'm never gonna play it because i really just want to play car games but i'm more intrigued by that game than i've been by racer in a long time because it's like why is so many people playing this game like not car people not people that like forza motorsport but just others i'm sorry chris you were gonna say something no i mean if you could snag it for cheap somehow i kind of don't think it's bad to get like because i i'm not really that kind of person either like i don't really like these games at all but i i kind of dug it for like a pretty good amount of time i think i put like 15 hours into it or something which is way more than i would it's probably that probably is genuinely the amount of time i've put collectively into every single like more like grounded more realistic racer i know it's not forza motorsport and that's like the more grounded one but um if it wasn't like need for speed or like i don't know blur or some of these like weirder obscure kind of racing games i wasn't really playing them it's good i i did like and i've forgotten this in the past is i was a need for speed fan from the first one through the ps1 ones through um hot pursuit 2 which i loved and that will come up later because it had one of the great soundtracks of all time like one of the great rap metal soundtracks of all time um hot action cop was on that it was like holy shit i was more i was more burnout i think burnout yeah i think burnout was even like after me like after after my time maybe like i liked car games um but then i was just like i don't really care about cars and i don't really drive it was just like something to play because i you know what else i liked was um the atv games was it um oh uh pure or like uh before that like atv off-road or whatever yeah i had like the best selling like they were they were huge sellers so i had like the on ps2 like the red label or it was like a i can't see i can see in my mind's eye it's like a light maroon for like best selling or whatever yeah um anyway uh rematches at number 12 uh clear obscure 13 wuchang fallen feathers that's the that's its first month right is uh july so so not not great at 14 and then a few other things hanging on killing for three just came out too that's at 17 the the game that i didn't hear about on this list is hold fascinations at war i went and looked it up dude yeah this game looks awesome it does look i want to play it's a world where it's a world war one or like napoleonic through world war one era shooter and it came out in 2020 like right at the beginning of the pandemic on pc and it's a 20 game so it's a buy-in game and it's at number 18 on psn pretty interesting i've seen clip i've been seeing clips of this on my algorithm oh yeah there's napoleon yeah this looks cool i can tell though i'm not this is this yeah i'm not this is not gonna it looks wild because like you're bayonetting people and shit and like pretty yeah it looks it looks it's not my kind of game but it looks cool yeah i want a battlefield game like this yeah the like the voice chat and it seems

2:26:24Colin Moriarty:essential um yeah the stop the the top steam review says joined a random game didn't know what to do some random irishman took me under his wing followed him into battle doing firing lines and everything then we did a charge on an objective and i watched him just get shot in the head i stood there in shock i will name my first born after him that's that's the funny stuff that

2:26:44Dustin Furman:comes out of games like that is so the multiplayer games that is so good yeah it's wonderful yeah because you can't yeah it's why i love them so there's so many things that you can't program for you know what i mean like you can't like you can't assure that that experience will happen to someone but it just happens because all these things are so dynamic well because it's like not to not to be too dramatic or melodramatic but it's kind of equivalent to what would happen in the real world like this fracas you find yourself next to a person you've never seen before in a foxhole and you're kind of fighting your way out and you're you stay together for 20 minutes and then the dude just gets fucking clipped in the head and maybe never even got his name and that happened to you in the napoleonic wars you know like there's a crazy it's crazy and so like that to digitally undermine that right it's just like where it is a where it is like a fucking costume basically like the shit that would haunt like your grandfather you're doing this you're doing this on your off time to relax is that awesome that is hysteria we're taking like a generational like traumatic thing that happened to like hundreds of thousands of people who are just like yeah you want to jump on you want to hang out after work in this in a foxhole with us with a single reloading musket holy shit scary times i'm watching i watch a gameplay of it it's so funny this guy is shot a guy in the back on horseback and he's just gone that's so crazy it looks cool i like these games i like that this is real well number 18 on the ps5 charts and then ps4 nothing really interesting to note here except for um star wars battlefront 2 holding on at number two i wonder if this do you think this has meant anything to EA?

2:28:35Dustin Furman:I doubt it. I think it would mean something if it wasn't licensed, then it was a different company. If you could revive an old game like that to bump it even back into the top 20 selling games, but it's a Star Wars game. It's licensed. It's electronic arts and it's insufficient. And it's also probably like what you'd imagine pretty cheap. Right. Pretty low. If it was this high at like 60 bucks a pop, I feel like that would be like, oh, well, that's probably something to pay attention to but that game's undoubtedly very cheap today and then PSVR 2 nothing new beat saber number one I wonder how long this is going to like is it going to stay that it's really it must be them saying like we're not putting games on our competitors platform anymore it has to be

2:29:24Colin Moriarty:yeah it's got it's zuck dude they're getting zuck it has to be

2:29:29Dustin Furman:like there's just no way that the game like I'm not saying these games are selling like hotcakes. They're clearly not, but it must be appreciable. Like if you're the number one best selling game on PSVR, too, that's got to be something like summer. You're the you're doing the best. It's relevant for sure. And yes, I mean, this it's so funny that Beat Saber is just the seminal VR. It is the VR game. Like it is the Mario of VR. It's kind of crazy. And then did it free to play Fortnite Roblox. rainbow six siege x free access number three maximum football call of duty war zone rocket league marvel rivals holding on it what is that seven fall guys eight asphalt legends which is that free-to-play racing game that comes up nine and then apex falling down to ten i don't know yeah is it in danger of being delisted is apex legends swooning i don't know anything about that to be honest.

2:30:24I don't know. I haven't heard about it in a while. I will say that. I do think it's kind of maybe fallen a little bit out of the zeitgeist as far as what's relevant to play. Definitely Marvel Rivals is the big kind of new thing. And obviously, even outside of that space, obviously Roblox, obviously Fortnite. But yeah, Apex is

2:30:45Dustin Furman:kind of falling a little bit. Yeah, I'm trying to find your charts. 77 ,000 players on Steam right now. And its all-time peak, its 24-hour peak is 206 ,000 on Steam. Its all-time peak is 624, 2.5 years ago. I wish we had this kind of data for PSN, man. I understand why we don't. It would look really bad for a lot of teams. It would look really great, though, for a lot of teams, too. I mean, it looks really bad for most people on Steam. But they just have no... I don't think you can even scrape Lilymo games. I wonder are we on here let's see Habraxia 2

2:31:31Dustin Furman:All time peak 4.5 years ago 6 Not good Not good for us We don't really sell games on PC We want to sell games on PC but we just Really don't we don't really make games for PC players Unfortunately And the two new games that we're going to show soon Ish which are not the role Playing game are definitely not for pc people either i mean we'll sell on pc we hope people buy them there but sorry we don't make fucking rtss and 4x games okay sorry that was a little angry i didn't mean to be so angry good um i just wanted to speak on this really quick so remedy the developer released their financial statements for the fiscal year actually it's for the quarter and they have a lot of interesting stuff in here about um fbc firebreak and kind of its lack of performance and a bunch of other stuff but they note in here that control has finally hit five million copies sold which i think is so interesting and again it's what we were saying about that stranding earlier right like we have this idea that these games are bigger than they are and they're just not they're just not control is nowhere near being full price and hasn't been for years and just now hit five million copies sold but ken and lauder wrote into us and said greetings ss crew remedy has released their latest investor report for 2025, and I can't help but be baffled at how the studio is being managed.

2:32:54To give

2:32:54Dustin Furman:them some credit, they revealed profits are slowly increasing and dev costs are decreasing. Control remains the studio's biggest hit, reaching 5 million units. Alan Wake 2 has broken even but remains a non-starter for profit. FPC Firebreak has left the studio commercially unsatisfied with the launch being driven by Xbox and PlayStation subscription service agreements. They intend to dig in with FPC and support the game despite only reaching double-digit player counts on Steam after launch. This brings me to the baffling reveal that Max Payne 1 and 2 Remake is the priority game for the studio with the game in full production in partnership with Rockstar.

2:33:24Dustin Furman:Control 2 remains in early development with a small team slowly working towards milestones. Am I wrong in thinking this team is a bit arrogant? Since Control in 2019, they've had three projects not meet expectations, Crossfire, Alan Wake 2, and FBC, yet seem to have little interest in making the sequel to the only product they have that sells. I'm not saying I want them to be sequel machines. I just want them to be a studio that isn't on financial rocks and at the mercy of Tencent who keeps investing. Not capitalizing on what sells and what you personally own for over six years now just seems arrogant.

2:33:51Dustin Furman:Am I wrong in thinking the studio is poorly managed? Be well and I'll hang up and continue my first playthrough of Mega Man and listen. Thank you for writing in. I interpret. I saw this stupid. I don't remember where it was, but this fucking stupid story. Not everyone gets it right all the time, but it's like someone wrote a story being like Remedy confirms that they're working in close conjunction with Rockstar on Max Payne. And I'm like, no shit. They Rockstar owns Max Payne. Take two owns Max Payne. I think the reason why they're doing this is because they need the money. And it seems to make sense to me to go for the sure thing.

2:34:31Dustin Furman:The surest thing that remedy has ever made is going to be Max Payne one and two remake. Those games are going to sell really, really well. And they need to buttress there. What is that? Dagan used to bring it up. It's like the directors that say, like, I'll do one for the studio and then one for me. And the ones for them are Alan Wake and Control, which are just not very big series, unfortunately, because they're fucking great. Alan Wake's dope. Control is even better. And we've highly recommended it since it came out in 2019. We both loved Control. But people, for some reason, just haven't connected with it.

2:35:08Dustin Furman:And so I think for Remedy to stay alive, they're actually doing what needs to be done. which is to say like we need to take some external money we need to bolster our coffers and make things a little safer and if you're i i don't think that can i think it's disappointing that control two is like not out already but it just doesn't probably seem reasonable and i don't think that five million copies after all these years is really demanding an urgent control too unfortunately it could be a huge risk for them to do it so I don't quite read it that way but I want to congratulate them any reflections on Remedy before we move on I still have to beat Alan Wake too that's for sure

2:35:53Colin Moriarty:I didn't realize how bad Firebreak is doing like looking at the player counts in the last 24 hours 15 people

2:36:03Dustin Furman:yeah it's bad I will say because it was on PS Plus and on Game Pass I don't think those numbers reflect reality on the other on the consoles, but it's probably in the low thousands at most.

2:36:15Colin Moriarty:I would say, yeah, yeah, you would hope that that it being sort of a live service shooter that PC would be kind of more primarily the platform for it. And even in this report, it says on Steam, which was planned as the primary consumer sales channel, the launch underperformed. so that's kind of where they were hoping to extract a decent amount of money. And it seems like that has not been the case. And this goes back to what we were saying earlier. I haven't played it, so I don't know if it's any good, but even if it is good, it is simply not enough in this environment. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead, Chris.

2:37:03No, I mean, I did play it a little bit. I, I think I put a couple hours in. It is good. It's, you know, it it's weird though because it's just like i as a fan of control and as a fan of alan wake like i just would rather be in a single player space in the if if i'm going to interact with these ip at all like i would just rather it be in like a a single player setting where i'm not necessarily thinking about the things that i'm thinking about when i'm playing a multiplayer game yeah agreed and so i just kind of i kind of just fell out of it it's very competent it's very well done it's very good looking it controls surprisingly well i will say that like their shift over to first person combat actually I think is pretty natural and surprisingly pretty solid.

2:37:45But yeah, it's just it ain't for me.

2:37:50Dustin Furman:I think that they made a choice. They undercut their sales proposition by going on to Game Pass and PS Plus. That's just you took the money. You undercut yourself and you sent a signal that's not always positive. And I think that in turn is going to hurt your PC adoption if people have consoles and access to those things. I just think it's a cyclical thing. It's a game that they should have never made. I agree. It's like these companies need to figure out what they are and be okay with that. Not everyone, publishers can pursue tons of different routes. I don't think developers can. I think you've got to kind of pick and choose what you want to do and i think it's it's they want alan wake and they want that the alan wake universe to be bigger than it is and i say that as a fan a big fan yeah and again i think control is the original alan wake i was shocked by how good it was actually but the original control is really great just everything about it is great and for some reason people just didn't clue into it.

2:39:03Dustin Furman:It's just the way it goes. That happens to a lot of games. Tragically, it happens to a lot of games. I think it happened to Final Fantasy 16 in a way where people are like, eh. All right. Finally, do we want a Far Cry TV show, my friends? Because your gamer reports a Far Cry TV show that quote unquote doesn't shy away from the darkest, most absurd parts of humanity is reportedly in development at FX. they write quote confirmation came not via a leak but apparently from ubisoft itself which posted about the show on its own site before quickly redirecting it back to the main page again albeit not quite quickly enough to have escaped the notice of reddit those who managed to access the page before it was removed report rob mcelaney of it's always sunny in philadelphia and who is holly i don't know who that is they don't say who that is no he's he's not uh mac hall they like they're that's like the first time they reference him but it's like says holly are the far cry oh is holly like that's the person's name yeah yeah yeah okay so it's not a last name it's

2:40:06Colin Moriarty:just the name so it's the last name holly okay from fargo and alien earth it says are the far

2:40:13Dustin Furman:cry his name's noah holly okay yeah they don't say that anymore are the far cry series co-creators holly will also reportedly serve as showrunner while mac is set to star in the show the series will be executive produced by mac holly and jackie cohen for more better productions blah blah blah blah blah um boykin right says quote this collaboration is really an embarrassment of riches far cry a psychological tailspin that doesn't shy away from the darkest and most absurd parts of humanity which aligns perfectly with fx's bold and fearless storytelling style listen well let's get this letter in here first jp hey sacred crew did you see the ubisoft leaked announcement that a far cry tv show is in development at fx with rob mack from it's always sunny and noah hawley from fargo working as co-creators the show similar to the games will be an anthology and personally this seems like a great series to adapt to a tv show but curious what your thoughts are on this news i radically disagree now um rob mac is awesome i mean mythic quest he's a gamer yeah and so it's cool that he picked up on far cry i think far cry is dope i think what makes people know i love far i unapologetically love a far cry i think it's awesome it's an awesome game series i do not know how it translates to a to a movie or a tv show and it just becomes an over-the-top action game if you remove your agency from it and the insanity of it you doing yourself i don't think it's going to translate like i just don't i wouldn't we'll see what happens i would be surprised if this ever comes out because i just i don't know if you guys agree with your experience with far cry imagine far cry 6 playing it which i think is an enormously fun game and then watching it well it becomes like another action movie with a dictator you know

2:41:52Dustin Furman:equatorial country tyrant communist like it's like whatever man you know what's fun is jumping out of the fucking airplane and right and shooting and clearing a base whatever i just don't i think it's a weird target and i say that as a fan and i think there are a lot of ip and games that can make great TV shows and movies and do. But I think that this is a weird one. Now, anything's possible. They made Gran Turismo into a compelling movie. So could they do with Far Cry and make an anthology series? Sure. But I just think taking the player out of it doesn't make any sense. It's Far Cry is totally dependent on the experience.

2:42:28Yeah, I mean, you could make the same argument with Fallout, but Fallout turned out well. like yeah i'm but although i think fallout has like a way stronger just aesthetic language you know a way stronger vibe to connect to like there's more there for you far cry is it really is just kind of like you know island or you know some random country paramilitary it is a very kind of like doesn't have a lot of that iconography like there's no there's no really iconic imagery from far cry that i can think of really it's just it really is what it is which is just like island

2:43:07Dustin Furman:guns explosions military rebels yeah and when and i argue when they tried to get away from that the most which was in four and five which i think four is good i like i love five those are the ones that are not tropical and they're like almost the least memorable ones for a lot of people so it really is that yeah it's that tropical setting that really whether it's africa or whether it's the caribbean the pacific yeah whatever um yeah and so like yeah i don't i don't see how they could do it really i don't think it makes sense but also i i also kind of feel like it's in some ways a win because far cry is so inherently like even the fans of far cry like the biggest fans of far cry i would imagine don't care that much about like the lore or like the you know the storytelling necessarily they care about the sandbox of what of what fire far cry is and so in some sense you kind of have free reign it's kind of like twisted metal in a although i'll be in a very different way where it's just like you could kind of just do whatever and as long as it's good people will like it so maybe they have something maybe maybe they have a good idea and maybe it'll translate to pretty good tv i don't think it would be necessarily iconic tv i don't necessarily think that you would look at it and be like, oh, that's clearly Far Cry.

2:44:24It might just look like some show, but it could be good. I don't know.

2:44:27Dustin Furman:Yeah, I will keep an open mind. See how it and again, Rob Mac being a gamer and it gives you a little bit of a little bit of faith and hope. It's not some like clueless person doing it. Yeah, I've never seen that Mythic Quest show, but I've heard it's really great. It's about like a studio, right? That makes like a game called Mystic Quest or Mystic Quest. I think so. It must be Mythic Quest because Mystic Quest is the Final Fantasy. it looked funny but i never yeah i haven't i haven't seen it i i find i don't know i'm just turned off at the idea of shows about gamer humor there's something about even if it even if it is good like i think i like i i'm good well me and my friends will do that when we're like riffing at like a bar like at at someone's apartment or something like we i don't need to necessarily see this but i heard it's good um and obviously always sunny is always sunny uh i think holy sunny is like i don't know anything i don't know anything about this guy though this other guy yeah me neither me neither always sunny though is fucking awesome how do you guys feel about his name the name thing yeah i'm not crazy about that but that's okay they the thing about well i don't want to speak out of two because i really do love them and i respect them and i think they're just hysterical but i feel like and people are people like they're not the characters on the show right like right but it felt like an outsider show and then they kind of and it was for a long time and now they kind of got famous and then they started doing their own sitcoms and getting work done on their faces and like doing all these things and i'm like oh it's like it reminds me a lot of um god what was a oh joel mckayle he's one that always sticks out to me is like joel mckayle was above it because on on the soup right because and he would make fun of things but he wasn't involved in it and then he became one of them and i was like now you're just like an actor in hollywood i thought you were like lampooning this and it felt like a little disingenuous in a way and yeah so i see like you know i love these guys but then i see like oh it's like yeah but i got you know facelift it's like oh okay like that's cool i just used to make fun of all this stuff you know um but it's one of those shows that I hope that they just continue to do in perpetuity every few years.

2:46:47Dustin Furman:Always Sunny? Yeah. Just every few years. Just do it. It's kind of the dream I always had for Seinfeld that never got to continue. We've already gotten 20 years of Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which is awesome. It's amazing. And it's still funny. I haven't seen the last two seasons actually, but it's still funny. From everything I saw up to whatever, 2022 or something. I heard the new season's pretty good. It feels like a finale season, but it isn't. But people like it. seinfeld i disagree i don't think it could have gone on for too much longer i think every problem in seinfeld goes away with the with the existence of smartphones well what i i should i should reiterate that i i have this i had this dream and then we kind of got it in curb but of like it just coming back every few like five years just like another season or another few episodes of just checking in and just being curious about what what's going on in this world and why the world stays so static like part of the humor is that like it's just static like nothing changes And that's what's so funny about Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

2:47:45Dustin Furman:I saw I saw I didn't see the episode, but I saw a clip of it where they are in the apartment, Charlie's apartment and Frank's apartment. And then they open one of the doors and there's just an entirely other room in the apartment that they never knew was there. And I was like that. I actually like started gutter. I was like, that is fucking hysterical. Like, it's really perfect. And they're like, you had this room the entire time, like all this space. You just been living together like this. it's so silly. It's so silly. And Frank is just a great, you know, Danny DeVito's inclusion in that show is a game changer as far as I'm concerned.

2:48:22Dustin Furman:All right, let's get into what we're playing. I'll go first just to get out of the way because you guys are playing the Battlefield 6 beta and I want to hear all about that. I know the audience does as well. So first up is I've been playing three different things. Ninja Gaiden Ragebound, I platinumed it's platinum number 185 phenomenal game highly recommended just absolutely awesome obviously know what you're getting yourself into if you're not into 2d side-scrolling action games then maybe don't but the game is I think more forgiving than the original ninja gaiden games except for the hard mode is so fucking hard that you really I'd be shocked if almost anyone is beating that hard mode without messing with the accessibility settings because you can unlock these settings where you can make it so that like you take only 75 % or 50 % damage and you can like make charges last long and even, and even go down to zero damage if you want.

2:49:16Dustin Furman:Um, and so hard mode is, is ridiculous. I was, I was explaining to a Jean cause Jean was playing it too. And I was like, the core game is easier than the old Ninja Gaiden games. And then the hard mode is like way harder than the old Ninja Gaiden games. And I was like, I don't know like where the balance is and all of this, but it was really, really fun. Got all the collectibles, beat the game a couple of quite a couple times straight up just really highly recommended just a wonderful job by the game kitchen and shout out to tech mokowi for allowing this to happen because it's the first side-scrolling ninja gaian game we've gotten in 33 or 34 years which is let's not let it go that long again i mean that's that's incredibly wasteful i mean we should be getting one of these again in the next few years hopefully i hope it did well and then uh i played mine's eye I bought it unfortunately funny little thing about this is uh the the the regular version of the game is 60 on PSN the special edition is 55 so okay so I bought the special edition I did this obviously for a stream we talked about that earlier the stream technically was a little bit of a nightmare but we did get to play it for a few hours I have to admit I wasn't paying very close attention to it so I'm going to restart it and try to just play it and pay better attention to the story at least but I will say that um it's a very strange game in that it seems like it has no soul and spirit, like it's empty, like you're just doing things in it.

2:50:39Dustin Furman:And there's this fairly high production value and motion capture and some of the, some of the cut scenes look pretty good and whatever, but, and it really has the spirit of a PS3 game, which is what was so attractive about it for me, even older than that, which is awesome. But there's just something so off about it. And I'm really curious. I know Leslie Benzies has said that they're looking to relaunch the game. And I wonder what that means. I wonder if they're going to try to salvage it, try to save it. It seems to have sold. Not well, obviously, but decently, I was saying on the stream that it has the amount of reviews on PSN that would indicate a game that sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

2:51:17Dustin Furman:But I really believe that it's people. It's got like 8000 reviews or something, which is a lot. and um but it seems to be like people going out of their way reasonably so they score the game when they bought it knowing that it's bad it has like a two and a half rating which is almost unheard of on bsn so yeah not recommended but i want to i bought it i might as well play it and then uh the last few days i've been playing doom the dark ages incredible i love it now i think i like them in well i like doom 2016 the best of these three games it felt like doom game um i think this is my second favorite one obviously doom eternal is really great but i think it kind of goes a little overboard with with like everything kind of piling on itself and i hated the hub world i just thought the hub world was so shitty like such an unnecessary like what are you doing this is doom dude the worst part of that game for sure like so they got rid of that which is great um i really love the interplay in this game of your shield and then you only have i think six weapons but each weapon has an alternate version so like your rocket launcher is also a grenade launcher your shotgun your spread shotgun is also like an up close and personal like you know bust you in the fucking gut shotgun as long as you're really close to someone you press a square button circulate between those and then you use the shield as like a captain america toss kind of thing or use the block incoming attacks and you can if an attack is green you can reflect it back on the enemies and stuff there's just a lot the interplay and the marriage between the different skills and the different weapons seems to be a little bit more in line with what i would want personally where it's not a little it's not so overboard and then there are these different melee weapons you can have like a you can have like a morning star style weapon or you can just use your fists and all of them have like different different skills behind them so i i just think uh i really really like doom the dark ages i i highly recommend it i'm on there's 22 chapters i'm on chapter 21 so i'm like oh yeah damn yeah i i'm i don't know i i i was playing it last night and i i remarked to my car like there was just in this major arena gunfight at a part of a stage i'm like this game is just so good like it's just fun to play it's just a joy to play and some of the weapons are really cool too because again you have like you have the big fucking crossbow and this would be fc and some of the weapons are really imaginative so you have like a sort of a machine gun and like i said a shotgun and so on and so forth but you also have this like ball and chain gun that like and that's like my favorite weapon i use it all the time and you can like charge it up and just like bash from afar like someone and then pull the chain back and that's really fun and there's like a nail gun style thing where you have like these pillars like almost like and you see some of them in the game and it's your machine gun it turns into like this one shot you can like slow down time and just like shoot dudes in the head with these nails that are really really cool as well so just and there's like a laser weapon like an energy weapon and i really dig too some Some enemies have like energy fields around them.

2:54:33Dustin Furman:And so you use energy weapons to get rid of them. Some enemies have armor. And if you shoot them with like more kinetic weapons, you can then throw your shield at them and the armor explodes off of them. And so it's a really, really creative, fun game. And I must say too, I'm not really sure what the fuck's going on in the story. I don't really care, but yeah, it's the enemies are really neat. I was a little skeptical about how this was all going to work because it's supposed to be aliens and space and everything. And so what it really feels like is Warhammer. and now I'm not a war and by any stretch of the imagination but that's what it feels like I mean that's what I would think warhammer felt like where for some reason you have these dudes that look like Vikings and but they have like these huge guns and they're fighting these demonic creatures and the villain the main villain is super cool I can't remember his name but he's like a devil with like horns and he has like an upside down cross carved into his head and I was like this is fucking great this is this is good shit man love it just really really into it highly recommend it so yeah mine side not so good but ninja guide and rage bound excellent doom the dark ages excellent i'm really glad to hear that because like i really liked it too although like i i know that it was like kind of a controversial like i think people like work a little bit softer on it but uh how did you i want to ask you about like since you're so deep into it i wasn't sure if you had gotten to these parts yet or if you'd had time to really think about them what do you think about these uh the dragon and the mech parts yeah i'm not i'm not crazy i'm glad you brought that up is that the dragon parts are okay it feels like i'm kind of just playing like it doesn't feel challenging in any way you're just kind of going through the motions the the mech like kaiju parts i find weird like you could have cut those parts out of the game in fact i think that that's one part of the game that in my opinion undercuts the drama of the game is that you're supposed to be this like one man kind of against everything and you're like going through a stage and shooting creatures and kind of on the ground and then you're going through the same stage in a mech and it's like, well, I could have just done this.

2:56:29Dustin Furman:I mean, obviously I couldn't get to the mech at that time, but it's like this kind of trivializes the entire experience. There's a bigger, I won't even say what it is, but there's something that happens with Doomguy in this game where I'm like, whoa. Right. Where I like, you actually kind of get to know him in a way you've never really gotten to know him. I'll say. And I'm like, this is cool. Pretty neat. but again i i think it it and this is it tech what eight at this point the game runs like a dream on ps5 pro it's just a fucking it's it's it's funny because it's a little foggy in its resolution still when you really like stare at the game it's like it's like why are the draw distances not very good it's a little but the game you just move at like a fucking mile a minute and it's just it's just it's just awesome it is it is it is so good it it's a shame that we don't get more of these single player shooters that are just really immaculate they're too few and far between at this point and yeah to get something of this high quality i just i think it's really great but yeah it doesn't seem like it's sold great seems like it did respectively and i was reminding micah i was like everyone was skeptical about doom 2016 no one knew doom 2016 was gonna be good until it came out because of that beta which was like a multiplayer beta that everyone's like yeah i remember it vividly being like this is okay right and so people didn't really believe the game was gonna be any good but it was really the it was the the single player component that was excellent aaron wrote in and said colin i saw you're playing doom the dark ages as i am and i wanted to warn you if you're not already aware that trophies are bugged i completed every chapter ensuring that i had done all upgrades and two of my acquire all upgrade trophies did not pop i saw other people had this issue on reddit as well and it may have been fixed in the latest update that caused it.

2:58:16Dustin Furman:I am so or it may have been the latest update that caused it. I am so annoyed. I also went back to Doom 2016 to see if they had fixed the audio issues when you started up the game and that is still broken too. It's so disappointing of what is otherwise a highly enjoyable series. I don't I can't speak for sure yet because I'm still haven't beaten the game, but I've gotten everything that I that I think I should have gotten. And as I understand, this was fixed, but it seems like maybe what you're saying is it has been rebroken. So hopefully that's not the case but the good news is that when they fixed it the first time everyone got their trophies automatically as long as you fulfilled the requirements so my assumption is that they will do that again but i don't think i am personally missing anything anymore and i just need to be judicious with my time right now like we have a gap of time before everything starts coming out at the end of this month so it's like i can't wait anymore if i don't play doom the dark ages now i don't know like when i'm gonna play it so so it's been sitting on my cross media bar the entire time i bought it when it came out so yeah it's awesome really into it i appreciate the warning, but I'll have to look further into that.

2:59:15Dustin Furman:I don't think I'm missing anything yet, but what I'll maybe I'll do tonight is that I'll play it and then I won't since I have a save in the cloud at chapter 21. If it's broken, I just will delete the save I have on my console and then just do it again when the game's fixed again, but I appreciate the warning. And no good cog sucking wire back number crunch and clanker wrote in. Just getting real robot racist over there. Hey, gents, has the patient Chad Collin outplayed the over eager soy boys, Chris and Dustin. Doom the Dark Ages just got a great update, adding customizable sliders, rebalancing weapons and difficulty, rebalancing music volume, new mechanics to mech and dragon fights, and a custom horde mode.

2:59:54Dustin Furman:It really goes to show that if you don't mind waiting, the best time to play a game is well after launch. Colin, enjoy your superior version of Doom. I don't want to say that they're soy boys just because if the trophies weren't broken when it came out, I probably would have played it immediately. So I just would have missed out on all of this as well. So we might all be soy boys.

3:00:13Colin Moriarty:yeah mark this down as the first time someone's excited that colin waited to play a game because all right usually the feedback is quite the opposite i know it's like why why is everyone

3:00:23Dustin Furman:so eager for me to play everything all the time it's like just let me play on my own let me play on my own terms i play a lot of games let me just get there i'll just get there let me be let me just take my time um Um, yeah. So, yeah, I think we're the patient Chad Collin. I was patient because I had to wait for the trophies to be fixed. But again, I would have been all over it when it came out had that not been the case. But I like the idea of you guys being soy boys. That's fine with me. All right. So that's what I've been playing. Let's go over to you guys now. Dustin, let's start with you.

3:00:58Dustin Furman:Actually, let's begin with Conor Reese's inquiries. It says, greetings, gentlemen. Collin, I know you were eagerly anticipating Hell is Us on September 4th and a demo released this week on PS5, letting you experience the beginning of the game. I played it for just under an hour and was instantly sold based on the immersion, the atmosphere and the very unique world that it's setting up. I do wonder how complicated it will get with no map markers or real guidance of any kind, but at least in the opening, I never felt lost and was able to solve puzzles using just the information the game had given me.

3:01:24Dustin Furman:Is anyone else here planning to check out the demo or just wait till the full release is out? I think this is a sleeper game of the year if the full release is as solid as the demo. Thanks and have a great weekend. So I saw this demo came out. A lot of people are playing it. Dustin, it says, you are playing it um what do you make of hell is hell is us's demo i don't need to be sold on it i

3:01:43Colin Moriarty:think it sounds awesome so i'm gonna definitely play it yeah well i didn't complete the demo but that was intentional i played like the first main section and then i was shocked that it kept going and i was like no i'm good um at this point yeah it's a really unique game i was trying to remember we made fun of something the director of this game said about how it uh what was it something about how the fact their narrative doesn't uh like they're not telling you what to do all the time he said he put it in some really weird way maybe colin will find it but that's one of the main things about this game is that the hud is extremely minimal and there's no markers in fact all you really get is that you can temporarily turn on a compass so when you start this game they just kind of put you i mean there's there's a there's like a cut scene that happens beforehand but there's no like go here do this kind of just walk through the woods you find this house you go in the basement you talk to this guy he gives you some info and says that there's a place you need to go east i think so i walk out of the house bring up my compass figure out which direction is east and start heading that way um it the world is definitely the most intriguing part to me because there's some kind of major war going on uh with some very deep level of hatred going on between these two groups of people but at the same time uh there's some weird wacky shit going on with these weird monsters inside these weird dungeons um so that was really intriguing too the thing i really want to shout out though the combat there's a mechanic i really really like uh the combat sorry colin feels a little souls-y um just in that you're locking onto characters uh you really got to watch enemy movement patterns things like that i'm not saying it's a souls game take it easy um but there's a mechanic that really reminds me of bloodborne where let's say your health is at half if you do a bunch of consecutive hits there will be like a light gray bar that starts to fill up your health and when you step away i guess not when you step away but when you stop your combo that bar will then flash white and if you hit r1 at the right second you will regain that health so it's kind of a mix between that there's like a mechanic like that in bloodborne where if you lose health you can attack and regain it if you're really aggressive so it encourages this like really aggressive play style it also has a bit of a timing mechanic like active reload so it's like active healing uh and i thought that was awesome i love games that encourage you to try to be aggressive.

3:04:44Colin Moriarty:I got to send you guys this image and I actually I am going to put this in the show and opening cut scene. You see the main character and this I was just so off put by what the fuck he's got going on with his hair.

3:04:58Dustin Furman:What is

3:04:59Colin Moriarty:going on with this guy's hair?

3:05:01Dustin Furman:It looks like it's like a it's like a Roman wig.

3:05:04Colin Moriarty:Yeah, he has like this oddly youthful hair but clearly being a middle-aged man. it's beautiful it's like permed not nearly this is this should not be as funny as it is

3:05:21Colin Moriarty:so yeah something about that was off-putting dude and i i don't want to spoil it for anybody but there's a intro that features this character that is uh really weird looking and i really liked it it kind of reminded me of dune in a way um yeah very promising and i really like this aspect of like where we're gonna give you everything you need but we're just not gonna tell you what to do and it's not like an elden ring we're not gonna tell you what to do it's very clear that there's a path that you're supposed to go on at least in the demo i'm curious about how it opens up more uh there's like a a data pad that you pull out and it shows you all the different characters you talk to and then you can click them and it'll show you everything you know about them uh the conversations you've had it'll show you how they connect to other characters so there's a a literal puzzle element to this game where there's a few different puzzles you You have to solve very kind of like a Zelda dungeon esque, but there's also an overarching like character interaction.

3:06:28Colin Moriarty:What information, you know, level puzzle to it. So it seems like a very ambitious title intrigued me enough to stop playing the demo just because I was ready. I'm just like, you know what? I'm good. I want to see what the full game is. And I don't want to have to replay any more of this beginning part when it comes out.

3:06:48Dustin Furman:It's interesting. because Rogue Factor is the developer of Hell is Us, and I only knew the name, but they did a game. They did two games with Focus Home Interactive back in the day. Mordheim City of the Damned, which came to PC in 2015 and then PS4 in 2016, and Necromunda Underhive Wars, which came out in September of 2020, which is like a tactical role-playing game according to Wikipedia. And now they're working with Nacon on something like that's much bigger. This seems to be like they're really coming out with this Unreal Engine 5 game, something much more broad and demanding than what they originally did.

3:07:23Dustin Furman:It's worth noting that trophies are live for this game and people are playing it. So they are fairly confident in it if they're letting people review the game already. And obviously the demo shows an incredible amount of confidence as well. I'm looking forward to it. Comes out September 4, I want to say. Something like that. Yeah, September 4th. Yeah. Okay. And then we'll stick with you, Dustin, and then we'll go over to Chris because you're both playing the battlefield six beta what are your thoughts battlefield six beta so this ran last weekend and

3:07:55Colin Moriarty:it also just went live again for this weekend with an additional map uh and i was i think we talked about this when it was revealed like i'm unsure because battlefield has not been very good as of recent as far as 2042 and battlefield five before that really hasn't been since battlefield one that they've really uh pleased the fans of that game and the beta was so shocking uh how much i enjoyed it on multiple levels the first thing was just that it ran great on my pc i did have the game crash a few times i'm gonna i'm willing to forgive that for a beta but it wasn't anything crazy but overall frame rates really stable there's a little bit of jankiness with some of the physics but i actually enjoyed that aspect of it it made it kind of fun when you like shoot someone in with a shotgun and then they blast really far away um so but yeah i was shocked how much fun i had i am not very good at it i have to like relearn how to play battlefield um but the thing that if you're gonna jump into the beta this weekend if you're listening on on to this on patreon and you're thinking about checking this out i highly recommend it's so much more fun playing with a squad like a team and you can really if you take advantage of the teamwork aspect of this game unlike when you're playing just like team death call of duty or something like that that's where it's really starts to shine because we were playing the one i was like me brandon uh my buddy jason and ben and jason took the role of the medic and my guy legendary medic he was you know he was he was playing the game too but he was yeah he uh he was standing he was he was there anytime you need you you need him he was coming up with a defibrillator shocking you back to life um and yeah we were having a great time the destruction in this game is incredible i've never seen destruction quite like it especially in multiplayer game it's very clear why this game is not on ps4 uh because some of the level of destruction like full house is just being obliterated uh with a tank or something like that so the only thing i kind of i need to be convinced on is the weapons you can fully customize uh like different barrel like gun attachments and stuff that's very call of duty and maybe some previous battlefield games had that too i i have like a love-hate relationship with that because i'm obsessed with it where i'm constantly like oh well if i connect this barrel and this attachment maybe i'll be able to shoot a little better or whatever and it's like i'm constantly switching around to the point where i start to annoy myself where it's like just i don't even want to just give me a weapon and this is the weapon and that's all you need but they gotta have the carrot on the stick with the progression so i get it uh and some people do really like the the building mechanic like building out your guns for your play style so it is good i think just for me personally i get a little too ocd about it and then i'm thinking more about that than actually playing the game so uh but yeah chris you're playing too curious what you think yes i'm kind of i'm i don't know I'm a little mixed on it.

3:11:29I think I want to be clear. I think it's very good. I think it's very clearly like, oh, this is a return to form for Battlefield. Way far more so than 2042 and definitely more so than Battlefield V. It was nice. It's nice to play it. It feels good to play. It runs really, really well. And I generally like the roles that I excel at in Battlefield, which are like Medic and Recon. I still do very well. and i've never been particularly a great running gunner in battlefield i typically just leave that to other people so anytime i tried to do that i was getting trounced but it was it was whatever this is kind of this kind of part for the course um i don't know if i have too many complaints it's just there's one thing i think specifically that is getting in my way and that is like i'm noticing i'm noticing and granted i only notice this when i when i attempt to do like more close quarters running gun stuff and that's like i feel like enemy readability is kind of an issue and and to be fair that's always really kind of been a battlefield thing because battlefield has always kind of sold itself on this kind of it's a video game it's video gamification for sure but it's like this is meant to be a little bit more grounded and a little bit more like serious military conflict than call of duty is especially call of duty is today and so camouflage works really well you know like oftentimes you'll just get shot and you won't even see the person because there's so much detail in the environment that like and and now there's like all these animations there's dust there's particle effects so there's dust blowing by that makes the entire image move there's like shadows casted by trees and and that gets muddy and that's moving and so like it there's a lot of visual noise that like i i find it so much harder to just see the enemy this time than i did in in like battlefield one or um or battlefield four when there was just kind of an accepted like lower fidelity on everything where there was less information to take in but that's also probably just like a skill issue i'm also just getting older and my eyes are worse undoubtedly um but i do think like it just feels that's one thing that feels a little bit off but it's very good like i'm definitely going to jump onto the beta again give it another try hoping hoping that maybe i can adjust to it um but yeah it's looking good i will say i'm not super big on this open weapon open class thing i did kind of prefer it when certain classes just kind of like these were your weapons for the class and that was it it's a little bit more open this time and granted there are modes that you can you know there's closed class and open class and and apparently i'm hearing people online talk about how uh i think there's like a rush mode in battlefield that's very popular that is apparently like not good like they just kind of completely fucked it and i think a big a big reason why people feel that way is that they they did open the classes up in that mode and that seems to be the primary where they're going forward with it and nobody seems to be happy i never cared about rush personally so that's it was all about conquest for me like the big wide the big open scale like fighting stuff so that's that's what i play battlefield for i don't really play rush mode but that's that's worth mentioning i think so it hasn't been all smooth sailing necessarily i also think that i also think the maps are a little small but we've only played two maybe this new one's bigger um i just remember feeling like maps in older battlefield games felt a little bit more open than this one does.

3:15:10But it's very good. It plays fucking well. It's gorgeous. Yeah, man, it runs surprisingly well. The only other game that I feel like has done destruction this well is the finals, which makes sense because that's like largely a lot of the same people. But it's it's very good. I just I wish I was just better at the readability thing. Really?

3:15:33Dustin Furman:We have a couple of inquiries here to expand. nourishing nut wrote into us so gentlemen the battlefield 6 beta weekend was incredibly successful and i had a ton of fun playing it did you guys see the news that over 300 000 players were caught cheating in just three days of that beta the hell is wrong with people i can never understand using cheats in a shooter in the first place but to use them in a beta for an unreleased game gives off insane amounts of loser energy just wanted to see if you all have any thoughts on this i'll nourish myself and listen did you guys hear about this yeah i did hear about this i i kind of disagree not not necessarily that like i think it's a good thing to cheat but i actually think a beta is a great time to do it so that like they can nail that stuff down and you know figure it out i think there's actually no better time to do it than at this period in time not that it really makes a difference because this isn't really a beta as we all kind of understand i think intuitively um it's more of a stress test or like a demo but i i apparently i got accused of cheating too because i was like like so so in you can if certain classes can deploy like a redeploy beacon so that it allows you to like spawn exactly where you've planted it instead of having to you know spawn at like a base that's um under your control you get to just choose where you're at and a teammate of mine on one of the maps put one of those display beacons on like a bridge that i think was outside of like it was like out of bounds or something and you could get on top of rooftops and just snipe people and so people in the people in the chat were like i love the the in-game chat they're so they got so bent out of shit they're like he's cheating he's not even good at the gate he has to go out of the map to fight and i'm like yeah i'm a sniper i'm i'm staying on this rooftop i'm sorry they let me come here if they let me come here like i'm not yeah i'm not gonna not take advantage of this also quite frankly i feel like battlefield is that kind of a game where like you should i don't know why that's out of bounds like there should be a way to get up there like it feels it feels weird that there isn't or that that was considered out about there's even ramps between these rooftops that look like they're specifically made for you to like jump across them so it's kind of like i don't know i don't know exactly what's i'm not even really sure if i've cheated but whatever.

3:17:50Dustin Furman:Dustin it looked like you were going to say something nourishing nut or you had something to say

3:17:54Colin Moriarty:well I just I was we went right past they said I'll nourish myself.

3:17:59Dustin Furman:Yeah yeah he's eating his own nut Christian

3:18:03Colin Moriarty:Christian just needs a little Fanta to go down the hatch someone might say Fanta yeah yeah yeah the cheating thing I will never understand it I don't get it the feeling of being good comes from skill so I don't know why you'd want to do that there's been a huge thing on Twitter about this cat girl VTuber being accused of cheating and I mean I'm not saying one way or the other I have no idea I've seen very compelling arguments on both sides apparently this person was banned from twitch and then deleted all their shit so that feels a little sus there i mean i

3:18:51Dustin Furman:was watching it and i don't know anything about this stuff and i'm like it seems fairly clear i mean maybe i'm just not up to snuff on how good people are at these games especially you don't know about the aim community i saw that i'm part of the aim community shut the fuck up losers i was crazy like i don't know anything about that person but i saw that i was like there's too many communities this is like this is that's the aim community wait until the community somebody somebody responded to me it's like wait until the community community hears about this yeah to me i'm just i'm a little it's again from my layman's eyes it seems pretty clear that they're using some sort of assistance just in the way that they're snapping and like the way it's snapping through walls and all these kinds of things like i don't know very much about it but it looked like that to me but then there are people that know a lot more about it that say that they're not cheating and then i think that the person released a video of them with their hand to show you them playing but then i'm like i don't feel like that's sufficient i feel like you need to see like your whole computer like what's running on it um so i'm not convinced either way really but my my own layman eyes not being involved in this i'm like i don't know how you can snap the people that quickly that's pretty crazy but i know that people are great at these games and so maybe that's possible too uh i'm more disturbed by the cat boy cat girl thing just absolutely fucking flabbergasted that people watch that shit and uh teach their own i guess what else can you say about that it's weird i was when i was watching the video i'm like so this this weird character with like very minor animation just sits in the corner like that the entire time and then just the mouth just kind of animates when the person talks dude i know but i'm like why

3:20:43why i don't understand why not just be you because everybody's 30 and bald yeah we need a better class of youtubers like peco you know oh from death stranding yeah

3:20:59Colin Moriarty:Death Stranding. Yeah, she was great. Yeah, I think I almost uninstalled it when I when I got to that point, by the way. Oh, man. I was like, I don't know if I don't know. I don't know what's going on now. I thought that was really funny. Yeah. That felt like a jump the shark to me. Oh, of course, which is hilarious. The whole game is jumping the shark.

3:21:19Dustin Furman:But yeah, it's funny that I knew exactly what you were talking about, though, Dustin was like the controversy. The person's name is Riley. and yeah just rampant accusation a lot of people accusing the cheating and then a lot of people being saying it's not cheating and then a lot of people saying you're gaslighting i don't know it's clearly cheating and then i'm like i don't know man i don't know enough about i don't know enough about aimbots to to say definitively whether or not that's because i've seen people who are like very very good who like they have a skill level that is kind of bordering on like damn that's actually like that looks like that looks like cheating but i understand like i know inherently like i know what's happening but i could go i'm like 50 50 on it i wouldn't be surprised if they were cheating and i also wouldn't be surprised if necessarily like that they deleted their stuff because they just didn't want all this attention in the first yeah it's a lot yeah well as i understand to be fair to this person this person is i don't know if it's a he or she i really don't know it's a cat like the i can't even tell by the cat it's a cat it's a cat um they were not a big youtuber twitch streamer i think i think when you like you're just a random person doing this for a small number of people and then like your traffic x like by i saw that the person tweeted out like their their statistics and it's like damn dude like the order of magnitudes attention and i think that's a lot to take it all at once especially when it's under duress right i think that that makes it even scarier probably for some people in some way so i get that too but yeah it doesn't look i mean there's one way to prove it which is to just go play where people can look at what you're what you're doing and i i also agree i think cheating is so fucking corny like it's truly corny yeah i just um i play on chess.com sometimes and you can easily use a chess engine and cheat there it's really supposed to be like it would be very trivial it's been trivial to cheat in chess since fucking correspondence just begin you're just kind of hoping everyone's doing the right thing and it seems like most people do do the right thing there and then you're like building in these tools into games that are supposed to be fair making them unfair for other people in other words i don't mind the game genie era or something where it's like oh i'm gonna fucking break this game open and give myself extra lives even if you're playing a multiplayer game it should benefit both people but like why would you cheat to make yourself look better and really hinder and hurt the experience of other people it seems like a thing that should get you completely banned from these various networks i think they get banned but on like a game-by-game basis right or something with this stuff but like if you're like a known cheater on a console in call of duty or something like shouldn't you just be banned from playstation network or banned from xbox that does happen i feel like does it i hope so i mean it seems wrong i remember that used to happen on xbox live people get like their entire xbox live account like um flagged or or banned permanently for cheating in one game yeah maybe maybe it shouldn't be a permanent ban at first but some sort of like and maybe it should be a permanent ban if you've done it multiple times on multiple games like we don't want you in our community and i it sucks that like people have to play knowing that there are hundreds of thousands of potentially people cheating in a brand new game and i agree with you chris it's cool to like see that stuff now and then maybe be able to tamp that down but and some companies take it really seriously i bungie sued and i'm pretty sure one against some people that were making cheap cheap software for for destiny so i just don't understand why you would play a game like that that i understand wanting to cheat in a game like you're playing a game you're having a hard time you drop the difficulty or whatever but everyone's affected by your behavior it's not a single player game right like have some have some fucking respect you know like what is wrong with you that's the thing that bothers me about it it's like what it's a it's a weird person it's like

3:25:10Colin Moriarty:it's like a uniquely selfish person we're supposed to live in a society and we don't it's a shame dude there's that scandal a few months ago uh the streamer youtuber dr lupo he was in a chess tournament he doesn't he's not known for streaming chess he's like an fps online streamer uh he got caught cheating and i think it was maybe a charity chess no let's see dr lupo admits to cheating in a hundred thousand dollar online chess tournament that's crazy dude i think he initially denied it too which made it worse uh but was he making like moves that were

3:25:44Dustin Furman:like way too sophisticated for him or something is that how people yeah well i think that people

3:25:48Colin Moriarty:if i remember correctly people caught on that he they could see him like glancing at another monitor that had a chess engine up it's like dude i'm looking at his channel he's got 1.85 million subscribers has this fantastic career where he's making insane money and then you got a cheat at a chess tournament for that's a hundred thousand dollars yes that's a loser behavior dude why would you do that dude and you had such a good thing going and now you've you've ruined everything i mean he hasn't uploaded in three months since it happened i'm guessing he'll eventually come back but it's like dude it is weird it's just weird but i don't get it you're making that much money to do something stupid like that and you've got an audience that loves you it's like and it's

3:26:31Dustin Furman:just so just at this point chess engines are so sophisticated i mean i play chess i'm a big i love chess it's like chess engines play that the highest and like um stock fishing like the highest rated engines for chess play chess at three four times higher play than the best player in the world so if you if you want to just cheat like what is you what do you what's even the point the computer figured it out buddy like you like you you the the idea is like keep it amongst humans and it's funny even with digital chess tournaments or people that are playing on computer that's so serious that if you like accidentally move a piece somewhere like it's over for you like you you have to either play like that or resign and it happens all the time with big players i'm pretty sure magnus carlson had a thing like that a few months ago where he like accidentally put a piece somewhere and had to resign so like chess is best played in person but it's a shame that it's a shame that it's so easy and trivial for people to cheat and you can tell when like when i'm playing on chess.com because i have an elo of like 1300 or something like that right and so which is like good but it's not like anything special at all and you could just tell people playing at a much higher level it's like you're not you're cheating you're not even making like and that's how stockfish became so good was it was not taught it was taught the moves but it was not taught how to play chess so it figured out these fundamentally different ways to play and different sorts of moves to kind of leverage and utilize.

3:27:53Dustin Furman:And it's just it's a bummer. I just I just I think it's just scummy. That's the thing. I just don't understand it. It's just shitty. To ruin other people's experiences and think that think that that means anything other than you ruining other people's experiences. It's fucking lame. Nourishing nut. Thank you for writing in. Ding Dong wrote in. Said, hey, guys, with Battlefield six on the horizon, it's obviously not going to pull 100 million players like Call of Duty does, but I think there's real potential for it to slice. Does Call of Duty have that many players? But I think there is a real potential for it to slice off a portion of the Call of Duty community, especially longtime fans like me, who have mostly fallen off since Black Ops 3.

3:28:29Dustin Furman:The only time I've come back were for Cold War or Black Ops 6, and even then, it's hard to stick around. Between the over-atop immersion breaking skins, skill-based matchmaking that's cranked so high you can't play casually with friends, and lobbies full of sweats every match, it's just exhausting. If Battlefield 6 can deliver solid gunplay a fair matchmaking system and keep its identity intact without chasing every trend i could see a lot of us making the jump for good do you think ea and dice actually have the discipline to do that or will they just try to codify it and miss the point this is a really great question because i think ea is in a really strong position with this game right now based on the feedback and the player count i saw what's the guy that worked at blizzard um mike is it mike's i can't think of it is he one of the guys that worked at blizzard for a long time he's always mike ybarra um he said something along the lines of like battlefield is gonna gonna like curb stop call curb stop call of duty this year and it was making the the rounds of being like a pretty you know pretty high level person saying something like this.

3:29:35Dustin Furman:Again, I'll say I feel like it's it seems like a heavy lift to beat Call of Duty. I just think that's going to be really difficult. I think a lot of people have tried. I think Battlefield has certainly tried many times and has been even well positioned to do it. Ironically, the last time that they might have been positioned to make a real inroad was when Battlefield 1 came out and then they interrupted their own flow by also releasing Titanfall 2. so really made no sense um yeah but i think if i i guess what i'm wondering is if ea ea probably understands this and i wonder if they're gonna fuck it up i think the big thing here is is the game gonna work when it comes out and there is a no pre-order movement for this game i wonder if that is shining through i think access to future betas will require pre-order right so that's gonna to ratchet things up for them and for people that hold for remember chris you always bring up the call of duty like won't buy call the steam group of like i won't buy a call of duty and then all of them are online playing call of duty yeah i think it's boycott modern warfare 3 right but yeah and then they're all playing modern warfare 3 so we'll see what happens so i i again i'm not in this community these communities so i don't know for sure it just seems like call of duty is not going to be beaten.

3:30:52Dustin Furman:But I think, as I said last week, I think long-term, Battlefield 6 can become bigger than any individual modern Call of Duty game if they really foster it for the years that it's going to require, while Call of Duty will continue to annualize and erode the last game and so on and so forth until they decide not to do that at all. And that might be where they're forced to go as well. So I wonder, do we believe that Battlefield will really go toe-to-toe with call of duty for the first time in maybe a decade i think now probably it has the best because even the fact that because what is it black ops 7 or whatever is this year is that what it is that's black ops 7 this year yeah yeah so that that's already kind of like a quick turnaround like more quick than people are used to between direct sequels of these things and so i could see and that there doesn't seem to be that much i remember that they was it xbox they close the showcase with it yes i remember people being like oh well that's kind of disappointing that you would close the showcase with that i mean we all know that's coming sent sentiment around call of duty has been kind of low lately um excitement for battlefield has been high i think i saw that the open beta for battlefield had like 500 something on steam anyway had like 500 000 um people in it as compared to like the call of duty beta which was like i think 67 000 or like below 100 so like i think there's interest there that us that isn't normally there and i think they're probably best positioned to walk away with it this year it doesn't mean that call of duty is going to be beaten necessarily it just means that i think battlefield will do um very very well and i think it will be worth considering um but you're not gonna beat call duty anytime soon like even if they put out like really shitty call of duty games every like like three years in a row like there's still going to be so much brand loyalty and built-in like name recognition there that like you'll they'll get hundreds of thousands of people hundreds of thousands of people based off that alone so it's not going to curb stop it but i think critically probably people seem to be really high on it if i mean this rush mode controversy notwithstanding um seems like they're in a pretty good position and and i think i don't know what they're calling it i don't know what it's i think it's called portal where like you could like make your own shit like that's bringing in some pretty like that immediately caught my eye because i was like that's forge that's halo stuff right there they even they even showcase like a like a really old like a really classic halo custom game in their like showcase for it so it's just like oh they they might they might take it they just gotta not fuck it up which i think they might actually they might actually land the plane how long it remains good it's another question yeah they're gonna have to like really override i mean call of duty i i've said it before just from an outsider's perspective like i think call of duty has gotten commodified to a comical level like or when i tune in every once in a while to see like what's going on there i'm like really this is what it looks like now this is the way it plays now this sucks this is this is really weird like i but ea is going to have a ea no ea is the master of microtransactions with their you know um with their sports games and all the rest and i wonder if they'll be able to resist and we'll see we'll see because it's easy money if you're willing to just take these licenses and all the rest but if if they if they're smart they'll like do the exact opposite of what their competitor is doing to just try to attract people and try to keep it grounded and even promise that they'll do that i think it'll be really interesting um i'm rooting for them i want i want i don't really give a shit about either of these games to be honest with you but it's it would be nice for there to be a competitor to call of duty i'm a little mystified by call of duty to be honest and i wasn't mystified about it 10 years ago i used to actually talk up call of duty back when i played it and i never really played online i always play the campaigns um but it's not 10 years ago it's like what are we doing just like every year you're gonna make a new one of these like every year and then of course everyone buys it so you have the power to determine and i mean you like out there like the individuals like has the you have the power to determine like where this goes but you buy this shit by the tens of millions you love it it's the same thing with sports games and everyone complaining about those it's like but you still buy them you could force call you could like one year you could get organized and really fuck call of duty like you really could you just have to you just don't have you don't have the the stuff to do like to resist that sort of thing generally like a lot of people don't and frankly i don't either with the things i really care about yeah so it's tough all right well that's all we have for the games we're playing i think we're satisfied there i'll report back on doom i'm gonna move on to mafia as well and uh again get in touch with my sicilian side see what my my family members were doing and uh what was it like what is this like 1913 or something dicking around eating tomatoes throwing spaghetti against the wall to see if it's done all right six questions comments concerns thoughts and ideas from the audience over on patreon patreon.com slash last damn media you can write in on the weekly threads in the news feed for this show and all the other shows within our network we pull out your inquiries you've heard a bunch of them throughout the show this is six more as we end things as we always do so look out for that thread each wednesday and i delete it on thursday so you have a small 24-ish hour window it's about 21 hours ken glizzy jr wrote in and said cvc music factory so after getting the plat in robocop i figured i tried dang and rompa well i got to the fourth trial after 15 hours and it said you're halfway through the game i said fuck this turned it off and deleted it off my PS5.

3:36:55Dustin Furman:What a stupid fucking game. Anyone that likes that shit needs to have their crawl space checked. Goddamn, what a slog. Anyways, I'm going to shove a Japanese bear down my urethra and listen. Kudos, boys. On a job, done. Dustin, I needed to know your feelings on this.

3:37:12Colin Moriarty:Well, what I find funny, I'm looking at how long to beat. Danganronpa is 25 hours. So either he was playing slow or the game when it, I don't remember it telling you being halfway done. Yeah, I don't remember that either, but

3:37:24Dustin Furman:I haven't played the original Dagon Rapa in 10 years.

3:37:27Colin Moriarty:I'm just shocked that Ken Clizzy Jr. plays 15 hours of this game before he decides that it's so bad that someone needs to have their asshole inspected. They think it's good. At hour 5, you were like, I feel it. I'm going to get this. At hour 10, you were like, here we go. And then something happened at 15 where you just cracked. If you didn't like it, you should have stopped long before because you definitely had the gist at that point of what Tanganronpa is.

3:37:58Dustin Furman:I'm accused by that too.

3:38:00Colin Moriarty:So but yeah, you're wrong. It's a fantastic game. It's not boring. I can see if you don't like visual novels then not liking it, but man, I've especially the ending is so good.

3:38:14Dustin Furman:It's really not a visual novel though, in my opinion. It's an adventure game. You know, like that's why I'm surprised like that. It's not even you don't even have that excuse.

3:38:23Colin Moriarty:Yeah. So I don't know, man. I'm more confused about you more than anything.

3:38:32Dustin Furman:Yeah.

3:38:32Colin Moriarty:I guess, hey, he gave it. He gave it a really. I mean, you beat. You're not that far from beating the game at this point, I think based on the hour count. But again, you may have been slow. So that might be on you.

3:38:43Dustin Furman:What a stupid fucking game. He says anyone that likes this shit needs to have their crawl space checked. Why? Because you think I have bodies in it? I don't have. Actually, I do have crawl space. what no nothing what were you gonna say when you said i when i read the crawl space thing i thought

3:38:59Colin Moriarty:it was something about getting your asshole check that's why i made that comment earlier it must have

3:39:02Dustin Furman:been very confusing i see yeah no i don't think that's i don't think it's a euphemism i don't know is your asshole a crawl space it can be if you want to find out i'll i can just go right up i

3:39:13Colin Moriarty:just kind of crawl right into it in there like a tauntaun yeah right tauntaun dude you can wear me you know you wear like a skin right that's how you get in bro right keep you warm think about it

3:39:27Dustin Furman:little something to think about um no i think he's literally talking about your literal crawl space which probably has like you know a prisoner in it a body a corpse skeleton right bro played over

3:39:40Colin Moriarty:half the game maybe maybe you need to check your own crawl space okay

3:39:44Dustin Furman:Okay. Nikolai wrote in and said, can doll man shut the fuck up? Dude is always telling me to do shit that I've done a million times or explaining some elementary shit to me like I'm a child. To make it worse, Sam keeps mentioning how you load packages into the back of the truck. Thanks, dude. I'm a child and didn't know how trucks work and I didn't hear the last dozen times you explained it. Has Kojima Productions completely been sonified with this infantilizing shit? What's with AAA games treating us like babies? Is the lowest common denominator truly that stupid? Chris, what do you think? The answer is, well first of all the answer is yes the answer is yeah the the yellow paint is on ladders for a reason agreed sorry like i understand like i understand that we intrinsically understand certain things and it seems incredibly obvious but we are also at a level we interact with these things you have to i i stopped being annoyed with these things when i started looking looking at them as the developers kind of understanding that this very well could be depending on you know depending on the game of course and depending on the developer this very well could be somebody's first video game and so yeah sometimes they're over explaining i found death stranding 2 to be i don't know like there is some of that it's not nearly as egregious in my opinion as like god of war when atreus is like solving the puzzle before you even have a chance to fucking do it because doll man doll man's really kind of like it is annoying but it's it's I think it's overblown a little bit with this with this comment in particular well we were making fun of it earlier with the the president talking about his connections and all that I just I think some of it is programming towards the lowest common denominator and I think a lot of it is focus testing but i think a lot of it like doll man to me and death stranding to seem to try be trying to fill a void like they felt like there needed to be something said like it's too much quiet and i i want games to embrace quiet more quiet moments you're not always bombarded with audio visual stimuli in your real world even when you're doing things that are exciting or interesting you know think about being well you guys wouldn't do this but like go to a tennis match or watch a golf tournament or something and everyone's quiet and they're just watching right part of it right or you're at a you're at a band and you have an obstructed view but you can still hear it and you don't necessarily the whole thing is nice sometimes and it's a stimulus but i want that for 40 50 60 100 hours i think companies need to learn how to embrace quiet moments more like it's if the game is not interacting with you you're going to lose you're going to lose the person because it's not bombarding them with shit so i wonder how much of it is sony and how much of it it which is probably some of it and some of it is just clever writing people vamping in the vo booth lots of triggers is the things you're doing just triggering the same stuff over and over again a little bit of an elegant way to go forward like there should just be a trigger like after we've told you five times how to use the truck we just will under no circumstance tell you how to do it again like that's the kind of shit that should just be baked into the game then if you need to help you go to the tutorial i do that sometimes where i go into the in-game tutorial be like how does this work again i don't really expect the game to like constantly keep telling me um but yeah there is a lot of extraneous exposition and what i'm trying to think of a game recently what what was it mind's eye maybe or something where you can tell where there were sticking points in in play testing and focus testing where like you just walk up to a thing and then it just tells you what to do because and i'm not even saying audio like where like a prompt like all like text will come up being like use the door or something like something like that and like that happens in a game every once in a while where it's like yeah why are you telling me this now literally 90 out of 100 people must have gotten stuck here or something so i like trying to like reverse engineer why they're doing certain things as well but that's an that's more in seldom parts of the game or when they introduce new elements too deep into a game or you haven't forgotten about an element or whatever but there's a lot of talking and death stranding no doubt big yoshi wrote in and said hi guys i was wondering if you have any recommendations for good stoner games my free time is limited and i love to take an edible to relax when i get the chance this often overlaps with time i could be gaming but i often find myself too damn stoned to game sometimes figuring out what the fuck is going on in oblivion or dealing with the terrain of death stranding is just not what i'm down for when i'm enjoying an edible i wonder if you'll have any recommendations for good games to play when you're stoned ideally really low pressure and engaging gameplay.

3:44:26Dustin Furman:Have a great day. I can't really think of low pressure games, but well, I mean, I could, but because my recommendation is not a low pressure game, but for some reason, Tetris effect came to mind for me. What I think you need is to capture a game that puts you in a sort of flow state. No narrative to take care of, no characters to track, no inventory, no menus, just pure gameplay. And I feel like those kinds of games cater pretty well towards what you're looking for. great rock like rock band and guitar here used to be great stoner games back in the day we were talking about those last week so i think a game like tetris effect would do pretty well for you but again it's not really it could be depending on what you put the speed on and stuff it's not really um low pressure but it is deeply engaging and it's all about gameplay and you don't have to kind of focus on all those other things i also wonder oh michael texted me and said power wash power wash simulator that's a great about to say that's a low pressure game is ironically high pressure right right with power wash right yeah that's another great one just something that kind of turns your mind off i wonder if like some of these long road or long distance trucking simulators would be good for that or whatever um you have to look for the games with like kind of a a monotype of gameplay like a golfing game like just something that lets you focus that's my answer to that but yeah i love that answer mike that's a good answer power wash simulator great answer power simulator or two coming out later this year hopefully i believe so excited really really looking forward to do you guys have any recommendations for this yeah i was thinking because you could kind of

3:46:00Colin Moriarty:apply when we've talked about cozy games you could also kind of just change that to stoner games because they're kind of one in the same depending on how stoned you are uh like i was thinking about stardew valley might be a good good one make grow some crops hang out with some of the ladies in the town you know do maybe do a little bit of the low low stakes combat well not always but uh something like that might be good but there's a flip side to this where depending on how stoned you are sometimes if you play a game you don't want something that's going to scare you so control maybe isn't the move but have you ever been this you're like wow this story is the craziest thing I've ever heard in my life and being stoned might even enhance that so but if you're too stoned might freak you out a little bit

3:46:56Dustin Furman:dead space

3:46:58Colin Moriarty:dead space Jesus Christ eat a eat a bunch of mushrooms and then play dead space or Silent Hill 2 I don't like playing games when I'm stoned I don't like it at all I can't focus on anything

3:47:13Dustin Furman:being drunk and playing games is more difficult for me not that I am drunk it's both like when if i get home from drinking and then i try to play a game i'm like all fucked up yeah it's not yeah that's that's just straight up impossible but i i don't know i'm too like i i want to do other things when i'm if i'm high like uh playing video games is such a like i'm actually like very very specifically like i want to i want my head to be as clear as possible from playing a game like i have to like meditate to like get out of stress sometimes to enjoy a game properly. Otherwise, I'm just not going to, I'm not going to get into it.

3:47:50Dustin Furman:Deli department wrote in. Impossible. Said hello, sacred dudes. I recently stumbled with some black magic tech called Genie 3 developed by Google, where you can print basically anything and you can make an interactive game of whatever you wrote in the prompt. Yes, it's AI slop, but from what I've seen so far, it's looking pretty impressive with realistic physics and real life graphics. You can almost call this thing first generation of a fully AI generated video game. Is this tool where the future of the video game industry is going, it's going, I'm sorry, is this tool where the future of the game industry is going?

3:48:20Dustin Furman:Seeing how Microsoft has been betting towards AI lately, or might be becoming completely sucked into the AI algorithm. Have a great day, amigos. It might be going in this direction. I just don't know why you want it to. Yeah, I see like, Jaffe's long talked about this, like these like AI tools where you can make like these really rudimentary games. It's like, who cares?

3:48:42Dustin Furman:Like, it's not like we're like without this stuff. I don't get it. I don't get it. I just don't understand. It's like, yeah, we have fucking 17 ,000 games that came out last year. I'm going to go make a fucking game on a with AI slop. Look, even Chris is exhausted by your fucking proclamations of using AI. We're all tired of it. I was watching a video and it actually did bore me. I was like looking at it. It's this video of some guy, a genie threeing. I guess the, you know, the famous Nighthawks painting. oh yeah I saw that and it rotates it yeah and I'm just like that's not the point like what yeah I don't know man it's a painting it's a painting I just don't like this stuff it's also my favorite painting oh it is I didn't know that just the no door it's just so interesting it's very weird it's a very weird painting yeah Yeah.

3:49:45Dustin Furman:But did you see that thing that was going around recently? Either of you have it's like the pixelated role playing game where but it's 3D. Oh, yeah. And that's like where a lot of the stuff it's like it's. And it's just like a two second clip of someone like going down a mountain into a village, but it's all 3D. It's all it's all pixelated. It looks beautiful. And then people are like, oh, you should use the item. You should make this game. And it's like, it's not how it works. It would be so expensive and difficult. it would be beautiful to make a game like this it would be incredibly hard to do and i am just simply not interested to see what ai has to say about video games i'm not you can use these tools to make foliage and duplicate things and help you around the edges and make npcs say interesting things i guess but at some point it's like i don't know man i just feel like i'm being redundant but I just don't understand why people are so intrigued by this.

3:50:39It's a person who doesn't

3:50:43Dustin Furman:play music or play an instrument being intrigued by making music. Nothing's stopping you from making music. And now you're going to use some other device or program or some other entity to make the music for you that you can't make yourself and then call it music and be a musician. I just don't think that works for me it might be gatekeeping but I just I just don't think that works and I'm getting to the point where this this reliance and I'm not saying this from the deli department I don't know this person but it's becoming a bit of an IQ test for me it is like where I'm like why are you so like you know when you're on Twitter and everyone's like grok is this true yeah it's like you could just google it like have some agency in your life what are we doing we're just seeding everything and we all get sucked up into it in different ways i was talking earlier about being just sucked into the algorithm on youtube it's like we gotta i don't know man we're not we're never gonna pull out of this so it's it's almost like saying like we gotta gotta change nothing's gonna change it's just gonna get worse and worse and worse and worse and we're all going to succumb to it and we're all going to be forced to fucking deal with it and adopt it and it's going to infiltrate everything we love and it sucks and people that talk about it like it's not this culturally displacing thing is they're dreaming they are yeah we can always wait for a solar flare that'd be nice we can just do it ourselves with an EMP yeah that's true the solar flare is good but the side of the planet that's not facing the sun will be immune to it we need to place EMPs strategically throughout the world, hundreds of them.

3:52:33Dustin Furman:Just fry the shit out of everything. No death, no death, no, no, no, no violence, just EMP blasts from the atmosphere. Well, there will be, you know, there'll be violence afterwards. Somebody, somebody's in an iron lung or something. Right, right. And obviously war lords will rise up and civil wars will happen and everything's going to go incredibly crazy, but at least we don't have to deal with this anymore.

3:52:58Dustin Furman:just so tired of it people should go look up the um i don't even know if it has a name but the the guy going towards the castle in that pixelated 3d environment it looks so beautiful but it's like it's it's ai rendering dude it's not a game there's nothing there there's no there there so yeah it's cool that ai can do this stuff i just don't give a shit i it's it's it's one of the things i'm most mystified about jaffe this like legendary designer he designed twisted metal and god of war and he is willing to offload all of it to AI like okay but remember that the AI only knows what design is because you made twisted metal and god of war otherwise I have nothing to copy very mysterious it feels like defeatism but much like nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction now everyone has to chase ai because otherwise you'll be totally out i mean did you guys see what intel said a week or two ago where they were like we are too late and like with ai and all this stuff and we're gonna have to like like lay off a shit ton of people and figure something out because like we're just too late like that's how accelerated it is if you weren't on this bandwagon and having these deals for microprocessors and all these chipsets and all these different things people need and these server farms and the power consumption and all these kinds of things and they just didn't see it in time and it ruined this once iconic american company that's another uh unforeseen consequence of all just the environmental impact of it is crazy in comparison to just like anything else that we usually do it's why we need to bring nuclear power back and i mean that's that should have happened fucking yesterday and yeah that should have been immediate and solar you know like freaking like it's you could tell that like we're not the utilities for instance are not and obviously they want to make money but if you lived in like a city like a sunny city la right a little hazy but really what you would want to do is to put so as many solar panels as humanly possible on your buildings all over the city.

3:55:10Dustin Furman:Right. And just farm the sun. I think Elon Musk always says that is like, we capture so little of the sun that it's like comical. Like all of the power we will ever need is just emanating out of it every second. And we just have to capture it instead of like, no, we'll burn fossil fuel and, and your electric rates will go up four times. It's insane. It sucks. Ridiculous. dustin's back he left for a second who knows what he's doing what happened his little headphones in no i can't hear you're muted you're muted now my parents showed up and were knocking on the door and holly wasn't answering

3:55:52Colin Moriarty:for extended period of time so i was like i had to go investigate okay everything's fine good

3:55:59Dustin Furman:derek dowdy wrote in said greetings ss clank is very respectful thank you can we just acknowledge that new metal is totally back. First up last week, we got Limp Bizkit's break stuff featured in the Battlefield 6 reveal trailer. And this week we find out that the Madden 26 soundtrack is loaded with bangers from Limp Bizkit, Korn and 311, just to name a few. Is it time to break out the Jenko jeans and Adidas shell toes again? I vote yes. Thanks for all that you do and keep on rolling, baby. 311 is not new metal. It's not metal of any kind. But yes, I've been seeing this, that the Madden 26 soundtrack has got an old school feel.

3:56:32Dustin Furman:And this is what I was going to bring up earlier about. And I saved is I was talking about Hot Pursuit 2, Need for Speed, Hot Pursuit 2 and the soundtracks. And dude, the soundtracks on EA games used to be amazing. I was introduced to so much music through EA sports games specifically, like tons of it. And Tony Hawk and these other things, it was just so awesome in that PS1 PS2 era when they can finally put actual music, like digitized music as opposed to MIDI on with without sacrificing space onto these discs they sure did like they sure did and I just remember it so well and it's cool that it's coming back like bands just don't seem to be a thing anymore like obviously there are bands we listen to bands we like bands but it's not really a thing where you I had like 10 bands at one time that I loved that could all be found on mtv and all be in hit parade or whatever the fuck nonsense you know like um and it just doesn't seem like that anymore and so you have to kind of go back it's it's on the come up i think i think i think it's been a while without him and now you're starting to see like i remember like i think i brought it up on a recent an episode somewhat recently in the last couple months of just like uh these kids in like a garage just doing like garage band stuff and they're like clearly like 14 15 or something and they're getting pretty big and even just like uh the bands that are popping up now like viagra boys and um you know they're uh well they had they're somewhat old but they're like relatively new to like mainstream stuff it's it's gonna happen again and i think this stuff is picking up steam specifically because it's just been that it's been that obligatory amount of time before things have to be be reintroduced to the the lexicon it was it was the 80s in like um the late 2000s early 2010s was like 80s was cool you know 80s was like fucking stranger things you know uh all sorts of other things that happened around that time and now it's like yeah the early 2000s late 90s that's that's about as long ago so now it's getting a little resurgence yeah i love it i love new metal so much and it's cool like i've kind of i was just the right age for new metal but it was definitely informed by a lot of soundtracks and film tv shows and all the rest and so it's always gonna be really special to me but yeah 311 is not a new metal band although i did see that yeah they're on madden i think down is the song on madden i could be wrong about that maybe it's come original or something um so yeah really really cool now i never owned jencos i said before like i couldn't really afford them that would have been like the only pair of pants i ever would have gotten that year jenco jeans yeah like my dad would give me 200 or we would go together we would go to bob's which was like the kind of uh it's not like a department store it's like a clothes store like you know a budget kind of clothes store yeah and i would buy i'm sorry well like a like a like a rainbows or yeah kind of like that like it's like a big big box store, but for clothes.

3:59:49Dustin Furman:I don't know if they still exist. It's called Bob's. I don't remember. It's just a black sign with white Bob's on it. I don't know what the fuck it was. But it's a chain. And yeah, I would get a pair of shoes and three pairs of jeans and then some shirts. And that would be my school clothes. And I wanted JNCOs, but it's like that would be literally the whole. And in hindsight, my dad did me a huge favor by never getting me a pair of JNCOs because I authentically never had them. So I never wore my pants that big. right now adidas shell toes they never went away for me i've been wearing adidas shell toes for like 30 years at this point seriously it's like it's like my earrings like i got my earrings in 2002 when they were kind of going out of style and they've kind of come back in and out and in and out like five times since then but i've just never taken them out just never stopped wearing them so i'll be ready when it comes back again um and in the meantime i'm out but the the shell yeah what a look what a look what a sound love that era and it was fun new metal was fun yeah it was angsty i think i found a lot of that stuff from like tony hawk and crazy taxi yeah crazy tax is another great example the offspring yeah it's now on the ombre i remember i found offspring and bad religion through crazy taxi and i remember being like what is this this is crazy yeah like I knew I by the time crazy taxi came out I knew like because the offsprings first two like real records which would be smash and X and the ombre I had those already but that that was coming up on um crazy taxi came out around the time that Americana came out which was pretty fly for a white guy as you might recall that old chestnut as it were I love the offspring I play the offspring on my drums all the time I'm really attracted to certain bands like I play a lot of songs from certain bands and drums like for some reason I could just play offspring songs no doubt um lit is another one that i love to play along with just really of rage against the machine stuff like that and yeah for some reason the offspring i can just i'm just into playing on the drums it's a lot of fun for me people should if you're not familiar with offspring definitely check out the records smash and x-ray on the ombre those are awesome records and that's not new metal really either that's like that's it's like post grunge kind of like it's like melodic punk yeah melodic post-punk something like that right yeah it's before new metal yeah and then it crosses over into new metal but it's it's before new by the way we by the way we talk about like how stupid genre naming is in video games like wait until you look at music oh yeah it's ridiculous sludge metal yeah cum metal i think i saw i and it's to the point where like i saw cum metal on like a magazine or whatever and i'm like i don't even know if that's like a photo i don't i don't even know if that's a meme because like right butt rock is real and like there's like you know what i mean so it's just like yeah that might there might be cum metal i have no idea a metal gent sounds completely believable gent how do you it's just an onomatopoeia which is the funniest part right math rock was always the one where i'm like i'm done with this now right and then post like i used it earlier as post grunge like the idea of post rock post all these things it's like well post hardcore was a big one but it's like well that's just something else then isn't it it's like if it's right something but you're still using the old word postmodern all right whatever derrick i'm ready for post come metal post-com metal yeah yeah soon enough give it time i'm ready i'm ready for pre-com metal that's what i'm looking forward to gross trefferoth writes in and says greetings sacred sirs i wanted your thoughts on a recent comment from satahiko hiawaka soon to be corporate executive officer and cfo's sony financial group when asked about sony's investment in bandai namco and its push for ip expansion he said that the company is quote moving away from a hardware centric business to a community-based engagement business, end quote.

4:03:58Dustin Furman:Of course, that line blew up online with people assuming it means exclusivity is ending and consoles are going away, but in context, he was talking about shifting towards entertainment creation, noting Sony's biggest and most sustainable growth is coming from areas like music and Crunchyroll. Sony's Toshimoto even compared their anime business to being in its PS1 stage, hinting at a big boom ahead. Given Sony's diversification into anime, music, TV, and film alongside gaming, here's my question. If their live service gaming plans continue to fail could these other entertainment areas prop up sony in place of it of it in the future is a live service hit really the only answer or should we look forward to new budding aspects of the business pulling the weight of the game funding in the future thanks for all you do and can we please get a mom and dad gears of war sacred stream you will you will get it i promise we will do that um um It's so funny how blown out of proportion this has become, in my opinion.

4:04:50Dustin Furman:I say that as someone who has been much more bullish than most that Sony should be going in some sense, multi-platform. I'll be really clear that I think Sony, as we said many times, Sony has a lot to gain from playing nice with Switch and playing nice with PC and Steam. I think they have nothing to gain really from playing nice with Xbox. And that's why I'm a little perplexed because it can't just be about, well, they want to make money. And again, I'll just say, if they want to make money, then why am I not playing Donkey Kong Bonanza on PS5? If it's all just, if that's the bottom line, then that's it.

4:05:18Dustin Furman:But it's got to be about a lot more than that. So there's a lot of people that are reading a lot too much into this. And all you have to do is kind of give it time. And I think it'll play out the way you probably suspect. But Sony's diversification and entertainment, I think, has been a really smart move. As I think Chris, I'm sorry, Dustin, when you and I were doing the E3 1995 thing, I was saying, this is such a unique time to view Sony through because they were just fresh off of buying in the eighties, CBS music, which became Sony music and, um, Columbia, which became Sony pictures. And they understood early, earlier than almost anyone.

4:05:56Dustin Furman:I would say that the future is in content, not in hardware. And I don't mean that about gaming hardware. It's just not about, it's not in electronics. It can be if you're Samsung or LG or these other companies, but the growth model was based on leveraging not the VCR, but what you put into it, not the PlayStation, but what you play on it. And they've been really, really solid about that. And if you read their quarterlies, music does well, typically pictures does well. And I think this continued diversification is going to be seen and is going to become vital. I specifically, I want to do want to focus in on anime.

4:06:34Dustin Furman:And he did say that they're in the PS one stage of their anime movement, which is really fascinating about what they see for this. And yeah, it could be like a thing that's bolstered, but it's about circulating these ideas and these products through the various silos of Sony in a way that's conceivable. Remember, we were saying, what was that? Last last hundred. What the hell is that song with that game called Academy? Something like that. The last defense Academy. Last defense Academy at the line. that's being published by a Sony, a Sony group corporate group entity and not on PlayStation. And like, these are the things that they have to like ameliorate.

4:07:12Dustin Furman:These are the like filling in these gaps. And I'm not saying that game really matters, but filling in these gaps. So there are no blind spots. I think it's going to be a major part of PlayStation sustenance moving forward. Sony is going to become less of an electronics company. It already has become much less of an electronics company. Much more than half of its money is made outside of electronics in content and services. So I wanted to ask you guys about this and specifically get your read on the interpretation of this, that this means they're going to publish on Xbox specifically. I just don't really understand where people are getting this from.

4:07:46Dustin Furman:And anything can happen. I think Helldivers 2 opened up a door that we never expected to be open before but i just feel like i don't know where people are like getting this particular read on this from and it really is seems to be more about the cross circulation between their different products so that you have an anime the anime does really well you offload the anime's game to bandai namco now you own a piece of bandai namco so now you like get special access to where you get perks or pre-orders or whatever it's like that's what it seems to mean to me but i don't know do you have anything you want to say i feel like the

4:08:20Colin Moriarty:the quote moving away from a hardware centric business to a community based engagement business that's the line that's been as the right and mentions blowing up online it's like yeah you can change what your primary focus is and still do that still right where it's like i don't think this means it's like oh we're done making playstation hardware which is what some people jump to which is just obviously uh insanity but it makes sense that uh as as you were saying as far as like playstation since the beginning i mean i've realized that content is like well not just playstation sony i should say in general is that content is king and if they can control all the different verticals in which the content uh is also consumed then i mean you've kind of got a winning strategy there.

4:09:14Colin Moriarty:I may am curious about them saying Crunchyroll is in its PS1 stage and anime in general. Clearly right now anime is bigger than ever. More socially acceptable than ever. Making more money than ever. That seems like it's a pretty insane trajectory to be in its PS1 stages right now. that seems like wishful thinking to me even as an anime fan that can see its growth i just don't know if it's going to have that level of growth in the future um i am curious where this all goes

4:09:51Dustin Furman:because they they do seem to be extra aggressive in that particular media silo where they they want to be an anime and manga and that was part of the katakawa stuff and whatever too um what do you think chris well i mean i i kind of latched onto that same kind of thing that dustin was talking about where it's like a ps1 stage is like are you sure i don't know it seems like i i feel like anime was in its ps1 stage around the ps1 honestly like at least like from from the vibe that i got or like the the feeling of it like maybe i just don't know how how it gets much bigger than it is now it seems like it's pretty fucking huge um so that kind of struck me as strange but i do think a lot of the the doom the doom casting here is a much ado about nothing it seems like a really weird it seems even just like the the phrase the phrasing of this doesn't even really seem to imply a lot of the things that i've been saying about it so like i don't really i don't really know where any of this is coming from really i think hell divers maybe did did it a little bit i think in conjunction yeah health ivers in conjunction with this like i think it's i feel like it's kind of an example of you know the human brain just um looking for patterns where there are none because it's just so used to looking uh i i wouldn't i gotta wear it's not going to series x or anything like you don't gotta worry yeah i just don't i don't know i mean anything's possible I just don't.

4:11:24Dustin Furman:Again, I just don't see why you would do it like Xbox is on the mat. For the games as a service where you need to spread the field. Do you got to do? But and I agree with it. And I've said that long ago, like we keep bringing up fair games. It's like just release it on Xbox immediately. Yeah. And just buttress the player base as much as you can. They're doing the same thing with Marathon. Right. Exactly. It's like that makes that's fine with me. But I just I don't understand why you would ever like if if it does come to pass that they start that Xbox gets any of Sony single player, you know, marquee games.

4:11:54Dustin Furman:I would be really confused by that. I really would. I just, again, a group that bought a hundred thousand units of Final Fantasy 16. I don't know. I just don't know like to what end you would do that and why you would undercut yourself when you're winning. So like you're winning, they're winning more than ever in the hardware space. And for people that don't think that you don't want to sell hardware and sell games on hardware, I don't think you understand how the games industry works as it's currently constituted. Remember, Sony is making much more money, grossing much more money than Microsoft just based on PlayStation 5 when Microsoft bought all these publishers.

4:12:34Dustin Furman:Obviously, it's just latent passive income. You got to protect it. Putting your games on other consoles is not protecting your latent income. We'll see how it all plays out. Anyway, let's get the hell out of here. It's time to go. Boys, it's good to be here with you today. I appreciate your time. Let's go around the horn and say goodbye to everyone. Chris, goodbye to you. Be well. Any plans for the rest of the day? No, I think today is probably going to be a Battlefield day. The beta is open again. So I'm going to get my time in, see what's new. Get a look at this new map. Maybe continue on with Human Revolution.

4:13:08I had it in my games I was playing, but I haven't really put enough time into it this week to really talk about it. But I do want to get through it. This DLC is just like really hitting me in like a roadblock kind of way. Like I just kind of want to get through it. just feel so disconnected. It's so disjointing. So it's just a prime example of why I just don't really generally like DLC. I just feel like it's disruptive to something that's like, why? Why? Why are you doing this? But that's probably it for me today. Relaxed, low-key. Cool.

4:13:40Dustin Furman:Very good. Dustin, goodbye to you. Any plans?

4:13:43Colin Moriarty:Any plans? I mean, really, it's the same as Chris. The only thing I got going on is playing Battlefield. I got a text from Brandon this morning before I woke up saying, hey, we're Battlefield's betas back on. What are we doing? So the boys are ready and I will answer the call later tonight. I don't know why my parents stopped over in the middle of everything. And I don't know why Holly didn't answer. So I got to get some questions. Yeah, there's a lot of questions.

4:14:13Dustin Furman:I have a lot of questions about that as well. So make sure to report back.

4:14:16Colin Moriarty:Yeah, absolutely.

4:14:17Dustin Furman:I want to know why they were there. I want to know why Holly didn't answer the door. So make sure to let me make sure to we got to ask Frisk, too.

4:14:24Colin Moriarty:I mean, she was the one that was freaking out. Yeah, right. What does she know?

4:14:27Dustin Furman:Right. All right. Very good. I don't know what I'm going to do. I really do need to mow the lawn. I think it might be a little too wet to mow right now. We'll see. Got to work out. I don't know. I'll be dicking around, hanging out. But boys, it was good to be here with you. Appreciate your time. I appreciate all of you out there as well for your support and your love and your kindness of all things. Sacred symbols and last stand media. Patreon.com slash Last Stand Media for early ad free access. Couldn't do without your support over there. Last Stand Media dot store for merch. Please check it out.

4:14:52Dustin Furman:We'll see you next time. Until then. Goodbye. See ya. Take care, guys. Sacred Symbols, a PlayStation podcast, is a product and trademark of Last Stand Media and Colin's Last Stand LLC and is proudly recorded in the USA. The show is 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.

4:15:31Dustin Furman:The following names are at the producer level on Patreon, our highest tier, and we're grateful for your thoughtful and kind contributions to our independent endeavor. Thank you.

4:15:46Dustin Furman:Taravin, Namaste25, Jacob Pirochta, David Patchalek, Zdenik Padiviter, Callie Magnuson, Robin the Intern, Ben Soto, Warchief, Eremo Loner, Ace1924, Hector Games, Jorge Trevino, Dennis Mirom, Simon, Andreas Wessling, Frederick Bach, Indigo Blue, Skygin100, Kaiman Togru, Lars Cerny, Fake Viking, Basil Frank, Sander Svedzen, Nashville Nibbler, Teddy Anderson, Nicholas Johansson, Uppercut, Hypeguy98, Youngstream, Marcus Mossberg, Evan Bake, Havard Oya, Fugjug, David, Sammy Rocklin, Papsy, Victor Blomberg, Thomas Person, Panic, Detective McNulty, Johannes Magnuson, Axel M. Bjork, Adam Shablawi, Zixton Larson, John Oman, Octo Fontas, Berg, David G, SHP87, Victor Fallin, Eric Steinsland, Philip B.

4:16:39Dustin Furman:Rainsford, DDDDDCCCC, Havard, Rocketman, Fred Carlson, Jonas Johnson, Dennis Lofgren, Jorgen Stenhammer, Gilfie Tratterson, Marcus, Marius Carson-Peterson, Breno Bezera-Bloom, Jennifer Rutkowski, William Holbert, Ross Marenka, Morgan Ashley, Azan, Michael Vecchio, Daniel Diamor, Patrick Leslie, Jacek Dabowski, Headbastin 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 Lofol-Johansen, Emil Vissing, Patrick Hakirle, James, Nicholas Feer, Toby Rothensburg, Huy Tran, Emil M, Neil Amon, Blackjack, Kyle J, Vance Cody, Aaron Betke, Jean-Francois Forzi, Marcelo Goudes, Donald John Vaders, Boy, Lumo, Rafael Alves, Ricardo, John Cordero, Guilherme Dos Santos Merlin, Eduardo Perez, Alex Porto, Diego Dos Santos, Matthias Philippe Badowski, Victor Elmo, Bruno Basta, Pizza Fria, Henrique Coelho, Guilherme Figueredo, Matthias Garces, Stove, Deadpool 2099, J.P.

4:18:08Dustin Furman:Lynch, Sweet Jones, Ethan Linares, Jiraiya, Wizard Infantry, Zen Red, Matt MGS24, Angry Living Meat, Hugo De La Guia, Eddie Smith, Uncharted Shinobi, WTF, Wesley Mullins, Logan Little George, Timothy Tolkien, Brian Williamson, Jorge Padua, Rallo, Danio, Adam Refriended, Jordan Vallett, Ross R. Lowe, Will Williams, Shane Brekke, Michael Mash Potato, Aaron Temple, Sweaty Magic, Nate Izod, Hargeet Chani, Josh Sullinger, MyNameIsMayo, Eddie Medina, Jason R. Zahn, QN, Grayson Maxwell, Electric Soup, Whiskey Sin, Corey Bcom, Relentless Rex, Alan Tuniak, Dustin Klingman, Jad Rita, Terry Tipp, Jacob Hancock, Dustin Graff, Zach Cohen, Peyton Stone, Fozzie Bear, Michael Buffel, Dan Root, Asak Paredes, The Shady Mailman, Christopher Morgan, Randall Holsey, Dio or Die, Josh Godfrey, Betty Ann Moriarty, H-Trons, Norse Nuts, Jake C, Trey Woodward, Antonio C, Alan Einer, Jay Getter, Bjorn Campbell, Jeff Mercado, Trelon, Zainal Yuichi, Gregory Slavinsky, Gus, Remington James, John Zial, Boots, Alex LaPere, Saul Balcazar, Eduardo Banda, Adam Bader, Matt Flowers, Joseph Baker, Kendrick Caius, Jimmy Rodriguez, Dave Alvarez, Chris Galvin, Mason Bouchard, Anthony Marola, Sakib Alam, Kyle Hagel, Colin Love, Daryl E.

4:19:36Dustin Furman:Naaman, Toby Ryland, Stewie 108, Patrick Montgomery, Ian C., Richter 86, Christopher Devayo, Chris Morton, Mark Liberto, Johnny Waffles, Lawrence Adams, Roto 24, Jonathan Coates, Simon Peterson, Sean Mason, Josh Gravelick, Organic Produce, Carlos Algaret, Miranda Grubba, David Castanez, Joosh, Martin Beck, Gavin, Jerome Ferreira, Nathan R., Joe McPartland, Gary Cavallo, Christopher Moore, Dennis Usel, Lou and Ray Loper, Jonathan Cortez, Alex Hobeck, John Scholz, Adam Kay, Alan Tremblay, Ryan T. Mandel, Pork and Beans, Tony Zaniga, Shane Miller, Alex Cabrera, Corey Dustin, Nicolaj Hanson-Turton, Anthony Vasquez, Jorge Pal, Cannonball Jones, Mr.

4:20:23Dustin Furman:Tom, Phil Crone, Throw7, Adam Nix, John McKinney, Michael Gates, Alex Gates, Sean Chandler, Gio Corsi, Joey Gondaliger, Alex Monez, Justin Payne, Justin Wagaman, Austin Riley, Chad Lewis, Enrique Perez, Joshua Smallwood, Shane Rayum, Don Lee, Brad Cooley, Mad Mock Media, and Jonathan Rice.