#394 | You're A God

41:08finally we have a write in from Isla Vainal who writes hey spunk synthesizers with all this stranger things shit fresh on my mind I was wondering if Colin has any interesting personal accounts or general lore about high strangeness on Long Island She says and says JK on Long Island. Any Montauk mysteries? Plum Island perplexities. To any who are unaware, Stranger Things was originally titled Montauk and is based on the Montauk Project conspiracy, which the source of is actually a creep, by the way. He told dozens of young men that they were brainwashed by the government and he could fix them at his house.

41:39But hey, they had to be naked in a state of arousal. Love you. Thanks. I brought this up many, many times. Long Island is deeply haunted and weird. And yes, if you go there, there are all sorts of things to see. and yes I've done a lot of this stuff you haven't even scratched the surface Brookhaven National Laboratory Camp Hero there's like all sorts of Plum Island did you bring oh you brought up Plum Island that's like you're not allowed to go like no one's allowed to go there I've never even heard of that Plum Island is like an island off of Long Island where they do like animal experiments and there's a theory and it's a I don't want like it's a fairly compelling like conspiracy theory that Lyme's disease started there and the reason is because it's in the Long Island Sound and then Lyme Connecticut is right there oh yeah I see and so it got in some ticks and people went over and then it got because Lyme disease is so bad and targeted isn't there shit where you can't eat red meat anymore if you get it I think that's

42:46Colin Moriarty:there's stuff like it's COVID-esque it seems like very calculated and targeted um i don't know if that's true or not probably isn't but that's but yeah so like i grew up and obviously like there's a lot of shit like amityville is on long island um and so and and every i said this a million times because i think it's so fucking funny is that like there's so many indian burial grounds and weird things on long island that bobby flay was building a house on long island and like dug into some some like indian burial ground and it was like yeah fuck it and just built his whole house on top of it. So that shit's haunted.

43:24Yeah, so I don't know. Do I have any specific stories? I know people that tried. I've been to Camp Hero and did all these kinds of things. Camp Hero is like a really cool array of mysterious satellite dishes on the end of Long Island facing Europe.

43:43Brookhaven National Laboratory is a place where people used to try to break in. I know people that tried to jump you know jump the fences and like went all the way into it or whatever uh my Dagan's best friend PJ his friend Jesse specifically um so yeah there's a weird feel there's a weird eeriness to Long Island and dude stranger things to actually taking place on Long Island where it should have would have been dope would have been sick I don't know why they why did they not set it there I

44:11Colin Moriarty:don't know i think probably my gut says filming but like i don't think they uh like costs wise like i would imagine it's cheaper to film in indiana but i don't know if they actually did film in indiana you know what i mean that would be my gut assumption but who the fuck knows or they might have just wanted some distance from like their their inspiration you know yeah yeah it's more original um so anyway you guys can go read about the montauk project has a lot to do with like time travel and all sorts of weird shit. Do you guys know what the Philadelphia experiment is by chance? Not by name. No.

44:47It was like this purported thing that happened where it's purported that the US Navy teleported a ship. And it's like a whole story, like a weird story, because they say that like when it reconstituted, like it was all fucked up. And like there were even like people were like fused into the ship and like things like didn't go like it. like apparently started in Philadelphia Harbor, like ended up in Norfolk and then went back to Philadelphia and all sorts of weird shit. So all that stuff is all connected. Sure. It's probably not real, but it's fun to think about. But yeah, you can go read about camp hero and like the air force base out there and all sorts of shit.

45:24Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. I love that stuff. Yeah, me too. And it makes a lot of sense. Like there's a, there are a lot of people on Long Island now, like millions of people. And obviously it's in the shadow of New York city, but my, my parents always remind me of this. It's like when they were, they were, my mom was born in Brooklyn. They moved to Long Island in the fifties and it was empty. You know, like even in Nassau County, along Queens, it was all farms. So like they hit a, they like, it was a reasonable place to hide shit, like further out where I'm from. It's like, there was nothing. And then over just a few generations, it became this like overrun place.

46:03And so, cause I think through the lens now, it's like, why would you ever think about doing any of that stuff on Long Island of all places? And they're like, well, it wasn't always like this. At one point, people can afford to live in New York City, so they didn't need to live here. And now no one needs to live here because it's too expensive. There you go. All right. That's it. Let's get into the news.

46:25Colin Moriarty:If you're tackling a home project, check out Angie.com. From roofing to remodels and everything in between, Angie connects you with skilled pros who do such a good job, you might trust them to do other things, like pull out your tooth or be your kid's godfather. Don't actually ask them to do those things, just let them get the job done well. Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find a pro for your projects at Angie.com. That's A-N-G-I dot com. The Super Mario Galaxy movie hits theaters on April 1st, and it's easily going to be one of the biggest film events of the year. This time the stakes are cosmic as Mario and his friends travel across entire galaxies to stop Bowser Jr.

47:08Colin Moriarty:from destroying the universe as we know it. You've got all your favorites, Mario, Luigi, Peach, Toad, Bowser, plus Yoshi and Rosalina joining the adventure in a way that fans of all ages are going to love. It's funny, it's epic, and it really leans into the wild imaginative energy that has made Mario a pop culture icon for the last 40 years. Whether you grew up playing the games or you're just looking for a great time at the movies. This is one you'll want to see on the big screen. Experience the Super Mario Galaxy movie only in theaters April 1st. The galaxy is waiting. The big piece of news this week, my friends, is about the casting in Amazon's God of War series.

47:48A lot of people wrote in about this, but we'll go with Kellen Kessinger, who says, Greetings, my fine lads. I just saw that Ryan Hurst was tapped to play Kratos in the live action God of War series. I was curious to see what your thoughts were on it. I thought Hearst was great as Thor in God of War Ragnarok, and it's nice seeing him back this time as Kratos. I hope you all have a wonderful day as I take a post-workout shower thinking about all of you. It's nice. I appreciate that. So it's true. Amazon released a press release saying Ryan Hearst tapped to play Kratos in Prime videos God of War from Sony Pictures Television and Amazon MGM studios in association with playstation productions and tall ship productions the it kind of bought like i don't know if you guys looked at the press release but it's it's all bullet points are people that broken now it's like when i was talking i was talking to my friend sammy barker at push square who we always cite and i i think i've said this to you guys i noticed that they're just doing like a sentence per paragraph now like and i'm like what are you doing like this is unreadable like unreal and he was saying i think that like they their audience likes it and and uh you know it comes from all these studies whatever but like that axio style writing if that makes any sense to you guys and i'm like this shit what like we're totally we can't even read a paragraph

49:06Colin Moriarty:well this is the extension of that that netflix mandate where they're like everybody's watching the show with the phone in their hand anyway right right so uh just repeat a bunch of stuff so no one misses a thing. That's what this is. It also just doesn't tell us anything here. Really interesting. Because each bullet point is like Ryan Hurst is tapped to play Kratos and then the next bullet point is he played Thor in God of War Ragnarok and then the next one is Kratos' description. And then the next one is based on PlayStation's massively popular ancient mythology themed video game. And then the next one tells us a little bit of information because it says, and we know this already, but this God of War follows father and son Kratos and Atreus as they embark on a journey to spread the ashes of their wife and mother Faye.

49:48Through their adventures, Kratos tries to teach his son to be a better god, while Atreus tries to teach his father how to be a better human. We know that Frederick E. O. Toy from Shogun, the boys in Fallout, is directing the first two episodes. And Ronald D. Moore, legendary sci-fi writer, responsible for the Battlestar Galactica revival, which I'm obsessed with, but also a Star Trek guy and stuff like that from a long time ago, is acting a showrunner, not new Star Trek, by the way right now i'm not a star trek guy but even i can tell the new star trek is garbage and so that's all the information we have so far they did release a picture it's just an image of him i think with like a god of war statue it's not a composite or anything i think that's like an actual like we used to get these at ign like these stat they'd make like 10 of these and send them to people the life-size statues we had them all at the entrance you remember that dustin you were at IGN right yeah they look cool yeah people used to love taking pictures of those which I like we had a big fallout Brotherhood of Steel guy and we had Lara Croft and all sorts of shit so yeah I think that's what it is and looking at it based on the lighting or whatever so what are our thoughts here Dustin Ryan Hurst the actor playing Kratos

51:04Colin Moriarty:yeah I have never watched anything that Ryan Hurst has been in obviously i played god of war where he plays thor and honestly i have no memory of thor's performance overall in that game other than it was good uh so it really doesn't mean anything to me but looking at photos of him he looks like uh he can play the part but this comes back to something that we've been saying from the very beginning i need to see him with you know in costume and see how he looks in context of the world and because this is gonna look like um i don't i will is are they gonna just make him a normal man size yeah he's i looked it up he's six six that's still not tall enough but that's tall right yeah um you could generally get away with uh hiring a supporting cast that is on the smaller side i think that's what they do with tom cruise a lot you know yeah scale everything else scale everything else scale everything else down or they should uh rings well i was i was thinking i don't know if i told this on the show or not but like i was trying to remember the term for force perspective and i just couldn't i couldn't think of it so i ended up calling him gandalf tricks for like for like a good a good 20 minutes like these like gandalf tricks right but yeah they could i don't know i don't know i mean I'm looking at it as like he looks the part a lot of it's in the voice though too so like I don't I don't know we'll see I'm sure it'll be I'm sure it'll be fine this is as good as it's going to get really it's a it's not like Wallace Shawn or something where you're like how the fuck does this make sense yeah I'm let me see here they have yeah they don't I'm just clicking around there's really no more information there's like a page for the download bio here I'm not going to download something from Dropbox please I do I did recognize him though I'm like where did I know where do I know this guy from because I'm obviously not very learned on actors whatever but it's um he's in Sons of Anarchy I definitely know him for that um yeah plays Opie and uh yeah I'm looking at other things he was in that I might have seen like he was in Bates Motel that was pretty big he was in the he did a turn in the Walking Dead Paradise City is that is that is still ongoing that's like a that's a another another Amazon series.

53:30His only video game credit is in Ragnarok. And I'm with you, Dustin. I don't actually really. I know it sounds crazy, but like, I don't even remember that game. It's like that's so many games ago. Like, do you really remember it? Like, really remember the ins and outs of that game? I don't. I really don't. Like, I played it. I platinumed it.

53:47Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I could recall bits and pieces of it with varying vividity, I guess. But I remember the original one better, I think than actually the than Ragnarok interestingly yeah yeah I think so too I think it's because again it's like fresher it's newer you know it sticks out a little bit more as opposed to like more of more of that new thing I remember the pause menu thing where they wait where he brings you back to life or like when you when it gives you the death screen then he brings you back to life right right that I remember he's in the Odyssey the upcoming Christopher Nolan movie oh cool that's interesting I'm curious about that who does he play does it say no i guess he's not a main main player because it's he's not in like the main list here but i'm so far behind on my christopher nolan stuff and also that doesn't sound very interesting to me i'm not into like mythology and like ancient literature and all the sort of stuff like i don't really care i think it's so cool well because i i've said this to you before that i just i'm i really don't believe that a lot of the things that we think we know about ancient societies are true like i i think that we put pieces of things together but right didn't we talk about this about how like it's so funny that there are entire philosophers like their entire body of work is only known because someone else wrote about it yeah it's like we don't know shit about what these people are saying or doing you know it's like secondhand thirdhand but like i think that's alone kind of interesting um it's kind of like how i told i think i told you once where it's like i don't know david a blinken's real i guess but right to the to the best of my knowledge like sure but like he could have been two guys in a trench coat what for the fuck i know what's that thing yeah last thursday ism have you ever heard of that before no what is that i think i could guess it's the i follow's hypothesis i'm looking it up here now is that anything before last thursday isn't real yeah like that there's no there's no it's like a it's actually like a young earth creationist argument i think which is interesting but the idea that like there's really no evidence of certain things even having existed at all in other words like everything can just be like a like spectral and fake and you're the only real player you know um okay it's interesting yeah it's an interesting idea i feel like that must have been a long time ago i did something on last thursdayism maybe i'm kind of funny all right uh so that's that i mean that's a that's a big news story we unfortunately just don't have much to to say about it i assume 27 i mean definitely not this year but we assume 27 for the rollout of this show and again to remind everyone it's already been renewed for a second season that makes sense they're investing a lot into getting this right and so they want to make sure they make their money and i assume they also look at it and say like listen uncharted movies uncharted movie did very well gran turismo did well the last of us is huge on hbo even um on peacock twisted metal is like one of the biggest things peacock's ever done and it got renewed for a third season so they're probably looking at all this and be like we have god of war as long as we execute like we don't have twisted metal or some you know some bullshit frankly comparable to god of war if we do this halfway right and they have fallout right yeah they're doing so they know what they're doing like amazon seems to be the best steward for these things.

57:06Colin Moriarty:Well, not Amazon. I guess HBO is there too, but there is season two of The Last of Us, which is notably not as good. Fallout's doing great. Yeah, I mean, I think... I would assume late 27. Yeah, that sounds about right. There's going to be a lot of things to get going, I think, on special effects and all that stuff, so I'm sure they'll... Because I was even reading that about Stranger Things, the most recent episode which they finished filming like two years ago or something like and then or like a year and a half ago and then they had to get all that shit ready to go. So makes sense. So please look forward to it.

57:43Colin Moriarty:It would have been cool if they would have done like today on Twitter. Everyone's posting the picture of Sophie Turner as Lara Croft. Oh, yeah, it would have been cool to show him in costume for the reveal, but maybe they don't have that figured out yet, but Then this time is second wave paper. Scfighting. Decification. She looks pretty good, by the way. That's like an old school, like 90s Tomb Raider they're going for with her, with the red glasses and stuff. Very, very cool. I think it's super cool. Yeah, that's straight out of the first game. And that's also Amazon, isn't it? Is it? I think so.

58:16I think so, yeah. Unclear who's playing Tom V. Still, we don't know. That character's going to haunt Tomb Raider in my mind for so long.

58:24Colin Moriarty:I just, I can't wait. I mean, there's, listen. The anticipation of seeing this character is so high for me. Yeah, right. what if we're responsible for getting that character totally written out or renamed just completely executed nah Tommy Torby's God the sacred guys really they shone a light on how ridiculous this was wouldn't it be awesome if we were watching like one of the trailers and it's like you know cutting between different things and one of them is that like Tommy I'll fucking shit if that ever happens that'd be so

59:02very good very good all right so we'll keep an eye out for god of wars amazon series of course and i assume that will be we didn't do it for twisted metal season two i just wasn't really feeling it but um we'll probably do a series of reviews for that i would imagine god of war is pretty big yeah and i'm very interested to see how it affects the god of war sales trajectory as well knowing that two-thirds of Last of Us viewers on HBO never played the games. This is a great opportunity.

59:30Colin Moriarty:Oh, yeah, it'll be huge. But it'll be one that most of us will be able to take part in, too, because Amazon is like a default subscription for a lot of people. Right, yeah, that's what I always have, because of the prime delivery. Right, exactly. It's funny, I had to pay my fantasy football fees for my serious league that I'm in with my uncle, and it's run by one of his friends, and I usually pay him by Zelle, you know, Z-E-L-L-E, which is just associated, like Bank of America bought them or whatever. Yeah. But they don't want to use that anymore, so they use Venmo now, and I don't use Venmo, so I had Micah just send him the money and I was talking to him, and he's like, you got to get with the times, man.

1:00:06Like, everyone has Venmo. You know, it's kind of like Netflix, and I was like, I don't have Netflix. So shut the fuck up. But I do have Amazon Prime. I do have Amazon Prime. I have Peacock right now as well,

1:00:19Colin Moriarty:but because there was a football game on it. I have HBO Prime YouTube and I do have Netflix for Seinfeld. This is always on when I'm going to sleep. Sure. Yeah, I try to circulate as I say, but like my only permanent ones really are Spotify and YouTube. That's like basically it. All right. Next up. Did you guys see this image going around? Mm hmm. in Japan it seems like there were some placards posted for and this looks like it's in a I don't know where like where is this FPS day X I don't know what this must be some sort of like convention in Japan or something but it does look like a subway or something but it's not there is this placard for the division definitive edition obviously real huge the placard is the size of many people.

1:01:15And they also have the Division 2 merch and they're kind of like circulating things at this festival in Japan. A poster Doman0204 from Japan posted this image and it's got people talking and Ubisoft at the time we're recording has not said anything about this. However, we are fast approaching the 10th anniversary of the Division and people are looking to connect these things and I think reasonably so. however massive entertainment had also recently experienced layoffs though they did confirm that the division 3 is in development i think what this all means chris is that we're going to get some sort of ps5 port of the division it's important to note that the division 2 is not on playstation 5 so yeah there is a there's potential for them to do both of these games put like it's always been weird that they've left them behind especially because both of them were long supported division two still gets content and i'm kind of amped about this because i love the division and having like a now what i don't want to wish things into existence that aren't true and aren't real especially because the division one and the division two take place in different locations at different times but can you get both of these games together into some sort of package and let people fuck around with them that would be so exciting so yeah this is obviously real i assume it'll be framed around march 8th 2016 is when the game came out originally and uh i'll be i'm gonna be honest with you i'll be all over this so where are you on

1:02:47Colin Moriarty:this yeah like i don't know like i heard i i had heard rumblings about this before even this um this image had popped up and it's it's gotten me in kind of like a weird mood that i'll get into when we talk about what we're playing. But yeah, I'm into it. I really liked The Division. I thought it was cool. I dug the vibe, especially that permanent Christmas. I think I said specifically on the show that way, way back when, where I really feel like The Division I did such an uncannily good job at capturing what it feels like to walk through New York City from a scale perspective. like the streets are that wide and the buildings are that tall and you do feel like dwarfed by them and a lot of games like i'm like spider-man or whatever they kind of like they kind of squish it a little bit to give you a sense of speed and to make things like flow well but like those like few blocks into division was like this is this is on point and it felt good to play like i don't know there's a nostalgia for the division for me i didn't spend too much time on it i kind of bounced off of it but i always liked jumping into it so yeah once this comes out if it's 60 frames per second on modern hardware nice fov increase i'm all i'm definitely gonna jump into it it's what i'm wishing for for other things that we'll talk about later but yeah it's this is cool yeah what do you think dustin i don't know where you are on the division if you enjoyed the division the division two came out in 2019 of course both games are still active so you can play them both right now on ps4 yeah i was never really into either one of them i did play a little bit of both of them i think i was just more drawn into destiny and so while it was good it wasn't something that uh if i was going to play a game like that i would rather play destiny so it's interesting of them going back to the first one when as you mentioned there's not a ps5 version of division 2 and i was looking they're still uh working on division 3 so clearly they have big plans still for the IP missed opportunity to not call it the division divisionive edition you know it's just sitting right there I feel like it's perfect if Embracer was doing it they would definitely be a divisionive it's hard to say it's as you said like there's good opportunity to revive and get these things going again and I don't know where this all fits within Ubisoft's framework because I remember noting when the split happened and they kind of spun off Assassin's Creed and so on that they didn't split off.

1:05:32They split off Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and only Siege. You would think they would take all of Tom Clancy, but a lot of that stuff has been left, and Ubisoft owns Tom Clancy's name and all that stuff now, as we've talked about many times. So the division, I think, is maybe the most important single component of whatever reconstituted Ubisoft exists because they got all their shit taken from them. And so from that perspective, I am rooting for their success because it'll give them good stability. And I think the division three will be very welcome because I was reading some stuff about the division one and two, and I guess I don't I played both games deeply and I guess I don't look at it because I play them more as single player shooters.

1:06:14But people were saying there's like a lot of shit in those games that's actually quite forward thinking, including the whole idea of the dark zone, which is basically its own extraction shooter and so on. So like it would be interesting if the Division three leveraged that of saying just in marketing. I mean, nothing can really change in terms of the game, but just saying like there is a there is an extraction component, but that's not all there is here. So if you want that, that that energy and that scariness and that tension, you can do that. But otherwise, play the game wherever city it takes place in and play with your friends and kill AI enemies and all the rest.

1:06:47So I think I'm amped for all of it. And again, it gets me into Red Storm Entertainment. They were working on the Division Heartland for years, which I really wanted to play. And they canceled it. So yeah, this definitive edition stuff is maybe the only division we're going to get other than the third one, whenever that might come to fruition.

1:07:05Colin Moriarty:You know what made me think a lot about the division when I was playing at Arc Raiders? When I was playing Arc Raiders, I got a lot of division vibes from it. Just like moving through like industrial spaces and kind of like trying to find shit and like shooting drone, like the drone aspect of it. I feel like I remember there being drones in the division. It's been a long time. I dug the division to quite a bit when I played it. But like, like Dustin said, like destiny was always the thing pulling me away from it. But now that destiny is kind of like not real anymore, basically, I'd have more time and more interest.

1:07:38All right, let's see. Anything else to say about the division, about Tom Clancy, about Ubisoft? No letters from the audience about this, which is not a huge surprise. I'm very excited for the official announcement. And I just want to see what it is. I'm not getting my hopes. Just the original one would be fine, but it would be cool. I wonder if maybe what they'll do is that the division definitive edition for 2016 and then the division two definitive edition for 2019. Or so for 2026 and 2029. I should say. Guys, I saw this news and I was so amped about it. It's circulating now widely, but I saw this just being popped around by some people on quieter parts of the internet.

1:08:20A trophy hunter and streamer named Rob Vanatos wrote on Twitter, all PlayStation games by the publisher, thy games or the games, T-H-I games underscore D-E, because they're German, seem to be unlisted from the PlayStation store. They had the fourth most games on PSN. it's unclear why and he listed this has this list of publishers and and they were the they have they had 1194 games on here and their games apparently have been suddenly batch deleted from playstation network and no one really knows why and it seems that it is because of some shovelware thing maybe or something that they some covenant that they broke, I guess, within the rules or whatever, because obviously they've been publishing their shitty games for many years and suddenly everything gets pulled.

1:09:16And there are a few publishers that are even worse than them. But these are the jumping. Have you ever seen the jumping something games? So like the jumping taco. Yeah, right. There's not much to say about this other than get fucked. Love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. what loser behavior to not only make games like this but then release them by the tens by the dozens by the scores by the hundreds over a thousand who do you think you i've said this before and i mean it who the fuck do you think you are flooding the psn like that having no respect for like the geography of the psn for other developers for like putting something out meaningful you're manipulating trophies and that's the only reason people buy this shit and

1:10:11buy you know uh it is my hope that this isn't like i'm still dreading that this was a mistake but i don't how could how could it be a mistake like that like push push square wrote that they went and like looked for dozens of the games like they're just not there anymore dustin what's your theory on what's going on here is it because of the shovelware did they break some other rule some people's theory is that they're doing asset flips and that is um not allowed by the rules yeah

1:10:39Colin Moriarty:yeah my biggest question is was why now and so while i would want to believe that sony is actually taking an initiative to clean up the psn it's more likely that they broke some kind of rule or did something and that is what caused this but it's just so stupid like it's funny to me like you think about like people i i think it it's good this happened but at the same time it i can't be too excited about it because it's like if somebody if you let someone in your house and they shit on the floor and you kick them out okay but let's say they do that for four years and then on year four you're like okay time to go It's like, well, it's kind of your fault that you let someone come in and shit on your floor in your house.

1:11:26Colin Moriarty:Sony has let them pollute the PlayStation Network for fucking years. And now it's finally time to go because they broke some kind of rule. It's like, no, I mean, our theory is that they broke some kind of rule. But it's like, no, it might be just too late in some ways for the PlayStation store unless you make a hard stance and slowly start to shift the tide on it. but I don't know. This is something we've been complaining about for literally years now, and it's only worse. The thing about these jumping games is, yeah, they're horrible. It's slop designed just for people to spend$2 to get a platinum trophy that, I don't know, to make number go up.

1:12:06Colin Moriarty:Yeah, like it doesn't even make any sense. Yeah, it's stupid, but there are so many other problems with the PSN. i would argue that are even greater problems such as developers that are making ai flip games of whatever is popular on steam and then trying to confuse people on playstation into buying that it's like instead of peak a game that's only on steam on playstation network it would be an ai flip game called mountain peak you know it's like are you asleep at the wheel sony yeah this stuff because you're not doing it. You did this, which is good. But again, it's not enough. They could. The thing is, and this is what the original tweet from Rob Thanatos says is like.

1:12:51They have like, oh, the 11th biggest publisher on PlayStation Network is Sony. With with 666 games, very nefarious. But if you just got rid of like. Eight or 10 of these publishers on here that obviously are just flooding the zone. and I don't want to throw them all in the same because like East Asia soft is the top publisher and I've worked with these Asia soft they release real games they just release a lot of them like they're they're signing games indie games from all over the world so it's like and the same with Radalika which is the second biggest publisher they they publish real games they do put easy trophies in their games but they are real games but when you're getting to some of these publishers it they only they don't exist for by virtue of the game they exist because people are buying them for easy trophies and i encourage people to go watch a video of what these games are it's literally like a sushi and then you just press the x button and it just jumps and literally the trophies just pop in the corner the entire time yeah and then you delete the game and get rid of it that's why the games exist it doesn't make any sense what to your point dust and why they let the network get flooded with these games for so so long if i don't i make the argument that i don't know who's making money on this they might be making a little bit of money on on trope but it's like you're selling your games for a dollar you're getting 70 cents on the dollar and what a few thousand people maybe care it's like what are you even doing and that's why that's why i say

1:14:21Colin Moriarty:chris it's like who the fuck do you think you are doing this yeah no i mean it's it's dude you have like you're not under uh or you're not overselling it really like it it really is like a lot of the games that are under this this banner are games that i'm not even exactly i'm not even shitty you when i say this i could make these games in like a week probably less than actually like maybe like two days a screen a jumping sushi like i can do that that's crazy like no like i'm sorry like and look as far as like this story goes i can't be i i can't really i can't bring myself to feel any any type of way about it because i like like we've established i do kind of feel like this is just a technicality mainly because this is again like dustin said like this is just not it's good that these games are gone but this is nowhere near the most egregious shit going on on the store like it's it's it's up there for sure but like it's not it's not like um you know prime target number one you know so it doesn't speak to any like intentionality on their part outside of um you there's probably a technicality there's probably a rule they broke they probably found an excuse to do it uh through that almost like getting al capone for tax evasion type deal but like you're a walled garden or it used to be like you're your own private platform like you don't need you don't need to catch them doing something you know what i mean like you can just not thinking yeah and it behooves you to do that i would think it behooves you to act that way so i i don't know i just i i don't really feel i see a lot of people celebrating this and like i get it and i'm with i'm with those people but i don't feel any type of way about this because i don't think this was for the reasons that we all feel it should have been for it's interesting yeah because i i totally agree with you what you're saying from multiple perspectives is number one you it's what i always argue because people like well it's a free it's a it's a free market and you should have the right to sell your game and i'm like so if you make like a dinnerware like let's say you're a dinnerware maker you have the right to just go to walmart be like we demand that you sell our dinnerware on in your store shelves and on your website it's like fucking nonsense it doesn't even like that argument doesn't even make any sense like it's your right to say no you don't have to be like nintendo seal quality level even though that didn't really mean anything either but at least they cared at one point like nintendo did and i was saying this on a show i was on recently that there used to have used to go through a process to get a game out so even though shovelware existed forever since the atari days you had to put a little bit of effort into it not everything was et like i had brought up the example of carnival games i don't know if you guys remember that game that was like a wii game it was like the biggest wii game outside of wii sports and they used to sell that as you guys might recall like it used to be like a little display on the counter of like game stop or like at walmart or whatever and i think there were 20 bucks or something like that and but it's like okay but you had to make the game manufacture the disc put in a box find buyers it it took more effort and when you look at a game like carnival games it's like this isn't shovelware at all comparable to a lot of this trash because you just have no there's no friction anymore sony will give a dev kit to anyone it's not that difficult to get one of these games up especially if you use some of these engines you can just buy assets like you don't have to make anything unique and it's exactly what you're saying like i don't get who wins i would i make the argument and i'm so frustrated that Sony has never been asked these questions, or at least they've never answered them.

1:18:07It's like, are you really making money on this? You have to have these games have to pass certification. They have to be published. They have people monitoring them. You're making hundreds of dollars maybe on these games, maybe a few thousand dollars. How does that even justify their existence just from that perspective? It just it doesn't make sense. So it's my so I agree with you, Kristen, I would say this is the one of the biggest culprits in terms of volume. The other side of of what they need to deal with are the copycats. You know, mouth washer or whatever, you know, like whatever. Yeah, it's like this isn't this isn't unacceptable that you're even publishing these games.

1:18:46They don't just appear. Like, I don't have a clear conduit where I'm like, whatever I want to go on the PSN is going up. it's like that's not the way it fucking works and it's really becoming annoying to me that they've let it get to this point and they could become great champions by fixing this problem and are you going to be able to fix the like they've already ruined the trophy system right they've already done all these other things which is why i keep telling people you got to earn trophies for yourself and to your point dustin like that i don't even understand why you would want those trophies.

1:19:22I realized this. I have some quote unquote, and I've said this many times, easy trophy, platinum trophies from the PS3 era, especially that still took you 10 or 20 hours. Like those were considered the easy go play up. And in 15 hours, if you get all the collectibles that are like cloudy with a chance of meatballs or something, it's like you still had to play shit. And I remembered when what was that? My Name is Mayo came out. Yeah. And that was the first game. Right. And right. And those are the first examples where I was like, I don't have those trophies. I'm like, I like, really? Like, you're going to just tap this thing and get it like what?

1:20:01And I guess it was funny and novel at the time. Like, and they were doing it kind of, I think, as with some intentionality as kind of a it's the antithesis of those guys that put the trophies in where you have to play the game for like 500 hours or like or like five years but people just reset their psn or their playstation clock to get the trophy and the whole thing was the metagame about how you did that to get the trophy so i i think it's cool to be subversive but this isn't subversive this is fucking crazy

1:20:30Colin Moriarty:and it's the volume it's volume dude right it's like i remember like kind of shit posty games like i remember like back in the 360 days especially there was like i think there was a game called um i made a game with zombies in it that i really liked it was just a twin stick shooter but it had like this ridiculous song like you could tell like the developer like made the song himself and he's like singing his heart out and it's like this is fucking dumb but it's like it's at least somebody made something you know and like there was this like this there's another game called no luca no do you remember this dustin do you remember no luca no no luca know is a game where you're literally just a hand and you're trying to keep your your cat who is a png of a cat from eating cereal so every time you would like come on the screen you would like push him away and it was stupid but that was like maybe like you'd get like maybe like five games a year like that you know that i could remember that stuck out at all but now it's like every day there's like a thousand we need people making games for the love of the game right right exactly and so i'm really trying to think like what do you get out of it and it's like do you really because you know you they release those press releases sometimes where it's like we have 22 000 games or whatever on psn it's like do you really and like do you really want 22 or whatever the number is like why would you even want that many games like that's insane for the for the for the uh the illusion of optionality right like come on man and choice give me a give it a rest don't this is my big thing and this is what i posted on that the one that guy posted on twitter i posted back to it is like don't stop like keep going like destroy these fucking companies everyone knows what time it is like there's no indie company of any repute that wants this shit to exist because they all understand what time it is it reminds me a little bit of uh there was a story going around last year or two years ago of an indie developer that released a game on steam and their game you know just like in in the order of like games that were published and then their shit was just pushed down like five pages because ea just updated a bunch of shit and it's like and that like i know that doesn't seem to matter to people but that might have been it for that developer like that might have been the only chance to be seen and i just think about all of the indie developers that don't have the advantage that like say lilymo does like i am a huge advantage.

1:22:59We talk about all of our games. So we've sold we have games that sold fewer than 5000 copies and we have games that have sold 40 or 50 thousand copies. And that's awesome. And that's extraordinary. But not everyone has that advantage. They need to rely on the organics, as it were, like placement, publishing, seeing something. And and then you're surrounded by the jumping taco. Get fucked, man. Have some respect. For like the system, have some respect for other developers other like for players like and if you're buying i'm sorry but like if you're buying these games on mass and like getting like that's loser behavior i don't know what else to tell you i don't want to tell you what to do with your trophies i think you have to earn trophies for yourself but like if you're supporting this and just earn like for what whenever i see someone with like 500 600 700 platinum trophies i'm like there's no way and then you always go look and it's bullshit.

1:23:57So you have a big number and then people go look and find out that you're fraudulent. Come on.

1:24:04Colin Moriarty:Come on. Come on. All right. That's it for that. Oh, Drew. Oh, yeah, we didn't read your inquiry, but that's just too bad, Drew. I went on a fucking pontification instead. Why have I asked my HVAC guy I found on Angie.com to change my grandpa's trachea tube? Because I I was so amazed by how quickly he replaced our air ducts. I knew I could trust him to change Pop-Pop's tube while I was on vacation. Make it quick, young man. Aw, see? Pop-Pop trusts you. Uh, I think we should call a doctor. Connecting homeowners with skilled pros for over 30 years. Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust.

1:24:45Find pros for all your home projects at Angie.com. Uh, I wondered what you thought of this. Our friend Reese Elliott over at Alinea Analytics estimates that Forza Horizon 5 has officially surpassed 5 million copies sold on PlayStation 5. That is, as he notes,$300 million in revenue. The game is from 2021. They also released other numbers to kind of show how things were doing on PlayStation otherwise. and what they say is that Forza is at 5.1 million and then Gears of War Reloaded is at 572 ,000. Indiana Jones is at 491 ,000. Flight Sim at 166 ,000 and Hellblade 2 at 50 ,000. So huge drop off there.

1:25:34Obviously, we know numbers from the first wave of games like Sea of Thieves did really well. I think it sold more than a million copies, maybe even substantially more than that. Obviously, Pentiment was never going to really move the needle. I think Hi-Fi Rush did fairly well because it was so novel. I mean, I bought it just so I was like, I can't even believe that this is here. This is so weird. So pretty strong performance there. Dustin, thoughts on Forza Horizon 5? And by the way, the Forza Horizon 6 release date for Xbox and PC leaked. It comes out in June. That makes me feel fairly certain that they'll get Forza Horizon 6 out on PS5 this year.

1:26:08Colin Moriarty:Yeah. So it's interesting just because last week we talked about GT7 and its popularity and success how it's the biggest gt game ever um but it's cool just because forza horizon is so different it's clear that uh there is a you know i it's the same market but a different market for a more arcade style racing game and it's funny just because sony was kind of on this track at one point uh with games like well i guess kind of like drive club or with um I don't know. Does MotorStorm fit in being like Horizon? It's been so long. Not really. I mean, not really, no. Because Horizon is more like open.

1:26:53MotorStorm is still a track-based racer. It's arcade-y. It was like more arcade-y. Yeah, yeah, sure. It's arcade-y.

1:27:00Colin Moriarty:So clearly there is a demand, a desire for arcade racing games. And to be clear, Forza Horizon, I played some of one of them. Maybe it was four. I don't know if I've played five at all, but they're very good, high quality, great games. And so it's no surprise that it's sold so well on PlayStation five where there's a demand for something like that. It's funny looking at this article from Alinea Analytics about Hellblade 2 only selling 50k on PlayStation five. I feel like that's a game if they would have released that day and date on PlayStation, it would have done way better. just because it would have had mystery behind it.

1:27:44Colin Moriarty:But by the time it came to PlayStation, everyone knew it wasn't very good. Yeah, I think the same for Indie, I think, is the same. Not because it was bad. A lot of people really loved it. And I don't think it's bad at all. And it came out in December, too. So it would have been perfect. They probably would have sold twice as many copies. I think they know this. It is interesting, though, Dustin, the Horizon 5 numbers nonetheless being so strong. Man, they must be just... I wonder how that's going to affect Forza Horizon 6. And maybe there is some argument to space them out more on PlayStation.

1:28:19Maybe you don't release it this year because it's like, well, maybe there'll be some gun shy people that don't want to buy it after having just bought Forza Horizon 5. Maybe you want to space it out a little bit more. Maybe they feel bullish about its back catalog potential, considering the fact that they've sold so many copies. I mean, they always toted the number of players on Forza Horizon 5, which was huge. But this must be substantially more copies sold than any other platform, I would assume. Maybe PC did the comparable numbers. I don't know. Chris, any thoughts here on Forza Horizon 5's performance and the potential Forza Horizon 6 coming this year, since we know the date now will be in June on Xbox?

1:28:59Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I mean, it's not it doesn't surprise me too much. I mean, I figured there would be this like I the racing genre is kind of like it's it's very not populated or not as populated as I remember it. And so like it debuting the strong. I remember playing Forza Horizon 5 the first time and being surprisingly taken with it, considering it's completely outside of my wheelhouse. The only thing that really kind of got in my way of getting into it deeper was the fact that I think famously they shadow dropped Halo Infinite multiplayer really early, like I think a week into that game being out. So it kind of undercut it for a lot of people, including myself, but it's a strong fucking game.

1:29:43Colin Moriarty:And so, yeah, it's cool to see it exploding like that. It's definitely they're definitely thinking about what this means. but I think yeah I mean is Forza Horizon 6 I think it's I think like we talk about like oh Forza 6 is coming to PlayStation but like I mean like yeah every it's it's all coming but this one obvious obvious yeah yeah other performance here let me see here they have other numbers Oblivion on PS5 1.1 million copies that's pretty good yeah Doom the Dark Ages at 500 Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and 4 at 227 Ninja Gaiden at 206 Age of Empires at 147 Age of Mythology at 111 and Outer Worlds 2 at 135 so this is indeed an Xbox it is indeed and we very much appreciate it over here on the PlayStation side of things and congratulations to to Playground on such i mean that's huge for them i'm sure they're getting some nice bonuses for that as well nothing wrong with that and speaking of uh xbox games coming to playstation last week we had buried in the show because it happened during the show that um what is that uh avowed is coming to playstation in february but we also have word that and this comes from video games chronicle so there's a developer direct on january 22nd so a week from when we're recording this and it's going to show some new xbox games which are kind of more third-party games now as a publisher and we've been curious about fable which is going to be at the show and video games chronicle writes quote fable was announced in 2020 as part of the xbox game showcase the game which is a reboot of the lionhead rpg series doesn't currently have a release date it's understood Fable is also in development for PlayStation 5.

1:31:39So there's that, and we're looking forward to that day and date as well. We have a write-in from Claire McMaster who writes, Hello, Sacred Bros. I know the level of Xbox fandom or appreciation varies greatly among the LSM family. For you three specifically, I would guess the disappointment in the direction of the brand bothers Chris the most, Dustin Nex, and Colin the least. For me, I've been one of those all three console guys for the last four console generations. And even though I'm more of a PlayStation and Nintendo guy, I'm still feeling a bit depressed about one of the big three basically on life support as far as being a hardware platform goes.

1:32:10What are your thoughts, especially with the upcoming Xbox developer direct, where it's rumored most of the game shown, including fable will be announced as a day one PS five release going forward is the new exclusive for Xbox simply the fact that their own first party studios titles are free quotes day one on Xbox game pass, whereas they cost money on their competitors platforms. What say you Dustin, how are you feeling about all of this uh i'm i'm i feel like it's over and written and done with at this point i i don't feel much of anything about it but but he is right that i i i'm not pleased about the turn of direction because xbox is dying as a hardware brand i don't necessarily want that but i am pleased that we're getting more games it's like we we're so now we're getting all of your games and all of our games it's great no problem right yeah it is i i think the thing

1:32:56Colin Moriarty:that concerns me the most is that i just don't like unchecked sony and not to say they're not fully unchecked because there is of course pc and nintendo hardware that they also need to contend with but um i don't know xbox is a nostalgic brand for me and i'm sure for chris too playing the original hardware um and particularly xbox 360 was where i was at that time because the ps3 was just too expensive for me at the um until later on when there was price cuts so i'm kind of in the same spot where i've always bought xbox hardware but if it is a a pc hybrid and the main benefit is that you can get game pass and get those games on that service then i have zero interest in the next platform i'm not saying it wouldn't have interest to anybody it's just for me as someone who has my own pc and now my old pc is my living room pc it's just like i don't or or a playstation down there it's like i have multiple options to get those games and i really am just not all that interested in game pass outside of occasionally getting it for a game that i'm on the fence on uh which then i just cancel and they give me my money back right Right.

1:34:16It's the best of both worlds.

1:34:19Colin Moriarty:So it's a little, you know, it's it's sad to see him go, but I'm not surprised. It does feel like and I'm sure that the primary Xbox leadership lays in bed every night thinking about it, about this, that they were like, we were almost there. But as you've always said, Colin, they just flew a little too close to the sun. They lost it all. Yeah, they shouldn't. They were. They shouldn't have gone for it. especially with what we're going to learn about what's going on with call of duty shortly but yeah they should they shouldn't have gone after activision i think it would have been totally different if they just went after a different target they undid themselves there's just no doubt about it it's not even an argument at this point uh chris do you have anything you want to say about this fable on ps5 that's going to be a little surreal i'm not gonna play it but i'm sure a lot of i'm sure a lot of people are going to so no i'm definitely i mean i said i think i said this specifically in one of our um i can't remember if it was a draft or like what it was one of our specific like themed episodes of uh what we're expecting on playstation 5 and i said fable like i think i i think of course as far as like look i don't know like i mean i i think xbox is awesome i think it's like a weird they i think probably are ultimately like looking back on it probably like my favorite platform because they were weird for so long like it was bizarre like ps1 was weird as fuck and then ps2 i remember started to feel a little bit like more like okay well you know you got your kind of tent poles and then ps3 just kind of was following in a in they weren't really leading and so like i just think that first xbox and and the xbox 360 were just such weird ecosystems they were doing weird things their uis were weird like everything about it was strange and interesting and there was always something weird happening the summer of arcade was awesome And I just, but for me, like the Xbox as, as, as that kind of vibe died a long, long time ago.

1:36:11Colin Moriarty:Like it, it died arguably like after the connect. I remember when they like made the, that they did their third dashboard update to make it more like the Xbox one before the Xbox one came out and they kind of made it, they gave it a Hulu UI and they kind of sucked all the character out of it. And, and so like, it's, it's been a while since I've cared really. And certainly ever since the Xbox one launch where it was just like, Ooh, you know, like how'd, how'd you fuck up this bad? So I don't lament Xbox being gone because I've always been relatively agnostic. My lament is more of the fact that like Xbox, along with many other platforms, by the way, have just lost a sense of identity so deeply to the fact that like all of these machines feel so interchangeable now.

1:36:54Colin Moriarty:Um, that's what really kind of bums me out more about it. It's less about Xbox and more about the fact that I got to, I got to live through that and then see it die and then see kind of playstation arguably kind of do kind of the same thing like i thought the cross media bar was so weird and cool and and then i'm not saying like the ui on playstation 5 isn't good or whatever like it's all everything functions but there is kind of a vibe or like a character that is uh missing in modern hardware even with the switch too and and um and all that so is it a bummer that xbox has gone as a main hardware manufacturer sure but it arguably doesn't make much of a difference to me not anymore i'm still very nostalgic about it and i think it's a it's a fucking unique as hell uh brand especially from the original xbox that that 10 year span of 2000 to 2010 was a it was a pretty it was a pretty special and unique and weird time to get involved yeah they they there's a lot I think there's going to still be a lot to write about Xbox but I think that they kind of they blew it I mean in a way but I also think that they just never had the territorial permeation to really compete long term they were very reliable in other words when the 360 sold you know the 360 is its biggest success by far it was like irrelevant in a lot of the world it actually really ran up the score in the united states in the uk in some emerging markets but like i think that they were kind of maybe trapped to begin with with a very western style machine and to their credit they did a lot to try to fight against that i bring it up over and over again they spent a lot of money on a lot of random games that had no business being on xbox 360 but were because they threw their money around think about blue dragon yeah blue dragon they basically sent that game out to die in Japan, you know, because no one had an Xbox, but they tried, they, they lost Odyssey.

1:38:56They, they did a shit. They had an exclusive tales game. They, and even back in the original Xbox era, getting with Tecmo and doing Ninja Gaiden and reviving that or whatever, like they were trying. I just, I just think that when we look back at things, it'll be that, that territorial lack of, of awareness and a lot of places that matter that are not the United States, of course in terms of their their sales but it's chip damage and you get that little chip damage and all these different places in paraguay and you know and final and it's like whatever and it's just a little bit of a little bit and then it all adds up and that's what sony has you know right yeah and people feel like and sony's presence is so they're so omnipresent in a lot of markets with like soccer ads and like you always see them blazing on all these different things and all and it's like so microsoft had an uphill battle i think they had to really do it perfectly and they fucked it up and and even a little bit of a fuck up what is

1:39:47Colin Moriarty:gonna derail it so they weren't savvy enough to uh have as broad of a success i i agree i i do think though that like the the western or i do think like the japanese market analysis part of the equation i don't know if that matters so much i think it mattered it ended up mattering but like i mean we see like even with the playstation that like even playstation ended up kind of shifting towards an america kind of focus you know like or like a like not japan it's like a prime focus so like arguably like they were they were positioned fairly well it was ultimately just the fact that like dude they every decision they made was so boneheaded from the the end of the 360 generation leading into the xbox one every single possible decision there oh we're gonna put a fucking camera in here that's gonna drive the price of the machine up a hundred bucks any idiot could have told you that that was like a stupid idea and but like that that got through somehow and then you know the always online drm before people were ready to hear it and and even just i think we had this conversation somewhat recently where like even if they were going to do all of those things the simple the simple fact of like the order in which you unveiled these things would have made a tremendous difference like if you did your e3 first and then showed your fucking cable bullshit that nobody gave a shit about because that would have been seen as extraneous as opposed to like the prime focus they just stumbled the fuck since since the project and tall or whatever and um that'll be that'll be the legacy of that of that of of that ship really it's uh it really is all i know we talk about like activision and all the mistakes like leading up after that but like i really think it's like you couldn't ask for a worse disaster than the than the xbox one like everything about it everything leading up to it all the decisions everything i know people think it's overstated but i i kind of as somebody who lived it and like was in that ecosystem and was there nuclear shit i got it because i thought the halo was only going to stay there and it did it did for a while i mean yeah you can't be even mad about having an xbox one it still was only there you know for all pc too but but um i think you're absolutely right I think it is a kind of a death by a thousand cuts.

1:42:05I also think they were too aggressive in like the always on line thing. Like I actually and really not the always online thing, but the always online thing catered towards some sort of DRM. Right. I always I didn't mind that. I just think that you didn't need to do it because what you could have done instead. Look at where we are now. People used to be like, I want to resell my games. I want to own them. And it's like, cool, like that's totally fine. But naturally more and more and more and more people are buying digital games. We see that in our own data. And eventually it's going to get to a point where it's like, well, you can't sell your digital games.

1:42:43Sorry. I mean, that's just the way it goes. And so it would have just gotten to that point. You didn't have to force it. You would have just gotten there.

1:42:49Colin Moriarty:You know, that's the problem is that they always, they're too early to a lot of things. And even when they are early to things that people generally end up adopting, they never, they never, they never sell it well. They never communicate it well oh we got a place for people like you it's called xbox 360 brother what that is a i still like that to me is still like top top five most insane things an executive has ever said publicly to an audience like what how disconnected can you possibly be indeed um they just didn't need to do it i understand they were you know used game sales were a problem they tried all these different novel ways especially in the ps3 and 360 era like online passes and stuff to like get people to stop selling their games and stop buying used games and at least getting a little bit of money from people.

1:43:35I get all that, but they should have just been smarter to be like the inexorable trend is just going to fix this problem. We just have to hang on. And by the way, we're Microsoft. It's not really going to hurt us. So yeah, it is what it is. You know, I certainly, again, my sympathies lie with the player base of tens of millions of people that love the console, the Xbox console, and they're not going to like with even all the stuff going on with component pricing and stuff you even look at and you're like i don't know man like is this thing really even going to happen i'm sure it exists i'm sure they want to do it but like ultimately when push comes to shove are you going to be like let's price this thing out

1:44:13Colin Moriarty:and it's like it's too expensive i say as an xbox fan i i don't see a reason you know even even the smallest reason we're like oh it'd be cool to interact with a new ui you know they're not going to do that it's just going to be the same because that's what they do with the xbox one going into the series actually the same UI it's like so I don't even get the I don't even get like the the the illusion that I'm using a new thing that was kind of a bummer so like I don't know man it's it's just kind of the the the writing's been on the wall for a while and uh I'm with you like it sucks for that for that player base and uh and the millions of people who are going to be affected by it but I mean I just I just don't know what the reason would be to even make a new a new Xbox at this point.

1:45:00I don't see it. I don't either, except as we have well worn at this point an off ramp, you know, like some sort of olive branch. But if you're making a PC anyway, I just let OEMs make it your shit. Yeah. All right. Anything else to say, Dustin? No, you're done. I don't want to hear it.

1:45:24Colin Moriarty:Oh.

1:45:27Call of Duty up next time. Well, all right. Yep. Call of Duty. Time to talk more about this. So Push Square wrote a story that cites the ongoing lawsuit surrounding Bobby Kotick. And I guess some of the Activision stuff that really has no relevance to us. But I'm going to read you through the story about the context of it. And then what he says about Call of Duty that I think is really interesting. It's not only eye-opening, it's like, oh, no. Let's see what it says. The title here says, Call of Duty on track to perform over 60 % below last year. Ex-Activision boss Bobby Kodik sticks knife in flagging FPS franchise.

1:46:09And they write, quote, It's no secret Call of Duty is enjoying a particularly torrid time, but ex-Activision boss Bobby Kodik may have revealed just how badly the latest entry Black Ops 7 is doing. In response to a lawsuit led by investors and funded by a Swedish pension fund named AP7. He repeated multiple times that the newest Call of Duty is down 60 % compared to last year's game, which will be sending alarm bells ringing in Redmond. To give some context to the suit, a group of investors have essentially alleged Kodik of rushing into the deal to sell Activision to Microsoft. They claim his valuation of$95 per share, $69 billion cumulatively, was too low.

1:46:43They further allege that he ultimately made the decision to sell to insulate himself from widespread sexual scandals. But in Kodik's response, He points to lagging console hardware sales and massive declines to the Call of Duty franchise as evidence of why he made the right call. He said, as read and reported by Gamefile, quote, Today, given that console sales are at an all-time low and Call of Duty sales are off over 60 % from the prior year, plaintiffs should be expressing extreme gratitude for the foresight Activision leadership demonstrated in consummating this transaction, end quote. We're not entirely sure, they write, where Kodik is pulling a 60 % figure from.

1:47:15I don't think it's that mysterious at all. but it's safe to assume a man with his standing in the industry would have his sources. Indeed, we know that Black Ops 7 has seen massive declines pretty much worldwide, forcing Activision to release an unprecedented statement late last year, which we covered on the show. The panic note the players mentioned it had never released back-to-back sub-franchise installments again. It's also true that console sales are at an all-time low in the U.S. anyway, where November's numbers were worst on a record in 30 years, despite the brand new Switch 2 entering the market.

1:47:41Elsewhere in his note, Kodik went on to attack the FTC, who famously tried to stop the Activision acquisition from going through. He pointed out, quote, Call of Duty is on track to perform over 60 % below last year because of intense competition from titles like Battlefield, destroying the FTC's now defeated argument about Call of Duty's purported monopoly and the lack of competition in the first-person action game category, end quote. Dustin, I lied. I do want to hear from you. What do you think about all of this? Now, I don't want to set the stage, and I don't want to lead you too much, but 60 % off is insane.

1:48:15And they're right. They right here. We're not entirely sure where Kodik is pulling a 60 percent figure from. It's probably because he was the CEO and co-founder of Activision for its entire duration since the since, you know, it's it's down days in the 80s and probably knows almost everyone still in the C-suite. So I assume that's where the numbers are coming from. What do you think?

1:48:37Colin Moriarty:Yeah, the I'm not not surprised. And I believe the 60 % we talked about that a few weeks ago about, you know, it's one piece of the pie, but the steam numbers in particular are telling of the situation. And so this information just confirms that we were on the right track with that. And I you got to wonder partially if I don't know, I was like, are the sales down 60 % partially because Microsoft is putting it on Game Pass? Certainly that has some part of it, but at the same time, the IP has just continued to decline and get more tired. And as pointed out, games like Battlefield, but also Ark Raiders have just pulled people away from this where they see how, I mean, Black Ops, what was it, 6?

1:49:36Colin Moriarty:I think Black Ops 6 actually had decent momentum behind it, but didn't pan out in the long term just because people were starting to get sick of the different DLC and the different types of characters they put in the game. And then Black Ops 7 was just like, man, the wrong direction at the worst time to take the IP. so the thing that i think is that while it is down 60 percent um i think i don't i think they could turn it around i think it would be it might take a few years and maybe it's not going to be quite to where it was for a while but these things ebb and flow and so i like right now battlefield i feel like a lot of people are kind of cold on that now too it's like things have their moment being in the spotlight call of duty did have this year call of duty had its moment in the spotlight it just was not a very positive one um and so if they come out with the right game at the right time next year it's hard because these things have to be planned years in advance but um i think they could see uh some of they could regain some of that 60 loss but but uh yep not surprising and I kind of was thinking that my take was that Call of Duty will still be Battlefield despite it all because it's Call of Duty like long term well not even just like this game before both of them are out people are like Battlefield 6 is going to annihilate Call of Duty and I'm like we always say that and it never happens and this time it actually happened it was against all wisdom but I guess the writing was on the wall so maybe that's we should have been looking or at least for meme who was making that take like like look around okay this the tides are changing yeah it's well before I get into it Chris what do you think about this this is a pretty big news yeah no I mean I was I mean I was pretty bullish about Battlefield coming out on top this year like there was something there was something in the air about it I wasn't sure obviously just a lucky guess but like it it felt like this year things were shifting and like it just it didn't feel like there was much clamoring for for black ops everything about it from like the fact that it was like a numbered sequel immediately after the previous one which is pretty rare and usually not a good indicator the last time that that happened was also like i'm pretty sure was modern warfare 3 dustin was it was that uh the last time that they had like a the more the recent modern warfare 3 by the way was the last time that they had like a direct numbered sequel without like a space in between or like alternating franchises and it also wasn't even a new game right well it was like a crappy campaign it was like a war zone small yeah new maps yeah so i mean that that being in the air was kind of a telltale sign battlefield just get just generally having positive under the underground buzz from like play testers and and our creators kind of exploding out of nowhere too was also kind of like that that was i think when i was more sure about it where it's just like oh there's like usually people will be like oh yeah maybe i'll get both right but now there's this other thing that's kind of sweeping up a lot of the attention and so like i just thought like yeah this is the year that they're gonna this is the year they're gonna fumble it's not surprising i i think much like dustin that like i think they can i think ultimately they can turn it around because call of duty is just one of those it's it's one of those franchises that i think if you build something good within it people will come like i think that's that's really as simple as it is like that name recognition is so huge um it's been around for a long time which that in and of itself isn't necessarily a guarantee but it helps and so yeah i the thing that i'm the thing that's crossing my mind a lot as i think about this is the fact that like man you could there was a time where you could get away with this kind of thing when when development cycles were three years where you could alternate reasonably between a handful of studios and have them each kind of pumping out an offset game that was that met some kind of quality bar that people reasonably saw something in but now that those development schedules are like five years apart and they they're more expensive to make now Like, I wonder how reliably you can even really do that without really seeing the deficits of what it takes to meet that demand.

1:54:17Colin Moriarty:Like, I don't I mean, this seems evidence to me that like the current way that they're doing things is not sustainable and they can't do it. like I almost wonder what they're I almost wonder if the if the remedy that they're going to look at is like building another team to fill in that space or we're gonna take a year off yeah scale down scale down bring back the kind of like make you miss us type deal almost like they did with the Assassin's Creed um that one year where they didn't release an Assassin's Creed game and so when it came back people were like okay let's see what this is um didn't work for me it didn't grab me or anything yeah i mean yeah um i think it'll work for some people like just like let you miss call of duty for a little bit you can't be too long because it's fucking expensive but i think even a year would would do a lot yeah i uh i'm i think you're right you both say a lot of interesting stuff because there's there's going to be a lot this is i mean this is really not good.

1:55:23I think you're being very fair, Chris, when you, or I'm Dustin, I'm sorry. When you say that, you know, this is 60 % down, what part of that comes from game pass, but that game pass would have game pass would have been in last year's too. Right. So, so that is fair and it's interesting to think about, but it's from this old baseline. In other words, that number would have been much more instructive. Maybe last year, I think the first year that they ingested it in the game pass and they lost a lot of money doing it. But I think you're right. Like, well, Chris, because there's two different ways to pursue it.

1:55:53It's either you like dump more money in. And I don't know that they have the appetite to do that, although it might pay off. It could become a sunk cost. The other thing is, yeah, to go away and scale down. And I think that that's what they really need to do. And I was saying this on an appearance I did recently on a different show where they have basically all of Activision working on Call of Duty. And what you might want to do is you just kind of get rid of the support teams. if you want to scale things down so your Beanoxes and your High Moons and all the rest and you keep Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer, Treyarch, and Raven and you let them collectively make a Call of Duty game every three years or something.

1:56:32And then have a roadmap even immediately of saying like this is quarters one through twelve. We're going to have things for this game leading into the next release. We're already talking about the next release. It's going to be here. And in the meantime, we're going to go silent again and make this new game. and I just think it's too aggressive to go after people for 60 or 70 dollars or your game pass subscriptions every year to go after call of duty when there's just too much competition it's not the same anymore call of duty used to be a an annualized sports title and yeah that works in sports still to this day because they're all unique to their particular brand in their particular game so madden is madden that's a ubiquitous thing but call of duty is call of duty but shooters are shooters in other words football another basketball game or another football game is not going to be an NBA game or an NFL game and it's not going to work.

1:57:18So. I just think they really need to they need to bite the bullet. And this this is why I think it's so funny that the Swedish pension fund is suing Bobby Kotick, because I agree with them in the sense that it's like, are you are you crazy? Do you have any idea how much Microsoft overpaid for this thing? That's why. And I remember saying you guys will remember I said that at the time I was like, this is so much money for call. I don't understand. Again, And just to use some examples, it's like Star Wars was four billion dollars. Star Wars. Star Wars. And meanwhile, Activision Blizzard is 70 billion.

1:57:57It doesn't even with the years detached, 10 years difference, it's like it doesn't really make any sense. And so I agree with him. Like if you were an Activision shareholder, you got a great fucking deal. And I love his kind of coyness. And it shows that he doesn't have good relationships with people that are involved in this. because, and it showed during the trial, by the way, where he said he would never put Call of Duty in the Game Pass because he would lose money doing it. And lo and behold, that's what happened. But he's basically saying like, yeah, like you should be thanking me. We got a good deal for you at the time that this thing has been declining.

1:58:30And they probably had a good feeling for it. Even at that time, they're not stupid. We have a letter from Drew Peacock that gets into something I wanted to discuss though. He says, hi, Kyle, Dusty and Christopher. I have a question about Xbox's handling of Call of Duty since the Activision deal. They've publicly acknowledged that putting COD on Game Pass potentially cost them hundreds of millions in lost sales, and now the most recent game is majorly underperforming compared to previous years. At the same time, Xbox leadership has gone through multiple shakeups. We really don't even know who is running it at this point, and they just don't seem to have a realistic long-term strategy.

1:59:01Do you think Microsoft actually has the leadership skills and creative stewardship needed to protect, handle, and grow a franchise's biggest Call of Duty? or is there a real risk that the Activision acquisition ends up being a huge financial and creative misstep because Xbox simply doesn't have the track record of managing and evolving franchises like Call of Duty? Curious to hear your thoughts. Listen, I don't want to pile on too much, but I said this from the beginning and it's not to be a dickhead. I even said this during the Bethesda acquisition, which made a lot more sense. It's like Microsoft simply doesn't have the creative talent to do this.

1:59:32If Activision was on a trajectory down or Call of Duty was on a trajectory down, Microsoft was definitely not going to be the company that stopped it from happening. And it was never a good creative fit. They're a major computing corporation. They're a services corporation. They are good at it. But you can't really look at their stewardship of virtually anything in the game space and be like, yeah, you did a good job. Look at Halo. Look at Gears. Forza Prime. I mean, that series is done now, right? they and it's as we were saying earlier just flying too close to the sun with deals and talking out of both sides of your mouth and acting like PlayStation was trying to kill them by getting exclusives while you do the same fucking thing and all the rest it just I'll just reiterate for the millionth time if I believe that PlayStation needs new leadership and I do at least on the studio side and I'm very on record about that then absolutely you drop a fucking neutron bomb on the Xbox brand and bring in all new people.

2:00:36And that should have happened a long time ago. And that should have happened when their strategy changed so that you could have brought in new people, interviewed people and said, like, this is what we want to do. And they're like, yes, we agree. And then they're the fucking figureheads of this whole shift as the ship turns into a different direction, a 90 degree different direction. But instead, they kept all the same people involved who never had the talent to deal with the growing organization behind the scenes to begin with. And then you give them Activision. Come on. it like doesn't it just doesn't it's just kind of nonsensical when you think about it no i matt booty could be the mice i've never met him nicest person in the world obviously has no idea what he's doing yeah um phil spencer talks out of both sides of his mouth everything he said ends up having another statement against it there are entire like meme images of it like it's so easy to encapsulate and boil it down it's that's what bothers me about the xbox situation not that they're failing but that they seem to be okay with it there's like a level of acceptance we're not going to win you kind of almost found it when phil spencer was like we're never going to out console playstation it's like well why not yeah why Bye.

2:01:51Colin Moriarty:Like because you're incapable of it. Well, yeah, the the thing to me about that was like. I agree with that assessment, but also like if you agree with that assessment, why are you there? Yeah, you don't say it. You know what I mean? Like you you can't. It's not even about you don't say it. Like I feel like the person in charge of that situation shouldn't even believe that. Because then what are you doing? I believe that I personally like and I've been on the record of multiple. times where I just like I feel like really since the xbox one there was really no way that they were going to come out of that like I just I that was the digital library and like even even he said it like Phil Spencer said I was like why are you saying this is crazy but even so you gotta have a guy who thinks that losing is not possible or at the very least is willing to project that image uh you know to the best of his ability that it kind of spreads like i i look i don't know what what game development is like i don't know what morale at studios is like but like i would have to imagine that if you're working at xbox uh game studios and and you're like and you hear that the main guy go oh we're never we're just we lost the worst generation it's okay it's kind of over i can't imagine that that's like the a fantastic thing to be hearing maybe it is because like you know you're in microsoft and there's like some level of just like oh well they're just gonna keep doing this and eventually we'll do multi-platform games and we we kind of want our games anywhere everywhere anyway because we're developers so like maybe it doesn't bother you ultimately because maybe that's the lens that you're looking at it through but i don't know man your head guy shouldn't be saying that shit at the even if it's a lie i mean you're paid to lie anyway like that's what you do but um just weird just very bizarre choice to come out and say that it should be clear also and i want to say this to be honest and fair is like my contempt for that leadership oozes out of my pores because of all the shit that leaked during the ftc trial like these i said it from the beginning these guys have no strategy no taste oh they were looking to yeah like sega and we can spend sony out of business is what matt booty said in an email okay how did that go um i just feel like they had no there was no like remember we would make fun of it that emails like here are all the acquisition targets every company like literally you couldn't even name a company that wasn't in that list here are all the acquisition targets we're vetting everyone it's like oh cool you guys are really like in it in it for like some sort of creative purpose or you believe that some sort of creative theory will net you.

2:04:36I mean, it's a business. You want to make money. It was so like, how can these guys be looked at as serious players? And I'm not saying Xbox is a brand. I'm saying those people. It's like, how have you not just result? Like, I would be so embarrassed if like, if I was in that position and people knew that I said that where it's like, yeah, we will just buy anything. And by the way, it shows. i i've been saying i've been saying that from the very beginning like it shows the the acquisitions are incoherent um activision's not even the beginning of it it's like all these random studios it's like okay because it was clear that they just went to anyone and were like what do you want and some some went with them and some didn't and much like unfortunately what's happening with Facebook, Sanzaro was closed down, which is the developers of Sly Cooper.

2:05:28You go with the wrong partner and you can pay the price. The studio pays the price. The people that sold the company didn't pay any sort of price. So we'll see what happens. But if those sales numbers are true, Microsoft is eating shit with Call of Duty, not even close to being even in terms of finances are concerned and it makes it make you wonder it makes you wonder what moves they're going to make because this is not sustainable it's sustainable in the real and that they could take money from peter to pay paul or whatever but if you want paul to be self-sustaining then you're going to have to cut a lot of heads and you're gonna have to think about a different way forward and i agree with you is like going away is the best idea because the one thing that they have And this is why I contend that like is a game like Fortnite permanent.

2:06:21And I mean, like forever, like 50 years from now.

2:06:26And there's a lot of juice and a lot of energy and something that is multi-generational, not by console, but by person that has just been present. And if it goes away and comes back, it's going to scratch. Like someone's going to be nostalgic about that. Actually, tens of millions of people. And so if you just like go away and come back at the launch of PS6 or something. And it's like, here is a new Call of Duty experience. and we've really put our all into this and it's the most robust amazing thing you've ever seen because we had time to fucking think because they would just throw bodies at these things it's hard to do it's hard to make three games at a time that's what they do it's really fucking hard

2:07:03Colin Moriarty:that's why you got those AI cards right exactly that's ridiculous but I'm telling you if these numbers are true and I believe they're 100 % accurate because Bobby Kotick would absolutely know He knows everything. Like, I like, you don't think he doesn't know everything that's going on there. So of course he does. Yeah. So they're not literally true. They're, they're true enough to be irrelevant to even argue, you know? Right. Exactly. Maybe it's 61 % or like, you know, 59 or something. Right. Right. Exactly. No, you're absolutely right. Because there's some, it's like, how would Bobby know? And it's like, are you kidding?

2:07:34Are you fucking kidding? Just because he, just because he's not officially there anymore. I'm sure he can get whatever he wants. So, um, cause I mean like, these are people that a lot of these people owe him everything yeah like that he's the one that saved activision then he's the one that hired all of them so if he's on the phone it's like so what's going on i mean i i used to do that i knew everything that was going on ign for years

2:07:59Colin Moriarty:yeah um was that what's the idiom the the phrase like a hand a company a call of duty and he eats for one year that is that is it teach a man to call a duty eats for a lifetime teach a man to Call of Duty. Sounds like you're having a stroke. All right, a couple more things to get through and then we can get into what we're playing and we can wrap things up with listener inquiries. New PlayStation Plus game catalog games for the extra and premium tiers. These games are added to the list and will be available as of the 20th of January. And obviously certain other games will be leaving the list as well.

2:08:34The big addition here is Resident Evil 8, Resident Evil Village as a prelude to Resident Evil 9, Resident Evil Requiem, which is coming out very soon in february so that's a big uh addition another big addition like a dragon infinite wealth for both ps5 and ps4 and by the way resident evil is on ps5 ps4 as well another big game is expeditions a mud runner game for ps5 and ps4 those games are quietly very big do you guys ever see any of these any of these games like mud runner snow runner i know them that they're like big game i think that's some of the biggest stuff embracer does

2:09:07Colin Moriarty:now I kind of want to play one of these I sounds fun I play snow runner like that's like uh death stranding right it's like it's like a very serious driving game like where you have to like use like winches and different sorts of tires and I played snow runner and it is really cool but it is very serious in that like it's it is what it is um but I can see exactly why people would enjoy it if you're because it's a high quality version of those games usually those kinds of games like the simulator games are not very high quality and it's like a high quality high produced version of it visually it looks incredible actually um less prominent a quiet place the road ahead i know you've been looking forward to playing this chris and uh the single player horror adventure game is available on ps5 for you darkest dungeon 2 i i played darkest dungeon 1 but i think on vita but i don't think i got very far in it did you so hard yeah it's so hard i haven't played the second i and i never beat the first one because i'm just i i'm not smart enough for it so that's available ps5 and ps4 the exit eight which had like a little bit of a moment yeah it's good it's only three bucks so not really worth being a plus yeah yeah i i recommend it i had a really fun hour and a half with it but it's cool it's neat and this is one of those games that had like a copy of it where it was like you know eight exit or something like that with like the same icon it's like all right guys yeah uh art of rally is out on ps5 and ps4 a little to the left will be available on playstation plus extra and then finally the only retro game this month is the original ridge racer from ps1 ridge racer which will be on ps5 and ps4 as well so disappointing level of retro support, but nice game catalog additions.

2:10:59Resident Evil, excuse me, Burped from Yakuza and so on and so forth. They're like a dragon. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Take it easy. So those will be available if you're a PlayStation Plus extra or a premium member as of January 20th. And finally, Sony released the best selling PlayStation Store games top downloads of 2025. So usually we go through these month by month, but now we have yearly charts. So here are the biggest games of note on PlayStation Network in the United States and Canada combined for the year of 2025. NBA 2K26. Most downloaded game. What do you think of that?

2:11:37Colin Moriarty:It's funny just because I don't know anyone who plays that game, but I'm also Western PA and no one cares about basketball. Well, it's also funny because everyone seems to hate the NBA now. I know you guys don't follow sports, but people kind of hate the NBA now. Like it's definitely in a massive decline. I don't know. Do you guys know anything about like what's happening with like where people are shooting a shit ton of threes now? And it's like it's like totally changed the game. Like what people have analytically figured out is like you should just shoot threes. And even though you miss most of them, you'll just score more points.

2:12:10And so if you there's like I got to send you some of the clips because it's fucking hysterical, like back and forth, like over and over again, these guys just throwing bricks. And like this is like what the NBA becomes instead of like settling down in the zone, passing the ball around, like trying to get close to the basket. And everyone's really critical of it. So this is all happening. This discourse is happening at the same time that NBA 2K26 is the biggest game on PlayStation 5. Okay. Can't really square that. Battlefield 6, number two. What do you think of that?

2:12:39Colin Moriarty:Yep. Pretty good. There it is. Number three. Grand Theft Auto 5.

2:12:50And then four and five. college football and Madden. So three sports games in the top five and a game from 2013. And then number six, Minecraft. And then number seven, Black Ops 7. Number eight, Ark Raiders. Yeah, you said ouch. I mean, that's unprecedentedly low for Call of Duty. And what's funny is Black Ops 6 is only a few down from there on the list. But let's see, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. So Goseyote was nine. MLB The Show was 10 Ready or Not at 12 that game was quietly very big on a console Forza Horizon 5 at 14 now this is where some people are starting to contest Alinea's numbers because this suggests that it didn't sell 5 million copies right on PS5 or maybe around there because they have Elder Scrolls Oblivion at 1 million and that's at 16 on this list and then Assassin's Creed Shadows at 17, Claire Obscure at 18 and Monster Hunter Wilds falling all the way down to 19.

2:13:58Did you guys see that thing about Monster Hunter Wilds DLC and all that? Do you think that's real, Dustin? Can you explain that to the audience?

2:14:05Colin Moriarty:Okay, this is just from looking at a few tweets, so don't take my word as gospel, but to my understanding is that someone figured out that in the PC version of Monster Hunter Wilds, the game does a check where it checks how much DLC you have downloaded. and it runs this check regularly as you play probably as some kind of i would assume some kind of like pseudo drm just to make like oh do you have this as you before you you know go into a world or something so what someone did is that they went and spoofed it to make it look like they had every piece of dlc that they ever released and the game was running like 30 frames higher like in this example it was like going from 25 to 30 frames per second to like 55 for owning all the dlc it's crazy i would i am gonna give capcom the benefit of doubt this is not intentional uh to that owning more games gets you better performance but uh wow huge oversight hopefully they fix that funny and it would it's uh it's so that the story of that game i think is interesting because it's obviously critically or commercially very successful people liked it at first but it's it's a it's a poster child for this era of ephemeral presence no matter how big your game is it just doesn't have presence because there's just too much going on and uh again i always just bring up silksong as an example of that that game has no presence yeah what happened what are you laughing at nothing i gotta i gotta i gotta dm it's it's completely irrelevant all right let's get to what we're playing my friends as we begin what we're playing let's go to dustin first because he's playing kingdom hearts 2 i want to hear about your adventures yeah the ultimate 5 ps2 game you're playing it on what ps4 i am playing it on ps4 when i played kingdom hearts one i played it the the pc version but i've noticed it's kind of when i played the first one it was kind of buggy in certain ways like the frame rate was weird and a couple audio glitches so i just decided stick with old faithful playstation uh for kingdom hearts 2 and yeah i decided to go into this just because i was feeling it i wanted to replay the whole series before Kingdom Hearts 4 anyway.

2:16:32Colin Moriarty:Am I potentially replaying way too fucking early? Probably. Because I'm guessing Kingdom Hearts 4 is not coming out this year. Maybe next year. But this game, as I was telling Colin earlier in the show, is the peak of the series. And there are other great games in the franchise, Birth by Sleep. Kingdom Hearts 3, also amazing. But 2 is really where it feels like one of those sequels like people always reference assassin's creed to assassin's creed 2 as like one of the great sequels i feel like kingdom hearts 2 is that as well in terms of uh the different worlds you get to go to and especially after playing king hearts 1 right before it seeing it directly how improved they are but not just like the combat but what you're doing in the worlds is much more interesting uh the story gets a lot more wacky in the second game uh in a way that i find really entertaining and across the board it's funny and i'm i was trying to figure this out because when i replayed when we were playing kingdom hearts one i feel like i remembered it way more than i'm remembering kingdom hearts two because the last time i played this was either in 2017 or 2018 before three came out and so it wasn't that long ago but there are parts where i'm like i i have no memory of this at all as i'm playing i have no memory of this specific part there's that meme of uh was it gandalf gandalf yeah i have no memory of this place that's how i feel dude playing parts of king hearts 2 so i'm having a nice time with it I like that specifically in contrasting Kingdom Hearts one and two, everyone focuses on the combat for a reason.

2:18:22Colin Moriarty:It has such a great progression of when you start the game. Sora is like pretty limited in his moveset and his combos and his jump. And you are leveling up in this game all the time. Not too much, but as you level up, you unlock more ways to customize your combat, more combos, more special abilities. And it's like, yeah, this you could see that Kingdom Hearts one wasn't the full vision of the combat. They were figuring things out. But yeah, I am absolutely loving it. Some of the Disney worlds in this game are so cool to the point where I know it's you can't spoil a game this old. But there are some that I don't think you know about Colin.

2:19:08Colin Moriarty:So I'm not going to say them, but there are some ones that I'm like, wow, that's please don't spoil Kingdom Hearts. I will not spoil Kingdom Hearts 2 but maybe the most here's what I'll say there are certain worlds in Kingdom Hearts 2 that they go into live action Disney movies and it's neat it's pretty cool so that's about it all I'm playing right now I'm just kind of taking it easy desperately awaiting some games coming out yeah there's nothing to really that's why I feel like I'm in no urgent rush right now I mean there are many things that I should I could play oh yeah nothing like coming out on this on this ever ending rotisserie of games that's going to begin with Resident Evil because it really Dragon Quest are you going to play no I'm not going to play I'm not I'm not I will I'd like to at some point but I didn't even finish three and I didn't even get to one and two I don't want to get too ahead of myself and then play the one that's even fucking longer than that is it seems to be yeah a death knell but yeah no that's going to be a big one for sure um kingdom hearts death now that's so dramatic chris let's go to you destiny one yes so i think honestly the rumblings of the division uh coming back kind of got me in like this weird nostalgic mood for these like early early ps4 generation kind of live service attempts that perhaps were perhaps were better than i might remember or perhaps worse and i wasn't sure it'd been a long time i haven't played destiny one since probably just before destiny 2 so like literally 2017 probably was the last time i even remotely dabbled so it's been it's been nine years so it's been a long ass time and I booted it up out of curiosity also because I saw that it was like I think six bucks for like all of it and you could like the Destiny collection I think it's like so every single DLC all of it from beginning to end it's not it doesn't have this weird vaulting problem that Destiny 2 has because Destiny 2 has been alive and supported for a lot longer so you can play through the entirety of Destiny 1 and I thought like you know what I don't know how deep I'll get into this but I'm kind of curious I'm into the idea of kind of revisiting this.

2:21:31Colin Moriarty:And so I started it up again. And yeah, man, there's like, there's this, I don't know what you call it, but there's like a vibe to the original Destiny 1 or like an atmosphere, like with music and tone that I find quite refreshing and endearing. there's there's something about it's a lot slower that's what something that's that's something that's so funny about like looking back at it it's like destiny 2 is so fast in comparison like destiny 2 is like uh damn near tony hawk pro skate like it's it's jet set radio people zipping around teleporting you know flying all over the place doing crazy trick shots and particle effects exploding every which way and there's a fair bit of you know there's a fair bit of like you know explosions obviously it's a first person shooter sci-fi magic game but it's a lot slower pace it's a lot more deliberate it feels a lot more like um oh man how would i even describe it it feels it just feels more firmly planted like you your jump isn't insane and you're not doing you're not stupid strong and it's funny listening to some of the cut scenes in retrospect now where like they're talking about how like the whole premise of the first destiny is that you're starting off on the back foot and you're kind of like trying to rebuild and like one of the one of the main guys in the beginning early on he says we used to be much more powerful and i'm like yeah well don't worry we get there we it gets don't even worry about it but i like this the more stripped down nature of it it actually reminds me a lot more of like what the version of marathon that exists right now is a lot slower and like a lot more like kind of pared back so it it was a little bit of a window into that but yeah it plays really well i dig the music i like that it's like a sequential kind of story i do remember that ultimately nothing happens in the story but it's still kind of fun knowing where it goes and kind of having the context of all this time a little bit of a bummer that it only runs at 30 frames i think there's a reason for that i think uh back then things were like certain animations were tied to frame rates or something like that like some weird reason why it's not like uh it doesn't see a boost from any modern hardware but so that's kind of rough to get used to the low fov is there also from being only a console game and there's little quality of life changes that i wish that i'm like oh i miss this in destiny 2 where like in order to go to any other planet from anywhere you have to go to orbit first so you have to like load into the space and then go where you want it's like ah that's a little that's a little clunky but but i'm finding a lot that i like in destiny one like there is kind of like this i wonder what i'm gonna get kind of kind of feeling and it is a lot stingier with the loot that you get like i find myself getting excited over shit that i would just immediately trash in destiny 2 because i'm just oh that's a green weapon i'm not going to use that but but some of them are pretty good and like the way the weapon unlock system is completely different like normally or even in parts of d1 you know you'd get a weapon and it kind of does all that it's going to do you can upgrade like i guess the the effectiveness of it but in d1 like you have to unlock all every single feature of it through using it so like if there's like a if you get like a nice weapon with like a crazy ability you kind of have to use it a shit ton before that cool ability even is usable to you and i think that that's kind of interesting i'm kind of into the multifaceted leveling system there i'm still pretty early on i'm i'm i'm jumping into it at night as i kind of like go to bed and so i'm only on the moon now which is only like the second place you go to but the one thing that i'm finding about it is like man this is so much more approachable than destiny 2 is because destiny 2 starts off and it shows that before you even consent it's like here's a cut scene of the latest thing that's happening and now here's a mission about the cut scene oh you've never played before tough it's crazy and like destiny 1 starts off and you're like yeah make your character and you'll start off from the beginning and you can play to the end and it's I don't know it is nice uh it really is just because I'm kind of like I'm I'm jonesing for marathon right now and it's kind of the closest thing I can get to it um but I'm enjoying it more than I anticipated enjoying it and I'm playing it for a lot longer than I anticipated playing it I thought I would maybe like kind of jump into it and be curious a little bit and just be like oh I wonder what this gun feels like oh neat but I'm kind of I am kind of going through the story and from what i recall it's not that long so maybe i'll maybe i'll end up beating it but it's a nice stroll down memory lane and it kind of reminds me of there there was something special about both the division and destiny around this time where like these kinds of games didn't really know what they were yet and so they they kind of didn't fall into the um the understood like expectations of what you would get from games like these like those hadn't been established yet so you can kind of feel you can kind of feel the ghost of of you know previous generations of like first person shooters kind of like haunting the area of this ultimately like new kind of genre a new kind of play space and it's it's neat it's got really strong art direction really strong sound design it's a really beautiful game actually in in retrospect especially now knowing knowing where it all goes and and now that it's not just kind of sitting there unfinished in some sense i i appreciate it a lot more now but that's really it i'm playing a couple other things that i didn't really feel uh was worth kind of like i'm playing megaman 9 a little bit also oh cool just because i'm in a bit of a megaman i don't know megaman x i'm like i'm so shit at it i don't know like i just like i couldn't i was getting my ass kicked so i was like maybe i'll let me work my way up to this maybe and so i'm like i'm playing megaman 9 again still getting trounced but getting further along in my progress in megaman 9 uh which is not new for me sheet man oh sheet man's a megaman 10 i guess yeah he's not yeah no no sheet man is no megaman 9 is like um plug man yeah plug man and um there's that's the only one that i've been like splash woman i think is one splash woman is in there yeah i dig it uh but yeah i'm kind of like just feeling my way back into into playing games i the next thing i really want to get to really and it's sitting here on my computer is um chronos because i just i know i know i'm gonna like it i just like i really gotta set it's gotta this is like a mood thing it's a mood thing for a game like that like i want to be i want to be hungry for some like horror and i don't know if i'm there but i think i'm getting there so that's kind of the next on my list before resi resident evil comes out but yeah that's kind of it cool for me um for me i've just been spending the last week with uh megaman 11 um i beat it i i'm working on all the trophies so i got doc did i talk last week about dr light's trial i don't remember what i even talked about last week but doctor i got the trophy for dr light's trial in um in megaman 11 and that's probably the hardest gameplay related trophy I've ever gotten or one of them.

2:28:53It's the it's one of the rarest trophies I have. Point three percent of people that have played the game. So there's another point three percent trophy on Mega Man 11, which is to beat it in under an hour. And I'm working on that now. The good news is that you can kind of you can save after every stage so you can kind of like manage your time. And if you don't like it, you just go back to your previous save and try the stage again. I'm running pretty late and I don't know if that I'm really going to be able to do it, but I'm still trying to figure out. It's so much harder. Like Mega Man nine and ten have similar challenges and they're so much easier to beat in an hour like no problem at all um this is going to be a lot tighter because it's a lot more of a dynamic game but i'm enjoying playing it and seeing it for what it is i feel like it's not and i talked about this so people can listen to my deep dive on megaman on summon sign by the way which will go live next week i guess on all all 11 megaman games because we get into all of it but it doesn't feel like a megaman game really like a classic Mega Man game, it's got too much going on for it to be a classic Mega Man game.

2:29:52And I think I'll be interested to see with this upcoming one next year, what their kind of take is on that. Are they going to go more traditional or are they going to continue to kind of buff this thing out? Because I always felt like Mega Man X was the elaborate classic Mega Man game. You have some side things and optional things and armor pieces to find and you get stronger and all the rest. and Mega Man 1 or the Mega Man Classic games were supposed to be a little bit more straightforward and gameplay oriented. And Phil wrote in and said, Colin, do you find that returning to simple skill and gameplay driven games helps reset your desire to dive back into modern AAA fare?

2:30:31I know you have been indulging in Mega Man recently as well as Terminator No Fate. I am close to completing Link's Awakening for the first time. I find playing classic 2D or even some modern indie games can help remind me of the essence of why we are here at gameplay. Yeah, I like balance. I don't want to say that I am here still to this day for gameplay because I don't know that that's entirely true. I like a lot of things about games and I always say that like a game doesn't even have to be fun to be good. It's all about the overall package but there's no doubt that the era in which we all come from and that I grew up playing games and was really all about gameplay and using one's imagination to fill in the gaps and so going back and playing the classic Mega Man games or even a game like Mega Man 11 that's newer but still gameplay oriented is refreshing.

2:31:14And there's a place for those kinds of games with a little bit of story and a little bit of plot and some environmental storytelling. But it's really all about the experience of play. But what I love about games is that games are about a lot more than that now. I don't think that walking simulators are fun. I think they're engaging and interesting, right? Like they can be not all of them, obviously. But when I play, you know, Gone Home or whatever, it's like this is my having. Oh, this is so fun. no like that's not what i was that's not what i was like i was like wow this is intriguing this is interesting so i don't i what i'm saying is i don't want to sell out and say yeah it's all about gameplay gameplay first gameplay gameplay is king ultimately i think but really you can just say interactivity is king because a game like pentiment is interesting and i'm enjoying it but i don't think it's fun yeah i think those are just different things so i'm not saying you're saying that phil but i just want to make sure i'm clarifying so yeah for playing a game like megaman 11 is a is a night and just all the megaman games is a nice palate cleanser to as has already been said by chris and dustin just kind of waiting for what's beyond the the next hill although there are some games i really need to go back and play as well so i'm gonna be done with megaman 11 soon i hope and then i don't know what i'm gonna go to i've been thinking about hell is us um and i've been thinking about final fantasy tactics so i think i will go in one of those directions i think we could imagine that that will happen but that's all i have for what we're playing which means we get into listener inquiries to wrap this thing up six questions comments concerns awesome ideas from the audience over on patreon patreon.com slash last day media you submit your inquiries to the threads for the various shows in the news feed each week and then we pick through those you've heard your inquiries throughout the show here are six more of course and um yeah go to any of the shows you don't have have to just do sacred symbols if you want to submit to other shows as well sacred threads go live on wednesdays and are deleted thursdays so you have about 24 hours kenny roberts wrote in and said greetings sacred lads this one's for colin with platinum number 200 coming up do you have any specific games in mind for the big milestone personally for my 100 i went for kingdom hearts 2 as it was a seminal game in my childhood and it felt good to go back to the old days now with an implemented trophy system so will you go for something nostalgic difficult Perhaps one you've been meaning to play for a long time or just a random game.

2:33:38I'll slowly reach for an officer's firearm and listen. Suicide by cop? Gotta be careful.

2:33:46Colin Moriarty:There's that. Do you know that, you know Jimmy Requai, right? You know that famous video that he did where he was like the moving furniture? Oh, yeah, yeah. Visual insanity. There's like this, there's this great scene where he's like sliding up to the camera with his hand open. And my favorite version of that is like, there's a police there's a police guy with a gun it's just him reaching to that fucking music virtual insanity i remember that video that was a cool video that's great yeah i don't know any other song by him he did uh he did canned heat which is the dance in napoleon dynamite which is the only other one this is the only other one that i know interesting but yeah i remember he was wearing what like one of those very 90s hats in the video yeah it's like a fuzzy it's a ridiculous Yeah, right.

2:34:33Top hat. Right. So I don't know what I'm going to do. My hundredth platinum was Twin Breaker. I did that intentionally because that was the first game I wrote and I wanted to commemorate that. So now we're at number 200. I'm at 197. My suspicion is Mega Man 11 will be 198. And then we'll see what happens from there. I do have an idea of what I want to do and it would be an interesting stream. Do I have the thing still? and Dustin would be a reason for us to use this that I bought a long time ago oh yeah the ps3 um the last of us remover the last of us the original last of us would be an interesting 200 because I had the platinum in the last of us part one in the platinum in the last of us part two twice but I don't have the platinum in the original the last of us which is funny because I have all the hardest trophies all the online trophies are done I did them back in the day when I was still when I was really good at online because I was playing it for so long so I got those trophies quick when it came out because I was still good before everyone got got better than me um that was probably the best I was ever at an online game like comparable to the environment in which I was playing because I'm always I say before like if I'm one to one kill death kill to death ratio I'm feeling good like about my performance in any given game so I was like way above that and that so I have those trophies and those are the really time consuming ones I think each of them take 40 hours to get because you have to get two of them and you have to play as the fireflies and as the survivors or whatever so what i'm thinking is maybe we'll hook up the ps3 and do that and i was looking i have i have to i have a save in the cloud i believe of a beaten game and i think what i have to do is beat it on new game plus at the hardest difficulty level so that could be an interesting series of streams um and playing it on ps3 is going to be rough but for yeah but it'll probably be very nostalgic and interesting so maybe that will be the idea i it could be a random one too but i feel like that's kind of lame it's not lame it's like who cares really but you should commemorate it it's a big number 200 is a big number so that's kind of kenny that's my my plan in my mind right now is to kind of maybe think about doing the last of us part one and i have to find a copy of it because i think my copy I probably have it somewhere, but that might be a Dagan's.

2:36:51So we'll see what happens. All right. Rob Purzglove wrote in and said, hello, Secret Trio. Colin, out of the games that you have or are going to release from Lillimo, which do you think would make sense to have DLC? Is this something you have ever considered? For Chris and Bustin Dustin, what game do you wish had DLC that never got any? Thank you and have a Maddie Genshin Impact video kind of day. What does that mean? Maddie Genshin Impact video?

2:37:18Colin Moriarty:no idea i have no yeah mr lord's too deep on that genshin impact it came up automatically that's hilarious um could that possibly be yeah this doesn't have the 23 000 views from a few years ago i don't know what i don't know what this is a reference to i don't know maybe he crashes out i don't know he crashes yeah who knows i don't know i don't know so if it was just a normal video like it would be weird to reference you know what i mean now i'm not a huge expansion or DLC guy, although there are expansions in DLC that I really enjoy, especially if I'm playing a game later. I love that. You're like, I think about going back to Fallout 4 sometimes and I'm like, what would be really nice about this is it's all there.

2:38:00I've even been thinking about playing Oblivion lately because I've been watching Mike has been playing it on Xbox and I'm like, this kind of looks cool. I've never played it. Am I nerdy enough for it? I don't know. I heard it's kind of simple. That's what she was saying is like, it's kind of simple and straightforward and I don't know if that's quite what I'm looking for right now but so I don't want to say I'm the biggest expansion of DLC person but I'm wondering Dustin do you have any games that could have gotten expansions that didn't or that you would have wanted to have more or are you kind of just ready to move on from game to game yeah well I'm not really DLC guy

2:38:33Colin Moriarty:almost at all because there are even games that I really love that I never checked out DLC or just have moved on. So I want to amend the question slightly. And, you know, I'm going to just say I'm allowed to do that. Yeah, sure. Sorry, Rob. My answer, I was thinking about The Witcher getting its DLC 10 years later or whatever. The game that I would want more DLC from, because this game did have technically DLC, that was before the era of DLC, is that I would love for there to be an expansion to Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 that adds modern roller coasters and updated AI to the game. I don't know how possible that would be because the game was coded by one dude in assembly, and I'm pretty sure he is long retired at this point.

2:39:26Colin Moriarty:He just kind of checked out, made his money, sold everything off to, I think Atari owns it now. So Jason, I know you're listening. Jason Polanski. make roller coaster tycoon 2 dlc with modern roller coasters and rides happen please interesting chris anything for you for dlc expansions anything that was never touched yeah i mean touched i was thinking about it and i just like i'm very much like this is a very non-dlc oriented crowd i feel like this this group of people you got up here you know i'm not i'm not really that person either like even uh the uh dishonored is a game i love i loved the original dishonored that has a really well loved dlc that i've never played because i'm just like oh i don't know there's something about it i grew up in a time when like you'd get a game on disc and that was kind of the game you know like it was and even on cartridge early on and and so i kind of view dlc the way i view director's cuts in the sense of like it's cool that it's there but fundamentally it's it's not like holistically it's not what the movie is so like i don't i don't know if i really care that much about it like even if it is great and and better and like all that stuff like this there's a i think there's a version of spider-man there's spider-man 2.1 that exists which is like a director's cut or something and there's a bunch more scenes in it alternate takes a little bit more of certain fights and stuff and i'm just like i've seen it and you know it's there's there's more of it and in some ways it's better but like it's not the version it's not what I think about when I think about Spider-Man 2 so like that's kind of how I feel about DLC where I'm like I'm not really that grabbed by it but one thing I will say it would have been cool of the DLCs that I did engage in it would have been cool to get more although you're being greedy at this point with this game but like it would have been cool to get more Grand Theft Auto 4 because I did think Lost in the Damned and Battle of the Gate 20 were so good and were so interesting and were so weird that like I wouldn't have minded seeing more of that.

2:41:40Colin Moriarty:I don't know what you would have done, I guess. But I think ultimately at the end of the day I'd rather a follow-up or a sequel than, you know, here's a DLC. A standalone DLC is different. I'm alright with that. But just not big on the concept as a whole. As far as what he's asking me about DLC on my own games, the games that Lily mode does. We have released DLC, although they're really updates and they're free. Super Perils of Baking got an update with another trophy. And then Habroxia 2, we added an arcade mode and put trophies on it as well. So we've never had paid expansions, and I don't know that it would be really appropriate for a$10 game to have paid expansions.

2:42:23Maybe it would be. But, yeah, I'm just not, I want complete experiences and if anything, the emphasis on expansions has only pushed me towards putting games off, knowing that they'll be more complete later and that I won't miss anything about them because, and even standalone stuff, it's hard to get me back in. That's what happened with cyberpunk. Like I thought cyberpunk was fucking awesome. Like I thought that game was awesome and so playable and so interesting and so dynamic and so fun. And then the Phantom Liberty stuff comes up and I'm like, I don't know, man, I'm not really in it anymore.

2:42:56And I know people are like, oh yeah, just play it again and get back into it. I'm like, I just don't want to. It's like, I think it's great. I'm not really in that mode right now. So it makes me want to just kind of delay things a little bit because it's funny. Like when I went to play ghost of Tsushima director's cut, I had not played it on PS5. I played it on PS4. And when Iki Island came out, as we know it at the time, I knew at the time I never went back and played it. So it was cool to be able to do that in the game and, and to actually integrate the experience too. Cause that's the other thing is like, it's hard to Mass Effect was like this too where it would be like missions would pop up that are like expansion missions and you can kind of integrate them into the entire experience but if you've beaten the game already then you're going back and doing this shit and it doesn't really make any sense.

2:43:38There's like no context for it. I think that's why the second Horizon game had that end game expansion. That was like not so because I think Iki Island was kind of a little weird where it's like you're going and doing this totally other thing this other place. It's like I don't know. It kind of breaks the entire experience for me. Jonathan Turner wrote in and said hello sacred symbols team I recently had some family over and with a number of kids in the house they naturally gravitated towards my retro gaming room my nephews and little brother jumped on the Xbox 360 while my 40 year old niece made a beeline straight for the SNES and Super Mario World here's where I need guidance she struggled to clear the very first level this immediately raised some concerns for me because I'm fairly certain I was clearing that level at her age with ease likely while holding a Capri Sun and solving cold fusion in my head.

2:44:23My question is simple. Should I continue to love her or is it time to quietly cut off the relationship due to this early and troubling lack of platforming fundamentals? Looking forward to your expert advice and thank you for everything you do and for your donation. Thank you for writing in. You have to nurture this girl, Jonathan. Think about the taste that she exhibited. Your nephews and little brother, as dumb as they are, went to the Xbox 360 and this little four-year-old girl bypassed all of the bells and whistles and went straight to the SNES you have to nurture protect raise up this little girl because she has that inherent taste that is so she's got that Nintendo taste she wants to play Super Mario World I teach her show her how to play I was playing games no doubt at four years old like at you know that's the highest level in the world but certainly not I could Mario World wasn't out when I was four, but, you know, as an example.

2:45:24So she just has to learn. And she will learn. But you got to teach her. Nurture that little girl, Jonathan. Nurture her, please. And keep in those other. What were they playing on Xbox 360? Geometry Wars. No, man.

2:45:40Colin Moriarty:Doubt. Prototype. Prototype. Prototype. Prototype one. Or something weird like blur. Blur. I gotta get a 360 man there's a lot of weird titles on that machine there the the black the black Xbox 360 like revision is a pretty solid piece of hardware right like as far as the 2010 one where yeah that's a that's a sexy machine I gotta say that's the best Xbox has ever looked but uh yeah maybe I'll just make yeah what could it be like what is it 200 bucks maybe max yeah you can probably even go to GameStop and get one yeah maybe I'll do that so yeah that's all I wanted to say I don't know if you guys have anything to say is that like she you should love her yeah teacher don't cut her off yeah teacher like uh the thing that got my nieces and nephews into it when they were kids was watching me play you know so like they would be they would see me play and they'd be like oh I want to try um the fact that she made a beeline for it uh without that or I guess presumably she's seen you play just um I don't know encourage it you know it's uh it's cool that she even cares you know it's not an ipad it's not roblox that's what i was gonna say yeah like what are you doing if you discourage her you know where she's going next roblox fortnight and don't don't fail like i did as i mentioned last week with my little cousin that told me we need to stream steal a brain rot in order to get views on our stream so you have an opportunity here don't fuck it up or else and honestly if she goes to roblox you're putting her in danger you know there's all those predators on there that's a good point saving her that's a good point yeah so don't don't be like me and and guide properly that's a good point there's no 45 year old on mike on uh super mario world i'm gonna i'm gonna uh engineer your child dustin to be the biggest megaman fan in the world come call me a little boy or girl or girl call me a little girl this is crash man from megaman 2 he threw these are crash bombs

2:47:59Colin Moriarty:i love the naming that's such straightforward names yeah these are crash bombs crash man i love it good stuff jason van over wrote in said howdy boys don't know if you've tuned into the season two of fallout but i'm pretty confident saying it's eclipse the last of us is the best video game tv show adaptation season one of the last of us not withstanding they've absolutely nailed the tone violence and dread of the post-apocalyptic wasteland of new vegas i was curious to see if you guys have checked it out i have not which is weird because I have Amazon, but I just I I'm not that big of a Fallout fan.

2:48:34And I don't know that I'm I like the act. Fallout three, as I've said, specifically came out at a very specific time where it really enchanted me because I had never played anything like it. Where I was like, what the fuck is this? This is crazy. I've never played anything like this in my life. And New Vegas was only two years later, so it wasn't that far off. And I think New Vegas is an awesome game. But I think by the time Fallout four came out in 2015, I had it kind of had a lot. It definitely had lost its luster for me and I don't know I like post-apocalyptic American shit I mean that's my stuff but I don't really like Fallout for that reason so I think for that reason I'm not that compelled by it and yet people speak highly of it so I'm sure one day you know I'll tune in tune in but I have not watched it yet are you guys caught up with Fallout there's an episode today that I

2:49:20Colin Moriarty:haven't seen but I'm caught up with it I like Fallout I've always been I wouldn't call myself like the biggest fallout fan arguably um i've only really beaten fallout 4 like i've played three in new vegas pretty extensively but like those games crash and are so like unreliable it's it's kind of crazy so like i've always just been thrown off of those games i still am playing new vegas kind of right now but or trying to but i i like the vibe of fallout a lot there's there is something about there is something about the atmosphere of like it's it's like it's a wasteland and there's like it's bing crosby through like kind of like a shitty radio and like there's like these weird like mental cases running right like there's something i don't know i dig it i dig the confusion of of uh survival game old like old radio retro future 1950s there is something special about it that i think is as a sauce like i really like um and so i'm into it i think the show's great i think i i think the season's actually kind of like look i i don't want to say the season's bad i think the season so far is pretty pretty good it's fun like everybody does a good job i do feel like i'm noticing the the netflix writing though like the because i feel like there are points that are made like there's a character that says basically like i'm you're uh you're me just give it a little time and i feel like that's it's been said at least like maybe twice in every episode it feels like i could be literally wrong about that but i'm like this is this is definitely like people don't have people have their phones out you know what i mean and they're writing for those people and that's kind of bothering me a little bit but it's still it's a fun show like i i think easily of the video game adaptations i've seen it's easily my favorite one i don't know if it's necessarily better than the last of us season one but i'm enjoying it more but i think fall lends itself well to that it's it's it's somewhat it's campy it's it's it's disturbing it's it's funny so it kind of covers a lot of bases um but i'm into it i i like it a lot i'm excited to uh watch uh tonight i watched the first episode and i liked it but i i wasn't like i i and i watched the first season so i'm saying i watched the first episode of season two and i was like yeah that's pretty good holly seemed to not really care and she watched the first season with me and i gotta be honest when i think about going to hit play or what to watch I think about the fact that when I click play on Amazon Prime, I'm going to be hit with ads.

2:52:06Colin Moriarty:Yeah, dude. And I refuse to spend the three dollars, which I get it. We preach about YouTube premium all the time. I almost never watch anything on Amazon ever. So why would I spend that three dollars there? So if I do watch it, I'll wait until it's all out. Spend the three dollars and do it for one month. yeah it just dude it's so annoying it's like dude you pay for the prime just just forego the ad money boy it is insane come on jeff what are we doing it is insane it it's the most frustrating thing about watching it which is i mean to the show's credit it's not the show's fault but but um i hate it too man the the the egregious nature of like oh you paid for this here's an ad you serious yeah if you want to get rid of that uh just 2.99 yeah yeah it's annoying you want to die son you want to die giving me an ultimatum like that crazy crapton picard wrote in nice said sup fellas meta just shut down four internal vr studios which have created some of the biggest triple a vr games like asgard's wrath one and two and deadpool vr we all know that sony has abandoned first party vr titles and it looks like it's not even funding third party vr modes as resident evil requiem and ace combat 8 developers have said there will be no vr modes due to a lack of funding from platforms.

2:53:25Valve has stated that it has no VR game in development. Is VR well and truly dead? Is it over, over, over? This makes me quite sad as I have been a big VR fan for years. RE7 and GT7 have been some of the best gaming experiences of my life. This past year has had some amazing VR titles with Lumines, Midnight's Walk, Arkham Age, Metro Awakening, and Behemoth. I'm worried that it's going to completely die out as gaming medium with lack of funding and support from platforms. From a technical standpoint, there's so much room to improve and for a long time that excited me. The Steam frame is an example of the continually improving tech, but now, without big players spending the big bucks, I just think it's going to die a slow death.

2:54:00Take care, guys.

2:54:05I don't know. I don't know what's going on. First of all, it sucks that Meta shut all those studios down, and we had said earlier in the show that Sanzaru is one of those. Camouflage was one of those, which was another second-party PlayStation partner. They made Iron Man. You guys might remember that came to the original PSVR. Oh, yeah. so

2:54:26I feel like I've heard a lot from VR fans saying like it's great it's good it's great it's good and people kind of fighting against the the trends and certainly friends of the show that are really into it and even do their own programming around it and I think it's always going to be this niche thing especially on PC I think if people are willing to make the hardware which they'll always be someone willing to make it then then that works but I just think don't I wonder how you feel about both of you we'll start with you Dustin is like I think we can kind of safely say now that the people have spoken.

2:54:56There have just been too many opportunities to buy one at all sorts of different price ranges. Some of them have sold materially and appreciably, but they, the company that I think was most bullish about VR, which was Meta, is done with it, basically. The Metaverse itself is a complete disaster. They spent enormous amounts of billions of dollars wasted on that. They bought all these teams to make games and the games are good. No one's saying the games aren't good, but they're just not, they're not commercial successes. There's an inequity between how much money it costs to make these games and then how people are buying them and what volume they're buying them.

2:55:32And I think some of the biggest VR games on PlayStation probably sell in the tens of thousands. And that's nice, but that's not sufficient. So if anything, I think that we're kind of lucky that Sony hasn't just, if you're a VR fan, that Sony hasn't been like, said just like, fuck this, it's not working. And walk away. But I think the big thing I want to reiterate, and Dustin, let's hear from you, is I just feel like people have spoken. They've had different price points. They've had really nice ones, really shitty ones, middle market ones. Look what happened with Apple and their mixed media thing or whatever, mixed reality thing.

2:56:04So what are your thoughts?

2:56:06Colin Moriarty:Yeah, it's clear that VR is not sustainable for big AAA style development, which is unfortunate. it. He mentions, or Captain Picard here, Crafton Picard mentions Resident Evil 7 and GT7 being some of the best gaming experiences of his life. And I don't know if it's one of the best of my life, but Resident Evil 7, I'm thinking Resident Evil 4 in particular, I played all the way through in VR, and it was incredible. And those big AAA games, it's weird, because some of them were absolutely amazing, like those conversions of the Resident Evil games But then there's the Horizon game that is probably the most amount of money that Sony spent on a VR thing.

2:56:56Colin Moriarty:And it just ended up being not very good. It's unfortunate because I think years ago before PSVR 2 came out and we were talking about what it needed to be success, that I was saying it needed IP behind it to really push it. But I guess it needs more than just IP. It needs good games. And I'm not saying there aren't good games. It's just unfortunate that some of the games that like that Horizon game just ended up being not very good. It would have been a cooler game if that was maybe earlier in the VR, like people's experience, because I felt like I was like, yeah, this is cool. But I've had experiences like this in VR before, and it just ended up not being that great.

2:57:42Colin Moriarty:I still think one of the biggest missed opportunities was not converting more standard games into VR games. Because that was initially the thought was like, you can't just take a game that's a normal game and make it a VR game. It wasn't designed for that. It won't work. And I think that was good at first. like good knowledge to be like you can't just like because people were trying to taking like the early oculus and making a half-life 2 mod and you still had to use like a mouse and keyboard and people were like throwing up because it was just too fast things like that so it made sense that the early knowledge was like do not just convert games into vr but after a lot of the tricks of what makes a good vr game work in terms of both gameplay and how comfortable it is to play when you're in the headset once those were learned there were some amazing conversions resident evil 7 resident evil uh resident evil 4 also was it resident evil 8 also had a conversion skyrim in vrs is actually awesome i wish there would have been more of these because i think it would have been really compelling to be like hey you can if you buy this game you can also play in VR or there's like a different kind of VR mode.

2:59:05Colin Moriarty:I'm not just saying like some games just sort of like, here's a VR mode and it's like this dinky little demo. It's like, no, not that. So unfortunately in the AAA space, VR for the time being, I would say is done. I think it will continue to survive, as you were saying, Colin, in the PC space, smaller titles, because it's clear that VR players do buy these games and play them. there's just simply not enough of them for those bigger titles yeah it's not it's not i mean it's a totally different market but it's not like what we do and that like we're not a mass market thing we only exist because we have a small you know group of thousands of people that that pay for the content but it's not a mass market success by any means and it doesn't mean you can't find a success in that space and there are developers and publishers that have found great success in the VR space.

2:59:54But but yeah, well, Chris, what do you have to say about this? Do you think the people have spoken? Because even though Dustin is saying like there are these great games, I still feel like there are just so many opportunities for people to jump on board and they just didn't.

3:00:06Colin Moriarty:I think it just all comes down to the fact that it's it's it's it's just never been easier to put on a VR headset than it is to simply turn on the TV. I think that really is all it comes down to, because like ultimately, like when we play games, even us who do it professionally like we ultimately do it as as some form of um uh i don't want to say maybe i don't want to say relaxation exactly but like we're kind of you know we want to settle into an experience and it's not necessarily this thing that we want to stand up and like you know crank our necks around and deal with this kind of awkward like 45 degree kind of radius turning and all this there's a lot of problems that you have to solve that can't be solved without massive spaces like massive rooms dedicated to it or you know omni-directional treadmills or like x y like there's so much that goes into making that feel natural that doesn't really exist with it just this screen because i think ultimately what we do in video games like we're simulating an experience but like vr is like simulating a simulation of an experience like it's very odd it's like there's like a disconnect there that I don't quite know how to even verbalize, but I feel it.

3:01:19Colin Moriarty:Like I really like Beat Saber is like the crown jewel for me. It's like, that is the best game that I've played on VR. Like as, as a complete package, I'm like, this knows exactly what it is. It understands the limitations of what this technology does. It plays to the strengths of it. And it's just fun. On the other side of that bone works from like 2017 or 2018 is still the most impressive thing I've seen in VR because everything that's a game that's like it's all like everything works the way you think it works. Like if an object does a certain thing in real life it'll do it here. Like reloading is like it feels awesome.

3:01:54Colin Moriarty:I don't discount like how amazing a good VR experience is. It's certainly up there. But what I will say is I've been enchanted with Boneworks for many many years. I've thought about it on and off a lot as like kind of like a pivotal moment for me. I have access to it. I could download it. I could play it. I haven't played it in five years. And this is a game I highly regard. Half-Life Alyx, same thing. I think it's fantastic. I have not booted it up. And it literally is just because like, bro, it's heavy. Like Colin, you kind of have the same experience with me where like it kind of makes my eyes hurt.

3:02:37Colin Moriarty:It kind of like it makes me sit. I mean, when I played it, literally, it made me kind of woozy. Yeah, it doesn't make me feel good. Like I can't do it for as long as I would like to play a game for like that's kind of a big thing, even on even on screen, on a normal screen, mouse and keyboard controller, whatever. I had to bump off of Oblivion because I was having that memory leak issue that over a while after long periods of play, like the frame rate becomes so nauseating to me that I feel sick. So like that's strapped around my head, man. It's just kind of a non-starter. And I do think there will be a time where the technology is so streamlined and it's so effectively shrunken.

3:03:18Colin Moriarty:It would be it would be foolish not to believe that. Right. like we have essentially ps4s in our phones now you know like you can run a ps4 game ostensibly like maybe even arguably like uh ps5 games at like you know 30 frames but you can run them you know and they operate on your on your cell phone so i have no doubt that eventually we'll get to a space with vr where like yeah dude this you can play half-life alex on like on your glasses i have no doubt that that will be possible one day and that will be that's that'll be amazing that'll be the time right where if if it if it's ever going to happen that'll be the time where it'll happen but the iteration that it takes to get to that point i fear like people are just not really going to be on board for it and so it's gonna it's gonna have to wait until the technology is so obviously there that um it would be dumb not to do it but i don't i don't see that happening for for a while it really is just the convenience aspect i think that's what it is for most people i don't know if you agree but like yeah no i i i do agree i i think one thing that i'm fascinated by is and it goes into this point is more like an augmented reality situation i feel like i do you guys see these videos of like these um these gameplay experiences in like in various places like you know kind of like hot lava style floor games and all these different things where people are jumping around or whatever i can imagine larger warehouse style things like that with like lots of tech and augmented reality scenarios where it becomes more about the experience of going out like playing top golf or something yeah like going yeah right like just going out and then you have the more basic screen level stuff that goes on with normal video games in home.

3:05:08I feel I just want to read. Well, two things I want to say is like, I want to reiterate that I think we're kind of lucky that we had so much runway with this tech because I don't think that the sales were necessarily ever there. And I think that the companies and the powers that be saw something special in it. The fact that Sony gave us another one is a sign that they were like, there's more here. And I and I appreciate that, especially as a tech company. I think that's really cool. I'll also say that I've had really amazing experiences, too, on VR that I think it's an old story now but as i said but the first time i was at you know that i i was at e the first time i played vr i was at e3 and it was e valkyrie and i was like this is insane like i can't believe how awesome this is and that's like a very rudimentary old game and even when i was playing arizona sunshine last year before i was like getting sick by it which is another old game i'm like this is super cool i want to like it it i'm not aghast about liking vr i just it's what you said it doesn't fit into the way I do things.

3:06:09I feel lazy. I sit down, I, I sigh into the couch or into my, my recliner. And then I have to put on a headset and I have to stand up and I have to charge the things and I have to put the fucking wristbands on and do all that. And then I have to calibrate it. And it's like, I'm not doing this. Like this is annoying. And I understand it's the nature of the beast. It's just not something I'm interested in. But I also want to say that I know that there are many people out there. We hear from them. We've done shows with them that really love and champion this space it's not for lack of trying and it's not for lack of good shit i just think

3:06:41Colin Moriarty:sometimes things don't work dude i invested heavy i invested i got in 20 i want to say 18 but like maybe even earlier than that maybe 2017 i got an htc vive and that was when it was fucking expensive to do it you know like they that that had like base stations that you had to drill into into the corners of your room to like sense where the headset was and it had like this really long cable and it was and i fucking loved it it was awesome but like i mean you know at a certain point like i look at it i have a i have a what is it the meta quest and i have it sitting there and i'm like i i i have this like fantasy about using it you know where i'm like but like the fantasy is always like wouldn't it be great if i felt like i wanted to set this up right i agree like that's that's the that's the fantasy it's not even the fantasy of using it it's it's the fantasy of like being in the mood to even want to try and um that's a that's a hard thing to get past you got to make it easy man and eventually it will be easy by the way i think that will happen yeah i think it's gonna be a while though it probably will i am always as far as ar is concerned i always think about this old microsoft presentation of them playing minecraft i think or something i want like a table right on a table right and i was like yeah i remember this is this is way cooler i think actually then making it as low impact on the player as possible should be the ideal right i mean so yeah if you're able to kind of get this spectral whatever into your living room i think that that's actually more interesting so but they that was hollow lens or whatever they they kind of walked away from that as well but anyway final inquiry comes from Caleb Greer who says greetings gentlemen when we talk about extraction shooters and the phenomenon of the extraction gameplay loop does see if thieves get enough credit while not precisely an extraction shooter and that you're not extracting gear for future deployment the game does center around PVP VE loot extraction you can even lose your reward multipliers upon death that another team can pick up and sell your emissary flag you can befriend players through in-game voice chat join a formal or informal alliance betray them for greater halls camp outposts to steal loot when people try to turn it in barter and so on thoughts thank you for your time i'm not familiar enough with this game but i i did want to talk about it a lot of people are playing it on playstation you have something to say chris about this that's a good point i hadn't thought of that actually like there is there is an extraction kind of element or especially like specific maybe not extraction element there obviously objectively is but that are that element exists in like the division as well um but the the voice chat like the proximity chat aspect of it is definitely like a big part of sea of these and that's a good point i hadn't really connected those dots but Look, there's a reason why that game is huge.

3:09:24Colin Moriarty:You know, I loved Sea of Thieves. Like, it's not a game that I can play all the time forever, but, like, once every, like, year or two, like, I get, like, a message where it's like, you want to hop on Sea of Thieves? And I always do it, and it's always a great time. Like, it's such a weird... It's such a weird game, and it's gorgeous in a lot of ways. Like, that water is fucking... I think the water in Sea of Thieves is still kind of the most impressive water I've seen in any video game, honestly. But... That's it. There's there's something to be said about that, that there is kind of an extraction loop in that game.

3:09:56Colin Moriarty:What do you think, Dustin? Yeah, I feel like I never gave Sea of Thieves enough of a chance because I played it a little bit when it came out. And well, Ben loves it, right? He's really. Oh, yeah. Ben super into it. When it first came out, it was pretty light on content. And yeah, I mean, this is for years now, it has been way, way, way better than when it first came out. but i am intrigued more by it now after having you know after having this realization about uh proximity voice chat and how fun it can be so who knows maybe we'll give it another shot maybe would this be a good sacred stream where the boys play uh sea of thieves for the first time and but the the key i think is that well chris you have more experience than colin and i it's we just went in how many people dean is it three person yes or three i think you can do four but like you can do three or four but three or three or four is ideal that would be funny that might be kind of fun that might be a little more low-key than arc raiders colin yeah like we can just go and dick around in there and and you know drive that not just sail the ship around you are we'll probably drive because i'll probably up bring it on the land yeah no doubt true yeah stranded on a beach somewhere that's fun man like i do remember like a lot of a lot of voice chat oriented situations that they came down i'm like man i had a blast it's a gameplay it's very light it still is even this many years out like as far as i remember like i played it pretty pretty late after all the updates and there wasn't really a lot it's more sandbox oriented so there's a lot of tools you can use but you as a character you can't really do much but yeah man that's uh that's an that's what a different lens to view that game through i think i might load it up with that mindset and i see where that see where that takes me cool report back let us know yeah all right my friends that's it that's all we have for this episode of sacred symbols of playstation podcast let's go around the horn and say goodbye to everyone chris goodbye to you you're now off to world way so enjoy yourself yeah we're actually out a little bit earlier than i anticipated we're out there earlier than we normally are yeah yeah it was a shorter episode this week there's not that much news dude if the god of war if the god of war casting didn't happen there would have been almost nothing to talk about yeah so i got some time to kill before my for my trek but um yeah i don't know i'm feeling like i think i want to grill cheese i think i'll make myself a grilled cheese i haven't seen a long time love grilled cheese yeah love it sounds good such a high quality food all right we'll be safe have fun dustin goodbye to you be well anything to say uh the firmans are light on groceries right now so i think the plan is to go to chipotle tonight oh and uh this pleases me pleases me greatly though i have discovered so i've talked bad about the buller chipotle many times when we come home from pittsburgh for holly's appointments on tuesdays there's chipotle on the way home i mean it was kind of a big mistake stopping there because it made me realize how good he had it's it's no oh how bad i'm sorry so much better oh interesting now did you look up the reviews and cross and then cross reference do people agree i have not done that um the thing about this chipotle it's the it's the pittsburgh mills chipotle which is a dead mall that has all the surrounding infrastructure but so the mall is dead but there's all this other stuff uh every time i've been there it looks like a fucking disaster the garbage cans are overflowing there's dirty tables but damn the the food hits at that chipotle but to be honest the buller one in terms of its cleanliness and upkeep not much better so it is what it is oh we're supposed to get a chick-fil-a in buller in the next year the there's like a spot for it and it's already been in the paper and stuff that's gonna happen so interesting there's that happens it's game over for my health there's people are so into chick-fil-a here that they just built one on the other side of the road basically like a mile up from like where that other one is and they're both just always so crowded i i love chick-fil-a but i just don't go to it anymore because it's like i'm kind of over it you know yeah again it's how i felt about in and out in in california where after a while i'm like i don't need to do this anymore i'm here i can just do it whenever it's not that special yeah but uh and it's just always so fucking crowded.

3:14:27I just don't understand what people are doing. Are you going to do the based Colin burrito plus quesadilla order? No. You don't have what it takes?

3:14:37Colin Moriarty:No. I'll probably get a bowl tonight because I've been eating healthier. Save a little calories on the wrap. The tortilla. They got a good tortilla there, man. Sometimes I get a side tortilla just to fucking eat it. I love tortillas on the side. Like a pig. Good shit. Love that. That was my favorite thing about going to like real taquerias and burrito shops in San Francisco, especially was I'm sure it's in L.A. too, is like you go to one of these mom and pop places and they're making corn tortillas that they'll just give you on the side and the little thing like the plastic thing that you take the top off.

3:15:11And I'm like, oh, my God, this is so fucking good. It's great. Love that. Great. Love Mexican food. All right, guys. Goodbye. I'm going to go. It's cold out. It's like 30 degrees out. I'm going to go walk the dogs and then work out. and hang out and hockey, got some hockey games around tonight. So do all this. Play Mega Man. But be well, be safe. Thank you all out there for your love, kindness and support as well. Hope you are all doing good out there too. Thank you for your support. Patreon dot com slash last day media for early ad free access. Last day media dot store for merch. We'll see you next time.

3:15:41Until then. Goodbye. See ya. Take care, guys. Sacred Symbols, a PlayStation podcast is a product and trademark of Last Stand Media and Collins Last Stand LLC and is proudly recorded in the USA. The show is conceived by, is written by, and is directed by me, Colin Moriarty. My co-hosts are Chris Raygun Maldonado and Dustin Furman. The show is produced by executive producer Dustin Furman. All of Last Stand's theme music is by my best friend, Ramon Narvaez. As you know, all of Last Stand's shows, including Sacred Symbols, are fan-funded on Patreon at patreon.com slash laststandmedia. The following names are at the producer level on Patreon, our highest tier, and we're grateful for your thoughtful and kind contributions to our independent endeavor.

3:16:27Thank you.

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