#389 | Something's Magnetic Here

21:00Chris Wray:people by the 200s yeah i am strange yeah i was uh there was a time a few years ago where you were

21:09Colin Moriarty:maybe gonna right yeah well there was a time i was thinking about it because i wasn't sure exactly like where things were going not like with the show i knew things were going to go with it

21:20Chris Wray:well with the show yeah you weren't sure what you wanted to do yeah because it was starting to become

21:25Colin Moriarty:like especially just with the star tank 2 is just like i was becoming like and i am still basically just like podcast oriented entirely and now it's so so much it's crazy but i've gotten used to it

21:37Chris Wray:i think you know podcasting is i mean yeah because i remember that being like kind of your dilemma was like i just don't feel like i have time to do like what i want like the the videos yeah that you want to do and all the rest and i'm like well nothing's really changed yeah no but i've gotten better at managing time i think i think uh and also it's the reality is it's just like it's it's

21:59Colin Moriarty:nice that podcasts have a reliability to them in the sense that like youtube isn't reliable you know you can spend you can bust your ass on something for like a long time and it'll cut and then you'll put it out and then like sometimes the feed will be like no just nobody's gets nobody's gonna see this and then you have to take it down and re-upload it and then it hits or like you know there's a whole bunch of bullshit that goes in there's no there's no rss feed equivalent i I guess. Right. Right. Yeah. So it's true. Like it won't it.

22:28Chris Wray:There is like that raw feed of things like in sequential order based on who you're subscribed to, but it's almost unreadable in video format, you know, and so you have to rely on your algorithm plus you maybe having the you know, the forethought to go to these different channels and just look. I often go to channels that I really like to see like has anything even gone up on this channel? And often it's like, oh, yes. Yeah. And it's so it's very I don't envy people that Let's do YouTube full time because YouTube's really more of a repository for our content as opposed to us really engineering content for YouTube.

22:59And I feel like YouTube is just such a podcasting is the same, but it's like YouTube is a very heated, sensitive, ever changing space to like put content on.

23:13Colin Moriarty:It's a very frustrating machine. I'm sorry, Chris. No, I said it's a very frustrating machine. There was change and shit that like nobody asked for. and just like that's just that's just technology people from their ai uh review team have you seen that recently oh no i didn't see that there's this pokemon youtuber that focuses on the games someone took one of his clips and uploaded it from twitter he's like his clip on twitter and then he was like oh it's doing well on this guy's channel i'm gonna upload it to my channel after i strike him for stealing my content youtube thought that he was stealing the original channels content and banned him oh wow and it wasn't until fucking moist critical came in you know a famous person to come in and be like this is bullshit oh i did see i saw i saw slivers of this story yeah yeah it's it's bad it's real bad um yeah it's it's it's i don't know man i've had we've had episodes of our show uh manually reviewed and they're like oh good uh it's good for monetization and i'm like there's no shot you manually review that if you think that yeah like we we put this episode up specifically being like this is not good this is fine like this is not good this is not going to generate nothing and so for you to come in it's like the first like five minutes of that show is like the most vulgar shit ever and so like you manually reviewed this no you didn't you're crazy well chris i'm glad that you

24:44Chris Wray:made the decision not to leave at that point. I always get I'm always fascinated by obviously everyone's free to come and go if they want to, but I'm always fascinated by like people's criticisms of our show specifically in either you or me. And I'm like, but it's been us since the beginning. It is the show. I don't understand like what even the critique is. Like it used to be better or it used to be this or this. It's like this person's not the right fit. It's like it's been eight years. yeah it's not a pilot right i don't know i definitely think it's gotten better i think yeah almost certainly yeah the show's gotten better it's it's found its way and um it's great it's all of our shows and dustin you know when did you join dustin was a 21 22 50 or was it 250 or 150 no it's 150 yeah 150 art so you've been here a lot more than half the time at this point which is crazy there's been different generations and of of the show and yeah we have a good thing going i i mean i really want to do this show with the three of us for as long as we can like like literally i i mean i don't want to speak too out of pocket but like i do feel like this show could reach a thousand episodes when you really think about it even if like life changes people do other things like doing it once a week and just having this thing running for that long with the same people is it's kind of where my mind is with it and i think if by the time we reach a thousand episodes so that will be you know many years from now um like more than a decade from now if we kept going the whole landscape will be so different that it could be a time where it would kind of naturally go away like it's like now is naturally kind of the time it goes like the show doesn't serve a purpose anymore right really it does never serve the purpose being honest so um But yeah, I remember that.

26:37Chris Wray:That was around the time when Chris was doing a content... Why can't it create a clash? Fucking out of my mind. I'm struggling. I'm like barely hanging on. By a thread. Anything else here to say? Yeah, no, that's it for that. Oh, merch. LastMedia.store. Please support us. Thank you. Oh, it still says Black Friday sale here. Nope. Nope. All right, let's get into some topics of discussion, then we'll get into the news. Remember all the Game Awards stuff we're going to splice in. It doesn't really matter to you. It'll be here in the episode. We'll get into what we're playing. We'll finish with listener inquiries, as we always do.

27:17Chris Wray:Let's start with Diploma Velazquez or Velazquez says Sacred Fellows. Can we start the episode with everyone giving each other a compliment? As the year closes, alleviating tensions and giving positive affirmation has always been a fun tradition in my family. Thank you all for an amazing year. my weeks wouldn't be the same without lsm and sacred streams was an awesome addition this year

27:39Colin Moriarty:how could this be dustin say something nice say something nice impossible no i'm just kidding um colin this something about this feels a little gay but you've asked me to okay here we go colin you're a very loyal friend and employer and both of those are important to coincide you know i can rely on you i appreciate that you've always had my back chris you make me angry with how funny you can be naturally i feel like i'm working my ass off to be 10 as funny as you he's dying over here so i uh you're you're just naturally gifted in that way and it's much appreciated oh so sweet there you go chris say something nice about dustin i admire dustin's work ethic genuinely i think it's uh it's insane like i wish i could do half as much work as he gets done in like a week like as reliably as he gets it done and uh Colin's fine he's alright should I say something nice only if you feel it in your heart may your heart be your guiding key you'll learn all about that pretty soon my family only complains about people so like I'm only used to complaining directly to people oh yeah no that's totally fine

29:15Chris Wray:Dustin you are a loyal friend and a hard worker and a good person, decent person, trusted with the keys of the company, basically. I feel very fortunate that you fell into my life. When you did as you did and the friendship that we've developed, you're a very important person to me. So yeah, that's my... Chris, I'm grateful for a lot of them. Like Dustin, I'm very envious of you too in your natural approach to content and the energy you bring to the shows. I'm also very grateful that, because I've said this before, like this show really started because of you and a decision you made when we went to dinner that time or a lunch in Santa Monica when we were just figuring out what to do with the show.

30:08Chris Wray:And I was surprised at the choice you made, but I was pleased about it. And we found its way and we just, it's just been almost like seven and a half years of just doing this and I really appreciate your presence in my life I really I love you very deeply uh you know um I feel like there are times where I you know uh like recently with what happened recently where I feel like I kind of let you down a little bit and um you know or like I feel a very protective brotherhood over my my people and whatever and when everything went down with with uh the the joke the charlie kirk joke i felt so bad because i didn't the uh and i told you i talked to you about this privately but um i felt bad because people interpreted it or some people interpreted our conversation on the show as me not being your like there in your corner enough and i felt really bad about that you know because i was like that well that really that i'm like no like i don't think you understand how i feel about chris no you know yeah well i mean

31:14Colin Moriarty:now that this is about this but like i didn't take it that way i hope you know that no i i do

31:18Chris Wray:know that but i i but i did feel that way before we talked or whatever and i you know um and i was and so it's like no like i i really love chris like i feel like he's so such an important part of the of our show our show became something that it was because of us and what we individually brought to it i get frustrated when people have this vision and this is what i was saying earlier about it's like always been us right they have this vision it's like it could be this but i'm like but it's not like that's not what it is you know what i mean yeah it's it's that it's like a little bit of a combination of a bunch of different things it's not three collins or three dustins or three chrises so yeah yeah i'm i'm real grateful i'm i'm very grateful that i encounter and i i love i know it sounds so fucking lame but you and it's the same thing with dustin really it's like I love that you guys are like a decade younger than me.

32:11Chris Wray:And it makes me feel like I'm connected to, I'm both, I, I think you'll feel this too. And maybe you already do. I feel old. Like I'm cognizant now at 41. I'm like, I'm old, you know, and I don't understand shit anymore. And like what people are saying, what people are doing. And like, there's a little bit of a tether towards something. It's like maybe the way my brother felt about me. And, uh, so I'm really grateful for you guys. Um, Dustin, I gave Chris a lot more than you. i'm sorry about that that's okay but i gave colin nothing i guess

32:44Colin Moriarty:no i'm a complete jackass no no i don't care i can't i'm so bad at being emotional on shows like i'm very i'm very i'm very guarded but i feel a lot of the same things i hope you know i love you too oh i know and i really do i know no i know that yeah i uh we we have this like

33:03Chris Wray:very it's not even an odd couple it kind of is but it's just like it's just funny it's just like it's a funny it's one of those things it's like a very unusual friendship right of people that are different but understand one another and i i think that that's like the most fruitful kind of friendship um so yeah here's to many many many more episodes but we'll we'll save all the gayest shit for episode 400 right both literally and figuratively so please look forward to it. Brandon Stark wrote in and said, Hey, CDC, I wanted to counterbalance some of the more depressive listener posts. Thank you, please.

33:40Chris Wray:Thank you. I wrote in earlier this summer about my longtime girlfriend and me splitting up. After about six months apart and a lot of work on both sides, we're finding our way back to each other. Things have been going great recently. I think she even wants to get a finger sized and look at rings in the coming weeks. Can I call this anything other than a Christmas miracle. Thank you, boys, for helping me get through some of the lows this past year. That's nice to hear. This can go either way, though. Yeah. I think about my sister and my sister, Dana, and her husband. They've been together since they met at SUNY Oswego in the mid-90s, and they've been together since 96 or 97.

34:19They broke up after college for like a year

34:23Chris Wray:and then got back together, and they've been together forever. And it worked. And that was great. I look at an experience I had where I had a girlfriend from 2008 to 2014-ish. And she broke up with me in there for like six months. And then we got back together and we shouldn't have.

34:47Chris Wray:You're like that guy in the road, you know, the meme of the guy in the road. And it's two pads and like the castle and like the sunny field, the rainbow. god bless you and good luck to you it's not the it's not the answer you were expecting either was it brandon of house stark yeah doesn't you i never had that experience never was uh with a girl twice you know after breaking up like getting back together so oh yeah like well my girlfriend i mean i i realized i kind of had realized it by the time I was in that relationship but like I was so damaged I just wanted attractive female attention no matter like at what cost yeah and um so like my college relationship was incredibly unhealthy for me like just a like a yo-yo of emotions and like totally it's like it's had me like sit down my nephew who like is now a sophomore in college and been like and like listen I'm just gonna like you're not asking for this advice you don't probably even need it you're like way smarter and better than i am but um don't waste your time in college on bullshit it's like it's the four quickest years and it's gone and you'll always look back and be like dude that was like the life you know um but brandon in all seriousness this is amazing news if you're happy about it then that's wonderful sometimes people come these things happen you know yeah um i do feel like it what brandon story plays into the famous adage of kind of letting the person go and then if they come back it was kind of meant to be you know but uh that's wonderful dustin

36:35Colin Moriarty:will you officiate brandon stark's wedding no i will not i'm uh i mean i guess i could get a certificate online to do it right it's not do you i guess you don't even need a certificate or

36:48Chris Wray:anything like to officiate a wedding i think it depends on the state like at my wedding my brother in law was the officiant uh derrick and he had to do like a little class it was like an hour or something and then he had to like and then he had to pay like a small fee right that was i remember

37:05Colin Moriarty:i mean somewhat unrelated but when ben became mayor that granted him the ability to officiate weddings and he did do it for a few people which i was like i mean that's that's cool it's not that's something i really it's not like a long-term goal of mine to officiate someone's

37:21Chris Wray:yeah i think there's like a some people moonlight doing that too they'll have like you know it's like being a wedding singer or like a dj or something it's like that's kind of a thing you might do right right yeah i don't know man i was i uh i couldn't have a priest obviously I'm not confirmed and Mike is not Catholic so yeah so I was really happy that our brother my brother-in-law could do it he was like he was perfect for it was that a rule

37:46Colin Moriarty:that you can't like can't just give a priest like$200 or something well maybe yeah maybe

37:52Chris Wray:I bet you what could happen is that a priest could do a civil ceremony like we couldn't get married in a church or do any of that kind of stuff you know right I've told the story right about how I was supposed to be Dagan's daughter Dagan's daughter Lillia I was supposed to be her godfather and then and and my family is very catholic but dagan's wife's family is very catholic and they found out that we were basically just going to lie and say that i was confirmed just so we can like and put the kibosh on that they had to call in someone from the bullpen that's awesome i like the last minute um so i ended up becoming my sister dana's son's uh godfather i was second second fiddle because of that and all because i wasn't confirmed

38:41Colin Moriarty:you know like who cares crazy yeah i think i am confirmed actually you got your confirmation i think so what age do you normally do that isn't it like eighth or ninth grade something like that

38:52Chris Wray:ninth grade oh never mind no i think you did communion communion i did yeah yeah i did i did communion as well your baptism is like done without your consent then you have your then you have your communion yeah like that's like second grade third grade and then you have your confirmation right like 10th 9th 10th grade and i just never did that yeah i never did that yeah that's such a foreign thing to me because we don't i mean there's not a confirmation you

39:21Colin Moriarty:in my church you can become a member of the church i believe when you turn 13 and so that's what i did i guess that's kind of like a confirmation take a little class

39:33Chris Wray:and uh you know all that stuff yeah it's like what we what we would do like to prepare for communion and i think that was the same for confirmation is you went to sunday school um or catechism or whatever they right isn't that what it's called like the the recitation of like all the different what you wouldn't know dustin but um i know what catechism is oh yeah it's probably a different catechism but we have that right um it's there's something cool about it but it was like the the you were saying this is like a very foreign thing to you is it foreign for when you tell your father that you're not going to get confirmed that he tells you that

40:06Colin Moriarty:you're going to go to purgatory purgatory well yes on multiple levels is that uh is that foreign to you yes the the concept of purgatory is very foreign but i mean do each of their own yeah calyx got some crazy ideas they're the original lore dude they got some lore let's not get into

40:27Chris Wray:this i don't know if i'd say the original everything splits off of catholicism you just don't have to get into it it's all about it's all about john smith i think

40:42Colin Moriarty:john smith john you mean the mormons of course oh yeah i was gonna say yeah the gold plates

40:52Chris Wray:the latter day they're latter day now right yeah this the when i was a kid i used to see commercials for the church of latter-day saints and i had no idea what that was but i think that

41:02Colin Moriarty:was them like rebranding or whatever yeah me too i had no i know cool i had no idea what that even

41:07Chris Wray:meant i am latter day what is i'm one of the people and i'm not saying this just like i've always kind of felt bad for Mormons because everyone's like look at this fake shit or whatever or a lot of people are and I'm like but it's like it's it only seems fake because it's new give it like time to like really like think about all the crazy shit that's happened in the in the history of Christianity and Judaism and Islam and all these different things I'm like just and all the claims of like this guy was 800 and shit and it's like just give it time and this will seem not that crazy at all and i will say this mormons have been some of the nicest people i've ever met and i mean that straight up and some of the most competent people i've ever met um just i didn't really i didn't really know any and they're not really on the east coast you don't really there probably are some yeah not really shit but they're a shit ton of them in california nevada utah obviously arizona and so you run into them and then you get to know them you work with some you become friendly with some and uh they really are like per capita some of the friendliest most decent people that i've ever i ever knew and i always think about i think i've told this story when i was at an airport i was actually in anaheim and i was like in orange county and i was like running really late to for a flight and um there was like a line of like missionaries like all in their white their outfits like lined up like dozens of them and they let me cut them like to and i always appreciated that so and so yeah i've always kind of felt bad for them because

42:39Colin Moriarty:they kind of get bodied a little bit yeah they're like other sex they're the newest they're kind of like xbox you know you know nintendo had been around a long time they've been making cards since like so they're like very holy everybody like they have like a ridiculous attach rate playstation's kind of in the middle where people respect them a lot but like there's some there's some naysayers and then like xboxes just came nintendo is judaism and sony playstation is

43:06Chris Wray:is christianity and that it like spawned from this conflict right and like disagreement right right that's exactly accurate oh god which i guess would make islam xbox i guess

43:26or maybe islam's like yeah on live i don't know whatever this is falling apart immediately

43:35Chris Wray:let's offend everyone yeah um your religion is on live sorry in a way it's a compliment you were like you were kind of you got there too soon you were

43:47Colin Moriarty:you were too right you're like a martyr yeah what is i don't know what scientology is it's like pc gamers just because they're annoying pc scientology is pc that makes sense because

43:59Chris Wray:very tech oriented yeah scientology is where i kind of draw the line where i'm i'm i'm very i'm just i i just i'm kind of tolerant of religion i think it's fine i think you know being in touch with god and your and your spiritual side i think there's something very human about that it's like it's up to you to to do that i think that's great but yeah when i scientology i'm like come on man even i'm like you gotta measure your thetans right it's like it's yeah you like what do they call it auditing or whatever yeah like they like use the machines and all that kind of shit it's fucking it's straight up sci-fi it's cool if you believe that but i'm not gonna pretend i take it very seriously yeah was it l ron hubbard is all right right yeah the sci-fi writer and and he and la is like ground zero of scientology yeah very very odd that big building is always it's creepy very stark yeah it's creepy it's like a it's a it they're just it feels there's like a i don't know i don't do you think we're gonna get probably not we're all gonna get we're all gonna get like murked i know they're gonna disappear like didn't the uh the the guy who runs it his wife hasn't been seen for like isn't that true for like many years yeah hey man hasn't

45:11Colin Moriarty:been seen and that's just like a thing some sometimes you know people go missing you know it's not you don't gotta look into it too much i'm thinking i'm thinking about the pc gamers being the Scientologists because they spend so much money to be in tune for arguably the same or in many cases worse experience.

45:34Colin Moriarty:That's pretty good. We're figuring it out slowly. Yeah. As this horrible analogy is going on. Yeah.

45:45Chris Wray:Andrew Walsh wrote in and said, hey boys, just wanted to remind you of the time when Dustin called DW from Arthur Double D. What a moment. double d

45:54Colin Moriarty:do we point out I don't know if I point figure this out on the show or later afterwards because it blew up double d is a character from a kids cartoon at Ed and Eddie so that's where the you know those very similar cartoons and Arthur yeah right well they're both in the cartoon

46:14Chris Wray:folder of your brain though sure sure yeah but yeah double d

46:18Colin Moriarty:dw

46:20Chris Wray:you i don't know i really don't did we talk about it on this show that i was disturbed when i found out that the ending of arthur was them like as adults or teenagers or something like that and i

46:31Colin Moriarty:watched it and i was like what the fuck is this oh yeah he's like uh yeah arthur becomes like peanut butter gamer basically and he like he draws he draw he like he's a comic artist right and it turns out that all of arthur's is his comic and let's face it arthur as a comic would not sell very new heart yeah it's yeah it'd be even stranger though if arthur showed up at another show as arthur just completely irrelevant and then that's how it ended as like arthur that's awesome the time always timely yeah dw was a cop i think i remember i remember that because she was that makes sense uh yeah that was a weird i don't know she was i can't pretend like i can't pretend like i've been watching arthur this whole time so like i guess the whole thing the entire premise of an arthur finale would be jarring to me i guess but you know she was she was very coppish in the uh in the show so i can see her being in law enforcement she was a rat she just ratted everybody out yeah she's

47:36Chris Wray:kevin by the way i've lived i live in a neighborhood with a cop for the first time like that like parks his cop car like and he's a really nice guy parks his cop car in his driveway and i'm like dude this is like this has to be like worth something right for like deflecting any interest in the surrounding area like casing our houses or getting up to anything just having that cop car parked there all the time maybe i've never had that before kevin whiteacre wrote in said hey sacred crew hope you are all well i've noticed something quite alarming over the last few months with this podcast though i only realized it recently once my brain copped it or rather copped that it had stopped happening i couldn't stop thinking about it can we please return to slandering the english the lack of slander directed at this unsettling group of people has me quite upset and i would very much like to hear at least 15 minutes of abuse and unfair words aimed at them in the next episode thank you and farewell Christ love from Ireland

48:39Colin Moriarty:love I don't know man it's it's the holiday season you know being we're being a little kinder we're reeling back a little not maybe not not on purpose but like that's the excuse right right I'm just I'm almost out of fuel right Paulie and I've been mocking the English because as I've mentioned on the show and streams, I listened to the Sorcerer's Stone audiobook. So we watched the Harry Potter and Sorcerer's Stone movie the other night. And there's just so many parts from that movie that we're like, it's Harry Potter. And we get really exaggerated. And there's the part where Alan Rickman is like, Harry Potter, our new celebrity.

49:23Colin Moriarty:We just said it over and over throughout the house he's got i love records the best man his voice is harry harry potter harry potter dude and there's the part where they're playing the chess match oh yeah yeah he's going to sacrifice himself no you no you can't you can't oh man then it's your turn to check the king raw no it is very it is it's charming though there is something like it's nostalgic but it's like that whole thing is stupid though because i'm like just get off the fucking thing what do you mean i was never under the impression even as a kid that he needed to stay on the the chess piece you know what i mean so when the knight hits him and it's like he's presumably like dead or wounded or whatever i'm like you could have just jumped off dude like i'm 30 i'm 32 and i have i have enough agility to do that way faster than you did how is that possible you're like nine i'm i'm trying to remember i think that's a movie issue yeah i know yeah because i don't think i don't think that happens in the book yeah i don't think he rides uh the you know the giant horse the metal horse in the book but and dude and then there's um the defense against the dark arts teacher he's like oh potter not nice to meet you you know like he's like he's very skittish put on a fucking i thought you'd like to know it's so crazy it's yeah those first two movies i actually really like i think um they're great because they're chris columbus movies so it's like the same guy who did home alone and home alone too so there's like a there's like a whimsical kind of um feeling to them you know in the same way that there is with like home alone whereas like after those two it kind of gets like teen drama kind of hunger games adjacent kind of self-serious and i'm just kind of like a prisoner of rest is good but i kind of stopped after that after that imagine having

51:28Chris Wray:the audacity to have a last name of columbus and name your child christopher it is yeah it's cut Come on man Do you guys know the family guy Alan Rickman answering machine Oh yeah I don't remember

51:44Colin Moriarty:I remember that there was a bit You've reached Alan Rickman At 555 0122

51:52Chris Wray:Please leave a message At the beep Hello Alan Rickman It's Alan Rickman Reminding you To move the pork chops from the freezer to the refrigerator so they defrost properly. Do not

52:10Colin Moriarty:disappoint me.

52:14Colin Moriarty:Early Family Guy is really good, man. There's bits from that show that's still... I still think My Name is Officer Rhesus, what seems to be the problem here is like... That's like a top 10 animated bit of the car crash between the two people eating peanut butter and chocolate and Officer Rhesus shows up and steals the idea and kills one of them.

52:36Chris Wray:Very dumb. It is. It's super dumb. I love, I've always thought Family Guy was excellent. Alan Rickman. Hello, Alan Rickman. This is Alan Rickman. Yeah, he's a frost properly. Rest in peace, by the way. Yeah, his. Yeah, absolutely. RIP in peace. RIP in peace. In fact. Slandering the English? I don't want to here's the thing about the English they're kind of awesome you know like this global dominant everyone speaks your language he is quiet quiet like I want them to do well I think it's important

53:24Colin Moriarty:little Timothy fell in the dark of the night it was 78 degrees in his room poor lad died right there on the table it does seem difficult to speak like that doesn't it it seems like it's so much more effort like what do you do like there's no way that it's easier

53:46Chris Wray:to speak that way the linguists say that we sound more like the british sounded when the united was founded than they do now i've heard that like that we are an older form of english actually

53:57Colin Moriarty:I've heard that southern is actually like the closest like the southern drawl apparently oh they do play their borderlands down there

54:06Chris Wray:yeah god I'd love to think it would be funny it's funny to think about like redcoats with like wigs on speaking like that speaking southern yeah

54:17Colin Moriarty:fix me a bowl of porridge I hunger

54:26Chris Wray:the british so i don't want to let's i'm irish by by genetics my family's over in the 1850s i don't really feel like i'm i've talked to you guys about this where i've talked to my family i'm like can we kind of let this go now you know like yeah come on man what are we doing

54:43Colin Moriarty:you know it's been 180 years we came here 180 years ago yeah you're more where you live than where you were from and even in that sense even as far as like america goes america's so such a big country that you're more like state oriented in like i find you know right right like i feel like i'm a new yorker before i'm an american honestly i actually agree with that like long

55:06Chris Wray:islander i agree i totally agree with that that's a very um i mean i was that was robert e lee's that's why robert e lee defected and went to the confederates yeah was because he was like i'm a virginian first and i'm like well virginia first with uh robert e lee

55:25Chris Wray:but i totally understand exactly do you feel the same way about being a pennsylvanian

55:31Colin Moriarty:i don't know I'm not even sure what it means to be American, but I'm sure what it means to be a Long Islander. Right. There's like it's too broad, you know, like we are ostensibly different countries with like a kind of like an overarching kind of umbrella of like like a federal. Yeah, federal kind of like a loose understanding of the rules between us. But it all kind of has like a different flavor. I feel like for me, Pennsylvania, the western part of the state is so different than the eastern part. I feel like I mean not that I even really identify But it's like I'm from Western PA Like I feel like it's so different It's like Western PA we got Pittsburgh We got Erie You know so And Butler Famous Butler County Where I almost died It was crazy Mayor Ben Didn't even bother to save me It was crazy Arrested arrest ice go get him go get him um dude i what do you mean this is completely separate this is completely separate i just wanted to bring this up before i forget i saw a tiktok recently that was talking about ice and it said frozen water agents and i fucking i turned my phone off i turned my phone off and went to bed and it was 4 p.m it infuriated me so deeply i was like there's no there's no shot you're not allowed to say ice i think about that all the time i think when i see

56:59Chris Wray:that kind of shit i always think about you i'm like oh my god i i because i also viscerally hate that shit yeah oh my god sorry i didn't mean to interrupt no that's it made me so bad just remembering it it's almost paralyzed me hearing that oh god um no shout out to the british shout out to the irish yeah they're hanging in there you know you're right though about like united like the expansive in the united states like if you just kind of projected europe over the United States, you would see the territories in the different countries and all. And you look at those inherently as different people.

57:34Chris Wray:The Germans are distinct from the French or distinct from the Spanish, from the Portuguese. But then us, we're all just like one group kind of, but not really.

57:42Colin Moriarty:I mean, just driving through is crazy. Like watching the topography change and watching the vegetation change over as you're driving. It's a wild. It's very weird. It's deeply unusual to see.

57:57Chris Wray:That's why I like when people from around the world, Europeans, especially like Americans don't travel very much and they don't see much of the world. And that's true for a lot of Americans. But at the same time, it's like, do you have any idea how big our country is? Like, yeah, just going to California is like going to a different place, like a different country. It's like an equivalent from you flying across your continent, you know, and different cultures. But you're right to Dustin, like New York is very much like what you're describing where western New York is very distinct from like Westchester and kind of upstate New York ish upstate and western are often used interchangeably from New York City from Long Island and even the boroughs in New York City are totally distinct like Staten Island is like incredibly conservative you know like suburban part of New York City so yeah I always consider myself a I want long I've said this before I want I want Long Island to be its own state and that is a thing on long island with um there were times when both counties supervisors so like they're our versions of mayors were both like secessionists that like wanted to secede from new york it was awesome but never happened yeah what complicates it is queens in brooklyn if they weren't on long island then i think we would have already done it to be honest but alas they fuck everything is our queens in brooklyn on long island yeah

59:21Colin Moriarty:geographically i don't really think about i guess i always think of oh yeah i guess so that makes sense uh yeah staten island is the one that feels very far stat i don't know that's like new jersey right i remember i i think i learned that staten island was part of new york and i'm not even exaggerating probably when i was like 23 because like i i had never encountered anybody from from there i'd never been there i'd never passed through it's very out of the way like there's no reason for you to go through staten island i only ever go there if i'm going to new jersey because that's how you have to get go even then you don't really you don't really you can go straight across

59:55Chris Wray:the city like into new jersey yeah from yeah from long island you would oh yeah from long island yeah you wouldn't want to go into the city and then out of the city or that you would go like from yeah you would like jump across yeah um but yeah it's so i i think the the individual geographies are interesting even within states. I love that. You know, and there is a distinct nature, but I understand that distinct. I mean, not fundamentally, but I understand it distinctly between Western PA and Eastern PA. Like where Dagan lives is very different from where with different politics and different mores and different traditions, different sports teams.

1:00:32Colin Moriarty:Yeah, you don't get a you get a really clear idea that when you when you move from coast to coast, or just how different like it's just like is a different this is a different country. California is a totally foreign country.

1:00:43Chris Wray:Yeah, it's different. Yeah, it's I remember when I first went to San Francisco when I was an intern, my first internship at IGN. I was I moved I moved there for, you know, a little while in the summer of 2003. And I was like, I'd never seen topography like that. Right. Jesus Christ. Like what like what is going on here? Just mountains everywhere. Houses on the mountains, succulents, like the whole totally different types of plants.

1:01:08Colin Moriarty:Yeah, there's just growing out. It's like vegetation is the most striking thing immediately. like that's what caught me i was just like whoa nothing nothing here looks the same it's where i came from but absolutely nothing and then you go to the supermarket i love palm

1:01:22Chris Wray:trees and the aesthetic of palm trees and i missed that a lot and i wish i'm not quite far south enough to have palm trees because we freeze here but like if you go into the carolinas they start to pop it up and it's like ah man pretty cool yeah you know shout out shout out to the the United States. We're trying. We're doing our best, you know. David Bostic wrote in, finally, this one's for you, Chris. He says, hey, CDC. This one is mostly for Chris since he will understand my pain. I was at my girlfriend's aunt's house over Thanksgiving weekend and while grabbing some sodas from her drink fridge in the garage, I discovered six glass Snapple lemon teas in the door.

1:02:01Chris Wray:Between the unshielded fridge light blinding me and the cherubic harmony playing in the background, that was definitely real. I thought I'd hit the motherlode. To my dismay, they each had a sell by date ending in 18. I can confirm it wasn't worth checking to see if they were drinkable. So can you all pour one out, preferably one of those from those shitty plastic bottled lemon teas for the six glass snapples that went to waste? I'll hang up and slip my wrist with a broken snapple bottle, but only after I turn the AC all the way down so my cats can have longer to be discovered while surviving on my remains.

1:02:28Colin Moriarty:Oh my God.

1:02:30Chris Wray:Thank you for that.

1:02:31Colin Moriarty:You really thought about that. Yeah, that was a very, very well written.

1:02:34Chris Wray:I appreciated you used the proper mother load terminology, L-O-D-E. yeah i appreciate that i appreciate classic um this is yeah yeah terrible it's look i have i

1:02:47Colin Moriarty:have a whole crate that's like on because i just knew that like oh they're going away i should it'd be interesting to just kind of have like a sealed i don't know it's a weird kind of thing but the thing to me that's like jarring about snapple is how quickly i've never tasted something that is so drastically changed by the container that it's in like i understand that there's like a coke thing where like coke in a can versus coke in like a plastic bottle versus coke in a glass bottle i understand that the general consensus is that the glass bottle coke tastes better and i do agree but i also don't feel like it's so far off from normal coke that it makes on that it makes like plastic coke undrinkable by comparison i think they're both like pretty close but snapple is like the exact opposite where i'm like glass makes it like it if it's in glass it's like a it's like an a tier refreshment damn near s tier and then like in a plastic bottle it goes to it becomes completely fucking undrinkable i don't know what the science is there but it's jarring it's very weird i don't know of any other thing that has like a flavor differential like that nothing certainly not in like the the beverage space it's very odd but and i and it was all the more clear when i came back to new york and i had it for the first time in years yeah i was just like wow they really are just making a worse drink for no reason yeah it's fucking crazy but god i feel like i have a slightly similar experience right now going on with me chris well it might actually be a little worse my favorite beer ever from 21st amendment brewery hell or high watermelon yeah that's it it's gone yeah because uh 21st amendment is out of biz hopefully someone buys their recipes or something but the unfortunate part the day i find found that out i went to my local distributors to try to find some but it's a seasonal beer and it was towards the end of the season couldn't find any and i was like well i had my last one without ever knowing yeah there's a dude there's a happy ending to the story though like a week or two ago oh it was on thanksgiving uh we were prepping stuff and my parents were out but my mom sent a text she's like go check the downstairs fridge and lo and behold my parents found a sampler pack that had three cans of hell or high watermelon in it so i drank one of them that night i'm gonna drink one on new years and the last one i'll save for a later date but after that at least i know like this is gonna be the last one it's tragic man it's a real bummer i really like sometimes you i think we all have that kind of thing that we'd like this is like a a staple right like it's like it's like this i relied on this for so long or whatever it's like maybe it's a drink from childhood or maybe it's just like a drink you're just very fond of and then for some reason the tragic thing for me is that like it's not even that they stopped making it it's that they just they just made it worse forever yeah so it's always there like i like like i could get it but it's gonna suck which is almost worse i'd almost prefer they just went out with a you know i'd almost prefer they left me wanting you know something that i couldn't get as opposed to just like oh you're still a company and you're still making shit but you're just doing this you're putting it in this like disgusting plastic that is absolutely full like it's absolutely bleeding into the drink it's absolutely you're drinking tons of plastic you know and the good thing about beer though is that like it can never have that happen to it you can't really store beer in plastic not really no yeah no no the

1:06:16Chris Wray:the only time I ever it's not even plastic at sports it's like in like some weird plastic bottle like or like um like light metal bottle so you can't like break it and fucking stab someone but you can't but you can't also like it's not heavy enough to like be a bludgeon yeah I love it Yankee games and like other they do it other sports games too they take the caps like they'll open all the beers like if you buy four beers for you and your friends they'll just take all the caps so you can't like fucking throw them um it's so funny i i find it so funny that 21st amendment's like a san francisco was a san francisco brewery and it it was right next to the old offices at ign we i used to eat and drink there all the time and it's so funny that you are like you have a connection to it because it's a it's just a play it's just a random yeah place it's not even a place locals would go to it it was big by virtue of its proximity to AT &T Park, which is where the Giants play.

1:07:09Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I got to go to that. The actual brewery one time when I was in San Francisco. It was great.

1:07:15Chris Wray:Yeah, it's really it's cool. It's two stories. And yeah, it's too bad. That's too bad. Actually, the food there was really good. Like, so it's too bad.

1:07:24Colin Moriarty:I'm looking. There's a can you order beer online? Apparently, I can get a 15 pack for$40. that's not so bad considering that it's it's yeah it's gonna be rare but how long like i i gotta drink all that at some point like it's not gonna stay good forever yeah you should just i wonder what it's how how quickly does it go bad if it's beer right i feel like that lasts a while right yeah what is it like six months oh yeah we talked about this recently oh yeah well i talked about

1:07:55Chris Wray:it because i and my family it's like a pathological thing where like people have to have out-of-date drinks in their in their fridge and they have to insist that you drink it

1:08:03Colin Moriarty:dude my dad did that to me with like a rum chata he was like drink this rum chata and i was and he was like and he said something about like oh i got this for uh i got this for my 60th and i was like aren't you mid 70s and isn't rum chata like a dairy drink like what do you mean like i'm not drinking he convinced me somehow and it tasted it smelled like pain thinner and he was just like oh i'm sorry i didn't know i was like what do you mean you absolutely do it's insane i have it was like yeah it's from like 2014 or something or something it's so it's so gross like i i hate that shit rough like like just get you got to get new drinks yeah yeah so according i'm just a random website colorado brewing company because this is i didn't want to trust the google ai most canned beers stay fresh for six to nine months past the printed date if stored in a cool dark place

1:09:02Chris Wray:past the printed date they mean the date the expiration date because some of them have born on dates you would assume

1:09:12Colin Moriarty:if I were you I'd grab it that's such a bad price if I had known that I could have gotten that much sample before they were just going to cancel it I would have done it bummer I'm going to go back to New York though soon so i'm gonna procure as much as i possibly can while it's back in limited time stock in the city i know exactly where to go but why you gotta send me on a goose chase man come on man come on come on man you know you know you know what you're doing

1:09:51Chris Wray:all right let's get into the news all right here we are with our interstitial we've recorded the rest of the show yesterday it is now friday late afternoon eastern time and we've reconvened chris had to record summon sign so we got going a little late i also wanted to sleep in i didn't go to bed till almost five in the morning and then i just wanted to wake up naturally i feel so much better i even feel like i look better when i don't have to it doesn't matter what if the alarm is at six or seven or even eight hours i kind of just wake up on my own yeah gotta do it you're glowing Oh, that's very nice of you to say.

1:10:26Chris Wray:I appreciate that. Thank you so much. It's so unusually busy right now. Yeah. As well. I have so much shit going on. But it's just, it's to manufacture that time in a little while. All right, boys. So we watched the Game Awards. You can hear the rest of the news that of this week unrelated to the Game Awards after this. The rest of the show flows on into the games we're playing and then inquiries from the audience. So definitely keep going and skip this if you don't want to listen to it, but we had to come back here and cut in. I wanted to ask you guys what you thought of the show, what you thought of the awards, all the rest, and we'll start there.

1:11:01Chris Wray:And then I made a list, which I shared with you guys, of, I count 26 games and two ancillary things that we should talk about. That is not everything that was announced or shown at the show. I parsed through things that were not announced for PlayStation. So for instance, that game, The Forest 3, which is going to be huge. The Forest 2, the sequel, didn't even come to PS5. So no reason to expect that. We don't really need to talk about that. You know, things that need a Nintendo game or whatever the case might be. So that's kind of what I came up with. And if we skip it, we can spend as much or as little time on every game that we want.

1:11:31Chris Wray:I pulled out and went, did a bunch of research, say found the original press release for each game so we can get the information from the horse's mouth. So we'll get through all of that and we'll take it in the order that they were talked about on the show. But before we do that, let's get our thoughts on the program itself and what we thought of it. This is a big thing for the games industry. It's easily the biggest thing in the games industry every year now, especially without E3 and all the traditions that that came with. So Dustin, let's start with you. We've it's we've gotten to marinate on it for, you know, 20, 18 hours, something like that.

1:12:00Chris Wray:What are your what are your preliminary thoughts here?

1:12:04Colin Moriarty:Yeah, overall, pretty good show. I wouldn't say there was it was like amazing or necessarily bad. I think the pacing was pretty good. a couple nitpicks specifically with uh maybe the pacing of where certain games were revealed um and overall i thought it was a good time i always like some people don't like it but the the muppet inclusion maybe a little too over the top this time the song by the end i was like okay we get it but i'm not going to complain about rolf you know any kind of rolf appearance sure i'm a raw fan so uh but yeah i thought it was good the awards and i think this is what we were saying on the stream and kind of general consensus the awards themselves which i know there's some people that hate them in general like i don't need awards just do do the announcements i'm just watching for the announcements i like the awards even if i'm not putting a huge amount of stake into them they're a bit boring this year simply because clear obscure one practically everything some that I think they were well-deserved winning others it's like maybe not but I'm happy for them either way all right fair enough Chris what are your preliminary thoughts here now that you've gotten to marinate a little bit yeah I mean I think I think it was overall a decent show I would put it if I were to do like an arbitrary letter grade I would say like maybe like a b or something like that like there's there's there was nothing there that really got me like jumping or like got me out of my seat and i do think there are certain placements of certain announcements where i'm like you could you probably should have swapped these two like if i was behind the scenes i would have been like that should go there and maybe that should go earlier like or like little things like that but overall i thought it was okay it's weird because when you're watching it from our perspective and and you're not there or maybe they do this when they're there i don't know but the lines get blurred between what is part of the game awards and what is like an ad you know sometimes and you're just like because they're ads for video games so it's like it kind of feels like the same so like there's a lot of i don't know man there's just a lot of anime gotcha slop in the in the feed and it like it begins to feel like it's part of the award show even though it's like not really and like for me it's just like it's it's a grueling kind of experience in some way but looking at at the show as a holistic show like i thought they did a pretty good job it was a a little more on the boring side this year just because of the big expedition 33 sweep uh previous years were a little bit more competitive i think and a little bit more interesting because of that it was more of a guess um and there are certain awards too where like i think claripsker deserves most of those wins and i do think it deserves game of the year i think it is a very kind of game of the year story you know just finding a one of the making one of the best soundtracks of the year with some guy from soundcloud and writing a great story with some lady you found on reddit and having one of the more compelling characters come in for like four hours and he didn't even realize he was in it it's like there's a lot charming about that story and the modest budget and all that stuff but like there are certain things like best rpg i think if i were running the show i would have been like throw a bone here to kingdom come or like you know i don't know diversify things a little bit more and and you know them being in indie is kind of i don't know like i get it it makes sense but maybe like an executive holist i think there needs to be somebody up at the top making a decision about the spirit of the categories and the spirit of the awards.

1:15:33Colin Moriarty:I don't know if that's allowed or like what but I think certain things may be like this isn't really the spirit of this category or this isn't really the spirit of like it's not really fair to put this with this kind of thing but overall I thought it was a solid show. Some fun reveals, some reels that I'm definitely excited to talk about. A lot of new things that I'm excited for in the coming year. So yeah, overall solid our stream was a different story we were starting to lose our minds toward the end but

1:16:01Chris Wray:i know uh already 50 something thousand views on that stream which is hysterical um yeah and uh yeah we were losing it at the end i was actually went back and watched some of it it's very funny like it actually is really really funny just why is our suffering so funny to people

1:16:16Colin Moriarty:um you know it just works it works so yeah we had a great stream that's true we had a great stream

1:16:22Chris Wray:sacred streaming was awesome we had brad on um we appreciate everyone that came and joined us we were live for what four little four and a half hours something like that which is not that long i've streamed for longer than that we've streamed for longer than that on sacred streaming and but it felt the time was just going so slowly i don't know why i i have to say i thought the show was good i i saw jeff put up a tweet asking people soliciting like a grade a letter grade and i I would give it a B. Yeah. I do think the pacing was weird. And I agree that games that were shown at certain points, like I would have paced this game a lot or this show a lot differently.

1:16:59Chris Wray:They had a little pre-show, which was cool. There were some cool games in there. And then you open with fate of the old Republic, which is cool. But I feel like closing with that game. High guard is like that might be like one of the great TGA ending duds ever. Honestly, that game should have belonged in the first third of the show. maybe they had other things to show here and i don't think i think megaman which i'm super excited about even that being like one of the last things to show it's like that kind of should go in the first third first half you just had other things here that you could have messed with tomb raider would have been a big thing to end with or um i don't know just something else that's what i

1:17:32Colin Moriarty:was referring to too where i was like i was like i would have put i would have maybe swapped high garden divinity you know what i mean like those yeah yeah sure as far as their places go like I think that would have been a stronger probably a stronger show.

1:17:45Chris Wray:So there was a pacing problem, I think. But I think overall, I think it was a good show. And the things that stick out to me that I think are worth noting at the high level is I thought Jeff was great. You know, I think we say this all the time. People bust balls with him or whatever, but he really he's good. I think Brad kept saying, you know, he's very professional and he is everything leads up to the show for him. and then he does his showcase in the summer. And it's like his whole life kind of revolves around these things. And I actually think without him and without his presence, I think things would look a little bit different in the games industry.

1:18:20Chris Wray:And I think that it's really one of the only filterings we get of content where it's like, oh, at least pay it. Yeah, 7000 games came out this month, but at least pay attention to something. And here's something to pay attention to. And it kind of these shows. I actually think the more seldom shows make sense as opposed to having E3 and then Gamescom and then TGS and everyone like it's cool there's little interstitial announcements and whatnot but everything gets thrown on the pile we're going to talk about the Knights of the Old Republic game or FOTOR whatever it's called like that game doesn't even exist at all what I was reading about it like it does not exist there's nothing so like you're announcing things and like Elder Scrolls style when I just don't think you actually need to do that that would be like one of my major complaints is like anything after 2027 don't show it don't announce it there's no need why right he did that with okami too right right and that was but that was a yeah and that was cool announcement and i love okami's tweet did you see okami's tweet yeah the fall on the gun very funny very funny but uh and then as far as the awards themselves are concerned i i think that like there should if a there's a dominant cultural product then let it win everything i think that that's i don't really have a huge problem with that and i understand what you guys are saying about role-playing games where it's like we'll give it to kingdom come but i just don't think you can i just don't it's what we used to deal with at ign when we do like action game of the year role-playing game of the year it's like well how can game x win action game of the year but game y which didn't win action game of the year win game of the year that's the that's the that doesn't make any so like they're kind of like in a bind like if you have all these if you have all of these uh genre winners then it It has to be from that pool.

1:20:02Chris Wray:Otherwise, it doesn't make any sense.

1:20:03Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say like diversify the wins like throughout the entire category. I think there is a case to be made, though. That's probably correct that Kingdom Come probably is a better role playing game than Claire Obscure. But like Claire Obscure does so many other things that are a lot more like of higher like quality and just different. I don't know. There's a case to be made there. but I see what you're saying where it would just kind of be like you kind of can't please everybody

1:20:33Chris Wray:so why try you sure yeah right I I think if anything I mean you can look at it two different ways it's like one part of it is like well this kind of really shows that the vote matters and like whoever voted voted and I know you know you can see the the panel of people who voted so it's like it's not a huge surprise that this game would win on the other hand I I was I and we'll get through this as we go through the games it's like Kepler's presence Kepler being exit or expedition position 33's publishers presence was during out the show is very weird. And I was like, why are we there's so many Kepler games in the same year when it's so anticlimactic and obvious that your game, this game that you publish is going to win.

1:21:12Chris Wray:I just thought that was kind of a weird look. And I'm surprised. I don't think people understand or know the games industry too insanely well in a lot of spaces. And so that I, I feel like if people were able to hone in on that fact more there would be more conspiracy theory shit like that's the kind of conspiracy theory shit especially if you look at expedition as like a woke game or whatever you you would think those people would be all over but that would require them to understand the industry which they don't uh and no level infinite which was nice yeah as far as i can tell um so overall i thought it was a good show i'm trying not to hold what i find is claire obscure is incredibly annoying fan base against the game.

1:21:52Chris Wray:I think it's a great game. It's a top. You'll see it on someone's time when we go through my games, but it's a top 10 game for me. It's not a top five game for me this year. And it's not this like overwhelming, amazing game. But I understand that like it captured people and that means something. And there are a lot of people making fun of Claire Obscura fans like being like, we beg you play and play one other role playing game, just any other role-playing game like you think this game is maybe what it's not because you're not really too experienced in the genre but there's another side of that which is to say like well ease them in and let them explore the combat system is where i think the game truly shines and i'll be very excited to see what they do and of course we were saying this about like independent it's not an independent game and that's something they really need to nail down it's not an independent game it is not i want to repeat not an independent game saint slayer is an independent game right a game with a publisher is not an independent game i'm sorry or a self-published right you right i would right well yeah like it's like hades 2 would technically be an independent game but that's much more of an independent game than expedition 33 is 100 at least but i feel like we it's like the old thing we used to do when we'd have like downloadable game of the year and stuff and everyone's like well they're just games like why are we doing this and that's true but we need to figure out a differentiation between what is an like a normal in quotes game and an independent game because i do think that was the one thing they won where i'm like that's bullshit like they are not independent they weren't they were they're not there's no there's no explanation just because they don't have an owner yeah what were you saying i was saying wouldn't hell divers

1:23:37Colin Moriarty:be considered an independent game under that standard yes not yours but you know it's like

1:23:42Chris Wray:yes if you brought that to its logical conclusion absolutely yeah and so is Baldur's Gate right oh I guess Baldur's Gate had a Wizard of the Coast publisher right yeah Larian is self-publishing Divinity so Divinity would be an independent game right and we know it's it we know that it technically is but philosophically it isn't we need to that needs to be figured out because that's the only way for smaller developers to get any notice and it's not fair you know in my opinion yeah even ball pit it's like that's not really an independent game i mean but that's spiritually much more of an independent game that that i don't mind being in that category

1:24:20Colin Moriarty:right nearly as much right it's about the spirit like again i think you just need to have somebody there being like what is this what is the spirit of this category what is the spirit of um the award that we're trying to give out because i understand that's nebulous but i also feel like it's kind of not i actually feel like if you looked at it like even just on its face as an objective kind of lens i think you could really easily come to the conclusion of like what counts and what doesn't like um but yeah that was kind of the big blunt like it bothered me seeing claire obscure in like best debut indie and indie because i'm just like bro i love that game but like just look at the company that you're putting it in and ask yourself if that's fair like if it if it makes sense to you and it the answer is clearly that it doesn't right it's like what's the more

1:25:01Chris Wray:for the layman out there not a layman but even just a normal gamer it's like what's more impressive expedition 33 or ball pit and it's like well i mean come on man yeah come on come on come on all right but i give i give the show a b do you guys agree or do you do you give it a i give it a flat b because i think there are a lot of good games we'll go through them a lot of games i i said b like i think it's a again so like again like and i'm considering like b where there's an a

1:25:29Colin Moriarty:above it and there's an s where i'm just like bro yeah okay sure this this this is for me but that's that's a very rare like it's very rare that i don't think i've seen an s tier kind of version of this show really ever so you know but i think it's solid i i think there's a lot to get to and we'll definitely get to it so all right so let's start going through the games let's do it

1:25:51Chris Wray:there was a pre-show and we we streamed that as well so we got online at seven there was a pre-show at 7 30 eastern they showed four games that i thought were interesting we can go through these as quickly or as you know as slowly as we want to first game came up was pragmata from capcom finally has a release date and it's sooner it's actually sooner than i thought although this game's been in development forever so i mean let's get let's get going already it was at the playstation reveal wasn't it april 24 2026 and uh coming to ps5 it's getting a switch version did Did you see the detail surrounding the Switch version, Dustin?

1:26:26Chris Wray:No, I didn't. There's going to be a Diana Amiibo figure.

1:26:30Colin Moriarty:Oh, that. I did see that.

1:26:31Chris Wray:Yeah. Pretty cool. I think I might buy that.

1:26:33Colin Moriarty:Pretty cool. I love, dude, some of these third party ones. Like I have the Solaire Dark Souls Amiibo. Still sealed. Worth a lot now. Is there really? Yeah, I'll probably pick that up. I haven't bought a.

1:26:45Chris Wray:I mean, I haven't bought an Ami. I'm looking back at my list. I think the Shovel Knight bosses were the last Amiibos I bought. That was a few years ago, probably at this point. So I'll definitely pick that up. but the game will be 60 bucks. There will be a$70 version of it with a bunch of different perks or whatever. It doesn't seem like they're going to be able to get us because I'd get God on this game, I think. No early access, at least nothing announced yet. But yeah, coming to PS5, April 24th. We've seen quite a bit of this game. I've seen enough. Some people say I look like the protagonist.

1:27:15Chris Wray:I don't really agree. Thoughts? Dustin, Pragmata, are you interested?

1:27:21Colin Moriarty:yes absolutely uh i played the demo at summer game fest and i was immediately in there and this recent trailer uh i they always get me with the music the music was kind of near-esque seems like a very potentially emotional experience for a game and he got me there too right so this trailer was awesome and i'm with you colin i don't i don't need any more other than there's a demo on steam now i'm probably gonna i can't resist i'm gonna check out the demo but uh yeah i can't wait for this game this is man capcom next year like number one for me is a game we'll talk about shortly resident evil number two is probably pragmata well i was gonna say i wanted to say

1:28:05Chris Wray:that by the way if you guys can keep a list of the top five games for you as we go through and then we'll at the end we'll say like what are the five games that we're most excited about um so just keep a list as you as we go chris pragmata april 20 when is it i already missed april 24th

1:28:20Colin Moriarty:2026 yeah i mean i'm intrigued by it i'm a little from what i've seen i'm not super into it i i like the look of it like i like the aesthetics of it and like whatever the the visual premise of what's happening it's just the brief snippets of gameplay that i've seen so far make the main character seem like lumbering where i feel like the the look of the game feels like I wish this was like a vanquish kind of you know but um but I haven't played the demo either yet so like I'm kind of reserving judgment on that it looks cool I think the the overall vibe of it is interesting but it's not on the top for me necessarily I'm curious about it um I'm yeah I

1:29:00Chris Wray:totally understand it I'm curious how this game does it seems kind of like a weird game and I but Capcom's got a little bit of juice so yeah maybe people will check it out I'm super excited about this game i think the game looks cool when it became clear what the combat is like a kind of a like a bullet time puzzle solving sort of thing i mean dustin you'll have more to say about it when you play it the demo i think it looks really neat and i'm also on the games press website for it like with all the press release stuff and they have a they have a bunch of art character art and there's a cat character in it with a bunch of character called hollow cat so that kind of gives it a little bit of something for me as well um capcom describes pragmato for people that aren't aware as quote a sci-fi action game with unique hacking gameplay mechanics set on the moon in the near future the story follows an unlikely duo on a mission to escape a lunar station overrun with hostile robots in the single player game players control both space fair hue and the enigmatic android diana each character has their own distinct skills and abilities and they must work together to hack shoot and overcome obstacles in a search way back to earth very cool excited about that all right number two we saw tank rat by the way this was just as this really is neither here nor there especially because it's a playstation podcast so we're getting these games that we're talking about but i was surprised by how many games are skipping xbox yeah and this is the first one so tank rat and this is the first game by the way from kepler as a publisher that that was shown and again this was in the um the pre-show quote tank rat puts players in control of whitaker a digitized human consciousness capable of fusing with fully customizable war machines the only way humans can exist in the world after a mysterious cataclysmic event.

1:30:35Chris Wray:Battle through a brutal war-torn wasteland, teeming with mechanical monstrosities. Dismantle enemies, harvest their parts and rebuild stronger for the next fight. Every mission is a test of survival strategy and sheer firepower as you descend deeper into the mechanical mystery at the heart of Tank Rat. Alpha Channel is the studio and are working with Kepler on this. Any thoughts? I think it looks cool. I don't know that I'm going to play it when the time comes. Dustin?

1:31:02Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I'm not super into I mean, I know it's on a mech game, but it is like a armored vehicle. Other than, of course, when I played Armored Core last year or the year before, I think this looks cool, but I would definitely want to play it first or like if there was a demo or something like that. I know that this team, I think you read it in the press release. They have a game out on PC called Tank Head. So I'm curious what people thought of that game. See, Tank Head, we can see on Steam real quick. oh wait no it was epic game store exclusive gross

1:31:37Chris Wray:this game will also be on epic game stores though it'll also be on steam and ps5 obviously

1:31:44Colin Moriarty:okay so I wonder if this is an evolution I mean of course it's some kind of evolution

1:31:48Chris Wray:well it could be like super acrobatic cars or whatever that ridiculous ps3 game that was rocket leagues prequel right so could be Dustin or I'm sorry Chris What do you think here? I'm reading the comments on the video. It's funny. Like some people are describing it pretty well. Someone was saying it's like Blaster Master, which it kind of is. And Pacific Drive with a tank. Yeah. I was like, that's kind of interesting. What do you think?

1:32:16Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I don't know. There's like something about this that looks really cool to me. Like I might want to check it out. But like also like I think I know better where I'm like, I don't know if I'll really stick with this. But I dig the weird like there's like a Banjo-Kazooie Nuts and Bolts like thing going on with this game which like that game is a mess primarily because it's just a banjo game where it doesn't need to be but i remember thinking like at the time like this mechanic is pretty cool it just doesn't belong and it's just to stop this should not be a banjo kazooie game it makes no sense so to see a game like kind of like lean into that and and not have the the corpse of a of a previously glowing franchise all over it i think it's kind of nice but yeah i don't i don't know i would play i would absolutely play a demo uh if they came out with one but i don't know if i'm necessarily I don't know if I got this on my radar necessarily yeah no word on the demo here yet but

1:33:08Chris Wray:presumably and of course you just play it on steam when it comes time comes if you want and then just get your money back if you don't like it like Dustin the third game we were shown here comes from day four night studios and it's Bradley the Badger this comes from the creative minds behind Red Dead Redemption and Mario plus Rabbids both well-respected games. Mario Post Rabbids is bigger than I thought, actually.

1:33:33Colin Moriarty:Yeah, people love that.

1:33:34Chris Wray:Not huge, but people really like it. So I gotta give a little respect to that because at first when they show this, I'm like, all right, you're kind of stretching like the creative minds behind Mario. It's like, all right, come on. But then the more you think about it, it's like, all right, fine. Now, this Bradley the Badger game revealed by this day four night studios is a quote new action adventure game that features exploration, traversal and mind bending freeform puzzles. It blends original play mechanics with live action sequences and a satirical storyline that is a commentary on video games.

1:34:02Chris Wray:The game is currently slated for PC via Steam with the team exploring additional platforms and consoles. So we don't know if this is coming to PlayStation yet, but it's one of those games that I thought looked kind of cool and I wanted to show it. And I assume it will come to PlayStation. So nothing guaranteed yet about this one. But Chris, let's go to you first. Bradley the Badger. Was it you that said that it kind of gave a Gex vibe?

1:34:23Colin Moriarty:I think you might have said that. Oh, okay. I don't know if I said it, but like i i seconded it like there's definitely like something going on with it look i appreciate any kind of attempt to um do something interesting with 3d platforming especially now uh we don't really have a lot of examples we have like hat and time uh and uh ukulele which was kind of like a

1:34:44Chris Wray:big kind of hat and time was cool i never beat it but it was cool so seeing this uh like looking at

1:34:50Colin Moriarty:what they're doing with like some of the the inside references it looks like like those old school platform is looks like a little bit of gex with the fourth wall and and kind of the irreverent character i'm of two minds where i'm like as i was like watching the trailer i was like this character i don't know if i don't know if i don't know if this character works for me he's he's doing like a jack black kind of thing where like it feels like they couldn't get jack black

1:35:12Chris Wray:so they just got like an impersonator or something right right but but the game itself looks cool

1:35:16Colin Moriarty:and i'm all about like shining a spotlight on on these types of like you know ps2 era kind of throwback games that aren't that are actually like moving things forward so like yeah i mean this is on my radar for sure it's getting a nice reception on its youtube channel because

1:35:33Chris Wray:was there dustin was there something about ai that people were saying that they were upset about

1:35:38Colin Moriarty:with this i can't find it but i think they i think the character made a court made a joke about ai or something okay i was like i don't know though because i watch it like what are people saying

1:35:45Chris Wray:about this that's ai generated or something i must have misunderstood i think it looks really really cute um yeah something different than we have we have enough post-apocalyptic apocalyptic action rpg whatever it's like all right get it let's get it get it back to our platforming roots and like chris was saying i think it's got a real 90s feel to it which is kind of cool and the 90s feel that works still not a 90s feel like duke newcomb when they tried to bring duke newcomb back it didn't work this feels like it will work a little bit better yeah i am always

1:36:17Colin Moriarty:down for a character platformer you know very reminiscent of old but i think what i like in particular about this trailer um and in the description is the godlike powers of a game developer and that's part of the aspect of the trailer is you can see like it bringing up a ui that's like change the scale of this object uh transfer copy and i think that's kind of a clever i like that it's meta on both levels in terms of what the game is because there's like a last of us style level of Bloodborne, Cyberpunk. And I love the direct parodying of those things. But the also meta of like, oh, there's game developer tools that are part of the gameplay of the game.

1:37:00Colin Moriarty:Pretty unique concept. I like it. So this trailer seemed pretty cool. I agree with Chris. Not sure about the main character yet, but just a trailer. But I'm happy to see a game like this. I think there should be more whimsical and parody style games about the industry. So it's a neat idea.

1:37:22Chris Wray:Yeah, I mean, what's the... It's like Hyperdimension Neptunia is probably the most... It's probably the biggest game that does that, right? There's probably no other series right now of any consequence that is self-referential like that. So... And I don't even know if Hyperdimension Neptunia even really makes new... I don't think they even... They re-release stuff, but I'm not even sure new stuff's coming out anymore. um all right so that's that all right fourth game up is stupid never dies i couldn't find a real press release for this game but kamatsu has something written up about it it's from a studio called gp track 50 and this is another game that's uh we were saying earlier skipping xbox for some reason and coming only to ps5 and pc like i said it comes out in 2026 it's described as a quote blazing fast growth 3D action RPG, led by former Capcom producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi.

1:38:17Chris Wray:An overview of the game via its Steam page, according to Komatsu, says, quote, werewolves, lizardmen, skeletons, in a world where monsters are part of everyday life, a bottom-rung zombie named Davy braves a deadly dungeon to bring back Julia, the frozen human he loved. Gear up for a delightfully wild, blazing fast growth action RPG, Stupid Never Dies. Set in a monster-ruled otherworldly dungeon, Stupid Never Dies puts you in control of Davy, a timid zombie living at the very bottom of monster society defeat enemies level up and collect strange items to grow stronger on your quest to bring julia a frozen human girl back to life steal enemy abilities customize your undead body with bizarre upgrades and experience fast pass fast fast paced combat packed with innovation this game did itself no favors i think by with its weird announced trailer in my opinion i don't know if you guys agree it was uh yeah it was a weird kind of sitch like they were doing like a musical sort of thing i didn't know what it was and i feel like that's cool if it's that's that's kind of the nature of the game or whatever but the trailers over it's two minutes and 10 seconds and they really only show the game for 30 seconds or so of that time and once we i remember when we saw the game i was we were like oh this like i think you said chris like why didn't you lead with this yeah because it looks cool it's obviously a lower budget game but it doesn't look bad at all i just don't know exactly what to make of it because of that strange maybe maybe it was very sarcastic and supposed to be weird i think dustin you said it was like lollipop chainsaw or something which which it felt like in

1:39:44Colin Moriarty:a way so any thoughts we have on this game yeah i strongly dislike this even the game i mean i i don't know the gameplay looks fine um the thing i strongly dislike is first it's just like it's very pop punk-esque and even the logo looks like something from hot topic in 2008 but it feels like disney channel trying to make something that's for punks or something it's like oh we're gonna get on the but like so it's like a company trying to jump on a bandwagon 15 years too late and i don't know if they're trying to go for like some kind of millennial nostalgia pool on it uh but it did not work for me i feel like i mean honestly my culture is being appropriated yeah i can see that by this game and i don't like it um yeah the beginning i thought was just so cringy and and weird who knows maybe i'll end up really liking this game but it it did not land for me and also one other note when i was doing some research earlier i was looking at game spots all the announcements list and it says a game starring a zombie boy and a human girl fighting monsters set to ska music ska music game spot that didn't sound like ska but that is not ska music okay you gotta get those horns

1:41:12Chris Wray:in there come on man come on it's not the mighty barstones come on alright well there's that Chris you have anything you want to say about stupid never dies I do like the idea it sounds funny I don't know why they're doing it such a disservice to it

1:41:28Colin Moriarty:yeah it's just like they kind of shot themselves in the foot obviously like um you know bad trailer doesn't equal bad game necessarily it could be good it could be great um but yeah just a confusingly bad trailer and maybe we'll look back on it it's like hey man they're bold and they had something that they thought was cool and they just wanted to fuck around and uh it worked out but as it stands for right now like yeah I I kind of dug it once it got to the the gameplay stuff i i like the style and the visual like look of it um but yeah that first uh that music video was kind of just grueling and it just kind of felt like it's kind of a waste of time you know yeah you want to maximize your splash at a stage like this i'm like i don't know if that was the best way to do it but we'll see all right now we've gotten through the pre-show

1:42:17Chris Wray:when we're in the main show now and Jeff opens with a game that is for many people the most exciting product in here. Although, as we were noting earlier, I don't know why you would announce this game so soon. It's Star Wars Fate of the Old Republic and it is literally coming probably no sooner than 2030, according to what we're reading and seeing. There is no press release for the game, but there is stuff on StarWars.com about it. And they write here, Star Wars Fate of the Old Republic revealed with first trailer and they have an exclusive interview over there as well with Casey Hudson. Now, that's awesome.

1:42:49Chris Wray:Casey Hudson obviously was one of the leads of Bioware during its heyday. And, you know, with KOTOR, and I think he worked on Jade Empire as well, but leading right into the Mass Effect trilogy for which him and Drew Carpishan and others did such an amazing job with. And Drew Carpishan's off doing his own shit now. Like those guys, obviously, that's what I'm saying. It's like Bioware is just a complete cover band at this point. It doesn't mean they're not going to be a good cover band, but they're just a cover band right now. But this new game, Fate of the Old Republic, is in the same vein as Knights of the Old Republic, which Keiji Hudson was the director of back in 2003, the famous Xbox console exclusive Star Wars role-playing game, which was the reason I got an Xbox back in the day.

1:43:26Chris Wray:And they write here, quote, in Star Wars Fate of the Old Republic, step into the role of a Force user on a journey through a galaxy on the edge of Rebirth and at the end of the Old Republic. The brand new epic narrative single-player action role-playing game from Arconaut Studios, which is, this is a new studio, A-R-C-A-N-A-U-T, developed in collaboration with Lucasfilm Games, was announced on stage at this year's Game Awards. Along with the first look at a thrilling trailer, it was announced that Fate of the Old Republic will be developed by a new studio launched by Casey Hudson, the director of the original Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, and the Mass Effect trilogy.

1:43:55Chris Wray:So there's an interview here. It's interesting. There's some stuff to read. They do say later, quote, still in the early stages of development and creation. Fate of the Old Republic benefits from decades of creative experience across the collaborative partnership, and they talk about collaborating with Lucas and all of that, how they have experience doing that. I am excited. People are excited about this. kotor is a banger of a game um i don't know how well it holds up to be perfectly honest kotor 2 is also a great game but that was a different era of star wars that was a pretty dire era of star wars in my opinion too but it's nothing like this i just i'm just being honest with you i cannot get excited about a star wars game no matter what it is and this would have been the one that i think would have captured me the most because kotor is certainly a top three star wars game for me and i i know you'd put the super star wars games in there maybe put yoda's story there but the superstar you put the super star wars games in there you might put something like dark forces or i don't know what it would be um but i just don't give a shit and but i was curious about it because i was like oh that's interesting i wonder what it is and all the rest and like oh yeah it really doesn't exist so i just i don't understand and i saw i think maddie had said and i do agree with him to a degree like you announced the game to attract talent stuff like that and i'm like i don't that's true yet i don't know that casey hudson's gonna to have that much talent or problem um that much down he has a lot of that much that much trouble soliciting talent quietly i so i just feel like it's i almost kind of feel bad for the star wars game we'll talk about later because it's like it doesn't even get its pop as being like a star wars game or anything so there's nothing to really go on other than the inclusion of some great people i'm sure it'll be good but i don't give a shit and also who knows where star wars is going to be by that point it seems like it's in a bad place right now and i don't know like even can even fathom what it might be hopefully it's turned around by then either of you interested

1:45:46Colin Moriarty:i'm mildly interested i played knights of the old republic growing up it's been so long since i played it and i don't think i finished it when i played it years and years ago i'd always love wanted to go back to it but uh obviously it's a super exciting announcement that means one of the legendary games of its era um but yeah the fact that it's so far off it just reminds me and i think maddie was bringing this up on twitter it's a great point is that it's like is it gonna actually happen how like how many star wars games that were so hype at their announced and then got canceled or just in limbo like we still don't know almost anything about star wars eclipse like where's that so and you're right colin too is that it's hard to get excited for Star Wars right now.

1:46:35Chris Wray:I don't even know what it could be that would get me excited at this point.

1:46:38Colin Moriarty:Did you know they're re-releasing the original cut in theaters? I did see that in January. That got me excited, but of course it's not because it's new Star Wars. It's

1:46:47Chris Wray:old Star Wars, right? But it's like, I don't I'm conflicted on it because I do want to go see it. I've only ever seen the special editions in the theater when they came out in 97. That was a cool experience. I was in middle school, so it was a little different, but I don't want to give disney any money or i want to give them as little money as possible like i bought cosmic invasion so there you go there's my disney stipend for the year but i don't want to uh i don't want to go any

1:47:11Colin Moriarty:further chris uh were you a kotor guy um no i mean i i i mean this is not probably too too hidden information but like i've never really been much of a star wars person yeah like by the time by the time i came around to star wars it was i had already experienced so much other sci-fi like i I had played Halo and the entirety of Mass Effect before I'd even seen any of the Star Wars movies. Like actually, I watched Star War. I already saw Star War. Yeah, I was all set on my Star Wars. Right. But like, I mean, I did like I think 2016 whenever. What is it? The new one, the first of the new ones. What was that called?

1:47:55Colin Moriarty:Force Awakens. Force Awakens. When that came out, I was like, you know what? Everybody's excited about this. Let me do my homework a little bit. And I watched the original trilogy and I liked it well enough. I thought Empire was great. I thought A New Hope was fine. I thought I didn't like the third one at all, actually. But so like I just kind of understood. Like one thing I do appreciate is like I think the soundscape and the visual design language of Star Wars is just fucking good. Like as somebody who went into it with no nostalgia at all, I was like, this is some good. like the way that the the laser sound and and the score is great and and the sound design of like the droids it like all of it is genuinely like next level good to the point where like you don't need to be nostalgic for it to understand how superior it is to a lot of other things but you know i i've never really cared that much about it i i would actually think it'd be pretty easy for for a game studio to make a star wars project that would excite me i think you just have to have a good if you have a good gameplay hook like 1313 i was actually really excited for despite the fact that i had no concept of like like i had played like uh force unleashed and um star wars jedi starfighter so like i had some tangential like care but it was never this big thing for me so i mean this this though is kind of exciting like again this is a very much like no game no hype those are the rules kind of thing where it's just like okay well you just got a teaser trailer like who the fuck knows what this will end up being sure even if you do have the right people who's who's who like who knows if casey hudson will even still be there you know like all sorts of crazy things can happen but when i did play a little bit of kotor on xbox backwards compatibility i i remember liking it way more than i thought i would considering how dated it is and considering how how little nostalgia i have for it i think i the only reason i stopped playing it was because i hit like a game breaking bug that apparently is in that version that isn't in i think the the most stable version which i think is the switch port of kotor one as that's what like maddie says anyway um so i've always thought about going back to it uh because i did like it but i don't know i i'm looking forward to this with like a very like the largest asterisk you could possibly put next to something that doesn't currently exist in any real capacity but i'm rooting for him i hope they do i hope like i wish doesn't but the best for Casey Hudson and that team like I would love for them to come out swinging with a with a hit again especially as a follow-up to KOTOR but you know

1:50:22Chris Wray:this could be a mid-gen to late-gen PS6 game which is interesting when you think about it this game will probably most certainly not be on PS5 at all which is that's how new it is which is which is fun to think about well I'm glad everyone is excited about there I was I'm sure Maddie streamed last night I'm sure I haven't gotten to look yet but I'm sure he freaked out oh yeah all right next up was Divinity this was the statue that was being shown. There is no press release for this either, but there is a website, divinity.com, which I wonder, I got to look into, I got to look at the who is it this, have they always owned that URL?

1:50:54Chris Wray:It seems like an interesting URL to own. I wonder if they purchased it or something. The problem with, Baldur's Gate just doesn't, I'm Baldur's Gate, Larian just doesn't make games that I want to play. I mean, I understand that they're a massive, Baldur's Gate 3 is huge and people love Divinity and all those games. I just don't like PC role-playing games. So I know this is not, Unless it is really different than Divinity Original Sin, which either of them, and I don't know if it's going to be or not. I can't imagine I'm going to play this game. But the trailer, like the cinematic trailer is fucking awesome.

1:51:29Chris Wray:And I was on the YouTube channel and I was reading the comments and I love this because it's like a group of people watching an execution. And someone wrote, not a cell phone in sight, just people living in the moment.

1:51:40Colin Moriarty:I was like, yes.

1:51:42Chris Wray:it i mean this is high budget really beautiful larian's obviously loaded larian's got to be like one of the larger electronics companies in belgium right at this point you would assume like electronic yeah i would have to imagine you know software outfits and so i i wish that because i i just loved everything about the trailer i just thought it was awesome but and we didn't see gameplay but i just uh i don't know i don't think it's going to be for me ultimately so i'm just being honest about that but it was certainly the most impressive trailer I think we saw during the night.

1:52:12Colin Moriarty:Are either of you into this? I'm into it. I wonder what it will be like. I think I saw Lockmort in our discord saying that he thinks it could be an action RPG and not a CRPG. I mean, who knows? That would be not.

1:52:26Chris Wray:I mean, that would be a game change, literally a game changer for me.

1:52:29Colin Moriarty:Why doesn't he go work for them? I don't know. He should. I mean, he's their number one fan. Yeah, I know. It's so interesting. He's right there. But yeah, Divinity, I have never played Divinity Original Sin 1 or 2 or any of the previous Divinity games before that. But I liked Baldur's Gate 3 a lot. And I believe someone on Twitter or someone on their team said that, or maybe it was at the show there, like this is, I think it was Jeff, this is bigger than Baldur's Gate 3. Which is staggering. Insane. So I'm very curious. I mean, they're, as you were saying, Colin, they're certainly loaded. And I remember us talking about, like, should they do Baldur's Gate four?

1:53:12Colin Moriarty:And it's like, absolutely not. Because now they own divinity. Yeah, they don't want to do licensed anything anymore. Yeah. So in some ways, I feel like this is really them unleashed at this point. And dude, the trailer was pretty sick. You got a pig eating vomit. You've got a lady fucking the lizard man.

1:53:32Chris Wray:a guy's you know boils exploding i love the shot of the little girl like watching the um watching the the execution it's pretty cool yeah there's a lot of good shit in there yeah it's crazy um chris will you spend three to four hundred hours on divinity when it comes out at an unknown time i can't fathom that i will sir i feel like i i have look i i i'm very much

1:53:57Colin Moriarty:like you where i'm like i understand i put some time into baldur's gate three to be fair like and I did like it it's just like the things that I liked were not enough to pull me through the things that I didn't like and ultimately that's kind of the that's kind of where a lot of these games die for me like I I have such a curiosity to to have one of these games land with me you know like I'm longing for it so like I hope it can maybe like that would be nice for one of them to work for me but like I just they just kind of don't generally work uh if they do an ARPG or if if they do like that would be something else that would be a different story altogether like i would

1:54:33Chris Wray:be probably all over it and the name maybe suggests that it is a whole rebooting and reimagining of what the because i don't really know what to be i know it by look but i don't even know what it really is so yeah so yeah it could be a way to draw us all and very similar to kind of how fallout 3 was a a reboot of fallout in a way it was it continues it but it's it's its own right exactly one or two i'm a huge fallout fan i didn't play fallout one or two like oh lord knows i would

1:54:59Colin Moriarty:never yeah like like i i just look at those and i'm like i know that these probably aren't for me but fallout three yeah fallout is a great example of like that got me into fallout in a way that like i probably would have never gotten into it if not for that so like if they can do something like that with divinity hell yeah but um as it stands right now this is ultimately another kind of no game no hype you know like it's okay it's a very good trailer cool we've seen that before I remember Dead Island. Sure. You know, so obviously it's a way different pedigree of these two studios. But I think whatever they're going to make is going to be great.

1:55:34Colin Moriarty:Hopefully I'll be into it. But if I'm not, that's OK, too.

1:55:38Chris Wray:Two things for me as well is Grand Theft Auto actually is another example of that as well, which is interesting. Two two things I want to say is one, I feel bad that this kind of. leaked but they got hoisted they kind of got hoisted by their own petard in a way because you're being too cute by half by like having the statue and out there and then everyone had kind of figured out what it was i think there was even a trademark of like the the logo of the outline right the logo outline right it's like you guys you got too cute you should have just not done any of this and you should have just dropped this bomb because the other thing i wanted to say is i'm pretty sure they've been lying about this game which i have no problem about with as i interpret it like people always talk about like Jeff he straight up lied to everyone about Twisted Metal when he came back he just straight up lied so it's not happening it's not in development I'm not going to be at E3 and then he rolls out in a fucking ice cream truck right and I don't begrudge people that because like what do you want him to do be like oh yep you asked me the question I'm under oath and I have to tell you that yes indeed Twisted Metal 2012 is real and we're going to be there so from that perspective I just I'm like ah it's too bad because I think this would have been a big one for people people fucking love Larian and always and i think they've been saying like we're not going back to divinity and stuff and

1:56:52Colin Moriarty:well the verbiage specifically was that like everybody was guessing divinity original sin three oh right right and they were coming out they were they were being coy about it where they were lying they were telling the truth because they were like we have no plans to do a divinity original sin three that's not even in the pipeline and so everybody was like oh well okay it's clever but they would have been better off not doing it the statue also i find this i find statue things like that annoying like the args like that like i don't know stop it

1:57:24Chris Wray:another puzzling um announcement i thought not that they showed the game but it's in the game for loop which i'm really interested to see what you guys think this is what's next this is a sony second party game being developed with bad robot games and jj abrams himself showed up to talk about the game which was um pretty cool and this is a not surprising since it's coming from the talent that brought us uh mike booth specifically left for dead this is a four player co-op game in that spirit um i'm a little confused why they kind of announced this a week or two ago they didn't announce the title of the game but they they announced that they were working on something did they assume it was going to leak i guess or something because this would have been a pretty interesting surprise and maybe even taken a little bit differently if they did again but i feel like maybe they were trying to guard themselves from some sort of leak or whatever i don't know people are pretty down about this game as far as i can tell and i'm a little i'm getting a little tired of people like my honest take is like i'm getting a little tired of people being like another service game like wake up Up.

1:58:30Chris Wray:Like, holy mother of God. Yes, guys, another service game. They're going to keep making them. You have to just get used to it. And this is exactly the way they should be doing it by investing in someone else's studio to do it as a second party and worrying about what they do well, which is the first party, first single player adventure fair or whatever. So this is not a game for me. I think Left 4 Dead is cool. he didn't this guy Mike Booth was gone I think by the time left for blood or back for blood and Wolf Alve and then back for blood were even being made so I don't know if you can blame him for those so much I know people didn't like either of those as much but this is not a game for me so I don't really want to judge it but I am noticing you know likes dislikes ratio comments on different things the kind of people's reactions on social media all anecdotal but it doesn't seem too good but I don't but I'm not really entirely sure why uh maybe people are just kind of getting tired of the same old things and kind of going back to the well but I'm not super surprised that they're they're making this attempt and I don't really begrudge them it at all I don't care whether it does well or not it's not gonna hurt Sony too much but if it does well it could really be a huge benefit to them Chris for loop what do you think yeah man it's come on man come on I don't

1:59:49Colin Moriarty:um look the name is terrible i think uh it's terrible i don't know who i don't know what the maybe maybe there's a reason for it if there is a reason for it i would retcon that reason because it's just not it's not a good it's a terrible reason it was we already don't like it so just yes it's not worth it like it's a terrible it doesn't communicate anything like what does that mean even i don't know whatever like that's the least of the problem like when i hear like oh left for dead uh i have a specific thing kind of come to mind and and it is co-op and it is this kind of this general kind of thing but i don't know about this vibe man like this this kind of sci-fi kind of thing going on here with like people running around in exosuits i don't know i i'm open to it like obviously this is one of those things where like i feel like you probably should experience it first before um making too many judgments on it could be good it could be fun i just like nothing i'm seeing here is is drawing my attention really or making me excited or or really pulling my attention to play it which is a bummer because uh on paper

2:00:59Chris Wray:that's a it's a really great get so i don't know well the website is play for the number play for for loop.com and you can sign up for the play tests that they're getting going. It is a PlayStation console exclusive. Not a huge surprise. And Sony is acting as second party publisher, although Helldivers was that other kind of experiment. I thought they'd be a little more aggressive with the stuff. Maybe not. Maybe they see Xbox kind of just being undone and they just don't need to bother at this point. I don't know. Dustin, the left for dead spiritual successor for loop is being drawn to PlayStation as a console exclusive via bad robot games.

2:01:32Chris Wray:And your thoughts are.

2:01:34Colin Moriarty:Yeah. so first off i feel uh not very strong about the art direction of the game i don't think it's bad but um in this market i think it's really important to have a striking or appealing visual style and um it's just fine the thing that concerns me and maybe this was in the initial press release that we talked about is um and there's a whole write-up in the playstation blog about this game having roguelike elements to it uh it could be great but one thing that chris and i were talking about one of the issues with back for blood was all of the extra stuff around the core gameplay um so i don't want to say it's a bad thing that has roguelike elements i just that's a point where i'm like oh that could either uh bring down the game or it could be a big positive for it um but overall i wonder like just looking at the trailer and you know of course it's the a spiritual type successor for left for dead but it's also like thinking about hell divers in the mix too and it's like you and three other people competing missions with hordes of enemies it's like okay well i guess the roguelike thing would set it apart from hell divers but uh i would like to do that i'm i'm curious about the play test i don't know if they would let me in but I this is a the type of game I really want to play before any like major judgment on it yeah that's fair I one thing I will say before we move on let's just like the narration in the trailer is terrible like the the the tone of whatever the narration is in this official announcement trailer where it's kind of like I don't know there's like an irreverent it's kind of trying to be cheeky with you and I'm like I don't really want that right now man like it doesn't match what I'm seeing at all and it's kind of annoying which is a bummer because i actually think it might i actually i wonder like how i would feel about this trailer if it wasn't accompanied by like an annoying narration like i wonder like if i just could let like the music or whatever their whatever their music is or whatever their environmental storytelling is like i wonder if they let that breathe a little bit like if it would come across better than it does i don't know we're

2:03:45Chris Wray:gonna see i mean i'm i'm i don't the reaction's just not good and i think that that's a bad place to start yeah um but we will see i think that um i'm eager to i'm eager for them to find success in this space so they can at least start to learn i mean hell divers obviously is a big success mlb the show but continue to learn about what works and the problem is is and i think we were saying this about hell divers is i'm not even sure what lessons you can learn from your major successes since each of them are these these specific permutations of and combinations of whatever that are probably not replicable.

2:04:20Chris Wray:So it's going to be a very interesting time for this game, but hopefully one of you, I'm not going to try, but one of you will get into the closed play test and we'll see more about For Loop, the upcoming PlayStation console exclusive. The next game up is Coven of the Chicken Foot. This is the new game from Bruce Straley, and we haven't heard from Bruce in a while. Bruce Straley, of course, was a longtime employee of Naughty Dog, and he joined the team, I think, in the late Crash era. He actually began at Crystal Dynamics because he was one of the original designers, we were talking about it earlier, of the Gex series.

2:04:55Chris Wray:But ultimately, he ended up at Naughty Dog. He worked on some art, I think, for late Crash games, and then he was one of the lead artists and one of the major people behind Jak and Daxter in terms of what it looks like. And then he became the art director and later full-up game director of the Uncharted games. He was the art director of the original Uncharted game and then co-director of The Last of Us and Uncharted 4. And I've always been interested by him. Bruce, I feel like, has kind of... It was always Neil and Bruce and then it wasn't anymore. And I've certainly not got... I mean, I'm not going to get into these personal conversations when I talk to Neil, but I'm always curious about what happened here because it felt like it was both of you and then it wasn't.

2:05:35Chris Wray:And obviously he left, but he doesn't seem to just get any credit for anything anymore. And I assume that that's fairly frustrating. this game is a little surprising to me just because it's not what i expected out of him and he's never done an artsy i mean this is like a ueda game yeah in some weird way and uh it's not what i expected which is cool so it's certainly very different and it's described here first of his studio is wildflower interactive we've known that for a while and this is their debut game says quote the dungeons have been plundered and the monsters long slain as the heroes move on an elderly witch quietly gets to work.

2:06:11Chris Wray:Covenant of the Chicken Foot is a single player adventure about the building of a bond between an elderly witch named Gertie and a peculiar creature who must learn to work together to fulfill an oath. As their trust deepens, a dark revelation of what they're up against will make them question their commitment to the oath and to each other. Dustin, you love Uedaslop.

2:06:31Colin Moriarty:Is this for you? I don't know about Uedaslop because I famously hate eco. Oh, that's right. Yeah, you're right. But what was the words peculiar creatures sign me up uh i like this weird guy in this trailer and the a lot of the feeling that i was getting maybe not directly but there's a lot of studio ghibli feeling here you know you've main character is this old lady kind of like um how's moving castle um and you got weird little creatures you got this big guy and i'm i think it looks cool um i i like games that you're co-oping with a cpu you know like last guardian was a game that famously people were very aggravated with but i think i knew that going into it and so i uh actually liked it quite a bit and i like that it's something that looks totally different we were commenting during the stream that she's got like a glide that's like um a peach mario 2 glide to it.

2:07:36Colin Moriarty:So I'm into this. I definitely have it on my radar and want to know more.

2:07:43Chris Wray:Chris, are you going to check this out when it arrives? I don't know if they gave a date. I don't think they did. I think so.

2:07:51Colin Moriarty:I think so. I dig the idea of like, I can't think, maybe I'm wrong, but I actually don't think I am. I can't I can't conjure a name of a game where you play as an old woman. like i that's a that's a genuinely like unique kind of starting point yeah i'm trying to think as far as i know like maybe there's like some i don't know i'm sure it exists but i don't know that i'm sure it exists but like not to the not to the point where like it would be even remotely accessible in my memory so like this is that alone is kind of cool i like the look of it i like the the cell shading kind of art style of it there is some ghibli in here um i like the look of it i don't know normally these games don't really entice me but like there is something about this where i feel like i feel like there's something here um yeah i um i don't know it's not

2:08:43Chris Wray:for me but i i wanted to talk about it mostly first of all it's not announced for console it's only coming to pc so far i assume it will certainly come to console but it's bruce traley's games we got we got to talk about it here on sacred symbols so something to keep an eye out for the next game comes from frictional games and this is again kepler popping back up as the publisher it's called ontos it is described as a quote mind-bending narrative mystery and it's coming to playstation 5 in 2026 says quote in ontos which is all it is stylized in all capital letters o-n-t-o-s players will become adidi amani a resource i went to a college with a girl named adidi a resourceful engineer as she explores the repurposed moon hotel samsara in search of the truth around her estranged father samsara is a vast labyrinth built atop the ruins of a failed mining colony and players will explore this open interconnected environment in their quest for the truth every corner of samsara tells a story and every story has something hiding beneath the surface waiting to be found players will scavenge for helpful items manipulate intricate machinery and face intense tests of morality as they encounter horrific experiments with a capital e throughout Samsara.

2:09:51Chris Wray:There is no one solution to the obstacles players will encounter in Antos. Players will need to use their wits and ingenuity to reach the narrative's mysterious conclusions and face the consequences of their choices. As I noted, this game comes from Frictional, which is a small studio of about 35 people, according to Wikipedia. They're best known for the Amnesia series that has been going on and before that Penumbra series, but the Amnesia series started back in 2010. And they're saying that this is the spiritual successor to probably their most famous game, which is Soma, which came out on PS4 back in 2015.

2:10:21Chris Wray:Antos apparently according to this press release if you read it has been in development for more than a decade behind the scenes that sounds bad but it's not a huge surprise they're a very small team and this has probably been they probably been you know tinkering on this when they can but I think this game looks super cool I guess a horror adventure walking sim of some sort I'm down and on the moon second game on the moon that we've seen today as well either of you interested in Antos Dustin moonslop

2:10:48Colin Moriarty:uh i love this game we we saw the trailer i was like oh this looks cool and then when i re-watched the trailer today i'm like there's a little bit of bioshock feel in this there's a little bit of prey in here maybe just visually i'm not sure about the gameplay itself but looked pretty intriguing looked pretty quality i've not played soma but i did play amnesia the dark descent and I think it's probably a little dated at this point but at the time it was a really unique horror game so yeah this was pretty intriguing to me and I'm I'm gonna have to check out Soma I think at some point I'm looking on Steam yeah it's like overwhelmingly positive reviews so maybe I need to

2:11:31Chris Wray:check that out it's interesting because I'm just fascinated with them working with Kepler because they kind of frictional hadn't been working with a publisher for many years so they might have leveraged their money to finally get this idea through um i think it looks pretty neat chris antos yeah it looks neat i uh actually just looked up soma on steam just

2:11:52Colin Moriarty:before this and it's like a buck 49 so i was like you know what oh nice i'm gonna go ahead and buy that that's basically free because that's that's yeah that's insane i was like okay yeah well it's a good good opportunity then right so because people have been taught telling me to play soma for a while um i just haven't gotten around to it but yeah i liked the look of it i don't really i don't have much to say about it though because i don't really know like i played a little bit a little bit of amnesia the dark descent years and years and years and years ago probably like 2012 um and i remember thinking it was okay i just wasn't really into horror back then as much so i kind of didn't keep up with it i know that they had like the what is it the something of den of pigs or something with amnesia or something that was chinese room that that that spinoff right and so like i just missed out on a lot of that i didn't play soma so i don't know what this is building off of but i'm curious to find out because it did look really cool and there were like pretty heavy bioshock vibes that i got from it too definitely i'm

2:12:53Chris Wray:careful about those bioshock vibes though because i remember i got those vibes from random games and And then it's like a We Happy Few, I think, gave me that. Yeah, that was not. And I'm like, no, no, no, no. Got to. We Happy Few. Wow. I forgot that game's entire existence. Xbox bought that studio on the back of that game. It's like, why? Dude. That's why I was just like, what are you even doing? And then they ended up making South of Midnight, which we'll talk about, actually, in a little bit.

2:13:20Colin Moriarty:What was that Russian game that also gave Bioshock vibes? Oh, Atomic Heart? yeah atomic heart see their hat there are you got to be careful that's that's a very good point

2:13:30Chris Wray:atomic shock lights yeah all right so antos uh is coming i believe in 2026 and i will be keeping an eye out for that that's again described as a sci-fi thriller coming to playstation 5 um next up was resident evil requiem i think the big thing here was the whole leon reveal i'm of the i've kind of beaten into the ground into the ground at this point especially with brad but um i just don't understand why they even had to show them i just think it would have been way more cool to and again it's one of those things that would be spoiled immediately when people started playing the game but you just don't you just don't have to say anything about it it's fun a little like you don't need i don't i maybe i'm wrong capcom knows their marketing beats better than i do and like what things look like behind the scenes but i feel like you really have to market a resident evil game this much yeah resident evil comes out too much it's probably weeks at most away from going gold like just shut up you know it reminds me a little bit of young drake in just that that was obviously going to be spoiled very quickly for people but it was cool that they just never said anything about it and uncharted 3 specifically little secrets little secrets that's all um we don't have to linger on resident evil requiem though do we need to say anything else about it at this point we're all excited about it comes out in february good yeah one

2:14:42Colin Moriarty:thing they did say that did concern me was that they were looking at the two protagonists as two separate types of right they were like oh we go to this character for the survival horror and we go to this character for the action i'm like maybe that maybe yeah we'll see i don't know that doesn't sound great to me i agree it's funny you say that because that was the first thing or i'd heard or seen about this game where i'm like oh yeah like everything else was like so

2:15:09Chris Wray:cool up to this point yeah and then i'm like oh all right but i try i'll say this chris i trust them until they show me otherwise they haven't had a miss in a long time so that's very fair yeah yeah long time and some of the things that they were doing i remember the controversy around resident evil 7 before it came out when people are going this is really going to work and it was fucking dope you know so i'll be easy give them the benefit of the doubt maybe they'll disappoint us uh next up was order of the sinking star this is the new game from jonathan blow and his first game since The Witness, although they did create a braid, what, 10th or 15th anniversary edition that came out recently that I think he was complaining didn't sell very well.

2:15:49Chris Wray:Nothing sells very well anymore, Jonathan. There's too many games out there. This is being published by Ark Games and Vecla is Jonathan Blow's longtime company. It's described, Order of the Sinking Star, as a massive narrative puzzle adventure featuring more than 1 ,000 handcrafted puzzles, an unlikely cast of heroes, and hundreds of hours of gameplay designed to put your intellect to the test. So that's a pretty extreme set of claims. And I believe it, considering how long he's been working on this game, how big the witness was and how much money they made on it. So he had a lot of time to do this.

2:16:24Chris Wray:It will launch in 2026 and it's coming to PC for sure. And they say that it will come to consoles and they'll announce those consoles at a later date. I assume a lot of this has to do with the fact that maybe they can't even get a Switch 2 dev kit. This is a problem for a lot of developers. I'm a little surprised he's working with a publisher. That's pretty much my only takeaway on this. Otherwise, as I was saying on the stream, I am way too stupid for this game. I mean, this seems like even more complicated and a lot of and a little bit more ethereal than The Witness was, and I could barely play The Witness.

2:16:58Chris Wray:So Chris, has Jonathan Blow's time come and gone or will he have his third major hit in three tries with Order of the Sinking Star? Hey, man, there's always there's always people looking out for for a blow slop blows, you know.

2:17:20Colin Moriarty:No, I mean, honestly, even in the time of Braid, Braid wasn't really my jam. Like I was more into like, you know, Super Meat Boy and Limbo around that time than then Braid. And the witness kind of came. And then I was like, I just really wasn't into the I can't really speak to Jonathan Blow's history as far as like the games that he makes, because I just don't really I haven't really played them extensively so like I don't know where this one's gonna sit I'm sure people are gonna be excited about I'm sure it's gonna do great it's it is of of the games that he's made this one's the most interesting to me just because like the sheer volume of puzzles in here like I wonder what style they're going to be like I couldn't really get a hint of I couldn't get a sense of what the puzzle was when I was watching the trailer in real time like I wasn't sure like what the problem was to solve I wasn't quite sure what the barriers were or what you could and couldn't do so i mean i'm probably more likely to play this than pick up the witness but i don't really know yet this is going to be one of those games where i'm it's going to come out and then people are going to either talk about how great or how disappointing it is and if it's great i'll probably undoubtedly be like siren songed over to it just to check it out but i don't know it's not really on my radar i'm i'm concerned too about just how dumb I am as far as like whether or not I'll even be able to play it although I don't really know like I've never played the witness so like I don't even know how hard that game is

2:18:44Chris Wray:I just I never played it I never played it either because I knew I would not be able to get very far and it's like what's the point the last game I truly humbled and embarrassed myself with and I'm even I'm even embarrassed to say this was the original portal where I was like I don't know after a while I think I played it for like 45 minutes and at that point and I got I'm like I don't know man like like I'm like I remember playing it actually at the office and I was like I don't know what you want me to do here. I'm just going to go play. Did you have a shooter?

2:19:09Colin Moriarty:Did you never finish portal?

2:19:11Chris Wray:No, I mean, I've seen the ending, but I've never, I've never, I've never beat it myself. Yeah, that's fair. But oh my God, I love because everyone loved that song and shit like that. So I obviously back at that time, almost 20 years ago now,

2:19:22Colin Moriarty:the contempt. Everybody love that song. We're still alive, dude.

2:19:28Chris Wray:Legendary song. Dustin, order the sinking star. I just wanted to throw out here two things where you can talk about whatever you'd like. I think there's two big mitigating factors with this. One is Jonathan Blow. He's not very well liked. And I like him. He's been on my show. But it's a very different era he's launching this into than the way people looked at him during Braid and especially during The Witness. Remember, The Witness was the first PS4 game we saw at the reveal event for the console. And he was on stage. It's a very different world now. So I wonder like how much glowing coverage he's going to get and how much that might help or hurt.

2:20:06Chris Wray:And the whole media landscape is different, too. The other thing is, and I don't know if you saw this, is that the game apparently the puzzles in the game are apparently a shit ton of different games that different people have made. So it's like it's like I don't want to say it's like dreams or something. It's a compendium of people's work, which I think is pretty interesting. And so it behooves them in some way to to leverage that to help mitigate any of the the harm that might come, not because he did anything wrong, but because of the way people perceive him in the industry. Yeah.

2:20:37Colin Moriarty:I wonder if he's like us where he maybe was considered by industry people a bad guy. But now there are much worse guys out there. so the spotlight is off.

2:20:53Chris Wray:I remember he was considered a bad guy because he's I mean I've never talked to him about this personally on the show or anything like that when we've had him on but he's a conservative. I mean it's fairly obvious and so I think that that rubs people the wrong way.

2:21:07Colin Moriarty:Right. For my perspective I love I loved Braid and The Witness I also really really liked. I have a couple gripes with it. Ironically the gripes about the witness are also something that concerns me in this game is that the witness for anyone who played it maybe you remember there's sections of puzzles that you have to like unfold a bridge and it's like oh do these 10 or 15 puzzles in a row to just slightly progress and it can be really fucking annoying where it's like oh i gotta do 15 puzzles in a row like homework and then do the next 15 puzzles to get to the next bridge so some parts of the witness from a pacing perspective I didn't really like.

2:21:52Colin Moriarty:But it was a really unique, interesting game. Almost out of the platinum for it. Other than the final trophy was too hard for me. So this game, I'm looking at an IGN article where it says, Blow says the game has a thousand individualized puzzles. I think we mentioned that. It can take up to 250 hours to complete at a normal pace and upwards of 500 hours for a completionist. Yeah, I don't know. And OK, I mean, show me what you got. I mean, it's a cool value proposition.

2:22:24Chris Wray:I think that value proposition hits a lot differently in this era. But yeah, I think a lot of it's going to be based. I feel like this game is going to find its way and be just fine. But I don't. I'm just very like the industry that embraced braid is not doesn't exist anymore. So that's that the witness is a pretty big hit considering what it was. I just wonder how many people really. There's just so many options. I don't know. I don't know.

2:22:50Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I'm excited. I'll play anything he makes just because of the two previous games are so good. I'll say this. I don't think anybody's going to give a shit about who Jonathan Blow is or like why people don't like it. I don't even think that's like a thing for the overruling majority of people who are going to be playing this game.

2:23:08Chris Wray:So and I want to be clear. I just think he's looked at by a lot of people in the industry as like MAGA. And and I I don't care about that one way or the other, but a lot of people do. And I don't know if that's fair or not either, but that's just kind of the perception.

2:23:23Colin Moriarty:I don't know. It's kind of like Erica Ishii or whatever. It's like, well, didn't seem to matter. Yeah.

2:23:29Chris Wray:Yeah.

2:23:30Colin Moriarty:People, people only care if something's good, really, ultimately.

2:23:33Chris Wray:Well, we'll see what happens. Wishing him the best. I'd love to have him back on the show. I said on the stream, I invited him back to the show earlier this year. I think he, well, I don't want to talk about like what we corresponded about, but I understand. I can say this much. Is that like, he'd indicated that it's frustrating for him because to come on these shows because it's always something spun out out of context, you know? Right. And I, I'm like, I get it. Yeah. So, so, yeah, so that's, I totally understand that. It's in other words, it's never about like the, what he's there to talk about.

2:24:06Chris Wray:It's like some fucking flippant thing that was said. And I totally, I totally relate. So the next two games, I think we can go through fairly quickly. They showed Exodus again. I, this is a huge game for me. I am so stoked about this game. I think they were talking about Exodus is coming out next year for a while, but now I think they're aiming for early 2027. I think that's probably the biggest change. It's a Mass Effect style space game. It's coming to PlayStation 5 and it looks fantastic. We've seen a bit of this game already. I really don't need to see much more about it. Matthew McConaughey doing a voice in it.

2:24:39Chris Wray:It's hysterical. And wasn't he at the Game Awards when it was announced? Is that?

2:24:44Colin Moriarty:He might have been. You might be right. Yeah. also I have a hot take about XS yeah yeah good okay and I gotta make sure I explain it properly I think this game looks good the gameplay looked cool something about these cutscenes looked like Mind's Eye

2:25:02Chris Wray:oh yeah I know what you're saying

2:25:04Colin Moriarty:something about this game gave me a little bit of Mind's Eye like pre-release Mind's Eye vibe do it yeah I'm not saying that I think it looks bad or it's gonna be a failure or whatever let me know if you agree there's just something about it that has a little bit of that flavor. I totally know what you're saying. Okay, good. I totally see it because like there were parts of it was like, I'm into this, but then some of it was like, look, it's pre-release, so like who the fuck knows, but like there were parts of it where I was like, there was a little voice in the back of my head being like, this is Mass Effect at home.

2:25:33Colin Moriarty:And I'm like, I'm sure it'll be better. I'm sure like there's going to be a lot to love about it, but like there's something, and I'm particular about this, man. There's something about video game cut scenes or character cut scenes where I'm like, that looks like Unreal Engine. Or like there's something in the motion capture or the facial capture where I'm like, it looks more uncanny than it might otherwise be. I think it was easier to look past in the 360 generation where things were kind of always jank and not quite on that level to even be discernible as like real. But now that we have this kind of like half step, middle step, it's just like, I don't know, man.

2:26:11Colin Moriarty:It bothers me. This is a very particular thing to me. Like I'm sure the game will be great. and a lot of the gameplay sequences looked fucking awesome. And I'm into the idea. But man, it's that Unreal Engine face. It's going to bother the shit out of me.

2:26:27Chris Wray:I'm excited about X's. Yeah, but I totally get it. We don't, we've both, they've talked about this game for a few years now and shown it and, you know, at least with cut scenes and cinematics. We just don't know. I mean, Wizards of the Coast is the publisher. So there's going to be a bit of money behind it. archetype's a new studio, so we really don't know what it's all about. The next game I don't have anything to say about, but people will care about is Warlock, an original dark fantasy game set in the world of Dungeons and Dragons. I think it's called literally Warlock colon Dungeons and Dragons, an original, quote, third person single player action adventure game.

2:27:05Chris Wray:Warlock is set in a dark fantasy open world inspired by Dungeons and Dragons. Developed by Invoke Studios, the game places players in the role of Catri, a veteran warrior who makes a pact to wield otherworldly magic against dark powers. The role of Katri features full performance captured by the award-winning Trisha Helfer from Battlestar. Who I have to go, of course. And it was great to see her, by the way. And I think someone was saying on the, maybe it was you. It's like, she looks phenomenal. That was me.

2:27:27Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I was like, I can't, but like, it's unreal. She's 51 or something. Yeah, it's like, it's incredible.

2:27:35Chris Wray:I obviously love Battlestar, as everyone knows. And she plays number six on Battlestar. And she looks pretty much the exact same. It's crazy. Yeah. She's crazy. so uh i don't does anyone give it i don't care about this game but no yeah it exists sorry trisha sorry trisha but it was nice to see you the next game we definitely care about though and the uh title of this had actually leaked via a trademark filing that someone had dug up in the last few weeks so we kind of felt like this was coming although we knew a sequel to control was coming it's called control resident and it's launching in 2026 now chris this was a big one for you and me.

2:28:09Chris Wray:I don't, Dustin, I don't know if you're as much of a stan of the original as we were of the original Control, but I loved Control, and I know Chris did too. And this is a very different sort of game from Remedy. Control Remedy is going to be self-published. It's co-financed by Annapurna, which is interesting. According to the press release, it will come to PlayStation 5, no PS4 version, obviously, for 2026. It says the following in the press release, quote, quote, after years of confinement at the hands of the Federal Bureau of Control, Dylan Faden's former captors are deploying him at the peak of a supernatural crisis.

2:28:45Chris Wray:Charged with combating a mysterious cosmic entity as it alters fundamental aspects of our reality, Dylan must harness his newfound powers to take the fight to the myriad threats overwhelming Manhattan. On the path to unlocking the full potential of his supernatural abilities, Dylan will also seek out his sister, FBC director Jesse Faden, as he struggles to comprehend and contain the dangers that have spilled beyond the confines of the oldest house to tear the world apart. And you and I both said we love that shot of the old house, the building's entrance, when it's like shattered through. And it's like, oh damn, this is awesome.

2:29:18Chris Wray:It's almost like goosebump worthy to me. I'm like so excited about it. And I'm so excited to play. I played Control and Platinum on PS4. I've never played the PS5 version. So again, I'll pull the Colin Moriarty and play that right before this game comes out in 2026. But man, I am amped. And as you were saying, Chris, when we were when we were streaming, it's like this story where you're playing as the other sibling and it feels totally different. It's now like a melee action game as opposed to more of a third person shooter. So pretty cool. What do you think?

2:29:46Colin Moriarty:Yeah, dude, I'm pumped. I'm excited all over this. This looks like everything a sequel should be where it's it's continuing, continuing the weird vibes and the weird aesthetic and the world. but like breaking it out of the building uh streets of manhattan weird dude i yeah i'm i'm just i'm really excited about it i'm excited about the fact that it doesn't look like anything that i had thought it would look like that's what's most exciting about it to me it's just like oh i didn't think they would do a melee action game i didn't think they would use dylan as the protagonist i didn't think they would break out of the oldest house and go to the streets of manhattan all of it's just like uh not something that i would have predicted although i guess in retrospect it would have been the obvious or in some ways just a really good idea to do it um but yeah dude it looks sick um i'm all over most of the things that remedy makes like the the only real not bump in the road with them is fire break which i did play and was good to be fair to them but it just like no there was no appetite for that so what's the i just don't what's the purpose yeah just very odd um again actually a pretty good game but like it doesn't like there's no one no one's hungry no one's hungry for that and so as far as i'm concerned And Remedy just kind of continually makes just really good shit and just really interesting games.

2:31:01Colin Moriarty:And the shift from this from one game to the next being so different is just it's refreshing and interesting and cool. And what is it? I think I said on the stream where it's just like, you know, taking this approach where you're kind of like going after the protagonist of the first game. It's like it's very it's very prototype, you know, like all great artists steal from from the great. you know so indeed i'm glad that sam lake took a took a note from from that that vital series

2:31:33Chris Wray:that comes up so often for some reason the iconic so often brackets prototype by the way yeah right right it's got brackets i always loved how you have prototype and infamous which were looked at as like kind of competitors at the time both had like this annoying you know like pr driven like i got a letter from sony once being like it's infamous lowercase i lowercase n capital f a MU. Oh, I'm like, we're not writing like that. You got a letter? That's crazy. Oh, yeah. Like, like they sent me a letter once because I kept calling the Sony, like the PS. Was it the PS3? It might have been the PS4 camera.

2:32:09Chris Wray:I kept calling it like the PlayStation Eye and they're like, it is not the PlayStation Eye. It is the PlayStation 4 camera. I'm like, leave me alone. Yeah, I think people will figure it out. Get out of here. Dustin, anything for you with control resonant?

2:32:23Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I think it looks awesome. I like the first control a lot. I think the main issues I had with it was so much of the lore being behind just too many fucking documents. Just too many documents. I like a document or two, you know? Yeah. Too many. How I knew it was control was that there were so many documents. They were drowning. It wasn't even like the floating guy. Because that could have really been anything. It was all the papers. I was like, oh, it's control. I wonder if that was intentional in some way.

2:32:54Chris Wray:because that is like something everyone says about the game and i remember when i was even preparing for our spoiler cast back in california uh i sat down to read everything and i'm after a while i'm like i can't do this like this is so much there is so much shit in here that's a famous

2:33:08Colin Moriarty:spoiler cast for us because like i'm convinced like both of us we were like i don't we i don't

2:33:11Chris Wray:know what this is yeah i remember yeah like i'm like i don't really think i even understand this completely but we'll do the best we can and that was before i played alan wake and i still have to get back which i ended up loving and i still have to get back to alan wake too because i i stopped playing it because it was all i think it was all fucked up on ps5 pro or something wasn't it something like that something like that yeah yeah but uh yeah i think it looks awesome i'm

2:33:32Colin Moriarty:definitely in i loved alan wake too and i'll play this is like other cases we've mentioned like with jonathan but i'll play anything that remedy makes well i guess other than fbc firebreak you should have they really could have used you they could have used me on that one i'm good but in this

2:33:48Chris Wray:case i will absolutely play it it's funny because they they walk and talk like a studio that's a lot bigger than they are we were saying this about alan wake too like that it took them a long time to even break even on alan wake too and it's like that's just so crazy like what are people fucking blind and dumb well it's also not it's also not on steam that's kind of the thing right like alan

2:34:10Colin Moriarty:wake 2 is not on state which is crazy it's just like no one's gonna go to epic games like the dedicated people will but like i don't like two is fucking great so like i hope they continue

2:34:21Chris Wray:i was shocked by how good alan wake one was when i played it when it came to ps4 and i was like this game's fucking awesome dude like this is a really awesome game loved it you you feel uh you

2:34:32Colin Moriarty:feel about that game the way i feel about bioshock infinite where like um a lot of people like even people who like that game were like oh man the skyhook kind of sucks or like the skyhook combat is whatever and i'm like i love the fucking i i don't care i love it it's like the same thing with the flashlight now and wake up like everybody's like that's whatever you just flash a guy and like shoot him it's like yes it's dope you do with energizer batteries and you use

2:34:57Chris Wray:it with your singular telephone or whatever the fuck weird ads they had in the original one which is horizon horizon that's what it was singular singular as it existed like 25 years probably um boost mobile boost mobile um so yeah all right so control resident 2026 i mean that's a fucking that's a day and this is why i wanted to wait we haven't recorded our our holiday episodes yet but like the episode of like games we're most excited about we just have like a whole slew of them to add to the list here and that's certainly near the top of the list for me so all right um dustin i was thinking about you with this next one and we did i'm surprised we didn't talk more about it we we were distracted with a million different things on the stream but Gang of Dragon this comes from Negoshi Studio Toshihiro Negoshi of course was one of the original minds behind Yakuza and famously split off from Sega and Ryoga Studio to do this they showed off the game it looks like Asian crime drama but

2:35:57Colin Moriarty:yeah can I gently call you out Colin sure of course there's a pause there I was like what did I do you said you thought of me and I think a few times with Yakuza you're like oh this is for you Dustin I've never completed a Yakuza game I just think about you with Asians you think about me with Japan and my Japanese language skills

2:36:18Chris Wray:right I don't know why I'm actually like it's as if you're an actual Japanese person and I'm stereotyping you yeah okay which is kind of crazy when you think about it go ahead uh yeah this trailer was this trailer

2:36:37Colin Moriarty:was cool uh the funniest thing about it to me and chris you pointed this out on the stream is just that it's um it looks like yakuza and it even has dragon in the title which is very funny so it's a bit it's a bit on the nose um it's hard for me to get too excited just because as i was saying a minute ago i've never completed a yakuza game so why would i dip my toes in this when i already have the wealth of yakuza games before me so um i thought it was cool dude it shows shinjuku on the trailer i got a picture of me right in front of that sign that is in this key art from uh the um the press release shown here so looks cool cool to play as a big boy too we need more big boy leads and this guy looks like he can throw a fucking punch so neat.

2:37:32Colin Moriarty:Now I'm a little

2:37:32Chris Wray:confused because is it Korea in this game? Because the actor is Korean but some of the you know how Korean has very very distinct circles and like curves that the other Asian texts don't have so you can really figure out if it's Korean. I don't know that I saw any of that but like because in the press release it says protagonist Shin Ji Song which is a Korean name is a high ranking member of a Korean crime syndicate and is portrayed by celebrated Korean actor Ma Dong Sok. So, yeah, yeah. So it'll be interesting. I mean, so I assume, but it could be a Korean gang in China or a Korean gang in Japan.

2:38:10Chris Wray:Very similar to a mafia kind of like early mafia thing in the United States.

2:38:15Colin Moriarty:Right. I mean, I'm wondering, maybe this is not a good representative of Japan here. I mean, that's the Sinjuku sign. are there other signs like that in the world i mean it looks hold on a second i think i figured

2:38:29Chris Wray:it out it's japan because i'm it says this is from negoshi himself says i'm both relieved and deeply focused as we finally reach the day to unveil gang of dragon this project depicts with unwavering honesty the lies of outlaws who inhabit the real streets of kabukicho kabukicho according to wikipedia is an entertainment district in shinjuku jokyo yeah i stayed there

2:38:53Colin Moriarty:it's supposed to be like the scummy part of Tokyo but when you're there you're like wow this is so much nicer than any city that I've been to in the United States so now people will say and I was

2:39:05Chris Wray:even seeing some comments like so he's just making a Yakuza game and I'm like I'm not sure he ever wanted to stop I'm pretty sure what ended up happening was Sega was far up his asshole and they wanted to be like all right so we're gonna have like the remakes and the spinoffs and the mainline games. And I think he just didn't want to do it.

2:39:22Colin Moriarty:Yeah.

2:39:23Chris Wray:I'm pretty sure that's what happened. So this is like, if I'm a real Yakuza fan, which I'm not, I would be very interested to see this game because this is kind of the vision of what it was going to be, I assume. Or like a way it could have gone. Because I do think Like a Dragon is huge and Yakuza is bigger than ever, but it is a lot. And I think Sega is learning slowly. we talked about this with uh the the quote-unquote soft sales that they feel like they received with uh what the fuck was the game they released atlas released last year why can't i think of the name of it the atlas japanese jrpg metaphor metaphor metaphor right that's i don't know why i couldn't think of it um the the thing with metaphor they you know they were saying like people expect us to re-release it and do this and i feel like yakuza is kind of getting into that zone now where it's like not necessarily remakes of everything because they're remaking the game slowly over time but it's just a lot yeah and i don't know that it's i don't know that it's going to always pay dividends to release that many games so it's cool to get something a little bit a little bit different here from them and i'm pulling for them i might even it's kind of fun because i can kind of get into the ground floor true yeah that's what i was gonna say where it's

2:40:36Colin Moriarty:just that's what i was gonna say where it's like yeah this is kind of great news because like now you don't have to be like a pose or whatever like i'm gonna jump into five or whatever it's like you got a new kind of fresh you get you get the benefit of all the knowledge that they've accumulated through make or you know building that other series now now you get to kind of go in on the ground floor of something else that doesn't really tie into the other thing at all so like i'm actually kind of keen on this i'm looking forward to whatever the hell this is going to be because uh my big issue with the yakuza is just how much of it i really liked like a dragon um when i played it i played i put a good like 20 something hours into it and then i just hit like a wall of grind I was like all right um but I like the world a lot and I like the tone and I wonder if it's going to continue or if it's going to be something different I'm into it

2:41:22Chris Wray:I wanted to so I promised you guys I had two non-game things to talk about the first one is a street fighter film that the whole cast on stage something what that mortal combat quote was not was that not um like practiced and rehearsed I don't think so interesting yeah because I think there's like some controversy around that today but whatever i think it looks cool i was saying this is what it has to be you can't do a serious non-campy grounded street fighter it doesn't work it doesn't make any sense it's fucking crazy it is crazy um so i feel like the the visuals of it from what we saw, I'm like, this is kind of right, actually.

2:42:10Chris Wray:And I'm, I'm not a huge contemporary Street Fighter fan, but I am a major Street Fighter fan of the nineties for sure. Like grew up on and was weaned on fucking Street Fighter two and Street Fighter alpha and all this shit. So I know it. And I felt like it was pretty true to form. Loved seeing Vega and I love Dan. I remember explaining to you guys, Dan's whole thing, like how he's like a weak, he's like the comic like he's a a poser version of ryu and ken and if you use him and he's in street fighter alpha and if you use him like all of his attacks are like wrong so he'll like he shoots a hadouken but it only comes out right in front of him and then disappears or he does like a a hurricane kick but he only does one kick instead of it being like this because like he doesn't know how to do it it's super cool so it's cool to see all these different characters in it i don't know if you guys have the love of street fighter old street fighter that i do but i just wanted to say that i feel like i don't know if it's going to be good or bad but i feel like it's it's what it's supposed to be visually and i'm going to look forward to see more about that yeah that might be a big cultural piece street fighter like i wouldn't be surprised if street fighter bombed at the box office i wouldn't be surprised if street fighter made 350 million dollars it's just one of those things where like i don't know i can go one way or the other I thought I'm a film expert or anything

2:43:29Colin Moriarty:yeah I I don't know anything about Street Fighter trailer didn't really do anything for me either I couldn't tell I think you're right Colin it does need to be silly and over the top but I just don't have any context so it just looked kind of silly to me I mean I know the Street Fighter characters like Blanca stuff like that but yeah I didn't Mortal Kombat did pretty well the first one at least so i could see there definitely be an appetite for this yeah i appreciated the car i appreciated them beating the car up at the end but that was kind of that was kind of it i don't know yeah that was i'm not i haven't it's not moved the needle for me really at all it's funny they

2:44:08Chris Wray:don't have no yeah i'm looking here like saget or sagat i mean i grew up calling him saget but um easy yeah be careful he's there's no he's not in here they do have honda and i'll see him in like the more ethnic but also interestingly interesting body types right like honda is obviously a sumo wrestler and all the rest zangief's fucking huge and it's pretty cool i love some of the characters like uh cody rhodes's guile doesn't really work for me but i do love the character of guile and so it's just cool to see him kind of represented with his big ass hair and

2:44:43Colin Moriarty:combing his hair and shit like that and all the 50 cent looks psychotic yes he does with that that hairline that hairline isn't all rock yeah and then they brought it it's cool they so

2:44:53Chris Wray:the core there's the core eight characters right and then there's the four bosses and that was like street and then there was super street fighter where they brought in like cammy and dj and all that kind of stuff it's cool that they've selected a few of those different characters julie i think is in it a few others yeah so so just wanted to throw that out there back to games though lego batman legacy of the dark knight has a date may 29th 2026 it will be 70 bucks by the way and it looks great i love lego games i just haven't really gotten into them too much recently in the lego star wars game as i think i said somewhere else in the show probably just uh didn't do it for me but the lego batman games are good i played uh the last i played the lego batman games were the vita ports actually of those and they were really fun so are you guys

2:45:42Colin Moriarty:interested in these or in this yeah yeah for sure uh this looks first of all it looks like a distinct like a distinct lego game in comparison to a lot of the other because the the old lego games seem like they're very um or the other lego games i should say or just seem like they're following the archetype of a lego game but they're they're kind of they kind of have the skins and the accoutrements of like whatever franchises are doing this seems more like them trying to make a Batman game with the skin of Lego. Like it seems more like an Arkham light kind of experience, which I'm totally, I'm totally down for.

2:46:15Colin Moriarty:And the way that they're meshing all of these different eras of Batman into the same story, I think is really entertaining and cool. And this is kind of the best way to do it in a way that's not super serious where you're not questioning like why, like why are Batman 1989 and the Dark Knight interacting in, in this weird way universally or narratively. I think they can get away with that in a Lego game that in a way that they couldn't really get away with it in another way so like i think there's a a cool opportunity here i'm gonna be paying attention to this for sure dustin will you be collecting gold bricks potentially it depends on how much they lean into the as chris was saying like it being a arkham style game and so far it does look like that um and i love the as you know the the celebration of all the different suits but listen they better take out the gay pride batman suit or

2:47:04Chris Wray:else i'm not playing oh my god that oh i i remember us talking about that like how they baited them they got them they got them oh my god what a great what i forgot about that what a great oh my god what a what an amazing disable of your enemy's great attack is to be like not only is that not gay pride batman but it's actually like this specific batman suit from a comic book you don't know because you're a fucking tourist thanks for playing you know and it's like oh my god got him good stuff got him good stuff all right next up are two tomb raider games tomb raider catalyst and tomb raider legacy of atlantis so tomb raider legacy of atlantis is actually going to come out first and legacy of atlantis is a remake they're calling it a revisitation they say revisit in the press release of Lara's original game from 1996.

2:48:02Chris Wray:So a 30th anniversary sort of release of that. And I think, Chris, you might have sniffed that out when we were watching it because she's fighting dinosaurs and doing all sorts of weird shit that doesn't really happen as the Tomb Raider games get a little more grounded later on. The game, I'm excited about this. Now this is a major reason why I'm excited about this and I did not realize this when it was announced. Flying Wild Hog is making this game. Fuck yeah. dude evil west was so good loved that game loved it vampire shooter come on man come on so i was excited to see flying wild hog um involved and i don't know how i missed that our friends over in poland and um i'm so hoping that they are going to do another evil i know everyone loves shadow warrior like that's the series that people love from flying wild hog but i really hope they get another evil a chance to do another evil west game curious how it did yeah so there's that and then there is Tomb Raider Catalyst which comes out the next year 2027 this is a new game it quote takes Lara to a northern to northern India in the aftermath of a mythical cataclysm that has awakened ancient forces built in Unreal 5 Catalyst becomes the series most expansive entry yet exploring themes of trust power and consequence and of course it will of course come to PlayStation 5 Alex Wilton Reagan will be the voice of Lara Croft and And you can begin, I think, pre-orders for the...

2:49:28Chris Wray:Let's see. Also, we're unavailable. It's really... Oh, no, this is different. This is a different game. So no pre-orders yet, but I think you might be able to wishlist them on PSN. And these are both being published, of course, by the Embracer group. So this is one of the IP they've owned where it's like you got to get this thing out if you want to survive. And they... Because obviously they acquired it from Square Enix. So where are we on this? Take either of them. Chris, Tomb Raider Legacy of Atlantis in 26 and Tomb Raider Catalyst in 2027, potentially with Tom V, if we're lucky. Yeah, that's what I was going to say.

2:49:57Colin Moriarty:I wonder if that scene is even remotely the same. If I hear Tom V wait, I'm going to lose my mind. That's going to be a big moment for me. But no, man, I'm excited. I like Tomb Raider a lot. Those early games are like a pretty, pretty, like a very early memory for me. They're kind of hard to go back to. They're very archaic and they're very of their time. and that much was even true in the in the Aspire kind of re-skinned pack that they did where like this is good and it's certainly more playable but it's definitely it's still got that age and that jank in it so to see like kind of like a more proper revisitation with some some new scenes and some looks looking like some more modern gameplay flourishes like I'm all I'm all over that dude like when I saw her do the the she grabbed onto a legend and she lifts herself up and does the the two-legged kind of like I don't even know what you would call that really but like that animation specific I was

2:50:59Chris Wray:like yes yeah and the camera kind of like flips up with her which is cool it's really nice it's

2:51:03Colin Moriarty:really nicely done it's good stuff so like I I like Tomb Raider I'm kind of like a like a like a background Tomb Raider fan like I really I dug those even the trilogy of the modern crystal dynamics ones of shadow rise and the original tomb raider i think they had a chance to make those games really really great and they didn't but they're very very good games and i really like them so yeah i'm i'm just happy to see it back and given some proper shine you know like i think it looks fucking cool and and like you said flying wild hog being behind the new one is it's a good fit i think actually that makes a lot of sense they got that they got that old school kind of sensibility that I think could make something like that work so looking forward to it Dustin is she hot enough for you oh that's I was gonna leave with Lara Croft she's always been

2:51:53Chris Wray:hot you know 100 % agree I was gonna say this is that especially with the the recent trilogy where people like she's not she's not hot enough like I'm gonna be unequivocal about this you have to be the gayest person in the world to not think that that Lara Croft is hot not that there's anything wrong with that i want to be clear about that there wasn't no boobies calling but it's like what do you look what do you are you that porn broken yeah now i was actually surprised by how hot they made laura in this that's what i was gonna say and i think i think

2:52:24Colin Moriarty:it's cool that i like that they made their grounded trilogy and you know it was maybe a little less uh i don't want she wasn't less hot it just she wasn't wearing tight shorts and a tank top the whole time right um and just like i'm looking at the playstation blog post and you can see down at the bottom that's like oh if you sign into some stupid amazon thing you can get the uh uh the mediterranean wetsuit outfit i'm like they know what they're doing it's back yeah so i think that's cool that they can kind of return to a more traditional feel in a modern era. It feels what's new, what's old is new again with this.

2:53:08Colin Moriarty:And I think that's cool. And I think that both these games look really awesome. So my only experience with Tomb Raider is with the rebooted Tomb Raider. And so I'm excited to see something that's a little more classic. Dude, they're crazy.

2:53:23Chris Wray:The shit that you do in those games is ridiculous. They're fun. I was self-conscious of being into Tomb Raider when I was, I wasn't into it, but I rented Tomb Raider 1 and 2 and then I actually got Tomb Raider 3 for Christmas in 1997, I want to say. It would have been. That sounds right. And I was a little self-conscious of it because I think my dad thought I was into it because Lara Croft was like, you know, a buxom. You know, it was very much on the cover and all of that. And she was, even in the pixelated kind of way that they were showing it. And I really wanted to be like, because it's funny, like when Tomb Raider came out, I have to admit, like I was like 11, 12 or whatever.

2:53:59Chris Wray:I wasn't really even into girls. You know, I was like, I grew up late, man. You know, I was like, no, I just want to play this new game that everyone's talking about. And I just think my dad was like, you're just a fucking gooner. Hey, in this case, Lara Croft, she is a very titular character.

2:54:18Colin Moriarty:She is the titular character. Yeah, that's right. You know, it's actually accurate when I say it this time. That's right. She really is so cool, man. like it really is like it's a it's kind of like I know what they were doing with that trilogy and I thought that they were building up to a place that would have been interesting and then they just kind of I don't know they got gun shy at the end where I think that really could have been something special and really cool but like those original her character in those original games are fucking she's so sick it's so I'm excited to see that with like modern cut scenes and like modern just I hope they treat it well yeah that game deserves that game deserves some level of like shine that I don't think it's really gotten

2:54:57Chris Wray:I agree I remember being so put off actually and this was like during peak games media cabal control when the original Tomb Raider you know late PS3 early PS4 or when that was kind of percolating like when they rebooted it and I remember people being so disturbed by the death scenes oh yeah and I was like and I remember being like I don't think this is going to work like what you're trying like I think it's cool but like these people are too fucking soft and too weird and too political and whatever and they're not going to be into like this like tortured butterfly of a of a laura croft and i think they kind of reworked it over time because of that

2:55:35Colin Moriarty:and i think it's about it is her deaths are jarring in that in that trilogy man yeah it's awesome they really like it's cool and it's it's really hardcore but like that's some like i even think it puts like some some of the violence in like the last of us to shame like earnestly like she gets like really gets like stabbed through the head with like you know like falls into a pit and like yeah it's gruesome it's upsetting but good stuff all right laura

2:56:00Chris Wray:croft we look forward to your return for legacy of atlantis in 26 and then which is a remake of the original and then catalyst a new adventure in 2027 uh next up they showed saros this is notable because this game has been delayed a little bit um it was supposed to come out march 20 and now it's coming out April 30th. So that's a five week delay, but they've, and they kind of did it without acknowledging that. And I don't even think I realized it because I was like, but actually wasn't I saying during the stream? I'm like, didn't it already have a date?

2:56:30Colin Moriarty:Yeah.

2:56:30Chris Wray:And it did. So they're getting, they're buying themselves five more weeks. I think that's fine. It gives them time to go gold a little later. And otherwise they showed a lot more of the game. Housemarque, of course, a first party PlayStation studio we all know and love. Saros, of course, is kind of the spiritual successor to 2021's Returnal, which we also all loved. I don't need to see another thing out of this game. So I said during the stream, that's the last time we're going to look at the game. And I don't even think I really wanted to see that much, but I am very excited about it. I think I put it this way on the stream, and I must say it was a good way of putting it, which is it's going to be exciting to see Housemarque do a returnal with all of the small lessons, but notable and important lessons they needed to learn on that game from the audience, specifically about continuity, upgrades, That kind of thing.

2:57:18Chris Wray:Permanence. If that's the shit that was missing, I think. And I ultimately got there in Returnal. I understood what they were doing. I think it was cool. I think it could have been a lot more. I think this game is going to be the representation of that. And so very, very excited about this. Is there anything you guys want to say about Saros?

2:57:33Colin Moriarty:Looks just as good as last time I saw it. Still excited. And Colin, you're going to get got on this PlayStation blog. 48 hour early head start with the deluxe edition. Oh my God, of course.

2:57:43Chris Wray:What is it? 80 bucks? probably not

2:57:48Colin Moriarty:I don't know if it says on here

2:57:50Chris Wray:Housemarque you can have my money it's fine it's never been any different yeah beautiful game right Chris I mean yeah

2:57:57Colin Moriarty:I don't have much else to say like I think it looks great I appreciate the Returnal was really one of those games where I was like I really do appreciate the gaminess of this like how video gamey it is in comparison to a lot of other Sony first party stuff so like I'm all over this it looks it looks like they're doubling down on what works and maybe sanding down some of the rough edges of some of the stuff that didn't work too well in Returnal. I'm all over this. I don't need to see more of it again. I'm good.

2:58:32Chris Wray:Next up is one of my favorite games that I saw at the show, although I don't know how everyone feels about it. Kind of came and went during the show. We never really got a chance to linger on it. The game No Law. is coming. Doesn't have a date yet. It's from Neon Giant, which is a Swedish studio. This is their second game. Neon Giant made the 2021 Xbox console exclusive at the time later came to PlayStation called The Ascent. I have never played that game, but that was their only other game. And I thought it was fairly well received, right? Like high 70s, maybe. I think so.

2:59:03Colin Moriarty:I think people like that.

2:59:05Chris Wray:See, yeah, 70s, 68 on Xbox, actually, which is interesting. But I think this game looks cool. It looks a little cyberpunk like. like the idea uh it is an open world triple a fps rpg fuck yeah nothing to not like about that and it's described like this in the press release quote in no law players step into the boots of gray harker we got to do something about these names an ex-military veteran who left his war torn past behind for a quiet life tending his plans until trouble finds him again when his peace is violently shattered, Harker must rely on his black ops instincts and custom hardware to take back what was stolen and confront the city that wronged him.

2:59:46Chris Wray:Set against the backdrop of Port Desire, a sprawling port carved into the cliffs of a restless sea, no law invites players into a world built on neon sleaze instead of regulation. The city is a hub of import and excess overflowing with colorful characters whose motives are as murky as the smog-filled skyline. From the rooftop gardens to the alleys below, every inch of Port Desire is alive, reactive, and waiting to be shaped by the player's choices. Every decision carries weight. Help a friend in need or silence an enemy permanently. Take the tactical route through the shadows or unleash chaos in open combat.

3:00:15Chris Wray:Even in a city of no laws, actions still have consequences. Each play that reveals new possibilities, allies and outcomes, making no law an immersive shooter defined as much by its story and morality as its firepower. It is, Chris, I'm sorry to say on Unreal 5. Are you guys as interested in this game as I am or are you a little more skeptical the only negative that i really have about this trailer

3:00:38Colin Moriarty:just looks too much like cyberpunk like it looks it looks like cyberpunk at home in some ways not a bad like it's bad quality but like certain shots in this where i'm looking like the the nightclub uh shot at one point and i'm like oh yeah this is and then you have like your raider type characters uh that almost look mad maxi it's like and there's also dude there's like a cyber what's the the part in cyberpunk when you're like doing this the hacking with like your the mind something oh right i forgot about that brain dance brain there's like a shot that's like brain dance and i'm like okay there's a lot of similar similarities here still may be an amazing game but i would have liked a little differentiated differentiation did i say that right differentiation you know what i mean that's right yeah um yeah it does look a lot like cyberpunk

3:01:29Chris Wray:what I'm trying to figure out because they are describing it like cyberpunk right like a fps rpg but they're also talking about replayability and so I'm wondering like is this a game that's 20 hours long in which case it's just immediately differentiated from the depth and breadth of a game like cyberpunk and it's trying to do something different even though the aesthetics are similar so I'd be very interested to see that almost like something like robocop like that game was kind of an fps rpg it was kind of open world I mean not really um anyway Chris what do you think about no law you know what i love about this i love the name love the name of it it's not a bad name yeah uh you know what maybe this is not right but like the vibes i'm getting from this for whatever

3:02:11Colin Moriarty:reason i'm reminded of like rage 2 and some parts of this okay yeah like that spray paint anarchy uh yeah not even necessarily just in the way that it looks like it plays like uh i don't know like there's like the kick right like that the kick button seems like very old school which i don't think that was in rage but like rage kind of harkens back to that kind of stuff um i think it looks okay like i would be willing to give it a shot i would this this kind of a game heavily depends on like what i hear about it as far as like the the depth of it you know what i mean like is this if this is like what you suggested where it's like this is like a kind of like a 20 hour game i'll definitely play it but if this is if if if this is competing with like you know 100 hour experiences or something like i don't know man i don't know if i got room in my heart for that right understood but uh everything everything looks good there are parts of it that look almost like too good like there's like a scene where he's like uh there's a at like one minute in where he's like screwing a silencer on onto his pistol and i'm like that looks really fucking good but like is it like what are they doing to me what are you doing how real is this

3:03:22Chris Wray:The press release, by the way, uses a tagline, which I was the I like the name no law a lot. But I was like, this would even be a better name, which is reap what you sow. That's an interesting, interesting name for a choice based action or shooter RPG. Yeah, kind of had it there, guys.

3:03:40Colin Moriarty:It looks phenomenal, though, like visually. I think like the visual fidelity, I think, looks great. Great. I've seen where he's running down the stairs in the rain. And I'm like, that looks fucking kind of real.

3:03:50Chris Wray:I'm all I'm all over this game. It's currently in development, so no date. I wouldn't expect it next year. The second of the two non-game things I thought I'd bring up is just the Devil May Cry 2 announcement on Netflix. That's not super relevant to me, but I know a lot of people really liked that show, and that happened during an Evanescence performance, so I just wanted to say, wake me up. And that was basically it. She also looks the same after 20-something years. Oh, Amy Lee. Amy Lee, yeah. All right. Next game up, we have, what, six more games to talk about. Ace Combat 8 Wings of Thieve was revealed by Bandai Namco.

3:04:30Chris Wray:And Ace Combat's huge. This is the first Ace Combat game since the mid to late PS4 era. What did we figure out? 2019, I think the last one was. And so I know people are really looking forward to this. So the thing about Ace, I played an Ace Combat game on PS3, and I played them like, I think they were in the arcades, right? um was there it wasn't was it ace combat i want to make sure i have that right i have no idea yeah ace combat there was maybe not it was one of those fighter jet games where you'd get in like the little it wasn't a little it was a big cockpit you paid a lot of money for it anyway um i don't have a lot of experience with these games and what i what i was going to say was what i realized when i played tried to play ace combat and i did i think i beat it whatever one it was was this is pretty hard you know like it's a pretty hardcore game for me it looks cool it looks fun and it seems like this one tries to at least in the the cinematic tries to capture the um the spirit of like living on the the aircraft carrier and doing all that kind of stuff so i wonder how how deep into all that it's going to get it's always been about characters and stuff i think but so i know people are excited about this it's not for me but wanted to acknowledge it are either of you going to get into the cockpit and shoot down some soviet migs

3:05:47Colin Moriarty:i'm always been interested in ace combat but i've never gotten to it so ace combat 7 right now on steam is four dollars and 79 cents might already be in my steam library for all i know but there's something intriguing about this series but i i'd have a little bit

3:06:01Chris Wray:of homework to do oh air combat's the game i'm thinking about which was the spiritual successor to Ace Combat. I remember this. This is just... It's pretty cool.

3:06:13Colin Moriarty:I feel like I remember playing the demo for Ace Combat 6 a lot on the 360, but I didn't know what the fuck I was doing. It was really just like, I'll put this game on until dinner's ready or something. I didn't really pay that much attention to it. My history with Ace Combat is very, very minimal. I'm not that interested in simulating the life on an aircraft carrier. personally, but like I know I know it's going to be a big deal for a lot of people.

3:06:41Chris Wray:Next up is another Star Wars game, Galactic Racer. This one seems to be much more imminent than the other one that was announced. And I love this look pretty cool. We were kind of wondering, like, is it a pod racing game specifically or not? I don't think it is. There is a big interview, just like the other game on Star Wars dot com. If you guys want to check it out, they talk about quite a few things. And they talk and we were talking about Sebulba and all those characters. I think Sabal was actually in it. Yeah. I didn't look at the trailer numbers. Yeah, it's doing pretty well. Like people are into it.

3:07:11Chris Wray:I think this has the potential to be good for people. I don't know if it's going to be like a big competitive game that people are going to play for many years. But I was saying during the stream, like I always wanted to ride a speeder bike from Jedi so bad. Like they're so fucking cool. Flying through the woods, like the woods, the trees, but not crashing into any of them and shit. It's like, oh my God, it's so dope. So I don't know. I'm not going to play it. But there it is. Yeah. What else here? Out of words is next. And we've seen this game before. This was actually announced. I want to say this was actually announced at Keeley's summer event, but I could be wrong about that.

3:07:49And so this Brian Crescente

3:07:53Chris Wray:is the writer of this. I didn't realize that he used to be the editor-in-chief of Kotaku. I haven't seen that name float around in a long time. Back when Kotaku was good, actually. Out of words is a stop motion game. it just looks beautiful they have a piece up on epic because i think it's an epic game store exclusive or maybe they're funding it i don't know exactly what it is but do you guys have anything to say about that it looks like a cooperative game and not in the in the hazelite

3:08:14Colin Moriarty:tradition perhaps yeah they really they really kicked off a genre there were a couple games like that that i feel like were shown in some capacity i think this was the second one i can't remember what the first one was but not here but like lately i feel like i saw another one pop up yeah but yeah it looks cool like i dig the stop motion style of it i think it's that's a really bold thing to do um i don't know that's crazy levels of art man it's like so hard to do that shit yeah the competency of it alone is like and it looks proper like it doesn't look janky at all like it's that's some really competent artistry and so if i i mean my main issue with these types of games is like dude i gotta find somebody to play it with and i gotta schedule time with it Like it's the reason I haven't played split fiction yet, even though I know, I think intellectually, like if I had finished split fiction, it probably would have been one of my top games of the year.

3:09:06Colin Moriarty:I just haven't, I haven't had the time to schedule with somebody else to play a game like that. And so like, it looks like it might be another one of those. Um, but it looks compelling and it looks really, really gorgeous. I love stop motion. I'm a sucker for that stuff. Yeah. I think it's cool. We're at a point with technology where, um, they can make i mean people have been making real world models and then importing them into games forever but uh what's that final fantasy ask apple arcade game that just came fantasia neo fantasia or whatever yeah and that had real world backgrounds that were made and then used in the game so uh i think it looks pretty cool so i haven't played that game yet because it's supposed to be mega long yeah yeah uh but this game out of words i will this is probably a game i'll play with holly at some point like split fiction yeah it's it's it's cool to make a game

3:10:03Chris Wray:like like a haze light game because i actually think that's a fairly competitive place to be comparable to like everyone else is releasing all these different games there is a risk to it though and that you need a friend to play it it's never gonna you're never gonna play with it this is kind of where ai would come in in the future is to like give you a comp or playing a true multiplayer game but you're alone or you don't have any friends to play with or whatever and having someone competent to play with because it kind of it has the potential to alienate you or alienate the game from the market if it's not popular it's really unplayable at that point yeah all right Phantom Blade Zero the game that's been in development forever finally has a release date it's a this is another one of those games so I've skipped a few of them already but that are not coming to Xbox although we knew that just find it so weird how many of these were at this particular show September 9 2026 later than I thought S game is the developer of course the Chinese developer and this game has been in development what for eight years or something like that at least so it's time for it to come out I was hoping it was going to be a little bit sooner people are excited about this game though and uh what's the uh what's the what's going on on the release trailer you had three million views in 20 hours on the release trailer pretty crazy are you guys going to check this game out what i want to know is is it is it of souls like or is it more like an action like a more gritty action game it's hard for me to tell yeah or something in between kind of like stellar blade was

3:11:35Colin Moriarty:right yeah i'm always cautious with souls likes um just because there's not very many of them that i liked liza p was good but this looks pretty interesting so this is going to be a wait to see what reviews say about it but it looks cool i like the style yeah i'll yeah i'll play it

3:11:52Chris Wray:if it's if it's not a soul's light game i'll check it out buy me buy me a chinese game every now and again all right two more uh biggest one for me is a new megaman game uh megaman duel override although it's mega it is megaman 12 and uh it's not going to be called that i assume it's not going to be called that because it probably turns people off to play it's like 12 it's like all right i'm going to ignore this uh that guy uh that the guy that runs rockman corner i don't know if you guys have ever heard that website it's like a fan site that's existed for a long time and it's run by a dude um i think his name is brian he's a very well connected very knowledgeable megaman person very well connected to capcom and he was saying after the game was revealed he's like so he knows like all this stuff before it's going to be revealed and he was like so this game he's like this is Mega Man 12 he's like in fact it was Mega Man 12 like that's what they were calling it at first so um awesome uh I only watched the trailer once or twice I'm only kidding I watched it like 50 times and uh there is cool stuff in there so we have a little bit more information about it it's a traditional and this a lot some of this comes from that guy Brian it's a traditional Mega Man game in 2.5d so like Mega Man 11 I saw some people in our audience saying like i'm surprised colin's excited about it he doesn't really like 2.5d it's like i would have taken 2d any day of the week but i just don't think they're gonna do it again megaman 9 and 10 were so fucking dope but i just don't think you can sell very many of those and i don't i think they look at it as like well what's really the purpose of us making megaman 12 and selling half a million copies when we can do so much more than that the other thing brian was saying was um you know it's the 40th anniversary in in 2027 this game comes out in 2027 and he was saying this is one of but not all of the games that are being prepared for this and so i feel like there's probably going to be an even bigger megaman game than this and i i do wonder what that is another exciting thing is i think we've talked about this in the past is that you know the team inifune and the team when they made rockman megaman one they made up all the robots.

3:14:06Chris Wray:So Bomb Man, Guts Man, Elec Man, whatever. But beginning with Mega Man 2, the audience made all the robots. And they would have competitions in Japan where people would submit their ideas. And that's where every other robot comes from through Mega Man 8, I want to say. And then 9, 10, and 11, they didn't do that again. But they're bringing that back, which I think is really cool. And so one of the enemies, one of the robots will be designed by the audience one of the bosses which is it's your time i was i actually messaged agan because i was like you should you know they're gonna need they obviously redraw it in their style and shit like that and if you look at like the winners i have all these megaman books where they show like some of the original like here's a heat man that was like submitted and then it's like nothing like or like looks like shit because it was made by like a five-year-old and then they they redesigned it or whatever so so they'll do the same thing here but i i did create a megaman so what i was going to say was it was never open to the west these competitions except for once nintendo power had a competition nintendo power facilitated a competition in the u.s and canada for megaman 6 where two of the eight of the eight six of them were made by japanese people and then two of the one was made by a canadian and one was made by an american the american robot i think was windman and the Japanese or the Canadian one was Nightman.

3:15:30Chris Wray:Nightman's a great robot. And so we've never really gotten the opportunity outside of Japan to really submit something. And now it'll be like a free for all. So and so I was going to say during Mega Man 6, I did submit a robot and it was Devilman. And I had, you know, they have arm cannons. And so I had like an arm cannon, but instead of it having a like a hole, it had like a hole with like a trident coming out of it that would like shoot out and somehow rematerialize or whatever but uh they didn't go for it bring him back time to resubmit i want dagan to do it he should he should do it although i'm so excited and i hope that they reveal a lot of the ideas it would be even cool to let people vote although that might be dangerous to do that and like undermine it which would be a bummer yeah a body mcbody mcboat face situation Yeah, right.

3:16:20Chris Wray:Exactly. So a few things from the trailer. There's obviously a lot of like, so they just they don't show any boss enemies, but they show a lot of fodder enemies like Matuls are in there, which is like the Goomba of Mega Man. And they have a Mega Man. They have enemies for Mega Man to Mega Man 3 and Mega Man 4 in there. So that's not a huge surprise because those enemies kind of traverse the different games. I didn't realize this until I went back to watch the trailer afterwards. The very end of the trailer, there's Proto Man's whistle. which is pretty cool. I didn't, I didn't realize that at the time.

3:16:52So very exciting.

3:16:55Chris Wray:And it is ostensibly Mega Man 12. I assume like Mega Man 11, there will be some somewhat unclassic Mega Man inclusion in the gameplay. So in Mega Man 11, Mega Man 11 felt a lot different than the other Mega Man games, wherein like you could slow down time and you can like shoot these really powerful shots. I think it was, and you used, you balanced it on the L and R triggers with like this shared meter. they felt like they needed to reinvent the wheel and so i don't think that's going to stop i would love something much more traditional but maybe you do a megaman 13 in the future where it goes back to 8-bit or 16-bit the other thing that i'm seeing a lot with megaman nerds like me and i've always felt like this i felt like this for years is that are they going to finally unify the games because megaman and megaman x take place in the same storyline but their megaman happens first and then there's basically like a hundred years and then megaman x happens and megaman x is designed by the same doctor light that designed megaman so they got to tie these games together and my fantasy is that it's not in this game but rather the other megaman stuff they're working on one of them would be the game that unifies the games which would be fucking sick i think maddie

3:18:04Colin Moriarty:was saying that on the little bit i heard of duke that we put out today that at the end like mega this Mega Man suit is like, you know, bursting out.

3:18:13Chris Wray:Like it splits out. It's got to have something to do with the gameplay gimmick, whatever it's going to be.

3:18:18Colin Moriarty:Dual override though. So there's dual, maybe the, there's a second Mega Man, Mega Man X.

3:18:23Chris Wray:I saw some people wondering if like, that would be sick, you know? Although that doesn't make so much sense either because it could be like a proto X or something like that. Cause the X design, it doesn't matter. I'm not going to get into the story. Who cares? Um, I'm wondering, I saw something, someone say something, which I thought was interesting, which was what if it, some of it's in 3d, like a dual, like dual perspective kind of thing, because it's his bat. It's like him on the building. That's obviously an ode to Mega Man too, but his back's facing you and you get a 3d kind of feel of it with like from that perspective.

3:19:01Chris Wray:I don't think that's what it is. I hope that's not what it is, but there's going to be some gimmick and that title will make more sense. but that they were going to call it and were calling it Mega Man 12 for a while indicates it's you're going to get eight robot masters. I can't wait to see the new robots. Oh my God, it's like so it's such an it's so exciting for me to see them because they're so fun and like what their real purposes were and like how they were bastardized. It's always fun for me. So very exciting times. Mega Man Duel Override. Will you guys play it when it comes out in 2027?

3:19:33Colin Moriarty:I'll probably check it out I'm most intrigued calling what you said about this being one of many Mega Man projects because Mega Man Legends I've been banging this drum for a little while now I'd love to see that too that would be so sick

3:19:49Chris Wray:what I would love to see is Inafune come back and do a game like I don't know he was pretty hardcore when he left and I don't know if you can heal that kind of shit especially in Japanese business but it would be pretty sick if you found out that he was like the producer of the big project. He gets Mega Man. Like he is the guy who he's it is true that he he like Kojima and others get he gets too much credit. Like there's a lot of people that did a lot of this shit, but he was the glue and it's very it's very similar to Igarashi in Castlevania. Like once that guy's gone, it's not it's not a fucking coincidence that he left and then there's no Castlevania anymore and it doesn't work.

3:20:32Chris Wray:and it kind of felt like that with Mega Man for a little while. Eleven was the only thing we ever got after Inafune. He was the producer of nine and ten. So anyway, the final game we were saying earlier, very peculiar that this game would go late, although it's also one of those things that we like to see because it's coming out in like two months. Not even.

3:20:53Colin Moriarty:Yeah, like seven weeks or something.

3:20:55Chris Wray:The game is called High Guard, a new competitive shooter from the developers behind Apex Legends and Titanfall, although that's a little, you know, some developers. It's not Respawn. It says here, quote, at tonight's Game Awards, Wildlight Entertainment revealed High Guard, its debut free-to-play PvP raid shooter. And High Guard players will ride, fight, and raid as wardens. Arcane gunslingers sent to fight for control of a mythical continent. Battle rival warden crews for control of the shield breaker, then break into and destroy the enemy base to secure victory in this all-new breed of shooter.

3:21:26Chris Wray:The game launches on January 26th with cross-play and cross-progression across PC, Xbox Series, and PlayStation 5. Trailers live now. I was, this is, as I was saying earlier, it's not only because it's not my kind of game, and it's not, I'm not going to play it. I would never play a game like this. It's just not for me. But this was the most underwhelming last game I remember ever seeing at the Game Awards. And I wonder, like, what's the disconnect here? It's not good for the game, and it's not good for the show. so I wonder what that's all about Dustin what do you think I well I was thinking wasn't there

3:22:02Colin Moriarty:one year where they did like a movie tie-in Fast and Furious game oh right that's right that might be that might be the worst right yeah yeah and I think Vin Diesel did announced game of the year so I maybe I'm misremembering but um I want to be fair to this I think I was more hard on the on the stream um is that gameplay really is everything for this and i think about a game like the finals that i'm not like in love with the visuals of it um but the gameplay was so unique and it's so well designed that that made me fall in love with it so maybe that's the case here it sounds like they're trying to do something uh different because it's a pvp raid shooter so sounds like they're trying to change it up and the gameplay looks good and it's not surprising coming from former um former devs of apex legends so i'm i'm willing to give it a fair shot but i totally agree with you that uh like people i think someone tweeted about this but it's like people are now rooting for this game to fail and it was simply positioning they just fucked up the

3:23:12Chris Wray:positioning of it big time yep it's uh it's it's on i don't know i i want to know more about it because we were saying yesterday like and you were saying this actually dustin earlier it's like that there's a there's a blurring between what's advertising and what's not and i really believe that all the game reveals are not advertising their quid pro quos and i don't mean that in a negative way it's like we you show what we give you a game to fill a slot that people are going to be interested in, you show it. And then you have that slot filled and you get the, you know, obviously the game developers get that bump as opposed to the actual ads.

3:23:47Chris Wray:But you see something like this and then you wonder. Because it's just like, why? Why this? It's just, there are probably six or eight other games that could have gone in that spot that would have made more sense, including either Star Wars game. What else? Divinity? even something like Gang of Dragon Control Resonant yeah there's a lot of shit that would have been fine there and no one would have been everyone would have been nonplussed about it but I don't know it's not right now on their official YouTube I mean it's anecdotal but 617 thumbs up 3 ,400 thumbs down and the the comments are brutal damn can't imagine the developers waiting to show this off and the entire internet is calling it Concord this one actually made me laugh should have kept it a secret

3:24:47Colin Moriarty:that's crazy

3:24:48Chris Wray:announcing a generic hero shooter in the big 2025 is crazy so I can already see an important announcement regarding High Guard tweet in a few months we'll see

3:25:00Colin Moriarty:yeah it is it's unfortunate the positioning really fucked it I think because there is a weird element where it's like i think people are just calling things generic now because like high guard doesn't really look like anything i've seen really like you're running around on like mounts you're summoning horses in first person pv like i don't know it's kind of it is kind of interesting and weird um but the reality is it is a free-to-play pvp shooter and that has that's a fairly over-served market i don't know dude yeah i don't know i'm willing to give it a shot just because i'm i'm big on first person shooters and i'm very very very aware that probably more than any other kind of game like first person shooters rely more so much more heavily on how they feel than how they look like they just there's a lot of great first person shooters that look if you're if you're looking at them they're just like what is this this just looks like another shooter you know you really have to get your hands on to feel like whether or not this is something that's worth it but i don't know the writing's not too great on the wall and it really is so avoidable because it really is just positioning this probably would have been a lot like way more well received if it if it didn't take the place of the one more thing yeah or if they're actually or if there actually was one more thing which there wasn't yeah right which i'm not sure if that's like a comment i don't i can't remember if the game awards usually has a one more thing like maybe they don't maybe i'm just misremembering but like this ultimately takes that spot like the spot before game of the year is that spot ultimately and for it to be a a pvp shooter is kind of like yeah i agree where it's it's any game would have been i would have put divinity there personally because that's that's the statue right that's your yeah yeah i mean that's

3:26:46Chris Wray:that i i wonder if they i wonder if divinity would people would have been like yeah we know kind of thing it's just that there are other options you have to reshuffle the deck sometimes I mean, the thing that this game has going for it is it's non-existent barrier to entry. So if it's good, people will discover it. I mean, it's going, people will figure it out. But the comments are, this one made me laugh. Respawn devs left to make this with like laughing faces. And then someone responded, the bad ones did. Jesus Christ. It's brutal out there, man. And a quote, it says, quote, a new breed of shooter.

3:27:21Chris Wray:And then underneath it, it says free to play generic hero shooter. I don't know I don't know good luck to you I don't want any of these games to fail you just know based on the way things are going that a lot of these games are just going to die quick and this could be one of them maybe not though maybe we'll be surprised we'll be talking about this game for years I don't know I don't see anything positive about this so anyway High Guard that was the end that's all for the Game Awards so we've already talked about how we feel about the show at the top I was curious did you guys have a list of five games maybe that you wanted to shout out from the show I'll go first and give you guys time if you haven't compiled them yet I'll talk about these five games Pragmata absolutely all over it Exodus all over it Control of course Control Resonant all over it Nola all over that and then of course Mega Man After that, those are the big five for me.

3:28:24Chris Wray:And again, I think, by the way, I guess I should note as a postscript, they showed a little in the pre-show, they showed that Toxic Commando game, which we already knew about. I think that game looks kind of cool. Got to be honest. And that's John Carpenter's, right? Yeah, John Carpenter's, right. And South of Midnight is coming to PlayStation 5. So those are the other two big pieces of news in case you want to want everything of consequence at the Game Awards. Dustin, where are you? Have you figured it out?

3:28:50Colin Moriarty:Yeah, well, I want to be, fair like are we including games that we're already announced because I feel like that's kind of lame well I did I mean I two of mine were

3:29:02Chris Wray:announced already so I guess I would replace those with the two Tomb Raider games probably in that case

3:29:06Colin Moriarty:yeah so the Jonathan Blow game Order of the Sinking Star Control of course Mega Man maybe I'm getting a little hype for it maybe not hype but I really like I love that it looks like when i think of like megaman like the way they drew it for the the guides or something not like the front cover of the american art right like what yeah but like it looks like that well

3:29:33Chris Wray:real nerds are pointing out that a lot of the megaman like the way he looks in the game is very megaman 8 coded which was the first time that's a ps1 game and that's the first time that they really got a chance to like make him look like something really something so yeah uh resident Evil Requiem, of course, because that's just. Oh, yeah. Requiem, of course, that would be on my list, too. A little. Yeah, it's just

3:29:55Colin Moriarty:I don't know. We were already so excited for it. And Leon being in the game was kind of spoiled. But whether or not Leon's in the game, I thought this game looked amazing. Punished. Punished Leon. Yeah. Punish Leon. He's back. He's old. He's going to need some ibuprofen for his back in the middle of the game. Is there anything else? Because I think that was four.

3:30:20Chris Wray:oh Saros is in there too I mean what am I talking about yeah Saros my list there's a lot of really good announcements doesn't even make any sense Chris yeah so I mean honestly it's there's a lot

3:30:34Colin Moriarty:of stuff that we already knew about that's going to be here that like I think this this this award wasn't really tailored for a lot of the stuff that I would be interested in so like not a lot of new stuff caught my eye um but of the new stuff that did caught catch my eye the that Bradley badger game i think looks interesting um curious about it the tomb raider uh both tomb raider games really like i'm pretty stoked about control resident is the obvious one and um obviously resident evil and lego batman are there i think but of the ones that if i were if i were to replace that last slot with something that was announced here it would be photor but like that's you know who the fuck knows how far away that is and it's not even real right now so it's all completely hypothetical but Control I think was the game of the show for me it's the thing that I'm most excited about and next to that is the Tomb Raider games just because it's nice to see that but yeah

3:31:32Chris Wray:your five games are Stupid Never Dies For Loop Warlock Dungeons and Dragons

3:31:44Chris Wray:High Guard right and what else South of Midnight on PS5 right yeah I will play High Guard in fairness yeah I will be very eager to see what people yeah I don't want to I think it looks really generic and I also don't play those kinds of games so don't make up your own decision I don't want to be the arbiter of what's good and what's bad except for Expedition 33 you guys should play more role playing games All right. Do we have anything else we want to say or should we get back into the regular show as it is already constituted?

3:32:23Colin Moriarty:Oh, shout out. I know it's a PlayStation show. Shout out to that 80s anime switch game. Yeah, dude, that looks. Oh, yeah. I got to send it.

3:32:30Chris Wray:I'm sure he hasn't seen it. Yeah, looks super. Oh, my God. That was the cool. That was that was probably the coolest thing at the show. I was like, damn. Damn, I want to play that. All right. Yeah. All right. We'll see you. wow that was crazy yeah yeah i would not expect uh jeff to expose himself on stage

3:32:54Colin Moriarty:yeah we should have known by the uh the trench coat that he wore that like something was something was a miss a trench coat and bare feet

3:33:07Colin Moriarty:yes that was a good show though it was the best show it's one of the best game awards that i've seen in in quite a while so i mean props to jeff for putting on a good show shame what happened to miss piggy how that man jumped off the balcony and shot her right it's crazy yeah it's uh it's gonna be it's tragic but like i mean there's people were talking about it so they got the attention that they needed yep everyone's talking there's some really good uh youtube poops already that happening so rest in peace miss piggy uh congrats congrats to jeff keely on his surprising endowment um wasn't expecting that so all around great show very impressive i thought it was really bold for them to announce no new games no okay yeah you got they're like we don't have half life 3 but here's a trailer here's the trailer for half life 2 when that came out yeah this

3:33:59Chris Wray:trailer for old games actually he was like i'm sick of everyone complaining about the how quickly i go through all the awards so we're just going to do the awards yeah hmm you asked for it It'll be funny if Jeff had like a real Pyrrhic year where it was like, I'm going to just destroy this brand that I've worked so hard to build by making a point that that's not what you really want. I almost respect that. Bold. Guys, kind of a PSA to begin things. PlayStation wrap up is live for 2025. This is, of course, their annual login module where you, you know, very similar to Spotify and Apple Music. And, you know, you know the deal.

3:34:40Chris Wray:It tells you what your behavior on PSN was this year. So it'll tell you how many games you played and how many trophies you earned and how many hours you spent on the network and kind of split things up between games and give you some different personality things where it's like, oh, you're an adventure gamer. So right now for me, and we can kind of go through these next week if we want to, but I said I played 53 games this year. And the scary thing is, is I spent a combined 18 % of my playtime on Death Stranding 1 and 2.

3:35:21Chris Wray:It says 164 hours. I'm sorry, 264 hours. On Death Stranding. Good Lord. Death Stranding 1 and 2. And I'm not going to beat the accusations. I'll tweet this out at some point. But my top five games. Death Stranding 2. Death Stranding. The Last of Us Part 2. Ghost of Tsushima. Ghost of Yote.

3:35:43Chris Wray:i was like oh

3:35:48Chris Wray:um did you guys mess around with it anything oh by the way your gaming style thrill seeker

3:35:53Colin Moriarty:yeah i got that too uh yeah i mean i have a couple like the the thing that i found really kind of disturbing about this thing is that like on page three i believe of this it says your favorite controller was the 30th anniversary limited edition i'm like i don't like that you

3:36:08Chris Wray:that yeah i felt the same it says the same thing for me to the 30th anniversary right and i'm like

3:36:12Colin Moriarty:why do you know that yeah like what do you that's not for you to know yeah i didn't i don't i don't like that something about that actually earnestly like when i read it in my heart my heart sank a little bit it's like how much is mine anymore like can't i just have i know what my favorite controller is you don't have to tell me like i i know that that's gonna be it but uh i had it said yeah thrill seeker uh i had 346 hours which is not surprising i spent a lot of time on pc this year but my top five games on playstation anyway we're dead stranding 2 at the top metal gear solid delta outer worlds which i forgot that i played this year um and beat deus x and then ghost of yote at number five nice it's a weird smattering of games

3:37:00Chris Wray:yeah it's uh anything else oh you guys wouldn't see this because you don't use it but it will show you how long you use the portal as well so i use mine for 90 play sessions it says for 50 hours custom playlist what else is here wait what does this say wow you've been a ps plus member for 15.4 years 0.4 is crazy yeah yeah and mine just says 13 maybe maybe you're maybe this is your anniversary like maybe maybe you know and actually maybe

3:37:32Colin Moriarty:it is it is my birthday like slash christmas month so like may i that makes sense actually but wow so i have a i have a bone to pick with playstation wrap up yeah because i think it's wrong in certain cases number one where's the trophy section here because i think it told me that oh yeah go you've earned this many trophies it says i got one platinum trophy if you look at my psn profiles yeah anyone can go look yeah i earned uh the vampire survivors trophy this calendar year over yeah 2025 okay ash well yeah the astro bot one you know maybe it's because i got a new trophy no i did you earn the astro by platinum last year i'm trying to oh you know it It might have just been the DLC, the DLC.

3:38:24Colin Moriarty:OK, that's most recent. But OK, it's still wrong, though. Wait, no, it's not. You're right, because the Vampire Survivor's Trophy was last year, but I've earned a new trophy since then. Right. So my only platinum, this is OK, so it is right. Tomba. I just wanted to let you get there. I knew it was right. I just wanted to let you get to that point. I figured it out. OK, so Tomba was my only platinum.

3:38:49Chris Wray:I had 23 platinum.

3:38:50Colin Moriarty:I have 23 platines. It's fucking crazy. So my top five games. Yeah. Number five, Ghost of Yote. Yeah. Four, Expedition 33. Three, Death Stranding 2. Number two, Blueprints. Wow. 71 hours in Blueprints. Wow. Oh, my God. The weird part. Number one, because this was very early in the year, and it's suspiciously, I'm wondering if it's counting some of late last year. Final Fantasy 14 online. oh boy 73 hours so god damn i don't remember that i remember that being the end of last year but maybe maybe i'm a role player 26 my game time spent role playing games what if it was like yeah you're just a fucking loser yeah you're gaming style in so you gotta you gotta figure because it's it's the 11th on the day that we're recording this we're getting these results so like they must factor in some portion of December, right?

3:39:52Colin Moriarty:Like it, like they do with all the Spotify wrapped, I think does the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. But it's kind of strange though, that we don't, we don't get like a holistic, we don't really get a holistic view of our year and anything in these recaps. It's kind of weird that we decided that.

3:40:08Chris Wray:Yeah. I, I, some people say if you log back into the wrap up, it'll continue to update through the end of the year. Cause remember it used to lock you like you're saying, you would be locked in from point x whatever the beginning was to like when you activated it and it kind of wasn't and then everyone started this arms race of getting them out earlier and earlier which was annoying as fuck too so like these things used to authentically be end of the year maybe right before christmas or something now it's we're getting them starting to go out in november but it is cool i mean it's such a brilliant i wonder who the first what the first company was that came up with that idea i think it was spotify it was a spot yeah it must have been

3:40:46Colin Moriarty:as far as marketing idea brilliant as far as i know i i just feel like i i feel like spotify was doing it for such a long time before a lot of the other the other things were doing it but it could be it i do remember one from a long time ago with xbox so like maybe it's possible that i don't know it's a good question actually because it is a good idea that's it's awesome it's yeah that i it plays into it plays into everybody's like uh like hint of narcissism where it's like tell me

3:41:15Chris Wray:about me oh yeah totally tell me about what i did right i mean that's absolutely 100 the ego like and what's funny is is that it had to be an idea that was stumbled upon because this data i would argue began to be available even to nintendo 2005 2006 they knew exactly what you were doing you know if you were connected to the internet on xbox live i mean with xbox maybe even a little earlier if you want to go back to the original Xbox and PS2 I guess maybe if you were modem connected but you know what I mean like once you were connected to these networks perpetually beginning with that generation this data existed and and it was only in the last what seven years maybe where this kind of thing was has been going on so a lot of missed time in there someone was

3:42:01Colin Moriarty:very smart in a marketing room somewhere yeah who are you so I looked it up and it says like the general consensus is that like i think i do think xbox did something as like your generation when like uh like when the xbox one was coming out like you could see like your entire like history of like through the xbox 360 because i remember they had like a whole like widget thing going on um but as far as i as far as the world is concerned it seems like spotify was the first want to do this and it originated as like in 2015 as your year in music and then the next year it was it was called wrapped which sounds about right because that's when i remember like things starting to get that way and then like obviously now youtube's doing it very late to the game so that and it's kind of dead ass wrong yeah it's also completely fucking incorrect like uh i don't know they're smart though they knew what they were doing that was like around the time when spotify was like purely favorable like people like really had a good opinion of it they didn't have any of the weird like the weird controversies around them so they were a pretty good they're pretty good ship for a while i'm waiting for the uh the steam one because they've done one in previous years it's not out yet i think nintendo also does one but my problem with those is they're going to be skewed because Holly used my accounts on both.

3:43:33Colin Moriarty:Because I was thinking, I was like, yeah, my PlayStation game time felt a little lower this year. It was still 457 hours. I was like, there's a lot of stuff on Steam and I was looking. My civilization play time on Steam is 198 hours. But probably two thirds of that is Holly, I would assume.

3:43:55Chris Wray:Yeah. by the way speaking of spotify dustin yes i was thinking about yesterday i listened to the top 10 turnstile songs on spotify well oh hell yeah um so the songs are birds blackout never enough i care seeing stars holiday look out for me soul dull light design light design great song um i like blackout a lot blackout sick yeah it's really it's first of all this is it the So let me listen to it real quick. Yeah, the song See in Stars is a straight up rip off of The Police, the making the best of what's still around or whatever that song. It's like so funny. I got to send you that song. So and it's like you could see and great artists steal.

3:44:44Chris Wray:There's songs in other songs everywhere. I have no problem with that. But it's like when I heard it immediately, I was like, OK, I can tell what your inspiration is. that song birds which i guess is their biggest song right now um at least number one is uh turns into like a new metal song like halfway through like straight up yeah i'm there it's good it's really good i like it i will say um it's surprisingly produced like there's a lot of production on the songs which i'm a little um like i'm curious how they play live some of the stuff like there's a lot of percussion and i'm saying that drums but like percussion and keyboards and like weird modulations and like there's a lot of production like more production than you would hear in most punk or any punk and so it's interesting to hear those things come together i'm not a big fan of like the like punk songs that like just kind of resort to like the or like you know they do that do that do that do that i don't know it's just like it's like every rancid song or whatever but when they like started to rock when they started to like rock is like there's a lot of that and that's not and it's very spacey there's like a little bit of and a little chaotic with right way the songs are structured like they end weird they start weird which is cool they're hard to predict i would like a song where it's like give me an intro verse chorus verse chorus bridge verse chorus chorus and let me get out of here they don't really they don't really give you any of that which is interesting so i like yeah it's good

3:46:22Colin Moriarty:they're interesting and it's funny i don't know how prevalent this is but they used to be a lot more of a traditional hardcore band but they've since become much more creative and different in their songs so there's a lot of like hardcore guys are like oh turnstiles is pop hardcore it's not for me anymore um like there's a song on the new album called maybe you know this one chris it's called I care and it's like I the first time I heard that song I'm like dude I love this it's like they just clearly like yeah fuck it we're gonna make this song and it doesn't sound like really anything we've ever done but I don't know if I've heard that one that one dude it's song

3:47:01Chris Wray:on the list of what I listen to

3:47:03Colin Moriarty:dude I love that song it's so good and they are amazing live the one time I saw them was before the new album came out but like during the song you're mentioning the percussion during the song blackout they have uh like the singer does the additional drum part live at the end and it was it's pretty cool cool yeah that's what i know that's what i like tuned into i was just

3:47:28Chris Wray:working out on my elliptical and i was listening to it i'm like yeah it's like a lot of production there's good music out there man yeah it's cool i like the spaciness of a lot of it like how it it lingers for a while at the end or it lingers for a while in the beginning it's the builds anticipation so yeah it's pretty cool i'm trying to remember uh

3:47:48Colin Moriarty:is it someone said that they sound like they're like a hardcore version of fugazi oh interesting i think hayley okay hayley williams said turnstile is my fugazi i remember someone

3:47:59Chris Wray:saying that it's funny like i love how new metal that that some of the stuff is though it's like you could tell that they actually like that stuff like the end of that bird song like

3:48:16Chris Wray:that's just very like barcore kind of like it's cool I was like yeah I wish the whole song was that to be honest but that's just me and maybe rap over it a little bit

3:48:29Colin Moriarty:a little rap oh a little rap okay

3:48:31Chris Wray:rap over it those metal riffs

3:48:35Colin Moriarty:no one's ever done that the vocals in that song because that's the finally i can't see yet it's

3:48:42Chris Wray:almost kind of rappy yeah it is it's like that's like that's like that part of that song is my favorite that i've heard yeah but that's what i'm saying like it's an it feels an ode to it like it's like they actually like that shit right and uh that stuff's kind of becoming popular again which is interesting just like what's old is new again i guess people my age that were into it and their kids are getting into it maybe or something i don't know yeah i mean that sounds about right

3:49:04Colin Moriarty:like i knew kids in late 2000s were getting into 80s you know that's what i think that's a probably the genesis of why stranger things exists you know i've just like they saw like kind of this but it was like oh a lot of kids now like like 80s stuff it's kind of lean into whatever that is and that's about the same time frame 2007 to the 80s about from like the early 2000s to now more or less so that's usually that's the cycle of nostalgia i mean we talked about like i think last week about like how like a lot of the a lot of the things that we thought were original works as kids are just like remakes of stuff from like the 60s or 70s or whatever so i listened to an 80s band i mean a band that i've heard before but i never sat and listened to them this morning the smiths oh yeah that's awesome dude very controversial i thought i was real i was like this is pretty good but i was like if i was in a certain mood this would be the most annoying thing i've ever heard in my life like the vocalist like if i was in like a bad mood i'd like turn this shit off now but in this morning i was like oh yeah this is this is good stuff they've been

3:50:07Chris Wray:like so you know morris is obviously very controversial um that's what i was reading

3:50:12Colin Moriarty:about him because i don't know anything about them really at all i saw like an instagram reel that had a song and i was like oh i kind of like that they have a very distinct sound like what i

3:50:20Chris Wray:think has been frustrating to a lot of people with the smiths is like they were only together for four or five years or whatever, and they have never gotten back together. Like they've been broken up. And I think a couple of them might even be dead now, but maybe not. But they, I think, last played in like the mid to late 80s. It's kind of incredible. Like I'm always so fascinated by that because they must have been offered a lot of money multiple times. Do they just hate each other? I guess so. I mean, that's what ultimately ended up happening with the police is like people finally offer them like enough money and they're like, all right, fine.

3:50:51Chris Wray:Like we'll do it like hundreds of millions of dollars. you know so yeah so it's like they just I don't think they get along and Morrissey I think plays those songs a lot of those songs but it's interesting that one what's that one record of theirs yeah the queen is dead I think that's the oh is that the one they'll meet his murder yeah I don't my sisters are both into the smiths but very distinct very sad a lot of it anyway yeah all right so anyway playstation wrap up 2025 uh go check that out if you want i believe it's at wrap up dot playstation.com and you just have to log in yep wrap up dot playstation.com and you just log in with your psn name and then it just gives you all the the information and there's like and you can just screenshot the stuff or you can there's like little modules for you to share if you want to like show your friends and whatever so fun little thing for you to do um i saw this so push square wrote about this as well what happened what happened

3:51:54Colin Moriarty:what i had spotify opened and i guess i like accidentally clicked start and so like the bronx a song from the bronx just started playing which is that song you want to you want to hear like out of nowhere it's very loud scared the shit out of me all right i'm glad you're okay

3:52:14Chris Wray:I saw this Sony released this trailer and even push square wrote about it which reminded me of like how good it looks in 2026 we're always so morose about things then and down be good to be a little more upbeat and so Sony released a trailer called upcoming games in 2026 it's on their PlayStation YouTube channel I just wanted to bring it to people's attention so they can check it out but push where our friends over there did carve out the And it's just a sizzle reel of games coming in 2026, dated in 2026. Some of them have dates. Some of them are just year dated towards 2026. But listen to this lineup of games on PlayStation 5.

3:52:54To me, this is incredible in terms of its strength or perceived strength.

3:52:59Chris Wray:Wolverine, Resident Evil Requiem, Halo, Saros, Marvel Tocan Fighting Souls, 007 First Light, Nioh 3, Dune Awakening, Animusha Way of the Sword, Crimson Desert, The Blood of Dawnwalker, Pragmata, Lego Batman Legacy of the Dark Knight, Seven Deadly Sins Origin, and Directive 8020. Gets a little weaker towards the end, but I was like, damn! That's a pretty nice selection of games. Games like The Blood of Dawnwalker looks so good. Like, that game looks so fucking dope. Speaks to me so deeply. Can't wait for that. that 007 game looks like it might be a little bit of a over the top uncharted which i think will be fun yeah uncharted itself is pretty over top saros very excited about that that comes out march 20th resident evil requiem somewhat imminent probably going gold i would assume in the coming weeks february 27th wolverine that's probably next fall resident work is coming out the day I think before our 400th yeah that's right yeah very interesting interesting so I just wanted to throw that out there do you guys in agreement with me that this is a very strong lineup of

3:54:11Colin Moriarty:games I mean yeah yeah I it's it's a good one I think the issue is it's like dude like I've the last several years I feel like I've just been very strong just earnestly like I feel like it's I feel like it's very and maybe it's because I'm very fixated on like the early 2010s like I remember i remember 2014 you know and like 2015 it was just like there's some good stuff there obviously but like it's i just remember i compare that to even just the last couple years i'm just like dude like the 2020s have been fucking really good um and this looks like uh a pretty solid continuation of that halo coming playstation for the first time wild new 007 game for the first time in forever is awesome ani musha coming back that lego batman game earnestly i think looks awesome i'm actually like genuinely interested in that uh pragmata has this weird kind of cloud around it that's like what is this so yeah like i think it's a strong i think for now it looks like a pretty strong year as long as nothing gets absurdly delayed or canceled outright which i i don't think that's really a danger for any of these games but the only game that i don't uh

3:55:23Chris Wray:know much about is the seven deadly sins origin i do know it's like a genshin competitor i think yeah it's definitely not for me but they're gonna try to spin that up i think and get that going um everything else so out of these games i'm gonna play i won't play token neo dune or seven deadly sins but i'd probably play everything else yeah on this list and probably will play everything else lego i'm i i think i agree with you i think lego looks good i'm skeptical because i was really excited about the star wars lego game in 2022 and i just thought it was kind of boring so hopefully they yeah well this one to

3:55:59Colin Moriarty:be fair like that one this one looks more like they're just making an arkham game straight up like they're making like a lego arkham game that just combines a shit ton of different batman property and like ip and just like that's that's really that's a good fucking hook i think like if you're just making like a zany wacky ridiculous arkham game that doesn't have to make sense where it's just like yeah fucking batman in 1989 and batman begins and the i was gonna say christopher reeve batman who's it was it matt reeve the matt reeve batman it's just like this is all fucking cool this is a sick idea like it would be so cool to have like that with like a lot of other heroes too like a spider-man game that combines like the entire history of like the animated series and the original movies and even some of the mcu stuff i love the idea of that the celebratory kind of idea of it.

3:56:49Colin Moriarty:And so like that, it looks awesome. I think the only game that like, yeah, I don't know anything about Seven Nidalee Sins. Directive 8020 for me is also kind of one of those things where it's just like, I don't know, man. I don't know about the dark pictures in general.

3:57:01Chris Wray:I'm kind of interested in Directive 8020 because I feel like they went away for a while. Like they were trying to recalibrate a little bit. And so maybe it'll be and it's space and I love space horror. So, but I've had this fantasy for a while of playing all those games and I just don't think it's ever going to happen.

3:57:16Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I feel like there's always this wish of just like, man, it's going to be great when one of these is amazing and it just hasn't really materialized. But like Lego Batman is definitely a play. Pragmat, I'm kind of on the fence about, but I'm interested about it. I'm interested in it. Blood of Dawnwalker, I'm almost like, there's like a too good to be true kind of aspect to Blood of Dawnwalker from everything that I've seen that like has me a little bit concerned. Because like I look at it and I'm like, that looks so good that I kind of don't believe it. You know, like it's it's like, how are you going to make this as compelling as it feels like it is?

3:57:51Colin Moriarty:I'm excited. I'm looking at it.

3:57:52Chris Wray:There's a 30 minute gameplay chunk that they published. Yeah, and it does look like I don't know. I'm like, I agree with you. It's it's it seems very ambitious. They have a good pedigree. Yeah. Rebel Wolves or whatever the studio is called. And it looks amazing. And vampires. I mean, I'm just a sucker for that shit.

3:58:10Colin Moriarty:Yeah. Animusha. Oh, animal marvel i'll probably play 007 i'll be first in saros i'll be first in halo i'll be first in resident evil marvel or wolverine so yeah it's a strong and that's that's only considering the

3:58:25Chris Wray:games that we know about you know right exactly and and i mean there's a bunch of other games that i know i want to play next year too so oh yeah gta it's uh yeah gta is not in that list which is interesting this was obviously they obviously have a license to have all these games in there and that's what's so interesting about halo being in there is that microsoft's working with them on PlayStation sizzle reels now, which is interesting, but we shouldn't be so surprised by that. Exodus is also not on that list. And that's the game that I am probably most excited about. Although I wonder if it's really going to come out this year or next year or not.

3:58:53Chris Wray:Cause that, that game, that game. Yeah.

3:58:55Colin Moriarty:Good. How smug do you think PlayStation feels putting a master chief on the thumbnail for this? Dude, I was thinking, I mean, we reference this all the time. It's the smug Maddie picture. That's what their, their, their face right now, the, dude putting master chief right dude right beside wolverine i know it is crazy ladies and gentlemen it's it is still like i know i know we're kind of past it but like it is still very surreal to see that like for me i'm looking at those like this is fucking weird yeah seeing it on psn like when

3:59:28Chris Wray:the the object popped up so you can wish list it or whatever and i was like damn that is fucking weird and i and i wish listed it but the the last the when you play it will be the last that will be the weird and then and then i think nothing will be weird after that because yours was a little

3:59:43Colin Moriarty:weird when i played it yeah this is arguably arguably nothing will be weird ever again right as far as like microsoft's stuff coming over but right now it's i think the weirdness will begin with what how sony interplays with nintendo i think will probably be the next

4:00:00Chris Wray:frontier of potential weirdness because i think there was this idea that sony was going to start migrating a bunch of shit to xbox i don't think that was ever really true and um yeah there's really no reason to do that so that weirdness is kind of like hell divers was weird hell divers was weird because there's no real reason to do it yeah i don't really get why i i understand it's money it's fine but i'm like i don't know why you would even breach that like for that for that little amount of money comparable and you like open this can of worms for yourself yeah it's

4:00:30Colin Moriarty:cool for the like for like the culture but like i don't know if it really does much of anything else and and i think the next weird thing is going to be just seeing what stuff from xbox just arbitrarily doesn't make it over like i wonder if the collection's ever going to make it over brought it up yeah because there's no i mean people the audience knows my feelings on this i just feel like they're just not gonna i feel like because they can't monetize it more than just the single sale like they're just not gonna bother whereas like i feel like wherever they go for the in the future is just going to be like micro transactions and trying to trying to make as much money out of the big player base that they will now have

4:01:05Chris Wray:yeah like i'm i'm focused on i'm interested in their back catalog from like what sunset overdrive is a big one where i'm like are you ever gonna release that is it even worth your while because you'd probably sell in the hundreds of thousands i would assume on playstation 5 something like that maybe a little more if insomniac put it put its back by you know put its weight behind it and and back the product maybe that would be worthwhile but then like you're moving forward because yeah like all right so the gear gears obviously is halo forza so then it's like the old fable games yeah i was saying like rare replay would be cool but i i just wonder if a lot of this shit will never happen because i even wonder that about games like avowed um red fall was a good example too where it's like this game obviously is just dead so that's not going to come but i'm interested to see like what what does migrate over so um but yeah dude blood of dawn walker and resident evil requiem and ani mushi has a lot of good a lot of good shit here and you're gonna be a very busy year just like this was a very busy year and then all the interstitial stuff that we we're still gonna learn about um someone wrote in i didn't end up using it but about uh hell divers on on uh xbox saying that you know they're bringing back the kill zone content and so kill zone will be on xbox before like and i'm you know before we ever got new Killzone or even old Killzone games on PS5 which is hysterical so it's like great thanks and I was going to talk about this news a little bit later in the show but since we're talking about it now I'm just going to talk about it here the website xdadevelopers.com conducted an interview with a guy that worked on actually is the director of the flight simulator series his name is Jorg Newman and he's head of the entire series and I guess has some sort of directorial role.

4:02:58Chris Wray:Just for connecting the dots, I thought this was pretty interesting because the first question that he's asked is this, quote, when did the idea of bringing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 to PS5 first emerge? Was it something the team was asked to do or did it come up naturally during development? End quote. So here's the way Jorg Newman, the head of Flight Simulator, answered it. And I just thought it gives us a little insight into what the feeling was behind the scenes, at least with one key franchise and studio. He says, quote, it was my idea actually with flight simulator 2020 we came out on pc first in august 2020 one year later we shipped it on xbox and we found millions and millions of new fans on xbox that had never seen the flight sim before because they're not pc gamers a lot of them thought it was great a lot of them stayed in 2020 it was already 120 gigs when we launched as a download when we were in 2023 i looked at the install numbers it was 300 gigs then we had our content roadmap and there was so much new stuff that we were doing that we could we would be well over a terabyte.

4:03:53Chris Wray:I said, we need to do something. So we decided to make Flight Simulator 2024 and had the concept of a thin client. Our client is now eight gigs. And instead of putting everyone on your hard drive and making that download huge, we put everything in the cloud. This made it possible to go to other platforms. So I proposed probably two and a half years ago to go to PlayStation. It was probably a little bit before its time because I was told no. Then somebody from Sony who grew up with the Flight Simulation thought it would be a great addition to the Sony portfolio. They reached out proactively to our president, who then came back to me and said, hey, remember when we talked about the PlayStation thing a year ago?

4:04:26Chris Wray:Sony is also interested. I think that really kicked off a whole avalanche of Xbox titles coming to PlayStation. Then we worked on it. It took a while as we had to obviously finish Flight Simulator 2024, which came out about a year ago. After that, we spent a lot of time optimizing for PS5 and making sure the controller works great. We also worked on the VR execution. It's not quite there yet, but it's coming. Dustin, what do you think about this? It seems like maybe Sony was a little more aggressive in getting these games behind the scenes than we had thought. How do you see, I mean, we have no idea, but I mean, how do you see these conversations having gone?

4:04:59Chris Wray:Because it's interesting that Sony would reach out, speak on an executive level about migrating games over and then the whole avalanche of games comes.

4:05:08Colin Moriarty:yeah well i wonder if i mean flight simulator it's mainly been a pc game and i could see outside of everything that happened where it's like microsoft decides to bring flights in to playstation 5 and nothing else just because it's a very unique type of game where they could get more of an audience is not selling xboxes necessarily but and i think this is a fun story but and maybe it did have some influence on the other titles but i think when you look at the context of everything that was happening with xbox um i think with or without flight simulator what happened uh was going to happen maybe it pushed things along slightly but i don't think that it necessarily kicked things off but who knows maybe

4:06:02Chris Wray:did yeah i i wonder i'm fascinated by because i think i i don't know if you have anything you want to add chris i'd always kind of just assumed that a lot of the movement was on xbox's side first and and to so to know to have something on the record saying like at least for one of the games that sony kind of was the solicitor i think it's somewhat interesting yeah i mean it's

4:06:23Colin Moriarty:it's possible that i could see it being possible that like that reach out for flight simulator kind of signaled to microsoft that like oh maybe what's like i could see it maybe being like some kind of proverbial okay in some weird way it was just like oh well there's interest i guess and if if things did come to that there would be an audience or there would be like some kind of demand or there would at least be some leverage here because our games like they would want them you know so i don't think i don't think it kicked it off in the sense that like oh without flight simulator that wouldn't have happened but i do think maybe it could have been like an early signal to them that like we could do pretty well maybe over there um but i i don't know like i i think i think the idea that like oh it really kicked it off it was like i don't know about that maybe that's kind of like maybe take it a little high on your own supply there yeah Yeah, could be.

4:07:24But I don't know.

4:07:25Colin Moriarty:Microsoft Flight Simulator in general is kind of weird because it's like, the fact that Microsoft is in the name is what makes it kind of stranger than it otherwise would be. Like it is strange to see Microsoft Flight Simulator on PlayStation, but like not really because it's a PC game. It really is just because of the name. But the fact that they got it down to eight gigabytes is crazy because I remember downloading that original like insanely huge file for flight simulator and i was like this is kind of cool and i probably would fuck around with this but like it's just not worth the like the sheer amount of space this is taking up is just not worth it yeah it's crazy how huge it is the power of the cloud now will mitigate yeah i guess so i guess they figured they to their credit i guess they figured a lot of that shit out eight gigabytes nuts that's like we talked about hell divers having like a a crazy decrease in file size like that is down to eight gigs is crazy yeah it's awesome

4:08:20Chris Wray:well anyway just a little bit of interesting insight i thought i'd share from the obscure corners of the internet about how this story might have developed as these games continue to migrate over oh delivery i got a coffee and a snack delivery holly doesn't know the no eating rule i'm gonna

4:08:38Colin Moriarty:munch this thing right in the fucking mic whatever it is what is it let's see what it is oh it's a donut and a cookie oh and a cookie and a cookie wow where from uh i have no idea oh no it's an unmarked bag it's an unmarked bag what's the logo on the coffee it's probably from that place well this the coffee is from a shop on main street called vintage coffee right so that must be where that's from i don't know i don't they don't usually have donuts there so i don't know what the situation is but i'm very pleased and i will uh i won't munch it in the mic i promise well i'm not gonna eat it all right now but i will be enjoying a nice latte shortly yeah enjoy your latte please i insist all right guys i was curious this is i think i mean this is

4:09:30Chris Wray:not gonna be the biggest piece of news because this this uh this week because of everything that's gonna happen inevitably at the game awards that we've already talked about in the pickup earlier in the show but i thought this was pretty interesting and i'm surprised that this isn't making the rounds more. It seems that Deviation Games' second-party title that was first announced in 2021 and canceled a couple years later has leaked. So I wanted to just share this with everyone. I use the Push Square story for our purposes here. Liam Croft over there writes about it, but the leak actually comes from the leaker who we cite, you know, from time to time on our show, Dusk Golem.

4:10:07Chris Wray:And he published on YouTube two separate five minute ish videos. I think one six minutes actually and one is yeah, five minutes almost exactly of some music and some artwork and whatever, but a lot of just gameplay and the gameplay is very raw. You know, a lot of textures aren't done yet. It's a lot of gray box and interesting stuff. And you can see it actually at different evolutionary points as you watch the different footage. And what I'm most surprised about this is that they haven't been pulled down. Like no one seems to care. Because Sony would be all if this was a big thing that they cared about, Sony would be all over this.

4:10:44Chris Wray:And presumably they own the IP, I would assume that this was being worked on. But anyway, it was codenamed Draconis. And people might remember the famous PlayStation blog post from June of 2021 that announced Deviation Games' partnership with PlayStation. And Dave Anthony, who was the CEO of Deviation Games, wrote about his partnership with Jason Blundell. Jason Blundell, of course, is very relevant because he is one of the movers and shakers at the original version of Treyarch and is one of the creative minds behind the zombies mode and now works at Dark Outlaw Games, the unfortunately named PlayStation first party studio that's working on a new IP.

4:11:24Chris Wray:And people had often thought that whatever was being worked on there might have been kind of a continuation of what was going on at Deviation because this studio had been hiring a bunch of people that worked at Deviation. Like something went wrong at that team. I still don't really know the whole story about it, but you will remember. I don't know if you guys remember that we kind of broke the story that the game was canceled. Because someone that, you know, was involved in the entire situation was talking to me about it. And so we talked a lot about it at the time. So this Project Draconis was shown off with environments and animations and all these different things as we see in these videos.

4:11:58Chris Wray:I would describe it most as Dead Space-esque, I guess. it seems like it's futuristic space era horror with some sort of black gooey enemy style so like if dead space has like the necromorphs with their long gangly arms that you're shooting off it seems like this was about like fluid dynamics of enemies and like the absorption of attacks and all the rest you guys can watch the gameplay and see for yourself the reason i wanted to bring this up was well I have a few things to say about this and I'm curious what you think first off is like this is not what I thought they were making and I thought they were making a this is a third person shooter I thought they were making a first person shooter and I thought it was going to be a multiplayer game now maybe there are multiplayer modes to this or even multiplayer components to the campaign I mean this is a very early version of it but this looks like a single player third person shooter like horror shooter and I'm like so so that brings me to my next point which is i was like all right so you guys will remember that around this time there were three second party games that were announced right or that like projects were revealed you had deviation with this game you had haven with fair what would become fair games and you had firewalk which would become concord and out of those three projects now of course we don't know the situation with this game we don't know like what it was like there's all sorts of mitigating factors that we'll never understand but it just makes me laugh that it's like this game looks so much cooler and seemed to have had so much more potential and was different and maybe more appealing than what you actually went forward with to the degree that you bought both of the other teams and even released concord and spent all this money and all this time on it again this kind of just reaffirms that maybe it's confirmation bias but it just reaffirms like this lack of judgment and but but so those are the big things for me is like this game i didn't know they were making this this is different than what they i thought they were making it looks kind of cool and i'm surprised that it didn't go get off the ground and yet i guess it wouldn't be a huge surprise that they wanted to stay involved with a lot of the people that did work on this game and that's a lot of the the nucleus of this dark outlaw outfit that they have going so chris did you get to watch the footage and what did you think yeah i'm kind of it's i have it on kind

4:14:28Colin Moriarty:of like on a on my second monitor right now and i watched it a little bit earlier it is i don't know it's interesting to see this because it looks so 360 coated you know like ps3 era like this kind of um single player third person kind of action game it looks like it's got a little bit of gears in it um but i do also kind of feel like it does look a little generic like as i'm looking like there is like the whole fluid stuff but like it's pretty rough in this build obviously it's very old or not very old it's very like early i guess i should say but yeah i mean i wouldn't begrudge them for not going forward with this necessarily but like it is weird to me that they didn't go forward with this but they went forward with like the biggest failure that they ever had and presumably i mean fair games isn't necessarily looking like it's going to fare a lot better so from that perspective of seeing like the the where they went versus where they deviated from no pun intended it is kind of interesting to see it because this i this i this looks like something that i would be interested like i would play this but like i I don't know.

4:15:42Colin Moriarty:I don't know if the market generally like as it exists today would care. And maybe that could be that could be some of the feedback that they got. It's just like, you know, it's connecting specifically with 35 year olds. Like, I don't know.

4:15:56Chris Wray:Yeah. Well, I'm curious, Dustin. What do you think about the quality? I mean, again, we're looking at very I'm it's impossible to judge the end quality of the game in the state. Right. Yeah.

4:16:07Colin Moriarty:Yeah. what i find funny about the situation is calling i mean we were all under the impression that they were working on a first person shooter you get jason blundell from treyarch uh it's like oh sweet maybe playstation can finally make an fps game again or second party you know what i have something on their platform fps and it's like uh no actually it was an over the shoulder third person shooter just like every other playstation game that's exclusive um not that they're all shooters being on him in general the over the shoulder third person uh who knows maybe it's a revenge story maybe the main character is a dad yeah maybe so when i saw this i was like oh there this is just kind of the same kind of this is i mean to put it it was playstation slop looked like so I hope that whatever they're working on now with Dark Outlaw or whatever it's called I think that's it Dark Outlaw I got the name wrong the other day yeah it's Dark Rider or something Dark Rider Dark Rider which is kind of cooler I'm gonna you know it's kind of a cooler name with Dark Rider I hope that they're working on FPS because we've we have so many third person over the shoulder action games, shooter games that it's just like, I don't, I'm covered there.

4:17:36Colin Moriarty:I would love to see PlayStation working on an FPS again.

4:17:42Chris Wray:What's funny about this game is we never really learned very much about it and they were coy about it from the very beginning, making me wonder what they, where they were, where their minds were about how it would evolve. Because in, the game is basically, I think, canceled by the beginning of 2024 and then i think the studio kind of exists for a while in a sort of skeletal form as i think they're trying to find work and they couldn't so i think they all went away and then i think a lot of the people that ended up bailing or even getting laid off ended up being hired by sony quietly and that was all having happening covertly for a while and then they finally announced the team probably out of necessity because people want to talk about at least where they're working and all the rest but we never got any updates on this game i was like looking around and there really wasn't very much information about it.

4:18:30Chris Wray:The original post from Dave Anthony that was written in June of 2021 says that it's a new IP. And then what's interesting about this, and I remember this, I remember us going over this on the show. He writes in part, quote, I know what you're thinking as you read this. What kind of game are we making? How long have we already been working on it? Is it story-based, multiplayer, co-op, all of the above and more? When is it coming out? Well, I can confirm development is already underway. It's really early for us to be going into specific details. So and you can see it was pretty early, but they note in this post that they had over 100 people working on it.

4:19:03Chris Wray:So it was not a small project. And I'm surprised that it took this long for any details about it to leak. But I don't know, maybe I'm in the minority. I'm sure the audience will let us know one way or the other. But I think this game looks cool. But I am a sucker for Sony slop. And I'm also a sucker for I just love third person action and I love third person horror third person space horror this just speaks to me in a certain way I think the bigger thing though regardless because we cannot judge the quality of the game once it has the final textures final animations final lighting could look like shit or it could be like wow this looks dope um it's impossible to really be able to tell I will just say it was not what I thought they were making and it makes me wonder it's just so funny so we don't we've never seen fair games run but we assume it's a first person shooter right and concord i was kind of well i don't know i was kind of person right concord

4:19:57Colin Moriarty:is first person oh concord i was right right yeah i was expecting i was expecting um fair games to be third for whatever reason i don't know i think it's just because of the aesthetics of it like it looked very like kind of like fortnighty and so like my my mind went to just like oh it's a third person kind of i i would imagine like in a game with skins like that like you'd want the camera to be pulled out so like you would you could see it and i think there's like probably internal data that shows that uh third person presents better than first person which i think is true like it comes across as more cinematic it's like it's a lot more readable for like the average person watching to like kind of get it like in order a first person shooter to present well you kind of have to be in it you kind of have to know a lot about fps is to really know if it looks good because otherwise like it just kind of looks like a mess you know the cameras going around like i remember my mom commenting on that like every time i would play a third person game like it would be completely easy for her to follow but like if i was playing like portal or like halo or something she'd be like completely lost because it just didn't register that like that's the pov right right um so like i wouldn't be surprised if like i just feel like fair games comes across like a third we don't know that for sure but i would bet money that it's a third

4:21:11Chris Wray:person shooter yeah we'll see maybe we'll maybe we never will i my assumption is that they've taken stock of what they're doing and um yeah and i don't know we i mean we reported on fair games like did i did i i don't even remember anymore i'd have to go back and look at my notes about if it was first or third person i feel like maybe that never even came up i don't i don't remember um dustin any thoughts you want to share um no i just uh i mean

4:21:41Colin Moriarty:yeah i was saying it was playstation slop uh but we'll call it sony slop it's a little it's a little oh sony slop yeah it's a little derogatory i mean i like plenty of third person over the shorter games i played many of them right but um you know what it reminded me of dustin right you ever play fracture no i'm trying to remember what's very weird it's a very weird like uh 360 era game like maybe 2007 maybe but it was like early 360 and the whole premise was that you could raise and lower the terrain but like in its unfinished state this game kind of looks like the finished state of fracture a little bit uh i could see it becoming good but like i also don't even necessarily think that it looks particularly like um playstation or sony slap or the slops of us or whatever you want to call it uh slobs of us yeah uh i think it looked i think it does look kind of gears adjacent like it looks gears like it almost looks like mass mass effect 3s like multiplayer mode type type stuff like it looks like it controls sort of like that um i don't know it is a bummer because it would have been cool to see like what this would have looked like in a in a final state because like we hear famously like a lot of games look like trash until like the last like couple months where everything like comes together i think like famously like i think in the racing racing kratos documentary they were talking about like how like in the last couple weeks like out of war was looking like rough um so it's possible that this could have been cool and that's a bummer because it would have been nice to have like a new single player um action game instead of yeah whatever concord ended up being i was thinking i said initially i was like oh i want sony to make an FPS and then you brought up Concord I'm like oh they did yeah that is true they did make a multiplayer FPS game so look how that turned out yeah

4:23:40Chris Wray:fair games is a third person shooter it says on me yeah multiplayer

4:23:46Colin Moriarty:are you looking at the reporting on your own league yeah I am working on my own it reads that way I think in the trailer, it kind of I can't explain how, but it just sort of feels like it it it's trying to communicate that it's third person.

4:24:04Chris Wray:All right, let's see what else here. All right. So we have the deviation game. A little bit of knowledge about that. I thought this was story was pretty interesting, too. This happened just after we stopped recording last week. So it is a little bit of an older story, but we have to get it on the record because I'm very curious what you guys think about this. it appears that London Studios, so Sony's old London Studios, which is now defunct and was shut down, but it existed for a long time since the 90s and worked typically on, they did some more serious and grounded games like The Getaway with different internal teams like Team Soho, but they were generally doing like, you know, casual fare and then later VR stuff and all the rest.

4:24:40Chris Wray:So they were working on a fantasy themed, I guess future fantasy kind of themed London-based, alternate London-based multiplayer game at London Studio. And that game never was announced properly. They acknowledged it in an interview specifically with GamesIndustry.biz in 2022 that they're working on what they called a fantasy online combat game. And there's an interview on there about it and them kind of getting word out about the project. And then a lone piece of art leaked, as you guys might recall. and then the game was canceled when the studio was shut down in february of 2024 the game was revealed back in 2022 so this game was pretty deep into development and was kind of cut off at some point it seems like it's re-emerged but under a new name with a different studio working on it and i'm unclear what the specific licensing issues are here so the game is called cast outs and it's from a studio called Twisted Works, which according to Gamatsu was founded by eight members of London Studio, though it's unclear how many people from London Studio were hired to work on the game and so on and so forth.

4:25:50Chris Wray:This game is coming out in early 2027 via an early access beta. So this is an early announcement and it'll be on PS5, Xbox Series and PC. And they note that they want to bring it to Switch 2 as well. What I assume with that, the problem with that is that that people are having a hard time getting their hands on switch to dev kits especially if they're smaller and more unproven teams um so this seems to be that game there's a trailer for it and at the end of the trailer for in the announced trailer it's about two minutes long i was looking i'm like i wanted to see if there were any notes like in the um in the trademark writings and all the rest here and there does seem to say that some some things are on are being used under license but it's just not clear what that means.

4:26:34Chris Wray:And when Sony licensed other stuff, Bandai Namco games, for instance, Sony is pretty explicitly being cited as the licensor. So I don't know what the nature of this is. It could very well be that Sony is like, we just don't want this game. And if you really want to, if you insist on continuing it or whatever, you can do so. I feel like that would be kind of giving it away for nothing. And I wonder what the deal is behind this, but this is the game. Apparently this was what it was. I assume that, and people have been looking at the artwork that leaked along with the art, like the key art from the game, and the color palettes are the same, and the setting seems to be very similar.

4:27:11Chris Wray:So I think it's... What do you think, Dustin? I think this is the game.

4:27:14Colin Moriarty:Yeah, this looks like the game, and I remember that key art because I think I used it in a thumbnail when we talked about it leaking initially. So this looks like it, and... Man, I hate to be negative for this because it's clear that they worked something out and they have this passion project. They want to make it work out for them. But watching the trailer, I'm like, oh, this is not for me. The trailer honestly kind of reminds me of somehow worse than Suicide Squad game. It reminds me of that where you have these different characters in kind of like a city co-op environment. Yeah, I personally don't find it too appealing.

4:27:59Colin Moriarty:but the story behind it certainly is interesting and i'm wondering whether sony just gave it up or if there's some kind of deal in place but um not really something i think

4:28:11Chris Wray:i'm interested in yeah was sony just like you know what you guys go ahead and take this yeah like we're we're we're good uh chris what are your thoughts here are you going to play cast outs when it comes to early access in 2027 on ps5 i don't know man i'm i'm kind of i'm looking at

4:28:27Colin Moriarty:the trailer and i'm like i appreciate that it looks it's kind of interesting i don't know i appreciate the weird kind this reminds you know this reminds me of weirdly enough like this the art style kind of reminds me of um almost like fusion frenzy that like that kind of era yeah of like weird kind of like exaggerated sort of i don't know i i don't want to hate this I don't think I do I just kind of look at it and I don't really feel anything I'm kind of like apathetic as I'm looking at it which is a bummer because I actually think the visual style is pretty decent I don't think I'm going to be in for this though 2027 they said I'm probably going to forget it's crazy the early access beta plan for release in early 2027 Jesus Christ seems like a should have just waited

4:29:26Chris Wray:they uh they write like this uh these faq which um gamatsu has relayed says what is cast outs quote a century ago fantasy beings from a dying world escaped through a dimensional rift many landed on earth since then magic is real myths have moved in and the fabled live side by side with humans in relative peace present day and the rifts are back but this time they bring sinister threats to our world you and your friends team up as a new generation of fabled citizens whose forgotten powers are awakened by the return of the rifts you must master your emerging and growing magical abilities to fight the invasion and save the city you now call home.

4:29:57Chris Wray:They describe it as an online multiplayer cooperative action game. And the genre for the setting is urban fantasy. It blends and deconstructs fantasy and folklore, twisting them into a brand new reality set in London. And the core gameplay loop is described as, quote, squads of players face overwhelming enemies and supernatural threats, creating high stakes cooperative moments where success depends on teamwork. Run-based missions call upon players to employ their fluid, magical traversal and visceral spellcasting to defeat threats that stand between them and their objectives. Players will utilize tight combat, special moves, team synergies, tag team casting and team up moves to save the city from invasion or liberate occupied districts.

4:30:35Chris Wray:Is it open world? It is not open world. Maximum number of players, two to four players. Player versus environment experience is what there's, because there will be no player versus player, no single player. and it will be a mid-tier premium game with a cost that is yet to be determined. So, but I think the most fascinating part of this whole thing certainly is just the reemergence of London's game to see what it was and I think they made a wise, if this is what it was, they made a very wise decision, I think, to not move forward with it because it's not going to, it's no offense, it's not going to succeed.

4:31:13Chris Wray:So it might find it's a little niche and do okay, but it's not going to be a thing

4:31:16Colin Moriarty:and that's that's Sony doesn't need to be publishing things like that this um this visual stuff specifically and obviously like this is way nicer than any game could have looked in the PS2 generation but like these characters would have would have hit on PS2 I think you know what I mean like there's like something like that little green guy in particular it reminds me of like Psychonauts or something or yeah just like that era like it's it's like there's like a Psychonauts kind of look not Psychonauts exactly but like I think we're both kind of on the same same wavelength with that we're like yeah maybe but like i don't know about now it's certainly not like a like a multiplayer like cooperative like if this was like a this if actually this was a single player game i probably would have been a lot more interested

4:32:01Chris Wray:yeah again i think it would have a better opportunity of being something if it was both single or cooperative multiplayer depending on what you wanted to do just to give it a way to

4:32:11Colin Moriarty:survive on its own oh you know what this reminds me of actually the that ubisoft um oh my god what the fuck is that they had to change their name because of like a copyright thing oh oh my god uh no not a was it immortals oh um rise of rise of the phoenix or something like some phoenix you know what i'm talking about right phoenix rising immortals immortals phoenix rising what was it originally called i forgot about i think it was called gods and monsters right and then and then monster energy drake suit him right that's right good memory or so they couldn't use it um but like it's like that kind of thing where it's like i remember playing a little bit of immortals um whatever the fuck that game was but i already forgot but like i remember kind of liking it i remember thinking like this isn't bad at all yeah this is pretty this is pretty solid and like i think that this type of style in a game like that i was like yeah I'd probably play that but like a multiplayer game like I don't know like this makes me this is the kind of game that I have to convince other people to get into and I just don't foresee myself being able to do it I bought your it's

4:33:19Chris Wray:funny man the gods and monsters thing I totally forgot about that I bought immortals because it came out right after the PS5 launched and then I just never really messed with it for some reason so maybe I'll go back and play it it'll look cool I think they were thinking about doing a sequel

4:33:34Colin Moriarty:right yeah and it didn't didn't happen i mean it's one of the more interesting it's one of the more interesting like both visually and and uh design perspective wise games that they that ubisoft has made in a while at least that aren't like you know indie kind of you know art type projects but yeah it was it was decent but like this is that yeah i don't know i saw a comment on the on the article that said like uh what is this calling a game made by recently fired devs cast outs is crazy work yeah i wonder if that was the original title i went and looked uh for due diligence just

4:34:11Chris Wray:went and looked at american trademarks for cast outs and one doesn't there one doesn't even exist so i wonder if it was just being developed under a different name they might have never named it yeah so it's possible so yeah just interesting for playstation fans it's just interesting to see it's not it's not unheard of for a game to emerge with someone else doing it but it's unusual and because we were noting um i forgot to say this when we were talking about the deviation games is that that dusk golem leaker had said that this isn't the core of what they're doing at the new studio like they've moved on to this different idea and by the way dusk golem if you're listening and you're not but if you're listening you don't have to watermark your videos like that put a put a more normal watermark on your videos that's a little insane you can put it right in the middle like something notable and and hard to get rid of and all the rest but you don't need to fucking do that yeah the windows movie maker like uh low opacity

4:35:11Colin Moriarty:yeah right exactly it's like it's just it's like it's too much but i appreciate the like i was i i actually think that that like the watermark makes the game feel older you know what i mean like it It feels like a YouTube video you'd see in like 2009. Right. Definitely. I totally agree.

4:35:30Chris Wray:Oh, my God. So funny. All right. All right. So that's Deviations game and then London's game. And now we move on to Call of Duty and this very peculiar letter that I'm eager to go over with you guys. they write on December 9th from the ambiguous Call of Duty staff on callofduty.com's blog a message from the Call of Duty team I find this really interesting I want I'm very curious to see what you guys think of this they write quote first off thank you for all of the feedback we have received over the last few months Call of Duty has enjoyed long-standing success because of all of you a passionate community that demands excellence and deserves nothing less we also know that for some of you, the franchise has not met your expectations fully.

4:36:16Chris Wray:To be very clear, we know what you expect and rest assured we will deliver and over deliver on those expectations as we move forward. With respect to Black Ops 7, we set our sights to deliver a spiritual successor to Black Ops 2 and the studios have poured their passion into making a great game that all of us are very proud of. But it's one thing for us to say it. More importantly, it's up for you to try it and judge for yourselves. So as it relates to Black Ops 7 and the future of Call of Duty, here are a few important notes. Number one, you'll have the opportunity to play call Black Ops 7 for free.

4:36:44Chris Wray:Next week, we are opening the doors for everyone to jump in and play Black Ops 7 multiplayer and zombies for a free trial along with a double XP weekend. We would like you to experience the game firsthand and decide for yourselves. Number two, we are committed to unprecedented seasonal support. Your continuing feedback will help shape our seasonal updates over the coming months. Season one is the largest live season ever and we're just getting started. We won't rest until Black Ops 7 earns its place as one of the best Black Ops games we've ever made. Number three, our strategy going forward is changing.

4:37:12Chris Wray:We will no longer do back-to-back releases of Modern Warfare or Black Ops games. The reasons are many, but the main one is to ensure we provide an absolutely unique experience each and every year. We will drive innovation that is meaningful, not incremental. While we aren't sharing those plans today, we look forward to doing so when the time is right. To be clear, the future of Call of Duty is very strong, and we believe our best days are ahead of us given the depth and talent of our development teams. we have been building the next era of call of duty and it will deliver precisely on what you want along with some surprises that push the franchise in the genre forward we look forward to welcoming you welcoming you in listening to you and moving forward together

4:37:50what do you think dustin this seems a little desperate i mean i like i don't it's it's is it really that bad so is it really going that that bad

4:38:06Colin Moriarty:i think it's possible um let me i wanted to bring up uh so we've talked about before that steam charts are not everything and they get brought up all the time by um stupid people on Twitter, try to get a quick own or whatever. So I'm not saying this is the end all be all right. It's important to know with Call of Duty that on Steam, just like on PlayStation, all of the games are included under this one package just called Call of Duty. I think it used to be called Call of Duty HQ, but now it's just called Call of Duty. The player counts are at an all time low, even compared to, for example, in No November of 2024, there were 315 ,000 players at its peak.

4:39:00Colin Moriarty:In November, so the release month of the new Black Ops 7, there was 100 ,000 players. Wow.

4:39:09Chris Wray:So a third, less than a third. Right. And it's important. I was going to say, we're both games on Game Pass, so that would be... Correct. That's exactly what I was going to say. So apples to apples then. Okay. Yeah. And I just don't think that on PC that 200 ,000 players went to Game Pass or Battle.net, which is another place you can buy because I think Black Ops 6 was also available.

4:39:32Colin Moriarty:and so we're gonna have to wait and see on you know the circana data and where it shakes out we did know that it was the top seller on the playstation network which is i think you can still see it being the top seller on playstation for that month and also not be doing well in comparison to its previous titles one thing i mean there's a bunch of really interesting things about this message but one thing i want to lock in here is this part about saying we will no longer do back to back releases of modern warfare or black ops games the reasons are many but the main was to ensure we provide an absolutely unique experience each and every year that's probably true when they went from modern warfare 2 to modern warfare 3 because that game was basically a glorified expansion that they just put the new number on it because the campaign was basically i think it was like four hours or something and it was just on a warzone map a lot of people didn't like it and the multiplayer was just more maps for the established mono warfare 2 so they got away with it that time what's interesting to me is that from black ops 6 to black ops 7 because i had extensive time at black ops 6 black ops 7 certainly is a unique experience to black ops 6 i would say from a visual standpoint um and to the multiplayer in general um it's not a better experience or even in again in my opinion this the same quality of experience is certainly much worse so the problem isn't necessarily it's unique i think the problem is that it was just a very rushed uh game that's not very good uh so it's pretty interesting i won i just want to know how bad it is um because i i had a take on my youtube channel a few months ago about battlefield where i was like listen battlefield could have its best year ever but call of duty is still gonna win and now and i did a follow-up video after call of duty i was like i'm i think i was wrong about that and so now I just want to know like how wrong was I like is it is there are we going to shake out that Battlefield 6 sells more than Call of Duty this year I think we don't have I think what you're saying is interesting just because I but is it fair to say that the PC player base of Call of Duty is definitely the smallest player but just comparable if so if you're saying like 300 ,000

4:42:04Chris Wray:concurrence for Black Ops 6 for a game that sold what 10 12 whatever million copies or whatever it's sold like a mass a huge majority of players are on console i would think for this particular franchise yeah so i think it's all it's going to live and die based on that but if the numbers are comparable because the competition's comparable arc raiders battlefield these are all available everywhere um maybe it is going that bad chris what do you think what's going on here what do

4:42:35Colin Moriarty:you think about this letter i think uh if things were going well we wouldn't have a letter to read you know i think that's like a really it's a really simple way to look at it but like i mean it's i don't think you need a degree to figure that out i think it's clearly something's wrong uh clearly it's not hitting clearly the fact that they're like listen we know everybody's hating on this here we're gonna give you a free we're gonna let you play it for free so you know whether or not you like it or not that's a desperate move there's no our graders in doing that i doubt i doubt any that i can't remember the last time that's even happened um i'm sure maybe it's happened before but like i do sample weekends

4:43:21Chris Wray:every so often but it's usually just like one mode and then like double xp or something like that this is a this is a demo and i also think they cut the price of call of duty i could be wrong but i thought that there was a discount over black friday which seemed very sudden and those by the

4:43:35Colin Moriarty:way those um those free weekends that you're talking about they don't usually come in conjunction with like this a letter a letter that says we know you're dissatisfied yeah we worked really hard we gave it our all but we know you're yeah it it doesn't read super well it seems to indicate some kind of problem clearly like i it doesn't surprise me at all that black ops 7 is not doing as well i think one of the strengths of call of duty despite how they've annualized it so deeply is the fact that they they kind of cleverly got around annualizing by having that like alternating cycle where it's like okay i'm more into black ops or like i'm more into modern warfare or i'm more into like the weird one-offs like world war ii or advanced warfare that they do right and so it allowed them to kind of make ultimately the same game every year i know it's like there's differences and i get it but like it also it allowed them to make a call of duty every year without people getting tired of it because what they would get at least had the facade of something different it was like it wasn't like you know black ops 6 into black ops 7 into black ops 8 over the course of three years like that would be insane i think any reasonable person would get tired of that um and i think every time that they've tried to deviate from that it's been a mistake like the modern warfare thing was a mistake this is clearly a mistake not just because it's a worse product overall but because if you're building a sequel to the same game in less than a year you're going to inherently be met with the reality of like we're gonna have to reuse a lot of this like we don't have time to build from scratch all this like a new thing in the same universe we already established something in this universe we just finished building it let's build off of it and that's how you get you know a lazy kind of hack job kind of job so i think they kind of shot themselves in the foot by even deciding to do this like they would have been a lot wiser it would have been a lot wiser of them to just i don't know i don't know if there's a modern warfare 4 would have made sense or something else but like it would have been it would have made more sense to give the call of duty audience some time to miss black ops before they went back and double dipped um because even if a game is good like that rubs people off the wrong way like i remember when left for dead two came on came out just a year after left for dead and i remember that put me off kind of because i was like how how much could they have possibly done on this game it turns out they didn't do a lot to be honest but it is a better game at the very least the leopard at two is better and they missed they missed that basic mark of like at least improving on what they did before so like i don't know man i think call duty's in a rough spot i think they're in in this is a unique year in the sense that call of duty is probably like the weakest that it's ever been in the sense that this is easily probably the worst i think any call of duty fan will probably take call of duty ghosts over this or like uh even modern warfare 2 which i think is like you know pretty or modern warfare 3 which i think is pretty rough um so it's an uncharacteristic year where call of duty is like unusually weak and the competition is unusually strong it's very rare that you have like a you know a massive like cultural zeitgeist game like arc raiders demanding a lot of people's time and it's very rare that you have like battlefield hitting around the same time in a way that battlefield never really hits like even battlefield one which i thought was superb and and fucking fantastic um even in comparison to the quality that came out that year um it still didn't ultimately stand a chance and this this year it kind of does and so i think those factors along with the fact that like them moving to black ops 7 too quickly and just all these added together just a perfect storm that ultimately gave us this letter and uh i'm not surprised by it i was saying a couple episodes ago where i'm just like i wouldn't i would not be surprised if this is the year that it falls off real hard and that by the way that's not to say that next year they can't just bounce back and like ultimately come back and pretend like this didn't happen by just putting out a game that people like a lot like not necessarily saying like oh call of duty's done from now on but like this year they unequivocally failed um i think that much is clear by the letter it's like what's that famous saying it's like if you're explaining you're losing right this is clearly this is explaining this is just explaining totally agree and they're in a bind because

4:47:59Chris Wray:activision like the brand is in a bind because the the presence of they have 10 teams working on Call of Duty. So the presence of plus whatever you're exporting, 10 teams they own, right? It's like Treyarch, Sledgehammer, High Moon, Digital Legends, Shanghai, Infinity Ward, Raven, Solid State, Demonware, and Binox. It's like, that's a lot of people, thousands. And to be able to support them, you kind of have to release a game every year. If you don't release a game every year, then you're going to have to lay a lot of people off. And you're never going to extract. This is where Microsoft comes in.

4:48:38Chris Wray:It's like you're never going to extract the value out of the company if you don't push. You've spent a lot of money. Ultimately, it's$70 billion. It's not inconsequential. But for them, it's like whatever. But I just feel like it's a tough position because to your point, what they should be doing is just stopping and saying like, let's figure out what we need to do here to make a call like a platform level call of duty game that can be supported endlessly and have a bunch of different different and they tried to do that obviously with uh with their online suite and the frustrations people have on ps5 playing it because there's not no platinums they're all like these nestled under this new call of duty hq thing and they understand i think directionally where they need to go but and i also think you make a good point chris that they could easily roar back they have call of duty as a part of multiple generations and i don't mean console generations.

4:49:30Chris Wray:I mean, people, multiple generations of their gaming memory, and it's a huge part of it. And so it won't take very much to get them back. And to this point that we've all been making, I think it shows how far it's fallen for a lot of people. But I also think too much is too much. Call of Duty, I've often railed against it, I think reasonably so, this like annualized sports mantra of like, you know, NHL 2000, NHL 2001, 2002, blah, blah, blah. But there is a method to the madness, at least in that the game of hockey is what it is. People want the best version of the game of hockey. And so you're slowly trying to mold this yearly game into a better and better product, but it's the same thing.

4:50:17Chris Wray:In Call of Duty, the fundamentals are the same in that you're, it's a first person shooter, military based and it's got all these crazy themes and all the rest but it's got to be something different like markedly different for it to really resonate and that's hard and that can't happen in a year and i know that they're not making the games in a year they're making them in three and four year cycles and batches and i'm pretty sure treyarch and raven made these two games at the same time as i recall was the word right that these games were kind of just in development concurrent to each other uh six and seven but i really i think we all know the answer is to like let off the gas and they can't that's the whole thing is they can't or the whole structure of everything changes for activision and this whole thing blows up in their face and i don't want to be too mean about it but it's like this is just why like microsoft buying activision was not it's like they're not going to be they're not going to fix you what have they ever fixed so it's to me it's just it's like it's not to say it's their fault this was already happening but they bought into it and endorsed it and then it kind of blew up on their watch yeah stop somewhere it is it is really funny thinking about

4:51:32Colin Moriarty:just how expensive and to be clear sony no stranger to a bad purchase or two oh my god recently the awful purchases yeah but with xbox in this situation it's like the last three have

4:51:43Chris Wray:been bad purchases like but maybe not the last three in sequence because there's some in there but but bungie haven and firewalk i mean these are yeah three worst purchases sony's ever made

4:51:54Colin Moriarty:right um yeah it's it just doesn't help the microsoft image of like everything they buy turn goes bad at some point not great man not great it was it was to i had said at the beginning

4:52:11Chris Wray:like I'm not and I actually reiterated this when Hogan I were talking and I'm like you're telling me that Netflix is going to buy Warner Brothers for 10 million 10 billion dollars more than than Microsoft bought Activision are you fucking kidding like to me it was just like such an overpay and an overestimation of the brand you know um and the reality is is that Activision probably was always going to be kind of declining at this point. And again, it can roar back, but they have to change the whole way that they make games if they want to change this thing. And the annualization is just, it's going to make it impossible for them to compete, I think, long-term because Ark Raiders 2 and Battlefield 7 and all these things are coming out next year.

4:52:56Chris Wray:There are going to be new, fresh competitors every year. And then they're going to get kind of get pummeled slowly by these different entities bringing different energies and things to the market. And then the new Ark Raiders will come out and then the next battlefield and the next battlefront and all these different things, and it's just going to be a death by a thousand cuts. I think the best way for them to compete in the long term and to make Call of Duty really pop again is to go away. And I know it's not possible. I know that's naive and it's just not going to be possible. But for the brand, it's like, imagine if it's like, we're not, there'll be a Call of Duty game in 2028 or 2030 or something.

4:53:29Chris Wray:And it roars back. And there's a lot of confidence in the letter they wrote. we know what you want we're building what you want we see you we hear you it's going to be great but then i see things like with these hedges where it's like we want to make black ops 7 one of the best black ops games it's like oh my god you guys are like really setting the bar um and what about and i know they did this with like world war ii and um a few other titles most recently i think with Vanguard, but it's like, what about a Call of Duty game that's not Black Ops or Modern Warfare? Like, do something new. And I know that it's like Advanced Warfare and Ghosts and all these are the ones that people don't look back on fondly, I guess, and World at War and all that shit, but it's like, you gotta maybe change it up a little bit.

4:54:24Chris Wray:Do something different. Anyway, we'll see what happens. I didn't read this letter we won't use it two more pieces of news and then we can move on to what we're playing just wanted to note this rockmancorner.com relays information from Capcom's 2025 integrated report financial documents and they write quote tucked inside COO Haruhiro Tsujimoto section as a passage that gives fans of the company's underutilized IP something to pay attention to. So obviously Capcom owns all this amazing IP, but they seem very focused on a few of them, right? Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, and so on and so forth. And they are getting some other things spun up to their credit.

4:55:10Chris Wray:Pragmata is one of those things and Animusha is coming back. So, and they've done good collections, Phoenix Wright and so on. So I don't want to be too harsh on them, but they right here are Haruhiro Tsujimoto, the COO of Capcom in the Capcom integrated report, according to Rockman Corner, writes the following, quote, at Capcom, we aim to sustain our KPI, that's a key performance indicator, of 10 % or better annual operating profit growth, along with our long-term goal of annual software sales of 100 million units. That's pretty incredible that they want to sell that many games a year. To improve our chance of success, we are working to resolve business challenges issue by issue.

4:55:51Chris Wray:Our efforts are focused on core IP, such as the Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, and Street Fighter franchises, and mapping out mainline series entries and sequels, remakes, new IP, and ports of content to the latest hardware. We consistently release two to three major new titles each year, but recognize the need to grow our pipeline going forward. Capcom owns a wealth of globally popular brands, such as Mega Man, Devil May Cry, and Ace Attorney. We aim to expand our user base and improve our performance through new releases, remakes, and ports of titles in these series to new hardware by enhancing brand power and cultivating loyal fan bases we will grow these into core ip so this has been making the rounds in in megaman fan circles and people have been you know sending it to me on social media and all the rest and i read through it mike anderson writes in and said what's up so that's colin thoughts on capcom now saying they want megaman to be a core ip i welcome it i do feel like they're a little too mono focused not mono because there's multiple games but We'll see you next time.

4:56:50Chris Wray:It's enough already. Resident Evil is awesome. I want more Resident Evil. Keep that going. Monster Hunter is obviously a big hit, although floundering a little bit. Sold really well, but no one seems to like it. It's kind of a paradox. And a few other things. Street Fighter obviously hanging on and they're doing all these sorts of things, but they do own a lot of IP that needs a lot of attention. And I was really fascinated and I don't expect you guys have anything to say about this, but the idea of remaking a Mega Man game. Is very tantalizing. I don't know why I never really considered it. Maybe because those games are so sacrosanct to me, but there was a Mega Man 2 remake-esque game in the PS3 era called Mega Man Universe that never came out.

4:57:30Chris Wray:And I wonder if they will do something similar to that. And of course, there was a remake on PSP of Mega Man 1 called Power Up, but it was not really what I was looking for at the time. So just knowing that they're focusing on it, I think makes me very happy. And I feel like we're going to see Mega Man sooner rather than later. I don't know. I just feel like they've they sent remember they sent out those surveys they got a lot of feedback about Mega Man's popularity like they know they get it they understand they got to get things spooled up but it takes time very very excited to see more about that and for Devil May Cry fans I'm sure they're excited about that too and Ace Attorney I mean speaks for itself it's had a long term fan base going all the way back in Japan to the Game Boy Advance finally PS Plus games specifically added to the game catalog so this is for people at the extra or premium tiers not the essential tier so that's the silver or gold tier not the bronze tier so if you have access to the game catalog hundreds of games on playstation plus game pass style you'll get a bunch of new additions that seem quite worthwhile including a new game yeah and uh these are available let's see all of these games will be available december 16th except for one of them which is available now skate story because skate story is a new game and that's available very much much like blueprints that we were talking about earlier was available at the tier, kind of an interesting indie game that people enjoy.

4:58:47Chris Wray:But the big games of the month include Assassin's Creed Mirage, coming for PS5 and PS4, Wolong Fallen Dynasty. Did you guys play? That game kind of in the Soulsborne genre kind of doesn't get any discussion comparable to its competitors. Did you guys play it? Yeah. No. No. No. so Wolong Fallen Dynasties another one of these games skate stories we said Granblue Fantasy Reelink which I played and beat last year I like the game it was interesting I'm not a fan of the IP but it was endearing and I enjoyed playing it Planet Coaster 2 Dustin this one seems like it could be for you

4:59:28Colin Moriarty:I've always wanted to get into Planet Coaster I bought the first one it's a lot more focused on theming and I couldn't understand it but I wouldn't play it on PlayStation 5 I don't think anyone should really if I'm being honest.

4:59:41Chris Wray:Cat Quest 3 is also available. The 2.5D open world action RPG. That's supposed to be very good. Those games are all supposed to be good. I've not played them. Lego Horizon Adventures if you hate yourself. Paw Patrol Grand Prix and Paw Patrol World. Both available on PS5 and PS4. When I was a little kid I saw the word Grand Prix for the first time and I said pricks and I got in trouble. And then finally PlayStation Plus Premium Soul Calibur 3 the PS2 release is available for those that are interested. People are getting a little disappointed in these these additions. They're slowing down a lot.

5:00:17Chris Wray:We got a little bit more insight through that interview via Mystic of the guys, you know, trying to get these ports over and working with different partners and making pitches and all that. And it's very interesting, but they got to do better than one game a month. I don't think it has to be 10. I don't even think it has to be five, but I think you have two, three good games and SoCal 3 is good but it's not it's not even do we already have socal 2 because that's the one everyone loved

5:00:42Colin Moriarty:um that one's on the nintendo switch online with link yeah that's the one i had yeah anything for you guys this month i want to check out skate story but i'm not gonna i would just buy it outright um it's kind of seems kind of bummed that they did horizon adventures when isn't that free for everyone on the lower tier?

5:01:04Chris Wray:Yeah, it is.

5:01:05Colin Moriarty:That's interesting.

5:01:06Chris Wray:I thought so.

5:01:07Colin Moriarty:Yeah, you're right. I get it why it's in there, but it seems a little lame. Grand Blue Fantasy Relink. Not a bad game, but highly not as good as I thought it was going to be. In fact, I never finished it. Now I think about it. But Paw Patrol, you know, a cab, you know. Teach your kid to be a cop.

5:01:33Colin Moriarty:uh defund the police get rid of the police get rid of the paw patrol defund the defund the paw patrol they don't need military style weapons yeah those dogs are running around with apcs and shit it's like it's it's getting a little ridiculous they have to send dog social workers to the crime right they've got dogs with bouncing bettys in the middle of fucking Manhattan and it's like all right we don't need this I probably would have loved Paw Patrol when

5:02:04Chris Wray:I was again I don't I've never even really sat to watch it or really understand it but it just seems like one of those very toy based character based things where I was like I probably would

5:02:11Colin Moriarty:love this and that's like a Bob the Builder adjacency to it I think but like I was too old for Bob the Builder but I remember being like oh yeah okay was it a Bob the Builder backdoor pilot there's a dog in Bob the Builder and then they're like it's spun off yeah I love that I'm so fascinated by backdoor pilots man what an awesome thing that happens um all right that's

5:02:34Chris Wray:all we have for the news all right my boys let's get into what we're playing i will go first and get out of the way here i platinum metal eden i talked about that pretty extensively already so i won't get into that platinum number one 196 if you want to see the game uh dustin and i streamed it a few weeks ago on sacred streaming so you can go check out that footage if you want to check out the VOD and I'm on and we also played Marvel Cosmic Invasion I don't have a whole lot to say about it with that VOD is also live I think Chris is going to talk about it when we get to him but it's a brawler we played the three of us played it together with some some listeners jumping in and out of our game we played from the beginning all that we did all the stages and played all the way and beat the game so I enjoyed it I think it's a little expensive for what it is but it seems very it's very much the aesthetic and the stylings of the Marvel that I find cool.

5:03:25Chris Wray:And so even characters from the movies where I'm like, these movies are seem so lame or whatever, like the characters are cool. If you draw them a certain way and treat them a certain way, it's it's it works for me. So so I like that. The game I'm playing, though, at night over these last few days is Dying Light the Beast and Digimon Hand Soap wrote in and said, Colin, you mentioned on Sacred Streaming, you were playing Dying Light the Beast. Of all the games to not do your replay thing, you decide not to do it for Dying Light and the following before the Beast. The following leads directly into the Beast.

5:03:55Chris Wray:Also, Dying Light received a 4K 60 frame update on PS5. Dying Light holds up phenomenally well. You should definitely replay it before the Beast. Loving the streams on Monday. Very strong flow. That is all. Take care, fellas. I don't have the time to replay Dying Light. I can't. You're right. I never played the expansions for Dying Light 1, but I'm a huge fan of the original Dying Light. I just feel like it's a bad use of time at this juncture when I have some other things I want to catch up with just to have a better holistic view of the games that came out this year. So I bought Dying Light the Beast on a whim during the, you know, I bought Hell is Us, I bought Dying Light, I bought a few other things and Metal Eden was one of those games during the Black Friday deals and I didn't know when I was going to get to it, but I downloaded it to my cross media bar so I was seeing it as we, you know, as I was going through returning my PSN my PlayStation on and considering it.

5:04:46Chris Wray:I also downloaded, I already owned it obviously, but I downloaded Dying Light 2 just because I was like maybe, but again, to the point of not spending my time judiciously, I'm like, it's not really the time to be doing this. So I was looking at what I was going to play. I'm kind of over Silent Hill F. I don't think I'm going to do like, I'm just, I'm just not into it. So maybe one day I'll go back and just do it all again. But I'm just like Silent Hill 2, I was so compelled by Platinum did. I just, I'm like, I don't really want to do this. so I've walked away from that and yeah, I was considering what, what direction should I go in next?

5:05:18Chris Wray:There's a few options like final fantasy tactics has been lingering. Hell is us. A few other things. Shinobi. I never got to play. I actually wrote down a, like I never played the altars hollow night, silk song trails, first chapter borderlands for balling for Absalom. So there's a lot of different directions to go, but I ended up going in this direction and I, it's fine. I'm not like, I'm not blown away by it by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I find it a little boring. I'm being, if I'm being honest, I don't know. I was saying this, I recorded a summon sign that people will listen to over the holidays with, it was just Brad and I and I was talking extensively about this game so you can get really into the nitty gritty if you want to listen to that.

5:06:02Chris Wray:But, I was so enamored by the original Dying Light that I wonder if it was a one-off thing. Not only for me, but for a lot of people. dying light when that came out i was saying on on summon sign that was 2015 and it was like dying light and the witcher where those two the witcher three where those were the two games where i was like damn this is pretty impressive comparable to the games that it's like we were talking about how witcher three made fallout four later in the year looks so pedestrian and i think that was one of the reasons why i didn't like it that much i'm not a huge witcher three fan i was just like damn this is a much better game than, you know, much better role, like open world role playing game and dying light.

5:06:48Chris Wray:I remember playing it and being like, I wasn't a huge dead Island fan or anything. And I remember getting a code for it and being like, this is amazing. This is like a really great, like has no business being this good. Like tech land just kind of pulled this thing out and a lot of bravado and walking away from deep silver and walking away from dead Island and be like, we're going to do our own thing. And they really deliver this parkour experience that kind of melds dead island and zombie stuff with mirror's edge and i and it took place in turkey it was very unique and strange and i loved it and nothing has ever really added up to it like led up to it and i think that the reason i was comfortable playing the light or the the the the the beast after playing dying light but not the expansion and knowing that they connect the the story of the protagonist from the original game just didn't seem that relevant to me.

5:07:41Chris Wray:And I don't think it would have really grounded me enjoying this game very much or very much more. So it's fine. And I feel like there's more to see. It was supposed to be an expansion. I think everyone knows this. It was supposed to be an expansion for Dying Light 2. And then I think what ended up happening was a lot of the information about it leaked and like it kind of just got spoiled and ruined. And so I think they've just decided to kind of rework it and make it into its own smaller Dying Light game. so it's a much smaller map. There's fewer things to do and whatever. But I'm wondering if maybe Dying Light was a time and place thing for me.

5:08:13Chris Wray:It's 10 years later. And knowing that Dying Light 2 didn't connect, not only for me, but for a lot of people, means that it's maybe just not what I thought it was. And that's a little bit disappointing, but the original one will always be like this amazing experience to me. So anyway, that's where I am. I'll have more to say about it next week. I'm sure I'm going to stick with it and see what comes of it. It's fun sometimes. It's just the pacing's a little weird. I don't really care about this character, even though it is the original character. The world's kind of cool. It's like this weird Alpine-esque village surrounded by mountains and like forests and stuff.

5:08:49Chris Wray:So it's interesting. And one of the cool things, I love Dying Light's Day-Night Cycle just in how dangerous it is to be out at night. Like it's like suicidal, basically. Like you have to really prepare to like be outside if it's nighttime like if and i don't know did you guys play the original dying light either a little bit so like it was fun like like when you're getting chased during the dark and you're just fucking running like just run like not no time to look back you're just like and that is a fun fun thing in this game but it is scary to get seen by the uh the extra powerful creatures at night and know like you stand no chance against them at all basically and i kind of like that level of terror it is a little annoying though because i think i don't think the sun comes up until like seven in the morning or something like that might even be eight in the morning or something ridiculous i'm like what's going on here i'm like trying to like run around and hide and i'm like looking at my watch and it's like it might be accurate like nighttime

5:09:43Colin Moriarty:it might be accurate to where they are depending on like you know could be could be because i've definitely been like there reminds me of when i was in canada and the sun set the sun went down at 1130 at night and I was like this is crazy yeah that is crazy this is fucking upsetting

5:09:59Chris Wray:um so that's what I'm playing let's go on to you Chris it says here you're playing skate story and

5:10:03Colin Moriarty:marvel cosmic invasion so take it away yeah so after we uh after we did our stream with cosmic invasion I was like you know what this is a really good steam deck game and so I just kind of downloaded on my steam deck and we kind of hammering away at it uh playing solo which in my in my experience is actually a little bit i i can appreciate it a little bit more just because like i know i looked into the controls and i know exactly like what the characters do and and i don't get lost in the chaos as much um i feel that generally with beat them up like beat them up games with other players is just kind of like caring about the game is is is very secondary it's really more about just like fucking around with your friends and so it is tuned for it feel i feel like it's a little bit more compelling as a solo which is weird because i don't feel that way often with beat-em-up games like generally like like streets of rage 4 i remember liking but i was like oh this is this is good with with other people and i do think it's still like cosmic invasion is perfectly fine with other people but i i think i just have a better focus of like how the game works and i can focus a little bit more on like how to juggle and how to get these combos like crazy high not competing with other people for like resources or just like like kills is nice too it's like a little bit relaxing so i've been going through it again i beat i got a couple characters to a higher level there's like an entire secondary aspect to the game that allows you to like kind of like unlock like you're unlocking points as you play and you spend them on this weird kind of grid and you don't know what's on the grid until you select something and like there's color coded so like there's like different costumes and like uh different i guess like codex entries and stuff and so i've i've been toying around with that but i beat it with spider-man uh got maxed out spider-man playing with uh beta ray bill and and i think rocket now but yeah it's just something that i've been playing like on my steam deck as i kind of like get ready for get ready for bed but it's pretty good i like it i like it a little more now that i've spent some time kind of alone with it and kind of like spending time in the menus and trying to figure out like okay what special moves this guy like i didn't realize there was a parry in the game at all oh yeah no i don't think i realized that i was like i had no i had no concept at all i was just like hammering i was just at a certain point like i tried to give up playing the game effectively and i just was like smashing my thumb all over the buttons and i was doing better in a co-op setting just mashing the mashing the faceplate but yeah there's like a parry mechanic and some characters can parry and some others can't it's interesting and so yeah i'm playing through it not much more to say about it really i mean you can kind of see our our experience on the on the stream um and it is ultimately that but i think it's good i think there's some voice acting that's like uh are i'm not positive that you're not ai that i wasn't hearing a lot in when we were doing the the stream because i kind of lowered i couldn't really i didn't really hear anything in the game you know i lowered the

5:13:07Chris Wray:volume really really low to hear you guys yeah me too and i also don't want it to bleed into the right yeah mics but yeah some of the voice acting i'm like cabin america in particular there are certain lines i'm like are you ai it's a little weird i'll have to keep an eye out for that or you're curious but well that may that compels me i think i'll i i think i'll play it by myself because i i am interested it was a little chaotic you're not you have to pay attention to the chat you know we get we're talking to each other maybe maybe i would like it more by

5:13:37Colin Moriarty:myself too yeah i i think it's worth a shot a round or two by yourself see if you like it i because that's what i did i was like i wonder if i like this by myself and i kind of ended up going through several stages and being like oh i guess so um so i've been i've been messing around with that i played the skate story demo afterwards just to get a feel for it it was this was this game's been on my radar for a while just the the look of it like the whole like glass skateboarder in like this weird kind of ethereal like space plane is just interesting uh so i beat the demo i think i'm gonna grab the full thing uh probably sometime sometime later today or tomorrow i'll get into it but the demo is pretty extensive like the demo gives you a lot more than i thought it would it's surprisingly deep you get pretty far you get a lot of tricks at your disposal at your disposal and um the premise is insane the premise is you're just like okay you're a demon and you're hungry and uh you want to eat the moon here here's a skateboard interesting and it's just very weird and it's like it it feels like there's an irreverent kind of comedy tone to it but also like not at the same time it feels like it's very warring with itself and i think it's really cool um like you get to this place of like it's it's very weird like i don't know there's like there's like a hub area that's kind of like i don't even know if it's a hub area or if that's where the demo ends and then you kind of move on from it but like there's a hub area like centered all around like philosophy and like thinkers and and weird like it's very odd and very interesting it's very captivating i'm really into it so definitely gonna play more of it i don't know if i i'm curious about how long it will keep me uh guessing about what it's gonna to throw at me because i feel like um you know skateboarding games are pretty particular i still feel like my favorite skateboarding games are the tony hawk pro skater the original like the the two and like two and three like there's something about those games like the way you move like the amount of height that you get off a jump like it feels right it feels like suitably arcadey whereas like skate was always intimidating to me because it felt too sim oriented this is kind of in between where like it's not quite either of them like there's a lot you you do have to pay attention to how your board lands and all these different things but the tricks are a little bit more automated but there's like a kind of like a quick time kind of thing so you have to time it's interesting it's cool um i the music's awesome it's very tetris effect kind of feel to like the vibe around it um but yeah i i spent a good amount of time with the demo i think i put around an hour and a half into the demo or something like that you can play pretty extensively in it so gonna play the full game it's it's supposedly pretty good people like it quite a bit and it's obviously going to be on the ps plus thing in in a couple weeks or like a few days

5:16:43Chris Wray:actually no no is it now already everything will be available next week but but skate stories

5:16:49Colin Moriarty:already available oh yeah well i mean i'm gonna get it just because like i mean it's an indie game it's cheap it's no big deal yeah i like i like to support especially just because it's so weird it's such a weird game but like yeah so that's really all i'm playing right now i have chronos installed um but i think i kind of want to give myself like the holidays to play it i think i kind of want to give myself some space so that i don't have to i because i don't want to rush through it i don't want to like play it and then be like um or like try to get through it in time for like to have stuff to talk about so like i think i i'll save that for christmas you know as as one usually should for horror games uh but that's really all i'm playing right now i kind of put down arc raiders i'm kind of i'm kind of good i think uh although i'm sure something will will pull me yeah you'll get pulled back in perhaps yeah every now and again but like i think i'm i'm set like when i saw the thing that really pulled me out of it honestly was like seeing how much time i spent with arc raiders open on steam versus how much time i spent in like actually playing the game and it was like over i think over 50 percent of my time was spent like in doing inventory management and like selling things and like breaking things down into lower materials and like organizing my backpack and it's like all right i'm not really i don't know if i can that's an entire game that's an entire game's worth of time yeah i spent in in the menus and so like ah yeah it's a lot it's a lot the mystique's kind of worn worn off for me in that sense but still still a great game but that's that's really all i'm messing that was the normal course of

5:18:27Chris Wray:gaming until the recent eras you would fall off a thing and that would be normal and fine right yeah like i'm getting emails for some reason oh these are okay my hoa dues are are do oh cool allow myself to introduce myself all right uh let's get that's oh dustin i was about to move out and just be like we're not

5:18:52Colin Moriarty:even gonna talk to dustin let's not even hear from him i'm done yeah i'm out um what do you have to say so uh the main thing i've been playing is metroid prime for beyond and it's pretty good it's not amazing um and i'm not like some hardcore metroid prime fan most notably infamously in our audience i played metroid prime remastered and i didn't really like it uh but i was open to the idea of a new metroid prime game and uh it's uh first of all i'm really impressed with the technique the how it runs on a technical standpoint it is a switch one game but there is a switch two edition of it and you can either play at a 4k 60 which i think is actually 1440p 60 overall like your HUD is 4K.

5:19:46Colin Moriarty:So a little bit mixed there, but I'm playing at the 1080p 120 hertz mode. And it's awesome. It runs, at least according to the Digital Foundry video, it's a locked 120. It looks like it's locked to me. But really the showpiece, what's surprising is the HDR in this game is phenomenal, like shocking. It's one of those games where like, man when you see the hdr it's transformative and you're like i wish every game's hdr was this good uh because it's clear that so many developers either don't care or a lot of the times it's unreal 5 just doesn't has like a default turn use this to turn on hdr and then there's no customization with it so a lot of times hdr kind of sucks but in this case the hdr for Metroid Prime 4 really, really looks good.

5:20:37Colin Moriarty:The big controversy about Metroid Prime 4 is, of course, the side characters in the game. And unfortunately, this McKenzie character that went viral during the preview cycle is in the game. I don't want to say a lot, but what's interesting about this Metroid Prime game is that you kind of have a home base that you return to multiple times that you that more characters show up at and so when you get like uh oh your your freeze beam or whatever your freeze special attack you get the part for it and you need to bring it back to mckenzie and he installs it for you and so throughout the game there are these different distress beacons where you'll interact with different characters in the game.

5:21:27Colin Moriarty:And so I could understand Metroid Prime purists that love the sense of isolation, that that part of that's going to be gone. But as I said off the top, I'm not a Metroid Prime purist, so it doesn't really bother me that much other than some of these characters are just kind of annoying, particularly the Mackenzie guy. But I find that overall he's not too annoying. it is funny because i remember part of metroid prime feeling lost at certain parts which is part of the point but in this game you'll go out to the hub desert area where you have the the motorcycle and he'll call you and be like hey if you go here you might be able to get something to upgrade this it's like you could just stop right you can just right you know not do that um so yeah it's cool i i like it there's nothing about it that's groundbreaking for me but um i think the sentiment we were talking about this in the staff checks i think maddie said this is that i think people are overly hard on it just because it's not what they necessarily wanted and i understand that disappointment but overall so far it's been it's been fine uh the other thing that i've been messing around with as of yesterday i actually can show you guys this is not this was i paid for this with my own money it's not an ad or anything but i got this a new guitar hero controller cool from the company gibson guitar it's a gibson guitar dude that it's um it's from this company called cracked crkd and these are the guys that were from red octane and so they are now doing this new company and this thing's pretty sick dude what's interesting the most interesting aspect of it is that the strum bar instead of like a mechanical click it has like a force feedback in it so it's like a really tough vibration motor which i'm assuming helps like the longevity of it and also it feels way better than i thought but the primary thing i've been using this for is a game on pc that's called free called yarg Y-A-R-G, which I believe stands for yet another rhythm game.

5:23:50Chris Wray:But is this the one that ingests any song you want, basically? Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

5:23:54Colin Moriarty:So it's a rock band PC clone and they have their own set list that you can download for free with part of the game. I think they have multiple, but you can put anything you want in this if you look in the right spots. uh and it's funny when you boot up the game it talked there's this whole disclosure about how yarg is not for piracy this isn't meant to be used for that and all that stuff and you have to like acknowledge it and i'm like no i know what i'm doing so i have loaded yarg up with uh over 200 songs from either previous rock band games or there are like custom songs you can easily get on the internet and uh certainly some people find that ethic ethically questionable i have spent hundreds of dollars in my life on rock band dlc that is now i mean i don't know it's not technically lost because if i had rock band 4 on xbox one i could still access it but it's just why you know what's the point i purchased all these games i'm not saying it is legally correct but i feel ethically okay about it and that's going to be up to you whether or not you agree but uh i'm just shocked how good this app is it is so customizable and it works with guitar controllers it works with a microphone it even works i don't know if you guys can kind of see back here i have my rock band one drums for xbox 360 everyone is thrown through those out Yeah, I still have these ones.

5:25:31Colin Moriarty:I don't think they were my original ones, but I got them at some point. And I just plugged them right into my computer. It works great. I'm preparing for last New Year's Eve. We played a lot of Rock Band and I was playing on 360 and it was cool. I was like, I want to up my game a little bit. So I've been just getting this together. And I was reminiscing last night playing some of the songs from Rock Band 1 and 2. and I even imported Through the Fire and the Flames, the iconic Through the Fire and the Flames. I'm so much worse than I used to be. I was like telling Holly, I'm like, I'm an old man now.

5:26:07Colin Moriarty:I can't play these games like I used to. When in reality, I mean, I just haven't played in years and years. But I do have the achievement for beating Through the Fire and the Flames on Xbox 360. I did it one time, never again. And it took me a long, long time to beat it that one time. but there seems to be a little bit of rock band guitar hero resurgence going on between these guitars uh from cracked which are really nice there's also i think another company is it pdp maybe made a guitar hero controller and uh cracked announced they're doing a new drum set and i'm actually most excited for that because that was the primary instrument that i would play on good on rock band play on expert mode and that's i got a little bit of drumming chops yeah from playing rock band so i'm very excited when that comes out and i'm excited to try these out for our new year's eve party but it's a very surprisingly sophisticated app this uh yarg so if you have guitar hero controllers or if you have some of your stuff laying around give this a download it's uh quite nice and so yeah that's what i was messing around with that last night

5:27:21Chris Wray:i'll have to hear you behind the my kit next time you come over and we'll see see what you got tickle those spins well i'll give you i can give it a little shot i can practice up a little bit but give me a little something show me a little something yeah so the drums and rock band and guitar hero were fun because they're the only ones that really translated to the real instrument you were basically doing what you were supposed to do on the drums it was you didn't have all the drums and cymbals and like open hi-hats and double bass pedals and shit but

5:27:49Colin Moriarty:well that's why i'm so excited for this new uh cracked guitar or cracked drum set for um you know whatever app you want to use but the rock band drums there's the four pads and the bass drum and eventually rock band released uh the uh the pro kit that had symbol it had two cymbals and so you actually had like almost a full kit experience on rock band and so this new kid is going to have the cymbal expansion with it and so that's like it's not quite one-to-one but it's pretty damn close and i'm excited for that level of of challenge just because i man we were i played rock band drums a lot um i beat what's the uh it's run to the hills was the iconic difficult drum song on rock band one and i did beat that as well so excited to get back into it um and yeah check out yarg yarg yarg it is ironic they're like no piracy but also yeah yeah it's called yarg yeah that's dude it's it's so easy there's literally you put all the songs in a folder and you tell it what folder and it scans it in that throat and then it's just like so it makes

5:28:59Chris Wray:it like automatically it's not like someone's doing making it for each song or whatever like the you know what I mean well like when you download a file it's all there oh so I was thinking just putting mp3s in but you're saying there's like files that people have with the song plus the data for the game itself all right that's the piracy I assume that's what it was yeah I assume that's what it was but I didn't know in other words if you could just like say

5:29:21Colin Moriarty:like here's a song and it kind of like oh no it's together or whatever yeah it's not that sophisticated but I assume not yeah the uh the songs that I've downloaded these are actually like mapped harmonic songs that you can go into the files and like that's cool just listen to the vocal track or just hear the drum track which is kind of neat for some of these songs to go into

5:29:40Chris Wray:oh yeah i i follow a youtube channel called isolated drums and it's so good it's just like isolated drums for like all these big ass songs and i'm like oh this is the best love that yeah

5:29:49Colin Moriarty:so it's pretty pretty cool i like it a lot you know it's fun it's fun to think that these things

5:29:55Chris Wray:are still kind of uh circulating around and relevant still in some way because i remember you know rock band and guitar hero kind of fell off and then i remember there was that resurgence that never really happened in 2015 ish where it seemed like it was gonna happen and then it was too soon yeah mad cats like went out of business i think like like it all like just like self destructed it was funny a lot i mean it's not funny but it was funny to watch it happen in some way after what you draw to the thq it's like another peripheral destroyed another company although they were a peripheral company so it's a little they like way overestimated i guess the resonance pardon the pun yeah the revival of these things so cool yeah i love those games i've i've also really wanted to mess around with uh rocksmith but i just never oh yeah i messed around with it it's i don't know i i that's kind of it's so it's so real

5:30:51Colin Moriarty:that i think you are kind of just better off just trying to just learn in a more traditional way like i don't know i never got the sense that i was getting a good lesson or a good game out of it that was kind of my thing with rocks yeah that's i'm sure like i'm sure some people probably feel differently like there were just certain things for me that like sensory wise like i can hear that the string that i'm playing is not correct but like it's it's correct to the game like i don't know just little things like that where i'm just like i'm sure if you if you were just picking up a guitar i'm sure it would be very helpful but as somebody who already kind of knew quite a bit it's it is kind of jarring in comparison we'll see what happens with that game about ubisoft though oh yeah that's right it's a platform now too right like it's a whole yeah rocks myth plus or something like that i

5:31:39Chris Wray:think something it's called yeah yeah maybe it's about it every once in a while people play it

5:31:43Colin Moriarty:but yeah i mean i to be fair i did play like version like the original so it's it's i imagine and it's probably far better than than it used to be but yeah i don't know but that's a game like rock band and guitar hero are games i think we talked about this before on like so i don't know if it was a main show or a sideshow or a stream or whatever but like i feel like those games are like kind of criminally underlooked or or or underappreciated when it comes to like top games of all time kind of situation because like i really do think they belong in that conversation yeah all right that's it that's all we have for what we're playing let's get in the

5:32:19Chris Wray:listener inquiries six questions comments concerns thoughts and ideas from the audience over on patreon patreon.com slash last day media you submit your inquiries on the thread in the news feed each week they go live on wednesdays and are deleted thursdays so you have like a 20-ish hour period 21 hour period where you can submit your inquiries the different shows on our network all use this thread mantra and you can keep an eye out on the news feed for all those so you can submit to those shows as well. If you'd like, we begin with the Brogan from Gas Effect Androgynous who writes in and says, hey, Milky Way dudes, what are your thoughts on the rise of actors in video game acting in video games?

5:32:52Chris Wray:Generally speaking, it seems like most esteemed actors have one major role in a major video game and don't often return. Do you guys think that taking a major role in a video game is a bucket list endeavor for successful actors or is it just a new thing for them to try and get out of their system? What are some actors you'd love to see take a major role in a video game? Get out there and kick some Reaper ass and have a great holiday season. some of us it's funny because i was thinking about it the exact opposite way where i mean they're obviously it's becoming more and more common but it's an interesting inquiry dustin in that i feel like there's still a stigma where at least there's not enough money circulating in the motion capture and voice acting realm of games though there's a shit ton of money in games not comparable enough to attract talent like that because it would be interesting to get like high tier triple a level hollywood talent which happens on occasion yeah but not really and i don't know if it's like a stigmatization only or maybe there's just not enough money in it i mean these people make millions of dollars on doing a doing a picture so and gaming is a lot more intensive and it probably requires maybe even a lot more time and time over time as well i mean you always have to do pickups and like and all sorts of things for movies but yeah you have to be on you have to be available sometimes for years to do these games and that might not be there might not be a willingness like we just saw the deviation uh play playthrough of that draconis codenamed draconis canceled ps5 game and that had voice acting in it and there's no way that it's final or anywhere close to it or that they have everything they need and those people need to be available in the future probably for many pickups and many different things so what are your thoughts

5:34:35Colin Moriarty:actors in video games but i was thinking like the first example i could think of from a long time ago there's the game that mark hamill was in in 1994 wing commander commander yeah yeah so we've seen some sprinkling of this always throughout the years but i think that as video games have become the dominant form of entertainment in in different ways and also at the same time becoming so cinematic and realistic with motion capture and scanning people into games. It makes sense that actors would want to expand into doing that, whether it's just from a artistic standpoint as an actor or from a financial standpoint as well.

5:35:21Colin Moriarty:So it's not surprising to me with the way the technology has gone and things like that. So actors that I'd love to see as a major role in a video game are, I don't know. I don't consider myself like, man, I love this actor a lot that I'd want to see him in a game so bad. You know, maybe that's just not the right type of person for that kind of question. Like there's actors. I like, we talked about Ryan Gosling recently. I was like, Oh yeah. Ryan Gosling is great. I don't need him to be in kingdom hearts for though. You know, that'd be really weird. We have had real, well, human actors in kingdom hearts.

5:36:04Colin Moriarty:like Johnny Depp is in Kingdom Hearts 2 it's not his voice but it is his face so there has been some of that but yeah I'm trying to think maybe I'll come up with one while you guys discuss but there's no one I'm like dying like I gotta get him in and nothing's gonna top Kevin Spacey in Advanced Warfare just being Kevin what you're seeing here is Advanced Warfare

5:36:33Chris Wray:iconic iconic acting that was one of the people i was thinking about like he was a very high caliber talent for video games yeah what do you think chris i don't know well well first of all

5:36:45Colin Moriarty:i think the the the environment surrounding like big budget hollywood like multi-million dollar like multi hundreds of millions of dollars uh price tag movies has gotten so green screen and special effects oriented that i think there was a period in time where it's just like all right well i mean if we're already going to be covered in motion capture suits anyway um why not do a video game you know like why not be into that sphere because there's that famous footage of like what is it um gandalf what's his name ian mckellen like on the set of the hobbit where he's like just surrounded by fucking green screen he like breaks down because he's like this is not this is not what i got into this for at all you know uh and i get it like it's got to be disappointing but like i would imagine a lot of people kind of probably like saw that happening and they're like well i mean video games is that and it's a little bit more interesting so if we're going to get this weird kind of like muted somewhat depressing version of this thing that we're already doing we might as well do it in a in a in a context that's at least like experimental and interesting and new and weird and so i think that's why like in the mid 2010s we had and you know leading into the early 2020s as well like we had this weird like this weird influx of like oh kevin spacey and like oh um keanu reeves and you know and cyberpunk and and all that stuff uh the the thing for me i would like to see a return to actors playing characters in video games that aren't them because like i'm i'm a big fan of deborah wilson i think she does amazing in like everything everything that she does she's amazing and she's like the best voice actor she's the best character in destiny as far as i'm concerned and you know a multitude of other games she does great but it is disappointing that like whenever she shows up her face shows up also right like it's the same like it kind of takes me out of it because i'm like that's deborah wilson that's uh cameron moynihan or whatever the the guy uh the cow kestis in uh the jedi fallen order games you know it i feel like it used to be we would have actors play a character in a game and it wasn't based on them you know it wasn't like a scan or like it was just like oh that person voices that person that's crazy that's cool like it's an interesting fact almost and i want to get back to that where it's almost like okay actors are in these games and they're they're having a great time and they're doing interesting shit they can even do the mocap or whatever but like i wanted to play different people like it's it's i'm distracted by it personally like i'm distracted by the fact that like uh what is it what was that rockay game rockay city what the hell was it oh yeah crime boss crime boss crime boss rockay city with all the actors in it it's just like this is so weird yeah and granted to be fair like that was kind of the point of that game like the whole the whole point was that it was like a weird actor draw but like i don't know i i'm i don't have an actor that i'm like stoked about or like that i'm like i have directors that i love and and you know musicians and things like that but like acting is one of those things where it's just like i appreciate a good actor but like i don't i don't know enough about that world to really like to really love it or to really like look at somebody's performance and be like wow i i i see what they're doing there and it's like i i don't like i'm a layman with that stuff but to the effect that it'll continue happening i just i want to take a step away from the the one-to-one scans of characters again like make make it you can make it look sort of like i like you're like jack black and brutal legend or whatever that was nice that was a good example yeah because it's a character like designed around a guy but it's that's not his face and uh even sam jackson in in uh samuel jackson in san andreas was another one where it's just like it's a black cop but that's not sam jackson's face you know more get back to that that's what i want to see more of more actors flexing their actual skill as opposed to you know getting top billing and kind of pulling me out of it it's distracting kojima gets away with it i guess because he's like kind of movie oriented anyway i kind of expect that in some way like who's going to show up in the next kojima game but most of the time i'm like give us new

5:41:01Chris Wray:characters i am fascinated by this this working theory that there just are no movie stars anymore or at least that movie stars, the movie stars we still care about today are like all older, that there's like no new crop of truly seminal artists that everyone cares about. And like this new cry, you know, you're Leonardo DiCaprio and you're Brad Pitt's and you're like the day, like a Julia Roberts or, you know, something like that. It seems like there's a lot of smaller people that are, you know, in other words, there's, it seems like there's a greater flood of people, same amount of fame to be distributed amongst them.

5:41:35Chris Wray:so you have like a you have a you kind of your pick of the litter of getting like smaller players that could be really good i mean that's what kind of uh expedition 33 did in a way and not that these people are small but comparable to that is what i'm saying and then the idea that like a big star that makes five or ten million dollars a movie which still exists but they're not super common anymore comparable to where they used to be like are they really going to walk it into a game and all of that budget will be spent on on their inclusion when you don't really need them. I mean, one of the beauties of video games is rendering your own reality even if you use motion capture and voice acting and stuff.

5:42:12So interesting idea

5:42:14Chris Wray:and we'll see what happens. The money will talk, I think, more than anything. Omar Rosa wrote in and said, Hey, Colin, any chance you can get your sons to play Madden or MLB The Show for Sacred Streaming? You could guide them through the game similar to them guiding you in Elden Ring. Dustin are we going to bring you through a season of the Pittsburgh Steelers

5:42:34Colin Moriarty:in Madden I have some experience with football games not for a very long time I played

5:42:44Chris Wray:NFL 2k5 the$20 one that was the famous one yeah dude it had a sick like crib mode where you could

5:42:50Colin Moriarty:like customize and like buy stuff for it between games it was I liked it I thought it was cool and I've played Madden before again very long time and for the most part when I'm picking plays you know I have no I have no idea what I'm picking here other than like okay are we running or are we throwing and hail mary you know it would be funny if if I played

5:43:15Chris Wray:and you guys like Chris you were like the offensive coordinator and Dustin you were like the defensive coordinator and you called all the plays and then I executed on them you know

5:43:24Colin Moriarty:that'd be hysterical i'd love that yeah yeah i played mlb the show years ago on a stream and my extent of baseball games is like backyard baseball so it's been a little while for that we could put you know we should play con the goat sports game blades of steel blades of steel yeah add that to nso dude amazing game konami get on that that'd be sick um and bring back nfl street that game ruled do you remember that yeah of course of course yeah a lot of these like

5:44:01Chris Wray:ancillary um like spin-off games for fifa nba nhl never really got them and even the backyard baseball shit that's kind of made a little bit of a comeback recently it's i i i personally Mutant League football. I like the spin-off sports games that were or an NBA Jam, of course, is probably the most famous of all of those. Arcade sports games are

5:44:25Colin Moriarty:awesome. Dude, NBA Jam rules. NBA Jam is a great game. I'd gladly play that for a stream. I mean, I would try Madden on stream. Why not?

5:44:33Chris Wray:It would be funny to have you guys just calling all the plays like all the defensive coverages and

5:44:39Colin Moriarty:we got to get the proper, some kind of headset.

5:44:42Chris Wray:Oh, you guys wouldn't see this because you don't watch the NFL. Sony sponsors the headsets. oh so there's like a huge on the mouthpiece there's like a huge sony logo and like a sony logo on the ear which is interesting everyone's sponsoring like some getting trying to get some sponsorship going on in the nfl chris you and i we will play from spring training all the way through a deep playoff run 162 game season of mlb the show all the way through you me i'm not

5:45:10Colin Moriarty:opposed to that kind of thing like the thing for me like the sports games have always put me off just based on the people that I knew who played them and like how how I knew like I remember when I first moved to uh when I first moved upstate with my parents the the first like the kids across the street we would have the same bus stop and so after a while they were just like hey you want to come over and like play games I'm like yeah sure and then I came over and like the only games they had were Madden games and I remember being like oh I can't I can't do this I remember being like I I remember thinking I remember deciding in that moment, like we can't be friends.

5:45:45Colin Moriarty:I can't be friends with these people. But I liked I played RBI baseball 2005, I think quite a lot back in the day. I liked my time with MLB the show, although I never really committed any serious time to it.

5:46:00Chris Wray:MLB the show is really good. If you're like into baseball, it's like a really, really complete game.

5:46:04Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I have like osmosis knowledge about baseball just based on like when I was playing as a kid and watching my dad. watch games but yeah i mean i'm not opposed to it there is a there is an air around sports sports games that i do like because they are so different and they're so like in some sense mundane and it's it's interesting that they are mundane like that that in and of itself is like fascinating to me um versus like oh that just sounds like a normal baseball announcer like there's nothing whimsical or fantastic about this like or fantastical about this or like elevating about it at all it's just like it literally is like a one-to-one facsimile of like what what exists in the real world that's kind of interesting because that exists so rarely like every type of sim that you play is kind of heightened and so like the sims is not like the sims is less accurate to the thing that it's simulating than mlb the show is to baseball right like it's it's interesting in that sense sure but i just i've never had the the drive or the time to like set aside and dedicate time to it but i i wouldn't mind doing a stream of something like that i must say i i've noted in the past that i i didn't grow up my there really are no football

5:47:17Chris Wray:fans in my immediate family my uncles are kind of into it my brother-in-law is really into it my nephews are into it but none of these people you know were around me and some of them didn't exist at the time and i learned everything i knew about football like getting into it from madden and i remember saying i think someone wrote in at that maybe a while ago about that where i was like you really if you really want to know football you should play mad because it's a very deep game it's obviously an arcadey game in in its execution but like the playbooks are the playbooks like the plays like i remember as a kid being like okay so this is what the center does this is what the guard does and the tackle this is an eye formation this is a goal line formation this is a spread formation this is like this is what a draw play is this is what a sneak it like you like and it

5:48:00Colin Moriarty:all translates to the real world so you could theoretically conceive of a future where like a great coach emerges having practiced a lot on madden it's like dude you love i should have

5:48:12Chris Wray:brought this up but like a few coaches recently in the last few years have talked about how they would like make these really deep madden um like franchises over many years and like make their own playbooks and man like it does have this place now that the coaches are getting younger they're in their 30s and 40s it's like now they they grew up with madden right exactly and like they talk about that a lot how like madden was like this seminal thing and for them and like and i know people that have done it like going mega deep like far into the future with a team like many decades in i had my roommate in college used to do that shit with college with the old college footballs where he would play like so far into in advance just played hundreds of games and to the point where it's like you're in some alternate reality and like it's their own little

5:48:57Colin Moriarty:fantasy world at school yeah yeah good i will say the thing about the mlb the show and i don't know if i mentioned this at the time but the thing that really got me that i wasn't expecting was that there's a nostalgia tied to baseball for me that is unlike anything else because unlike unlike everything else that i'm nostalgic for i've experienced it again since right like it like there's a game that i grew up with that i loved i've played it somewhat recently like within the last like five or six years there's a movie that i grew up with i can watch that kind of at any time but like the soundscape of baseball like that type of announcer the sound cues the way it sounded the same forever like the crack of the the bat like i've not watched baseball for like probably like in any real capacity for the last like 20 years so playing it again when the show came out um on game pass i remember was very very weird because it it did bring me back in a way that's like unlike anything because everything else i've just have more experience with like halo is not nostalgic for me like i played it like yesterday right so like but that was something that was interesting about it where it's like man nostalgia is a serious thing if if you actually let things fall into the past like like far

5:50:18Chris Wray:well i have another sports question i'm interested to see what you guys think of this mark wrote in and said hey mates with the recent discussion around the mlb property not appearing on pc would it be beneficial for playstation to develop an equivalent product of football manager the series has seen large sales in the pc community and could be a great way to bridge the gap to pc players as well as their mobile initiative for perspective football manager has seen peak concurrent users of over 80 000 players rivaling any of playstation's pc releases hope people have a great Christmas and Happy New Year.

5:50:47Chris Wray:So Football Manager is this long running franchise football, meaning soccer, of course, that I think and I want to make sure I look this up. I'm pretty sure Sega is involved in. Yeah, they own, I think, the studio Sports Interactive that and have for 20 years that make the series. And I want to ask you guys, do you guys understand what Football Manager is like in your mind's eye that it's like all in like spreadsheets and like numbers yeah and are you into it like not necessarily in sports but would you be interested in something like that because i i totally get it like i told like intellectually i understand that game and there was a game that i really loved on they only did one year of it it comes up every and every so often on our show it was on ps2 uh nfl head coach which was an ea spinoff of madden and i loved it like it was it was like so i wrote a guide for it at ign so they just gave me a copy of it.

5:51:43Chris Wray:And I was like, oh, and I was really into it. It was like calling plays and making moves and being the general manager and dealing with the facilities and the press and doing all that kind of that. I was like, this is kind of neat. But ultimately, it's just making decisions and then seeing how the simulation plays out based on your decisions. And football manager has a massive fan base. And so I would love to see more of that kind of stuff. And I think so. That's it. It's funny because baseball is one of those games that I think would work really well in that world because it is so do you guys know what like saber statistics are and all that kind of stuff like um no they're baseball well moneyball we were talking about it a few weeks ago i think in a different context with the show that whole notion of like being able to reduce a baseball player especially because it's a turn-based individualized game a person versus a person right a pitcher versus a batter in this case and you can like reduce it to its essence which is what money ball was all about about being like these players were under a nick swisher was a famous player i think the a's like valued that no one else did because of all these things the numbers spit out and it's a game they've slowly gotten to this metric based um format for all the sports like hockey has a thing i think called corso or something and like all these different stats that it's not like goals and assists and points and all the things that used to matter it's like how long were you on the ice and where were you when they scored and what like heat mapping your movements and doing all this kind of shit.

5:53:08Chris Wray:And there's a game there. Like for sure. I just don't know if it would have a huge console audience because I'm pretty sure Football Manager has come long come to I think there was even a Football Manager games on Vita, but they're on console. And I think Football Manager 26 is on console so you can play it right now. So could they go in the other direction and Sony do something like that? The other thing is, is that they have a lot of it's based on data and all the analytics that's being done and crunched behind the scenes in a game like Madden and the show and NHL is just a shit ton of dice rolls if you look at it from behind the scenes like your score you pass the puck your passing score is this the person who's receiving it is this there's all these mitigating factors it does all these dice rolls and then the puck gets to your stick they almost have all the data it would be about giving it in a more mathematical simulation level.

5:54:07Chris Wray:And I don't know if people would be into it, but fantasy sports is so big. That's all. That's the same thing. You have no real control other than the choice. So I don't know if you guys have anything to say about this, but I would love to see something like that. I think that's really fun. And would you guys enjoy a game like that? Or like, would Dustin, would you rather play a game like that? I mean, I suppose no, and that you would have to have an even deeper understanding of the sport probably than just playing. Yeah, yeah.

5:54:30Colin Moriarty:I would have zero, not zero, but very little understanding of any sport. And I mean, the only kind of equivalent I can think of in my gaming life is that when you play a game like City Skylines or Roller Coaster Tycoon, and I'm looking at the financial reports of my city and where I need to raise taxes or lower taxes, something like that. but it's not one of the like broadly appealing things about that game for me so i don't think it would be something i would be into but i can understand i mean they made a game out of microsoft uh excel right there's like the excel world championships or something and people it's wild dude it's all on the keyboard so i totally think there's there's room for it um i don't know if it necessarily makes sense for so i mean it makes sense if they were to do something for baseball to do some kind of baseball management i don't know if that would be an equally or as appealing of a game as a football i think it would be just as if not even more i mean basically reference for the sport but baseball is so baseball leagues go so many layers deep

5:55:41Chris Wray:there are so many players in an organization like hundreds of them you know and so being able and you know i think you probably understand it's like a ball double a ball triple a ball major leagues and like players drop and like come in and but it's an organization the yankees have a triple a team and a double a team and an a team and a development league team and and then you draw the players in between them and you drop them and bring them up and you trade them you put them in your lineup so there's like a there's something i think baseball would really translate really well to it probably better than almost any other any other sport but the idea of like making choices and having no control is fun.

5:56:16Chris Wray:And that was like what NFL head coach was about. Like, are your players prepared, coach? Because you're just going to be watching the outcome. And that's not for everyone. So, right. Yeah. The Diddler wrote in and said, Hey, not worthless, Sacred Crew. Do you agree with the Netflix co-CEO's claim that WB Games is worthless? In quotes. Put your gaming bias aside and consider what WB Games has released over the past five years. In my view, WB Games has lost much of its value because leadership prioritized profit over quality, rushing games like Mortal Kombat 1 to market and forcing projects into a live service model.

5:56:51Chris Wray:On top of that, it seemed like they were devaluing the brand for years in preparation for a sale. So maybe WB Games really is becoming worthless, or maybe this is a symptom of a bigger problem, AAA gaming itself losing its value as profit margins take priority. That might be what the CEO is really getting at. Anyway, I'll shut up now so I can do something not so worthless. You can probably guess what that is. Thank you, Diddler, for writing in. I wanted to bring that I mean you guys can say whatever you want but I wanted to bring this up because that's not what they said and I've been seeing this story circulating a lot and as I said earlier in the show Hogan I have sat down and do a sacred plus all about this deal or this proposed deal and how it affects games but how it affects entertainment and economics and whether it's the right thing and who wins and who loses and all that so definitely look forward to that on patreon.com slash last day media but I wanted to say this because we got a lot of letters about this and that's not what they said and it's a really important thing to go back this is what i always say is go to the source and see what was really said and so pocketgamer.biz um transcribed these thoughts from i guess a call that was based on the netflix proposed deal with wb and obviously paramount's getting involved so they write quote speaking during a conference presentation about the deal.

5:58:11Chris Wray:And again, this is writing from PocketGamer.biz's perspective. Co-CEO, president and director of Netflix, Gregory Peters, was asked whether the acquisition, which has been accepted by Warner Brothers Discovery, but faces competition from Paramount Skydance, would accelerate its own gaming plans. Peters said, while Warner has done, quote, great work in the game space, we actually didn't attribute any value to that from the get-go because they're relatively minor compared to the grand scheme of things. Now we are super excited because some of those properties they've built, Hogwarts is a great example of that, have been done quite well.

5:58:44Chris Wray:And we think that we can incorporate that into what we're offering. They've got great studios and great folks working there. So we think that there's definitely an opportunity there. But just to be clear, we haven't built that into our deal model, end quote. I don't know where people are getting this idea that they were like, they're worthless. That's not what they said. What they said was like, it has nothing to do with why they're buying the corporation and they're not even dealing with it on paper right now. like they'll worry about it later now I think and we and you guys can get into this if you want I don't think anyone benefits in the game space from being with Netflix I don't think they know what they're doing they have a very linear idea of what they need to do which is make games on their own platform they did publish a couple of games on PlayStation I think right that one game from Oxenfree 2 I think they published right and that was a console game but they want you on this they have a uh their own gaming app and they've they've gamified netflix in the past with things like black mirror um and you know just choice based choose your own adventure shit and all the rest so it's it's a good place to be in a way of there's going to be some financial stability but i don't know that it's ever really going to work for them because i don't know that they need to expand much more than like i don't in other words i don't know that anyone gives a shit about you're called the Netflix right yeah flicks even doing TV shows it's cool it's great but like games and all the rest so it might not be the best place for WB and they might gut all of it or at least spin it off what I assume will happen if the deal goes through and honestly I don't think the deal is going to go through but if if the but if it does go through then they'll probably just sell all that shit off I assume but I just wanted to be clear as using as an example and I don't mean to embarrass you diddler although maybe you should be embarrassed but the other people writing in everyone's circulating this that's not what they said and when i saw that quote i was like that's not what i i immediately was like there's no way they said that because like why would you say that about this thing you're trying to buy like it doesn't even compute and actually what they're saying is fairly complimentary they do a good job we think we can incorporate it but we just didn't put any value on it because it's not why we're interested in it right that's it i just wanted to throw that out there got to be very careful with with the stuff in my opinion i think i think a lot of it started with the kotaku article as i recall um because netflix considers warner brothers games to be pretty much worthless is

6:01:03Colin Moriarty:what the title of the and it's like that's not what they said shocker from kotaku it's just it's just weird like it's not we they just say we didn't attribute any value to that from the get-go

6:01:16Chris Wray:because they're relatively minor compared to the grand scheme of things there's no doubt about that what is the revenue of Warner Brothers games in an off year, like in the low hundreds of millions of dollars? This is a fucking$80 billion deal. So I think they're just like, we'll take whatever you got. I mean, there's gonna be a bunch of shit. They're like, we want HBO and DC.

6:01:36Chris Wray:So whatever else you got, we'll take. So I just wanted to throw that out there. Again, look forward to that Sacred Plus episode. Do you guys have any feelings and thoughts otherwise you want to share on this story before we move on?

6:01:48Colin Moriarty:Not really. Okay. Hogwarts Legacy 2. I mean, that's inevitable. I want it coming to Netflix. Coming to Netflix games. I don't know man I don't like acquisitions I think it's annoying but whatever

6:02:03Chris Wray:I just don't know who wins when this happens other than the shareholders Netflix but it's like yeah they're so foolish I don't even want to get into what we were talking about the thing that bothers me is that they're full of shit in that they're like we want to keep these things separated and it's like sure you do they're like we're going to have all the HBO back catalog on Netflix but that won't affect HBO

6:02:26Colin Moriarty:it's like no they would love to have that new harry potter show day one on netflix yeah just

6:02:32Chris Wray:in court i think the ultimate goal would be to they're gonna have to wait so they don't get in trouble with the regulators if they do get through but it's like hbo will just be on netflix

6:02:40Colin Moriarty:yeah yeah it'll just be like a silo it'll be the same way that disney plus kind of has like uh disney hulu espn yeah yeah it'll probably be like that if they even bother to even put that much effort into it and not just like throw it in into the into the uh the churn as it already goes but like i i know it just feels like i i remember when i was like maybe in like early college maybe late high school and i remember seeing a chart going around of like how many companies exist and how many of them are owned by what and how it was like a relatively small handful of companies owned everything and that was in like 2011 i can't even imagine what the that chart looks like now yeah it sucks and so like it's just it's just disappointing that it's going to ultimately come down to like three dudes in a fucking room just like playing a shell game with like a bunch of different entities and you're you're ultimately going to have a hell of a lot of illusions of choice going forward so like we'll see how that plays out

6:03:50Chris Wray:very cool it's interesting because I just I'm rooting against it just on principle I don't like any of these mergers some of them are fine but it's just it's like what people say about Sam Altman where it's like all this fiasco with computing components and like pricing and whatever it's like really due to them you know like they're the ones doing it and you're kind of at the behest of just these individuals or these small cabals that have too much money and too much power so whatever doesn't matter who cares no one cares what i have to say liam nissan altima wrote in says hey gents it reportedly now costs one million dollars for three minutes of airtime at the game awards or approximately five thousand five hundred and fifty five dollars per second colin will you be dropping eleven thousand dollars to get a two-second ad for saint slayer I think just flashing the name of the game and wishlist now should do the trick in all seriousness I would love to see the stats on how much an appearance or nomination of the show moves units did you guys see this and do you think do you think Dustin do you think it's unreasonable I actually don't know that three million minutes for a million dollars with that audience is that inappropriate I mean certainly you're making certainly Jeff's walking away with a lot of money but it's not nothing to get three minutes of time in front of a game awards audience that just grows year over year over year that really likes the process of watching the show and will be exposed to this game i it's about as good of a shot as you're going to get so if you have like a marketing budget it might behoove you to blow some of it if not all of it yeah what do you think well i think

6:05:28Colin Moriarty:jeff he put his money into the game awards made a big risk and it paid off and now especially with no more e3 i would assume that it is the most watched gaming event of the year oh my god probably by a long shot yeah i would assume easily um and so a million bucks for three minutes of airtime with that audience yeah that makes complete sense to me and i think that it's worth noting to my understanding is that not everyone is paying a million dollars because I'm sure if if Gabe Newell came to Jeff and was like hey I want to reveal Half-Life 3 I don't think he's paying a million dollars to do that because I think that there are some that he just Jeff knows the power of that reveal and what it does for the appeal of the show right right and I think there are examples too of smaller games that have been chosen they were chosen to be highlighted that didn't pay that uh to add to the well-roundedness of the show and so you know a million bucks for a big publisher i'm not saying it's nothing but it's in the scheme of marketing you know it's it's probably a price that's well worth paying to get that many attentive eyes on whatever your product is.

6:06:53Colin Moriarty:So I have no problem with it.

6:06:55Chris Wray:Yeah, there's two ways of looking at it where I think a football is an example where I think a Sunday night football ad during the season is somewhere between like a half a million and a million dollars, I think. But you can get it, which is an incredible amount of money, but it's like seven million dollars during the Super Bowl. So it's actually more cost effective to be during the Super Bowl because there's so many more people watching it, but it requires a heavier investment while it costs in the low thousands to tens of thousands of dollars to get like an ad on during a TV show. I think I have here, I just brought this up.

6:07:30Chris Wray:Yeah. Tens of thousands, a hundred of thousands for a single airing during national cable. Like so broadcast prime time for a slot would be like a hundred thousand dollars. So when you consider that it's like a million dollars for this is yeah, reasonable. I mean, it's a lot of money. It's just, it's, it's just that to say that, that, that could, that can make your game. Like it's, it's a, it's a risk just like anything else is the big move is to get your game revealed. But I also wonder, and I don't know if he's talked about this, like how much of that is organic and how much of that is also paid.

6:08:03Chris Wray:In other words, if you were to approach him and be like, we'll pay you a million dollars to reveal our game, I guess, or something like that. But then he gets like a real intrinsic value out of that. So that might just be a quid pro quo of him kind of selecting winners and losers. And then the losers in quotes or people that just don't have anything to show, but have a commercial for Genshin or whatever, they're going to be like, all right, here's like three minutes for a million dollars means that it's some three hundred and fifty thousand ish dollars for a minute. And that might be something that Nexon would drop or some of the one of these companies.

6:08:33So is the money a little gratuitous?

6:08:36Chris Wray:I suppose so. But I don't mind people making good money if they're putting on a product that people like and the game awards kind of speaks for itself. Maybe maybe that we've you'll have already heard the pickup. Maybe this game awards was fucking awful. But I doubt it. We're very critical of it all the time and make fun of it, but it's a it's good. He does his best and it has really good

6:08:55Colin Moriarty:years and it has years that aren't so good. Right. Just like anything cycles kind of like E3. Yeah. And I think the other critical thing for Jeff is that he always is asking for feedback and you can see sometimes that he's reacted to feedback and change the show for the better for it. So kudos to him for that.

6:09:14Chris Wray:All right. One last inquiry from Denny would never who says, greetings, gentlemen. On a recent stream, Dustin once again, rather triumphantly refunded his Game Pass subscription. This got me thinking, where is the line? If you could refund every game you played, would you? I'm not here to defend a giant corporation, and I agree that they shouldn't allow it. But at what point does this affect games and devs? So often I hear my favorite podcasts lamenting the layoffs, live service initiatives, et cetera, in the games industry. But again, I ask, where is the line? Are the so sad to hear about the layoffs?

6:09:43Chris Wray:More thoughts and prayers bullshit is keeping your own money more important than supporting games and developers. It's murky. I know just the thought I had. Sorry, I know it's long giggity, but I had to ask another family guy reference. Thank you for all that you do. Please relax and enjoy your holiday. All the best. So what do you think about this? You did this on sacred streaming. I'm not terribly offended by it because they let you do it. It was very similar. I only did it once when I played Master Chief Collection and then I was like, all right, I'm canceling my subscription. And they're like, all right, here's your money back.

6:10:16Chris Wray:To me, it's like really like if you insist now, I did that blindly. I didn't know that was going to happen. And I'm not even sure there was a way for me to be like, no, you keep it. I think they were just like, no, all right, bye. And I don't know if that's just an automated thing. Like Dustin, my assumption is that they do that because it just stops them from dealing with a bunch of people that want their money back. It's like, just fine. Just take your money. But is there a line of like, you didn't have to do that, but you did and you knew you can get away with it. Right. Is there a moral boundary or do you even care?

6:10:48Chris Wray:To me, I think it's I think it's so strange that it should be abused, actually, because it's like, why are you doing this? Like, why are you doing why are you allowing this to happen? You should just say no, just say no. But you've done it like you've done it over and over. like there's not even anything in their back end saying like you've done this already right so it's

6:11:08Colin Moriarty:kind of on them at some point yeah and to be clear about this situation and in previous situation well maybe not in previous situations but in this one i had no intention of buying and playing marvel cosmic whatever car cosmic invasion um so it's not like they really lost a sale in fact they probably gained some sales from watching us play it um but even with that being said they got their money from game pass from that whether it was a upfront check for the game or if it's a time played from game pass users they still got that info yeah microsoft loses yeah so microsoft lost on that and yeah i the question is like would you refund every game you've ever played no absolutely not and there are opportunities of games that i could have done that with like for example doom the dark ages i could have bought got the game pass for a month played it and then when i was done refunded it i wanted to own it and buy it so i think that they absolutely should figure out a new solution like it just seems like stupid business as you were saying colin for them to even let you do it even if it was a situation where it's like okay well i think ultimately they should just say okay well you can keep the this for the rest of the month and we're going to take that money that's how most subscriptions work is that it's not like they're going to refund you a weird solution is that they could have just been like okay well we'll give you a prorated refund and will take off one day or something, which might bring more abuse into the system if people knew that.

6:12:54Colin Moriarty:But so, yeah, it's a weird thing that they do that I don't understand. And I don't think it. Yeah, like as you said, the only person people that really hurts is Microsoft. It doesn't hurt the devs of, you know, Dotty Moo or whatever that made Marvel Cosmic Invasion. We're told constantly that they have infinite money

6:13:15Chris Wray:and nothing matters. So. Yeah. But really, they should just. Stop. I would love to know the specific reason why they do it, and I have to assume it's just the path of least resistance. Right. But I think that most people would be like, I don't want like I'm not. That's not why I'm, you know, we see it on Patreon. Some people sign up for things a month at a time and then immediately cancel because they don't want to be they don't want the recurring charge. Like there are reasons why you might do that. Right.

6:13:44Colin Moriarty:Yeah. Yeah, I would have been fine if they had said like, oh, well, you're going to spend$16 and you get this one month of Game Pass. It's like, OK, cool. I'm probably not going to use it. I do recall. I think that it might have been a little different this time because it did give me two options. It was one option was to let my Game Pass run into the end of the month and I pay it or it just offered me a refund. And in a case, it's like I have no reason I've Game Pass the rest of the month. So why wouldn't I pick that? so yeah i think that uh it certainly is abused and could be abused i mean i guess i you're abusing it but but it's you have to ask yourself again it's just like yeah i don't know i i personally

6:14:27Chris Wray:what i've only ever done that with that game pass once i've never had that opportunity to do with anything else i've never tried to like refund something on playstation or anything like that like you have to like message them and so i'm happy with spending the money on the games but But if you're going to win, this is, I think, an insistence. Like if you're going to insist. That's your problem at some point. Yeah.

6:14:47Colin Moriarty:Yeah. I think there is a scummy like on Steam. There are people that will buy a very short indie game. If they beat it in under two hours, they can refund it. And that's scummy because that's like I agree with that direct money that goes to that developer. That's a whole different situation. And I'm not saying like there are plenty of games I've tried on Steam, played for 45 minutes. minutes and thought I don't like this and I get a refund I have no problem with that I don't think anyone should have a problem with that but if you're playing and beating a game and enjoying it and then getting a refund on it in less than two hours that's gross but this is not that situation

6:15:24Chris Wray:yeah I mean just I've said before piracy like overt piracy generally which is not refunding your game or refunding your subscription but just over piracy is like so it's so sad to be proud of that and to like gloat about it but because that's like a that's literally stealing but people beg like basically say like all right get just shoving money back in your face is different

6:15:47um shall we go let's go you guys today yeah i'll see you in hour and a half yeah

6:15:56Chris Wray:well let's go around horn say goodbye goodbye to you chris good to be here with you today i was gonna i'd ask you what you were doing for us today but i already know

6:16:02Colin Moriarty:yeah we all we all know don't we yeah and then i and then i'm recording after really yeah it's

6:16:09Chris Wray:it's holiday man it's december yeah wow so it's what we'll do tomorrow by the way is the show will just be late and we'll i just want to wake up normally tomorrow because we're gonna be up so late i'm gonna be so jacked with energy probably i probably won't go to bed till like three or four in the morning at least so we'll just wake up and record in the afternoon and okay and then get it up in the evening i think that will work best we'll we'll figure out a time later but yeah all right cool well thanks for being here dustin see you soon be well goodbye you're gonna eat your

6:16:40Colin Moriarty:donut i will i might save it because holly's got some some chicken downstairs cooking can smell it and uh so i'm gonna eat dinner and i don't want to spoil the din with the uh the donut so maybe of the donut as a dessert and then it'll just be us hanging at and then tomorrow more recording getting duke out tomorrow and maybe we should discuss this off show we talked about potentially recording a Christmas episode on Saturday I don't know if you're available Chris we'll talk about in a minute yeah we'll figure out just busy times but good times looking forward to Half-Life 3 that got revealed right yeah crazy right

6:17:22Chris Wray:crazy times we're living right right right right right we'll see um okay cool guys i appreciate you um hope you're all well out there uh be good get your christmas shopping done for christ's sake what are you waiting for you gotta get that done i'm talking to you someone out there got a fire under their ass when they heard that you know it get your shit together um all right my friends see you soon well actually goodbye then no one knows i mean this is all non-linear whatever see you next time see ya take care sacred symbols a playstation podcast is a product and trademark of last stand media and colin's last stand llc and is proudly recorded in the usa the show was conceived by is written by and is directed by me colin moriarty my co-hosts are chris raygun maldonado and dustin firman the show is produced by executive producer dustin firman all of last stands the music is by my best friend, Ramon Narvaez.

6:18:20Chris Wray:As you know, all of Last Stand's shows, including Sacred Symbols, are fan-funded on Patreon at patreon.com slash laststandmedia. The following names are at the producer level on Patreon, our highest tier, and we're grateful for your thoughtful and kind contributions to our independent endeavor. Thank you.

6:18:48Chris Wray:Austin Riley, Justin Wagaman, Justin Payne, Alex Monez, Omar Rosa, Joey Gondaliger, Gio Corsi, Cam Wallace, Benjamin Michalko, Donald Difford, Alex Gates, Michael Gates, Josh McKinney, Adam Nix, Throw7, Phil Crone, Mr. Tom, Cannonball Jones, Jorge Pal, Anthony Vasquez, GhostStorm672, Simon Conception Jr., Peter Dreher, Alex Cabrera, Chris Ritchie, Shane Miller, Tony Zuniga, Jean-Francois Forze, Ryan T. Mandel, Alan Tremblay, Anton K., Spencer F., Robert Byers, Jamie Fraley, John Schultz, Betty Ann Moriarty, Geek Aloud, Jonathan Cortez, Qualia Freak, I'm the Silent Minority, Dennis Usel, Christopher Moore, Stove, Gary Cavallo, Joe McPartland, Nathan R., Jerome Ferreira, Gavin, Martin Beck, Turbo Makes Games, Jouche, David Castanez, Miranda Grubba, Michael Vecchio, Sunny Sides Up, Carlos Algaret, Organic Produce, Joseph Lopez, Josh Gravelick, Sean Mason, Jonathan Coates, Roto24, Johnny Waffles, Mark Liberto, Aaron Betke, Chris Morton, Christopher Devayo, Azan, Cody Benin, Conrad Pennyfarthing, Stewie108, Toby Ryland, Daryl E.

6:20:03Chris Wray:Naaman, Colin Love, Morgan Ashley, Kyle Hagel, Saqib Alam, Robert Schultz, Ali Fritz, Mason Bouchard, Chris Galvin, Dave Alvarez, Jimmy Rodriguez, Kendrick Caius, Joseph Baker, Matt Flowers, Who is Steven Day, I Come on My Toys Just In Case Toy Story is Real, Nick Amato, Saul Balcazar, Ross Marenka, Wesley S, Alex Lapeer, Dan Nolan, Mr. Malf, Boots, John Zyle, Ticos, Remington James, Gus, Gregory Slavinsky, Zainal Yuichi, Traylond, Weary San, Jeff Mercado, Bjorn Campbell, Captain Verde, Jay Getter, Stefan Hackett, Alan Niner, Antonio C, Jeremy J. Roberts, Trey Woodward, Jake C, O, Tyler Tremel, Electric MD, Sketch McGetch, Josh Godfrey, William Holbert, Randall Halsey, Christopher Morgan, The Shady Mailman, Vitra, Asak Paredes, Neil Amon, Dan Root, Michael Buffel, Peyton Stone, Zach Cohen, Double Duty Dirk, Terry Tip, Jad Rita, Dustin Klingman, Matt 20, Alan Tiniak, Relentless Rex, Corey Beacom, Whiskey Sin, Electric Soup, Grayson Maxwell, Frail Cabbage St.

6:21:19Chris Wray:Matthews of the Diocese of Brig, Jason Arzon, Eddie Medina, Umcart, My Name is Mayo, Donald John Vaders, Josh Sullinger, Albion, Ellis, Nate Izod, Lizard King, Sweaty Magic, Aaron Temple, Michael Mash Potato, Shane Brekke, Will Williams, Dustin Spruill, Collins Mindhole, Adam Refriended, Rallo, Vance Cody, Jorge Padua, Brian Williamson, Zachary Wood, Brandon Runger, Kyle Jay, Emmanuel Perez, Brano Bezzera Bloom, Logan Little George, Wesley Mullins, WTF, Uncharted Shinobi, Denny Woodnever, Eddie Smith, Hugo Delegia, Blackjack, Anthony Arcure, Matt MGS24, Keith Richards, Zenred, Jiraiya, Orchard, Sweet Jones, J.P.

6:22:08Chris Wray:Lynch, Isaac Claiborne, Brad Lohman, Saltab, Ray Ligia, Zman8601, and Adam Balm.