#393 | Pleasantly Caving In

57:50And even traveling to Mars would take you six or nine months and then you'd have to come back. So, but going to the moon is a few days. Yeah, the moon is nothing in comparison. So it's like, I think that would be so incredible because I think what the plan is with Artemis is like they're ultimately going to build, I think they're calling it the gateway, which is supposed to be a space station that's going to orbit the moon and like this is the artemis one already went up and then artemis two now is going to go to the moon and they're getting further and further along on this plan and then the the idea i think is that they're going to have this this working space station in lunar orbit and then launch martian missions from that because once you're away from the earth's gravity or whatever you don't have to use all this fuel and you can and the ships can be a shit ton lighter and stuff like that.

58:35Because like even technically, even like if you were just in space and you just touched something in a certain direction, it would literally just go inertially into that direction until it was pulled by another body of gravity. So it's amazing. Oh, so exciting. But I'm not an adventurer. No. Nathan Bell wrote in. Now, I don't know if this is true or not, Dustin. He says, Hey, Sackboys, I'm writing to you out of concern. I was listening to the latest episode of Summon Sign and Dustin has admitted to creeping into furry territory. Can Colin and Chris talk him down or is he going to have to take a trip to Arkham?

59:08I worry for our brother. Thanks, guys. Hope you all had a fantastic time off. I wanted to give you a chance to because this could be completely defamatory for all I know. Sure. I knew this would happen based on what I said. I knew this. And I knew Nathan here doesn't want to provide the full context in order to try to surprise, shock, not only Chris and Colin, but also the Sacred Symbols audience. And here's what I said. I saw Avatar fire and ash over break fire and ass fire and ass. And there is a character in this new film who is played by, I realized this the other day, Charlie Chaplin's granddaughter.

59:51I don't remember her name. Sorry. I'll look it up. But she plays kind of this crazy, uh somewhat evil una chaplain una that sounds right o o o n a una yeah it sounds it is her varang or varying varang is her character's name yeah she plays kind of this you know this crazy i think they're called navi uh in the avatar world you know what they're called come on i think i'm saying i'm saying if any men if you've seen this movie i never thought these avatar aliens were hot then i saw this movie and i was like you know what i can fix her you know she's got she's got something going on in this movie and what i said on some inside i was like listen if liking that character thinking that character is kind of hot from avatar if that makes me a furry then get me a diaper and a fursuit wow so be it so be it that's all i'm trying to say and i know listen i know you guys haven't seen the movie i know all the guys who've seen the movie they may not want to verbally agree with me or say it out loud but i know what they're thinking well and it's okay i will say it you'll say yeah i will say it you'll stand and you'll say it i'll stand and say it she was hot

1:01:43She's freaky huge so like i don't know maybe it's a china thing maybe china loves it oh dude the chinese that's what's gonna fund the next movie it's the chinese market or the just the asian market in general but yeah i saw it in dolby 3d incredible visually like i i will see any avatar movie in the best highest quality theater experience every time and i will never see it need to see it again you know and i think you're right chris it's like there's some parts of that movie i remember but i will quickly forget them there's some parts of the movie i don't know if you saw you probably saw way of water chris i did and dude some of the like when they're when they're swimming around in the water and there's like the the space whale and stuff the alien whale i was like wow yeah yeah no insane it's so cool what's funny about that is i remember i remember thinking that yeah but i don't remember i couldn't pull up a shot in my head of it you know what i mean i remember being like wow that's impressive and then it just kind of leaves me i don't know like i don't remember the names of the characters in that in that in that world like i don't know and i don't even say that it's like a hater i just i genuinely like i think they're good movies i just they're just like so uniquely i don't know like they completely fall out of me after i after i see them i'll just like any other movie the first 10 minutes of avatar is awesome yeah if it was all that like there's that shot of because i love the idea what's a pandora which is like it's like a totally forested like completely endor like planet or whatever and then they like cut out this or at least that part of the planet and then they cut out this territory for their land but it's just being totally like it's just it's it's just their little their little base and then just immediately the wild nature of it all like it was it's such a I know that's not the vision.

1:03:33I want something totally different out of Avatar, but I was like that whole visual of this humans or whatever, going to this planet and interacting. It just becomes so whimsical and weird, but there's a whole different direction. Yeah, it could have gone. So, but shout out to James Cameron. What a master. And the thing I love about James Cameron, I remember Dagan and I talking about this when we did, uh, must've been like the Terminator movies or something. It was like, he's only directed like, what is it like eight movies or something like that? It's like really interesting. Like he doesn't like, I think since Titanic, he's only done avatar which is crazy titanic was 30 years ago i love a person who becomes obsessed with like this one thing and i know that this was like his white whale well i know he always wanted to do this so it's cool i think he had like a dream about it or something like the same thing with terminator i think he was talking about how he had a dream like a chrome skeleton and firing he's like i gotta make that a movie and so like he's very like visual in that way yeah titanic made a titanic made a shit ton of money so he could just do whatever the fuck he wants so like i mean more props and avatar did too so you know oh my god he's fucking crazy rich like it's james cameron's interesting he's interesting i don't yeah i don't love his stuff generally like i like terminator or terminator 2 i think it's cool but honestly like titanic is like i get it the boat sinks whatever yeah and like avatar is like it's good but you know i don't know what i remember about titanic was because i saw it in the theater but I remember seeing it like a couple months after it came out in 97 or 98 I was in middle school oh did you get it spoiled oh yeah well yeah it was all spoiled but well that's what I was gonna say was that movie was such a fucking ever-present phenomenon that I feel like it was in theaters for literally like a year even in that era yeah like they would have one little theater off to the side playing Titanic a few times a day or whatever and it's like yeah I remember that movie just never ever going away and then of course it came to vhs it was on two tapes as i recall it was like one of those thick boys and i remember that like braveheart and a few others and that was 97 right yeah 97 i want to say yeah like late 97 early 98 maybe i think i was in eighth grade seventh or eighth grade something like that i was in private school yeah 1997 and uh yeah and it was like such a fun it was just such a crazy phenomenon and it is a really good movie it's a love story it's a soapish kind of love story it's like whatever but it's it's it's actually incredibly well made it's well shot it's well like there's nothing bad i can't say anything bad about it i just don't care i like the acting in it i like i like all the like i love all the stuff that's happened in the years since about how like people really focus in on the funny shit in the movie or like the weird shit in the movie like the um the guy like the i guess he's supposed to kind of be like the villain but um the redhead's like fiance or whatever he's kind of like the victim and a lot like a lot of it because she's like like there's all these like funny things about like making fun of that and then of course the old lady at the end throwing right what would be a what like a 50 million dollar stone or something like that into the yeah the ocean it's like what a dumb bitch the perfect metaphor for that generation also right exactly exactly that's like but she was like the silent generation yeah she's just like i think this wealth is better off at the bottom of the sea.

1:06:49I could start generational wealth from my entire bloodline for a thousand years. But instead of throwing it into the ocean. It is fucking insane. I love, there's a scene from that movie that I love that I used to use in videos all the time. There's a guy falling off the boat and he hits the propeller and then becomes a propeller himself, basically. And that was a violent shot. It was a violent shot, but it's so, I don't know, maybe it's just the way i don't know maybe this is the way things have or the way humor has evolved or whatever but that it's just removed from context it's a hysterical shot because like you really picked the worst trajectory and location to jump off this boat from my assumption about that shot and a few other things is like he was really studious apparently about you know the titan as he would be making a film and i think that's something someone saw which is like crazy you know yeah um like i remember as a kid not really understanding ships sink in all different ways but i didn't know like the ship goes sideways like perpendicular and it's like that's which is when that happens i'm like that's fucking nuts that that happened like that's so scary and then and then it just sucks everyone down because the the force of the displacement and all the rest so you can't even swim out of it and so it's like really scary it's crazy and it bothers me when you learn about it i was listening to a thing about the titanic on um the rest is history which is an exceptional podcast for anyone that's interested in the history podcast exceptional and uh the big thing is like many of the boats like the rest they didn't have enough for every like enough famously to like accommodate everyone but a lot of the boats were empty or like half empty because like especially men wouldn't get on them right because there could be room for more women and all sorts of other things because i guess what the argument they were making on the podcast was like it's looked at as a class thing and they really play that up in titanic the movie where it's like oh if you were people like locked in and if you were like under the under you know in like third class you weren't saved or whatever but they're like it really wasn't so much that as it wasn't more gender like more i guess per capita more first class men died than third class women which is interesting right yeah so including some really famous people like that we would like you know names you would know like you know big money names rockefeller or whatever just as an example right right right right it was like the was they like like a like a like a day the music died kind of thing right right it's exactly right and that's how uh on the day after that happens is when downton abbey begins because that's what downton abby's all about is about how the the heir of the downton like their fortune was on the titanic and died and so it's up in the air who gets it now oh is that real that's actually the premise of that's the premise of down abby yeah oh wow yeah so like there's this you never meet him but he's like one of the cousins is on the titanic and he dies and then the guy who has the money only has girls and and so like there's another cousin they don't know about and and that's kind of the beginning of down abbey comes about a bunch of other shit but that's that's how it begins all right it's time to go all right let's uh let's get into the news it's gonna be back with you guys doing the show i'm excited to be here all right there's a lot of news to get through i went back all the way to the you know to i think i started looking at news on the 18th or 19th so because we have to add a lot of things to the record and some important things some sad things some some vital things to know happen and i want i want to start here um right after we went away on break, Vince Sampella tragically passed in a car crash and Kilwin wrote in and said, happy new year's fellas.

1:10:36A lot of people wrote in about this, but he said, Vince Sampella sadly passed away just before Christmas. I've not really seen any coverage of his passing outside of a mention from a random YouTube video I watched. I wouldn't have known otherwise. Was he not as important as I thought? To me, he leaves behind quite the legacy from Call of Duty to Battlefield. and with the success of Battlefield 6 especially I thought I would have seen more thoughts and prayers well first of all when he died I mean it was all over social media you might not be on social media which is good but that's how I learned about it as well and so I saw websites writing about it and talking about it but I also unfortunately think he was victimized by timing like if Vince Zampella not to be flippant with it I'm not trying to be flippant with it at all if he had passed away and died in July, like there would have been time and space to for think pieces.

1:11:30And right. I don't know. I I've, I've said before, right at IGN, I doubt they had one for him, but we had like, we had pre-written things about people dying and like, we're ready to go. And like, you know, and how you would cover that specific specifically with like Miyamoto and big names like that. Um, and, uh, yeah, I, I don't, I don't know that people were ignoring it or not giving it enough enough time as the timing was butting up against Christmas and it just it's just sucks for that for that reason but let me read a little bit of this from the New York Times I wanted to find a a non-gaming entity that wrote about him so we can get a little bit more information about him so they wrote a piece called Vince Zampella, formative designer of Call of Duty games, dies at 55.

1:12:21And they write, Mr. Zampella co-founded two game studios and also worked on the Medal of Honor, Titanfall and Battlefield franchises. They write, Vince Zampella, a key figure in the creation of Call of Duty, the best-selling video game franchise that has reproduced World War II battles. I love like real writing about games, you know? Yeah. It's like it does a little bit more than that, but okay. Rift on modern global conflicts and imagine the technology future soldiers will wield has died. He was 55. His death was confirmed by Electronic Arts, which owns Respawn Entertainment. The studio of Mr.

1:12:50Zampella co-founded in 2010. It did not provide a cause. Now we have more information on the cause and we'll get into that. EA said in a statement, quote, Vince's influence on the video game industry was profound and far reaching. A friend, colleague, leader, and visionary creator, his work helped shape modern interactive entertainment and inspired millions of players and developers around the world. Mr. Zampella was instrumental in the development of the most popular first person military shooter games, including this year's Battlefield 6, a Call of Duty competitor. He was the general manager of Respawn, which was produced to Shooter's Titanfall in which players control giant robots and Apex Legends, a sci-fi battle royale.

1:13:22Among Mr. Zampella's earliest video game credits was Medal of Honor Allied Assault, which included missions to sabotage a German U-boat and storm Omaha Beach on D-Day.

1:13:33So he was a, and people can read, there's like more information. People had released some statements. I think Infinity Ward released a statement, his original company, obviously. Respawn released a statement. I think Treyarch released a statement because they work closely with Infinity Ward and still do. EA, Activision. So we got a lot of different statements and this is a horrible situation. This piece in New York Times was written before more news was known, but basically what ended up happening was he died in, what was it, a Ferrari or some nice sports car and there's footage of it, of him crashing the car, which is tragic and terrible.

1:14:11It's not mega violent. It's you can it's implied what happens, obviously. But he was driving through a tunnel way too fast, lost control of the car and crashed, killing both himself and a passenger. And it's an awful situation. I wonder if we have any reflections on Vincent Pella. I know we're a little late here, but I feel like it would have been disrespectful for us not to acknowledge his death. He is a very important person in games, I think incredibly important. I was thinking about it over the break. actually i was like is he one of the most let's see 25 most important people to ever be in games i mean i think that's pretty easy easy right could you go even lower than that probably but i think that that's worth a lot of respect in and of itself uh chris what are your thoughts here on the passing of ben sampella died at 55 yeah that's crazy man it's not even it's not even old so like it's it's tragic obviously so preventable too that's what makes it so sad also but I mean he's a very he's an important dude I mean like I think the Vince Zampella era of Call of Duty is where it was probably the best I think you know them going into Titanfall and Titanfall 2 is obviously like notable in and of itself and them shifting onto the Star Wars games which for Respawn was like a massive change and they kind of nailed it uh dude knew what he was doing so i mean it's it's uh yeah he's a he's the real deal sort of and it's uh i don't know it bums me out when shit like this happens because it's like dude cars are so deadly it's i don't think people appreciate how deadly cars are when they're like on the road like i know this intrinsically as a as somebody who's like kind of like queasy on planes like i don't love planes because they feel unsafe, but I'm like a lot more at ease in a car despite understanding that like this is probably like way.

1:16:03Oh, it is. It's like you're way more likely to die in a car crash, obviously. Yeah, yeah. So I don't know, man. It's tragic, especially dude. 55 is not old at all for, you know, for this industry. So like it's sad. What do you think, Dustin? You have anything you want to say about Vince Zampello? Yeah, obviously we've talked about him quite a few times on the show, whether it's at his work at Call of Duty or Respawn or now at Battlefield. But he isn't like necessarily a household name like Kojima or something like that. But as you pointed out, like clearly based on his work, one of the most influential people in gaming created, you know, or I guess created the games of the Call of Duty games that really set it on the path to becoming the, I mean, the biggest game franchise in the world.

1:17:03so huge respect there I feel terrible for his family obviously and especially this being like right before Christmas I mean it's having this happen anytime any day of the year would suck but yeah it's a reminder also for people to stay safe and your life is very valuable so try not to be too reckless with it because it's just it absolutely sucks. The video is horrifying. And as you said, Colin, it's not, it's not necessarily like graphic graphic, but the situation is just like, you just see, you see the video. I can just describe it. It's like, you know, at the mouth of a tunnel and his car just zooms out of the tunnel and then just crashes into like a couple seconds later.

1:17:55And like, as he's, he doesn't turn quickly enough into like, you know, a side rail or whatever. And it's like, when you see something like that, like, it's like, well, everyone's dead. I mean, there's just no way. Right. Right. That was confirmed to be the video. Cause I remember seeing some things about like, where it's like, that's a video from like years ago. Oh really? No, I thought it was. Cause I thought, well, I don't know. Oh, I don't know. I do want to verify. So I'll look it up. I don't, I just remember seeing that initially and being like, is that real? Like, cause I thought like, why would they be filming that?

1:18:19Well, I think people film that because I think a lot of people drive like that in that area, as I understand. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you could be right. I don't know, but but i mean it doesn't change the reality but like dude it um i will say it it does there are a few things that really piss me off quite like videos of people like just speeding through like traffic and shit like i don't know man it really upsets me yeah this is yeah this is the video i don't know if we're talking i mean not that we'll show it on the show right but it's like confirmed probably yeah I mean this is this has 246 ,000 views and people are just discussing it in the yeah fucking insane yeah it's insane and I mean yeah just it's so reckless obviously it's so unfortunate but could hit someone else too right that's exactly the thing it's like yeah that's what makes me mad yeah it's just yeah and every time because every time I see videos of like teenagers or whatever like doing this shit or like speeding through traffic I'm like death penalty I hate this I hate this I hate this person you're playing with other people so irresponsibly so like I don't know it's it's it's scary out there so be well be safe I mean Vince Vince is you know I I'll go into it a little bit for people that don't know but who like who this really is and like why he's why I think he's so important and I think it's not that I think he's so important he just was really important a lot of people I think overplay Vince Zampella's role in Medal of Honor.

1:19:56But what's interesting is that, because he didn't really work on the original Medal of Honor, I don't think. He worked on Allied Assault, which is, and he was the design director of Allied Assault. But he, I think, I think what ended up happening was like he was kind of working on Medal of Honor, but they were doing it externally. Medal of Honor, EA wanted to kind of bring back internally to their own assets and use their own assets to make the game. so he founds infinity ward i think to make what they would call the medal of honor killer which is hysterical because it was the medal of honor killer ultimately kill zone was halo killer but that was not ended up not killing halo at all this really did end up bodying medal of honor in a major way and so he was the producer of the original call of duty game and that's the big thing is that though he started as a design guy it's really production that is his forte and it's incredible i've said before he's obviously a creative person but production is inherently uncreative it's about it's about getting things done about facilitating the work of creatives about staying on task and delivering and so he rises up to executive producer of call of duty 2 which came out in 2005 and then modern warfare which is called duty 4 in 2007 is when call of duty becomes obviously as we all remember this massive phenomenon and at that point i think he became the ceo of infinity ward and all the rest but there's this whole chapter that people forget about because um what ends up happening is activision remember activision fires vince Sampella for like they buy infinity award, I think in 2008 and then ultimately Jason West, who's a name you don't really hear about anymore.

1:21:47Who was like Vince Sampella's like Lieutenant or like they were partners or whatever they found, ended up founding respawn later in 2010 because Activision fired them. And remember they sued Activision, I think for a billion dollars ultimately. And they said all this money was being, do you guys remember this shit at all happening? This was like a huge story back in the day. There's people forget that there was all sorts of drama between them. And so he ends up back with electronic arts and they signed the contract with EA, I think in 2011 for Titanfall, which will the game that would end up becoming Titanfall.

1:22:25And that comes out in 2014, Titanfall two and 16. And then EA buys Respawn in 2017. And then he's kind of incorporated into like the greater electronic art structure so that by the time like apex legends comes out in 2019 and then the jedi games come out 2019 2023 he's in a general management role so it's no overstatement to say that he might be the most important the single most important video game producer as a as like his discipline operations than any anyone else in the entire industry history like who else would it be like producer i'm not talking about a miyamoto that's got his hands all in design and and all that or a kojima like an auteur but like or ken levine who's deep in the weeds with the game i'm talking about like a producer and so i think like he i mean that's that's a no joke run of games all the call of duty games through modern warfare 4 and then titanfall titanfall 2 apex legends the Jedi survivor games and then it all caps off with Battlefield six.

1:23:41Pretty impressive. Yeah. So from that perspective, you know, that the industry has lost a great talent who knew what he was doing. And as you said, 55 isn't the youngest, but like that's a guy with 20 more years in him of work, probably if you wanted to. So there was more to do. And that's a huge loss for EA. I'm also, and I can't help but think about this, and this is just me being honest, is like with the deal being approved by EA shareholders to sell to the Saudi Wealth Fund and Vince no doubt being deeply vested into EA in his role at a high level, it is my sincere and deep hope that that transfers to his family, which I assume it would because that's a lot of fucking money probably in what i would assume is the tens of millions of dollars easily

1:24:39so r.i.p in peace vince dampella i want to make sure everyone knows who this isn't far from an r.i.p bozo situation and by the way i think a lot of other things that people people are saying like well why aren't more people talking about it i i think like i said the timing matters but i wonder if you guys also agree it's what you were saying, Dustin, like he kind of he's responsible for this himself. If what seems to have happened, like what we've has been reported is true. And I think people more take towards things where people are victimized. Right. So I think there would have been a lot more if he was like T-boned by someone or something like that.

1:25:22But I think that like the conversation around it can only go so far because then it becomes about like blaming the victim. Yeah. I don't know if that's true or not, but that's kind of my, my theory of the case. Anyway, thank you all for writing in about this and, you know, our deep and sincere thoughts are with the Zampella family and all of his people. I was thinking about, I was reading, I was trying to read about like Jason West left respawn before Titanfall even came out and he's just gone. And I wonder if he's one of the guys that's like, I have enough, you know like we we did all these early call of duty games i founded infinity ward we sold infinity ward we founded respawn i still own a piece of respawn and then we ended up selling it later it's like i don't need to do this anymore just a different different level of drive tens of millions of dollars easy in his bank account i would lose motivation too but i don't know that for sure i just was wondering what happened to him gemini didn't know

1:26:28gemini never knows gemini doesn't seem to know much of anything though yeah all right the big story of the week in my opinion is a story that's not being covered by very many mainstream outlets and i was wondering why this is and i feel like it's to protect their relationships if i'm being honest with uh companies like sony but i saw this and this comes from tom's hardware the website tomshardware.com playstation 5 rom keys leaked jailbreaking could be made easier with boot ROM codes. And they write in the subhead, you still won't get a jailbroken PlayStation 5 with this leak, but it will make it easier for hackers to compromise the console's bootloader.

1:27:06It says here, quote, the PlayStation 5's ROM keys have allegedly been leaked, meaning anyone who can get their hands on the hex strings now has the hardware code that will allow jailbreakers to try decrypting and analyzing the console's bootloader. According to the CyberSec guru, this is an unpatchable problem for Sony because these keys cannot be changed and are burned directly into the APU. The only way that the company can invalidate the leaked codes is to replace the chips on yet-to-be-manufactured units, meaning consoles that are already in the wild could possibly take advantage of future jailbreaks stemming from the use of these leaked codes.

1:27:37When you turn on the PS5, its CPU runs the boot ROM code that's baked into the chip and uses the ROM keys to ensure the bootloader is valid. Now that the ROM keys have been leaked and assuming they are valid, a hacker could then decrypt and study the official bootloader and potentially use that as a starting point to understand the PS5's boot system works, how it works. Since the issue is at a hardware level, Sony would not be able to release an update that will stop consoles with the compromised chip from loading kernel level exploits in the future should one become available. Note that this leak does not automatically mean that we will see jailbroken PS5s on the market right now, especially as Sony has other security measures that hackers need to bypass.

1:28:13However, the appearance of these codes means that one of the biggest security features of the console has likely already been compromised, making it easier for those working on creating custom firmware to have a deeper understanding of how the console works and use that knowledge to maybe build a modified or even totally different operating system for it. Dustin, I asked you in our chat on Discord and our channel to look into this if you hadn't already and kind of explain it to everyone because I kind of gloss over when I read this sort of stuff, but this is a pretty big piece of news because the PlayStation 5 is now officially more vulnerable than ever to being jailbroken, which could have massive ramifications for Sony, for the PlayStation Network, and for things like trophies.

1:28:57And the most fascinating part of this to me, and I don't know if you read about this at all, but is apparently this all revolves around a copy, a physical copy on PS4 of a Star Wars racing game that is from the PlayStation 2 era that runs a PS2 emulator that the exploit uses to gain access to this information. And this has obliterated the price of this game, apparently, in aftermarkets, which is hysterical. So pretty interesting. Explain it to us more deeply. And what do you think? Well, I don't know if I can explain it too, too deeply just because this is I don't want to speak at a turn about something i don't fully know but basically explain it deeply explain it on a very very uh minute level uh basically my understanding of this is that the play the ps5 and i mean consoles in general they try to be as locked down as possible so you can't access the firmware in order to make modifications of it and with this boot rom or the the hex string or whatever being leaked it now opens up that people can get in and take a deeper look at you know as the article mentions how the ps5 operates um and eventually run custom firmware i would assume is the end goal uh thus you have a jailbroken console this happened with nintendo switch uh some of you may remember there was basically an exploit that people found that was baked into the nvidia hardware on it where you could use like a paper clip and it was if these two on the joy cons on one of the sides if the two ends were connected specifically when turning it on or something like that it would it would load into this like hardware safe mode where then people can figure out how to make custom firmware and opened up all kinds of switch hacking some for good some not so good and so that sounds like that's what could happen here and it was the same problem for nintendo is that eventually nintendo did the hardware revision and got rid of this so uh for a while i don't know if this is still the case in the switch hacking scene but those launch units and like first year or two had a certain value to them because they were hackable.

1:31:32And then after that point, they were not. And so as this article points out, there is nothing that Sony can do to fix this other than release, change these codes on new hardware. So at this point with how many PS5s are out, Sony is probably desperately figuring out and making sure that the other security measures that they have in place are as strong as possible because, I mean, knowing the hacking community, they will figure this out and figure out a way to get into the system, run custom firmware, and be able to do all kinds of things. Yeah. So the original story comes from the CyberSec guru, which they cited in the Tom's hardware story.

1:32:22The reason I use the Tom's hardware story was it was just shorter and much less technical. But if you read the CyberSec gurus.com's article about it, they basically say like the chain of trust is basically broken. Like because they have, there's all these other security features, but it's just basically a matter of time because like you said, they'll figure it out. And what's interesting, and I was reading a little bit more about it and they have some information is like, you'll remember the PS3 was broken open fairly quickly. it was i think after three years we're at five years in the ps5 uh fail overflow remember that and like ps3 was just completely cracked and uh it sucked because they it caused as they note here like a shit ton of cheating and piracy and stuff on ps3 um the ps4 was never jailbroken and still isn't apparently jailbroken they write here um quote while we have kernel exploits we never got a full boot ROM leak that compromised every device permanently.

1:33:23The PS4 scene relies on finding older firmware consoles to run exploits. So you need to find, and I don't know, like I remember especially PSP games used to have the firmware built in to the UMDs. And I assume there are PS4 games with also the firmware boot like loaded into it. So you could find an older game to load, I guess, version nine or whatever you need of the PSN. So they were kind of, they kind of got away from this and the Vita famously was really resistant to until the Vita was basically irrelevant by the time that they actually cracked it open. So this is happening and it's something worth keeping an eye on.

1:34:02Chris, did you get a chance to look into this or do you have any thoughts that you'd like to share about it? No, I mean, dude, like they're talking about like hex strings and shit i'm like i i'm out of my depth with this one i gotta be real but it is interesting that it's happened i guess already and i i guess it's interesting that it's happening at like at such a level that it just can't be it can't really be addressed with software and so there's like millions and millions of units that are kind of open to this i wonder how easy it let it would end up being to jailbreak because like some of these machines are very easy to jailbreak like i remember the psp was like at least in my experience i don't know how like i don't know how actually difficult it is but like with with some pretty easy help i jail broke my psp um oh yeah the psp was fucked and it didn't take that long at all um but i guess it's interesting that it's happening to like i guess a piece of hardware that is so central and so primary in focus uh you'd assume that they would have to address this some some way right yeah i well i mean the hardware level it is what it is i mean i guess they can redeploy new hardware and fix it moving forward but this is what i was telling mike and i were talking about it and i'm like the reality is is that even if ps5 sells to ps4 levels which i think it will so like 120 million ish or whatever basically two-thirds of the consoles are in the wild and are like it can't be fixed so there's more work to be done um i won't get into the technical ramifications of it either because i don't understand things but i will say this and i i remember saying this about switch um piracy and other things is like there i i'm of two minds with this stuff i think it's cool that people work to exploit things and figure out why things and how to break things and why things are broken um and that's always going to happen with a technical minded group of people buying things and just and tinkering with them eventually you're going to figure out a way to to fool it and and it's weird like they figured out a way to do people it's so complicated that they had to use a ps4 physical version of a ps2 game ported over using this emulator and it's so like it's all of this weird shit that has to happen um and i think that that's neat yeah I think it's what you decide to do with it that matters.

1:36:26And I guess this gets into things that I don't really understand too deeply, like white hat, gray hat, black hat, hacking and all the rest. And it reminds me of there. I don't remember exactly what it was, but you guys might recall like a year or two ago, like these guys that I guess would be considered gray hat. Were. Figured out something really catastrophic about Google. I don't remember what it was. Do you guys remember this? like there was like there was like these guys that were like we we found this like massive exploit and they told google and i think we're like paid and that's kind of the thing i want to see you know like right because i don't know what you i guess you get credibility and whatever from leaking this sort of thing but you're basically ruining the ecosystem at that point trophies are going to be corrupted online play for all the games is going to be corrupted people are going to be able to play a ultimately free versions of any game they want because they won't be able to verify the digital rights this is what happened with vita ultimately create like on vita as i've said many times they constructed a facsimile of the playstation store but everything's free like that's destructive and disrespectful sure and i'm not into it i believe as i've said many times that emulate first of all emulation is not illegal it's like what you do with it that's legal.

1:37:49I get it. And I also think that emulating old things is generally fine. If you're emulating an Apple II game or a fucking NES or S, who cares? I mean, I do think that matters. I do think proximity to value matters. I do think if something's on the market and is easily accessible matters. I think all these things matter. I think when people say like it's A or B, I'm like, no, it's not. You have to think about all these different constituent facts. And in fact, I think in a lot of ways, like Switch, having such a robust online ecosystem of old games, almost nullifies even having to like use an NES emulator in a lot of ways but nonetheless like whatever but when you're dealing with newer shit that's taking money out of people's mouths and ruining things that are currently on the market that people are using right now it's not some sort of oddity like some old oddity that you can still mess with I think it's fucked up and I think it's wrong and it doesn't matter what I think about the morals of it because it's going to happen anyway but like it's what i said remember when we talked about metroid and zelda and people getting these games early like that's wrong that's theft it's not some gray area and i think it's kind of corny to be proud of doing shit like that i'll just reiterate that like being like yeah i don't i play switch and i don't buy anything it's like wow you're a fucking loser.

1:39:08Like that's I'm sorry. It's not like you're playing the master system and you have like an emulator with the master system. It's like it's like what are you doing? Why do you think that that's OK? It's brazen theft. So again, I think the technical stuff is really interesting. I think it's great. Like I know that there are major companies like Uber and others that like literally pay people to try to break their shit all the time. I know Tesla does that with their self-driving features or whatever it's cool that people are like working on the edges and are and have like nefarious abilities but it's like it's like doing something with them that's positive or worthwhile that doesn't ruin something for everyone else so you can get a little bit of credibility i don't like it so that's where i stand in other words if you're playing an emulated ps5 in like 5 10 or 15 years it's like i don't know man that like but it's the now that matters right and like what it means for everyone else's experiences as they said on ps3 and i remember this like once that ps3 exploit happened like online games on ps3 were fucked you had to just trust that that wasn't happening but it was happening and it is happening micah was saying even uh she logged into something an older call of duty game i think on xbox one and it was just totally fucked oh yeah it's the older call duty games the older call duty i think i remember playing like modern warfare 2 like the original modern warfare 2 online i think maybe a handful of years ago like maybe three years ago and it's just i mean it's interesting like it's fascinating from like a david attenborough perspective you know i've just kind of like this ecosystem is completely fucked you know but it ain't a game no more really um so i don't know it's i i agree with you i think it's cool i think it's kind of interesting i think it'd be unfortunate if it like ultimately got blown open and led to a deteriorate deleterious effect on the overall ecosystem but i also got to be real i look at this and i see like if i was watching a hacker movie and somebody said hex strings i would be like the writers of this movie don't know shit probably like that sounds fake as fuck yeah that's not real that's not a real bootloader get out of here sounds like an insult angel of cake wrote in and said welcome back sacred gents any thoughts on the rom keys for ps5 being leaked online with the homebrew community about to enable widespread piracy piracy how do you think sony will react their reaction to the vita being hacked in this way wasn't exactly inspiring have a great week um they've already reacted in one way which which is noted in both stories that i linked to um or the tom's hardware story which links to the other story anyway, which is that they have responded and that they've, they've, um, filed copyright like strikes against these things on social media.

1:42:03Like, so it's real. That's the unfortunate reality of any sort of corporate reaction. It's, it's like when, uh, we got in trouble for the Tomb Raider stuff with square and we had to take it down. It's like, well, okay, but it's real. you know um so it's the same thing here where there's i i am sure this is an urgent issue behind the scenes and i imagine they will fix it fix it on a manufacturing level but i don't know what else they can do like you were saying dustin they i guess they can do some things to like sure up firmware level things but it's not going to matter and people will just i think the major thing here is I think just staying disconnected from PSN, I guess.

1:42:48I mean, because they'll be much more aggressive this time around. People used to get away with a lot of shit back in the day on PSP, PS3, even Vita. I don't know that you're going to get away with shit anymore if you're connected to these machines and maybe that will keep things relatively clean, or at least people will be smart enough in quotes to not log into their names. But even then, like they can be found with IP. Like, I just think, I think the best way for Sony to, to, I think Sony should be aggressive in pursuing people that are doing this sort of shit, ban their PSNs. If they log in with them, you know, um, people that are ruining the experience for everyone else.

1:43:23This is what I always say about cheating and like why cheating and like single player games and multiplayer games is so different. It's like, I guess, I guess cheat in the single player game. If you want, I mean, I don't care, but the multiplayer game shouldn't be doing that. And, um, so we'll see what happens. but I'm sure Sony is going to be quite aggressive in dealing with this. All right, guys, what do you think of this? We're getting new DualSense colors and PS5 covers. Oh, an interesting. So some people are connecting this indeed, these colors, red, green, and blue, and I think reasonably so to Marathon, although I don't think they're doing it literally in the marketing.

1:44:00So if you go to PlayStation blog, they write, revealing the Hyperpop collection with three new designs for PS5 accessories launching this March. That's, of course, when Marathon comes out as well. The colors are called Techno Red Remix Green and Rhythm Blue. And they, quote, introduce a new vibe to DualSense wireless controllers and PS5 console covers. You can go check these out. I mean, how am I going to describe colors to you? They're a gradient. They're a gradient. They'd start off bottom of the controller as the color and then it darkens out to black at the top. There is an important detail about these, Colin.

1:44:32Go ahead. in this uh in this write-up and you can tell from the trailer too or the the video these are high gloss finish so i said on our discord perfect for uh genshin impact players because they're used to their controller feeling sticky right right right right amen and so i think these look really cool i would never use a high gloss controller ever just feels gross so total miss for me not that i need another controller uh the plates are cool these are dude you were saying these are marathon i was thinking weezer no yeah sure they got the red right you know the weezer has claimed red green blue yeah that's them that's there yep rgb that's that's so weezer that's so weezer dude you need the weezer blue i was thinking when i see when i first looked at it i thought playstation xbox and nintendo oh although it's a different green so it's not it's not quite the right green yeah it's a little light the i think i'm gonna i don't need a controller either but i think i'm gonna buy the blue one i'll see when when it comes but you might be right about the the material or the feel of it i don't know maybe i won't like it is it a high gloss finish or is it or is that just like the render because i know these aren't yeah this is not real no well i mean well i mean the the plates are rendered properly so like there's no gloss on the plate yeah here's a it's a weird line from the playstation blog says a seamless gradient wraps around the front back the dual sense finished in a high gloss coat that makes the colors pop more than ever yeah um the controllers are going to be 85 usd and the covers are available in limited quantities and will be available for$75.

1:46:21You can get them at direct.playstation.com. Pre-orders begin January 16th for a March 12th launch. So look forward to it if you'd like. Now, there is a problem here and a lot of people are not happy with this. Tref Roth wrote in to express this. He says, greetings, sacred sirs. Curious to hear your thoughts on PlayStation's new Hyperpop collection. while I do find the color scheme eye-catching and unique and love the effort to continue to update design so far into a console cycle. I'm curious as to why Sony continues to refuse to release plates for the pro, leaving their most enthusiastic fan base high and dry.

1:46:52Why won't they let me give them my money? What could they be thinking over there? I can't stand having this giant white hideous monstrosity sitting in my living room or living space. Would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks so much for the crazy amount of content over the break. Keep it up. Thank you for writing in. This is funny because if you go to the comments on the playstation blog the first seven eight nine ten the first ten comments are about how there's no ps5 pro option and you would think with limited now listen i get it there are what we're talking about like 90 ish million ps5s in the wild maybe what three four million of them at the most are pro units, something like that.

1:47:36I understand the idea of like, we're not going to sell many of them, but you already say you're going to have limited quantities of the plates for the regular PS5, just have a much more limited quantity for the pro. You would think you would want to press them. Those are your most hardcore people that want to spend money. So it is a little bit of a miss. And I do understand that. And I don't know what the point is of not supporting the pro like that. But I feel your frustration and sort of the people on the PlayStation blog who are all commenting about that as well. And maybe Sony will see it and do something about it.

1:48:07But I'm sure they have the numbers where it's like, we're going to sell. But again, it's like, how many are you going to really sell anyway? 10 ,000 units or whatever. Just make it. Yeah, it's a little strange. But I'll keep an eye on those blue, the blue one when the time comes. The hyper, the what is it? The hyper pop collection? Jeez, man. I don't know. I don't know about that. I'm writing it down now. Hyper pop collection. They're going to write that word again. All right. Did we talk about this before we went on break? So we talked about it being possibly true. Okay. Because I talked about it, I think.

1:48:47I can't remember what episode it was. But I talked about how there were, there was rumblings that he wasn't, that this was true. Okay. So, okay. So this, so yeah, because the date is the day our podcast went live. I think the last podcast we recorded. So the game posts, which we cite more and more often these days, writes Bungie veteran Joseph Cross appears to no longer be Marathon's franchise director, franchise art director, I should say. Right. And so they realized based on a LinkedIn update that Joseph Cross had left at some point. and I think actually Kotaku got a comment because Kotaku wrote a story citing the game post and and all the rest but then they actually ended up endeavoring to get a comment which he did they did and he said I'm super proud of the project marathon and what the team accomplished over the last six years and quote to them so there's that and he shared a clip of marathon with them or whatever.

1:49:50I don't know. So this basically is important, just relevant because Joseph Cross was the art director of Marathon under which there was this art theft fiasco. And apparently, though, he left on his own accord. Maybe it was more of a mutual thing. I don't really know. And yeah, it's a sad situation, but I think a necessary one. A lot of the work is done. The game is slated to come out in March. Joseph Cross, I was reading a little bit about him. He actually worked at Visceral on Dead Space 2 and 3. And he is a concept artist by trade, which is interesting. So he rose to the ranks of art director as a concept artist, which is not unheard of, but interesting.

1:50:30And then he was a concept artist on Destiny. So after Visceral didn't close up because they were working on a game after that, obviously, after Dead Space 3. But with Amy Hennig, actually, as we remember. but he leaves after Dead Space 3 ends up at Respawn. I'm sorry, not Respawn. He ends up at Bungie for Destiny, which comes out in 2014. And then he rises to concept art lead for Destiny 2. So after Destiny 2 comes out, I guess he works on Destiny 2 for a year or two. And then he's given the marathon, the secret marathon project at that point. He was there for a long time in an executive role.

1:51:12So I'm sure he was vested during the Sony acquisition. And so monetarily, I think he's probably in pretty good shape. I don't know him personally. I have nothing against him. I don't think he did anything. How do I put this? A game like Marathon is sourcing art from so many different sources and they have to audit the art better. But if you're being lied to, is it really like your responsibility? In other words, if he knew that's different. and if you really would expect him to know i guess that's a fair assumption but maybe blaming it on him is a little much as well maybe blame it on the person who did it you know well the person who did it was no longer at bungie at the time right that's right that's true i think uh yeah i don't know how i feel about this really because like joseph cross is a really good artist like he's like his stuff is very it's very design is republic it's very wipe out i mean that's that's an entire style that he's cultivated for years i mean there was art of him that looks like marathon looks today that he made in like like 2013 or something so he's this aesthetic has been with him for a long time and i'm kind of with you in the sense of like man like i i get why you have to step down in some way because it's like yeah i mean this this did happen under your watch i personally don't think he knew because so here's the thing right he was following the artist on his public Twitter account.

1:52:39Interesting, yeah. Interesting. And this was art that was stolen in like 2017 from this Twitter artist, Antireel. I don't know about you, but if I was trying to steal art and was brazen about it, or I was just like, yeah, we're going to steal this art, whatever, as the art director of this new IP.

1:53:04The least I would do is... eliminate any trace yeah you know what i mean like it just doesn't it doesn't strike me as something that was intentional it seems like i could see him following the artist and being like and giving like a a general kind of like a vision board type thing to like the art team being like these are this is the type of art that we're looking for for marathon it's it's i can't remember what the artist art style is called but it's like it's designers republic it's this kind it's wipe out it's this we're looking for this in a in like a sci-fi tone this is an artist anti-real this is an artist this is an artist um flesh out this idea and someone just fucking ripped it it's crazy for that person i i wonder what that person's got going on like i wonder if they're like blacklisted in some way because they know who did it right right right they know who did it because they singled it out and so i don't know how i feel about this because i think i think he's a good art director he slipped up in a way that he definitely shouldn't have and i think there should be consequences for that in some way but like it it is it is kind of a bummer because this is the art director which means you know if there's going to be future marathon content which there should be if it's a live service it's not really going to have that guiding hand although i guess i would imagine the whole team is kind of up to speed on what marathon's supposed to look like and so maybe it's not that big of a deal but i don't know he's been at bungee for a while uh so i don't really know how i feel about it i think there should be consequences but i i kind of don't think he's really the villain here so i don't know i'm kind of iffy about it yeah i agree with your sentiment that and i say it all the time like the buck has to stop somewhere sure ultimately leadership is responsible in the in the in the real world for bad things that happen under them i agree with spiritually responsible right exactly but like i don't look at him and be like what did you do kind of thing it's like yeah you kind of had a fall on your sword and you take if you're again if you're and i don't want to speak out of turn about him but just knowing his history and again the vesting at Bungie and all the rest like he's got a lot of money I'm sure and like at some point it's like yeah just fall on the sword and yeah and move on everyone knows what time it is I don't think it's like a the end of the world the the person was compensated for their work which is good and and they got to audit all I mean so what my assumption is is that he probably stayed through the audit of the art and then once that was good then he probably was like all right it's time to go now and that was maybe the right thing to do so So, but a lot of work on a lot of unnecessary work and strain.

1:55:31And I do wonder how much they had to pay as well. Yeah, because they smooth things over with the artist too. So like, I wonder if that was like, what kind of compensation that was. Yeah, I don't know. Because they said the bungee marathon art thing is solved to my satisfaction or something like that. They use those kinds of words. Antireal. So curious what that deal was, if anything. Money. I'm sure it was money. Lots of money. I wonder how much. Yeah, I wonder. I do wonder how much, too, because it's probably not as much as you would think, but a lot. You know, like, I don't think it would be in the millions or something like that.

1:56:08No, but it's probably like in the hundreds of thousands. That's my that's my guess. It's like, yeah, yeah. Something like that. All right. Let's see. Joseph Cross be well. I know you're a big listener.

1:56:26All right. Oh, man. I thought this was an interesting story from GT Planet, the website GT Planet dot net, which is a long time Gran Turismo website. And we cite them every once in a while. But they wrote here right before Christmas. And so we're getting to it now because, again, we haven't recorded in a while. Gran Turismo 7 has two million monthly active users and it's still growing. They write during an interview at the Gran Turismo World Series 2025 World Finals here in Fukuoka, Japan. Series producer Kazunori Yamauchi revealed that Gran Turismo 7 is currently maintaining an active user base of over 2 million monthly players.

1:57:00And perhaps more impressively, that number is still growing. The disclosure made during a roundtable interview with select media, including GT Planet, comes at a peak moment for the franchise, following the recent announcement that the Gran Turismo series has officially surpassed 100 million copies sold worldwide. While most titles see a steady decline in players years after launch, GT 7 appears to be defying the traditional industry lifecycle. According to Yamauchi, the game's current momentum is unlike anything Polyphony Digital or Sony has seen before. He said in the interview, quote, Gran Turismo 7 has been released for several years, but still the active users are currently over 2 million people and the New Year's users are increasing.

1:57:37The status that Gran Turismo 7 is in now is probably the best of any Gran Turismo titles that we've seen in the past. We've never experienced this phenomenon before and neither has PlayStation, end quote. what makes this particularly notable is that the growth is occurring without the traditional price drop strategy typically used to rejuvenate older titles yamiuchi attributed this longevity to the studio's evolving relationship with its community and a shift in how it supports long-term titles or titles long-term a process that began with the update structure of gran turismo sport so um the what they're just what they're referring to here is that gt gets a lot of paid updates that are big but they got a lot of free updates too um and the game is just constantly being fed wheat then wrote in little wheat then a little wheat then says welcome back cdc over the break grand turismo creator and producer kazanori yamauchi had an interesting interview kaz discussed how gt7 is attracting 2 million active users and that number is continuing to grow almost four years after release he also had this notable quote quote we've never experienced this phenomenon on before and neither has PlayStation end quote.

1:58:40Sony executives are surely analyzing this data given their live service woes. Do you think some aspects of GT sevens model could guide decision making going forward or is this a unique situation in general? What live service features do you think best promote player retention? I'll hang up and listen. It's funny, Dustin, because I was thinking about this and I was like, is this why Gran Turismo seven was purportedly canceled for PC? like you know how there was there were rumors like this seems like such an obvious PC release and then there were rumors you know who knows if they're they're supported or not but that they've kind of pulled back on that idea and is it because it's doing so well um and continuing to grow and nurture an audience and it's it's vital to playstation and the playstation hardware got my mind going but they they do technically have this third live service pillar that's really doing well for them and you know obviously hell divers is killing um we have mlb the show which is perpetually doing well and and then gran turismo so maybe we're not giving them enough credit that they're actually succeeding pretty well in the pay in the paid online space nonetheless yeah i i think it's probably a bit of a unique situation when we're talking about live service success um i think part of it why this particular grand turismo game gt7 is more successful is that their biggest competitor in the console space is gone with forza forza horizon exists of course yeah for some word of sports they announced that recently right that it's just kind of we we had to like we know that they're they shut the studio down basically but that now the game's not getting any updates apparently it's kind of right and i i i mean i'm speaking a little bit out of my ass right now just because i i don't know this for sure but it I would assume that those hardcore racing sim people, a lot of them, I remember years ago, I guess this was more in the Xbox 360 era about how people were more into Forza than GT at the time for a while, which GT did lag behind for a while.

2:00:49I guess this was before that because there was the PS3 game that came out after the PS4. Yeah. That was Gran Turismo 6. Yeah. so it was lagging a bit in terms of what hardware was on eventually they got gt sport um so i wonder if so many of those people that um then with forza going away their options were either to switch to pc with something like i racing which is obviously huge as well uh but i'm assuming they just picked up a lot of forza fans along the way as well not saying that's the only reason it's doing so well but it's something to consider it's part of the equation and uh the other thing too is just gt7 is really really good and even for someone like me who's not into these games just spending i probably put 20 ish hours into gran turismo 7 a few years back and while i can't understand or appreciate the minutiae i can understand looking around like man this game is insanely high quality and the attention to detail uh across the board from the cars the tracks being able to modify your cars the different modes and settings the vr mode which is amazing in this game clearly and i tried gt sport uh back on the ps4 and i was like whatever but clearly gt7 is a cut above and they're seeing the player base because of it evolve and we even got a write-in a few weeks ago because there was like a big update and someone was asking us about it and so it's one of those games i think it's also kind of a i don't want to say a sleeper hit but it's one of those games where like uh my good friend that you guys hear about all the time brandon his ex-girlfriend's dad uh huge gt fan like talked about gt had the racing wheel setup so i feel like is this like the low-key dad game that people buy you said that i was thinking it's funny because like my my ex-girlfriend's dad was also in the gran turismo and like forza and those like specific the exact permutation right people that aren't listening to the show people that aren't posting on social media or reading game stories they're just the the it's not a casual game but it's for a casual market if that makes sense yeah because it's like it is like the anti-casual and that's not arcadey but yeah it's so real and grounded that i think it's going to attract a lot of people from it's like a sports game really no no different i mean it's i don't mean that as an insult it's really no different than a sports game by the way a big thing too that i forgot about they did that my first gran turismo thing which was which was probably and i'm surprised that that's not being brought up more but that's uh yeah that came out about a year ago i want to say and it's a free-to-play version of grand grand turismo seven that i wonder it's got 18 cars three tracks well i wonder if that's kind of helping bring people in yeah i think it's a number of different factors i think if i'm not mistaken is this not the first also to my knowledge or the first modern grand turismo that's also kind of concurrent like is there is there a ps4 version of this there is i think yeah yes yeah as far as i know there's that's not true for six no it's not yeah that's that's a good point yeah yeah so what you're saying cross-platform i don't think there is any other cross-platform for gran turismo that's a good point so you've got everybody on ps4 and you've got ps5 and you've got like the the fact that it's kind of an underserved genre you really only in console you really only have forza and gran turismo is if you're really serious about it and there's the vr functionality that like kind of takes people into it a little bit more like a lot more people are more serious about the racing wheel like in that kind of genre than than anybody else would be serious about any other peripheral you know um it's akin to like fighting sticks but i would imagine yeah i would have to imagine that that cross-platform kind of concurrent support is a massive factor in this yeah i'm looking now it's funny man that's a great point it is the only cross cross-generation gran turismo and i'm just looking the the most the highest rated gran turismo game outside of the original which has a 96 on metacritic is a spec and i remember how big that game was man but like that that game was so big on ps2 and it sold 14 million copies which in the ps2 era is nuts that's like that's like grand auto level numbers in that era 14 million if that game was released today that's the equivalent of selling like 50 million copies you know like something insane um that is that is obnoxious but yeah a spec was uh that was a i i remember it came out that first summer the ps2 was out like 2001 and um god people loved it just so but i'm so bad at gran turismo i i want to play arcade style racers if anything and i really don't want to play card games at all but um yeah it's just not for me i've told you guys before how like i was there was um a female japanese producer of studio japan games and polyphony games or whatever that was just kind of a liaison and i remember her she was the woman that laughed at me when I was playing Bloodborne about how bad I was at it and she was laughing at me when I was playing Gran Turismo once it was probably GT5 PS3 game and yeah that weird GT that was so weird GT6 was so weird I don't know why they did that like they released PS4 it's not backwards compatible and then they release in December a PS3 Gran Turismo game just stranded complete waste very weird yeah all right gran turismo polyphony keep it up they're apparently working on a new gran turismo i do wonder um and by the way those rumors always circulate because they're always seen we've talked about this many times they're always seen at random places doing weird shit like the people like taking pictures of fucking hubcaps and shit yeah it's a bunch of japanese He's mad with cameras at at a at a car manufacturing plant.

2:07:01It's like, yeah, let me let me see the nuts and bolts on this thing. Let me photograph this with my DSLR. Yeah, we'll show you the nuts. Got some nuts for you, boy. Yeah, I appreciate that level of obsessiveness. I think it's awesome. Yeah, like it's cool that you it's like the sports guys being obsessed with their their craft. It's like, yeah, that's good shit. Like the the MLB, the show team is really maybe not surprising, obsessed with baseball. Like if you go to San Diego studio, they love baseball. They fucking love it. And that's what you want. Of the people that are making their game. So it's cool that they do that.

2:07:33Can you imagine a fresher hell if you were working on, if you were working on MLB, the show and you didn't give a fuck about baseball, you're animating like whatever, all this shit. And you're just like, this sucks. You're just sitting here like, who cares? Yeah. I wanted to make Klonoa three. But I work in San Diego and they're only so they can work at psionics. they can work at San Diego studio and just a couple of others. So we, or whatever they're called now daybreak. All right. Um, I thought this was interesting just because we're excited about this game. I think, although we don't know much about it and it doesn't really exist yet, but Kojima wrote his little new year message on new year's Eve on Twitter.

2:08:16And he talked a little bit about physics. So I thought I would just throw this in here. And he says, quote, happy new year in 2026. We will move forward with the second phase that leads into Kojima production's third phase. What do you say? Unlike last year, unlike last year, like I was traveling all over the world, this year will be about staying grounded and laying solid foundations. We will continue development on the horror game OD and move forward with preparations for the espionage action title Fizzin. This includes casting actors, scanning, and performance capture shoots. Also, we will be pushing forward with the live action film Death Stranding, as well as its animation projects, both the movie and series.

2:08:53In addition, we're preparing several events this year. Once things are finalized, I'll be able to share more. This year also marks my 40th anniversary in the games industry. Excuse me, from 1986 and began my journey in game creation. Thank you as always for your continued support and supporting Kojima Productions. I look forward to another great year. And then there's a horse emoji. Yeah. So the big thing here for us is I think OD is obviously going to be coming to PlayStation. We'll keep an eye on that. but uh preparations for the espionage title fizzin including casting actors scanning and performance capture shoots chris who should be in fizzin i don't know anything about it yeah just get just get every just get everybody you worked with before who cares uh i mean this it this is so how i don't know how to gauge this really because i'm excited for it i'm looking forward to it i don't know what the fuck it is they said like i think the initial teaser was something like it's kind of like film also you know that was the idea that it was like merging oh od mediums yeah yeah are you talking about od well fizzin wasn't that the whole thing it's like because then they have that oh i see what you're saying with with uh the sony pictures component of it right right right okay yeah yeah yeah yeah i think because i think the announcement was them in like on like a yeah they were on the set they were on a studio lot right yeah so So I mean, I don't know.

2:10:16Like I trust whatever this is going to be. I'm looking forward to hearing more about it, but I can't in good conscience be excited for it right now. Like this is completely metaphysical as far as I'm concerned. But I mean, this wording is so funny. The second phase and our third phase. Like what are you saying? Yeah, I'm already lost. Yeah, he's like obviously if there's a second phase, I assume there will be a third phase. I don't think you go right to the fourth phase. Right. Or is he saying it's the second phase? I don't like the way this is written at all. Well, I think what he might be saying is that the third phase will begin this year.

2:10:57So the second phase continues and the third... I don't know. Who cares? Right, whatever. Who gives a shit? I'm looking forward to it. In Kojima, I trust. I'm excited about whatever it is he's working on. I'm curious about OD, which, as you said, will be coming to PlayStation. um so it really is just a waiting game at this point i am i am curious about who he's going to cast only because like he always picks like really interesting people like and he has like these like weird tendrils into hollywood yeah people want to work with him like weird people want to work with him which is cool right but but he's the thing is it's like he's been photographed with so many people at this point that like it really is just like i don't know you you know everybody so like it's it's not even like i can make a it's not even like i could make an educated guess because you're gonna pull some random italian actor that i've never heard of and we're like ella pernell or you know it's very odd his connections but i'm sure it'll be great and interesting and weird yeah i gotta say i mean i agree with you like there's nothing to really be excited about yet and yet dustin knowing that they're casting and scanning and even beginning capture the game's written I guess I mean at least they know what they really do know what it is and what it's going to be and who they're looking for it's kind of exciting I mean it's still so early in the process obviously we're a long ways away but things are moving so and I loved Death Stranding 2 was my game of the year last year so very excited for whatever he does next the leading theory is that the main character will be played by Robert Pattinson really?

2:12:33because i believe i'm there's a whole forbes article but i can't it won't let me read it because i have ad blocker on and i say fuck you uh but i did see i found when i searched google a genki tweet showed up i'm assuming this is what they're talking about that uh him kojima and robert pattinson are friendly and he's talked about this on his radio show and from the genki tweet he said he said robert pattinson is a nice and good person and they talked about things that he is not able to share yet oh and i think that would be great because i think robert pattinson is great so having him be the lead would be amazing cool i'm fine with that yeah fine with that he was in that vampire thing right twilight that's where he became famous yeah that's that was his well originally he was in harry potter oh as a cedric harry and potter harry potter our new celebrity i love i have no celebrity i love uh i love uh you know i love how malfoy always says potter like it's a slur potter dude potter i'm just waiting dude i'm i've listened to book one and book two i'm waiting for book three to come out now oh i'm fully ingrained in harry potter in the background right now oh good for it uh but yeah dude robert pad's also the batman right i saw him in that that was good i saw i was also i was looking at his movies here yeah i've only seen a few of them but he's in mickey 17 too which i thought was kind of fun i need to watch that but i also haven't seen parasite which i i know they're not related but i wanted to know more about that director right parasite's great uh i need to watch that yeah parasite's fucking awesome but uh yeah mickey 17 is not as good as parasite but it's it's weird and cool and straight it's like i would recommend seeing it okay yeah I've only seen I'm looking at his filmography I saw the lighthouse oh yeah that was a weird fucking movie oh that's the one I haven't seen um and I saw the Batman so that's it that's all I've ever seen he's good I I like him generally like whenever I see him in interviews or whatever he's always got like this weird thing going on where I'm like I get it there was an interview where he talked about like the the Tifa versus Aerith debate oh really yeah he's a nerd and I he's a nerd he was into it I'm trying to I can't remember exactly what he said but it was he he knew you're seeing more of these people come out now like i saw like a thing with like uh what is it um jamie campbell bauer who's like i think he's he's vekna and stranger things and he was like walking through the set and they were like these goopy things is like this reminds me of uh it's like the half-life tongue things that was a sick fucking game it's like you played half-life that's so weird by the way dude it's getting weird now the great dude i i don't watch stranger things i did see stranger things through the mall season but I haven't seen it all and I don't really give a shit but um the whole meltdown about the end of the show and then this this fan the fan theory that there was like a secret episode yeah I was like first of all I'm like that's an awesome idea but my Georgie isn't smart enough for a scheme like that you know um like like that that I mean that like the way that they just like the audience was getting into it like this is wrong the season in the shot is wrong this guy's looking at the camera like what it ended up being was just all the shit that's wrong with a 400 million dollar production and not all the stuff that led to this this so i was like it's such a self-own on the actual franchise but i loved it i loved that people like thought that that was gonna happen that would be sick that would be incredible if they did that it would be awesome netflix would never be brave enough to do it the thing about you know what it reminded me of do you remember you must know this column of like i know what you're gonna say the indoctrination theory for like mass effect and like that explained why mass effect 3's ending was so shit no i don't think i even do know that no oh that's interesting like yeah like it was it was a very similar thing where it's just like wait no things aren't maybe this is because shepherd has been indoctrinated by like the reapers and like everything's fucking wrong and it's like no i mean it's it's just different it's just not what you wanted the thing about stranger things what's so funny about the duffer brothers it's like dude how did it work out that their writing and the production aspects were so bad that they all magically pointed somehow all connected to this one amazing theory like i was dude i was i was never on the train that was gonna happen but i was reading these theories i'm like man this is so cool it's never gonna happen i wanted it to happen because i thought it would it would be so cool if it did but like i knew like ain't no way that'd be incredible that would be like one of the great media moments of all time really i mean if they pulled yeah they dropped the ball not not thinking of it quite frankly but you know whatever stranger thinks it's fine like the first season's the best and it always was and like i don't know if you guys feel this way and we're definitely getting off topic here but i always felt like that show was supposed to be like an anthology show where like the first season would be this and then the next season would be like a different story with different characters and that's why it's called Stranger Things and not something like Hawkins or like more specific but like that first season was so popular and beloved and everybody loved it that they were like oh we got to keep going and then it ended up kind of you know going going a little bit off the rails that's how I feel about it yeah I'm I liked the first season a lot as well I think it's great and the third season I actually the third season ends with like I actually just shut it off in the last episode like this kind of is not my thing anymore but yeah so like when I hear it's like Vecna I'm like who the fuck is that I don't even know what that is but I don't think but yeah I I did love the idea it would have been cool for them to figure that out I think it's hysterical that it ended up being just a dissection of the many, many, many errors that the show apparently had towards people that have an eye for that sort of thing.

2:18:40Like they're in the basement at the end, right? Playing D &D or whatever. And the door is like opposite what it was in the original. And it's like, that's a major oversight. Like people are going to notice shit like that and think you're doing it on purpose, but you actually just, it's like the Starbucks cup in fucking Game of Thrones. Like you just, you just fucked up. Yeah, exactly. And it's like, I'm like, that's not so impressive. actually when it when it when it comes down to it that there were this many errors you would think with all that money and all that time you would have gotten it better so from my my perspective it almost makes me want to even get into like the rest of it less because i'm like well people that like it aren't don't seem to be so into it but whatever it's not the worst i've ever seen but it's not that last season's pretty bad for it i think is great actually or is great i think it's i think it might be no it might not be my favorite the first one's probably the best but it's the second best season it's the second best by like a lot and uh and then they just they completely fuck the lady it's so funny they really game of thrones that i don't think it's as bad as game of thrones but like it's it's definitely like man it's so funny watching everybody like twist themselves into a pretzel trying to justify it's like no it can't just it can't just be shit they're smarter than that right right i don't know yeah maybe maybe they are maybe they are but i i loved uh i was yeah i i knew i was like there's just no way that that's true like there's no way there's a secret episode that there were just certain things that indicated that to me even from the outside i'm like they had the final episode in theaters didn't they like just like weird shit like that i'm like i don't think so like what would have been cool and this would have had too many people involved so it would have leaked would have been not putting the final episode in quotes in the theaters and then saying oh there is a final a real final episode and it is in theaters right now and you can put it on Netflix and do all that kind of stuff that would have been cool but that would have been yeah but again you would have had it would have you yeah exactly there I wonder if they're like damn ah it's like the what is that movie where like it's like the sequence of shots of like audiences the naked gun isn't it yeah yeah yeah okay yeah it was the naked gun whoops all right let's see kojima god bless in the the second and third phases i'm excited for you the website all about ai posted something interesting that's been making the rounds um and it's that sony has patented a ai ghost that might help them with you playing your game so they right here what is sony's ai ghost player patent and how might it help ps5 gamers.

2:21:22They write, quote, a new Sony patent filing sketches AI ghosts helpers for gameplay, while AI driven DRAM pressure is raising fresh questions about next gen console pricing and schedules. The filing describes a gameplay overlay character that performs interactive actions alongside the player. Instead of pop up tips, it shows what to do in context on the same path you are trying to clear. The ghost is tied to an assistance AI engine that generates control inputs, making it appear like a second player demonstrating solutions. The patent also suggests the ghost can be customized, including being represented as a character that the player recognizes.

2:21:55The most practical read is show me, don't tell me. A ghost that runs a route demonstrates timing or highlights safe positioning can teach without pausing the game or dumping a long tutorial screen. The patent also describes mode switching, which matters because help is not one size fits all. A player stuck in combat needs something different than someone who missed a hidden path. Here's what those modes could look like if implemented faithfully. Story mode, nudges towards objectives without solving and every encounter. Combat mode demonstrates dodges, counters, spacing, or ability timing. Exploration mode leads towards paths, puzzles, or hidden interactions.

2:22:28Full game mode completes certain tasks like a guided assist run. None of this guarantees a shipping feature. Patents often describe possibilities, not product plans, but the mechanics map cleanly to modern assist and accessibility to design. There's more to this story because the AI functionality will then lead on memory squeezes at different farms that are going to be generating all this stuff, leading to more expensive hardware and all the rest. So there's all interconnected connectivity you can read about on all about AI. But I really want to focus on the AI ghost itself. Dustin, AI ghost, what do you think?

2:23:05I don't overall have a problem, I think, with this because, you know, a lot of people, I mean, Colin, you've talked about that. you kind of already have a little ai ghost it's just not in your game it's on your phone with chat gpt telling you what to do in a game if you're lost and so the idea of you know the game showing you how to do something uh is interesting or being able to help you or nudge you in the right direction i think where it gets weird is this this one bullet point full game mode complete certain tasks like a guided assist run that's where i'm it's a little weird where it's like ah just just have the game do it for me it's like well what's the point of that right you know and obviously i would assume sony would have this figured out that it's like you can't have the ai play the game for you when you're playing online a multiplayer match or something i don't wouldn't be worried about that at all but i think we brought this up for uh or maybe it was a write-in or something about like some of these co-op only games like would you play split fiction with an ai partner it would be an option if you didn't have anyone to play that's an interesting idea so i'm not i mean this is just talking about as you were saying colin just talking about what this is obviously there's the huge impact of ai and how it's affecting hardware and the environment and stuff and so i'm not touching that i'm just talking about what these specific features and i'm not i'm not jazzed about it but i'm also i could see it working for some people yeah i'm i like your um more open-minded approach towards this idea because i i think that i feel similarly where are you on this chris on the ai ghost patent um i don't really mind it it's not it's not generative ai which is like my main holding point for ai it's like this scene this seems i mean i've played games where and i and to be fair like i don't know exactly like which ones they are like i think like certain racing games i know use some sort of like an ai ghost of certain players to kind of fill single player lobbies with their friends when they're not live like that kind of mimics the way they drive or maybe mimics previous runs so that they have like they can they can experience or that the player can experience playing with their friends without them necessarily being online or whatever like i can't remember what game did that i think maybe a forza game but i could be wrong so like i mean the concept of like an ai ghost in a game either to compete against or or to compete with or to assist like i don't know that doesn't really strike me as particularly um egregious or even particularly new so i mean i i presume the way it would be implemented would be new but like as a concept it's a pretty old um idea at this point So, I mean, this doesn't, it doesn't interest me, but it doesn't bother me either.

2:26:06Yeah, I'm with you on this. Like modularity, I think, is the key. And in a way, it can inform more pure game design. Get us away from the yellow ribbons, the bright lights, the neon ladders and yellow paint. Yeah, right. i um i'm a big strategy guide fan as people know as a old writer of them a collector of them back in the day i mean i i really love them and i i think i struggled with a similar issue about like what is too much when video guides started like even when i was making them famously my final fantasy 13 boss guides um i like i didn't understand and i still don't truly understand although I've used them from time to time I suppose is the idea of watching someone do what you need to do as opposed to what I felt was pure about strategy guides was you were kind of explaining it or giving some tips and things to keep an eye on but like ultimately you have to execute like you're playing your game the video versions of guides which are now so prevalent they really started to erode away that differentiation between doing and not doing because now you're just replicating as opposed to kind of reading and thinking about and executing.

2:27:28And so this is just one more step and I guess it's clear that most people don't finish their games. Most people don't play through their games. I mean like a hundred hour game is completely or 50 hour games. These are like things that a lot of people never play and maybe this will allow them to get further into games and play on their own terms. Part of me is like who I really am where you are especially doesn't where I'm like, I don't know that I give a shit because Like you said, as long as it can't be weaponized against other players, does it turn off trophies or can you not use it in multiplayer games or whatever?

2:28:01Like, as long as it's self-contained, it's like, well, then it doesn't affect anyone else. Like, who gives a shit? Like, who really cares at that point? As opposed to it interfering in some way. It's like using a game genie back in the day. It's like, well, yeah, I'm ruining it for myself, but it doesn't affect you. um and also as they say in the story at all about ai i mean most patents don't come to fruition but i i just think that this is a clever sort of solution to game help it's clear it's on sony's mind in some way because of what they've tried to put it with the game help functionality in playstation games that exist on ps5 they're thinking about how and it's all about and i think this all leads back to containment right like don't leave don't get off a psn you don't need to go to youtube you don't need to go on your phone just just bring up the cross media bar and select this thing and it will show you whatever you're looking for it's like i think everything it's like cloud gaming it's like everything gets the portal everything goes back to this about containment so be very interested to see what happens with this but we might never hear from this again.

2:29:12At the same time, that's entirely reasonable to expect.

2:29:17Let's see here. Oh, we had a question. I guess we don't really need it. Ironically, it's from Big Dumb Stupid Idiot who wrote in about the AI Ghost playing games for you. But we don't need your comment. All right. This piece has not been really breaking away. Maybe it's just not that interesting to most people, but I find it deeply interesting. There seems to be a serious issue going on with one of the China Hero Project games that was announced a long time ago. The game is Convaleria. I included in our notes here for us the trailer of Convaleria from three years ago, but the game has been in development for much longer than that.

2:29:56So for people that don't know, Convaleria is a PvP and PvE third-person shooter that accommodates up to 100 players. And it's being made by a Chinese developer called Longforce with two O's. So Longforce. And the studio was founded in 2016 and the game was revealed in 2018. And I think joined the China Hero or 2017 and joined the China Hero Project is one of the original China Hero Project games in 2018. And interestingly here, and this is really important to the story, is that most China Hero Project games, so think about like Fist or Evo Tinction or whatever, like they come out, they ultimately migrate to other platforms if they want to.

2:30:37And Sony kind of helps shepherd these projects along. And sometimes like with Evo Tinction, they barely acknowledge that the game even came out. But Convaleria fell more into what happened with Lost Soul Aside, which came out last year. Lost Soul Aside was a China Hero Project game that Sony ultimately got involved with as a publisher. And that's different. Totally different thing. So like making it into more of a second party game. And Convaleria in 2022 was also in that small group of China Hero Project games that were going to be published by Sony as a console exclusive. So this is all relevant because apparently they've, the studio Longforce has directly reached out to certain websites with a bunch of information about how fucked up the development of the game is.

2:31:24And here's what they write in part and the noisy pixel, this is the website I'm using noisy pixel.net. They write Longforce accuses Sony's China's China Hero Project of sabotage, delays, and control overreach in Convalaria dispute. And they write, quote, a China Hero Project studio says its partnership with Sony Interactive Entertainment's China division collapsed after years of stalled development, financial pressure, and an attempted transfer of control over its game, Convalaria. The China Hero Project is a Sony-backed program created to identify and support Chinese developers, offering select studios access to resources, publishing support, and international visibility.

2:32:03Ask Evo Tingshan how that international visibility did for them. It says, quote, Long Force, the Chengdu-based studio behind the long-delayed co-op shooter Convaleria, says its multi-year partnership with Sony Interactive Entertainment's China division unraveled into stalled production, financial strain, and what the studio alleges were repeated harmful decisions by members of SIE's China's software team. Over several months, the studio shared internal emails this is with the website, chat logs and formal complaints with Noisy Pixel outlining concerns about obstructed development, conflicts of interest, and an attempt to takeover of the project's leadership.

2:32:37A developer at Longforce told Noisy Pixel, quote, we didn't go public because we wanted attention. We did it because every internal path was exhausted and nothing was changing. Former developers involved in past China Hero Project titles told Noisy Pixel that while they could not confirm Longforce's internal experiences firsthand, the source is legitimate and the patterns described align with issues they had privately observed within the program and then they say that they reached out to sony for um for detail now give me a minute i want to read through some of this because there are specific allegations it says quote long force joined the second batch of china hero project games in 2018 an initiative created by si to support and highlight emerging chinese developers in 2021 long force signed a global multi-platform publishing agreement with SIE, placing Convaleria among a very small group of projects directly published by Sony.

2:33:27Longforce says its relationship with SIE changed after 2022, when a new production lead, Bao Bo, who we're going to talk about in a minute, took over responsibility for Convaleria inside SIE China's software division. According to the studio, this leadership change marked a shift from early cooperation to prolonged inaction and escalating disputes. Longforce says it later compiled a formal complaint against Bao of unethical content, misuse of authority, and actions the studio believed harmed both the project and the broader Chinese development ecosystem. The studio says it requested an internal review and corrective action.

2:33:57These are the allegations. Repeated delays and lack of publishing direction. Longforce says it began raising concerns about publishing and operations in mid-2023 as months passed without concrete plans for marketing, server deployment, or launch coordination. After Convaleria passed beta approval on January 30, 2025, the team expected final stage preparation to begin. Instead, they said the project entered a prolonged freeze. we kept asking what the plan was a developer said every time we were told not to worry and then nothing happened according to the studio there were no player tests no marketing activity no storefront pages created and no formal evaluation feedback during what should have been the most critical phase of development and then the second accusation is marketing absence and removal from official media and this is true because i verified some of this this is easy enough to verify long force says the lack of momentum extended it into official playstation china channels producer zoom Min was scheduled and filmed for China's 10th anniversary documentary, which was intended to spotlight China Hero project developers.

2:34:52When the final video was released, Convalaria was absent. Every other project was there, a developer at Longforce said. Ours was simply gone. For a team already struggling with visibility, the omission carried weight. That was the moment it stopped feeling accidental, the developer added. It felt like we were being erased. And then the third accusation is alleged payment deep delays and financial pressure. According to Longforce, delayed payments beginning in mid 2025 pushed the studio to the brink of collapse. After the planned March launch window passed, monthly losses exceeded$230 ,000 and the team nearly dissolved in early April.

2:35:24Despite the strain, development continued. Weekly builds were delivered and a US server test was completed at the end of April. After what the studio describes as unreasonable new cooperation proposal and the unilateral termination of payment agreements, long force halted collaboration. The studio estimates total losses to have now exceeded$1 million. This is incredibly important because it seems like they basically pulled the game from Sony at this point, or at least the two sides are no longer working together. And then there's apparently a bunch of shit here having to do with outsourcing to Virtuous, which is a studio we talk about all the time that works with a bunch of stuff and kind of maybe even redirecting the game's development priority towards other studios and ultimately leading into what they contend is an attempted seizure to control the project.

2:36:13so it's a real and you can go read the whole story to get much more information it's a really great piece of journalism over at Noisy Pixel and I don't know if we have much more to say about it but it just shows that not everything is going according to plan at least according to these guys with some of the China Hero Project games and then I was thinking about Evo Tinction and how weird that was and I'm like is this all kind of interconnected not necessarily the studios or whatever but this idea that we just shit this game out don't even acknowledge it. And was Convalaria on a similar path? I think the game looks kind of cool.

2:36:47The one thing I was saying about verifying, by the way, I should have said it earlier, because they were talking about its removal from all these different things, is the one thing I verified that people were talking about is that it's not on China Hero Project websites anymore. It's like no longer acknowledged. So that's what's happening with Convalaria. I don't know if you guys have anything you want to add, but I wanted to throw that all out there for those that are interested as we do follow the China Hero Project stuff. and this wasn't making the rounds too much, but by China Hero Project standards, Convaleria looks pretty high budget and pretty good.

2:37:16Yeah. So will we ever see it? Who knows? The trailer is still on PlayStation's YouTube channel from three years ago. Anything you guys want to add before we move on? Sounds crazy. I'm wondering. I mean, I don't want to immediately defend Sony, but who knows? Maybe there's other sides to this as well in terms of you know the game not working out the way they wanted it to but uh definitely sounds weird that like the main thing that i think sounds the most weird is then like he recorded it sounded like he recorded for that you know youtube video and then they're just like oh we're gonna take that out sounds passive aggressive yeah no explanation either it's crazy um the rest of the stories that we have here we can move through fairly quickly so stop me if you guys want to say anything about them okay okay um machine games is apparently working on wolfenstein 3 this comes from both reporting from kotaku and from our friend jez corden an aerial look on a sewer says happy new year my slit is friend of the show jez corden has reported that machine games is working on wolfenstein 3 this will mark the return their return since 2019's disastrous young blood so my question is simple what's the hype level for this wishing you all the best from beautiful sunny Puerto Rico Puerto Rico I'm super excited about this I'm curious where Wolfenstein 3 goes I was looking to make sure I had the timeline correct so obviously you have Castle Wolfenstein beyond Castle Wolfenstein those are the early PC games that I've never played that's from 1981 1984 those are by Muse software Muse ends up going out of business it somehow gets the the IP in the early 90s 1992 wolfenstein 3d basically the first first person shooter that comes out that's wolfenstein as we know it and then we get return to castle wolfenstein in 2001 which came to xbox and ps2 in 2003 that was by gray matter studios the same studio that did call of duty united offensive which was some call of duty dlc and then we got 2009's wolfenstein that was by raven and then ultimately it ends up with id the new order old blood wolfenstein 2 young blood this covers from 1946 to 1980 I think and so I wonder where Wolfenstein 3 will go will it be later than Youngblood or will it be somewhere more maybe closer to Wolfenstein 2 which was 1961 I want to say 1962 so excitement is very high for this although early in development I'm sure and I gotta say I thought Indiana Jones was totally mediocre so I want them to go back to first person shooters and like what they really know and i'm very very excited about that so shout out to wolfenstein 3 yeah hype level is huge my suggestion retcon it pretend that young blood never existed and just pick up wherever you want from wolfenstein 2 because that game was awesome is young blood even i don't even do they even have to retcon it like how important was it like did it happen it was about like these twins that i think i don't know are they pj's kids or something I don't even know but it was 1980 so it was way it was way later yeah I don't think you even need to address it really you probably could just make it to the Wolfenstein without even acknowledging it and without even reckoning it either like because I feel like nothing really happened in that game either like nothing of any consequence but like I could be misremembering it has been a while the only thing I remember the game is like that was it the thumbs up button or like the oh good job Jess yeah yeah right no yeah yeah right that's right yeah we that shit's I hated that game it's not good all right uh just it's so disappointing because Wolfenstein 1 and 2 are so good and and the old blood is good too it's great expansion yeah and to be fair to that game it is arcane is it's an arcane collaboration I believe right that's true and that so it's because that was also there was also Cyberpilot which was another studio I think that was the game was just a mess i don't i didn't even play cyber the uh wolfenstein cyber pilot game but yeah that was that was during bethesda's kind of dark period as a publisher where things weren't going too well which is why part of why i think they've sold ended up selling themselves yeah probably okay um so that's that wolfenstein 3 the witcher 3 is apparently getting a new expansion 11 years after lunch what happened well no i mean that the the story oh oh yeah so okay so big yoshi wrote in and said hey gang happy new year my question is about the sweet spot between live service and traditional single player games with the news that the witcher 3 is getting a new dlc in 2026 i'm wondering why more single player studios don't lean into creating many dlcs for their shipped games this seems like it would be a great business decision for single player studios and also great for fans why not make 10 dlcs for kingdom come deliverance 2 for instance while working on kingdom come deliverance 3 curious to hear your takes of what i may be missing here I mean, the major thing you're missing is that that's not going to pay ultimately, but it's not unprecedented for there to be expansions for games that are very old.

2:42:24And I'll get into that in a minute. This particular story comes from Eurogamer, where they say, is there really going to be a new Witcher 3 expansion this year? And the original story that they wrote, they updated it twice, but they ask, is there going to be a Witcher 3 Wild Hunt DLC in 2026? and the rumor they write stems quote from someone called the boris nispilak a trusted source of polish games industry information a leaker of sorts he made a documentary a few years ago about the polish indie game development called we are all right which is a good watch and it shows he has industry connections nip select says in the summer last year that fools theory the studio remaking the witcher one for cd project red was making a new witcher 3 expansion and he reiterated this ahead of the game awards in december where he expected the announcement to be made but such announcement never came.

2:43:10Rumor quashed? No, because a separate voice has added strength to it. Polish noble securities analyst Mateusz Czarnowski wrote a report on 16th December after the Game Awards, which he says, quote, we expect the next paid add on for Witcher 3 to be released in May 2026. And he talks about how much they expected to sell and all the rest. And then they updated saying that the original leaker had noted that he had collaborated this with some verified independent sources in Poland that all confirm this and that indeed the earnings transcript for CD Projekt Red's financial report kind of confirms that they're planning something secret for this.

2:43:46Now, the reason I wanted to say that this isn't super unprecedented, what game does this remind me of? What game do you guys, can you guys think of anything? What game was dormant and then got an expansion? Is it Borderlands? Yeah, Borderlands 2 specifically. so Wild Hunt came out in 2015 and it got its two expansions in 2015 and 2016 and then it was done right so that'll be 10 years of dormancy that's more extreme than Borderlands 2 which got its DLC a bunch of DLC from 2012 to 2020 2014 but then the Commander Lilith DLC that came out in 2019 directly connected Borderlands 2 to Borderlands 3 and that was part of the handsome collection I I think it has sued the PS3 version.

2:44:30So it was only available on the new version of the game. But nonetheless, it was there. And so it's not super unprecedented. And I don't think it's a bad idea to like revive an old game, get people to go back. But like continuing to release stuff is going to take resources that can take away from your new game. You don't want to get too crazy with it. Yeah. But I like this idea a lot. So that's that. Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, I think it's one of the I think it's one of the few. games that could get away with that really i think ultimately like there's maybe not one of the few i should say i would say that there are i would say that there aren't like a a glut of games that could really do this and yield really anything from it i think there's enough cachet that cd project red has built back from their disastrous cyberpunk ps4 launch um where people are just kind of curious and people have some level of faith in them that they'll deliver something cool so like and which are three is like a beloved like all-time game so i think that helps as well like i don't think you could do the same thing for like i don't know state of decay two or something you know what i mean like not shitting on that game by the way it's just like it's a completely different echelon of experience and so and also there's a reality of like there if you build a if you make a dlc and if you if you dedicate resources to dlc you're you you kind of have a a ceiling in some way of like how many people own the original game granted depending on how old the game is the original game could be like dirt cheap by then and you could get a lot of people in but then but then what is what's the value in doing that i guess i don't know it's a lot trickier than just why don't why doesn't everybody do it i think there's a lot of factors that go in kcd2 actually probably could get away with that as well right i agree i agree that there is a diminishing return it's almost why i remember people i think was was it mass effect 2 that had day one dlc that people freaked out about maybe three i mean two might have also but you kind of get it though right like i get what they were trying to do the difficult thing is it's like okay so you made this concurrent to the product and then you're selling it separately it should just be in the game like it's a complicated marketing push but what you're what you're seeing is i think makes most sense which is like really expansions make the most sense when the game comes out right?

2:46:52Like, sure, because people are most engaged with it. If you want to make money on it or spell your, sell your special edition, you have a la carte purchasers. So there really like is no win condition because you either make the expansion too quickly or you wait too long. And it's hard to kind of thread the needle. The, the, the, the game that had really great expansion timing was fallout three. Um, right. People, I remember fault people. It's funny because it's obvious based on the cadence that those were all in development when the game was unreleased. And yet no one flipped out about them because they waited a few months and then they released them every month.

2:47:26And that was cool. And I really liked that timing. There were five expansions total for Fallout three. And we'll maybe get to play them again soon because apparently they're going to re-release the game, right? Is that the, that's the rumor? There's the, that's the rumor. So Witcher three, we await you. Also kingdom come, not kingdom come deliverance. What was that? What was the 38 studios game?

2:47:52why can't I 38 studio I don't know

2:48:03Kingdom Survival yeah that had really late DLC too like really late DLC I think maybe similar timing to what this will be but that was also part of a re-release and i think kingdoms of ameler as an ip which they totally blew that man i mean i just it's like one of the most blown stories ever like kingdom of ameler had the opportunity to be a witcher style presence they were so fucking stupid because they they wanted to ultimately get to that copernicus mmo they spent all the money that game sold millions of copies well camp i only know so much about that because i knew people that work there but um it's a crazy story kurt shilling interesting oh yeah from grace right it's right the ball baseball right yeah like like hall of fame level baseball player hence the 38 because that was his name or his name that was his number his name wasn't 38 he's not a cylon right all right so that's witcher three next piece of news uh 007 got delayed First Light.

2:49:10Not a huge surprise. It was supposed to come out, I believe, in March. Now it's coming out in May. They write on social media, quote, hello everyone, today we are sharing an update regarding 007 First Light, as we have decided to move the game's release by two months to the 27th of May, 2026. 007 First Light is our most ambitious project to date, and the team has been fully focused on delivering an unforgettable James Bond experience, bringing together breathtaking action, globetrotting, spycraft, gadgets, car chases, and more. As an independent developer and publisher, this decision allows us to ensure the experience meets the level of quality you players deserve on day one.

2:49:44So I'm fine with this. Any thoughts? Yeah, I think one of the main takeaways when they did the big gameplay reveal is that it was very framey, which is fine, but maybe a little more framey than it should be for a first debut. So I'm not surprised, but take your time. Let it cook. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. It looks fun. It looks like it's got a little bit of an uncharted spirit which i'm down for um i don't know how much that's going to translate but i'm down and they they describe themselves as an independent developer and they really are an independent developer because they are developing and publishing it themselves a lot of people were upset did you see the thing in i don't even know what they are the indie game awards removed expedition 33 from their list because of the because of uh the ai art and i'm like i thought you might have removed them from the indie game awards because they're not an indie game but i'm right but okay all right so there's that sorry i'm just writing a note okay i saw this this drives me fucking insane the game 100 line the last defense academy which is from katuzaka kodaka danganronpa developer was published last year on um switch and PC.

2:51:01And it was published by Anaplex. Anaplex is a company that's owned by Sony. And they still haven't released a PlayStation version and in an interview with RPG site dot net, Kodaka tells the website that they have no plans right now to do that. I just wanted to kind of say real quick, get your shit together. It's not Kodaka's problem, but Anaplex should be publishing its games on PlayStation. It's completely fucking crazy that they are not publishing this game on PlayStation. Now, I assume it will come over eventually and maybe even the Xbox as well, but it's unacceptable. I'm sorry, it's just weird.

2:51:37And I know that like the excuse they use is like Anaplex kind of operates on its own. It's like too fucking bad. Yeah, if you want to release it on Switch, that's great. If we need to give you a few million dollars to port the game at Sony to get like it makes you look fucking stupid. It's just it's like it goes back to the one Sony idea from generations ago where it's like you guys are totally disconnected from each other like you have no idea what's going on one hand doesn't have the like that's a that's so strange i i don't that would be like a company nintendo owned making a game for xbox yeah well why would you do that this is nonsense you could do that too but you have to focus your efforts on so just want to throw that out there don't in the short term I wouldn't be expecting this game to come over this makes me upset because I think it looks good and it's at the same time and we could jump forward real quick it's just the same time that it's revealed that Danganronpa the series has surpassed 10 million units sold so there's some hunger most of those units I assume were on PlayStation so um we're waiting aniplex we also have listen yeah go ahead i'm sorry if if hundred line comes to ps4 or 5 whatever and you play it before you play danganronpa v3 i i might just i don't know do i quit what do i do um there needs to be punishment there is uh the danganronpa what is it called two by two that's coming out this year i will probably just play it those there and then go into three on console because i had long i had long kept up the because i played one and two on vita threes on vita i long kept up that i was gonna but it's like the vita's kind of done you know like well it's been done but for me it's it's done like i'm not gonna play the vita so which is unthinkable for me to say right i mean i was like fucking obsessed with it but um so i i think i got to lead back into it so i think i'm kind of embracing the idea of just doing it on console and this will be and by the way Danganronpa one and two I think are already on console but it's it's uh this will be apparently updated in some way so I'll be looking forward to that I platinum the original Danganronpa on Vita it was quite complicated I'll be very interested yeah well yeah good was it in Japanese what the was Danganronpa oh you said on Vita I was thinking of the PSP version oh no no no no I didn't play the PSP version and PSP has no trophies so get with it no you get with it all ranked play v3 play v3 okay you've you've been punished a lot recently but i i couldn't i couldn't let that stand no that's not a punishment what's funny what's funny about it is that i'm i don't think it's i want to i want to carefully choose these words i had something to do with dang and romper's popularity in the west i'll just say that yeah absolutely and i'm not saying it was just me or whatever but i was all over that series when it came to Vita.

2:54:36We wrote a shit ton about it. We did a bunch of exclusives. We did a bunch of videos. It's like the guys at Bandai Namco told me my review of Ni No Kuni was a major reason why that game, they think that game sold. And so it's like one of those things where it's like, it's so funny. I identified Danganronpa very early as something that was really notable and interesting. And then I was like, eh. You know, by the time people really started to love it, I'm like, I don't know too many people like it now. column where the patron saint of patron saint of Danganronpa Danganronpa because it's it's great and again it's not it's it's the power I wielded at IGN PlayStation it was just such a big place that right we we wrote about things and they really did circulate and get crazy with it we had a lot of exclusives and all that so it's like it's funny how that worked with Danganronpa especially because you can go read all my shit on IGN about it and then by the time like the second game came and went I was like I'm kind of over this but the third one's supposed to be better than all the other two right so that's what they say better I don't know it's been so I played them all so many years apart I would love to do a replay of those three games maybe maybe that's content yeah that could be that could be content looking back on Danganronpa that'd be fun that'd be safe that would be fun all right where are we now okay so we did the Danganronpa thing PlayStation Plus games for January.

2:56:03These are out already. So this was published on New Year's Eve. We're obviously recording much later. We're recording on the 8th. So these are available as of the 6th. So they're already available for you now. The games are Need for Speed Unbound for PlayStation 5. This is a nice one. Disney Epic Mickey Rebrushed for PS4 and PS5. I'll definitely add that to my list. And finally, Core Keeper for PS4 and PS5. Last month's games were already gone. So you've if you missed out, you missed out. You're a fool. anything here for you guys that you're interested in i never played through epic epic mickey all the way um and it kind of sequel didn't it so there's a little bit of mickey out there and this is obviously the re-release of it um need for speed is not really my thing that's one of the last need for speed games i think or maybe even the last one yeah the latest entry and yeah that's like need for speed's kind of like on hiatus right now and then court keeper is a like management game i think this looks like stardew valley yeah right yeah like very closely which i mean i like stardew valley a lot so um maybe worth checking that one out i've heard that that need for speed game is very good so i probably won't play it i'll hit it on my list but i probably also won't play it but uh yeah epic mickey's nice and core keeper if you're interested in that anything for you chris i've never played epic mickey but it's always been one of those things where i was like i'm curious about this i remember when this was out and i was like i'm curious about this but not curious about it enough to spend money on it that i could spend on things that i'm actually earnestly and actively excited about so this just kind of passed me by i don't even really know what standing this game has i don't know if it's like remembered fondly i don't know if it's particularly good or controversial or whatever i don't even know what it looks like i think i've seen the game in motion so i'm i would be going in completely blind if i were to play this didn't war inspector direct it you might be right so that was like i think that's why it was a big deal war inspector of course is like the producer of like wing commander and a lot of ultima stuff and yeah i gotta i don't know where this fits into the kingdom hearts lore is it before kingdom hearts one or is it in between is it referenced at all no that would be fucking sick but uh yeah i don't i i haven't i genuinely haven't seen to my to my knowledge or my memory a frame of epic mickey and so the fact that i would be going into it completely blind is appealing to me like there's few games that i have that luxury of doing that with like where i just like i don't know anything about it but i don't know it's going to depend on the schedule really but i'll add it to my list for sure need for speed i don't know i'm not a car person enough with the cars already it's enough with the cars yeah enough with the car i'm not i'm not for the cars myself all right so check those out those will be available let me see uh does it say oh february 2nd so you have till february 2nd to to grab them if you'd like yeah if it pleases you by the way I'll put this in the chat I forgot to put this in the notes I think but they're also the top downloads for did I put that in the notes I don't think I did oh it's under arc raters oh right right right okay so yeah we can talk about it all at the same time I guess arc raters is doing exceptionally well Alinea Analytics wrote that arc raters has surpassed 12 million copies sold 7 million of them on Steam and that the game's user base is increasing this is pretty exceptional at the same time that sony released its december 2025 download data um for the playstation network in which arc raiders was the biggest game of the month for paid games bigger than nba 2k 26 bigger than call of duty black ops 7 bigger than madden bigger than gta 5 even um so the game is obviously blowing up a great way ghost of yote is falling off the charts a little bit nothing too interesting otherwise to really discuss here beat saber goes back to the top of the VR charts, Fortnite and Roblox back to the top of the free-to-play games, although where wins meet?

3:00:12is number three, which looks pretty good. actually i gotta say but will i play it probably not um anything else interesting here not really marvel rivals hanging on and so on and so forth but i wanted to talk i'm sorry dustin you're leading i was just gonna say oh we talked about call of duty extensively and their weird letter call of duty being number three in a december list it's unheard of basically it's basically unheard of bad their alarm bells are going crazy over there probably i knew it too with our creators too like i figured like it's just it's a different beast you know and um it's a uniquely bad year for call of duty and a uniquely good year for all of their competition so this is not necessarily surprising to me to me anyway but it is still wild to see because it's just so infrequent that this happens well and it's and the games are so expensive to make like they gotta get more out of it it's it's that it's that serious these are these are they have the whole activision entity basically working on this shit so we're talking about games that cost six seven eight hundred million dollars probably at least in fact wasn't that what they said the 2021 call of duty cost or the 2022 call of duty cost was like six or seven hundred million dollars so it's like it's probably getting close to a billion i would say for a game and uh you gotta juice those numbers dude because that's a serious amount of investment you can't you can't survive on on a pittance with that so we'll see what happens yeah as that continues do you guys want to talk about arc raiders we have letters about it but do we want to get into them i'm okay to do it mark burn wrote in and said howdy boys hope you're keeping well and had a well-rested game-filled break straight to it what do you make of the continued arc raider success the game continues to grow and as retained if not grown its active user base and release it shows no sign of stopping i for one can't put the game down and i'm prepping my radar for a second expedition as a brisk winter wind covers a dreck scotland stay warm thank you mark for writing in what's going on here with this game it really is a phenomenon it's 40 bucks right so reasonably priced but the good news about it in my opinion is that it is priced it does give hope that people it's like helldivers people will buy in it gives hope for a game like marathon you know maybe even a game like fair games i doubt um it gives hope that people will but if the game's good enough people will buy it they'll even support it with expansions and and and their money afterwards dlc and all the rest and microtransactions i don't really understand its popularity though because it's not for me so i can't speak in a a more authoritative way about it really right i mean it's it's uh i don't want to say it's a new genre because extraction games are quite old like you had examples of it even in like as early as the division probably maybe even earlier but like the division was probably like one of the the bigger ones that had like extraction kind of mechanics with that dark zone stuff and you know obviously tarkov so like i mean it's not a new genre per se but it's this is definitely the most accessible that genre has ever been.

3:03:26So it feels new to the most people. And so that's a big deal. The fact that it is social is a big deal. The fact that it is getting people on mic is a big deal. The fact that getting people on mic contributes to its ability to go viral in the way that it has is a big deal. And like all of those kind of put together in a game that I think is overall pretty solid. it's not glaringly broken it's not like torrentially buggy it's stable enough to not feel like a fluke or just like oh this is this is popular for the wrong reasons or whatever like this is a competently made game it's not perfect by any means but it's definitely um it's it's delivering on the promise that's being made to them when they see it go viral and when they see it being played by like streamers or like out of context clips on twitter it's delivering on that and you know i i think that's unique and it's pulling people in and it's capturing people's attention it's it's a good recipe yeah and uh they they they really nailed it it could have gone completely fucking sideways like i do think ultimately the game is strong from like a gameplay perspective i personally think the gunplay is actually like the weakest part of it but everything that surrounds it is so strong that it it almost doesn't feel like it matters to your average person what do you think so they they nailed it yeah i'm done i'm sorry i didn't mean to interrupt yeah i feel like um it's a lot of what chris was saying i i think it's novelty and i guess novelty makes it sound weak like it's like oh it's just a novelty for now but mainly it's like new approach as chris said it's not extracting shooter isn't a new genre tarkov has been around for years but they figured out how to make an approachable extraction shooter and made something that was mass market and really really good and uh they've been steadily updating the game very attentive to their uh fan base and i'm that part doesn't surprise me at all just from playing the finals beforehand and seeing how much they improved and how dedicated the fan base is to that game that if that mindset was there for arc raiders that their trajectory for success was probably pretty strong uh but to see it be you know this can continue to go up at this point where we're a few months later is awesome i've kind of taken a break on it i put 65 hours in and uh this goes to show where we talk about on this show how we're not the normal gamers where i put 65 hours in and i'm like i'm good for a bit i need to go play other stuff i need to go play kingdom hearts i need to go play you know shinobi stuff like that uh and i'll come back eventually but it's interesting how people just like they find their game and that's their game for you know six months a year or even more five years who knows yeah the other question we have about it this was originally going to be at the end of the show in our six questions part but i put moved it up here because i had another one that i and i just thought i'd keep all the arc arc uh let's say arc system works arc raider stuff together but i thought this was interesting you eugene levy basis wrote in and said hey fellas happy new year hope you all had a great holiday dustin and chris did you guys see the embark ceo say that in arc raiders you will be place in more aggressive lobbies if you are an aggressive player.

3:07:03I personally haven't noticed. I've had the game for about a month and recently I've been doing a little more shoot on site, but also when I go into a lobby and I see a player being nice, I feel bad and I chicken out and I don't engage. Thank you all for the content and look forward to 2026. Is this true? Because I think that's a huge mistake if that's what they're doing. They're going to make the game more hardcore for some people and remove those people and the wildcard nature that they would bring to a normal game. I think you would want to keep everyone together, right? That's the unpredictability of it.

3:07:30yeah or are they trying to siphon off the aggressive players because they're ruining it well so the the issue that i find with this is that how do you even look maybe they have like a really complicated algorithm that keeps track of all this but the glaring issue to me that i find in this is that like okay let's say let's say somebody shoots at you but misses and then you return fire because you're you're defending yourself does the game understand that you are not the aggressor does it does it think that because you've defended yourself against one of these players that you are now those players and does it then put you into lobbies like that because you've been forced to defend yourself so like i'm curious how sophisticated their way of tracking that stuff is um if that is how they do it um i don't know if it's necessarily the worst idea i do think you ultimately need that mix and match but i i think there's value in maybe making certain players match more often with other types of play i think that's fine and it shouldn't really although i will say this is kind of the issue with with arc raiders and kind of why i've i think i've put as much time as i'm going to put into it i think it's like it's it's really cool i i appreciate it but like that the gunplay for me is not there and so like that's really what sticks me that that's really what keeps me playing multiplayer games like this the social element is the most interesting thing of in arc raiders it's it's running into people and not really knowing what you're going to expect like not knowing what the interaction you're going to going to have is not knowing what the conversation is going to be and i've noticed even as somebody who isn't aggressive really uh that people are just getting more aggressive with it because people are more competent at the game now it's less of a mystery people kind of know the economy now people kind of understand what's what where to go for what if they it's getting to the point now where if people see somebody at a location they know exactly why they're there because they've you know they've played the game so extensively and so because people feel more confident and more uh i don't know i guess they feel like they know the game more there's kind of less of that than there used to be i'm not saying it's all gone i'm sure it's still there but there's way less of that than there used to be in my experience and now you're just kind of left with the gunplay of it which i just don't love and so that's kind of that's kind of an issue but it's kind of it was doomed to happen that way i think like art graders was kind of like in in the first in the first weeks the first like month or two very very special because everybody was trying to figure it it reminded me a lot of destiny one actually where like people were playing destiny and they just didn't quite know like what is what is this like what genre even is this game like what are we doing and then the raid comes out you know and then it's like what is this it like evolves and changes now you kind of know what destiny is you know it's like you're gonna get an expansion it's gonna have this currency it's gonna have a new fucking ability for you and they're gonna they're gonna you know what i mean like it becomes a formula and so yeah i don't know uh i i don't know if it's a good or a bad idea i think it's generally smart to match players with equivalent social profiles in a game that is so heavily social but i don't know i think it might be kind of i think it might be kind of pointless because ultimately i think everybody's going to end up being aggressive at the end of the day anyway except for the new people who are just going to I wonder what it's like for a completely new player in Arc Raiders today versus when everybody was kind of getting into it at the same time and nobody knew what the fuck to do.

3:11:20Anything you want to add, Dustin, before we move on? Yeah, I agree with Chris. I'm curious because I don't know if anyone really knows the extent of how the matchmaking works. I think that if you have people, because there are certainly people that are just PVV players. They go in, they don't say anything. They don't try to interact. They shoot on site and their goal is to just kill as many players as possible. And I wonder too, like, it's like, okay, well maybe we have one of those in a match and we have, you know, how can we spread it out? So the matches are dynamic. We don't, as far as I can tell, people don't really know how it works yet, but it would make sense that they want players.

3:12:05that are, as Chris was saying there, how they interact to have the most fun with the game. If your most fun is PvP, they want to match you with people that they're going to have fun playing PvP with and social players to be paired with other social players in general, maybe not only, but as a general rule. So I didn't notice this happening to me because we played all kinds of different ways. we were sometimes ruthless warlords shooting people on site and other times we were teaming up with other teams uh so i didn't notice anything personally when i was playing yeah i am i'm fascinated as an outsider by how important this balance is going to be to get right they're doing something very right and that's awesome um i think that it's all on like a on tinterhooks though like it's like you gotta maintain it and be be smart about it's a fine yeah fine balance yeah and i don't know if it's i don't know if it's a balance that they can balance forever i don't know it's this is kind of ultimately why i think i'm very excited for marathon because i I like the aggressive play.

3:13:27And all these games eventually end up that way anyway. And I think Marathon is going to start that way. And so I think it has less of a chance of having this problem. But yeah, they've got the right formula going on right now, but they're going to have to maintain it very carefully. It's a little bit like, well, not exactly like Helldivers, but when Helldivers was kind of responding to community feedback and they kind of fucked their weapon economy and they completely didn't understand where the fun was. I don't think Embark is in danger of doing that. I think they kind of understand where the fun is.

3:14:02It's just that that's a tricky thing to engineer. It's social engineering really is what they have to do. It's less about like, all right, how hard should this gun hit? Or like how much, how many rounds should be in this thing? There's a little bit of that. But it's, Arc Raiders is primarily like a social phenomenon. on and so you're gonna have to you're gonna have to balance that game in ways that you're probably not used to thinking about balancing which is interesting it is so i'm sure i'm sure arc raiders is gonna have a long tail and i'm sure it's gonna do pretty well for a while oh yeah i think so too i mean it's obvious it's it's it's huge i mean it's it's incredible i would have never guessed i thought it was gonna do great but i this is an incredible you know what does it mean for the finals yeah can they can they make a virtuous cycle between those two games can they get people from arc system into the finals can they do a crossover can they make it more appealing i think they could get certain players i think i think first person games are always going to be a little bit harder to get people into just because they're a little bit more prohibitive and they they don't they don't um showcase as well you know like it's different when you can see the the millions of dollars that they spent on the character model that you're playing on and it's like more cinematic people can kind of follow a little bit more with first person it's more about like how they feel yeah um and so i don't know like i think the finals will always be like their second kind of thing and they're gonna siphon few few people but there's gonna be some hardcore people who are definitely gonna be curious although i wonder how you how much your average person even understands that i i wonder how much your your average player understands that oh that company also made this you know what i mean like the more i talk to some people who are outside of this space but like also play games they're like they don't know even though the company splash screen is literally at the start they could probably play the same game every day and like with the same company splash screen the same company logo and if i asked them who made it they'd be like i don't know because it's completely tuned out yeah i i i most people yeah i i we talked about that as when we were younger yeah i remember that i i couldn't i could not tell you like when i was like nine oh yeah of course like it wasn't until i was it probably wasn't really until even it was like during the well my whole life it's like capcom konami you didn't really know what this was i didn't know who keiji in a fune was or hideo kojima you just knew you liked games from this company and then i think it was like during the ps1 era when i started to because it was the internet really when you started to become more aware of oh this is these are these guys and this is this person and then i'm by the ps2 error i was pretty in tuned in that stuff um the only last thing i wanted to note two sales one of them is not in here i have two two notes about sales that i thought were fairly interesting the first is that uh final fantasy tactics the evilest chronicles has surpassed one million copies sold which is i'm sure great i i wonder if they feel good about that um i suspect that they do um we i bought it dustin you bought it i bought it for holly on switch and she doesn't like it so no it is what it is no taste no michael what michael wasn't really into it either um yeah the other thing that i wanted to say and i i i just saw it on linkedin before we started recording and i forgot to put it in here is that uh detroit become human 15 million copies sold since its launch in 2019.

3:17:28Not so bad. Most of them on PC probably, but it's also available on PS4 and PS5 and it's an excellent game. I highly recommend Detroit. I think it's awesome. The final thing I saw in Gamatsu here that I wanted to note is that the Xbox Studios game from developer Stoic, Towerborn is coming to PS5 on February 26th. So, next! It's a it's a side scrolling action RPG. Oh, yeah, yeah. I yeah, I think I heard about it. And it was in early access, I guess. So there it is. Tower born coming on over to PS5. I might actually check this out. It's kind of on my alley a little bit. All right, let's get into what we're playing.

3:18:13All right, let's begin with Dustin. And Dustin, I want to read this letter as well. I see you're playing it. So we can just begin here. JP wrote in and said, hey, guys, I would love to get Dustin's and Chris's updated thoughts on Skate Story. I've been taking my time with it just a chapter a night when I have time, and I'm so impressed with the game's visual and audio presentation. I've not really played a game that matches it from an artistic expression perspective. It's surreal, poetic, and I think the gameplay is quite good. Having boss fights in a skating game to cap off the chapters is not something I was expecting, but works well here.

3:18:45I hope you two are enjoying it as much as me, and I'm eager to hear your thoughts so you can talk about Skate Story as well as everything else you're playing sure yeah well skate story was one of my christmas break games and i did pick it up on pc because of chris saying the playstation version was uh not so hot and i also saw that online so i picked it up on pc played it completed it over break and it's pretty good i don't recommend it for everybody but um the main thing i really appreciated about it was uh it just the the visual style and atmosphere of this game is completely unique and it's clear i think this is a mostly solo developer yes and i yeah i i really appreciate seeing a developer that had a very clear vision on what he wanted to do obviously inspired by previous skateboarding games but making a skateboarding game unlike any other for sure it's not perfect um i think this game shines most when you're doing there's these long stretches of like kind of downhill sections and that's where i really like the game the most there are more uh like open level sections where the mechanics kind of fall apart a little bit just because by design it is more realistic in terms of your agileness on the skateboard and moving around so it doesn't quite work as well i feel like in those sections the game is a bit buggy too even on pc i at one point clipped myself out of a building like a shop where you can upgrade your your skateboard and so there's like a hub world called the skater's dream and so i had to go back to the skater's dream in order to get out of the unclipped area and then i thought that i lost a huge amount of progress because the way that it's laid out is super weird.

3:20:51I was looking up online. There are people that specifically have had a similar issue and have lost like chapters worth of progress. Thankfully I didn't. So putting that as a warning out there, if you play this game, be careful about going back to the skaters dream. But I guess for people that don't know anything about this game, it is a skateboarding game where you play as a demon in the underworld and And you make a deal with the devil for the skateboard and you become your body becomes glass. And the skater's goal is to eat the moon or the moons of the underworld. And so it's very weird. There's a bunch of weird little guys that you meet throughout the game.

3:21:35It's very cute and fun in that way. The music of this game is maybe one of the best parts. Like I was looking, I might try to pick up the soundtrack on vinyl. and uh yeah to bring it full circle all these elements combined it's like it's neat when you know all of us play so many games and we have almost our entire life and you kind of see the same things over and over again they just get slightly better and while this is of course as i said a skateboarding game it is just so unique in its vision that if that's something you're looking for i highly recommend it it's not the strongest gameplay of a game it's not necessarily tight on a technical perspective but it is wholly unique and a cool experience so uh yeah i finished that up uh the other game that i played and finished over break which there were other games too but if you want to hear the full everything i played over break go listen to summon sign there's a couple other things in there but the main one i want to talk about of the skate story is shinobi art of vengeance and it's funny because i think it was on sacred or maybe sacred streaming that i was uh telling you colin that i had a list of all these contenders of rpgs that i wanted to play and i when break started i was like i don't want to play any of those i don't feel like it i just kind of want to play i don't know something shorter something that i can just digest and then play maybe an rpg after that and so shinobi i don't know i i decided to play on a whim because i played the demo and i was like that was fun i was trying to decide between that and ninja but for some reason i decided to go with shinobi i think because i played the demo so i like it was surefire i knew it was fun and it is awesome i was i'm not surprised it was awesome i'm just surprised how much i liked it um one of the most unique things that i found about this game was i didn't know if i was getting into a metroidvania i was hoping i wasn't because i like metroidvania games but i wasn't in the mood for something like that like trying to getting lost and backtracking and stuff like that um but what shinobi does is that each level is basically its own mini metroidvania map and so they're designed uh with certain sections that you can't access until you get stuff from later levels that's not required you can play this game very linear in terms of going from point a to point b certain levels do have light metroidvania mechanics where you just like collect all of this in order to progress but i was uh i found that very refreshing for each lower like it's like i'm not going to be lingering here forever you can kind of enjoy all the different things the game has to offer and the combat of this game too is sick there's a mechanic i really like where it's kind of it reminds me i'm sure it's not the only game to do this but for me there's like almost like a poise mechanic from seki row where once you wear an enemy down enough they get like an indicator on them and then you can press l1 and r1 and it does this cool finisher move and so in certain battles you'll try to like wear down multiple enemies at once and then you'll do this like sick jump around the screen and finish off all these enemies at once pretty cool and uh the art style also i know that some people were disappointed that it wasn't a pixel art game like old shinobi games and not like the the ninja a Gaiden Ragebound game.

3:25:20But what they were able to do with its hand-drawn style looks phenomenal consistently throughout the whole game. So I played it, beat it, got to the end. I didn't like 100 % or anything like that. But low-key, awesome. Not low-key, high-key, awesome. I guess I just didn't. It's a game that I totally could have skipped last year and would have never thought of it. And I'm really glad that I played it. So that one was fantastic. The last thing, very fresh on my mind, Colin, very near and dear to you, is I played the Dragon Quest 7 reimagined demo yesterday. This is a chonky demo, boys. I played it in two sittings, like one earlier in the day and one later.

3:26:06My playtime was like a little over three hours in this demo. And it's excellent. It is really, really excellent. and I wasn't sure what to think initially because I've tried a lot with Dragon Quest I guess not a lot I tried Dragon Quest 11 and I got pretty well I probably got like 10 or 15 hours in which is not very far for the context of how long that game is and I would like to go back to it at some point so I just wasn't sure if it was gonna hook me but uh I absolutely love it the visuals are super cute of course there's the matt damon character that we joked about which looks a little weird at first but as soon as you start playing the game i think it all feels cohesive and the combat of course very traditional and i'm curious about how it compares to the original there's like this new mechanic where maybe it's not new it was new to me uh where there's a character once they're like hit so many times they get like juiced up and then they get a special ability so like your main character after he does this like you know you get you this power up move he's able to apply uh like a protection on each of your characters that they each can take one hit without taking any damage and so it's an interesting mechanic where you'll get powered up but you're like do i use this now or do i save it for a few battles or is it worth just using because i'll I'll build it up again before I really need it.

3:27:39So story was super cute and charming. I know the original Dragon Quest seven is notoriously very, very long and very, very bloated, crazy long, crazy. Like I was looking, I saw people say this and I, it was, it seemed to line up in the YouTube video that I checked out. You can go like four hours without getting into combat in Dragon Quest seven, the original. and so I was just watching like and jumping around in a long play of Dragon Quest 7 and they cut out a lot uh particularly in this opening area and I never played that game so I'm not really in the position to say whether or not that's a good thing but from what I could tell it was like a lot of mindless puzzle dungeon stuff that involved no combat and I would assume this applies to the rest of the game i saw that they've already confirmed some of the storylines that they cut out of the game and it seems like it's welcome just because of how bloated that game was and i so if you play this demo your save does transfer over to the main game and i can't wait now i really was super super impressed by this and uh i'm i'm totally i'm so excited now i kind of felt like oh good i have dragon quest until resident evil comes out and now it's like hell yeah i have dragon quest 7 because this demo was so good i highly recommend it i was saying when we were talking about dragon quest 7 a while ago dragon warrior 7 as we knew it in the west that at the time so that was um i think it was summer 2000 when dragonware finally seven finally came out might have been 2001 um it might have unironically been the longest console role-playing game ever at that time like i couldn't even imagine a game being any longer than that at that time it was crazy and uh it never stops with dragon like the dragon quest games are just dragon quest i understand i platinum it but as i've lamented before dragon quest 11 is just way too long it doesn't need to be so long it ends like three times yeah they just won't stop just won't stop all right shinobi i have to uh i think i i gotta look but i'm pretty sure i bought shinobi i i still have to play it i have not i've not done so all right chris let's move on to you very tree here says you're playing megaman x yeah so this i want to point out there's a couple of there was a lot of things that i played that were just kind of like i have original hardware so i was like i was playing i played through the original like two strider games i don't know if you guys remember those yeah on genesis but well i had it on playstation but like uh strider oh strider i'm thinking of shinobi yeah yeah no you're right it was the original strider was an nes game yeah that's what i'm thinking of now okay so like to reimagine strider i got you yes strider one and two strider's awesome it's a really cool dude i love strider i forgot how much i loved i was going through my games because like i had left um a friend of mine got like his own kind of retro setup but he didn't have any games and so i brought it over to him because i barely use mine and so i like over the over the break we had like a christmas thing and i was like oh shit my games he's like oh yeah you can have i didn't i meant to give these back to you soon so like i got home and i was like just going through a bunch of them and strider one and two were the ones that i was like really into but like strider is fucking so sick but the the real get like there's really not much to say about those those are like side scroller i don't even know what you would call like side scroller slashers kind of like platform slashers like they're very odd but the big thing the big three that i've been diving into or trying to dive into megaman x i got the megaman what there's an x collection i think there are two of them yeah let me see more specifically what uh megaman where is it i have it installed on my steam deck i don't have it on my computer yeah there's there's the megaman x collection one that's like megaman x through x4 and then there's another one that's x5 through x8 i have the megaman x legacy collection presumably volume one because it's it's one through i think four yeah it's four one through four yeah yeah so i've been yeah i was i don't know like i think playing marvel cosmic invasion kind of got me in the mood for like like a comfortable kind of steam deck like portable pixel art kind of experience like i was kind of like hungry for that for some reason and so I was diving into Mega Man X dude I'm getting my ass kicked in Mega Man X I gotta tell you like I'm I'm pretty competent at like standard like normal Mega Man like I feel like I'm generally okay at it like if I played it for a little for like a couple minutes I could get like in tune with like okay this is the jump this is like how you're supposed to kind of navigate the space but Mega Man X I'm getting I feel like I'm getting trounced I don't know it's because I see less of the screen and so like because Mega Man's bigger and so like things surprise me more easily than they do in classic megaman but like megaman x is kind of fucking me up a little bit but i really i really love it like i just think like the the style of it like the the visuals of it the music the music is awesome sound effects it's like it's all so good i've only beaten one one of the i don't even remember which one it is um because i i this has been like kind of my steam deck go to bed kind of games but i'm working my way through the first megaman x and depending on how i feel about it at the end i'll keep going but it seems like it's going to be a permanent fixture on my on my steam deck by the way it says it doesn't run on steam deck but it does so i don't know what's i don't know what's going on about that like it works perfectly fine for me but so be noted it is one of those things where it says like it's not supported but like it runs and i was like i downloaded i was like there's no way this isn't support shut up like what it can't run on this sure but so that's the first one i i think it's great uh still working my way through it the christmas season always gets me into it like it always makes me want to play skyrim and i kind of always do and i just remember being like no this i can't do it again i can't do it this year i i it's too many times i've started skyrim and not finished it and i already finished Skyrim years ago so like there's nothing really there's there's a lot left there honestly like there's a lot of DLC that I haven't gotten to but like I do the Skyrim thing every every every Christmas and it's good and it's cozy but I inevitably fall off of it and so I was thinking like what's the Bethesda game that I really should finish that I really should have played by now and it's New Vegas and it's kind of somewhat uh well-timed because the the show is out now and uh the season two is like literally all about new vegas so i'm kind of in that headspace anyway so i'm like all right you know what yeah let me get into new vegas i've started and stopped new vegas a myriad of times it's never run well like even as i like i tried to play it on stream recently and i downloaded it and i couldn't full screen it just it doesn't let you do it you have to download like a fucking eye and eye thing or like a day you have to download a mod to let you full screen uh fallout new vegas on modern pc so it's like that's very cool but I'm playing it on my Steam Deck and just kind of getting into it and it's it's great there's a lot more there's a lot more to New Vegas than I thought I would always get kind of bored in with New Vegas because I'm I'm more I love urban environments in video games like I've always loved like urban kind of exploration the idea of like there's a there's a skyscraper and it's emptied out and like what's in every there's the possibility of like what's in any one of those rooms is like a lot more interesting to me than like a like a you know a wasteland that's kind of spread out it's why i think fallout 3 works so well with like the the washington dc district with all the buildings and the sunken the sunken skyscrapers and and all that stuff but like new vegas has always missed me and i i'd always like kind of fell off of it before i got to like the strip even and so i'm i'm really kind of just putting my foot down and being like you know I'm going to I'm going to really give New Vegas a proper shake and try to learn a little bit more about it because there's also like a bunch of mechanics in that game that I never really bothered to get like crafting and like you get these like ammo things that are not real ammo it's like cases of ammo and I never knew what the fuck to do with them so I'm like I'm really just trying to get into it and and kind of wipe it off my list because it really has just been sitting there for an absurd amount of time granted it's the game's fault for crashing on pc every 10 minutes uh that could stand to not happen yeah that would be nice that would be that would be great i probably would have finished it a long time ago if that wasn't the case but it runs really well on steam deck i will say that and it's been that's also been like a really cozy kind of nighttime game like the old school radio and kind of wandering it really like that game lulls me into like a really perfect kind of position to just fall asleep which is nice it's a good vibe so i'm working my way through new vegas i've spent let me see like what's what's my time in new vegas uh i am yeah 30 hours about so i'm putting some time in the last one is the most interesting one i think it's uh the altars so this is this uh kind of resource management rpg kind of game it's a little bit of it's a little bit of fallout shelter in it a little bit of uh feels kind of mass effect it's not really massive but it feels that way it's kind of like it reminds me of it a lot in just like the character interactions and things like that but this game is really really interesting it's really something it's what so i i'm playing this on um pc on the epic game store because i kind of had it and i didn't even realize that it was there i'm thinking i might just buy it and play it on steam deck because it is kind of one of those things where it's like i want i want to play it more but i don't want to sit in front of my pc to do it so this might be another one i have to see how it runs but like dude it is really fucking interesting so if if if people don't really know what the altars is it's like the premise is like you kind of land on this this planet you're on an expedition and you're supposed to land with like a bunch of people but everybody dies and you're just kind of you're the last person left alive you've got this roving base that's kind of set up like a big wheel with like fallout shelter type rooms in the middle of it and you can choose what to build and you know uh how to maintain it but you're just kind of like a you're not really a specialist you're kind of like you're a builder you build the rooms and and all your experts are gone and so what you do is there's a machine that allows you to make a clone of yourself but choose different life paths for that clone within like the the memory of that character that puts them on a different path to being a specialist at different things and so it's really fucking weird and it gets it gets like it's existential sometimes because it starts to make you think about like your own like branching pads and it's it's really it's just really fascinating it's really cool how like each of these characters are the same person but cloned but they're like their voice acted completely distinctly they're you can feel that there's a difference in characters like oh you you uh stayed at home and didn't go to college so you're kind of like a you're kind of like a hothead because you had to stay in a situation that you you otherwise would have escaped from like that version of you or like this version of you is like kind of emotionally distant because he left earlier or he made this pivotal decision at this point in his life it's really fucking it's really like meticulously crafted in that sense like it's it's so much deeper than i even thought going in uh as a gameplay experience it's it's somewhat clunky it doesn't feel the smoothest there are like sections where you're kind of out gathering resources that i feel like kind of are a little bit not super interesting in my opinion but like you they feel rewarding because you go out you do like the menial work and then you kind of come back and you're rewarded with this like really interesting diorama or this really interesting like setup of character interactions and you know plot progression and there's like a ticking clock in the game too that kind of like you have to avoid the sunrise basically because the sunrise will fucking cook you it's it's really kind of and everything you do takes up time and speeds up time or it's it's really cool i really highly recommend people check this out even if you're not if this even sounds remotely interesting to you because this is definitely one of those games where i looked at and i'm like i don't know man i don't know if like i think it's interesting but would i enjoy it you know these are two different things oftentimes but i'm liking it more than i thought i would to the point where i'm like i'm really i'm kind of considering it buying it somewhere else and like starting fresh and just just so i have the comfort and freedom to play it wherever um it's really fucking good and it and playing it now it is kind of jarring that it was it is it like i remember when people were talking about like it's it's absence from certain game awards categories is like conspicuously weird and i i totally agree now like i see what people are saying like being able to voice so many different characters and be able to like and it's the same guy and you can tell who the character is just by their voice and not even having to pan over to them it's like that's really fucking impressive like oh that's the scientist i can tell and it's the same guy all like all there's other characters in the game too like they're kind of like voices on a radio but it's really fucking interesting really really unique it's kind of unlike anything i've ever played there's elements of like different games in there for sure like like i said fallout shelter is the fallout shelter is the more obvious one because you can kind of see like the layout but yeah man it's it's i don't want to say it's surprising because i thought this game might be good i guess it's surprising i guess it's something similar to how what dustin was saying earlier where like he's just like I'm just surprised that I like it as much as I do and uh I would I would recommend people kind of branching out if this isn't your cup of tea if this sounds interesting to you you'll probably like it I think yeah that's another game on my list I was actually writing it down because shinobi and the alters are two games that I didn't get to play last year yeah that I really want to play along with hell is us I actually yesterday or two days ago because it was 25 off so it's 15 bucks I bought silksong she says I'm like that's that's just a crazy price I mean I might as well just buy it um so a few things for me to get to okay um i can go through mine quickly here i played quite a bit over the break uh terminator 2d no fate i i beat the game probably a dozen times at this point there's all sorts of different things you can do different paths and so on i really like the game the more i played it the more i liked it i think it's a lot of fun there are a lot of cool accoutrements in it as well it is so i did a playthrough there are a bunch of i'm looking at my trophies now you have to complete the arcade mode in under 15 minutes which is i haven't done uh achieve an s rank on every level which i haven't done but i think that's doable but there's one where yeah complete any route on very hard difficulty route is a playthrough of the game and i i'm playing on very hard here and there i was like in like late in december and i'm like I don't know if I can really do this and I actually I beat the game on hard with an s rank which was somewhat difficult there's a way to cheat apparently where you can unlock the so you have to beat the game on very hard and then you unlock all sorts of cheats that you can use in the game and apparently there's a way to kind of finesse unlocking that earlier and then you can use it on these playthroughs but I'm like that's kind of just too overt they can teach their own i just don't want to do that um so i played a lot of that and i highly recommend it if you're in terminator if you're into 2d games i think it's pretty good i uh i beat dying light the beast over the break um i don't know man it's not very good i mean it's it's fine i i would have probably gone for the platinum if one of the one of the trophies is you have to like get every blueprint and make every blueprint i'm like this is just so fucking annoying and dying light actually is notorious for trophies like that so i just kind of pulled up after i i dicked around with it a little bit after i beat it and i'm like i'm just not gonna platinum it so why am i even doing this um i i really don't recommend it i don't think it's very good uh i platinum marvel cosmic invasion so that's platinum number 197 oh cool um it's somewhat straightforward each stage has three special things you have to do on it like kill use this character to kill these guys or whatever and then like some collectibles to find and then you have to beat the game with every character but you only have to beat the final stage with every character so there's 16 characters i think so and two at a time so eight times um i really i like that game a lot i thought it was really fun um the combat's fun it was it was a great uh game to play on and i played it a lot on portal while football or hockey were on so so yeah i ended up platenning that and then um i played and beat kingdom hearts but i'm not going to talk about that here we're going to do that on sacred symbols plus you think i'm not gonna make you pay i paid i because i fulfilled the spirit of the deal but then i went ahead and i beat the entire game um right and so we're gonna discuss that me dustin and brad we invited maddie he can't make it so there's that but i needed a palate cleanser after kingdom hearts and by the way i won't say much about kingdom hearts it's a lot better than i thought it was gonna be i'll say that oh um there are a lot of problems with it but there's a lot i like about it too oh yeah we'll talk we'll talk a great deal about that and then for a palate cleanser i was like i'm gonna play megaman and i so i played and beat megaman 1 through 10 and i'm playing megaman 11 now but what i really spent a lot of time on with the megaman legacy collections because there's two of them one has one through six one has seven through 10 there are these challenges and i have all the trophies neither of them have platinum them trophies by the way but i had all the trophies for beating the games and doing a few other things but there are so in megaman legacy collection one there are 54 challenges and you have to gold metal 50 of them so you have to like get the gold metal time in 50 of them and they're hard this is one of those things where it's like this is like get good there's nothing you can do there's no way to finesse it there's no way to cheat or finagle it like you got to get good and i spent a lot of time after i beat kingdom hearts probably i spent probably about a week with megaman legacy collection one and two playing it every night for sometimes five six seven hours at a time just getting through these challenges like grueling challenges and i really enjoyed the challenges in the first megaman legacy collection because there would be things like in a linear order where it's like megaman one boss rush megaman one stage remixes then like megaman two would come in then they would bring megaman one back in so it'd be like megaman one and two stage remixes and so by the time you get the six it's like megaman one two three four five six stage remixes beat all the bosses from all the games do all these kinds of things beat all the bosses without special weapons it's it's hard and i ended up getting the the rare trophy in this game which is gold 50 gold trophy or 50 gold medals it's um rarity rate is 0.4 so it is i think one of the rarest trophies i have and according to psn profiles it is the fourth rarest trophy i've ever earned and that is a well earned like that was a fucking hard trophy to get and then i downloaded megaman legacy collection too and i needed to clean up trophies in that so i already had the trophies from when i came out for beating the games but you have to beat megaman 9 with proto man which is basically like playing it on very hard mode because proto man takes like a shit ton of damage and like it's it's hard and then megaman 10 you have to beat it with proto man and with base so i did both of those base and treble of course um and proto man by himself and so i did that and then it has its own challenge mode but the challenges are a lot easier so like i was saying a megaman legacy collection one you have 54 challenges and you have to gold medal 50 of them in megaman legacy collection two there are something like 78 challenges and you have to gold medal 50 of them so you just have a lot more leeway if like one is really you're really struggling with one or whatever you don't have to do it while in megaman legacy collection one you really have no room for that.

3:48:14So that trophy for getting 50 gold medals in Mega Man Legacy Collection 2 is at 0.8%. So twice as common as the one from the original game. So I did that and then I got back to Mega Man 11. In fact, the real sequence of events is that after Kingdom Hearts I downloaded Mega Man 11 and I was playing it and I'm like, man, I suck at this. And then I got to get comfortable with Mega Man again because Mega Man 11 is hard as fuck. It's like way harder than all the other Mega Man games with the exception, I think of maybe parts of eight, the end of seven, which is like insane. I was reminded of that, like the Wily fight in Mega Man seven is so hard.

3:48:47It's like, why is this so difficult? And Mega Man one, of course, is pretty difficult as well. But I've gotten back to Mega Man 11 in the last couple of days. I'm just trying to do some of the challenges, do that. I'd like to platinum it. It would be the rarest, that platinum trophy would be one of the rarest platinums I ever got because it's 0.3%. So I've just kind of been palate cleansing with Mega Man for a while. And also I think that after I got through like Dying Light, Marvel Cosmic Terminator like games from 2025. I didn't feel the heat anymore because I'm like, there's nothing more I can really do now.

3:49:17I'll get the hell is us. I'll get to the authors. I get to all these other games. But like, I'm not trying to fill in anymore. These gaps that I thought might inform me as we were doing various game of the year endeavors. Right. And I will note I platinum. So for the for 2025, I platinum 24 games. I beat another 16 games. So that's 40 total games beaten. and I looked at it too with Mega Man like I was spending a lot of time with it not really doing much of anything not earning really any trophies but just having a good time and I'm like I'm just vibing right now just playing I don't feel like I need to do anything or be anywhere I'll get back into the swing of things but I was playing a lot of game I was gaming a lot over the holidays and I was playing a lot of games but then after Kingdom Hearts it all went to Mega Man so so shout out to them so yeah I have the 100 % of the trophies in Mega Man Legacy Collection 1 and too which is nice and um they're permanently now stuck together also on my trophy list because you know if you can't earn any more trophies they just kind of stay in the same place so it's kind of cool to see them on top of each other like that and that's it that's all i've been playing so i'm sure i'll be on um on someone's sign in the coming weeks as well to talk more about that but or some of these games anyway man my throat hurts because i think i've talked so little for three weeks yes now i'm like going on and on like it just won't shut the fuck up so there's that let's get into six questions comments concerns thoughts and ideas from the audience and wrap this show up we've been going for a while here of course for the uninitiated we wrap up every episode of sacred symbols with six inquiries from the audience over on patreon patreon.com slash last day media you put your inquiries into the thread in the news feed for this show and all the other shows and then we pull out of those what we want you've heard a bunch of them throughout the show already but we end with six here a half dozen we start with a little raisin says greetings little raisin and little wheat then yeah i don't know what those are the two that i like i always call raisin little raisin i don't know why little raisin little raisin says greetings sacred boys a couple months ago i wrote in asking if sony would wait until after trump's second term to release the ps6 with rumors indicating sony may delay the release of the ps6 due to with a ramp shortage, I have to ask, would this be such a bad thing?

3:51:30Rightly or wrongly, many individuals still feel like this generation hasn't even been started yet. Many individuals are still playing on PS4. That reality will still be true in 2027. So I ask, would it be so bad if the next gen consoles got delayed? Personally, I don't even want to see or hear the words PS6 until 2030. But what about y 'all? What are y 'all's take on this? So there has been some percolations in the industry that RAM shortages and just the ridiculous cost of a lot of components on the current market is going to affect the release timing of these consoles. Part of me doesn't believe it because these are such economies of scale with contracts that are put in place years beforehand that I'm not entirely sure how much flexibility you really have.

3:52:11On the other hand, if you have no customers that can afford the console or even worse, as he's saying, don't feel the need to have the console, you're kind of in trouble. This could be a happy accident. I guess is what I'm saying. If these things are true, Dustin, should we expect a delay based on RAM shortages and other component costs for the PlayStation six? Are we really going to see this thing in 2027? And if so, how much is it even going to cost? I mean, that's the major thing is if Sony's play, if if Sony's rates are locked in, then they're good. But if they're paying market rates, it could get a little dicey out there.

3:52:50Yeah, I honestly, man, I've thought about this and I really don't know whether or not they'll delay because I just honestly don't know enough about the manufacturing side in terms of like what prices they're locked into. What are the prices comparative when you're buying instead of at a consumer level versus a manufacturing level? I really don't know. I think I'm with you, Colin, and I'm leaning that it probably is locked in. So I guess the question that becomes is like, do we do we want PlayStation six in 2027? And on a personal level, do I want it in 2027? Yes, because I love new hardware. I love to new technology.

3:53:35I love the idea that if we're hitting diminishing returns, that my hope would be the next PlayStation is really focused on high frame rates specifically. Because we have seen games on, I mean, we have PS5 Pro now that's helping somewhat. But I think we're seeing games on PlayStation 5 that could use more horsepower. I always think of Final Fantasy 16 as a game that's like, I was just almost there. but not quite in terms of performance. And yet still so perfect. Yes. Yeah. Still amazing game. So I personally would love to see PlayStation 6 in 2027 along with a handheld. But if I put on my more analytical cap, I definitely do think it's a problem for Sony that so many people...

3:54:27My question, I guess, is people are saying that right now at the beginning of 2026, but by the end when we have all this time passed i'm sure that feeling will still be there but maybe not quite as much and i wonder too just um like what they have planned in terms of the technology and maybe they can make a really convincing argument for it's like hey this we're going to show you why playstation 6 is really that much better and maybe that'll appeal to some people maybe it won't appeal to others but um the ram issue is definitely going to be potentially a huge problem it's got me wondering like i with switch to i told holly i was like whenever you want one of these say the word and i will go buy one for you whenever and she said like well i would prefer a smaller switch to light and i'm sure they'll come out with that at some point it's like cool but now with the ram pricing it's like should i just go buy one of the one of these right now when it's 450 bucks and not 550 or 650 i don't know uh because i mean man the pc market right now is just devastated it's crazy absolutely devastated hate to see it well laugh now but it will affect you later um man yeah no likely i'm sorry chris go ahead you can no i mean it really like i don't know like i my gut reaction is that like i could see a delay i don't 2030 is insane i think i think that's not i'm sorry if you're if your goal is to not hear about the ps6 till 2030 your dream is already broken yeah because we're talking about it it'll already be in your living room for two years by that point probably yeah i i would imagine yeah i would say 2020 i could see 2028 that's very very possible and in fact i think i would prefer it um just because again i i sympathize with the general consensus of just like yeah man this doesn't even really feel like it's this it i wouldn't say it doesn't feel like it's gotten started but it certainly doesn't feel more than halfway done to me like it feels like we're still kind of in this growing pains of just trying to figure this out and so and i gotta say like if i wasn't doing the show would i get a ps6 next year no like i i just i i genuinely do not see the purpose um 2028 that might change you know there would be like some distance between the the pro i would be kind of in the appetite i would have an appetite for like some new hardware um i don't know i i just i do think this is going to be a problem and i don't see it really getting better anytime soon and if they can buy themselves a little bit of flexibility not 2030 but like one more year i don't think that would be too bad for them really i think i think it really only stands to help them because the console market doesn't really care clearly about performance like we care about performance but you know people clearly don't care people play most of their games on quality and don't even notice people are playing on their tvs without game mode on you know um it's just not a thing for most for the overwhelming majority of people so if they can squeeze out a little bit more time for the machine to identify itself even something as simple as just getting getting a game like intergalactic to have some legs on the machine before you transition over to something else like i think i think that helps really um but who's to say who the fuck knows at this point nothing seems predictable anymore i'm a i'm of multiple minds with this where i'm a little annoyed by the i mean capitalist markets are about supply and demand everyone knows that so there's a portion of the increased pricing that makes sense and yet it seems so predatory because it's not really about like oh we're out of silicon or we have nowhere we can't find anymore or whatever it's literally just production issues and who can pay the most for these components not in other words and it's like my dad always said something's worth what someone will pay for it but it's jacking up the prices for those very reasons to the point where i think i've seen with pc market like prefab pcs are getting like canceled if people order them because like they can they can already charge so much more for them.

3:59:01And so I'm, I'm a little upset about why this is happening. And as we've said before, I hope that we can gear up, you know, in the United States and elsewhere, just a bunch of component manufacturing for electronics, because we're going to, we're going to ultimately need them. Yeah. I don't, I don't, I must admit that I specifically don't know how these contracts work for making consoles as far as how, and I get someone like Tom might know more, maybe we can have them on the show in the coming weeks, but it would be very hard for me to believe. And now check me if I'm wrong out there. It would be very hard for me to believe that Sony would approach company X and say, we need 20 million blah.

3:59:42And that that price isn't set at the time of the contract. You can't make a contract to buy that much shit and then say like, yeah, market rates. It just doesn't work. Like, so I guess what I'm saying is I'm not entirely sure Sony is going to be shit out of luck in some of these things because they might already have it all locked down at an old price. If they and that would be very advantageous, even if the console came out in 2027, because PS6 could therefore be unusually unusually cheap, comparable to a lot of things that are on the market electronics wise. And remember, Tom would Tom said based on the stuff that he had seen that they're aiming for like a cheap mass market machine that like he thinks it'll be cheaper in real money than a ps5 pro all of this balancing act i don't know i don't know how it all plays out i'm sure this is an urgent issue for them um but i do very much agree that like you said chris we are we feel at the halfway mark right now doesn't seem like we need this console i'm looking at my it's so funny looking down at the, you know, the windows module for like date and time.

4:00:49And it's like, whoa, 2026, like we were saying earlier, it's like, okay, if you say so. So it does seem like there's a lot in the air and I don't know the palatability of releasing a new console unless it was really affordable, which would be contingent on Sony's contracts to get this console manufactured. It's no small thing to manufacture 10, 20, 30 million of these things for, you know, its first 18 months on the market or whatever. So, yeah, I don't know. I would love, I think we all universally agree, I would love for this thing to be punted to another year. Seriously, just punt and go in 2028 or something.

4:01:26Don't even worry about it. No one gives a shit. We would care because we're PlayStation enthusiasts and gamers of a certain cloth, but the need isn't there. Like, I remember when what's a good example? Like, really like the SNES is a great example of like of like a need or like a clear delineation. Obviously, the jump to CD hardware, CD based hardware and polygons and all these different things. I don't know, man. I mean, we've hit the sad nauseam where I'm like, I just don't really see it. But maybe it's just me. Yeah. All right. Hayden Glass wrote in and said, how do you sacred boys? Highguard social media page has been completely silent since the announcement.

4:02:10why do you think that is is there no point in feeding the online hate machine that has already deemed your game of failure what could this mean it's very interesting so um yeah high guard was the game announced the game awards the very last you know one last thing um announcement i don't think they did any favors to the game by doing that it's from a new studio called wild light the game is slated to come out january 26th that was what was so interesting about that announcement is that they were releasing it six six or seven weeks from when they were revealing it, which I like. I think that's really awesome.

4:02:42However, this game does seem to be in serious trouble. Now, I'm not entirely sure what their marketing plan was all along. Maybe they were always planning on kind of going silent for a while. Right. But I do believe that you can't know for sure because they definitely have nothing to gain by saying anything right now. And it does seem like fair or unfair and unfortunate or fortunate. This game is going to get battered and bruised, and I don't know if it really has much of a prayer. I would like to be wrong because I don't really want games to fail. I don't really see what's appealing about this game, personally, but I don't play these kinds of games.

4:03:17So it's not for me. What I want to throw out there in the wild, though, is this continued idea that they paid for their slot. Now, I'm not saying they didn't, but I think that there is a differentiation, as I noted last year, between ad space and game reveal, and that the ad space is purchased and the game reveal is quid pro quo. If that's true, then really the disservice was done by Jeff and or his team or the people at Wildlight that thought their game could be that last one. Like the response to this game would have been radically different if it was like the third game revealed. Right. And not the last one.

4:03:53So I so I keep seeing people say like they spent millions of dollars on this reveal and this and this. And I'm like, I don't think they spent anything on it. Because it's not an ad. And I think now Now, I don't know this for sure. Am I? Do you guys interpret it the same way that like there's ads and then there's game reveals? And if they're if people are paying for game reveals, that's a pretty muddy thing. And I don't know that I believe that that's actually what's happening. Like, I don't I don't believe it. I mean, honestly, like I, I think I did kind of assume that some portion, if not all of them were were paid because it's because it are trailers, not ads.

4:04:32You know what I mean? yeah reveals like i in other words i could see like a genshin impact commercial for 30 seconds okay pay or whatever like something that's driving you towards a piece of hardware but then like we're revealing high guard it's like they're paying for that don't you what do you what do you like don't you isn't the quid pro quo you have something to show yeah i i don't know i like my i guess i haven't i never really i should just email jeff keely and Yeah, you should. Because I really, I genuinely don't know. My assumption always was that there were like a certain amount of slots that they would look for.

4:05:06And they would be like, okay, this game's going in. We think this is cool. We have some slots to fill. We don't know what to put there. Make a pitch as to why this should be yours. You know what I mean? And like a little bit like half and half sort of. You could be right though that it's just the ads. I just wonder because the ads never seem to stick. nobody talks about the ads yeah the ads don't even like so i i would almost wonder like what the benefit and it's and also it's just like genshin slop that's just in those ads yeah so like so i don't i genuinely don't know um i will say that whoever the whoever placed the game there is completely fucked if they paid for that slot i would i would i'd be like yo give us that money back yeah it might be one of those rare examples where you paid for marketing that truly did blow up in your face yeah um that's why i hope i guess in my mind chris that it's not marketing because i'm like oh what a fucking really sad story you know but then that's but then but then also that's also wild because jeff keely is smart enough to know i have to assume jeff keely is smart that's the thing right like he's not if they didn't pay for that then that means like jeff keely was like yeah let's put this last you know like that's that that At that point, that would feel malicious.

4:06:30Because you know what that's going to do. That slot should have gone to Divinity. Or something like it. I totally agree with you. And maybe that was the idea before it leaked. But then they were teasing it. So that wasn't really a leak. Sure. Yeah, you're right. Because you're right, Chris, in that. Jeff Keighley has a very keen understanding of games in the games industry. He's been doing this for a long time. He understands games. is it possible that he was like oh a big game from the from guys that were at respawn for many years making this new shooter of course and he just misread it i can't imagine for that slot i mean who's at fault right that's that's what i'm most curious about really is like who put it there because the placement is everything like you said i just think um again even just for the for the cadence of the show like even though it did leak that that was divinity it's the only it's the only bit of external marketing that you had for the show why would that not be your last thing why would it be where it was yeah if it was this i don't know everything about it is weird i will say i can safely assume that their plan after the game awards was not to go dark yeah i would assume that like if there was a great response they would be like we're excited that you're excited you know we're working on this here's how you can whatever there would be some communication but i do think there is wisdom in not saying anything i think i think whoever is there to their credit i think has a has probably a good understanding of what to do which is people are against our game whatever whether this was jeff's placement or our uh marketing uh we missed we missed the mark here nothing we can say is going to turn that around let's wait until the game is out it's free to play yeah it's free to play people are curious about it because it is a topic of conversation where's this game maybe their hope is that we can't we can't change the narrative so we shouldn't let's just let the game speak for itself and if people love it that'll fix it and which is by the way which is what i would do if i was releasing like a free-to-play game where there's like really no like there's no pre-orders to be gained there's no real financial incentive outside of getting people i guess into the game and and um you know buying you know whatever whatever their monetization angle is um that's what my instincts would tell me i would be like let's look we fucked up here let's just stay silent let's let the game speak for itself essentially shadow drop it even though we did announce it it'll come out we'll announce that it's out and that way i mean it's free there's no barrier of entry people are surely going to be curious about it yeah and so yeah that would be that's how i would handle it because it really is the best with it's it's the best way you're it's not the ideal situation i doubt anybody wanted this but this is that's kind of like your best bet out of here and you you kind of bet on the game you made and hope that it resonates i i don't know how likely that is um it doesn't look too appealing to me but i'm curious about it i'm gonna try it out i'm watching the video now i mean i just don't really see what differentiates it but i don't know this shit that deeply yeah the thing again like i was saying earlier like first person games are weird because like you look at even even when they showed some of doom single player you know um doom 2016 people were like yeah i mean maybe it's all about how it feels and that's really going to be the deciding factor.

4:10:07I would personally, if I were a betting man, I would say like probably not. It's probably ain't it. But there have been stranger upsets, I suppose. I will say looking at it, Dustin, too, that to bring you into the conversation, it doesn't look appealing. It's not my kind of game, but I don't see what's so offensive about it either. So it's what Chris and I were saying, where it really is that placement that did everything. It really it's so unfortunate for wildlife entertainment. what are your thoughts here on this game? Are you going to check it out? Are you optimistic about it in any way? I mean, it seems like it's definitely in trouble.

4:10:42Yeah, well, all of this, I mean, in some ways, the negativity maybe for some people has been marketing for the game because I probably would have never played it. But now it's like, oh, well, maybe I will try it since everyone thinks it's going to suck. So let's find out for real. And it's tough because they're the, you know, they're publishing the game as well so i don't know what their money situation they must have private investors private investors yeah presumably i wonder you know chris was saying about letting the game speak for itself and i think that that's definitely the route they're going to have to take at this point but let's say they know the game is very good and they're very very confident something they did if i remember correctly for apex legends was when they announced it they had all of these streamers play it like that day they paid a bunch of streamers to play it and they were all like oh this is awesome because i think at that point with apex the cell was difficult because there was a lot of big players in the battle royale scene between fortnite and pub g like how is there room for another one until they literally paid people to play it for their audience and realize like oh this is good you can't have it that's also like a wild card though because you don't want a mind's eye situation where you paid streamers to play it and they're clearly suffering when they're playing it um i don't know maybe do you fly people out and do kind of like what they did for marathon where they had a bunch of people play it and then talk about their experience that also i don't think that hurt marathon but i also don't know if it really helped them and that was even pre-art controversy as well yeah so maybe the move is just to wait and let it come out at this point it's it's a tough situation there and yeah i'm kind of analyzing because i agree with what chris was saying too that like the idea was almost certainly not to go silent that that is an interesting idea but i feel like that would be a better idea if your game was after you really well received um it's just like nope no more well you know what's you know what's even a better idea is just like if you're if you're that close to launching anyway i don't know man like how much how much work could seven weeks have really done to make like is the game really seven weeks better from where it was to the point where oh we couldn't have possibly put that out i just think like if you're gonna if you're gonna announce something like that as the last thing why not shadow drop it yeah why not drop it that night and then also everything about it was just so on like the placement and then not only the placement but like the way jeff introduced it it's like these are the guys that did titanfall and it's like why would you set up that expectation at all wait until after to say that in my is how i would feel i don't know yeah that's like something for a press release i mean if you're on the precipice of showing something then you don't even really need to say that because you're you're have a captive audience that's watching already so you don't need to like court them by saying like these guys worked on fucking apex legends it's like well and i'm looking at their so there's a few things like their website they have a website for high guard play high guard.com you can't you still can't wishlist the game via on xbox or playstation that's interesting yeah the um wildlight.com or the wildlight.com for the studio does showcase the game proudly so there's that it's not like they're trying to hide it and then if you look at the steam stuff the community hubs a mess that's not a huge surprise of course um i think the big thing for me is just i mean we ask this question pretty often, I guess, but like the mean spiritedness of like the worst thing you could do to this game is to just ignore it.

4:14:44There seems to be some sort of joy that people take out of things like this, which is like whatever. I mean, it is what it is, but I don't know, man, there's an there's a story behind this game. There's a story behind that reveal. And I'm hoping that it does well. It wouldn't be unprecedented for it to dig itself out of this and become something think about but even i was gonna say like think about no man's sky or something but like people there were some people that really wanted to play no man's sky like that were into it there's not this game just does look so generic that you almost wonder like what's the purpose and how are you going to make any money on this in the market you're entering it into but i'll be keeping a close eye on how this game does and i'll be very interested to see how people feel about it because my suspicion is that it'll be like concord where maybe not as bad as concord but it'll be like concord where it's like the game's not bad it's just nobody cares yeah it's just like whatever yeah it being free will if anything will save it from that though it just got to get people to try it that's it yeah all right connor campbell wrote in and said hey cdc i hope you had a good holiday break and appreciate the work that went into giving us podcasts to listen to at that time we know your favorite games from 2025 but were there any gaming collectibles or merch that you enjoyed from last year too i collect art books myself in 2025 brought a lot of great titles including art books for star wars outlaws assassin's creed shadows given ubisoft a lot of money doom the dark ages starfield i'm giving bethesda a lot of money juicet metroid prime and more art books are in a healthy spot right now but wanted to hear about your loot as well you know i gotta say sorry i'm off mic dustin bought me a very kind present for christmas yeah which is this megaman 2 and 3 vinyl oh and dude i love the art on the back the boss art look at how cool that is that's cool yeah that is um i don't know if i saw the back on the order yeah it's megaman two and three bosses well that makes sense because it's megaman two and three but i thought this was really neat i love i was telling mike i'm like i wish i had two copies of this because i would love to frame both copies because this is cool with megaman and roll and rush and whatever but then why but then wiley on the back yeah it would be kind of neat as well so yeah for sale from the site I can find the site that I bought it from they might still be for sale and it was a good price I like this touch here Gemini man is shown twice right here like that very cool very clever I noticed what you're doing so yeah a cool a few cool items that I received this year but nothing I'm not too much of a physical collector the things people send me like a this was kind of cool too.

4:17:23This was Astro Bot. Oh, nice. This is the one where they number all of them, right? What is this called?

4:17:32Nendoroid. Nendoroid. Nendoroid. And like they're all numbered, I think, like through the whole run of like every toy, which I think is kind of cool. Yeah. Yeah. Product number 1 ,879. So people send me cool things, but I really don't buy where am i gonna put all this shit the gi joe stuff takes up enough room i like i don't have room for all this any any anything you collected chris non non-game but gaming related no not really i didn't uh i can't remember if it was this year or last or well not this year but like 2025 or 2024 where i got like i got like a halo 2 limited edition kind of statue i think it might have been the year before but i'm not really i'm not really big on that either like it's it's pretty rare that something catches my eye where i'm like i should get that um the closest thing i guess i did get a i did get a marathon shirt where it was like uh it had escape will make me god on it because that was it was around the time where people like the internet was like wondering if they were like changing the tag because like one trailer had a different tagline i think it was like uh death is something i can't remember i like the escape will make me god escape will make we got is dope and that's also a line from the original marathon that like fits perfectly with extra i just thought it was so cool and so i was like oh if that's like the new tagline i kind of i want merch with the old one on it but then they were like oh no it's not actually like we're it's both of them like we're it's you can have more than one tagline it's fine and i was like okay well i'm gonna get the shirt anyway because it's fucking sick um but that's really it like i don't it's rare that i find something that i think like yeah let me grab that it's usually stuff that people give me for christmas or like my birthday or something or like a random gift like that's how i get most of the i don't really buy things for me really and my christmas this year was weird i got it i got a i got a vinyl of jfk's speeches dude that's cool it's is it like a super old vinyl uh i don't know i i i mean it's framed um but it looks it looks like it could it looks old but not like it doesn't look as old as it should look so like i don't know but uh yeah i got i got a couple other things like that where it's just like it's this is literally just because i make i've i have a lot of videos a long time ago where I would make JFK jokes.

4:20:00And so I'm associated with JFK to a lot of people, which is weird. Yeah. But it's cool. I got to figure out where to hang it. I have no fucking earthly clue where I'm going to hang this completely out of theme JFK record in my apartment, but I'll figure it out. The set of Snark Tank. Yeah, I'll put it next to the Strokes. Yeah. a few months back i was at a thrift store with brandon and he found a vinyl of jfk speeches and bought oh yeah because he wanted to put it up and he's like what are the hoes gonna think of this in my apartment like right they're gonna love they if they don't love it yeah kick them out i'm thinking of hanging it on the wall that faces my bathroom so the second you leave the bathroom there's jfk smiling yeah in this decade in this decade said that yeah it is yeah yeah it's weird decade you're emphasizing the wrong part of it god damn it we will explode venezuela not because it is easy but because it is fun all right uh oh yeah yeah you have something anything in the jar anything uh dude okay i was just i was i complained about somebody about this to discord i i explained the jar meme on one episode now the jar follows me everywhere i go i want i won't bring it up no no no it's okay speaking of jars the jar follows you need the the jar for the tifa figure that i got her famous shoryuken shoryuken yeah i remember that move yeah yeah um is that one of her limit breaks or something i think it's one of the limit breaks yeah yeah so i got that uh i don't want to sorry yes uh i don't want to shout out limited run but i did get my tomba special edition they can go fuck themselves did you get this thing about their uh their class action suit suit oh yeah they sold everyone's data yeah I gotta I gotta I went to I went to get my money or like sign up for it but I'm confused about what I'm supposed to do so I gotta like look into it more so I got the Toma special edition and the merchandise is really cool the plushes are really cool so that was nice also I'm trying to think of video game vinyl I know I got the persona 3 reload vinyl set um so yeah those are the main things i don't have any video game vinyls somehow dude there's a whole world out there i know i know i don't i don't know i don't know why i have like very straight like i have like bands and artists but like there's something about a video game that i just like i i guess i guess most of the vinyls that i've gotten i've never ordered i've only like happened across and i guess video game vinyls are like they're not super you know emergent in like you're not gonna necessarily find them in like barnes and noble or like or like record stores or right or whatever but i have the spider-man uh sam raimi vinyl oh nice which is weird but night you have to get spider oh you have spider-man umd probably right umd yeah you know how they released the umd movies oh i i somehow did not i did not have spider-man on umd yeah that would be that way i think spider-man specifically might have been at you and i i really wasn't that interested in in psp movies to be like i mean who the fuck it was so weird it was a weird yeah it was very odd you'd think i you'd think it would be kind of big because like i remember like even a couple years ago like a big thing for me was like video now where you could have like this like fucking there was like a player that like would give you like two spongebob episodes on some weird disc and it would play it in black and white and that was like oh i can't believe i can watch spongebob on the go dumbest shit looking back on it but I only had are we there yet and I don't even know why I think it came with the PSP or something or it might have it was like a deal like I watched the shit out of that movie because it was the only movie I could just casually put on it's a funny it was like a very short it was a funny idea that maybe would have worked in a different yeah they didn't last in a while they released episodes of like shows on DS didn't they like a Spongebob Game Boy Advance that's great that's like unfathomable isn't that insane the entirety of shrek and the quality because like the pokemon episodes were okay or the cartoon network ones but it wasn't really designed to hold an hour and a half it's really not designed to play any movie or video format but it's definitely not designed for a whole feature film uh dude i would love to have like a movie night and it's like the it's it's the it's the game boy advanced skew of shrek dude oh man who was it sounds magical i think it was the youtuber bob wolf he put all of tenant on a game boy advance because christopher nolan's all about like the theatrical intent and experience so he put it on a on a on a game boy advance cartridge he actually got the rom cartridges and put it on there it's like it takes like eight of them or something i'm trying to find this footage the frame rate is so funny the frame rate of shrek on gva is hysterical this is like this has got to be 10 frames a second oh this is awesome yeah i found i found like a comparison of it that's what i'm watching oh you're watching it too okay i'll put it in the chat it's a lot more vibrant actually which is interesting yeah it is it is vibrant um i guess it would have to be oh my god imagine watching it like this i love i love this i want this how much is shrek on game boy advance how many cartridges would it take to put this episode of sacred symbols on game boy advance oh my god three probably oh my god we're selling that someone please figure that out all shrek games on gb uh no no not games god damn it yeah this is so funny like i didn't even know they did this on gba like how did they even fit it even seven seven seven dollars you can go buy that you can get you can get you can get shrek two on gba i wonder if it works on the game boy player for game game q probably it probably does you would assume it probably does all right um god let's go to the next inquiry trevor cannon and said hey fellas during the break i was able to dive into go see yote and holy shit what a fantastic game i don't think this game is getting enough credit for how great it is from the gameplay to the engaging open world the game is truly special but i say all of that with one major caveat i can't help but think while playing it man i want something else from sucker punch i want sci-fi i want horror i want anything other than more samurai games i'd really love to see them take this momentum and apply it to something new what do you fellas think what do you think is next for sucker punch and do we think we're five years out which is also depressing thinking about that first of all yes um i don't think you'll see a sucker punch game until 2030 at the earliest unless there's something truly unbeknownst about that studio as far as like how big it is and then it has a separate team because you assume i think they said that they'll do they might support yote with an expansion it seems like sony might be getting away from that a little bit i don't know but yeah one thing i'm fairly certain of and i don't know this for sure but it's like there's going to be no more ghost games i don't think i think it's over for ghosts and i think that that's fine.

4:27:39Maybe they wanted ideally do a trilogy and it would be cool for them to get even more modern, like something about the opening of Japan or like the interaction of the West and East, like in the 19th century would be pretty neat. But is that what we really want from them? And I think some people would say like, yeah, that is what we want. But for me, I'm like, no, I think it's time to move on. Now, Sly, well, Rocket Robot on Wheels is its own game, but then Sly was a trilogy and so from them and so was Infamous. So I don't know if that, but they did the Infamous trilogy in such a short amount of time.

4:28:12They did the Sly trilogy in four years. It's different now. I suspect there must be an appetite to move on and if I were at Sony, I know that they try to give these guys free reign as much as they can and this is one of your kind of crown jewel studios, but you got to kind of direct them towards something else, I think. And I love the idea of them doing a horror game. That'd be sick. Yeah, that would be cool. I think ultimately people have to reassess. I feel like a trilogy, do we not essentially kind of get a trilogy with how big the duologies are now? Sure. How long they take, how big they are.

4:28:51I prefer trilogies personally. I think it's a nice number. It's really cool. But that was a lot more palatable when you could get three games in eight years or even fewer. you know that was a lot that makes a lot more sense a trilogy for a game that takes five years to develop is just like nah man i don't want to be playing i don't want to be playing the same like the the three for 15 years it's insane yeah at a certain point and so like duologies are the new trilogies and we kind of got to get comfortable with that um and i actually think that's fine like i i arguably like we didn't really need ghost of yote really um i mean ghost yote is great and it's better but like you can kind of feel like oh this is this is refined tsushima which is nice definitely but like i don't know if i need it more refined than it already is yeah i agree i it's on one hand it's a shame for them to do all this work and then have to throw it away but that was kind of what yote was for tsushima where it's like they got to replicate a lot of what they did and like you said learn from it make it uncharted 2 style game but then you don't need to to continue onward um i do think that if the sales were stronger they probably would demand more but there was never a huge demand for ghost like ghosts of Tsushima did sell very well, but it sold well over time.

4:30:07I think the ecosystem in which things are, you know, that entered into the late PS4 generation. It's different now. I I'm sure they're figuring out what they want to do and I'm sure they have ideas, but I would really, really love to see them just do something else. And as much as I love infamous, first of all, they're not going to make Slack Uber infamous, I think is in the realm of possibility. And maybe they do an infamous collection or something, and maybe they even do a new infamous game which i think i would even prefer but i do think that that is deeply redundant with spider-man and x-men like and what's going on with wolverine it's like you don't need i know they're different ones fake superheroes and quotes ones like real established superheroes but you're doing those right you're gonna use two of your fucking studios to make superhero games you know come on move on yeah dustin what do you think uh i'm really hoping for a zombie game oh yeah yeah i don't have any of those yeah uh you know zombies or superheroes maybe they do that maybe they do a zombie superhero revenge tale about a dad yeah that'd be sick have all of the tropes all in one yeah well they're like a revenge of the revenge now it's like now it's uh Saito's like bastard son's revenge on you know the whoever uh what's her even what do I can't even remember her name I guess she was that memorable Atsu that's her kids or whatever some sort of full full cycle thing yeah I don't know I don't know I totally forgot that they were called freakers you just you pulled freakers you really you really you really like violently pulled me back into a memory yeah i'm sorry i i uh well because i remember they were like very insensitive they're not zombies they're freak right no they're free you have to understand this is a really incredible delineation that they're freakers and not zombies you must understand this by the way avowed has been announced for playstation 5 coming february 17th don't care yeah i don't give a shit sorry yeah yeah that was that was just about was not it actually i actually played a little bit of the elder worlds too over the break and i actually did like it but i was just like i wasn't in the mood for it they are getting work done man at obsidian i'll say that they're carrying xbox the way fucking insomniac carries playstation very interesting yeah very good purchase for them yeah and by the way it's not a huge like obsidian almost made the most sense for xbox remember how you were like, well, it was a long time ago, but making fun of all these acquisitions where I was like, what is this?

4:32:40But that was one where it's like, yeah, OK, yeah, that makes some sense. It's like Ninja Theory. It's like, OK, have fun. Compulsion, compulsion games. It's like, OK, have fun. Minnesota Twins fan 92 wrote in and said, welcome back, boys. I hope you had a great break. My question for you as you speak about games, do you find it easier to talk about your likes or dislikes about what you've played i feel like it is easier to articulate why i don't like something versus why it is great thanks this is an interesting question um the way i would answer it is i am able to best articulate when a game makes me feel something like if i go into a game and i'm like this game sucks that's what i'm gonna viscerally feel if i go into a game and i really get it and i love it and everything snaps then then i'm feeling it from that angle so it's not about good or bad it's about the strength of the position um i generally feel like game criticism is just comically easy and it's not that it doesn't take work and effort i take fastidious notes when i do my spoiler casts and when we do kingdom hearts i'll definitely have notes and all that kind of stuff but like talking about what you experienced is pretty easy and i think the more you do it the better you get at it and then you're able to kind of clue in on the things that that means something to you when i used to write reviews at ign i would i would never take full notes but i had a notepad like a physical notepad not a surprise of just things just thoughts because the whole thing that was taught taught to me early on is that it's not about everything the game review ign game reviews that i've made fun of before used to be about everything they'd be fucking 5 000 words and they would be about everything the game did be like sound yes sound and the voice it's like rather it's like what strikes you like what is this all about and there would be certain things that i'd always try to touch on i'd always try to say how long a game was for instance because i knew people liked that i would always you know get into but it's like sometimes audio would never come up sometimes audio would be central to the review sometimes graphics wouldn't really be a big thing or the way a game ran or whatever or story so i think to me it's all about just what strikes you it's not necessarily about what's good or bad it is way easier to talk about what is bad in an objective terms because you can kind of do it flippantly.

4:35:01But yeah, so that's the way I answer. Chris, how about you? What do you how do you deal with the art of criticism? I don't know. I think it really depends on the intensity of the emotion. If something if something is so good that I love it or that I really resonate with it, it's easy for me to describe. If I like something just fine, it's going to be a lot harder. Or if I play a game and I'm just like not feeling it i can explain probably why but like i'm not passionate enough to i guess but like if i play a game that's like really disappointing and i'm like i can't believe they made i can't believe you would do this i can't believe this decision was made like who thought to i think about it a lot with back for blood actually back for blood really bothers me because i'm just like you almost you over designed this like you could have done less work and ended up with a better product why why did you work so hard to to be a deficit to it like it's it's so those things are fascinating to me and those are interesting to me and so i'm like if i'm passionate about something whether it's negative or positive i i find it very easy to dissect but if something's very whatever you know and and to be fair most games are that way most games are kind of you know like that was fun or that was okay you know like i'm sure like colin like i don't know what you would be able to really say about dying like the beast but i would imagine that that's very you could probably go into why it's not that great but like would you you know yeah i mean yeah i could i could totally i could write an essay on why i don't think it's good but yeah it's like what is it's also like the top wrong thing it's like well what's really bad about it it's like well it's just it's badly paced it's it's out of place it's self-contained it's you know it's it's easy to talk about that does it do good things yeah it's fun to play sure but like you're playing it within the context of the framework and it's not the framework is not very good yeah yeah doesn't where are you on this yeah it it definitely can be easier sometimes i feel like to talk about what you dislike because sometimes i know for me sometimes it's hard to even describe like the feeling or the quality of why you like something like thinking about the dragon quest demo there was a a feeling of a grand adventure through the music and the way the story was told that I really like I you I probably after playing the game will be able to get into the minutiae of like what that feeling is and why it does that but sometimes it can be a little bit more vague and I think too something that um i've noticed with talking in about criticism and and being critical of games online is a lot of times the games we are the most critical about are also the games we're the most passionate about we're critical of them because we love them like for uh for the kingdom hearts spoiler cast that we are going to record tomorrow i went and i replayed the whole game so i'm fresh on this with you Colin and there are things about this game that I am going to tear up because it fucking sucks there's some things about Kingdom Hearts that fucking suck I got something for you to tear up oh I'm I mean please daddy please so yeah I will be very critical of Kingdom Hearts on this spoiler cast and that's because I love it and clear do Kingdom Hearts 2 I'm not going to ask you to play Kingdom Hearts 2 ever, Colin.

4:38:36But they made so many improvements. I'll save it for the show. Save it for the show. Save the mystery. Save the mystery. So, yeah, sometimes it's important to be like, you know, just because we're talking about things we don't like doesn't necessarily mean we don't like it as a whole. Right. Just these are the things. You can identify what you don't like and then also explain how you want to see improved. so it sounds like there could be more talking about it than what the good things yeah i think too like that there's like uh i don't know there's a lot of there's a lot of games that are like sevens that i really love you know i mean i think i tweeted about this over the break where i was like bethesda games are perfect whereas like bethesda games are like but this is great because like they make absolute 10 out of 10 7 out of 10 games like which is a confusing statement i guess I totally understand what you mean.

4:39:26I understand. It's, it's, it's like an S you know what? It's like Chili's. It's like an, like an S tier mid kind of place. And I'm like, I love this. I'm into it. It's not, it's really janky. It's, it's busted. There's a lot of ways in which it doesn't really deliver on like what it's trying to do, but like whatever it is, whatever this is at the end of the day is really cool. And I'm into it. That's Domino's pizza. Yeah. That's valid. 10 out of 10, seven out of 10. Yeah, sure. Yeah. I would agree. That's awesome. All right. One more inquiry. Combat sneeze wrote in. I added this one right before we recorded because I thought it was interesting because we didn't get to cover it last week and we probably should add our thoughts to the record.

4:40:08Howdy, Sacred Boys. At the beginning of the holiday stand down, news broke that Naughty Dog was requiring developers to work overtime every week for at least eight hours, not allowing more than 60 hours of work a week. This news was disappointing to me as the last 10 minutes of Grounded 2, the making of The Last of Us Part II had a segment with Neil and other studio leads pledging to eliminate Crunch and Naughty Dog. My question is, is Crunch a failure of management or a necessary evil in the games industry? So the first thing I want to say is that this story did break in quotes right after we finished recording the last episode of the year that we did before we had all our preloaded episodes.

4:40:39And someone did ask me about it on Patreon. And I responded to them saying in the comments saying, like, I don't think this is news.

4:40:50um i am i don't i personally am very lax with my own staff but we don't make a game like well we're making games at lilymo and that's different i have nothing to do with managing that but i don't want to squeeze like the last ounce of whatever out of my own people but we're kind of doing these repeatable loose sort of things we're not making this project for years at a time hitting milestones trying to get something to the market putting all of our money and efforts into something to make it back in the back end. I think sometimes crunch is a, and maybe it is, is often a failure of management because they're not giving the team enough time.

4:41:26They're not laying out proper production goals and milestones and all of the rest. And the story that was, that was being reported last, late last year was that they're basically trying to create like a vertical slice for internal review, like a final polished part of the game. And that needs to be delivered by X time. And so people need to crunch. I don't want to speak out of school. I don't think 60 hours a week is that heinous. If you have to do it for a little while and if you're being compensated and they're going to be compensated, not at all, you know, as is the case with most first party studios get significant ship bonuses.

4:42:08It's not like you're doing it for nothing. And the money can be significant. What I would rather want to know is what the consensus is on the team knowing that. And what you hear a lot in games, and I know this, and this was the way it was in media. It's certainly like this in games development is it's often up to individuals. Like they care. They don't want to be the weak link that causes Naughty Dog to, in this case, to lose its luster. They want to make sure that whatever they're responsible for is perfect. And this is a high level game they're playing much higher level than a lot of other developers.

4:42:45So I don't think crunching for a month or two and working overtime to meet a deliverable goal is necessarily newsworthy. And so that's why we didn't include in the news this time. There are plenty of studios working 60, 70, eight hour weeks all over the fucking world working on all sorts of deliverables. that's the creative art of no 40 hour weeks you can't really make games and clean parameters of 40 hours a week you can often have the much of your development in those parameters but there comes a time when the rubber hits the road and things need to get done so i'm not excusing it and i never watched actually grounded 2 so i have no idea what they said and and obviously they had a different idea but i would also say that at the time they were making grounded to fast forwarding to today a lot has happened including the cancellation of their main project right so it might have been that intergalactic had more time and now it doesn't because they need to deliver something and fucking release a game i mean this is where the last was part two 17 comes from and the last was part one remastered remake comes from and all these i mean so i don't know if i heard that they were working 80 to 100 hour weeks for three months at a time or something like that then i'd be like yeah this is a little fucking crazy but 60 hours a week for to deliver something i don't know man i'm not gonna complain about it i worked many many many 60 hour weeks not anymore but when i was in media absolutely like that was a fairly i was i was a workaholic and by the way no one would talk me down so i that's why i know it's often up to the individual my bosses weren't necessarily enforcing anything i mean they would often tell me to work less so that's where i stand uh i don't want it to be a regular thing i don't want people to be taken advantage of but i just think if if and i'm not saying you think this combat scenes but i think a lot of people don't understand that dagan always talks about this now that he's in he's in advertising it's like dude this is like a crazy creative job that requires a lot of hours and a lot of time and it's what you do if you want to go push papers and do a different kind of job then do that yeah you can't schedule creativity in the ways that like you can't neatly do it like i remember like even just knowing people who are like writers and like like oftentimes a lot of that work looks like nothing it looks it looks like kind of just like sitting there and staring and then like and you're like what are you working and it's like well no but no and yes because i'm like processing and i'm trying to think about certain and then eventually it'll just like oh it hit me and then and then and then the crunch happens and then and then you're kind of writing until like 7 a.m because you want to do it i think it's um i i don't know it's it's it's one thing to be forced to do it it's another thing to uh just create an environment where people just want to do it because they're proud of what they're making and they're excited about it um i think those are those are distinct but i don't think either one is necessarily happening here.

4:45:43It seems like a pretty standard, you know, we got to get this done, you know. I'm sure plenty of people are crunching their own accord. Yeah. And I'm sure that a lot of it's mandated to and a lot of it's peer pressure. You don't want to be the first person to leave. You don't want to be the first person to get up from your desk and shut off your light and go home. I get all that, but I just it's what you said. It's like you can't mandate. You can plan as best you can, but there are just things that are going to have to happen and and uh i don't i don't think it's ideal but i'm not really against it and having been in the trenches of my on my own things it's like that's just the way it goes sometimes and um that's what you got to do and i think everyone on on at naughty dog especially people that have been there a while know that the stakes are very high on this game yeah it's like there's a anti-naughty dog sentiment that they're going to have to overcome with something especially good And I think that they know that.

4:46:38Anything left to add before we move on? Get out of here. Let's get the hell out of here. It's time to go. It's good to be with you guys today. Going to be back in the swing of things. Yeah. Back from this vacation, back in the saddle, as it were. Chris, goodbye to you. What are you going to do with the rest of your day? It's still light out where you are. I can see through the window. So time yet to do what you need to do. Yeah, there's some time. we got to run some errands before five but and it's a three now so i got i got time maybe make some food i don't know i'm playing it kind of chill today good maybe do some editing good on your new spiffy macbook dude it's fucked it's it's airdrop is so crazy yeah airdrop's cool it makes me so mad how fat how useful airdrop is and using like an i like the fact that you can use an iPad as a second monitor like wirelessly is fucking ridiculous.

4:47:34Yeah. I'm thinking more and more about going back to Apple for computing, but we'll see. Yeah, I'll wait until this thing dies. It might not ever die. Who knows? I like it. It does the job. Yeah. All right, Chris. Be well, Dustin. Goodbye to you, my friend. Anything left to say? Anything left to say? I'm very excited for our recording tomorrow. Colin with Brad to talk Kingdom Hearts tonight uh i'm gonna play some kingdom hearts too i think oh i'm on the train right now and i don't have much else to play and it would be to play the gba game right it would be but i don't want to i don't like it it's card based right i don't i looked at it i was like i don't know i i don't recommend they remade it right for ps2 and then that's the version that's in this okay yeah yes I played the original Game Boy Advance game when it came out.

4:48:31So a very, very long time ago. I've tried to go back to it. I don't like it. The story is, of course, as with every Kingdom Hearts game, important. But you can just refresh. Well, I guess in your case, it'd be a little different. But in my case, I just refreshed myself on YouTube on what happens and then started playing Kingdom Hearts 2. Right, because they introduce like a character and shit, like a really important thing, right? And some other stuff. they introduce everything in that game in Chain of Memories that's so interesting well they begin the process of introducing the entire setup of everything after that we'll leave it for the Kingdom Hearts conversation in the meantime guys I appreciate you being here with me today it's good to see you again you're glowing bright faces and good to be out here with everyone out there as well I hope you guys had a great vacation good time away with family good Christmas good Hanukkah good New Year good sports on right now a lot of football college football NFL football NHL is going the NBA is going a lot of cool things keep you busy a lot of TV shows coming out people are interested in Puribus and stranger things and there's some films in the theater there's a lot of things going on right now so hopefully you enjoyed your time but now we're back to it and we'll be back here next week of course with more sacred symbols you can find us on Patreon patreon.com slash last day media for early add free access and last stand media dot store for merch we'll see you next time until then go islanders goodbye see ya take care guys 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.

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