#382 | I've Seen the Light and I'm Gaining in Height Now

39:06I feel like a million bucks right now. I'll let you know. I'll let you know if things change. Sure. Okay. Oh, I should acknowledge these, by the way. We got a few things to the P.O. box. Oh, I don't have it up here to show, but I can read the letter. This is from so this guy, Repon, sent me a custom DualSense controller. Last of Us DualSense controller. Whoa. And he gave me no way to get in touch with him. Like no Twitter account or email address. So Repon, this is for you. R-E-E-P-O-N. he says hi colin just thought i'd send you a custom controller i made in my spare time i remember in one of the sacred simple episodes you mentioned about having a controller that didn't have the built-in microphones or that i wanted that so i removed them for you and added a few nice quality of life enhancements i changed the shell to the last of us controller but with the colored playstation logo and black analog sticks which are also replaceable i have included two additional normal height rubber sticks for when the ones on the controller wear out and there are a pair of medium and tall head height rubber sticks too they can be replaced easily just by pulling them off and pushing the new ones in.

40:05The controller also has TMR hall effect sticks, so no stick drift ever. I went with favor union ones as they feel the closest to stock dual sense. I've also replaced the one 1560 MAH. Let me figure out what that might mean before we look it up. It's a battery, MAH battery. Milliamp hours. There you go. See, we didn't have to Google it. i figured it out uh with a custom 4001 i have them in my personal controllers and after playing for five hours straight they show full charge wow i hope you like the gift and enjoy using it thank you for providing me with nearly two decades of entertainment your opinions and insight love from the uk and a loyal patron and i think he sent me like the hall effect like data get it closer whoa dude it's calibrated yeah with the results dude that's that's above and beyond totally unnecessary we have our p.o box address on our patreon and people send us things and that's really nice but totally unnecessary i really have it there because people insist sometimes this is very nice rebound if you um message me on patreon i'll send you a copy of habroxia and some merch how's that and then now john lee said to give me a way to get in touch with him so i'm going to do that at some point um probably this weekend when i go through my I have so much correspondence to get through.

41:30I'm talking like I'm in the fucking 17th century. I have so many correspondence. But this guy's from Long Island. His letter is a little longer, so I won't read the whole thing. And it's also a little more personal, so I won't read the whole thing for him. I don't want to blow him up. But he sent me the Astro Bot controller because he bought an extra one and then heard that I kind of wanted one, but I missed out on it. And then I was going to buy the blue one. so basically i got these two brand new dual sense controllers at the same time and then i realized i forgot to pre-order the walmart controller it's as if god himself was looking down upon me and he also sent me these oh nice i remember you saying that you were getting someone was sending those yeah he sent me i had a guy just send me one like a loose one that he didn't want anymore um which i appreciate there are going to be no games that require more than two nes controllers.

42:23There was no multi-sap on the NES. And I guess you use these controllers for the Game Boy as well. But nonetheless, it's much appreciated. And who couldn't use more NES controllers? They are the most robust NES. The NES controllers are so crazy like that they work. They like work perfectly. You pick one up from 40 years ago and it works fine. Yeah. The dog bone controller is cool. I don't know if you have you used the dog bone NES controller like the new NES controller from the from the top loader. I never had one. Dude, the top loading NES is fucking best. It's like only problem with it is just doesn't have AV out.

42:59It only has the screw in in the back of the TV. You got a modem if you get one. Right. That always made sense to me at the time, though, because no one really had those plugs. That was what was so weird about it. Right. It was like those were those plugs, unless you had a really nice setup or like products of the mid to late 90s, even. Dude, I connected my Dreamcast via one of those. not to mention my PS2 you know a little later oh actually by the time the PS2 came out I guess I finally got a new TV so like that's how I had to do it the TV I played my consoles on was from the 70s oh man I'm sure that was great oh man yeah it was what it was you know like that's like no wonder I'm so stupefied by graphics today right so wanted to shout those guys out thank you for sending those along Derek Dowdy wrote in a few people wrote in about this.

43:48Let's get into some topics of discussion. Is this hello, significant others? Do you get the reference?

43:56Significant others? Significant other is Limp Bizkit's second record. Oh, no, I definitely don't get the reference. He said, just want to say RIP and peace to one of the most underrated bases of all time, Sam Rivers. Nearly 25 years to the day after the release of Chocolate Starfish in the hot dog flavored water, he died at just 48. Colin, I know he was influential in your life as he was mine. Glad he got to experience one last billboard number one before his passing no doubt that he and chester are forming a super group in heaven as we speak thanks fellas have a great weekend um yeah limp biscuits basis died i don't know if you saw that and it's really sad it's the they're the original lineup um and that's so nice to be able to like see a band and i think we talked about this maybe on sacred streaming even that like there was a uh it's nice to be able to see a band in their original form because that's somewhat rare actually if a band is old that's i feel so blessed 311 always comes up with like that's the original lineup since since you know 90 91 it's really cool and that's and that was so um yeah i was i was pretty sad to see about my a friend of mine texted me about it when it happened and i'm like what um and he never got his i don't think he ever got his due because i think west borland is kind of the musical black hole of that group like he's so well respected by most guitar players.

45:14I'm sure you know who he is, but I know you don't know his music. People love him. He's an aficionado of all these weird noises and these weird pedals, and he's awesome. So I think he just like... But they're a really legitimately good band musically, and their rhythm section is excellent. So yeah, RIP and Peace. And Zero wrote in and said, I love the ongoing bit on Sacred where Collins speaks so eloquently and seriously about music, except it's almost exclusively turn of the century, butt rock or rap metal two of the most regrettable genres in the history of music i can't help but respect him speaking about corn or creed while using words like seminal without a hit of irony please never change this used to be a problem not a problem but like it was a point of contention with ramon and i'm um my best friend that i met in college that people know is like he kind of like we grew up on the same music and then he kind of became too good for it and he's since come around and kind of admitted he's like this kind of like why did i but like he really was like i gasped by some of it and i'm like i don't really understand it i love this shit i always did doesn't mean i don't love other things too i love all music like i listen i am incredibly eclectic when it comes to music wildly eclectic and it's because i like everything it doesn't mean I like every band and every act and every song and every genre but I like everything like there's no genre you're going to present me where I'm like oh I'm like I don't want to listen to that but I really love the shit I grew up with which I would say goes from grunge which was huge for me you know when I was a little kid my siblings were listening to Nirvana, Pearl Jam Soundgarden and I love that shit you know I kind of picked up Stone Temple Pilots which is kind of a little post grunge-ish you know you get into the mid 90s smashing pumpkins huge you know huge for me um melancholy and the infinite sadness is like absolutely incredible record um and then you just get into the late 90s and that is when it becomes like new metal rap metal rap rock and i like that shit and it's actually fun for me to see it revived it's like that the sad thing about him dying is that you could argue Limp Bizkit is maybe bigger than ever.

47:31In terms of just the festivals they're playing and shit where it's like, dude, like doors have opened for them that would never have opened for them when they were big. And that's what it's kind of sad about it. But I understand some people like a lot of people don't like it, but I think that I think a lot of that shit fucking rocks. I'm unapologetic about it. But I'm. Music snobbery doesn't do it for me. And I try to stay out of that lane as much as I can. and I don't really judge like what people listen to. And honestly, and I'm not trying to be a dickhead, but like if you can't pick up these and know what to do with them or a guitar or a bass, I'm interested in your opinion, but I don't take it particularly seriously.

48:08And I know for a fact that I'm not saying this is zero that a lot of people that are most critical about music don't know fucking truly anything actually about it.

48:17So everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but I'm not being ironic. Like I love this shit. Now I'm not going to say Olympus gets one of my favorite bands in the world. they're probably in my top 15 or 20 though for sure my top five is probably something like 311 dredge ben folds five stone i didn't know that i knew you liked ben folds five i didn't know it was a top five yeah i mean they only have they have a fourth record technically but it's like three records uh stone temple pilots and the police nice i think from that you can get more of like my vibe um but i love everything from country and hip-hop to classical and opera and whatever right dude i remember there was a point in my life where i was way more snobbish about music particularly when i was in like eighth or ninth grade and i was real into heavy metal hardcore bands i was so snobbish where there were bands that i felt like were uh like poser bands or guess i guess or like bands that were adjacent because i like you know pop punk bands and stuff but i was like dude fallout boy those guys are gay fuck them you know because they were popular and i just did that because i was in eighth grade and i was stupid now those early fallout boy records i'm like those are elite i love those they're new stuff not not so much for me but it's funny now because in college i was starting to get into more artsy fartsy music and now when i look back at that i find that stuff kind of cringe you know like i've gone full circle with my music tastes yeah i get that to me creed it's funny he brings up creed because creed is the perfect example of like i've never really disavowed any band that i liked at any given time creed was fucking awesome dude those three albums are awesome you know um they have that fourth album that they released when they got back together i don't know that album so i don't speak to that but like my own prison whenever that second one was with higher on it and then weathered which is human clay human clay right and then weathered which is the third one and i like that one the best actually that song bullets is fucking sick but like even things like i love that song what if and one and all those it's like i never like it became really cool to hate them um in fact famously 311 got into like a like a physical altercation with creed or specifically like one of the singers at 311 broke his his hand punching scott stab in the face nice and there was like all this beef people can read about a really weird situation he was like talking about one of their wives and shit um it was like during his like you know he like got clean and shit i think but uh but i i was people may make fun of it so limp biscuits another great example of that where like they really fell off for a while i'm like no i love i like them like i i just i'm not embarrassed by i don't care like it's it's me it's art it's just like it is it's like a piece of media you either like it or you don't but i'm not really interested in like judging other people's things and i also am just used to everyone telling me everything i like sucks not only professionally but like i was the youngest of four surrounded by my siblings and their friends and shit everything I liked sucked.

51:28I was just like used to it. What is this shit? Shit sucks. Right. You know, people have been saying that to me every day of my life, basically my entire life. So I, um, it would be, it would be, I don't know where it would fit, but it'd be fun to like, really get into like the band and the music and stuff and like, and point people towards things. Cause there's so much good shit, man. I just love what I love the most is just rock. and on drums i play along with a ton of songs i have a whole drums playlist that i add songs to and then i often sometimes i want to play something i'll select it but i often just you know randomize it and just play whatever the bands that i play most on drums are like foo fighters smashing pumpkins um and shit like that i play a lot of hair metal which is like super fun to play but then there are bands that are like too hard to really replicate like the dynamics of like the police is a very difficult band to play on drums 311 i mean one of the greats 311 is very difficult to play on drums properly like you can play like some half-assed version of it i told you about holly performing with stewart copeland right i think so which is amazing as he was conducting or whatever he was conducting yeah because he's a great right he wrote the spyro soundtrack dude i was telling they were having some kind of after party and i was like holly everyone's gonna be everyone in your choir is gonna be bringing him police cds i will give you my copy of spyro have him sign it and she's like i can't i can't do it so i was like ah wow that sucks because he probably would have loved that yeah i know and that's i think that they i don't know if like the choir conductor was like listen try not to be weird right around stewart copeland or something you know like so which is good advice i've i've been given that advice not because i was weird but that like people that were so famous where it's like, just don't.

53:14And Green Day was one of those bands where I'm like, can I? I wanted to have them sign my copy of Nimrod. And they're like, yeah, you can't do that. You know? Yeah. Yeah. It's now I want to point out, Colin, if I may. Yeah, you got you. You love rock. You got a blind spot, though. I'm sure that's new stuff. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, I listen to a few new things, but yeah, not not much of it. No. I listen to lots of many times. You got to check out Turnstile. especially as a percussion guy, some of the stuff on, I mean, all of their records, but they have some crazy percussion stuff for a hardcore adjacent band.

53:55Yeah, I watched their tiny desk. Oh, yeah. Which was awesome. Yeah, they're great. Did I tell you the story about the turnstile show here in Richmond that my nephew? It's just an interesting thing. my nephew went to it um my oldest nephew who's like a big music head and my sisters are really in the music so that makes sense and uh we all are and uh so he was at the show and then he saw this guy in a 311 sweatshirt so he went up to like just see it or it was ramon that's awesome literally and then they sent me a picture because he was there for the night like his nephew lives in richmond and he was just in and out to like surprise him bring him to the show and then go back to LA for work or whatever.

54:42And I was like, and so I just got this picture of them. I'm like, what the fuck? Right. And I love that he was wearing a 311 sweatshirt at the Turnstile show. It's awesome. That's pretty sick. Yeah. Turnstiles blowing up big time now, but they're great though. I've noticed anytime I mentioned Turnstile on the show, there's always like a little debate in our discord because some, for some people they're not like hardcore enough. Yeah, I know because they kind of started as a more traditional hardcore band and now they kind of just do whatever they want. And I mean, I just don't care if the music's good.

55:20I don't care how it's classified, really. So. Can't please everyone. No, I know that. Let's get to this real quick. I mean, we could save this for next week, but Arian Yee wrote in and said, hey, guys, there have been some crazy things said on Sacred, but nothing has been more shocking. than Chris and Dustin saying they think a couple as meaning more than two. Jesus H. Christ, what little hope I had for humanity has gone forever. I would never have thought I'd be hearing such post-modernist, common core, commie nonsense from sacred symbols. Sort it out. Stand down. I'll now load a couple of rounds into my M &P and shoot myself five times in the back of the head.

55:57How are you going to do that? I guess you can get it off quick. That's five, I think. I don't know if that's possible still but so I listened to the clip that uh Sandeep yeah oh yeah he was friend of the show Sandy Bry um he was disturbed by it and I don't blame him I mean I kept I I said to him on Twitter I'm like you gotta let's I just have to let some things go like I'm not not everything has to be a fight now I need to come from a position of defense if I I listen to the clip and if I remember correctly, Chris is the one who claimed that a couple could be more than two. My take was and maybe I didn't say this.

56:44Honestly, I don't know. I rewatched the clip and I responded to Sandy there. I was like, I think that a couple is always two, but a few can be anywhere between like three and five. Yeah, I so and I think that where Chris's confusion comes in is that when you tell someone I'll be a couple minutes, they don't literally necessarily mean to. So sometimes a couple is used, I think, in a more vague way. But in a literal definition, a couple is always two. Or if you're telling someone like, grab me a couple cookies, then I would expect them to grab two. Yeah, two. A couple. I agree. But I did make my case to him more briefly on Twitter where I was just saying I have to move on with my life sometimes.

57:34I can't be sitting here with Chris arguing about this for like a half an hour. It would turn into a very like Seinfeldian thing. Do we really have time for it? I say we don't. No. Let's bring the show down a little bit. Thomas Bruce wrote in and said I boys or a maybe a Y E I

57:59right i i right i would say i would assume so it's a weird greeting i i boys is that right is that a greeting it's like i i captain yeah it just so happened that i got the notification for this thread about 20 minutes following my girlfriend of two years ending things with me i don't want to lose her i don't think there is a save but i'm also very anxious for life without her as a 30 year old single man in scotland not overly populous sorry for the depressing write-in but does the sacred symbols relationship helpline have any advice for me love all that you do your content has got me through some tough times and i'm looking forward to this friday more than most ps rest easy you lads we're not the cause of this relationship's downfall well i don't know if that's true or not um it's easy to speculate and give advice on other people's relationships very easy i've acted totally irrationally in it didn't matter with when it comes to matters of the heart i think everyone does and then you look back and you're like i have a little dignity you know um Um.

59:03just let her go I mean that's my gut instinct, the best thing you could do first of all, you got to feel it and go through it. And I guess if you really feel like. It's possible that you guys could get back together and I guess be together forever. I mean, like I'm not going to say it's not possible. In fact, my my sister Dana and her husband, who've been married since 2003, they dated in college, broke up and then got back together after college. So it happens. You know, they've been together ever since. So I'm like, I don't want to sit here and say, like, that's impossible, but it's just unlikely.

59:37Like, it's hard to, like turn that switch off and then turn it back on. You're always going to be wondering and skeptical. Like she was comfortable walking away from you. And you see, I got back together with someone once who broke up with me and then wanted to get back together with me. And it was a huge mistake because, and this was a long time ago, but it's like, you already told me things about myself and like, and the way you felt about things. And it's like, it's all, that's not true anymore. Like, of course it's kind of still true. So it's, it's going through breakups is very sad it's like it's like such a unique horrifying harrowing thing it really is like it sucks and it feels so hopeless and helpless but what's always true in my opinion at least in my experience is like you move on and then you look back and you're like dude like what was I even that like so upset about or like so pining over this person or like so into this person or so you know in love with a person or whatever.

1:00:36And then you look back and you're like, this doesn't make any sense because love makes you irrational. So that's why you have to like let you yourself feel things, go through it, don't rush through it, don't try to move on, you know, rebound if you want, but understand what it is, put it in context and be alone for a little while and see what you want. I mean, that's my opinion. Many fish in the sea. I think you'd be surprised. I know it's hard for people to meet people out there. I've been very lucky. I've never used a dating app or a dating website or anything like that. I don't really know what that's like.

1:01:10And I know that's difficult out there. But there are many people out there in the world in the right match for you. Even in rainy Scotland. Anything you want to add? Well, I think I've told you before. I may be not the best person to give advice because I was always the heartbreaker and not the one with a broken heart oh boy in my dating years so i've never been broken up with its own kind of tough by the way right yeah i'm sorry yeah and i would never claim that it's as tough no but it's still you know you don't want to when you break up with someone it's like man i'm about to uh ruin this person's life temporarily hopefully but deeply but seriously yeah yeah it sucks so in this case though i agree with colin like some if she walked away there's a high possibility that your relationship maybe wasn't quite right and as time goes on you hopefully will be able to look back and be like yeah actually that wasn't right i've seen that with my friends and i guess in my own relationships that i broke it off where maybe you're unsure And a few months later, you're like, wow, that I I'm glad I made that decision because we really weren't compatible.

1:02:29Right. So take some time, reflect, think about the relationship, think about what you want. And it is a dude, I, I feel so bad for people in the dating scene right now, particularly if you are in your 30s, just because dating apps are horrible and it's tough. out there so i wish you well but uh the best should be yet to come yeah i'd say it's funny man like i never i never did the dating app or dating website thing there's totally nothing wrong with it it's normal it's like it's modern um i couldn't imagine ever actually doing it though because i just feel like it would be so honestly if you're a woman it's probably very inflating and if you're a man it's probably very deflating i think unless you are like of the best quality man, which I am physically not a specimen, let's say.

1:03:24Right. So,

1:03:28so yeah, like I wouldn't want to subject, like I feel bad enough about myself as it is. I don't need to subject myself to that level of rejection. It says a lot about the mindset of a man today than the modern man and like why they're so downtrodden.

1:03:43But I really feel like you got to just it's not, you don't want to be someone's concession. like you just don't you don't like you shouldn't have to convince someone to be with you if it's right um and if she's playing some sort of game where she wants you to then that's like the wrong kind of person too and then it's just like because there are some women that i'm sure men too where it's like they want you to kind of chase them and they kind of want you to like twist their arm and all that i'm like no that's like never been me i'm not doing that no um so all right good luck to you, Thomas, you'll be fine.

1:04:21Adam Cracknell wrote in and said, oh, actually. Oh, this was supposed to be later in the show. Adam, sorry. I put this in the wrong place. See ya. Who knows where I'm going to get to you? I don't know. There might be too many now. But Adam, I've read your questions in the past. You relax. I don't want to hear about it. Finally, this and this is just a a piece of advice. Brock Thomas Walsh wrote in and said, greetings, gents. Colin, have you heard of anyone else having issues with the off-sited PSN profiles? I recently signed up and noticed it wasn't displaying some of my proudest Platinums, such as Final Fantasy XIV, A Realm Reborns, PS3, and PS4 Plat.

1:05:01After further investigation, it doesn't appear to have captured any of my trophies after around May of 2020. I reached out to their contact email twice, but have not heard anything back. I did change my PSN name at some point, but for the life of me, can't remember when. I was just curious if anyone else had this issue thanks for taking my questions and the amazing content is always cheers and happy trophy hunting to my fellow artists so you're definitely i mean i want to say definitely i guess there's some possibility that there is some bug but you're almost certainly doing something wrong the reason i wanted to talk about this is because i think psn profiles is so fucking good it's like it's a website that i highly recommend if you're in the trophies like i am it's just a really great and i don't have any relationship with them we're not making any money off of them i just think it's a really really great website for trophy hunters um and the thing that i think you're doing wrong brock on it is did you like update your name and i don't mean that like you made gave yourself a new name i'm like you unless you have a platinum like i have a lifetime um premium member subscription and i think you do too that means that the site updates your name automatically so like you don't have to do it but the website for most users and this is why like when people try to use psn profiles as anything where i like to use it as an anecdote to see what people are playing by volume but you can't like so for instance go see yote is huge right now on the site because everyone's playing go see yote but you can never use it as like real data because it's opt-in it i actually think um i wish i saw i wish i knew where the oh here it is there are only 674 000 people that have ever used it there are 80 million ps5s uh 120 million ps4s 86 million ps3s a bunch of vitas so it goes to show you how small the the um the community is so i think the problem you're facing brock and i want you to be able to use the site because it's so good as i think you just have to update your name if it's if it's everything from a certain date it obviously stopped ingesting your shit at a certain point and there's no way that it would stop scraping you unless your profile is hidden but if your profile is hidden on psn it would show it as being hidden on psn profiles so there's no way it's like on i don't think it's a problem with them i think you're not updating your name.

1:07:07That's my theory. And if your name changed at some point, it's not going to read your old names, trophies. Moriarty-IGN doesn't exist on PSN profiles anymore. My old name. It moved everything to the new name. So that might also be your problem. How to help you out? Felt like I had to do it. Shout out to PSN profiles. Great site. Between them and PowerPix, you're all set. IMO. I see here the Plants vs. Zombies trophies are live. This game is supposed to be. Oh, dude, I'm so mad about that. Have you seen anything about it? I saw that it leaked on the PS, the PC build leaked in EA play or something like that.

1:07:48And then it was all fucked up. And then I see here in the forums on PSN profiles. That's something there's already a glitch trophy. Well, yeah, I so I watched a video from I think it's Nintendo Life. And it was like their review of the game. and so there's problems with specifically the switch version like the mouse mode is stupid and stuff like that but other issues in the game where apparently the audio so when you start a game it's supposed to be like very light and spooky and then as the the combat ramps up the music evolves they don't they just took that out like it's just full blast the very start of each each round oh interesting there's also a thing too where some of the original devs there's like a a museum section where you can do concept art yeah and some of it's not actual concept art yeah the theory is that it's like modern or garden warfare art right i saw that that might have been a theory so like they're not even like careful enough to know what games they're they're doing their museum content with i i know that it's fully rebuilt like it's not a port because I think they have it on unity now if I'm I could be mistaken but I'm pretty sure that's true and I think that's why it's all fucked up and I was saying on ironically on a recent episode of the show that the as a big plans versus zombies fan who's played it on multiple platforms four of them I think like Xbox 360 PS3 Vita and phone or tablet or whatever it was it's like the vita version is fucking awesome they should have just ported the vita version i'm not i don't even mean like i'm not even kidding it's so we made it sony online entertainment made it it's like a custom version of the game and sony would have access to this and maybe uh maybe could liberate it but uh that's not what they chose to do it's too bad because i've been waiting for them to release this game forever and what i really want them to do i want i want this but what I would really like too is for pvz2 to be released but fixed so that it like operates like a normal game and not like a free-to-play fucking nightmare because I never even really experienced it beyond five hours or something um is there a pvz3 they should make that too maybe that would be the way to go I think yeah the two was the stupid free-to-play version I don't know if they made they might have made three i'm looking i see plants versus zombies vita review on ign from greg miller yeah oh yeah i gave it a nine out of ten yeah yeah now i'm trying to remember could i the vita store is still open because we talked about that endlessly it was supposed to close but they kept it open and i'm there's like some fuckery that you have to do in order to go in and purchase things like you have to add money on something else oh do you uh i can't remember because I would love I was thinking like I was hyping myself up to play this game and now I'm not going to like I'm just not going to buy a shitty port of the game not doing it but I still want to play it so maybe I should check out the beta version you should I remember the big deal I can't possibly be so expensive anymore but I think it was 40 bucks when it came out which is hysterical I doubt it's what it costs now but I'm not even sure if you can look at the Vita store online.

1:11:08You might be able to. Yeah. Oh, no. And there is a PS3 version, but there is no PS4 version. And the PS3 version is really good because it was on Xbox 360 first. Again, that was during like Xbox 360's dominance of these like more casual indie games. And that was PopCap before EA really fucked them up. You know, so although to be fair, they did get the Garden Warfare games were pretty popular. But they never really like they they they took the soul out of it like they like things like peggle and shit like that it was just like they were never gonna let them make shit like that anymore that's why it's surprising that that we ever even got this at all i'm gonna buy it i'm gonna buy the shitty version i'll let you know how it is i'm looking at a reddit post from nine years ago on the vita subreddit someone said after some research it appears the game was published by sony online entertainment which no longer exists so the license expired oh so it might not even be listed anymore Oh, that sucks.

1:12:08So it's a lost version of the game because there's no physical version of it. Piracy it is. Sorry. I mean, I was I was going to try to you drive a hard bargain, but I think that you're I don't actually have a hack to be so I've never done that, but I've heard it's cool. I'm going to pirate all the Lilymo games. Yeah, great. Love that. Get them all. I always love seeing that when people pirate our games. Taking money out of you're taking food out of Barry's mouth, money out of his pocket. Right. Yeah. How dare you? I just talked to him the other day have you seen the new game I've seen it on the discord yes pretty cool yeah it is it is pretty cool I'm interested to see I still have some things to do with it but I like the idea I came up with like for the story and the world it's something a little different I just have to be really annoying and figure out how to connect it to Harbroxia which I don't I have no idea how I would possibly Okay.

1:13:35let's get into the news. All right. We're here with a pickup. We found Chris. He hasn't been here so far and he won't be here after this. Right. Oh, not, not moving forward after the show. I'm just saying for the rest of the episode. Yeah. So you guys, Dustin, you were getting back from a movie that you saw a film. I saw a film, a fine film, the chainsaw man movie. I think I talked about it in the episode either before, or you feel about me. Talk about it later. Never seen a movie in 3d again. It was so dim. It was like I couldn't see anything. The whole movie. Nice. So but it was great. Korean barbecue.

1:14:15Very full of meat right now. Me. But that's about it. OK, so you got owned by the gimmick of 3D. Yeah, I fell for it. Yeah, that's right. Chris, good to see you. You're back home in California. So you've gotten flown safely. Now you have something to do tonight. So we want to be mindful of your time, correct? Yeah, but we should be good. I think I think we have enough time to get into all the crazy stuff. OK. All right. Well, we were kind of contemplating. I don't know what we said on the show, Dustin, that we suspected Halo would be announced and then we maybe wouldn't do a pickup or maybe would.

1:14:51And game announcements usually don't come on a Friday. I feel like this was kind of strange in the political world. They would call it the Friday news dump. Like you put things in Friday because you don't want anyone to cover it. So it's a little bit strange. Like that's literally the reason you would do something on a Friday. So no one notices. So I thought it was a little strange, but they did announce Halo. Now, last night, because we were going to put the episode up just to give everyone a little bit of background. I knew people that were at, and I'm sure we all did, people that were at that Halo event.

1:15:18So I literally just asked a few people. I was like, listen, I'm not going to like just like is Halo on PS5 or not? And is it going to be announced on PS5? And I was told reliably like, yes. So at that point, I got in touch with the guys and I'm like, we probably should. you know, publish sacred symbols plus first and then sacred symbols later. People thought I did it because I was on a podcast of another show recently. And I'm like, that's why now Dustin, Mike and I were making fun of you a little bit today because I'm like, why did why is Dustin's note on the podcast so vague? You know, you put a little note like when you publish sacred symbols plus saying like we've decided to we need to it's like we need to publish a pickup.

1:16:00right everyone like you could have just said like halo we're probably going to talk about halo so i did say we were going to probably talk about halo on the discord when i first said something and then i thought well i didn't want to make it seem like we knew for sure because we did you know because we on the show we were like well maybe maybe not is it worth it and i was like well i guess people hadn't heard it at that point so i'm just trying to be vague to protect the fact that we knew the sanctity yeah sure sure but it did bring a lot of people want to talk about we were we delayed the podcast we could talk about how you owned a guy yeah no that you can go find out all that out on your own um all right let's get into the news i'm very well let me set it up for everyone microsoft had i guess a halo event today was this for the it was there's like an anniversary event or are they just doing so there's um i believe it's connected to uh the hcs so the halo championship series so i think it's like this the esport thing and it was i think the second to last or the last one for infinite i think and so they were going they were teasing that there was this was going to be one that people would want to show up for um as far as i know interesting okay so yeah because i was gonna say like 20 it would be 24 years it would be a little bit of a weird anniversary it's not 25 years because the game came out in the fall of 2001 so um so yeah i was thinking i'm like what the fuck was the point of all this but they announced at this halo event halo combat evolves remake the second remake called it's halo right i mean it's it's the first remake technically because this is i mean we'll get into it but combat evolved anniversary was like kind of like a it was like the way tomb raider uh has since been remastered in in the in the aspire collections and legacy of kane it's like a new coat of paint over the original thing not really touching it at all this seems to be more fundamental um but yeah it is it is the second time that technically the third time if you want to count it like being up res to hd for the xbox live arcade right oh yeah yeah halo combat evolved has been touched up quite a bit but this is the most substantial rework of this is more along the lines of like some of the stuff that we've seen recently i think with like some people talking about like oh maybe we're a little harsh on the last of us and i'm like come on this game's from 2001 a totally different can of worms.

1:18:18Yeah. But anyway, here's what it says on the Xbox Wire. Xbox Wire, of course, is the official press release website for Xbox. And it says, it's official. Halo marks the next chapter for the franchise with Halo Campaign Evolved, a complete Unreal Engine 5 remake of the original campaign from Halo Combat Evolved, including some brand new surprises. The original Halo Combat Evolved is a stalwart of gaming history, a cultural icon that helped define the first-person shooter experience. For Halo Studios, bottling the impact of that original campaign and all of its special moments is the ultimate goal for new players and longtime fans alike.

1:18:50Halo campaign evolved as a modern evolution of that iconic story, thoughtfully brought to life in Unreal Engine 5 with stunning new 4K visuals, updated animations, remastered music, and re-recorded voice lines. Halo Studios is also bringing in a roster of beloved weapons and vehicles from later Halo titles and adding three new bonus campaign missions, all designed to expand and celebrate the adventure that started it all. Halo's legacy of cooperative play continues here, supporting the original two-player local split-screen experience on console, And for the first time of the four players and online co-op across Xbox, PC and PlayStation five, I think I sniff a certain episode of sacred streaming next year, perhaps.

1:19:24Oh, yeah. So, Chris, I think a lot of people are I mean, I think people want to hear what all of us have to think, but obviously you're a big Halo fan. I think we want to hear from you first. I was seeing some of the things you were saying on Twitter that you're kind of. Lackadaisical about it, as I understand, though, you don't really like Halo combat evolved comparable to Halo two and three, right? So, yeah, I do want to give content. I think ultimately, fundamentally, this is a really cool thing. This is something that we've been talking about this on the show forever. Like, when is it going to happen?

1:19:52I've always been a proponent of it. I think as many people should be able to get involved in the series as possible. I love that this is multi-platform now. And it seems like, by the way, broader, the broader conversation is that this seems to be, you know, the big admission in my view. That's a deep, that's a broader kind of thing from Microsoft that it's like, oh, we're, yeah, we're multi-platform now. But yeah, I mean, Halo Combat Evolved has been the one like it was the first one that I played for sure. But I and I'm sure anybody who who's played it can attest like it's really good. But it is also it's got a golden eye quality where it's like you can feel that there's something special about it, but it's not quite as fun.

1:20:29It's not as fun to revisit as the ones that immediately preceded it. They seem to nail things a little bit better. Things feel a little bit tighter. halo 2 and 3 feel dated but they don't feel compromised by that dated feel and halo 1 does i think in my opinion um it's my least favorite of the bungee halo games for sure but it's still great and i think um the under the hood tweaks they seem to be doing they seem to be doing a lot to this it doesn't seem like again this is not combat of all the anniversary where it's just kind of like you know it's the same game running underneath it and it's just like a coat of paint they're adding mechanics they're adding weapons they're adding entirely entirely new missions presumably i think i remember her i hear i think i heard something about a pretty notorious level uh which a lot of fans will know is the library that they probably i would imagine are going to drastically redo um and again like three prequel missions sounds cool re-recorded voice lines from like the original cast and all that stuff like i heard voices where I'm like, oh my God, that they got the original people.

1:21:37And so I'm actually, like, I'm looking forward to this in the sense that this was a game, this is probably the only game in the trilogy of the original games that I kind of didn't fully love. And so from that perspective, them doing all of these kind of under the hood tweaks to it might actually turn into something that I genuinely really am into. But at the same time, like fundamentally, like the trappings of what it is is still part of like what i consider to be like my least favorite but i do think this is like a big i mean this is exciting it's it's really cool news but it's it's more i'm more happy for other people where this is going to be somebody's like first try and somebody's first like fresh-eyed you know step into this world and they're going to have presumably a pretty definitive version of that original game to do it with which uh it's pretty cool what do you think gelson yeah so halo combat evolved i mean amazing game one of my favorite games growing up um and seeing this trailer it's funny when i watched it on my phone uh before i went into the movie i was like this looks really this looks pretty good uh and then when i watched the trailer on my 4k monitor it's like oh man it uh it doesn't look bad i don't want to make it sound like it looks bad at all it looks like halo unreal 5 yeah it looks very unreal uh it looks too yeah well i'll say mine so i don't i don't know i guess in one sense like the devil's advocate to myself it's like well what do you want it to look like yeah honestly i don't know but I guess and it wasn't it's not like I feel like it's the worst thing I've ever seen or anything like that but I was like okay well I can I can get over that and it's still you know they put like the pre in development footage so there's still time for it to bake of course and I'm I don't really have any problems with the as Chris was saying the the new modernizations whether it's sprint adding new weapons all that sounds cool if you're gonna do it if you're gonna remake it go ahead and add that stuff put your flair on it i'm really curious about the new missions uh because that's going to be a thing where it's like man they better be good uh or else they are going to stick out badly and i'm not saying every mission in combat evolved is great chris mentioned the library is a is a weird it's a weird mission in my mind because it's one of the most memorable the first time you play it and then every playthrough after that when you when you already know about it is kind of a slog weren't you saying some of the guys that worked on it recently saying like we like why did we make this so long it wasn't even recent it was like it was pretty damn it was like i think before halo 2 came out they did like a direct commentary and they were like why the fuck did we why the fuck did we make it this way like what were we doing so like that's that's kind of the thing there's a lot of cut content from combat evolved you know like there's a lot of like ideas that didn't get to flourish correctly they even talked about bringing like certain enemies from future games like into this one and new ai behaviors and stuff they i think they confirmed in the in the round table that they're bringing like a particular like flood enemy from three back into back into this one and so they're really like they're going in there and kind of doing a lot i remember here i remember originally there was a lot of like wildlife intended for halo ce that ended up getting cut because they couldn't figure out how to do it it would be really awesome if they if they did like a truly like almost like a director's cut like this is like the original kind of vision for this with you know bells and whistles added i think that would be really it's exciting it's cool um those prequel missions better be good though that's that is like something where i'm like i'm kind of worried about that because i don't know man like you you gotta write in the same tone as like a game from 2001 without it feeling jarring you've got to like voice act in in the same way you've got a i don't know there's a lot there that would they run the risk of things feeling kind of disjointed um so i'm curious to see how they're going to handle that um especially because the only the only example that we have and this is this might be kind of niche knowledge but when halo 2 anniversary came out in the massive collection when that was when that launched in the in the absolutely fucked state that it launched in they marketed it as like oh this is halo 2 anniversary with the collection kind of surrounding it and so the halo 2 campaign has these bookend cut scenes that they that they did new to connect it to like to halo 5 and they're bad like they're not they're really short but they're like really like why'd you do this like this is not good at all so fingers crossed it that's it's been a while you know so there's a lot of new people there but um yeah the the idea behind the retcon of halo is in far as far as gear and stuff i find kind of cool i guess i don't because i guess they're trying to bring continuity like why wouldn't they have had these certain weapons here and certain options to fight um probably not necessarily i don't think anyone would really ask that that question there's a million different in universe reasons that that could be uh the the re like i am much more interested in this from the business standpoint than anything just because i i really like halo actually and we've talked about it many times i didn't get combat evolved until 2003 82 years after it came out that's when i bought my xbox and i was really quite enamored with it um and i think a lot of people were just because it's like we had like on ps2 there was like unreal and uh red faction and a couple other things but not like you know metal of honors yeah time splitters um for sure at this point we i mean by the time i played halo probably had two time splitters games but so it's not to say that there was nothing there but we were still a couple years away from kill zone and there just was no identity on playstation for that sort of thing so it really felt like it was the marker of something different on xbox and i really loved it um and then i didn't played for a long time i played halo 2 as well i never played halo 3 and then as you guys might remember on knockback digging and i did halo 1 2 and 3 via the master chief collection over like a year that was a couple years ago or whatever so i really like the games but i'm not like a super fan so the fact that they're like cleaning it up and adding things to it adding new missions and stuff that doesn't bother me so much i imagine this is going to be the stuff that bothers people not necessarily like chris but akin to chris where they're purists and they care a lot about the lore and stuff i don't really know the difference yeah i yeah yeah no there's a i get it there's like a sanctity to those original games but i personally think like halo one needs the most touching up of any of the three of them i think two and three maybe uh but like i think that those would be a lot more sacred ground i think those would be like very difficult to go back and rework one i think everybody even who loves it acknowledges that it's you know the library's bad and you know there's there's some finicky things with the engine that are charming but a little a little difficult um so yeah i i suspect that i i know for a fact there's videos i know there's already videos of like super fans being like they got the wrong sound they got the wrong sound for the tires and i'm sure you know on some level as as like uh if you're making this kind of thing i i almost wonder like why change things arbitrarily in the first place to even give people that lane of critique um why not just bring everything up and so i get it on some degree but there i've seen complaints about the hud i'm like what i don't care whatever like it looks fine to me i'm more but again this is a game that's less sacred to me and i think everything so far i think looks cool i think um the sprint thing has always been a big thing in that community but i i think because it's a single player game i don't really I don't know that doesn't really bother me um it looks cool I will say and I think you guys were touching a little bit on this or and I saw other people talking about it too is like graphically and this is the only thing I can really glean on to just from watching it you know kind of um in my own time that first of all there are two videos on YouTube PlayStation's YouTube which is so it's just so strange it's like it's as if they got hacked it's the same thing with uh with PlayStation Network like when it was announced and I saw that I went on PSN and there was yeah and i i wish listed it and i was like okay um yeah it literally is almost like a fever dream but i will say graphically i think the environments look really good i think all of the human l and you know creature elements in terms of like spaceships and buildings and stuff looks it's not clean enough like i i i don't know there there's like a it almost i don't want to say it looks too good it looks too detailed in that i you know when you hear about spaceships uh like you know in this like all this uap shit that's going on and a lot of the people say that there are like no seams in them and no handles and no buttons and like it's kind of the way i envision a lot of this future tech and because and that might just be because they were so low texture um yeah then maybe that's not wasn't really their vision but that's kind of the way i saw it almost like the cylon ships in battlestar galactica where there's like almost nothing to there's like a cool design philosophy to them but there's like nothing human about it yeah i don't know i think i think humanity's vision for the future in those games is always more like kind of like retro it's like kind of like 80s like it's it's the way that alien views the future where it's just like it's very industrial and very like kind of like um very gray and very and very like military green and there's like a lot of there's pouches you know the military people have pouches and then there's like there's seams in a lot of the so i don't necessarily mind that i know what you're saying because like the original especially the original warthog if you look at that original model it's very sleek because they just didn't have a lot of polygons but that lent something to it um i don't know i i'm i'm kind of iffy on a lot of things as far as like how it looks um i don't think it looks bad at all i think i'm like satisfied with how it looks but there are things that i would maybe change but like not enough to not have to really complain about i think ultimately the thing that's only that really the thing that's bothersome about it is just the fact that like it feels like unreal engine like if you're looking at it and it just kind of feels like there's like a haze around certain things where like oh that's unreal unreal engine and i'm sure i would imagine that this is over a year away i would maybe not but like i imagine that this is maybe a year away october november something like that i just feel like this is like a 25th anniversary thing you know and so like i would imagine they would put this out in november i don't know where gears is gonna fall maybe maybe that's pushed maybe that's earlier i really don't know but it just kind of feels like there's more time to kind of iron that stuff out and hopefully hopefully they listen um because if they are really responsive to feedback like that i think they could end up with something really cool and really interesting.

1:32:49It's not often that you get remakes of beloved classics that do this much. You know, like even Oblivion, which was, you know, they went under the hood and tweaked some things, was not as drastic as this. And Metal Gear Solid Delta was kind of in a similar vein where it was just like, it was maybe a half step away from this, but this seems like a full on, like, you know, a proper, no, we're going to bring this forward. And I suspect with a lot of these new kind of trappings, I think this is going to do really well for them because the story and the pacing of that first game is really good. And so I suspect it's going to win a lot of people over.

1:33:32So it's exciting as a Halo guy to see that for an audience that maybe is not familiar with it. I've already seen plenty of people in the comments like, oh, I'm excited. I've never, you know, this is exciting. For me, it's more intriguing. Like, I wonder how I wonder how much more I'll like it or if I'll end up maybe not liking some of the changes because I'm maybe maybe I'm more of a purist than I thought. I don't know. I'm really fascinated to see how this is going to land in general. Yeah, by the way, Dustin, you have like a sort of Ron Howard aesthetic going on right now, like like you're on like you're at a junket, a junket.

1:34:15it's probably the hat yeah yeah and like you got like you got the coat on you're like it's like you're casual but you got a little bit of a nice flair like you know you look like a rich guy oh okay you know what i mean like yeah but there's like some touch to them well i think you're a shirt ties it together some you're at you're on a comic-con on some panel right and you're just kind of waiting your turn sure sure i mean it's not an insult i like it the one like i said the one piece shirt really ties it all together but well i haven't chris you still have time to talk or do you have to go yeah yeah i got i got a little bit of time well i was just gonna say i have a few things that i think are interesting to pull out that are apart from the game because like we really don't know much else about it i think the four-player co-op thing sounds really cool um obviously it'll be in game pass i assume it'll be 70 bucks like it's a ground up remake i yeah with no campaign with no multiplayer oh yeah that's true so maybe yeah there's no multiplayer i could see maybe a 50 or i think even 60s fair honestly and at that i could see that being fair at that point you know a year away um maybe they'll try 70 i don't imagine it'll be an 80 game yeah yeah i think you're right there is i guess local co-op and then and then the online copy but no online not well i guess halo one wasn't online but there is no land multiplayer or what they could rebuild i guess like that does that tell us something about so this is kind of the thing this is what i want to kind of get into i think there are a few interesting things to pull out from this right the first is and this actually comes from it's just a thought that i saw um tweeted out oh shit i i have to go find it again andy robinson is the editor-in-chief of video games chronicle which we talk about a lot and he's been tweeting out some interesting stuff today but he said this and i wanted to see what you guys thought he said emotions are high today some of my greatest gaming memories came from my from xbox i've loved covering the platform over 20 plus years but i can't help but feel microsoft has manipulated their fan base and quietly ditched their obligations as a platform holder xbox fans deserve better um dustin i'm curious what you think about this and he's a very sober experienced person he's been in the industry longer than i have um and i've been here for over 20 years so I take that somewhat seriously that a person would say something of that nature.

1:36:32And I don't necessarily disagree with them, but I think we would probably come at it from different angles. Curious what you think about his statement. Yeah, well, not to self-promote, I just did a video about Xbox and I opened up with how Microsoft does not. It feels like they don't respect their customers anymore, particularly their most hardcore dedicated ones. And we knew that the multi-platform strategy was here. So this was really an inevitable. At some point, we were going to see Halo on PlayStation. We didn't know it was going to be day and date. And now that is confirmed. But I think the things that might feel the most disrespectful in regards to this announcement are, and I'm sorry, I'm a little behind because I was at the movie and stuff, but I was seeing on Twitter, like, was it their community manager wearing a PlayStation shirt?

1:37:22Yeah, that's one of the things that I saw. And I thought that that was actually really weird. Yeah. So the point of like unnecessary, actually. Yeah. And they were saying like something about like PlayStation. Halo is now on PlayStation. Moving forward. Moving forward. And yeah, I could understand if you were if you're a hardcore Xbox guy that like, oh, it's not just that you're releasing it, but you're like making it a bold statement. Like we're not only releasing this game, but PlayStation is now a home for Halo. Get used to it. And, and who knows with all this other, it's like, Oh, and your game passes$30 more and all the, it's just like all of these, it's a million little cuts, but in particular, it seems like every week for the last three weeks, there's been bad news.

1:38:11And so I could imagine that. Yeah. If you're, Hey, if Xbox has been your home and, And it's a death by a million cuts at this point. Chris, do you have anything you want to add about this idea of Andy's idea of this kind of disrespect that Xbox's fans have received from their own brand? Yeah, I mean, it really depends on what their plans are for the future, because I think actually this kind of this strengthens the. The hypothesis that this next machine is going to be like, you know, that their next machine is going to be this hybrid kind of PC thing, because like if you don't have if you're putting halo everywhere you've got to have something else and that seems to be the prevailing theory that like yeah okay well it's going to be a module there was there will still be a reason i guess is what i'm saying to have that machine uh in the future i don't know exactly what form it'll take but they've got to find a pretty compelling reason and it's i don't know if it's like a full betrayal until we know more about that machine and maybe to be fair i'm a little bit unflummoxed by this because we've been expecting this for a long time so like it doesn't really hit me in the same way that it's hitting a lot of people um so it's hard for me to get into even to get into that headspace but if this if this really is like blindsiding information um then yeah i mean i guess i could i could see being like yo why why did i get this machine like why did i invest in this ecosystem and they're going to have to answer they're going to have to answer that at some point um but i don't know if it's necessarily i don't know if this in and of itself is necessarily like i don't know the slight that people perceive it as it's only a slight if they've if they've got nothing to fall back on and That very well might be true, but I don't know yet.

1:40:05There's a you're right in that there was obviously a level of inevitable inevitability to this. I don't think the inevitability necessarily began when Pentiment and all those games came out. But I think once the fifth and sixth and seventh, it's like, OK, so and gears, especially in Forza. It's like, OK, there really is nothing off the table. The thing about this, I think, is that there literally is nothing left. And I don't mean literally in terms of games. It's like there's nowhere to go that's crazier than this. So now, yeah, everything is I mean, obviously Gears E-Day is coming. Obviously, Fable's coming.

1:40:35I think we already knew things like Elder Scrolls 6 probably would have always even if things were working for Xbox. I still believe that that game would have just come to the PlayStation. It's just too big and it would be just stupid. I could understand them holding a game back like Doom a lot more than I can understand them holding a game like Elder Scrolls. So. The thing that I think is that Andy speaks to, I don't know if this is specifically what he meant, but this is kind of what I think when I read what he's saying is that I think the disrespect comes from it's not a zero sum game like there's a lot of permeations and ripples through this decision and I think the thing that people don't aren't quite getting is I don't want to use the NES as an example for everything I mean everyone knows I love it but think about how powerful the NES was with its Nintendo games but what really made Nintendo and the NES tick it's that Capcom loved it.

1:41:24It's that Konami loved it. It's that SNK put games there and everybody was putting their games there and brought an insane amount of value. When you migrate your first party games to a rival console, you're making that console better. It's not just saying like we're making our console worse. You're actually making the competitors console better. Right. Because they don't get they don't get play. They don't get a God of War and Uncharted. Like, right. Like I mean, anything's possible, but we've said it before in the past. Like, I just don't see that happening. that's not i don't see why you would do that like why would you do that i think the games as a service is happening we've said marathon obviously is coming over it's been long announced but i just don't know about that like maybe but why and especially now that we know and i mean it's all but confirmed with things sarah bonda said and stuff like their next as you said their next console is a pc with you know some sort of hybrid machine and the games will be on steam sony knows that like why would sony's probably thrilled about all this shit could you imagine the conversation because the game was wish listable and it's obviously their trailers are up.

1:42:24Sony's known about this obviously. And can you imagine like how they feel about this? We're like, holy shit. The big thing that I and this would almost be a good YouTube video for me to do at some point like called PlayStation is a killer is there have been four. I mean, if you want to count Atari, but they weren't really a player in the modern gaming era. There were four post Atari players in the hardware space and PlayStation killed one of them and made them a third party, killed another one of them, and are now making them a third party, and almost killed the third one in Nintendo. Like, they were chasing Nintendo down with a fucking knife.

1:43:03Nintendo obviously pulled out, and it's totally fine. Sega's great now, but they're nowhere near hardware, and Microsoft's going to be in the same position soon, and I'm just like, that's so interesting. Like, Sony's survived. Nintendo survived. It is a battle of, it's an evolutionary battle. It's the survival of the fittest. It really is. And it's not only about the power of the machine and the catalog of games, but about the decisions you make. And that's why I think it's really interesting to just say Halo being not being a Xbox console exclusive anymore is a thing for Xbox, but it's huge for PlayStation.

1:43:36It really does illustrate. It's like, dude, like we've said it before in recent episodes, unless you're using Game Pass specifically, why would you even have an Xbox at this point if you know you can just get all those games on PlayStation? this is this they really are tying them i put my notes pretzel in quotes because they're tying themselves into a pretzel like yeah it's really all none of it really makes any sense like even the pc storefront stuff i'll keep beating this drum especially as the console gets closer it's like they're gonna send you to another storefront i don't even know how this is all gonna work like i can't wait to hear what this all means and it doesn't make any sense if you understand the economics of the video game industry and how these companies make money on games and it makes no sense but but in terms of microsoft becoming very much like sega but even bigger uh becoming a third party they're going to be a fucking huge and successful publisher of games now that they are unencumbered and i think having your community manager for your biggest franchise go out in a playstation shirt and then talk about how everything for halo is coming forward to playstation it's like a complete capitulation of the likes we've never really seen and i think that it's it's truly done at this point um and i find that fascinating and i do and i i've expressed this is that i do feel bad for xbox fans i don't feel bad for the annoying xbox content creators i feel bad for like rank and file xbox fans that yeah that lost because of bad decision making and the thing that gets me that bothers me the most and this is the last thing i'll say is just seeing i don't know if you guys saw the new york times article um that was published today called xbox's prize sci-fi franchises heading into PlayStation by a writer named Zachary Small, but he talked to Matt Booty.

1:45:14And I think that this particular piece illustrates why I don't understand why Microsoft hasn't fired these people, if not for incompetence, but then just for more direct messaging. Because he's saying, quote, we are all seeking to meet people where they are, end quote. And he says later on in the piece, quote, our biggest competition isn't another console. We are competing more and more with everything from TikTok to movies, end quote. This is true, but let's not overstate things. It's, I guess what I'm saying is, is it's really tough for me to kind of hear Matt Booty say this when emails dated four years ago that he wrote internally talked about how these deals would spend Sony out of business.

1:46:03Let's not pretend that this was always the plan. And plans change and things don't work, but you can't send out the same messengers. It's so disingenuous and strange. I remember the shit that this dude said. It's the same thing with Phil Spencer saying, like, if we lose our way with Halo, we lose Xbox. It's the same thing with, you know, things that Aaron Greenberg and other people have said. Sarah Bond recently talking about how, quote unquote, antiquated exclusives are on the same day that that new Pokemon game sold 5.6 million copies in a week. yeah and to put that in because we talked about this early i think earlier later in the show you don't know chris but i was saying just as an adage that silent hill the entire franchise has sold 10 million copies its entire life 10 million copies pokemon 37 just sold 5.6 million copies on a single ecosystem exclusives aren't antiquated your fucking your entire approach failed and that's okay because things fail but why are you the messenger this is a big question i'm going to keep asking these guys they're disingenuous because we know that their strategy didn't work because their strategy was transparent and they talked about it so that's a big thing that i just see here like xbox needs new stewards and i don't know if we'll ever see that but that's and people are lighting them up i mean Ybarra's on these guys' asses every fucking day and other things.

1:47:30It's like... I just wanted to throw that out there. As interesting as this story is, as inevitable as it is, as good as Halo is, this messaging shit is just totally fucked. You have to be delusional not to see it. You have to be out to lunch. We've talked about this shit for years. It bothers me. It's like in football. Not to use it like you guys don't give a shit about football, but it's like in football having a bad team and a bad coach and just leaving the coach like letting the the bad coach just and then you have like other decision makers that are like the owner pulling the strings now the coach just starts saying other shit and it's like why wouldn't you just get the other another coach to say that shit so that's it yeah halo coming to playstation 5 in 2026 i did see some people express this too and i i agree i'm a little surprised like where's the switch to love for microsoft yeah i don't know they're supposed to get we were talking about this again somewhere else in the show like call of duty is still not on switch even though it's supposed to be yeah according to the mcc stuff so did i don't know i feel like am i misremembering or like i feel like there was a conversation about like it just being the campaign and you were going to say something but then you kind of you distracted yourself i think i could be remembering it yeah because i think dustin you said something about it yeah it's just the campaign and then you said that doesn't that speak to and then oh right oh good good memory so i was gonna say speak to the future like and i guess this would be a good exit question good good job chris it's like what does this mean like what's so they're saying explicitly more is coming to PlayStation.

1:49:18Is that a, again, a much more ambitious Halo 2 ground up remake, or is that a port of infinite or do they bring Master Chief Collection over? Or is there some sort of like fixed boutique reworked online suite that they release across the platforms at some point? There are a lot of different options, but like what's clear is that more is coming and i don't think they're talking about the next halo game i think they're talking about something else yeah yeah maybe i mean it would their decision making is already kind of incomprehensible so like i don't i don't know like maybe after this they'll put the collection on so like hey see halo one as it originally was and then the rest of the trilogy but like the thing that's weird about this the weirdest thing about this in my opinion is that although i think halo combat evolved requires the most touching up this kind of implies halo 2 campaign evolved and you know like it kind of like why do that and then set people up for like the expectation of like oh this game has sprint and all these other things and then the sequels that people are meant to go delve into don't like it it's it confuses me but as far as like the multiplayer space

1:50:38the i don't know because infinite seems to be wind being wound down to the point where like a lot of the content coming to it is like kind of reworked current assets and stuff like that so like i don't it doesn't seem like they're really investing that much in infinite and certainly like i think the collection's been handled by a very small team um i do i have i don't know my assumption would be that they're the multiplayer stuff is going to be supplemented elsewhere and i i don't know what that looks like i would imagine halo infinite maybe maybe going like if if this game's going then why not the rest of them i just wonder what the order would be and what like the like what what would the incentive be to okay here's the here's the first game with no multiplayer and then the last one right good luck right yeah you know like what is that even or yeah or here's the collection which they would have to reinvest in despite the fact that it has no they could really only sell it because there's no micro transactions in it so would that would it be less valuable to them in that sense or would you bring just would you just bring the multiplayer of infinite it's weird i don't know all of those sound possible because all because it seems like the messaging and the strategy seems like not particularly ironed out like why is gears ultimately why why do the first gears and then e-day is definitely coming before the other two gears games or potentially like based on what like their their current release schedule is so you're gonna go from the prequel into one and then nothing and then have them wait for two which is going to be undoubtedly like a less modern experience i don't know you understand like this is like a very confusing space to be in and i would imagine it's very confusing for them and I earnestly think they just want to rip this band-aid off as quick like they just want to rip the band-aid off and I think this is kind of that the first step in that Dustin it looks like you're gonna I have a I have a tinfoil hat theory that um Halo since 343 and now Halo Studios took over uh no one has really been impressed with really any of their campaigns overall and I know some people were like, well, actually, Halo 4 is really good and stuff like that.

1:52:57But overall, none of them were able to capture anywhere near the level of interest or overall reception as the Bungie campaigns. So I wonder if at this point with Halo Infinite winding down, Halo Infinite multiplayer was free to play, right, Chris? Yeah. So I wonder if the move is that they're like, OK, we can have a smaller team and we can go and remake Halo one's campaign and we're going to put our full force into a multiplayer only Halo game. And that's going to go everywhere. We can use the basis of infinite because people generally overall, that was their best multiplayer that three, four, three slash Halo studios made period.

1:53:41And that can be multi-platform and they can just keep riding off the fumes of those bungee campaigns. Maybe they remake two, two campaign three campaign or whatever. and they can have a live service multiplayer halo that exists everywhere that doesn't have any strings attached to the campaign because they can do that separately yeah i don't know that also sounds possible which is you know what i mean like it all it's all valid i think i think that would be an interesting route to go on uh you'd have your hands full with two and ever remaking halo 2 and and 3 like that's the kind of the thing that good luck but yeah this is all very interesting stuff and uh it's finally happening it kind of feels it feels surreal that it's like it's kind of came out of nowhere and so i not out of nowhere like we kind of expected it but like it i guess the day and date stuff is the most interesting part of this yeah and then it wasn't infinite i guess you know i i've also just uh i think i've just continuously underestimated their aggression and i don't know why i've continued to do that maybe just to hedge my bet in some way and not look too ambitious and aggressive but their lack of temperance is what'd you say chris i'm sorry i keep telling you man like they just want to get the fuck out of it it seems like it's funny colin you're like i haven't been ambitious enough when anytime xbox has announced a game for the past year you've said i look forward to playing it on playstation very boldly yeah almost every time in fact yeah that's true that's true fair enough touche touche indeed um i guess we can leave it there for now there's really not much more to say i don't think but that's big news we wanted to make sure to stitch that in and it would have felt weird to wait a week yeah and we would have had to deal with so many people like being annoying about it you know so i think we made the right choice yeah for sure all right we'll get back into the show we're going to say goodbye to chris now chris we'll see you next week yeah i'll be back next week bye guys enjoy the rest of the show and dustin let's get back into it the website tech for gamers um this has been circulating in playstation circles they wrote a story a few days ago now says hell divers 2 studio now developing self-funded new action ip in unreal engine so we already knew that Arrowhead had kind of decided to move on from working with Sony.

1:56:11They're obviously going to continue to support Helldivers 2. I suppose there's a possibility they do a Helldivers 3 in the future. But I think that they've made it a sufficient amount of money to go out on their own and get away from Sony. They've been with Sony for a long time as a second party with the original Helldivers as well. So here's what they wrote. They wrote, quote, after amassing a dedicated group of fans with the original Helldivers, Arrowhead took the gaming scene by storm with the sequel's addictive co-op gameplay loop two years ago the game has come a long way via updates and has become one of the best live service offerings however the studio has also been planning on developing a whole new title on the side for a while now we haven't found a job listing for a senior system designer which mentions it will be a co-op action game based on a new ip there's not too much more to say than this it's an unreal engine game also not a huge surprise remember that hell divers and hell divers 2 are built on a defunct a long defunct engine that makes it incredibly hard to update.

1:57:02And it's probably a root cause of some of the early problems Helldivers 2 experienced. So them moving to something new is going to be exciting for them. I also want to note that I would be shocked with Sony's acquisitions of Firewalk and Haven that Arrowhead wasn't an acquisition target. And they, I would assume, turned Sony down. If Sony didn't offer to buy Arrowhead, especially after Helldivers 2 came out, then they are totally deficient in choices and choice making, especially when you buy game studios like Haven and Firewalk that are complete botched operations. So I'm curious. I mean, this is just a little something to talk about.

1:57:42Sony is going to slowly lose their grasp of Arrowhead as their contracts expire for Helldivers.

1:57:49I always feel like I don't want to read into it too much because I just don't know. And everyone's been pretty tight lipped. I haven't heard anything. So it's just conjecture. But I don't know, Dustin, if you agree, it just feels like there's like some beef between the sides. Over. Handling of PSN. The outage, maybe not believing in the game and marketing and like how much bigger it could have been if they actually cared about it. But that could be nothing. They could be all it could be all roses bound on the scenes for all I know. What are your thoughts? Yeah, well, clearly it was not marketed a crazy amount.

1:58:20um so it i don't know if it felt like sony didn't believe and i guess you could say they didn't believe in it like they believed in concord right no they didn't so there's that element but i think more importantly there is the element of the playstation network requirement that was implemented after the game's launch to people that had purchased the game in territories that you could not get a PlayStation network. It was just completely fumbled. Uh, and my guess is that they did not really like that at all, that suddenly the game that they were pouring their blood, sweat and tears into and had a huge success has this major, you know, multiple steps backwards implemented by its publisher that already seemingly from our perspective, didn't even do a lot to push the game.

1:59:14It was successful on its own footing of being an awesome game. So I think there's an element too where Helldivers 2 now has so much cachet that if they can, if they have the cash to fund their own IP and release it themselves, and even if it's half as successful as Helldivers, that's going to be awesome for them. And they're going to own it. I think about Larian with Baldur's Gate 3. Obviously, they had a Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2, and those were successful, but nowhere near as successful as them being attached to a huge IP, the Dungeons and Dragons IP with Baldur's Gate 3. And now, I mean, Game of the Year winner, millions of copies sold.

2:00:01They're doing their own IP, and they're going to own it. And it's going to be way bigger than their own IP beforehand because now they have the cache. so they're kind of in the same position where it's like well if you have the means and you don't need sony anymore and all they did was um fuck up your game massively at certain points do it uh because certainly i know for for a lot of the audience of this podcast it's like yeah hell divers 2 is so great whatever arrowhead does next we're interested yeah we're going to be keeping a very close eye on so it seems like a winning position to be in i i wonder yeah i I wonder what they want to do moving forward and probably just focus.

2:00:42I think they've said focus just on one thing at a time. They've made a lot of money, buys you a lot of security. Yeah, I'm interested. It just seems like one that got away for Sony. Out of all the acquisitions that they've made recently, that make no sense at all. That was actually the one that made a lot of sense. Because they rattled off like Bluepoint and Housemarque. Those obviously made sense. But then you got like Bungie and Firewalk and Haven. and it's like what are we doing and then arrowhead kind of slips through the cracks that's why i just feel like based on my own conversations with people at studios in the past when i've interviewed them and asked them these questions directly especially at insomniac about like has sony tried to buy you before and you'd get a lot of different answers meaning that like yeah they obviously have and so maybe they didn't maybe sony didn't push hard enough but i feel like i would want to be independent yeah if you could do it once you can do it again although it's risky too because you are missing out on your chance to cat like it's guaranteed cash out money it's just a matter of for a lot of people at the studio you know not not the people in the trenches but for the people that founded the team and stuff and it's hard to say no to that but you might believe and larian's a great example where it's like we'll we'll bet on ourselves and i think i think arrowhead has one pause again...

2:01:56It's very similar to I think what Bungie had with destiny to into marathon really and how they kind of squandered it with some people I think where you like you buy a lot of like you said a lot of value of value of the customer. over time by satisfying their needs. And then they're interested in what you do next, regardless of what it is. And so I would just leverage that and, and bet on yourself. I think you're totally right. So hell divers to out now. Also, do we have it here? I guess we can talk about it later because we're going to talk about some sales data, but I was my instinct about hell divers on Xbox.

2:02:30The data being wrong via Sakana was right. because remember it didn't chart last year last month and it made it seem like it just didn't sell at all and like that's just not that can't be and that's been corrected but we can get to that a little later over at the game post they write sony's horizon zero dawn movie to begin filming in 2026 targeting 2027 release they write quote sony confirms its live action horizon zero Dawn movie has a finished script and plans to start filming in 2026 aiming for a 2027 release according to a new court filing. Back in 2022, Sony revealed plans for a Horizon live action TV show at Netflix with the Umbrella Academy's Steve Blackman attached to lead it.

2:03:10That series quietly fell apart in 2024 after misconduct allegations surfaced against its showrunner. Early this year in January during Sony CES presentation, the company announced that a Horizon Zero Dawn feature film was in the works with Columbia Pictures, the same studio behind Sony's Uncharted 20 from 2022 and Gran Turismo from 2023 adaptations. What they're not noticing here is that Sony owns Columbia, so that's not a huge surprise. Now there's a new update. We finally have new info on when the Horizon Zero Dawn movie is expected to shoot and release. They write in Sony's ongoing lawsuit against Tencent over Light of Monorum, which the company describes as a slavish clone of its Horizon franchise.

2:03:47New details have surfaced about the long awaited Horizon Zero Dawn movie. According to a legal document obtained by the Gamepost head of PlayStation Productions, Asad Kisselbash, revealed that the Horizon Zero Dawn movie already has a working script and Sony is actively looking for a director. The company is aiming to start filming in 2026 with a planned release in 2027. The actual quote from the document that was filed on October 16th is, quote, and this is from Kisselbash in his declaration, we are in development for a film based on Horizon in partnership with Columbia Pictures. We already have a working script and are actively searching for a director with the goal of shooting the picture in 2026 and releasing it in 2027.

2:04:20The live action film follows the recent collaborations between Columbia Pictures and PlayStation productions on Uncharted and Gran Turismo. So we wait and try to find out. And by the way, this was written as a series of declarations for people inside the studio as Sony hits back a Tencent over the light of Modernum slash Horizon lawsuit that's brewing with basically a series of executive level people at Sony saying like, this is why Horizon is important and this is why like this is hurts us. And specifically, he writes that she's, quote unquote, a key icon in the anticipated film and her importance, quote, to the flywheel of franchise building.

2:04:59Dustin, are you excited about the Horizon Zero Dawn film that already has a script and is ready to film? Yeah. We've talked many times about how PlayStation Productions has surprised us with their film output, because even even for me, Gran Turismo, which on paper is a game or a movie that I really shouldn't be interested in at all. I saw and I was like, oh, that's that was pretty good. And Uncharted, of course, when we heard about the casting of Tom Holland and and just all the kind of lead up to that film, we were like, I don't know about this. And then it turned out all right. So I think this could be cool.

2:05:41I can't say I'm I'm insanely excited, but I could see it being like a big spectacle movie. Like this is sounds like a prime IMAX movie and not comparing it to Transformers. But I could see the CG of the robot dinosaurs looking pretty cool. I'm mostly really curious on who they will cast as Aloy. I'm not really sure I saw some people on Twitter like suggesting it should be the girl that was in the movie it the the red haired girl from that she's also ironically she's in the new HBO series with Tim Robinson the chair company she plays his daughter and she would Sophia Lillis that sounds right let me see yeah she gained prominence for her roles as Beverly Marsh in the horror films It and It Chapter 2.

2:06:42And as a teenager with telekinesis in the Netflix drama series, I am not okay with this.

2:06:49She looks like she could play her. She could be Aloy. So, but yeah, I wonder too, with this timing, Colin, because it's, what, slated to come out in 2027. This could fit nicely that with a assumingly a third video game yeah that can't wait if it's successful they could kind of get these out and not have to worry about waiting for the next game yeah i'm um i'm stoked about this and if it's done right because i think horizon is fucking awesome i unapologetically believe that and it could be the start of something cool and i think a movie is probably the right direction. I mean, I prefer TV shows.

2:07:34I just think it's going to be expensive to make. And I know this really had nothing to do with how it fell apart, according to what people report about the showrunner, but it'd probably be a pretty expensive project to do it for eight episodes or 10 episodes and then expose yourself to doing it over and over again, as opposed to maybe making a film trilogy that's just grafted onto the actual movies or the actual games. I, um, it goes against a little bit what I believe just in that I do prefer TV over movies typically, but you can really spend a lot of time and money and make it really, really nice and look, again, you got to do it.

2:08:12It's going to be dude. Imagine, I mean, it wouldn't be entirely possible, obviously, but practical making it as practical as possible would be pretty cool. Yeah. And they could do it. It would be really expensive. I would assume, but it would look awesome if they did it right. I mean, I still I mean, it's machines. It's not biologic or biologics as it were. But like, I still look at a movie like Jurassic Park and I'm like, this is incredible. Like and just even the original Star Wars trilogy. It's like this is good shit. Dudes on pickup trucks driving by fucking Battlestar Galactica style like model kits that they've pasted together over and over again to make Death Star trenches and shit.

2:08:51It looks fucking amazing. So I don't know. It'll be interesting to see and i'll be interested to see how people feel about it there seems to be such a split between how people feel about horizon and its sales numbers that i think there's something there but i think people calling it the avatar of games is true where it has that feel like avatar is this inexplicably huge thing but no one seems to like it yeah yeah and i wonder too how a non-gaming audience will respond to horizon i would imagine that if it if it's visually there then it could be like people would be into it but like how would uh who is i'm trying to remember who you said was is it your sister that was watching the last of us yeah yeah but yeah doesn't know anything oh yeah what would she think about horizon i don't i don't think she has any knowledge of Verizon.

2:09:50It's funny you bring that up too because I was talking to my dad about some of this stuff when I saw him on Long Island a few weeks ago or a couple weeks ago. I was like, what are you watching? He really likes watching HBO and all these different things. He had still not watched the second season of The Last of Us. I was like, it's so funny, man. He would be not exposed to spoilers or anything like that. He has no idea what's going to happen there. I wonder how this franchise will... I wonder who they're aiming at. Is it going to be like a young adult thing? Horizon kind of has a young adult feel.

2:10:21It's not quite. It's like Hunger Games ish. In a way. Maybe a little more adult than that, but I wonder like where they're going to try to place it. If it's going to be like a popcorn flick or if it's going to be like something kind of serious and sci-fi and gritty, which would be kind of cool. Right. Yeah, I don't know. We'll see. All right. There's some new information about this Resident Evil Zero remake that's been percolating for a while. MP First has new reporting. We've been citing these guys quite a bit and they have pretty good reporting that I think some other people have corroborated, but this is what they say.

2:11:03Report Resident Evil Zero remake and development, new casting and plot details unearthed. Quote, following the huge success of the Resident Evil remakes, it's no surprise that Capcom continues to work on more projects, remaking classic entries. Among the most requested titles for our current gen treatment are the acclaimed 2000 spinoff focusing on Claire Redfield, Code Veronica, and the GameCube prequel, Resident Evil Zero. Fortunately for fans, the existence of both projects has been repeatedly corroborated by reliable sources, suggesting we'll see them in the near future. We can now confirm that Resident Evil Zero remake is indeed a reality, and we were able to gather some details about the project, including additions to the plot, casting, and information regarding its development.

2:11:39Similar to what has been reported by reputable insiders, we have been told that the Resident Evil Zero remake is a project that has been in development for a few years now. The title has been worked on under the codename Chamber, which works as a clever pun referencing the last name of protagonist Rebecca Chambers, and that voice and performance capture work with new actors for the leads would have begun at some point in 2024. One of the actors joining the new cast is John McLaren, known for playing Star-Lord in the 2021 game adaptation of Guardians of the Galaxy and for his roles in Far Cry 5.

2:12:06We know this thanks to a mention of the actor's resume where Project Chamber is listed as one of his projects and is noted as a lead role. Additionally, the project is overseen by Beyond Capture Studios, a motion capture company that has previously collaborated with Capcom on games such as Resident Evil 4 Remake and Street Fighter VI. There are some plot details too. I won't get into any of those. This, I think, just goes to show that this project is real. I think we've had plenty of corroboration from reliable sources, as this piece has indicated, about both Code Veronica and Zero. I wonder what order they're going to release them in.

2:12:40They seem to have a lot of information about Zero more than they would about Code Veronica, but Code Veronica would go first, I would assume. And it could just be what they had access to, so I wouldn't read too much into that. I really love Resident Evil Zero. I always have. When it came to GameCube in the fall of 2002, I remember it very well. It was probably the first Resident Evil game I really obsessed over in terms of trying to play it perfectly. Getting far and being like, I used too many items, used too much ammo. I'm just going to start again and go forward. but it is like kind of like one of the offbeat games that wasn't widely played because it was until it came it came to we later on and then finally came to like imported to ps3 and ps4 i think um in like 2016 2017 so people have access to it now but it's not a widely played one so i'm actually excited for people to get their hands on it um what are your thoughts here on resident evil zero remake it's definitely real yeah i am pumped for this just because every capcom I mean, almost every Capcom game right now, whether I'm interested in it or not, something like Street Fighter has been awesome so far.

2:13:41And the Resident Evil two, three and four remake, while three is probably the not probably is definitely the weakest one of those three. They're all excellent games. And four in particular, I think was maybe a little bit more. I don't want to say scary, but so many people hold that game so close that going and remaking it is probably a little more touchy. But I and I still think the original is great, too. It's one of those ones where the original and the remake both offer something and they both can stand as great games. So I've never played Resident Evil Zero, so I'm excited to play it. Maybe I'll try to sneak in because I think it's available on PS4 now that you can still buy and play it.

2:14:26So I'd like to play it. But yeah, give me give me really anything Resident Evil at this point, other than a weird multiplayer shooter game or something like that, which they've tried. I did notice here, Colin, later after they talk about the plot stuff, it says, interestingly, despite having these details, everything indicates that we still have some time until we see this remake. as recent statements from insider dust golem suggest that we would first see the code veronica remake launch which is currently rumored to be targeting q1 2027 while resident evil zero remake aims for a 2028 yeah that'd be nice and then you can you yeah that's perfect resident evil game a year for the next three years excellent excellent yeah love it i think resident evil 9 is my most anticipated game right now yeah it's up there for me i don't know i don't i don't really there's like almost nothing that I guess intergalactic would be my most anticipated game but we don't really know it's kind of disingenuous in that we don't really know anything about it so we know so much more about Resident Evil 9 that Resident Evil 9 is definitely up there now that I mean earnestly now that Power Watch Simulator is out too which comes out the day we're recording so I'm definitely going to play that after this if I can stay awake I'm still not tired by the way good eventually it's just going to like hopefully like right you'll hit stop on recording and then you're like oh shit I'm out that'd be nice because i need to sleep i mean it's like got to get the uh the brain rested a little bit purging of its toxins and of its all the various things in it all right um i thought this was interesting just to note we have been waiting for this for a while it's a little frustrating i think this does show not the unreliability of insiders but the the nature of flux of plans that they have access to and are privy to that they report on because i think a lot of the people that talk about this stuff are reliable but over at push square our friend And Sammy Barker writes, Xbox and PC sci-fi RPG Starfield won't be revealed for PS5 until next year.

2:16:21Quote, Starfield was seen as the flagship post-acquisition console exclusive for Xbox Series X and S when it launched in 2023, but it failed to really resonate with consumers to the level Microsoft had hoped. The game has been rumored for PS5 ever since, but we're now approaching the end of 2025 and it's still not been confirmed for the console. The last we heard is that Bethesda is reworking the game and wants to align all of its improvements with its PlayStation debut. It's been touted for a spring 2026 release on Sony's console. But according to a reliable, reliable rumor monger, Nate, the hate, who's clearly extremely well connected, the port won't be announced this year.

2:16:51Requiring to fan inquiries on X, he said, quote, I believe the announcement will be in 2026 unless plans change. And then one user pushed back to the rumor, sarcastically pointing out that the game has been going to PS5 since 2024, according to you, to which Nate, the hate doubled down and it'll go to PS5 next year. So this is believable, but. I don't know, I think the reason I wanted to talk about this most is that I just I'm kind of becoming increasingly curious about this game because the more time goes on, the more people are like, I think you would actually really like it. But I'm just so overwhelmed by the idea of it.

2:17:23And I also feel a little. It feels a little I don't want to say disingenuous. That's not the right word, but like I'm not an Elder Scrolls person, like I'm not really excited about Bethesda games. And I authentically don't feel a lot of excitement for it, even coming to PS5. I'm like, I don't know that I really give a shit. I think it'll do pretty well though what do you think I feel like it's I'm trying to take my personal bias and dislike of this game away from my commentary here but I feel like kind of people have made up their mind about this game if you were amped about it then you either played it on PC or Xbox I guess there's a possibility that you're on on the PlayStation side and you're like man I can't wait to play Starfield despite the very mixed reaction to it.

2:18:15I don't want to say everyone ate it. There were lots of people that really liked it. People on our crew that really liked it. Personally, I put 10 hours in and did not see really anything that I liked about it. So the most interesting thing to me, I forgot about this because it links to another Push Square article from August about Starfield is getting some hefty gameplay reworks for its PlayStation 5 release, which would make sense that you mentioned the shifting nature that maybe they did initially plan on trying to push this out onto PlayStation 5 faster, but then they decided they were going to try to make the game better for a PlayStation audience.

2:18:56And that really is, it's going to be a huge relaunch for that game. And if they can come out and, you know, show off all these crazy improvements that But maybe you would even have someone like me be interested in giving it another look. I wouldn't buy it again on PlayStation 5 because I purchased it on Steam for full price and then played 10 hours and dipped out. But that would be something that could convince me at least to give it another look. And who knows, maybe it could be a huge seller once they sort out whatever these major gameplay improvements would be. um yeah i think you're absolutely right they've had a lot of time to sit with it i wonder do we even know how many people work it but that's the game studios right now let's see it's got to be a couple hundred at least oh wait wait 450 yeah all right so definitely multiple teams i was i guess i was wondering like did this have some sort of material effect on elder scroll six where it's like we gotta we gotta sit with this game for a minute um but there's no way they would have you know but i bet you they have a third of the team or something still working on starfield content um maybe a quarter of the team you'd imagine most everyone's working on elder scroll 6 i would hope that they were smart enough not to be looking beyond it and being like fall out 5 and todd calm down um but yeah i'm just i really appreciate what bethesda does and fall three is a seminal game for me and was a really inspirational, influential, eye opening experience for me when I played it.

2:20:35I really loved that game. But and I love New Vegas as well. But then I'm playing Skyrim and not really resonating with it. And then Fallout four specifically when I was like, I don't really like this. I realized it was a time and place thing. 2008 and 2010, when those games came out, Fallout three and Fallout New Vegas, very different than now. And I'm not saying that those games wouldn't hold up i think i think when the fallout 3 remake comes out i'm gonna buy it and play it and it'll be incredibly nostalgic for me i'll be unable to judge it through the the the prism of today which is why actually oblivion would be a little more interesting to me because i really have no experience with that game so i really don't know and i maybe i love it maybe i won't but i what i'm saying is i just realized that i don't i don't think i really like bethesda games like a lot of people do i just don't think i think fall 3 was the anomaly and I think it was and by the way it could be that fallout 4 would have been that game for me if I had played it at that time but I don't think so because as a console gamer especially I never played a game like fallout 3 like that like I didn't know games like that really even existed and they really didn't and they don't like these wide open crazy games like this games like mass effect that came out the year before you know it would had the facade of being open but it really wasn't it was a bunch of choices and missions but it wasn't like this thing of like do whatever the fuck you want and everything you do matters it's like so it could have been any game that probably did that to me in hindsight um but i know i know thematically people are like dude starfield is like so up your alley and that i do appreciate because i love sci-fi and space travel and all that kind of shit i love it it's awesome so um but honestly like even if it came to playstation at the time i don't know that i would have played it just based on like my experience and again i'm not shitting on skyrim i'm not shitting on fallout 4 i'm just saying it's not it's not really for me i had a jump scare this morning because they announced the fallout 4 anniversary edition which is just fallout 4 with all of its dlc oh yeah and i saw fallout i don't know my mind just saw fallout anniversary i was like holy shit they're doing at fallout 3 remake and i was like oh it's just uh fallout 4 again but they're they're bringing it to switch too which is cool i guess yeah yeah we'll see how that does i wonder like i don't know i guess i guess there are quite a few big third-party games that do well on switch but i'm curious about like the overall audience purchasing pat like like their behavior willy most we sell quite a few games i think switch is our second best selling console um but i just wonder like what people like because you have all these you have an attach rate that's whatever x and then you have like all these charts of games that sell 40 million copies or something like that you're like all right this must consume a ton of that number so like how is everything else doing do that does anyone care i don't know i'll find out when PlayStation goes away and then I have to go play Switch again like I told you was going to happen.

2:23:41That's right, dude. I'm going to be on the Switch too. Over on Switch, you're using your mouse mode Joy-Cons to play Civilization and your low frame rates. It reminds me of when I was playing I think I don't know if it was a call. No, it was like a 007 game on the Wii and I was playing it online and I'm like it was like 2008 or something and I'm like what am I doing? you know like like what am i do like what am i doing like i feel like the online i could be making this up but i'm pretty sure the online mode was such that like it didn't even save your data like you just like signed in and like had a name and played right because there was no id system on this on the way and i was like dude what am i doing like it was definitely an eye-opening experience right all right you're not going to care about this but this is big news um ea announced that they have renewed the NFL license, but there is a little bit of a wrinkle that I found reported somewhere that I wanted to get into as well.

2:24:43So a press release from Electronic Arts noted that, quote, EA, EA Sports and the National Football League today announced an expanded multi-year exclusive agreement to grow American football worldwide. This is the most comprehensive partnership to date between EA Sports and the NFL. Under the partnership, EA Sports and the NFL will continue to drive innovation and expansion of the celebrated Madden NFL franchise, which will continue as the exclusive action simulation game for NFL football. The partnership will also support new content and experiences in EA Sports College Football, as well as entirely new large scale interactive experiences for football fans built around community, social connection, self-expression and gameplay.

2:25:17So we won't get too much deeper into the PR stuff because who gives a shit? I mean, what they're basically saying is that they've renewed their deal. I can't find the exact terms of it, but it's reported that this is through 2030. So that will be that will make it at that point a 25 year arrangement because it was after sega's nfl 2k 5 2k and then madden 2005 do you know this do you remember this whole thing about these games it's a big deal at the time like the i remember 2k being 20 bucks right that was the big thing is like they sega basically just came to market 30 cheaper um and a lot of people consider that a better game than madden as well and that was the one year Madden really got bodied and EA basically got scared, I mean reasonably so and just locked the license down so that Sega couldn't make the games anymore and that's literally how Madden existed for 10 years or so before that but there were many other NFL games especially on like SNES and Genesis and PS1 so like Sony even did their own NFL game for a while through 989 Studios which was one of the questions from the Sacred League but there is a there is a snag here sports business journal writes quote EA sports in the NFL are extending their exclusive licensing deal for console and PC video games along with expanding their work content work content and experiences such as the Madden cast and for EA sports college football it's a multi-year extension through though an NFL spokesperson wouldn't comment on the financials involved NFL EVP CRO Rennie Anderson said the deal last through the 2030 season so there we go no outside agencies played a role in the agreement but SBJ has learned that this deal is between the league and EA Sports as the NFLPA and EA Sports have their own separate deal for name, image, and likeness rights and other details for Madden NFL.

2:27:02Sources said the NFLPA and EA Sports are still far apart on a deal to extend their relationship beyond February 2027 and that the union is evaluating the impact of EA's leveraged buyout by Silver Lake Affinity Partners and the Saudi Arabian PIF under its existing contract. Major contracts such as this typically include change in control provisions. Notably, the NFLPA did not do a license with EA Sports to include pro players in college football 26 as it did last year. Without a union extension, the game would lose its real-life player identity starting in 2027. Very interesting. I'm surprised that this isn't being circulated more.

2:27:34What they're basically saying is that the NFLPA is privy to this deal. And they're like, raise the price. Like, everyone seems to be doing pretty well. We're locked into this deal. We have a provision in the contract that says if the ownership changes, we get a new deal. and Madden is worthless without the players. You could have the teams. There are old sports games in the NES and SNES era where you had the teams, but not the players. There were some where you had the players, but not the teams. Locking them together is really, really important. So I know you probably don't have anything to say about this, but I had to put it on the record that they might have a potential problem beginning with, I guess, Madden 28 if they don't get this locked down.

2:28:18so in that situation then you would they would just have to make the game they could use the teams but they would have like glup shadow as the quarterback of what they would what they would do is what college football used to do and i and other sports like other pro sports games without the players association license would do which would that the numbers would be the same they can't they can't really do anything about that so like oh no you know if your favorite player is is Billy Billy's and he's number three on the Colts and it's like the number three will be that guy and like he'll have his like you won't probably look very much like him but he'll be like a generic whatever guy and then he'll have all the stats and all of his you know so they would do that to keep the realism but yeah no and that's what college football was like because of the the lack of NIL stuff but it would be a huge I mean it wouldn't be possible to do the game I don't think without without everyone on board and it's funny that this is exactly what I was saying about the about the deal with the Saudis at all it's like why are you selling now you're like renewing all these deals you just launched battlefield everything is going really well like why are you cashing out I feel like you could rate like get more if you just waited but it seems like some people are going to hold them to the fire now including the NFLPA which is a very savvy organization so um yeah just wanted to throw that out there Madden continues to crush.

2:29:41College football continues to crush, of course.

2:29:46This is just a few business things I wanted to get into, and then we can get into what we're playing. We reported a couple of weeks ago, I want to say about the maybe it was last week. I don't really remember, but about the exit of Mark Alexis Cote from Ubisoft, who was there for a long time and basically in charge of shepherding Assassin's Creed and a couple of other things. he wrote a note on LinkedIn that's interesting because it conflicts with what Ubisoft had said about his exit and they basically had said about Mark on Mark Alexis's exit from Ubisoft that it was voluntary but he's saying that it wasn't and he wrote last week quote the past 24 hours have been deeply emotional reading all your public and private messages has reminded me of so many moments people and shared dreams from the past two decades I've been archiving all of them something to revisit one day when I am old, smiling at what we built together.

2:30:38From the messages of colleagues, friends, and fans, a recurring theme has emerged that I feel I need to clarify. Many of you have expressed surprise that I would choose to leave Assassin's Creed after so many years, especially given the passion I still hold for it. The truth is simple. I did not make that choice. Ubisoft decided to transfer the leadership of the Assassin's Creed franchise to someone closer to its new organizational structure. A different position was mentioned, but it did not carry the same scope, mandate, or continuity with the work I had been entrusted with in recent years. I want to be clear that I hold no resentment.

2:31:04Ubisoft has been my home for all my professional life and i will always be grateful for the people the projects and the belief that together we could create worlds that inspire millions but i also owe it to my team's past and present to say this plainly i did not walk away i stayed at my post until ubisoft asked me to step aside what do you uh make of that i have no love for the assassin's creed franchise obviously there's going to be a major upheaval at ubisoft with everything that's going on in their reorganization um they laid people off at red links as well recently which is the trial studio and they're laying people off at massive which is the division studio so they're starting to contract as they right size because there's just way too many people working there anyway um but what's with the the shadiness right that's what it comes down to me is like why would they just be like uh why don't they just say the truth i mean i guess the truth would make them you would think that maybe their mindset is like okay if we say that we are letting this guy go then that makes us look bad but wouldn't surely they would know that it's like oh well he can just come out and say that he didn't choose to leave like what in what reality would they think they would get away with that yeah maybe it doesn't make any sense maybe there I mean I don't want to say it's a miscommunication but it's like maybe there was something to like we you left like you left you chose to leave without really clarifying the full story is that he chose to leave because you basically demoted him.

2:32:29Right. Which is what most people do in those situations. Because he does say here a different position was mentioned, but it didn't carry the same scope mandate or continuity with the work or whatever. So it could have been possible that Yubisaw was like, listen, this is what we're doing. This will be your new job. Even though it's, you know, demotion or not the same. And he was like, nah, I'm not doing that. So I guess you could argue from their perspective, he is choosing to not accept the new position thus choosing to leave yeah yeah i mean it's just so i guess it's just a just pr speak depending on how you want to look at it um he is a fairly important person though i was looking on mobi games for um assassin's creed shadows which came out earlier this year he's listed as assassin's creed franchise vice president and executive producer so they didn't trust him with a lot and shadows i thought i mean i think shadows was a botched operation from a thematic standpoint i mean well just the way they executed the thematic standpoint but um it seemed to have done well and i don't i know there's a long been a division in assassin's creed fandom about like what assassin's creed is and it seems like the the people that like ac2 and you know some stuff from that era you know don't like the new stuff there was kind of that period where no one seemed to like it like with syndicate and things like that and then it seemed to kind of come out of the wilderness with odyssey and then valhalla i thought people those games sold extremely well and i'm surprised i know i know that they are they're like i have no interest in playing them they're they're like massive fucking enterprises but i thought they sold materially well and i i mean i remember saying on the show that i was surprised by how well assassin's great shadows was selling because it seemed like everyone was so down on it but it's a it was a hit so i just wonder i wonder what their thought process is there obviously they want to have new people involved.

2:34:15Also, it's important to note that because this is a new joint venture with Tencent, I mean, the people at Ubisoft, the Gilmots that run the show don't really run it anymore. And Tencent might have its own idea of who they might want to charge. But for people that don't know, I mean, he was the executive producer of Assassin's Creed Mirage, the executive producer of Assassin's Creed Valhalla, the executive producer of Assassin's Creed Odyssey. and he directed Assassin's Creed 3, Assassin's Creed Syndicate, and Assassin's Creed Brotherhood. So he's got a pretty deep well of experience with the franchise.

2:34:57I'm sure he'll land on his feet. A lot of people are not landing on their feet because there's just so many people getting laid off from all these ventures, but someone of his pedigree, I'm sure, will be fine. Speaking of executive upheaval, we talked last week about What I feel like is kind of a bad situation going on with Remedy. They reported that they basically lost every dollar that they invested into FBC Firebreak. They are running in the red. Cash on hand is fairly substantial, like 20 to 25 million dollars, but they're going to burn through that quickly. Alan Wake 2 obviously took a long time to really reap benefits, as we know.

2:35:36They write here on a press release that they have to release because they're traded. They say inside information, change of CEO and remedy entertainment. Marcus Mackey appointed as the interim CEO and Henry Osterland assumes the role of the chairman of the board. We don't have to pretend to know these names. These are all guys that have been with Housemarque for a while, though. Marcus Mackey, the guy who's taking over as interim CEO, has been with Housemarque for 30 years. I'm sorry, remedy. I'm sorry. Remedy for 30 years. Yeah. And yeah, pardon me. and uh so i'm keeping my eye on this i guess is what i want to say so here's something i didn't think of last week when we were talking about uh fbc firebreak how much money did they spend that they are still in the red after taking both money from playstation and xbox on game services you know because you hear all the time about stories like oh we went to game pass because it made our game, you know, we were no longer at risk, which normally that's where indie companies that are, their games are not as expensive as something like this.

2:36:43But FBC Fryer Break doesn't scream of a game that is, was insanely expensive. I'm not saying it was cheap, but when I looked at the Steam reviews last week, people were talking about how content light it is. So maybe they fucked around for a long time, trying to figure out how to make it work, blew through a bunch of money. The game comes out. It's not very good. It's content light and the price of admission that they got for both PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass. And they're still in the red. Ouch. Yeah, that's pretty bad. Yeah, I'm worried about Remedy. They obviously are working with Rockstar, and so they have a steady supply.

2:37:22I mean, they have multiple teams going in there. Some of their games are going to be successful, but I just think.

2:37:30Yeah. I don't understand why they wanted to invest in that game and what they were thinking they were going to do. Control and Alan Wake are not that popular. To make a spin-off of that universe in a multiplayer realm,

2:37:50it's not going to work. I could have told them that. What a waste. And you have to wonder if people that are working on it even know that this shit's going into the void. because it's not even like delusion. It's like, it's kind of stupid to just be like, yeah, we're going to do this thing and try to enter it into the market, into this incredibly saturated market, base it on this niche IP, hope for the best, try to flood the field. And again, it's what I said last week. They bragged about a million players and I'm sick of hearing about player bases. want to know about numbers money made and yeah that apparently 15 million dollars they lost on it which is frankly not a lot of money for other studios that could lose 15 million dollars on a project and actually survive without even having any layoffs but not for them and then speaking of sales numbers and all the rest we do have new information from cercana and we have a lot to talk about here because i'm i feel like i have to do a public service announcement of some sort, because I want to make sure people understand how this works.

2:39:01I think the introduction of Alinea Analytics and other firms that are really interesting, but that kind of project numbers have made it seem that everyone does that. That like anytime you hear a number that's not from a publisher or a developer themselves, that the number can't possibly be anything more than a projection. And I think people look at Serkana like this. circana of course used to be called the mpd group and it has been tracking video game sales in the united states originally only at retail because that was the only option since 1995 so they have a full catalog of how every game is sold um and they became circana i don't know what was it like five six seven years ago something like that um unless things have changed which is possible let me let me back up and explain it when i worked in journalism we had an npd subscription for a while we actually got rid of it while i was there because it is so expensive it was six figures a year to subscribe to npd and get their data and what would happen is and this was during the this was actually there were digital games at this time but it was largely retail driven you know 07, 08, 09.

2:40:14Every month we would get a massive Excel sheet and it would be every game to the absolute literal unit that sold that month at retail in the United States. And in fact, one of our favorite things to do was to scroll to the very bottom because random shit would pop up like an SNES game or like a 32X game, like something that like someone found in the back room of some store and sold it and scanned it. And it went, you know, whatever. Very similar to, I guess, Nielsen, like they have, I don't know exactly how the numbers are reported. I think it used to be reported through the retailers. And now I think the publishers self-report.

2:40:52And when it was still called the MPD group, a major problem started to erupt. And I don't know if you remember this because the numbers started to become incredibly unreliable because they were not counting digital games. And so the numbers were right as far as like retail. But they were becoming increasingly irrelevant because it's like, well, who gives a shit? Like, is it 60 % of sales, 80 % of sales? And eventually, they overcame this to track digital sales too. Now, my presumption, not being on the inside, is that the numbers are therefore garnered from some combination of retail partners and the publishers themselves.

2:41:28And we know this because Nintendo does not participate. Famously, when you look at Serkan and numbers like the top 20, you'll always see the little carrot icon at the bottom and the carrot icon next to all their Nintendo published games. And it's because they don't report digital sales. So literally they like, there's no insight still as if it's the old days, like where, and that's why when Nintendo announces these numbers, it's like, holy shit, because no one really had, we know the game was big, but not that big because they're kind of keeping it for their own marketing beats and all the rest.

2:41:58The reason I say all this is because the numbers are real and they're accurate. And they're judged by the dollar sales, by the way. So games are not ordered by units sold. They're actually ordered by how much money they made. So if you have like special editions and like the$100 version in the early access and all the kind, it's all in there. That's why you see games like Madden and college football as individual games. And then you see the like the the kickoff pack, which is both of them together. Like it's all counted separately and it goes to show you how big it all is. Ghost of Yotei listed fourth in the United States for the month of September, which runs from August 31st through October 4th.

2:42:41So it was counted for three days. And that three-day period, it managed to be at number four in the United States. And in the year-to-date charts, it is number 18 already after three days. I was talking. So Reese Elliott is going to be on the next episode of Sacred Symbols. Plus, I probably should have said that earlier in the show. And it was a great episode. And we talk about Ghost Yote. And I don't know if it was on the show or off the show, but we were talking about it. And I'm like, my gut feeling is like two and a half million units. And he's like, really? That's like, he's like, that's exactly what we think.

2:43:14And he actually published that piece today from their blog. At two and a half million units sold of a first party game, that's at least$70 because there is an$80 addition to the game as well, but we won't even include that. If you assume that Alinea is right, and based on their numbers and where it tracks on Serkana, I think that they're in the realm. That was where my gut was. And it's not 2.5 million, by the way, in the United States. You're trying to glean information by how it performed here for a global audience. So we're saying 2.5 million globally. You're looking at$175 million in revenue.

2:43:52If what Nate Fox was saying was true, that the game had a similar budget to Ghost of Tsushima, and let's even say that it's 1.5x that budget, they've already made $50 million in profit. I'm not saying that that's a lot of money, because as we say, the actions in games as a service. You're going to extract 50, 100, 200, 300 million dollars out of your biggest games when you're releasing single player games. But the level of skepticism about this is strange to me because I'm not saying that Sony's happy with it. I'm not saying that Alinea's numbers are accurate. What I'm saying is that Ghost of Yote in three days sold more copies than Doom the Dark Ages has sold in five months on three platforms.

2:44:47So let's not and I'm not shitting on Doom the Dark Ages. I platinum Doom the Dark Ages. I really love that game. What I'm saying is let's not understate the success of Ghost of Yotei. It seems to have done pretty well. Serkana says it's in line with how Ghost of Tsushima sold. That's also the reporting out of Europe. The PS4 was far more installed when Ghost of Tsushima came out people may remember ghost of shima was the last consequential ps4 exclusive so i guess what i'm saying i'm going on and on dustin but i just wanted to say there's if you're skeptical of these of the reporting of these numbers then you're skeptical of the very numbers that the industry itself uses to try to figure out what everyone else is doing and subscribe and at least in my experience i don't know if it's different now i don't think it is pay enormous amounts of money for it and by the way the reason the numbers are never public is because you're not allowed to share them.

2:45:41And I don't know if you know this, the word back in the day was that they would often, when they suspected that people were leaking, like, and they were trying to figure out who it was that they would give different numbers for certain people and try to track who was like sharing shit. Because back when NeoGAF was like the place to be, I don't know if you remember, like shit would get posted there. And then you remember like people would post and be like, they couldn't say the number because they didn't want to give it away. They would be like, it's more than this, but less than this. And people, it would be almost like a puzzle.

2:46:07Like this publisher announced this game sales. This is this game. This publisher announced this game sales. This is this game. This source says that it's between this and this. That's that game. Therefore, we can figure out that this game was probably in this range. It was fun. No one even sees the magic in that anymore. They just assume that everyone's lying. So I just wanted to throw that out there. Like it's not the unless things have changed again, since I was familiar with the MPD group and had access to that shit, their accurate numbers to the digit garnered from official sources to, like I said, would literally scrape Dreamcast games when they were sold.

2:46:45And they have all of the data. You can have all of the access to all of it if you're a subscriber. So anyway, I'm sorry. I'm going on and on, but it just bothered the fuck out of me. Right. Well, this has to do with the Ghost of Yote. Can we call it a boycott? Is it still a boycott? I guess it's still a boycott, even if it wasn't very successful, right? people will make up or go with whatever angle they can find to try to make the, I don't want to call it truth, the reality they want to see be their truth. And I mean, you remember back early days, PlayStation five, I remember seeing this sentiment all the time, not from anybody worth listening to, but the sentiment of like, oh, well, those PS five sales, Those are all just sitting in some scalpers garage.

2:47:35It's nonsense. It's like, shut up. No, it doesn't even make any sense when you think about it. Like, so a scalper bought them and then is sitting on them until they're less valuable. Yeah. Like scalpers moving things. It's like it's I'm not trying to be an asshole, but like. I'm just so surprised how stupid some people are. It's like, what are you talking about? Not everything is a conspiracy. and they'll throw things out like, oh, Assassin's Creed Shadows was disappointing and Star Wars Outlaws was disappointing. It's like they're disappointed to those publishers. It didn't mean that those games didn't sell millions of copies.

2:48:09They did. It's all about expectations. If you don't understand that in a three day period, a game appearing at number 18 when it is on one console is an impressive feat in the biggest gaming market in the world. come on man you know it just it just it's just kind of and i'll say this too and we can talk about yote later but it's like what is woke about like i'm still trying to figure out like what's woke about ghost of yote woman i've seen this woman bad i've seen this tweeted at me like girl boss it's like it is like i'm like 30 something hours into it i don't understand how it's a girl ball because it's because it's a woman protagonist.

2:48:55Like, what are we even talking about? It's like, oh, she's unattractive. She really isn't. But it's also not about that. And she's a lesbian. I don't think the game brings up her sexuality at all.

2:49:10I think some people hit on her and shit.

2:49:15It's just like a bunch of bullshit from people that don't play games and don't play and specifically haven't played this game like the way that they talk about it's like you just haven't played it and then they'll say like sony would would scream for the mountaintops if it sold well and i'm like not this sony didn't they not announce helldivers numbers for like months like everyone knew it was killing but i think it was actually in like a they waited for like their their next report like their quarterly and it might even been two quarter quarterlies until we got like full numbers because i think then they announce like something like it was like 10 million when they announced it yeah um like they they're not there my opinion is that it's obvious that they're not the same company as when they announced ghost of shishima sold 2.4 million copies in a week or whatever they announced in 2020 it's like that's a different sony they don't talk to anyone they don't say anything

2:50:10i don't know yeah it's it's copium it's sad dude like i released a ghost of yote video And there wasn't like an overwhelming, but there's some comments with people that are like parroting the like, oh, I'm woke stuff. I'm non-binary. Like, I don't know if you've seen that. It's like so it's like so lame. So now, OK, Colin, let's play. You mentioned this earlier, so I'm going to bring it back up. Some devil's advocate. You talked about the numbers being right. What about hell divers? Oh, so. Oh, you mean like Serkana? Yeah. So this is we touched on that. I was curious about what the follow up was because I remember we speculated was right.

2:50:51So what Dustin is referencing is that last month's Serkana numbers for so they break it. They have a Serkana releases. And this is public data. Again, their private data, I'm sure, is more robust. I don't subscribe to. I haven't I haven't seen like NPD data with my own eyes in 15 years. But you better believe my autism was like all in. Like I was like, so fuck, I would like look for any shit and like do all sorts of weird like things you wouldn't even find and like just see like how games sold. It was like and we were told like. Can't share these numbers, it's like really important. You can get us in a lot of trouble.

2:51:20And we used to have like a betting and I'm sure people would other people were in on it. A lot of people were in on it. We used to like bet internally, just fun bets. It wasn't like money. And we had standings about like we would pick 10 games out and be like, how many copies did each of these games sell? And everyone would guess. And then when we got the NPD report, we would like vet all the answers and then had these standings. It was like a whole thing internally. So the numbers are totally reliable. But fuck, I was saying something else and I remember what it was. I interrupted myself. I knew I was going to do that.

2:51:54It doesn't matter. Helldivers. Helldivers, right. So with thank you with Serkana last month, they again, they delineate like this is the overall chart. This is the year to date chart. This is the 12 month running chart. And then they have like Xbox PS. They have Xbox console. So it's actually Xbox one as well. PlayStation consoles. So PS4 and PS5, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, they're all on the same charts. And last month's Xbox chart didn't have Helldivers on it at all. And this didn't vibe with what was obviously true about Helldivers on Xbox, which is that people cared about it and that it sold probably something like a million copies in its first couple of weeks, which is good.

2:52:34And my theory, and I think you shared this theory as well, was there's an error here. and i was actually talking about it where i was like did they do this and then we might have brought this up on the stream where i was like did they do this on purpose oh no it was actually with a with with um with reese on cigarettes plus people will hear it where i was like i wonder if psn's numbers have to be self-reported by sony like there's in other words there's no like back-end access where like um they're just like getting this data like sony has to report it and maybe Sony's like, oops, we forgot to report the Helldivers.

2:53:10You know, or Microsoft was supposed to report this. We didn't know that they were supposed to report it. In other words, to make the game not look like it really mattered. They never. So Matt Piscitella, NPD or Serkana agreed that it was weird and said he would look into it. But then there was no update. But then when they posted these, he did update saying that the game was number three last month on Xbox and is now number four. And in game sold. so hell divers 2 is doing well over there and i think well we recently got into that pretty deep just as far as like what what that means and i don't know that it means too much because i was saying if the if alinea's numbers are true about how many copies it sold on xbox sony has made something like 48.5 million dollars net or actually i'm sorry gross and i'm like i don't that's a lot of money but i'm like do you really like want to get little bits and bobs like this at a time and legitimize your your dying competitor i i just feel like it's so i think games as a service are still in play obviously marathon marathon is being tested right now on xbox but um but yeah that's that's copies sold right like because i it wasn't there a thing that like hell divers has made more money from its battle passes than they say that they say that now that it now does but i don't think i don't think over i don't think that's possible overall you know because that would that would suggest that it would be the average person or the mean is like more than 40 per player right in addition there's just no way yeah it doesn't make sense you know but but i think what they were saying and i think you're right is that like it's settled into a rhythm where we are making more money now or you know from their perspective we are making more money now from battle passes and from whatever they call them war bonds then then from people buying the game um so yeah it's a good question and i think it's uh it's worth well just to note that um i think being in line with tsushima is pretty good the game is ten dollars more expensive there are probably 20 million fewer ps5s than there were ps4s ghost of tsushima i think came out in a different era as well when there was when these kinds of games were more attractive to more people before they were starting to get sucked into all these other time sinks.

2:55:27So, yeah. So I didn't mean to rant and rave. I just wanted to say, like, if you are skeptical of this, then you have to assume that the reporting data is lying.

2:55:42And I don't know how that would be any use to anyone. so i just and by the way i guess to to close the loop as well i noted that npd started in the mid 90s they were counting all the games via retail to the to the unit and then digital games started to come in and they weren't counting any of the digital sales and it was and again the list just started becoming like who gives a shit but they did figure it out and the nature of what that is is unknown to me but my assumption is that it is self-reported because they write september 2025 us top 20 best-selling games physical and full game digital from the nintendo e-shop playstation xbox and pc platforms for publishers and the digital leader panel ranked on dollar sales how the fuck would they know that if it wasn't and there's nothing about saying it being a projection system.

2:56:41so just wanted to clarify that for everyone now if your whole thing is that that someone's being dishonest and somewhere in the chain, that's a whole different argument. You know, like I'm not disputing that. I don't know. Maybe that's true. But anyway, so here's what the top 20 looked like some notable games for. And again, this is August 31st through October 4th. So the numbers were stopped being counted almost three weeks ago. And we'll get those numbers in the next few weeks. Borderlands 4 bestselling game. What do you think of that? That game's quietly killing. yeah i'm not surprised it's one of those games that i mean for borderlands 3 was also huge and i when borderlands 1 came out i was in high school and that was the game that like all the dudes were playing uh so i'm not surprised by it it just it's an interesting game because i'm not into it at all like i've seen a little bit of gameplay of it i've seen the trailers and stuff but i'm totally uh in the minority of game well maybe not the minority but people you know this is a huge game and i'm just like yeah it's fine i know that they announced 2.5 million players after a week which is pretty good and that will be a slow burn for them nba 2k 26 another take two game dominating right now and they're going to be dominating with grand theft auto before very long was number two ea sports fc 26 was number three and then ghost of yote number four both of those were new additions and then we get madden at five hell divers two at six so i this is and and and you can see here last month it would have been at five if the numbers were counted properly so that's good you know um really good numbers silent hill f7 so i'm sure kanami's happy with that that's awesome that's actually kind of shocking to me that it's ranked that high but i'm i'm super pleased because it's an awesome game sonic racing cross worlds is at eight now this is where the old npd game would come in they announced that sonic racing cross worlds is at a million units so you can see where and that's worldwide but you again you're just trying to garner information and assuming things are kind of static be a little bit different in europe a little bit different in latin america and so on so forth but but generally speaking and so you see it at a million at eight and you can kind of go up and down now and say like okay like right and there is an element that i bet you there's a lot of digital switch sales for sonic racing oh yeah oh yeah sure that's true and i was happy to see this tactics at nine and that's again based on dollar sales not units so pretty impressive because that's a 40 game snake eater yeah holding on at 10 you have to assume i don't know did they announce sneak eater data sneak eater remake sales 1 million copies in its first 24 hours i mean again so it's not super surprising about how a game like osu yote might be doing um other interesting games nhl 26 to 12 that's a new edition digimon story time stranger which i know some people were excited about obviously 13 galaxy and galaxy 2 at 14 now again doesn't count digital sales although is there a digital package for those games yes and they so i think you can buy them both or you can buy them individually, but you end up spending five or ten dollars more.

2:59:57I think ten if you buy them individual. Interesting. And then Minecraft here is their Forza Horizon 5, again, holding on based on its sales on PlayStation and being around there. And then it's funny. Red Dead 2 is peaking up as well. There are other numbers to get into. Should we be interested to do so? Year to date, NBA 2K26 is the best selling game in the United States. And this is again through January through October 4th for now. Monster Hunter Wilds is number two. It's been bumped off from number one by NBA 2K which is pretty interesting. And Borderlands 4 already at number three which is really impressive.

3:00:38EA Sports College Football 26 not surprisingly at four. Oblivion at five. Not a huge surprise there. I mean maybe a little bit surprising. Actually it's not a full price game. It's old. I think a lot of people are curious. There's a lot of pent up demand for that shit yeah um and there'll be the show 25 holding on here at number eight interestingly neither nintendo or xbox digital sales are counted here i am curious why that's the case but elden ring night rain at nine nice kingdom come deliverance 2 which was an early year game so it's kind of been i don't want to say forgotten about but we it's kind of gone to the back of people's minds that's a number 11 it's amazing forza horizon 5 number 12 really crap, all PlayStation sales.

3:01:23That goes to show you the purchasing power of the PlayStation audience. It's crazy. Split Fiction, 13. And then you see some funny stuff here like EA Sports FC 26 already at 15. EA Sports MVP bundle, which is a college football and Madden. It's itself at 16, which is crazy. And then yeah, Ghost of Yotei at 18. And again, Helldivers 2. It's doing well on PC. It's doing well on PlayStation. People are still playing it there, but you have to give a tip of the cap to to Xbox players for bumping it into the charts. It was 21 last month, so it wouldn't have been on this chart. And then Civilization 7 is number 20.

3:01:59So again, go see Yote in three days on one platform made more money than Civilization 7 did on all platforms in the last six months. I mean, that's not impressive to people. There's nothing to that. Nope, the boycott worked. And again, I'm not trying to demean boycotts, like boycott whatever you want. your money is powerful and you should spend it how you want and if you're offended by something that's great but get real with like i feel like people are out to just hate things and i don't really understand and it's all it's all triggered by these like random things and i i think it's a bummer because i think that some of the shit that people are upset about is true and and but it gets all wrapped up with these people that get mad about everything have no direction.

3:02:49It's just this ever present furor over fucking everything. The girl boss. The girl boss at Sue. She's a lesbian. You're missing out. Go see it. It's great. Yeah. All right. Anything else to say here? Oh, yeah. PlayStation 5 has now surpassed PlayStation 3 in America in sales, which is pretty impressive. And PlayStation 5 is 5 %-ish or so ahead of PS4 in American sales. So good signs all around. And remember, at this point, you couldn't get a PS4 for more than$300 unless you were buying the Pro, which would have been$400. You're not going to get a PS5 of any kind for that much money these days.

3:03:49And yet they're selling 5 % more. I think that's a great sign for Sony. And I just wanted to keep things in context. We were talking about sales. Silent Hill 2 Remake, it was announced that it hit 2.5 million copies over the last year. The bigger number here is that Silent Hill series in total is$10 million. I wanted to bring this up because I just wanted to put in context like. I always use again, I always it's very tired. I always use Metroid as the example where like there's an assumption that like Metroid is this big thing. I'm like, no, it's not. It's comically not. Unfortunately, I used to love Metroid.

3:04:21I still love Metroid. I just thought it would be funny and interesting to people that like the entire Silent Hill franchise is only sold 10 million copies.

3:04:34We're small fries. in this space and becoming smaller by the day. It's something for everyone to adjust their expectations for. And it's so crazy, man. I mean, we're talking about what Silent Hill, one, two, three, four, some of the spinoffs like the Vita game. I assume digital sales of like PS one classics and it's so great. I mean, there are, there are, I mean, again, if a linear numbers for Yote are right, 2.5 million is what Yote sold in a, Couple of days and a few days. And by the way, doesn't that put Final Fantasy 16 numbers in the context? Yeah, three million. In a few days. On a console with what, a 30 something million install base at the time, 40 million install base, what a joke.

3:05:22That story will always bother the fuck out of me. Square Enix undercutting their own game. I think they did a lot of damage to the image of the game. Yeah, Gene always brings this up. but uh let's i mean this is just quick wikipedia search luigi's mansion 3 for the switch so what many would consider a i mean not a b tier in quality but in terms of its relevance on switch b tier or maybe even c tier has sold 14.25 million copies luigi's mansion 3 has sold out the entirety of the silent hill franchise nuts it's so it's so funny like it's so it's i love that kind of shit i would love to see that they probably do announce them like nihon falcon like the lifetime numbers of east or here trails it would be interesting to see you're probably in like the sub 10 million for both and that would be that's crazy because there's so many games but you can make good money and like and survive it's all about expectations um is there anything else you want to say before we move on from this topic this is our last news item other than i'm just happy to see silent hill 2 selling well to me i'm thinking a lot about silent hill 2 remake recently i've been wanting to play it i don't have time to play it right now i think on the night of halloween i'm gonna boot it up maybe just play the beginning just to get the feel it's just so good and the expectations were so low and i think about it all the time it's like surprising it's aged so well in my mind even though when i played it i had some complaints about how repetitive and some of the enemy encounters could get a little annoying.

3:07:02But as a whole, it was just such an awesome game. So I'm happy that it sold decently well. I guess the last data to share, there is a little bit more if people are interested, is just PlayStation's numbers themselves. So top 10 best-selling games on PlayStation platforms, PS4 and PS5, ranked on dollar sales from August 31st through October 4th. NBA 2K26 was one. Ghost of Yotei 2. Borderlands 4.3. EA Sports FC 26 4 that's really interesting by the way that Ghost of Yote sold more than Borderlands but not by much it looks like Madden NFL 26 and again I'm a platform by platform basis Silent Hill F 6 Snake Eater holding on at 7 College Football at 8 Sonic Racing Cross Worlds at 9 and NHL 26 coming at 10 as the hockey season begins and yeah just to put a finer point on it Helldivers 2 as you see here or I get you probably don't think I'm scrolling through these other things.

3:07:56I forget we're not looking at the same thing ranked fourth on Xbox. I think interesting data, too, is that PC sales. Helldivers is six. And it was five last month, so that game is just selling. Steady, I would assume. Couple hundred thousand a month or something. At this point or more just on PC. Pretty nice. Not bad. let's get into what we're playing I'm still playing Ghost of Yote I mean I don't know how much more I can really say about it I don't want to spoil it too much I am approaching 40 hours into it I'm really taking my time doing everything in the game as it's presented I still haven't killed the third person so by the way dude the twist in the story I'm talking about with one of the characters um is amazing like there's a there's a thing with one of the villains and one of these characters and i won't get into the nature of it but i was like wow that's fucking cool it was actually one of the like a really good moment in the game for the story again i like the more open-ended nature of it it's so it's a little bit more of a cerebral game than tsushima and less of a checkbox game either though fundamentally under the hood, they're kind of the same.

3:09:19The combat is, is really a step up and really fun and, and quite dynamic. I don't think it's particularly difficult. I'm playing on normal. So it's like, I've, I've seen people playing on the hardest difficulty and like some of the optional bounties and stuff are supposed to be like really difficult. That's not for me. I'm not, I'm not good enough to do that. So yeah, I'm enjoying the game. It's beautiful, dude. There, there are so many shots and vistas and they, they, It seems like they designed the map with it in mind almost like to always give you something to look at. And it's just amazing that the floor of the fauna, the environment, the geology, the weather, day night cycle.

3:10:02I just love it. I really think it's a classic style sequel of just doing everything the first game did better. And I really do highly recommend it. It's a high quality product. and I think that I'm I I guess this is gonna be a matter of taste I mean everything is but I find the story to be way better and I find Atsu to be a way better character than Jin way thing I get again I said this last week I get people's complaints about kind of the revenge story narrative or whatever as opposed to being this thing more about defense and honor which I think Ghost of Tsushima was more about but it's cool I'm curious the one thing I'm curious about I know the games don't literally connect obviously I mean they do in that they're both a history of Japan like a historical fiction look at Japanese events, especially the first one.

3:10:47But I am curious how they might have connected the games in some subtle way. I hope that they did. And I probably won't, I don't probably know Ghost of Tsushima well enough to be able to identify it, but I'm eager when the time comes to Google it and just see like, you know, some article will come out like, these three things were odes to Ghost of Tsushima and Ghost of Yote. I don't know if any of that should exist, but that's what I'm kind of looking for now. But I really, really like it. and highly recommend it it says here you're playing dustin ninja guy in four oh by the way what are you done with ghosty today so i was going to get into that i was playing it before i got ninja guy in four and i'm at a great point to take a little break and i know that can be killer for some people i i really don't feel like this is a situation that i'm going to like not come back to it but um i was just getting a little fatigued by it i had just beaten the part i think the part that you were reference referencing where uh well just in the snowy region i completed that section so i'm at a good point where i could take a little break and uh do something else for a little bit so i will get back to it though so um as far as ninja gaiden 4 now for full disclosure with the audience i requested this game to try to get it a little early to have a video out on my channel i ended up getting it like a few hours early from xbox um so they did provide me with the code uh but because and my intention is not to like i don't want to i'm not going to be the type to kill myself for an embargo um and plus the getting a video out an embargo is just asking to be in the meat grinder of a million videos being released at once um so i'm going to have a video on it next week but i'm happy to talk about it now i'm not a huge like ninja guidance guy in fact the only ninja gaiden that i've really played is when was it three that they just put out recently yeah they like remastered it i played a decent amount of that but i fell off and i went to something else it was it was fine but what made me interested in ninja gaiden four was platinum games involvement uh platinum games i there's so many of their games that i absolutely love most importantly near automata which was in collaboration with square annex all three Bayonetta games Bayonetta two in particular excellent and Platinum games kind of in a weird spot where a lot of their main leadership has left and I think there's like kind of a big question mark about the future of Platinum games and overall man the combat in this game is fucking awesome like it is so so clearly to me feels like a platinum game and i was like man i miss this like i missed how fluid and how crazy like you're you have like dual katanas you're like chopping people up cutting up people's heads and it's doing like crazy camera angles and stuff like that it is uh over the top in all the right platinum ways and i'm just from that perspective like man i every time i sit down to play this game i'm so the the combat is what i'm enjoying the most the thing that i'm noticing so far is that it's very very linear uh which is i think normal for ninja gaiden like the 3d ninja gaiden games but this almost feels like going from corridor to corridor over and over again just to get to the next bunch of enemies that you fight they do add some interesting it's not even really platforming like there's parts where it's like oh use your zipline thing to here run on a wall zipline to this thing but there's no like creativity in how you do it it's just like this is the sequence events you got to go through to try to change it up so the levels are so far kind of boring uh and the story like i don't i have no clue what's going on in the story at all i know that they introduced this new character who's kind of edgy kind of reminds me of devil may cry when they introduced uh the character that's not dante what's his name um i don't remember oh virgil virgil right it reminds me of when they introduced virgil uh and then i think eventually you do play as the other guy the ninja gaiden what's his name about hayabusa yeah he has not really been in the game i i'm i don't know honestly as what his status is but the main takeaway that just to tell people was like platinum i don't say platinum is back but this if you love platinum games or i've loved platinum games in the past this is one you're absolutely going to want to check out the there's like all these different moves that you can get and up not upgrade but unlock new moves so your moveset is constantly changing uh i've unlocked a second weapon and it plays almost exactly like the first weapon it's like almost like a spear which when you use your power moves turns into a drill so that's can be pretty cool you like do these this move where you jump up in the air and then do like this drill down on enemies uh but it plays almost the same as the katana so i'm curious about i'm assuming there's other weapons in the game.

3:16:15I'm curious if those are going to be a little more different, like they were in the last Ninja Gaiden game I played. It feels a little, I don't want to say budget. Like the combat is all super high quality. And as I've been saying over and over, but it's a little budget. It's definitely a little budget in that there are cut scenes, but they are kind of few and far in between. And most of the dialogue is done on your radio as you're playing. It's like, you're talking to the different characters, the characters at HQ, so and i think the level design too makes it feel a little bit budget but um but yeah i am having a good time with it so far i don't think it's terribly long i think it's like 12 to 15 hours i'm playing on normal some of the scheme has like an inconsistent difficulty to it but nothing that's bothering me too much i had a really tough not a really tough time but the first boss took me I don't know, somewhere between 7 and 10 tries.

3:17:14And then I got it. And every boss after that, I have beaten in one try. And there's been a few parts where you need to clear all these enemies in order to progress, and they just keep dumping more and more enemies. I'm like, what the hell? This is totally way more difficult than the other sections I just played. So it's a little scattered in that way. It's not perfect, but I'm having a great time with it overall and uh it makes me feel happy to see plat i mean i was thinking about platinum in their uh was it babylon's fall yeah they're so up and down babylon's fall that's right yeah they're they're so up and down so that was them chasing i mean it's the same thing that happened with the fbc firework it's the same situation like just make what you make there's no shame in making what you make you're not a publisher you don't need to diversify like that yeah i think i have a physical copy of babylon's fall that i was able to get for five bucks i think i played it one time before it shut down and it was not great yeah look they tried you know it just looked like it just looked generic so generic it's like who gives a shit about this yeah uh the other game that i have been playing is ball pit or ball x pit i think it's just ball pit but i'm not yeah i think i saw this the developer i think say that it's just ball pit yeah it's just ball pit i don't know why you would like what the x is supposed to be but yeah i just saw a thing on twitter let's see devolver they announced their sales number if i spell it right this game has sold a lot of copies of 400 000 units sold already so it's awesome a lot of people have compared this game to vampire survivors and i think that's kind of true in that it's the type of game that has that insane dopamine hit where it's like you're shooting all these balls uh if you haven't seen the game you are in a lane and there are enemies slowly creeping down and your character is shooting out different balls and so there's like little like blank baby balls that don't have any kind of abilities but as you kill enemies you pick up gems and that lets you level up and that's where it really becomes more like vampire survivors where i believe you have four slots for special balls and four uh like buff items that you can pick up so like vampire survivors You got to fill up your weapon slots.

3:19:38You got to fill up your your buffs. And the unique aspect of this is that you pick up balls and you level them up and then you can combine balls. So you can like combine a lightning and a fireball. And when you do that, then you have the ability to pick up an entire new ball. So you're just consistently getting more powerful. You can try to design different builds. I've been doing a thing where I mentioned there's the baby balls that aren't like your superpower balls the baby balls goodness oh you can have different items and different special balls that will create more baby balls so it's like you can focus on I want to have as many balls as possible on my screen that's what I'm always trying to do Colin I'm trying to have as many balls in and around me so right sounds right sounds like you yeah So it's really fun.

3:20:34And it has a really neat element, too, where there's the different levels. It's not... I mean, I guess it is like Vampire Survivors in that way that has different set levels that have an end boss. But they don't, like, infinitely go on after you beat the boss. Like, there's a set ending and a main boss at the end. In between each round, you're, like, building a little town that gives you, your character, different buffs and different resources. and that's a way you unlock new characters is that you have to build them a little house in your town. So it's a nice little metagame in between the actual game and it's super addicting, man.

3:21:09It's one of those games that you play and it's two in the morning and you're like, I'm just going to go one more round. Just because seeing the numbers fill up, seeing what kind of builds you can make. As a fan of Vampire Survivors, you'll probably really like it. Yeah, I'm going to I mean, again, I bought it just sitting there. It's funny, man, because I guess I don't know why I didn't put it in there. I've been playing Mega Man Battle Network as well. And but I've been playing that on Portal and I think now I'm just going to segue over to Powerwatch Simulator 2 on Portal. I mean, it's a perfect Portal game.

3:21:45So I saw Ben's review. He was he 100 % of it before it came out and he said it was awesome. He's a beast. I mean, he he's the first person I knew that loved it. yeah that like really loved power watch simulator and i'm pretty sure he platinumed both the ps4 and the ps5 version which is pretty hardcore because it's not it's not that it's hard per se there are actually a few hard trophies this trophy list is supposed to be easier on the sequel but it's just time consuming you've got to just sit there and do it like do all this shit it's a lot um okay very well well i'm gonna get to uh some new games next week and we'll or for next week and we'll talk about those at the time and of course we'll have chris back as well now we have six questions comments concerns thoughts and ideas from the audience to end our show as we always do and uh these come from patreon patreon.com slash last day media we put up threads in the news feed on patreon for each of our shows as they're needed so the defining duke guys put their thread up the punching up guys and the summon sign guys put their their threads up we put our threads up on wednesday afternoons eastern time and then we delete them on thursdays so you have a day to submit your inquiries you've heard a bunch of your inquiries throughout the show already but you'll here more of them now beginning with k hey guys reading gene's tweet about his silent hill f review wherein he says he interviewed a therapist for it got me thinking my literary analysis skills are pretty damn basic and i'm okay with that i wasn't able to glean some deeper meaning from something like the last of us part two but that's stranding i have no idea what kind of theme i was meant to grasp from it but i still enjoyed it greatly because of its world art direction and general weirdness i guess when it comes to games having to dig too deep feels like work which i'm not really into doing i already have a full-time job so my question is how would you rate your own literary analysis skills would you like to improve or are you okay with leaning more towards being a basic bitch consumer like me take care i think it depends yeah i think that there are things that i get really really heady and into not only games but just um shows and books and i want to know more and i want to know everything and i'm really into it and um you know i think cormac mccarthy's novels strike me like that, like where there's a deeper meaning and things to be said in the realm of fiction, something that I got like mega obsessed with and still am really is Battlestar Galactica where like, and there's so many themes in that show about humanity and all the rest.

3:24:03It's really good shit. But then there are things that I play and consume that I'm sure trying to tell me something that it's just lost on me or goes in one ear and out the other, which is probably more often the case. And then of course there's like interpretations of things that are not meant to be there. And that's kind of the most fun is like what people get out of your products and what you get out of products that are, that are not really intended. And this is something that Hogue always talks about with the, you know, the, what is it? The death of the author, the idea that is it even appropriate or valid to read into something, a theme, a leitmotif, something that isn't really supposed to be there, or is it really up to the consumer to figure that out?

3:24:41so i think the big thing you have to figure out for yourself k is and you have because you're a basic bitch consumer like you said it's like if that's what makes you happy i don't think there's anything wrong with that and i also think that for as many things try that try to tell you something and are poignant there's so much schlock i've probably written some of it it's not like i'm immune to it but like everyone's trying to say something it's very little of what you're exposed to unless it's like a straight up platformer game or something old or something basic like everything's kind of saying something it comes from somewhere so where are you on this i think you're right that it does totally depend i think some of the times we've done spoiler cast has been interesting where listening to you know other people talk about a game i'm like wow i i feel dumb as hell because i didn't pick up on that at all and i think that's kind of partially what can make art interesting is there are certainly things that are designed as you were saying to be put in there's a message it's being said maybe you pick up on it maybe you don't but it can be interesting when people interpret it in different ways and i think that's what makes discussing video games or really any kind of artistic thing in general i feel like i've i like i said sometimes i'm totally oblivious sometimes i feel like i'm looking for it a little too much in my film class in high school.

3:26:09This is going to sound extra dorky and nerdy. We learned about something called mise-en-scene, which is, I think, a reference to that French director that the movie Hugo is about, actually. But the idea is that everything in a scene is there for a reason, and it contributes to the overall storytelling. So you see this in movies all the time where it's like, this guy is on top of the world and we're going to angle the camera more up towards him or stuff like that like the way someone dresses is or the colors of their clothes and people can't do get totally lost in the sauce on this stuff there's a documentary about the movie the shining 247 i know that yeah i know that documentary where they'll be like the poster in the background of the skier is meant to look like Satan.

3:26:58And it's like, come on, man. There's absolutely a level of reading into things too much. But I do think when those details are in there, they can be really neat. A YouTuber, I really recommend someone that I've talked to here and there is Max Derritt. He has a video that I've talked about on Sacred before called The Most Profound Moment in Gaming about Metal Gear Solid 2 but I think overall probably the videos he's best known for are really looking into the uh the psychology and um different references in Silent Hill games and when I watch those videos that's when I feel like a complete moron because he's bringing up all kinds of different schools of psychological thought and like Freud and stuff like that and I'm like yeah this is absolutely what they were doing I just would have never picked up i mean mainly because i don't know about those things but well right i mean i think that's that's the whole thing is i think you have to it has to be within your it's kind of is full circle with our jeopardy conversation before where it's like you have to be pretty well-rounded but you would be really good at the shit you knew right and if you uh if you're hit with something over the head i think that's what far cry five was to me where i was like getting really annoyed about i'm like what don't you see like what aren't you seeing about this like uh in terms of david koresh and all the rest and it bought the fuck out of me but it's because people didn't who like who the fuck knows who david koresh is you know um it's a similar sort of thing so yeah if you don't know freud and you're not into like the psychological theories and all the like how would you really even discern that but i think that's really fun and i i do fall into random games like that like uh i think the last game i really analyzed to that degree was chronos actually um which is very much about communism and um and collectivism and was written during covid no doubt and and has and is so in that space and in that zone that it's fun to look at it through that lens especially because i played it through it twice and was able to really see it but you don't have to do that with everything and you don't really have to do that with anything to be honest i think there are certain games or experience movies whatever that you're going to get so much out of it like think about there are thousands of people tens of thousands that probably played bioshock and never once thought about ayn rand right or you know objectivism it's like so yeah it's so crazy And they probably had a great time.

3:29:22They probably love Bioshock. And I think that that's totally fine. I think that you would get more out of it if you took in some of what Ken Levine was trying to say or some of the different angles. But I think that's kind of a cool thing about it is that you don't have to do that if you don't want to. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So are you a basic bitch? Yeah, probably, Kay. But that's OK. Most people are. there are people that played Bioshock look at Dagan he played Bioshock and when we did the when we did the knockback for it I'm like so like what did you think of like this this audio diary and this audio was like oh I didn't listen to them I'm like so what the fuck was the game about what are you doing like but he loved it he had no idea what the game was about the whole he was just in a rapture and all that kind of stuff and that's a valid experience I guess strange strange experience for sure but nonetheless jamie hexam wrote in said hey boys this is obviously a colin question although i think we can both answer this the release of power watch simulator 2 is finally upon us and it got me wondering if you had the choice for any ip to get its own dlc pack and power watch simulator 2 what would it be i would love to have a teenage mutant ninja turtles pack among many others thanks boys well it's a great question and uh they They announced that they're going to do three paid licensed packs next year for Powerwatch Simulator 2.

3:30:50It's a big deal because they did six for Powerwatch Simulator 1. So they're continuing along with that trend. Plus, they did a lot of free DLC. There was like DLC for Final Fantasy 7, I think, and shit like that. I actually tweeted at them when they tweeted out their roadmap. And I was like, please. And they got a bunch of likes. So a lot of people agree. I'm like, please include trophies with your free updates. And not just with your paid updates, because I would like to get those trophies as well. I'd play much more of the game actually if uh if there were trophies and I wasn't just feel like I was just wasting time although power watch simulator is really just a huge waste of time anyway uh tmnt is a great pull um you know I would say I don't know exactly what I think I do actually like I don't think they want to go with a vibe that's not accessible and friendly and I think the ip that they've picked shows that generally final fantasy 7 is probably the most violent thing that they they picked when you really think about it or the most adult thing because you're talking about like wallace and gromit back to the future uh alice in wonderland it's cool but um shrek but i was thinking like some some horror stuff would be cool well and and i know that there is a there have been a lot of copycats of power wash simulator but one of them apparently is fairly compelling which is like a crime scene and it kind of thing or whatever that people really like and i'm like you guys should kind of lean like people are copying you should like kind of go full circle it's like the uh it's like uncharted tomb raider begets uncharted begets tomb raider which is exactly what happens what happened in the real world as to you know in other words uncharted was inspired by tomb raider and then the tomb raider revival was inspired by uncharted it's like you can kind of volley back and forth and i would love to see them like and an ip i was thinking it was obviously a big murder mystery but murder or um slashers and stuff like that but i was thinking about uh dexter for some reason because it just seemed like a a more minor ip like some of the ones that they deal with and that's all about murder scenes and like clean murder scenes and shit um so i think that would be kind of cool and you can lean into it but they would never do something like that but uh that's where my mind was is there anything come to mind for you well i like your idea of like uh a horror game because i mean we're just talking about silent hill like imagine if you're in the other world of silent hill where it's all rusty and nasty and disgusting and you're just pulling up you got a job to do you got to clean this place up i think that would be hilarious and you could even do it it does with silent hill wouldn't necessarily have to be bloody or whatever but uh the thing that first came to my mind i'm not helping the weeb allegations here is the akira like the the bike from akira or like being and that's kind of like you could do like a cyberpunk world or you could do a cyberpunk 2077 dlc that might be kind of cool but particularly the akira bike would be pretty cool boner simpson wrote in no said greetings gents an interesting story recently came to light in regards to trophies croc legends of the gobos disappointed many when it was first released without a platinum however in what seems to be a first the makers have publicly addressed this not only revealing a bit behind the scenes info about how the trophy process works and what makes it what it takes for a game to receive a plat but also by releasing a brand new skew for the game appropriately named platinum edition which you may have guessed now includes a platinum trophy what are your thoughts on this what could it mean for other games that failed to include a plat should we expect more games to get platinum updates or how is it even possible still for games to be released without the coveted shiny plat so i want i don't i didn't see like what they said about the process for getting a platinum trophy but the process for getting a platinum trophy is literally i want a platinum trophy like if you don't have if your game doesn't have a platinum trophy that's your choice it used to be hard to get a platinum trophy back in the ps3 era and for and famously and even in the early vita era and famously downloadable games didn't have platinum trophies and it pissed people off but it was very similar to what xbox was doing where you would get what 200 gamer score for downloadable games and a thousand for retail games and that's kind of a similar thing to what sony was doing comparable like the conversion to bronze trophies and stuff um but they realized that this was a selling tool and so it just bothers me when developers act and i'm not saying that they some people just don't know or they're not aggressive or they're not talking to the right people but like there is no mystery behind having a platinum trophy i think that's fairly obvious at this point i mean isn't it do you see the games that they're releasing that have platinum trophies that you can get in 10 seconds you think that fucking crock doesn't they're not going to be like oh this can't have a platinum trophy that's the way they were 15 years ago but it's not the way that they are now but so i'd be interested to see what they had to say i probably should have looked but games getting updated trophies is not unheard of but it doesn't happen very often and as i understand with this croc game and i could be wrong about this is that i think the object is the same and they've replaced the trophy list so i think the old trophies count but you can no longer access them i think unless you have a very specific version of the game like physical versions probably um well i have news on that yeah good well i pre-ordered that physical version before it came like before the digital version came out and i still have not received it i like check in every few months i think it's a company called rocket games that is doing the physical and there are people that are pissed yeah they should be i mean this is not a good look but they apparently at some point they said like we're waiting for the final version like they're letting it get updated which for a lot of physical people they do want a like the best version of the game on the disc and so i think there maybe was just some kind of communication issue with people that pre-ordered the game and then the updates to the game and certainly this platinum edition is what pushed out that physical version for a long time i still have my pre-order and i can keep waiting for it i can wait for croc uh but i really do want to play it because croc was one of the games i played growing up particularly on pc weirdly enough with the side the microsoft sidewinder gamepad that thing fucking sucked uh but i remember playing that on the family pc so i'm excited to play this at some point i think it's cool though that they're going and do this platinum edition clearly uh i i'm wondering if a game like croc that will like increase sales certainly a new marketing blitz behind the game that they're doing this new edition and i believe too if you own the regular version they're just going to update it and you will then have the platinum edition so it's not like a new version to buy but it's cool i i still think there are just like you were saying there are some developers that just don't care or don't think about it so that's why they don't apply yeah it's weird it's weird that they don't care but it is what it is steve carly wrote in and said good afternoon sloppy succulent sacred sluts okay we can all agree photo mode in a game is just free marketing for the studios right it's a brilliant strategy when you think about it you give players as much customization as you can and they in turn take beautiful pics post into social media and it gives the games free exposure it's hard not to notice how transparently this tactic is being pushed over the last two generations but don't fix what ain't broke i guess do you guys ever use photo mode do you ever get irked when it isn't available in a game at launch no chickens are dying because of this write-in i could give a shit about photo mode I got to be honest with you.

3:38:04I use it if you have to in some games like, you know, you have to do a little some in-game photo stuff, but just some games have like, you know, you get a trophy for just using it and I'll do that. But I don't I don't get it personally. And I also think you're saying it's used to like take beautiful pictures. It often is. It's also the I would imagine the bane of many developers as well. And I think the reason that it's put in late is because they want to make sure the game is as stable and running well and nothing weird is happening for which you can easily snap funny pictures too um and bad pictures and pictures that make the games look bad so the reason that i think that sometimes photo mode is added later is not only for that extra marketing beat like new game plus but because they want to have a more secure game um but gociote for instance has the photo mode in immediately and uh it's i don't i personally don't get it like i'm like i don't know like what the people love this shit but it's totally not for me it's lost on me what are you where are you on photo mode i will occasionally check out a photo mode most recently it was death straining 2 i didn't go crazy but i i snapped a few fun pics and just explore because man it's in depth on death straining 2 you can set like lights uh in the world and stuff to really customize different things change uh sam's facial expression all kinds of different stuff and people really are into it and really find it fun to make these cool photos and i think that's awesome um sometimes i the only thing this is such a minor complaint is there are certain games that i get annoyed with where the photo button is mapped or it's just like me personally where ghost of yote when you i think it's when you press you when you press the touchpad it brings up the map right um yes yeah so because it's different than than like you would bring up the menu with the start button i think in the other game they they did different things in tsushima but they do this yeah now i can't remember exactly there's something in my brain that when i'm playing ninja guy in four that i've hit the touchpad a few times and i start photo mode right yeah like stop yeah i don't i don't need photo mode right now uh i i would prefer photo mode is not mapped to a button which you probably can change it or get rid of it or something but i'm i'm too lazy to do that but it may to uh let's see is this steve's point here i think it is a good a good marketing idea to do this where people do take pictures and some of them get popular or you know get lots of likes or something if they're cool but i don't know if it's something like crazy driving sales are like oh we gotta have a photo mode so we can get engagement the game can get more engagement online the system has a built-in screenshot which i know is not the same but i feel like the thing that's really gets shared around with games is clips uh and people just do that via the console totally and that began with the ps4 error which i think was so wise it was sony especially i think uh saw something special in this like they they they identified the whole streaming thing i don't want to say very early but fairly early before it became more obvious that that was going to be like a perpetual lane of entertainment for people for lots of people art vandalay wrote in and said sacred gentleman all signs are pointing to the next xbox being a hybrid that blurs the line between pc and console and that begs the question could that actually expand the overlap between pc and console players and if so what does that mean for sony's current pc strategy should they double down and embrace the whole pc as the inevitable future or maybe take a step back and go the nintendo route stay focused on their own ecosystem and play it to their strengths interesting times indeed so keep it up i think it depends on the kind of company sony wants to be and i think that they we have to keep in mind that nintendo is a powerhouse of game sales we we bring it up we brought up many times on the show their game sell copies that are unimaginable for exclusives that like games just exclusives just don't sell the number of copies that they do typically on nintendo platforms or often do but that level of ecosystem awareness which i think they've always exercised and it's good i mean that's what they do it's it's it's placed a limit on their ceiling and i don't think they really give a shit because they're a profitable company they make a lot of money but there's they make so much less than Sony does because Sony spreads the field, has more access to third-party games and is now putting games on PC.

3:42:36Not that that's really making a huge amount of money, but it's more that Sony is an attractive place for lots of people to publish their games. Switch, frankly, isn't. Not because people don't want to be there, they want to be there. It's about if the hardware can accommodate the games and what they're trying to do. Because Sony is larger than PlayStation and there are other considerations i think sony spreading the field where it makes sense both on pc and on switch 2 i think it should be continued to be explored i don't know that their pc strategy has really changed i think we'll see with death stranding 2 and i guess ultimately ghost of yote and some other stuff that hasn't migrated yet but i think that they generally are pretty open about what they want out of pc and i'll just reiterate my stance that i think the PC strategy has worked pretty perfectly in that they're making decent money.

3:43:27I think a few hundred million, a few hundred million they made, they said they made last year or last fiscal year. So that's nice money. And, but that's not enough to unravel what you're doing internally. In other words, you might be more concerned if you were selling better on PC, because then you would wonder like what the downstream effects were of losing potential customers in your ecosystem and on your platform, but that's not happening. So I think they have the best of both worlds. The whole Xbox strategy that's being employed, in other words, like I don't, and again, it's not to be dickheaded, it's just, I don't know that they're, like what their next console is going to be is even going to be really that relevant.

3:44:06It's really for, it's as I described it to Reese on our Secret Simples Plus episode, Microsoft is placing a series of off-ramps for their consumer, and that is the last one. That's the last, that's like the last exit before the bridge, last exit before State Line or whatever um is that console it's like this is the last way for you to veer off get you have access to your games and kind of sunset the traditional way of doing business at xbox so it's not even worth really talking about in terms of next generation beyond interest because i think sony and nintendo are going to be more star competitors than than xbox and nintendo or xbox and sony are now where are you on this yeah well i there's been a lot of conversation all right I mean, you could see this coming from as soon as it was announced, but there's people that are like, look, I'm playing Spider-Man on my ROG Ally X.

3:44:55It's on an Xbox. It's like, OK, cool. It's a PC. It's a PC and PlayStation. That game is on PC. So cool. but and i think that even if xbox's next console you know if it is true that it has steam and it's a hybrid device of some kind i don't think sony gives a single fuck uh because there's uh there's they're still making the money off of it you know and i think it would be a little different if they were doing day and date on pc with some of the like if ghost of yote was a day and date pc game then maybe it'd be a little more concerning but i just don't think it really uh matters to them at all and we talked before about how there's people that maybe play a game on pc they get into the ip and then when they when the next one comes out they're like oh i have to if i want to play this now i have to get a playstation and maybe that won't sway them at all but i'm sure for some people it does yeah yeah i i think they've settled into a nice little rhythm here i think i'm more curious about again their interaction with switch and if they're willing to kind of go down that road and maybe because they're entering the handheld space with ps6 like re-entering it portal it's kind of doing its thing i don't know if you saw that by the way they five percent of american ps5 owners own a portal they were saying something like that holy shit or what was it yeah I think that it was at yeah right that's right because it's it was like 1.4 million or something which which can be garnered to like 4 million cumulative global sales of which would be actually a little more than 5 % but yeah I just think that so as far as the Nintendo strategy is concerned I wonder if maybe things are kind of changing there and are more malleable there obviously they had a few experiments with the Bandai Namco licensed games and of course Horizon, Lego Horizon but I wonder if it goes any further than that.

3:46:54And again, it might be a power differential thing like Switch 2 just really might not be able to handle what they want to do. And certainly it's online games. We'll not be able to operate there. Remember, Call of Duty was supposed to come to Switch and still has it. Oh, right. I keep forgetting about that. Kind of interesting. I wonder, like they kind of lied. Anyway, at least that's my interpretation. Xbox lied. Can't believe that. Wow. Shocking. It's less of a hog, more of a piglet, but it still gets me off-roading. So what's up, gentlemen? This one is primarily for Dustin, maybe Colin or perhaps Chris.

3:47:28He's not here. I'm looking at finally taking the leap and getting a sound bar. I've been using the stock TV speakers for years, and it feels like now might be the time for me to make the jump. I remember Dustin mentioning he has one and that he had gotten Colin one, although I don't know if he had set it up or used it. It is set up. It's set up in our upstairs TV. Dustin, is there a sound bar you'd recommend? Chris, do you have a sound bar or have one you'd recommend? Colin, do you use yours and how do you like it? Is there any flame of knowledge that you, the proverbial Prometheus of soundbars, are able to bestow upon we, the smooth brain and technologically illiterate amongst us?

3:47:59Thank you. Be well. Show that chicken who's boss and let them hogs oink. Well, let's see if this comes through. Oh, it won't come. It came through. Oh, it did? Oh, I heard it a little bit.

3:48:13So, yeah. All right. So for Chris isn't here. Obviously, you can't answer for me. Yeah. Our soundbar that Dustin bought us kindly bought us is hooked up in the TV upstairs. And so when I use that TV, I do use it. For me, it's nice. It's really nice. I think Micah and I are kind of similar though, where I'm not, and I guess this is funny because I am a musician and I love music, but I'm not really an, and I love loud music, but otherwise I'm not a loud audio person. Like I don't like the over presence of something on a television because the volume is jacked up and it's on surround sound or whatever.

3:48:46I just, I don't need it. That's just like my stance. It's like, I don't necessarily need it. it's cool it's great in a movie theater it's great in our loft when we use that but it's not something i really need um that's just how i feel i think i made that i was making you guys laugh i think when i brought it up it's like i want the sound to come from the source of the video of the image it doesn't really make any sense to me when you have like a surround sound system and like there's audio like 5.1 or whatever and there's audio behind you i'm like the tv's right there it's not well i'm not i'm not in jurassic park right so that's my stance on it i know it's not a very popular stance.

3:49:20I know a lot of people really love their audio setups. I come from a family. My dad loves his audio setups. I'm a come from a family that has that kind of thing, but it never I like the TV to be low. Personally, unless it's a really intense moment, a good moment, but otherwise I don't need it to be in my face. I think we know where you are on this, but what are your recommendations? My recommendations? I mean, there's such a wide range of sound bars out there now, and I'm not since I have a good one and have for a few years, I don't necessarily uh i haven't been in the market if you're curious about the one i have it's a fucking samsung here samsung hw-q95a and it is a more expensive one that i got you know let's see 2021 is when i got this and it has the rear channels it technically has atmos but it's kind of like not great atmos because it's a soundbar, but the ultimate experience is getting the individual speakers and getting the receiver and doing all that.

3:50:23But if you're just trying to get in with the soundbar, my recommendation is there's a website called ratings.com and that's R-T-I-N-G-S.com. This is a fantastic website for anytime you're buying any kind of like TV or audio setup, because they have really extensive reviews. These guys are like the digital foundry of physical AV tech. And they have an article called The Seven Best Soundbars of 2025 that will show you the best overall. And surprisingly, I was looking at this. It says the best budget soundbar is the Amazon Fire TV soundbar, which I didn't even know they made one. Yeah, more of the vertical monopoly we've been talking about.

3:51:13so i know a lot of people that have sonos that's what i got colin was a sonos one because it's the easiest to use and they have really great app support my parents bought a sonos beam and they've been really happy with it they they are significant i don't want to say significantly more expensive but they are more pricey so yeah check out ratings.com look around for what your budget can allow uh just don't buy some cheap piece of crap just because you're not going to be happy with it you like if you're going to buy something i'm not saying you need to spend like thousands of dollars or anything but spend enough that you're not getting some kind of junk that you're going to regret buying fair enough yeah you i mean i always try i mean generally sometimes we all make exceptions and sometimes it's not true but generally speaking you get what you pay for yeah my my first sound bar i think i got at sam's club and it was maybe 90 99 100 bucks and it did the trick for my apartment it didn't sound bad it's what i could afford and really all i needed at the time but as soon as we moved to our our new house i was like yeah i gotta this thing is not not cutting it anymore so i think got a Vizio one that was a little bit more expensive, but it was ass.

3:52:35I bit the bullet with the Samsung one and it's been very good. My dream is to do the thing where you get the individual Klipsch speakers and the receiver and do all that, but I just don't have the space for it in that living room. Maybe someday in a new house, but for now, the sound bar is the king. Fair enough. Thank you. We did let those hogs oink. We appreciate you letting us know that we should. that's what we have it's over wow it's over and done with now short shorter episode people will be disappointed but there's not a third person here so that there's just not a lot for us to even talk about like i said it was gonna be a bad episode it was horrible the worst episode of sacred symbols ever oh god it hurts when i breathe deep you just gotta go farting the whole show farted out farted you know i'm gonna go for the sickness yeah i'm just gonna fart with the sickness i'm gonna yeah just go for a walk and hopefully just fart crop dust around the neighborhood yeah that's good that's what you need to do um so now okay you were locked in last time we checked in how about now though are you you say you're going for walks you're still not ready to for a little nap no i'm like still pretty wired i don't know what that's all about like i'm i'm a pretty tired person i'm like i'm literally more awake right now than i usually am probably adrenaline or something i don't know yeah because it's 5 22 now and this is what we were discussing with chris a few weeks ago that you can't you probably should just push through yeah i probably will um and then you know maybe just go to bed a little earlier or whatever because i usually not usually but i would say half the time maybe not like two-fifths of the time i take like a nap at like night and then i do fifths yeah two-fifths okay yeah just not three fifths not three um so like every few nights every other night or whatever i'll like just sleep on the couch for a couple hours but i think if i do that tonight i'll just probably sleep all the way through so if i can make it to like i'm gonna go yeah go for a walk i'm gonna be tired i'm take a shower i'm gonna eat and then we'll see where i'm at football game on tonight hockey game so nice and i want to play some of these games that are you know i want to play power wash simulator i'm like i was bummed because i was hoping it was gonna be up at midnight but it was it wasn't they did release a map saying that it would be out of like noon eastern so i just didn't see it right i'm trying to see on my family steam share oh power wash simulator too here it is.

3:55:05Fantastic. Fun. I don't think I will We'll check it out anytime soon, but I'd like to play a little bit. I'm excited, man. We'll see. I'm going to be interested. They put some new additions in there, too. So and then it would be funny if Ben and I did a spoiler cast review discussion for Powerwatch Amelior 2. That'd be hysterical. Doesn't it? Does it have co-op? It does. Yeah, it does. They added it to the first one. I think this one natively comes with it. Maybe that's a I don't know if people would be into that for a stream, but it might be kind of fun. Yeah, we could have a little bit. A little bit sacred crew cleaning up a rocket ship or whatever shit is in that game.

3:55:39I don't know. That would be fun. That's not a bad idea. All right, my friend. Well, thank you for your time. Hope you're well. Any plans? So what's going on tonight? Well, no plans at all tonight, which is nice just because I'm going to play some Ninja Gaiden Battlefield later tonight, of course, which has been really fun. And then tomorrow I mentioned I'm seeing my first anime movie in theaters, like an actual like anime, a TV show that they're making a movie with Chainsaw Man movies. So I told I told Holly, I was like, well, I told her this, like when I bought the tickets over a week ago, I was like, no showering.

3:56:19We got to fit the part in the theater. No showering till then. We got to stink that place up. Yeah, you definitely do that. We'll fit in. Yeah, I'm assuming. Yeah. with the anime audience there it's like i don't want to they're like who's that guy that showered recently get him out of here you know so gotta figure out somewhere nice to eat before that yeah yeah definitely eat before yeah so but yeah that's it i don't have any other i don't have any plans with my life yeah that's the best that's the best love that you used to give me agita when i was a kid like not even a kid when i was like a teenager and when I was in my 20s.

3:56:55Like if I didn't have plans, got to go do something, got to go go out to eat, got to see a friend, got to be social. It's like, oh, thanks. Yeah. All right. Time to go. Chris will be back next week unless something tragic happens in between now and then. I don't think I think I'll be back next week unless again, I also die. And we've already sorted out who gets the company, who gets what I got another one. Let's see. I was I still heard it, but it sucks because I had some fucking crazy ones and I muted them and I should have just done them earlier. you know yeah honestly if you interrupted like if i was talking and you just ripped one i wouldn't have been mad yeah i mean again it's about the moment about capturing the comedy of the moment sure um but yeah we'll be back next week for more uh patreon.com slash last time media for early ad free access sacred symbols plus rss feeds all the rest you could not do without your support over there last time media store for merch we'll see you next time till then goodbye see ya sacred symbols a playstation podcast is a product and trademark of last stand media and collins last Stand LLC and is proudly recorded in the USA.

3:57:57The show was conceived by, is written by, and is directed by me, Colin Moriarty. My co-hosts are Chris Raygun Maldonado and Dustin Furman. The show is produced by executive producer Dustin Furman. All of Last Stand's theme music is by my best friend, Ramon Narvaez. As you know, all of Last Stand's shows, including Sacred Symbols, are fan funded on Patreon at patreon.com slash laststandmedia. The following names are at the producer level on Patreon, our highest tier, and we're grateful for your thoughtful and kind contributions to our independent endeavor. Thank you. Patrick Leslie, MadMockMedia, Kyle Martin, Mark, Brad Cooley, Daniel D 'Amour, John Cordero, Don Lee, Shane Rayoum, Joshua Smallwood, Enrique Perez, Chad Lewis, Paul Joyce, Austin Riley, Justin Wagaman, Justin Payne, Alex Monez, Omar Rosa, Joey Gondaliger, Gio Corsi, Cam Wallace, Benjamin Michalko, Donald Difford, Alex Gates, Michael Gates, Josh McKinney, Adam Nix, Throw7, Phil Crone, Mr.

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