#388 | Broken Records Wanna Make A Case

1:02:20All right, top channels, NFL and NBC. The rest is history is two. The Rich Eisen show is three. Dr. John Deloney, which is hysterical, is four and Sports Illustrated is five. Do you know who Dr. John Deloney is? He's like, he's like the psychologist in the Dave Ramsey circle. Like, oh, he's like the, he's like the Dave Ramsey of psychology and people just call him and like, it's just everyone telling him about his problems. It's quite listenable. there's a there's a screen where it says your top songs and uh it's very funny because it's all ridge racer type four oh nice because that's the shit that i have in the background of streams so it's just not i don't even know what half the shit is yeah my top song because i don't i don't listen to music on youtube but now i mean i've hit the point in my life where after i've had a couple beers i put on the live music oh yeah i do the same thing i do this is a meme going on right now that's like oh you're past 30 you're putting on the live music or whatever so my number one song is i want to make sure i get the right version right eric clapton layla live at the royal albert hall 1991 wow great song god that's a great song that version of it is amazing too oh yeah i love both of them the the the acoustic there the softer one and then yeah the proper one i love that video in particular because it first of all he's got a lit sig at the on the end of his strap right on the neck he's just got a lit sig and it's burning for the aura of it and i'm like that's sick and it's also i mean i love it because you got it's just like people in the 91 they're not worrying about anything you got white boys busting a move to eric clapton in it i'm like man this is white boys you know all all races really i was like this is a time of racial peace in america i mean not quite let the eric clapton show that was racial peace i don't know much about eric clapton other than he wrote layla and then i think his son fell out of a building or something the uh do you guys know what you it's a weird story yeah it is like it is a crazy top two stories to know about someone i guess the do you guys did your spotify one right yeah i did yeah do you guys remember what your there's they did this one where it was like um your your listening age oh yeah mine was 42 and i'm 41 oh all right that makes mine was 39 interesting a little older wasn't your birthday was it yesterday it's today it's right now it's happening right now happy birthday i didn't that's fine i'm 32 now wow she's getting up there how do you feel good that's i feel i feel good i feel better than i thought i would when i was like as a 20 year old what i thought 32 would feel like would is not what this is but i definitely don't feel fantastic you know i wake up and like oh man there's bad acid reflux is real huh uh yeah yeah i'm at that point where i've got to start like i'm at that point where like now i'm realizing like okay after a certain time at night i've got to cut certain things out yeah i gotta start i gotta stop maybe drinking coffee at like 10 p.m., which is probably not smart anyway.

1:05:51But I like in late night coffee. I don't know. Do you guys ever do like the espresso after like a meal or something like, I don't know. Yeah, I do that at a restaurant sometime. Sometimes. Yeah, it is nice. I like it a lot. So. But it kills me in the morning. Well, happy birthday. I totally. Yeah. When I looked at the counter, I was like, I thought it was December 3rd for some reason in my mind, but it's December 4th. OK. Yeah. My brother's. So that's that's pretty easy to remember. like in that's how i i remember of like your birthday is like a few days before yeah my birthday's always felt weird though because it's like it's immediately after thanksgiving and it's in like the prelude to christmas so like it was always kind of like this it was far enough away from christmas where like people didn't feel like they could justifiably combine them you know like or it's just like oh it's basically november it's kind of we can't just like wait till christmas but it was still kind of i don't know you go outside and there's christmas music everywhere so like your birthday feels kind of like absorbed into this like mega holiday yeah i totally get that mariah carrey's there you know just haunting you so like that's what yeah i've ever been the biggest fan of my birthday not for any like sad reason but it's just like i feel like i would have liked my birthday a lot more in the summer i'm jealous of people with summer birthdays because i remember i remember even when i was a kid like when they had like a birthday party like everybody could show up right right right because it was like no one had anything to do but like my birthday was always like i got finals and like everybody's like stressed out so it's like ah it's fine but yeah yeah some digging has digging December 6th like I was saying and I always would wonder and ask him like do you feel like you're kind of getting hosed because you know your parents are buying you your presents and stuff but then it's like do you think that that kind of goodwill is bleeding into your Christmas hall and like it's just better to be kind of far away from it yeah so I have an October birthday as you guys know and it's like that it's fine I don't like my birthday either and it's I I don't mind if people don't acknowledge it or like that's like i don't men are different with their birthdays it's it's it's weird to encounter a man where it's like it's my birthday it's like get the fuck away from me you know like yeah i don't care i i really ultimately just want to like ideal an ideal birthday is like i sleep the entire day or i do or i eat like a an entire pizza and that's it like i don't need like all the thing that me and my friend because i have a lot of friends with birthdays around the same time like i have one on december 7th a friend who's on the ninth so what we usually do is like we have like a compromise where it's like we have like a kind of like a combined kind of get together where neither no individual one of us is like the focus so it's more like kind of like a just a hangout and that's nice i like that but like i hate being i don't know the whole premise of a birthday party is like weird like i like other people's parties yeah right i like people looking at me like expecting me to like you know be the focus it's uh it's not my not my jam really i uh i've said before that i i went out of my way on my 30th birthday to be weird and like have a like and went to kentucky with a bunch of my friends and like did like rented a house and because i was like i should and my thought at the time was like i should do this every 10 years but even when i turned 40 like something weird like where i'm like really being intentional and social and then i'm like and i'm like yeah i don't think so that was like a birthday yeah i think a big birthday is fine like 50 50 or something like that like that's a good one yeah i remember my dad's my dad my dad's 60th was like a big thing so like i think yeah i mean every now and again it's fine but like yeah yeah i'm 32 like whatever yeah that's a very i yeah i turned 41 it's like oh it gives a shit yeah we're cooked oh my god dude you still have so much life in front of you compared like i'm i'm dying over here like that's what people say to like that's what people say to people who are in their like 70s right but i'm like you have so much life ahead of you speaking of this don't worry about it wrote in and said hey guys i didn't even mean this segue we haven't had any jokes about colin dying lately so i just ask is the depression getting better or just moving on a new material um i don't know that i have much more material other than just being chronically depressed but um no i feel i feel good i'm i've wound down as i've gone into this is like i've wound down all the meds I was taking substantially.

1:10:08I'm off of two of three of them. The lowest dose. Are you more or less depressed as a result of that? If I feel the same to be like, I feel I just like I, I think I really needed it at the time. And I think I really was like in a deep depression at that time for many reasons. But I'm always, I always, I always say this, I have like a very pessimistic, dour New York disposition. Like that's just who I kind of am. But, but I've said, I've also said this before too and i remember even saying this to a therapist you know like when i'm in a bad way i go see a therapist i think this was in college when i specifically had this conversation and they were like so like are you suicidal and it's like no like i'm i'm like i've never actually been in that space before i'm just really dark like i don't want to dispatch myself i just think i think the macabre and like the weird shit is funny you know and it's how i cope with things i do love that you said in a bad way because that that phrase was like my friend jalen he used to work for the post office and we had this we had this joke i don't know if it was a joke so much as we just thought we all just thought it was funny and we just kind of kept saying it where he would come home from like a bad day or something and i'd be like how you doing man and he goes like i'm in a bad way today man it was that phrase i never heard it outside of us using it that was you saying it was the first time I've heard interesting another person say I'm in a bad way interesting yeah it's a good yeah it's maybe a New York ism I don't know or something maybe I have no idea I have no I don't know but so good stuff so yeah that's so yeah the the you know I'm I'm still the same old Colin just uh you know I do think that I'm becoming I think age I get the I've said this before but the idea of wisdom like I'm starting to get it like you just withstand things and understand things better the older you get and just react differently and i think that brings a little bit of peace like you understand why you see like the older people that just walk around don't give a fuck because i think at some point you realize like who gives a shit about any of this really none of it's mattered and now i'm x i'm 60 or whatever and it's like okay i'm good i don't care about your approval i don't care what you think about the way i look i don't care about what you think about my clothes or my car or like what it's like yeah i get it all right um finally i did this is a psa in my opinion tyler kidder wrote in said colin how can i convince my in-laws that we don't need to do presents for christmas every year we are all grown-ass adults wasting money on gifts the other doesn't want i hate when people say it's the thought that counts that just means it's a bad gift why can't we buy gifts for kids and grandkids and ignore the obligatory idea of buying gifts just for the sake of it will i be shunned by my in-laws should i keep my mouth shut and just accept my t-shirt that would be too small for Mr.

1:12:56Raygun. How can this be? The adult gift giving has to stop.

1:13:04It's enough. You have a spouse that's different. You have kids. Obviously it's different. You're in a white elephant slash Chinese auction. different right but like the idea that i have to i have to like buy my aunt and uncle and my cousin's presents i have to buy all these different like it's like come on man enough enough already i don't know too too much consumerism too much stuff so i'm totally with you on this it's got to be a holiday geared towards children and I like the gift exchange thing I think that's cool like everyone buys something cool you do have a little game we in my family we even stopped doing that and now we just do ugly ornaments and we do like an ugly ornament exchange just like something different it's like because like I was actually a big impetus to that and I think some people in my family are more like the adult gift givers like where they like it and I'm like it's enough dude like this chronic need to shop and give and you know this need to give

1:14:15such a fucking Michael Caine and the Muppets Christmas Carol that's the craziest thing I've ever said probably this sickening need to give bah humbug you know I mean I get it like I'm not much of a like I don't know I don't like getting gifts I always feel like it's I feel like I'm in like a debt like if i get something for free like i understand that it's a gift but like i i never feel like it's i always feel like i owe i owe something now and i i just don't like that feeling even if it is just a feeling like i don't like it so i've made i've made clear for years where i'm just like look i'm not gonna get anybody i'm not gonna get if if unless i know for sure like i've come across something like very hyper specific we're like oh so and so was talking about this i'm here this is like a weird thing that like i don't think anybody would expect i'll i'll get it but that happens like once every like maybe four or five christmases i come across something like that where i think like this would be a good gift actually but like most gifts aren't good gifts you know they're just kind of like they're just um i get it's the thought or whatever but like honestly now i just appreciate like oh clothes like socks underwear the shit that i the shit i wouldn't the shit that i wouldn't go out and buy for myself because or like that i would but like it's just kind of tedious and it's just like ah do i really want to go do this i appreciate socks a lot now now that i'm older because it's just like uh gotta go to gotta go to ross yeah exactly no it's exactly right i'm the same way i love getting socks and um i just had to throw out like i keep my boxers for so long that like they just rip at some point it's like all right time to go like how long have i like what century did i get these fucking boxers i have one pair like that it's a tatters and i'm like i don't need this i have like i have like so many so many other pairs but like for some reason i'm just like yeah maybe this is an emergency pair or something i don't know i'll be packing i'll be on vacation and this will be like an this will be like a dire situation pair you know but yeah enough with it's too much enough with it yeah for my family's like on my dad's side it's kids only which is nice yeah uh for my mom's side we do white elephant and it's strictly like stupid stuff uh like one year polly's white elephant was like she got jurassic park on vhs this was all thrift store stuff and we got a framed photo and we put jeff goldblum with the you know with his chest out in jurassic park and it was like stupid it's fun um holly's mom and her side of the family holly's mom that's she her love language is giving gifts so on christmas you may get 20 gifts from her each person and it'll be like oh here's a book or like some game book that i saw at goodwill here's a little figure that i found for a dollar so it's about the thought more than anything and it's you know i'm willing that's fine right right my mom's she really enjoys that um it's funny because holly and i usually give them each like one nice gift uh and i always wonder i'm like i wonder if she would rather have 30 small gifts right but we're just gonna i don't know everyone has to do it in their own way i i'm in a big thing a big thing for me right now is like i put my my my thoughts and my intention out there and like and people i i feel like like i'm one of the youngest in my family so i just feel like people i make fun of my family about this all the time like you don't give a fuck what i say like like i could like say anything like no one gives a shit you know about like like and it's it's so it's so funny and so annoying to me but i'm like this this gift gift thing is one of those things where i'm like i'm just not doing it even if someone like gives me a gift it's like i appreciate it that's very nice thank you give them a kiss or whatever and a hug but it's like i'm not getting baited into this i've like said for many years now like let's not do this i don't want to do this this isn't but i let my mom get away with it because i do to your point i think she likes you know likes to do it so it's like all right you know you want that's if you insist but i think my siblings are all on board with me where they're like this is because they have their own kids and shit and i get all their kids presents but the second they turn 18 you're out you're done that's what happened to me because i was of my cousins on my dad's side i am the oldest by 12 years so all my younger cousins you know i got cut off when i was 18 and some of them now they're at that point you're done it's like a truck too because it's like the there's no transition yeah i mean it's not like 17 it's like a little bit worse or something like it's usually just like it's pretty fucking night and day from one year to the next you're like what the fuck what happened and you're like okay that's fine i am yeah two two of my six nieces and nephews are out now because they're both in college the the three nephews that i have that are brothers i've bought them all their video game consoles and two of them are still in high school so i think i'm gonna buy them a switch too just as the final finale of that that began with you know i bought them their ps3 their ps4 their ps5 and their switch so the switch two will be like the finale like the top because then i think the next one goes off to college in a year and then it's kind of almost over at that point and then i'm i'm liberated but i'm giving the kids money and shit it's like the other it's like on the other side it's like i like i saw my my oldest nephew for for lunch you know lunch like a month ago and i just gave him a hundred dollar bill because i that's like the shit my uncles used to do you know to me and i want to like keep that kind of stuff going so it's like it's actually costing me more on the fucking adult end yeah Yeah.

1:20:05Yeah. I should say I still do. Me and my parents do gifts, but I feel like it's more reasonable because there's there's no one else. There's no other. I don't have any brothers or sisters. Right. Right. That's a that's a very intimate thing. Yeah. So we we get my parents get Holly and I gifts and we get them gifts. And man, I'm so excited for the gifts I got my parents this year. They're super cool. One of them coming up soon. That's a core family thing. that's different in my opinion i'm talking i in my mind when i talk about this i'm talking about like your extended family when you like go to christmas dinner and everyone's giving each other it's like come on man yeah there's like 25 of us but even but even then it's like i don't know my parents are like impossible to shop for like i don't i've tried i've been like what do you what do you like and they're like ah whatever they give me nothing they give me like they i think because they're like me and they don't want gifts either probably so like i think everybody's just kind of avoidant but like it's like all right i'll try i don't really know what to get at any of you um but my i must say micah is an s tier gift giver like just really elite at it and uh i really appreciate that um it's because it is cool like christmas is fun because it's like oh what kind of random things did you like figure out that i would actually want you know and uh So I have to give her credit for that.

1:21:30She's good at it. And I don't. Yeah, I am. I saw I got her a really interesting gift. Like I have. I got her a few things. But and like I said, a big thing she already picked out herself, which is. I don't know where it is. The jewelry. Yeah, the jewelry. I was like, where the fuck is really? And she picked that out herself. But I did a few other things that I'll say. I'll say what it is after because I don't want anyone to spoil it for after the holidays. But it's like a very funny, weird thing that I got for. I think she'll enjoy. this just reminded me that i have a white elephant coming up and i gotta figure something out yeah white elephants interesting yeah very interesting all right my friends let's get into the news my mouth is so dry today i don't know why that is i'm parched go on take that drink boy take a sip take a little sip there take a little sip there you like that water don't you you're gonna get the juices flowing yeah all right those juices I want to talk about juices this piece of news just broke this morning and it's gonna be the top story I guess we'll talk about although we don't have much to say about it we can of course enter our own conjecture PlayStation has announced via press release that they have entered into a second party agreement with Bad Robot Games Bad Robot of course is the J.J.

1:22:50Abrams founded and led out production outfit i wasn't their first thing alias but lost of course is the is like the big thing that they're known for right and uh they have a games division like a nascent games division i was looking at some of the stuff when i was researching this i forgot they did that show revolution which i actually really liked that was canceled it was like a post-apocalyptic like electricity kind of goes away show oh yeah yeah and it got like canceled after a couple years But so this is them doing a second party game with Sony. And here's what the press really says. It's not very long.

1:23:26It says, quote, Sony Interactive Entertainment today announced a partnership with video game studio Bad Robot Games, a division of Bad Robot, the film, television and theater production company founded by J.J. Abrams for SIE to produce and publish the studio's upcoming project, an unannounced four player cooperative shooter directed by Mike Booth of Left 4 Dead fame. The game is currently in development for PlayStation 5 and PC. more details on the game will be shared at a later date and a sweet ceo of bad robot game says quote partnering with sony interactive entertainment allows us to bring our new ip to life with an expansive vision for this new universe with the support of playstation we hope to deliver a bold innovative experience that is truly special for players i cannot be more excited that mike booth is at the creative helm crafting a cooperative adventure that will lead to unforgettable moments with friends end quote and then christian svenson vp and head of second and third party content ventures and strategic initiatives that sony says quote we're greatly impressed with the talent bad robot games has assembled at their studio and are thrilled to partner with them to help produce and publish their upcoming game their unique creative voice and passion for innovative for innovating across all forms of interactive entertainment perfectly aligns with si's mission to craft experiences that resonate deeply with players we can't wait for the gamers to step into the world they've been building end quote so pretty generic shit dustin thoughts i think the most interesting thing about this is that it's a cooperative shooter directed by mike booth and it's funny because there seems to there's been many attempts to recreate or capture the feeling of left for dead one and two there was uh evolve which was the asymmetric multiplayer game what was the the reason uh back for blood back for blood back for blood i think is the most notorious of these where they were so close yeah thoroughly just they fucked it up that that was such a thoroughly disappointing game specifically because of how close you you could feel like it was so close and you're just like no man nah it's wrong yeah you gotta it's weird but you gotta kind of keep it simple i feel like these uh back for blood in particular really uh just made things too complicated with like a card system and because like chris i think that was that was really early on but i think we streamed that game together we did yeah yeah and we were like ah damn it i almost liked it that was kind of the thing is like i could feel myself like almost liking it was like the cards kind of fucked it up they got too it was too battlefield oriented like they had all these attachments and it's like you want a silencer for your fucking assault rifle it's like i'm killing zombies dude yeah like i don't what do we yeah i don't know they've it now it should be noted like evolve that was turtle rock but apparently like mike booth was not there at that point like he left in i think 2012 if i remember correctly and evolve was i think 2015 yeah it was 2015 i want to say i think that's exactly right evolve i'm just gonna check make sure but like Like, yeah.

1:26:35So, I mean, dude, if it's like if it's a proper. If it's the guy who directed Left 4 Dead and he wasn't really in there's no there's no crossover at all with Back 4 Blood or Evolve like that's you have my attention. Yeah, you definitely have my attention. I think I mean, it's a perfect time for something like cooperative games. I feel like like four player co-op games are so big right now. I mean, of course, we know about friend slop games being big. And most recently for Sony Helldivers, I think Helldivers, while it's not, I mean, it's kind of like Left 4 Dead in some ways where there's hordes of enemies.

1:27:13And they were smart to keep that game pretty simple, where it's like you get you pick your weapon, you pick some of your equipment. And then, of course, the stratagems and stuff. But it wasn't like super stat heavy. Yeah. So it's exciting. I'm curious I mean a straight spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead would be cool but I'm down for something else along those lines as long as as long as it's good I guess I mean it sounds stupid but yeah nothing too complicated and clear Sony now has a lot of good experience with what makes a four-player cooperative shooter successful even if it is with the second party with Arrowhead of course but i think it sounds pretty promising bad i was looking bad robot they've not published any games yet i don't think um no well i on their youtube or i'm sorry on their wikipedia page it leads to like different games where i like so it says like weird west is one of them but then i like look at weird west and it's like they're not the publisher wolf is obviously the developer so i don't really know if like there's different investments mike booth did direct I think Silent Hill Ascension though which was that random Silent Hill spinoff oh weird the live yeah like I like I think he I think he had something to do with that let's look into this oh yeah this was the weird live one oh well I'm trying to see what his credit is chief creative officer sir but we all make mistakes you know and that was so i guess bad robot crossover i'm sorry chris what did you say no i was saying there's not really much crossover in those genres to be fair but yeah what were you gonna say well i was just gonna say that he joined bad robot in 2020 so like bad robot had something to do with that game so i don't know if that's a great sign creatively but whatever i mean they're getting their feet wet and seeing what happens i i believe um well jdog mcsizzle to the point you were making especially dustin wrote in and said hi guys it seems sony is partnering with jj abrams company bad robot games to come out with a four-player co-op shooter feels like for the first time in a long time sony is actually learning by experience here giving given hell divers wild success it's exciting to see thanks for all the awesome work you do all my best to you and yours this christmas season thank you so mike booth it's interesting because i'm not a left for dead guy i think left for dead one is a really cool game it's a game that i played a little bit but um and left for dead too obviously people loved as well but maybe even more and it did seem it's a product of its time and very much reminds me of xbox 360 like it's interesting like left for dead never came to playstation yeah i don't know if a lot of people even like especially if you were playing on xbox 360 you might have just made assumptions it was over there but like that was just never there i um i remember distinctly in high school I have a very distinct memory of walking, of like standing in the hallway waiting for like, it was like five minutes before classes were going to start for the day.

1:30:22And we were all talking about Left 4 Dead because we had downloaded it or played it the previous night. And a friend of ours, Mike, who had a PlayStation, we were like, dude, you got to play Left 4 Dead. And he was like, it's not on PlayStation. I was like, what? Like, it didn't make sense to me. It's like, why? why not it that was a big one like that was a huge game like especially around that time like that was like the talk of the town for like a hot a hot minute in 2008 remember my um i lived with just this random dude that was james that was like super into left for dead he wasn't even in the industry or anything he was just like he was like an artist or something at some some company i always thought that was interesting but um mike booth is the director of left for dead but he was the founder of one of the founders of turtle rock so it's a kind of an interesting situation i always think that like valve owned turtle rock for a minute i think and so he probably made a little bit of money but it's it's too bad even i mean he would have had to hang on for like another decade obviously he had like a whole different career after that but tencent ultimately bought turtle rock and he probably would have made a lot of money a lot you know um which he obviously wasn't gonna get this time around but he ended up a blizzard i think before going to bad robot and uh it it shows i agree with everyone like they're they're acutely aware of what makes helldivers popular which i think is the cooperative nature of it people playing with their friends kind of the shared pve experience and i don't know i think that i appreciate sony's aggression and going after some of these old school talent or some of this old school talent that worked on seminal multiplayer games that worked at one time and could work again i mean that's what the jason blundell stuff is so interesting and they've been in bed with him for years now trying to get something out the door and now they're in bed with this guy that from the left for dead you know the director and the designer of left for dead it's a pretty aggressive move and yeah i'll just reiterate they know what people think a lot of people think i'm crazy when i say but sony knows damn well what i you know they don't need me to tell them but it's true it's like they have to find massive success in the multiplayer space if they want to thrive over the next couple of decades it's simply there's no other option like yeah they they have to continue to invest very very heavily in it and make better decisions that that's the the shitty thing we've said before is again directionally they were right they just made awful decisions but now they need to it doesn't it shouldn't stop them from making decisions they need to make better decisions put better decision makers in place to shepherd these games and i thought it was interesting in the um i don't want to read too much into anything

1:33:10but anna sweet ceo bad robot games and she's apparently been there since like 2020 or maybe even before that like around the time bad robot games was founded because it says that like sweet just on wikipedia i was reading earlier like he has long reported to this woman but um she says partnering with sony interactive entertainment allows us to bring our new ip to life with an expansive vision for this new universe like that's that could just be generic pr nonsense i mean it is in a way but are you there's a sin there's a synergy between bad robot and Sony far outside of games. And I think that everything Sony does in the AAA space now has an eye towards that connection.

1:33:59And so being able to come out with a game wherein you could help co-produce alongside a storied production house in Bad Robot, a television show or film or both or whatever that could accompany. In other words, the fulfillment of the Concord promise. right i don't think there's any accident about the verbiage there and i don't think there's any accident about sony wanting to be in bed with bad robot and i think that's a massive component of it could be wrong but i don't think so here's a hot theory apparently bad robot is working on a new cloverfield movie oh my god i don't know who owns cloverfield oh look cloverfield game fighting all them little monster guys it would work it could fit dude what if you fight all the tiny little guys and at the end of the level you fight like a giant kaiju yeah you know fight the little clover clover the clover fellas cloverlings cloverlings cloverlings is awesome i uh i don't that would be so disappointing i gotta say if like the clover the whole clover field thing is like annoying to me in general like because it's just like look that that movie was like okay fine cool and then they had like the 10 cloverfield lane which is a completely different movie that they like shoot jj abrams saw and he was like this is a good script but it needs it needs a cloverfield in it i don't know why every director is george lucas yeah George Lucas.

1:35:42A Cloverfield and this would really tie it together. All the Cloverfield trademarks are abandoned. And they were all owned by Paramount. We should scoop it up. Yeah. There seems to be no active trademarks in the US with Cloverfield. So I'm sure someone. I don't know. I don't know. It's very common. like there's a shit ton of cloverfield like cloverfield dairy cloverfield restaurant cloverfield the cloverfield cloverfield communications it's so a lot of it's a lot yeah yeah interesting stuff though so we'll see i mean we have nothing else to say i mean this is a game that by the way this is entering the hopper now of this what i was saying earlier about like all of these games it's like i don't know man it's cool to keep announcing them but you have to you have to deliver at some point on some of these promises.

1:36:38I look forward to seeing the teaser trailer in 2029. Right, exactly. Yeah. All right. This was the biggest news I thought of the week before that. It's not like something we have to linger on, and obviously I don't know how much of our audience will truly care about this, but it is a big deal. Sony has quietly released MLB the show on mobile. It seems by all accounts that I can find that Sony San Diego itself made this game. And you can go to the show mobile dot com right now and learn more. So here's what's happening with it. This was quietly released on December 3rd, and it's only available in the Philippines.

1:37:20They're obviously slowly rolling this stuff out. If you go to the website and there's a little FAQ that says, when will my region get access as we continue development? They say we aim to expand availability to more players around the world. There is no set timeline for expansion. This is the bummer, I think, is that it's a standalone title, which I guess is fine, but it doesn't connect at all to the show on console. And I think that that's a missed opportunity and hopefully something that they later integrate to be able to send your saves around or whatever. But they could be different kinds of games.

1:37:54It's for Android devices and Apple devices. Again, only in the Philippines right now. You can sign up to get updates. so if you put your email address into this little module on the site and then you select your specific region where you live and then sign up they'll let you know when there's pertinent information about launch and other details for your region whether it's the u.s or europe or whatever so um and it's worth noting again just to be to reiterate the website's branding has san diego studio as the developer so pretty interesting stuff now just a few weeks ago we reported on stuff about how it seemed like they were kind of sneaking around and trying to do a mobile product for MLB the show.

1:38:31And I got to say, guys, and I don't know if you agree with me or not. By the way, there's a trailer that Sony San Diego quietly published on their YouTube channel. It only has 3000 views right now, but you can see it. It looks pretty good, actually. And well, I was going to ask a stupid question. Yeah, good. We're like, is it normal for them to put out a trailer like this and have it be unlisted? I was about to say that because it's unlisted. Oh, yeah, it says it here. Yeah, I don't. I guess it's just connected through their website, perhaps maybe yeah just bizarre well i don't think i've ever it's yeah it's not on the website yeah i found this on gamatsu maybe they discovered it it's being linked somewhere some some trade some like uh uh press release has this link but and people are finding it but um i think it looks pretty cool and i i don't want to be too bullish on it but i think this be pretty big for them yeah do you guys have any thoughts well i was gonna say my favorite thing about this is that they chose to launch it in the philippines which indicates that they were looking for a place that was asian enough to like video games and want to experiment with them but also hispanic enough that they would care about baseball like it's like it comes across as very like like almost like transparently hilarious but i mean i think it's a smart idea i mean it makes a ton of sense that like now that now that we have phones that can do these types of things like it doesn't make sense not to try with these types of ip i think it's a smart move um it's weird to me that it's so quiet and under the radar though i guess this is kind of like a somewhat of a i mean i doubt they would label it this way but this kind of feels like somewhat of an early access kind of run uh not in name but certainly in practice where like because if it wasn't i feel like this would be available everywhere it seems like they're trying to maybe get feedback and figure things out in a smaller market that is a little bit more into this type of thing um which is smart but i wonder like when this is going to roll out everywhere if that's even the plan because we know that there are some games that are kind of like tied to certain markets weirdly enough even though we we think that they would make sense elsewhere so that's really my only curiosity but i don't have much else to say about it it is funny though that that this is where it's that this is where it's being uh put up i put in the chat here by the way there is already a listing on the app store on iphone so you can see more video and screenshots of it um it's being developed the developer is marked as playstation mobile inc which is sony's internal spinoff.

1:41:13It says here, MLB The Show mobile brings 20 years of authentic MLB gameplay to your phone, master skill-based controls, collect legends, and use unique abilities to outplay rivals. Collect, build, dominate, collect more than 1 ,000 player cards. I mean, this is going to be big. And stack your dream team with today's superstars and historic legends like Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, and Ken Griffey Jr. Put your skills to the test and prove you've got what it takes to rule the diamond. So realistic batting, pitching, and fielding, the ultimate sports game experience these are all the kind of categories strategize with the new momentum system build the perfect squad play new game modes so i don't know i i feel like baseball is it baseball seems to be waning in the in the public imagination but like for the people that love it they really do love it and the mlb the show is just such a big phenomenon imagine when this goes around globally, Dustin, even turning on the show on a console and getting a splash screen that says like this is out now.

1:42:10I think it's going to be a nice hit. Yeah. The thing that stuck out to me in the trailer, it's clear their monetization is that somehow the game is played through baseball cards that you get, which I think is kind of cool. There's a shot at 15 seconds in showing all the different players on the field, but as baseball cards. And this is, man, this is so smart. If you look at not only the success of trading cards right now being so big, I was at Target a few weeks ago and there was a guy, I think, I don't know if he had an altercation, but they put a limit on how many boxes you can buy to two, mostly for Pokemon.

1:42:48And this guy's like, man, it's fucking bullshit. I'm not here trying to get Pokemon cards. I'm trying to get stuff no one cares about, blah, blah, blah. But whatever. Baseball cards still popular. but in addition if you look at the success of the pokemon trading card game mobile right now which is like hey you can log in and you get a pack a day for free and so i could see them doing a situation where you get people coming back by it's like oh you get to open a new pack of baseball cards of players that you can use to build your team every day but if you want more packs pay up yeah and it's so funny too with mobile games too that wasn't it this data might be old but a few years ago there was data that was like most of the money on these games is made by a very small group of players that just spend literally tens of thousands of dollars on these apps which is just insane but um you know if it's fun and well done uh i could see this being potentially huge for them yeah it's a very interesting move i like it and this is exactly the kind of now again they need to there's two things i want to say they need to connect this to the game somehow to the console game that's still the beating heart of mlb the show it's going to remain that way and i i don't want to overestimate its global reach but i do want to you know not understate its domestic you know reality of mlb the show which is it's one of the biggest games in the united states every year you know and it's only on you know and it was only on until recent years one console it's amazing that it's kind of created this huge i guess uh 2021 for xbox and i think 2022 for switch the other thing i wanted to say and i was curious what you guys think of this is like they're really stubborn about bringing this game to pc and i don't know i don't know what that's all about i think if you look at the performance of pc sports ports from like ea they're not very good there's something about people don't really want to play madden and fifa on pc i don't know why so i don't know if they like if we just think it won't be big but it just seems like a just an obvi even if you just had a passive 500 000 people playing it a year you would think that you would just want to put it on pc i don't know what that's all about i i think they the the the i maybe the colloquial wisdom is probably like most people are going to are going to play this on the phone The phone is the most ubiquitous device.

1:45:17Having it on PC would mean two skews. Maybe it's more of a headache. I'm not really sure the ins and outs of that. But there is truth to the fact that nobody really... I've not seen anybody play a sports game on PC. I'm sure people do it. But Derek actually does it. But he does it specifically to mod giant fake penises on people. It's not for the love of... It's not for the sanctity of the game at all. So like, yeah, it might just not be worth it to them. Or maybe they'll, again, maybe they're just kind of saving it for later. Iron some of the kinks out. But I don't know. Well, with respect to baseball, I mean, it's still pretty big.

1:46:06Because I was at a birthday party at a bar, and we didn't realize that it was during Game 7. whoops but like that place was jumping dude like a ton of people so it's still pretty big it's funny man madden madden uh 25s all-time peak on steam is 5 900 understand this is like the top five that's insane yeah top five selling game in the united states that's why i just feel like for all the doom and gloom around console gaming and for every as bullish as people are about pc gaming and reasonably so in a lot of ways it's like slow your roll a little bit like a game like this is a massive seller and really only relevant at any way on console i just think it's pc gamers are just kind of huge nerds and i i just think there should be more crossover with sports which is a huge nerdy thing i think there's the very there's the very um brutish pig-headed violent aspect of sports and sports fandom which i think is fun too but like then there's like the whole analytical like mathematical money ball like this shit speaks to games so much have you guys seen or read money ball you probably wouldn't have read it but did you see i've seen it yeah i mean that's like the shit i'm talking about so good you know and it's like it's so it's like it's video game level nerd shit and i just feel like there should be more synergy there and there just isn't i don't know all right next piece of news Let's see here.

1:47:41This is about Nix's and Helldivers 2. So Arrowhead revealed in a Steam update. I just thought this was an interesting piece of news and people have been circulating this. That Nix's had come in to help them reduce the size of the package for Helldivers 2 on PC by 85 % from 154 gigabytes to 23 gigabytes. What's that all about? that seems crazy to me how is that possible Nike I can't fathom I guess maybe they weren't compressing audio and like a bunch of other shit like that is insane that is by the way been the main reason why I have not played Helldivers is because like the the like the memory cost of even downloading it is so intense where I'm just like ah I don't know if this is worth it necessarily but 20 is like that's a that's an insane decrease I don't think I've ever seen that much of a decrease probably ever it feels like a world record almost i guess they from reading it i'm a bit of a layman dustin but from reading there it's a pretty long statement but it sounds like a lot of it had to do with making the game more in line with the standards of an uh like a a a new like hard drive as opposed to the old solid state or the old hard drives so i like more for ssds i guess than the mechanic yeah the mechanical that's what the word i'm looking for but i don't know if i'm really interpreting it that way um so like the ssd doesn't need all the data duplication i guess that a regular hard drive would otherwise would take it a long time to retrieve all that data i mean that's how i understand it but i don't know if that's what you got out of the letter yeah because they they mentioned here about mechanical hard drive users mission times have only increased by a few seconds at the worst case.

1:49:40And then they go on to say, didn't you just tell us that you duplicate data because of the load times and hard drives could be 10 times worse? So anyway, the point is it sounds like it was that big because they were accounting for mechanical hard drives, which at this point on PC, I think they said what the percentage of those users were, which was like maybe 10 % or less, if I remember. I'm trying to find it. It's 11%. 11%. So they were able to change the game to still accommodate those users, and they only have to deal with a couple, a small additional load time. But it's kind of an interesting read if you're into the nerdy stuff about it.

1:50:24But it sounds like it was all duplicate information that was not necessary for literally what 89 % of users and apparently not even for hard drive users because it's not like they're getting a downgraded experience um so apparently this is kind of like opt-in right now they're calling it the slim version of the game and you can go to steam and i guess opt-in immediately and test it for the help them test it seems like people are interested in it it's got 10 000 thumbs up on uh on steam and almost a thousand comments from people as well this news. So just an interesting story about how important Nix's I think has been and what an interesting company they are within Sony for all the questionable shit Sony has done with acquisitions in more recent years and a lot of the second party games that they got going that failed or never came to pass.

1:51:12This was a really canny move to pick up Nix's and just kind of get them working on different things. And they're almost 100 people strong now and they're working on saros as we understand which is cool so shout out to them and shout out to hell divers yeah awesome that's cool and all but like i that's cool and all but i kind of wish they would work on like an uncharted live service game instead yeah you know i think that would be a more wise fight for fortune remember that game what is that that was like the v the like very early vita uncharted like card game oh really yeah i have no idea um I kind of like that game.

1:51:52I think I reviewed it on IGN. We were just desperate for anything on the Vita at that point. All right. Helldivers 2, shout out to you. And by the way, we don't really know for sure, but based on a lot of analytics, the vast, vast majority of people playing Helldivers are on PC. So it's important to cater to them. You're looking at maybe three or four million sales on PS5 and all the rest. You know what it would be, 10 plus million on PC. So it's a really important group of people to to cater to. And John Tom Black wrote in John Tom Black said, hey, it's a very like. Three just individual syllable names, you know, very rhythmic.

1:52:35Yeah. God, this thing's itching the fuck out of me. Says, hey, CDC, with the recent news that Nix's came in to help Arrowhead with data deduplication to reduce Helldivers to storage footprint on PC. it feels like yet another reminder that Nixx's is probably one of Sony's savviest acquisitions it's kind of wild that it apparently took a third party for Arrowhead to make this change especially considering the archaic engine the game runs on with this announcement that Arrowhead is still getting assistance from Sony's first party support studios how do you guys read the relationship between Sony and Arrowhead when Arrowhead announced they'd be working on a new independent game I took that as a sign the relationship with Sony is strained even if Helldivers 2 has clearly been a cash cow for both sides I kind of read it that way as well just because I mean there's no real reason to it's just all conjecture but I just don't think the rollout I think the game was bigger than anyone imagined it was going to be I don't think they were they were very well prepared for that on either side maybe reasonably so if they just didn't believe in the game as much the market potential of the game but I don't understand how the big reason I read it this way is that I don't understand how you can have such a big hit like hell divers and not either sell the studio to sony which i'm sure sony would probably be interested in or um getting another game going like how much money did sony shortchange them is arrowhead really heavily believing in their ability to segue their success on this game into their next game and it just doesn't make sense they don't need they've made an enormous amount of money they don't need a publisher i probably would be in their camp where i'd be like we don't really need a publisher we and the people that own the studio are rich they probably were wealthy before this and now they've made a lot of money so maybe it's just like it's what we always say about capitalism maybe it's like well it's enough we could sell the studio for a couple hundred million dollars or whatever that's cool but we're already rich or we could just make another game and bet on our name and i bet you they will do great as long as they deliver the goods because they've earned that respect so i understand both sides but it does seem like it's this is a partnership that would have made a lot of sense a lot more sense than a lot of the partnerships they've made so it's too bad for sony i mean i'm happy for arrow i don't care whatever they want is fine with me speaking of hell divers too i'm very curious what you guys think of this this comes from hollywood reporter they exclusively report justin lynn to direct Helldivers video game movie.

1:55:07We had already reported that PlayStation Productions is working with a guy named Gary Dauberman who wrote the horror movies It and Annabelle to write the script and now they have Justin Lin in the director's seat. Justin Lin, they write, best known for his work on the Fast and Furious action movies, is set to direct Sony Pictures and PlayStation Productions adaptation of Helldivers based on the popular video game franchise from Arrowhead Game Studios. So they write here, quote, the concept which recalls Sony's Starship Troopers movies centers on an elite unit of shock troopers known as Helldivers who must battle aliens known in simple terms as bugs, cyborgs, and Illuminate, threatening to destroy the fictional interplanetary and faux-democratic empire of Super Earth.

1:55:45Throw in some spores and genetically engineered decomposing bug corpses come to life and you've got yourself a sci-fi monster party. Lin is not a gamer and leaned into that as a strength when pitching his take on the material, said insiders. He aims to find the humanity in the characters and weave timely themes into the story while building out a world and mythology there are plenty of details waiting to be drawn in something that is compelling to the filmmaker and it gives lynn a second potential franchise at sony that has an upward trajectory on top of now working in the growing video game adaptation sphere lynn remains in development and is attached to direct one punch man which adapts the hugely popular manga what do we think of this chris i see you shaking your head i'm disappointed in this decision if that's i i'm not i don't know anything about this part this filmmaker and like what his talents are but you know i'm not a film guy but i don't know that that's actually a good like not being a gamer i don't think is necessarily a good a good take like why would i why would i want to yeah what do you think i mean the humanity and the hell divers that's that's the thing where i'm like so i don't mind that he's not a gamer i think it's fine i think like if your strength is directing you're you're gonna you're gonna direct a movie like i I don't it's cool if you are a gamer it's kind of one of the things that like I'm most interested about um Zach Kregor Zach Kregor directed um Barbarian and uh oh my god what's the recent movie weapons uh he's set to do a Resident Evil movie and he he loves Resident Evil and like he's played it so like that's interesting to me because it's like he's a director and a gamer and that and the way he talks about it I feel like oh I think you kind of you do understand what makes this kind to tick the thing with this though is that hell divers is so is so blatantly unserious like it it's it's kind of like a tongue-in-cheek like the idea of like trying to find the dramatic heft or like find the humanity in hell divers is that feels very misguided and it feels like the only it feels like the type of misguided that would only come about if you did not play the game you just didn't really understand what this was because i don't really want i this needs to be i don't think it needs to be a comedy per se but i i don't want it to be a movie about like the perseverance of the human spirit you know what i mean like it's hell divers like i don't know i just it the way he's talking about it feels like a fundamental like misinterpretation of whatever what they're doing with the game and like what people expect out of it could be wrong it could be surprisingly good like we don't know like i mean there's all sorts of takes that seem insane at the time and then end up kind of working but on the outset this seems like not the best frame of mind to go forward with as far as like adapting hell divers goes like it seems a little too self-serious the way he's talking about it now well i agree with i agree with that in the sense that what the things that are important about hell divers to me can only be learned from being a being a gamer being a player of the game and right for instance being told as a non-gamer that oh like friendly fire is like a really big part of this game that's like a very grounding and interesting thing that like kind of is a vague like that's a vagary to someone that doesn't understand games but if you play games you're like oh that's really interesting that's like a really interesting dynamic or the idea that you're basically fascists but you're kind of but you want to be and like you're into it Yeah, that's a meta that only is introduced in something like a video game.

1:59:38And so you can't, I don't think, fundamentally understand hell divers. It's no disrespect to like the idea of an outsider giving giving an interpretation. And it could be valuable, but and it could be great for all I know. But I just think it's like you can't possibly understand. I'm sure people are showing you. I'm sure people are talking about it. I think he could have it. I think he could have it like relayed onto it. Like if he picks a staff well, you know, like it's I don't want to say this is going to be bad or whatever like i i just think like the the way that they're talking about it this early on just seems like a it seems like it's a little bit not oriented correctly um because i think the core of helldivers to me is like that scene in starship troopers where like they're all saying like i'm doing my part like that's like that scene that scene is kind of the thesis of helldivers in some way where it's just like the absurd the absurd dedication to this thing that is so inherently like you're gonna go out there and you're gonna die for nothing basically and it's going to be fun and it's going to be funny that it happens uh i don't know how you could like i don't know we'll see i guess but dustin what are your thoughts here on a potential held iris 2 film helmed by justin lynn i have only seen one justin lynn movie because i've never seen any of the last and for your furious movies so the only one i've seen is star trek beyond which it's been a long time since I've seen any of those rebooted Star Trek movies but I remember at the time thinking it was the weakest of the three but it was the one that leaned into being kind of if I remember right it's been so long I remember it feeling a little more campy compared to the other two Star Trek or the other yeah the other two rebooted Star Trek films the J.J.

2:01:24Abrams ones right yeah the jj abrams ones so from that sense and thinking about what i know of fast and furious being over the top and ridiculous and fun in that way that sounds great that sounds like it could be a perfect fit yeah but as you guys were just saying this interview or this this uh you know this article presents a picture that doesn't sound as compelling so it's so far off that maybe who knows maybe what we'll see in the end will be actually really good but i guess the main thing for me is that if his thing is being over the top balls to the wall bombastic crazy then it could be in good hands yeah i i will say i i want i am open-minded he's obviously very talented right i haven't seen that i've seen the first two fast and furious movies i love the first movie the first one which was like a big movie when i was in high school but i've not seen all these different films so i can't speak to him but i know that they're very well received he's made an enormous amount of money for these different studios um and so it's like cool you have talent we'll see what you can do but i um I want to say like twisted metal was cool and is cool on peacock and they were doing something different it was actually something radically different even making post-apocalyptic is not what twisted metal is as i've said many times and it works it's like okay it's like it's inspired by twisted metal and then even then they get into the tournament ultimately because like that's what twisted metal really is all about and i like that approach but not everything can be like some so it's the idea of being like oh maybe it's about like a store on super earth and it's like you know it's like yeah that's well you could do something weird thing where it's like people supporting them from the back like it's a totally a different view of hell divers i'm like that's cool but not sometimes we just want the thing and right hell divers is actually a would and i i think someone had even written in with the idea that like basically an idea which maybe is what they're going to do because it goes into the humor of it is like getting into like a squad of hell divers and like getting to know them and then they all just die like but like in the most horrible ridiculous ways and there's no resolution and the entire idea is that they're alive like their deaths were worthless they're just one of a million people that are dying in this war it's like you zoom out quickly from the conflict kind of thing but at the same time hell divers should be like this kinetic starship troopers style political thing and that's what i hope that they lean into is like it's okay especially because sony owns the film rights to starship troopers so it's like it's okay to lean into the fact that that it is like kind of a copy of starship troopers and i think that like doing something like that i think would be kind of fun and neat and exactly what it should be the one thing i think we all agree on is like no tv shows none of that like it's a it's an in and out kind of thing 90 minutes you know yeah yeah maybe even shorter honestly like i think uh brevity would would benefit it i think but uh yeah no that's i feel like i feel like i can't imagine i i feel like i can almost see like the the almost because there's moments in fast and furious i haven't seen those movies really like at all but like i've seen clips of it where it's like it's almost so dramatic and it's so self serious that it kind of loops into being funny so like i wonder if they can maybe do that where like they play it so serious where it just like it it becomes a comedy like i would kind of appreciate that in some way so like maybe it is a better fit than than we're seeing but uh yeah we'll see tell i guess since we're on this subject um of tv shows and movies and all the playstation production stuff i thought i would also just report on a story here quickly from deadline they write god of war frederick eo toy set to direct as pre-production and casting are underway on amazon uh on amazon series with two season order so there's two important things here that i just wanted to say and we can move on quickly the first is that uh emmy award winning director, Frederick E.

2:05:26O. Toy, who worked on the series Shogun and the Boys, is going to direct the first two episodes of the God of War series on Amazon whenever that comes out. The series was greenlit back in late 2022, so they've been kind of working on it for a while, and we've been covering it. The other thing, and they said it here in the title that's really important, is that Prime has already renewed it and ordered two seasons at the same time. Now, they note here that this is, quote, not unusual for a series of this scope when a platform believes in the creative because such shows involve a lot of upfront world building costs related to production design set building costumes and props that are better amortized over multiple seasons and quote we still don't have any casting details on what they're going to do i mean the kratos casting is going to be essential and i know people have ideas with that and i want to see how they execute on this they must have screen tests and things that make it seem like it's going to work right um that's the size and scope of it kratos's size comparable to everyone else and i'm sure there's a lot of different tricks they can do but i'm interested to see this see what they do any thoughts here chris yeah um i don't know i think uh yeah wallace sean for kratos you know i think that that'd be a good fit who is that i gotta look that up wow he's the inconceivable guy from oh yeah the guy from like mall or from um from uh clueless yeah yeah he's the guy who becomes an alien at the end of my favorite martian by the way you guys fuck i haven't thought about that movie dude on thanksgiving my friends and i we were like going through this rabbit hole of like watching like movies we haven't seen in a long time and just skimming through them have you have you guys seen the movie jack by the way jack the robin williams movie yeah the robin williams yeah i saw that in the theater it's so sad why you you derek said the same thing he's like i saw that theater is like why would you see jack in theaters i don't know but i did and it was so sad like dude i watched that movie for the first time recently and i was immediately flummoxed bill cosby's in it and you're like oh man and then j-lo's in it and then she then 40 year old 10 year old robin williams gets molested by fran drescher and you're like i don't i don't know what the hell this movie is spoiler alert for jack jack me and my dad i told you me my dad used to could just go see like so many movies i don't know why oh that's right that was about that that was around that time yeah that makes sense it's like the mid-90s i can't imagine being in the theater for jack oh god um dustin any thoughts here before we move on on god of war i'm gonna choose to be optimistic about god of war as as ridiculous as we've said it could look seems like they've got all the right players involved with this uh that show shogun people absolutely loved shocker a japanese show a show about japan i haven't watched yeah that's interesting i've only seen the i saw the first episode seemed you haven't watched it because it's not a japanese production though right that's why i was turning you off from it there's not a 10 000 year old dragon in it right yeah um and we talked before about ronald d moore and his credentials, of course, are very good.

2:08:39So everything seems very promising. So I will give it the benefit of the doubt until given a reason otherwise. All right. Just wanted to... I just saw a random video. There's like that Breaking 911 Twitter account. I haven't watched the video, obviously. We're recording, but I just saw what it says. It says Tim Waltz says people are driving by his house calling him retarded. It's just a video, like a video clip, but I haven't seen it yet. I got to open that for later. Oh, I see. It's crazy that that was Thanksgiving, too, that that happened. I know. It's insane. We live in like a dystopia. It's fucking crazy.

2:09:30I mean, look at us. Like, what are we even doing? I'm like dressed up like a clown basically right now. talking about and people are paying you to talk about playstation i know it's a fucking clown world we live in well we all know it all right i thought i would just put this out here real quick uh this has been reported but there's not much to say because i can't find a press release or anything not that there would be but anti-real or whatever the the artists that the futuristic artists that was robbed by bungie or purported to have been robbed by bungie according to them back in May a lot of the design posters that they made that this person made ended up being incorporated improperly and uncredited apparently into Marathon according to these accusations these accusations seem to have been true since the response was quick and the two sides talked and then some months later so here in early December Anti-Real writes on Twitter quote the Marathon art issue has been resolved with Bungie and Sony Interactive Entertainment to my satisfaction i wonder yeah i wonder how much how much very interesting to know how much that that cost because like what did the like i wonder if we'll ever know the results of the audit because like what did the audit discover like was you would think that they would if the audit discovered something subtle they could just replace or remove it maybe pay a small fee to not get sued anyway but if you're going to yeah presumably incorporate it and then and so maybe they went deeper and found more i mean who the hell knows i would just love to know more about this but probably because of the legal settlement between the two sides that that is probably as much as we're ever going to get so there's not much else to say about it but to say that that is a resolved situation i guess that was a pretty big deal also that person blocked me on twitter anti-roll yeah i don't know why i don't know what i did to that person i can't remember anything either we might have discovered that when we first broke the story for all i know i don't remember i don't remember what happened 10 minutes ago so um right so yeah that's it the posters stolen or i'm sorry the posters that were purportedly stolen were designed back in 2017 incorporated into the design language as we know of marathon i guess we'll find out i'll be interested to see the credits of the game and um also if that stuff is found to still be incorporated in the game and i would love to know what do you guys think how much any idea what you think that would i have no concept of like what you would even yeah i'm not i don't i don't even think i could make an educated guess on like what that settlement would be yeah me neither because i wonder like how i mean i have an idea but i wonder how actionable it would have been in other words like could you have could could the the the the artists have found a lawyer representing them for winnings later on in which they were like um your settlement of five hundred thousand dollars whatever is just simply not sufficient you stole from us you know it's in all these different trailers you're marketing your game with this art like we think we can make several million or whatever and i wonder if it if it got that high or if it's like that's just a vast overstatement and it was like 50 000 or whatever i mean i i have no i have no concept either yeah because I imagine that would have been a pretty big deal should they have wanted to pursue it and that it took all of this time to settle indicates that something was happening behind the scenes some sort of conversation yeah it feels like it took a long time this is in May right that this happened so about a half a year yeah I don't know glad it's resolved I guess alright this next story is about Yacht Club Games.

2:13:22And Mega Maddy wrote in, a few people wrote in about this, actually quite a few people wrote in about this and said, hey, Sacred Shovels, what the hell is going on at Yacht Club Games? This week I read on Push Square that Yacht Club has said they need Mina the Hollower to be a hit or they'll be in trouble. How can this be? Yacht Club released one of the best and most notable indie games ever and now finds itself in trouble after having already let people go. To me, this seems like the result of poor management, at least partially. 12 years between games is ridiculous. What do you guys think about the state of Yacht Club?

2:13:49And will Mina be the hit they need to make it in this already overcrowded market? Thanks. I'll deploy white phosphorus against the Mushroom Kingdom. And listen, I don't, it seems a little extreme to me. It's that level of genocide on the Mushroom Kingdom. So Bloomberg, Jason Schreier, writes a story entitled, if people want to look it up, creator of hit game Shovel Knight is at a make or break moment. and so basically he writes about how he was invited to la to play um and look at me to the holler with a holler with other journalists however it seems like he was doing a lot of background reporting too and we were conjecturing in the group discord ben brought up like what is the what was the angle like why did they give them access you know and i was like yeah that's a very thought-provoking question and a good question it's like my son and what i was saying is my assumption is, is that I assume that wasn't the idea like or and I had this other idea, which is like or this is kind of a ploy to give a little bit of access and to get a very reputable person to write about your game to let people know like we're in trouble and we need you to show up when the game comes out.

2:15:01I should note that I personally know the people at Yacht Club Games. I've been in their office. They've done things for me for people that don't know. I and this is kind of it's funny to really talk about this, but I was the person who revealed the shovel night originally like that was my exclusive story when they launched the Kickstarter, but they tell the story about how they targeted me intentionally because they knew how much of a mark I was for the kind of game they were making. And I love that because they were right. I was like a huge mark for shovel night. I wrote about it constantly. I was super into it.

2:15:35I I reviewed it when it came out. I loved it. And it's a super awesome game. But I've also said over the years that they've really, I think, fumbled. Like an amazing situation. And I don't understand what the thought was about it. So people can go read the story themselves. But the basic thing here is this. At some point after Yacht Club. So Shovel Knight comes out in 2014. they port it to a bunch of machines in 2015, 2016, and then they start working on expansions. And there are three expansions. And these expansions were promised on their Kickstarter. This is the, I say this because I think this is a major inflection point for them.

2:16:17Shovel Knight becomes this huge hit. It ends up selling 3 million copies, life to date, which is an enormous amount of copies for a game like that. And it's in fucking Smash Brothers. They get Amiibo. They have like this whole merch operation. It's like really, really going well for them. And they take the time to do what are basically remixed versions of Shovel Knight three times with the Plague Knight, Specter Knight, and King Knight DLC. And the entire idea was that they were fulfilling the promises of the Kickstarter. So they do all that. The games are very well received. And then they split the team into two, according to this reporting.

2:16:51One team works on Mina the Hollower, which is being led by a kid in his early 20s. And this is another huge part of it. It's being directed by this person. The The other is that they're doing a 3D shovel night game. And this was, by the way, always the idea. The first time I spoke to them, they said they had this idea of evolving shovel night from 2D to 3D eventually, like that they want to do an NES game, an SNES game, an N64 game. Like that was like the whole idea. And this was like their NES game. And so what the story reports is that eventually it gets to the point where Mina is years late at this point.

2:17:27Mina Mina was conceived in 2019, but not even kickstarted till 2022, because at that point, I think they needed to maybe buy themselves time and get this thing out there that like, you know, and get the promotion of a Kickstarter and all the rest. And they did really well with it.

2:17:46At the same time, they're making a 3D shovel night game. And to me, I guess what I'm saying is like, who am I to judge? They made this amazing thing. They're great people. I, again, they've always been nice to me, friendly to me, accommodating. Like I've said before, I even bought the, I wrote the intro to the art of Shovel Knight book and which is still sold to this day. And they even signed a, like everyone in the studio signed a copy for me to give to my nephew, who's a huge fan of Shovel Knight. So it's with no disrespect that I give my own criticism. And I think Shovel Knight is immaculate, like a fucking amazing game, just absolutely amazing love letter to that era and yacht club was on the precipice in my opinion of becoming an inti creates or even way forward like and way forward is where they come from like like one of the great 2d retro developers of all time but instead and but instead they just made peculiar decisions and one of the things i was saying on discord was you think they would have just made shovel knight 2 and shovel knight 3 and you would have even thought that they would have said to the people on Kickstarter, we understand we promise these expansions.

2:18:58We're not going to deliver them. Instead, because Shovel Knight has become so popular, we're going to make a true sequel and we're going to give it all to all of you for free.

2:19:08Like, and then you get another game out and you start producing more and you get instead they got upset. I guess maybe I don't want to say obsessed, but like they got really interested in this 3D idea. And to me, like in hindsight, I'm like, that's a cute idea, but I don't think that's what people want. The people that wanted that made Shovel Knight big don't necessarily want a 3D Shovel Knight. Maybe it's going to be awesome. I'm open-minded to it. And then letting Mina be kind of crafted and guided by this young, inexperienced kid who was at one time their intern. It's a cool idea, but he obviously someone in the thing said, like, if we all just focused on that one project, it would have been done like three years ago, at least and it's gotten to the point where sean velasco himself who's like the head honcho of shovel of uh you know one of the leads of shovel night and one of the head honchos of yacht club is now directing mina and one of the things that the article says too is that like they didn't even have the game stitched together in any way until very recently at which point they realized like they needed to do more and that's why the game was delayed so late so the big thing that people are circulating out of the story.

2:20:17I'm sorry I'm going on and on. I just care about this story a lot. Velasco says to Jason about Mina the Hollower. So for people that don't know Mina the Hollower is a Game Boy kind of Game Boy Color style, borderline Game Boy Advance style, but really Game Boy Color style, Zelda style game. And it looks fucking awesome. Like truly does. It looks great. And I'm sure it's going to be great. But this is what attracted people's attention. He said about the game, quote, it's make or break for sure. If we sold 500 ,000 copies, then we would be golden. If we sold even 200 ,000, that would be really, really great.

2:20:49If we sold like 100 ,000, that's not so good. It's just impossible for me to imagine how they've been gotten into this situation. It doesn't make any sense. And I just feel like they should have leaned into what was so obvious instead of, in my opinion, over milking the first game and losing sight of the, they, I guess it's what I was saying earlier about, about the criticism of capitalism, like what is too much? And maybe they're in that position. They're obviously all, you know, a lot of those guys are wealthy and it's fine, but it's like you, you did the hard work. You made this amazing game.

2:21:26Why didn't you push? Like, why didn't you do more of it? like really more of it and it just frustrates me so much because i'm so jealous of the like that they had such an amazing game and like what i would have done if i if i had like director control over i'd be like oh my god dude shovel knight 2 for sure new bosses new worlds expansive i don't know i've gone on and on but it just frustrates the shit out of me and so now i think they're gonna do great i think me to the hollow is gonna do great and i think they're gonna be just fine but it's crazy that they even had to be in this situation in fact they talk about how they're getting rid of their office and going remote they've laid people off the 3d shovel night game is just in stasis everyone's working on mina now i just didn't expect it for them and so i'm sad about it because i really feel like they had it they really had it and i don't know i don't know what that's all about anything to add to do you guys have any feelings it feels like to me there's um macro and micro level management issues and decisions that were made of course as you were saying colin um i'm wondering too because the article mentions that they also i mean y 'all club at one point there was um the game they published cyber shadow and they also had developers working on two shovel knight spinoffs with shovel knight there was shovel knight dig and there was the Shovel Knight puzzle game.

2:22:56I played both of them. I'll look it up real quick. Yeah. Which in the article was mentioned that they were they did fine, but weren't runaway successes. Yeah. And that's too bad because I mean, I wasn't crazy about the puzzle game about the like the spinoff games. Really? Yeah. Pocket dungeon. Pocket dungeon. That's it. And which was cool. And then Shovel Knight dig. It's like I was it's like just give me more Shovel Knight. Like, why are you being too cute by half? Why are you doing this? It's just so weird, especially coming from a studio like way forward that has pushed Shantae so hard. It's like you should know what to do.

2:23:32Like cater to your audience. The audience will get smaller and more satiated as time goes, but lean into the era of the game in which you're replicating. It's very frustrating to me because they had it. They fucking had it. And it's too bad about Cyber Shadow, which they didn't make internally, but that game was great. Like their eye for what is good. Their eye for what is good is on. It's just I don't know. I don't want to be too critical of them because I really do love them, but I got to be honest. It's like. Yeah. And then, you know, from the micro level, it seems like with Mina specifically, a quote from this article says we didn't address issues as they came up quick enough.

2:24:11So I don't know if that's, you know, it sounds like a diverted attention issue that maybe they just weren't ready. it's like if you're going to split yourself into two teams uh to work on different projects it's you really need the most competent people at the top of each team and it sounds like that was maybe the major failing of mina which sounds like to me it seems like that game is going to be saved i've played the demo on switch too it's awesome um and man i it's so crazy to think about Mina right now it's like that game was going to come out this year and now it's just kind of yeah unknown um and there's part of the article too I'm trying to remember where they decided to like delay the game like pretty last minute yeah it was like it had it they've they were already it was supposed to come out in 23 right and even then they say it was probably supposed to be ready before then if you like read into the math of what they're saying but it's an interesting article people should go read it um but it's it's not what i expected and i'm very curious to know what yacht clubs buy-in on this article was because it's it it references people that are not supposed to be talking i mean it says that so i wonder like how much of this is controlled and how much of this is kind of like ginning up a little bit of something so people know the gravity but how much of it is like more authentic reporting i don't know yeah by the way this this isn't from the wikipedia page for shovel night and this is what i'm talking about about just like losing the plot in my opinion shovel night appears as a playable guest character in many games including indie pogo blade strangers cook serve delicious battle kitchen mover died dino run dx runner three river bond rivers of aether blaster master zero blood stain ritual of the night road redemption epic manager sea wars star mazer runbow all-star Dungeons and Diamonds, Ghost Police, Mutant Mud Super Challenge, Pixel Noir, and Mighty Quest.

2:26:08Shovel Knight characters make cameo appearances in Brawlhalla, Super Smash Brothers Ultimate, Azeroth Striker Gunvolt 2, Two Brothers, Yooka-Laylee, Aegis Defenders, The Reward, Tales of Aetherion, River City Ransom, Underground, Creepy Castle, Puzzle Depot, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Enter the Gungeon, Katana Zero, Bellatro, and For Honor. For Honor? There's one game. Mm-hmm. you're focused like why make i don't know man i don't know there should have been a shovel night too and it should have been out in like 2018 like it's just i don't know i don't know what to say isn't that all licensing though like isn't that like uh relatively work free for them yeah yeah it's all free licensing for them especially if they're flexible you know yeah i haven't done it for nothing i think the i think the biggest thing and look i don't know much about you i i have very little experience with shovel knight so like it's very clearly uh speaking somewhat out of turn here but like i think it it's it seems obvious to me as as even like a layman somewhat that like if you're a studio that's making games like shovel knight probably the least wise thing to do is to work on multiple projects at the same time you know like i would imagine that you would want to keep like remain lean and remain focused because you kind of need that as like a smaller team and it just kind of benefits you to do that generally i mean we look at you look at like hollow knight and that team where they kind of like worked for an insanely long time making this other game but at least they were making it you know what i mean like they were actually doing this thing and then they weren't like distracted and so what they came out with at the end of it was like something that was you know really big and people love it but also it wasn't like a make or break thing for them you know like they didn't have all these presumable what i would what i would imagine are extensive costs in building these other things that have not yet come to light um i don't know i i feel like if i was the head of a team like that i would want to remain as lean and as focused as possible it's like a strange decision from my perspective outside.

2:28:17Well, I'm rooting for Mina the Hollower. I mean, I'm going to be all over it. I'm going to buy the shit out of that game. It's going to be awesome. But it's a bummer to hear about the situation. I think they're going to be just fine. I think they'll recover. Hopefully, they'll get to finish the Shovel Knight 3D game. We'll get to see what that is. And I'm optimistic about it. I just think that that's maybe where you get after a trilogy of the original games. I personally am so hungry for more. And I think a lot of people are. Three million is a lot of copies for a game like that, man. That's more than the original Mega Man games each individually sold.

2:28:50It's a big game. So anyway, enough bitching from me. A couple more things to get through and then we can be done and get into what we're playing. Just quick things to talk about. The Wall Street Journal reports this and there's not a super amount to say about the Saudi fund buying EA, but they did report on something interesting here. So they wrote an article called Saudi fund to own almost all of electronic arts after buyout. and they write here the public investment fund has teamed up with silver lake the technology focused buyout firm and jared kushner's investment firm affinity partners to buy the video game maker for 55 billion dollars including debt the deal unveiled in september is set to be the largest ever ever leveraged buyout the consortium didn't disclose the planned ownership breakdown but a november filing with brazil's antitrust regulator shows piff would own 93.4 percent of ea while silver lake and affinity would own 5.5 and 1.1 respectively that puts the onus on pif or pif to fund almost all of the deal end quote so it just goes into the question i've been asking which is like it with a lot of these these deals where it's like who benefits from this like ea doesn't benefit the players don't benefit it's just to the benefit of a foreign entity i'm not into it but there's nothing that can be done about it but apparently no one gives a shit so just sell another like small piece of americana to a foreign government yeah very cool yeah there's a there's nothing wrong at all with the way things are going indeed it's all very good that's what i have to say about it it's fantastic no one cares it really is I think we got to get I think really we really got to get over whatever weird emotions we have tied to labels and criticizing labels because like this guy I mean like I don't mind making money I don't mind a little bit of capitalism but like bro like what are we doing what are we doing what are we doing this is crazy that and by the way like this is going to keep happening by the way we're going to get to the point where there's like what like two companies that own everything it's it's it's i don't know yeah it's it's not whatever i'm just a little i mean there have been some people in government you know congress that have said some kind of passing things about this but i'm surprised this isn't a bigger deal like this is a massive leverage buyout and it's gonna there's a react there's a real there's a possibility this works out great and it's fine but there's a real possibility too that it actually just destroys EA and or at least makes EA into a shell of what it once was EA is always going to be valuable because of all the things it does but yeah and I'm really interested to see just like what happens because are they really gonna I don't understand how you service that level of debt without making massive changes increasing the debt load of the company 10x is going to have some level of constraint on your flow of capital, even if you keep things exactly the same, so much of that is going to be absorbed by the servicing of that debt.

2:32:04And so I'm just a little surprised even from just a pure economics perspective why more people aren't kind of looking at this with squinted eyes because it just seems dangerous. And EA is not nothing. And I think we should be more protective of our domestic companies instead of selling, like allowing them, you know, and again, And ultimately, it's up to the shareholders, but they're going to approve it. And I don't know, whatever it is, what it is. But I wanted to report that. So it seems like, yeah, the the other players are really playing. I don't know what they're playing like a role. I remember saying about Jared Kushner's firm, especially like they're like the lubricant, I think.

2:32:42And they're being paid like it 1.1%. So not that that's not that's not nothing, but it's not a lot. All right. a few more things just about games um variety wrote a piece about hitman turning 25 and i it was an interview with io interactive ceo about all sorts of things they talk about 007 first light which obviously looks awesome however i did want to just note this so um when asked about the future of hitman the ceo of io interactive said the following so of course there will quote so of course there will be more hitman but right now i think we need to get to the other side of this year and next year you'll get more news about hitman co-op because i think co-op is a really good extension of that universe and we'll introduce very interesting mechanics and combinations in world of assassination but we will after that be talking about the next hitman because of course there's going to be a next hitman end quote so it's presumed hitman for you guys were both fans right of uh i liked i i did play hitman 2016 quite a bit and i did like it but i never i never went beyond that so are you guys looking forward to more oh yeah absolutely and if you played hitman 2016 then hitman 2 and 3 are really at their core they are just expansions of those games more levels um so the the basis of that game is all built on you know playstation 4 and so the idea of them being able to make a true uh next gen or current gen whatever maybe it'll be it'll probably be playstation 6 by the time it comes out uh hitman game sounds awesome uh just because i i couldn't believe how much i fell in love with those games and i i have no experience with hitman outside of those newer hitman games and so maybe there are some hitman purists that want it to go back to the old way, but I'm very curious too with the, what they're going to learn from doing the 007 game as well.

2:34:52I'm very excited for that. So hell yeah, bring it on. I love the, the open sandbox of those hitman games. And I want more of that only crazier with newer tech. I do give them credit for the, for doing what I think a lot of games should be doing, which is platformizing their franchise in the world of assassination and like kind of leaning into that for short-term loss but long-term gain in the organization of it and so you assume the next hitman if they call it hitman 4 but they're probably just called something else will be a new platform yeah yeah yeah that'd be awesome i love i love those those hitman games man hitman 3 is so is so good there's a mission in hitman 3 that has like some of the most impressive shit that I've seen in any of those sandbox driven games.

2:35:39And this article is crazy, by the way. There's like some slim, shady Eminem thing going on. Yeah, I don't. Yeah, I'm kind of curious about. Can you kill Eminem? I think he's the elusive target. Yeah, that's awesome. Because I think they didn't do something with like Sean, Sean Bean also or something like that. Yeah. And when I went, I mentioned that weird io interactive showcase where they had mind's eye and in person and uh it was mads mekelson was the elusive target for because they doing a 007 thing in hitman but right so yeah they've done quite a few they need to go crazy with it like who would like mr bean uh elusive target mr mr mr mr bean would be great um george lucas it it's funny because they do say he's at the food court yeah yeah you gotta like get to him uh eating his panda express right they do say in that article it's interesting that they have like a lots of ideas and like it i would love to know like who says who has said no because apparently like they say they like it's a lot of it's about like who's available that's i love the concept of that platform though where you like approach people it's like hey do you want to be killed in hitman and some people are just like yeah dude yeah that'd be sick like that's an awesome like that the idea that that's a conversation that happens is awesome like i i want more people to like let's kill weird al you know let's get weird al in here i feel like it'd be awesome you like you rig the accordion to explode yeah i just i I don't know.

2:37:20It's such a flexible game and it's so it's, it's, it like rides this weird line of being so goofy while being like, it's on this tightrope of dramatic and absurd where like you throw briefcases at people and they, you throw a briefcase at somebody and it homes in on their exact target, but it moves so slowly and it like spins and it turns corners chasing after it's ridiculous. Dude, some of the like in hit man in the recent one, um i guess it was hitman 3 where it's like you have you can kill the target in a wine like a grape crusher do you know i'm talking there's the level and you can you can set them up you can just like hitman's completely great i remember i first when i first played the game i didn't quite get it uh or i didn't like use the the full toolkit it's a deceptively like sophisticated game and so like i'm totally happy that there's going to be more because uh They're really kind of single-handedly carrying the stealth game torch at this point.

2:38:21Well, for now, because Push Square reports something very interesting. JP wrote in and said, hey, Colin, Destin and Crisp. Can Crisp pretend to be excited by the former director of the Splinter Cell remake returning to head the project again? I would appreciate a real cartoonish level of excitement in your performance if possible. So our friend over at Push Square reports, Splinter Cell remake gets its original game director back. announced over on LinkedIn. It seems like David Grivel, who was the original director of Splinter Cell remake before leaving in 2022, is rejoining Ubisoft Toronto in charge of the project.

2:38:55The game, of course, was announced in 2021. It's running in Snowdrop. It's a remake of the original 2002 Splinter Cell game from Ubisoft Montreal that came to PS2 in 2003. He was the lead designer on Far Cry 6, so shout out to him. and lead designer on some of the crisis stuff as well. So anyway, do you care? I mean, where are you on this? I mean, obviously the game is there's something happening if he's coming back. We back. We back, guys. I'm so pumped, dude. This is like I'm crying. You can't see it because it's a lie, but I'm crying a lot. I'm crying a lot from being so excited about it. You know, how long has it been?

2:39:43How long has this joke been happening? It's about to be 2026, by the way. So since the beginning of the show in 2018. So it's been quite a fucking while. Look, at this point, I'm morbidly curious what this ends up being, if it ends up being what's going to happen to it. If it's at all serious, I I'm just of the mind that this is not real until I'm playing it. Yeah, that's fair. At this point. I understand. and there could even be like a teaser. They could, there could be like a whole, you know, gameplay showcase releasing this fall. I'm not going to believe it until I'm, until I can preload it and like play it.

2:40:26And I'm always going to be curious about the splinter cell. I loved it. I'm curious what they're going to do with it. If they're going to rerecord everything, it's going to be a little bit weird and empty without Michael Ironside attached to it. If that's the case, cause I know he's like, he's either retired or dead. I genuinely don't know. I don't know which one, but he's not involved with any of this stuff anymore. So like if they're going to rerecord it, that's kind of that's somewhat disappointing. But at the same time, it would also be disappointing if they were working on a remake and they didn't do anything to make to update it in some way.

2:40:57Like, I don't I don't know. I just feel like this has. I try to be fairly optimistic about these things or at the very least, I try not to be so pessimistic that like I don't let myself enjoy anything. but like this this kind of project is uh i feel very very skeptical of it and uh i don't know dude whatever keep at it i guess because didn't the didn't the other one wasn't there like a whole report recently that came out that like x defiant was like yeah was supposed to be a was supposed to be a similar so even then they turned it into that so like god i spared you from that story but i didn't want to spare you from this one this one was good news no it's fair um it's a running joke man i can i can manifest a lot of things but for whatever reason splinter cell is the one thing that just like eludes me so dustin i don't want you to feel left out because i have something for you as well the release date for tomba 2 on playstation 5 this comes from gamatsu tomba 2 the evil swine return special edition which of course is a re-release of the ps1 whoopi camp game japanese 1999 american 2000 release so a late release uh launches december 15th the trophies are already live I looked at them last night the game will cost$20 and there is no longer a PS4 version which was previously announced but otherwise it has a release date early Christmas present for you are you excited oh I'm so excited what do you think can I get the world first plat on this you probably won't because there's probably going to be people that are reviewing it they're going to get it yeah the reviewers I don't think I could ask limited run for early access i think that would uh be not a good choice but uh i'm very excited about this this is as much as i love tomba one tomba two this this one this is my game this is my shit right here so uh i will absolutely be all over this uh unfortunately i did pre-order the crazy special edition once again look forward to that in a few years yeah so you're not so you'll you'll not buy the digital version then no i will oh you will okay oh i see i will i will uh because it's i don't know it's 20 bucks whatever so i will get the digital version i will platinum it probably in december unless with tomba one where i hit the uh the there's like a thing that locks you out from getting the platinum right that i discovered very late into the game you got to read you got to read trophy guides before you get in there just read the roadmap i well that's the thing is that i did basically you have to complete all quests and there is one quest that you can break and it will no longer be well actually there might be two um so i just i had such confidence i had such i was like i'm the toma guy i'll have no problem with this should have read it but yeah toma 2 i'm looking at these trophies now this is gonna be no problem good very good that's where we're at right now guys we get we get two tomb we get two tomba games before a single single splinter cell related anything let's go fucking crazy monkey's paw dude yeah it is get everything else you want that yeah i guess it is the one thing yeah you're you you're the luckiest of all of us that is true yeah i shouldn't complain though you can i'm not really like it's whatever i'm satisfied with i'm satisfied with as much splinter cell as we've on it's just like it i i wouldn't mind if they just stopped it you know what i mean if they just if they just were like we're not doing it no more it's the whole like we're doing it and then they're just like actually we pretzled it into x defiant against its will and it's like oh cool very nice thank you all right one more piece of news this broke this morning so we can get through this quick but it's just november's top downloads on psn as reported by sony on the playstation blog so So not surprisingly, Black Ops 7 was the top downloaded game on PS5 for the month of November, followed in second place by Ark Raiders.

2:44:57Big success. This isn't based on dollar sales, I don't believe. So this is based on units because Dispatch is number three. Battlefield 6 has been dropped to number four and NBA 2K26 rounds things out at number five. Ghost of Yote falls to number nine. College football, number 11. Spider-Man 2 peaking at number 12. Expedition 33, 13. MLB The Show, as we were talking about earlier in the show, is 14. And you see some things like The Outer Worlds 2 rounding things out at number 18. Over on PS4, Red Dead Redemption 2, obviously the top download, especially spurned on by the new PS5 port as well. So people are getting their cross-play going, or their cross-downloads, I should say, going, their cross-saves.

2:45:36Arkham Knight, number 2, Black Ops 7. Still being purchased on PS4 and came in at number 3. Nothing else too interesting there. VR 2 games PSVR 2 games top 10 alien rogue incursion is number one beat saber number two Arizona sunshine remake number three um and a few other things that are very familiar job simulator pistol whip etc and then free-to-play games where wins meet the biggest playstation 5 plus playstation 4 free-to-play game that game is game looks cool I gotta say I don't really want to play I see people on my I see people on my friends list playing this and I've never I don't know what the fuck it is donkey just put a video out chris that i highly recommend for you oh okay yeah um battlefield red sec was number two this drops fortnight to three and roblox to four war zones holding on at five marvel rivals at six and i thought this was interesting number 10 aim labs oh yeah that's on console that is very bizarre for that to be on console i kind of don't see the point of that but okay so that's uh the top download so that's all we have for the news this week let's move on all right let's get into what we're playing and then we can move on the six questions comments concerns thoughts and ideas from the audience and move on with our lives chris let's begin with you says here you're playing the tmnt cowabunga collection from kanami very interesting what's going on yeah i needed something kind of small to play i wanted to start i haven't had a lot of time to play anything this week but like i did want to start something new and i was like looking for something that i could i thought about starting chronos because it has been sitting there but i was like i need a little bit more i want to start that i feel like that's a game that i want to play like maybe over over like the break or something when i have like some time to really like sit and digest but i saw that i was like oh yeah i have this i have the tmt game and it's just kind of chilling here and i have it's been downloaded for ages but i've never i've never started it up so i went through it a little bit i don't have a lot of gameplay in it to be honest but like i was like kind of skimming through and like playing like i because i had the arcade game for the nes i remember that i remember that was like one of the earliest games that i had so i was playing through that a little bit i tried the nes one which i was like which my earliest memory of the nes one was like the angry video game nerd it was like one of his first videos i'm pretty sure and so like that's the only context that i know that i know it through and playing through it was like oh man this is uh this is quite difficult this is not a joke uh but the tmnt arcade game was like fun to kind of visit again because it was like i remember this like very distinctly and i remember like playing it with my sister a lot and playing with my nieces and nephews when they would come over and so it was just like a really weird it was a weird feeling like playing it again because i was like this is it's been a while i think they had like an arcade and xbox live arcade re-release of it as well back in like i think maybe 09 or something like that that's in that vicinity but like i haven't played it like since then and it's i feel like it holds up pretty well it's like a really solid beat-em-up i was going through like some of the other ones as well like some of the ones that i have no history with the fact that the fact that there are game boy versions that you can put it is mega i don't know how to describe it exactly but it's really weird playing a game boy game on a big tv and i know that's not like not a novel concept to a lot of people because i i think there was like even like an expansion pack to like super game boy four or like yeah there's some there was some kind of expansion pack that let you do that yeah it was on snes on snes i never had that i only i only i went from nes directly to ps1 to ps2 to xbox so i kind of missed that interstitial like n64 snes kind of cartridge time so like i never had any of that shit but like it's a i don't know there's like a surreal feeling playing a game playing a game boy game on a tv there's it's it's very odd i don't know how to i don't know how to describe it it feels unholy in some way but it was cool to to kind of play through at least a little bit of each of them i think there's like a handful that i haven't touched a lot of them have names that kind of blend together in my mind so and i don't have like too much too much of a deep history with it so it's like i don't i think four i haven't played yet and uh i think there's like maybe three or two other ones that i haven't touched but yeah it's been a nice kind of like small thing to kind of chew on kind of revisit some nostalgia be reacquainted with some stuff that i have only had like tangential experience with but i would imagine that as like a tmnt fan like this is like a really like compelling package especially the way that it's put together i love the presentation of it you have like the filters the scan lines you have like you can get rid of the border which i do almost every time i i don't does anybody like the borders yeah i don't like i don't like i really hate when they do this yeah i guess i feel like they need to do it i think yeah i don't know i don't they had that on on contra on the 360 as well and i hated it there i was just like i i don't at least they're wise they're wise enough now to let you turn that shit off because they understand that like people some people just don't want it but yeah it's it's just been really cool like there's a lot of production value in it surprisingly i think i think it's like put together really well i think the the menus are really well like animated and really well laid out there's a lot of style in there um and so it's it's pretty cool i don't know if i have much to say about it i only grew up with like a handful of these games um but it's a nice kind of palette cleanser to the to the stuff that i was playing i was pretty much like locked into arc raiders for for a hot minute and i was like looking for something before i moved on to something a little bit more meaty and it's been pretty nice i've been playing it on my steam deck streaming it to my pc that's kind of how i've like like at night i've been kind of like going through like some levels and stuff but dude that nes game is like really not easy like i find it like tremendously difficult yeah it's very hard the controls are so weird like he like he jumps your the turtles jump so much further than you would expect yeah they jump crazy it's ridiculous like it's slow they like do like the little flip yeah they do a little flip it's like super slow like some of the weapons are surprisingly like like you can totally pick the wrong character and again i don't know i don't know the names of the turtles super well like what's the one with like the the little fork knives or whatever the fuck they're called that's what rafael rafael sucks like his his weapons have like no reach at all yeah in comparison to everybody else yeah you use the bo staff to like hit down through the platform you could use the bo staff to hit down and like even the sword is pretty useful for that but like the ref is just like if you start with him it's just like wow this i've made a a terrible mistake um but it's interesting like playing these games that i really only have i haven't made it to that famous underwater swimming famous underwater but i'm kind of i'm excited to see that so i'll probably that's probably what i'll call it quits because that's what i really do like that i really do like that game like i always kind of did it's just that you guys probably know this in history like everyone wanted the arcade game right which is what you were saying and the the arcade game was released as tmt2 on nes so there was that first tmt game and everyone was kind of like ah like we and they so they like really made a pretty nice port the arcade version of tmt is obviously immaculate but uh right yeah and then they kind of just stayed in that arcade game mold after that like the brawler mold after that which is cool but um so that was i remember that that was the major disappointment everyone wanted tmnt2 and so many people bought or had the wrong game and shit it was so fun i will say dude like the the port of the arcade game is is pretty competent yeah it is like i i like it's definitely obviously it's like the the full one is is obviously better it's it's better animated all that stuff but like of the arcade ports that i've seen considering it's an nes game like that's it's really it's not that it's not as compromised as i would expect it to be um and so it's just it is cool to just kind of even just from a from a presentation perspective it's it's just cool to have these old these old things playable on modern hardware i always appreciate that shit like even just for for curiosity's sake and i don't even think i bought this i'm pretty sure there might be a ps plus game at some point it might have been a ps plus game so like for sure if like you have that in your in your queue or whatever like yeah give it a go it is it is interesting and i'm like the least i was born in a weird time where like tmt has like damn near no cultural relevance to me at all like i grew up in between like the movies and like the modern kind of tv shows that people really really loved so like there was just like a a vacuum of space where like i had uncles who were really into it and and like nephews who are really into it and And then I was just like, I don't.

2:54:58This whole concept is dumb as hell. But like, I mean. Yeah, it's funny. I grew up. I was the perfect age for the cartoons. I was four when the cartoons came out. And I was into it from that age until probably 93 or so. But the thing is, is that I was. It was competing. It's what Dagan always talks about, about childhood resource management, where it's like you have to like and I love how he always talks about this. It's like you have to just decide what you're going to be into. and I love turtles and I had I had the four turtles I had shredder I had rock stadium bebop and a few others but like I wasn't I was like GI Joe man I'm still in it was cross they were major competitors with each other so I was like I don't have the the resources like I'm not my parents they didn't just capriciously buy a shit you know like we had to be like a good report card and you got an action figure or it was your birthday or something or you saved money from something or did some chore or something so that was like what stopped me from getting deeper into tmnt while i knew kids that were like that was their shit and if you were into that original run of playmate toys like they went on for a while and yeah they're like really popular and i loved the uh the tmnt shredders was it shredders revenge where that was like such a throwback to my era and even shit that I didn't even recognize where I was like oh this is from like 1994 or 1995 and like like the various villains and shit but I I think turtles is the turtles that I think is the best and this is a little I don't know how unpopular this would be is the the the first movie is the live action movie is so fucking good like has no business being that good and I am a huge fan of Casey Jones so that's like my favorite thing in TMNT is yeah Casey Jones just beating the shit of people with baseball bats in New York City it's like I'm with a hockey mascot it's fucking dope love it yeah I think like at my age uh for a lot of the people who were like that age around the height of the turtles I think for me it was like Spider-Man and Dragon Ball sure kind of was like took that mantle because there were so many games and you know Boudicca and the Spider-Man movies were like new and big so like that was like my obsession and it was just like and then I think in 2007 is when like turtle started kind of coming back because they had that yeah and i don't know any of that like i don't know any of the new shit at all i don't i've seen that that mutant mayhem movie is actually pretty good i remember i remember a bunch of friends of mine wanted to see that and it and it was it looked like it was like animated with like some spider-verse style stuff so i was like as an animation person like all right i'll check this out and it was pretty good uh it's surprisingly good actually from what i remember but yeah i just missed it so like my only experience really is the tmt arcade port and i played the shit out of it but like i don't even think i knew it was like i don't even think i knew that it was based on a cartoon until like genuinely probably like 2009 or something like i had no concept that it was ever like i think i knew the movies but i thought that they were i guess i knew that they were comics and i knew that the movies were based on the comics but i had no idea like about the the television shows from like back then i had no fucking clue so yeah but that's really all i've been playing arc raiders every now and again still too and i'm trying to play through vampire the masquerade still but like i just i have it on pc for free and i so rarely want to sit at my pc to play games and that's kind of like the it's really the only barrier really for me it's just like i'm just not that's why i want this machine i want to do i want this valve machine i could sit and play this stuff in my living room it's like it'd be pretty good but right now like my desk is too i'm always like i'm always like frustrated at myself when i'm at my desk i'm not working like it makes me upset so like it's not the best environment but I think Kronos is probably next over the holidays.

2:58:52oh yeah i'll probably get to that yeah past 500 000 copies sold shout out yeah shout out to chronos i'm hoping i've heard really good things about it and i'm hoping i'm hoping that i haven't built up an internal narrative in my own mind where i'm like expecting it to be more than it is like i'm always like very cognizant of that where it's just like i i hope i'm like managing my i think you're gonna like correctly but i think you'll understand it i hope you like that you you feel about dead space the way i feel about that space and this is definitely in that vein so I think you'll dig it Dustin are you with Turtles do you like Turtles I like Turtles I grew up playing Hyperstone Heist on Sega Genesis and I really like that game I like them but I've never considered myself a big Turtles guy so I have wanted to play the Shredder's Revenge at some point but I just haven't gotten to it alright let's hear from you So as you're playing Metal Gear Solid Delta still, I'm done.

2:59:51OK, you're done. And then Red Dead Redemption one. Yes. Yes. So as far as Metal Gear Solid Delta, I wrapped that up. My thoughts really haven't changed on it. It, you know, it points looks insanely beautiful. I love the different enemies in this game. Some of the parts are very silly. The ending, of course, is so good. Iconic. i was sitting down to play it and i was in that everyone knows if you know you know but i won't spoil it i was like holly pay attention she's like looking at her phone during this scene i'm like you can't this is one of the most iconic scenes in gaming history you can't be on your phone she's like i don't know what's going on i'm like doesn't matter if this watch watch uh the there is a section the the motorbike section colin i was i thought about you because I was like, you're like, I didn't notice anything.

3:00:46You surely noticed something during the motorbike section. Yeah. The explosions were, it's bad. Yeah. It's bad. It's bad during that action, action set boys. It's, it's like, I don't, I don't know if I would call it acceptable, but it is, it's playable and it's just, I wish it was better from that sense. Also, I checked out the, the PlayStation exclusive, like the ape escape mode. Super cute. I don't know if you, you played that. Oh, I guess you got the platinum calling. You probably had to. No, no, you didn't have to. And I didn't. Oh, I did. I did play it for the for the love of the for the love of the game, for the love of the game, for the love.

3:01:21It is really cute. It is just like a fun kind of romp. Yeah. So I enjoyed that. But I've moved on. I was in a weird spot this week because as of the day we're recording, Metroid Prime four is out. So I'm going to be playing that. So I decided to start Red Dead Redemption. But no, I've been saying for years at this point. And I feel like since Red Dead Redemption 2 came out that I've wanted to start. I wanted to replay both these games, but I really want to enjoy them and take my time with them. And I decided with Red Dead Redemption, there's the they just ported to the PS5. So it's, you know, people are talking about it right now.

3:02:01And that got me thinking about it. I was debating where I was going to buy it because I was like, oh, this PS5 version looks pretty good. But I ultimately decided to get on PC because if this is a long term game, then I want to be able to play it on Steam Deck. And I looked and it runs fantastic on Steam Deck. So that gives me options for long term play. And the main thing from the beginning of the game that I was just thinking about was it's always funny in hindsight. because I remember when PS4 came out and even throughout the PS4, a lot of people were like, well, the games are better resolution, but they're really, you know, it's not that big of an upgrade.

3:02:42And I know it's Rockstar, but seeing Red Dead Redemption 1 again after Red Dead 2 being most fresh in my mind, I'm like, you look at these two games and you see a major generational upgrade. It's insane. It's crazy. And it's probably not fair. because we are talking about rockstar here on and i'm sure we'll see a similar type a level of quality with red our gta 6 but dude it's been fun uh well you okay no i would like because i saw a screenshot recently of like comparing like character models from gta 6 and gta 5 and it's like it is insane how that game makes gta 5 look like fucking san andreas yeah like it it's fucking bewildering i don't i really don't understand it yeah i i'm very excited uh for what that ultimately ends up being but uh yeah red dead one is it's so good and it's so cool playing it again with red dead 2 now all the context of that story in my mind it's good to be around john marston he is so you know so charming and i remember playing that game in ninth grade and like me and all my friends were like howdy ma 'am like we were obsessed with like being of how being a cowboy in ninth grade which is so funny uh he's not he's not arthur morgan though uh i don't they're both so great but something about arthur morgan just existing as who he is and partially because of us is now just funny to me so it's not quite that level but I'm having a nice time with it.

3:04:20I'm still extremely early. I've basically done a few missions and you're on the ranch at the beginning. So I'm liking it. It's weird to play that game at 4K 120 FPS. But it is very nice. It doesn't look like that. It's very nice. Alright. I'm playing a couple things here. Utah, get me too. I had to look this up. this is from point break i think oh and it's just a random right i don't know yeah it's um gary bucey says it to keanu reeves in point break the 1991 movie so i was like what is that reference i don't i don't remember this at all but that's what it is it says hello colin i recently popped the platinum trophy for ball pit over the thanksgiving weekend it's a great game and lots of fun and I really enjoy chasing the platinum.

3:05:14However, now that I have it, I don't really feel any desire to play it anymore. I know that you usually delete the game off your list and move on after getting the platinum. Is this a hard rule that you live by? Do you have any games that you have gone back to after the platinum just because they are so enjoyable? Yeah, of course. I mean, especially a lot of old games like I'll play again, but the platinum is usually the end. I mean, there's really not often very much to do. In fact, you've kind of gone typically above and beyond getting the platinum. I will say I also got the platinum in ball pit a few days ago.

3:05:41It's platinum number 195 and uh i think you do so much of repetitive shit in the game i mean it's fun i enjoy the game but to get the platinum you have to beat every stage with every character like what else are you going to do you have to build every building you have to do everything in the game so there's nothing left to do if you want to play it again because you you want to delete your save and do it again have have at it in fact is is ball pit on ps4 probably you could probably even just it i don't know if it is but if it is then you probably just get that version download it and then just do it again if you want is wait dude google ai is so bad it is it is bad um because i'm looking on the wikipedia yeah it's i don't i don't believe it's on ps4 yeah it's only on ps5 google ai is like it is a roguelike game for ps4 it's like no it's not yeah why is it so bad isn't it crazy how like we have brand new technology that's making old technology worse yeah and no one wants for things we used to be able to just search for things and get like responsive answers that were accurate all right so i utah get me too i think that you are totally in the right of doing this that's totally fine i think it's acceptable ball pit is basically has basically run its course if you've gotten the platinum trophy it's not one of those games where there's a lot of to do after the platinum i have a i know the question was for you colin but i just saw they announced multiple new new content pieces for ball pit next year three why not just put it down put down let it breathe when that new content's out there you go you can beat every stage again with two new characters every time they release a content right exactly exactly so and i i should say that i i love the the trailer they were celebrating a million sales which is awesome and that they're they're gonna do three free updates next year which is awesome and keep it going but yeah there's no need to so no i i really typically don't it's like and i'll redownload the game when the dlc comes out but for now i'm totally satiated and i do think ball pit's one of those games where it's like that that makes you really see every inch every fucking square inch of the game is just necessary to get the platinum and then i've been playing metal eden which is a first-person shooter that came out in september that i would describe as doom meets um you know various platinum games specifically vanquish i would say and then has little tastes of like metroid and bioshock and all sorts of different things with some of its you know gameplay mechanics but at its heart it's a doom-like shooter where you don't even aim like you can't aim down sites you there is no run button you're just always moving really fast and i really really like it it's a little bit um well all right so i played through it and i beat it on hard i also played it on stream and probably played a third of the game on stream on normal and now i'm playing through on brutal difficulty which is the hardest difficulty level and i'm on mission six of nine like towards the end of mission six it's it's really difficult but i'm slowly getting through it um i don't think it's a game for everyone but i think if you like doom especially the new doom games or you like just first person single player first person shooters it's it's nice it's it's got some technical problems wherein there's like some clipping problems where you like clip through the environment from time to time or like end up on the wrong platform and it kind of fucks your whole vibe up of like where you are and like what way you're facing and like you're kind of snapping in another direction and the screen tearing is crazy in the game although i don't know if that translates translated in the stream i don't know if that translates but like the screen tearing locally is bad like um but if you can get if you can get past that which i did the game moves so fast it's like you're not even paying attention to that kind of shit you're just like looking for enemies and it's really fun and cool futuristic story really nice writing really nice voice acting not very long on normal you can probably beat it in eight hours maybe on hard it took me like 10 or 11 and i'm brutal it's taking me a lot longer because you have to be very deliberate cool upgrade skills and upgrade trees in the game you're upgrading your weapons you're also upgrading the character so yeah nothing too uncre it's by a studio called rykon and they're the guys that made the game ruiner if people remember that which was like kind of like a like a twin stick i think it was like a not a twin stick shooter but like a top-down shooter and it makes you want to go back and play i think i own it actually i think i bought it on sale once or maybe it was on ps plus or something but i want to go back and play that at some point this makes you want yeah i forgot about this i also think metal eden the one one that i was saying it's like vanquish i think it's like vanquish very much in its visuals and it reminds me a lot of gi joe which vanquish also does like what what a gi joe game could be so it's it's pretty cool and so if you're into that sort of thing go check it out and let me know what you think and you can do watch our stream as well over on youtube that we did all right that's all we have for let's what we're playing so let's get into six questions comments concerns thoughts and ideas from the audience over on patreon patreon.com slash last day media.

3:11:01Remember you support us over there. You get early ad free access to all of our shows in our network, including sacred symbols. You get access to sacred symbols. Plus you can submit inquiries to the show, which you're about to discover here. You do so using the thread on the newsfeed for the various shows, for defining Duke, for punching up for sacred symbols, whatever the case might be. A bunch of other perks as well, RSS feeds and so on and so forth. I like this right in from Denny would never, because it's not really a question, but it gets me into something that I wanted to ask you guys about, because I've noticed this.

3:11:29denny would never says headline gamers loud potential game of the year arc raiders for a revolutionary concept of socializing are gently introduced to the concept of outside dustin you guys are both players of arc raiders so i want to hear from both people let's start with you there does seem to be this this unusual social element to this game that is bringing people out of the woodwork and like it's like one of the shining things about it and And it seems now to correct me if I'm wrong, it seems like online gaming has become increasingly antisocial in a way since I played back on PS2, PS3, 360, whatever, the original Xbox.

3:12:10I don't play online games at all anymore, so I have no experience in them. But what I understand is like I used to be the weirdo. I would jump into a map on Resistance 2 or something and I would mute myself and I'd be the only one not talking. It would annoy people. you know like now you jump into a game or like when i randomly jump into online games like hell divers was an interesting one whereas like no one's talking which was fine with me and i didn't feel so weird anymore so what do you think about this could this be an inflection point in moving games back towards a more social realm well i think there's an element of i mean particularly on playstation 3 maybe they introduced it at some point but a lot of people were forced into in-game lobby chat because they had no alternative to talk with the people that they were choosing to play with, like their friend or something.

3:13:00It's like, you want to keep talking with your friend? You're in the party with everyone else that's in the lobby as well. Eventually, Xbox introduced the party chat feature, which removed you from that. So you were only talking to your friends. And now, I mean, particularly both on console and on PC, people are playing on their own private discord servers and they have no reason to interact with the people in their own games so what's been interesting is that there are more games now that can that use interaction with other players is not just like a way to i mean it is a way to smack talk but is a feature of the game that the games are designed around that social element i think is the big difference where particularly games like like i remember one of the game first games we played recently where it's like oh we gotta go we gotta play use in-game chat um with some of these friend slop games uh what is it called what was the main one called chris repo before that even oh uh lethal company yeah lethal company was a game that's like hey we're and that wasn't even with randos necessarily it was just like we want to use the in-game chat in order to use the features for it and with arc raiders in particular is that arc raiders it really is a form of role play when you are because you're putting yourself in the situation of someone that's in this you know dangerous uh wild west setting with other players where maybe you could team up maybe they'll just shoot you on the spot and there's people that are getting absolutely wacky with some of these player action player interactions i saw a guy on instagram reels that would down people and then he had like music set up and he would do like an a trivia game and he's like you've been selected to play arc raiders trivia and if you win i'll revive you and give you a gun um so there's just like all kinds of off the wall stuff so i as much as the right in here is making a joke about it and you know it's funny uh i don't think gamers are think that's revolutionary for the concept of socializing most people playing online games are socializing they're just not socializing with people they don't know under the context of a light role play of the situation you're in in our creators yeah i think the big part of it too is the type of game it is like even if um Because the option of having Discord chat still exists.

3:15:33You can choose to... You don't have to go into in-game chat in Arc Raiders. You can still... The options are available to you. You can still do the PlayStation Party. You can still do the Xbox Live Party chat. You can still do Discord. You can still do TeamSpeak if you're still doing that. It's not like the option isn't there, but people are choosing to opt into the game specifically because the type of game it is. If you're playing a game of Halo or Battlefield or whatever, there's really no... there's no reason for you to communicate with the enemy team outside of the novelty of it, because your only real meaningful interaction with the enemy team in a game like Halo or Battlefield or whatever is, I'm going to shoot you.

3:16:15I'm going to kill you. I can choose maybe to take the shot now or wait to take the shot later. But the only real interaction that we're having is like i kill you you kill me there's no option really in between that would benefit the objective of the game whereas like an arc raider is like if you meet a random person they could be an enemy or they could be a friend and so it it does behoove you to be able to communicate directly with them to iron that out and that by itself kind of creates this weird interesting dynamic where people can like they can betray you they can stab you in the back i've seen so many interesting things were like there's a there's like a door on one map that like i don't know if it was a glitch or whatever but like you could only open it from the outside and so like there was this guy so it was a glitch so basically like if you were locked in that room you couldn't get out and he was this guy was waiting outside the door and he was opening it and he downs him and he's like hey hey listen listen don't kill me don't kill me there's a weapon in that room i can show it to you it's in the back corner and then he goes in there and he's down and he reaches up and he closes him he locks him in and it's just like there's it's just interesting like there's i have yet to play um and to be fair this i don't want to pretend like this is just arc raiders this does happen in extraction shooters but i do think there is something about arc raiders where like because you are so much less i don't want to say equipped i do think the third person perspective and just the type of play it is it's like there's a little bit of weapon jank in it it's not the most it's not like destiny where you feel very capable you know if you need to get somewhere you can do it or you know you're very reliant you're very weak and so because of that it it incentivizes this kind of more careful mode of play there are other extraction shooters where you can team up and it does happen but i think the nature of the first person perspective in those other games just makes it feel inherently more competitive and makes you feel a little bit more like no i could take them out like there's there's less of a reason i feel um and so it's it's just this interesting kind of social thing that i've not played a game of arc raiders where people are talking and it's been the same outcome more than once like it's always like different there's always like these people with weird gimmicks i ran into a dude who was doing like a radio he was like he was like he was standing on a he was standing in like this like tower and he was just playing music and he was taking requests i guess he was like doing it through spotify but he had like no weapons on him he just went in there to just like play a radio dj and it was just like it's interesting like it's weird like he's literally doing this for no reason other than to create than to create interesting moments for other people and i think that's cool like it's really interesting it's been a it's been a really fun kind of thing to be a part of I do think, though, that the kindness is becoming more and more.

3:19:18I've noticed a little bit more hostility as time's gone on, because I think people are like getting more competent at the game. They kind of understand a little bit more. They get how the weapons work. They understand how reliable each thing is. They know they know to upgrade their guns to the highest quality. So now I've noticed more firefights. And that's kind of just destined to happen. but this brief period of time has been really fucking cool and i'm sure it'll continue to be as more people jump in and resets happen and all that shit but i i do think it's more than just people being reacquainted to socializing i think it's the fact that it's actively it is a tool for the for the actual gameplay as opposed to this extraneous thing that you just kind of opt into and opt out of i'm fascinated by the meta of the game i mean say i've said that many times now that i'll be interested to see how they they lean into the balance of it to keep it somewhat kind but also somewhat hostile um and i'm sure yeah i'm sure these well it reminds me a little bit of like every once in a while like my algorithm will recommend me like a gta 5 role play like uh video like people like people playing as cops or and shit and like all it's so strange and interesting i look it reminds me of like the old second life documentaries from like 20 years ago where there's like this whole subculture in games that's so fascinating that i truly and i'm not saying it because i'm above it i'm not it's just like i have no interest in being doing any of this shit in fact like a lot of it is cringy to me like like playing as a cop in gta 5 it's like oh i don't that's that's kind of okay that's cool if that's what you guys are into but it's cool that people do it and that you can absorb it without really playing it and uh the arc raider sociability stuff is is super cool and it's going to keep the game alive it's never going to be i don't want to say never but i don't think anyone expects it to be like a call of duty level um success story but it's a big game it's a really big game and this is this is why by the way too that like it was so baffling to me that marathon was going to forego this feature i really like i can't it is the primary and i'm and i mean the primary highlighted factor of any arc raiders clip that i've seen on social media the prime factor in it is strangers interacting with each other on mic like there's no like look at this crazy trick shot i got there's no like oh you know i i shot this drone and it fell weird it's always like every clip is two strangers interacting in a way that's like weird and eerie or funny or just like you know whatever whatever you want to call it but like the idea that that was even on the table where it's just like yeah we don't think we're gonna do it it's like why like how do you not know that this is like an inherent like a self-fulfilling marketing engine for your game and poor marathon by the way you know like yeah like i said there's a there's a possibility of marathon benefiting a great deal from arc raiders priming the you know prime you know greasing the skids and like people are into it and then maybe it comes along and then maybe like the gun plays better there's something very compelling about it and it attracts people but the the proximity of the game to arc raiders also means that it can die very quickly too and yeah i'll be very interested to see how it all goes i think it has the potential to grab a lot of the first person people because that is the main thing where like i hate pvp and arc raiders i think it i think it feels like dog shit i really like no matter how good i get at it and i've gotten pretty like i can competently like play that game and like scope people out and win but it's like it does not it doesn't it i don't know there's something about it that feels kind of i'm excited for whenever marathon's going to come out because i do know for a fact that it just it plays so fucking good but yeah there's definitely going to be people where it's just like that's just not going to be their kind of game you know because it's more pvp focused arc raiders is a lot friendlier it's a lot more like hey you want to help me do this quest like i know for a fact like even with proximity chat i know i know for a fact marathon is going to be toxically hostile i know it i know it's because you're just like you're gonna feel empowered to be that way because you're not just some guy you're not like some fucking weak little dude with a backpack running around like scavenging for screws and shit like no you've got like insane abilities so you're going to want to fight and that's going to be the prime difference i think between them i think marathon is going to be immediately hostile uh which i'm kind of into also but we'll see i think it's it really is like kind of like a coin toss where like i don't know how it's going to it might benefit it in the short term i think but like i do think in the long term it might be like they might be fighting a war with a studio that's and by the way bungie i'm saying might be fighting a war of attrition with a studio that's very responsive and very quick to react like embark is pretty good about like updating their game pretty quickly as far as like there's some issues still like there's glitches and shit where people are shooting people through walls but they've cleaned up a lot of like the the door exploits i know you probably know about that dustin where like you could like squeeze squeeze the doors to know about this so there are keys you can find to open up special unlock doors.

3:24:46But what people discovered is that if you were in a trio, one person would run at the door and if the other two jumped in front of it, it would push them through the door and they could unlock it without the key. This is a problem, but I'm sure it's like a tough problem for them to figure out in terms of like the level geometry and stuff like that. So their solution was, if you go into a room without unlocking the door, there are traps set up inside and they will roast you alive. it'll like fire will flow into the room and kill you i'm like cool that's pretty good solution it's a very skunk works solution it's it's like it's like it's like those third person camera uh mods of like the original doom 2016 where like you could see that like doom guy is like a head attached to like big feet right it's just like you're not you're not supposed to see that like like it's so funny to imagine like that room is just full of traps and then the second you you use the key on the door they just despawn like really unceremoniously and then you could just go in that is an awesome fix i think but uh yeah they're good about reacting and so that's going to be the big thing because bungie uh for as good as they are at like building games that just feel really fucking good they're not very responsive um they're more responsive than some other studios for sure but like it's just like dude there's been key destiny issues that have gone completely unaddressed for like a really really long time and so like i don't know they've got to be kind of on it with marathon and to be to their credit based on some of the people that i've spoken to who have been playing and playtesting marathon for years they have like responded to player feedback and stuff but and like change stuff for the better but like it's hard to know what that's like in a live environment it's hard to know like what their response time is going to be when the game's out the door and there's like a game breaking bug that like deletes everybody's loot like in outriders or something when that when that game had that problem you know how quick it was ridiculous that was the thing that made me not want to continue it because i was just like bro i'm not gonna it's a looter shooter and like i could lose all my shit no way yeah that would have that would have been soul crushing i dodged that thankfully yeah but yeah jonathan turner writes in and says hey guys got a question for you are there any games that over time have appreciate have appreciated for you the way good real estate does i'm not talking about replaying them just the way they grow in your mind and take on more value as years pass for me that game is the first death stranding when i first beat it i was pretty lukewarm on the whole experience but as time went on i kept thinking about the atmosphere of the soundtrack and that strange sense of loneliness i felt it i felt playing it during an unusually cold winter here in phoenix all that has made the game settle into a really special place in my heart even without revisiting it.

3:27:33Do you guys have any games like that? Titles that didn't fully land at the time, but I've grown in meaning or appreciation as years have gone by. Thanks as always. Dustin, you have any ideas that come to mind for this particular question from Jonathan Turner? Yeah, well, I don't know if the things that I was thinking of fully apply because he's saying something that you're lukewarm on and then grow. Because usually if I'm lukewarm on something, it usually doesn't change. There are games though that absolutely in my mind that I was like, yeah, it was pretty good. And then time goes on and you're like, actually, that was amazing.

3:28:07And games that have done the opposite, like famously for me, maybe not famously, but I've said many times, metaphor is a game that I thought was pretty good. And as time gone, as goes gone on, I'm like, yeah, I don't, it's, it's not as good as I think I thought it was at the time, or at least as memorable. But the games I think that have really grown on me that I've thought about. I mean, Death Stranding is a great example of a game that as time went on, you're like, wow, that was really, really incredible. The other two I could think of are, for me, NieR Automata is a game that I think about regularly.

3:28:45Think about the story and the concepts and how amazing it is. And I would love to replay it at some point. And also Red Dead Redemption 2. I mean, I just talked about Red Dead a little bit ago, but I think about Red Dead 2 all the time and how impactful that story was. And it's one of those things where you go to replay some of these games that age well in your mind. It can kind of be a double edged sword because you can like really, you know, lock in and think about those things that made it amazing and experience it again. But those less favorable things you maybe didn't like as much that you forgot about may come back.

3:29:24because I know when I play Red Dead Redemption 2 again, that epilogue that I will just leave it at that is entirely too long. But when I think about Red Dead, I don't think about that. I think about the key moments that are so good. And I think about like, this could happen with Nier Automata, though when I play it again, that some of those lesser moments or things that aren't so good about the game will come back. And so you got to be careful. Maybe some things are better left in your mind than going and re-experiencing them. Chris, anything come to mind for you? Yeah, there's been a handful of the...

3:30:03I think Metal Gear Solid V was the biggest one for me where I just had a borderline 180 on that game where I liked it reasonably enough, but I also... It's hard for me to talk about these kinds of things because I think it's earnestly just because I played them in different ways. And so I wonder if I would have felt the same way if I'd played it the same way you know like because when I first played Metal Gear Solid 5 I just I had no context for Peace Walker I had no context for like the metagame it just kind of seemed like frivolous um tedious menu stuff that I just didn't feel like engaging with I just wanted to do stealth shit and leave uh and because I was so focused on that not realizing how those those metagames kind of tie into that and give you more equipment I kind of fell off that game early and then i played it way later on steam deck and i chose to specifically interact with those elements a lot more and because of that i ended up like oh this is like a actually a fantastic like this is a really well well done system and like the meta narrative of it i think is like really compelling like more so than the like the narrative that's there like pre-scripted for you but i'm sure there's other games like that like i i often come back to games because they don't hit me right in the moment uh the witcher 3 was another one of those where i started that famously i started i started the game like a couple times before i really got into it and like before it really like gelled with me and even when it gelled with me i got i got really deep into it and then i got pulled away to something else so i'm sure there's a bunch of these uh that aren't coming to mind maybe the biggest one though is probably combat evolved where like over time i think i like combat evolved more i still acknowledge that it's like my least favorite of those games but like i think when i was a littler i didn't like it as much as i do now even if i still don't like it as much as the other the other things i think there's more to it and it is more interesting to study and like look at but those are really the only ones in my mind i was with you dustin where you were saying like games that I didn't necessarily didn't hold these games in esteem.

3:32:18In fact, I held a lot of these games in high esteem, but rather like the games that I think still have resonated over time in an even greater way are all the games that I think I thought we would get more of, but actually ended up being kind of one off attempts at something new and exciting. So I think about Mass Effect. Or even something like Spec Ops, the line is like a really powerful and dynamic and interesting game for the time just the game a metal year solid the original metal gear solid it's like these are the games where it's like damn all these years pass and they're still so interesting and unique and really think about all the things that have been copied ad nauseum there's certain things that are uncopyable or like really hard to replicate and that's the stuff that i think stands out to me more over time just a high level of quality even of a game like red dead redemption 2 what we were talking about earlier it's like just this insanely high level of quality for that sequel that all these years later it's still kind of the benchmark which is why i'm so very interested in gta 6 just from that perspective about like how much how high our expectation should be for it but anyway charles krauthammer wrote in very interesting charles krauthammer was you guys know who that is he was like he was like a he was like a political commentator and writer he was like in a wheelchair i think and uh he was on like fox news all the time i think he was the washington post i remember this guy he passed away probably i don't know five or ten years ago um charles and i what was funny is it's not he even it was even a picture of him like his icon was like a picture of like all right charles krauthammer wrote in and said hey gents i wanted to see if you share my disdain for leakers there is with rare exception some unemployed basement dweller who functions as a data broker, seeking to take all the wind out of our sails before a given media event.

3:34:05Can you imagine how cool it would be during the Game Awards if Half-Life 3, the current balloon being popped is revealed and absolutely nobody saw it coming? A delightful surprise. Instead, being a video game fan who is even mildly plugged in is akin to enjoying thriller novels. You're engrossed in one, except inevitably some schmuck comes up and says, wait till you see how she dies at the end. It's gruesome with the chainsaw. Can you believe her dad fucked her too? Jesus Christ. A seemingly apt parallel to turning into any media event in the game space. thoughts if you didn't it wouldn't have been weird if you just stopped before you talked about the dad fucking the girl yeah you know like you had you had like a lot of momentum going there charles it's it's charles crying you know yeah we to judge right yeah he's a great he's an award-winning writer accomplished person you know um we we discuss this every once in a while from different perspectives and obviously with the game awards on the horizon there's this feeling that you know what's a surprise and what's being leaked and all the rest.

3:35:01And I don't know, it feels a little less inelegant these days than it used to be because it's, it's just, it's all, it's all optical, but it's, it used to be like, uh, typically a, an outlet reporting something about talking to sources and they say this, and it's like this kind of story. And now it's just like someone tweeting out some fart and it being real or not and then people writing about that fart and then people interpreting it it's what we were talking about last week with intergalactic and many many times before i appreciate the game because there is a balance between just leaking everything that exists like i i all right let me put it this way i understand the perspective of a journalist saying like anything I learn, I'm reporting.

3:35:54I'm fine with that. It's not really their job to like keep secrets for and marketing secrets for companies. But then you think about also the gravity of that. Like it's not a state secret. It's not prism and like the spying apparatus or like secret wars in laos or like it's like the existence of a video game and it actually does have material effects on the planning of a company that you should ostensibly not care about but that nonetheless is being victimized by these different things and so i think there's a like a balance like i've leaked the existence of games before and it is what it is but i don't the thing that i'm mostly confused about i guess guys is people making a career out of it like that's what seems to be Jason Schreier's kind of thing, or we were talking about inside gaming like a while ago or whatever, it's like, here's a factoid you're not supposed to know.

3:36:48And there's a place for that. And that's awesome. And we use that, you know, we do that once in a while, but we also source that all the time when we talk about things. I'm just glad that I've never really been in that wedged into that space where like, that's what your production is expected. Like if, if Jason Schreier doesn't have a scoop for a month, that's like a big deal. we might not notice but for him you probably feel the pressing need to like say something that people are gonna but like for us it's just like oh here's our opinion on a game or here's like the interpretation of a news a news item and so i'm just glad that i don't even have to really be in that space so i don't have to worry about that i can say that there are things i know that would definitely spoil things for people not necessarily at the game awards but just like the existence of things and there really is no need to do it a lot of it is like a game for people and so i i can see it always and it's like really up to up to you so i don't begrudge the people saying like i'm learning anything i learned i'm be careful what you tell me it's like okay just be careful what you tell them i guess or what he learns do you how are you feeling about this the leaking and uh and to me it's not even the leaking it's just a speculation about the vague leaking again things used to leak when we were at ign and we wrote about destiny that shit leaked you know it wasn't like some vague thing that's what i'm saying like put your chest into it a little bit yeah i don't know i i mean it's not their job to protect like the the feelings i guess of like fans or or studios or whatever i do kind of miss being surprised by things that is a like a good feeling but it seems to me like the only way to get that really like you can still get that you just have to choose to not plug yourself in as much and we just kind of don't have that option i I think there is a fine line of like your interest in the industry where like you can choose to engage in such a way where like you know enough, but you're still capable of being surprised.

3:38:44But like at the level where it's like nothing's really going to like some things might be surprising. But like even if even if they are surprising, you would know like, oh, that makes sense because of this, this and that. you know what i mean there seems to be like it almost behooves you in some sense like it almost feels like you get maximum enjoyment out of this medium not necessarily the less you know but there's like a sweet spot it's kind of like uh like if you're a star wars fan but like it's kind of loose and you watch like a new movie and you're kind of like that was pretty good but then you go online and you hear like there's like a four hour sva about why it's actually shit and why you were you were a bad person for liking it it's like oh i guess i was i guess i was wrong right so like there is kind of this weird um i don't know like would it be cool to be like surprised by half-life 3 sure but at the same time like are we really going to be surprised because not even necessarily because it'll leak but this is a game that's been talked about forever so in some sense it's going to be like oh finally like i actually don't think it's going to be more surprise it's going to be more like oh they're doing the okay it'll be a big thing for like maybe a day yeah and then it'll be under the next thing well that's what you're saying about dick cheney died and i got like two hours and then i just forgot it ever happened and then they had his funeral i was like wait dick cheney died and i was like i was like oh yeah that's why i think chris they would have just benefited and i still think do benefit most from just releasing the game yeah there's no marketing that's even necessary it's just one of the it's like one of a half dozen games that could come out where it's like no no introduction needed valve does not need to market in half-life 3 no i hope that and i wish that they wouldn't announce it in other words just release it that'd be kind of neat um dustin do you have anything you want to say about uh leakers leak culture yeah i think i tend to agree with you colin that it's like if you're a reporter then that's your job and what you do and there's an element of how plugged in you want to be as a consumer i do think there is a degree of like if somebody a year ago was reported like report uh valve is toiling away at half-life three officially good leak interesting leak if as opposed to somebody finds out that it's going to be revealed at the game awards imminently and leaks that like at that point i think there's a point where it's like just just let them just let them do it the way they want to at this point you know as weeks away because sometimes that happens where it's like oh we know this this and this is going to be at the game awards because of leaks and i could see that being a little more annoying and feels like it's ruining the surprise but I think in general it just I don't know it really depends on the situation I'm of the mind where I just think the old whimsy that we expect out of the games industry is kind of long dead unfortunately because it became too big and it's commercial it's always been commercial it's a money making endeavor but The mystery and wonder of the magazine era has long been dead.

3:42:04And I think the. The Internet slowly eroded away things to a point now where it's just anyone can say anything. It's taken seriously. And then random people are proven right, which is even weirder. And then like it becomes clear that this random ass person on Twitter over the years actually knows things. And it's just it's just a different way of doing business.

3:42:28And it's always like I don't know if you guys saw like that guy, Hip Hop Gamer. recently said that steam was going to be on ps6 and it's like that would the reason i say this is because he actually says things sometimes and actually is right you know and it's like so you know things but then it's like but then we i don't report on that because i'm like that would just that makes no sense but then it could be true and my my reaction to it by the way is it would be the same it's like you just you're destroying your own business like why would you ever do that like it it would be like the end of what you're doing so but so you just never even know like what you're supposed to ignore what you're supposed to take seriously this guy got this thing wrong this guy said this thing it was right i don't know man it's crazy out there all right very interested to see what you guys think of this next story because it's making the rounds obviously and people are interested in what's happening here nerf ninja wrote in though as many did and said Any thoughts on Micron killing the crucial brand of SSDs and RAM for consumers as they pivot to support AI companies?

3:43:32I know gaming is a luxury hobby, but I wonder how the potential of pricing people out of hardware will impact the industry. So what's basically happened here is that, and this is from The Verge, they write, quote, Micron is retiring the crucial brand, marking the end of its line of budget-friendly solid-state drives and RAM kits, as reported earlier by video cards. In an announcement on Wednesday, Micron says winding down its consumer-focused businesses will improve supply and support for our larger strategic customers and faster-growing segments, a.k.a. AI companies. The brand shutdown, they write, is a huge blow for PC builders and hobbyists who are already dealing with skyrocketing RAM prices linked to a surge in demand from AI companies.

3:44:08OpenAI, for example, struck a deal with SK Hynix and Samsung to make up to 900 ,000 DRAM per month for its Stargate project. I was thinking about you guys when this happened as I both I know you're both more much more in technology than I am especially you Dustin so I'm curious what what this all means are these one of the only manufacturers of consumer ram or whatever or sellers of it and will it have any effect on things and will the the focus on they're they talk about strategic customers I don't think that that necessarily precludes video game manufacturers right they didn't say they're going all in on AI did they i honestly i'm not sure i've heard of this story of course and and i think that its effects could be pretty bad because to my understanding there are only i mean there are only so many people that have the or companies that have the uh manufacturing capabilities of making this kind of stuff and as we discussed on on some show i don't know for sake of streaming but open AI is purchasing 40 % of the world's DRAM manufacturing, which is causing complete chaos.

3:45:15And so the fact you have one less manufacturer just saying like, eh, we're just going to go all in on that. I mean, so that just means the supply is only going to get worse. And yeah, immediately this affects PCs, but it will affect everything. Uh, cause these company, I mean, PlayStation, Sony, Xbox, Apple, whoever, if you use DRAM, um, you need to get it. And that's what we talked about, uh, last week, I believe with the Moore's laws dead reporting that Sony had bought up a lot of extra supply. And so they don't need to raise prices for the time being, but it could be a long-term problem for them.

3:45:58So, I mean, I just, I'm wondering, it's funny when, when I see people talk about the AI bubble it's like the number one thing like when's the bubble gonna pop do you think it's gonna pop so i guess my very layman's opinion who's someone who does not follow a lot of this stuff is eventually all there will be an ai bubble pop of course but something like the ram that is needed just because there are less ai companies doesn't mean there's not still an increased amount of ai needed equipment from the winners of that. So even if the bubble pops, this RAM problem and all of the different problems along with AI in terms of manufacturing and hardware, I don't think are going to go away.

3:46:52So we just settle in at this point. It's funny, my friend, I was out to dinner with my friend over the weekend and he was like, I think I'm going to slowly upgrade my computer just because it'll be, you know, I think it could be cheaper that way. I can look for deals. I was like, no, this was Sunday night. I was like, listen, listen, Josh, you need to if you are wanting to buy a new computer, you need to do it tomorrow on Cyber Monday because you will never get a better deal now than you will in the future. And he did. He went and bought a new computer the next day just because it's like, dude, between the shortages and ai and tariffs and who knows and inflation inflation um the best time to buy a pc is absolutely right now and it probably should be a pre-build unfortunately because that d ran the the the price is going to be is insane on it i am i wanted to be fair because i was reading the press release and this is what i was talking about is that they write this is from Sumit Sadana, the EVP and chief business officer at Micron, and says, quote, the AI driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage.

3:48:05Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger strategic customers in faster growing segments. So I like I it'll probably be a lot of AI customers, but you assume it's and that might be. In other words, what they're saying is like we have a bunch of customers now and we need like the supply we have for the consumer side for our ai customers so i think a lot of people are saying like what does this mean for console manufacturing and what does this mean for the future consoles and stuff and i'm like sony is very well one of those major customers still of this this type of ramp so who knows i'm not super worried about it chris i thought you'd be appreciate appreciate this though we have more forward-looking statements here this press release contains forward-looking statements including statements regarding product supply and support areas of growth and profitability and workforce redeployment these forward subjects forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially so nothing so yeah nothing so nothing don't hold us to account for anything we've said here i need a new pc at some point i guess yeah but but i might just go and splurge tomorrow i don't really need one but i don't know why not really at this point it's a little bit i think you think i'll be all right for a while dustin if you're not playing games on that thing you are golden yeah all right cool in my opinion i mean do you notice it slow if you notice slowing down it's probably because windows getting worse yeah every once in a while like i have too many windows or i have too many like browser windows open or just too many things running in the background if like when my computer restarts it it it starts steam it starts disco like all these things and then i forget sometimes it just close them yeah but uh no i don't notice anything really crazy happening to be honest yeah you should be fine if you're not playing any games on it i think though at some point you want to stream directly on it well you're not you will only be using your computer just for the streaming it's not like you're going to be playing a game and streaming so even that it's already done that before because you streamed from that computer i believe so maybe you are completely fine yeah we'll see we'll see how it goes hopefully a lot of the the domestic manufacturer of a lot of this shit like they're building a lot of the stuff in arizona and nevada now i think it's like hopefully for us if we can just wait a couple years they'll start spitting shit out travis berry wrote in and said by the way just on the the manufacturing these factories and and and all the rest and fabricating all the stuff i totally get it's like immensely complicated immensely technical but it still seems like it takes a really long time to like build a factory if you do it in three shifts like 24 hours a day basically which is what a lot of these places do it's like it just seems like it still takes a long time anyway travis berry wrote in and said greeting sacred bros i find myself in a tough spot by the way this is why i didn't have any sad write-ins in the beginning because it's like and we're getting too many sad write-ins i think as well but i wanted to use this one because i thought it was it was it was nice it was heartfelt a lot of them are heartfelt but i think a lot of people also being like why do you have to depress me so much i'm going to try to stay away from him for a while my best friend of 27 years died suddenly this past summer growing up we played video games together especially halo and super mario brothers 3 battle and had meant to play no man's sky together before he died i didn't have a lot of friends growing up and he was the only person i knew that i could play games with i find myself getting jealous when i hear about dustin or brad playing a game with the boys.

3:51:39I don't have that now, and I have no idea how to make new friends online at 42 years old. Everyone I meet randomly online in games always already has a group of friends of their own. A group of their own friends, I'm sorry. I always feel like a third wheel. Any tips from the group would be appreciated. I thought I'd ask you guys this because you do, we were even kidding around about it, about, you know, the guy you were messaging on Arc Raiders and would you play in the future and stuff. and um travis i'm sorry for your loss i mean it's awful um but there's got to be way i mean it seems like discord and other things and just social media have made things so pretty social on the front of finding individual people if you're willing to do the legwork i think i think it's very possible very doable back in the day remember psm playstation magazine used to have like a personal a personals part where like you would try to find friends and like you would put like what you were into and like an email address and people would like correspond with each other.

3:52:37If you were in a role playing games, you're in this, that. And I actually met a good friend of mine on there that way a long time ago, 97, 96, 97, I guess it would have been. It just seems a lot easier now. So what do you think? Yeah. Well, I would recommend there's tons of like looking for group. Um, like I think we even have a looking for group channel on our discord, but the key is you're looking for other people like you that you're not looking to necessarily join a group of friends but finding other individuals looking to play together i i remember this was uh destiny one era before they had matchmaking for raids you the best way or at least the way we did is you would go to bungie.net and they had a forum and you could like post like looking for a group for Crota's End or whatever.

3:53:27And at some point, me and my friend, because you needed five people. So we had three people that we played with and we needed two more. We met a guy. I only remember him as Puff. Hopefully not Puff Daddy. But no, his name was Puff. And he ended up becoming our friend for a while. And he would play Destiny with us. And we've lost touch with Puff years at this point. But so finding friends online is absolutely still possible. and in fact probably easier than ever uh you just gotta i i don't know about any specific places to go look but like i said looking for group places in in terms of any like major gaming community they're gonna have those available what are your thoughts chris yeah i mean i think i would echo most of what dustin already said but i do feel like also i don't know like there seems to be and i don't know if i'm reading too heavily into this but like it seems to be an aversion to joining like an established crew or whatever but like you're probably gonna find that a lot and there's really nothing wrong with that like i'm i have plenty of friends who like have been friends for way longer than i've been friends with them and it's cool uh i've been friends with people since high school and people have jumped in to the end and people i don't know i just uh you're going to run into people who are friends with other people you know like and there's no reason why you can't also just get along with them and then suddenly you've got a bunch of people to play with so like i don't uh and and to be like maybe i am reading into that but i think yeah it's i i feel like it's easier now than it used to be because it used to be for me by chance you know by chance or based on the people that i know in in new in real life at school which is a pretty limited pool like you could luck out entire you could luck out entirely or luck in i guess like i don't know what i guess both of those would mean the same thing but you could really find yourself kind of fucked if you were like oh i'm in fifth grade or whatever and i'm in a small school and oh nobody here plays games that's crazy and then that's your entire circle um i was fortunate enough to not really be in that position but yeah i feel like looking for group there's forums still i feel like a lot of games also have like discord communities now too more so than i i ever remember like it used to be like you were really on your own like dustin was saying like you'd have to go to the bungee forums to find somebody to raid with like i remember i only had like i had like maybe four friends who were like super into destiny so we always needed that like those two other people and it was like really weird trying to get home because it was always just some straggler or just some person that like we barely knew or whatever but some of those people i i still have on my friends list and still play games with every now again uh i linked up with a friend of mine that i met that i haven't played played with since probably vanilla destiny to play marathon when uh the alpha was going on so like you just got to go out there and like look because the tools are there for sure yeah i'm looking i just want to make sure we do in our community discord we have a channel called lfg my recommendation is to go in and hop into someone else's game instead of saying i'm playing this anyone who does anyone want to play this meet people where they are yeah all right i just went on the discord and it's like that they have their own like recap discord recap oh no what the fuck show me you guys in our server i'd love to know how many messages you sent because some of you oh boy you know i'm talking about i'm not saying you guys i'm saying you the listener know who you're talking i've sent 977 messages how do you get that you know who i'm talking it's called checkpoint it was i'm on the browser version but it's uh it's just like one of the options on the top right for me I left 395 emojis number one being Rush number two being Smug Maddie yeah let's see Rush was number one actually the pilot from Harbroxia one is number two because I use that as the Rush in the Lillimo discord and then Smug Maddie is number three Smug Maddie that's elite uh what else is on here it's kind of i'm only on three servers so it's so funny your discord squad dustin chris and brad oh it is mega funny to me that like every single thing is doing like oh let's do a spotify wrapped you know like a lot of them just don't know how to do it like the youtube recap is quite frankly not not very good at all no someone made a tweet about that and they're like it's a genius idea because they realize that everyone is just obsessed with themselves yeah and so a spotify rap to give you all the information about what you like makes sense yeah i mean it's it's good marketing and it does feed in everyone's inherent ego yeah all right finally pushing positivity wrote in and said hey sacred symbols crew big fan from montreal here even though i enjoy the show a lot i sometimes feel the criticism can go a bit far almost like things are being picked apart just for the sake of it i do understand that that is the job, but do you ever stop and ask yourselves whether you're criticizing something just to be critical versus having a genuine substantial issue with it?

3:58:43It's a great question. And what I've realized is, I realized this a long time ago is, and it's just been, it's just been, just been proven over time is that you can't really please anyone or not anyone. You can't please everyone, please a lot of people. And I've always been looked at as too critical. And then there are other times where I've been looked at as too soft. And depending on where I am in my career, I think those things, one will outshine the other. I think I was looked at as much more critical when I was younger. I think what's funny to hear this from you now is I feel like people think I've gotten softer.

3:59:21That's like the general feeling that I get from, you know, just a kind of a smorgasbord of feedback that we receive is that Colin's too soft on Sony. Collins not critical enough on what's going on with PlayStation Studios and all the rest so I feel like if anything I've probably gotten softer and a little bit more calmer about things but remember my job isn't to have a genuine substantial issue with things it's to talk about the news if we're talking about the things that I have genuine substantial issues with this would be a very different show I'll tell you that much yeah um so don't lose sight of what we're trying to do.

3:59:59We're trying to talk about what's relevant and then give honest opinions on those things. But I'm not, I pick things through a little bit of a lens of what, like Tomba, for instance. It's like, well, Dustin cares about that. That's not really important news, right? Or a Mega Man piece of news. It's like not an important piece of news. But so there is a little bit of bias, but we're, I always say this, I'm like, I don't make the news. And I think I try to be fair. I try not to be flippant. That's the big thing for me. I think these are people's jobs, to projects that have cost hundreds of millions of dollars and entire companies riding on things.

4:00:33It's very serious. But I do the best I can. What do you guys think? Chris, do you think we're too positive, too critical? What's your take? I don't think we're too critical. I can say from, I mean, I can't speak for either of you, but I can say for sure that it is a genuine, it is a genuine, I guess pet peeve would be the nicest way to put it. But it is an an authentic pet peeve of mine when people are, when I can tell people are just trying to find something to complain about, or when people are trying to find like the latest thing to be petty and, and pick apart. And like, there are certain things that I think warrant it.

4:01:17And then certain things that I feel like don't, but like a big issue that I have with a lot of the online space is how like everybody has a really, really intense and a really, really hyper specific opinion about everything every single day and that feels impossible to do authentically and so i try personally like i'm just very hyper aware of that and so i try i try to be pretty um relatively kind to things that even i don't you know gel with that much uh but as far as like if if i'm really harsh on something i feel really genuinely about it you'll you'll know you'll know and i think that's true for any any of us really um but yeah like you said it's not really the job is to to talk about the news and so sometimes we'll pick it apart like i wouldn't necessarily like stake my life on like some of the things that i've said about like some some game or whatever like it's not like a deep like oh man i'm not actually livid about splinter cell you know is it is it is bothersome to hear about it and have it like not materialize for years but like i'm not like thinking about it night and day and it's not like like an intense position of mine like i wouldn't sit there and make eight videos about it but it's relevant because it's some news happened about it and so we're going to talk about it and i'm going to voice the small you know the the confusing feelings I have about it.

4:02:50And sometimes by virtue of me talking about it, it's going to seem like more intense than it actually is. But just view it through the lens of like, we're talking about things that are news and things that are happening. And it's our job to have something to say about it. And there are even sometimes where like, we're talking about something and I'm like, I don't have anything to say about that. I think Dustin said everything that I would have said. It doesn't really, or like vice versa, you know, and there's nothing to add. trying to be respectful of people's time and all that so i don't know i i don't think we're too critical or too positive or really anything i think we just i think we're just talking about the news doesn't it's you know it's funny this job and i'm sure that it's any critic's job that's like if you're too positive you get called a glazer if you're too negative people don't like that either the thing that's always been important to me and i'm sure this is important to you guys too is that i'm just i'm never going to be try to be inauthentic um like i'm always want to tell you guys what i think is it maybe sometimes biased and not as justified as possible sure but i don't think you're looking to sacred symbols for like the most factual analysis uh well i mean it's factual from that standpoint but i mean just like that we're we're telling you what we think about something from our personal experiences in life um maybe there are things that bother us a lot more than others um and it's funny this is this writing is from pushing positivity yeah and i i don't mean to rip on you but it's like that sounds just being positive all the time it just says to me that you don't care um i'm not saying you push in positivity but if we were just here like yeah well actually concord had a lot of great qualities um and well yeah everything you know is great playstation they're doing a great job all the time about everything it's like oh these guys are so inauthentic and i think i would hope at least in my impression is that we are very the things we are positive about we are very positive about to the point where it often annoys the audience it can go both ways but going back to what I said I think the most important takeaway is that for me I'm always trying to be authentically myself with my thoughts and opinions you're either going to like that or you're not and that's fine I just never am going to be like I need to be more positive or I need to be more critical it's just what I think well I think that's well said yeah yeah I again I just get back to the you can't please everyone so you just have to be yeah authentic I think that's the best we can do so we do what we can push in positivity thank you for writing in let's get the hell out of here it's time to go that's all we have for this episode of sacred symbols Chris goodbye to you be well any plans for the rest of your day no I'm actually recording I'm recording probably in 15 minutes so i've got another show and then and then we're recording after that uh so i'm probably going to be at it it's like it's two it's almost 2 30 i'll probably be recording since we usually have what's it three so probably i'll probably be at it till like 7 30 nice well good luck it's a long day yeah i mean i don't mind it i i like i like recording and working it makes me feel like i'm not i'm not doing nothing right usually on and usually on days like this where like i i do a lot the whole day i feel more at ease with like okay it's 9 p.m i'm just gonna waste a ton of time on a video game right right because i still have this nagging feeling in my mind from like my parents not that they like discourage me from playing video games or whatever but i still have this like i would i would like spend a lot of time on a game and then i would go downstairs and be like welcome to the land of the living right right look who's alive and it's like it's like that meme it's like that meme when you come downstairs and everyone's like looking behind them yeah it's it's even though it's my job to play games i still get this feeling like i'm not working and it's like it's so frustrating but today i'll i'll probably i might start chronos tonight actually cool that might be that might be the move especially like once the sun goes down late at night some good some good horror vibes going I think that might be the move Cool enjoy Dustin goodbye to you Be well anything going on in your life Well I can already smell Holly has chili In the slow cooker for dinner So I'm pretty excited about that I have to go to my dad's House tonight we're going to look at Insurance Yippee my insurance is going up Many times and I need to figure out New insurance health insurance yeah my health insurance hell yeah dude insurance companies are awesome ah i love this middle man i love this middle man that we've all agreed that we need for some reason yeah i was already guys i was already spending some more money in my life last year on insurance just to take care of things for the family and they're like hey uh you're spending more than you have in your life we're gonna we're gonna jack that up yeah it's quite a bit it's fucking complete racket and it's there's not there's nothing wrong with the idea of health insurance there's something wrong with this being like this this blatantly for-profit just evil fucking it's just weird dude it's i'm trying to know if i i'm on the edge of the of a rant right now about insurance all i'm gonna say is just you spend so much money on this shit like i just said more than i have in my life every time there's an appointment i still need to pay money yep and i understand i understand premium i understand how this shit works it just makes me so mad yeah it sucks dude uh bullshit so on the high on the nice side though when i'm inevitably gonna be sad about how much i'm spending on insurance later tonight you know what you do to fix that go out and spend money i'm gonna buy metroid prime 4 probably so is that samus is that dude that video that got dude i at least i'm not my cubicle i man man uh we didn't talk about it on the show obviously because it's not playstation oriented but like wow uh hopefully that is not all that game but i'm hearing so i'm hearing some things i already saw i already saw it's not that bad yeah i've seen it's minimal right but i've seen some I don't know there's there's some videos that I'm excited to click on because I'm like what's good what's going on but oh well all right yeah let's get out of here guys thank you for your time appreciate you guys we'll see you next time for more remember next episode will be late because of the game awards be patient we'll see you on sacred streaming of course and we'll see you for the game award stream as well that night that's it uh patreon.com slash last day media for early at free access last stand media.

4:10:01So for merch till next time. Goodbye. See ya. Take care guys. Sacred symbols. A PlayStation podcast is a product and trademark of last stand media and Collins last stand LLC and is proudly recorded in the USA. The show was conceived by is written by and is directed by me, Colin Moriarty. My co-hosts are Chris Raygun Maldonado and Dustin Furman. The show is produced by executive producer Dustin Furman. All of Last Stand's theme music is by my best friend, Ramon Narvaez. As you know, all of Last Stand's shows, including Sacred Symbols, are fan-funded on Patreon at patreon.com slash laststandmedia.

4:10:41The following names are at the producer level on Patreon, our highest tier, and we're grateful for your thoughtful and kind contributions to our independent endeavor. Thank you. Patrick Leslie, MadMockMedia, Kyle Martin, Mark, Brad Cooley, Daniel D 'Amour, John Cordero, Don Lee, Shane Rayoum, Joshua Smallwood, Enrique Perez, Chad Lewis, Paul Joyce, Austin Riley, Justin Wagaman, Justin Payne, Alex Monez, Omar Rosa, Joey Gondaliger, Gio Corsi, Cam Wallace, Benjamin Michalco, Donald Difford, Alex Gates, Michael Gates, Josh McKinney, Adam Nix, Throw7, Phil Crone, Mr. Tom, Cannonball Jones, Jorge Pal, Anthony Vasquez, Ghost Storm 672, Simon Conception Jr., Peter Dreher, Alex Cabrera, Chris Ritchie, Shane Miller, Tony Zuniga, Jean-Francois Forze, Ryan T.

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