#386 | Baby, It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over

14:41Chris G.:to do you know like i gotta get the fuck out of here it's a natural it's a natural response

14:45Colin Moriarty:i think so yeah panic rolling it just it happens to everybody you know so but at the end of the five tries for godric pretty damn good feels good and now you're off on a new adventure in the wizard academy or whatever it is the castle yeah the next hogwarts hogwarts right dude yeah that vista with it like on the hill i love like every every new step out into into a

15:15Chris G.:new location that game is awesome yeah like i can't i can't get over how good it is like that place in particular looks like like starry night to me and it's so sick to just walk around it

15:27Dustin Furman:i'm enjoying it um i'm definitely enjoying do we have an inquiry later on about it actually yeah we do i guess i'll just delete it and we can talk a little bit i'm i'm liking it uh a lot and i liked it when i played it the first time it reminds me a little bit of it's a weird reference but but when i was playing arizona sunshine earlier in the year where it's like uh i really like this but there in that case it was i really liked it and but i just i was getting sick playing it i would have just raw dog the shit out of that game and the sequel i was like this is awesome but I just couldn't play it there was something about the way it jived with me and the VR and all the rest and it just made me feel ill Elden Ring is the kind of game where it's like I want to enjoy it I want to like it I get it I totally intellectually fundamentally understand the game I just am not good enough to play it I don't think without knowing more about it and really and I'll talk a little bit about ball pit later because I'm playing that it's like there are times where games are obtuse enough where I actually think you benefit a little bit from just getting like some tips and tricks not even a walkthrough or a guide or anything but like what what are some things I should really be paying attention to and honestly in playing Elden Ring the first time I just didn't know anything at all and I know you're not supposed to but I don't find pleasure in learning everything there is to know about the game from the game itself without it telling me something and so having people in my ear telling me like oh go upgrade your sword you know maybe you go abandon those souls you don't need them right now you just keep keep going run past these enemies like i didn't know any of that so no wonder it took me fucking 25 hours probably to get literally probably 20 to 25 hours to get as far as we've gotten we've done that in what six or something of actual gameplay probably

17:20Dustin Furman:so it's it's just one of those experiences yeah um i had mentioned earlier we we showed our new game saint slayer spear of sacrilege which comes out next year and you can check it out on steam as i noted um this brings us of course into the role-playing game that um we've been working on a lilymo for a while and that barry and i both wish we never even talked about at all but has shim barakat wrote in and said good day sacred big beautiful bubba's colon you talked about how the release of your JRPG game dependent on the success of Saint Slayer? Would you consider using crowdfunding to fund the game or the next ones in the future?

17:53Dustin Furman:I know the risks and pressures of crowdfunding, especially that for every successful story, there are 10 tales of cautionary tales. But we got to do something about that writing. What do you and the boys think of this option? Thank you for the great content as always. And I wish you a great day. Thank you. um i don't know how you guys feel about it but and i don't mean from a i like kickstarter from i used to be really against kickstarter long time fans of me like really a long time ago like more than 10 years ago at this point um will know that i used to i used to hate kickstarter because i just was like a lot of things were failing on there and it used to bother me that these games that didn't really need to be on there were on there and like shenmue it's like to truly like get bent like sega can't give you five million dollars like are you are you serious that kind of shit bothers me it was but i liked the the smaller games like shovel night of course was like a famous success story and many many others over there um but over time and we've discussed this on the shows in the past is that like i slowly came around as a consumer of kickstarters and i've i've supported maybe a half dozen or so i think only one video game a lot of it is like I've supported like G.I.

19:05Dustin Furman:Joe Kickstarters and and other things like that as well.

19:11Dustin Furman:Kickstarter is not I mean, I don't know how Barry feels about this. We've never talked about it, actually, but my take on this and ultimately he owns a majority of the company, so he will make all the decisions and I'll support him in that. But I don't think Kickstarter is the right option for us. I get nervous about seeing games get kickstarted because sometimes it works out really well, like you said, and there are all these stories that don't pan out. I'm not worried about us not being able to raise money. If I went to Kickstarter and I asked for money for St. Slayer, I think we'd get it. I do.

19:42Dustin Furman:I mean, I'm not trying to be a dick. I think we would get the money. And if I wanted to do that, it's like, okay, that's cool. But the way I look at it is the business, you're doing your business with your most ardent customers up front. And so when I support Kickstarters, I always think about this is like, what do you do when you're done? If your game or your product works out and you successfully Kickstart it, but that's kind of it, you took all the money up front and then you've undercut its tail in the back end. I actually think it's a trap in a lot of ways and doesn't allow you to scrape by and then reap the rewards on the market from your people.

20:30Dustin Furman:You get those rewards earlier. And in fact, you might even be underselling a lot of those rewards depending on the end product. So that's what makes me nervous about Kickstarter is not about I'm not worried about raising money on it because we would raise money on it. And I'm not worried about delivering because we would deliver. We've already made six games. I mean, we've shown that we can put games out. Saint Slayer is our seventh game. But I just worry about the financial realities of like that could actually just kind of like fuck the company up in reverse. In my opinion, maybe I'm wrong, but I just don't think we need to do that.

21:04Dustin Furman:I'm not putting my own money into the RPG. I wouldn't expect anyone else to put their money into the RPG either. We'll figure it out. And it's not going to stop with saint slayer like we have at least one other game after saint slayer before we even talk about getting back to the role-playing game like barry said on our stream the role-playing game is just dormant it's just sitting there we we're we don't have the the means um or the time to deal with it it was a much it's a much more complicated and ambitious project that i think we both understood and i don't know why we didn't understand that but we we do now so thank you for your inquiry merch last day media store t-shirts sweatshirts stickers etc hats copies of hybroxia if you want to get those on ps5 nevitz wrote in and said hey sacred gents i was wondering if the lsm store would have any black friday deals or not or start a new sale day like pass me that white boy wednesday pass me that white boy thanks and good day gents yeah we're gonna do something i don't know when we're gonna turn it on do we have any idea about that when we discussed it like a month or two ago

22:04Colin Moriarty:We said it would run from Black Friday until the end of Cyber Monday.

22:10Dustin Furman:The end of time. Okay, great. That's what we originally talked about, but we need to finalize things.

22:19Colin Moriarty:But my prediction of what we'll do is what we've done in the past is that we'll put out on Patreon and on Twitter and stuff like that. There will be a promo code that gets you some percent off. I know what we discussed, but I won't say it. Colin just in case I'm misremembering or we change your mind but we are doing some kind of deal for

22:40Dustin Furman:that weekend so yeah we'll we'll get there and we hear you and loud and clear we appreciate all the sport on merch by the way we're I feel like we're having an all-time year in merch I have to like look at the the numbers um I don't look at the numbers very often for anything to be honest just like yeah everything seems fine yeah you know who knows who knows could be awful for all I know I think seems okay all right let's get into some uh inquiries here um and then we can actually I wanted to get rid of this one and then we can move on to the news there's a lot of news this weekend I will say this there's a lot of PlayStation centric news not just like third party stuff and general things to talk about although there's that as well all right we're cutting this together I don't know what happened Chris had a technical issue I read this entire I read this next entire letter.

23:35Dustin Furman:And then Dustin's like, we have to read it again. And it's like the saddest thing.

23:41Colin Moriarty:Chris was like on his phone for part of it. I'm like, because he was texting us to say it was not working. Like, oh, no, no. You know, so the horrible.

23:51Dustin Furman:No, it's all. It's classic sacred symbols. Yeah, it's good. Will Smith wrote in and said, hi, sacred boys. A rough entry for this week's sacred depression Olympics. my mom's just been done and he says mom with m-u-m so we know where he's from my mom's just been diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor and given and tumor with you and given around two years at 26 she's my last remaining blood relative so not only am i staring down the emotional apocalypse i'm also soon to become the final boss of my own family tree not quite the generational legacy i was hoping for i don't really have a significant point beyond this when things get this bleak the small pockets of escapism matter a ridiculous amount your four to five hours every week or the one time my brain stops doing the constant anxiety speed run and I actually feel normal again.

24:31Dustin Furman:You probably don't realize how valuable that is, but it's huge. So thank you genuinely for the stupid jokes, the deep dives and the adventures of Colin Montgomery. Thanks very much. First of all, that's awful when I'm sorry to hear that. And that's by the way, only one, I'm only going to use one depressing right in a week. We had some write-ins about other things. I mean, understand that I don't ignore you out of malice. I just got to pick the one that I feel like makes the most sense to say something about and acknowledge someone out there who's struggling or whatever, but this is a weird one.

25:00Dustin Furman:You're going to appreciate this, Chris. I think you're going to especially appreciate this. The reason I wanted to bring this up in the for you section of Twitter, I'm always in there, right? It's always interesting. It's like fucking whatever stream of consciousness. I saw a video people were circulating and making fun of of the Twitch streamer Pokimane. Yeah. Do you know who that is? vaguely yeah i'm not obviously walked into the i know her face i don't obviously have never listened to her content but she's like a famous streamer people were making fun of this video so i was like okay what what are they making like you know i was like all right i want to listen to it's like 30 seconds long and she's so people were making fun of it because it's hard talking about how to get over a breakup and i'm like oh this is gonna be like some awful advice and then i was listening to it and I'm like she was she brought up she brought up something like it's I think it's called noting or something she calls like she called it and it was actually really good and interesting advice and that's why I wanted to bring up Will's letter is she was just saying when something like she was talking in terms of a breakup but like when something bad is happening to you and you're in that mode where everything's ruined and then that moment where you don't think about it and you laugh or have a good time or something and for like 10 or 20 minutes or whatever it might be, you forget about it and then you go back, but you weren't there for a minute.

26:22Dustin Furman:And I was like, oh, this is a surprisingly poignant thing for someone to say, why are people making fun of this? And when I saw Will's letter, I was thinking about that video because I was like, that's the way you climb out of these situations is by finding more and more of those situate more and more of those moments in your life where you're not thinking about it. And then And before you know it, everything's okay. You know, your mom being terminally ill is like one of the, I mean, that's horrifying. Yeah. Completely horrifying. I've said this before. You know, my mom is 75. She's getting older.

26:59I will be totally, God forbid anything happens to her.

27:03Dustin Furman:I hope I outlive my mom. I'll be out of commission for a minute. Like that's going to, and I can only imagine that level of weight that a person feels when you're close to your mother or anyone in your life. And then something like this happened. So I wanted to say, I just thought that was a funny way to tie it together. As I saw this, this random streamer getting made fun of for what I thought was actually fairly good advice, which is to like, try to just stitch together these moments of, of normalcy. And then will, I saw your letter. So I'm glad that we're able to help you do that. You know, every laugh, every moment distracted, these are good things.

27:36Dustin Furman:And then before you know it, unfortunately, and she was talking about breakup, something more, much more trivial than the death of someone. But yeah, I just I feel like that's and then before you know it, you're you're kind of over the hump and it happens every time. It's weird. But so I want to just give you that. Yeah, try to find those moments and hold on to them and wish the very best for us to your mother, please.

28:02Colin Moriarty:Yeah, those moments. I mean, when Holly and I were in the hospital last year, it was it was funny thinking about Because there were moments that we were surrounded by our friends just trying to pass time just because Holly needed to get, you know, heal. And it was like we were there's I was thinking like is some nurse hearing like that there is an eruption of laughter coming from this room that literally just had the worst fucking day of their life? You know, like it's kind of a weird thing. but those moments and those times spent with friends and obviously you don't want to live in a reality where it's like, you're just completely ignoring everything going on, but those reprieves can be super meaningful.

28:47Colin Moriarty:And, and as Colin was saying, help you through it. So the fact that we can provide some of that for you means a lot just because sometimes it feels like, I don't, I don't want to say that never feels like our jobs aren't meaningful, but it's like, yeah, we're talking about video games. into a microphone every week. And on the surface, it can sometimes be like, oh, well, it's just like there are people doing real shit out there. But it's letters like this that make it realize it's like, no, this is actually it's good and important to provide this kind of thing to people. So thank you for writing in and nothing but the best for you and your mom.

29:24Will Smith of Great Britain.

29:27Dustin Furman:Be well. I wanted to bring this next one up just to kind of touch on something. I am mogo305, Ronan, and said, hello, sacred gents. As we approach 10 years since PSX 2015, I would just like to give a heartfelt thank you to Colin for what I consider one of my best pieces of PlayStation memorabilia. Going to PSX, I thought it would be a good idea to flip the inside cover of PlayStation All-Stars and have anyone relevant to PlayStation sign next to their favorite character. I got to attend the PS I Love You event given that year, but what I did not expect was to run into you on the show floor. I took the opportunity to ask you for an autograph and you picked Fat Princess to grace you with your signature.

30:00Dustin Furman:It's been about 15 years of listening to your insight and not only playstation but also anything important in the business of gaming i thank you and your crew for countless hours of content and laughs i look back now and realize you probably didn't want some random fan to approach you but i can see the positive that at least it was with a game you championed thank you gentlemen and happy thanksgiving to you and your families i wanted to bring this up for one one specific reason i feel like it's becoming and reasonably so because i play into it and i lean into it that i i'm like incredibly curmudgeonly and don't want people to approach me or talk to me and i don't want to come off like that because it's not really true um i don't mind interacting with people i don't want it to be i don't want to get this runaway train where like my serious because i've realized this dustin you and i've talked about this in the past is that like i'm so deadpan a lot that i actually think people think i'm serious when i'm not um and to me it i to me i i it's so obvious that i'm not but i think people sometimes read it the wrong way and so i guess what i'm saying is i just don't want people to think that like oh if you see me out i mean you're not going to see maybe you'll see me here in virginia but if you see me say hello it's not a big deal i don't want people to feel like it's like oh maybe you didn't want that or don't bother him it's a i don't want it to be that serious it's okay i'm not a dickhead well within reason within reason yeah right i feel

31:21Chris G.:like especially at like a place like that i don't know man like i i remember being in the headspace of like whenever i was at like vidcon or pax or something where it's just like no i'm fine if people come up to me like that's like kind of like expected and so it's like especially in a location like that like psx like i feel like i feel like you're probably in the mode where it's like yeah i'm probably gonna get approached and that's fine right i would imagine yeah yeah and

31:47Dustin Furman:oh i'm sorry dustin you've been you've been recognized a lot oh yeah because there was the

31:51Colin Moriarty:the most recent was the cedar point uh where someone talked to me and that was cool i was thinking about psx 2015 i looked it up this isn't the vegas one this is the first anaheim one i think and what's funny about this is that i was at that ps i love you thing but ironically someone close to me saw you walking and you were booking it somewhere and it was none other than friend of the show Brandon Duncan oh interesting and what's funny is Brandon I mean no offense he didn't care about you not that he just didn't know he was he was like oh he's the guy from the podcast Dustin likes and he was like oh hey Colin and you were like hey and then you just kept you were like you're like hey sorry and then you just kept walking because you were like booking it somewhere but I just think it's funny that Brandon of all people was the one I was like oh hey Colin PSX yeah I uh I was probably going to an appointment or something

32:46Dustin Furman:yeah probably um you might not I don't know I don't remember which ones it were what what was the last PSX was it 2016 2015 I'm trying to look um the last two I've said this on the show the PSX was the only place I've ever been where I'm like holy shit I'm kind of like really a celebrity here and so it's not like e3 where you recognize a bunch of people and people recognize you or whatever but like there's a shit ton of people have no idea like you could rub elbows with fucking a billion people and they wouldn't know who you are but obviously you're gonna see people that know you and all like at psx it became clear we needed a security like a group of people to like walk us around not because i we were afraid or whatever but because like we couldn't move because people would constantly like i that was the one show where i was like holy shit like this is what it's like to kind of really be famous somewhere like or this is the way people really famous people are treated everywhere right and uh i'll never forget that because that was very it was it's it if you feel like i don't say you i felt like a dickhead walking around with like four security guards you know like and our little group but it just was the way it was but i wanted to read this out specifically because i just don't want people no one's gonna like like, where are you going to see me at Waffle House?

34:04Dustin Furman:You know, yeah, like, you know, I was at Cedar Point. Yeah, that's true. I mean, you could find you could find me at the Waffle House. Could find me at the supermarket, could find me walking around the neighborhood. I've talked to store, tell the story about that woman that recognized me here. And then the girl that like the teenage girl that recognized me a few weeks ago through probably like I told the story of how she's like, are you the streamer? And I'm like, oh, no, someone because I was just like someone in the neighborhood knows who I am. This isn't good. I want to live like a totally like right incognito life.

34:31Dustin Furman:like someone told like someone in one of these houses knows but uh you're not gonna see me but if you do it's okay to say hello yeah it's quite all right i don't want to i don't want people to think that about me now what's a place you don't want to be recognize that like specifically a

34:48Chris G.:place where it's just like if i'm here to definitely don't talk to me um is there a place like that like a doctor's office or something yeah doctor that right yeah like something like an aa meeting yeah like i feel like i would have like because i i told the story before like how like i think uh my uh the bank teller uh when i was done with the whole thing was like hey you do youtube right i was like yeah so yeah you can't you can't do that i don't want yeah i'm going to a different bank now i don't i don't like this because i don't know how you feel about me i know you recognize me but i don't i like the idea that you could just go in and just like you know change a number and fuck my life up right exactly so like uh you know that or like

35:27Colin Moriarty:a planned parenthood or something they're like goodness you know they're like hey i'm just we've

35:34Chris G.:all been there i'm just getting i'm just staying safe you know my being here doesn't mean anything i'm just i'm being precautious yeah yeah i understand i understand yeah good i was gonna

35:48Colin Moriarty:to say i i'm having a hard time think of anywhere that i don't want to be like greeted other than if you're at an event greet him yeah not in the bathroom if you're pissing beside me and you want to say hello hurry up and then meet then meet me outside you know we don't need to talk on dick in hand i know you might want to yeah but honestly i don't want to have your dick in their

36:12Chris G.:hand you know who knows who knows who knows you're in this you're in the stall and so he's like i recognize those grunts goodness fighting for my life in here all right a couple of important

36:29Dustin Furman:questions here we'll start with kurt aka big juicy who wrote in and said boys i have a question of the highest importance what is your favorite type of french fry from the shoestring to the crinkle to the steak to the five guys style what is your favorite me and my girlfriend were talking about this and i knew it would be entertaining sacred opening question also would you consider tater tots or sweet potato fries as being in the fry family or are they more of a distant cousin thanks uh i like sweet potato fries i don't consider them a french fry there's something else tater tots are a french fry in my opinion it's the same thing it's basically the same thing

37:03Chris G.:but like i don't know i no no i i can't i can't i can't sign off on that i feel i feel like tater tots are like they're more hash brown than french fry you know even though they're the same thing

37:17Dustin Furman:you wouldn't call like a hash brown a french fry yeah that's true okay sure you don't eat hash browns with your fingers yeah i guess so but like i mean i you know what i mean though like you're right like it's ultimately ultimately like sweet potato fries like i'm with you where i'm like these aren't fries these are sweet potatoes that's what that's what these you can't fool me

37:40Chris G.:but i pretty much anything as long as it's crispy i don't like the soggy fry i don't i don't i know some people who like that on like they purposely make it like that like it's almost like steamed or something and i'm like i don't understand how anybody could even stomach this not that it's like the worst thing i've ever had but like in like comparing it to what it could be you know it's just like it's such a downgrade that i find it almost offensive to to even entertain that you know what i do you remember uh colin do you remember that place that we used to go to um umami umami burger oh umami burger yeah they had good fries i really like those i like a thin crispy fry i like a thin crispy fry i don't love a fat fry is okay as long as it's crispy but too often times i find that fat fries are like they don't crisp them enough right yeah they're

38:30Dustin Furman:always mushy yeah you can't you can't do it it's like it's it's not doable you have to bake them

38:34Chris G.:almost you got to get it like really close to the time that they're out of the fryer or whatever because otherwise they sit in like they sit in the box and they steam and they saw they get soggy it's too much but like crispy is the rule in my opinion i think uh i do like the five the

38:53Colin Moriarty:the five guys style, almost like Chris was saying, like kind of the five guys, they can be kind of wet. Like it depends on how they make them.

39:01Dustin Furman:Yeah.

39:02Colin Moriarty:I ever eat once in a while, like I'm in the mood for, I like, I always say they're like the nasty fries from like a stand at a carnival. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. They're kind of gross, but dude, you get those and they put the cheese on them with the bacon bits. Oh yeah. It's kind of gas, man. Yeah.

39:19Dustin Furman:That's the whole thing. And I brought up, I have a list here. just to get into some of the kinds of fries like this here i'll send it to you guys oh i thought

39:28Chris G.:you made you pre-prepared oh no no no that's a column i already list fry i googled it um

39:35Dustin Furman:standard cut fry all right so like a mcdonald's not a mcdonald's fries are s tier fries but a fry like that by the way i stand by this completely is like pound for pound pound for pound done right right there's no fry better than a mcdonald's fry none there's no fries better than the mcdonald's but it's got to be done right and again the mcdonald's in my neighborhood is a good mcdonald's they do it as as a general rule probably i do think like if you get like specifically i know

40:08Chris G.:we just talked about five guys fries and how they come out so if you get five guys fries when they're crispy dude like i don't know man like that's like that's like a golden i i don't think i've

40:17Dustin Furman:better fries than that the the five guys in my neighborhood or in my area it's not my neighborhood in my area that we go to like we order on the app and then we go pick it up and they seem to have a thing there where like they don't even start the fries until you're like you're there and then you have to kind of wait a few minutes which is a little annoying but they do the fries really well and they put all the salt on them and they're so greasy it just absorbs yeah they're like dude the dogs go nuts for like they know like they like love five five guys fries it's hysterical like They love them.

40:48Dustin Furman:So, all right, we have a few options here. They have the waffle fry here. The waffle fry is great. There is a fundamental problem with them, though. Is that because like a Chick-fil-A, for instance, you get waffle fries and waffle fries have such a large surface area that they get cold really quick. You have to eat them right away, in my opinion. Like, that's what makes Chick-fil-A to go suck. it's almost like Chick-fil-A's got to be really it doesn't have to be but it really should be eaten in the person because the fries are just never right it's very similar to In-N-Out like taking In-N-Out to go is almost like that's so strange you can't do it you got to eat it right away um yeah they have curly fries here curly fries are they hit the spot sometimes but I don't always want them because they have to see the seasoning salt and whatnot on which is good but i don't always want that but the curly fry is good no doubt about it a curly fry the curly

41:46Chris G.:fry where it was a was a savior of mine in college specifically like i remember the cafeteria would have them and they would always be like way better than whatever the fucking that's the thing it's like the standard curly fry i find is better than the standard fry you know because it's got that default kind of seasoning baked into it so it's just like it's it's rare that you're going to be like particularly disappointed by a curly fry versus like you can get a normal fry and you're like ah this isn't seasoned this is like saltless or you know whatever it can be bland but i haven't

42:15Dustin Furman:had a curly fry in years i don't think i haven't wanted one in a while either i like uh obviously

42:22Colin Moriarty:i mean arby's is the one that has the the curly fries and they're good but then you have to eat arby's you have to eat anything else at arby's and that's just not so hard arby's is rough like i just don't know that i don't i've never had it it just looks it's rough yeah i feel like it's gone downhill i we never like went there all the time when i was a kid but i remember it being good the last time i went there recently i think i went there with holly's parents or something it was like just bad like i got chicken tenders and they were dry as hell and it was dirty inside it

42:55Chris G.:was bad but i can't i walked into i walked into a derby's once that i was like so flummoxed by the smell in there like i just like i couldn't i was like what do they make here i still kind of don't

43:08Dustin Furman:know god rough it's so funny man um what other ones they have on here that i wanted oh crinkle cut i mean crinkle cut fry is a classic but that's really a home like a home style and i don't mean home fries i mean like you eat this at home crinkle cut fries the only place that i can think of that has crinkle cut fries that i like is steak shack i want to say or shake shake shake shake yeah yeah yeah they are good they are good um what else here they have shoestring or match stick fries that's not really a fry that's more of like a potato chip at that point because that you know you got like the canister of them you know i'm talking about there's there's a fine line

43:52Chris G.:between a perfect thin cut fry and a shoestring kind of match. I do like a matchstick fry, but it's like that's really more like if that's if it's at the place that I'm eating and they have it. I'm like, yeah, OK. I'm down for that.

44:06Dustin Furman:What else do they have here? Yeah. All right. So these are the two that I wanted to say that I think are I've never understood these, especially one of them. Steak fries. I don't understand. I don't understand why you'd ever want a steak fry over. almost any other kind of fry. And then they have potato wedges here, which are even worse. Yeah, potato wedges are. That's because you can't get. They're always going to be mushy and not right in the middle. So that's kind of where I put that. They have a few others on here. I've never like potato tornado. What the fuck is that? I've never heard a whole potato on a skewer thinly sliced through to make a spiral fanned out and deep fried.

44:42Dustin Furman:I mean, that sounds awesome. That sounds great.

44:44Chris G.:It sounds like a good carnival.

44:45Dustin Furman:Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Yeah, but I've never heard of that.

44:48Chris G.:garlic fries are on here too and those are pretty goaded but like that's a pretty rare yeah these

44:52Dustin Furman:are like accoutrements right because they have cheese fries on here too like i love just like go to a diner in new york and you order a cheeseburger and fries and you're like melt cheese over the fries and they just put cheese on them and put them under the hot plate it's just like so good man oh god i love american cheese like i just think it's so in and out it's oh yeah and that does it too yeah of course some people don't like that it's you got to eat

45:15Colin Moriarty:those fast though because that cheese will not stay melted long right and it's just that's just

45:19Dustin Furman:the case for in and out like you have to eat i think the reason that in and out is always crowded inside is not only because it's popular but because everyone understands you can't take it to go

45:30Colin Moriarty:yeah you got to eat there i always get so i'm befuddled by the entire idea of bringing it to go

45:36Chris G.:the fries in particular the burger you can get away with yeah but yeah i guess could you ask

45:40Dustin Furman:them to cover everything i guess they would if you asked them right they probably give you a box because that's the thing if people don't know In-N-Out basically just gives you your food like open plate basically even in a even if you get it in a bag it's like the fries are uncovered the burger is like half exposed because you're eating it out of a wrapper it's not really made to don't drive 20 minutes or whatever and then go eat it all right another important and much more seasonal question Serge wrote in and said gobble gobble SS crew with the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday next week I thought I'd share my thoughts and well wishes with the sacred community any big plans or will everyone be more reserved this year much like jerry's girlfriend with her father's toy collection i'll be passed out on trip trip to fan from all the turkey and wine i will surely enjoy what say you thanksgiving is incoming i was going to do this next week but then i'm like that doesn't really make any sense because it'll yeah people not even hear it's like well what is it but but it'll be more you know we're a week out let's just say that uh big plans chris for thanksgiving what are you going to do you're going to do a friendsgiving are you going home uh i'm probably

46:40Chris G.:gonna do it here uh there's no real like big plans i'm probably gonna do like a really small thing with some close friends maybe i don't know thanksgiving is never was never really that big of a thing for me personally like we we do it we used to do uh a chickensgiving every year which is basically thanksgiving but no turkey because all of us kind of agreed that like we don't really care for turkey really um but this year we're probably gonna keep it uh small nothing nothing crazy i'm more of a new year's halloween christmas kind of guy i like a turkey i like a home-cooked turkey but it's like it's it's rare

47:22Dustin Furman:that i care enough to want it yeah the turkey's like my least favorite part actually yeah the Turkey's kind of the turkey is more of like a prop or like an accessory.

47:33Chris G.:Right. We're like even eating it for the taste of it. It's like, yeah, this is good for what this is. Right.

47:39Dustin Furman:You know, I like turkey cold cuts more than I like. Yeah. Like meat. Yeah.

47:43Chris G.:Yeah. Turkey sandwich or turkey club or something.

47:45Dustin Furman:Yeah, definitely.

47:46Chris G.:That's that's not bad. But like there's something about like, oh, I get the wing of the turkey. It's like this is like this is three times bigger than a chicken wing and five times less flavorful in comparison. like i know it's i know it's all the way that you you prepare it i'm sure there's like oh i'm sure there's a fucking gordon ramsay fucking asshole in the audience be like you're not seasoning it correctly you've got to stuff it with this and i'm like that'd be me i'm sure i'm sure you can but like dude the pain of the pain of like the process of like getting a turkey ready and like seasoning it right and it's like it's like so much longer than any other food that it would to prepare to get to the same flavor place.

48:27Chris G.:So I'm just like, I'm fine with, I'm fine with chicken and macaroni and stuffing and all this other, other stuff, you know? Yeah.

48:33Dustin Furman:We make bags. My mom makes, often makes big ZD. Oh, big ZD is great. Yeah. Turkey and all the other, like American accoutrements. Just like, yeah, I, I totally agree with you. Like I love a roast chicken. Micah makes this roast chicken dish. That's just like fucking awesome with carrots and onion. And we just have rice with like some butter on it. And, It's perfect because it's juicy and it's kind of quick. Yeah, the turkey is not there's not a lot of it's not worth it, really. It's no disrespect to the turkey. Yeah, I love the turkey. Benjamin Franklin thought the turkey should be the American bird, like the American symbol, which I think would have been kind of awesome, actually.

49:09But it's a lot of meat.

49:11Chris G.:I'll give it that. Yeah, it is. It's it's it's and I guess that's ultimately why, because it is for like a family like chicken is kind of like, you know, you got to get a lot of it. But I don't know. I'm of the mind. it's like dude i'll have duck for thanksgiving oh wow duck to me is like if i could if i could start anything maybe next year because i don't have that much time to plan this time but like next year i might i might just go all in on duck because duck is gonna have to make two ducks i'll make eight dude i will dude i i duck is so good that i get i get hungry looking at like a real duck like a live duck like it makes me it triggers something in me it's like i want to eat that do you ever see a duck's penis yeah yeah i know they corkscrew and they do all some

49:54Colin Moriarty:they got barbed wires on the dick i think about that when i see ducks it's kind of ruined

49:59Dustin Furman:ducks in a way for go to go to silver lake and just go hunt one just just spear a duck in uh silver lake you don't think anyone speared a duck at silver

50:09Chris G.:lake before i guarantee you that happens i i've 100 someone's probably while i was like walking the lake but i think um yeah i don't know uh thanksgiving's always been like the not that i don't like it but it's it's always been on like the lower rung for me of like the of the of the later year later in the year holidays you know um it's still nice but i don't know i like new

50:36Dustin Furman:years yeah dustin where new year's depresses me but we can we'll wait for that when we can talk about how depressing that is later in the year uh dustin thanksgiving plans food recommendations

50:47Colin Moriarty:ideas what's going on what's happening yeah well i have to be i have to defend the turkey

50:52Dustin Furman:here at last stand it's uh that's my turkey impression that was very good is it good i if

50:59Colin Moriarty:i closed my eyes i think i would have thought there was turkey yeah right here in our home studios uh so yeah the turkey it is a bitch and it's annoying but that's why i only do it once a year it's like i'm willing to put in the the time and the effort it is funny and i we have talked about this calling on sacred years ago at some point but when i started making the turkey and started doing the cooking for my parents holly's parents my grandparents they all come together for this uh thanksgiving meal uh they were the boomers in particular like wow i have never had a turkey this good in my life wow or a turkey this juicy or whatever and here's the thing i'm not doing anything special i i'm the asshole that chris talked about i watched a gordon ramsay recipe i do that and it's great there's no problems it's not really that hard uh i just think that maybe there's a people are still used to their boomer parents or grandparents whatever that are making turkeys they're using the bag or whatever and cooking it because there's a whole boomer thing about them overcooking everything to oblivion and people are out there eating a lot of dry ass turkeys yeah they are and they're not seasoned either yeah and i think that has tainted the good name yeah of the turkey yeah sure so there's a gordon ramsay video on youtube of course it's christmas because the british people eat turkeys for christmas or something uh but that's what i do every year you put the the bacon on top keep the moisture in with the bacon it's good shit it's good shit this year we'll be doing it at my parents house but i'll be cooking it there just because they got way more space and it's usually an all-day affair so the question is this turkey takes like four hours there's new stranger things on netflix that day but also the remastered beatles anthology on disney plus and one of those might be nice to watch stranger things man

53:05Dustin Furman:it's over just fucking end it i know this is over i know why couldn't this be it why couldn't they have done this in 2020 or 2019 like what was what is going on with tv what the fuck is going on with it that like yeah it's just so annoying like i look at i saw some of them on like their recent media tour or whatever and i'm like what is this even going to be about you're all in your fucking 20s you know like they wasted so much time with all this you know it's uh it could have been this really tight i don't know it just it just bums me out it's 10 years for four seasons or something right or five seasons yeah exactly and it's like crazy that's the one thing i miss about i miss a few things about network tv actually but it's like i can't think maybe there's an example but i can't think of one example of a like a show that wasn't like you know and again i'm talking network tv where it's like yeah we're just gonna go away for a couple years then we'll come back

54:01Chris G.:it's like no yeah outside of like outside of a show getting like canceled and brought back like family like family guy yeah or something like that yeah but uh yeah it's weird that that's kind of the rule now like that's kind of how i'm feeling about like um i just started watching

54:16Colin Moriarty:pluribus uh that new hell yeah how many people have real quick colin how many people have asked

54:21Dustin Furman:you to watch pluribus no no i've only no one has asked me to watch that's shocking that's a colin that's the new show from uh what's his name uh vince gilligan yeah right right right of course

54:30Chris G.:you'd like him bad yeah um and so i was paying attention i saw that and i was like oh there's a new show and it's on apple tv which is probably why no one's ever no one's been telling colin to watch it because nobody has fucking no one knows it exists um dude apple tv like i got it just for pluribus and i was like looking at all the show like all the shows on apple tv look like shows you'd see on like i don't even know like they look like they you'd see them on on the on a background tv and like smiling friends or something or like on like a on some other tv show where it's just like my daughter the cake or something it's like you're just seeing like what show is this even who the fuck is watching this right but pluribus is on it and i'm watching And I'm like, it's really good and interesting.

55:09Chris G.:But I'm like, I'm thinking in my head, like. How long is this going to take?

55:15Colin Moriarty:Hmm. You know, how many years is this going to is this going to be like three seasons, four seasons over the course of the next eight years?

55:21Chris G.:Right. I don't know if that's true. Like Vince Gillian's typically been pretty good about that. But like. I don't know, man. It's in the back of my head now with like modern TV, where it's just like, how long is this going to be? When's the when's the next severance?

55:34Dustin Furman:Yes. Severance is a great example. I mean, that shows what two seasons over five years or something. It's like that. Well, yeah, they got caught between in COVID and the writer's strike. i know in the writer's strike so i i get there's all these mitigating excuses but it's just surprising at netflix and i know that they're the power you know dynamic is different now because there's so much competition for this talent all the rest but it's like you would think it's like when did stranger things come out 2015 or something like that and everyone like loved it yeah yeah and then it's like you think that they'd be like all right we need a little bit of time and it's like yeah uh you have like three months to write the fucking shows and we're going to record the next season like what are we doing like we you're gonna like it's i don't think netflix benefits

56:13Chris G.:from stretching it out like this to be perfectly honest with you it's gotta be perfect yeah it's gotta i gotta yeah i gotta really i gotta i gotta make sure it's absolutely there's no there's no rough edges at all i want it to be like hey i made it i think i would be a lot less enthused

56:27Colin Moriarty:about stranger things if it wasn't the show has had ups and the last season was amazing

56:33Chris G.:it was yeah the mall season bad yeah bad not horrible i mean i've seen worse tv of course but it wasn't it's a good show overall i like it i'm curious to see how it ends although it's gonna be so funny watching it because they're all like 50 and so it's just gonna be like them like some like you know mid-20s adults with like bowl cuts like i don't know it's maybe

56:53Colin Moriarty:i don't know are they aging them up a little bit like i don't know how they have how you have to

56:58Dustin Furman:it has to take place in the 90s at this point i mean that's like my whole thing is like how is

57:02Chris G.:this not like 1992 now yeah that's like when like what is it the uh that 70s show when they when they got to like the later season it's like this is the 90s now right

57:15Dustin Furman:or the 80s i guess yeah they did didn't they do that 80s show they did that 80s it had it had had glenn howerton in it uh oh i don't think i even remember that and that must have been no that would have been before always sunny i guess right that would have been like yeah yeah because i was thinking like that that was probably like 99 2000 2001 something like that um yeah

57:36Chris G.:which is not smart if you're gonna do like a 90 show in the 90s it's like the fuck are you doing like that's that's that is crazy actually i always think about the wonder years which would

57:50Dustin Furman:dude if the i think the wonder years now would be like not like the first episode would be like 9-11 you know you know how the first episode is like winnie's brother gets killed in vietnam it's like a really serious ass episode and it like grounds the time they would have to have some

58:06Chris G.:sort of horrible yeah i don't know maybe they're maybe they're trying to do a rolling simpsons timeline where like they're you know they're they're always kids at some point um or something but like i i don't know stranger things is a weird that first season's great the last season was great the middle seasons are kind of no middle season is as bad as walking dead season two or something uh well i get the second season the mall season was pretty bad but it's a decent show except for that one episode what was that one episode that was like a backdoor pilot for some like x-men oh yeah the that that episode i know exactly what you're talking about everyone hates that yeah it's like a but they did this random backdoor pilot episode where like 11 goes off on an adventure with a bunch of like all alternative misfits and it was clearly like this is another show i love backdoor pilot like i love when you can see a backdoor pilot something so fascinating about that like in a tv like at the office had that thing with like the farm or whatever like oh that's right yeah with like dwight and he was like i'm gonna go live on a farm with these kooky characters it's like what the fuck are you doing why are we doing this

59:16Dustin Furman:the shroots yeah yeah yeah it's about an alien invasion isn't it

59:23Colin Moriarty:i want to tell you the concept i want to tell you what it's about but it's it's the hardest sell ever because do none of the teasers tell you what the show's about at all but they reveal what it's about in episode one and the way it unfolds is so good that i refuse to tell anyone

59:44Dustin Furman:what the show's about i thought it was well tell me i thought it was about like alien mind control or something like i thought that that's what it was i guess you're on the path yeah okay

59:52Colin Moriarty:yeah it's not really a spoiler i'm sure like people are taught they're everyone knows now but if anyone hasn't or if you haven't it's worth finding out uh it's really good so far it's crazy

1:00:04Dustin Furman:but uh but yeah i have to i have to get it because i um still need to watch the second season of what we were just talking about. Severance. And there's something else I wanted to watch on Apple. There's like, actually, I appreciate, I must admit when I have Apple TV, which occasionally I do like once a year or whatever, I do appreciate how tight it is. Like there's not a lot of stuff comparable to Netflix and Amazon, but it's, I think of an overall much higher quality. And I think they're not really doing it to make money. In fact, I don't, I'd be surprised if they do make money on it. It just seems like a thing that they kind of do as part of the Apple ecosystem.

1:00:46Dustin Furman:You can obviously get it anywhere. It used to be$5 a month. Yeah, like that's fucking crazy. I'm sure it's not that anymore, but it's just so it just seems like it's a prestige kind of move for Apple and they take seriously or more serious. I'm not saying there's not bad shows on it, but I don't know. But it seems like they take more seriously the attachment of the Apple brand to the show and you get kind of cool things like that cool you know they should be a more creative company like that so yeah i'm trying to think of the other shit that's on there that i oh for all mankind that's a cool ass show too on apple oh yeah like the alternate history one yeah it was kind of big right um yeah that was supposed to be big too i have not seen that yeah so i don't know there's a bunch of shit on there i got to get it at some point oh ted lasso is is is uh that's on that right that's supposed to be great too but i don't really want to watch it

1:01:39Chris G.:i don't yeah i i don't know that's a funny idea isn't it about it's about a football coach it

1:01:43Dustin Furman:becomes a soccer coach right like oh god i think that's what it's about but it's supposed to be

1:01:46Chris G.:like really funny as fuck i i i couldn't think of a premise less for me if i if i tried man yeah

1:01:54Dustin Furman:like i think it's about like an american football coach who somehow becomes like a british soccer coach in some weird like yeah that's what it's about it's like supposed to be i think it's supposed to be it sounds it actually sounds really funny but um yeah I don't really want to watch it you know it's one of those shows where I'll probably watch it for 10 minutes I'll be like

1:02:10Chris G.:oh I should have watched this for years but yeah here's these two sports that you don't know anything about enjoy enjoy it yeah yeah good luck and I think Apple has major league soccer as well so there's a lot of like um you know there's like a synthesis between that kind of programming I

1:02:26Dustin Furman:guess like-minded people subscribing anyway let's get into the news before we get into the news I this is this is such a left field thing but i'm seeing on twitter this morning that cheney dick cheney is trending number one because his funeral is today or is today and i wanted to just say like didn't that just kind of come and go more than anything you've ever seen even in the modern era of 24-hour news cycles like dick cheney died and like it seemed like it was not even acknowledged like it's just so funny to me like like it just it just happened and like I don't even know exactly when it happened how it happened it didn't like it didn't register and you think that like people hated this dude you know yeah you would think that I don't know I just feel like it's like a weird I saw that I'm like why is Cheney trending I'm like oh yeah

1:03:21Chris G.:yeah and then you and then you remember that he died

1:03:23Dustin Furman:yeah right I'm like oh right

1:03:25Chris G.:he technically died like decades ago he's been walking around with no pulse so it's only a matter of time but yeah that's uh that is a hard left field you're right

1:03:37Dustin Furman:just so it's just so interesting to me it's like i don't remember like a i i was just like what everything happens so fast now that even though a previous vice president dying it's like we you got about two hours to think about this and then we're moving on all right all right p and peace i don't know depends on how you look at it i guess i don't want to i don't wish anyone I don't want to wish anyone bad but I'm sure you can't hurt him no no not anymore not where he's going all right let's get in the news I wanted to start here uh Black Friday is coming up we were talking about Black Friday for our own merch obviously and Black Friday is going to be very friendly to you if you're looking for PlayStation hardware so playstation blog reports that on direct.playstation.com which is the playstation direct website and um maybe some other retailers are also participating i'm not really entirely sure yeah participating retailers so a lot of big deals here deals on ps5 consoles offering offerings include now i'm going to use usd obviously we're an american podcast but it's important to note that these deals will also take place as i understand in canada mainland europe the UK and other places and you'll have your own equivalent for whatever fucking Star Wars currency you use in your country of origin.

1:05:01Dustin Furman:The PS5 Digital Edition 825 gigabyte Fortnite flowering chaos bundle will be available for$400 and the PS5 console one terabyte bundle will be available for$449. You can save$100 on PS5 consoles and$100 on PS5 Digital Edition consoles and participating locations, of course, as we noted. And here are the other things that they note. And again, USD$100 off PSVR to$20 off the portal,$20 off the Pulse Elite wireless headset, $30 off the Pulse Explorer wireless earbuds,$30 off DualSense Edge,$20 off of DualSense, $20 off of the access controller, and then discounts on a bunch of first and second party games, including Death Stranding 2, Lost Solicide, Astro Bot, God of War, Ragnarok.

1:05:52Dustin Furman:let's see what else players in participating countries who joined PlayStation plus during PlayStation's Black Friday promotion can save up to 33 % on a 12 month membership so again that's we complained about this last year and we have a letter about this but that's only for newcomers as far as I understand which is a little bit unfortunate Tim Bob wrote in come on over here Tim Bob hello chaps with Sony announcing their Black Friday pricing in particular$100 off the PS5 Pro I wanted to ask as people who have owned one for a year do you still think the upgrade was worth it or should those of us with the original Sato Kaiba I don't know what that means continue to hold on to it for a few more years and move to PS6 in 2027 and 2028 thanks I'll hang up and listen now you're fluent in Japanese is that I just say like I just I just got it no it's the

1:06:43Colin Moriarty:yugioh character right with the yeah there's like his nemesis in uh in yugioh had a popped collar very reminiscent of the look of the ps5 oh interesting okay that's that's like three levels

1:06:57Dustin Furman:deeper than i would have ever gone with that particular thing i thought i said something racist um i don't know man i feel i mean a hundred dollars off is nothing to sneeze at these consoles aren't getting any cheaper to be able to take advantage of this in like a an ephemeral way while they have these deals going, I think is probably worth it. But maybe it's not the last sale they do. Maybe things are normalizing a little bit more where you can expect sales in the future. And if you've come this far without a PS5, can you kind of get away with the rest of the generation? You've kind of come through what?

1:07:29Dustin Furman:Three quarters of the two thirds, let's say two thirds of the generation probably makes a little more sense. It's a little more than that. So do you really need one now? I don't know. I don't know. Do you want? hmm jamie wrote in said hey sacred boys i'm here to lament the fact that playstation doesn't discount its 79.99 ps plus essential subscription for black friday anymore was this the bean counters or perhaps a parting gift from jim ryan is a subscription for cloud saves only too much to ask for i'll hang up and listen it is a little annoying that you only get the discount for ps plus if you join at the time.

1:08:05Dustin Furman:It's kind of shitty. But I also understand that if people could just, especially if you could just predict it's going to happen on Black Friday, you would just wait every year until you can renew. And that's like a permanent discount that they can't really do much about. And you're kind of destroying their margins. What would be funny is if they like offered really specific packages, like three years of PS Plus Essential, but give you$20 off per year or something like that. and lock you in, save you a little bit of money doing something like that. But yeah, it's annoying. I'm not crazy that they do that, but they do.

1:08:39Dustin Furman:So anyway, a bunch of games are discounted hundreds of games on PSN. You can save on PlayStation gear as well. Remember the PlayStation gear website? I think they're winding that down. So I'm pretty sure they have substantial like 60 % off. It says sitewide on gear. And I think it's like all sales final. So kind of clearance situation, but yes, some good things here. So if you're looking for PS5, PS5 Pro and the whole litany of accessories, I guess now is the time to strike if you're looking to save a few bucks. Can't sneeze at$100 off of a PS5 Pro, I suppose. Do you need one? I don't know. $20 off of PlayStation Portal is pretty nice.

1:09:12Dustin Furman:Because, of course, this thing is a beast. Just an absolute beast. All right. Game Awards. The nominees were announced. It's that time. So let's see. How many categories are there? 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 29 categories. Dustin, anything here interesting to you? I guess we should go through a few of them. Game of the Year. Claire Obscure Expedition 33, which I think is obviously going to win. Death Stranding 2 on the Beach, which is my personal selection so far. I haven't played everything yet. Donkey Kong Bonanza, Katie's 2, Hollow Knight Silksong, and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, which I think is kind of the, it's not the dark horse because it's not going to win, but that's kind of the one where I was like, I think all of those other five games were totally predictable.

1:09:58Dustin Furman:I think actually the most bubble ones were Death Stranding and Kingdom Come where I was like, I don't know what those two might be. So we have that for game of the year. What else do we have? Best game direction, best narrative. Let's see what's best narrative. Claire Obscure Expedition 33, Death Stranding 2, Ghost of Yotei, Kingdom Come Deliverance and Silent Hill. That was surprising to me. Silent Hill F?

1:10:20Colin Moriarty:Silent Hill F pulling a best narrative. I don't know if it's my choice for best narrative, but I'm glad to see it get some nominations. I think the also the actress that plays the main character was also nominated so cool to see that in there

1:10:36Dustin Furman:yeah let's see best game direction i think claire's got that by the way yeah yeah yeah go ahead i'm sorry no no which category were you moving i was gonna say best game i'm just going to just clicking through the best game direction is expedition 33 death straining 2 ghost of yote hades 2 and split fiction split fiction is actually the one that probably i was maybe a little surprise didn't make the game of the year list yeah yeah i didn't play it though so i don't

1:11:01Chris G.:i heard it was fantastic though i mean it's i mean i loved the the last thing they did so wouldn't be surprised if it was anything anything too different it is funny man like the it's just

1:11:12Dustin Furman:the same games like uh what is this best art direction claire obscure death stranding ghost yote hades 2 hollow knight i think that's gotta go to claire obscure you assume maybe that one's

1:11:25Chris G.:that direction yeah that one i think is a little bit more competitive i actually think like i actually could see pretty much any one of these getting it maybe not as evenly but like i think they're all i think they're all kind of up for up for competition there i did my voting on stream

1:11:41Colin Moriarty:last night and so i have a you can download your vote card to see all the things you voted for i voted best art direction death stranding 2 oh i didn't i'm not gonna i'm not gonna vote i don't

1:11:53Dustin Furman:think i just don't care that i don't really well that's it was funny because there were some people

1:11:58Colin Moriarty:like i was trying to vote for best adaptation i'm like hmm let's go with minecraft there was there was a couple decisions people were like what the fuck and i'm like you can't take this that seriously yeah we're just doing this for fun i could see i could see art direction going to

1:12:14Chris G.:hades or sulksong honestly um i don't know much about either like i played a little bit of sulksong i don't know much about hades 2 i gotta get around to it it's sitting there it's sitting waiting for me but um i could see that happening because those are really strong 2d kind of games i'm sorry i didn't mean to interrupt you no best adaptation i thought i was a little

1:12:37Dustin Furman:befuddled by they have minecraft which is not a surprise devil may cry from netflix which was popular splinter cell death watch um which is also from netflix but then they have the last of us season two which is it was it was fine it was not anywhere near as good as this and i think it really literally was starting to lose the plot and then they have until dawn what what about um

1:13:01Chris G.:fallout is that not everyone doesn't everyone love fallout no fallout was um last year i believe oh yeah and then then so and then the new season of fallout doesn't come out until december of this year i see so it'll be eligible next year i guess because he has that grandfathering kind of thing going on over there jeff does there was one other twisted metal i felt like kind of

1:13:20Dustin Furman:we'll talk about twisted metal later i was like that kind of i know a lot of people probably didn't watch it but it's it's like one of peacock's biggest shows ever not that that means a whole lot but i think they were saying it was their second biggest second season ever

1:13:33Chris G.:which is crazy it's a weird it's a weird qualifier but i know what you're saying

1:13:38Dustin Furman:like yeah in other words like their fault like when they renewed something it was like it worked out for them really well and we'll talk about in a little while it got renewed for a third season so i thought that was kind of weird i thought people didn't like until dawn and it seemed like people were really negative on the last of us but i guess i guess not anything else in here let's see what's best esports team oh jesus christ gen g for league of legends nrg for valorant team falcons for Dota 2 Team Liquid for Mobile Legends Bang Bang and Team Vitality for Counter-Strike 2 it's like oh I don't want to be a hater dude I so when these when this first uh when this all got

1:14:14Chris G.:announced like the nominees or whatever I saw best RPG right best RPG that list and I thought I didn't read the context I guess I thought the best RPG category was game of the year and i was losing and i was losing my fucking monster hunter i was like what are you fucking

1:14:34Dustin Furman:saying i found obsidian i almost like i primed i primed like my twitter i was like opening up

1:14:40Chris G.:twitter i was about to be like yo what the fuck is this and then and i read closer i was like oh my god thank god uh that would have been about is certainly not even close but oh geez uh what

1:14:55Colin Moriarty:about esports team what about content creator of the year there's a a vtuber on here two vtubers

1:15:02Chris G.:actually yeah chris do you know who this burnt peanut guy is i do i've been i've been uh i'm not following him specifically i haven't been following him specifically his clips pop up on my um on my for you page uh on instagram and like tiktok and twitter every now and again he's big into he's big into extraction games so he was like into tarkov for a while but i think since uh arc raiders blew up a lot of his clips have been popping off it's funny it's good stuff he's he's funny i don't know if i would i still feel weird about following people like this i don't know there's something there's something about the digital kind of thing that freaks me out a little

1:15:39Colin Moriarty:bit but he's funny when i was voting i voted for moist critical for charlie not that i watch him all the time but i think he's he's good he's a good i thought if he wins though am i cursing him you know you think of boogie and dr disrespect but that was trending gamer yeah it's different it's different so i don't know i don't want to hurt charlie but i did vote for him

1:16:05Chris G.:so charlie okay the the funniest interaction funniest interaction i've ever had with charlie is when i was doing the fight and i i walked out to suavemente and he called it he said uh oh that they're playing the boner jams now and i was like yeah okay good someone appreciates but yeah this burnt peanut guy is pretty funny i don't know any i honestly don't know much i only know charlie and this peanut dude i don't know any of the other guys um at all i know kaisen i know the name kaisenette but i don't know i don't know i know he i didn't wasn't he the guy who like in new york city he started like a riot because he was giving out playstations on top of like a yeah something like yes that sounds familiar i swear to god that happened but i i could be

1:16:48Dustin Furman:misremembering let's see what else here oh so it's worth noting sony has more nominations than any other publisher um 19 some of them come from tv like we said the last of us and then told on would be two hell divers actually got a nomination for best community support so that's an ongoing thing it's in competition with games like balder's gate and final fantasy 14 so it's a it's a hodgepodge no man's sky is in that nomination listing as well but um they've managed to get it's i think the biggest thing i realized was they managed to get 19 nominations with no games it's crazy how did they do that yeah congratulations to them best multiplayer is an interesting category too because arc raiders is in there uh battlefield six is in there elven ring

1:17:33Chris G.:peak which is cool to get a nod i think it deserves a nod and split fictions there as well I think Arc Raiders is probably going to get it right Dustin for best multiplayer I would hope so I would imagine

1:17:50Colin Moriarty:Colin something this has been the big one of the big conversations about the nominees I fucking hate this conversation but a lot of people are talking about it so I'm sure that people will ask when we you know if we do the show and not talk about it best independent game

1:18:05Dustin Furman:oh yeah clear obscure be nominated as an indie game no it doesn't make any sense it's not an independent game as a

1:18:14Colin Moriarty:publisher well pretty much all these games have publishers yeah i mean i i just think i haven't

1:18:19Dustin Furman:looked at the list i just i just think that an independent game is if if you're talking about an independent game from an independent studio then like alan wake is an independent game true you know like there i just this gets back into the whole argument of like what is a downloadable game you know um that was like a big thing back in the day you had like best downloadable game of the year and then it's like why are we segmenting these but it made sense at one time and now it doesn't i just i don't know i i think indie game is almost a worthless qualifier if anything they should just have a like under 20 MSRPs like obviously you have a better title than that but

1:18:55Chris G.:like you know I think like look I think um I think this is one of those categories where it pays to kind of like this is why you need like kind of human hands in in like in the room where it's just like hey we understand that sure clear obscure is an indie game but what is the spirit of this category right you know what i mean like what is the subjective albeit i think kind of uniformly although it's subjective to not include clear obscure in indie games i think it's also somewhat objective i think you can just look at it and kind of understand like bollocks pit totally uh absolute i think um from what i've heard and seen blueprints i think qualifies but clear obscure is the only one that kind of feels like really like is this really in the spirit of this also it's got so many other nods like that's kind of thing too it's like that maybe that shouldn't play into it but like i feel like it's in some ways it should right it was just like this guy this this game's in the running for a lot of these categories does it need to be an indie game where it arguably doesn't fit i don't know i think some subjectivity in in in this is would would uh would benefit greatly um yeah i'm also i don't know it's like true i'm looking at

1:20:21Dustin Furman:the list now so like hades 2 self-publishing and hollow knight self-publishing those are those are true indie games right yeah if you but if you again if you're looking at it through that lens than hitman's an indie game right like i i don't there's got to be a better qualifier than that and like you said the disqualification of like ball pit being published by devolver and stuff does that really matter but devolver would call itself an indie publisher probably call itself an indie publisher probably but i don't think there's any such thing really when you really think about it i don't know the bigger the bigger thing that the one thing that I do think and someone wrote in about this I did want to bring this up because I thought it was kind of strange was uh let's see where is it oh here it is um retard d2 wrote in oh retard d2 I think I would be saying more like that hey cdc here's another game awards question did we really need three expedition 33 actors for performance of the year nobody from death straining to kingdom come deliverance to the altars of dispatch is blasphemy I do think it's a little weird mostly because I think they're going to what's funny is that it's probably going to go to Erika Ishii because they're going to cancel each other out.

1:21:38Dustin Furman:Troy Baker is eligible for Indy even though it came out last year because of those grandfathering rules that they have for games that are kind of too late to be nominated. Oh yeah. And Kanatsu Kato for Silent Hill F. I don't know if that's even really going to, it's a realistic thing. The thing that bothers me more about this, I said this last week and I'll just reiterate it is was it charlie cox that was giving that interview about his performance in the game or was it

1:22:01Chris G.:someone else yeah it was right he talked about it yeah and i just yeah i don't know man like i i

1:22:08Dustin Furman:just think it's weird to nominate the performance is great it's awesome it reminds me a lot of uh um you know you hear about musicians where they would do like like frank sinatra frank famously digan would always tell these stories about like how he would do like one take yeah and then be like that's the take bye and then he would like leave or whatever and that's like what they would use. It kind of is weird that these people didn't even really know the roles they were doing. Ben Starr, I'm sure did. But but the you know, to say like I came in for an afternoon, read these lines. I'd never thought about it beforehand.

1:22:42Dustin Furman:I never thought about it afterwards. Not until my agent said the game. It's like this is the guy you want to nominate for best performance. I don't know. I just think it's like in other words, the output was good, but but you know, his heart and soul wasn't in it you like sure performance arguably that arguably makes it

1:23:02Chris G.:crazier is that he just went off and riffed look i've played a number of games this year and i will say like his performance in clear obscures is unlike anything i've heard before because it is so like it feels on it feels weirdly real like it's it's i still remember it very vividly where it's like that's a uniquely like great performance and he didn't even notice arguably that that makes it like oh he should win because if he just like if he just like on a on a that's like on a tuesday afternoon some dude's like oh yeah i'm just gonna write all the beatles songs bye you know and just like he doesn't give a shit he doesn't even notice that it's great i don't know ultimately i don't care that much so it's not something i'm gonna get on my high look at this and it's like three expedition 33 performances and you're just like damn like what the like there wasn't anything better and i'm no like it really it this is kind of an objective list honestly like as far as i as far as like what i've played and what i know i don't know anything about silent hill f uh i think troy baker totally deserves it like that that indiana that harrison ford like replication is kind of crazy yeah he did a nice job i don't i'm not

1:24:22Dustin Furman:crazy about the game, but I think he did a really good job.

1:24:25Chris G.:Right. Well, yeah, for best performance.

1:24:27Dustin Furman:Yeah, right. Exactly.

1:24:28Chris G.:But I think, yeah, I think Ben Starr, Charlie Kirk, Cox and Jennifer English like they yeah like those were those were the most memorable performances that I heard all year.

1:24:36Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I voted for Jennifer English, but since I'm not taking any of this seriously, I want Erica Ishii to win because I want to see the meltdown.

1:24:44Dustin Furman:Oh my God, it'd be awesome.

1:24:46Colin Moriarty:I want it so bad.

1:24:47Dustin Furman:She shouldn't. I think I like actually the character. I don't think her performance is anything to write home about. no you know so like it would be not deserved but it would be it would be deeply funny you know it's a much cooler character than jinn but i actually think jinn's performance was maybe better um i see what you're saying yeah yeah she's a much more compelling character than jinn in my opinion but and i just i'm surprised i'm perfect i'm personally surprised that there wasn't like those expedition 33 people are going to cancel each other out you would think that maybe they would have tried to work together to just get one or two of them off of there and nominate other people or whatever because it just or just have a rule where only one person per game or maybe even two people so you can imagine split fiction like maybe they both got nominated or something in that but it's like a little much that's the one that's the one thing where expedition 33 is nominated or I'm like I don't know I want charlie cox to win this and go on stage and be like

1:25:45Chris G.:i i and that's it that's this whole speech yeah thanks this was literally three hours of my life yeah four years ago thank you for this award it is funny how long ago it was it really is crazy though because like i i still like like honestly when i look at all these performances i do think

1:26:06Colin Moriarty:like for those who come after you know like that's that's that's subdued delivery is crazy

1:26:12Chris G.:like it's yeah that's what that's what struck me about that game in general was how like real he felt it compares to the because everybody else feels like a real like video game character like you know ben star is giving like this like real like you know uh almost like shakespearean kind of performance and it's really good but then you have charlie cox who's just like that's a real dude

1:26:30Colin Moriarty:that's just right that's just a guy one one snub that i thought was interesting um best audio design to me a clear winner but very controversial take is arc raiders for the in-game audio in that game it is really good is crazy good what you like dude the amount of information you get as a player from audio is i don't want to say it's as important as visual but unlike any other game that i've played before you gotta be listening in this game that would be controversial though right because it would be because of what we talked about last week with the ai voices that has nothing to do with what i think is incredible about it but uh yeah the ai voices

1:27:17Chris G.:if anything uh feel the most feel feel the least impressive of uh all of the technology like the audio feedback in that game is pretty fantastic it is so it's weird to not see it but i guess if there's ai in because there is ai audio design intrinsic to it so that might be like a in some way in some ways i think that it probably should be a disqualifier but like also it isn't what i'm thinking of when i think of the good audio design in art graders right so like i don't know it's a

1:27:47Colin Moriarty:weird one embark is probably so happy that call of duty just came out and is now taking so much heat for the blatant ai i saw a picture with six fingers in it uh which was funny dude it's

1:28:00Chris G.:you bet you it's a that it on fucking real that that made it for like the ghibli piss filter made it into call of duty who are you paying what are you yeah it's it is great it is crazy it's like you have no excuses it's yeah i just like i pay some artists it reminds me like during the the new york mayoral race like cuomo had all these cuomo had all these like ai ads like these completely ai generated ads and at the end of it it says like paid for by cuomo for new york says like you paid for this yeah you could have just you could have generated this for free in like 15 minutes you paid for this oh my god it is interesting with it's over with ai i guess

1:28:46Colin Moriarty:is kind of unrelated but it's interesting that i feel like gen x and above their embracing of ai is very weird because you would think that a younger generation would be the ones to embrace new technology but it's like when i go on facebook and i see people around me uh that are gen x and older they're like posting all kinds of stuff they know it's ai and they don't care it's weird yeah

1:29:12Dustin Furman:yeah it sucks yeah it's it sucks it's it's really it really is crazy it does seem like uh call of duty is getting getting the it's shit kicked in this year not from any not from a sales perspective but from just an optics perspective like it feels like a little bit of battlefield a little bit of arc raiders a little bit of some other things it's like putting it on its back foot like you can imagine a situation where call of duty really starts to lose its grasp on this absolute cultural dominance it just this is serious chip damage being done to it it needs there needs to be more or not i don't give a shit about people like call of duty or not i'm not judging it i'm just saying this year feels different i'm going to be very interested to see its sales data um it'll obviously be the best selling game of the year but i've only will

1:29:57Chris G.:it i don't know about that actually um it would have to it would have to be it would have to be

1:30:03Dustin Furman:like a cataclysmic failure for it to not there's outsell battlefield well it's on game pass right so that's yeah that's yeah that's on pc and xbox game pass so there's that it it being on game pass

1:30:13Chris G.:and it being like probably the worst call of duty in years uh by a lot of account like dude i i saw i saw some gameplay footage for this game that i was like truly bewildered uh truly bewildered by there's like a destiny raid boss in this game and you're just like what dude oh was it was it the dream sequence it was like it was like a giant i don't know guy yeah i saw that i was like

1:30:37Dustin Furman:what is that yeah it does it looks like it's fucking outriders or something yeah it's like

1:30:41Chris G.:all right we'll see uh but it's it's i don't know i could say based on steam numbers i mean um which is you know who who the fuck no i i know uh call of duty is more of a it's more of a console thing but i'm pretty sure arc raiders is pushing it shit in yeah at 40 so i could see a world where like our creators actually sells more i could see it maybe and given considering game

1:31:07Colin Moriarty:pass but the thing too about the call of duty numbers is that includes i think it includes warzone i might be wrong in that about that but it includes many previous call of duty games all in that one launcher oh so that's even kind of worse for it it's steam numbers are not good

1:31:26Dustin Furman:right again this could be this because it's on it's even on battle net isn't it so it's like it's hard to look it's hard to look at yeah they won't be super transparent with it but it does seem i want i don't know i don't want to put it that way it's like i wouldn't mind seeing call of duty decline just because it's like come on enough already what are we doing here like stop stop with this and i know that if they're in a catch-22 they can't stop making them every year. They would they would have to like basically close a couple of those teams and sharply reduce them. What they should really be doing is doing what Battlefield did.

1:32:06Dustin Furman:They've never had a market reason to do it, but it's like, just go away. Yeah. And do you have any idea of Call of Duty? Just one. I know I know this is like financially suicidal, especially with all the money Microsoft spent, but the amount of excitement for Call of Duty, if it went away for a few years and then came back, would be fucking huge.

1:32:25Colin Moriarty:Even one year. one year there hasn't been a year off since what 2004 or five i want to say so yeah maybe no later than that no late yeah six yeah no later than that that's crazy so here's a point of comparison and again as you guys pointed out the steam numbers aren't everything because there's battle net there's game pass there's console last year november 2024 their peak player count on seen was 315 ,000 this year this month their peak player count is about 100 ,000 yeah they I mean

1:32:59Dustin Furman:that's a horrible erosion if if those numbers are consistent across platforms that's devastating

1:33:03Colin Moriarty:it could be that people are deciding since they're playing battlefield or arc raiders that maybe they're just checking it on a game pass or they're getting a month there but it's it's not nothing to because last year was on game pass also but they still had you know 300 000 people on on steam to lose 200 000 people i don't think 200 000 people went to game pass but maybe yeah it's it's surprising that microsoft didn't make activision better

1:33:37Dustin Furman:Can't believe that. Wow. No one saw that one coming. I'm super curious about what the future holds for Call of Duty because I think that when push comes to shove, the way they're doing it now is unsustainable. It simply can't be done like this. They're spending$700,$800 million on each of these games. By the way, those numbers are from 2021. These Call of Duty games might be a billion dollar products for all we know. And they do make money and they make their money back and they're going to sell a lot of copies, but it might not be worth this incredible risk. And certainly having a basically a whole squadron of teams that only work on this one product.

1:34:22Dustin Furman:I don't know that it's I don't I would be curious to know what things look like in five years if they continue to have this chip damage from other products. But the problem is, is that they have. It's not a problem. I mean, it's like Call of Duty's advantage is the annualization means that like they just withstand all market pressures and they're just there the next fall. So like Arc Raiders won't be there the next fall. It'll still be a big game, but they're not going to have a new big huge drop. Battlefield will be out for a year. It's not going to have that big huge but Call of Duty be like we have a new game.

1:34:52Dustin Furman:And then the year after like we have a new game and a new game and that's that is an advantage if you can keep it going. I'm surprised people are so much so willing to spend so much money on these games. every year when they can just buy these other more sporadic packages that seem to be outdoing them. And it seems like a combination again of arc Raiders and Battlefield has kind of hurt call of duty this year, but we'll never really have full insight into it. It is fascinating to think about where things might go because there are times where I look at it and I'm like, this seems a permanent. This is a permanent franchise.

1:35:24Dustin Furman:I'll be around for 50 years. And then you see things like this where you're like, well, not if this keeps up. Yeah. And will one day here's the other thing. Will it one day be cool to kind of hate Call of Duty? It is already cool, but it's always, you know, it always got like 10 to 1 dislike ratios on YouTube and all these things. And then it would sell 20 million copies. Will it get to a, will there be a tension point where it's just like this is over all at once? And you'll, and one year you'll realize that this is done. It's not going to work anymore. Um, also they could on ps5 they continue to do that peculiar thing where they they have that it's not even i don't know if it's the launcher it's like the they have the trophy nesting have you seen this dustin where like none of the call of duty games have platinum trophies anymore they just keep ingesting them as expansions in this call of duty nest and so like it's just weird like they're trying to build this hub and it's cool and it's transparent and i think people will enjoy that but the other thing they can do is to just make everything much more available right like make a launcher with all the campaigns in it that'd be kind of cool and uh but no one gives a shit about the campaigns i don't think at the end of the day either yeah there was that one year without a campaign people flipped out about that

1:36:38Chris G.:that's right black ops four i think four yeah people weren't feeling that and it had the roman numeral four but like the four the four lines i remember that yeah bothered a lot of people

1:36:51Dustin Furman:okay let's see this is an interesting story this all kind of happened since we last recorded and uh it's interesting the game post the website the game post which we be we we be citing i was about to say we be citing more and more they write sony's concord is playable again thanks excuse me to fan-made custom servers and there's a follow-up story so don't get too excited yet They write, quote, Concord is not completely dead. Community developers have brought Sony's shutdown hero shooter back online with fan made custom servers, rebuilding its back end API and getting full matches running again.

1:37:30Dustin Furman:Concord was supposed to be Sony's next big live service game. A five versus five hero shooter from Firewalk Studios launched on PlayStation five and PC in August twenty twenty four. Instead, it crashed almost immediately. The game struggled to build an audience. Reviews called out its lack of identity. And just weeks after launch, Sony announced it was pulling the plug, offering refunds and taking the game offline. line. Not long after Firewalk Studios itself was shut down, turning Concord into one of the fastest and most brutal live service failures we've seen. For most people, that was the end of the story, a$40 multiplayer game that became completely unplayable in a matter of weeks, with its servers and studio both gone.

1:38:02Dustin Furman:But behind the scenes, a small group of developers in the community have been working on a way to bring Concord back in some form. After months of reverse engineering and server work, that effort has now hit a major milestone. Concord is running again on custom servers and full matches are now playable the new progress comes from a community project led by developers known as red open wizard and guag in an announcement posted to the project's discord server red shared that concord is officially running through custom servers this is thanks to a full rebuild of the game's back end api by open wizard a major amount of reverse engineering work on concord and the systems by red and additional help from guag who assisted in fixing several major issues along the way um so that's that that was on november 14th but sony wasn't going to let this last for very long because the next day on the 15th the games post writes sony cracks down on concord custom servers issues dmca takedowns on gameplay videos says quote sony has started removing youtube videos showing concord running on fan-made custom servers raising new questions about how far the company will go to shut down this the community revival.

1:39:05Dustin Furman:Concord's short run was rough from the start, blah blah blah. Earlier today, the story took a surprising turn when a small group of developers brought Concord back online with custom servers. Fans finally saw the game boot, upload characters, match players, and even run a full Clashpoint match. Shortly after the project gained attention, the two main YouTube videos from the original devs behind the project showing Concord running on these custom servers were hit with DMCA takedowns. The takedowns were issued by MarkScan, the same company responsible for many of Sony's recent copyright enforcement actions.

1:39:33Dustin Furman:um let's see anything else important here so yeah that's basically where it lasts now so concord is back it's apparently playable on pc in some form the videos that were showing it have been dmca'd i don't think sony can i mean sony could ultimately do something about it but they can't do anything about the custom servers for now and people playing the game the reverse engineered game they could go after the people that did this and have them take it all down and I wonder if that's what they're going to do. But I thought this was kind of neat to see this happen. I don't. I understand Sony's position, but I don't really think it's that big of a deal.

1:40:07Dustin Furman:And I think ignoring it would have been the better. Concord's not going to come back. It's like this big thing where they're like, oh, we shouldn't have done this. I don't know. Chris, what are your thoughts here on Concord's aborted revival?

1:40:18Chris G.:Yeah, I'm I'm really kind of of the same mind where I'm just like, I don't I don't know how it really benefits them to draw attention to it is very strives and effecty uh because i definitely i don't know if i would have noticed that this even happened without without them taking it down um independently outside obviously would have covered on the show but i think yeah i mean i think it's cool whenever people do this this kind of thing whenever like a whenever especially a game like that that you would assume would have lasted at least a little bit longer gets you know like very quickly killed and you know if there's a way to bring it back and have it playable i think it's cool like there's no real way to keep people from playing a game if they're if they're really dedicated to playing like there are people playing dead games on pc right this very moment you know like people will find a way to do it so you just kind of have to accept that reality especially since it's a game you made on pc so like i don't know just ignore it let people have funny like you said it's not going to it's not going to be this like oopsie daisy kind of thing where suddenly millions of people are playing the free version of concord i know like they

1:41:27Dustin Furman:discover something about it now now yeah it's just yeah i don't think so yeah it's like a youtube

1:41:31Chris G.:video essay it's like the underappreciated genius of concord three years it's 50 minutes long yeah it's 50 minutes long uh i that's not gonna happen concord is entirely fine and that's all it ever was and that's all it ever really could have hoped to be really um without extensive extensive reworking and so yeah i'm of the mind you just let it let it happen but they've got their own plans it seems dustin are you gonna be all over this concord revival or what i'm already downloaded

1:42:06Colin Moriarty:it i'm ready to go i've been playing matches not really uh yeah i kind of i understand that maybe sony would like everyone to forget and move on and so maybe they took down these videos but i'm hoping that's all the further they go it's funny because as much as everyone dunked on concord rightfully so there are legitimately many people that really enjoy the game yeah and you know Remember those people that platinum did like,

1:42:36Dustin Furman:like worked their asses off the platinum. They were just running off cliffs to get XP and stuff.

1:42:43Colin Moriarty:So let them have it. Let them have their fun. I hope they don't go any further, but you know, big corporation, they might, they might do it, which would be annoying.

1:42:55Dustin Furman:There could be, I want to acknowledge that there could be true legal reasons for this. Like as we noted, Sony went out of their way to, completely obliterate this game from existence. And even forcing people to take, if they could, especially for digital versions like refunds, and obviously the physical versions are going to be different. But basically, they're trying to get the number back to zero. And we were saying that this is because they want to write it, and they did write it all down. They can at least write, incur some of the charges for the money that's lost, make their tax bill a little bit more affordable.

1:43:27Dustin Furman:It's not going to get them the money they spent back, but it'll get some of the money back. But they have to kind of stay tight to that. And they might just be very conservative financially where they're like, we literally have to. This game cannot exist or we can run into trouble, you know, even if we're not selling it, even if we're not endorsing it, all the rest. So there's that angle to it. But I really think a bigger thing is what you were saying, Dustin, is just that they want this game to be done and over with and people forget about it. But they have to understand I'm never going to forget about it.

1:43:54Dustin Furman:And I'm never going to move on. What were you guys thinking with this game? it's so strange but this was the beginning of people starting to really be able to fuck with it in a more meaningful way maybe like you know mod new characters into it fix some of the shitty character models and put the work into it i will be interested to see if we hear any more from these people about if sony will go after them because sony's gone after other people like the the blood porn cart people like i don't know what they were thinking with that in fact if i wanted to be a real dickhead and like send a message to people and i think i might have said this at the time with bloodborne cart like that was an open secret it's not like sony didn't know that people were doing that and that didn't trickle through the grapevine you want to maximize the pain it's like oh it's done and ready for lunch now we're gonna sue you you know like in other words like give people warning being like you don't feel safe if you're making like some sort of sony thing don't feel safe if you don't if you're promoting it for years and you don't but you don't release it like don't feel safe nintendo does the same shit they did that with that.

1:44:56Dustin Furman:Remember, there was that was it like a whole remake of Metroid 2, which is a Game Boy game that I think they remade for either SNES or Game Boy Advance, or at least maybe their game maker and that kind of thing. And then so it was going on for years and then they like they launched it and Nintendo suit like went after them. So that to me is an intentional thing. Maybe also a legal thing to say like we need to make sure you're going to execute. It's not necessarily illegal for you to just do this. but it's illegal for you to distribute it. So maybe they're waiting for that as well. But Concord can stay dead for all I care.

1:45:31Dustin Furman:Yeah, I just think it's cool that people are doing this. It's the same. It's the same thing. People have done a lot of work on PS3 to get private servers running for games on there. And that's pretty neat, too. But that's a much more dormant machine. Does the world need more Concord? I'm sorry. Go ahead.

1:45:46Chris G.:Well, I was gonna say, yeah. And I guess the difference is that those games just died naturally and weren't, you know, pulled by the publisher and the developer so i guess there is that wrinkle that makes it different but still oh concord what are we gonna do what are we gonna do with you all right

1:46:09Dustin Furman:saw this on euro gamer playstation's horizon series reportedly surpasses 40 million sales further cementing its position as one of sony's best-selling franchises they write quote it has been reported that playstation's horizon series which began in 2017 with zero dawn has now passed 40 million sales these latest figures come from a korean news article which was translated on reset era if accurate that means that horizon series has sold roughly 2 million copies in the last few months in july of this last year as part of the filed legal complaint against tencent where sony accused the chinese tech conglomerate of ripping off horizon the playstation maker said the horizon franchise has sold in excess of 38 million units We, of course, know that the MMO from NCSoft is now in development, which is fun.

1:46:50Dustin Furman:Steel Frontiers. That's not coming to PlayStation for some reason. And we know the Gorilla is working on a multiplayer game. I heard a little bit more about it from someone, actually, which is interesting. I won't get too deep into that. And then, of course, Horizon 3 will be coming and who knows what else Gorilla will be doing in the future. Dustin, everyone loves Horizon. Cope and seethe, as the children say.

1:47:12Colin Moriarty:yeah it's uh i mean i'm not surprised by it i think the horizon hate is probably an online bubble thing but what's interesting is a lot of people that are middling on it like chris and myself i mean i've purchased three horizon games uh in my time with horizon the original Forbidden West and the VR game. So yeah, it's cool. It makes sense why they keep investing more money into it because it just seems people keep buying it. So good for them.

1:47:47Dustin Furman:Dustin, I'm sorry, Chris. Horizon. I was going to yell that for a second. Dustin, fuck you. Let's go back to you again. Chris, Horizon surpassing 40 million copies. Are you surprised?

1:47:59Chris G.:No, I mean, it's a very mass market kind of like it makes sense that it's successful. and i think it's it's i still feel like like the gameplay of horizon is is it's strong suit i like the way it feels to fight robot max it's it's it's good and a lot of people have way more patience than i do like unquestionably and so like yeah when when a character kind of gets in the way of that for me like it does kill it for me but i've bought i own i bought horizon what was the first game uh zero dawn yeah i own that on playstation i bought it again on pc um i have forbidden west so like i mean yeah i mean it's a game that i like and i i would like i would like to like it more i'm kind of in a similar situation with like con and eldenry i guess right where it's like i understand that this is good and i understand that i that there's something here to enjoy there are just certain things about it that get in my way that i know i i eventually just kind of have to get over and just like just deal with it um but it makes sense that it's it's selling really well and it's it looks like an approachable kind of ip it is the kind of thing that you would buy when you when you've got a new machine you know it's like you're fighting robot dinosaurs that's inherently cool um and i and for what it's worth i do think that uh what is it those those multiplayer projects have a pretty high potential i think because it kind of does away with the the main reason that i can't really connect with those games which is like the It really is the story and some of the writing.

1:49:32And I just want to play the game.

1:49:34Chris G.:I'm having that issue with a lot of games now where like even a game that I'm playing right now, which we'll get into when we're talking about what we're playing. I'm just like, dude, I just want to play the game. The game feels good. Let me play the game. I don't want to have these conversations.

1:49:49Dustin Furman:Indeed. Yeah. Well, shout out to Gorilla. I love Horizon and I've always been a dedicated fan of it. And I agree with you, Dustin. It does feel like forced online hate. The sales just simply don't match. we bring up avatar all the time but i think it's it's even more pronounced than that and just that obviously avatar is a huge property that no one seems to like we make fun of that all the time but horizon does have its fans i think honestly i feel like there's a lot of i could be wrong about this but i don't feel like anyone really had a problem with horizon when zero dawn came out i think the big thing about it was it got overshadowed by zelda and then it got overshadowed by zelda again but i don't remember people being so critical of it it wasn't until forbidden west came out that i feel like it became more in vogue to shit on the

1:50:37Chris G.:game and yeah that's my tracking of it forbidden west in fairness um does kind of double down on some of the it doubles down on the good things too but it doubles down on some of the stuff that wasn't as fever pitch in the first game that I remember like Aloy kind of gives away the answers to a lot of the puzzles in Forbidden West or like way more than I remember in Zero Dawn and she does a lot of this the talking to yourself kind of thing and then there's also she's just kind of more standoffish from what I remember in the second game in comparison to the first one so like there is like I understand why it has the reputation that it does because you can you can hyper cut a lot of those clips together of her saying you know i need i need to get horns for i gotta get horns for fucking phajax or whatever the guy's name is um and i remember playing it like you know how many times are you gonna tell me that i need to get these horns yeah like it's shut it really this is just even if you could just like uh change the frequency of how often she would like you know hint at you like if you could just be like yeah just let's bump it down to 10 % 10 % of the time you'll you'll tell me once his

1:51:49Colin Moriarty:women talking less in games I absolutely

1:51:52Dustin Furman:do yeah right right right I tried to tell you no one to hear all right well congratulations to gorilla and Sony for that I was trying to think so I think the biggest franchises are it because I saw a list recently I think it's like Gran Turismo God of War Uncharted and then i think it's horizon and i think it's the last of us um but i but i i think mlb if you counted mlb that might actually be even higher than gran turismo and spider-man is in there too but that doesn't really i mean that counts but it doesn't it's not really a sony ip yeah so they're doing pretty well horizon continues the horizon games will continue until morale improves all right i remember that do you guys know that whole like the beatings will continue until morale improves do you know that like saying it's like an old what is that from what is that i don't know it was like i just bring it up because when i was a kid that someone had like a sign that said that in like their kitchen or something and i didn't and i didn't understand that it was a joke i'm like what does that mean like the beating is it like mark twain or something it sounds like

1:53:04Chris G.:something twain would write or something yeah yeah something like that i don't know that sounds

1:53:10Dustin Furman:more morale improves it's like such an awesome that is crazy all right so yeah actually like as a kid i just didn't even understand the joke i'm like i don't understand what this means like i'm not getting it it's a fucking bewildering thing to have in your kitchen yeah it was like you know like a funny little funny little thing you know on your fridge or something i was and

1:53:30Chris G.:how long ago was that that was probably like the early 90s or something yeah that's great because like nowadays you expect to see that kind of like separate like i remember the kitchen and just generally like any place that wasn't your bedroom being like kind of like a it's like a sacrosanct kind of like this is gonna we're gonna we're gonna make it look nice almost we're gonna have like almost no indication that we have any quirks to our personality at all in these spaces right you know it's just like a nice wooden armoire or something or you know a tv unit very standard stuff and they're in your room you can have like the farrah fawcett poster you know that's my

1:54:07Dustin Furman:my my uncle mike slides like a farrah fawcett poster in his uh in his garage it's so funny

1:54:12Chris G.:yeah it's a timely reference as always on sacred symbols the farrah fawcett poster

1:54:17Dustin Furman:all right i wanted to ask you about this one chris and of course dustin you can chime in as well. The Game Post writes, Exclusive Destiny 2 is considering adding Sparrow Racing League on vaulted campaigns, NPC sidekicks, new subclass abilities, new gambit mode, I'm sorry, gambit mode, and more new survey reveals. So basically, they were provided with an internal survey that was being sent around. Did you get this?

1:54:40Chris G.:I probably did. I did not fill it out. I have too many things. I have too many emails, as it is.

1:54:46Dustin Furman:It says, quote, the game post has obtained a closed invite only survey. Bungie sent to select destiny two players earlier this week. The email says it is a one-time survey per account and offers 500 silver in-game reward within four weeks of completion as a thank you inside that survey. Bunjay bunjay bunjay bunjay asks a long list of potential bunjay asks a long list of potential features to be added to destiny two and ask players to rank them. Some of the options are small quality of life ideas. Others would fundamentally change how destiny two works. let's break down what Bungie is asking about they write so question please rank the following potential features to be added to Destiny 2 in terms of their potential to improve your enjoyment of the game and there are five items to sort new stasis and strand abilities gear tier enhancement new simplified portal scoring system new void melee abilities and power prestiging so let's stop here for now what do you make of this list of things to be added to Destiny 2 any care about any of that?

1:55:46Chris G.:I mean, of it's first of all, it's strange. And I understand why there this is like a multiple choice kind of thing. But that kind of inherently frames it from their perspective of what they're willing to do. You know what I mean? It's like, oh, we're willing to. Yeah, we can do a new void melee abilities. What I would say is like, I don't know, where's like fundamental changes to like the weapon system? Like, why can't why is there no like dual wielding or something? like why is there no more like fundamental different things going on as opposed to you know a new stasis and strand of it like okay i expected that would happen anyway it's it's weird it's weird that that would that would even be in this this uh survey but yeah none of this strikes me as anything that's interesting like these options for this question any commentary on

1:56:39Colin Moriarty:this doesn't before we move on to the next one i i wish i it's been too long okay yeah i won't

1:56:44Dustin Furman:include you i don't know if you have anything well if you have anything to say just jump in sure so the next one is uh it says here quote another question focuses on raids dungeons events and core playlists the exact wording is similar to the first ranking question asking players to order a list of potential features i don't know why you wouldn't just write the question so you have to order these options and this time there are nine a sparrow racing league event or playlist raid night a day of the week where players can play the featured raid for extra rewards a new gambit mode or gambit event new difficulty tiers to legacy raids and dungeons raid rotator legacy raids that are included in the weekly raid rotation that offer special rewards and unique challenges added old campaigns and other activities to the portal rotating portal activities each week daily and weekly competitive pve events and new pvp modes eg combined arms so anything

1:57:33Chris G.:speak to you there yeah so first off immediately um yeah spout racing league i was always confused why they got rid of this just like an interesting having different ways to engage with destiny as opposed to just like always shooting or just always being in the social space is good and the spout racing league was fucking awesome they just had like this cart racer in the middle of or what is essentially a cart racer in the middle of fucking destiny and it was sick um and that happened towards the tail end of d1's life cycle and it was it was really cool and i was convinced that they were going to bring it back uh in destiny 2 i thought that they would like you know make the sparrows a little bit more dynamic have a little bit more customized customizability there um and then they just kind of didn't and that was always confusing to me so that's a good this is all of this is good like all of these strike me as like things that would would be appealing to me the biggest things are the racing league um i guess like incentives for the raid so like the raid night and the raid rotator are good old campaigns is compelling and specifically this last uh they say new pvp modes example combined arms that's another thing we're like so combined arms was from what i recall and i could be getting the exact number wrong but like the audience can correct me it was like six v six and it was on bigger maps where you could like there was like vehicle gameplay in it so like you could summon a vehicle or like there would be vehicles on the map that you could take for some reason they got rid of that in d2 like there's none of that and that was a strange thing too where i was just i remember being like i remember destiny one some of the most satisfying things some of the most satisfying gameplay clips that i remember were like sniping somebody off their bike or whatever and i'm just like oh this is this is cool this feels good completely absent through the entirety for the last like 10 years of destiny 2 or like however long it's been i I think eight.

1:59:27Chris G.:And so it's, yeah, these, I would jump back into D2 for at least a little bit. I'm kind of broadly over it. Like there's like too many other things to play, but I would pop in for like a Sparrow racing event or like a combined arms being brought back or, you know, the raid rotator and raid night is less so for me because I'm more or less lapsed. I'm kind of done, but like, that's definitely something for the community that I think would be, that would work. um so they're asking interesting questions and the fact that they're asking these questions specifically and they have them in the uh the rotation for the questions seems to indicate to me that these are the things that they're willing to do they wouldn't you know they wouldn't it would be baffling if they put if they put options here that they weren't willing to do so the fact that they're thinking about sparrow racing league and combined arms is good but my question would be why did it take this like why did the game have to be in this space in this dire situation for you to consider bringing back two easy wins like i just don't that that's befuddling to me

2:00:36Colin Moriarty:yeah the only thing i had to add on here i do have something to add here the old campaigns i know that at one point they said they had to take them out because they just didn't want this the package size of the game to be so big uh and i'm you know i'm not a game developer but it seems like it's ridiculous there's no way to just be like hey let me install the original destiny 2 campaign so i can play it don't force everybody to download it but let me download it yeah and play it as like a you know maybe it's like a dlc or something and then you can choose to play it in the game just because you want they make destiny such an important the story to be such an important part of destiny and it's already insanely tough for new players to get in and learn how the game how to play the fucking game uh with all of its systems but from a story perspective it's like yeah go watch um bife my name is bife or whatever if you want to know what happened because there is no way for you to do it in game.

2:01:40Colin Moriarty:And that's ridiculous. So that would be cool. I don't think I'd be going back, but I'm sure some people would appreciate that.

2:01:46Chris G.:Yeah. Yeah. At the very least, I don't know what, I don't know how you would rectify or reconcile the big package size. I would imagine like maybe, I don't know. It's not elegant, but like maybe have like a separate.

2:02:02Chris G.:Launcher or something like here's the here's the like here's the destiny vault and here's all the sunset content or whatever. This is separate from destiny. Like you can install both of these or one of them or none of them. But this isn't part of the main game, but it's it's you know, it's it's the history of the main game. And so you can go over there like I really they're kind of in a rock and a hard place with that stuff because like that game would if they kept all of it, it would be like 600 gigs probably. Some like obnoxious size. so i don't know but anything's better than nothing i guess at this point

2:02:35Dustin Furman:you know finally we're going to hear um another it says another question focuses on raids dungeons events and core playlists the exact wording is similar to the first ranking question asking players to order a list of potential features um oh wait i'm reading the wrong one sorry oh by the way i wanted to uh note i like the sparrow racers they look like speed speeders in star wars which school yeah they're totally they're totally like inspired by that like unquestionably and they're

2:03:00Chris G.:fun to use it's it's it feels good to drive around in a sparrow and so it's weird that that's like

2:03:05Dustin Furman:not capitalized on at all bizarre one of the biggest blocks in the survey is another ranking list for potential features to be added to destiny 2 the game post writes the options are unvaulted expansion campaigns such as red war and forsaken new clan upgrade and progression system an in-game trophy room npc sidekicks to equip and fight alongside your guardian more replayable story rich side quests for npcs more random encounters with other players while adventuring new vault with increased space new onboarding experience an in-game destiny 2 information glossary an in-game destiny 2 tutorial library any of those speak to you finally uh i

2:03:45Chris G.:mean that sounds interesting i i can't even imagine um i can't even imagine like npc sides sidekicks to equip like that seems like very strange and very fundamentally different so the fact that they're the fact that they're mentioning that is very odd um because it means it's something that they're thinking about but i mean all this is good i think um yeah uh more vault space is good uh unvaulted campaigns is good and in-game trophy room is an interesting idea like that doesn't seem like it would i don't give a shit but like i mean that's definitely people do care about that kind of thing i mean this is all good stuff generally like i mean i just wonder for me as a as somebody who's kind of satisfied with destiny as it is the issue really is that they did something that is highly unusual which is that they ended their they ended it you know they had the final shape and they did and they ended it in a satisfying way that like they landed the plane really really well and that's kind of antithetical to how live service games are supposed to operate so like i don't know like maybe it was like it was one of those things where like this is an artistic choice at the at the at the sacrifice of ultimate longevity as like a product but you've given me a good off ramp where like i'm kind of satisfied anything you do now is just kind of an addendum and i'm not that invested anymore and i would imagine that a lot of people feel that way and i also don't necessarily think that that was the wrong move i think it's good to have an ending but at the same time if you're gonna have you can't have your cake and eat it too you can't have like your ending and then like all right now we're gonna keep going the marvel is kind of going through this right now and granted they're making money but like it's not the same and so all these are cool like a lot of these would be a lot of these changes would get me to play destiny 2 again for a little bit but like i'm never going to be as into it as i as i was because like i'm the story's done i think so i don't know yeah an

2:05:56Dustin Furman:uphill battle for them you kind of got to move on i think it's just like or start again yes destiny 3 right right that's what that's what i mean i mean like move on to something else i'd be down for destiny 3 i'd be down for destiny 3 at this point but um that's not really in in the the docket for them so like i don't maybe maybe at some point it will but like not right now so

2:06:15Chris G.:like i don't know a lot of these are kind of hollow i would like to play the sparrow racing league again that was fun i would like to play combined arms again that's really entertaining it's good stuff but i don't know it's an uphill battle really fair enough all right i wanted to

2:06:31Dustin Furman:talk about this real quick because i just thought this was interesting is this a sign of things to come EA sports F1 franchise. So the F1 racing series that Codemasters did for a long time was actually a one time, a Sony exclusive a long time ago. Sony brought, bought Codemasters to do this and other things. And they're going to try something a little different here. I want to know what you guys think of this. It says quote today, EA sports confirms future plans for F1 25 with the game set to represent both the 2025 and 2026 FIA Formula One World Cup championships. This news drops alongside an announcement for the future of EA Sports F1 as 2027 will see the series return and mark the start of a new and more expansive F1 experience.

2:07:14Dustin Furman:Following on from F125's commercial and critical success with praise from players, media, content creators, and F1 drivers alike, the team is building on the experience through a paid expansion. The premium content update will bring players closer to the sport's major changes for 2026 that include new cars, sporting regulations, teams, and drivers. The decision to offer a premium content upgrade for F125 is part of a strategic reset for the F1 franchise. In 2027, a new game will be released that looks, feels, and plays differently, delivering more gameplay choices. We don't know much more about this right now.

2:07:47Dustin Furman:I am fascinated by this, though, because this is them experimenting, I think, with a franchise that is not as important to them as Madden, FIFA, or Football Club, College Football, NHL. F1 is a little bit more of an outside game for them. Dustin, I'm very curious. Do you think this is a sign of things to come for electronic arts sports games? Or are they just kind of in between a rock and a hard place, simply can't execute on an annualized F1 game that would meet fans' expectations and simply want to punt to get a new game out or is the 2027 f1 game going to be a new platform that itself is updated annually and could we expect this to bleed into their other games what do you think

2:08:33Colin Moriarty:well it sounds i mean it's hard to say because we don't know how much the paid expansion will cost i wonder if it will cost the same pretty close to the price of what a new game oh my god it better not uh which that would be interesting but it sounds interesting and cool it sounds more uh pro consumer if that's the case uh and i think it would probably it sounds like it would be a better experience for players instead of just getting a slightly updated game every year that if they do these updates that would be cool but at the same time i think with madden um and these bigger ips it's like but why why do that when you can just charge 70 for a slightly updated game in some cases sometimes a slightly worse game from my understanding i mean i don't play them so i can't speak with authority on it but sometimes certain years are not as good as the previous year which is crazy uh but people still just you know the fans of those games just buy them every year it's much like call of duty where do you remember a few years ago i think it was after Modern Warfare 2, the rumor was that they were going to take a year off.

2:09:46Colin Moriarty:And I was pumped about this. I was like, dude, this could be sick. Do some kind of big update for Modern Warfare 2, take some time, and then come back with something different and new. They decided not to do that. Instead, they made a half-assed Modern Warfare 3 with, well, what at the time was the worst Call of Duty campaign and an upgraded new maps for multiplayer. So basically was a big DLC and they charged$70 for it and slept, gave it the modern warfare three name. And it was totally fine. It was totally fine. So when I see the situations like that and who knows, maybe things are a little different with call of duty.

2:10:26Colin Moriarty:Now I think that maybe the tank is running a little too dry at this point, but we'll see what the sales.

2:10:33Dustin Furman:Drives a bone. So in theory,

2:10:37Colin Moriarty:all of this sounds great, but depending on the how the expansion works how much it costs um and whether or not they're willing to actually do something i just don't see them changing anything with their the big hitters until they have a a reason to financially what do you think about this chris am i reading too

2:10:57Dustin Furman:much into this or is this a sign of maybe an experiment on a less important ip to see how it affects their sales and then they can kind of gleam some information from that and how it might affect Madden or something like that if they tried it in the future yeah I mean it strikes me as an

2:11:13Chris G.:experiment I I don't foresee them extending this strategy to Madden just because there is such a such a hold but I think F1 is is one of those um that's one of those niches that I think is so that's like an underserved area of of of sports races or sports games i think and so like i do think they they have a devoted uh player base i would imagine and i think they probably feel like all right well we got a devoted player base this is kind of a smaller thing we could stand to do something here you could stand to kind of like mess around with this it's not really going to affect um you know our maddens will deliver we're good and so the vibe that i'm getting from this is that like this is an experiment that's kind of the long short of it i can't speak with authority on it again like these are this is very outside my wheelhouse but that's the vibe

2:12:13Dustin Furman:that i get from reading it there is a mitigating factor that i wanted to bring up which is things can get they're making this decision while they're under this you know this um deal to be purchased it might not go through but i'm sure it will i wonder if this this was in play before all of that was going on i imagine it was probably on the table and i think everyone there's a we talked about this when ea when the whole deal with ea and the saudi investment fund was announced was there all right let me back up ea has two billion dollars worth of of debt right now when And the purchase goes through because it's leveraged and it's the biggest leveraged buyout of all time.

2:12:57Dustin Furman:That's going to explode literally 2 ,000%, I think, to$22 billion in debt. And that is going to have to be serviced. They're going to be stuck between a rock and a hard place, I think, this new EA, because they're both going to need the revenue that a Madden, a football club, an NHL gives them. but they're going to be really cost constrained to make those games and the quickest way to profit and paying that stuff back might be to try to nickel and dime people with the same product in other words have madden as a platform pay 20 or 30 dollars or even as we talked about this in the past remember like i was like well really these could become subscriptions in and of themselves.

2:13:47Dustin Furman:I don't know that that's I think that 10 years ago that was almost obvious and now I don't know if there's a tolerance for that shit anymore because I think people are kind of over it like the everything's a subscription you got to get a subscription for your car fucking heat like enough already but I think that little things like this might not become surprising with the new EA because they're going to need to cut costs and they're going to cut costs I mean they're going to lay thousands of people off when this deal goes through there's just no doubt about it and I wonder how it all pans out after that.

2:14:20Dustin Furman:Of course, they're not valuable if they're not putting out games and they're going to have to put out the games, but then they're going to have to justify the cost of those games. And I don't know. It's going to be interesting. So I think that you're probably right, both of you in that, especially you, Dustin, that this is probably means very little and that F1 probably just isn't ready to go. But that's never to your point. That's never stopped them in the past. I did grow up playing these games. It never stopped them from releasing shitty annualized sports games every so often and as i've noted to you guys in the past really these games happen in cycles of three or four years because they only have time to do like basically a quarter of a normal games development in the nine months they have to prepare the game so they select one thing basically and try to fix it sometimes that works and sometimes they don't and then every three or four years there's like a major gameplay tweak and this to your point seems to be working fine for the audience we had uh we'll talk about the sales of games later, but just to bring them up, I mean, to wit.

2:15:17Dustin Furman:Let's see. NBA 2K26, which is not an EA game, is the was the fifth bestselling or the fourth bestselling game last month. EA Sports FC 26 was five. Madden was six. You don't want to fuck around with that kind of money either. So we'll see. But that struck me as something that was interesting and I wanted to take note and we'll keep a close eye on that as it develops. I will be interested to see what the F1 fans think of this. it's not an inconsequential franchise it's not that big but it's not nothing and it's way bigger in europe so i actually think that the sales figures if anything are under cooked on cercana because it's not really showing the true representation of how the game does globally all right there's that let's see i thought this was an interesting story for my friend sammy over at push square i wanted to share with you guys it's called playstation ceo pushed through cut price PS5 in Japan after seeing system slump against Switch 2.

2:16:12Dustin Furman:So as we noted last week, it's not really relevant for us, but there is going to be a PlayStation 5 released in Japan shortly that will only allow you access to the Japanese PSN, will only be in the Japanese language, and it's basically something to be locked to that territory to try to spread the field in a country that is in an economically dire situation with a currency that's not very strong or anything else, And this is obviously following the footsteps of what Nintendo did with Switch by having a Japanese only unit that they kind of subsidize. I thought this was interesting in that they write here, quote, PlayStation's previous management believed it was acceptable for Nintendo to erode its market share in Japan.

2:16:50Dustin Furman:But new CEO Hideaki Nishino, who's Hideaki Nishino, who's Japanese and has replaced British leader Jim Ryan, won't go down without a fight. According to a report by TV Tokyo, as translated by user Hartman on its stall base, the company committed to its plan of releasing a price cut, Japanese language only model within four months of its rival deploying the same strategy with the Switch 2. The move comes with substantial risks. The model may lose the manufacturer money as component prices have soared since the PS5's launch in 2020, but apparently Nishino believes it's necessary to stop PlayStation's domestic rot.

2:17:21Dustin Furman:While the PS5 started quite strong in Japan, its sales have slowed significantly due to rising prices. To make matters worse, Nintendo's grip on the region with its more appealing hybrid hardware form factor has started to eat into Sony's market share. The big wake-up call for the manufacturer may be seeing ten-pole titles like Resident Evil Requiem and Final Fantasy 7 Remake beginning to ship on the Switch 2. Historically, titles of this ilk have skipped Nintendo's hardware due to technical limitations. Sony still has an uphill battle ahead for it, of course. It can't compete with the cultural dominance of its rivals' first-party titles, and the PS5's stationary form factor is always going to put it at a disadvantage.

2:17:52Dustin Furman:But Nishino will be hoping the significant price reduction and renewed marketing push at least gets the PS5 moving in the right direction again. Dustin, what do you think of that? It seems like, based on this interview with nishino they were almost fine losing sony not only losing there they've been losing in sony or japan for a long time but sony was fine losing completely i mean basically seeding the territory and i've long said for years on the heart on the handheld front that they made a mistake but they were making they were this was actually starting to affect ps5 not necessarily

2:18:20Colin Moriarty:the vita and the psp what do you think yeah yeah the japan in japan i mean the playstation 5 is even from the Americans I know that live in Japan talked about how expensive PlayStation 5 was to get and also difficult to get at various points and Nintendo definitely absolutely dominant there it's not that it's not like the different like Xbox bad in Japan like when I was there and looking around in stores there's still a significant PlayStation section but clearly Nintendo with the Switch being handheld, really, really dominant. And it might be a little bit of forward thinking, too, for them to try to lay the groundwork where they are going to have a device next generation that could be much more appealing to the Japanese audience with their handheld.

2:19:11Colin Moriarty:So and I like that this article does point out that Requiem Final Fantasy VII Remake, there's definitely something going on with third parties uh now being cool like being able to release these games on switch with the switch 2 being much more powerful than the switch one so i think it's good i think it's uh exciting just because obviously sony and playstation being a japanese company and having such a strong japanese heritage on both their hardware and their software to see them take it seriously again is great i don't know what this means from a software front maybe long term uh it would it would be cool to see more sony first party japanese stuff but uh i think it it's good to have a an affordable console for people over there

2:20:04Dustin Furman:chris any anything to add here i feel like it's important that sony plays hard in japan for their own cultural identity um and i want them i want to see them do well there it seems weird for them to be an export only company at some point yeah yeah i mean it it makes sense for

2:20:21Chris G.:them to kind of refocus especially if especially since they seem to be going down the route of like switch switch adjacent types of hardware um you know if the leaks and the rumors are to are to be believed so like i mean yeah i mean it makes sense to kind of play to that market a get the name back out there have a more um specific push but i don't know if it'll i don't know if it'll manifest really with i don't know if it'll do much for playstation 5 it'll it'll do a lot for playstation i think just to kind of be a little bit more competitive and a little bit more appealing over there but like i think it i think this is really kind of like seeding the ground for the eventual you know handheld handheld thing that they're they're going to be doing

2:21:08Dustin Furman:I'm excited to see that, you know, for them. Yeah, me too. They made a massive mistake seeding that ground. I think they in some way had no choice. Vita wasn't going to cut it. It wasn't clear that a handheld was a wise direction to go in. And it was certainly unfeasible at the time to expect that you can have a true console quality handheld. That's how they promoted Vita back in the day. It wasn't really true. Remember handheld gaming on the go. I mean, that was the big commercial push on the actual TV commercials. That wasn't really the case. It was also a different time. Now the technologies have unified against Switch cross Steam deck have shown the different ways you can approach this.

2:21:51Dustin Furman:I'm intrigued to see them fight harder, and I'll be very interested to see how this console does once they release, because now there's going to be pent up demand like the console is going to and I think already has started to fall off on the weekly Famitsu charts or whatever and it's going to bust back up oh uh once they they release that new price point that new console model i'll be interested to check the media create charts that week to see how it does all they can hope for is to erode a little bit of that nintendo dominance there's not much they can do about it otherwise at this point it just is what it is it's too bad for them nintendo's not a fucking shitty company to be losing to though i will say that if you're going to lose to someone in the game space, you might as well make it Nintendo.

2:22:31Dustin Furman:All right. I didn't use your letter. I'm going to delete that. Okay. This is an interesting thing. We're almost done here with the news. This comes from the PlayStation blog. My old colleague, Andrew Goldfarb, who is the senior communications manager at Sucker Punch, writes New Game Plus comes to Ghost of Yotei on November 24th. And they write, or he writes on November 24th, a free patch for all Ghost of Yotei players will introduce New Game Plus, allowing you to replay Atsu's Quest for Vengeance from the beginning with everything you earned throughout the campaign. yes that means it's time to bring a gun to a sword fight with all the armors abilities and weapons from your first playthrough available from the start of the game i do love just blasting people with that pistol it's fucking very satisfying so new game plus and some other base features there'll be a new store and new currency to buy cosmetics so nothing too crazy however there was an eagle eye lawrence mcdougald in the audience who says hey cdc just a quick write-in how do you guys feel about developers adding new game plus after launch thanks keep up the great work oh this isn't the letter i took the wrong letter lawrence will use your letter anyway someone had written in i guess i didn't keep it saying this is the quickest that sony has ever released a new game plus that wasn't in the original package and i think that that's true so it's starting a little bit quicker i have no problem with them adding the stuff afterwards i wish it was there originally because you would probably be more likely to take advantage of it for instance uh chronos i played chronos on new game plus right after i did my new my normal playthrough of that game because it was available right away so that's that from that perspective it's a little disappointing but as we've noted ad nauseum um this is just a good way for them to market their games and to keep them back in the conversation uh are either of you interested in this new trophies new game plus dustin you're out you're out of your day i'm out i finished it oh you finished it okay and what did you think it's good oh is this in the is this in your

2:24:14Colin Moriarty:i think i finished it last week i think i just forgot i didn't have a i don't really have much more to say on it uh overall other than it's good it's not i'm realizing it more and more it's like these this style of open world game is not my type of game and i think i made a mistake fucking around too much early on just because i got burnt out of it but i thought it was very good and i enjoyed it but the ending i dude the missions in this game are so formulaic at points and once i realized it's like go somewhere talk to somebody walk and talk for a little bit maybe climb something together for a little bit and then a battle ensues and then you just do that a million times it's like okay and i know there's other stuff to do i'm simplifying it greatly but i just had had enough by the end so i i hit the end and then immediately put the disc out of my

2:25:12Dustin Furman:and let brandon borrow it so i am all good i don't need new game plus chris uh any interest

2:25:19Chris G.:in this an eote new game plus for new game plus no like i these games these types of games are just too long like i think new game plus sits really really comfortably in like a dead space kind of pocket or like a resident evil 4 kind of pocket yeah you're going to be spending maybe like maybe like 10 to 20 hours maximum but like with an open world game where you're kind of like Like you're uncovering the map and you're doing all this kind of exploration stuff. A lot of the joy. A lot of the fun of a game like Ghost of Yote and most open world games is exploring and finding things and discovering things for the first time.

2:25:55Chris G.:And like New Game Plus doesn't really for those games doesn't really hit like New Game Plus for a game like Dead Space or like a game like Resident Evil 4. Like that's more for the love of the game. You know what I mean? Like that's for like, oh, I love this. I love the gameplay of this. I love fighting. I love healing and like being in tense situations. It's just a different kind of cadence. And so like new game plus doesn't really speak to me for these types of games. So this isn't really do much for me, but it's cool that it's the quickest. You know, the turnaround is more reasonable, I think.

2:26:31Chris G.:So that's nice.

2:26:34Dustin Furman:Well, I'll keep it as an option if I want to play it in the future. Like, yeah, I have these saves in the cloud. and if I want to go back and play these games, I'll play them on New Game Plus. It'll make it a little easier to get through them a second or third time, depending on where you stand. Just a couple more news items, then we'll get to what we're playing. Twisted Metal, as we noted earlier, has been a hit for Peacock, the Twisted Metal live-action adaptation. It has been renewed for a third season, so congratulations to them. Again, these statistics, 993 million minutes viewed to date for the second season.

2:27:10Dustin Furman:I have not watched it yet, I heard it's good and I believe it because I thought the first season was good too so congratulations to them this is becoming a little bit of a hit for them small peacocks not huge yeah but it's there and it's a fairly robust show for people that are interested in it I think the first two seasons are eight or ten episodes each so go check those out and then um I wanted to note this just because I'm a little frustrated by it I know a lot of other people are we don't talk about usually smaller game announcements, but Tales of Berseria Remastered is being released February 27th.

2:27:45Dustin Furman:Tales of Berseria, of course, is a it was it's what's funny is that this is only two Tales games ago, but it came out in 2016 in Japan. It came out in 2017 in the West. It was on PS3 and PS4 in Japan, but only on PS4 in the West. And then it later, I think, came to PC. They're doing a remastered version of this game, which is just frustrating because it's already available on PS4 right now. You can just play it right now on PS4. and I know that a lot of this is probably because it's coming on other platforms and that's the first time it'll be on Xbox it'll be on Switch this is the first time that those will be available there so obviously it's cool but there's no upgrade like it doesn't seem like there's any upgrade path for people that own it on PS4 maybe not a huge surprise there but it pumps me out more that they just seem to be ignoring all the old Tales games and I don't really understand why you would go for this game that's already available and you have games like Tales of fantasia tales of destiny tales of eternia um and even tales of legendia they're like totally unavailable and just hold on that would require effort yeah it would and and fantasia fantasia is a super famicom game the only way to play tales of fantasia in the west as i understand i mean you can play it obviously on an emulator there's a game boy advance port and that was the first time we ever got it and it's like what what are we doing here um and that really bumps me out and then Tales of Destiny is like one of my favorite games of all time.

2:29:06Dustin Furman:And that's locked on the PS1 Tales of Eternia locked on the PS1 Tales of Legendia locked on the PS2. I love these games. I just wanted to throw that out there that I'm a big Tales fan. I've been a big Tales fan since the very first Tales game came to the West, which was Tales of Destiny. I got it for my birthday. It came out two weeks after my birthday or two weeks before my birthday that year in 1998. And my dad bought it for me. So it's a very nostalgic game. I was in ninth grade and I was a fan ever since and played pretty much all of them with rare exception and um i don't know when i saw that announcement i'm like tales of berseria like what are we doing that was two tales games ago

2:29:41Colin Moriarty:i have a theory colin this isn't for us or it's not for you as a playstation yeah it's for switch and xbox people yeah it's for switch it's but but that's the point i was making earlier is like

2:29:53Dustin Furman:though that's obvious it's also true that there's no upgrade path like there should be a way like this is the only it's just weird and again i'm not one of those guys that like bitches too much the upgrade path for ghost of tsushima was kind of bullshit too where i was like come on man oh yeah it was like expensive i think it was like 30 bucks well that came with the icky island but that shit's old you know like i guess what i'm saying is like i wouldn't mind paying that maybe then ten dollars for an upgrade i already fucking bought it at some point i think it just gets a little annoying so i understand that but yeah so you're right about that dustin and that's what i was noting earlier but i how do they not know that there's like some sort of there's probably a higher demand for the old games than there are for some of these newer ones because they've released them so many times at this point like symphonia for instance symphonia is huge it's arguably the biggest tales game but they've also re-released it multiple times and it's like enough dude yeah and and the 2d hd style that square enix does so well that would be perfect for these games although just release them as they are if you want but do a little bit better than than was done by whoever the fuck released the lunar silver star story and lunar eternal blue collection because that was a little it was a little rough you know they didn't do anything to it so let's get these games out there i just wanted to bitch about that because i love those games and it was a disappointment to see tell and by the way i knew that there was a this is so nerdy but i read that website gamatsu which is like a very japanese website but they also just have listings of like every game that's announced and the tales of berseria announcement story had like hundreds of comments on it and i was like oh no and i had to go go read because i was like oh i guess i'm not the only one that's disappointed and it is true i'm not the only one that's disappointed finally the morning that we're recording matt piscatella over at cercana has released data for the united states market for october of 2025 showing us how things are doing and of course we like to go through this to get a taste of how games are selling in the biggest core gaming market in the world here in these United States.

2:31:57Dustin Furman:So the dates counted for these charts are October 5th through November 1st. Battlefield 6 was the best-selling game in the United States for the month. Pokemon Legends Z &A is number two. This is especially significant because that's only over physical sales. It's entirely possible that's the best-selling game of the month, I would imagine, even more than Battlefield, right? million yeah uh ghost of yote holding on at number three during the month so that this basically counts all of ghost ghost of yote's time on the market except for its launch three days so pretty good ghost of yote nba 2k 26 at four as i was noting earlier football club at five and madden at six the outer worlds two is at number seven not so bad considering both when it came out and that it's on Game Pass.

2:32:50Dustin Furman:So that's a very respectable number. Little Nightmares 3 finally comes out. That's from Supermassive, I want to say. Develop that. And Bandai Namco put publishing that. Digimon Story Time Stranger is at number nine again. That was where it was last month. It's very interesting to see a game hold like that. Borderlands 4 falls from one to ten. Ninja Gaiden appears on the list at number 11. Surprising. It is surprising. It seems like it was kind of soft, like it kind of came and went like a fart in the wind. I don't know why that is because it's supposed to be pretty good. What else is on here that's interesting?

2:33:22Dustin Furman:Final Fantasy Tactics holding on at number 14. Silent Hill F holding on at number 16. I bought it and playing it. We'll talk about that shortly. Helldivers 2, mostly because of the Xbox release, I would imagine, is at number 18 now. And yeah, that's basically it for that. There are a few other notable things. If you want to look at year-to-date sales, which I always like to look at. Battlefield 6 is the best-selling game in the United States for the year so far. after only a month on the market. NBA 2K26 is at number two. Monster Hunter Wilds at number three. Very interesting. That game was so front loaded that I think it's just kind of impervious to being knocked down.

2:34:00Dustin Furman:Borderlands 4, number four. Not a huge surprise. And by the way, this puts it all in the context. The Take-Two financials had noted Borderlands 4 kind of sold soft. And it's still the fourth best-selling game of the year. College Football 26 at five. Oblivion Remastered at six. This is significant because it's by dollars sales. Hmm.

2:34:21Chris G.:Oh, so yeah. So 50.

2:34:22Dustin Furman:Yeah. The order of the game. That's why I'm even seeing a game like split fiction on the list at 17 is really impressive because that's not a 60 or$70 game. It's all by dollar sales and Helldivers 2 is at 20 for the year. Another $40 game. So pretty cool stuff. Other things on this game. Forza Horizon 5 at 15 because of the PlayStation release. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 at 14 and your very own Elden Ring Night Reign at number 11 by the way for those curious go see yote is now the 10th best-selling game in the united states for the month is that bad it's only slightly better than a multiplayer elden ring game

2:34:56Colin Moriarty:i mean come on how much didn't they say how much uh uh it sold elden ring night rain yeah i think

2:35:01Dustin Furman:so let me see that's it by the way though that's another sub 60 game right oh yeah green sales 5 million units as of July so yeah unit sales not so relevant here just because well not as relevant and that can be looked at the other way too go see Yote had an$80 version so those things also count MLB the show holding on tight Black Ops 6 and number 7 so obviously the new Call of Duty is going to be on this chart next month but I don't know that there's going to be very many other new things so this is kind of what it is and now you're going to see things kind of sort around a little bit nba take 2k 25 is number 19 pretty crazy pretty crazy any comments guys before we move on i think that's everything right let me see it's like he usually is battlefield 6 gonna lock it in for number one i don't think so you think call of duty is gonna beat it yeah i do

2:36:02Colin Moriarty:you don't think even with the game pass cannibalization of the dollar it matter last

2:36:08Dustin Furman:year to oh well there was no battlefield last year i guess so that's not that's not an apples to apples kind of thing i just until i'm shown otherwise it's it's bad to bet against them until you're really yeah in my opinion until you prove it otherwise by the way if you want to order it on playstation only top 10 games for the month of october battlefield 6 ghost of yote nba 2k 26 and by the way not to overstate it but go see Yote outperforming NBA 2K26 in the opening month of the NBA season is pretty substantial football club 26 Madden 26 little nightmares 3 the outer worlds 2 Digimon story time stranger ninja guy in 4 number 9 and Borderlands 4 slotting in at number 10 what did the Nintendo charts look like here yeah the Nintendo charts kind of suck because we don't have the digital sales but it since none of them really have the digital sales it kind of all evens out I guess yeah Mario Galaxy one and two kill him Super Mario Party Jamboree it's your favorite game of the year I think yeah all right my friends let's get into what we're playing Chris I want to start with you yeah as you're playing Vampire the Masquerade Blood Alliance 2 I've heard not good things about this game but I'm not entirely sure whether that's accurate or not

2:37:17Chris G.:so let's get into it with you yeah I don't know I've been playing I'm playing a lot of arc raiders and then so I was thinking like you know what I need to I need to play something else in between i'm putting too much time into this so i and i saw i saw vampire the masquerade bloodlines just sitting there and i'm just like you know what why not let's give it a shot and i so i've put in i'm about three hours into it so i'm still somewhat early but i can get a feel for like what this game is and the most striking comparison point that i have colin is um ghostwire tokyo it's very ghostwire tokyo and in the way that it feels in the kind of setup um it evoked that that game constantly for me um and there's other things too there's like there's definitely like it's not one-to-one there's definitely like more it's more rpg focused obviously there's like a lot of emphasis on conversation it's a little bit jank it doesn't explain a lot of things too well um but i will say man like i'm i'm kind of digging it like it's there's something about this game in particular in the way that it feels to control that i'm i'm i'm quite enamored by like whenever you're fighting or whenever you're like dealing with like the the combat like every like it all feels really it feels really cool and really impactful like i don't know what it is about the sound design or something or the way that people go flying when you hit them uh but it's really it feels really good now the caveat to that is that those moments of where the gameplay really shines and it feels good to play are broken up by uh you know very linear uh very linear sections that don't allow you to do much and then there's conversation uh parts of the game that are a little bit they're not super polished it feels a little bit like uh you know the scenes in ghosts of tsushima goes to yote when like the camera pans out really far because they didn't want to they didn't want to animate the yeah faces too carefully it kind of feels like that but but they're really close up, but they're quite close, you know, and that's interesting.

2:39:42Chris G.:And that's just kind of the conceit of the game. And it's not that bad. Like it's, it's okay. I'm just saying like, there's like a level of polish. That's not quite there for the conversation pieces. The writing is a little bit awkward. It's, it's, I'm not necessarily, I'm not super sold on like the story and the characters and what's happening, but I do like the feeling of like moving through the space. space as a vampire and like kind of like soaking in the atmosphere and feeling and like strategizing on like you know how to maneuver around the place and how to like how to use your different vampire ability like there's like one ability that i have where like i like i can curse somebody and it takes a while to build up and then like once i've cursed them and i hit them once any like any the first time i damage them after i curse them they like start to like inflate and then they explode into like this massive like blood bomb and it's really fucking cool like there's there's a there's a vampire fantasy here that's like really kind of really enamoring and really cool i just don't know if i'm necessarily sold on on the world or the story of the characters at this moment that might change as i get deeper into it but the gameplay is really pulling me through which is not something that i anticipated because i expected the gameplay to be i don't know like with a game like vampire the masquerade bloodlines you expect that kind of thing to be maybe not the least compelling but at the very least the you know the thing that kind of glues together the compelling parts like you would imagine that in a game like this it would be more about narrative and it would be more about um you know world building and maybe to some people it is maybe it maybe it lands a little bit better than it than it is for me but i'm quite enjoying like running through the speed and running through the streets and like beating the shit out of people and like feeding on them and like cursing people and watching them explode i'm only i'm really early into the skill tree but a lot of the other skill tree uh things that you can see previews of look really compelling too um but it feels more like a vampire power fantasy sandbox uh than anything there's like stealth mechanics here too and you know light rpg where you've got to like manage it seems like there's a relationship management mechanic here because characters like that telltale thing will pop up in the corner where it's just like uh x will remember that or x was satisfied by this and i don't know what that is building to yet i haven't seen the consequences of anything uh necessarily this early on but i'm enjoying it the performance is a little off um i'm playing on pc in fairness uh so i don't know what it's like necessarily on um ps5 or on console uh it is on console right i would imagine um and so i'm muted sorry it is on console yes yeah yeah so i'm playing it on pc and what i'm noticing is that like whenever you so there's no loading screens but it almost it almost feels like uh if you've ever played like those old um if you ever played like a valve game if you ever played like half-life 2 or like portal 2 or something like there's that stutter before you enter a new area like that's kind of prevalent like whenever you go into like a big sprawling indoor environment you transition to the outside place where you can jump around and do crazy shit uh that's there it's not too bad like it's it's noticeable but it's like it's it's whatever i'm enjoying my time with it i'm gonna spend more time with it to uh iron out my thoughts a little bit more on it but like my first impressions are relatively positive uh it's definitely not going to be for everybody it's definitely like a particular kind of game it definitely feels i think there's like a there's like a euro jank to it um that is absolutely there uh but i'm liking the vibe of it so far it's been a while since i played a game that's that puts you in the shoes of like a like the the bad guy so to speak i don't know i like i like those kinds of games like a destroy all humans or like a prototype or or uh you know the darkness or something like that you know what i mean where it's just like you're kind of like a a monster and you're doing kind of unspeakable things to people who who may or may not deserve it probably not like i i uh i was getting hungry and i was outside and i just saw a homeless man i was like well you're i'm eating you and it was just and it was gonna miss awesome no one yeah who are they gonna who are they gonna call um but uh i don't know there's something about this kind of like i feel like this type of game doesn't get made that much anymore and so i'm appreciating it from that angle too where it's just like this feels unique right now whereas i feel like there would have been a time where it might not have felt it might have felt dime a dozen or like it might have felt a little bit um you know you know not too uh distinct but in this environment now where it's like that that kind of framing is relatively unheard of it it it's cool and i'm into it i'm gonna spend more time with it but i don't have much else to say about i'm pretty early on um i will say i like the setup of the story i like the set like what the overarching path seems to be but some of these characters are written in a way that like kind of is is jarring where it feels a little bit i don't want to say whedon or like marvel because it's not quite that it's just there some characters are written a lot lighter than i anticipated like there's like a hunchback kind of like deformed like i i don't even know how to describe it like a like a like an igor type character but he's just he's like a 90s gay guy like it's very bizarre not that there's anything wrong with that it's just like it's the tone is very jarring in some cases um but yeah that's that's really it i've been playing more arc raiders also with uh friends of mine it's been kind of like the default multiplayer game because it's just everybody's on it um and i'm enjoying that more too but vampire the masquerade's kind of cool are you gonna play the tabletop rpg fuck no i never played anything in the world

2:46:05Dustin Furman:the darkness like that whole yeah there's like hunter and mage and a few other things and vampire the masquerade comes from the early 90s it's old um yeah so yeah it's been around for a long time but i'm not familiar it's like i never encountered it as a young tabletop guy so it was not a um it's not something i ever experienced but it still goes on to this day apparently yeah no tabletop

2:46:27Chris G.:i'm just like i don't know i'm not into i'm not into tabletop you're not a fucking dork i just i just feel like if i'm out with people i'd rather be like hanging out or doing something else like than playing again like i don't know i can play i can play games at home you know or like uh with people online like i don't i don't know there's a i don't know when i'm gonna see you again and we're gonna spend time arguing over the rules of like exploding kittens you know what i mean like i know that's not like a tabletop game like in the same way but like i just mean i don't know dude i'm not a board game if you're at a party you're three

2:46:59Colin Moriarty:beers deep and then some guy pulls out a game oh god it's like oh don't worry it won't take me very long to explain it's the worst feeling in the fucking world i just i just want to relax and like riff and come on come on come on man put that shit away yeah cool well we'll keep up with

2:47:17Dustin Furman:your travails and vampire the masquerade bloodlines to finally out so strange the chinese room ended up the studio that put the game out it's not really their thing to make a more action-oriented game they of course worked with sony as a second party for a while on everybody's gone to the rapture and they released uh still wakes the deep which i platinum either was it this year or last year

2:47:39Chris G.:it was fine it was it didn't yeah it didn't strike me as anything you should um i'm curious as to what you would make of it because i like i would actually like if you looked up gameplay of it like minute to minute gameplay. I wonder if you would see what I see in it, too. Like this. Yeah, it looks it definitely looks cool.

2:47:55Dustin Furman:And I love vampires, so it's like totally. Yeah, maybe I will. It's something that I would like to keep in my mind to check out. It'd be a little bit of a poser thing just because I don't know anything about vampire the masquerade, but neither do you. And who really gives a shit? Yeah. I have no idea. All right, Chris, that's all for you today or this week. Dustin says here playing a couple of bangers. Well, one anyway. Metal Gear Solid 3 Delta, which is awesome. Black Ops 7? Less so. Take it away.

2:48:22Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I finally picked up Metal Gear Solid 3 Delta just because I saw the Digital Foundry reporting that the Pro version got a patch. And while I would not say it is perfect, but it is significantly improved. You're no longer getting a worse frame rate on Pro than you were the standard PS5. So that was enough to be like, OK, I'm willing to deal with some of the other tech issues with the game. And so far, it's a it's a bit of a mixed bag for me. And I don't mean that as an like overall negative. It means there are some things I really like and there's a couple of things I'm like. This game is gorgeous, first of all, like in when I'm like still when I'm like I'm snake and I'm sneaking around somewhere and I like stop for a second and look.

2:49:15Colin Moriarty:I'm like wow UE5 they did something pretty nice here and it's really funny because it's weird on the surface Metal Gear Solid 3 looks like a very serious game like when you see the trailers or you see the uh the different screenshots but then when you see this what actually happens in this game and it is just fucking insane and seeing um some of the different and dude the enemies of course in this game are are awesome uh but the end like seeing his eyeballs pop out in the unreal engine in unreal engine quality is like it's kind of awesome it's it's it's pretty cool uh the frame rate is still it is bearable uh if you have a vr display it is a little bit like if as soon as you get into any kind of action which you're really not supposed to in a stealth game like this it will get a little wonky and i've noticed that the cut scenes too there's something i don't know if there's like a little bit of a frame pacing issue but i'm noticing it many people won't uh hopefully you're not retarded like me and you can just watch it colin i know you didn't have problems with it no uh so i didn't it's it's you know in the eye of the beholder i would say the only thing it's really tough because you don't want them to change middle gear solid three uh because it's such a classic game so they were really faithful to it i'm remembering that there are some things that i just don't really care for in metal gear solid three in particular the thing i hate the most is the stupid healing mechanic where it's like oh you got shot you gotta go into a menu and go to the knife and press x to pull to take the bullet out and then put on the ointment and the bandages and do this every time.

2:51:06Colin Moriarty:I hate it. It's stupid. It feels like a little checklist that I got to do every time I get hurt. I don't care for it.

2:51:13Dustin Furman:Yeah, it's annoying. I agree.

2:51:15Colin Moriarty:It's annoying. And the camos, I'm in a weird spot with the camos because it is important. But I don't know if it was with the iPod. I went out to Target and bought it and it still was like the day one preorder edition. Oh, interesting. and i think it came with the it's like some desert camo that makes it so your suppressor never wears out i'm like oh well i'm i feel like i have to use that the whole time uh because i'm using the suppressor all the time and so i don't know it's a little annoying but overall i'm having a good time and i just yeah i just did the end fight and it's funny because that fight is like

2:51:56Dustin Furman:kind of annoying but also awesome yeah it is at the same time but yeah it's it's a great idea

2:52:00Colin Moriarty:i remember though this time i didn't i i did a save and then i read i undid it but that you can totally kill him when he first appears in the game yeah i love that when he's sleeping in a wheelchair and they're like about to take him away if you just snipe him you get a trophy for that you do so pretty cool i'm having a good time playing through it the other game that i'm playing is Okay, we lost Chris for a second, but we're back. The world didn't want me to talk about Black Ops 7, which is what we're going to discuss. Now I've been playing this a little bit over the past week because I'm doing a video for my channel that is hopefully out at this point.

2:52:40Colin Moriarty:I'm behind. And this game's interesting. It's funny because I was thinking like maybe I don't have the authority to speak on Call of Duty games. then i looked and i'm like oh in my steam account it says i have 244 hours on just the call of duties that i've played since they did this launcher thing not including all the hours i have on modern warfare on battle net because it was once exclusive there of course all the other ones so i have a decent amount of credibility but i'm not some kind of call of duty mega fan And so I've split my time a little bit between the campaign, which is apparently not very long.

2:53:20Colin Moriarty:I'm probably already halfway through it because I saw it's like four hours and the multiplayer. And a lot of the focus of the conversation has been around this campaign. And it's clearly obvious that this was a very, very quick work. Basically, the format is that there are... Like actual smaller levels that are more traditional Call of Duty levels that are then sandwiched between kind of these open world levels that I don't know if they're using the Warzone map. That would make sense to me that are clearly not as much effort put into them and nowhere near as fun. and even there the levels that are the actual levels are like these weird they're kind of like dream sequences but they're induced by some hallucinogenic gas that's part of the story and that's when you get the the weird stuff the the weird man kaiju fight that you guys were talking about earlier crazy i have a hot take about this guys first of all i want to say the campaign's not very good what i've played so far uh but honestly for me i've never thought call of duty campaigns were really that great uh they're they've been fun and their action set piece moments are fun you know it's popcorn fun it's slop in a good kind but i've never thought that they were anything crazy in terms of story and to be clear i haven't played all of them so maybe your favorite one that you think is amazing.

2:54:59Colin Moriarty:I haven't played. Maybe that could be true, but there's something about the fact that call of duty campaigns have just been always kind of ridiculous. And in this one, it seems like they just said, fuck it. And they're like, we are making this actually crazy. And in one of the earlier missions, there's this part where you're in a dream sequence and there's giant machetes falling down from the sky that you have to avoid and then you do this boss fight and there's a part where you pick up a kill streak and you get to like it's basically like gps pick and then shoot a giant machete from the sky i'm like this is kind of sick like i kind of think this is cool but unfortunately it just wrapped up in a kind of lackluster and boring experience so it's it's a weird mixed feeling like i'm not defending it i'm not saying it's great i guess i just don't hate it for the reasons a lot of other people hate it the fact that they went totally weird with it it's kind of interesting it's appealing to it's it appeals to me in that way so i probably won't end up finishing it i'm just not really having a good time with it the multiplayer which i feel like i mean i have way more experience with call of duty multiplayer i played black ops 6 pretty extensively last year and i i can't get into it i i started to play it and i'm like am i something changed in last year am i too old for this now uh but man i it's really hard for me to comment on this skill-based matchmaking thing going on because people are going nuts because some people are accusing them of saying they're not doing skill-based matchmaking but they are secretly and there's also a skill-based matchmaking mode that some people are having better results on all i can say is that when i've played the what they claim is the non the no skill-based matchmaking i am i feel like i'm a boomer playing this game dude there's people that are fucking cracked at this game and i'm getting absolutely demolished and maybe that's the thing i think we had pointed out at one point that the main people that complain about skill based matchmaking or at least the prominent people online were the very good players and they were being put up against other very good players and that's why they were mad about it so now that those people are in the pool with everybody else it is potentially tainting the experience to some degree for everyone else and maybe they were right about it i don't really know but the the look of the like futuristic guns and there's like robots that run around i mean this happened in the last game too in black ops 6 i just was willing to tolerate it because i think overall it felt more grounded in some ways but this is kind of just like balls to the wall there's drones flying around there's a robot dog that you can call in as a score streak that absolutely demolishes people and i it's not hitting for me it's not hitting at all and i was i really liked black op 6 at launch this one i was on discord last night because uh arc raiders was down the servers were down we planned to get on and play so i was like okay i'm gonna hop in call of duty and i was streaming it to brandon and brandon's like dude i don't even want to watch you play this this looks like this looks like a Chinese like ripoff of Call of Duty, but it actually is Call of Duty.

2:58:37Colin Moriarty:Like something about it is not right. And I've seen a lot of mixed opinions about the multiplayer. Some people are loving it. Some people are hating it as normal, but it is not hitting for me at all. And I just wonder, I'm so curious about how well this game is doing or not doing. We talked about the steam charts and how you can't really glean like definitive information off of that but the whole experience from the campaign and the the multiplayer i didn't touch zombies at all yet so i don't know about that but this feels like an ip that is running on creative fumes at this point and i mean it's literally called it's black ops 7 it's the seventh black ops game and that is a sub series within call of duty it is and we're at the point where there's like all this ai art in it and the campaign feels while it's a little different it's feels half-assed i'm just like man i i am hoping as a fan of the ip overall not a mega fan but a fan i hope it does bad i really want it to do bad because i want them to slow down i want them to take some time and like hey instead of like pumping this shit out as fast as possible to the point where we're we're putting calling cards in chat gbt let's go back and let's make a good game let's just make the good game also some like a bunch of the maps are old maps redone again which that's normal but the new maps are just okay it's like man did you uh when you were playing the campaign did you play co-op

3:00:22Chris G.:no and i know it's designed around that well yes but also did you know because i was watching i was watching maddie play and he was playing by himself and there would be all this team chatter from his teammates but his teammates weren't there yeah they're just not there they're just not there but their voices are yes so like you you feel like you're fucking insane and then you go and then you open like a door that like like uh there's like a waypoint or whatever at a door and then you open the door and then in the cut scene you and your you and like three other people are there and then it cuts back to gameplay and it's just you it's just you and they're still talking it's very um yeah i don't know man it just seems like maybe they just jumped the they did the fast and furious thing where they're just like uh all right we're in space now i guess you know what i mean like they kind of jumped the sharp i mean they call duty's been in space way before this but like i mean as far as like tone where like now you're in like a fucking you're fighting destiny 2 raid bosses and psychonauts levels i like i mean now they're just kind of you know they're just kind of in a fucking mood i guess but uh right and that's i i know that

3:01:27Colin Moriarty:their lesson from this is that they're never going to make well i don't know it seems like they the audience clearly does not want a weird call of duty game and i feel like i'm like man if you actually just did it and did it right it might have been cool yeah they have they're half-assing

3:01:42Chris G.:it clearly and that's kind of that's the the bigger issue um but it's so funny how funny is it in retrospect to see like dude i can't i can't get out of my head their their uh their statement about like beavis and butthead or something where they were like we're gonna not do that anymore because we really want to keep we really like we really want to keep the sanctity of uh you know the call of duty tone and vibe anyway here's a destiny boss right here's a destiny here's a giant plant that you fight right yeah the giant plant i forgot dude yeah i don't know i mean i

3:02:23Colin Moriarty:is a spoiler for a call of duty campaign um so i guess fast forward 30 seconds if you need to the plant has absorbed woods from previous call of duty you have to fight through like his flashback in like Vietnam or something so and I get that it's the fact that they were also weird and they were fucking with the stuff that people liked what did you just

3:02:45Chris G.:say is that real yeah woods

3:02:48Colin Moriarty:like absorbed into the plant they're like I'm gonna save you man

3:02:52Chris G.:that's woods yeah he's in there dude holy fuck man that's great I really did not know that I thought it was just some it's crazy enough that there is a plant but that the but that the plant is woods is hysterical

3:03:05Colin Moriarty:i can't i don't know if it is him or if it just absorbed him i that's even crazy i like i love i love all that god bless right exactly and that's you know dude the campaign too it has all these war zone mechanics in it which is kind of weird like you you use the enemies have armor on them you use armor plating in order to get new weapons you

3:03:28Chris G.:go and open crates yeah it seems like an onboarding thing for war zone more than a an actual campaign which is crazy because the onboarding for warzone is just warzone like if people are going to play multiplayer stuff that was always the joke for years was that like this was a game that people played for the multiplayer so much that they just didn't even know that they had stories even yeah um so the idea that they would make a single-player campaign that is just an onboarding tool for warzone seems so ass backwards um yeah i don't know dude and the xp

3:03:57Colin Moriarty:is shared like the weapons you use you will upgrade them by playing the campaign at least

3:04:03Chris G.:it seems like it will tell me maybe it's just camos i'm not exactly sure but no you're right it's the it's like cross progression between modes which i think if i'm not mistaken has been i think that's been done before i'm not i'm not a call duty expert necessarily but right yeah

3:04:20Colin Moriarty:whatever so yeah it's not very good uh in my opinion but people are mixed on the campaign so don't necessarily take my word for it it also something to be totally fair too is that right now i'm playing arc raiders and i was just playing battlefield and i think both of those games are awesome arc raiders in particular so it's hard to like after i got really burned out of black ops 6 and i feel like it kind of crashed and burned for me last year to come back to something that i deem you know that's not as good um i'm easy to say like yeah i'm not investing more time because i want to i want to go play arc raiders yeah

3:04:58Dustin Furman:All right. That leaves me, I guess.

3:05:03Chris G.:Well, I just can't get over that. It's woods in the plant. I like your response. It's next level.

3:05:10Dustin Furman:John wrote in on Patreon said, Colin, I've noticed a trend in the last few months. You will start the what we're playing section basically every time by saying that you'll go first to quickly get out of the way. Why don't you think the audience wants to hear about what you're playing? I know that's kind of why you started Summon Sign in the first place, but that show has a rotating cast, so we don't hear from you on Summon too often. on the show about video games. We'd like to hear about what you're playing. Am I crazy? Thanks. No, I'm not trying to avoid what I'm talking about. I just say that when I've I play the same games for weeks and I play pretty slowly and these guys are always on to new things that I think you're more interested to hear from.

3:05:37So I try to make room for that.

3:05:39Dustin Furman:That has really nothing to do with someone's on. But I'll try to be better about that. All right. So for me, I platinum Powerwatch Simulator 2. That's platinum number 194. I loved it. I thought it was great. It's Powerwatch Simulator. You're going to love it or you're not. It's really nothing to say about it other than that the two other games well i actually have three other games here we talked a little bit about elden ring before i won't get too deep into that because i'm playing that only on stream i've not played it off stream so i'm really enjoying the process of of playing and i'm enjoying playing alongside uh brad and dustin and playing my samurai character colon montgomery and just doing the best i can out there somebody yep when we were recording our arc raiders

3:06:17Colin Moriarty:podcast someone brought up that someone thought you were playing it off stream no i might have

3:06:23Dustin Furman:booted it up or something but i didn't play it off stream okay i definitely didn't i mean i'm

3:06:27Colin Moriarty:i mean i was like oh interesting but apparently bad info yeah i mean it maybe someone saw it

3:06:34Dustin Furman:online like when i a couple times that i've played it up here i just shut the ps5 just stayed paused and then it just shuts down so when i turn it back on to use portal um with the upstairs ps5 it's probably still up and then i just close it and yeah for the next thing but no i've not played it off stream um i probably will at some point if i really want to beat it i have to do that but no i have not done that yet the games i'm playing in my spare time um are silent hill f and ball pit so i'll start with silent hill f i'm probably halfway through it i've not played it in a few days at this point i don't know how i feel about it i think one of the things that I can say with confidence is that Silent Hill 2 remake is a far superior game, but they're different.

3:07:18Dustin Furman:I will say that I really dig the setting and I really dig the character, at least the protagonist, who it is, like a young 16-year-old schoolgirl or whatever in 1960s rural Japan. Very cool, very creepy, not something that I've seen too much of. I mean, I'm not watching a lot of Japanese fiction or anything like that, but I don't know anything like this really. So it feels really fresh in that regard. And I will say the game feels quite dangerous because of who you are. You know, if you're playing Silent Hill 2 as James, he's not the most capable person either, but he's more of an adult man. He can kind of handle himself.

3:07:52He's got guns and all sorts of things. Here, the game encourages you often not to fight.

3:08:00Dustin Furman:I think this is one of the things that where the game kind of falls apart for me, though. So there are a few things I don't like about the game. One, I think the game's poorly paced. there's the game interrupts you a lot just a lot of real like you know exposition and random cut scenes and you're kind of walking forward and then there's another cut scene and all that just kind of a lot of unnecessary stuff but the bigger thing than me is just the combat micah keeps telling me and i think it's true and it's right it's like the game you're a 16 year old or whatever school girl in japan you're like literally in your fucking sailor moon outfit you're not gonna of take these guys on and that makes sense i totally dig that but i think the game sends mixed signals with what it really wants you to do because it almost seems trivial if you're just running past everything you almost feel like you're not playing it's actually not unlike what i what i'm joking about when we play elden ring where you guys just have me run past things and i'm like but this is like kind of lame like don't i know they respawn and i know that but it's like don't you want to fight and like play the game or you just want to like run through these environments there are dream sequences in the game for lack of a better term where the rules kind of change you get different weapons and then the weapons can be used like you get like a like a knife and a sword and like a spear and all sorts of things and then you can use these weapons unlimited in the dream sequences but when you're in the real world there's weapon destructibility whether you're using like a pipe or a baseball bat or something i'm not i kind of hate weapon destructibility.

3:09:29Dustin Furman:I totally understand. Brad has made the point. It's like this is the way for them to manage ammunition, basically. For the game to be scary in some way, you need to not master the combat and be able to kill everything in one fell swoop. But I feel like there's something kind of missing and disconnected in Silent Hill F. So I'm not wild about it. It's good. It's fine. I haven't seen. You beat it, Dustin? Yeah. Okay, so I'm halfway through it it seems fairly short um i might have played it for six hours maybe seven hours something like that i do like the modularity and and this is not unheard of at this point especially in in horror games but the modularity of difficulty with puzzle and combat i think that's kind of cool giving you different options again this goes all the way back to like tomb raider shadows was like the or shadow of the tomb raider was the first game i remember really doing that in a granular way.

3:10:23Dustin Furman:And now a lot of games do it. So that's fine. I'm playing with the English voice acting. It's fine. Yeah, everything's fine about it. I don't know. I'm not really that impressed so far, but maybe I'll have better things to say about it when I'm done. And I will beat it. The other game that I'm playing is Ball Pit, which I finally succumbed to. And I'm really sorry that I did because it's incredibly addictive. And this is why I didn't want to get into the Bellatro, right? And why I still haven't played it because I just know what's going to happen. I know the way my mind works with these kinds of games.

3:10:58Dustin Furman:It's how I've been and I don't even put it on the list anywhere, but I play Plants vs. Zombies before bed like most nights of the week now. I just get really into these games and I love playing them and then you just kind of lose track of the shit that you feel like you should be playing but then you feel like maybe you should be playing what you want to play. And yeah, I don't know. When I first played, so I bought Ball Pit when it came out, but then it's been sitting on my cross meaty bar and I'm like, fuck it I'll just play it and I actually needed something to play for summon sign we're going to do the 100th episode of summon sign Dustin and I with Brad and I'm like I'm only playing Silent Hill it's kind of boring I'll play something else and get something else in the mix I must admit when I first turned it on and first played it I'm like I kind of hate this like I I'm like I was actually for five minutes or so it was like one of those weird nervous feelings where I'm like oh no like what is this like why don't I like this and then there were certain things that I realized you just have to do.

3:11:48Dustin Furman:And it was, I was saying earlier in the show, I'm like, what am I not understanding about this game? So I went on YouTube and I'm like, just, and I looked for like some quick tips and I found like some two minute video where I had like five tips for a ball pit and it gave me like everything I needed to know. It's like play the game on the fastest speed, use auto fire and that's it. Otherwise have fun, you know? And once I figured out that the game's not supposed to be played so slowly and that it's much more frantic than you think it is like at first you're trying to catch all the balls as they bounce and like do all these things like you can't play like that it's got to be like a frenetic sort of situation and once i really understood it i'm like damn this game's fucking great yeah and it's weird it's it's multiple games to me it the perspective of it is pinball and in fact even the the play field is pinball like in its diet you know in its diameter and like it's thinness and it kind of edges out as you get further into the stage which is cool obviously it's breakout or arkanoid but in a different sort of way it's actually it's not even people are calling it breakout or arkanoid but or twin breaker but it's not that so much.

3:13:10Dustin Furman:It's really more space invaders. If that makes any sense, because in space invaders, the enemies are moving towards you and they're firing at you. And that's basically what's happening here. As opposed to Arkanoid, even if the blocks are coming closer to you, it's not really an active game like that. So it is ostensibly a brick breaker. And I think that that's what they were going for, but it's not really. It really reminds me more of something like space invaders. And then it's a rip off of Vampire Survivors otherwise. And I don't really mind that vampire. I was very hard on Vampire Survivors, and I think reasonably so in some ways.

3:13:49Dustin Furman:But there's no doubt the game's great. I mean, it's a great game. And yeah, it's a brilliant idea. And it's endlessly scalable. And as we've noted in the past many times, there are so many copies of it now. And that's cool. I appreciate how cheap it was. I appreciate how accessible it was, how generous they are with the DLC, the fucking millions of trophies in the game. It was cool and I really liked it. It's vampire survivors to an extent, but it's a much more active, much more difficult vampire survivors. Vampire survivors, in my opinion, is once you learn, I mean, I didn't platinum it like Dustin did, but I played it extensively.

3:14:23Dustin Furman:And it's like, once you kind of learn what works, it's kind of trivial until you get into like really difficult situations. You're kind of just surviving. I remember going on for fucking ever in some of those stages, like because I think the stages only end when you die, right? Or when you find the things you're supposed to find. So these things can go on forever. That's not the way ball pit works. And because of that, you're never able to get very strong. And that's kind of what I dig about it. There are permanent. So you have all these upgrade, you know, these unlockable characters. And each character has like a certain skill or whatever, and then they have their own statistics.

3:14:57Dustin Furman:And those statistics permanently increase as you play the game, which is cool. It actually reminds me a little bit of Rogue Legacy. I don't know if you guys remember that game. And it reminds me of Rogue Legacy in a different way too. And I'll get into that in a second. But I like that the game kind of resets you at zero-ish every stage and kind of forces you to get going again. And this will be frustrating to some people, but there are just runs where they're like, this isn't working. And you die. Like you get overwhelmed with enemies and you die. And you're like, this just isn't working. And then the next stage, you'll play again, you'll just retry and you'll get the certain drops that you need and you're like destroying it.

3:15:38Dustin Furman:And there's something incredibly satisfying about it. I really, really like it. I like the way the game is structured from a systems perspective where there are all of these characters. Basically, to get the platinum trophy, you have to beat every stage with every character. And I think that's really cool. There's one character where you can't select your upgrades. He just selects them for you. I like all that kind of stuff. I think there's one I really like this character where there's no mini balls. So for I haven't really described the gameplay. It's like you're and this is where it's kind of like pinball ask or Arkanoid ask is like you're shooting balls at enemies as they come down space invader style towards you.

3:16:14Dustin Furman:And you're trying to clear the field at the end of every one of them is a is a boss. And there so you're constantly bouncing these balls back and you have like you can have up to these four primary balls. So like a stone ball that like does a lot of damage or an iron ball. But then you have all these mini so-called mini balls and you're trying to scatter them and get them caught behind enemies and hit them from behind and stuff. It's it's really, really good. I really like it. And again, I'm sorry I started it because it's going to be it is a distraction. Even last night when I was playing, I like wrapped up and then I sat down and realized on my couch.

3:16:48Dustin Furman:I realized I didn't shut the PS5 off and I'm like, all right, I'll just play again. and then I it's I like it more than vampire survivors because I think it's it's more meaty like there's more to it and yeah but it's no detraction from vampire survivors like vampire survivors is the reminder that people come up with new ideas still to this day and that was one of the shames about about what it did with all the Castlevania stuff where it was like well you didn't need to do this because the idea is so brilliant you didn't need to do it that was what was so frustrating to me about that this is a truly unique game even aesthetically now i brought up rogue legacy i don't know if this is too much but there is this whole city building aspect of the game and i don't know exactly how i feel about it i think i like it but i'm not entirely sure it's necessary and this again is where like rogue legacy comes in because that was all about building your castle and getting all these perks and you do the same thing in this and it is kind of clever where you have you put down these buildings and these forests and these fields of wheat and all that and then you send out your enemies or i'm sorry your protagonists that you've collected so far as if it's a game of arcanoid and they're like trying to just bounce around get everything before the time runs out it's very strange but pretty ingenious shout out to this game yeah shout out to ball pit i really really like it and i'm going to continue with it and i'm going to platinum it i hope i've beaten four stages i think i think there's nine

3:18:15Colin Moriarty:yeah that sounds right colin one of my favorite elements that you didn't mention is the the when you're so you're like selecting balls like you would selecting upgrades and vampire survivors

3:18:28Dustin Furman:but then you have the ability to combine balls use them or whatever yeah and so the i guess you

3:18:35Colin Moriarty:call it build crafting in this game where it's like you can figure out what balls work well with one another or it's like there's certain runs where there's the character i can't remember what they're called but you have two characters at once yeah right two like the ice climbers yeah yeah and so it's like okay well i have twice the amount of balls but they only do half the amount of damage but it's like okay i'm gonna pick up stuff that gives me more baby balls and so you have like you can do a build where you have like hundreds of balls flying around and honestly it's my dream come true yeah you love that just get slapped with them so but yeah the build crafting in this game i feel like i'm still learning because there's like ultimate ultimate balls there are like really cool specialty combinations that you can do that are very powerful yeah you're

3:19:24Dustin Furman:right there is a whole system and that is the vampire survivors thing is like where yeah you're leveling up you're even collecting the similar colored dime you know jewels and leveling up and then it gives you yeah you have active and passive skills so like the active skills are like the balls you select like the spiked ball the iron ball the ice ball the fireball and then there are things like this will let you do more damage to enemies if you hit them from the right this will let you do more and damage enemies if you hit them from the left this will let you do more damage you know one of my favorite things is to get the uh is to make the cornucopia which is like it like increases the amount of mini balls you have and their damage or whatever and that itself is a synthesis of two items and the cool thing about the synthesizing of items it's not unlike vampire survivors where it had a limited number of things that you just you can select you're making room for more items when you like so like you can constantly synthesize the balls together if you're able to do so and make room to get another ball so you basically could have a ball that's like two or three balls combined and then three other balls in your four ball list and so you just have this crazy thing going on and you're right like some of the combinations are nuts like the i love the laser ball that has like the vertical and horizontal lasers and you like oh together and you like just the you can get like a fireball that puts people on on you know lights people up and then get a passive skill that does 20 more damage to people that are on fire and like it's cool but it is funny it is very much unlike vampire survivors in my opinion where it's just like these things fall like you're either gonna some of these runs just fall apart and then some of the runs are just masterful it really all depends on what you're grabbing i really like it

3:20:51Chris G.:highly recommend that city building thing is the only thing that's getting in my way of trying and honestly like i have it sitting there but i'm like i don't know i don't know about the city

3:21:00Colin Moriarty:i don't know about that stuff colin did you see i don't know if we talked about on the show that there is a game called warhammer survivors coming out oh oh is it that and is it is it the

3:21:11Dustin Furman:guy that did so apparently or they're really ripping them off well it is a different team

3:21:16Colin Moriarty:doing it but they licensed the vampire survivors engine oh cool that's cool oh interesting well okay yeah this is well this is the steam page it's coming out sometime in 2026 but i'm like if it's another vampire survivors game for me to platinum i'm in i will do it yeah this looks cool I mean it's just like oh this is cool what the hell and just make like Halo survivors or Horizon survivors I don't care

3:21:49Chris G.:Spartan survivors my brain rot is

3:21:52Colin Moriarty:vampire survivors so it's just

3:21:54Dustin Furman:I mean I loved them I got really into vampire survivors for a couple weeks probably when it came to PlayStation and I had to move on it was right around the time we did our last live show I remember and uh it goes to show you, in my opinion, like there are new ideas. They're not always the most spectacular ideas. They're not always the most sophisticated ideas or complicated ideas, but there are new ideas. And vampire survivors is a new idea. Like the idea of the kind of buttonless moving around, like you don't control anything other than your movement and you're just gathering and up leveling up.

3:22:25Dustin Furman:It's very brain rot. It's very good in that. Like I totally it's it's a it's a mainstream sort of thing. and it's an idea worth being proud of so to see kind of an evolution of this infusing more it just goes to show you that there are just more and more new ideas like ball pits a new idea too it's taking something that's it's predicated on something else but it's actually wildly different and i dig it a lot i really really do and it seems like a shit ton of people are playing because there are leaderboards and there's a million fucking not literally a million but you know ton of people on the leaderboards and yeah i'm digging it so shout out shout out the ball pit made by one guy apparently i don't know that that was the one thing i noticed actually i looked at the credits because they're just available in the menu and it's like this one guy and some artists and some people and then it's just all the like there's so many people at these publishers it's like what are you all doing what have you all been doing on ball pick give me a break you didn't all work on this all right let's get into listener inquiries and wrap this show up we end this episode and every episode of sacred symbols with six questions comments concerns often ideas from the audience over on patreon.com slash last day media submit your inquiries to the different threads that are put up in the news feed for the different shows our threads typically go live on wednesdays and are deleted thursdays for this coming week because of thanksgiving it'll be tuesday and wednesday respectively so be warned king ryan james wrote in and said hey guys i wanted to wish all of you a happy holiday season as we approach it hope it's as stress-free as possible and you're all able to spend time with family and loved ones i wanted to get your thoughts on rage bait culture and why you think this sells or attracts so much attention in different industries, including video games?

3:23:58Dustin Furman:What factor do you think social media plays in this? And do you think people in corporations should have a responsibility or an ethical duty to try to minimize rage as much as possible? Interesting question, King. Thank you for King Ryan. Thank you for writing in. Dustin, let's hear from you. What do you think about rage culture? Should companies, do they have an ethical duty to minimize rage? Does this sell or attract, you know, sell products attract attention and um what do you think about rage bait culture especially in

3:24:26Colin Moriarty:games big in games yeah it makes sense that it's big in games because uh i don't know gamers are more online probably overall um clearly i mean we with the rise of the raise bait rage bait culture at least on twitter is partially because now uh your rage baiting is profitable you can say whatever you want and if you have twitter or x monetization whatever on you can make some money off of it but it's not just there either i mean we see this on youtube as well that if you are you can preach to any choir that you like and make lots of money off of that it's unfortunate because i think that if we're if we're calling it what the question writes in as rage or if we just want to say anger sometimes anger and and quote-unquote rage i would say is justified and an important tool for us as consumers to relay messages things we don't like to people making games or publishers or whatever.

3:25:40Colin Moriarty:Obviously, some people go way too crazy with it, are super toxic, but being outspoken about things you don't like does make a difference and can change things for the better. The unfortunate part is this, there are bad actors in this and use it to enrich themselves. And honestly, they don't have to necessarily even believe or even care about that much about what they're even saying because they know what their audience expects of them so it's uh yeah it's it's funny i mean sometimes even we get accused of this and i think that's it's so prevalent now that uh even if you're if you're angry or you know you're putting an opinion about out there you will get accused of like oh well you're just saying this because you're X fanboy, you're this fanboy, or you only care about this company.

3:26:40And it's like the,

3:26:42Colin Moriarty:the well's poisoned in a lot of ways. And so the only thing that we can do both for us as podcasters or people that look at the industry, but also I think for the audience is just to try to raise the level of conversation up. And in some cases call out bad behavior when you see it.

3:27:02Dustin Furman:chris what are your thoughts here on rage bait culture in our game space

3:27:05Chris G.:yeah i mean i don't know i think it's i think it's i think it's boring but i think it works um the reality is that like you know there's a factor this question here it's like what factor you think social media plays in this i think like almost i don't maybe not the entire it's not the entire formula but it's a it's a grand majority of the formula i think i think Like the reality is that you have people, you know, you know, who are much smarter than any of us working around the clock to try and figure out what is the best way to hack past your brain. Past all of the defenses to get you to care about something that you normally wouldn't care about.

3:27:50Chris G.:And your average person is not really a match for that. and it's um i don't know it's it's it's unfortunate i i think the reality is though that like this is kind of where we're at this is where we will be this is the um the meta as it were and uh i don't know i think it's i think it sucks i think it's boring i think it's predictable the amount the the the sheer predictability of it is is staggering like like before you even i mean we've been talking about intergalactic But like, I mean, we all know what's coming with Intergalactic. Like, it's not going to be a surprise when it happens. And it almost be like, I bet we could probably predict word for word some of the some of the titles and some of the thumbnails that will be made about it.

3:28:41Chris G.:And that, I think, is the most disappointing part of it is that it's not even that it's anger all the time. it's not even that it's just all of this rage and all this doom and gloom and all this like perpetual dissatisfaction that seems like people are almost addicted to the feeling but the fact that it is so pre-programmed and so inauthentic and so uh so predictable

3:29:07Dustin Furman:is almost the more disappointing part of it right like i would rather i would rather have

3:29:10Chris G.:people be like genuinely angry at things with like a unique perspective and with like and you could tell that people meant what they were saying like i much prefer that anger than like whatever the fuck we have now which is people just kind of being performative for i don't know four dollars from elon or something like it's very odd right but that's that's the whole thing

3:29:32Dustin Furman:it's funny you say that because that's what i was gonna say was i think in some way and i think for bigger actors like Dustin's right it's it's it's very profitable to bring heat on things to be negative about things whatever and people can do whatever they want I don't care and you can digest whatever you want but I think people all also overestimate how much people are making on this like it's I know how things are monetized I know how much money I can figure out how much money you're making on YouTube based on your general account views and like you how long your videos are like, it's not that lucrative.

3:30:04Dustin Furman:And I feel like a big thing that people, how do I put this? I think discourse around games has always been somewhat toxic and heated. And it's true in a lot of things I like, like sports is incredibly toxic. Politics obviously is like the king of toxicity in terms of subject matter. But I also think people just need to take responsibility for themselves. Rage bait in quotes works because you watch it and you respond to it. And people often accuse me of being like, why do you why are you rage baiting? And why are you doing this? And I'm like, I don't I don't even know. I like I literally don't even know what people are talking about when they're describing some of the things I've done and said in quotes.

3:30:49Dustin Furman:Just because I say something that that doesn't strike you or I'm sarcastic about something or whatever, your response to that is your problem, not mine. I don't give a shit. Like I'm not your dead. So you have to kind of act the way you want to act. And the way I feel like people act embarrassingly is often in response to things that are not even meant as much more than an anodyne statement or something obviously sarcastic and biting. But people take things, I don't want to say too seriously, but they just, they're too overexposed to it. And they think that I think everything revolves around this sort of rage culture and maybe a lot of it does but like when i tweet something out for instance like i tweeted out the sales figures for yote today and said sony must be freaking out you know as a like as a joke they must be oh my god they must how much we only made four times the money we spent like it's crazy how much of a failure that was um that's obviously sarcastic your response to it is your problem sure like ultimately like if you want to respond and be really upset about it if you want to respond and be, you know, incensed and make fun of it.

3:31:54Dustin Furman:It's like totally up to you. And to be perfectly honest with you, I just ended up muting every one of those threats. So I ended up not really seeing most of it anyway. And that's part of the way that I stay sane in a culture that does thrive on negativity, where it's like, I'm going to say what I say. I tweet 10 or 15 times a month. You can freak out about whatever you want. I'm not insulting anyone. I'm not assaulting anyone. I'm not making fun of anyone. I'm not calling anyone out. I don't do any of those things it's so funny when people bring up and i know i've said this before it's like i was so much crazier on twitter 10 or 15 years ago than i am now it's like not even funny it's like where were all these people when i was like making fun of everything and everyone and and being much more hostile as i've gotten older i'm just like i'm gonna say what i want to say i'm gonna say what i mean your response is up to you it doesn't affect anything for me and i think the i think that bad actors and i've said this before and when i was on uh that tj smash guys show it's like we it's like every once in a while you have to like go into bad actors territory and call them out and it's not playing into their game it's it's it's creating a cost for playing that game that appearance is gonna is gonna follow him not not in a way that's good for him you know it but it hasn't affected me at all because it's not what we do i don't care you know so sometimes like going in and taking a swing and and delegitimizing someone is worth it i hate when people say like oh don't you platform people into something i'm not platforming anyone and by the way i'll platform wherever i want you know right but but i just think people don't look into their own response to things as the major fuel and driver behind this culture and that you simply have to gauge the way you respond to things trust me i see things all the time where i want to like bite someone's fucking head off there are so many stupid people in the world and so many stupid people on social media i can spend all day just but i just don't respond to any of it so i i guess what i'm saying is like just let's all calibrate ourselves towards the common end of saying what we mean being earnest having fun challenging people but like any deeper than that is a you problem i'm not carrying this with me through life like sure you know yeah i don't know i i think the fact that we view it through that lens though is

3:34:25Chris G.:is in and of itself kind of like you said it yourself like you you're crazier like 10 years ago on twitter or however long ago and people didn't people didn't view it through the lens of this you know i mean it was a different lens it was a lot more since the the lens was pre uh pre-assumed sincerity you know was that everybody meant what they were saying and even if they were joking about it they meant that they were joking but now it's like not even it's almost like post-ironic where it's just like there's there's no value and if it's like oh well the standard rules of engagement are don't engage or it's like but isn't this supposed to be like the third space right right right you know what i mean like it's it's kind of like i don't know it is it's just bad man and again like you got you got people working around the clock to hack through your brain to make sure that you you fall for this stuff like it's not it's like the difference between like you know you cook a chicken and you you you're okay like i've got chicken here how do i make it taste better i use like the the earthly accoutrements that we have like i have salt and you know basil or whatever uh it's one think to do that to to cheat in like an earthly way let's say versus like some guy in a lab coat reverse engineering like a beaver anus to taste like a blueberry so that you're addicted to fucking blueberry waffles you know what i mean like there's there's like a different thing going on with like social media and i think it's more akin to like it's less flavoring speech with like exaggerations or like sarcasm or you know the earthly accoutrements that we that we engage with in person but like through the through the lens of like whatever the fuck this is it becomes like that guy in the lab coat like how do i make fucking lead delicious yeah it's fair i don't know it's there's something about it that's like uh it's not good because it's been a while now it's

3:36:25Dustin Furman:been a couple years but there was a couple years you guys might recall where i just stopped really using social media very much and i realized that it was like i want to be part of the stream of consciousness too i'm a human being i have something to say i want to participate and so i slowly and with micah's you know i think she really kind of pushed me towards it as well to be like why don't you just post on social media again like why do you feel like you just need to not say anything it's like because i at one point i was like oh the only it's like war games the only option is to not play like that's the only winning move but i'm like no there's another winning move which is just say what you want and ignore all the feedback about like of people freaking out about things that they have the right to freak out about but you just don't have to do it and so i think i found kind of a medium where i can just where i can just kind of say what i need to say it's never as bad as people make it out to be no and their responses are always 10 times worse than whatever they accuse me of and when i when i realize that it's like okay i mean i can't control that there's just i don't even mean to be a dickhead it's just like i think with when you have a stream of consciousness with humanity there's like an iq differential with people and you just realize that like a lot of people are not on the level and ultimately you can't we don't make a podcast for those people so why would i tweet for them and just because they're there and reading it just like they could be here listening to it doesn't mean it's for them because it's not and once i kind of realized that it's like good then the rage can kind of happen all around me but i'm certainly not a participant in it the only thing i rage about is like the jets and the islanders and i do that off camera yeah i don't know i do miss just when you could

3:38:06Chris G.:it would just be nice to be able to gauge where where people really are instead of having this like constant lens of like ironic distortion over everything like i saw something earlier or like the other day where it was just like uh oh break it like it was like breaking news or like New York is going to require all elementary students to learn Arabic numerals, which we already use. Right. No, exactly. Like and the responses to it are so crazy. But like and I can't even tell anymore if people are just genuinely this stupid or if everyone's just joking, I think.

3:38:37Dustin Furman:And that's worse. Right. There is something worse about that. But I think it's both like I think there is. I don't know. It sounds mean and I don't I'm not saying I'm the world's smartest person i'm not not even close but i think the longer i've been on the internet and the older i get the longer more i realize that like this kind of egalitarian idea i had that like we're all kind of we all kind of are the same mentally and it's like no we're not

3:39:03Dustin Furman:like no we're not yeah like like there is just a lot of dumb shit out there and right we're just overexposed to it the thing is is it's always existed it's just that we were never we weren't at the local pool hall hearing someone shoot off at the mouth we weren't overhearing someone's conversation at the supermarket or whatever now you just see all of it it's just all and it's unfiltered and unfettered and so it's there it is yeah i can't remember who who it was who said it

3:39:27Chris G.:was like it was like um it used to be you had a village idiot but now it's like the village idiots have like a forum right and they're the only people saying anything because any anybody who is in the village idiot doesn't need to say anything it's it's very yeah i don't know it's

3:39:42Dustin Furman:it's all over the place so it's a really great question and like i think it's worth noting but i also one thing i want to say and i'm glad i remembered i said this before we move on is there are we actually talked about this with with our argument or not an argument but our conversation chris over twitter and like the importance of twitter and how i was saying like twitter probably won trump the election like literally like elon buying twitter probably caused the election to be won by trump like it's one of the major domino pushes right Right. And I think there's still this idea that none of this really matters.

3:40:17Dustin Furman:And that's the one thing that I want to challenge people on is like you can it can be an intake and an outtake depending on your own involvement with it. But these spaces really do matter. And. Ignoring them is ignoring them at your own peril. So when people, in other words, say, like, don't worry about what other people are saying about games, don't worry about what the consensus is about games. It's like, dude, what are you talking about? like that's a massively important part of culture of games is what people are saying how people feel what are they mad about what are they happy about like and just because there are actors that overtake that there was always actors that overtook that they just had a magazine or a fucking tv show you know so i think there's also like an overstatement of of us saying like ignore that and just be about the games and i'm like but the games bleed in the culture like everything's downstream from culture don't you understand like that so to me i'm i i think it's about the balancing act um and so people say like you've been really fixated on ghost of yote for a game i'm not even like that in love with like you're really fixated on ghost of yote's sales figures and i'm like yeah because there are really stupid people out there that don't know what they're talking about that's a relevant thing to nip in the bud and i did sure you know that's useful that's useful to the culture i did everyone a favor i did right yeah i did everyone a favor when i did that when i went on that show so like i'm willing to jump on there if more of us were willing to jump on those grenades as they appeared once in a while and like a rotisserie it we would have a much better space actually so it's a complicated problem but i appreciate the question, King Ryan.

3:41:56Dustin Furman:Anything else to say, Dustin? Nope. Good. Then we'll go to It's Not a Lie If You Believe It, who wrote in, said, Hey, gents, the common belief in the industry is that eventually consoles will be a thing of the past. What would be the warning signs from Sony's perspective that they need to transition away from making consoles? Would it simply be a downward trend in console sales that would make the decision for them? I don't anticipate this happening anytime soon, but I'm curious what kind of metrics would set off alarm bells for Sony. Thanks and remember to drink enough water. And I'm always drinking water.

3:42:26Dustin Furman:you kidding and again you can't hear the bottle can you squeezing it can't hear it dusting hear this either that's true you can't where are we here on what what is this is a great question because we've talked a lot about the future of consoles right where when will they go away what will things look like how will we play but what he's asking here it's not a lie if you believe it which is of course a seinfeld reference is what are the signs that sony would have to see for them to be like, oh, shit. And I actually don't think it's diminishing console sales is like the only thing. It's obviously going to be an important thing, but there's still a viable PlayStation business with half as many consoles as there are now.

3:43:05Dustin Furman:We know that because Xbox is doing fine. So it's got to be more than that. I wonder what you think.

3:43:12Colin Moriarty:I think that if they started to see an uptick, I mean, it's tough because like right now, We recently talked about the portal that you can technically play and buy PS5 games without a console, right? So there's not really an opportunity for it would be interesting if that really took off. It's so it requires a lot, though. You got to get a portal. You have to have the highest level of PlayStation Plus in order to do that. So I don't think that that's really a metric right now. But I would imagine that's something that they're interested in potentially expanding in the future. But to me, it all comes back to I guess this isn't really what the question is asking, but I just always think like the infrastructure while we have, you know, improving Internet all the time.

3:44:07Colin Moriarty:I have eight gigabytes download and upload in Butler, Pennsylvania, which is pretty insane. so the internet is getting much better but like we i can't imagine a post-console world and for a very long time until that starts to really because that's the one hang-up right now is that even right now like a company like microsoft if i use their game streaming absolute ass where i live like it's just not not quite there yet uh but i guess that's the The question is, what are the signs?

3:44:42Dustin Furman:Absolute cinema.

3:44:43Colin Moriarty:Yeah, absolute absolute ass Xbox cloud streaming. I should try it again. To be fair, I haven't tried it recently. So maybe it's better now. Server's a little too far away at the time. But what are the signs? It requires it to have there to be a whole nother infrastructure and platform set up like this portal situation. So I don't know. I feel like I don't have a good answer to this question.

3:45:10Dustin Furman:Chris what are your thoughts here what are some of the do you have a better answer not that Dustin's anything wrong with Dustin's but he said just rambled a bit

3:45:17Chris G.:I mean honestly like dude like the question is would it simply be a downward trend in console sales I mean probably I mean like a notable one yeah I mean like what why because the thing is it's because PS5 is technically behind PS4 right like a little bit I think because is that true colin yes yeah um so i mean something like that it's not really that big of a deal because like there's still like millions upon millions upon millions of units being sold right but like yeah if you notice like a downward trend to the point where it's like noticeably far behind like that might yeah i mean that's there's probably a good case to be made that's like yeah that might be a sign where things are going as far as like like an obvious kind of like oh it's time to aim in a different direction i i don't know what that would look like that would probably look like i don't know if that you could even really like accurately predict or even envision what that would look like because we've had such a such a strictly held standard of how these things go i I mean, some things die and some things, you know, go away like Sega and Xbox is in the current is in the stages right now of kind of transitioning into a third party publisher.

3:46:41Chris G.:But I mean, the machines.

3:46:45Chris G.:The machines technically generally persist, and in fact, I think Xbox is a pretty good example. I mean, look at a lot of what happened with Xbox is a pretty good indication of like, okay well all right we're behind our previous console that also failed not great the writing was probably on the wall are arguably like a while a while a while back um for all of this and we talked about it on the show um but i don't know how you would really make a staunch prediction without like just like looking at that downward trend and noticing how noticing that it's beyond normal like it's not like what we're seeing with ps5 to ps4 now yeah i think i think it's an awesome question like because i don't i don't know what i actually really don't know how it

3:47:37Dustin Furman:all operates without a console like i i think about it and i i feel like that's an inevitability and yet i don't understand how playstation remains a relevant player when that happens because think about like the more agnostic space is PC and that's locked down with Steam, right? So that's not a place Sony can really go. They can. They can probably get millions of people there, but they're not going to play ball with Steam. It's not going to be anything like it. And then the console space, they dominate, but they kind of have to hope and maybe all part of the strategy is to say like, we don't have to worry about this potentially for decades.

3:48:12Dustin Furman:I mean, this is more what Dustin might be even getting into was like there are just infrastructure problems i think i'm actually on the next episode of sacred symbols plus after the arc raiders one i'm actually going to talk to someone who has worked deeply in cloud gaming for big companies and we're going to talk about all the semantics of it because i'm really interested in it it seems like people are really into it but i don't really understand the use case and the big thing that i don't understand is how the companies make money when you cloud game it's it's not i think people look at these as like it's a zero-sum thing where like that you just stream the game.

3:48:43Dustin Furman:And I'm like, no, you don't just stream the game. They have a machine, like a virtual environment that they're hosting. That's like a spot taken by you. And then there's electricity that has to power it. And then there's all of the bandwidth. It's not like cloud gaming. And this is what I really want to ask this guy is like a cloud gaming actually seems to be the worst solution for cost. It doesn't make any sense in a universe where we're already freaking out about all the power chat GTP is using, GBT is using and all these things. You're going to fucking add cloud gaming into it. Into the mix, everyone, hundreds of millions of people are going to play cloud games at any given time around the world.

3:49:26Dustin Furman:I don't know about that. Like it just seems like it's not a false promise because it works. If you're close to a hub and you have low latency and a good internet connection and all that, it does work. Jaffe talks about that all the time, and he's talked about that for years. But I just I feel like there's no good solution for Sony off of the platform. Yeah. And I wonder if they really think and they might be it might be true that like this is kind of always going to be the way it is. It seems unbelievable, though. it might ostensibly be like the way that the way that i envision it is that and by the way this is nowhere near being true like i think probably maybe like 25 30 years or something or something like right yeah right where you would there's no reason to believe or there's no good reason to

3:50:18Chris G.:believe that what is capable on a ps5 now will not be capable on a calculator or like a calculator equivalent in 20 to 30 years um and for that reason like i can imagine like a future version of a playstation console being like almost like a almost like an amazon fire stick or something you know what i mean or something like that where it's just like arguably like this is a console technically but it's kind of not either or it becomes so trivial to run these things on hardware that you would need to to see like almost like a tv like here's a sony you know bravia is coming out with the new tv that has a playstation built into it or whatever and it can just handle everything um that i think is kind of like more more of a likely future than cloud because they don't want they don't want most people on cloud if anything it's if anything the more people who use cloud doesn't that technically hog it doesn't that technically make it worse for everybody because it's like more people drawing from the cloud like i would i don't i'm not look i'm not a scientist

3:51:19Dustin Furman:i don't know how there probably is a set number of like spaces and then they get it starts to It's like when you use a cell phone data during like peak hours, you're probably going to experience a similar thing.

3:51:28Chris G.:I would have to imagine that that would have some effect on it to the point where it would like, so they don't want most people on. And so it can never be their primary business strategy. It can never be the primary way with which they engage with their customers. So it will always be a machine. It's just a matter of like whether or not that machine will be a set top box or an internal chip or a dongle or, you know, I think the form factor of the machine is what's going to change the most as opposed to um you know whether or not it's a it's a machine or not it'll always be a machine this is a matter of like whether or not it'll matter at a certain point or it'll be so trivial you know like the fact that we can dude the fact that we the fact that you can run resident evil 4 on an iphone is crazy resident before remake on an iphone at 30 frames but like still dude like that's fucking unhurt that's if you told me you could run like oh halo 2 on a nokia you know what i mean like what the fuck are you saying like that's crazy yeah it's a long way since like morrow wind on the engage or whatever that was right like it's like it's and it hasn't even really been that long and so like yeah i think i think the future will eventually be that where and playstation will be like kind of like a storefront and uh uh you'll be able anything will be able to run it reasonably anyway but we'll see i'm fascinated by the whole situation just in that i agree with you i don't think this is where they want players

3:52:56Dustin Furman:i think it's a it's a good option it it's like a robust way to capture people for the outside chance that they want to stream or stream a game or if they're like not in front of their console there's all these different things but i've reminded people many times like when you play a PS3 game on PlayStation Plus, like you're playing it on a fucking PS3 in a server farm, like a literal PS3. It's strange. And I feel like it doesn't, the math doesn't math. Ultimately, it doesn't math for profit. It doesn't math for power consumption. It doesn't math for proximity to cut down latency. It's all based on the speed of light.

3:53:36Dustin Furman:I mean, it and so there's only so much you can do about that which is why we've talked about in the past like predictive technologies or like local loading of games um which would be interesting i mean there's all sorts of different options but i just we we talk about all this it's like why don't you just buy a fucking console i mean that's kind of like where the like that's kind of where it all comes down to and it's the same thing or a pc it's like whatever just buy the machine but i think Like, so I was saying earlier, I'm not even sure that declining console sales would be it because without the console, they're fucked.

3:54:12Dustin Furman:Whether they have to serve 30 million or 40 million or 100 million or 150 million, like they're fucked. And I think they know that if things turn, this is why they need to own IP. And it's why I keep saying they got to own the Fortnites. They got to, and I'm not saying Fortnite itself, but they need things like that for leverage. because without the console, without the delivery service, they are done. PlayStation can't survive. And that's a big problem. Big. So we'll see how it all plays out. Thank you for writing in. Jonah Sparks wrote in, said, what's up, gents? A couple of weeks back, someone asked about the next band Dynamco in Japan Studio Project.

3:54:49Dustin Furman:You all mentioned some great picks, but one that never gets enough love is The Legend of Dragoon. It earned Sony's greatest hits. Green label was a top seller when we released on PSN and still has a huge cult following, big enough to inspire a fan-made PC port called Severed Chains. The game was way ahead of its time with cinematic CGI cutscenes, a unique skill-based addition combat system, and a massive four-disc story packed with great characters and lore. Sony even brought it back on PS5, PS4, and 2023 with trophies. It feels ripe for the modern revival. What do you guys think? Should Legend of Dragoon finally get its moment in the spotlight?

3:55:17Dustin Furman:Let the hogs hang. Thank you for writing in. I can answer this one, I think, kind of succinctly, although if you guys have anything to add, you're more than welcome to, is that I just don't, there would be something cool about reviving Legend of Dragoon, but it's not, it wasn't even really big enough for them to follow it up with a sequel, which they wanted to do. And obviously Shuhei Yoshida produced the game. It's somewhat notable for that. For people that don't know, Legend of Dragoon is a JRPG made by Japan Studio and some internal assets. And it came out at the very end of the PS1 lifecycle before PS2 came out.

3:55:47Dustin Furman:It came out in the West. That summer I went into, was going into 11th grade, I remember. And it's a really cool game. But if you're going to create a new, I don't hate the idea of Sony making a JRPG. I just don't know that you want to use the Legend of Dragoon. Why not just make something new? There's an argument to be made with the popularity of the Falcom games, Persona, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest. It's like, yeah, maybe. But again, I don't know that they're going to like we saw this with Dragon's Dogma 2, which came out last year, like a year and a half ago just past 4 million copies or like what goes to yote sold in a month basically and i don't know if sony wants to play in those small waters anymore but should they or smaller waters more tepid waters should they want to do that i don't know that going back to legend of dragon is the move chris i know you never played it but dustin did you play legend of dragon ever or do you own

3:56:42Colin Moriarty:it the only time i played it was a demo growing up oh yeah the demo multiple times i'd like to play it someday, but I just haven't gotten to it.

3:56:51Dustin Furman:So you should. It's on it is on PSN. If people want to check it out, it is a cool game. There's no doubt about it. And it was a response to Sony seeing the popularity of the time of Squaresoft and what they were doing with 3D Japanese role playing games. That's why I came out so late in the generation. But I don't know. Do we have sales numbers here? I'm on the Wikipedia page. No,

3:57:13Colin Moriarty:I don't think so. Anyway, Legend of

3:57:17Dustin Furman:Dragoon, we never knew ye. horse the patron wrote in said hello friends pardon my dear abby style right in have you guys ever hit a point with gaming where you feel like it just isn't for you anymore in 2025 the only current gen game i played a lot was claire obscure 2024 wasn't much different relatively i find myself playing mostly pre-covid era rts remasters and battlefield games on pc and non-action combat jrpgs on my ps5 i am now close to turning 40 married with children and modern gaming is becoming increasingly lame and with monetization and general game design and the crazy dumb discourse from every direction about everything gaming.

3:57:50Dustin Furman:How do I get the magic back in my gaming relationship? Or am I destined to become an old man yelling at gaming-related clouds as I play Final Fantasy VII through X for the nth time? Or maybe I embrace being a crusty old gamer and become insufferable. I feel like my honest answer is as if you, and we've said this before, but it's in a different way. If you're not finding anything for you, I think it's you. And it's okay to kind of fall in and out and to fall out permanently if you're not into it anymore. But it's hard for me to imagine looking at video games today, even with all the cultural bullshit and all of the, like we're saying, the rage around the games and the monetization schemes, like there's nothing Like nothing speaks to you.

3:58:41Dustin Furman:I don't know how that's possible. There's so much that speaks to me. I'm old. I'm 41. You're saying you're going to turn 40. I'm old. I've been playing games for a long time. I've played a lot of fucking games and they're still talking to me. So it's hard for me to relate. You just have so many options. and if you're not into it anymore I don't think there's anything really wrong with just going back and playing old things there are a lot of people that only watch old movies or typically watch old movies they watch old TV shows they read old books the classics there's nothing wrong with that maybe you like the way things once were but don't anymore maybe you're just overwhelmed by choice maybe the prices are too high and you don't like the culture of it but I don't know man my honest answer and I don't know Chris if you agree like it seems like you're kind of falling out of it and that happens and maybe you'll be back maybe you won't but you have other priorities in life and other things speak to you now there's anything wrong with that i don't think you should even deny it or refuse it go with it but it's not games it's you in my opinion

3:59:52Chris G.:i don't know i think it's i think it could be a bit of both uh there it it there are a lot of good things and you you do have to kind of dig i think because there's there is a lot of slop especially you definitely can't go to like new releases on psn anymore you know it's that's kind of over uh those days of relying on that to find stuff but there's there's always going to be something like like i think ball pit is like a weird fucking game that like it's a type of game that i i've never seen before and you know there's there's some good triple a stuff too but there is a reality to the fact that like yeah games are designed very differently uh than they used to be like there there's a lot more bloat in a lot of these uh a lot of triple a um ui in my opinion has gone down the fucking shitter for a year i don't know what the hell like i saw uh i was reminded that the call of duty ui is hulu and i just it made me it made me so sad because I was like, oh yeah, that's right.

4:00:53Chris G.:They have like, a lot of these are Hulu and streaming service inspired design. So like, I get it. Like I get being a little dejected and I've definitely felt like periodically throughout the lifetime of the show, like there are definitely times where I was more engaged and times where I kind of felt like, yeah, nothing's really grabbing me. And when I do try to grab, when I do try to play something, it's not quite, feels like I'm not doing anything. I think it's natural to kind of ebb and flow. Like you're not, you don't always have to, be listening to the newest music or you know catching everything in the theater or playing the newest thing it's okay in those times where nothing's grabbing you to kind of look at your backlog or like play an old favorite or like get reacquainted with something that you you know played a long time ago that maybe you haven't played in a long time and then eventually like something will something will catch your eye dude like even just the last five years alone it's a lot of great stuff um but whether or not that matters to you is is a different thing altogether like i tell the story on the show occasionally about how many times it took me to play witcher before it finally clicked and it took me five tries like a good honest like i'm involved i'm going to pay attention five separate tries and then the fifth tries i finally got it i was like okay like all right i'm into it i like it you know um and sometimes that's the case with some games i don't know what what it is you play or i mean it says you're playing clear obscure and and battlefield and some jrpgs that's a broad scope that's like a broad i mean i guess clear obscure and jrpgs are kind of somewhat similar but uh yeah rts remasters and battlefield games it feels like there's a lot of stuff to play if you're into all that stuff so yeah i don't know play old favorites it's okay but in fact it might be better for you actually because like some of the new stuff that you might be interested in may be fucking cheaper by the time you're done playing all those older games so like it might actually benefit you to kind of just reacquaint but there's no shame also in just kind of taking a break like there is also truth to the reality that like with every new game you play the next game gets some percentage point less special because you're you're becoming acquainted with the tricks and and you know the illusions and you know the design and and things like that it becomes less mystifying and more um not samey but like more predictable in i guess in some way but then there's again there's a game like ball pit that's just like what the fuck is this or like balatra that kind of comes out of nowhere you're like what the hell who'd have thought this would work so keep your eyes peeled but don't feel bad about falling off is what i would say what do you think he says maybe i embrace

4:03:43Colin Moriarty:being a crusty old gamer and become insufferable do that if that's what feels good i mean i don't know if i really have much to add that con and chris haven't said other than um do what feels good and if you need to if you you mentioned here the crazy dumb discourse disconnect you know um Even if, you know, this is not good for business, but if you need to disconnect from gaming discourse, not listen to any gaming podcast and just enjoy what it is. I think about the meme. You guys know the picture? It's like a guy eating Little Caesars. It's like Little Caesars. So good. If you have a bitch in your ear telling it's nasty.

4:04:18Dustin Furman:Yeah, totally.

4:04:19Colin Moriarty:You know, gaming can be so good when you don't have a bitch in your ear telling you it sucks. Yeah, I love that meme.

4:04:25Chris G.:Yeah, that is that is true. The discourse is one thing I will say is absolutely fucking garbage. like that is uh unquestionably way worse than it used to be but that's not all gaming that's arguably that wasn't even video that wasn't even a factor in video games for me until i was like maybe like late teens early 20s so like i don't know man yeah just uh you can become a crusty old gamer you don't have to become insufferable though like i think those those are two separate you can you can choose both of those i guess if you want but you don't have to like dude i'll tell you this right now i i boot up uh i boot up halo 2 and halo 3 probably once a week still to this day i'm still i'm not above playing old shit that i love and will never stop loving but i i'm i still try to play other things and uh you can do the same yeah you know you could do

4:05:15Colin Moriarty:that side note as we as we leave this question or not little caesars is good when you have it don't have a bitch and you're telling you it's nasty totally you know sure i mean it's it's

4:05:27Dustin Furman:I remember I remember when I first moved to San Francisco so you know almost 20 years ago it was like five dollars to get a pizza yeah like the hot and ready and I was like dude I used to just dip that in fucking like Italian dressing and eat it I was so poor there's an Instagram video of some

4:05:42Colin Moriarty:guy talking about Little Caesars he's like this man was there for you when you were broke and now you're too good for him I did see that yeah you're too good for Little Caesars what happened and I'm like you know what you're right Little Caesars I'm gonna eat it now I'm not saying it's the best just saying it's good it's fine that's what you need sometimes are you gonna have it tonight no wasn't that good i guess no i'm feeling chipotle tonight oh chippers

4:06:10Dustin Furman:all right david wilson the second wrote in said salutations sacred sommeliers do any of you save the packaging of your hardware i've moved several times over the past few years and the original packaging for my consoles is the best way to box them up and keep them safe during a move however i hate having to keep the mountain of boxes in my closet i've accumulated as my collection has grown i'm throwing all sorts of other possessions away constantly in order to minimize my overall clutter threshold but i've clung to these boxes am i okay to let them go or should i continue saving them for future relocations your advice is most coveted regarding this matter be well gentlemen it's funny because i key i do keep all the hardware boxes i have all my hardware boxes going all the way back to the nes and uh they're in my attic right now nice here's my thing i don't save them to like move the consoles or anything like that i just always save the boxes i have my nes box snes n64 dreamcast you know uh ps1 ps2 all of it um i think i've said this to you guys before that i i love old things right like i'm a history guy i love old and i love antiques roadshow and there comes a point it's not that they're necessarily valuable, but it's always interesting when something gets old, whatever it is, it's kind of cool to have.

4:07:26Dustin Furman:And yeah, like a piece of Victorian garbage would be kind of cool to have right now, like something from the 1890s, just whatever it is, an old newspaper, you know, I feel like that's always kind of going to be true. And as we get into a more and more digital world, I feel like a lot of physical goods will become more interesting to have such that having an NES box in 100 years is not going to be nothing. I'm not even doing it for the money. It's just kind of a cool piece of culture. And I like keeping them. It reminds me of some of those I walked out of Toys R Us with or what I assume nobody beats the whiz with or whatever.

4:08:01Dustin Furman:And they're like the conduit by which I ended up falling in love with these various systems. So I do keep the hardware boxes. It is a waste of space. I have them in my attic. So I don't ever I'm never going to see them. Like I have so much. I don't have a lot of stuff in my attic, but it's like my old goalie equipment, like a bunch of hockey equipment, all the every card or letter anyone has ever sent me. I've kept all of them. And I'm probably never going to see any of it again. And then when I die, someone's going to go up into that attic and throw it all away. But in the meantime, yeah, there it is.

4:08:30Dustin Furman:Dustin, do you keep your hardware boxes?

4:08:32Colin Moriarty:Yes. I'm like you in my attic. I'm an unfinished attic. It's horrifying up there uh you have to use a ladder to get up there but up there there are multiple garbage bags that are filled with old game console boxes and uh yeah you're right i wonder if you can

4:08:51Dustin Furman:you see it yeah you have the nes you have the nes box there i see yeah that one is not one that i

4:08:58Colin Moriarty:i bought it on like craigslist or something a few years ago uh but i think it's super cool and so i keep them it's uh can be very annoying to have all these boxes laying around but just don't move i can't no that's the problem i need to move so i have more space to put the boxes you know like i need more space for the objects that i'm never going to use do you understand

4:09:21Dustin Furman:yeah i get it i mean i get it yeah and i i understand what he's saying too like where i am both a minimalist and not like i am constantly purging and through i love throwing shit away i I love cleaning things up, but then there are very specific things where I'm like, no, it's okay to have fucking every GI Joe. It's okay to have all the one thing I wish Chris that I kept were because by the time you got to like N64, I started keeping the boxes, but NES and SNES, I threw the boxes out. I don't know why we were doing that, but everyone did that. It was like not an uncommon thing. And I'm like, why did I do that?

4:09:56Chris G.:You know, like it's normal to throw away the boxes. I did it with every Game Boy Advance game. i ever had like the what is it the uh the cardboard boxes that the nes games would come in like i would i would rip those apart and throw them away because from my perspective i was like oh this this this is the cheapest shit ever clearly they don't care so i'm not gonna like i would never like rip apart like a like a ps3 case you know what i mean just to get to the disc but the game boy advance for whatever reason those boxes felt so shoddy

4:10:30Dustin Furman:yeah they had like they were they were thin and then they had like the little slot like white thing you would slide in and you would slide it out and it would have the cartridge like stuck in

4:10:36Chris G.:it yeah it was just like a it's not a good not a good way to store them so i would just rip the fuck i'd rip those apart but like i don't know man i i like i still have the nes box um my parents uh for whatever reason saved it i don't even think they care about that kind of thing but they just thought like oh this is kind of neat um i think i still have a 360 box somewhere but outside of that really like i don't know i don't necessarily get like i'm not i have my ps5 pro box here just in case but like i the second i need that space i'm throwing that

4:11:14Dustin Furman:thing out like i don't it's funny dude because i i think with the p i think i kept the ps5 box but i think i might have thrown the pro box out because it comes in that like sleeve that's like

4:11:26Chris G.:It sucks. It's like this doesn't. You're right.

4:11:28Dustin Furman:Like the NES and the SDS box were meaty, thick, high quality cardboard with like beautiful graphics. Like now this box is just like some sort of covering. So it's a little less. But I guess the whole point I'm saying is like saving anything and then just like letting it go for like potentially hundreds of years and then having it in the future is cool. Like anything. No, for sure. Yeah.

4:11:48Chris G.:Yeah. There's there's definitely like I wish I there's certain things that I wish I get. Like I wish I kept the box that like my Motorola Droid came in. Just for no reason other than it's just a weird bit of tech. My PSP, I wish I still had the box for. My 360, if I don't have it. I hope I do, because like I remember that box being like a really nice box, like it opened really nicely. Even the Series X box was like a really nice like the packaging and it was like the way that it was presented was like this is a nice. So it's a way nicer box than I remember. that was one of the things that i noticed like back to back because like the series x and ps5 came out so soon uh so close to each other was that like the ps5 box sucked in comparison like just like it was but um i don't even know if i kept the series x i'm pretty sure i didn't so like i don't know i'm not that sentimental about them like if it's something that i know that i loved like i like is tied intrinsically to my childhood like my nes and like my 360 i would want to have it but like i think i still have my the original xbox box somewhere also yeah i have that yeah i have that although i got the 2003 edition so it's not the original one to be fair yeah but i don't have like the three i don't have my nintendo ds or my psp or like my my ps3 or my ps4 pro i certainly don't fucking have um i don't know it's a case-by-case kind of thing for me um yeah i'm like i am thinking i'm trying to think back on i'm sorry no i was

4:13:20Dustin Furman:i was just saying they take up a lot of space i was trying to think back i remember it must have been when the ps5 came out maybe we were even talking about it is that or maybe it was the pro it was more recently was i do like the idea of electronics having like you know nice electronics having an experience of opening it of yeah apple does a really good job of this and it matters and i think sony has started to cut corners with that over the last generation or two and i don't really know why if your margins are so bad that you can't have high quality cardboard like one of your designers like your industrial designer should be like what is the experience like we should be obsessing over one thing which is like what is the experience like when you pick the pull the box open how does it present it to you think about like when you open an apple phone and it says like right in the middle like design in california and all this and yeah there are things they want you to see and they've tested it and it's clearly a high quality thing and it's not cheap but it can't be that expensive and if your margins are so thin you need to go back to the fucking drawing board on your console because you're you're putting this expensive thing inside this shitty box and it doesn't it matters yeah in my opinion it matters

4:14:30Chris G.:i remember i i mean i remember the unboxing experience for a lot of pretty much everything everything that i'd been excited to unbox and i i know the ones that stick out the series x stuck out to me because i remember it was like suspended like the the console was like suspended in the middle of the box like it wasn't touching any of the edges and i remember it was just like a really nice clean really good shit um the ps5 was just like you know it almost felt like it was like free floating in there yeah it's just like it's just strange i

4:14:59Dustin Furman:don't know why you would like put this thing in the like literally the shittiest possible box that you would buy on like uline it's like what are we doing here you're sony it felt like the box was refurbished it probably was it was probably all post-consumer which is fine yeah probably all right late night milker has the final inquiry great it says hello my fellow late night milkers not sure if you boys have been on social media after valve's new hardware announcements but once again people are thinking that with this new hardware valve surely will announce a new game for the hardware, more specifically Half-Life 3.

4:15:33Dustin Furman:As an avid fan myself, my gut doesn't say they'd be announcing that, but who knows? Gay might need another yacht now. What say you three, and if this game ever did come out, would all three of you play it? Anyway, I'll hang up and listen as I play Half-Life 2 the way it was meant to be played on the PS3. Be the orange box. You have to play it on PS3 with Vita remote play. That was the way it was really meant to be played. I'm not a Half-Life person, so I don't know. I've messed around with it, but I've not beaten Half-Life. Half-Life 1 and then Half-Life 2 episode 1 Half-Life 2 episode 2 right those are the three games plus Portal and Team Fortress I know comes from that and all the rest but these rumors have been going around they're not necessarily new rumors but these rumors seem extra interesting because I don't know Dustin if you saw but I guess there were some claims that like there was heavy security like when people went to Valve to look at the Steam machine under NDA there was apparently like major security in parts of the building indicating that there were things that they didn't want anyone to see I don't know if that's just them having security because they have a bunch of randos in their fucking building generally and there's just not, Valve is not very big, there's only a few hundred people working there so it's not like the biggest office you've ever seen, it's not like going to Facebook or something so I guess that leads some credence to it part of me feels like why would they ever do it because there's just no need to make games like why would you even bother the on the other hand why wouldn't you and why wouldn't you have done it already so i don't really know how to feel about this the one thing i'll say though dustin is a lot of the conversation around the steam machine has indicated that my feeling about this thing not really competing with consoles per se is true because the price is supposed to be maybe pretty high i think they actually said they're competing with pcs not consoles

4:17:24Colin Moriarty:um so what are your thoughts on all this i believe i think half-life three well we keep saying half-life three i'm wondering if it's just going to be half-life blank like some kind of subtitle some people throwing around half-life x so i'm not too sure about that but enough with the x already jesus yeah i don't know but to me there's enough rumor i mean there's been rumors for a while. I think that YouTube channel Valve News Network has been on the case for this for a while, but now more people are starting to chime in that seems like some kind of announcement is happening this year. And I'm pumped.

4:18:06Colin Moriarty:Yeah, maybe the Game Awards. Yeah, could be some. The big rumor is that it's going to be before the Game Awards. So everyone's kind of like wondering, like sitting around like, OK, well, when and apparently Valve is acting unusual with their when their sales are they've like changed things around so i believe and i'm excited because i played through all of the half-life games probably two or three years ago now for the first time uh so half-life one half-life two half-life two episode one episode two and portal even because it's kind of in that world yeah and i loved it i thought it was great and i would love to see more And it's just going to be such a big moment in gaming where it's like, it's actually finally happening where we're going to get a new half-life game.

4:18:52Colin Moriarty:And we got Alex and I never finished Alex, which I feel I've been thinking about a lot recently that I would like to go and play it might buy the PSVR to PC adapter for that. So we'll see. But to my understanding, half-life Alex opens the door. Not that the door wasn't already there with the end of episode two, but it it feels real to me i think it's happening what do you think chris

4:19:21Chris G.:if it was ever to happen it would be now i think um just because it seems like valve seems like the company that like they usually only work on something big if it happens to correlate with technology that they're trying to figure out and so like if if this thing is like you know if this if they're working on this steam machine then like it's it stands to reason that they would have something i would hope that they would have the confidence to just call it half-life 3 i am kind of sick of this like subtitled bullshit it's like half-life uh uh resurrection or some shit like i'm just like i'm i'm over it call it valve of any company valve of any company like does it need to follow like whatever just general marketing strategy

4:20:15Dustin Furman:half-life re-life dirt oh my god re-life dirt is crazy what was it what was it red red faction remastered remastered yeah god but um no i mean i look i don't know if i buy it but if there was

4:20:30Chris G.:ever a time that i could see it happening it would be now it would be with this new machine yeah I could see it like more now than ever I gotta get around to finishing Alex too like it's VR for me man I just get headaches I really loved what I was playing of it I just like I could not I cannot get through it but Half-Life 1 in particular is like I love Half-Life 1 like I think Half-Life 1 is exceptional and so I'd be totally if this game came out I'd be all over it

4:21:05Colin Moriarty:alex kind of scared me hmm what do you mean it's kind of it's it's kind of scary at parts i mean the the aliens and stuff oh yeah of it and it's in vr like it would be a not scary game at all on a flat screen but when you're in vr some of it kind of freaked me out yeah everything

4:21:22Chris G.:everything is scarier in vr for something like because you're just because you're just in it yeah um yeah i don't know it'll be exciting either way like i i hope i hope it's real i'm gonna i'm gonna say that do you think i hope it does happen do you think it'll ever come to console

4:21:42Dustin Furman:ah i don't see why yeah i mean i don't know why the big thing to me is like because some people are like saying like oh you have something to kind of launch with the console but i'm like but it's just not the way they usually do business i'm i'm i'm not skeptical even because it seems like a lot of people are talking about it but it's just like i've been in this industry since 2002 and half-life 2 came out what 2007 something like that 2006 four oh earlier than 2004 episode

4:22:11Chris G.:episode two i think was or episode like the last episode i think was 2007 yeah okay so

4:22:16Dustin Furman:i could be wrong it's like i've been hearing about this for most of my career at this point. So it's like it kind of just goes in one ear out the other until that it's like I was saying about UAP recently where I'm like, I don't care anymore. Just show me the fucking aliens or just leave me alone. You know, it's a similar thing here. It's like, I don't care anymore about more your stories. I want to see the fucking I want to see the spacecraft. Otherwise shut it. So it was a little aggressive there actually probably didn't need to be so aggressive. Anyway, Half-Life 3. We'll see as far as this new steam machine, though.

4:22:45Dustin Furman:Yeah. Do you see the pricing rumors? Dustin?

4:22:47Chris G.:Yeah. Over 700.

4:22:48Colin Moriarty:They're not really new rumors i think it's people dissecting a comment in linus tech tips video where he mentioned the pricing and valve engineers didn't say anything so i don't know i think if it is over 600 then who's it for i think 600 maximum for the base unit is what i would expect what i would hope not expect what i would hope for so we'll see okay well it's time to go it's been long enough sick of doing the show it's time to go on the greener pastures let's say goodbye to everyone

4:23:29Dustin Furman:and uh and then get out of here i'm sorry chris goodbye to you be well any plans that you want

4:23:35Chris G.:to share anything going on uh nothing really i'm gonna record snark tank in about 20 minutes wow you have a lot of stamina hey man it it helps that they're completely different vibes yeah sure sure you know if i was doing the same if i was doing this and then like i don't know defining duke and then summon sign or something that would be like that would be one thing but there's enough it it varies but i i think i have some time to get a little bit of food in me but that's really the only place we're recording to today so two so it's a it's a long day oh man today's like a today's packed well godspeed to you and be well dustin goodbye to you what are you gonna eat you

4:24:22Colin Moriarty:gonna go get a little caesar's pizza no i honestly don't know well right now i realized well i knew this i just didn't think about it until now that uh i gotta get duke out you know sorted out xbox if you're gonna have an event that delays duke to make my life annoying at least announce something cool at it which from what i could tell nothing no so duke got delayed i gotta do duke right after this get that out as soon as possible then i got it sacred long night ahead of me no i mean not long long but there's lots to do still so i'll be doing that i don't know if i'm gonna go out and get chippers we just went grocery shopping it feels bad to go out yeah just went grocery shopping yeah feels wrong yeah but it doesn't mean i'm above it no you're not you're not above it still might do it we'll see oh and penguins game saturday oh yeah oh very exciting cool first hockey game that's gonna be exciting i'll be interested to see what you think that'll complete i've been to obviously i've been to many baseball games one nfl game this will be my first hockey game so you've been a pirate games what's that you went to pirates games yes pirates games and then the steelers you've been to a steelers game one steelers game cool yeah and you have no

4:25:32Dustin Furman:basketball team so that's that's the trifecta of that's the trifecta of pittsburgh sports very

4:25:36Colin Moriarty:would it's berg sports all i know is you got to hit the puck in the net that's right that's right

4:25:42Dustin Furman:i think i can follow i think you might like hockey live hockey is fucking awesome dude i think you'll like it sounds like fun we'll see we'll see what you think next week all right my friends thank you for your time today good to see you thank you all out there for your love kindness and support of all things sacred symbols and last day media we couldn't do without you patreon.com slash last day media for early ad free access and last day media.store for merch see you next time until then Goodbye. See ya. Take care, guys.

4:26:32Dustin Furman:As you know, all of Last Stand's shows, including Sacred Symbols, are fan-funded on Patreon at patreon.com slash laststandmedia. The following names are at the producer level on Patreon, our highest tier, and we're grateful for your thoughtful and kind contributions to our independent endeavor. Thank you.

4:27:02Dustin Furman: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. Tom, Cannonball Jones, Jorge Pal, Anthony Vasquez, GhostStorm672, Simon Conception Jr., Peter Dreher, Alex Cabrera, Chris Ritchie, Shane Miller, Tony Zuniga, Jean-Francois Forze, Ryan T. Mandel, Alan Tremblay, Anton K., Spencer F., Robert Byers, Jamie Fraley, John Schultz, Betty Ann Moriarty, Geek Aloud, Jonathan Cortez, Qualia Freak, I'm the Silent Minority, Dennis Usel, Christopher Moore, Stove, Gary Cavallo, Joe McPartland, Nathan R., Jerome Ferreira, Gavin, Martin Beck, Turbo Makes Games, Joosh, David Castanez, Miranda Grubba, Michael Vecchio, Sunny Sides Up, Carlos Algaret, Organic Produce, Joseph Lopez, Josh Gravelick, Sean Mason, Jonathan Coates, Roto24, Johnny Waffles, Mark Liberto, Aaron Betke, Chris Morton, Christopher Devayo, Azan, Cody Benin, Conrad Pennyfarthing, Stewie108, Toby Ryland, Daryl E.

4:28:15Dustin Furman:Naiman, Colin Love, Morgan Ashley, Kyle Hagel, Saqib Alam, Robert Schultz, Ali Fritz, Mason Bouchard, Chris Galvin, Dave Alvarez, Jimmy Rodriguez, Kendrick Caius, Joseph Baker, Matt Flowers, Who is Steven Day, I Come on My Toys Just In Case Toy Story is Real, Nick Amato, Saul Balcazar, Ross Marenka, Wesley S., Alex Lapeer, Dan Nolan, Mr. Malf, Boots, John Zyle, Ticos, Remington James,

4:28:54Dustin Furman:Thank you.

4:29:15Dustin Furman:Payton Stone, Zach Cohen, Double Duty Dirk, Terry Tip, Jad Rita, Dustin Klingman, Matt 20, Alan Tiniak, Relentless Rex, Corey Beacom, Whiskey Sin, Electric Soup, Grayson Maxwell, Frail Cabbage St. Matthews of the Diocese of Brig, Jason Arzon, Eddie Medina, Umcart, My Name is Mayo, Donald John Vaders, Josh Sullinger, Albion, Ellis, Nate Izod, Lizard King, Sweaty Magic, Aaron Temple, Michael Mash Potato, Shane Brekke, Will Williams, Dustin Spruill, Collins Mindhole, Adam Refriended, Rallo, Vance Cody, Jorge Padua, Brian Williamson, Zachary Wood, Brandon Runger, Kyle Jay, Emmanuel Perez, Brano Bezzera Bloom, Logan Little George, Wesley Mullins, WTF, Uncharted Shinobi, Denny Woodnever, Eddie Smith, Hugo Delegia, Blackjack, Anthony Arcure, MattMGS24, Keith Richards, ZenRed, Jiraiya, Orchard, Sweet Jones, J.P.

4:30:19Dustin Furman:Lynch, Isaac Claiborne, Brad Lohman, Saltab, Ray Ligia, Zman8601, and Adam Balm.