#390 | But Without Me, You're Only You

42:24Dustin Furman:listen listen i work my ass off out there during the year i have i definitely have one of the nicest yards in the neighborhood i believe um and a lot of people have nice hours it's not like i live in a shitty place where no one has a shitty yard but i work hard at that but you know that's my responsibility. Micah doesn't even really seem to care. So it's like, well, she doesn't ask and doesn't care about the lights or anything like that. I don't think she really cares, but, but she can always ask me if, if, if things change, um, and I'll be happy to comply. We have all sorts of things we could put lights on shrubs and trees and bushes and obviously like railings.

43:08Dustin Furman:I'm definitely not going and doing like the thing on the house and because don't you have to like nail things in your house or something like I don't know you're like making holes and shit and I don't want to be like that's like the worst idea to do when I got my solar panels that was like the major risk and like why I went with a really good companies because you're like you're making holes in your roof right it's like one of the stupidest things you could possibly do if you don't get it done right you know anyway all right so William and everyone that wrote in And of course, everyone listening, the tens and tens of thousands of you listening.

43:39Dustin Furman:Merry Christmas. And happy Hanukkah. Happy New Year. Be well. And thank you for writing in with your kind words. Andrew wrote in and said, what's up, Lampoon? Genuinely and come on, man. I've been a listener since episode 83. Up until recently, I've never owned a PlayStation and haven't really only played on Xbox. I met Stephen, a fellow patron at a mutuals Thanksgiving last year. He and his wife were also at this year's Thanksgiving, and we were talking about games that we had been playing recently. He offered to sell me his all-digital PS5, still in good condition, for too good of a price to pass up.

44:12Dustin Furman:He had upgraded to the Pro. It just so happens that two months ago, I agreed to pet sit for them for a stretch leading into Christmas. We agreed on having the amount he'd owe for my pet sitting services be lowered to the amount for how much I would pay for the console. He got the PS5 hooked up in the guest room before they left for the trip. I've gotten in a few hours of Spider-Man remastered so far, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. I'll gradually repurchase some of my Xbox library to play again on PlayStation Demon Souls and the last of us are exclusives I'm wanting to get to next shout out to Steven and also to his cats Ratchet and Clank and three dogs one is named Tifa they've been a lot of fun to care for go Bills isn't that there's a lot of interesting stuff in that letter to fans to star-crossed fans listeners finding themselves

44:53Colin Moriarty:and each other this reminds me where I met a listener of the show at a mutuals halloween party this is before i was on the show but i was editing the show and i knew because i pulled up and there was a kind of funny sticker on someone's car oh that's right i remember that yeah that's so funny dude uh and so inside you know i met him inside and he was cool because he listened to sacred also so shout out to cory he's probably listening right now he ordered a christmas sweater oh because micah alerted me she's like someone from butler bought one i was like who is it and i was like oh it's cory so shout out cory i see him moon stickers if you want to replace that sticker on your car i i dude i think uh well i'll i i think he's moved on but maybe not i don't know i think he's uh he's out he's with us now we won you can't stop winning

45:43Dustin Furman:so yeah so these guys i love that that people like it's interesting i mean that's a low that's a low probability but possible situation to find yourself in is to meet a fellow listener out there in the wild. Very fun. Upgrading to the Pro, but selling your old console, I feel like that's dangerous for some reason. You want to have a backup, in my opinion, at that point. If you can. I mean, that's maybe a little too much for some people, but what would you do without your PS5? You know, I'd probably kill myself if I didn't have any video games to play. What am I going to do? That's a PC. Yeah, I could put the lights up.

46:22Dustin Furman:A little late now, though. yeah it's a little much it's like when you i remember i don't know what it specifically is like why i got this impression but it must have been old movies and tv shows or something where it's like there was this thing where people would go get their tree on christmas eve do you know what i'm talking about oh yeah like it's not i only remember seeing it in like uh like in media i don't remember anybody that i ever knew or like was aware of that went and got their tree on christmas eve but there's a lot of like holiday episodes of things that are like kind of i think even the smiling friends christmas episode from the first season is them getting a tree on christmas eve and it's like this is definitely old school yeah like i wonder what that's all about yeah it's interesting well because i guess we have like all these things we like uh feed to the trees now to like keep them going and because like you could water that you water the trees when you get a christmas tree but now there's like all these like because we buy them like this because we get real trees or whatever it's like the substance you put like this like substance in it and it like keeps them alive longer and in other words they're not going to go in 1950 getting the tree and like you know december 10th and this thing's gonna be dead by like december like totally like dropping its needles by the 18th or something so you get it on christmas eve because it stays fresh maybe through new year's or something i remember we had a fake tree for quite a while but that thing was heavy because like i don't know where when my parents got it but like it definitely felt like you know you can tell how old something is just by how heavy the material is yeah yeah sure in some way where it's just like this is clearly like a an old like a 19 this is like a 1989 like steel fucking christmas tree and it was so heavy to put together i remember it and then when we moved into a house out of the apartment we got a real tree for exactly two years and then we're were like fuck this we're going back to this we're going back to because it would shed yeah yeah shedding and then like i don't even i don't think we thought about that and then like the dog would like oh what's this and it would start eating the the shedding and then it would get sick and it was like this is kind of a this is kind of a fucking racket this thing yeah well that's exactly what i'm saying it's like that's probably maybe where that came from back in the day before they figured out all these chemicals to try to like feed the tree to like keep it going which right yeah which is it because you're just straight cutting them and they're dead yeah and it is it is it's funny to imagine a tree sitting there through most of december almost like a like a dog like a like a 23 year old dog that the owner just refuses to let die right and you're kind of having this those like side conversations in sidebars where you're like i don't know if this is like the most humane thing to be doing really right like you're cutting it down and then you're like it's like you're like posting it up like as a symbol to other trees like this is what we this might happen to you right it's like vlad the impaler is like yeah like we're putting lights on it like decorations we talk with a star it's like we're humiliating it yeah shout out to christmas trees yeah i like that i've said this before on the show but it's just uh i like the pagan tradition of bringing a tree inside that's where that all comes from and it's cool that we still do it even if it's it's ostensibly for christmas and for jesus christ and all the right but it's but i'm not doing it for that reason i'm doing it because i just think it's a cool like weird thing humans have been doing for 1500 years or something you know where they're just like yeah cut this fucking pine tree down and bring it inside yeah like the most toxic type of those toxic type of tree too yeah you can't breathe in the smoke or like eat the anything that's cooked over or whatever yeah you can't it ruins everything but yeah it's like it's toxic right if you burn it yeah yeah i've i've i uh i mean i didn't learn that i guess i kind of fundamentally knew that but i was i remember micah buys like all this weird you know weird wood and she loves a grilling and smoking and stuff like outside and uh i was like what about pine wood and she's like can't use pine wood dude i'm like yeah it's interesting i guess you can't you have to use like cedar or something maybe that's not even one of them or some some sort of uh different wood that they enjoy my favorite thing about that specific bit of knowledge is that we had to have learned it at some point right which implies which implies that like so many like george washington with his lead teeth were probably he's probably like cutting down pine trees for christmas and then like burning them and like cooking all sorts of shit out of awesome just sucking on lead for decades like a jolly rancher yeah for decades and decades oh god bless he did go crazy around your neck of the woods dustin during the french and indian war and you know he became a hero for like some conflict he had with the british where he killed a bunch of british him and his people in western pa maybe around fort pitt actually but I don't remember.

51:30Dustin Furman:It is funny. I'm starting to just... I don't exercise this muscle at all. I used to know the American Revolution and the colonial era so well. And now I'm like... Sounds like a good...

51:45Colin Moriarty:Sounds like a good... Okay, so you went on a rampage, basically. This could be a good beat-em-up game. George Washington. Dude, American Revolution beat-em-up. Yeah, dude. dude lilymo write this down get it going am rev beat him up right that right down my nose

52:09Dustin Furman:um all right i miss history sometimes it was so it's looking back on it and i'm like what is it what was it what my whole thing was like i was just gonna know things it's interesting all right that's all i have from the audience this week so let's get into the news there's only a few things of note this week but some things that we need to talk about and then we've played we're playing a bunch of games we're getting into that era that era that time of year that season where we can finally sit down and catch up with things and and i've been playing a lot of stuff so it's been fun and then we'll get into listener inquiries at the end as we always do and hear again from you all right i just wanted to throw this psa out there a few weeks ago we talked about this new ratchet and clank mobile game ranger rumble and um it was only playable in certain territories wasn't it the philippines that was the case with uh the mlb the show port 2 and you can go to ranger rumble.com to pre-register for your for your um territory to play this game if you're interested it looks kind of cool i mean i'm not going to play it but it doesn't look bad but I wanted to say the PSA is that the game is now available in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland.

53:22Dustin Furman:So Scandinavia, and we have a sizable Scandinavian audience. So I'm letting you guys know now, if you want to check this out and see what it's all about, ranger rumble.com, you can get going on there and play it on Android or Apple and see what you think. So just a little bit of a PSA for a beloved speaking of ratchet and clank great names for pet by the pets, by the way, I liked that earlier. Yeah. Almost as good as Russian treble. But not quite. But not quite. First piece of news broke this morning from when we're recording. And it's funny because we talked about this on one of the episodes of the show we've already done.

54:02Dustin Furman:But it seems like Sony has bullied Tencent successfully and gotten them to drop this Light of Modern game. The word comes by way of a filing. It says this is in Document Cloud. And it says Sony v. Tencent stipulation for dismissal pursuant to rule 41. And it's Sony Interactive Entertainment versus Tencent and all the other groups that they were suing over this blatant Horizon copy, including Tencent Technology, Aurora Studios, Polaris Quest, Level Infinite and so on. The document is brief. It says, quote, pursuant to federal rule of civil procedure 41 and the confidential settlement of all parties, plaintiff, Sony, Interactive Entertainment, LLC, and defendants Tencent America, Proxima Beta, Tencent Holdings, Proxima Beta, BTE, and Tencent Technology by and through their undersigned council of record hereby stipulate as follows.

54:55Dustin Furman:All pending motions are withdrawn and this action is hereby dismissed with prejudice. All parties shall bear their own fees and costs. With prejudice means it can't be refiled. So this is a finalized thing and everyone's incurring their own internal legal costs, which is not a huge surprise since it's probably all their own internal lawyers. And it is a confidential settlement. So we're never going to find out what happened here. However, the game is no longer on Steam. So that's that. And I'm not usually for these litigious things that are a little looser. and you know what is it but this was so over the top um that it became i assume listen i'm not a lawyer obviously but it seemed like sony kind of had them dead to rights it's like you're not gonna get away with this we all know what this is this is the game you tried to pitch us and you're not gonna just like reskin it vaguely and then pretend that that's not the case we have all the we have this paper trail all these people were in these rooms with you you gave us decks and here's a picture of your studio playing Horizon and it's like, come on, man.

56:04Dustin Furman:And I think eventually they were like, come on. And I think eventually they were like, yeah, you're right. So what I assume will happen here is this game will reemerge in some re-skinned way, but they probably have a lot of work to do to differentiate it. And I would love to know the confidential settlement because I would imagine, since they say specifically that legal fees are incurred by the individual parties, there's probably nothing other than that game just being taken down. I doubt that there was any payment or anything. So Dustin, any reflections on the light of Monorum now? Case closed.

56:37Dustin Furman:Dismissed with prejudice. It's over.

56:39Colin Moriarty:Yeah, it is interesting because it seemed like Tencent was ready to fight for a little bit. And I think we discussed that at some point. But you're right that the paper trail was there. There was no way they were going to get away with it. I wonder, I'm guessing this is highly unlikely, but it's something that we discussed and I believe Hogue brought up. Is there any chance this game comes back as an official Horizon game?

57:04Dustin Furman:Yeah, I mean, that was his theory of the case is that like this game is sufficiently developed enough where there's some way you could reskin it, but I don't know. It's so slimy. Like, why would Sony want to be like, it's almost rewarding them, right? It's like, fine. The game we didn't want to do with you will do. It's like, if I were Sony, I'd be like, you can get fucked and this is and this is going to affect our relationship like with you with us with the two sides with level infinite and ten cent and all these different things like we can promise you that you know that's what if i were so that's that's what i would be saying but

57:40Colin Moriarty:i would say it's probably unlikely just in the fact that they already had they have two horizon multiplayer games already that's already i mean we don't know about the two too many there's two too many we don't know about the official or not i guess they're both official but we don't know about the gorilla games one we do know about the mobile one but i think it's already causing some confusion or it will uh particularly when the second one when the gorilla one's announced so it's like why even why even go there with another one that started as a blatant ripoff so i think

58:18Dustin Furman:it's probably just dead and r.i.p bozo yeah r.i.p bozo for sure absolutely chris any thoughts on the light of modern room i think that you actually are i don't want to spoil the upcoming episodes but i think this was on your list right oh yeah yeah yeah we were talking about at the time we were talking about like wondering how it was going to conclude now it's you'll hear about that on episode 391 yeah right but uh no i mean it's it's a little surprising i thought it would maybe last a little bit longer or like this wouldn't necessarily be the outcome because i thought like maybe like it is undoubtedly i guess i look at things like um pow world which seem not that seems like more egregious not drastically more egregious but like it feels like a little bit more egregious than this did because i don't really know what light of motorham is supposed to be outside of like the general visuals of horizon like it's very well it to me it very well could have been that the gameplay is like completely different and it's not really there's like a bunch of other shit involved in it that we just don't know about so i thought maybe this would drag on a little bit longer or there would be some kind of weird like okay we're gonna go and reskin which i'm sure they are going to do like they're not going to throw away all that work

59:37but yeah it's a little surprising for it to be resolved in my opinion it's a little

59:43Dustin Furman:it's unusual yeah I'm well I'll let NIH speak because there was an angle of this that I was looking forward to although I don't know that I was ever really going to get this far he says hey CDC now that Tencent and SIE have settled their differences do you think we will ever see light of motor home again but reskinned is to not infringe on horizon quite so blatantly so that's the smaller part of his question and the answer is I think so and I think we all do and Chris was just saying that or could it be possible that SIE will license Horizon to Tencent's game after all again I just don't see why they would do that time will tell I'm just personally disappointed that the case won't proceed to discovery here's the here's the key the ABK acquisition and Epic versus Apple and Google lawsuits provided so many juicy internal documents for industry nerds like us to enjoy Merry Christmas to y 'all and yours I'll go wrap some print some I'll go wrap some presents from Santa and listen, all the best.

1:00:30Dustin Furman:Thank you, Ed, for writing in. That's where my mind was, too, with the last thing you said, Ed. The only value this case would have had was to see more. What's clear in all of these cases, this is especially true in Epic versus Apple, is whoever's like calling through these documents and editing them for primetime or whatever, they don't understand a lot what's important or what matters. And it's so funny how many slip through the goalie because of that even because during the sony microsoft ftc thing things leaked that shouldn't have leaked like unredacted things that just shouldn't have been in there but there's always things in there in quotes that are like really you're saying you're like allowing this to come out this is so interesting and it's just shit that people don't understand the importance of something always gets by and that was one of the things i was looking forward to as well should it have gone through but discovery would have taken i mean in this case would have just dragged on we wouldn't have gotten shit for years so um this is the right outcome i think this is creatively the right outcome legally it seems like the right outcome and i just don't think that there was any prayer when you really think about it of 10 cent exposing themselves to discovery when it's so obvious that they what happened i mean that that picture of the studio playing horizon like made me like laugh out loud when i saw it like actually laugh when i saw it where i was like this is crazy it was a picture they sent sony at some point their lawyers were probably like listen we're we're completely fucked here and we flew too close to the sun and now we're dealing with the responsibility of that so light of moderam like dustin said r.i.p.

1:02:08Dustin Furman:in peace come back re-skinned if you'd like and come back with a better name Because that name's not doing it for me. What is Modorum? Yeah. Modorum. It's like, it's, I mean, it sucks. It's not great. Come back with a better name. All right. This is big news. Sucker Punch's co-founder, Brian Fleming, is leaving the studio. He's been there since the studio was founded in 1997. And he will be leaving the studio leadership in the hand. So he's, I want to say, I'm not sure. So when I wrote the history of Sucker Punch at IGN, I interviewed, there were three founders left at Sucker Punch at that time.

1:02:48Dustin Furman:That was 10 years ago, more than that. Brian Fleming was one of them. I'm not entirely sure how many of the founders are there. There were seven founders, I want to say. So he ended up in the top role, but he was a longtime producer and executive producer of their games. I don't know if you guys know like the history of Sucker Punch, but Sucker Punch was founded by a bunch of people at Microsoft. long before Xbox was a thing or whatever. And they all spun off and they wanted to make a game and they made Rocket Robot on Wheels, which I believe Ubisoft published. And that was a Nintendo 64 game.

1:03:20Dustin Furman:And then they were kind of on the ropes and they encountered this kind of idea for Sly Cooper, which they kind of sold off to Sony and worked with Sony as a second party. And the rest is history. Sly Cooper became a popular PS2 trilogy. It led to Infamous and that led us to Ghost. and Brian Fleming has been there the entire time, but Sony has kind of discreetly announced that he is exiting. So they write here in a PR release, quote, after nearly three decades helping bring life iconic franchises like Sly Cooper, Infamous, and Ghost of Tsushima and Ghost of Yote. It's funny, they're talking about them as separate franchises.

1:03:58Dustin Furman:Brian Fleming has announced he's passing Sucker Punch studio leadership onto a new generation. Over the past year, Brian has worked closely with PlayStation Studios to ensure that Sucker Punch was in the best hands moving forward, with a strong foundation for the studio's continued success. Starting January 1st, long-time creative and technical leaders Jason Connell and Adrian Bentley will step into new roles as studio heads, continuing to guide the team's focus on ambitious character-driven experiences that define PlayStation Studios. Jason and Adrian have been instrumental in shaping the creative and technical direction of Sucker Punch in recent years.

1:04:27Dustin Furman:Jason, who served as co-creative director on the Ghost franchise, has helped define the studio's visual identity and storytelling style, bringing cinematic depth and emotional resonance to PlayStation players around the world. Adrian, as technical director, has led the studio's engineering and production efforts, driving innovation across development tools and game systems that make Sucker Punch's world so immersive. Together, they represent the perfect blend of creative vision and technical excellence that has always set the studio apart. Nate Fox, longtime director at Sucker Punch, will continue as co-creative director to complete the overall creative leadership team.

1:04:59Dustin Furman:Brian's vision and leadership have shaped the studio's culture of creativity and collaboration, and established a foundation that Jason, Adrian, and the entire team will build on as they look to the future. So one thing that I'm, and I don't know if they're saving this for later, is like I was surprised not to hear from Brian himself. He's never been a majorly forward-facing person. I think Chris Zimmerman, who's another founder, is still there. And I think he was kind of giving more recent interviews during Ghost of Yote's PR cycle. I wonder if we'll hear from him later or maybe he just doesn't have anything he wants to say but he's been there forever and he's a he's a really nice guy I have very specific memories of meeting um during when infamous one was in development that was that was kind of when I started to cover playstation and they so I saw the game behind closed doors and it was him and Nate Fox and they were just really friendly and very warm people uh Nate Fox especially is like a very very i mean nothing wrong brian i just knew nate better he's just a very nice guy and uh sometimes it's just time to move on it must be difficult to walk away from something you founded sold to sony i mean sony ended up buying the studio outright in 2011 so he made a lot of money and you're the ceo of the and the lead of the company you're making a lot of money regardless so it's time to kind of walk away sometimes i think we'll know there's like some theories out there that like this is a this is a bad thing and i'm like i think we'll just find out if he if he really is retiring or if he you know people are allowed to just retire i understand the skepticism behind things like the jim ryan thing kind of panned out strange but then you have something like ted price when he retired it's like no he really just wants to be done and maybe it's just time to get out of this especially when these games are dragging on it must be such a culture shock over all those years when it's like they made all the sly cooper super cooper games in four years and then and then the infamous games in so three infamous games in seven years or eight years and then things just drag on and it's like well maybe it's just i don't want to do this anymore um so i just want people to know who these guys are that they were talking about and then we can go over to you guys and see if it matters brian fleming of course like we were saying one of the co-founders of the studio came from microsoft in the 90s his his discipline was more like in production as a producer um but the thing about sucker punch and i think people probably have noticed this over time this really started in the infamous era especially is they kind of credit themselves as a team and it becomes very nebulous who did what in some of these games so it'll be like like in the sly cooper games i'm pretty sure the credits were like sucker punch is and then just a bunch of names.

1:07:42Dustin Furman:So it's a little bit limited specifically on what some people have done on some of these games, but Jason Connell is a designer by trade and he worked in design on the Ghost games and he also worked on Infamous First Light, which is the expansion, the standalone expansion, the Infamous Second Son on PS4. And he worked on lighting and effects for Infamous 2 and Second Son as well. So he's been there since the mid infamous era. And Adrian Bentley goes back even further. He's a programmer by trade. And his first project was Sly Cooper 3. So these guys have been there, know the culture. We'll see how it all goes moving forward.

1:08:22Dustin Furman:Dividing and conquering is something that Sony seems to want to do more. And it is true. I've seen some speculation about this, too. It's like this is not a great thing to put two people in charge. It is somewhat rare to do that. But it seems like Sony likes to split the difference. I think this is what they were kind of trying to do with with Nishino and Holst originally was like, you worry about the games like the creative we worry about. For them, it was like you worry about the games. I worry about the hardware here. It's like you worry about the technical stuff. I worry about the creative stuff.

1:08:53Dustin Furman:And I know people are skeptical about that. And there's some like scuttlebutt. But let's understand our PlayStation history a little bit. But Evan Wells and Christoph Balestra led Naughty Dog together during what is widely considered its most prosperous era, like the crown jewel of PlayStation that drove forward these AAA narrative character-driven games. So it's not unheard of. And Sony has found success having that structure for many years. So just some things to keep an eye on. Chris, Sucker Punch losing Brian Fleming, his co-founder. I think there's only going to be two founders left now out of the seven.

1:09:32Dustin Furman:What are your thoughts? I mean, I'm not worried about it. Like, I look at this as like, you've been in the game for a while. You know, it seems like, dude, honestly, I look at the landscape right now and I look at like, oh, it takes this long to make a game now. You know, I do kind of get it. It almost reminds me a little bit of a and I'm not saying that this is his view. I don't know anything about him personally, but like it reminds me a little bit of Ian McKellen like sitting in that green screen room of the Hobbit you know what I mean where it's like this isn't what this isn't really what I signed up for necessarily like it would have been cool it would have been cool to get like like you were talking about like the all the Sly Cooper games were in what how many years for 2002 to 2005 it's fucking crazy like that's coming from that era I would imagine that this feels kind of like yeah you know I don't know I've kind of done what I need to do and like you said like studios those um specifically playstation studios as far as like naughty dog goes like they've they've successfully passed the reins before and so like this this this doesn't strike me as particularly like sound the alarms uh it's it's very far from like the jim ryan thing which i kind of felt a little bit more like like what the fuck exactly is happening but even that was kind of like debatable at the time anyway um but yeah i mean best of luck whatever whatever he's planning on doing yeah hopefully just retiring and laying in a bed of money I mean that's what I heard if I were him and yeah Dustin let's get you on the record on this as well I feel we often talk about the cover band kind of syndrome of these studios but and I feel that way about Media Molecule for instance as we say in Bioware and some other things but these guys are kind of OG and that are leading the team now and my feeling is that this is kind of I don't want to say irrelevant but I I don't think it's going to affect the trajectory of Sucker Punch, but maybe people internally feel different.

1:11:26Dustin Furman:The only people that really know are the people that understand the politics of the studio, which will be internal. So maybe this is like a horrible thing. I don't know, but I don't think so.

1:11:33Colin Moriarty:Yeah, there's no red flags for me from my very limited understanding of, you know, how they operate. But people from the inside that have been there for a long time sounds right. as far as Brian Fleming, whether he retires or I mean, you got to imagine that being a studio head is extremely stressful and managing these now long term projects. And so whether he decides to retire or maybe just wants to go back to the way he operated before, start a small team, do smaller games. I mean, that would be cool, too. I mean, that was kind of I guess Ken Levine had a very interesting situation where he had 2k supporting him to do a small team for 10 fucking years but um i think that in your interview with him colin i believe or somewhere he was talking about how it's just like yeah managing a team that big under that much pressure is just i don't want to do that anymore so maybe that's the case for him maybe it's not either way uh i wish him the

1:12:37Dustin Furman:best of luck yeah i mean i think ken would admit i don't know i don't want to speak for him but like you know they famously had to bring rod ferguson into finish bioshock infinite like to get it all right right over the finish line like to like be like all right this is enough already like like let's let's like put the pieces together and get the game out so sometimes these like creative visionaries yeah i don't i could i just personally can relate to that in that i don't i i don't want to lament it because it's like i love i do love doing this and i'm blessed to be able to do this but like the team that we have now is like maximally big as far as i'm concerned like i can barely lead this team and i i said that on a recent episode when i was on dan allen's show where i'm like i'm not a natural leader and i don't like being a leader and i can i can totally relate dagan is like that too like dagan could have been the creative director of a few different like tv shows and done like a bunch of things and he's like i just want to be an animator like i don't want to right i don't want to do this other shit and i so i can relate i can relate to that and yeah i think probably for when you're in a place like sucker punch and you find first of all you're like real hungry in the beginning and then you find this runaway success and then you're making a lot of money and then you sell your company to sony and stuff it's like the going's good you don't want to walk away it's what i always think about when i watch sports where i'm like the reality is a lot of these guys don't love the game and i and i think that that's okay it's like they're just really good at it and they make a lot of money so the going's good it's like all right so you do it you don't have to necessarily love it and eventually it's time so but it's all conjecture uh yeah right now um we'll see we'll see what happens here but it's not unlike um what's going on with uh that what's that game the chicken foot game oh coven of the chicken foot coven of the chicken foot where it's like yeah this is bruce straley i read an he actually gave an interesting interview i think it was on game informer i didn't include it i don't think in our rundown because there's not any news in it really but it's a guy that's like reflecting a lot on his time on naughty dog and being like i just didn't really like doing this you know or at least like this kind of had run its course for me i'm making things for some i i'm making this major ip i don't own shit i make a lot of money but it's kind of like he didn't say this specifically but it's like kind of like a mercenary thing really high pressure you know and to what end so to what end and and you would you can look at Bruce Traley could have stated Naughty Dog forever you look at a guy like that you're like why would you ever leave but it's like people just don't understand the mitigating factors about why a person would leave so anyway Brian you're not listening but we wish you the very best all right marathon has a release month they released a nice big vi doc as well how long is it it's like yeah 22 23 minutes 22 minutes yeah so a lot of information in there but you can go to bungie.net as well and check out kind of a rundown of things so marathon the big news here is marathon's release will happen in march 2026 although no specific date yet and uh chris and i have discussed previously although you'll hear it in the future is like i'm a little weirded out by that i don't understand that at all about like yeah it comes out in three months when in three months like no specific date yet okay forty dollars that's the target price or your local equivalent that's to be expected that's the same that hell divers and concord were and i assume fair games will be they right here quote purchasing marathon will give you full access to the game including a roadmap of free gameplay updates as the year progresses this will include new maps new runner shells events and more starting with the exploration of UESC Marathon's Cryo Archive in Season 1.

1:16:25Dustin Furman:We also want to ensure you are logging in because you love the game, not from fear of missing out. So Marathon's reward passes will not expire and you'll be able to purchase and unlock prior passes. That's a big difference, I think, from Destiny, right? Finally, and most importantly, we believe in preserving competitive integrity in Marathon, so survival will never come down to how much money you spend. We'll share more about our plans for seasonal content, a roadmap, and details about what you'll be able to try in the game as we get closer to launch. And they highlight some things from the Viadoc that you want to see, and then you can get in touch with them in different ways on Discord and so on and so forth.

1:16:56Dustin Furman:But that's the big news. Chris, I'm very eager to hear what you have to say about Marathon. Yeah, so this is a chunky Viadoc. They showed a lot of new shit. Now, granted, I played the Marathon public alpha in, I believe, May or April of this year. So it's been a while. But I remember even at the time, I put a good like 40 to 50 hours into it. I really enjoyed what was there. Needed a little bit of polish, some visual cleanup and some little design decisions. Like where's the prox chat? You know, certain littler things that I wasn't super sure about. And they seem to have kind of addressed a lot of this stuff.

1:17:37They've got prox chat in the game. They've got a solo queue. They've also got this like soul, like this scav run kind of thing where like, if you don't want to risk anything, you can like kind of jump into the middle of a match in progress as like a hollowed out shell with like no crazy abilities just running around ratting around looking for shit and trying to escape free loadout basically it's free loadout but you you miss out i guess on having like the the unique like you're probably gonna lose a firefight i guess because you're you don't really have a lot of uh abilities at your disposal i thought that was kind of neat um the big thing for me that was like kind of interesting and exciting and something that's actually new uh from what i've seen of this genre is like this this body decay premise where like originally in the alpha that i played uh which is which was public so i'm not breaking nda they

1:18:31but you would you would kill an enemy and then they would kind of become like a they would vaporize and then they would become like a duffel bag and then you'd kind of like go through their their bag or whatever and that was really the only indication that somebody had died there you would see a duffel bag um now the bodies remain and over time throughout the match they'll like decay and they'll kind of like melt into this like cybernetic goo which kind of gives away like oh if there's like a fresh body you can kind of deduce that like oh this was like a very very recent firefight versus if it's just like a puddle or whatever it's like oh i'm probably there's nobody probably around this happened a while ago which i thought was like that's a dope idea i'm glad that they managed to implement something like that anything that's like anything that gives the player information that's also like diegetic to the world is really fucking cool it's it's a similar vein to the wind and ghost of tsushima where it's like not like this big arrow or like or text that says danger was here recently like it's a cool little thing they seem to fleshed out a little bit more classes looks like there's a medic class um no duos still which is kind of weird i don't know if that's necessarily the biggest deal but it is kind of like a weird omission arc raiders launched without duos either so maybe they'll like course correct on that but there's four zones like you said the that last one being an end game kind of location on the on the ship itself which something is cool that i i don't know if this is true in arc raiders it's been a minute and i don't know if i was paying that close attention but in order to even gain access to that high-end ship you have to go in with like a minimum loadout value so like so like you can't you can't go in there with nothing basically you like you have to go in there and like risk stuff which is kind of cool i don't know if that's i don't think that's in arc raiders as far as i know but yeah i think you just go in there for free but i think that's like a neat idea um there's like some they teased a bit of a raid boss in the cryo archive from the original marathon the compiler enemy which i just fucking i love the design of that thing they got a grappling hook in the game so immediate win uh but one of the more interesting things about this is like seeing who's in the vidoc and granted this isn't necessarily new like there's been a bunch of old faces uh showing up on these vidocs but even particularly for marathon but seeing chris butcher there who's been who's like the technical director on marathon he's been in it he was an engineering lead from from the original halo combat evolved all the way through destiny to steve cotton who is the creative lead was like he started doing multiplayer environments for halo 2 all the way through witch queen for world art lars bakken who's like the multiplayer guy he's been there since halo 3 so you've got like a lot of like really original guys that i remember seeing in like viadocs in like 2004 2007 seeing that's interesting one of the weirder things and this is kind of curious so obviously they had the the art scandal right they had the the solon decals from anti-real and what i did notice is that the art director or the the art lead i can't remember the exact term is jason sussman now so it's not joseph cross who was the art director at the time of the of that whole thing so it looks like i don't know if he's still i checked his twitter feed like during the because there were some rumors going around that he was like fired and so i was like researching i was like i don't know if he's been fired he's still re he's still retweeting like i think he retweeted the uh the vidoc even like the day it came out so like i mean and maybe that's like a like a a nice thing to do like i don't really know what the situation is as far as like his employment but he's definitely not the art lead anymore which that makes sense yeah something something valid yeah got by the goalie with that one yeah you kind of should have caught that you caused a bit of a bit of a problem them there but jason sussman also like a lot of money yeah but jason sussman uh i just want to comment on him because him being there is interesting too because he's been there since odst and so like a lot of original guys here like working on this thing and uh that's kind of i don't know it's fascinating but yeah four maps uh 40 bucks maybe a little steep in comparison to like arc raiders which i think has like i want to say five or six maps i think at this point i think i'm not super sure actually i'm pretty i don't because it's buried city um oh my god buried city damn spaceport buried city damn spaceport and uh there's five it says yeah yeah so there's five so it's still one fewer yeah so it's one fewer uh one of those maps in marathon the fourth one is going to be like kind of like a you can't just that's like an end game map that you have to like buy access to essentially like with your with your equipment and stuff so like maybe some people will look at that as be like there's really only three maps that like most people will experience that seems a little steep for 40 bucks um i don't know i'm looking forward to this i think it looks great i think it's a great vi doc i think it kind of quelled a lot of the concerns that i had personally i don't think it was great when i played it back then it It just needed like a little bit of TLC.

1:23:54But now that it's looking a little bit more feature complete, they've changed some of the weather dynamics. They've changed the way foliage is rendered. So it doesn't look... I remember one of my main criticisms of the game back then was the indoor environments look great and the outdoors look like, I don't know, like the lighting's not right or something. They've really, really addressed that. So I don't know. I'm looking forward to it. I'm bullish. I'm optimistic about it. uh i'm excited to play it and i think this this vidoc did a did a lot to uh rehabilitate the image i don't know if it's like fixed it entirely i think there's always going to be like kind of like this stink on it in some way but a lot of the comments that i've seen outside of ign ign comments are always a fucking mess but like most of the uh most of the reception that i've seen to this vidoc both in the comment sections on bungee's account and on you know various other places where it's been reposted.

1:24:47It seems cautiously optimistic to just straight up positive, which is better than they were a couple months ago. So I think they did a good job with this.

1:24:58Dustin Furman:Cool. I'm glad to hear that. I'm sure everyone's glad to hear that you're down with it. I think that's a good sign. It seems like I was looking at the YouTube video for the ViDoc to just look at the comments and it's very positive. Dustin, what do you have to say?

1:25:11Colin Moriarty:yeah i think this looks awesome clearly they were listening with the proximity chat uh aspect of it i think that i mean especially after arc raiders released it was like they they had to get that worked out uh they also showed in the in the vital chris touched on this is just that they talked about how like certain environments in daylight didn't really look that great yeah and it shows that there's a clear difference there um it is one funny thing to point out and this is just me being a dick mostly is that there's the part that shows the menu and the store is at the very top it's like come on like you don't don't put the store as the top option and i understand that it's there's no gameplay things but it's like okay uh maybe just from an optics perspective it is unfortunate especially because i think that's the store for like the like the market like for you buy weapons and shit from like vendors and stuff so like you could have just you could have chose a more neutral term because it's coming across i think it's coming across wrong but right we'll see um i i one thing i will say is like i appreciate the fact that there's dude i it's so nice to see a game without a fucking hulu layout like i don't know what the hell because even um even battlefield has this kind of hulu thing going on and i'm just like i don't know man just give me a fucking list please for the love of god the uh the the other thing oh you're good the other thing i'm unsure about is they showed off a character has an ability to turn invisible and i don't know if i like that and i i mean that i do not know if i like that uh in this type of game so unsure but we'll see when it comes out i'm i'm super excited for this game and honestly i mean when it was i mean before even the the art theft stuff like and people were kind of down on it i was like i don't know i mean i think this looks this looks pretty good this looks pretty interesting i'm i'm i'm down so this has only increased my desire to check it out you're down you're down i'm down to check it out yeah absolutely we'll find out what happens in

1:27:31Dustin Furman:march with marathon yeah very weird yeah very weird that doesn't have a numbered date yeah i don't understand that i don't really get that because it doesn't i feel like there's no real work like it's it's gonna be good so like i don't i don't know why not just commit maybe they're like finalizing maybe they're trying to finalize like when the the pre they might try to figure out like when the beta is going to be because i think there's they're probably a plan for that yeah i don't know i just i i agree that it's strange just in like what kind of flexibility you're trying to buy yourself here and to what end at this point like just you got to commit so we'll see we'll see when they clear that up and maybe it's some sort of rolling thing while there be some sort of early access if you buy a certain thing i don't know maybe they're trying to be a little weird with that too i have no idea all right just a few more quick things uh silksong has already been or has already surpassed by the rather seven million copies sold which is incredible considering it's also on game pass so congratulations to team cherry they announced this in a blog post where they announced and that wasn't the real news i wanted to talk about although we want to congratulate them for that what we wanted to talk about rather was that Silksong, the second Hollow Knight game, is going to get an expansion.

1:28:48Dustin Furman:And it's pretty amazing that they're moving this quickly, actually, considering how long the game took to come out. They write a bunch of stuff thanking everyone for everything that they're doing. And they say they have big news and they want to talk about it. They say, quote, that first big expansion is already well underway. Check out the teaser below for a hint at what's to come next. that the teaser shows a video about 40 seconds long for something called the Sea of Sorrow. And they promise, quote, new areas, bosses, tools, and more. Hornets adventures continue in our nautically themed expansion coming free for all players next year.

1:29:25Dustin Furman:We'll keep further details a secret for now, but expect additional info shortly before Hollow Knight Silksong Sea of Sorrow releases. They also talk about how they're bringing the game to Switch 2. I didn't know that it wasn't on Switch 2. Again, I think this has to do with just Nintendo being very stingy with development units for it, even to promising, you know, teams like this. Very strange. You're hearing a lot about this, about how games are coming pretty quickly or late rather to switch to. So I just wanted to throw that out there. I think this is one of the games I'll be playing this holiday if I can find the time.

1:29:59Finally get into it and support it.

1:30:01Dustin Furman:They're also saying, and I don't know what I should actually read the exact quote because I thought this was pretty interesting considering how well the game is selling. They were, where is it? Oh yeah. Beyond fan gamers, excellent items. The hollow night games will also be popping up in various sales across the holiday break. Keep an eye out to grab a discounted copy, whether that's for a friend, a family member or for yourself. I wonder if that's just the original or if they're going to even drop the price for a bit for silk song as well. So something to potentially keep an eye out for. Do you guys have anything you want to say?

1:30:36Colin Moriarty:I think I maybe I misheard you, Colin. I think I maybe have a light correction. Please. Hollow Knight Silksong is on Switch 2. This is a they're ported. The first Hollow Knight is getting a Switch 2 edition.

1:30:49Dustin Furman:Oh, OK. Oh, OK. That makes sense. OK.

1:30:51Colin Moriarty:And I think that will include. Yeah. High frame rate modes, higher resolutions. Oh, cool.

1:30:56Dustin Furman:OK, great.

1:30:56Colin Moriarty:You'll be able to probably play the first Hollow Knight at 120 FPS like Silksong. on Switch 2. Very cool. Yeah.

1:31:03Dustin Furman:Oh, thank you for that. Okay, good. And then just a couple other pieces of news. This has really nothing to do with us, but I just thought it was interesting. Ubisoft has purchased a studio from Amazon and a game that they were working on. The game is a MOBA called March of Giants, which is only on PC and will probably never come to console, although who knows? And Amazon is not a publisher of games that is particularly prodigious. In fact, I think they've been fumbling and stumbling for years considering how much money they spent on all this. What I thought was interesting about this, and I just wanted to put it out there on the record, was Ubisoft itself is purchasing this team.

1:31:40Dustin Furman:So this is not the... We've been kind of wondering what the future of Ubisoft itself is after this spinoff with Tencent where they took a bunch of their most valuable assets. And this is an aggressive Ubisoft that's buying a team and trying to acquire a game that they feel like is promising. So I just feel like maybe that showed a little bit more fight than I expected. and maybe this situation will turn out a little bit differently than we had assumed. So I just wanted to throw that out there. The deal happened on December 15th, and there are press releases out there about it. Neither the game nor the studio have any, I'm not interested in either of those things.

1:32:10I just thought it was an unusual story.

1:32:14Dustin Furman:Ubisoft seems to be in distress. So that they're, they're, now I wonder how people at Ubisoft that are getting laid off or about to get laid off feel about them spending potentially whatever it might have cost them, tens of millions at least probably to acquire that team and that IP, but. I guess I see some sort of promise in it. The Mega Man Star Force Legacy Collection got a release date of March 27th, 2026. This includes, I'm pretty sure, and I was looking, where is it? Star Force. Yeah, so this is all of the Star Force games, I believe. Because there are only three of them, and then there are different editions of them because they were doing that kind of Pokemon thing with both Star Force and Battle Network during that time.

1:32:58Dustin Furman:So that's coming out. it's not really huge news, but I'm a Mega Man fanboy. And so I thought I would say it here on the show. And Aaron Anderson wrote in and said, Hey, CDC, I'm super excited for the new Mega Man game. But what has me even more excited is the fact that it's been said that this isn't the only Mega Man announcement coming and the other announcement could be sooner than we think. Colin, do you think this is a new Mega Man style game? Maybe visiting a series like Legends or a new Mega Man X? Personally, I would love to get just Mega Man Legends legacy collection with trophies. Could this even be more than just one Mega Man announcement incoming?

1:33:27Dustin Furman:I think I said this last week but just to reiterate there is a reliable source that guy proto dude who is like who runs like a massive megaman fan site who's very well connected to capcom who says that there are multiple megaman projects coming and what what they might be or what the nature of them is remains to be seen i i don't really know how to read megaman 12 or whatever to override as being like the marquee game if that's the case then i wonder if they're going to remake some stuff they Like they've they've Capcom has been so thorough that there's not much left to do. The only Mega Man collection that I really want still is the Mega Man Game Boy games.

1:34:05Dustin Furman:And I wonder if maybe that's in the works. But other than that, I don't know. I really don't know. Mega Man Legends 3 was a thing at one time. That was canceled when Inufune left Capcom. So that's possible to continue there. I think Battle Network and Star Force are dead. And should stay dead, but they've released the collections. And so those are playable. Mega Man X hasn't gotten we haven't gotten a Mega Man X game.

1:34:34Dustin Furman:Since X8 was 2004 or 2005, I want to say it's been a long time and people really love Mega Man X. So that's always possible. They go back to that. They might feel internally that they're redundant, like Mega Man Classic and Mega Man X, because they are kind of similar games. Mega Man X is a much more robust Mega Man experience from a gameplay perspective and from a systems perspective. But they are similar. I've said it ad nauseum. the game a lot of Mega Man fans want is the game that connects Mega Man Classic to Mega Man X because they do take place in the same universe. And there is an event that happens that we never see.

1:35:05Dustin Furman:So that would be cool if that was the big game. And that could be the big 3D game, maybe even if they wanted to revive Mega Man in 3D, which I think will happen. So we'll see what happens there. And then finally, we have sales data for the United States market for the month of November. And it's apparently not very good. Matt Piscitella writes over on Blue Sky quote the average price paid for a new unit of video game hardware in the US during November 2019 was $235 in November 2025 it was$439 3.9 million units of video game hardware sold in the US in November 2019 in November 2025 it was 1.6 million so this is apparently the softest hardware sales in the United States since 1995 for a November.

1:35:55Dustin Furman:November obviously is a incredibly prodigious time for sales. I wonder what we think of this. And then so we'll touch on that. And then we'll also touch on just the game sales themselves. So November's best selling game was Black Ops 7. So that answers that question, at least for our market. Battlefield 6 is second. NBA 2K26, and this is for all consoles and PC, by the way nba 2k 26 madden nfl 26 and ea sports fc 26 are number three four and five so very boring top five pokemon legends is at six but remember nintendo or the circana group doesn't incorporate digital sales for pokemon so you would assume that game is more like number three i would say uh gociote is uh holding on to number seven college football at eight kirby air riders and Hyrule Warriors, Age of Imprison are at 10 and 11, both again with no digital sales counted.

1:36:52Dustin Furman:So those will be higher. Donkey Kong Bonanza's digital sales are also not counted. And that would also be higher slotted here at 14. But otherwise, not a very interesting month. Forza Horizon 5 hanging on because of its PS5 release. Digimon Storytime Stranger is at number 20. Borderlands 4 is still hanging on at 18. And The Outer Worlds 2 is selling seemingly appreciably at number 12. So there's that. and then year to date so this is this is where things I guess kind of get interesting and this shows Battlefield 6 as the best selling game of the year so far with Call of Duty slotting at 7 so wow so again Black Ops 7 outsold Battlefield 6 in November Battlefield 6 came out in October it is still the best selling game of the year and Monster Hunter Wilds.

1:37:46Dustin Furman:I'm still surprised by this because no one seems to like it is number three. Now, the other thing that I wanted to point out here is Borderlands 4 is the fourth best selling game in the United States for the year. And this gets into my whole theory of the case. It's like no one is talking about these games comparable to how they're selling. Like nothing has the zeitgeist. Nothing stays around long enough. Borderlands 4 is considered a disappointment by take two according to their own financials and yet it is the fourth best selling game there's a disconnect there you know um and monster hunter wilds everyone hate it's just so funny everyone hates monster hunter wilds everybody's too busy playing the game to complain or talk about i guess you know that's it's the only conclusion very weird that's fascinating to me is that like there's no and this is not necessarily surprising i guess um let me check real quick just to make yeah no arc raiders at all but that demand that's commanding the zeitgeist you know yeah and i also wonder like are they reporting you know oh true yeah i don't know that's the thing about these charts is that they're a great it's 95 accurate the real thing there are things missing like uh ubisoft doesn't report any either assassin's creed shadows would be on this list they pull themselves off for some reason and um nintendo obviously digital sales are missing so it's this is incomplete and would look a little different should we have known that but nonetheless i think it's a and ghost yote hanging on at number 10 night rain 13 kingdom come deliverance 14 split fiction 18 helldivers because of the xbox release i assume has bounced up to 19 for the year so not so bad but again the borderlands number is just so fascinating to me because borderlands 2 especially was everywhere like it you couldn't escape it we remember we talked about the shift keys and all these different things and and randy pitchford being all over social media and all the rest it's totally different environment where a game can sell that well and seem and and you wouldn't even know anyone was playing it very weird shit yeah all right uh dustin let's begin with you what what what sticks out to you we have the hardware numbers ps5 was the best-selling console of the month in november but it seems like the console situation has collapsed precipitously maybe we're at a price tolerance um wall at this point yeah that's uh it's interesting particularly too i'm

1:40:08Colin Moriarty:just thinking about i think that also i mean that includes switch to uh what you think this was its first christmas on the market um so a little weird i'm most i mean the most interesting to me here is black ops seven slotting at number seven um and i'm i'm curious i'm assuming that's significantly worse than previous years and so again teasing our episode for next week but one of the big stories of the year is the fall off of call of duty is this the beginning of something even bigger or worse i guess those can be the same uh for call of duty in the future and how it's going to shake out by the end of the year.

1:40:58Colin Moriarty:Like I could see, I just don't see it shooting up that many, that many spots before January. We'll see this month. Yeah, we'll see. Especially just because it seems like they're putting it on sale already, which I don't think they normally do for December. They did that statement. So I wonder if a lot of that number seven slot is just its initial, sales. And part of the reason they're freaking out is that it's just a was a colossal dive bomb after that.

1:41:30Dustin Furman:Yeah, I would love to know more about what they're thinking about Call of Duty and absorbing that that deep cost of making those games is something no corporation really wants to do if you're not selling big. But I a lot of people are focusing on the hardware sales being soft. And I want to get into that as well. But software sales are also soft. I read a little less into that just by virtue of the way people are playing games like I just I feel like that's the reality that's not on I think it sucks because I like those kinds of games and that's what I play but really the big tell will be overall cumulative gaming revenue which will no doubt be up year over year and so it's hard to really judge the software situation based on a lot of a lot of people don't buy games at all so i can't relate but i'm a fossil as we've discussed before uh chris does anything stick out to you here that you'd like to discuss um i mean i it's just bizarre the the hardware fall off but i guess it's not necessarily surprising i just feel like there's just a lack of uh i don't know there's not a lot of hype moments or aura you know that are driving people to the store to grab to grab stuff I guess I don't know I it's a it's I guess the fact that it's the lowest since 1995 is shocking that to me is kind of weird like what I don't know what to attribute that to necessarily outside of just people I want economy yeah well I'm saying like the Black Friday deals were pretty steep I mean I don't I've said this for years and I think it's worth stating that like without differentiated numbers between all the different consoles talking about the cumulative health of the hardware industry is a little disingenuous like I'm not trying to be a dickhead but we have one competitor who has fallen off a cliff right right that's just that number is being absorbed to the point where that next machine is outselling it like consistently now right and And it's like, that's not really a holistic view comparable to previous generations where there were more challenger, even when Xbox and GameCube were falling off and neither of them sold as well as the Xbox series did, but they sold for longer.

1:43:55Dustin Furman:There's like a sales tale and this price for the Xbox Series S and especially the X are so high that it's like, well, they're almost not a contender anymore. And so then you have to really judge things based on PS5 and Switch 2. And that's what I think, Dustin, you were making the point. It's like Switch 2 is new. Maybe the theory of the case there is that there's a little bit of a saturation in that market as well. And that maybe there's a lot of people that use Switch that don't feel like they need to jump yet to Switch 2. If they're playing Switch at this point, they don't care about power.

1:44:30Dustin Furman:So there's that factor as well. but I think that's what you were saying, Chris. It's like, it's just the economy. I think things are bad. I don't think that, obviously, like we want the stock market to do well and all those things, but it's just a complete disconnect from that and the reality on the ground. The rich make more and more and more money and that accumulates on these markets and makes the economy seem healthy, but it's really the people in the trenches that are struggling. And like, are you going to really go out and spend four or$500 on a piece of hardware? I mean, yeah. Now, I think this brings in the question, and actually statistical barista wrote in about this and said, hey, CDC, now that Serkana has released the November sales data and it is the worst performing November since 1995, is this the beginning of the end for console gaming and the transition into PC gaming becoming the dominant platform?

1:45:16Dustin Furman:You recently had a question, what would a sign be for Sony to start to leave the console space? Isn't the worst performing November, which is the most important month for sales, a clear indication? Hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and get a well-deserved break thank you um there is something to that especially with the aggressive black friday sales that they've put out there but i don't understand how that translates to the success of pc gaming which is also becoming prohibitively expensive yeah if ram by itself is exploding so right if console gaming is too expensive for people then how the fuck is pc gaming going to be affordable to them that that to me doesn't wash that doesn't make any sense so yeah if if if things are becoming more expensive and you assume there's a price prohibition on people entering the market, then you would assume consoles would be the beneficiary.

1:46:04Dustin Furman:That's just obvious, right? I mean, yeah, so there's something else. Like that to me, if I were theorizing about it for some company and talking about what might the problem be, it's like I don't there's definitely a move towards PC gaming, no doubt. but having a pc capable of playing the games you want to play is a much more expensive proposition than buying a playstation 5 so i just don't see the connection personally so it's something to worry about and it's something that they're going to consider but yeah i don't know i'm not so worried about i'm worried about it from that point of view i'm more worried about like what this what this means for the gaming industry just in the gaming industry is a robust and resilient industry against financial downturns and the last time we had a bad financial downturn the gaming industry boomed but it's because you can go out and buy a console for 400 bucks 300 bucks games were 50 bucks into the 60 buck era now I feel like things are just radically different.

1:47:18Dustin Furman:The economy seems to be shakier in a lot of ways. It's just a different systemic problem and inflation is out of control and people don't make any money. So here we are. All right. Anything else to add before we move on? No, no. All right, my boys, it's time for what we're playing. Dustin, let's start with you.

1:47:42Colin Moriarty:Okay. so the truth is I haven't been playing very much at all but I have a few things to talk about that are interesting what are you laughing about I fart I didn't

1:47:50Dustin Furman:fart noise we probably didn't hear those oh

1:47:52Colin Moriarty:I thought maybe you actually farted oh no I wish I did I wish I had that kind of timing yeah that'd be good okay so I've been playing Metroid Prime 4 and I was hot on it no I wasn't like this is amazing but I was like oh this is good at the beginning I gotta be honest I'm getting real bored it's not bad but I'm starting to understand the mediocre response to it honestly I feel bad for Metroid Prime fans you waited so long for this game you waited so long and I got to this part last night that involves another character that's not as bad as the the McKenzie guy but it's like this girl that's like she's like fangirling the entire time she's like oh samus it's so cool to meet you and also and she won't shut up i'm like ah okay so is that samus oran is that samus um so yeah it's i'm i was thinking about this last night and i know everyone's gonna be different about this but i i got to the point where i'm like okay i'm i'm decent ways into this game i honestly don't i I would assume a little over half.

1:49:08Colin Moriarty:And I'm like, I'm not really into this. Do I keep going to be like, yes, I finished Metroid Prime 4? Or do I just say? Life's too short. Can't do it. Life's too short, bro. Can't do it. Can't do it. Thank you. Can't do it, man. Sorry. Can't do it, man. Sorry. I'm done. So I don't know. Right now, I have not decided if I'm going to keep playing it or not because there's just too much other stuff to play. the other game that I checked out lightly was the re-release of Tomba 2 and it's had some interesting controversy around this release and I was curious to get your thoughts on this Colin so basically the game released and it does not have the US soundtrack it only has the Japanese soundtrack attached to it and And this was a surprise to everyone playing it.

1:50:05Colin Moriarty:But there were hints in the trailer. They use the Japanese soundtrack. But people were like, OK, whatever. I went into this thinking, OK, well, I played Tomba 2 in the last few years. This will be a new experience. I can kind of play it in a new way. Started playing it and I'm like, ah, this isn't as good. I was like, this is weird. Like I I'm not like there's something off. And the Japanese soundtrack just clearly isn't as good as the US.

1:50:29Dustin Furman:What was the explanation? Who did this? This is a limited run. Limited run did the port. So it's a licensing issue.

1:50:36Colin Moriarty:Well, that day, because people were refunding on Steam, people were leaving negative reviews. And so someone in a reply to a tweet, LGR said that it was the licensor's decision to use the Japanese soundtrack. So, okay. Also important to note in the special edition, you can listen to the soundtrack in like a music player mode in the menu and you can choose between

1:51:05Dustin Furman:the u.s and the japanese soundtrack so they set it to the for that to be a default for some reason

1:51:10Colin Moriarty:it's not there is no option to use the u.s soundtrack in the game currently but it's there but it's there in the music player oh that's that would send me so so they'll they'll patch it probably right well yeah lgr so lgr says no it's the licensor's decision uh which by the way tomba one lrg by the way it's lgr lgr is lazy game reviews but i would never i would never talk poorly of him he's already gone through a lot with the he's been through a lot i would never ever say a bad thing about lgr lrg they play in the licensor and that night on release day they post a tweet and say a patch is coming to tomba 2 with a little emoji of music notes and then the following day they released a statement they're like at limited run games our community of fans come first dedicated to celebrating the classics our carbon team blah blah blah we're working on a patch the patch will give fans the ability to enjoy tomba 2 the way you remember it include both the original japanese soundtrack and the u.s soundtrack so less than a day they're like oh we're working on a patch like what the fuck is going on here interesting so i was like maybe the licensor because i know that there's different deals with limited run and some of these people where maybe it was a two combo deal.

1:52:26Colin Moriarty:Maybe the first one didn't sell as well. So they were kind of just quickly getting the second one out. I don't know what the deal was, but you're telling me that the, that they were told the licensor was like, Oh, just use the JP version. And they weren't like, Hmm, Hmm. We're selling a nostalgia based product to a very niche audience. They're going to want that, you know, it just something about it. stinks yeah yeah not it's weird yeah i'm glad they're fixing it uh in the coming weeks oh by the way this is the weirdest part is that when you play the game with the japanese soundtrack there are certain tracks that are the u.s soundtrack

1:53:11Dustin Furman:so what they must have done the team must have like been like which version of which song do we like better and then intersperse them as like a custom kind of thing specifically it's the

1:53:23Colin Moriarty:music that when you talk to a character there's this little do do do do that's very nostalgic and i was like oh okay so maybe that was the same in both versions is the carrot the talking to a character's song but then i went to that music player and it's different in the japanese version so i don't know yeah what's to be made of that i don't know i don't understand and i know that i'm sorry i know most people that listen to this podcast do not give a flying fuck about the tomba too. Yeah, but I love

1:53:52Dustin Furman:semantic stories like this I think are really interesting actually. I resonate with this. I mean, I remember when they were talking about Ape Escape coming to the classics or whatever and I remember being like, oh man. I really hope it's the American version because they might go with PAL and the PAL version sucks. It's got completely different tone. It's got completely different voice acting. I think the music is different, although I'm not super sure about that one but it's just a very... It's a worse version in my opinion. So like I totally resonate with it. That would send me spiraling if I had like, oh yay, finally.

1:54:31And then like nothing is like what I remember it. It's like the whole reason I'm playing this is to remember it. Right.

1:54:35Colin Moriarty:Yeah. And yeah, I was trying to be open-minded. Be like, oh, I'll try the Japanese soundtrack. It's just, it's not as good. It's not.

1:54:42Dustin Furman:You can't do it. You can't do it, man.

1:54:44Colin Moriarty:I can't do it, man. Sorry. I can't do it, man. Thank you. So this was, you know, kind of annoying. I am just going to wait for the patch. There's plenty of other things to play, of course.

1:54:55Dustin Furman:Yeah, of course.

1:54:56Colin Moriarty:But it was just a look. And overall, I'm venting. The package is just not as nice as Tomba 1. Tomba 1, they did interviews with some of the creators. They did a remastered soundtrack as well. And there was like all of these extras. There's a little bit of extras. There's like, oh, here's a couple of some of the concept art. Here's the different covers. It just it's nowhere nice as a package as good of a package as Tomba one special edition was. And I get it. Maybe it didn't sell very well. And so they're like, ah, let's just let's just get this thing out here. But it just seems like such an easily avoidable blunder.

1:55:38Colin Moriarty:How could you not know? How could you have not fought? Be like, no, no, no. We got to have option for both.

1:55:44Dustin Furman:but yeah I think your theory about maybe like diminishing returns was true and they're like we got to just we have to at least release this other one it's not really worth our while to do much more than that but it's it's disappointing to hear yeah and I'm sure that yeah I mean I wouldn't want that to happen that's kind of what happened to a degree how I felt about not as bad as how you feel about this because they didn't blunder really but it's like the lunar collection I'm always making fun of everyone what is this like what was wrong with that one again just had nothing. It's just like Noah Coutrement's like just nothing going on.

1:56:13Dustin Furman:And it's like you didn't do anything bare minimum. Yeah. Yeah.

1:56:18Colin Moriarty:So it is what it is. And now I'm I was like, man, I I'm ready to kind of start something new, but I'm just going to wait for break. I've been I organized a list of like what games I'm interested in playing over break. Oh boy. And I put like how long they are to beat. And I'm like, OK, well, maybe I'll have an RPG and a non RPG going on at the same time. Yeah, that could work. but I my list like I'm like is it time to play Suikoden is it time to play Lunar is it time to play Dragon Quest 3 should I dip my toes into that Trails game that came out so many options I can't decide but I'll have lots more to report when we come back next year I don't know what I'm

1:57:00Dustin Furman:going to do over break we can talk about that of course um Chris let's go over to you you're playing quite a bit here yeah I'm kind of in that space too of like trying to I've got a lot of stuff in my backlog and i'm just trying to cycle around to different things and see what i'm feeling um i installed like there's a bunch of stuff installed on my on my like i have hades 2 sitting there i got chronos new dawn sitting there i got soma sitting there uh because i got it for like a buck or something on some sale just by sheer happenstance when we were talking about it on one of the shows yeah one of the shows that we yeah because that game on toast right is the yeah spiritual successor to it and i keep hearing about soma in fairness so it's like there is a curiosity there as well but i kind of went with a handful of things so i'm playing the outer worlds two right now um i've started and restarted it because like i kind of realized like i want to go with this build i don't know how i'm feeling about like you know so i kind of i started restarted early enough where i'm like okay i don't mind it i don't know if i'm feeling it right now i might not be i might not be in the zone for like a lot of you know character choice and things like that like maybe i'm not in that headspace right now but like i it feels good to play but i'm kind of in a i don't know i'm playing and i'm kind of like i don't know if i care about what's going on right now which is not the best sign uh i can feel that it's good but like i just like i i might put this down come back to it when i have a little bit more free time on my plate because i got i still have a lot of snark tank recording left for the next like week but oh well okay but i think yeah and then so i was like you know what let me just pick up and play something destiny 2 they got their star wars expansion renegades i don't give a shit about star wars at all but there are things i do like i like the accoutrements i like the i like the soundscape and i dig the art direction so like yeah maybe this is maybe this will be a fun thing uh the first level of these expansions are typically free so you can play them without buying it and then like you you you basically pay for the rest of it to get your resolution to the story which i appreciate um and i do have to say man it's that first level is very it it really And they really Star Wars did up, man.

1:59:22Like it's it's every single trope. Like you find yourself in a garbage compactor. You you you're there's two people fighting with lightsabers and shit like there's a a lot of the accoutrements there. But it weirdly works. And the level was good. It's just nice to be reminded of like how good destiny feels because it does feel so good. And I always forget. I'm still on the fence about whether or not I want to plop down money to get sucked into destiny again. but the beginning of that expansion is pretty good. They do a lot of good work. Feels great to play. A lot of interesting new mechanics going on, but still feeling out whether or not I want to continue with it.

2:00:01The big thing I want to talk about. Skate story. So this is a very, very indie kind of skate project by a guy named Sam Eng. It's very ethereal, very weird. you play as like a skateboarding demon made of glass and your quest is to eat the moon and there's a bunch of moons that you gotta eat and it's it's very it's weird it's like this kind of in-between cross of it's not quite arcadey like tony hawk but it's not quite as like simulation heavy as skate it rests in this really interesting middle ground where you don't feel you don't feel super powerful you don't feel like it's like a power fantasy type deal um you feel very fragile which even helps like your your character's made of glass so like when you fall you like shatter it's very interesting kind of feeling that it evokes the soundtrack's really great um the setup is interesting and weird and sort of provocative i'm really into it but on my list in the document i have parentheses ps5 and i have that specifically because i've played i played the demo on my pc i played the demo on steam and i was like you know what yeah i'm into this but i kind of want to play this on the couch and so i downloaded it on ps5 and the ps5 version is fucked i don't know what the hell's going on with like maybe it's my like look ps playstation is weird like we had uh friend of ours have that whole returnal situation i'm opening up that possibility maybe it's me but like this thing runs so poorly that i can't even fathom how it's possible like it it it's not so much that the frame rate is bad but it's like the the pacing like it feels stuttery even though it isn't it feels jittery there's not a lot of flexibility that you have on the console version to really remedy that and it just it's somewhat it's a bummer because it's like somewhat nauseating to play and i'm just like man i'm really into this but i what is this i don't know if there's like a patch planned or if they've or if uh the developer said anything but i was really bummed out uh just kind of playing through it because i was like yeah this is almost this is this i know this is cool whatever this is and i know i'm into this but uh the way it's performing on this machine right now is like really not good and i really do feel the need to mention that like the demo function is perfectly fine on my pc and the full game is just it's it's very inconsistent on ps5 which is a just a bummer so i would recommend honestly um you know if you're curious about skate story it is on ps plus uh that is how i played it um before i committed to buying it and i'm kind of glad i did um but give it a shot see if it's see if it's true for you maybe it isn't maybe it's just maybe i'm like really sensitive to these things but it it feels just worse like in every way to the pc version which is a bummer because i was really looking forward to skate story i think i'll probably keep going um i'm gonna try and see like maybe maybe they've patched it maybe they will patch it i don't know because the game is really cool like the the vibe it's it's got like a very tetris effect kind of feel to it it's very ethereal and kind of there's like a dark psychedelic nature to it it's very off-putting but very encouraging um soundtracks dope the characters you meet are very weird and uncanny it's cool um artistically i just wish it ran better but that's really all i'm playing right now i have like i said there's a bunch of other stuff i think i'm gonna i'm kind of nibbling on certain things to see like what i'm gonna what i'm really gonna be sinking my teeth into uh over the break but that's it for now okay fair enough um for me i'm playing marvel cosmic invasion is kind of my portal game right now uh during football and hockey uh i'm just

2:04:23Dustin Furman:kind of cleaning up trophies you have to beat the game with every character but you just have to beat the final stage with every character so i'm kind of working towards that but i went through the game and got all the collectibles and did all the challenges and um so just messing around that it's fun it's a fun little beat-em-up and then and we played it on stake retrieving so you can go check out the vod of that if you want and then i am playing dying light the beast i'm at the end of the game now i think i'm at the last mission or the second to last mission i've done all the side quests i've done all the encampment kind of things they're like these power plants you have to bring on line or whatever so i've done most of it i gotta say it's not very good i'm a little surprised some people are high on it.

2:05:02Dustin Furman:I think it's weirdly paced and kind of boring. And maybe I'm just not in the right mind space to be playing it or something. But again, I am incredibly partial to liking Dying Light because of how much I appreciate and love Dying Light 1. And so I went into Dying Light the Beast with hopes that it was going to be great, but it's not great. That's my opinion. But I talked about it deeply on Summon Sign, and you guys can go listen to my further thoughts on that. I won't belabor them here. and then the game I've been spending quite a bit of time with is Terminator 2D no fate Serge wrote in and said greetings sacred comrades I've traveled back through time to tell you that Terminator 2D no fate is a fun game and skipping it will ensure humanity's dark fate wait I'm receiving a message now that you've done a sacred streaming episode about it the world is safe for now thank you for another year as the best podcasting network thank you so much search for writing in Terminator 2D from bitmap bureau is a good game I really like it I beat it three times now there are there are three different endings you can basically get so you have to like in the game you may it takes place during the events of terminator 2 so like you just there are times like once you beat the game normally then you can go back through and make certain decisions just a couple different times to change the outcome of the game and it's cool it's neat and it opens it gives you like a like well you got two thirds two let's say two thirds of the way through the game and then you start making decisions and then it kind of mixes things up a little bit some of them are like repurposed stages or you're playing a stage with a different character from a different perspective.

2:06:27Dustin Furman:Some of them are totally new with like new boss fights and so on. So it's pretty cool. But I think my major, the thing that kind of gets in my craw about this game, and I was saying it on when we were streaming the game is that this is a really cool game. It has no business being$30. It just feels like a ridiculous price to pay for a digital version. I can understand a physical version being 50 bucks or 60 bucks or whatever. If you get all these accoutrements and you get the physical version it's different but it just speaks to either a ridiculous licensing fee plus there is licensed music in the game two songs specifically that really didn't need to be there but it's cool that they're there but i'm like damn you're paying one of those songs in particular is like a very famous like we were we were speaking of time travel like when that song played on on sacred streaming they almost went back in time to strike that video you know and be and and claim the ads on it it's like one of those kinds of songs bad to the bone so i'm like is it is it the terminator plus song licensing fees that have you charge 30 so it's kind of worth your while the bigger problem is is that the game can really be beaten in like 35 or 40 minutes you can beat it all three if you know how to play you can beat it all three times fairly reasonable in about two hours maybe a little more and i just feel like that's from that perspective i'm like i'm not crazy about the price the value proposition I think if you're really into Terminator, then you should buy it.

2:07:53Dustin Furman:And it is, I don't know how long this will last, but I got 10 % off for being on PS Plus. So it was 27, a little bit better. But there's a boss rush mode, which is cool. There's like some other options. There's an arcade option where you're like, there's no continues, which means you basically can't die. So there are different options to play, but you're playing the same game over and over again. I will say the gunplay is fun. And it's like I keep a game. It reminds me of, and this is what I was saying on stream is it reminds me of an old Capcom game that I used to really love on NES called Codename Viper.

2:08:27Dustin Furman:And but it's like Codename Viper meets Contra meets a bunch of there even bosses like the big room size machines, you know, like just like Contra. Like, I love that shit. And so you can see that the inspiration is there very similar to a game I played last year that I really loved Iron Meat that people might remember. I absolutely adored. So, yeah, that game was I mean, that game is. awesome. That's an awesome fucking game. So this is a cool game in the Genesis SNES style. Really the market, the makings more of a Genesis game, like a late Genesis game. And it's certainly beautiful. And they did a really nice job with it.

2:09:01Dustin Furman:The animations are pretty nice. The oats to the movie are great. But there, yeah, I think 20 or even 2499, but 1999 seems like a good price for this game. So, and I know people are very cost sensitive, so I'm just throwing that out there because presumably at one point it'll go on sale. But that's what I've been spending a great deal of time with. And as far as what I'm going to do over the holidays, Backpane wrote in and said, I predict that the return episode will have a Kingdom Hearts thumbnail and be dominated by Colin's enthusiastic report of how much he actually loved it. He'll say he loved it so much that he couldn't stop himself from playing Kingdom Hearts 2 immediately.

2:09:36Dustin Furman:So I do have to spend at least some of my time playing Kingdom Hearts 1 over the break because though, Dustin, as you'll remember, I fulfilled the spirit of the deal. We have to be very literal. And so I will be playing Kingdom Hearts over the break. But there are a few other things. I think I got to get into tactics at some point. And I think Silk Song and then I'll leave it there. I mean, maybe I'll play other things, but I don't want to like overwhelm myself and feel disappointed or whatever when I didn't fulfill those goals. So that's what I've been playing and messing around with in my world.

2:10:08Dustin Furman:And Marvel Cosmic Invasion is good. And I recommend Terminator if you're a fan. But Dying Light, I think, is an easy game to pass on. What were you going to say? well I was gonna say like because I looked it up just out of curiosity there is apparently a confirmed ps5 patch for skate story that okay that has it has been launched since I played it so apparently it's should be better but I just want to make sure that was out there because I know people are going to be saying there's a patch it's like I know I'm excited to get back to it then all right let's leave it there and get in the listener inquiries to wrap up this episode of sacred symbols six questions comments concerns thoughts and ideas from the audience over on patreon patreon.com slash last day media and this episode is going fairly quickly although there's really not much to talk about yeah so we're easing into things I don't people gonna be a short episode come on man come on come on man

2:11:04Colin Moriarty:we gave the longest episode of sacred symbols of I think ever

2:11:08Dustin Furman:last week yeah and well I don't even spoil it never mind summon sign right is gonna be you. Please be excited. Please be excited about someone's time. KB wrote in and said, Hey, gents, the CEO of CI games took to Twitter to say that Lords of the Fallen 2 will in fact feature, quote unquote, attractive female characters. In today's online climate, it feels like whenever a game is revealed, one of the first reactions we see is gamers complaining about the attractiveness or lack thereof of the protagonist. And it almost feels like we've swung to the opposite end of the horseshoe curve compared to about a decade ago where there was backlash over characters like quiet from metal gear solid five or the cast of dragon's crown my question is this do you think studios are going to or should start leaning into attractive characters as a deliberate marketing

2:11:48Colin Moriarty:tactic going forward what say you thanks dustin hmm yeah this is a tough one because the from my understanding about this like lords of the fallen two business and they're trying to appeal to a very specific audience on Twitter with what they're saying about something like that. And I think it's annoying, if I'm being honest. I can understand some of the sentiment around a lot of these characters in modern video games just looking weird. I think in particular, the situation that was funny was the Star Wars Outlaws, where the main character of that game was um nowhere near like they clearly could have just used the actual actor's face but changed the character to look significantly worse and maybe that was a creative decision i don't know but i'm kind of just like whatever the developer wants to make their characters look like clearly though there is a renaissance going around of the sexy female lead of course with stellar blade they've kind of with tomb raider reverted back to her older look which when we talked about this at some point we were like listen tomb raider laura croft was always hot yeah she yeah you're

2:13:17Dustin Furman:crazy if you don't think that like the last laura croft was good looking but nonetheless the this one i was surprised by how glamour shot she looks almost in the new one like she looks great but it's it's i was even surprised she's hot enough i think for everyone now

2:13:37Colin Moriarty:yeah so the the whole conversation uh like the of like oh she's not on enough is so annoying like bro we've i mean we've touched on this multiple times the past few weeks it's like turn off the hub bro like you just why why do you have to have to have this gooner mindset constantly about everything yeah it's weird yeah i find it weird yeah what do you think chris i think it's kind of one of those things where it it kind of comes across i feel like you're better off just doing it you know what i mean just like do do the thing i feel like saying you're gonna do the thing is kind of like more embarrassing like because then because now i'm gonna be looking at it it's like all right well let's see yeah right right you know like let's see how hot she really is and then i'm gonna be judging it like way harsher it's like just if you want to make an attractive characters just do it i'm only ever really bothered by these types of things if it's like if there's a character that that exists and then there's backlash about how how oh it's it's too attractive or whatever it's like too unrealistic and then through pressure of some kind that's changed because ultimately that's like an original artist's vision that's then being corrupted by all sorts of like that to me is like the most annoying part of it it's not the principle of having like attractive characters in games it's the principle of letting artists do what they want to do and so if they want to make a game full of attractive like I don't give a shit fine cool it didn't really save the first descendant but like it'll

2:15:10Dustin Furman:forgot about that it'll be you know it'll be it's not going to knock against you for sure so yeah do it I just think it's it comes across as like the other side of like this kind of comes across as like if there was like a studio where they had a PR statement that said like we're committed to making characters that don't appeal to the male gaze or whatever. You know what I mean? It seems like the other side of that where it's just like, just make your game. I don't need to hear this weird fantasy that you have about making this. I don't care. I don't give a shit. The Wards of the Fallen 2 thing, though, does seem reactionary in a way to didn't the game launch with character style a and b in it i'm pretty sure i think so yeah that's the case and so like they that like kind of i don't know how that got by and then they had a kind of a tone for that i think i'm pretty sure that's the story and so maybe there's like you have to kind of say that in order to be fair to like what they're specifically saying is like no we like we like chicks we want them hot you know but at the same time i'm with you guys where i just think you got to make the characters you want to make and right i think people like beautiful people beautiful things beautiful scenery there's no doubt about that but i think that the full texture of life requires you to look past that not everything in other words final fantasy 7 is one of those examples where it's like every in the remakes and the original it's like everyone's beautiful right even red 13 is kind of hot but like but you know sid looks great and you know you feel looks great and t obviously tifa eris you know cloud barrett like everyone looks good they're well-dressed they're stylish that's cool i love that but yeah there's the other side of that which is like the real not the real world but a representation of reality of downtrodden you know uh average um what like it's that's cool too and i think i agree with you dustin where it's like i I feel like this Gooner style.

2:17:23Dustin Furman:Listen, and the audience knows, I've always been pretty prude. I'm just being honest with you. I'm kind of a prude person. Just not in terms of what people do and how they live their lives, but I don't need to see it. I always got really disappointed in the sex scenes in Game of Thrones. It's like, come on, man. This is so gratuitous. I don't want to see this. And that's just the way I am. But I understand a lot of people aren't built like that. but there seems to be such a hyper focus on aesthetic that it's like it's disturbing and i'm not trying to be i want to be clear i understand full well i'm not god's gift to women i get it i don't talk i don't ever bring up really people's looks or anything because i know i'm an average person right i'm not trying to but like why is it that the people that always rail against this stuff happen to be like it's often decrepit right like your your looks match looks match sir is a woman that looks like duke nukem right uh i don't know why we're we're like so fixated on all this shit and then people throwing stones from glass houses about who's hot and who isn't and what they're it's like shut up yeah you know that's why i make fun of a lot of things, but it's you'll never really hear me making fun of someone like this person's ugly or something like I would never say something like that because I understand what time it is with me.

2:18:47Dustin Furman:Like I don't want people to make fun of my looks. Right. And so maybe have a little more self-awareness. That could also go a long way, in my opinion. But generally speaking, I just think I am disturbed by the oversecretary. I think there is something. I don't get too deep into the weeds, but I think Mike and I have talked about this in the past, maybe on a different show, but. There's something, in my opinion, so hot about the sexual repression of like the Victorian era. Or like the the flirtation, the game. You know, like the sure the pretty girl, but you don't know what's under the dress like there's no hint.

2:19:26Dustin Furman:Like to me, that's so much more attractive in a way. Then you're just scrolling through Twitter and it's like, oh, girl in bikini or whatever. Or people are on Instagram or whatever. and it's like i don't like this it all just washes i'm like i don't know man like it's like how many of the same thing can you see over and over again oh it's more boobs it's more it's more boobs in video games like come on man like are you serious come on it just it's just so sexuality is important but it can't be like your defining feature i feel like i feel like people used to be more normal about it too like i don't know like i think even back then even back in like the dead or alive days right most people felt uncomfortable playing that around around other people right jiggle like literal jiggle physics and all the rest it was ridiculous we understood like look it's this is it is what it is i do feel a little bit shamed playing this in some capacity now it's like there's like there's no shame at all it's kind of like all right well let's we don't gotta go this hard and look to be fair i do think i do think there is a um there are legacies that do need to be upheld i guess like look you're not gonna if you make a street fighter game and cammy is chopped i'm coming for you right right of course you know like you can't be doing that you can't be doing that to can i love that term by the way that term that new term chopped that everyone i think it's so funny good stuff like you can't it's like if it's if it's if you're making a new world and like a new character or whatever or like even if it's like something like that's a reflection of an old character like a tomb raider like i and making it more realistic like i still feel like and we we've mentioned it before like a beautiful woman in all three of those games like i don't really it's just it's just realistic but i also think truth truth be told i do think a lot of people insomniac also struggle a little bit with like because dude like mary jane in spider-man 2 looks like tim minchin it's fucking crazy it's really fucking strange and i don't think it's like an intentional thing genuinely i do think it's about like engines and lighting and like all these different things that like are kind of outside of the expertise of certain studios where like i mean dude i dude one of my favorite games of all time like halo 3 I love if you if you look at the cut scenes for the original Halo 3 like some of those characters look like what have you what have you done to this man looks like a clay clay pot of boiling piss it's insane it's horrifying but so it's like it's more of a specialty thing too and I think certain studios are better at it and other studios like so I don't think like there's like a grand conspiracy said a grand conspiracy to make people unattractive I do think there's a general kind of art design in place or general philosophy that wants to make games look more realistic and as things become more realistic it's harder to kind of exaggerate the types of features that are typically just like objectively beautiful like you're going to see more flaws in a character the more realistic they look this is kind of the nature of it and some studios are better at handling that that balance than others i don't think it's like i think i think they could have

2:22:39Colin Moriarty:made mary jane look better than that oh well i think i don't know what that was all about it was

2:22:44Dustin Furman:weird it was weird because she's supposed to be i'm not usually sympathetic to these arguments but she's supposed to kind of be the girl next door yeah right she's literally a model like right it's like come on man like and she looks better in the first game also which is which is just i don't know i don't know what i don't know what they've done i don't know it's how many i struggles with that a little bit uh every yeah they're they're not you know they're not great at making realistic looking characters but that's why i think they shine in like something like sunset overdrive i think sunset overdrive looks character designs in that game look great because they're exaggerated um but we're picking out in saniac for some reason but it's yeah i don't know it's the gooner mentality is so weird i don't remember them for some reason because they made mj look pedestrian and she's not supposed to anyway that's fine i mean it is it wasn't it didn't ruin the game for me like it seemed to ruin the game for a lot of other people

2:23:36Colin Moriarty:great dustin what were you gonna say so i wanted to hop in because i found the tweet that's referencing this and I wanted to be fair to Merrick Tominsky. Maybe I'm saying that right. No, that's right. He says, many of you asked why the game initially had body type A, B. Hexworks started early 2020 as an autonomous studio owned by CI Games. Early on, political correctness and filtering meant not every decision reached me on time. I get a lot more involved from late 2024 and now act as studio head alongside my CEO role. Things are very different now and the studio got fully integrated. We reverted.

2:24:16Colin Moriarty:A lot of wrong decisions will continue improving. Lords 2 is being built on real player feedback and it's crystal clear in these last two trailers. And then someone followed up and said, I'm going to buy the game. Definitely. Will there be attractive female characters and will there be revealing outfits and armor for them? And he responded, yes.

2:24:38Dustin Furman:Right. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Fair enough. I didn't even want it. That's totally fair. And I know that actually, because I did read all of that, but I wasn't even trying to it's important to correct the record. I wasn't bringing it up because he said it specifically. This person's asking, is that something you should lean into?

2:24:55Colin Moriarty:But you're right. You're absolutely right. I wasn't trying to correct you. I was just because I know I came out and was like, why would you just come out and say this? But it's like he was asked. Right, right. But still, he came out to be like, we're not politically correct anymore. well yeah liberal good you know it didn't he didn't say that i mean the liberal part

2:25:13Dustin Furman:political correctness stuff is yeah it's good you shouldn't be you're you're a creative that's the exact opposite of political correctness it makes no sense um you're not an academic you don't work for the government you're a fucking artist get over it right uh so um should be so again it goes into i think i think games should represent all every people again people like beautiful things beautiful people you know it's it i totally get that but i actually think it would be incredibly boring if everything looks sterile like that and i think it all depends on the game the product what you're trying to go for and i think in people's interpretations are just crazy because again the tomb raider thing is just so funny to me like you had you had brought up it's just like what are you blind why are you gay it's why are you gay i don't know i just it it just comes across as like trying to i don't know man this comes up a lot too of just like uh um the the comedian on stage at his like 15th netflix special saying like you can't say anything anymore it's just like it's not really brave to like i understand like it's trying to come across like look at me i'm standing up to the system but like brother like you could you could be working at cinnabon and call a somalian woman a slur and make 30 grand in a day like it's like it's not this isn't like i don't know what like i don't know what you're you're fine just make the damn game like i don't care it's so annoying i hate how everything is like this weird like pedestal to step on make a good game and then people will care there you go yep i don't know if any i don't know if many people i don't remember how like well received the first um what is it the because this is lords of the fallen too right right yeah i don't have any context for the first one.

2:26:59I remember hearing that it ran kind of poorly, so I didn't. But also, it seems like a long-ass game. It's not my style of game anyway, but.

2:27:05Colin Moriarty:They did, like, a major overhaul, and people liked it a lot more after the 2.0. Cool. Good for them.

2:27:14Dustin Furman:Ruffham wrote in, said, Hello, CDC. With the recent Bloomberg interview of Larian Studios' CEO admitted on using AI for the upcoming Infinity game, along with the resurfaced article from outlet El Pius about Sandfall Interactive using AI-generated art for the textures in Expedition 33. Should there be more disclosure from developers and publishers if their games are using AI? Do you believe Game of the Year winner Expedition 33 is still deserving for winning as many awards as the Game Awards, including Best Art Direction, because of this? Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone at LSM. This is making the rounds a lot now, too, and there's multiple things to pull out here, Ruff.

2:27:52Dustin Furman:I think the first thing is, yeah, I think that eventually there should, I don't know if there'll ever be an ESRB like establishment. There might have to be because the government might otherwise get involved to make it clear if AI is used in the creation of something. But I think it depends on how you categorize AI because AI already kind of has been being used for years. Procedural generation. Right. Exactly. Like with trees and shit and like the foliage and all of that. I do have a problem with the way people are using or at least the way they're saying they're using AI I actually talked to my brother about this recently where I don't know if you guys agree with this I find it weird as fuck like so not just a little weird just to be clear I find it profoundly weird when I hear a studio or someone from a studio saying like yeah we used AI to generate like the feel like like or like like show us this or what does this look like kind of thing try to like kind of you know sketch things out and i'm like that's literally the fundamental aspect of creating a video game you're offloading it like the actual creative art i think it i think it's strange and i don't know my big thing with ai is not so much its utilization as much as like what problem it's trying to solve what's the problem the are the games too expensive to make you better figure that out or are the games taking too long to make better figure that out we don't need that because the end solution is like this makes it easier for us to make more games and put them out quicker and it's like but there's no need for that right we don't need more quick we need less

2:29:41slow if anything the arguments are against so there's only like a corporate economic reason

2:29:46Dustin Furman:And I think you're seeing this in AI a lot with just the integration of it and how no one really like it's being forced into people's lives where you don't really need it. And then people are relying on it. And I find it weird. I think it's a great tool. I love asking questions and it's showing me like, you know, what's the answer to this question? Show me some sources for that. it's so different than it's than saying like show me uh an environment with uh trees and and you know orcs running around and all i don't know man it's i find it grating too but i also know it's inexorable and it doesn't matter it's like it's not i'm not going to change anything so that's where i stand chris um i don't know i think well it's funny that it's like it's funny that this was in relation to i mean the question is asking it's like oh should it does it mean that expedition 33 is less deserving of some of the awards including best art direction i was actually under the impression that best art direction was one of the few awards that i don't know if it should have won i think maybe i actually agree with you i don't think it's a particularly beautiful game to me i mean there is beautiful parts of it but i'm not like that's not what blew me away about i think there's cool parts of it but like i think that like something like hades 2 or really, I think any number of games could have competed in that category and done very, very well.

2:31:06So as far as I'm concerned, like the most compelling parts of Expedition 33 don't really have anything to do with the AI components of it. And it's the same reason that I feel about Arc Raiders. Like the AI voices in Arc Raiders are probably like, they're the dumbest thing in it, but they're also like the least, like I don't think about them at all when I'm playing. like i'm not thinking about like oh boy this game is great in particular because of the the ai voice lines you know it's it's not the thing that sets it apart if it had won um you know if if we found out that like oh best narrative and then the script was written by chat gpt or something like that would be like that would be a different situation you know what i mean because that's like well that's the whole reason like that's the whole that's the whole reason your game sticks out in the first place and it was it was offloaded to like a bunch of stolen malware like that's crazy um i'm not a fan of it like i'm not a fan of really any of this being used i get why like there's like a bit of a gray a gray area because like you said like there's the there's a i can't remember what the tree software is called i used to know speed tree um speed tree there's like speed tree and there's like procedural generation and there's like all these ai tools my line personally is i don't want ai generated content in the in in the 1.0 or like the publicly facing build of the game that i'm playing like i don't want to see anything that was made by a you know just a fucking algorithm that was like stolen from other places like that's my line i think it's i i also think it's weird to use it for like placeholder stuff but i think it's like more reasonable like i could see why somebody would be like yeah you know what let's this texture isn't done yet we have people working on it let's just see how this feels like in the moment um with like some like i think the the thing with expedition 33 was like um there were newspaper clippings on like a on like a pole or something like that and it was kind of like it was like a placeholder thing that's supposed to just give you the feel of like a bunch of papers there which they then replace with like real ones like i don't i don't mind that so much i'm not a fan of like the slippery slope that it leads people down i think you're better off creatively just not relying on those tools at all um but in in my opinion like arc raiders having like ai voices in the game at launch like as a as a point is actually like that's that's worse to me in in my opinion than placeholders or whatever kind of pre-development stuff you would want to do although then there's the argument of like well what if we use it for concept art it's like

2:33:45Dustin Furman:well there's concept artists right and that's that's exactly what i'm talking about it seems like they are some teams are using it for concept art and I'm like that's fucking crazy right that's like some of the that's nuts that's like the very foundation of your game the very essence of it is the is the is the concepting both from an artistic standpoint and from a design standpoint and a production standpoint it doesn't it's such a great like there's no it's a weird area to figure out because it is this like if I use if I have a script like let's say i'm right like even just on my level like let's let's say i'm writing a youtube video and then i throw it into like an ai and i say like uh i want to put an interesting spin on this give me a give me a weird spin and then it tells me a bunch of spins and i think they all suck right but in in that process of elimination of like realizing well that doesn't work that doesn't work that doesn't work i come up with something on my own that has nothing to do with those premises but i only got there because i was eliminating every option that's a creative line of thought that exists purely with me but i used ai to get there but it's not you know what i mean like it's a very weird kind of area to regulate like i don't know how you really get away from this um it's weird i'm not a fan personally i would at the very least i would like to know if ai is being used that's what i want i want like a sticker or something or like in in the not even in the credits on the box on the cover brother like that's what i want like next to next next to the m rating yeah sure that might be that might end up happening the m rating is voluntary the SRB obviously you have to keep the government out and I wonder if they'll do the same thing in the future if this becomes a big commercial problem for them where it's like we want we feel like this is dishonest and then the government's like well you either govern it yourself or we'll govern it and then you'll start seeing those kinds of labels we'll see Dustin do you have anything you'd like to add to this conversation yeah uh yeah it's a tough one

2:35:58Colin Moriarty:I feel like in the case of Claire Obscure, where from what it seems like Chris mentioned the placeholder asset that was there, that then to my understanding, like very quickly replaced, probably because I would take them at their word saying it was a genuine accident and they had the real asset ready. Maybe not. Maybe they lied about it. I don't know. and now also with the case of larian it's not ideal certainly and my line for sure is like i definitely wouldn't want uh ai generated assets um in the game and of course that brings in arc raiders 2 which is like show me something compelling with what you're doing and right Maybe we can talk then.

2:36:49Colin Moriarty:But I think my whole thing with all of this controversy around these two games is I feel like we're fighting the wrong battle about this. When we have a slew of AI-generated slop that is flooding our primary marketplaces that we interact with these products slash works of art. and I everyone hates it but it's like no one's doing anything about it and I don't I think that in some ways and we've talked about this before it's like the genie is out of the bottle my prediction I'm I'm maybe pulling this out of my ass I don't have any concrete word on this is that most big triple-a games are using ai way more than you think yeah I think that's I think

2:37:44Dustin Furman:that's that's what's been coming out even in the past few days is like kind of this this idea that like you have no idea how deep it might go with something you know and um yeah go ahead you have

2:37:54Colin Moriarty:more and i just think that uh the ai is going to become bigger whether we like it or not and i do think that there should be some level of i guess i don't know if policing is the right word of purely AI generated assets in things and it taking the place of real creativity? Absolutely. But at the same time, AI can be used as a very helpful tool to help things along. In some cases, will it come at the expense of people's jobs? Unfortunately, probably yes. But in other cases, it will just allow people to be more efficient and create things more quickly. I've used this example before and I've taken heat for it, but I honestly think it's because people just do not understand that.

2:38:45Colin Moriarty:Like when I make a thumbnail and I bring in a picture of Colin or of Chris, there's a button that does an auto outline to cut them out. And then, so I can remove them from the image and put them in something else. Is that it's an AI tool? Is that okay? Is that permissible by people? to me it should be because it's like okay i could go and manually outline each person yeah you know and also it's like it's not it's not taking from a hive mind of other people's work yeah i mean you know what i mean or it's like that's the differentiating factor i think is like there's there's tools that are made simpler and then there are tools that just straight up steal like generate generative tools that generate unique assets um there's there is a difference between these things i think right it's the difference between i don't know it's the difference between a lot of these like i feel the way ai exists in its current form and by the way it's annoying that we even call it ai because it's not like that's like a really irritating thing to me too is like this is like this is not ai if it was real ai it would be actually very interesting but it's like it's just it's just a repository it's like a server full of stolen information that's all it is so we haven't like created like a thinking brain or anything um i just feel like a lot of this is the difference between a tool made more refined and a tool that steals that's the the primary difference between the tools that we're talking about yeah because that like it goes further with like people are using some of these ai based tools all the time i mentioned the cutout but like there's also a tool i think i mentioned this on the show where if your image doesn't quite fit your canvas on photoshop you can use something called generative fill.

2:40:48Colin Moriarty:There's two versions of this. There's one of them that goes to the Adobe cloud and uses that hive mind that we were just talking about. And there's one that looks at the image that you've put in the program and then generates a little bit more of the sky based on the image you put in. They are both AI but very different. And so it's really important I think that people start to you can't just be like I hate all AI. Because you're going to hate everything very soon. Like we have to try to differentiate what these two different, what these different aspects of these tools do and whether or not certain aspects we deem are okay or not.

2:41:31Colin Moriarty:We can't just have a blanket. All of it's bad. So.

2:41:36Dustin Furman:I'm, I'm of the, I agree with what you're saying. And I think I don't like the semantic argument of like, well, yeah, it's like you're saying like, well, this, if you like, if you don't like this, then you don't like that and I'm like you have to just it's to what you're saying you have to know the difference and and I shouldn't have to explain the difference between a computer rendering art for you or writing text for you or doing other things and cutting out a face on photoshop if you don't understand the difference between that then I guess we really can't have an intellectually honest conversation but I still get back to this core point this seems to be the way that they're discussing or the way we fear ai being used let's say that the way we fear ai being used seems to go to solve problems that do not exist.

2:42:20Dustin Furman:And it might be a problem for you if your game's too expensive or if it's taking too long, but offloading it to the computer is not a solution. And if you're concepting shit on a computer with AI, that to me, listen, I'm not writing the most sophisticated stories for our games. I don't do like the most sophisticated design work or anything like that, but it has never once crossed my mind to ask ChatGPT to do it for me. Never. that's the fun part. Right. It's like, it's making it up. It's the fun part. Like, that's the easy part is being like, this happens, then this happens and let's write some text and let's write some dialogue and let's make some stages and let's do like, that's, that's what you're supposed to want to do.

2:43:06Dustin Furman:If you're, if you're not doing that, then you're not really foundationally making video games. Right. You are getting ideas from a computer. and that's kind of pathetic and i really feel like real creatives wouldn't want to do that and they understand the difference between speed tree and other much more seemingly nefarious options for getting your work done and i just but i'll say this and i i there's nothing that's going to stop this from happening i understand that i understand that there are important things that it can do and will do and are doing and is doing. And I understand that I can't control consumer behavior so that it might all not even matter if all this stuff comes from computers because people just want quote unquote good things.

2:44:01Dustin Furman:And that's the major thing is for me is people so hyper focused on AI's deficits. Ooh, it's got six fingers. I'm like, dude, dude, just give it a few years. You better start arguing about something else. If you want to look, you're not going to find any imperfections in a few years. So you better start focusing on what really matters about this, which is it at its core, not its execution or what comes out of it, but like what it is doing. And people are totally missing the forest for the trees on that. Look how shitty this looks. Look, I'm like, oh my God, you're going to need to find a new, I'm guarantee you're going to need to find a new argument.

2:44:42Dustin Furman:very soon I gotta say I see things regularly now with these new AI videos where I have to like look twice to be like is that real that like seems crazy because you see crazy shit on the internet all the time that's real so then you're like is this real not anymore it's over now I think I said a while ago that like we really took for granted this like brief period in human history where you could genuinely like trust that footage that you were seeing was at the very least real even if it's like even if it's fake it's real you know what i mean like somebody had to go fake it you know somebody had to orchestrate it whatever like we took for granted this brief period because we thought it'd be here forever but it was like really like it was really like 20 years 20 years of like you could trust what you were seeing basically at least on the basis that what you were seeing happened now it's over it's it's all gone yep thanks a lot thanks for writing in roughham it's your fault yeah wheat then wrote in little wheat then says happy holidays cdc a couple of weeks ago you all discussed the d ram shortages and how they affect pricing across the industry something dustin mentioned has stuck with me and i wanted to push this conversation further in reference to purchasing PC parts.

2:46:06Dustin Furman:Dustin said you should probably buy a pre-built PC to save on the final cost. In my own circles, I've started to notice a slow trend of PC players who once did custom builds moving toward pre-built PCs, citing a combination of these deciding factors, cost, convenience, and hardware availability. To me, these are the three points that resonate with console purchasers especially. Do you see a trend like this growing with the increasing component shortages? And if so, how do you forecast if it could affect the console space moving forward? If console manufacturers can maintain lower prices by placing large component orders, Can we see a reality where PC players transition to the PS6 or Xbox with Steam integration?

2:46:38Dustin Furman:I hope you and your families have a wonderful holiday season. I'm incredibly grateful for the content you and everyone else at LSM has provided over the years. I love this question because what it asked Dustin is, is it possible of a reverse migration? We always assume things are going to PC. I think that's happening. But there is a intellectual argument to be made that pricing will be so prohibitive that it actually might send people in the other direction ultimately. Do you think that that's possible?

2:47:03Colin Moriarty:Certainly. There's just news the other day. I didn't read into it too deeply, but there's something about NVIDIA lowering their amount of stock by like 30 % next year for the 50 series. And who knows, maybe that's because they're not selling well or something, but either way, it's shaky ground. And of course, the DRAM situation going around is absolutely insane. And so, yeah, I could absolutely see there becoming a market. I don't know if it will push people to consoles. I think it could in some situations. But the Steam machine, maybe it's not the Steam machine that is the device that people go to.

2:47:50Colin Moriarty:But much like Steam Deck, it's probably going to create an entire new section for the PC market of people, of manufacturers making prebuilt machines that are smaller, foreign factor and designed for the living room that run Steam OS. So the issue, though, is that they are still also affected by the DRAM shortage. In fact, the rumor right now is that the reason Half-Life 3 wasn't announced is because Valve is kind of unsure about the Steam machine right now and what they're going to have to do because of the DRAM prices. So the whole thing a few weeks ago where I said buy a prebuilt PC right now is because those RAM chips were already part of that package.

2:48:45Colin Moriarty:so those pre-built PCs are going to go up as well because of the RAM situation it's just that was the stock that they had already purchased at a lower price so and I guess how this affects I mean PlayStation Xbox we Tom a few weeks ago had that report that PlayStation wasn't going to be affected in the short term because they had the savvy to buy in advance but it certainly could affect them in the long term and yeah they'll get a reduced price because they're not making they're buying it bulk first of all for the console and second they're not buying them to be chips that can be swapped in and out like a PC but I think everyone's kind of fucked in the long term if they don't figure out what to do in terms of both DRAM and also just like video cards and stuff like that those chips they're so in demand because everything first of all everything uses them cars uh like self-driving cars have a uh video card in them and so yeah moving forward and oh yeah the big thing of course ai yeah i mean they're just sucking those things up as fast as possible so it's uh not a good looking future for hardware pricing across

2:50:08Dustin Furman:the board in my opinion yeah it's they can't i mean other places in the world are going to need to start building a lot more plants too but these plants in america that they're finally building to fabricate silicon can't happen soon enough like yeah the problem is they just take so long to make yeah so fucking expensive yeah it's once we get those those planning they're in arizona and maybe nevada or something like once those get up hopefully at least domestically things will become a little easier and that'll remove tariffs too for any of the stuff you're bringing in or whatever because i think taiwan manufacturing or whatever is doing those factories and those are the like That's like the big company that, that, but I'm not obviously an expert in this.

2:50:45Dustin Furman:Chris, how do you feel? Do you think that like there could be a, I guess by economies of scale, a counter migration from PC to console simply because really only Sony and Nintendo could leverage and Microsoft, but they're not selling consoles, but they can leverage substantial savings in economies of scale that some other companies, even fabricators can't necessarily afford. I don't really know. I think, I don't think it speaks. I just think everything's kind of I think everything's kind of fucked right now like I don't know if there's going to be much movement in either direction like I'm sure there will be obviously like statistically there must be but like I don't know if this is going to necessarily spark some kind of mass migration from one thing to the next I think a lot of people who are in the market for a new PC are people who already have a PC that they're just kind of not super happy with or like that they could stand to improve and so I think what the more likely outcome is that people are just kind of going to try and get by with the race that they currently have for as long as they possibly can and probably just wait out whatever is going on, which, you know, good luck considering everything.

2:51:48I mean, AI is going to, all these data, all these AI data centers are going to be a massive drain on everything. So like, I don't, I don't know. I don't know if I foresee a particularly good outcome for really any, anybody right now.

2:52:05Dustin Furman:In the short term, we need much more nuclear power. In the long term. Yeah. Dyson Sphere. Just build that bad boy around the sun. Blot out the starlight. Get all the energy of the sun. We'll become a Kardashev type two civilization at that point. Very exciting. It's never going to happen, of course. No. Yeah, it's all in. It's all in. I don't know, man. AI does seem like it's going to be incredibly valuable in all these different ways. And I think it's quite remarkable and it's exciting in a lot of different ways. But does it really necessitate this level of demand? You're seeing the economy respond in such a way that there is such a deep fear in missing out on this and not being the one that lacked integration.

2:52:54Dustin Furman:And it just is going to create a bunch of losers. And we're the biggest losers of all because it's just driving our component prices up for 80 % of these companies. a lot of the shit's going to end up in a fucking landfill so they're just going to bulldoze over some of these data centers at some point just bury them into the ground but yeah the even more than silicon availability which is a bummer is just the power situation and it's becoming crazy like how much power they're using and it's unnecessary and unacceptable so we got to figure that out by the way I want to be clear I don't think this reverse migration will happen but I think it's within the realm of possibility based on economics, the economic situation, inflation, economies of scale, all the rest.

2:53:38Dustin Furman:We'll put it on Calci and we'll see how people feel about it. Likelihood that PC gamers will go back to console. I'm only kidding. We won't do that. Theckless Foister wrote in. It's a hello, sacred gentleman, and thank you for all the consistently awesome content. I'm getting carpal tunnel surgery this Friday on my dominant right hand for reasons that I swear are not gooning related. As a result, I may need to take a hopefully short break from most gaming. While I will be out of commission from playing most of my usual types of games, I figure I might still be able to play some less demanding games one-handed, like visual novel types games, like Ace Attorney, Doki Doki Literature Club, or even some turn-based RPGs like Final Fantasy Tactics.

2:54:16Dustin Furman:Do you find gentlemen have any suggestions for games I could play in my one-handed state for non-gooner reasons? Giggity, giggity. You're saying it too much. Yeah, now I'm like... point where i assume 100 you gave yourself a gunner or injury yeah um what should you play a great so big recommendation for me and i'll be curious if you guys have any one-handed recommendations is uh civilization that's a great game to play with one hand you really just need i mean if you could play with a mouse that would be ideal but even if on a d-pad you're really just gonna be clicking around and using x you could you should i wonder if you're if maybe the access controller would be good for you in some in some way while you're recovering from what you you swear up and down is a non-guner related injury and yet you keep bringing up that it's a non-guner related injury making it seem again like you're hiding something so i think you i think you've erred i'm doubtful chris any recommendations for one-handed gaming yeah dude vampire survivors oh yeah vampire survivors is is it's more action obviously but it's like it's so it is so good for one hand specifically like i was actually surprised at like i guess it's like obvious when you're kind of playing it that it you only need one hand to do it but it wasn't until like i was at a friend's house and we were kind of doing the uh the couch co-op thing and i was like oh this is great like i'm eating i'm eating and i'm playing at the same this is this is this is the life right here man it's good stuff but yeah vampire survivors is really the only one that i can really recommend i don't really play a lot of pure turn-based games so like that's more colin and dustin's wheelhouse but of the games that i've played vampire survivors is like the obvious like the the best like one-handed game that i can think of right now i'm sure there's probably some others but that's the one that sticks out to me the most that's a great selection

2:56:11Colin Moriarty:dustin what do you think yeah i'm looking i found on steam there is a curator called one-handed gamer uh which curates games that uh i mean this is pc but i would assume some of these would translate over um and that's if i could only game with one hand it probably would be best to use a mouse i would assume even if it is your left hand um but here's the thing quit you're like oh i only have one hand i i can only play you know turn-based game no if i can only play with one hand i'm

2:56:46Dustin Furman:figuring out how to beat sekiro with one hand oh yeah just to say that i could yeah yeah like you

2:56:52Colin Moriarty:know that might be kind of cool might be kind of badass to figure out how to play some of these games with one hand maybe with the access controller as you said colin but uh i think you you hit it well with civilization is like this is the time dude to play civilization oh definitely this is

2:57:09Dustin Furman:a really cool i'm on steam now on the curated list this is a cool idea to like each one says like uh so for instance a final fantasy tactics is on here both mouse and keyboard 95 of the game can be played with the mouse only but there are a few things like renaming characters that can only be done with the keyboard so like it gives you very very um granular advice for those that are disabled or whatever which is pretty neat i like all right oh i scrolled up accidentally what's the next inquiry there it is shuhei yoshida's constant clicking wrote in it's a good afternoon detectives that's a pretty deep cut by the way that is a deep cut there that's because when i had shuhei on once he was like clicking something for like the beginning and i And I eventually was.

2:57:52Dustin Furman:Oh, yeah. What is that? He had a fidget toy. Yeah. There's been a murder and you're the only ones we can trust to solve it. A week ago, a new player in town was unceremoniously bumped off at the lavish birthday bash of one Jeff Keighley. The victim, a young upstart by the name of High Guard, also known in some circles as Horse Concord. He was minus seven weeks old. Who is responsible for this? Did Jeff knowingly place the victim in harm's way by making him the center of attention at the finale of the party? did Highguard himself overestimate his own importance and put himself in the firing line was he the victim of a cruel conspiracy led by Concord developers to draw attention away from their own crimes the game is afoot gentlemen thank you for writing in there are some people that worked on Concord working on this game by the way I was like oh boy oh no oh no no oh no not even because they don't have the talent to do so but because they're they're very likely to be attached to another of these kinds of games although maybe it won't be that bad for this game i don't know it's not looking good i'll say that um this is an understated story because i maybe i'm i gotta go back and look at like the grand finale game at each game awards even going back to spike and all the rest i don't remember it being this like this no we got intergalactic last year right sure was that was that the last one yeah you might be right sure i might i mean i can double check but i'm pretty sure i remember that being it's and people are theorizing and i think reasonably so was this a paid slot but again i always interpreted this as like the i think it's fairly obvious what is an advertisement at the game awards and what isn't sometimes an advertisement reads like a trailer and sometimes a trailer reads like an advertisement but the way they pitch them the stage the stage presence sending you off giving you a little bit of that seems like it's a more again a quid pro quo style you give us access to your game you get your game out there we have something to fill and have people in the seats and watching at home that they're excited about as opposed to the ads that are selling things for the gotcha games and all the things that are already out or whatever but that is a reasonable expectation that maybe this was a paid slot because otherwise it jeff isn't stupid i mean that's the thing is like jeff plays games it's not he's not like some clueless person it's like did you really believe that and i really think that that affected this game in a major way.

3:00:08Dustin Furman:I don't even think it's like the nature of the game so much as that it was supposed to be like this. This is what you thought was the big pop. And I think it really hurt the game. And if that was a decision that they made mutually or it was paid for or whatever, bad choice. Bad choice. Where are we on Chris? Where are we on high guard? Does this game have a chance? I don't know, man. I mean, it's free to play. So the barrier of entry is going to be pretty low so that i'm sure people are going to be curious about it at that point it's going to depend purely on word of mouth um which is possible it you know stranger things have absolutely happened but yeah man i don't know it's just got the stink on it and like you said like it really it really didn't have to like i i do think its placement in the show is is the primary cover like i actually think like this could have been shadow dropped and people probably would have been okay yeah they made it so far like why not just do that yeah like why not like it's because what is it seven weeks yeah it's yeah it's seven weeks away so like what could you possibly get done in that time like absolutely like miscalculation across the board i'm curious i'm open to it i do think as a first person shooter multiplayer kind of guy i did look at it and I was no I noticed things there that like are kind of interesting that are not typical I'm curious to give it a shot like I think the like summoning spectral fucking mounts in a in a pvp raid shooter like they say rage you know I don't know what that means so I am curious to check out like what what makes it tick I'm not too enthused by the art direction I think it's a little bit dude I think even in the stream like the first I think the first frame of a character I just like I tuned out immediately because I was like oh man I'm yeah I'm not feeling this but I mean it could be fine I don't think it's going to be successful though like I think And I think it may like the ceiling for this game, in my opinion, is that it finds like a like a relatively modest but loyal kind of fan base that kind of swears up and down by its quality, but cannot convince anybody to jump in.

3:02:19Like, yes, it's kind of the future that I see for it.

3:02:22Dustin Furman:70 employees is not that big of a team. It won't take that much money to get this thing sustainable and going and pay back what they've spent on it. which is probably free right exactly well exactly you're going to need to convince people to buy battle passes or whatever whatever strategy they're going to have but it i don't know like i'm curious what you think dustin it seems like these things become self-fulfilling prophecies nine out of ten times based on this this reception this very cold and negative reception i don't like when people say because we've said this before it's like i don't like when people say like you never survive something like this it's like call of duty survives this every year but there but there are but certainly most games don't survive this you need to have excitement in the pre-release it's harder to convince people on the market but like chris has said the lower it's the lowest possible barrier to entry so it could win people over i i think it looks really generic but i don't know why people are so outraged by it either but maybe it's just because i don't

3:03:26Colin Moriarty:play those kinds of games i mean i think it was that the it was the placement of the final game uh i yeah i really don't know where the decision came from like you said whether it was an ad or a keely team decision or what it was not a good idea i was pretty down on this as well but if i'm being trying to be realistic about it i think that uh gamers are human and that they humans have a tendency to be like oh look this is the hour of hate for this thing right we found the thing to hate yeah it's all point and laugh it feels like that yeah but the other thing is that they are quick to forget of course there's the iconic image of the steam group that was like we won't buy modern warfare until it has dedicated servers and then they're all like it shows they're

3:04:24Dustin Furman:all playing modern warfare 2 right so i love that that's the best that was awesome i think about

3:04:30Colin Moriarty:But when Apex came out, I mean, that was during like, you know, a big time for Battle Royale with Fortnite, PUBG and others. And I think that they was if I remember right, it was like a shadow drop where they're like, we're coming out. This is our Battle Royale in the Titanfall engine. And we have streamers playing it right now and you can go play it right now. It speaks for itself. and it convinced a lot of people in a crowded market that like apex legend cemented itself as one of the big battle royale games so i think there's a possibility where this game comes out and people fucking love it and the gameplay is great and then suddenly it's like everyone forgets but there's also it's it's just as possible that this game comes out and it is tries to do a couple cool things that end up not really changing the game and then it dies like less than a year later i think both of those outcomes are equally possible we just simply do not know enough yet for that so i don't i do feel bad because as i mentioned the the the gamer hour of hate was definitely cast upon it the hour is probably unfairly yeah they yeah i think it's fair i think it's fair they didn't the placement man and and not only the placement of it the dude the the the preface of it where they were like from the creators of titanfall you know it's like oh dude no you got to kind of let the game speak for itself really put that information maybe at the end that way people are like oh well i mean it did look kind of you know what i mean like it's I don't know dude I if I were them I would have just shadow dropped personally or I would have found some way you know some way to do it where uh we're just out you kind of got to get out before the the audience has even room to doubt you in some sense or like time to construct a narrative around it that's what I think Oblivion Remastered did well granted Oblivion is a completely different thing you know that's it's got prestige people love Oblivion they're going to they're going to play it sight unseen.

3:06:42But like that game kind of just, you know, people were speculating about it and then it just dropped and there were a ton of problems with it, but nobody seemed to care because we were just excited to play oblivion. And I think that's kind of, it's not the right move for every game, but I think if you, if you got a free to play game and you've got a spotlight in the form of the game awards, like there's probably no better time to do something like that. than with a free-to-play game that like you have to know internally looks uh you know you're gonna have to convince people indistinguishable from so many other things i mean that's the problem yeah i mean it's got the same i don't want to say the same because it's a bit reductive but it's it's got this fortnight adjacent let's say yeah you know style that like you're gonna have to convince people to to look at this and you know you do you do we really want to give people seven weeks to pontificate and spread rumors and make X amount of daily YouTube videos hating on the fucking...

3:07:47Do we want that narrative to take hold? Or should we just... How much more feature complete could seven weeks be for 70 people? That's, to me, what I don't understand. You should have just dropped it. But I'll be checking it out. I'm going to give it the time of day. I'm curious about it. I like a good multiplayer shooter. I don't care about I don't interact with live service elements really at all like I don't I don't really fuck around with battle passes or so it's just a new multiplayer game to me which I'll gladly take but it's an uphill climb for them I think and maybe they have something special but like they're gonna have to prove it a rookie wrote the final question says hello

3:08:26Dustin Furman:sacred boys kickmaster terra enigma which was never released in the United States Alundra hybrid heaven and brutal legend are some quirky but awesome games I've had the pleasure of playing in my gaming journey, but they are kind of forgotten. Kickmaster was an NES game. I hold no hope for their revival in a remake or any sequels, but I wish that wasn't the case. My question for you all is, beyond the obvious franchises, which bottom of the drawer game would you love to see revived, but you just can't hold any hope to see, but you can't hold any hope to see again? I got an answer for this one. Naughty Bear.

3:08:57Dustin Furman:Bring it back.

3:09:01Dustin Furman:Artificial mind and movement, I think, made at the Canadian studio. Came out in 2010 on PS3. It ran like shit. I remember especially on PS3, it ran hard. It was horrible the way it ran. But it's such a great, it really is a great game when it works. And I really loved it. And I bring it up every once in a while about how much I really enjoy that game. And I think it's so strange and interesting. And they did bring Naughty Bear back in. There was a sequel, but like a PSN sequel, but he was a character in something too. Like in some horror game or something that they made. I think he's like appears.

3:09:34Dustin Furman:is it Dead by Daylight maybe? You might be right. So he's bouncing around but I just wanted to give a shout out to Naughty Bear. Naughty. Yeah, Dead by... His Naughty Bear character the appearance is a legendary skin for the trapper killer in Dead by Daylight. That's cool. It's such a weird game. For people that don't know Naughty Bear was about like an outcast teddy bear that was like in a group of teddy bears but he was the outcast of them and he would like basically sabotage their get-togethers. and like, and like end up murdering all of them. So like there would be like a, a birthday party that he wasn't invited to or something.

3:10:10Dustin Furman:And then he would like stalk the birthday party and like slowly kill everyone at the birthday party. But you were doing it as a teddy bear against other bears. So like it wasn't gory. It was, the violence was like fluff and like in the insides of a cotton and whatnot. It was, I thought it was a really clever idea. I think I'm literally the only one that thinks that, but, but I wanted to give that one a shout out. Dustin, do you have a good, a good answer?

3:10:33Colin Moriarty:yeah the two that i could think of because it's ironic some of the ones that immediately came to mind have come back so unexpectedly of course tomba we talked about it earlier but there was also the croc uh the revival that that happened that's like the long-awaited croc revival long long-awaited croc revival revival still have never gotten my physical copy of that that i ordered over a year ago yes that's limited run game style nope well yeah but it's rocket games oh that's right okay sorry and there's landering dude there's people on reddit that are because i every once in a while look up i'm like what's going on with this you know and people are pissed about it i should probably just cancel my pre-order and buy it digitally at this point but the two games that came to mind and these are two games sorry i'm doing a lot of prefacing that i don't remember how good they are but i i mean i remember them being good in my memory but are they actually good i don't know number one threads of fate the from soft game the action rpg uh for the playstation one you can play as either the boy or the girl character colin surely you played this right yeah yeah yeah i remember thinking this game was awesome when i was a kid i actually bought a copy of it a few years ago haven't gone back to it how much was it so yeah it was kind of an expensive one i want to say it was like 100 bucks i'm reading the croc reddit by the way dude the croc reddit some coming up with more excuses is the newest uh

3:12:02Dustin Furman:croc reddit croc reddit dude uh insane the other game that i thought of which i barely

3:12:11Colin Moriarty:remember this game other than thinking it was so cool was a ps2 game from konami called shadow of memories. This is like a time travel mystery. Oh, yeah. I remember this box art. And we rented this game and played through it and thought it was so cool. And I always wanted to go back to it. And so maybe at some point I'll pick up a physical copy. But the reality is in this day and age, like he mentions brutal legend, like someday they're going to bring back brutal legend. Everything comes back of almost everything comes back. Yeah. If Kroc can come back, certainly Brutal Legend can come back.

3:12:53Dustin Furman:It's funny, man. This Reddit is funny. Kroc Reddit. Get distracted by it. Chris, what is your selection? I got a couple that I think... And again, a lot of these are in my memory, too, because it's been so long. But I would love to see some form of them again. Gun. i think like like gun was so cool and so weird and i think like i don't know like there could have been more there hunter the reckoning was an old kind of favorite of mine would be cool to see those again but i thought it was i thought gun was activision yeah yeah this but i think um oh yeah there was as far as like this sorry good i never played the psp one but the uh The ones that stick out to me, honestly, are like the weird kind of pandemic games.

3:13:45Like I would love to see a new mercenaries would fucking floor me, dude. Like I loved mercenaries and how weird it is. And I guess EA owns that, right? So soon the Saudis. Yeah. Well, that'd be an interesting spin. Yeah. But it would be. Yeah, I don't know. like those are the ones that kind of come to mind uh there's like a handful that like i can't i know there's like really obscure shit that like i'm not remembering but all i can really i don't really even know how they would continue it but i loved i loved the premise of the saboteur and i really think this question is kind of going into for me territory that like i wish like certain games could be reborn with like a proper budget and like proper tlc as opposed to kind of not really getting the amount of time that they deserve because i think there's a lot of special premises there lord of the rings a new battlefield like but like in lord of the rings like lord of the

3:14:44Dustin Furman:conquest would be so sick yeah that's pandemic too isn't it yeah it's a lot of i have a lot of fond memories of pandemic games it's so so weird but yeah i mean those are the ones that kind of stick out to me self-actors another one self-actors are really weird but that's like very specific i like something like oh i'm sorry go ahead oh no i was gonna say i don't even know if that's still happening but yeah alundra is a great selection um hybrid heaven is an n64 game that's a really cool game konami game too so there's a uh i actually had a hybrid heaven like i bought that like when it came out i don't really even know why because it wasn't that good but it was it was certainly an interesting game um that's all we have yeah and it's over for us now that's it it's over we're done for the year it's time to shut it down uh this is episode 390 but of course 391 392 and all the sacred symbols plus episodes through uh the first week of january are recorded and so we're except for dustin's he still has to do his sorry doesn't yeah i've been super lazy about it yeah i knew i i wrote a i wrote last like maybe 10 days ago i wrote a to-do list and i wrote down all the shows i had to do and split them up between days and i'm like i gotta stick to the schedule and and i did so um but let's go around the horn say goodbye to everyone Chris goodbye to you Merry Christmas Happy New Year Yeah you too Are you excited for your break Are you going to New York you're staying in California What are you doing I'll go to New York I think I'm probably going to be there for New Year's I think it's typically what the plan is Usually But I'm looking forward to being back and gorging myself On all the food And then coming back Back to the grind But I'm looking forward to I'm looking forward to the break back to the old grind yeah I'm I need I need a vacation pad so yeah I'm ready for this to happen to Dustin goodbye to you Merry Christmas and by the way you didn't even bring it up you you publicly announced your big news we should have said at the top of the show I totally yeah I'm sorry I'm so glad you said it because I was I was like am I going to spoil this at some point I feel like I've known for a while now and I feel like I don't know what one person said you hinted

3:16:55Colin Moriarty:you tip them off during stream oh like something i said yeah oh okay which i was like that's whatever it's fine because i was like what did i say i wonder i was like oh i'm waiting to do my christmas park card but i can't talk about it and you're like i know what that's about and i'm like no you don't oh okay i'm sorry yeah yeah sorry no it's all good but yes it's true uh holly and i are uh having another baby um so she's pregnant again she's um uh due this summer so right between right after summer game fest

3:17:30Dustin Furman:right in that time frame so we'll have to decide on a name um jeff because it's we born right around

3:17:38Colin Moriarty:jeff keely right yeah jeff keely firman i think i think there's something something to that

3:17:46Dustin Furman:something to that so well congratulations i was i'm so i mean i we've already talked about this

3:17:50Colin Moriarty:probably but it's thrilling news yeah thanks we're we're very excited uh holly has been doing very well uh she's had way more morning sickness this time which has been fun dealing with that but she's a trooper she's doing great uh the baby's very healthy women just get the fuck it it's just crazy yeah someone's got to do it someone's gotta do it go do it um but yeah she's getting like blood tests every week um we've already had an ultrasound which is not normal just to make sure everything's good and everything's great so um yeah well good that's about it

3:18:28Dustin Furman:congratulations i'm sure you're looking forward to congrats to getting away you'll be local your parents are there now again so you're not going anywhere i assume yeah i'm not going anywhere either fuck that no no no oh man i'm just gonna be hanging out and uh doing whatever it is i do playing drums I don't know walking around eating watching football expensive time walking around this is a riveting week oh man riveting week awaits but congratulations guys on another great year and happy holidays to you and happy holidays to everyone out there as well thank you so much for another year of your love kindness and support of last stand media and sacred symbols of course the episodes will go on for the rest of the year and into the new year uninterrupted, as you know.

3:19:14Dustin Furman:So nothing really other than new to report. Everything will be there as you expect. Lastdaymedia.store, by the way. So patreon.com slash lastdaymedia for early ad free access. We appreciate all that. Lastdaymedia.store for merch. You could still buy, I think, but we're not going to be shipping anything until January. So there'll be a note about that on the store. Otherwise, I guess there's nothing else to report. Boys, be well. Take care of yourselves. We'll see you soon. To all of you out there, be well. Thank you again. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. See you in 2026. Bye. See ya. Take care, guys.

3:19:48Dustin Furman:Sacred Symbols, a PlayStation podcast, is a product and trademark of Last Stand Media and Colin's Last Stand LLC and is proudly recorded in the USA. The show is conceived by, is written by, and is directed by me, Colin Moriarty. My co-hosts are Chris Raygun Maldonado and Dustin Furman. The show is produced by executive producer Dustin Furman. All of Last Stand's theme music is by my best friend, Ramon Narvaez. As you know, all of Last Stand's shows, including Sacred Symbols, are fan-funded on Patreon at patreon.com slash laststandmedia. 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.

3:20:29Dustin Furman:Thank you.

3:20:39Dustin Furman:Chad Lewis, Paul Joyce, Austin Riley, Justin Wagaman, Justin Payne, Alex Monez, Omar Rosa, Joey Gondaliger, Gio Corsi, Cam Wallace, Benjamin Michalko, Donald Difford, Alex Gates, Michael Gates, Josh McKinney, Adam Nix, Throw7, Phil Crone, Mr. 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 Algorit, 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.

3:21:57Dustin Furman: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.

3:23:13Dustin Furman: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 J, Emmanuel Perez, Brano Bezzera Bloom, Logan Little George, Wesley Mullins, WTF, Uncharted Shinobi, Denny Would Never, Eddie Smith, Hugo Delegia, Blackjack, Anthony Arcure, Matt MGS24, Keith Richards, Zen Red, Jiraiya, Orchard, Sweet Jones, J.P.

3:24:01Dustin Furman:Lynch, Isaac Claiborne, Brad Lohman, Saltab, Ray Ligia, Z-Man 8601, and Adam Baum. 102 miles ago, the oil light came on. 100 miles ago, you noticed. Now, it's time to head to take Five, this oil change, fall in love with your car all over again. In just 10 minutes, your dream technician will check your tire pressure, top off fluids, change your oil, and verify with Carfax exactly what your car really needs. All while keeping you in the driver's seat. Take five, the stay in your car 10-minute oil change. Save up to 30 % on your next oil change to take five. $15 value, valid at participating locations, terms and conditions apply.